adamgreenfield

adamgreenfield, 3 months ago to random

Can we not?

adamgreenfield, 5 months ago to random

I really appreciate, in spacefaring fiction, when the author has included a diagram of the ship or environment in which the action takes place. MacInnes – so good at furnishing “In Ascension” with vivid, telling description otherwise – hasn’t described the layout of the Nereus in a way that allows me to grasp where the characters are in relation to one another. In another story it might not matter; here it does.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

The philosopher Ivan Illich, one of my go-to influences, died pointlessly and painfully from a tumor which could have been treated - that he could have had at least some respite from but which, in accordance with his beliefs, he refused treatment for. So we don't have to take him as gospel truth in everything. But I think he had a point about technology, and in fact complex systems more generally.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

I wish more people used What3Words – I find it extremely helpful in coördinating meetups in large, potentially confusing public places (big parks, particularly busy intersections, airports, shopping centers, etc.), but folks always look at me like my head’s on backwards when I suggest it. https://what3words.com/

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

So this is something I’ve just tripped over that tickles a certain part of my mind, that I also think a whole bunch of you would be interested in & probably have not heard of – it seems like it might be useful in mapping out the distributed functions and institutions of a local #solidarityeconomy or #circulareconomy. http://valueflo.ws

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

Every Sunday for the past month or so, I’ve posted threads previewing my forthcoming book “#Lifehouse” for folks who follow me here. A bunch of them asked me to make yesterday’s thread public, so they could share it with friends they thought might have an interest in it, and after some consideration that’s something I’m willing to do. So please enjoy this discussion of one of the ideas in the book I’m most hoping readers find useful: a neat little bit of social technology I call “the #pragma.”

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

What troubles me still, a year and some after finishing “The Ministry For The Future,” is that this kind of just-so handwaving on Stan’s part was taken seriously – remains, if anything, the current gold standard for thinking through the contours of our crisis in speculative or imaginative form. But it’s ducking every question that matters, every last one.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

In a low-diligence culture like the UK – a term I’ll explain shortly – overlaying digital systems (like these smart meters) over the processes of everyday life results not in efficiency or productivity gains, but in just the opposite: compounded failures that take extra time, effort and resource to correct. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/26/smart-meter-rollout-number-faulty-machines-leaps-great-britain

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

Sunday! And that means it’s time for this week’s #Lifehouse thread. Last week we talked about the #pragma; this week I want to cover something that I see as at least as important to the idea of a functioning Lifehouse network or federation, which is the distinction between formal openness and a quality I think of as “invitationality.”

adamgreenfield, 9 months ago to random

A good friend of mine thinks that the way I habitually structure sentences, with lots of clauses and parentheticals and so forth, is in itself diagnostic of ADHD. I find this idea intriguing.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

Year before last or so, as I may have mentioned to a few of you heads, I tried my hand at writing a short SF story. It was called “The Inheritance,” and, speaking broadly, it sucked. So I have a real operational sense of just how difficult it is to balance worldbuilding, character, dialogue, and plot in any literature of the fantastic, and my already-significant admiration for those who do it even halfway competently has only grown.

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

So here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I live in the UK, where (as you may know) our National Health Service, the #NHS, is under severe strain. I believe a lot of that strain is intentional – designed to fracture the system so that it’s easy to privatize – but some of it is organic, and however it arises, it’s a real thing. With the need for access to care increasingly desperate, what I wonder is why people with healthcare skills are not setting up free clinics.

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

Looks like it’s Sunday, and that means it’s time for another #Lifehouse thread. I’m intensely mindful that I’ve been talking about the book Quite A Lot lately, so I’m thinking of dialing back on the frequency of these posts a tad – you’ll let me know if that sounds right. But for today, let’s talk about one of my favorite aspects of the book, which is the chance it finally afforded me to affirm in my writing an intensely material, hands-on flavor of politics that descends from the DIY/DIT 1960s.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

Last(-ish?) post for the day, before I go hang out with my partner and the cat and a good movie: who should I be following who you’re reasonably certain I’m not already following? I’m looking especially for folks actually building out “solarpunk”-style social and material infrastructure & community, triple word score for folks who are doing that in the “global South.” Thanks for your recommendations! 👊

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

Not that he was perfect, or anything of the sort, but I cannot express the joy it gives me to see Stafford Beer’s watchword “the purpose of a system is what it does” at long last pass into common usage, especially among folks with no obvious reason to know who Stafford Beer was. It’s been a vital analytical tool for me this past quarter-century, in all kinds of circumstances. #POSIWID

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

OK, big conjecture time. Put pretentiously, this is my Grand Unified Theory of organic political response to crisis in North American and Western European societies: a generalized, free-floating sense of crisis tends to drive majority populations toward the nativist right, and the usual search for convenient scapegoats, but curiously, as a crisis intensifies locally, sentiment passes through some phase transition that activates, instead, instincts toward mutual aid and expressions of solidarity.

adamgreenfield, 10 months ago to random

I have to say this about Rebecca Solnit, and it will seem petty but I think it tells: she doesn’t get the details right. I opened her book on walking, and stumbled right out of the gate at her characterization of the Marin Nike site as (IIRC) an “ICBM silo.” I’ve never been able to entirely trust her again after that. And in reporting on matters like the climate, the details aren’t merely the details: they are the story. It matters. Make of that what you will. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/26/we-cant-afford-to-be-climate-doomers

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

I’ll tell you what’s weird about turning 55: the implicit time horizon behind your decisions changes, subtly but profoundly. “Am I really going to get 25 years of value out of this thing I’m considering buying? Am I really ever going to read this book, if I’ve been carrying it from one house to another ever since college 35 years ago, and have never yet cracked the cover?” It’s clarifying, and sobering.

adamgreenfield, 9 months ago to KindActions

Well, beloved, it’s real. You can preorder my book “Beyond Hope” as of now. If you suspect that #MutualAid, #municipalism or the example of #Rojava suggest strategies to survive a hot, dangerous future, if you want to learn from examples ranging from the Black Panther survival programs to the solidarity clinics of Greece, or if you’re interested in a concrete working-out of #solarpunk ideas in the form of the #Lifehouse community resilience hub, this is the book for you. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Hope-Collective-Mutual-Emergency/dp/1788738357

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

Learned about this organism this morning, courtesy of @abolisyonista: it’s a myxosporian endoparasite that may have originated as an endogenous cancer, and which – uniquely among the known varieties of Earthly life! –does not use mitochondria or aerobic respiration to power its metabolism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henneguya_zschokkei

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

Burying the lede, quite literally in this case: “The inquiry saw internal documents that revealed how in 2019, 16 separate pandemic preparation projects were ‘stopped’ or reduced as a result of planning for a no-deal Brexit.” This needs to be in the headline, at the beginning of the headline, all of the headline. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/20/covid-inquiry-britain-remains-wildly-under-resilient

adamgreenfield, 9 months ago to random

I’ve tried to say this a couple of different ways over the past few weeks, but I am extremely uncomfortable with the emerging line of rhetoric on the climate left that casts strategies of adaptation to the circumstances of heating as somehow acquiescing to the extractive industries and/or their enablers in rightwing politics and the mainstream media. Adaptation really is all we have now. It’s up to us to ensure that it’s liberatory in conception and practice.

adamgreenfield, 10 months ago to random

Do you have any real sense of how recently chattel slavery was (formally) outlawed in the United States? Two not-overlong human lives ago, stacked end to end. That’s it. It’s not at all inconceivable that someone now in their eighties knew, in their childhood, someone that had been born into slavery. I often sit with this fact. I recommend the practice – it’s sobering.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

A friend spotted this in Hackney this morning. Just putting folks on notice that if I encounter one of these, I will take preemptive countermeasures, believe it.

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

I’ve spent more energy than I would have liked over the past few days responding to someone here who was stanning for China, bigging up the Belt & Road initiative as a fraternal and “socialist” gift bestowed out of boundless generosity, and ascribing Han anti-Blackness to the wicked Europeans. Let’s all be crystal clear, though, that in its obliteration of Tibetan culture, in its attempted physical erasure of the Uyghur people, in its own deep, organic racism, China is an empire like any other.