Notices by James Fairbairn (james@mastodon.exitmusic.world)

I had a little rant - with bonus Latin coinage! - about designers making objects friendly that have no business being made friendly https://exitmusic.world/dark-discourse

@skinnylatte yes exactly. the food is soooo much better here :)

@skinnylatte recently moved from Novato in North Marin to El Cerrito in East Bay and I really miss those places being on our doorstep!

Just discovering the outdoor places around here - Wildcat Canyon, Tilden - and while they are lovely, they have yet to win my heart ❤️

@sanityinc that's right up his street! We also picked up a 90s shred machine (Washburn) for $100 in an estate sale about a year ago and fixed it up - first guitar in this video https://youtu.be/07mma3KRsv8

Who has written on the implications and practicalities of rehabilitating subsistence, in preparation for the transition of heavily-financialized economies to a post-growth world?

#permaculture #degrowth #subsistence #postindustrial

@skinnylatte I have a high school friend in this category (from Henry Fok’s family) whose approach to this problem has been to become incredibly well-read, driven and accomplished. But they have been absorbed into some part of the family business. I’ve never been able to figure out what what actually would have wanted to do if they’d made their own way. Maybe they don’t even know.

Just upgraded my single-user Mastodon instance to 4.4. Now that it proactively fetches comments on posts from servers you aren't necessarily federating with, the Fediverse feels 10000% more alive :)

The AI people think they’re developing “agentic technologies”, but what’s actually happening is they are becoming agents of technological capital.

Being young and making lots of money as part of a mission you believe is changing the world is not a recipe for self-awareness

cf. https://sfstandard.com/2025/08/05/ai-wearables-recording-devices/

@skinnylatte this is of great interest to me as I have recently become an East Bay person :)

This sounds perverse and probably facetious, but I believe the main thing the industrialists of our time are panicking about and failing to grapple with, is a probable future where there simply won't be enough consumption to keep the system going.

Okay... deep breath. I’m, erm, I'm writing a book. I think. Or at least I'm writing something that sits in my heart as a book now. Who knows where it'll lead. If you'd like to follow along and cheerlead/act as a passive accountability partner, join up here :)

https://departurein.place/departure-in-place-an-outline-for-a-wildly-ambitious-book/

@skinnylatte I live in Marin County and yeah. Almost impossible to get anything other than your bog-standard American Chinese food here…

(There is a good sushi place here in Novato though, which is a blessing, though expensive)

Observation. Barely anyone is talking about Russian influence this time. Given how flagrant it was last time, and how unpunished, and how the, um, strategic situation has only ratcheted up, it seems likely to me that there is more of it now, rather than none.

Experimenting with a new theory of change for the coming decades we are facing:

- Get people relating healthily again (bring back third places, decommodify and de-mediatize relationships)
- Nurture a generation of polymaths (use the tools and technologies of learning and collaboration to enable young people to cross disciplinary boundaries and synthesize better futures)
- Build social resilience out of the resulting emergent friendships and knowledge/skill communities

@adamgreenfield this is a fantastic thread, Adam. Thank you!

The federated model, absent the “just add targeted ads” panacea, pushes us to rethink constraints like disk space and bandwidth and moderator capacity, and to build things that are much more frugal with those resources than the centralized, highly-capitalized hegemons.

What stuff can we build to help each other, that we can run on our “universal basic hosted servers”?

(This thought brought to you by inspiration from @dansup continuing to tinker with cool things)

Unpopular take: “applying my design skills to help solve climate change” is like “applying my colonization skills to help solve slavery”

@woodbark right. And yet we still depend 100% on farming and land management for our survival!

Heard someone say on a podcast that we all still live in an agrarian society, only the set of people now directly doing that agrarianism is very small.

I will never be able to forget that now.