@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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inquiline, (edited ) to mastodon
@inquiline@union.place avatar

Friends, strangers, haters: I have... made hay. Let no one say I haven't committed to the bit.

(Wrote a paper about Asstodon, everyone be kind)

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13367/11436

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@inquiline WHICH IN ITSELF ARGUES FOR ITS SIGNIFICANCE lol

adamgreenfield, to random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

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,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

Those of us who first encountered Gibson’s stories in Omni, thoroughly unprepared, c. 1981, will tell you that no short fiction before or since has rivaled them for immediate physical effect. Sure, “cyberpunk” is as completely cooked now as a Trump steak, with the more-than-faintly embarrassing tang of a different time wafting off it. But on its first appearance? A mulekick. No, more: a bolt that arced through you on its way to ground, and propelled you wholly and bodily into the future. Damn.

adamgreenfield, to Hrvatska
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

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,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@GhostOnTheHalfShell As I define it, anyway, it’s a theory and practice of local governance, based on and deriving its legitimacy from deliberative participation in popular assemblies. I would say it’s the most exciting political development of the past quarter-century. For a not-terrible overview, see https://www.fearlesscities.com/

adamgreenfield, to random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

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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(Do I really believe that bit about human history? For all my usual skepticism about strong technodeterminism, unquestionably. In fact, I believe there are strong arguments to be made that both the smartphone camera and the smartphone map separately transformed the way we’d done things in their respective domains of practice for millennia, and did so more or less immediately. Each would have been epochal alone. Together? No argument. None.)

adamgreenfield, to random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

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,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

My tendency is to believe that markets for illustration, animation and freelance writing will collapse first, and very few people will care, but that folks will suddenly sit up and take notice when generative music starts to supplant top 40-style pop. I’d like to have a better handle on this, though.

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 I’m sure the idea didn’t gestate entire in Lenin’s mind, but he’s the historical locus classicus (and the one to blame).

adamgreenfield, to random
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Can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but entire stretches of Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for “Dune: Part Two” could slide seamlessly between, say, Phurpa, Hildur Guðnadóttir and SUNN O))) in a Real Heavy playlist. In fact I wish more movies sounded like this. https://open.spotify.com/album/1PeYjDmxcRNvxLd5mGHuCC?si=E7f9X_QsTXKnb-xfQfJZ2g

adamgreenfield, to random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

Every Sunday for the past month or so, I’ve posted threads previewing my forthcoming book “” 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 .”

adamgreenfield, to random
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“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, to random
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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, to random
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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,
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How might these technologies be made to account for themselves, in ways that ordinary people can understand? How might they be made transparent, such that their workings become subject to democratic oversight and accountability? What can you do to ensure that their operations do not abscond from the human comprehensibility and justice, including the interests of nonhuman life?

adamgreenfield, to random
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One of the most frustrating things in life is that – like a great many people, I suspect – I have a few areas of interest in which I’ve developed enough of a competence that I feel I could probably make a meaningful contribution to their future development, but which are fated to remain secondary because I simply do not have time to attend to them, and also do the work to which I’m centrally committed.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

For me, this is stuff like the design of urban mobility systems: an area which has always fascinated me, in which I’ve done both theoretical and practical development work, and where the existing disciplinary lay of the land feels radically unsatisfactory to me. I bet we all have some analogous thing in our lives, a pursuit that clearly could flower into something beautiful if only we lavished time and care upon it, but we know we will not. It’s actually kind of painful to think about.

spencerbeswick, to anarchism
@spencerbeswick@kolektiva.social avatar

Post-1960s anarchism

As a reactionary counterrevolution remade society, the New Left was decimated by violent repression, and the Soviet Union collapsed, many on the radical left reevaluated the politics of the 1960s-1970s.

A new generation of radicals—together with many ‘60s veterans—critiqued the failures of Marxism-Leninism and grappled with fundamental changes in social, political, and economic life. As the ruling class embraced neoliberalism and repressive law and order politics, much of the left turned away from party building and attempting to capture state power.

Their analysis of social changes and the failures of state socialism led many militants to reject the state, and the late twentieth century was marked by a spread of anarchist politics throughout the radical left. This subterranean growth of US anarchism burst into view in the 1999 revolt against the World Trade Organization.

Beyond the growing popularity of formal anarchist ideology and organizations, an anarchist ethos had spread across the radical left. As David Graeber put it in 2010, “for activists, ‘anarchist process’ has become synonymous with the basic principles of how one facilitates a meeting or organizes street actions.”

This anarchist process includes consensus-based decision making, organizing in horizontal and non-hierarchical fashions, coalescing in networks and bottom-up federations rather than democratic centralist parties, and a commitment to direct action in many forms.

adamgreenfield,
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@spencerbeswick It’s so true, and I’m old enough to have experienced the shockwave that was thrown up when more traditional ML-style activists first encountered ACT/UP, Critical Mass and similar sorts of leaderless, bottom-up formations. It was a grammar of organization they simply couldn’t parse, any more than cops or bureaucrats could.

waciuk, to SF
@waciuk@mastodon.social avatar

Blindsight tackles the nearly impossible task of understanding the strange motivations beyond our own minds. And there's aliens.

http://incompletefutures.com/2024/03/11/blindsight-explores-the-pain-of-first-contact/

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@nyrath @waciuk @maxthefox It is one of the very, very few novels that offered what I felt was a convincing account of the otherness of alien life, which of course stems from Watts’s background. There’s lots to recommend it – I enjoy his take on “vampires” and “zombies,” the telematter drive is neat-o – but that’s the real gift of the book IMO.

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

I'm trying to remember old pulp scifi stories containing an old scifi troupe.

The idea was in the story, there existed telepathy and other mental powers. Some people's powers were latent, they had them but could not use them. Often were unaware that they had them.

BUT ... if another telepath tried to read their mind, they could see (internally) how it is done. Suddenly the latent telepath was a full telepath.

Can you remember scifi stories like that?

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@SkipHuffman @nyrath Except for those who were simply unable to jaunte, and IIRC they became an underclass as a result. (Or am I making that up? My library is in boxes at the moment.)

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@nyrath Feels like Silverberg’s “Dying Inside” to me?

adamgreenfield, to random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

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,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@FredKiesche @christopher_brown @KarlSchroeder Boss! I’ve been following @nyrath since, oh, 1977?

adamgreenfield, to random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

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.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@simon_brooke Sure, me too. But even beyond the boost to readability/digestibility, I enjoy the writerly discipline of trying to make each discrete point fit in the natural-seeming semantic module of a single 500-character post.

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

A sample play through of the TTWG High Frontier

https://verywordy.wordpress.com/2018/09/27/theres-a-starship-waiting-in-the-sky/

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@nyrath @FredKiesche I am reminded, obscurely, of a similar comment in an old review in “The Space Gamer,” which was worded so distinctively that I remember it verbatim from 1980 or so: “Rich Slabbekoorn, you have given birth to a peculialarity!”

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@nyrath ¡jesucristo! was any actual fun had at any point in this session, do you think?

adamgreenfield, to random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

This piece shimmers with something uncanny right beneath the surface, which is the specter of a direction machine learning might have taken had it not been developed inside the constraints of the late-capitalist political economy and property-rights regime. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/science/ai-learning-biology.html

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@otfrom Aye, that we could.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

Yes, you may fairly conclude that I think there might well have been a place for such a comradely technics in the world I want to bring into being, a kind of partially-automated plenitude anarchism. But that’s not the worldline we seem bound to carve together.

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