Adam Greenfield

Endurance athlete, heavy-music appreciator, compulsive greeter of cats, host of Lifepod. My 2024 “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World on Fire,” is available from Verso; new books forthcoming.

Lifepod, the podcast about taking care of ourselves in a world on fire: http://lifepod.transistor.fm
Pre-order my next book!: https://store.illwilleditions.com/products/the-tetrad-value-in-a-more-than-human-world-by-adam-greenfield
Sign up for my free dispatch at: https://www.adamgreenfield.site/

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Last Notes

2026-10-25 22:08:42 UTC

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Aw man. Jubilant scenes in Belgrade – giddy, universal civic delight. Incredible.
Inshallah we too will have our Ding-Dong, The Witch Is Dead moment.

2026-10-25 22:05:05 UTC

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Amazing story. Happy for them and for you.

2026-10-25 21:53:52 UTC

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Firstly, WHAT. Your Jim? Klaus Flouride from the Dead Kennedys??That I did not know.
Secondly, yeah, musically there’s only so much I can take. But lyrically nobody captured Britain in the rough interval between the Coalition government and COVID the way they did.

2026-10-25 21:43:31 UTC

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Great band.

2026-10-25 20:44:45 UTC

Congratulations Serbia. Well done.

2026-10-23 13:55:09 UTC

Heya, I just wanted to make sure you-all know about this free talk I’m giving at LSE on the evening of November 12th.
It’s called “Against Fire and ICE: The Lifehouse as Community Defense,” and it’s dedicated to the proposition that the ways we organize our neighborhoods to protect ourselves from climate chaos also happen to serve us in good stead in times of authoritarian heavy manners. The principle involved is what professional emergency planners call “all-hazard preparedness,” just reframed with the understanding that some hazards wear badges.
Anyway, if you should happen to be in #London that evening, come join me, Gargi Battarchayya and Dubravka Sekulić, talking #autonomy and #mutualaid as tactics for seeing us through dark times with our values of dignity and justice intact. Drinks after at the Seven Stars!
https://www.adamgreenfield.site/against-fire-and-ice-lse/

2026-10-14 17:37:19 UTC

There are people in Ukraine who were alive yesterday who are dead today because Elon fucked them, and I hope the thought of it tortures the smirking shit to madness. Not holding my breath though.

2026-10-05 13:03:47 UTC

Blessed this afternoon to have made a playlist for my favorite twelve-year-old – currently into Slipknot 🤮 – introducing her (with her parents’ close involvement, oversight and approval) to the wonders of Sabbath, Mötörhead, Metallica and Iron Maiden; SUNN O))), Earth, Sleep, Thou and Ragana; Liturgy and Agriculture; Senyawa, Scarcity, Glenn Branca and Mogwai; and finally and somewhat off to one side Stooges, Bikini Kill, Black Flag and Bad Brains.
I’m trying to suggest with this selection that there are many rooms in the heavy house, and that it is possible to bypass the myriad forms of self-harm available to someone her age in the time and place by channeling frustration, alienation, rage and despair into community and affirmation. I really hope she finds something she finds personally meaningful.

2026-09-27 13:53:37 UTC

I’m getting ads for productivity-bro grindset successories, “proudly pro-Israel coffee” and probiotic gummies for guys who bottom. HAVE I DEFEATED THE ALGORITHM?

2026-09-25 13:27:01 UTC

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Wow, thanks. However did I miss this? It makes overt and certain what I was only inferring.
JFC are we ever doomed if this jumped-up shitbird ever learns how to translate his wealth into actual power.

2026-09-25 11:57:07 UTC

Mark Zuckerberg has evidently named his own AI assistant “Agrippa,” implying of course that he himself is Augustus – founder and first imperator of the Roman Empire.
I don’t know what’s more profoundly cringe, that rather revealing fact or Meta’s infantilizing depiction of its agents as cuddly, marshmallow-proportioned cartoon characters. In fact this whole worldline needs to collapse, the sooner the better.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/117/331/531/297/031/065/original/d64f8088f08620b4.jpeg

2026-09-22 08:22:24 UTC

Is there a word for that CLEVAR PUN thing all Extremely Online people under the age of thirty or so do with their profile name, e.g. call themselves “Brosef Stalin” or “Jock Derrida” or whatever?

2026-09-15 10:08:13 UTC

RE: https://autonomous.zone/@lake/117274246130693070
@npub15l5…uqg8 has this right – the AI discourse is killllllling me, slowly extinguishing my joy & embroiling me in conversations I’d just as soon let pass me by. Will be implementing this filter when I’m back from foodhub later on this afternoon.
#note1h5u…ql36

2026-09-14 10:05:22 UTC

Whomst amongst us could read this headline and not immediately think “suck on deez mind-altering nuts”? (Interesting finding, though, really!)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/sep/09/indonesian-foragers-mind-altering-nuts-research-finds

2026-09-13 10:45:56 UTC

I don’t see how that branch of anti-AI sentiment that is primarily concerned with minimizing its novelty – the “stochastic parrot” line – is tenable after recent events.
Before you reply with a lecture on how LLMs work, I’d ask you to consider that it is possible to understand how these systems function in some depth and sophistication, while also granting that a degree of emergent behavior was inevitable once they were deployed at scale.
And while we’re most used to concepts like “creativity” or “adaptive response” being used to characterize the behavior of subjects, I think we must also grant that actors without interiority, worlding capacity or a sense of self can do those things too. (Why should what is true of slime molds be any less true of sufficiently complex software agents?)
I’m not asking you to approve, and still less to endorse any description of the situation offered by commercial actors. I *am* asking that we contend with the reality of what we’re confronted with.

2026-09-12 12:29:21 UTC

“#Philosophy, as we understand it, is the conceptual proliferation of theoretical weapons aimed at the order of things. Anything else is mere collaboration.”
- Acid Horizon, “Anti-Oculus,” 2023.

2026-09-10 11:48:50 UTC

Fifty full years on, so much has changed, and so very little.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/117/246/574/313/428/702/original/975f92e0df4734f4.jpg

2026-09-08 10:12:04 UTC

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Because, sure, I’ve spent plenty of time in my life in social centers and infoshops and free clinics, and similarly counterhegemonic spaces. But we talk about these things – we articulate their affordances and constraints, we valorize them, in some way they’re the furniture of our aspirations.
But I’ve spent just as much time, if not a good deal more, in coffee houses and bike shops and diners and video stores (remember them?) that are just kind of crap businesses, but vital and beloved social condensers. And other than, I guess, liberal “third place” theory, it feels like we just don’t have a way of talking about these spaces that captures their importance to us and our communities. Am I missing some body of thought?

2026-09-08 10:04:28 UTC

I was yapping with Jim from The Approach the other day, and our conversation turned to a set of institutions that had been significant in both our lives – *not* collectives, necessarily, *not* coops, simply small businesses run by human beings, who’d decided for whatever reason to be “bad at capitalism.”
That is, these businesses and their owners faced the world with policies and practices that were consciously suboptimal, by the late capitalist economy’s cut-throat rules of accumulation, because it allowed them to preserve space for the community, for taking care of neighbors, and for the introduction of other, more congenial values.
After I got off the call with Jim, I remembered what it was like to run a West Philly coffeehouse, a long long time ago, that was like that, so we could e.g. let runaway kids crash in the basement, feed unhoused customers for free on the DL, etc. And I thought: huh, actually, this space is really undertheorized on the left.

2026-09-07 08:03:04 UTC

I’ve detected a new note in mainstream opinion writing these past few months, in big liberal outlets like the Guardian and the New York Times, which I’d broadly characterize as “whistling past the graveyard.”
You’ll notice now that columns and op-ed pieces are larded with little asides, varyingly apologetic or ha-ha funny or frankly cynical, vaguely acknowledging the terrible, terrible straits we’re in, collectively…but then the piece kind of resumes its previous direction of travel, makes some trivial point, and nothing further is said about the matter of greater consequence engulfing us all.
It’s like some remnant of integrity or sense compels the writer to at least gesture at the thing that’s in front of us, but they can’t or don’t want to take it in in its full enormity, and so they just move on to the TV review or the analysis of fashions at the US Open or whatever. I can’t unsee the pattern now, and it scares the crap out of me.

2026-08-30 13:22:55 UTC

I’m wondering if anybody here’s interested in contributing the cover illustration for my new book for Ill Will? This is a paid gig.
The book — title still TBD, street date June 2027 — is an attempt to think value in a more-than-human world. Across its pages range Sun and Moon, Silvia Federici and Sylvia Wynter, Robert Silverberg and Peter Watts, Martin Heidegger and Baruch Spinoza. It brings the Tao te Ching into conversation with Das Kapital. It reckons with ozone in the upper atmosphere, fungus in the soil and 5-MeO-DMT in the human bloodstream. It leans not unheavily on Eugene Thacker, and I think it probably wants to be illustrated like a #blackmetal record.
Let me know if this is a project you’d be interested in taking on/please do feel free to share this post in places folks who might be interested would see it.
#illustration #illustrator

2026-08-29 10:14:33 UTC

I hesitate to say this bluntly, because I know a whole lot of folks on here are actively involved in technical development of one sort or another, and derive both pleasure and a significant part of their identity from that fact. There’s something I think we all need to get clear on, though, and it’s something I myself had to learn the hard way: no tool will liberate us. The achievement of justice cannot be automated, or otherwise outsourced to a technical apparatus of any sort.
You work on tools because that’s what you’re good at, because that’s the way your brain works, because that’s what you enjoy or can get compensated for doing. That’s all as may be. But please, please do not make the mistake of thinking that the tool – any tool, of any sort whatever – will produce “progress.” There is and can be no technical fix for the social-psychological, existential or ontological predicaments that confront us. In the end there is only us, staring back at us from whatever mirror we’ve built.

2026-08-26 21:38:33 UTC

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You know I’m no stranger to the Surely This current, but it’s been that way for me these past few weeks. Like: man, enjoy this leisurely walk around a peaceful, plentiful, diverse neighborhood, after a wonderful, filling dinner made with ingredients from all over, because who knows how long any of this will last?

2026-08-26 20:12:49 UTC

This is what, and all, it takes to be a designated terrorist organization anymore: being a “cadre of radical hackers and tech developers [that] provide a full spectrum of services – including encrypted chats and email, web hosting, secure video conferencing and streaming, anonymity shields, and a suite of other technological tools – to Marxist, anarchist, and other left-wing extremist groups in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.”
NB: That’s just about every one of us on here, is it not? Incredible overreach, incredibly pernicious and incredibly dangerous.
https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/08/designation-of-autistici-inventati-as-a-specially-designated-global-terrorist/

2026-08-23 09:10:33 UTC

I want to thank everyone who kicked in overnight to our effort to get a mutual-aid hub in Gary, Indiana – serving a city now eleven days without electricity – a solar generator. I’m delighted to report that as of this morning, we’re well over halfway to the target.
One more push today and, with any luck, I should be able to order the generator by the end of the day. Please circulate this as widely as you can – let’s let ‘em know they don’t have to face this alone.
Again, thanks so much for your care, your generous support and your solidarity. Taking care of one another is something we have the power to do.
https://chuffed.org/project/196914-lets-ship-a-solar-generator-to-folks-without-power-in-gary-indiana
#mutualaid #anarchism #solarpunk #gary

2026-08-22 11:15:16 UTC

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A ten-day outage would be inconceivable in most places, of course, so NIPSCO’s inability to restore power really stands out. The reason behind it is clear to everyone on the ground there: a local activist describes the situation as “organized abandonment in a deindustrialized sacrifice zone.”
#Mutualaid is currently being organized through a space called…the Space, one of a few autonomous projects in Gary (including the Joy Bomb social center, where I gave a Lifehouse talk on the last leg of my North American tour) where folks are storing goods and doing pop-up distribution.

2026-08-22 11:14:30 UTC

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To clarify: it’s been another one of those shocking-but-not-surprising things, to see how little note the media have taken of what’s happening in #Gary, Indiana - a predominantly Black, relatively poor, post-industrial city with a shrinking population.
Roughly 20,000 households have now gone ten days without electric power since an unusually strong derecho tore through on August 11th. In all that time, local electric utility NIPSCO has been unable to restore service, with all the predictable consequences: spoiled food and medicines, no recourse to air conditioning or refrigeration, local businesses unable to operate, people having to spend heavily on generator fuel (and suffer all the pollution that accompanies their use), difficulty charging phones and medical equipment, and schools remaining closed.

2026-08-21 14:49:47 UTC

Folks do know what’s happening in Gary, right?

2026-08-17 10:11:22 UTC

It probably bears repeating that the wisest thing anyone can do in turbulent times is to invest their resource in the creation of goods whose value is broadly scenario-invariant – wagers which pay off no matter which possible worldline eventuates.
At the personal level, these goods might include things like maintaining one’s physical fitness, a robust set of friendships, participation in local community (counter-)institutions, solidly-made tools, a contemplative or meditative practice of some sort, etc.
It sounds platitudinous, but these are the things you’ll be able to rely upon more or less no matter *what* else happens.

2026-08-14 23:57:58 UTC

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I hate it almost as much as when people call something a “PSYOP,” most especially if they spell it “psy-op.”

2026-08-11 13:03:39 UTC

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Hahahaha I know, man: I used to be head of design direction for service and UI design at Nokia.

2026-08-11 12:39:03 UTC

As someone who regularly helps elderly, low-vision, low-English-literacy & other folks who are struggling to understand them manage their phones (I know @npub1prs…eh8y does this too), I cannot begin to explain to you the rage I feel at the designers & development organizations who foist these UI choices on a public not remotely equipped to navigate them.
The controls are overwhelming, still. They’re couched in jargon, still. They’re hidden somewhere non-obvious, down the end of a four-node decision tree. Fifteen years after I left the industry things have only gotten worse. And the worst bit of all – as I always insisted then, based on my own extended observation – is that *users internalize the blame for their inability to comprehend the UI*.
They wind up feeling stupid and incompetent. They wind up bewildered and scammed. They feel terrified to hit the wrong button, and then not be able to find it again. It’s so, so hard to watch. It breaks my heart, and it makes me furious.

2026-08-08 15:56:14 UTC

Oh, and: not to turn you into my nonconsenual accountability buddies or anything, but I’m declaring my entire goal for the next year now.
*By next summer, a small group of people somewhere on Earth has a material capability they did not previously possess, because I worked with them to develop that capability and learn how to use it most fruitfully.*
That’s it. I need to make sure I don’t remain epistemically upstream of the work I believe in – commenting upon it, sanding it into some notionally ideal configuration, but not being exposed to the rigors of use or the stakes of failure. I need to get stuck in.

2026-08-01 18:34:00 UTC

I left the house for the first time since July.

2026-07-31 17:04:10 UTC

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There it is. 👊

2026-07-31 16:49:59 UTC

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(I already have my opening sentence: “The Chilean politician José Viera-Gallo is often quoted to the effect that ‘socialism can only arrive at the speed of a bicycle.’ I found myself wondering what kind of politics shows up when it travels on foot.”)

2026-07-31 16:45:36 UTC

I’ve got a question for you: the remaining book that I’m now on the hook for with Verso is supposed to be “about walking.” I like to walk! The trouble is that, so far as I can see, there just isn’t much about walking that hasn’t been said, either philosophically or politically or poetically. I’m currently having a hard time seeing how “Margin Walker: A book by Adam Greenfield” might make a meaningful, *useful* addition to the already-groaning shelf of books on same.
What do *you* think the gap or absence consists of? Especially if you walk as a contemplative, political or expressive practice: what might a book about #walking take on that you would find entertaining and generative?

2026-07-12 12:57:12 UTC

The sordid Platner undoing only underlines the point I’m always trying to make: *stop “believing in” politicians* and *stop outsourcing the work of making change*.
Look, I, too, love Zohran and AOC, and will always have something of a soft spot for Bernie. But the work of making a world fit for us is not theirs to undertake. It’s ours.

2026-06-24 18:19:14 UTC

The thing is, everyone you know has those zines, those books, those stickers and posters. That’s the point of this prosecution: to render them incriminating in and of themselves.

2026-06-21 08:47:28 UTC

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ELADATL!

2026-06-21 08:45:58 UTC

Happy solstice everyone! I hope you don’t have to throw any elders from the top of a cliff.

2026-06-12 09:30:00 UTC

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“Robustance” is good, very good – but I often worry that such coinages are bound to meet the same fate “spime” itself did.
(FWIW, my next book discusses the process of “groundation.”)

2026-06-12 08:22:39 UTC

So as some of you know, I’ve been fighting a pitched battle against the concept of “resilience,” for two reasons: it implies that we return to the contours of a fucked-up system after some exogenous shock, and it displaces the responsibility for that capacity of return largely onto people who are already expected to silently accept so much of the burden of keeping our fucked-up system ticking over.
In my writing and thinking, I generally therefore prefer to use the term “robustness,” and have even tried to reclaim the very useful notion of “antifragility” from its chowderheaded coiner. But I keep running into people (and entire discourse communities) who seem committed to “resilience.”
What do you think? Is my refusal to embrace that language upholding an important and meaningful distinction, or is this simply a losing battle? (For that matter, do *you* think of your work as being about “resilience”?)

2026-06-05 17:39:10 UTC

By artwashing the process of production, and shrouding it in spectacle, useful idiots like this do vastly more damage than the more obvious villains like Sam Altman or Dario Amodei. It’s difficult for me to convey the true depth of my disdain for the banality and tonedeafness of this work. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/arts/design/dataland-ai-museum-los-angeles-art-artificial-intelligence.html

2026-06-03 15:14:05 UTC

My birthday present arrived in the afternoon mail.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/686/814/776/714/896/original/9aeedc9e75f4c7b8.jpeg

2026-06-02 17:33:43 UTC

Folks in the #UK, it’s clear that the Farageist right are gearing up for an anti-Sikh pogrom. It’s vital that we come out to defend the Sikh community, who have already faced so much abuse from the hindutva fascists, in whatever way we can. Now, again, is the time for intercommunal solidarity.

2026-05-30 07:49:29 UTC

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When folks push back about not everyone involved in this work needing to “be anarchists,” I point out that the Lifehouse’s dedication to autonomy is not primarily ideological, but pragmatic.
Firstly, our collective experience of climate-driven catastrophe tells us that the state simply will not be there for us in our moment of need. It shows up on the scene late, if at all, and with a top-down approach to relief that (again, experience shows) is most often at odds with what the community perceives as necessary.
Secondly, the state not merely does not recognize the claim to care made by some members of the community, but is actively hostile to those claims. We make recourse to our own capacity because every body has a right to care.
And finally, turning to the state as a supplicant does *nothing* to cultivate the sense of “power, purpose, possibility” we know people discover in the course of their involvement with autonomous mutual aid efforts, and which is the goal of this work.

2026-05-29 18:09:40 UTC

Among the most difficult aspects of organizing in the UK is the deep, I want to say instinctual, habit of psychic recourse to the paternalist state.
I’m participating in a conversation among a group gathered to discuss the establishment of a Lifehouse network in the British Isles, and even in this context I’m finding that people continually refer to what government should be doing, or the plans of their local council. I don’t want to be That Guy constantly going on about autonomy and self-organization – which are, after all, central to the conception of a Lifehouse to begin with – but it makes me want to tear my teeth out.

2026-05-10 08:37:58 UTC

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An issue that confronts the would-be urban walker determined to traverse a megacity from one boundary to the other: do you outfit and equip yourself for ordinary urbanity, or for the walk?
I’m halfway minded to adopt some of the practices and tactics I use in #ultrarunning and #ultralight hiking, but by the same token poles and hydration bladders and so on stick out like a sore thumb. You want to be able to move through crowds, duck into bodegas, pet the local cats, etc.

2026-05-09 11:35:06 UTC

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One of the questions I’m minded to ask is: what might a 21st century-native psychogeography look like, a psychogeography beyond Hawksmoor churches and the Place Saint-Sulpice? I guess we’ll find out, together.

2026-05-09 11:17:50 UTC

Before the human project on this planet comes to an end, I’m going to embark on something old-fashioned: a series of urban walks intended to excavate the layers of geography, history, struggle, infrastructure, technology and everyday making-do that sediment into our experience of place. I hope you’ll join me.
#walkshop #walking #psychogeography

2026-05-07 20:06:49 UTC

I dunno, man. Those “smears” sound pretty good to me – better in most cases than the actual policy.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/535/082/577/574/780/original/1d5b7dfa1a205e72.jpeg

2026-05-04 21:23:55 UTC

RIP Ben Morea, founding member of the Motherfuckers, ad plures ire May 2nd, 2026.
This interview will give you a real taste of Ben’s Lower East Side, and all the dimensions of freedom one could explore there, now lost: https://illwill.com/the-ultimate-dilemma

2026-05-04 16:41:09 UTC

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It sounds like it’s something of a pseud’s pride flag, then?

2026-05-04 16:28:55 UTC

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lol tbh I am failing to see the need for a “fediverse symbol” at all, except to press invidious affiliations still further into the collective body – more Team Good Guy bullshit.

2026-05-04 13:19:55 UTC

OK, I’ll bite. What does the “therefore” symbol in a profile connote?

2026-05-03 11:01:23 UTC

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Why such an unnecessarily abrasive comment?
@npub1tca…pt7j

2026-05-02 09:30:59 UTC

Whoever had this sticker made up, I love you.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/504/276/770/353/106/original/a2b818d498bb4057.jpeg

2026-04-26 09:07:42 UTC

RE: https://ecoevo.social/@ReNatureLdn/116464665522931060
It’s incredible to see this in the neighborhood. I’m so grateful to the @npub1usk…y8r5 cats.
#note1kdf…u3nq

2026-04-21 20:24:50 UTC

Either this is as gorgeous and wonderful and inspiring as it facially appears to be, or one of you will come along in thirty seconds to tell me why it isn’t, and that I should be ashamed to post it.
Please, please let it be the former.
https://nodestar.net/

2026-04-09 22:41:35 UTC

Dudes I’m really mad at myself for neglecting fun. Everything I do is so serious. I know the world is intolerably grim & cruel, etc., but I never let myself just have fun anymore.

2026-04-04 15:43:20 UTC

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Kintsugi? : . )

2026-04-04 15:23:58 UTC

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The infuriating thing about this book is that when it’s good, and on the things it’s good on, it is very good indeed, and lots of fun besides.
It is disqualified completely, however, by its thorough, fatal lack of attention to those inveterate maintainers known as “women,” acknowledged in its pages only on the dedication page (and even then in a way that isn’t anywhere near as charming as Brand presumably intends).
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/347/112/857/524/082/original/3d175f07907a3af1.jpeg

2026-04-04 07:37:48 UTC

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(Exploring the particular irony of lauding Musk’s ostensible design genius, in an era when we know his insistence on flush, electronically-actuated handles on Teslas has contributed to the deaths by incineration of multiple victims, is left as an exercise for the reader.)

2026-04-03 22:50:19 UTC

OK, it’s, admittedly, gorgeously produced. And I’m willing to give Stewart some considerable benefit of the doubt, given how primordially foundational his work has been for so much of who and what I am.
But opening it to see an ESR quote, in this day and age, feels greasy and retrograde and gross – not quite as bad as getting some DHH on you, but not far off, either. And it gets worse: I wouldn’t have bought the book in the first place had I known Stewart devotes an entire (brief) section to the design “of” Elon Musk, as if Musk had ever designed anything more elaborate than a stealthy excursion to a Black Sea hair-transplant clinic. That bit is all-but-disqualifying in itself, and tends to make me ashamed to have the book on my shelves.
The deeper issue, though, is Stewart’s narrow definition of “maintenance.” The book feels like it’s sidestepped a whole generation of discourse on the topic, to its detriment. I’ll let you know what I wind up concluding.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/343/183/715/781/316/original/627b290060ba00b7.jpeg

2026-04-03 09:57:32 UTC

Last week I heard someone who should know better, one of the initiators of the Hard Art project, express her surprise that no one was making art about the ecosytemic catastrophe we’re all living through. And I wanted to say: yes they are! They’re just doing so in ways, modes and genres you think are beneath you.
#Metal, and specifically #blackmetal, remains a place where all the anguish and grief and fury and terror we experience at the willed destruction of the Earth can be felt, expressed and metabolized – and never better or more pointedly than by Austin Lunn’s project Panopticon, who we were lucky to see last night in London. If what you’re looking for is art that weighs our entanglement with labor, struggle, the land and our desecration of it, you needn’t look any further. But you might just have to get outside the gallery.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/340/172/730/388/256/original/9bbb1dd793ff58ed.jpeg

2026-03-29 09:02:30 UTC

I’m not trying to tell anyone how to show up here, please believe me.
I *do* want to pass on that no fewer than three people whose presence On Here I really enjoy have recently told me they need to (at the very least) take an extended break from being here. And it’s all because of the same set of issues: what they consistently described, often in identical words, as the incessant, joyless judgment about choices of tool or platform or mobility mode, tone and language policing, hectoring about missing alt texts, humorlessness, etc.
I think a lot of this is due to context collapse, and probably also the desire to exert shape and control over *something* in a world that is otherwise terrifyingly unresponsive to our needs. But please do consider that others – including many who would otherwise number among your natural allies, comrades and friends – might arrive at different answers to complicated questions than you have, and that it doesn’t make them moral monsters. Thanks.

2026-03-26 08:09:50 UTC

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Wow, I’ve never seen (or noticed) that box before.

2026-03-25 23:15:07 UTC

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All of my books are on Anna’s.

2026-03-25 09:08:42 UTC

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You know his proposed solution for the conditions that vex us is literal War Communism. (I wonder who gets to be Lenin?) I need to be careful in what I say in public – fellow Verso author, widely beloved on the left, etc. – but it astonishes me that anyone gives his prescriptions a moment’s time.

2026-03-17 19:20:37 UTC

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BTW I love that some of you-all seem to think I’m British.

2026-03-17 19:17:40 UTC

The plan as of now is to fly Stateside for the “Lifehouses, Resilience Hubs and Dual Power” event at Woodbine in Manhattan, 14-17 May, but I’m inclined to pop down to Philly and do a book jawn there the 12th or the 13th – I know @npub1gs6…v6rt is interested, maybe the @npub1ely…g9y8 cats would be too? Anyway, TBD. https://www.woodbine.nyc/lifehouses

2026-02-27 12:18:22 UTC

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…and second, I am *thrilled* to share the news that I’ve been appointed Visiting Professor at the Sociology Department at LSE through March 2027. (Whaaaaaaaat?) Currently scheming about ways to leverage this appointment to do fun stuff, and open to suggestion.

2026-02-27 12:15:52 UTC

Two things: first, steadily building up time-on-feet with a deliberately *achingly* slow 15.1 mi in 3:23:17 (13:35/mile) | Parkland Walk, Finsbury Park loops, Clissold Park loops and home | 56 F, grey and windy, first blossom on the cherry trees! | Adizero EVOs | New fueling protocol (60g carb/hr) vastly improves next-day recovery | Power song: “For Whom The Bell Tolls.” #ultra
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/142/514/523/856/267/original/ac54d829651e601e.jpeg
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/142/514/711/571/582/original/3b42a60a2b0d4122.jpeg
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/142/514/720/053/644/original/975ea1c747f58dac.jpeg

2026-01-26 17:08:44 UTC

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Be all of that as it may, I’m just suggesting some reasons why you’re going to have a hard time making that case to folks on this side of the pond.
They may not be reachable on this issue, either at this time, or by you, or at all, and accusing them of being clueless liberals inadvertently propping up fascism is neither accurate nor fair nor particularly comradely.

2026-01-26 16:45:40 UTC

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I mean, it’s real. After having lived in the UK for 12 years, I can tell you that not needing to worry that ordinary disagreements can escalate into gunfire is a palpable improvement in quality of life – something you don’t realize how grateful you are for until you’ve lived it. Europeans do regard the US social contract around firearms as bizarre, and I’m not so sure they’re wrong to do so.

2026-01-22 23:50:45 UTC

C’mon. How is this not a firing offence?
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/941/409/904/902/261/original/7e89fc4bde3641b5.jpeg

2026-01-22 10:58:48 UTC

I’m saying this more to vent than I am because I’m under any delusion that my saying so, or even all of us saying so simultaneously, will change a damn thing, but: how on Earth is Cory Booker so completely useless?

2026-01-21 11:44:23 UTC

Something I’d ask people to consider, here and everywhere, is that if someone isn’t perceptibly responding to a situation with the grief or anger or rage you think is appropriate, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care.

2026-01-21 00:31:18 UTC

I know some of you cats think it’ll be well and truly the end of US hegemony to crash the dollar, and it will…but there are an *awful* lot of hostages duct-taped to it from head to toe, including many things I promise you you care about. Be careful what you wish for, is all I’m saying.

2026-01-16 16:53:22 UTC

Say! I’m looking for folks with a background in the Earth and life sciences who would be willing to read something I’m writing for publication with Ill Will Editions, to keep it rigorous and honest. (We’d have to have a longer conversation about what proper acknowledgment and citation means to you, as well as other ways of ensuring the work proceeds on a more adequtely balanced, non-extractive basis, but superbonus if you’ve got a strong grounding in non-Western epistemologies.)

2026-01-12 22:21:25 UTC

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2026-01-12 11:40:39 UTC

Just wanted to make sure you saw this: my write-up on the Wuben G5 pocket flashlight and what it can tell us about the present/near future of production and consumption. You’ll see why I think the Wuben is a textbook example of what I call the New Exuberance — from Kickstarter to Pearl River Delta manufacture to iteration via online fan communities — and why I see these little flashlights as the trilobite of the Cambrian explosion in designed form we’re living through. https://www.patreon.com/posts/147949143
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/881/930/758/096/918/original/926926b108778efc.jpeg

2025-12-16 23:22:15 UTC

Dudes I am an actual doctor now.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/731/799/467/210/609/original/839e06dcf6d52c1e.jpeg

2025-12-15 06:33:31 UTC

It’s gifting season *and* the Verso end of the year sale, which makes it a great time for me to recommend “Lifehouse” for anyone on your list who’s into #anarchism, #mutualaid and care, #collectivepower, ideas about organizing our communities to survive #climatechange (and the chaos downstream of that), a #solarpunk with teeth, etc.
It’s a book I’m really proud of and, I think, something the right kind of giftee would be delighted to find under the tree. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2536-lifehouse

2025-12-02 02:01:03 UTC

I continue to maintain that Pete Hegseth gets a hard-on every time he says the word “kinetic.” The man is such a pathetic, tragic open book.

2025-11-25 14:25:41 UTC

In my head, Wesley Willis had a song called “Chidi Anagonye.” (You can hear him singing it, can’t you? Rock over London, rock on Chicago. Jiffy Lube — Leave Worry Behind.)

2025-11-20 21:35:27 UTC

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Well precisely! I can’t imagine needing you to wear black and listen to Sumac and worship Antique Olive Nord like I do before thinking of you as a friend. That kind of litmus test is literally inexplicable to me.

2025-11-20 21:20:47 UTC

Reading more about a community with a strongly-articulated shared aesthetic – lol literally none of my friends shares my personal aesthetic. Like some of them are even hippies. 😮

2025-11-15 23:36:04 UTC

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I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, which in good part is why I’m still here.

2025-11-15 23:31:35 UTC

I meet lots of people who are clearly reasonably bright, but who have optimized themselves for the self-promotion viability in the world increasingly seems to require. They introduce themselves with a spiel, a pitch, and I frankly don’t care for many of them.
I know just as many people who are every bit as bright and insightful, if not significantly more so, and who don’t know how (or simply do not care) to present themselves for consumption in this way. These are the people I want to be with.

2025-11-10 21:02:34 UTC

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Oh, wait: you thought this was about DHH, didn’t you? It actually wasn’t intended to be…but if the shoe fits…

2025-11-09 15:32:55 UTC

Watching someone you used to merely dislike and disagree with become a sad, lost, ridiculous human being, utterly corroded with impotent rage and hate, is a curiously chastening experience. That shouldn’t happen to *anyone*, you know?

2025-11-05 20:49:22 UTC

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Well, I expect I’m (currently) in a mighty small minority on this, but I find it an untoward, really presumptuous appropriation of the traits and lifeways of beings who are sentient and agential and have an umwelt of their own, but who have no voice of their own in our culture – i.e., you’re not a lynx, ffs, you’re performing lynxface. I find it offensive and, yes, I’m dead serious about this.

2025-11-05 17:23:23 UTC

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Ha! I have trouble understanding furry content as anything but the worst, blithest and most unapologetic sort of cultural appropriation, and I am certain it will be universally understood that way in years to come. It’s funny to look in real time at something the future will regard with the same horror we have for cultural artifacts from last century.

2025-11-02 22:02:53 UTC

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There is a somewhat weaker, concomitant sentiment I feel for something like a black leather jacket: how long before the implicit claim to sexuality in a garment like this can no longer be credibly sustained? How long before all those facets of the presentation of self seem delusional, or merely pathetic?

2025-11-02 21:06:24 UTC

I’ve reached the point in my life where I ask of every new acquisition (book, piece of clothing, bike, laptop): realistically speaking, how much longer will I get to enjoy this? How many times will I get this down off the shelf? If I divided the retail price of this thing by the years I expect to have remaining to me, how much am I effectively paying to rent it on an annual basis?

2025-10-22 22:00:23 UTC

DUDES. We went to see “Black Sabbath: The Ballet” at Sadler’s Wells, and at the very end TONY FUCKING IOMMI came out to play “Iron Man.” I absolutely, completely and totally LOST MY SHIT. #iommiclifecomplete
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/420/060/584/851/027/original/da7121289082144a.jpeg

2025-10-13 14:26:12 UTC

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What’s a self-verification tag?

2025-10-11 03:55:44 UTC

The thing about the Thiel transcript isn’t that it’s insane, though it is that, and it isn’t even that it’s detached from any actual real concern on a planet with plenty of ‘em. It’s that it doesn’t make sense from one sentence to the next. In places it’s very nearly whipped word salad. You would worry about a relative or other loved one you heard speaking this way.