adamgreenfield

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

I’m so sorry to have to make this explicit again, but I suppose people keep showing up here (which is good!) and haven’t had a chance yet to fully internalize community norms. So! Please understand that I cannot accept your follow request if you have an empty profile, few or no visible posts, and no other way for me to get a sense of who you are. This goes double if you have a cryptic name and/or an account on an instance that’s likely to be poorly moderated. Thanks for your understanding.

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.

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, 1 month ago to random

What’s vexing me in my PhD at the moment is that the department wants to see a complete introduction and substantive chapter at this checkpoint, and that’s…just not the way I write? How I write is much more like the inkspot theory of counterinsurgency: I start with little sentence- or at most paragraph-length chunks of ideation, and suture them together until they form arguments, then hopefully a fabric. The coherence remains low for most of the way, before going asymptotic toward the very end.

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

I kinda buried the lede yesterday: my next book “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World On Fire” is finally available for pre-order from Verso! It’s about how we organize ourselves as communities to survive the climate-systems collapse unfolding all around us, drawing on lessons from the Black Panther survival programs, Occupy Sandy and the Crisis-era Greek solidarity clinics straight through to municipalism in Spain and democratic confederalism in Rojava! https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2536-lifehouse

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

I had never heard of the Noahopinion blog until a friend sent me a link to it the other day, specifically to a post about this book, “Emergent Tokyo.” Noahpinion characterized it, glowingly, as an empirical defense of market YIMBYism, and it very nearly put me off ordering the book despite its being highly relevant to my interests. That guy’s dumber than a bag of rocks! This book is nothing of the sort! It’s wonderful!

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

So let’s talk about prosopagnosia, or “faceblindness.” I have it! What this means is that I could well have known you for twenty years, but if I see you outside of the context in which I usually encounter you, or even if you change your hairstyle (!), I may simply not recognize you the next time we cross paths. It’s mortifying! I have literally introduced myself to people I’ve worked alongside for years – who are, entirely understandably, generally fairly miffed that I’ve treated them so poorly.

adamgreenfield, 1 month 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

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, 1 month ago to random

Here’s a pamphlet introducing the idea of Convivial Research, from the pleasingly-named Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy. (Via Ashley Cooper – she’s not on here, is she? Damn.) http://cril.mitotedigital.org/sites/default/files/content/ccra_convivial_research_2-18.pdf

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

Anybody care to hazard a guess as to the significance, if any, of the paperback copy of “Dhalgren” that chap is ostentatiously carrying around in “3 Body Problem”? Don’t worry about spoilers: I’ve finished the series, and reread the book every few years. #towoundtheautumnalcity

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

I buy this thesis completely. Ackman (ptui) I didn’t know about, but I’ve been saying for months that Elon (ptui) broke hard right when he couldn’t deal with his kid transitioning. https://publicseminar.org/2024/03/psychosis-bill-ackman-elon-musk/

adamgreenfield, 1 month 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, 1 month ago to random

I’m going to make explicit something I’ve been practicing for a while now: I will not boost posts that contain machine learning- (“AI”) generated images, as surely as I will not boost those without alt text, and I encourage you not to do so either.

adamgreenfield, 1 month 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, 1 month 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, 1 month 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, 1 month ago to random

It’s worth articulating as a general principle that just about any legitimate end one might serve by developing autonomous vehicles you could address far more readily by simply investing in free, accessible public transportation, and getting cars off the road.

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

I am curious about the impact of so-called “AI” on the labor market for illustrators, specifically, as I think that’s a really useful canary. I can’t find anything good, though – just buzzwordy, speculative noise from content farms or LinkedIn. Can anyone point me at solid, empirical work on this?

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

Is anyone aware of actually-existing infrastructures dedicated to the scaled recovery and recycling (composting or reuse) of mass-timber construction products – CLT, glulam, etc.?

adamgreenfield, 1 month 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, 1 month ago to random

“We're building a platform for revolutionary autonomy. Amid climate change and economic ruin, we’re connecting a network of people who are ready to live and fight, aggregate skills, build infrastructure, and share tools to make a different world…Inhabit is a book, an online portal, and an IRL network for our critical time.” I have a great deal of time for these folks. https://inhabit.global/

adamgreenfield, 1 month ago to random

Oh! Dudes. Last week I had to write to SPIN to demand attribution for my 1988 William Gibson interview, which they’d credited to “SPIN Staff.” I’ve always been proud of the piece, despite its manifest amateurism, because I pitched it to my editors & believe it is the first-ever interview with Gibson in a mainstream, national outlet. (Quotes from it have been used as blurbs!) Credit where due: SPIN got back to me within minutes, and actually fixed the attribution! https://www.spin.com/2019/08/william-gibson-mona-lisa-overdrive-neuromancer-december-1988-interview-new-romancer/

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

Heads up that I simply don’t read wall-of-text posts or comments, and I strongly suspect I’m not the only one. The 500-character limit on my home instance feels juuuuust about right for easy, pleasant readability.