Notices by Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop)

As some of you have heard me say before, I don’t believe the greater part of the situations confronting us in life can usefully be constructed as “problems” admitting to “solutions.” We should be so lucky as for things to be that discrete and bounded!

As systems theorists have been reminding us since the 1970s, we’d be far better off conceiving of such situations as *messes* than can (at best) be managed. It’s something to keep in mind the next time you hear someone advancing a problem/solution framing.

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, who the historical Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa served as lieutenant, executor and alter ego.

I don’t know what’s more profoundly cringe, that rather revealing fact, Meta’s infantilizing depiction of its agents as cuddly, marshmallow-proportioned cartoon characters or the utter banality of its proposition that agential deployment is justified by some perceived need to “brainstorm and get things done.” In fact this whole worldline needs to collapse, the sooner the better.

Happy autumnal equinox, beloved. It’s 76 degrees fondly Fahrenheit outside, at 51.5 degrees N.

What I’d like to do with my life now is put in the time and effort and energy to get genuinely good at something.

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.

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?

@douginamug I do too, but good people are (famously) hard to find. : . )

This is the scenario from the end of “The Shockwave Rider,” but without the socially-constructive, the-truth-shall-set-you-free qualities.

Soon, very soon, some autonomous code entity will compromise the security of some platform with an active-user count in the ten figures, and evert details of all sorts of events and arrangements that people would prefer to keep private. Some of these, perhaps many of them, will be matters of public consequence and legitimate public interest. But the majority will not be.

Lives will change. Relationships and communities will be torn apart. And via one pathway or another, people will die.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/us/politics/calif-ai-worm-wechat-hack.html

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

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.

Relatively recent scholarship involving patterns of human settlement in the pre-Columbian Amazon basin, and the deliberate engineering of terra preta there — the latter strikingly similar to the production of chernozem at the Ukrainian “megasites” — has opened up a really fruitful vein of thinking about the human future for me.

It’s a way of imagining long-term, relatively dense human settlement upon the land that looks *nothing* like the post-cyberpunk urban futures we now tend to envision, or even the cozy solarpunk visions that amount to cottagecore with a few airships and wind turbines tacked on. That treats soil as not merely a technology, but the keystone technology on which everything else literally depends. That consciously modulates its throughput rather than suspending itself between violent extraction and the equally violent expulsion of denied waste.

I have to find some way of writing about it that isn’t science fiction.

I think it’s super, super important to articulate a horizon that’s both desirable and practically achievable, however improbable or unlikely it presently seems.

It allows us to begin mapping out the concrete steps it would require to get from here to there, which is the only way to get around the Jamesonian, capitalist-realist “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” problem.

We have to devise ways of allocating resource and seeing to our material-energetic provision that take the full compass of human complexity, contradiction and frailty, that do not require us to imagine a land peopled by a New Man [sic] or purged of contestation, that can actually be accomplished, and that seem like reasonable conditions to aspire to — a place we’d want to live, people we’d want to have as neighbors, a settlement we’d enthusiastically assent to. I’m just not content to wallow in the wrongness of our world without at least trying to see if we can’t do better together.

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/

Giving up on “Foundation” three episodes in. Each of these episodes has asked me to care about a completely different set of characters, none of whom is particularly interesting; the writing and acting are not great; and the production design, costumes and environments are consistently unappealing. Even the typography is bunk. It feels like there’s a certain amount of money on the screen, but to little effect.

Having once written a short story featuring the collapse of a sabotaged space elevator, I thought this one was effectively presented and handled. But otherwise: a pronounced meh.

Compelling, adult SF on the small screen is, I’m fully aware, not an easy thing to pull off. But “Foundation” ain’t it.

I miss “Westworld.” : . (

What (and maybe all) I appreciate about “Foundation” in the end is a quality that emerges from Asimov’s original scenario: not “longtermism” as that commitment has come to be understood, but a care for spinal *continuity* under significant pressure.

Too many of the things we invest our care in are built to flourish only for a brief moment in fashion, during a particular season of life, or in the happenstance constellation of a particular group of friends, lovers, comrades and interlocutors; our very politics commend to us the contingent and the projectual. It’s time to consider the design of lightweight armatures that can endure under pressure – structures and systems and practices that convey *just enough*, and can be sustained indefinitely.

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

UPDATE: Less than twenty-four hours later, we’re fully funded, thank you!

#mutualaid #anarchism #solarpunk #gary

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

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.

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.