adamgreenfield

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, 9 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, 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, 6 months ago to random

Somewhere beneath all the other, rawer heartbreaks of Gaza, or coiled around them, is the specific grief I feel as a Jew that all of this is being inflicted under a flag bearing the star of my people — that wherever it appears, this symbol will only ever again remind people of this theft, anguish and suffering. It will be cursed by history, and it's hard to argue anything but that this is rightly so.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago to random

It can never be said often enough: Garrett Hardin was an unregenerate, overt white supremacist, and you should never allow your interlocutors to refer to a or the “tragedy of the commons,” even in casual speech, without making this explicit.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

Creative people who are interested in everything have a much harder time getting visibility for their work than those who find one thing and stick to it. It’s so much easier when “Oh, he’s the parklet guy,” or “She does those Lovecraftian botanist drawings,” or whatever. But invariably some of the most interesting projects I encounter are those pursued with no thought of career consistency or personal brand. If this is you I just want to say: I see your work and I’m so glad for it and for you.

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, 2 months ago to random

Sure, this wannabe-Gilead stuff sounds goofy AF, but fortune favors the prepared mind. These troglodytes have an existing network. They have capital. They have a more or less clear sense of what they want to do, and the order they want to do it in. And you better believe they will have a sufficiency of people willing to do the foot-soldiering. We mock them at our peril. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/inside-a-secret-society-of-prominent-right-wing-christian-men-prepping-for-a-national-divorce

adamgreenfield, 1 year ago to random

Remind me: have we talked much, here, about my notion of the “convivial stack”? This is the idea that, to the greatest extent possible, community governance, the built environment and the technological surround should all, simultaneously be designed so that they are open, participatory and actively invitational; modular, user-modifiable and extensible; and reward experimentation?

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

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 year ago to random

Toujours des sujets, jamais des citoyens.

adamgreenfield, 10 months ago to random

Popping up real quickly with an urgent request: For my book, I’m interested in hearing a firsthand description of the current situation in #Rojava, including accounts of how it has evolved since the Turkish incursion of November 2019. This state of affairs is dynamic, complex and confusing to outside observers, and I’m bound to get some things wrong, but I want to be as accurate as I possibly can be. Your help is vital, and hugely appreciated – please do share. #AANES

adamgreenfield, 10 months ago to random

Sometimes it feels like we’re fated to live out “The Dispossessed,” right here on Mastodon. Here we’re freed from the shackles of the systems that constrained us before, free to make whatever kind of culture we collectively desire, and yet that culture so often feels circumscribed by our dreariness, our failure to imagine, our inability to show up for one other. An ambiguous utopia indeed.

adamgreenfield, 11 months ago to random

I’ve been expecting this for quite some time now – this and Florida, actually. This is the harbinger of a more complete abandonment: in practical terms, uninsurable means undevelopable. I expect this to cascade as well. https://www.ocregister.com/2023/05/26/state-farm-says-no-new-property-insurance-clients-in-california/

adamgreenfield, 10 months ago to random

Become ungovernable. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/11/crows-and-magpies-show-their-metal-by-using-anti-bird-spikes-to-build-nests

adamgreenfield, 1 year ago to random

Not yet 17, I disobeyed my parents and drove to the police barricades at the far end of Osage Avenue after nightfall, as close as I could get to the bombing – I needed to see it with my own two eyes. The overwhelming memory I carried away with me, though, was olfactory, and not visual: I promise you that nobody within a five-mile radius of West Philadelphia that night will ever quite be able to get the smell of that murder out of their nostrils. It’s 38 years gone by and it feels like yesterday.

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, 4 months ago to random

Let’s be clear from the outset that, yes, some people don’t have the choice, but if you are fortunate enough that you do, your life does not need to be all struggle all the time. You are allowed to have moments of joy. You are allowed to be goofy, or trivial, or shallow. It doesn’t make you any less committed to the cause, and anyone who would judge you for it needs to reflect on why they feel compelled to do so. You definitely don’t need to answer to them.

adamgreenfield, 6 months ago to random

Remember that this woman calls herself a Buddhist. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/04/suella-braverman-says-rough-sleeping-is-lifestyle-choice

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, 4 months ago to random

I want to echo what other folks have said about the (foolish and counterproductive) wave of cancellations Germany’s liberal institutions have evidently committed themselves to. If you’ve been disinvited, defunded or fired because of your support for the Palestinian cause – or even, increasingly, for having expressed anything but the most tepid and anodyne concern for what’s happening in Gaza – my goodness, wear that with pride. There will be plenty of us who want to hear what you have to say.

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, 4 months ago to random

Look, there’s not a whole lot of bad shit you could accuse Israel of that I would even blink at, but please, please check all your sources before repeating or reposting claims that Israel has been harvesting organs from dead Palestinians for resale on the black market. I see a lot of my friends in the struggle reposting these stories, and they are invariably sourced very thinly, with reference to the same two or three original posts, in a way that doesn’t satisfy my standard for veracity.