@adamgreenfield@social.coop
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

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 random
@inquiline@union.place avatar

Oh cool it looks like @dasharez0ne mastodon.social is blocking people who respond to their posts accusing them of stealing their schtick

(edit, someone else can provide receipts of their stealing; I don't have them but recall finding them convincing when they went by earlier, so I willingly participated in said accusations and am now blocked)

(edit 2, receipts in replies here)

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@inquiline This reminds me of an account that’s huge-for-here, with something like 45,000 followers, that I’ve reported multiple times for blatantly and transparently plagiarizing old Twitter posts. Like literally eight out of ten posts of hers that I Googled were originally posted by other people either there or on Reddit. We have a real clout-chasing problem here.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@julieofthespirits @inquiline You know who I mean, then? Yeah, it’s so weird – like, both obvious and also pointless? I guess she gets her jollies that way, she blocked me for calling her on it.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@julieofthespirits @inquiline Aaaand she’s still doing it! Same MO: a totally obvious, completely unacknowledged lift from an easily identifiable source.
Compare this: https://mstdn.social/@Strandjunker/112140269113867437
…to the original: https://www.newsweek.com/ronna-mcdaniels-new-job-ignites-firestorm-1882451

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@julieofthespirits @inquiline I really question the values of a person who has to get their affirmation by deceiving people in this way. It seems like such a profound violation of the basic social contract, here especially – the idea that, for better or worse, we’re all going to show up as our own authentic selves, and agree or disagree, like each other or despise each other on that basis.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@inquiline @julieofthespirits Normies seem to love her. Liberals, etc.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@inquiline @julieofthespirits Heh.

Loukas, (edited ) to random
@Loukas@mastodon.nu avatar

If you had to define your personality based on RPG types, are you a

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@Loukas -7, surely.

adamgreenfield, to random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

Not that he was perfect, or anything of the sort, but I cannot express the joy it gives me to see Stafford Beer’s watchword “the purpose of a system is what it does” at long last pass into common usage, especially among folks with no obvious reason to know who Stafford Beer was. It’s been a vital analytical tool for me this past quarter-century, in all kinds of circumstances.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@nyrath 👀 You’d love it! Eden Medina’s book is definitive.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@nyrath @eldadoinquieto Akkurat!

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@eldadoinquieto @nyrath No, but I do love that typeface. That and Galaxie Polaris have been my go-tos this decade.

HeavenlyPossum, to random
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social avatar

My favorite kind of reply guy is wildly unhinged aggression just right out of the gate.

https://mastodon.social/@gmsizemore/112147698748291142

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@HeavenlyPossum Oh, I had one of those today too. Is there a full moon?

FredKiesche, to random
@FredKiesche@dice.camp avatar

And there it is…the first novel-length installment appearance of the BOMB-PUMPED X-RAY LASER!

image/jpeg
image/jpeg
image/png

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

@FredKiesche Those miniatures, as I recall, were molded from a very high grade of plastic, yielding lovely surface detailing, crisp snapping-together, etc.

adamgreenfield, to random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

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 random
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

Sunday! And that means it’s time for this week’s thread. Last week we talked about the ; 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,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

They didn’t assume that people needed help. They didn’t arrogate to themselves the task of deciding what form that help should take. They didn’t impose themselves on the situation like a savior come down from above. They inquired – that I saw, with surprising gentleness and attention to the right moment – if the people they met needed anything. The power of this pivot cannot be underestimated. To put it in somewhat technical terms, it transformed the subject of care from passive recipient into

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

an active, agential co-creator of their own safety. And many of the people who’d experienced this did in fact go on to join the Occupy Sandy effort themselves, as volunteers. This is the key to that effort’s widely-noted effectiveness, or one of them, anyway. This is what allowed people who were very possibly undergoing the worst moments of their lives, in objective terms, to experience them instead as woven through with a sense of purpose, power and possibility.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

And this, I believe, speaks to a real deficit in what are otherwise some of the most inspiring intellectual projects of the past half-century or so: those loosely clustered around the ideas of “open” and “openness.”

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

However unwise it may be to present such a broad diversity of projects and aims with such brutal schematicity, I think it’s fair to say that most “open” projects – whether Wikipedia or the open-source hardware community or even many nominally “participatory” political formations – are merely open to newcomers in a formal sense. And very often, as I’ve seen & heard directly & for myself, the convenors of some such project wonder why there doesn’t seem to be the community uptake they’d hoped for.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

I do not mean this as a judgment upon these projects or their initiators and maintainers – just the opposite, in fact: as I say, they are some of the most inspiring developments of my adult lifetime, and involve some of the best people I’ve ever met. But neither can we pretend that there aren’t very severe challenge gradients in place, that prevent all but a relatively small minority of people from availing themselves of the offer of openness.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

You know what this challenge gradient consists of, because we speak about these things all the time hereabouts. Folks are exhausted by the necessity of earning a living under the conditions of late capitalism. Their time is already spoken for: they are bound in a web of obligations to people who need them. They may physically be unable to access the project space, or find it uncomfortably homogenous when they get there. They may feel othered, from the moment they walk (or roll) through the door.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

They may not speak the dominant language in the space fluently, or feel anxiety at the thought of doing so. All of these situations, and many more, function as real, material barriers to participation. There is, in short, what @inquiline refers to as “the burden of participation,” and that burden is distributed unequally among the bodies who compose the participatory project. Again: you know this.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

But if we want to make good on the (very considerable) promise of nominally “open,” participatory institutions, we have to do the work that Occupy Sandy did seemingly effortlessly: the work of meeting people where they are, in dignity and respect for the whole human being. We need, in other words, to transform our open institutions into invitational institutions.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

I do not suggest this will be easy, or unvexed by any of the complications that invariably attend human sociality & collective endeavor. But it’s not optional, either. In fact, a large part of the reasoning behind bothering to articulate the idea of the in the first place is to unlock the invitationality of the Lifehouse as a space & an idea. Each local hub has to be free to vary in its presentation and affects, in order to feel authentically like the effort of the people who make it up.

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

Anyway, you can read more about invitationality, and the other qualities that I think made Occupy Sandy so successful and such an excellent example, in the book. And I hope you’ll let me know about examples of this quality that you yourself have experienced, and maybe together we can try to identify some of the principles at work so we can put them to use elsewhere. See you next Sunday for another thread on the , and how I see it working to support us in the time of troubles we face!

adamgreenfield,
@adamgreenfield@social.coop avatar

I want to pick up on one final aspect of the way Occupy Sandy worked, beyond the practical difference it made in the lives of the people who interacted with it in the course of the storm and its aftermath. The orthodox sociology of social movements defines such movements in terms of the claims they make on power. The moments I’m interested in are those at which the movement stops appealing to those in power, and instead moves to directly supplant that power as it manifests in people’s lives.

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