@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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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,
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For me, the distinction arises out of my very first moments of involvement with the Occupy Sandy effort, in the last days of October 2012. My partner & I – wanting to volunteer to do recovery work in some capacity, having been outright rejected by the Red Cross, & having rocked up at the 520 Clinton distribution hub with little more than desire & energy – were immediately greeted & welcomed as we approached, in a way that would put most customer service-oriented businesses to shame.

adamgreenfield,
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It was made clear to us very quickly that, if we could but agree to a few basic principles of mutual respect, our efforts would be welcome in Occupy Sandy, and more than welcome. Whatever it was that we might have to offer would be put to use. We would be able to “plug in” to what was already an impressively large and sophisticated effort, but as whole human beings as much as people with an inventory of skills and capacities. It was electrifying.

adamgreenfield,
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But this was far from the only way this sprawling disaster relief and recovery effort made space for people as whole human beings. This quality was also, and every bit as importantly, expressed at the other end of the process, in interactions with the individuals, families and communities that had been hit hardest by the storm and were in most acute need of relief. The way Occupy Sandy approached this stood in the sharpest contrast with the way top-down relief agencies went about doing so.

adamgreenfield,
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Where agencies like the Red Cross distributed generic aid packages impersonally, and in a manner that inscribed a vertical savior/saved relation between people, the Occupy Sandy approach started with a natural conversation. (There were other salient differences in approach, too, as you’ll see in the book, but this is the one I want to drill into today.) When OS volunteers met someone who’d been displaced or otherwise injured by the storm, they started by simply asking: “How are you doing?”

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

adamgreenfield,
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@nyrath @FredKiesche

adamgreenfield,
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@nyrath @FredKiesche I would love to redesign their current-gen OGRE stuff somewhat more tastefully – the bright colors and not-great typography really drag me under. : . (

adamgreenfield,
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@christopher_brown @nyrath @FredKiesche @KarlSchroeder Philcon! It was indeed a MHWZ! And you were taller than me, because I was, like, eleven. Good times!

adamgreenfield,
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@nyrath @FredKiesche @KarlSchroeder @christopher_brown I can reliably say that, other than family, you are the only person I met during the 1970s that I am still in touch with in any way.

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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If we want to uphold the idea that we all have the right to understand the processes that shape our world and the choices (and, again, this is something I think of as self-evident), we have to reckon with those aspects of contemporary technology that abscond from even the possibility of broad comprehensibility, either through complexity (“Al”), involution (neural nets, the blockchain), regimes of speed, etc.

adamgreenfield,
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If we wished to live in a world where these technologies were present and operating, and, at the same time, that definitions of justice that encompassed matters beyond the merely distributional remained a possibility, we would have to break them to harness. In Illich’s terms, we would have to render them, somehow, convivial. So that’s the challenge I set to those of you who are enthusiastic about technologies like “AI”:

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,
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For me, these are a few of the irreducible minimum conditions for the acceptability of a technology, and at that this is clearly not a comprehensive or a complete list. But that I can see, considerations like these only very, very rarely feature in the conversations people have when they set out to develop new technics, either with themselves or among their peers.

adamgreenfield,
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I tend, out of a quarter-century of experience with thinking about, designing, using, maintaining and living with emergent technical systems, to be sharply skeptical now about any chance that they’ll help us live more lightly on the Earth, in justice and dignity, but I know there is still a great deal of enthusiasm for their development here. And given that the people within range of my voice right now feel like they’re among the more likely to be thoughtful

adamgreenfield,
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about the way they approach questions of technical development, that’s what I’m going to ask of you. How can your enthusiasm for these technologies be expressed in such a way as to center justice, dignity, and the virtues Illich described as convivial?

adamgreenfield,
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@inquiline You nail it. It’s such a difficult needle to thread, and he’s still IMO one of our more reliable guides.

adamgreenfield,
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@inquiline whoah

adamgreenfield,
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@cyberlyra We can only hope! Great to see you respond to this.

adamgreenfield,
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@cyberlyra (On the substance of your point: oooof, I wish I had something smarter-sounding to say than “it depends.” I think some technologies have the kind of plasticity you’re interested in, while others – proof-of-work-based blockchains come to mind – can only ever be harmful at scale, so far as I can see. I’d imagine the nous consists in being able to assess which was which before investing too much energy in development.)

pvonhellermannn, (edited ) to random
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My discipline, anthropology, is not seen as a “growth" discipline, and departments are being closed down. But the world needs Anthropology and Anthropologists now more than ever!

Here are my 8 reasons for this:

  1. POSSIBILITIES
    At a time of polycrisis, when the destructive fallouts of capitalist modernity are ever more apparent, anthropology highlights that there are myriad alternative ways of thinking and living; that there is so much to learn from other peoples in the world. 1/n
adamgreenfield,
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@roblosricos @pvonhellermannn @HeavenlyPossum @carcosa @danmcquillan Enumeration was a mistake.

adamgreenfield,
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@carcosa @roblosricos @HeavenlyPossum @danmcquillan @pvonhellermannn (I joke about this all the time, but it’s what we might in Korean call “a joke with bones.” Enumeration feels intertwined with the will to control in a primordial way: we count things so that we may assert order over them, or their distribution.)

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