Adam Greenfield

Endurance athlete, heavy-music appreciator, compulsive greeter of cats, host of Lifepod. My 2024 “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World on Fire,” is available from Verso; new books forthcoming.

Lifepod, the podcast about taking care of ourselves in a world on fire: http://lifepod.transistor.fm
Pre-order my next book!: https://store.illwilleditions.com/products/the-tetrad-value-in-a-more-than-human-world-by-adam-greenfield
Sign up for my free dispatch at: https://www.adamgreenfield.site/

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Last Notes

2026-05-10 08:37:58 UTC

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An issue that confronts the would-be urban walker determined to traverse a megacity from one boundary to the other: do you outfit and equip yourself for ordinary urbanity, or for the walk?
I’m halfway minded to adopt some of the practices and tactics I use in #ultrarunning and #ultralight hiking, but by the same token poles and hydration bladders and so on stick out like a sore thumb. You want to be able to move through crowds, duck into bodegas, pet the local cats, etc.

2026-05-09 11:35:06 UTC

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One of the questions I’m minded to ask is: what might a 21st century-native psychogeography look like, a psychogeography beyond Hawksmoor churches and the Place Saint-Sulpice? I guess we’ll find out, together.

2026-05-09 11:17:50 UTC

Before the human project on this planet comes to an end, I’m going to embark on something old-fashioned: a series of urban walks intended to excavate the layers of geography, history, struggle, infrastructure, technology and everyday making-do that sediment into our experience of place. I hope you’ll join me.
#walkshop #walking #psychogeography

2026-05-07 20:06:49 UTC

I dunno, man. Those “smears” sound pretty good to me – better in most cases than the actual policy.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/535/082/577/574/780/original/1d5b7dfa1a205e72.jpeg

2026-05-04 21:23:55 UTC

RIP Ben Morea, founding member of the Motherfuckers, ad plures ire May 2nd, 2026.
This interview will give you a real taste of Ben’s Lower East Side, and all the dimensions of freedom one could explore there, now lost: https://illwill.com/the-ultimate-dilemma

2026-05-04 16:41:09 UTC

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It sounds like it’s something of a pseud’s pride flag, then?

2026-05-04 16:28:55 UTC

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lol tbh I am failing to see the need for a “fediverse symbol” at all, except to press invidious affiliations still further into the collective body – more Team Good Guy bullshit.

2026-05-04 13:19:55 UTC

OK, I’ll bite. What does the “therefore” symbol in a profile connote?

2026-05-03 11:01:23 UTC

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Why such an unnecessarily abrasive comment?
@npub1tca…pt7j

2026-05-02 09:30:59 UTC

Whoever had this sticker made up, I love you.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/504/276/770/353/106/original/a2b818d498bb4057.jpeg

2026-04-26 09:07:42 UTC

RE: https://ecoevo.social/@ReNatureLdn/116464665522931060
It’s incredible to see this in the neighborhood. I’m so grateful to the @npub1usk…y8r5 cats.
#note1kdf…u3nq

2026-04-21 20:24:50 UTC

Either this is as gorgeous and wonderful and inspiring as it facially appears to be, or one of you will come along in thirty seconds to tell me why it isn’t, and that I should be ashamed to post it.
Please, please let it be the former.
https://nodestar.net/

2026-04-09 22:41:35 UTC

Dudes I’m really mad at myself for neglecting fun. Everything I do is so serious. I know the world is intolerably grim & cruel, etc., but I never let myself just have fun anymore.

2026-04-04 15:43:20 UTC

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Kintsugi? : . )

2026-04-04 15:23:58 UTC

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The infuriating thing about this book is that when it’s good, and on the things it’s good on, it is very good indeed, and lots of fun besides.
It is disqualified completely, however, by its thorough, fatal lack of attention to those inveterate maintainers known as “women,” acknowledged in its pages only on the dedication page (and even then in a way that isn’t anywhere near as charming as Brand presumably intends).
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/347/112/857/524/082/original/3d175f07907a3af1.jpeg

2026-04-04 07:37:48 UTC

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(Exploring the particular irony of lauding Musk’s ostensible design genius, in an era when we know his insistence on flush, electronically-actuated handles on Teslas has contributed to the deaths by incineration of multiple victims, is left as an exercise for the reader.)

2026-04-03 22:50:19 UTC

OK, it’s, admittedly, gorgeously produced. And I’m willing to give Stewart some considerable benefit of the doubt, given how primordially foundational his work has been for so much of who and what I am.
But opening it to see an ESR quote, in this day and age, feels greasy and retrograde and gross – not quite as bad as getting some DHH on you, but not far off, either. And it gets worse: I wouldn’t have bought the book in the first place had I known Stewart devotes an entire (brief) section to the design “of” Elon Musk, as if Musk had ever designed anything more elaborate than a stealthy excursion to a Black Sea hair-transplant clinic. That bit is all-but-disqualifying in itself, and tends to make me ashamed to have the book on my shelves.
The deeper issue, though, is Stewart’s narrow definition of “maintenance.” The book feels like it’s sidestepped a whole generation of discourse on the topic, to its detriment. I’ll let you know what I wind up concluding.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/343/183/715/781/316/original/627b290060ba00b7.jpeg

2026-04-03 09:57:32 UTC

Last week I heard someone who should know better, one of the initiators of the Hard Art project, express her surprise that no one was making art about the ecosytemic catastrophe we’re all living through. And I wanted to say: yes they are! They’re just doing so in ways, modes and genres you think are beneath you.
#Metal, and specifically #blackmetal, remains a place where all the anguish and grief and fury and terror we experience at the willed destruction of the Earth can be felt, expressed and metabolized – and never better or more pointedly than by Austin Lunn’s project Panopticon, who we were lucky to see last night in London. If what you’re looking for is art that weighs our entanglement with labor, struggle, the land and our desecration of it, you needn’t look any further. But you might just have to get outside the gallery.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/340/172/730/388/256/original/9bbb1dd793ff58ed.jpeg

2026-03-29 09:02:30 UTC

I’m not trying to tell anyone how to show up here, please believe me.
I *do* want to pass on that no fewer than three people whose presence On Here I really enjoy have recently told me they need to (at the very least) take an extended break from being here. And it’s all because of the same set of issues: what they consistently described, often in identical words, as the incessant, joyless judgment about choices of tool or platform or mobility mode, tone and language policing, hectoring about missing alt texts, humorlessness, etc.
I think a lot of this is due to context collapse, and probably also the desire to exert shape and control over *something* in a world that is otherwise terrifyingly unresponsive to our needs. But please do consider that others – including many who would otherwise number among your natural allies, comrades and friends – might arrive at different answers to complicated questions than you have, and that it doesn’t make them moral monsters. Thanks.

2026-03-26 08:09:50 UTC

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Wow, I’ve never seen (or noticed) that box before.

2026-03-25 23:15:07 UTC

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All of my books are on Anna’s.

2026-03-25 09:08:42 UTC

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You know his proposed solution for the conditions that vex us is literal War Communism. (I wonder who gets to be Lenin?) I need to be careful in what I say in public – fellow Verso author, widely beloved on the left, etc. – but it astonishes me that anyone gives his prescriptions a moment’s time.

2026-03-17 19:20:37 UTC

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BTW I love that some of you-all seem to think I’m British.

2026-03-17 19:17:40 UTC

The plan as of now is to fly Stateside for the “Lifehouses, Resilience Hubs and Dual Power” event at Woodbine in Manhattan, 14-17 May, but I’m inclined to pop down to Philly and do a book jawn there the 12th or the 13th – I know @npub1gs6…v6rt is interested, maybe the @npub1ely…g9y8 cats would be too? Anyway, TBD. https://www.woodbine.nyc/lifehouses

2026-02-27 12:18:22 UTC

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…and second, I am *thrilled* to share the news that I’ve been appointed Visiting Professor at the Sociology Department at LSE through March 2027. (Whaaaaaaaat?) Currently scheming about ways to leverage this appointment to do fun stuff, and open to suggestion.

2026-02-27 12:15:52 UTC

Two things: first, steadily building up time-on-feet with a deliberately *achingly* slow 15.1 mi in 3:23:17 (13:35/mile) | Parkland Walk, Finsbury Park loops, Clissold Park loops and home | 56 F, grey and windy, first blossom on the cherry trees! | Adizero EVOs | New fueling protocol (60g carb/hr) vastly improves next-day recovery | Power song: “For Whom The Bell Tolls.” #ultra
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/142/514/523/856/267/original/ac54d829651e601e.jpeg
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/142/514/711/571/582/original/3b42a60a2b0d4122.jpeg
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/142/514/720/053/644/original/975ea1c747f58dac.jpeg

2026-01-26 17:08:44 UTC

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Be all of that as it may, I’m just suggesting some reasons why you’re going to have a hard time making that case to folks on this side of the pond.
They may not be reachable on this issue, either at this time, or by you, or at all, and accusing them of being clueless liberals inadvertently propping up fascism is neither accurate nor fair nor particularly comradely.

2026-01-26 16:45:40 UTC

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I mean, it’s real. After having lived in the UK for 12 years, I can tell you that not needing to worry that ordinary disagreements can escalate into gunfire is a palpable improvement in quality of life – something you don’t realize how grateful you are for until you’ve lived it. Europeans do regard the US social contract around firearms as bizarre, and I’m not so sure they’re wrong to do so.

2026-01-22 23:50:45 UTC

C’mon. How is this not a firing offence?
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/941/409/904/902/261/original/7e89fc4bde3641b5.jpeg

2026-01-22 10:58:48 UTC

I’m saying this more to vent than I am because I’m under any delusion that my saying so, or even all of us saying so simultaneously, will change a damn thing, but: how on Earth is Cory Booker so completely useless?

2026-01-21 11:44:23 UTC

Something I’d ask people to consider, here and everywhere, is that if someone isn’t perceptibly responding to a situation with the grief or anger or rage you think is appropriate, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care.

2026-01-21 00:31:18 UTC

I know some of you cats think it’ll be well and truly the end of US hegemony to crash the dollar, and it will…but there are an *awful* lot of hostages duct-taped to it from head to toe, including many things I promise you you care about. Be careful what you wish for, is all I’m saying.

2026-01-16 16:53:22 UTC

Say! I’m looking for folks with a background in the Earth and life sciences who would be willing to read something I’m writing for publication with Ill Will Editions, to keep it rigorous and honest. (We’d have to have a longer conversation about what proper acknowledgment and citation means to you, as well as other ways of ensuring the work proceeds on a more adequtely balanced, non-extractive basis, but superbonus if you’ve got a strong grounding in non-Western epistemologies.)

2026-01-12 22:21:25 UTC

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2026-01-12 11:40:39 UTC

Just wanted to make sure you saw this: my write-up on the Wuben G5 pocket flashlight and what it can tell us about the present/near future of production and consumption. You’ll see why I think the Wuben is a textbook example of what I call the New Exuberance — from Kickstarter to Pearl River Delta manufacture to iteration via online fan communities — and why I see these little flashlights as the trilobite of the Cambrian explosion in designed form we’re living through. https://www.patreon.com/posts/147949143
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/881/930/758/096/918/original/926926b108778efc.jpeg

2025-12-16 23:22:15 UTC

Dudes I am an actual doctor now.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/731/799/467/210/609/original/839e06dcf6d52c1e.jpeg

2025-12-15 06:33:31 UTC

It’s gifting season *and* the Verso end of the year sale, which makes it a great time for me to recommend “Lifehouse” for anyone on your list who’s into #anarchism, #mutualaid and care, #collectivepower, ideas about organizing our communities to survive #climatechange (and the chaos downstream of that), a #solarpunk with teeth, etc.
It’s a book I’m really proud of and, I think, something the right kind of giftee would be delighted to find under the tree. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2536-lifehouse

2025-12-02 02:01:03 UTC

I continue to maintain that Pete Hegseth gets a hard-on every time he says the word “kinetic.” The man is such a pathetic, tragic open book.

2025-11-25 14:25:41 UTC

In my head, Wesley Willis had a song called “Chidi Anagonye.” (You can hear him singing it, can’t you? Rock over London, rock on Chicago. Jiffy Lube — Leave Worry Behind.)

2025-11-20 21:35:27 UTC

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Well precisely! I can’t imagine needing you to wear black and listen to Sumac and worship Antique Olive Nord like I do before thinking of you as a friend. That kind of litmus test is literally inexplicable to me.

2025-11-20 21:20:47 UTC

Reading more about a community with a strongly-articulated shared aesthetic – lol literally none of my friends shares my personal aesthetic. Like some of them are even hippies. 😮

2025-11-15 23:36:04 UTC

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I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, which in good part is why I’m still here.

2025-11-15 23:31:35 UTC

I meet lots of people who are clearly reasonably bright, but who have optimized themselves for the self-promotion viability in the world increasingly seems to require. They introduce themselves with a spiel, a pitch, and I frankly don’t care for many of them.
I know just as many people who are every bit as bright and insightful, if not significantly more so, and who don’t know how (or simply do not care) to present themselves for consumption in this way. These are the people I want to be with.

2025-11-10 21:02:34 UTC

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Oh, wait: you thought this was about DHH, didn’t you? It actually wasn’t intended to be…but if the shoe fits…

2025-11-09 15:32:55 UTC

Watching someone you used to merely dislike and disagree with become a sad, lost, ridiculous human being, utterly corroded with impotent rage and hate, is a curiously chastening experience. That shouldn’t happen to *anyone*, you know?

2025-11-05 20:49:22 UTC

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Well, I expect I’m (currently) in a mighty small minority on this, but I find it an untoward, really presumptuous appropriation of the traits and lifeways of beings who are sentient and agential and have an umwelt of their own, but who have no voice of their own in our culture – i.e., you’re not a lynx, ffs, you’re performing lynxface. I find it offensive and, yes, I’m dead serious about this.

2025-11-05 17:23:23 UTC

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Ha! I have trouble understanding furry content as anything but the worst, blithest and most unapologetic sort of cultural appropriation, and I am certain it will be universally understood that way in years to come. It’s funny to look in real time at something the future will regard with the same horror we have for cultural artifacts from last century.

2025-11-02 22:02:53 UTC

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There is a somewhat weaker, concomitant sentiment I feel for something like a black leather jacket: how long before the implicit claim to sexuality in a garment like this can no longer be credibly sustained? How long before all those facets of the presentation of self seem delusional, or merely pathetic?

2025-11-02 21:06:24 UTC

I’ve reached the point in my life where I ask of every new acquisition (book, piece of clothing, bike, laptop): realistically speaking, how much longer will I get to enjoy this? How many times will I get this down off the shelf? If I divided the retail price of this thing by the years I expect to have remaining to me, how much am I effectively paying to rent it on an annual basis?

2025-10-22 22:00:23 UTC

DUDES. We went to see “Black Sabbath: The Ballet” at Sadler’s Wells, and at the very end TONY FUCKING IOMMI came out to play “Iron Man.” I absolutely, completely and totally LOST MY SHIT. #iommiclifecomplete
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/420/060/584/851/027/original/da7121289082144a.jpeg

2025-10-13 14:26:12 UTC

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What’s a self-verification tag?

2025-10-11 03:55:44 UTC

The thing about the Thiel transcript isn’t that it’s insane, though it is that, and it isn’t even that it’s detached from any actual real concern on a planet with plenty of ‘em. It’s that it doesn’t make sense from one sentence to the next. In places it’s very nearly whipped word salad. You would worry about a relative or other loved one you heard speaking this way.

2025-10-03 22:28:20 UTC

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Other than the needlessly dismissive and frankly misogynist “wine moms,” this is a decent roundup.

2025-10-03 15:54:01 UTC

You may well not care, and if not I surely do not blame you, but what’s happening on Bluesky right now is *extraordinary*. I have never seen a management team in open warfare against its userbase, at a time when they desperately need active-user and engagement numbers to cash out in any significant way.
Quite the spectacle. 🍿

2025-10-02 21:01:54 UTC

dudes there’s a store with christmas lights and whatnot for sale. it is the second day of october.

2025-10-01 12:00:10 UTC

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I would frame the question like this: if your aim is to drive the cost of human labor to zero in some given field, how much land area would be required by the necessary calculational resources? Where is that land, who does it presently belong to, can it be acquired at a price consistent with available resource?
Think of AI not as some ethereal process of becoming-Singularitarian, but as a simple, hardknuckled calculation in commercial real estate ROI. Does the return justify the investment?

2025-10-01 11:56:21 UTC

What still seems largely absent from popular AI discourse is any reckoning with fundamental constraints imposed by the materiality of computation. Not so much the thermodynamics thereof — which indeed does show up, albeit sideways, in the form of concerns about energy generation & waste-heat production — but the materiality of calculation.

2025-09-27 09:37:38 UTC

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It’s not a binary, dude. But yes, thank you for explaining my own politics to me.
And since when have institutional safeguards slowed a fascist down by so much as a second? You think Kash Patel cares one whit about the Attorney General Guidelines?

2025-09-27 09:24:51 UTC

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Counterpoint: harm reduction is real, and is worth it. (You don’t need to argue back, I know this is something I’m not likely to budge anyone’s feelings on and I’m not really looking to.)

2025-09-19 11:06:25 UTC

Look how they massacred my boy! (Actually I’m glad there’s a preservation effort underway.)
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/230/621/223/863/494/original/ecdb283d0551179c.jpeg

2025-09-12 19:47:22 UTC

Good god, is there no reactionary bloviator they won’t normalize? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/technology/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-book.html

2025-09-12 11:56:15 UTC

“There is…in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy.” I read this line of Joan Didion’s and thought immediately of Nate Silver.

2025-09-11 18:52:07 UTC

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I seem to recall a convenience store chain in Taiwan doing something similar. Since we know high-density, small-footprint nodes outperform centralized systems in disruption, I think it’s brilliant. (I call it “embedded civil mesh.”)

2025-09-07 21:01:11 UTC

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.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/165/002/654/661/047/original/0e4aeed6fca3f092.jpeg

2025-09-06 11:28:04 UTC

My skin crawls whenever I do yardwork: the dried spider husks, the rich fungal rot, shards of Phil Dick’s short story “The Father-Thing” rising in memory. Today it’s a decomposing snail, backyard whalefall in the pooled water in the bottom of a flowerpot with a blocked outflow, surrounded by bryophytic life: a whole universe there against the back wall.

2025-08-29 19:30:22 UTC

Actual pink triangle sky!
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/113/700/350/247/754/original/8ad6658320c8bbcb.jpeg

2025-08-29 15:57:49 UTC

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The very first thing I said was, “Well, at least it’s not swinish Arial.”

2025-08-29 15:55:51 UTC

Sorry to bring this up once again but HOLY SHIT THERE IT IS. #lowprobabilityoutcomes
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/112/859/420/401/900/original/fa2c3614d31c2b51.jpeg

2025-08-29 09:29:00 UTC

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And now that the PhD’s behind me, we can really get started on implementing our plans for same here. Growing any particular amount or variety of food is out of the question – we’re in Zone 2 London, after all – but I think we can at least turn all our organic waste into compost & therefore divert it from the recovery chain, while also meaningfully supplementing our diet. A meaningful degree of energy autonomy is more realistic, but eminently achievable. It’s exciting.

2025-08-29 09:21:49 UTC

Energy sovereignty and, where achievable, food sovereignty: what makes good geostrategic sense for nation-states is also sound advice for households and communities.

2025-08-28 13:23:02 UTC

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Of the hardcore period? Minor Threat, Black Flag, Bad Brains.

2025-08-28 09:19:43 UTC

SLF are such a masssssively underrated band. Foundational for me – up there with the American Big Three, for sure. https://open.spotify.com/track/5547Pj9VfbPFpcsBUtgzLI

2025-08-27 23:27:12 UTC

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I’m guessing you’re familiar with “The Shockwave Rider,” where popular Delphi-based prediction markets are positioned somewhere between mass entertainment and a corporate planning tool (and are consciously manipulated by the federal government)?

2025-08-26 10:45:34 UTC

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These are not books, in other words, that have been through the *highly* contemporary, market-oriented process of breaking things down for legibility & comprehension. Their authors did not care if someone coming to their work wound up hurling it across the room the moment they first encountered a train of unfamiliar terms. You’re very much on your own – still moreso if, like me, you picked the book up not as part of any curriculum, or because it’s been assigned or chosen by a reading group, but

2025-08-26 10:37:05 UTC

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What follows from this is that a text like “Nomadology” is much denser than it appears to a casual reader, in fact fractally dense, and that readers with the proper equipment enjoy an incomparably richer experience in the text than those of us who don’t. Most contemporary theory is like this: the author is implicitly situated in a lineage, (generally) implicitly arguing with someone/s specific, and enlisting entire bodies of thought in their argument by deploying the most glancing reference.

2025-08-26 10:31:26 UTC

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And just in the way a fish never becomes aware of the water through which it swims, I think it’s fair to say that D&G had remarkably little reflexivity about the field of knowledge they implicitly assume mastery of on the part of the reader. They were products of a particular curriculum, and it equipped them with the ability to *encapsulate* ideas in a single reference, without citation, and trust that a certain payload would be delivered to the mind of a reader in the moment of encountering it.

2025-08-26 10:27:55 UTC

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But what I didn’t know, and in fact wouldn’t grasp for decades, was that the phrase belongs to Immanuel Kant, and therefore brings in its train a whole set of resonances & implied understandings. And these would be obvious to anyone who’d had a proper grounding in philosophy, in the same way it’s obvious to folks with a different grounding that the guitar sound on a Galaxie 500 record is an allusion to/invocation of the Velvet Underground, with everything *that* implies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condition_of_possibility

2025-08-26 10:21:24 UTC

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From my own position, actually – which is assuredly not that of someone with an elite education of any provenance. I can offer a concrete example, and hopefully it will shed some light on what I mean.
I forget where I first heard the term “conditions of possibility,” but it made sense to me immediately. I was a fan of James Burke’s TV show “Connections,” & therefore delighted to have been offered an elegant phrase to describe *what has to happen before something else can come into being*.

2025-08-26 10:15:24 UTC

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Before we get into today’s text, I want to briefly weigh the question of preparation and, conversely, authorial intention. Does it matter what you bring with you to reading a book like this? What will the author(s) have expected of a reader, by way of context?
I think it’s important to situate this chapter from “A Thousand Plateaus” not simply in the history of philosophy, but in the context of an elite French education. And I’m going to approach that, appropriately enough, from the outside.

2025-08-25 16:38:07 UTC

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And finally for today, rrrreally close readers may want to pursue the ceremonial management of spiritual power in Rome as a submerged but discernible theme in John Brunner’s 1969 near-future SF novel “The Jagged Orbit” (which features a household-security firm called Lares & Penates Inc., and one of whose protagonists is indeed given the name “Matthew Flamen”). I’ll be back tomorrow with more “Nomadology”!

2025-08-25 16:33:10 UTC

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Oh, and: links. I see I invoked, in passing, the name of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, so here’s a link to the Wikipedia page on one of his most impactful ideas, the “state of exception”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_exception
I also mentioned critical race theory. Here’s a painstakingly neutral overview of the topic, though you may well prefer one more rooted in advocacy. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-rights/archive/lesson-critical-race-theory/

2025-08-25 16:22:00 UTC

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Or so, anyway, they would have us understand the counsel of the Western mythos. Tomorrow, we’ll have a look at the ways in which the notion of the war machine’s pure exteriority to the logic of State is manifest in games…and maybe even get past the book’s first few pages. Do let me know if you’re enjoying this reading, are finding it useful, or think I’ve missed something? 👊

2025-08-25 16:17:13 UTC

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to you, all this talk of “incomprehensible cruelty” and so on, well, that’s a perfectly legitimate question. There is unquestionably a degree of romanticization here that feels – to put it mildly – incompatible with the experience of war’s reality, and I can’t really find fault with anyone who loses interest in the argument at this point. But there it is: if what you’re interested in is disrupting the State’s logic of control, what D&G propose is that you have to ride the lightning.

2025-08-25 16:12:02 UTC

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And this is pivotal. In a sense, even, it’s the whole book. For as I understand them, what D&G are arguing is that this thing they call the war machine *produces an opening*. With its sudden flashing violence, its “pure and immeasurable multiplicity,” the war machine constitutes “an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis” against sovereignty, the State apparatus and the milieu of interiority it churns out in its cycling between principles of rule. Whether or not this appeals

2025-08-25 16:04:12 UTC

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And what begins to take shape is a conception not of war as we might think of it – as a logistical, indeed bureaucratic exercise, which has as much or more to do with organization and command as with the ability to inflict kinetic violence on a given target – and more of something wilder and purer. For them, war is a force, or skein of forces, that inherently runs counter to State logics and each of its modes of power: “Indra, the warrior god, is in opposition to Varuna no less than to Mitra.”

2025-08-25 15:57:54 UTC

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And here, already, the reader begins to get a sense of the specialized way in which D&G use common terms.
We might think of contemporary policing, for example, as something practically indistinguishable from the State’s making of war on its own subjects, and so – as these terms are conventionally understood, anyway, by just about anyone from Schmittians to critical race theorists – it would seem nonsensical to insist that war occupies a position of absolute exteriority to the State apparatus.

2025-08-25 15:52:40 UTC

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Rather like three points define a plane, the State’s cyclical alternation between its modes of domination makes a *stratum*. And what D&G go on to argue is that war is always exterior to this space, this milieu or stratum. We might, indeed, think of the State as something that constitutes itself precisely in and through war, but for D&G the bundle of energies we know as war is something that properly remains outside of the State and furnishes an absolute contrast to it.

2025-08-25 15:45:31 UTC

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And as we’ve seen, while it is possible to glimpse some distinction between the opposed terms of each pair, in each case they are hardly polar opposites. Each term seems to share something of its nature with the other. What becomes clear here is that maybe there’s a reason for this: “their opposition is only relative”. They are, in fact, different moments or aspects of a State apparatus that “distributes binary distinctions and forms a milieu of interiority.”

2025-08-25 15:37:28 UTC

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We continue! We’re still on the *first page* of “Nomadology,” still working our way through the quote from philologist and comparative mythologist Georges Dumézil with which D&G choose to open up their exploration of the war machine and its exteriority to the State apparatus.
Following Dumézil, they have offered up a series of opposed pairs, each term of which represents one of the two modes in which the State practices its art of domination: the “magician-king” and the “jurist-priest.”

2025-08-24 21:46:41 UTC

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Because, remember, what these figures of myth are supposedly emblematizing is the “absolute exteriority” of the war machine to the State apparatus – given that emphasis, you might expect a more sharply inscribed, not to say polar, binary than that present between Romulus and Numa or Varuna and Mitra. Fortunately we now arrive at the final terms in this series, which give us something to sink our teeth into: “the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer.”

2025-08-24 21:40:22 UTC

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What can we learn from Varuna and Mitra? They take us back to the “Indo-“ facet of Dumézil's expertise. Varuna is a Hindu god – perhaps significantly, the god of Order and Truth – but rather confusingly, Mitra has so little independent identity he generally appears in the hybrid form Mitra-Varuna, “which has essentially the same attributes as the god Varuna alone.” It’s not much to go on, by way of opposition between figures symbolizing two principles, modes or rationalities of domination.

2025-08-24 21:05:51 UTC

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The contrast being drawn with his immediate (and equally legendary) successor Numa is, again, less sharp than it might be, but evidently vests in the latter’s ability to instill civic peace not through the imposition of order but via the quality of inspiration. (The source here is Plutarch, who tells us that a kind of golden age of conciliation descended on Rome during Numa’s reign, until “on the iron-bound shield-handles lie the tawny spiders' webs.”)

2025-08-24 20:59:37 UTC

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This opposition begins to do a better job of clarifying the distinction I think D&G are trying to uphold, certainly better than that of “Rex and flamen.” But let’s move onto the next dyad, Romulus and Numa.
Here we’re back in Rome. Romulus, of course, was with his murdered twin brother Remus the legendary founder of the city. He is held to have laid out the city's boundaries and districts personally, and to have pursued social order by dividing the populace into three tribes.

2025-08-24 18:39:15 UTC

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Raj and Brahman! These terms from India clarify matters slightly. As the context in which Westerners most often encounter the term – the British Raj – implies, “raj” connotes a sovereign who rules by conquest, and inscribes their power of capture and command in the state form. “Brahman,” by contrast, is the ever-self-transforming ultimate ground of reality, something very much like the Tao. (We’ll assume D&G did not mean to invoke the “brahmin,” the highest, priestly caste of Hinduism.)

2025-08-24 18:30:38 UTC

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Wikipedia (sorry) tells us that the “rex sacrorum (‘king of the sacred things’)” was a “senatorial priesthood” (!) reserved for patricians, while the flamen were high-ranking members of society who officiated the cults of various gods.
Hmm, I *kind* of get it? But to someone whose education has not immersed them in the culture of ancient Rome, there isn’t really enough contrast here to quite grasp the distinction D&G are trying to make. Perhaps we’ll have better luck with…

2025-08-24 18:25:43 UTC

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OK, we go on! And I promise we’re not going to be *quite* as painstaking as we move on, but I think it’s important to lay out each element in the array of opposed pairs D&G offer to characterize Dumézil’s two modes of domination.
“Rex and flamen”: These are roles in the ceremonial culture of Rome, different channels by way of which divinely-sanctioned authority flowed through the Roman state.

2025-08-24 18:13:26 UTC

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(At suitable intervals, I’ll drop in links to topics that crop up in the text, neither assuming that you’re already comprehensively familiar with this material, nor that it’s utterly new to you.)

2025-08-24 18:12:55 UTC

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Some links before we proceed! It is, after all, very much in the D&G spirit to pursue tendrils sideways through the loam:
Georges Dumézil: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Dum%C3%A9zil
Here’s a bit on the differing rationalities of power Foucault distinguishes as “sovereignty” and “discipline”: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2024/08/27/foucault-power/
…and some thinking about some of the resonances that may crop up when D&G refer to a “State *apparatus*”: https://openreadings.wordpress.com/2014/08/23/apparatus-dispositif-material-discursive-practice/

2025-08-24 16:56:56 UTC

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[Dinner break! And a chance to let all that settle.]

2025-08-24 16:54:12 UTC

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But maybe “forms” isn’t quite it? Maybe it’s closer to *modes*. And Dumézil tells us that from the infancy of what would become the West, myth, legend and (where these things are distinguishable from) history agree that there are two distinct and recognizable modes in which domination is enacted over people: “Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer.” Thank god for those last two opposed pairs!