Notices by Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop)

@derek I develop Bookchin’s ideas on the assembly at some length, and explore their influence in places as different as Rojava and big-city Spain, in the third section of “Lifehouse,” Collective Power.

@derek Honestly, my experience was hugely atypical: they came to me after they’d seen my self-published book “Against the Smart City” in 2013, and proposed doing something together. That book became “Radical Technologies,” then we did “Lifehouse,” and now we’re working on a third.

It’s been wonderful, the whole way. I’ll never not be grateful.

@derek @Roots I am coming to believe that how we construct the interface of nature and culture is among the most significant questions we can pose. In that respect, a few folks here recently suggested I pick up a framework I hadn’t worked with for awhile, Murray Bookchin’s opposition of “first” and “second” nature — it may be helpful here?

Carne Ross on the catastrophe in Rojava. https://www.carneross.com/blog/syria-catastrophe

@derek Couldn’t agree more, in both respects! Especially when some of the propositions that constitute “deep sustainability” offend my sensibilities for other reasons, often quite elementally.

@derek I’d agree, but also caution that very often folks who *think* they’re invoking the latter seem to mean “BAU but with wind turbines and balcony solar” when pressed. I’m not unsympathetic — imagining-otherwise isn’t easy, and gets much harder the more embedded in consensual normalcy one is — but it’s a real stumbling block to articulating genuinely different arrangements of power.

They straight up murdered her.

Amidst all the other damage, curtailed lives and general vile spew, I’m really upset we lost the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, responsible as it was for some of the basic architecture of my self. This will hurt in all kinds of ways.

@ntnsndr @bonfire

@ntnsndr Oh, I beseech myself thusly on an at-least weekly basis. It’s my epistemic bedrock.

The Espacio Escultórico at UNAM, a 1979 work of land #art by Helen Escobedo, Manuel Felguérez, Mathias Goeritz, Hersúa, Sebastián and Federico Silva, is one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever been. The lenses on this phone are entirely inadequate to its scale, and these pictures in no way convey the feeling of being there. The most amazing bit is that I’d never heard word one of its existence before yesterday morning. A must-see in Mexico City.

Pete Hegseth, man. You only need to look at the guy to see his roiling self-loathing, woman-hatred and internalized homophobia. He’s like a walking (or more exactly strutting) confirmation of every last word Klaus Theweleit ever committed to print.

I hope everyone on here knows just what this mask signifies, but if not: it’s a piece of visual iconography all but exclusively associated with Iron March, Atomwaffen Division and closely parallel fascist/accelerationist groupuscules of the hashtag-READSIEGE era. It’s all right out in the open now.

I think by now the notion of “asymmetric warfare” has entered the mainstream, right? The notion that new technologies and new modes of coördination permit lone actors or small groups to inflict a scale or intensity of kinetic violence it formerly would have taken the resources of a nation-state to exert?

For a few years now I’ve been curious abt the opposite case, in which new technologies and new modes of coördination permit lone actors or small groups to achieve *production* of complexity or

sophistication that formerly would have been the province of enterprise-scale actors. These technologies and modes are approaching the threshold at which they can be essentially invoked and directed at will, by an untrained individual, to produce artifacts of arbitrary complexity. This is the threshold of a condition I call the New Exuberance: a Cambrian explosion of form, function and possibility, so far as manufactured artifacts are concerned, and a genuine introjection of the new.

Today I spent a few hours with a dear old friend who is feeling his way toward the New Exuberance, producing a piece of consumer-grade electronic hardware, more or less from a standing start, as a single individual, responding to nothing more than his own curiosity and desire. I came away from our conversation — as one does from all the best and most important conversations — with more questions than answers, but it’s clear to me that something really epochal is happening underneath or alongside

@ntnsndr What do you mean? What does yours say other than Octidi, Fructidor 18, 233?

@skinnylatte Fair enough. Every time I see someone with a Tom Bihn I want to say, “What the heck are you thinking toting all that unnecessary mass around? Get you a Hyperlite Mountain Gear.”

Just saw someone use the expression “night of the long knives” when they clearly meant to invoke “Kristallnacht.” Let’s keep our allusions to pivotal events of the Nazi period straight, people! We’ll be needing them.

A refresher: Kristallnacht was the Nov ‘38 antisemitic pogrom organized by the SA – the Sturmabteilung, the brownshirts – so named for the shards of glass from smashed windows that covered the streets of Germany the next day.