Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Long Emergency: A Discussion With Adam Greenfield
208 Plays4 days ago
Welcome back to The Beautiful Idea, a new project from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We’re bringing you interviews and stories from the front-lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis.
In this episode we sit down with Adam Greenfield, author of the book Lifehouse, out on Verso. In this discussion we talk about technology and the internet, the occurrence of disaster, the long emergency, the concept of lifehouses, prepperism, and the complexities of organizing in communities.
You can find Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves In A World On Fire here:
https://www.versobooks.com/products/2536-lifehouse
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Adam Greenfield
00:00:09
Speaker
Thanks for listening. to the beautiful idea a podcast from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world we're bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles as well as original commentary and analysis follow us on mastodon and at the beautifulde show thanks for listening
00:00:44
Speaker
Today, we're going to take the conversation in a slightly different direction, and a direction that I myself personally am really connected to. And this is ah direction which focuses really on the question of what it is that we're doing as radicals, right? As anarchists, as, you know, sort of fellow travelers, like what is it that we are doing in the world? And how is it that we understand what we're doing? I think that right now there's a lot of open conversation about rethinking revolutionary thought that's incredibly productive.
00:01:15
Speaker
And so I want to try and push a conversation a little bit
Adam Greenfield's Background and Disillusionment with Tech
00:01:19
Speaker
in that direction. so do you want to just jump in and maybe introduce yourself real quick? Talk about some of the stuff you're working on things that you're interested in those kinds of things.
00:01:28
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Hey, so ah first off, thanks for having me It's a real pleasure and privilege to be on the show, especially you you know so early in its youth. I'm really honored that you've chosen to invite me.
00:01:39
Speaker
My name is Adam Greenfield. As you can hear from my voice, I am a New Yorker, but I've been resident in London for the last 10 years. And i come you know I've got a really mixed background, but most recently,
00:01:54
Speaker
I spent about 20, 25 years in technology and looking particularly at the ways in which technology intersects with design, intersects with politics, and intersects with everyday urban life.
00:02:08
Speaker
And it has taught me a great deal. i mean, I'm really... chastened by that experience in a lot of ways. And I've come out the other side of it with all of my utopianism stripped away, fallen to my feet.
00:02:22
Speaker
ah fast the tech industry does. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, really, if
Community Organizing and Survival Strategies
00:02:27
Speaker
you want if you want a place where where dreams go to die, it's it's it's that entire sector. ah We can get into that later. And, you know, with with my dreams and ashes around my feet, but what I'm left with is is optimism.
00:02:39
Speaker
and And, you know, this is definitely one of those pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will sorts of situations. Yeah. But it is where I am. And so what I've been working on lately is a how to undo all the damage that I felt that I did in the course of my time in the technology sector. and And B, specifically how to undo that is in helping myself and others forge more productive ties with one another at the local level in a way that does an end run around a lot of the political discourse that
00:03:10
Speaker
that that we're fed in in ordinary mainstream society that lets us get to the root of some of the major issues that we're contending with, most primarily, of course, climate system collapse. So to put it in nutshell, how do we to get together with one another? How do we organize ourselves as individuals, as communities,
00:03:30
Speaker
to survive the thing that's coming at us and to do so with a modicum of grace and dignity and with our values of of justice and equity and and freedom intact. How do we do any of that? That's what I've been working on for a while.
00:03:46
Speaker
Yeah. And so, you know, I want, I obviously have written a lot on like smart cities and stuff. I think I want to focus on your recent texts on Lifehouse very specifically and maybe get into, maybe if you could kind of walk people through like how that text came about, like you talk about it in the book a lot and it's a fascinating story, but sort of how someone who had been writing about smart cities and working in tech and doing tech things all of a sudden had this kind of formative shift in experience. Like what, what was the process of bringing that text up? And like, why, why were you interested in writing it?
00:04:21
Speaker
Well, I think it's fair to say that even in technology, i was trying to extend a lineage of thought and and action that even at the time I got interested in technology was already dying and has since just been, i think, intentionally extirpated.
Impact of Occupy Sandy on Community Aid Perception
00:04:41
Speaker
There was line ah line of Idealism is accurate, but it doesn't even convey the sense of what i'm talking about. I mean, we're talking about going back to the whole earth catalog or a pattern language. I mean, that there were real left libertarian currents of thought that expressed themselves through individual and collective empowerment through the the tools that we had access to at the time.
00:05:08
Speaker
And i was i was very deliberately trying to keep that tradition alive and to extend that tradition. in contemporary network digital information technology. So it isn't like I was this, you know, typical Silicon Valley tech bro who had an epiphany one day and decided to become an anarchist. It was more like this was a natural evolution of beliefs and tendencies that had always been part of what I was trying to realize and actualize in the world. and and and frankly, you know, just failed in actualizing.
00:05:38
Speaker
The critical point, the the nodal point, the inciting incident, as my partner would say, she's ah she's a documentary filmmaker, and so she always talks about inciting incidents, is Occupy Sandy.
00:05:50
Speaker
And I realize now that we are 12 and some years downstream from that. Wow. that all of a sudden I'm finding, yeah, it's crazy it it kind of puts the zap on your head. yeah I'm finding that I have to kind of explain to a lot of people, not merely what Superstorm Sandy was, but what Occupy Sandy was and and and why it came into existence and how it came to it to existence. So for the benefit of those of your listeners who, you know, might not have been, you know, out of diapers when this all happened in the fall of 2012 in New York city, where I was living at the time, there was ah an extraordinary weather event.
00:06:29
Speaker
It was something that was fairly unprecedented. It it was a a large Atlantic hurricane very late in the season and a continental cold front that in itself was, was just, you know, outscale.
00:06:42
Speaker
And these forged, in in you know in the atmosphere over the Northeastern United States and made landfall on New York City in in the fall of 2012 and brought the city to its knees.
00:06:54
Speaker
I mean, it was it was like nothing that anybody had experienced in the city's living memory. you you know, infrastructures, all of the infrastructures that support us in our desire to to kind of keep on living everyday life, all of that just came down in splinters.
00:07:11
Speaker
And in some of the more affected neighborhoods, those infrastructures stay down for weeks. And it really left hundreds of thousands to millions of people at very real risk for their lives in some cases. And, and you know, with just absolutely serious,
00:07:30
Speaker
consequential risk to their, their health, their body and their, their ability to go on existing. The good news in all of this was that within 24 hours of the storm making landfall on New York,
00:07:43
Speaker
there was a response. There was a very robust response that had already opened up to disaster relief and recovery hubs within 36 hours or so. We're serving tens of thousands of meals out of those hubs, was operating in every neighborhood that was affected, was getting out to the hardest hit communities, you know it was getting relief supplies out to people, and was really pulling people out of some really dangerous situations.
00:08:08
Speaker
And I'm always at pains to stress that this organization wasn't the government and it wasn't anything in the philanthropic or charitable sector. it wasn't the Red Cross, which, you know, Americans generally think of or at least used to think of as being that sort of the the prime protagonist of events like this.
00:08:25
Speaker
It was a consciously anarchist, avowedly mutual aid, organized, self-organized initiative that was put together by people who had come through Occupy Wall Street the year before.
00:08:39
Speaker
You know, these were people who retained their networks, stayed in touch with folks all through a year in which it seemed like Occupy Wall Street had pretty much played itself out and was no longer a force in American life.
00:08:53
Speaker
And when the storm made landfall, all of a sudden they were able to stand those networks up, begin directing supplies towards these relief hubs. And really generate an extraordinarily impressive mutual aid and effort that, as I say, you know, really helped anywhere from hundreds of thousands to maybe even millions of people get through the storm together.
00:09:15
Speaker
To me... That experience, you know, I always say my the the role that I played in Occupy Sandy was very small. it was It was literally merely shifting boxes, you know, being part of human chains that were bringing parcels in off delivery trucks and sorting them into the pews of the church that we had kind of appropriated.
00:09:35
Speaker
as a relief hub. um You know, my role in in Occupy Sandy was not that of a theorist. It was not that of a strategist. It was literally just a pair of hands and not even for very long at that. I mean, I think in my calendar, there there are 12 days that I was a part of this. So we're not talking about, you a huge commitment on my time, but it transformed utterly my sense of the possible.
00:10:01
Speaker
It transformed my sense of what it was legitimate to ask for from people, from communities, what it was legitimate to expect of people.
Learning from Historical Social Movements
00:10:11
Speaker
And really the question I began to ask myself after the success of this initiative was, my God, why don't we organize more of our lives like this more of the time?
00:10:23
Speaker
i mean, it's it's right there for the taking. And it that is the question that I basically kept close to my heart to this day. Why is it that we don't organize more of our lives like this more of the time. Can we?
00:10:37
Speaker
Is the space available for us? Can we claim that space? How do we make that happen together? How do we overcome the very real forces that are trying to prevent that from happening?
00:10:49
Speaker
And can we together forge forge a trajectory through all of the stuff that's already fallen upon us will continue to fall on us and will determine most of the rest of our lives on earth can we forge a pathway through that that responds more to the values of the politics that that i i hold so very dear and and it sounds to me like you share yeah How can we do that?
00:11:17
Speaker
Can we do that? And in in what ways can we learn from places and times in the past that people have done that and maybe glean a thing or two from them and pick up some some tips and some tricks and see if we can't do it for ourselves? so Yeah, yeah. Well, and there's, I mean, there's a lot of threads in what you just said.
00:11:35
Speaker
want to mark a couple for people to kind of take a look at so we don't end up getting sidetracked on them because they themselves are whole conversations. But, you know, you'd mentioned like the whole Earth catalog and the early kind of techno-utopianism that came out of the hippie community.
00:11:48
Speaker
It's a really fascinating story if people really want to dive into it because that circle of people ended up creating the Electronic Frontier Foundation. right John Perry Barlow, who was a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, was the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. right so like those And there's a lot of complicated reasons why they moved into techno-utopian space as opposed to a like physical activism space. like There's a lot of story behind that, but one of the things that comes up in that story is...
00:12:16
Speaker
This very specific incident in which a crew of hackers from New York, and this is early hacker scene, so they were still like dumpster diving and like picking locks and breaking into offices and stuff like this, got onto the well, which was the whole Earth electronic link. It was like one of the first bulletin boards.
00:12:31
Speaker
And they started arguing with John Perry Barlow about how what was happening wasn't this super liberatory thing that it had these elements, but that it was also deeply tied in with capitalism and the state.
00:12:43
Speaker
And he said, well, i don't I don't buy that. And so they hacked into TRW and stole his credit record and doxxed him on the internet. to prove that TRW had been gathering all this information about people without anybody knowing it right? So that's a whole really fascinating story. and that's a whole conversation, you know, as someone myself who kind of comes out of the hacker scene, there's like, that's a whole conversation in itself.
00:13:04
Speaker
There's also another thing you bring up about the importance of learning movement history, which I really want to encourage people to do. i mean, Occupy Sandy was 12 years ago, right? The anti-war movement was 20 years ago.
00:13:15
Speaker
You know, Seattle was 25 years ago. And like, those are the roots of what we have today. And so for those of you that are getting involved with this stuff now, really it like go back and read those histories, talk to the people that are in their forties and fifties that have been around this whole time, because it'll really help you understand the depth of the thought and the experience and the drive and the energy that has gone into these kinds of things over a couple of decades.
00:13:40
Speaker
And so Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I, you make a great point, sorry to interrupt, but like, I just, I gotta say that like, so I'm 56 years old and I still feel quite, you know, young and involved and vigorous, but it occurs to me that just through the passage of time, I've become kind of an old head, you know, like that was like the old heads that remember who had been through the post 68
Horizontal Organization in Activism
00:14:05
Speaker
moments, right? Like they had been in Chicago in 68. They, or they, you know, they grew up in Panther schools.
00:14:12
Speaker
or they were members of various anarchist and anarchist-inflected movements in the late early And always thought that... and you know i always thought the once they had established certain beach heads in popular culture that we wouldn't need to fight those same battles. And and what I've seen in my time, sadly, is that you kind of, ah there's no permanent victory, you know, and, and you have to kind of reestablish each of, of the, the achievements that was won an, in a new time and a new place with new protagonists, right. With people who,
00:14:53
Speaker
and And if you do have our kind of politics, especially what this means is that you can't rest on your laurels because they might have achieved opening up some kind of liberatory space for technically savvy white male privileged programmers you know with a particular kind of access to technology. you know and And because of the mediation that we had at the time, we might have regarded that as sort of movement history. And yeah I'm not saying it's not movement history, but it was incomplete. yes Even as an achievement, it was radically incomplete.
00:15:23
Speaker
And so I'm just, I'm both humbled and kind of odd in a sense by the responsibility that now falls on the shoulders of people who have lived through the transition from pre-Seattle to post-Seattle.
00:15:39
Speaker
We now live in a world in which horizontal organization, as you say, is sort of de rigueur. This is just the way we do things. It was not always that way. No, that was not that way when I got involved in the early 2000s even, like at all.
00:15:51
Speaker
It was still hierarchical coalitions and liberal organizations with their steering committees and like all of that. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So, so tell tell me more about like, for you, how did that wave crash against you? How did, how did you find your way into horizontal organizing? Oh, that's interesting.
00:16:08
Speaker
Well, I was, as you were talking, I was going to mention ah thing which just kind of came across my signal feed from a friend today who works at a book warehouse. Yeah. And had come across a box full of old radical newspapers from the early 1970s.
00:16:23
Speaker
One of which my mom worked on. Right. So you get this, like, there's like this lineage. And what's funny about it in that context is like, they there's a statement that my friend took a picture of about how, you know, all these people playing these like games of ideology are really playing these like power games. And really what they need to do is they need to not play power games. They need to bring politics back down to life. And it's like so similar to the conversations we're having today.
00:16:50
Speaker
Right. Like it's so, so, so similar. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, that's a little pain yeah, like my, my trajectory was, I was lucky to put it mildly. i was lucky. I came up in ah city with a strong political history in a family with a strong political history in the Rust Belt in a time when everything was collapsing.
00:17:12
Speaker
And so like my whole life has just been collapse. Right. It's part of, but part of why I'm so drawn to some of the things you're writing. yeah That's all I've ever seen. I mean, LTV steel collapsed when I was in high school and that was pretty much the end.
00:17:26
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. And so you you've you've been in like the kind of the light cone of deindustrialization ever since. Pretty much. And you can even see it starting when I was young. Right. So starting in like my case was the early eighties, but about 10 years before that the oil crisis really started seeing things go downhill here.
00:17:42
Speaker
Right. And so I came up in that world of economic stagnation and then collapsed. You know, and so, but I think it's one of the things that this points out, though, is like, we all have our stories, you know, and they're all fascinating stories. They're all different stories and they're all fascinating stories. I don't know. I know maybe two or three other people who have a background like mine and that's it.
00:18:05
Speaker
Most other people I know came out of like evangelical Christian families or, you know, just normie suburban families, like whatever. Right. Like there's not a lot of that connection, unfortunately, to the movements of the past, which we really need.
00:18:21
Speaker
in order to inform the things that we're doing today. It's critical. It's maybe one the most critical things. desperate to reinvigorate. Yeah, no, I couldn't
Rediscovering the Lifehouse Concept for Resilience
00:18:28
Speaker
agree more. um And and that that is in large part the project of the book, which I'm going to get to in a second. But, you know, it so to your point, and and particularly about the point about finding a box full of old magazines that you turn out to have a connection to, it turns out, so so the book is called Lifehouse.
00:18:45
Speaker
And I'll get into this in more detail, but the the fundamental proposition of the book is that we have to organize these neighborhood scale disaster relief and recovery hubs. But they're they're quite a bit more than that.
00:18:57
Speaker
They're places that are designed to offer us shelter and refuge from the ordinary insults of late capitalism, as well as the insults of the climate crisis. And the the deep irony is, is at the very end of this project, a friend of mine sent me, you know, it turns out that in the meantime, the whole earth had digitized their entire archives. They are on archive.org. Oh my God.
00:19:20
Speaker
Yeah. oh my God. And so a friend of mine who's been doing like a deep dive into this sends me this link. He's like, well, surely you must've known about this. I'm like, what, what, what known about what? He's like, it's your, it's your proposition. It's even called the life house. It's,
00:19:35
Speaker
It's in like, you know, this this footnote of of the 1969 edition. Oh my God. yeah it's It's crazy. And so not only is it really, really important to maintain ah vital connection to the past, and and here is a place where i I do feel that network information technology has made a big difference in our ability to do that and not rely on crates full of, you know, mouse shit and, and, you know, nod upon old fanzines.
00:20:05
Speaker
Um, but, oh, it was so painful to read this and to realize that I had reinvented the wheel. Right. And that, that, you know, that there are aspects to my proposition that are novel, but the emotional core of it was articulated in 1969 and even had the same name.
00:20:25
Speaker
And so, you know, I think this says a couple of things. I think it says primarily that we'd ah we'd be in a much better position now if we had done what these people in 1969 were suggesting we do.
00:20:39
Speaker
And so I'm kind of hoping that collectively we undertake the project that that I'm proposing we undertake in the book together with the idea that maybe if we do, we'll be in a better situation 40 years from now.
00:20:50
Speaker
and And also just by way of observing and and and really putting some respect on you know all of the you know the efforts of the people who come before us, without whom without whose efforts we probably wouldn't even be able to articulate. We wouldn't be able to have the conversation we're having.
00:21:08
Speaker
We wouldn't have the language to have it in You know, we would have, there would be, we would always have a language, but the specific terms and ideas, so many of it, you know, it's not novel to me. It's not novel to the book. It's things that I've soaked up from from respectful attention to other times and places in history.
00:21:29
Speaker
And so that is the project of the book, right? Is to disinter those experiences and hopefully bring them to life. So what is this book, right? What is this? this why Why is this? Why am I on your show? Why have you had me on your show?
00:21:41
Speaker
After Occupy Sandy, after i had that experience, the idea lay fallow for a couple of years. they're really i wasn't in dialogue with anybody that was interested in these sorts of things. And and frankly, after the crisis of Sandy passed...
00:21:57
Speaker
Very much against my expectation, my perhaps naive expectation, New York City went back to New York City-ing. ah You know, just like we've now seen again after the pandemic lockdown, late capitalism has this ferocious way of reasserting itself, even, you know, in the wake of what you would regard as as pretty significant disruption.
00:22:18
Speaker
You know, it just kind of picked up, you know, resumed resumed your previously scheduled broadcast, right, where had left off. And all of the energy that I thought was going to go into a horizontally organized, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal way of being in the world in New York City it didn't really happen.
00:22:41
Speaker
But the idea kind of stayed with me. And then, you know, the the pandemic and the lockdown happened. And again, one of the most effective modes of response was was autonomous local mutual aid popping up spontaneously.
00:22:57
Speaker
And I really began to see that there was a longer historical arc to what I was talking about. It wasn't simply about response to crisis, but it was it was a response to the to the meta crisis, to the larger rhythm of collapse that you know you experienced in your lifetime, that I've seen in my lifetime.
00:23:17
Speaker
And that really just kind of seems to be picking up pace. and And this is something that I think of as the long emergency. And the long emergency to me isn't simply global heating.
00:23:29
Speaker
It is the second and third order consequences of you know enormously destructive weather events and the withdrawal of insurers from insuring commercial real estate against those events.
00:23:44
Speaker
And you know ultimately, there was yeah the the the withdrawal of the state for some of the things that it previously took responsibility for, its disappearance from our lives and and the necessity of us organizing ourselves in response to that. So if this is now the fundamental grounding circumstance of our existence together, how do we begin building structures that might see us through?
00:24:07
Speaker
And so I began to look back in time and across space, and I found amazing examples of things like the Black Panther survival programs, of things like the common ground mutual aid effort in New Orleans, which I think pretty much directly inspired Occupy Sandy that happened after Hurricane Katrina.
00:24:26
Speaker
ah the The Greek solidarity networks after the the crisis in Greece in 2011. And even things that that, so those things felt to me like they were about care, but they all kind of delaminated at some point. I mean, the Black Panthers most obviously, because they were the the target of really extreme repression by the United States and local governments.
00:24:47
Speaker
the the The Greek solidarity networks, you know, because they were co-opted in some ways by a putatively left-wing government, which kind of took on some of the the effort.
00:25:00
Speaker
And then I would regard them as having betrayed that that effort by having, you know. In technology, would say embrace embrace, extend, and extinguish. you know We used to say that's what Microsoft would do to technology companies that they were buying.
00:25:13
Speaker
And to me, that's what the Syriza government did to the anarchist efforts, you know the local clinics and the local pharmacies and and the and the local kitchens. you know it it absorbed, it embraced, it extended, and it exterminated those things.
00:25:26
Speaker
So I began looking at like ways... If these care efforts are to survive, what do they need to
Proposing Neighborhood Lifehouses
00:25:32
Speaker
do? Well, they need to achieve local power. And so the next chapter of the book is how do you do that?
00:25:39
Speaker
How do you claim local power is sufficient to articulate in the world a network of mutually driven, mutual care driven programs to protect them, to give them space, to allow them to breathe.
00:25:53
Speaker
And so I looked at things like Spanish municipalism and and most triumphantly, most interesting to me, the experience of Rojavan, you know, where, you know, after 2014, know, you know by By some reckonings up to the present moment, I really regard sort of the classic period of High Rojava as being 2014 to November 2019.
00:26:17
Speaker
But, you know, a ah society on the scale of a state, so, you know, up to about 5 million human beings at times, organizing itself on non-state principles. Yeah.
00:26:29
Speaker
organizing itself on eco-feminist, on on anarchist principles, organizing itself on really very profound values, and doing so in the middle of a grievously bloody conflict, the Syrian civil war, and and the fight against what the West knows as ISIS and what what they would know as Daesh.
00:26:53
Speaker
you know, in this kind of crucible of absolutely bloody interstate conflict where the local factions of Syria were used as puppets by state actors from outside.
00:27:05
Speaker
And, you know, so so the people, the what what is now called the the Autonomous Administration of Northeastern Syria, but we more generally call a Rojava, you you know, these people managed to do anarchy at a very large scale for a very long time with very good results. Yeah.
00:27:21
Speaker
And so that becomes the the next chapter of the book, like collective power. And then all of these things culminate in the proposition that gives the book its name, the life house, a chapter on the life house. Like what if you organized in every neighborhood, in every city, in every town, in every community, every two or three blocks, there was a physical place you could go to.
00:27:45
Speaker
that would protect you from the effects of climate change, that would be off-grid, would be able to you know power itself, would be able to run medical devices for the people that needed them, would be able to purify water, would be able to possibly even grow a little bit of food.
00:28:07
Speaker
And in general, would would physically and psychically sustain people against the insults, as I said, not merely of a world where all bets are off in terms of what the atmosphere is doing, but also the ordinary everyday insults ah that that we're intimately familiar with because we've been on the the coalface of of late capitalism.
00:28:29
Speaker
Yeah. and And we know what that feels like. Well, and to to put another historical marker there, I mean, I think one of the really interesting things that I picked up on when I was reading the text, and you mentioned this, but the idea of the kind of hub for a community to be able to have its needs met is a thing which, and mean, we have roots in doing these kinds of things in the United States, especially in the Rust Belt, right? Like where I grew up in the city I live in, they were called community houses and they still exist, a lot of them.
00:28:58
Speaker
And they were there for like, teach everything from teaching people how to read all the way up to getting them food and clothes and medical care, right? And like everything else in the middle at a time when, you know, most of the population of the city was living in like grinding poverty, even more so than now.
00:29:12
Speaker
And just how core and how central those institutions are still to whole communities 100 years later, right?
Ecological and Political Collapse Discussion
00:29:20
Speaker
um Because they fulfill a need that capitalism can't. And they do it in a way that's empowered, right?
00:29:26
Speaker
That's right. And that, yeah, I mean, there's... a lot of the projects I've personally been involved in locally have been very inspired by that for these these exact reasons, right? And I think there's, so there's a number of things that kind of come up here that I want to sort of hone in on for the last half an hour that we have that have to do with some of the the implications of of what's being said, right? So like one of the more controversial claims in some circles, and this is controversial in the sense that like whenever people talk about an irreversible collapse, you always get pushback, right?
00:29:57
Speaker
I generally face that as well a lot of the time. But one of the more controversial claims that's made and one that I have a lot of ah affinity towards is the idea that the situation that we're in now, currently, ecologically, politically, economically,
00:30:12
Speaker
is not even if one would want to salvageable, right? That it's so far beyond gone. I think you put it like we had crossed many red lines at this point, right? Like many points of no return, many thresholds.
00:30:25
Speaker
You know, we're we're living in a world which most of the infrastructure on the planet has been built since 1945 and isn't able to be sustained with the amount of resources we have, right? So that really realigns a lot of things politically, right?
00:30:39
Speaker
And I think a couple of the things i want to kind of talk about really quickly are first, one of the things that came to mind was how this sort of ah reading evokes a conversation that we had where I live ah four or five years ago, where someone from Mutually Disaster Relief came through and we were talking about disaster response and someone raised their hand and went, how do we tell the difference between a disaster and a not disaster?
00:31:04
Speaker
Yeah. Which was a really great question, right? Especially living in in the place where I live, where there's murders and people starve. And, you know, it it's it's bad. it's ah It's an incredibly poor American city.
00:31:17
Speaker
How do you tell the difference, right? And I think one of, you know, like one of the things that's happening in this text is a disruption of that separation, right? but think secondly, that's all the other thing that's happening is this sort of pushback against the concept that political work is there to conserve or save something.
00:31:34
Speaker
Right. Which is sort of an idea that comes out of the environmentalist movement, but it's one that sort of saturates a lot of political discourse. And so what do you think that the implications of that are? I mean, like that's two things to move beyond that are like relatively significant in the way that people understand their sort of relationship to what they're doing.
00:31:53
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. the The first thing, you know, I think that's a really pointed question. It's really welcome because anytime you invoke the idea of a disaster, the thing that sort of falls by the wayside, it's it's such an overwhelming idea that I think people forget to ask, well, disaster for who or for what, really?
00:32:15
Speaker
right You know, it's become in some quarters almost a cliche by now to invoke the idea that that the thing that we've done to the atmosphere, you know, barring the really bad runaway greenhouse effect scenario where you get Venus on the other end of it, which I think is pretty much, you know, um unambiguously a disaster for everything.
00:32:35
Speaker
there There are any number of scenarios that are alternately bad for the current ruling class or bad for some relatively privileged sector of humanity or bad for the entire human species but not the other species on the planet.
00:32:51
Speaker
There are all kinds of scenarios that are... you know There's a lot of violence in them. There's a lot of kinetic energy in them, but they might very well represent sets of of conditions in which other things can thrive.
00:33:04
Speaker
So I think something that I do need to be explicit about is you know Who are sets of circumstances that we're now having to contend with a disaster for?
00:33:18
Speaker
i don't think it's simply that they're a disaster for CEOs. I think, you know, i'm I'm very sensitive to the argument that, you know, we might as well call this the capitalist scene because capital, you know, it's capital to created in this.
00:33:29
Speaker
But I do think it's it's going to be really hard for all of us and not merely all of us in the global north and not merely all of us who you know currently enjoy privileged positions within the global north.
00:33:43
Speaker
I mean all of humanity.
Reinventing Societal Structures Post-Crisis
00:33:46
Speaker
There is a larger enclosing, there are many larger enclosing circles to that. You know, i have to confess on some level, I'm not a doomer, I'm a Taoist. And so, you know, i really, at the and the ultimate last call, end of the day, my sorrow is that the kinds of relations that I've grown up around will become impossible.
00:34:09
Speaker
That the particular sets of experiences and structures of relations that that i'm that i grew up around and have nostalgia for you know are are going to be rendered completely impossible and i'm very clear about that you know just hanging out with people having conversations that are are not charged with the the freighted weight of everything that we're living through having you know in in that sense, the privilege to have kind of an unambitious, ah unproductive,
00:34:44
Speaker
not particularly dramatic life, you know, that's, that's out the window. The people who say, you know, okay, so what, this is how people have always lived under pressure. This is how eight tenths of humanity or more have always lived.
00:34:55
Speaker
Get over yourself. I think there's justice to that. Right. And I, I, I admit that, and you know, they're, they're not wrong. It's just, this is, this is a disaster that I'm experiencing as such.
00:35:07
Speaker
the The other question, which is very closely related to this is about re resilience. Right. And in the book, you know, one of the things that I pick up on is a discourse that that I first heard being offered maybe around 2013, 2014, which is that, you know, we had the discourse of sustainability for a long time.
00:35:27
Speaker
And early in the 21st century, it became evident that not a damn thing we're doing is sustainable in any way. And so what is the discourse that replaces sustainability?
00:35:38
Speaker
And that discourse came to be known as resilience. and And particularly even after Occupy Sandy, you know there's this thing called the Special Initiative for Resilience and Recovery,
00:35:49
Speaker
In New York City, people to this day talk about, oh, you know your book is about resilience hubs. and And I'm like, well, no, no, it's not. Why is that? Because resilience, as we are now increasingly hearing, means the capacity of a system to return itself to the status quo ante after some disruptive event has happened. Yeah.
00:36:11
Speaker
And it took, you know, a couple of years of people being told this for for a lot to, you know, that it's it to sort of sink in on on a more widespread level. But the system that we now experience, that we now live with, that we now contend with, is not just, does not deserve to be restored, ah deserves to be transcended.
00:36:33
Speaker
And, you know, this is in some ways the argument of a really interesting book called Anthropocene Back Loop. and experiments in unsafe operating space by a woman named Stephanie Wakefield.
00:36:46
Speaker
And her argument is like, okay, well, it was never something that that we should have even countenance trying to restore or recover or protect or defend. We now have an unparalleled opportunity to reinvent all of the the fundamental conditions of our existence. I mean, really, you know a lot is up for grabs now.
00:37:07
Speaker
And let's make the most of that and not settle for these really... kind of epistemically weak claims, you know, like, okay, well, we're going to, what, you know, keep the power on and, and we're going to, you know, make sure that people have access to like ongoing supplies of insulin, but we're not going to do anything about the reasons why things got so fucked up in the first place. That's crazy to me.
00:37:33
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the, the democratic party's proposal, right? Essentially is let's deal with the, you know, fallouts of capitalism without actually dealing with capitalism. Yeah. Yeah. and And you see this you know from across the political spectrum in a variety of different guises, but they're essentially like, these are extraordinarily conservative propositions. The Green New Deal to me is is nonsensical to talk about.
00:37:58
Speaker
you know With all due respect to the people I know and care about who are you know very motivated by that language, you know good industrial jobs working on the solarization of late capitalism you know is it Is it better than what we have now? Marginally, but when everything is up for grabs, why settle for the marginal?
00:38:17
Speaker
Well, and I guess the question, you know as as we're seeing with the actual effects of solar panel production, um it doesn't necessarily make the situation any less disastrous the yeah in the immediate sense, right? like we're And this is kind of, you know it's sort of like the...
00:38:34
Speaker
if you want to be ecological, you live in a LEED certified building, right? Which is going to be new, meaning you just tore something down and built something new to be ecological, right? Like that's so much of how that discourse placed itself out. It's based in these kinds of sort of reductions of the general global situation to individual acts, right? As opposed to understanding it systemically. And I think one of the things that's really changed, that's become really...
00:39:04
Speaker
I kind of see change in the way that that we're starting to see things. And and it's similar to, you know, we were recording the podcast with Eric King recently, and we were talking about the CEO shooting. And one of the things I said is that one of the things the CEO shooting exposed, interestingly, is a sort of realignment of what people consider to be self-defense.
00:39:24
Speaker
Right. That the way that people are talking about this is as self-defense against a person who carried out mass societal violence. And normally that mass societal violence is considered legitimate and therefore not something to defend yourself against. But that is what has changed.
00:39:38
Speaker
Right. It's like that is the shift in the discourse. And I see something similar happening with the idea of what we consider to be normality and disaster where the. these kinds of breakdowns, and and this was talked about a really brilliant article about Sri Lanka. I'm forgetting the author's name off the top of my head, but these kinds of disasters, these sorts of collapses don't appear necessarily as anomalies, but they actually appear as a slow shifting of what normality means.
00:40:06
Speaker
And so the way that it was discussed in Sri Lanka is it's like, You go to work in the morning and you go out at night and then you wake up and you hear a news story about there being a bombing somewhere and then you know go to work again and you go grocery shopping. You come back, you hear another story about there being a firefight somewhere. And that's just how it is.
00:40:25
Speaker
Every once a while, you see the effects of it. But most of the time you're kind of living in this situation, which is degrading almost imperceptibly until it's not imperceptible anymore, which is kind of the way that people talked about the fall the Soviet Union, and right? That it was, you know, impossible until it was inevitable.
00:40:43
Speaker
And there's this kind of sense to that. And i I think one of the questions I have is how do we address that? Like, how do we deal with that? without allowing those things to become normality,
Prefigurative Living and Collective Survival Strategies
00:40:55
Speaker
right? Without allowing disaster to just become acceptable as the situation that we find ourselves in, but without also falling into the the other discourse of trying to save what exists to stop the disasters from happening, right? It's a difficult space to end up in.
00:41:11
Speaker
it's It's really challenging. And my only way of addressing that is is equally complicated. It's sort of a multi-part maneuver. i think I think we have to preempt disaster.
00:41:24
Speaker
And I think we have to preempt disaster by living prefiguratively, right? And this is the wonderful thing is that so many of of the theoretical tools and practical experiences of movement and and community in the last 20 years kind of already prepare us for this. They're right at hand.
00:41:41
Speaker
We have to live prefiguratively. In this particular context, that involves what would ordinarily be thought of as prepperism. yeah And so so one of the struggles around this book and the set of ideas that we're discussing is how do we retrieve some very, very valid, very valuable life-critical information from the paranoia, from the racism and and the xenophobia and the fear of the other that it's generally bound up with, from from the machismo that it's generally bound up with, from the affect and the aesthetics that generally bound up with.
00:42:21
Speaker
you know Can these things be disentangled? And you know I believe they can be. I just think that it takes people doing the work. And so that's one of the challenges that I've set myself. I think that if we organize ourselves differently cellularly, you you know, as, as communities, as, neighborhood scale assemblies, you know, making real dispositive, yeah you know basically having, having deliberative control over actual resource, right. So, so that the assemblies are dispositive of actual resource in the world.
00:42:57
Speaker
And if this becomes more of the way we live our lives more of the time, All of a sudden, the disaster, when and as it happens, and it's already happening, doesn't have that you know that extended, that infinitely drawn out and then all at once quality to it. yeah to to it right the the The dynamic has shifted completely.
00:43:18
Speaker
What you need to do is and Here's where it's difficult for people with politics like ours, because I don't believe in vanguardism, right? I don't believe in getting too far out ahead of people.
00:43:30
Speaker
I think the idea that I use isn't isn't leadership or certainly isn't vanguardism, but it is initiative. You have to take the initiative and you have to begin modeling these ways of survival and and thriving, which I believe will become quite mainstream. And I think that they'll become mainstream because there will not be any other way to do this.
00:43:53
Speaker
and i I think the degree to which we model and practice and live those things, none of it, nothing that happens afterward takes us by surprise. The infrastructure is already there.
00:44:04
Speaker
The physical infrastructure is there. The social infrastructure is there. And in a way, this is exactly what Occupy Sandy did you know with with ahc ah with Occupy Wall Street. like The network was there. It was stood up immediately.
00:44:15
Speaker
So just make the networks now. Forge the networks now. And the thing is, you're doing this. Literally, by doing this podcast, you're doing the work. Yeah. Yeah. You're beginning to have conversations with the people that you're going to need to have as part of your network. I know, you know, maybe you have, and maybe you haven't made this explicit in, in the context of this podcast. I know that you personally have a lot of the skills that I would certainly want to have access to, you know, in, in, in untoward situations, you know, we, we begin by, by spreading this knowledge and,
00:44:51
Speaker
And by reducing, because ah do you know what I think makes people make bad decisions is fear. Yeah. And I think when you're all up in your fear, you make bad decisions as individuals and you make bad decisions as societies.
00:45:04
Speaker
And so I just think like what helps with fear is, is practice is drilling. Yeah. It's kind of living with the incipient reality of something until it no longer scares you because you know exactly what you're going to do and who you're going to do it with when it eventuates.
00:45:22
Speaker
and so this is that this is the mission. Yeah, and I think, you know, i will we're going to have definitely ah an episode. We're goingnna talk about to Margaret Killjoy at some point in the future about prepping as well. um Yeah. Because Margaret also... Ask her ask her about her ask her about her um her black metal band. Oh, definitely. Oh, yeah. No, that's coming up. And so so is the, like, electronic band. That's absolutely coming up, too. Yeah.
00:45:47
Speaker
Outstanding. Margaret has a lot of really interesting thoughts about this. and I know we've talked about this kind of, you know, not during this recording, but you know one of the really difficult things about the idea of prepperism in the United States, very specifically, is that it is so deeply tied in with a notion of sort of, you know, the isolated individual at war with the world.
00:46:10
Speaker
Right. That you need to get as far outside of everything, as far away from everybody else as you possibly can with as much guns and ammo as possible and just like lock yourself down in a bunker and come out 10 years later. Right. hundred That's generally how it's thought. And it is a deeply problematic understanding of what that means for a lot of reasons, but also flies completely in the face of human experience.
00:46:32
Speaker
Right. No, that's right. And like in the communities. No, empirically, that's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like in the communities I grew up in, that's how people survive. That's how you get food. That's what happens when you don't have a job. Like you rely on your neighbors, right?
00:46:44
Speaker
Yes. And somehow, though there's a very long history of that, even in the United States, that is not how we think about these things. And so I think maybe a good question, ah couple of questions to sort of close on is first, how do we get people to start thinking in our circles? Right.
00:47:01
Speaker
to start thinking about things in this way, to get past, I mean, there's there's a similar conversation around gun culture too, to get past the right-wing connotations, to get past all of the machismo and militarism and all of that and understand that you are learning to use a tool, right? like And getting through the demodification part.
00:47:19
Speaker
How do you think we can do that most effectively in relation to things like this? Because it is so deeply bound up with so much of the culture war stuff that happens in the US right now. ah So much to say about that.
00:47:31
Speaker
One thing, going to go way out on a limb here. This is just a conjecture. It may be that some of the culture war stuff is beginning to die down a little bit. And I think this might be a silver lining of some of the reversals.
00:47:47
Speaker
then That's interesting.
Inclusivity in Mutual Aid and Labor Organizing
00:47:49
Speaker
broadly progressive forces have experienced and in you know i and don't want to get into electoral politics or or whether what happened in november was you know a defeat or you you know i personally do regard it as as you know one of the worst people i've ever met kind of becoming more more and more powerful um and and just the worst people in the world doing their little touchdown end zone dance is just really you know unattractive. But let's put that to the side. you know let Let me just, you know for the sake of argument, let's just say that that was a real reversal and and a real injury for anybody who believes in justice and anybody who has a soul. you know And I say that with all due respect. I know there are people who...
00:48:36
Speaker
you know I've been living in a lot of pain and this was you know voting for for the eventual victor was their way of giving vent to some of that pain. But let's leave that to the side for a second.
00:48:48
Speaker
I think one of the silver linings of that experience is that there is a discursive space that's open that is in some ways the experience of defeat. Mm-hmm.
00:48:59
Speaker
and and of recognizing that whatever it was that we were doing didn't work and there may be some people who conclude from that well we should have you know we should double down and we should do that harder you know we should just go you know just just absolutely no pun intended guns blazing and you know but for me it was like yeah some of the some of the language particularly some of the stances that we took, managed to strongly give voice to the experience and perspectives of people who have never been listened to. And and that is right and proper and just. And I don't believe that we should we should retreat from that at all.
00:49:40
Speaker
But that we failed to have the kind of conversation that could bring people... into those perspectives. It's my personal opinion now. And I think there may be just a little bit more patience now and sorrowful reflection about, well, what might work if that didn't?
00:50:02
Speaker
Yeah. And I hope, I hope, you know, I have, I have very many strong existential beliefs, you know, that, that, that, that separate me from, from other people. But I really, you know, particularly in mutual aid, you know, that, that like you need, it's all hands on deck.
00:50:23
Speaker
You really need everybody to be there and you need access to all of the energy and all the skill and all the ingenuity that people have. And so one of the things I'm really interested in the book is invitationality, like, which is not, which is not quite the same thing as radical inclusivity. It's, it's different in a nuanced way.
00:50:42
Speaker
Invitationality is like, how do you make sure that people feel comfortable and welcome in these spaces of mutual care that I'm talking about putting together? And it means really just ah minimal commitment to treating other people with dignity. It's funny how far that goes, right? Like treating people with basic yeah respect and dignity. Yeah.
00:51:02
Speaker
Yeah. It's amazing how far that goes. Yeah. Like, so I'm not even necessarily asking like, you know, what you do outside of this space, but when you're in this space, if you cannot agree to treat the people around you with respect and dignity, then you're not welcome in this space. Absolutely.
00:51:17
Speaker
And i think that from that, you can begin to knit relations outward. You know, one um one of my kind of culture heroes and and a good friend, she's become a good friend, is is is Kim Kelly. Oh, yeah. Kim's great. um The amazing metal journalist and labor activist. Best metal journalist ever, by the way, if all y'all don't know that.
00:51:38
Speaker
Kim was an amazing, she's found amazing metal reviewer, like back in the day. um my Yeah. Yeah, no, I first came, you know, to know her as Grim Jam. Oh, yeah. And so latter day career is as ah is a labor archivist and and journalist has been kind of extraordinary to watch.
00:51:56
Speaker
But she talks a lot about, you know, working with, with um in unionizing, you know, with folks who are who are Trumpists, you know, or who are, you know, evangelical or who are,
00:52:08
Speaker
you know, they have opinions and beliefs that are upsetting to her. And she's like, you know what? We have, we have a fight on our hands now that needs all of us if we're going to prevail and, you know, let us not suppress our differences, but let's put that, let's take that off the table for now. Let's, let's win this victory.
US vs UK Disaster Response and Self-Reliance
00:52:28
Speaker
And then we can get into the things which divide us and and hopefully do that from the perspective of people who have won some victories together and maybe develop some appreciation for one another. And I do not believe that she's naive.
00:52:40
Speaker
You know, there's, there's kind of a liberal Kumbaya version of that. And I don't think that's what she's, she's, she's peddling. Right. And I really, i really take a lot of inspiration from that. I think that,
00:52:52
Speaker
you particularly for people in in the States, you know collective survival will require developing relationships with people who have beliefs who are different from yours. yes i think that's It's not just going to be anarchists. One of the lessons you learn the Rust Belt a lot when you're doing organizing here is that You end up organizing in situations with a lot of people with a lot of problems and that do, you know, not always the best stuff.
00:53:20
Speaker
And you have to learn to deal with those people as people in a situation that's real. Right. And not as sort of like symbols who broke a moral rule or something like that. It's a lot more complicated.
00:53:31
Speaker
Like real communities are not spaces of moral simplicity. Right. Yeah, yeah. And I think we kind of, again, this is just me, you know, shooting my mouth off, but you know, I think we let that moral simplicity guide, you know, it was it was founded in in genuine and legitimate rage, but it tip guided us to places that were not functional.
00:53:55
Speaker
And I hope that we were able collectively to come back from some of that. So for me, what that means is um trying to decouple a lot of things which I think are really healthy and positive from things which I think are deeply inimitable.
00:54:10
Speaker
So for example, I'll give you an example that's just, you know, it jumps out at me every day because I live in the UK. You know, it turns out that when crises happen, people in the States... take initiative. they They do what they need to do. And weirdly, I think that it's because in the settler colonialist DNA, you know there you know that that rugged self-reliance that is so deeply and profoundly unhelpful at least means you don't wait around for for the the state to come to your assistance. right
00:54:41
Speaker
right It at least means that that you understand that you're on your own. What I'd like is for our understanding of what it means to be on your own, to be a collective one and not kind of a clannish, small family group, armored bunker based one.
00:54:56
Speaker
But here, you know, in the UK, when something terrible happens, the the first recourse, you you know, very ordinarily, even among people of of pretty significantly anti-authoritarian politics is to wait for the council to do it, that the local government.
00:55:12
Speaker
I was at, no, this is crazy. I was at a a municipalist workshop here and the scenario was one of flooding, which, you know, increasingly happens here due to the rains that we have now, which are, you know, just unprecedented in the experience of anyone now living.
00:55:25
Speaker
And the scenario was like, you are, a local assembly, an autonomous local assembly for a village that has received a you know ah weather forecast that that flooding is going to begin in the next 48 hours.
00:55:39
Speaker
What does your assembly do? And you know there's a lot of discussion. And then midway through the exercise, the the moderators were like, well, guess what? The storm is here. The community has started to flood in a matter of a quarter hour.
00:55:51
Speaker
What does your assembly do now? And I cannot tell you how surreal it was for the conversation at that point to be like, well, we negotiate ah power sharing with the local council and we see what...
00:56:03
Speaker
you know, what, what we're allowed to do and what they, you know, what what they'll let us do. And, you know, other people were like, well, I don't know why we would have an assembly now in the moment of maximum danger. And i'm like, dude, you know, this is not a hypothetical. I mean, this is how Occupy Sandy did things. This is how, you know, this is, this is how generally mutual aid communities do things.
00:56:24
Speaker
This is not just a talking shop. This is how decisions are made and resources are allocated. And this is how communities respond. And mind you, this was a group of people who were explicitly self-selected and gathered to discuss municipalism, you know, libertarian municipalism, like the the anarchist version.
00:56:46
Speaker
yeah It blew my mind. It blew my mind. So, you know, let's just be thankful that in the States for all of the things that we contend with, including, you know, both the, well, everything that comes as a consequence of having a gun culture, you know, at the very least people are primed to take care of themselves. They don't wait.
00:57:07
Speaker
They don't sit in place and wait for the council to rescue them. And
Navigating Political and Social Challenges
00:57:11
Speaker
i think that is a material to work with. yeah So why don't we end with, you know, kind of the question I ended a lot of interviews with, what does that mean for us now?
00:57:22
Speaker
So like we're we're coming into a moment in which the future political situation the US is ah incredibly precarious, I guess would be the nice word for it. The world is on fire and it feels like everything's burning down, right?
00:57:34
Speaker
And so we're yeah you know we're kind of... In this, you know, we're in the like slow tail before everything happens all at once. And I know that a lot of the sense that I've been getting amongst people I know is that they're kind of falling into like one of two categories, right? Like one is people that have just been like,
00:57:53
Speaker
well, I'm done. I'm just going to just rest for the next six months. And I guess we'll see where we're at. And then there's people who are doing the let's build mesh nets. Let's start stockpiling supplies. yes You know, which is a very different way of, of approaching that kind of a situation. And it's one, which is grounded so much more in the idea that, you know, and this is kind of how my community is approaching this, right. Which is, you know, how I can speak about this with some level of information, but.
00:58:21
Speaker
You know, the idea where I'm at is political activism is grounded in complaints, right? Complaining at people. And that's not a form of politics I personally engage in but right now that's not a form of politics that's even viable for those that want to engage in it because the people that you'd be complaining at literally declared war on you and do not care.
00:58:42
Speaker
Like they are antagonistic forces. And so that makes the structure of protest irrelevant. Right. In this moment. And I think it's it's kind of pointing out a lot of the shortcomings of the idea of protest in liberal democracy. But that's made a lot of people a million. Yeah. And like this is this is definitely a topic of a thing I'm going to write about at some point soon. But a lot of people are kind of lost in that situation right now.
00:59:06
Speaker
right They don't really know what to do They don't really know how to break out of the norms of activism that they've been sort of you know brought into as part of their political development. They might not be in a place where there's a whole community of people.
00:59:18
Speaker
like I'm very lucky to be in a city with a lot of anarchists in it and and a lot of us gather in one spot and we can sort of organize things like this. But for other people, for people that are outside of these communities, for people that live in rural Tennessee, for, you know, someone who's like the one anarchist they know in their like weird suburb or whatever, right? Like, what can people like this do to sort of start the process of getting the conditions together for something like this? Right? Because like one of the... one the
00:59:50
Speaker
most damaging outcomes of American capitalism is the way that isolates us. Right. And that it keeps us away from collective understanding of ourselves and who we are in the communities that we're in and overcoming that is a major problem. And so how, how can we sort of help or encourage, or what should we be telling people that are trying to sort of create the conditions to create something like this going forward?
01:00:16
Speaker
So something that I derive from my understanding of like chaos and complexity theory, like the dynamics of and behavior of complex systems, is that you know in in any situation of turbulence,
01:00:31
Speaker
where it's kind of unclear what basin of possibility you're going to wind up in. The best strategy you can possibly adopt is a strategy that pays rewards no matter what possibility you wind up in.
01:00:44
Speaker
And so to me, that counsels things like developing the knowledge base you know that you're talking about. It it you know consists in forging relations with your neighbors, no matter how tentative or uncomfortable that might be.
01:00:59
Speaker
you know In getting as fit as you possibly can, whatever that means for you. And there's another whole conversation there about you know extracting the idea of fitness from ableism and and you know toxic masculinity and all the other nonsense that it's mired in.
01:01:15
Speaker
you know I think that if if you are somebody who is capable and knows how to do things and exists within relations, no matter what happens, you will find yourself with something productive and valued to do.
01:01:30
Speaker
I think that to the degree that people are hearing your words, they're probably already at least limitally aware of some of the networks that might help them connect to people who share more of their beliefs and values than maybe their immediate neighbors.
01:01:45
Speaker
But I always say, you know, the most radical thing you can do is literally go and knock on your neighbor's door and introduce yourself. And, yeah Again, there's there's kind of a liberal kumbaya version of this. and and there's you know i I don't necessarily mean that everybody bringing sugar to each other's door is is going to stave off some really bad things.
Final Thoughts and Promotion of 'Lifehouse'
01:02:05
Speaker
you know you you might It's uncomfortable. now It's uncomfortable to be you know to to cross that threshold of intimacy with people that you know you might have good reason to fear.
01:02:16
Speaker
I get that. And I think that it's worth attending to the experiences of people, you know, like those, you know, in... The immediate example I always go to is the Bosnian war, but yeah there are examples from every period of history where, you know, guess what? It's your neighbor that actually poses the biggest threat to you.
01:02:35
Speaker
I think none of this is without risk. None of this is without nuance. None of this, you should certainly never do anything that, you know trust your instincts about safety and certainly don't open yourself up.
01:02:48
Speaker
to people who mean you harm. But to the degree that it's safe for you to do so, there is literally nothing that you can do that will better prepare you for a wider range of outcomes, no matter what comes, than getting to know the people around you. Because it is going to be those people who you depend on and who depend on you when it happens.
01:03:08
Speaker
Well, thank you for joining us. This has been a wonderful conversation. yeah And you've been listening to The Beautiful Idea. ah Do you have anything you want to plug before we sign off? You know what?
01:03:18
Speaker
ah Not really. I mean, I think like it's it's weird. like i Yes, I would love it if people read the book. I hope that they would find it meaningful and and enjoyable.
01:03:29
Speaker
But you know they'll they'll find to they'll find their way to it or not. you know For the folks that are listening to this, if anything I've said makes sense, the book is called Lifehouse, Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire. It's on Verso Books, and it's available in you know wherever better progressive books are sold.
01:03:46
Speaker
how did that yeah that, that's a plug. Yeah. Yeah. I've learned like the language of pluggery from late capitalism. Exactly. So yeah. Thank you for, thanks for listening to the beautiful idea. ah We will be back soon with more conversation. Anything you want say before you sign off?
01:04:02
Speaker
Thank you and take care. be well, be safe ah be safe, be healthy, and and ah really consider introducing yourself to the people around you. It's very powerful.
01:04:12
Speaker
All right. Well, thanks for listening, everyone, and we will be back soon.
01:04:23
Speaker
Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Beautiful Idea, news and analysis from the front lines of anarchists and autonomous struggles everywhere. Catch you next time.