Notices by Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop), page 6

@Arcana I also suggest, if you’re not already familiar with him and what he believes, looking into Marc Andreessen’s recent thinking about “reality privilege” and augmentive and virtual mediation as, effectively, consolation prizes offered to the multitude for their manifest failure to be wealthy.

@woodbark Even this one isn’t final. Uff da.

Galleys are in.

@woodbark You know I’ve been using “the Long Emergency,” though that obviously has its own issues.

Really, though: if you’re serious about making headway with any kind of degrowth/“postgrowth” strategy, enacting a ban on advertising is where you want to start.

The bottom line here is the titanic Gish Gallop of bullshit Andreessen and his pet projects confront us with, as if actual genocide, ecological collapse and mass impoverishment weren’t enough to occupy our energies.

Most depressingly, what this once again underscores is how *any* incoherent body of assertion with eight or nine figures of capital attached will tend to organize policy around it, one way or another. And therefore, so as not to cede them any rhetorical or practical ground, one still has to parse this adolescent wank-fantasy as though it were serious thought. That effort is labor and it exacts all the costs that labor does.

It is refreshing to see that, for once, mainstream reportage on the ostensible Effective Accelerationism “movement” mentions its primary ideological inspirations and progenitors – Nick Land, the Extropians, etc. I don’t think the piece makes it clear just quite how repellent their positions would be to most stable, well-grounded people, but hey, it’s a start. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/technology/ai-acceleration.html

@KevinCarson1 But the real point here is made way down in the comments: as long as lazy reporters/mainstream outlets keep embedding tweets in their pages, Elon’s going to reap (and brag about) those numbers. Every time someone even scrolls past such an embed, it juices Twitter’s engagement figures. I wish to hell folks would stop doing that. (Grauniad, I’m looking at you.)

It would, of course, have to be set in Amelia. http://www.identifont.com/show?2PD

And I'm trying, fairly desperately at this hour, to avoid drawing what feel like the obvious conclusions about human capacity more broadly, or about the unwisdom of conflating victimhood with heroism. If the victims of collective oppression can so swiftly become its architects and authors, it seems pretty clear to me that horror alone does not and cannot sanctify.

I have never felt interpellated by that star: I've just never felt it named me. It's clear that now I never will. I don't think I will ever understand how a people who know what disinheritance, displacement and being targeted for extinction feel like can turn around and do that to another people. I have to consider it the greatest moral failure of our time.

Somewhere beneath all the other, rawer heartbreaks of Gaza, or coiled around them, is the specific grief I feel as a Jew that all of this is being inflicted under a flag bearing the star of my people — that wherever it appears, this symbol will only ever again remind people of this theft, anguish and suffering. It will be cursed by history, and it's hard to argue anything but that this is rightly so.

@silentashes This is just how I came to be on Verso’s radar in the first place! Self-publishing via POD is a perfectly sound strategy for early-career folks, and I’d advocate just that for anyone who’s willing to hire a professional editor out of their pocket (which really is mandatory IMO). Where it falls down, by and large, is in distribution. Unless you’ve got, like, a hypermotivated stan army to pass your link around like nerdly samizdat, you really need those resources behind you.

Well, beloved, it’s real. You can preorder my book “Beyond Hope” as of now. If you suspect that #MutualAid, #municipalism or the example of #Rojava suggest strategies to survive a hot, dangerous future, if you want to learn from examples ranging from the Black Panther survival programs to the solidarity clinics of Greece, or if you’re interested in a concrete working-out of #solarpunk ideas in the form of the #Lifehouse community resilience hub, this is the book for you. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Hope-Collective-Mutual-Emergency/dp/1788738357

@woodbark @playinprogress It wasn’t all for nothing: it taught me how very badly ad hominems come off in print, how weak they make the writer look & how poorly they hold up, no matter how justified they may have been at the time. (See my pinned post!)

@woodbark Uncle Murray was a genius, but he wasn’t very bright. : . |

I’ve tried to say this a couple of different ways over the past few weeks, but I am *extremely* uncomfortable with the emerging line of rhetoric on the climate left that casts strategies of adaptation to the circumstances of heating as somehow acquiescing to the extractive industries and/or their enablers in rightwing politics and the mainstream media. Adaptation really is all we have now. It’s up to us to ensure that it’s liberatory in conception and practice.

@slowbikeiain Well, I mean: for me it *is* a battle against capitalism. But who am I?

Greenfield’s Law of Requisite Variety: Every single cornershop/bodega/konbini in your neighborhood offers some item for sale that none of the others carry. If you want the good bread, the good hummus, the good beer and the good chocolate, that’s four different trips and four different transactions.