@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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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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Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that I was kind of a fuckup at the age of 13, dealing with life issues that included not having a stable place to stay and also what I’d pretty clearly now characterize as ADHD. I was getting bullied in school – not awfully, but enough to make it an unpleasant place to be – and had started to cut classes. Up to then an ostensibly “gifted” student, I landed a failing report card in my first semester of eighth grade, and one day just refused to go back.

adamgreenfield,
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(I promise you, this is going somewhere.)

adamgreenfield,
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The school district insisted I see a psychiatrist, who wasn’t great, but to his credit told my parents, “You should trust him, he really isn’t going back there. You need to find an alternative.” Well, conventional private schools were out of the question. There were Friends schools around – two of them, excellent – but even putting expense aside I just bounced off their social universe. My parents were getting fairly desperate, when somehow they heard of a place that seemed to offer some hope.

adamgreenfield,
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It was a failing, hippie-era experiment in egalitarian education called the Miquon Upper School, which makes it sound a lot grander than it was. It was in a ramshackle house in Chestnut Hill, an hour away across town – I had to take two commuter trains to get there in the morning, and two to get back, which was its own kind of education. And it didn’t have grades in either sense, i.e. neither year-based distinctions of curriculum, or letter-based evaluations of performance. You called teachers

adamgreenfield,
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by their first name. You took whatever classes you felt ready for, with whoever else was there, from 12 to 18. There was lots of hands-on craft. It was the kind of place where students had a smoking room (!), and put on their own production of “Ubu Roi.” It literally saved my life.

adamgreenfield,
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There were many wonderful things about Miquon. I orbited a set of older students who seemed impossibly glamorous to me, who drove and smoked and made films and listened to the Specials and Black Flag and had sex (sometimes at school!). But the very best thing about Miquon for me was the library. It had been lovingly accumulated over two decades, and was filled to overflowing with the cultural and intellectual fruits of the American ‘60s and ‘70s.

adamgreenfield,
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This meant everything from James Baldwin and Tom Stoppard to “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and War Resisters’ League material on how to evade the draft. But it’s now clear to me that one thing I first found in the library there had more consequence for the rest of my life than anything else, and that was “The Whole Earth Catalog.” I’d just never seen anything remotely like it. It blew my mind.

adamgreenfield,
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There was a rich tranche of parallel texts in the library as well – unless I’m very badly mistaken, for example, it was the first time I saw Ken Isaacs’ brilliant “How Go Build Your Own Living Structures” (and the last time for many years, as well, until the internet returned it to me lifetimes later). There was, in short, access to a whole way of thinking about and intervening in the material world I’d barely been exposed to. http://letsremake.info/PDFs/k_isaacs.pdf

adamgreenfield,
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If I can summarize what I learned from that first scatty, ADHDish, mostly-looking-at-the-pictures encounter with this current of thought and praxis, it was that you didn’t have to accept the material world of tooling and shelter and vehicles as some eternal, received truth. People who felt left out of the mainstream deal could, with some effort, design themselves genuine alternatives. And these alternatives were generally what we’d now call lightweight, modular, extensible & user-configurable.

adamgreenfield,
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And what was very clear to me, and most exciting, was that people equipped with these alternative technics could step outside of the monstrous waste and inhumanity it was even then clear to me (at the age of 13, in 1981-82) was the purpose and motor of the mainstream economy. It would be years before I heard the expression , but I already understood the truth it encapsulated, and I wanted nothing to do with the purpose I saw unfolding in the world.

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/

sofiav, to random
@sofiav@mastodon.online avatar

People are calling Belt & Road capitalist again 😡😡😡

adamgreenfield,
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@sofiav No, they’re pointing out the asymmetry of the relation, and observing that this situation generally doesn’t end well for the party on the wrong end of the power relation. Remember that “the first hit is always free.”

adamgreenfield,
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@sofiav I wish there were another, less abrasive way to say this, but when you characterize Belt and Road as a fraternal, benevolent and even socialist project, I’m afraid I’m not assuming anything. This is about securing long-term revenue for PLA-owned enterprises, access to captive markets and strategic ports, and influence, and those things only, accompanied by the most extraordinary contempt for local labor.

adamgreenfield,
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@Loukas @sofiav Which shade of meaning would you see applying to this project?

adamgreenfield, to random
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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,
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@luis_in_brief A mistake. Ego, really. I was tired of being patronized by academics.

adamgreenfield,
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@luis_in_brief I wanna give my parents the gift of having their kid earn this degree. (Of course, each of them could care less, neither of them would be any more or less proud of me with a few letters after my name. It’s entirely my confabulation. Therapy would have been better.)

seachanger, to random
@seachanger@alaskan.social avatar

‘airhaulers fantasize about hauling more than air’ pretty much sums up the big black truck set https://universeodon.com/@LaNaehForaday/112185401724797739

adamgreenfield,
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@seachanger I see you’ve been to Australia

spaceflight, to random
@spaceflight@spacey.space avatar

"Making 🇪🇺 a reality" - While a multi-million-euro new investment in would be significant for the company, the opaque nature of this investment and the vehicles with which it was executed leave us with more questions than answers. https://europeanspaceflight.com/polaris-spaceplanes-secures-multi-million-euro-investment/

adamgreenfield,
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@nyrath Wow but this company seems sketchy to me.

inquiline, to Neoliberal
@inquiline@union.place avatar

"Like most institutions, had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs"

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

adamgreenfield,
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@inquiline @Yuki I’m sorry, that’s incoherent. Neoliberalism is a mode of governance within late capitalism.

urlyman, to random
@urlyman@mastodon.social avatar

@jackofalltrades just to say thank you for trying so hard in this thread https://mas.to/@jackofalltrades/112133626258185236

The number of people imputing things they wanted to hear, seemingly so they could accuse you, but which you didn’t say, and/or not investing any curiosity in what you did actually point them at… was quite something.

It kind of brings home just how much is functionally invisible

adamgreenfield,
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@RD4Anarchy @neonsnake @HeavenlyPossum @Loukas I kinda want to publish it as a PDF zine?

adamgreenfield,
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@HeavenlyPossum @RD4Anarchy @neonsnake @Loukas Heh. You know I’m torn down the middle of my soul – it should either look like “Search & Destroy” or like Müller-Brockmann did it his ownself.

inquiline, to random
@inquiline@union.place avatar

Oh you think you've seen the worst global capitalism has to offer? Not unless you've watched this, you haven't:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0lJc3PMNIg

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@sofiav @inquiline I cannot agree with you here. Belt and Road is a transparent attempt to transform its African partners, particularly, into client states dependent on an imperial metropole – a textbook inscription of exploitive and extractive neocolonial relations, reliant on the intercession of an exceedingly narrow comprador class in each polity it touches. If China understood soft power better, and was capable of not being racist, I might even take it seriously.

adamgreenfield,
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@sofiav @inquiline But “socialist”? There’s not a single socialist thing about it.

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