Good afternoon, beloved —
In the end, all it took for me to reignite my interest in my PhD (and my various other neglected projects) was being able to travel the world once more, to see you, to walk the night streets and drink and talk endlessly with you.
I love London, still, after eight solid years of living there (and just short of two years being only there), but perspectives on life and possibility differ so fundamentally from place to place that being able to move around the globe sometimes feels like a precondition for thought itself. At any rate, I think we all know that this opening is likely to be temporary, so I'm taking it for everything it's worth. And hopefully this upsurge of interest isn't just an artifact of Seoul's energy, Madrid's sunlight and Helsinki's saunas — that it turns out to be a thing I'll be able to maintain once back in the Smoke.
What's emerging from my return to my work on municipalism after embarrassingly long away is interesting, to me anyway, and it probably does have something to do with the perspective that comes with having stepped away for such an extended period of time. The sense of things I'm developing is confirmed by the fieldwork I'm doing here, and it comes down to this: for all that those of us from far away held it up as exemplar and inspiration, Ahora Madrid neither contested the 2015 election for citywide office, nor ever seriously attempted to govern once in office, as the municipalist platform it seemed to be, even to itself.
Everyone here understood this, obviously, but it's not always easy for something that's self-evident to survive the dual filters of distance and translation into other languages — possibly precisely because it is self-evident, and therefore hardly deserving of comment for anybody at close range. This is why being able to put boots on the ground is so important, even for a few scant weeks. If I'd never come here, never chatted shit with friends over vermouth in the gathering dusk of La Latina and listened to them narrate the collapse of all their hopes and dreams for the municipalist project, I wouldn't really ever have understood this. And as an accepted set of facts, it poses a significant challenge, in turn, to all my hopes for the relevance and utility of this way of thinking, doing and living.
There'll be plenty of time to delve into that later, though. For now, I simply want to focus on something else that's come up in the course of my interviews, rather weirdly to me, which is how central overt, explicitly self-identified "hackers" evidently were to Madrid's municipalist moment. It seems as if a significant fraction of technically-proficient people here took seriously the current of thought that started with Richard Stallman's free software definition, and which in the States led only to the self-regarding, fundamentally neoliberal, ultimately empty projects spearheaded by the likes of Lawrence Lessig and the disgraced Jeffrey Epstein associate Joichi Ito. By vivid contrast, here “free culture” to a very significant degree meant autonomist culture, and many of the foundational “hacklabs” were located in squatted social centers; there's even an argument to be made that the practice of assembly originally finds its way into the 15M occupation of the Plaza del Sol from the social centers, where it had long been used to facilitate everyday household discussions and manage the inevitable controversies and frictions of collective life.
This line of descent had consequences for the way in which at least some tendencies of Ahora Madrid tried to go about managing the city once they'd won office in 2015. Most obviously, the well-known hacker Pablo Soto joined the city council under the Carmena administration, where among other things he developed the Decide Madrid platform for online citizen participation. (Decide has, somewhat improbably, been maintained by the current right-wing city government of the Partido Popular, though they clearly don't use it as the clearinghouse for ideas and propositions Soto intended it to be.)
So even though one ought to be careful not to overstate its centrality, a current of thought and activity I've always thought of as politically and materially toothless, màs o menos, had an important role to play in the development of municipalist praxis here. And one aspect of this that came as a particular surprise to me was that a lot of the relevant conversations evidently transpired at and because of Medialab Prado — a venue I’d been invited to on at least two occasions throughout the Ahora Madrid period, and always found a bit, well, wanky. It's gutting to think that while I was rolling my eyes at some godawful Urban Internet of Things noise and trying simply to stay awake through the dozy afternoon, a conversation of far greater salience (and interest to me) was unfolding in some adjacent space, mere feet away. (The new government must also have believed these conversations had a certain puissance, for they evicted Medialab from its unimpeachably central, city-owned premises not long after evicting the Carmena administration itself. Compare, though, my friend C’s pungent characterization of Medialab as “fifteen people working fulltime, inviting hundreds of people to work for free and share their creations with open licenses, to serve as content for their yearly exhibitions.” There is that, and maybe too that's the wankiness I sensed.) At any rate all of that is history, now — in every sense, I guess, but most especially in the sense of being over with, finished, done.
Oh, one other difficult piece of news to relate: the guerrilla commons of el Campo de Cebada is gone, too, overwritten as I guess it was always fated to be by a clumsily overscaled, bluntly exoskeletal beast of a building. I don't pretend el Campo was the incubator of political possibilities I once thought it might be, so much as simply a pleasant place to hang out through the afternoon on the reconfigurable seating/shade structures, drink the cans of Mahou being peddled on a loosie basis by roaming immigrant vendors, enjoy the drifting weedsmoke and genderfuck basketball games, and read to one's heart's content.
Vale, vale. Here we are. A ton to digest and mull over, and — atypically for these past eighteen months or so — I’m crackling with energy and the desire to get into it, wherever it all leads. I'll shout at you again when I'm back in London, but in the meantime...
§ I'm reading damn near everything on Ana's shelves (In and Against The State, Cynthia Cockburn’s The Local State: Management of Cities and People, raumlaborberlin’s supertasty, impossible-to-get-ahold-of Building The City Together) in addition to the big new Graeber tome I humped all the way to Spain, his last; listening to newish stuff from Gazelle Twin, Divide And Dissolve, the Transcendence Orchestra, GY!BE, et al.; and watching (cough) A Very Secret Service, yes againnnn.
Until next time, then: please remember to take care of yourself and those who need you, and to let yourself be taken care of. You have, as ever,
all my faith,
ag
somewhere not london!
This is Dispatch from London No. 114 of Sunday, 5 December 2021, 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. ◊