Good morning, beloved -
A quick dispatch today, mostly concerned with an announcement and a question.
The announcement is that I'm giving in at long last, and joining everyone else you know in launching a podcast. Inevitably called Lifepod, it will follow up on and extend the ideas I explored in Lifehouse, and concern itself mostly with ways that we might care for one another in this time of storms.
Why a podcast, I can hear you asking? Or more to the point, why on this good green Earth a podcast now — now that the medium has clearly peaked, and started its long slide toward irrelevance?
The first reason is something it took this election to convince me of, which has been obvious to most everyone else for a decade or more now: that podcasting is the salient discursive space in the culture. In our time, it's where ideas are developed. It's the commanding heights, the space in which the egregore of a thought community starts to manifest itself. And if it's a channel I've disregarded for too long out of my own lifepatterns and neurocognitive predispositions — i.e. I tend to have neither the time nor the patience to absorb audio or video presentations — it's past time for me to stretch and challenge and generally get over myself if I want to bring the notions in Lifehouse into the broader conversation.
The second has to do with a point Jan Groos from the Future Histories podcast made to me about about his own project, which is that he sees the conversations he hosts as a mode of inquiry. That really struck a chord with me. One of the great joyful insights I’ve managed to retrieve from doing what is by now a reasonably long string of Lifehouse talks is that my thinking is generally sharpest (and frankly, my recall greatest) when I get to develop ideas dialogically – or even dialectically, when wrangling with folks who hold divergent positions or fundamentally different priors. If a podcast can function adequately as a container for conversations like that, in a way that allows insights to grow and stack over time? So that everyone participating in the project is able to build up a shared conceptual vocabulary together? Yeah, that's powerful. And still more than powerful, if I can manage to capture in the studio even a little bit of the warmth and intimacy I've felt in the course of the conversations we've had around the book, in venues from Long Beach to Norwich to Rotterdam.
And that brings me to the final and most important reason, put beautifully by the essential Mandy Brown here: that in uncertain times, "our power is with and through each other." Working out ideas for the printed page is something I'm arguably constitutionally well-suited to, but it's notoriously a lonely business. And that simply won't do, when trying to develop a coherent body of ideas about mutual care and collective power. It's time (and really long past time) to open this up into a mode of common inquiry — and a podcast feels like a splendid way to approach doing that. So mote it be.
OK, so much for the announcement. The question is: who would you most like to see appearing as a guest on this show? Who do you think would be most interesting and most fruitful for me to be in conversation with, who has the most relevant insight to offer, who do you think I'd be able to strike sparks off of?
Let me know, if you would – either in comments here, or on Signal, where you can always reach me @soixantehuitard.68. My hope for this production is to cast a net reaching much further than the usual suspects, and especially those who are already in my contacts list, and I can only really do that with your help. It doesn't matter if the guest you have in mind is a bike mechanic, a street medic or a Buddhist master, by the way — what matters is that you thought of them when prompted in this way, and I'm inclined to trust that instinct.
Beyond noting that Agriculture have generously let me use a few seconds of "Living Is Easy" as intro/outro/stinger music (!!), which I'm hugely stoked by, that's all I have on Lifepod for now. I'll say more once we have a few episodes in the can, and we're good to launch. Can you tell that I'm excited, though? I think this has a genuine chance of being something you'll enjoy and find useful, even amidst all the many other conversations available for you to listen to, and of taking me into regions of possibility I've never yet explored. The very thought of it is an uplift and a great Yes at a moment when so very much else feels like negation.
§ Speaking of. If you're reeling from the onslaught of awfulness unleashed by the new administration, and feeling shock-and-awed right down to the ground, well, know that you're not the only one — not by a long shot. You might want to have a look at this list of concrete things you can do to respond to those circumstances, though? First collated by Frontline Medics and greatly extended by Mariame Kaba, it's literally called "Some Actions That Are Not Protesting or Voting," and so far as I'm concerned that's exactly what the moment calls for.
One of the arguments I make in Lifehouse is that voting and acts of protest are a lot like hope, in that they're ways of displacing agency onto some external party. Their implicit logic is that someone else is responsible for making consequential material change in the world, and that the only tools that are available to us consist in trying to exert leverage over that party's decisionmaking process. What this list suggests instead is that the power to make change always resides in our own hands; that whatever change we're able to make is something we can experience in our own immediate environment; and that an even semi-coordinated series of such change acts can do a very great deal to hold back the encroaching darkness.
For better or worse, I think this proposition is something we're now going to see tested severely — but how much more life-affirming it is to take this proposition at its word than to cower dazed in whatever safe space we're able to frame for ourselves, numbed to the point of passivity by the veritable Late Heavy Bombardment so many of us are experiencing. Thanks as ever to Dubravka Sekulić for the heads up.
§ Right now I'm reading H is for Hawk and Blood Meridian, in perverse nightly alternation; listening to a 34-hour post-metal playlist, which varies wildly in quality but offers a good number of solid directions; and, well, I confess to not having watched anything at all lately.
That's about it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 137 of Sunday, 16 February 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊