@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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heads and others who would know: check out this very strange edit war on Wikipedia, revolving around the assertion that a Guadeloupean-French singer contributed to the first single, “United/Zyklon B Zombie.” This, to put it mildly, is news to me, and I know the history of this band fairly well. Does anyone know the story behind this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/1127251549

adamgreenfield,
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@acousticmirror This was my feeling, and nor is it entirely implausible that his involvement could have been erased, even fairly comprehensively. But it also feels like an instance of the LLM-era epistemic contamination I so worry about: without access to physical resources (the original 7’) or direct testimonies, there now seems to be no ready way to determine the truth value of these statements.

adamgreenfield,
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@acousticmirror …which invokes the delightful specter of SLEAZY RISING FROM THE GRAVE TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT. As it were.

adamgreenfield,
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@acousticmirror Please! We’re moving house, so mine’s in a box at the moment.

adamgreenfield,
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@acousticmirror “🤷‍♂️”

adamgreenfield, to random
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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,
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In the wake of BLM, I feel like we may finally be getting a little better about remembering MOVE. There was a long, long time there where you’d mention it to people, and unless they’d spent time in Philly themselves, you’d invariably draw a blank. These past few years, though it was and remains incredible to me that an American police force’s murder by incendiary of six adults and five children could ever have been so completely erased, people finally seem to know what I’m talking about.

adamgreenfield,
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@idlestate MOVE had a fraught history in West Philadelphia – you’ll still find plenty of working-class Black folks, neighbors of the original MOVE house in Powelton Village, who’ll tell stories about the pariah dogs, or the rats that were attracted by MOVE’s unorthodox approach to composting organic waste. Their voices are part of the story too, and responsible history gives them a place. But used to justify state murder? Obscene. The police burned six adults and five children to death.

adamgreenfield,
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@idlestate And you will hear people trying to justify the bombing, even now. You’ll never understand the bone-chilling, cold-blooded sociopathy of American white supremacy half as well as you do in the moment you listen to someone trying to do so. The stakes become very plain.

openculture, to random
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Cats Migrated to Europe 7,000 Years Earlier Than Once Thought

https://www.openculture.com/2023/05/cats-migrated-to-europe-7000-years-earlier-than-once-thought.html

adamgreenfield,
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@openculture hello cats

adamgreenfield, to random
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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,
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@misc It’s essentially the culminating argument of the book I’m writing, maybe even its tl;dr. The way we are going to endure these terrible years is by collectively getting stuck into the granular details of managing our being-in-the-world, from the way we feed and shelter and care for ourselves to the way we design the environments in which we gather.

adamgreenfield,
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@misc It’s important (to me, anyway) to bring highly abstract ideas back into contact with the friction and mess of reality. Participating in the Fediverse daily has taught me a lot about the power, and the limits, of confederal systems.

adamgreenfield,
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@trochee @misc Not for me, but maybe for someone else, sure.

adamgreenfield,
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A convivial stack requires deep and ongoing conversation between people who think of themselves as working in FLOSS, in open-source hardware, in open construction and building systems, in open agriculture, in distributed power systems, and in participatory politics (to the degree that they’re not already, and I’m aware that some of these links already exist). I believe that full agency over the circumstances of our lives requires that we first comprehend, quite literally, how the world is built.

adamgreenfield,
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The systems that underwrite our survival on the planet need to be engineered such that we can meaningfully intervene in their operation and improvement, at all ages; that they invite that intervention, and are robust enough that they do not fail in the face of experimentation; that they account for and explain their own functioning; and that they organize non-exclusive communities of practice around them that are more than formally open.

adamgreenfield,
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There are so many of the necessary pieces on the table, waiting only for us to assemble them. And though you know I hesitate to overgeneralize from my own position and particularity, what I can tell you from personal experience is that getting stuck into the details in this way is a specific for the alienation and deselfing inflicted on us by the everyday late-capitalist lifeworld. We can be more whole as individuals when we work together toward the creation of systems that sustain us all.

adamgreenfield,
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What bothers me about this framing is that there’s no constituency for it – at least, no constituency that knows it’s a constituency. It’s a big project, with lots of (at times quite literal) moving parts, and cannot even begin without people in all of these communities taking the initiative to make points of connection – interfaces – with other communities working in parallel. The coordinating of that sort of effort generally requires some kind of banner or empty signifier to rally around.

adamgreenfield,
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(“FLOSS” itself is an excellent example of such an empty signifier.)

adamgreenfield,
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But please do let me know if the convivial stack is a vision that appeals to you, if you are aware of any of the conversations happening that would underwrite the emergence of a program along these lines, if you yourself have participated in such a conversation, or, indeed, would like to. I’d love to have a better idea of where these negotiations are happening, and who’s currently undertaking any such thing. Give me a shout if you feel like this is you!

adamgreenfield,
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And one final thought, though this is more of a supposition, or even an article of faith: I believe that when we finally understand the profound complexity of the natural world’s systems, our own systems will tend to the robust and simple. The better the understanding we have of the way the Earthly ecosystem sustains itself across deep time, the more lighthanded we can be in our interventions.

adamgreenfield,
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@becha Many aspects of it, surely, as is “permaculture,” and it’s people who think of themselves as degrowthists that have responded most favorably to this framing of ideas.

adamgreenfield,
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@acousticmirror Herbert-as-Irulan is Best Herbert.

adamgreenfield,
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@neil Tremendous.

adamgreenfield,
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@bonfire @neil @smallcircles @dajb It may, admittedly, inhere in my possibly misleading use of the word “stack,” but I feel like that’s too narrow an interpretation. What I have in mind is a logic that extends from the assembly as a forum for collective self-determination through advanced DIY construction systems like WikiHouse. (It’s a shame the creators of the latter turned out to be so intent on centralizing & monetizing it – we badly need some such scheme.)

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