adamgreenfield

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

It isn't simply our political institutions which disempower us. The overwhelming majority of us are also undermined by our inability to understand the fundamental enabling technologies of modern life – how they do work in the world, how we may intervene in their operation, even how to repair them when they inevitably break down.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

Illich’s response – which I read as both a reflection of its epoch, the 1970s, and as having been enormously influential on anarchist and antiauthoritarian thought downstream – was to argue for a “convivial” technology, a technics which allowed ordinary, nonspecialist and non-technically-inclined users to inspect, disassemble, learn from and meaningfully intervene in its operation, and which tended to organize communities around each stage in this process.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

The desirability of this seems self-evident to me, but there are any number of voices on the contemporary Marxist and accelerationist left who are troubled by it. Frederic Jameson, I think acutely, reads many anarchist projects as embodying "a spirit of conservatism and of preserving the older and more humane communities and ways of living against the inhuman or posthuman development of late-capitalist technology." And so far as this goes, this is accurate.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

But when Jameson goes on to lodge the charge that this “is to encourage an unproductive Luddism and an anarchism with purely negative views of technology, easily accused of a commitment to vandalism and destruction,” he loses the plot.
What seems to have eluded him is that the production of justice for all has a cognitive dimension, as well as the more usually discussed distributional or representational aspects, and that this dimension is intimately related to questions of speed or scale.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

@ntnsndr oh ffs

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

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.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

@alxd I just can’t take a book seriously which proposes central bankers and cryptocurrency as the sovereign solution to our troubles, you know?

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

@alxd Oh, it is known. I felt it incumbent on me to read it twice, while writing “Lifehouse” – I kept wanting to believe he’d identified some nuanced angle that prevented it from being that exactly. Nope. It was that exactly.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

@alxd That has not generally been Stan’s jam, which is why MFTF was so very disappointing.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

@fraser Sweet Home Laniakea!

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

And it struck me that this notion might prove particularly fruitful in the context of the fundamental idea I’m trying to get across in the book: a distributed federation of local, autonomous relief, restoration and care hubs with which we might counter all the depredations that land on us as individuals and communities, both the ordinary insults of “organized abandonment” as it plays out in late capitalism and the redoubled traumas of general climate-system collapse.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

Each local, democratically-managed hub in such an arrangement would clearly benefit enormously by being able to call upon the resources of a confederal network at larger, even global scale. This would, among other things, allow them to share burdens & practice “mutual aid” as the term is generally understood by emergency-response organizations, as an exchange of specialist resources in time of acute need. But it’s hard to summon any such network while maintaining the integrity of local practice.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

Say that you manage to organize a Lifehouse locally, and you want to collaborate and share burdens with others – but your local membership is fiercely committed to being vegan, or a decent chunk of them are in recovery, and do not want alcohol or drugs used onsite, or have overriding sensory-sensitivity issues that affect the way they’ve gone about organizing the space itself. You want to affirm & uphold these values, but understand that the broader network cannot be expected to implement them.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

Why not defuse this as a potential point of schism, by saying on all non-definitive points of local divergence, “We have a pragma here that people using our Lifehouse agree to do X,” or “agree not to do Y”? Again, I don’t mean this to paper over points of principled contention that folks regard as existential. But surely most such points are not? Can they be accommodated w/in a framework that flexes respectfully, so as to permit local practice, style & character to flower, just as Mastodon does?

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

Have people already been doing some version of this forever? Of course! But they’ve done so tacitly, and, well, we see how well it works. So I don’t think it’s silly to wonder that we might not get better results by making our points of divergence explicit, and naming the practice of doing so in order that everyone involved understand what dynamics are in play.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

A pragma, as I think of it, is a way of saying, right out in the open for everyone to see: “We feel bound to do things this way. It’s important for us. We also want to work together with you, and we understand that you may very well not feel so bound. In our house, though, we expect you to observe our practice.” It’s not much, but it allows local groups to diverge in non-definitive ways, and therefore to preserve both their identity and the power that comes with working together.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

Our Lifehouse is vegan, and yours is not. Your Lifehouse is committed to armed self-defense, and ours is very much not. Both of our Lifehouses are committed to the same definitional principles of care with justice and dignity. Let us articulate whatever local pragmas we expect to be observed on our own ground, and not let these disagreements sunder our collaboration, however profound they may be.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

So there you have it: a “pragma” is a local agreement that neither comes into conflict with globally-held commitments, nor compels any other party to adopt it in their own local context. It allows the whole network to flex and vary, and should prevent build-ups of the ideological brittleness that leads to fragmentation and the squandering of capacity. Goofily idealistic? Sure, maybe. But, it seems to me, worth articulating as a value.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

@Laura It’s not new, not at all! But I have found it very helpful, myself, to have an anchor for the idea, a way of talking about what we so often find difficult to address. I hope you find it as useful as I have.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

@urlyman @boud I just reposted the entire thread on Public – search #pragma.

adamgreenfield, 2 months ago

@jlou @jackofalltrades @afterconnery @HeavenlyPossum @thesquirrelfish Cities produce things of value that no other human environment can – niche subcultures, to mention just one thing that I’d be devastated to have to live without.