@adamgreenfield@social.coop
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adamgreenfield

@adamgreenfield@social.coop

Endurance athlete, heavy-music fan, compulsive greeter of cats. My next book is “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World on Fire,” coming from Verso mid-'24. #syndicateofinitiative

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pvonhellermannn, to Massachusetts
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“In a drastic attempt to protect their beachfront homes, residents in Salisbury, Massachusetts, invested $500,000 in a sand dune to defend against encroaching tides. After being completed last week, the barrier made from 14,000 tons of sand lasted just 72 hours before it was completely washed away”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dollar500k-dune-designed-to-protect-massachusetts-homes-last-just-3-days

adamgreenfield,
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@juandesant @pvonhellermannn @dibi58 @espanabizarra @passenger @stevenbodzin @dogzilla FWIW, Forensic Architecture’s Samaneh Moafi theorizes such zones as “negative commons.” I’ve found it a fruitful frame. https://www.instituteforpostnaturalstudies.org/article/negative-commons/

adamgreenfield, to random
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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,
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I only observe it. People you rely on for important things lose critical documents. A task that you’d expect to be done right the first time needs to be redone and then redone again. The wrong kind of emulsion is specified, or the financial support is deposited in someone else’s account, or the wrong form is filed, or the referral is lost in the mail. (These are all real examples from the past year of my life.) And when you layer brittle, overspecified and inflexible digital processes over this

adamgreenfield,
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rather slapdash comedy of errors, the result is not improved accuracy or streamlined process flow. It’s a new and supervening set of faulty readings, with its own particular kind of plausibility and authority, that people must somehow summon the energy to challenge and counter. Occasionally, this has literally lethal effects - if you do not live in the UK, prepare to be shocked speechless by the Post Office/Fujitsu scandal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

adamgreenfield, to random
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Looks like it’s Sunday, and that means it’s time for another 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,
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And so I read Illich, and Freire, and “Shelter.” I read about New Babylon and Christiania and Drop City. When I saw posters of Clifford Harper’s legendary Visions illustrations a few years later, tacked up in the place I was living, they immediately made sense to me. https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/antecedents-of-the-minimum-viable-utopia-cliff-harpers-visions-series/

adamgreenfield, to random
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First, I hope it goes without saying that Larry Summers has never been right about anything but the Winkelvii, and fuck him forever. But ever since I heard about his advice to Elizabeth Warren the other day, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

adamgreenfield, to random
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I have a friend – a cherished friend, of some twenty years’ acquaintance – who’s building things on top of ChatGPT, and guilelessly enthusiastic about the prospect, and has just in general decided to be completely cheerleadery and uncritical about this class of technologies. And I don’t know how to tell him that I think they represent the enclosure of the commons, and a theft from those of us who generated the corpus – accumulation by dispossession happening before our eyes, in real time.

adamgreenfield, to random
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Spent a decent chunk of yesterday with food justice activists mostly in their twenties and thirties, and was struck (and moved, and saddened) by the common structure of feeling among them. Their language turned, consistently, to the trauma and violence they felt the state and the market had inflicted on their communities, and on their bodies as well. I had to sit with it for awhile.

adamgreenfield, to random
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Maybe things would’ve turned out better if we’d reposed MASSIVE SOCIETAL POWER in the hands of nurses or teachers rather than, y’know, software engineers.

adamgreenfield, to random
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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, to random
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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, to Hrvatska
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Just a heads up that I’m going to be in in April to continue my research into comparative . If you are or have been involved in Zagreb je NAŠ!/Možemo, or have opinions about them you’d like to share, I’d love to talk to you.

adamgreenfield, to random
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I appreciated the forthrightness of these wastebins on ASU campus, but given what we know about the recycling industry, the options should probably be labeled LANDFILL HERE and LANDFILL SOMEWHERE ELSE ON EARTH, AT A HIGHER CARBON COST.

adamgreenfield, to random
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There are, of course, worse things in the world, but I find it nearly unbearable that all of us are constantly exposed to the banal things Elon Musk thinks, says and does, whether we want to be or not. I cannot remember the last day on which I did not see or hear his name. (I’m doing it to you right now, and I hate it!) He is the very worst of us, and I look forward to a time in which he is first ignored and then forgotten.

adamgreenfield, to random
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Really, though: if you’re serious about making headway with any kind of degrowth/“postgrowth” strategy, enacting a ban on advertising is where you want to start.

adamgreenfield, to random
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“Direct, life-saving aid in Gaza, near the Rafah crossing”: This is urgent work and it deserves your support. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HRG8NM9XvYAufETLAZzr08EezCsmPJjhlVGHg2sP-bQ/edit

adamgreenfield, to random
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Can we not?

adamgreenfield, to random
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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 , 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,
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Why are we not establishing neighbo(u)rhood-based solidarity clinics, to provide communities with at least some access to the kind of acute care such clinics are best able to provide? Would that not both serve obvious humanitarian ends, as well as take some heat off the NHS? We’re not talking about major surgeries, chemotherapy or MRI scans: the Greek solidarity clinics generally had to arrange these things by surreptitious barter with public hospitals & the BPP clinics were generally unable to.

adamgreenfield, to random
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We’re moving house, which has meant turning up all kinds of stuff I squirreled away and haven’t laid eyes on in a good long while. This is the iPhone I bought at the Apple Store in San Francisco on launch day, June 29th, 2007. It’s not often you get to be present at the actual hinge of an epoch in human history.

adamgreenfield,
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Anyway, I don’t know how many phones they shifted that day at Union Square, but a Fermi approach suggests it was in the low thousands. Let’s say that by the time we got to the store, they’d already sold, oh, 2500 – that’s probably high, but it’ll do. Then think that this phone is within the first 2500 true smartphones ever sold, of the 1.5 billion now in existence. That flat-out blows my mind. 💥

reginasbread, to random
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my ads are getting wild.

adamgreenfield,
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@reginasbread @inquiline I give you…

adamgreenfield, to KindActions
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Just popping up to share that we now have confirmed dates for the West Coast leg of my Lifehouse tour! It would make me beyond happy to see you on August 1st at Elliott Bay in Seattle (w/Dean Spade!),
August 3rd at Page Against the Machine in Long Beach,
August 6th at Green Apple’s 9th Ave store in San Francisco, or August 8 at Powell's in Portland – and hopefully break bread with you afterward. Feel free to share with anyone you think might be interested!

adamgreenfield,
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Oh, and a very important follow-up request for folks in #Seattle, #Portland, the #BayArea and the #LA basin: if you work with or know of any #mutualaid efforts that would like to present themselves to my audience, set out literature, etc., please let me know as soon as possible. It’s my great hope to use each one of these book talks to share a little bit of shine with local organizers in every city I’ll be visiting. 👊

adamgreenfield, to random
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Glenn Wallis's book "A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real" is available free here, in a variety of formats. (Glenn is an accomplished scholarly interlocutor of the Buddhist canon, but I knew him first as guitarist for legendary 1980s Philly hardcore band RUIN.) https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/45850

adamgreenfield,
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I should point out that this 👆is why I continue to believe in the power of zines, flyers, stickers, samizdat, even graffiti occasionally. They’re all potential onramps, ducts leading directly to subterranean currents that are otherwise not so easy to access. (I also acknowledge that the meaning of “subterranean” is fundamentally altered in an age of sharded community, in which subcultures coopt themselves before they form & ostensible nonconformity is both banal & trivially monetizable.)

simon_brooke, to random
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot avatar

Where did the idea of a "Vanguard Party" – that the proles were essentially too stupid, too imbued with false consciousness, to know what was good for them, and that consequently an elite revolutionary cadre must seize power and govern on their behalf – first emerge? Was it Lenin, was it Marx, was it Paris Commune, was it earlier?

adamgreenfield,
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@simon_brooke So far as the roiling and contested ideational space of the Commune, Kristin Ross is my go-to English-language source on this. My sense in reading her is that vanguardism was not a robust aspect of Commune ideology, though there certainly may have been some amazed delight at being the first to have broken through, and the hope that others elsewhere would be inspired to do likewise.

adamgreenfield, to random
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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,
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@nyrath @FredKiesche

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