How to reclaim power in a time of perpetual crisis
We are living through a Long Emergency: a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars, and other climate-driven disasters. In Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield asks what might happen if the tactics and networks of care that spring up in response to these times might be brought together in a single, coherent way of life?
Using examples from the Black Panthers' 'survival programs,' the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort, and the neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that sustained many during COVID lockdowns to the large-scale, self-organized polities of municipalist Spain and Kurdish Rojava, Greenfield argues for rethinking local power as a bulwark against despair-a way to discover and develop the individual and collective capacities that have gone underutilized during all the long years of late capitalism, and a means for thriving in the face of impending catastrophe.
Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services, and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future.
We're told that innovations-from augmented-reality interfaces and virtual assistants to autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars-will make life easier, more convenient, and more productive. 3D printing promises unprecedented control over the form and distribution of matter, while the blockchain stands to revolutionize everything from the recording and exchange of value to the way we organize the mundane realities of the day to day. And, all the while, fiendishly complex algorithms are operating quietly in the background, reshaping the economy, transforming the fundamental terms of our politics, and even redefining what it means to be human.
Having successfully colonized everyday life, these radical technologies are now conditioning the choices available to us in the years to come. Greenfield's timely guide clarifies the scale and nature of the crisis we now confront-and offers ways to reclaim our stake in the future.
