Notices by Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop)

I'm experimenting with different ways of discussing ideas, so today I did something I've never done before — made a fully public post on my Patreon. It's about the inherent tension between the #degrowth imperative and a set of emerging design and production capabilities I'm calling the New Exuberance, and I hope you enjoy it. https://www.patreon.com/posts/dispatch-for-5-111400512

Ooh, this looks tasty. https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/insurgent-ecologies

You absolutely do not have to love, or like, or care for, or trust Labour in any way to be beside yourself with glee that the end of Tory rule is upon us.

Beloved, I am begging you: *document your mutual-aid practices*. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my conversations with activists, it’s how much of the practical insight they developed – going back to the 1960s, but as recent as COVID – now resides only in individual memory, and is brought forth only if anyone thinks to ask for it specifically.

Nobody needs to cobble together some gross, McKinseyish inventory of “best practices,” but I do think seeing how people confronted by similar challenges in the past learned to address them can be hugely useful, particularly in helping to circumvent the continual cycle of reinventing the wheel & burnout that besets so many of our efforts in these domains.

Howdy! Just a brief reminder, for folks who are interested in issues around #climate, #mutualaid, #anarchism and self-organized strategies for persevering against the array of ecosystemic threats now bearing down on us, that my new book “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World On Fire,” can now be pre-ordered directly from Verso. Order now and it’ll ship when it launches in two weeks – you’ll be among the very first to get your hands on it. Thanks for your support! https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2536-lifehouse

Need your advice: I want to try barefoot/minimalist shoes for my weightlifting workouts, but the Vivos are hell of spendy, and the alternatives I’ve seen advertised seem cheap or flimsy – like dropship fast-fashion quality. Do you have any experience with barefoot shoes and weight training? What do you use and feel comfortable recommending?

But also: “If I had my last laptop for twelve years, and I’ve just bought one, will this be the next-to-last machine I ever buy? Or even the last?”

@susankayequinn Quite. “At the end of the world, plant a tree” isn’t just a pamphlet title for me, but a commitment to a practice and a lifeway.

@clacke Oh, totally.

@subMedia Tried to pitch them a few bucks, but the Firefund site doesn’t seem to work. Do you know any other way of supporting them?

by their first name. You took whatever classes you felt ready for, with whoever else was there, from 12 to 18. There was lots of hands-on craft. It was the kind of place where students had a smoking room (!), and put on their own production of “Ubu Roi.” It literally saved my life.

Looks like it’s Sunday, and that means it’s time for another #Lifehouse thread. I’m super-mindful that I’ve been talking about the book Quite A Lot lately, so I’m thinking of dialing back on the frequency of these posts a tad – you’ll let me know if that sounds right. But for today, let’s talk about one of my favorite aspects of the book, which is the chance it finally afforded me to affirm in my writing an intensely material, hands-on flavor of politics that descends from the DIY/DIT 1960s.

Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that I was kind of a fuckup at the age of 13, dealing with life issues that included not having a stable place to stay and also what I’d pretty clearly now characterize as ADHD. I was getting bullied in school – not awfully, but enough to make it an unpleasant place to be – and had started to cut classes. Up to then an ostensibly “gifted” student, I landed a failing report card in my first semester of eighth grade, and one day just refused to go back.

(I promise you, this is going somewhere.)

The school district insisted I see a psychiatrist, who wasn’t great, but to his credit told my parents, “You should trust him, he really isn’t going back there. You need to find an alternative.” Well, conventional private schools were out of the question. There were Friends schools around – two of them, excellent – but even putting expense aside I just bounced off their social universe. My parents were getting fairly desperate, when somehow they heard of a place that seemed to offer some hope.

It was a failing, hippie-era experiment in egalitarian education called the Miquon Upper School, which makes it sound a lot grander than it was. It was in a ramshackle house in Chestnut Hill, an hour away across town – I had to take two commuter trains to get there in the morning, and two to get back, which was its own kind of education. And it didn’t have grades in either sense, i.e. neither year-based distinctions of curriculum, or letter-based evaluations of performance. You called teachers

I had never heard of the Noahopinion blog until a friend sent me a link to it the other day, specifically to a post about this book, “Emergent Tokyo.” Noahpinion characterized it, glowingly, as an empirical defense of market YIMBYism, and it very nearly put me off ordering the book despite its being highly relevant to my interests. That guy’s dumber than a bag of rocks! This book is nothing of the sort! It’s wonderful!

@tokyo_0 Funny you should mention TT. I chose not to cover the movement, out of concern for its politics and demographics primarily, but also because I couldn’t really turn up much in the way of concrete, practical, real-world results I could point people at.

I kinda buried the lede yesterday: my next book “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World On Fire” is finally available for pre-order from Verso! It’s about how we organize ourselves as communities to survive the climate-systems collapse unfolding all around us, drawing on lessons from the Black Panther survival programs, Occupy Sandy and the Crisis-era Greek solidarity clinics straight through to municipalism in Spain and democratic confederalism in Rojava! https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2536-lifehouse