For the first time anywhere, as a modest benefit for supporters: a comprehensive listing of all my dispatches from London. This list will be continuously updated [Ha! - Ed.].
Also for the first time? Where I'd always considered the dispatches something that expired in the act of sending, and were irretrievable afterward, the text of anything listed here is available on request — just ask and I'll sail you a PDF [Again, wildly optimistic: please do not. - Ed.]. Those marked as keepers feel like adequate representations of the kind of thought and writing I aspire to, and don't often achieve. Enjoy!
0. 01 January 2015. Introducing the dispatch from London. A brief nod to the great John Brunner, Alvin Toffler and The Shockwave Rider. My irritation with the P2P Foundation and its seeming desire to own the commons discourse. NYPD work-to-rule strike.
1. 02 January 2015. Notes on James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Listening to Floor and Russian Circles.
2. 03 January 2015. On punk rock aging poorly and being displaced in my affections by metal, of all things. Why I find Cards Against Humanity distasteful.
3. 04 January 2015. John Doe’s 1976 Los Angeles, the lunar Lower East Side of the 1980s and the relationship between cheap real estate and cultural innovation. I praise TARS and the lovely black hole VFX, but otherwise correctly declare Interstellar a “minor film.”
4. 05 January 2015. Daily caffeination rituals. On Hunter Hunt-Hendrix and the logic of deliberately confounding one’s core audience. “Transcendental” black metal v. “immanent” drone metal. Why there is no archive of dispatches.
5. 06 January 2015. A paean to Soho sleaze, inspired by Sebastian Horsely’s famous “This is not a brothel” door, directly across Meard Street from my publishers. Dunking on Yahoo!, though it’s not clear why I even bothered. The impressive heterogeneity of the dispatch readership.
6. 07 January 2015. On my way to leisurely Chengdu. Health Goth and tacticool derpery. Mercedes misunderstands the promise of autonomous vehicles. Dialing back dispatch production to a more sustainable rate.
7. 11 January 2015. The Charlie Hebdo attack and performative grief on social media. Props to whoever buys for the ICA bookshop. A note on “recovering from dreadful 2014” that hits a trifle hard, given 2015-2021.
8. 18 January 2015. The willful, culpable ahistoricity of “social innovation” discourse. Andrew Sempere helps me identify a folk song I’ve been haunted by since mid-childhood.
9. 25 January 2015. Long-haul air travel in the age of bingewatching and box sets. True Detective and the neonihilism of Thomas Ligotti, Eugene Thacker and Ray Brassier.
10. 01 February 2015. Digital POS systems, preset tipping percentages in the UI and the problem(s) with tipping in the first place. On permanently leaving Twitter and Facebook. “Postcards from a Supply Chain.”
11. 08 February 2015. The evolving consensus notion of what constitutes verbal wit, as telegraphed in filmic dialogue across the decades. The long shadow cast upon my behavior and speech choices by the 1982 National Lampoon article “The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs.” Listening to afrodelia from 1970s Nigeria.
12. 09 February 2015. A gentle reminder, which must surely have been prompted by some interaction now lost to history, that I am not a Thought Leader and especially not your Thought Leader.
13. 15 February 2015. Guides to writerly craft and concision, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace facing off against Strunk & White. Greil Marcus’s celebration of punk rock as an exemplary piece of writing.
14. 01 March 2015. A trip back to the States. Americans’ surreally disproportionate fear of a new Caliphate. Why America’s best dining can be found in failing strip malls.
15. 08 March 2015. Normie misunderstandings of kink and its culture. Why Fifty Shades of Grey ruined everything.
16. 15 March 2015. Holed up in snowy Montreal with the charmlessly low-resolution, eight-bit Marxism of Ed Soja’s Postmodern Geographies. A new Liturgy record.
17. 22 March 2015. “It didn't get to me at all, Auschwitz, until I got to the women's shoes.” This one's a keeper.
18. 29 March 2015. Our cat is unwell. My disgust, as an NYU alumnus, with the school’s new campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, and the shameful concessions they make to local constraints on speech, assembly and conduct.
19. 05 April 2015. On being reminded that many of the people one encounters in the course of an average day can best be thought of as the “walking wounded.” My addiction to Swarm Simulator. William Bunge and Gwendolyn Warren’s Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute of 1968.
20. 12 April 2015. The Apple Watch and notifications as inscriptions of power/knowledge. Nurri’s film Tender screens at DOC CON in Brixton.
21. 19 April 2015. Finally seeing The Parallax View for the first time. Why its wonderful Division of Human Engineering montage doesn’t and can’t mean quite the same thing for us that it must have to its original audience. My favorite tidbits from the secret history of the 20th Century; how these events taught us to be cynics; how that cynicism has now become overgrown and counterproductive.
22. 26 April 2015. "Now I have a motherfucking mushroom!”: travels in the surreal “extended parody universe” of Angry Hitler videos. On not mistaking Ryoji Ikeda’s Supersymmetry for anything deep, but enjoying it anyway.
23. 03 May 2015. A robust culture of free events on a nightly basis makes a great city. The critical importance of low-cost public transit infrastructure to the success of niche cultural propositions. Detroit Soup.
24. 10 May 2015. Cleaning out our NYC apartment as we prepare it for sale means letting go of the people we never became. The 30th anniversary of the MOVE bombing.
25. 17 May 2015. “The redemptive thing about Dubai is what the desert knows, which is that there shouldn't be a city there at all.” This one’s a keeper.
26. 24 May 2015. Mad Men absolutely sticks the landing. Believe the hype, too, about Mad Max: Fury Road.
27. 31 May 2015. A resounding Tory victory and its immediate consequences for the London real-estate market.
28. 07 June 2015. A report of progress on the book that would become Radical Technologies, then in its seventh year of gestation. Several things I used to believe about networked technology and civic life that I no longer hold to be true. Why I no longer talk about the “liberatory” or “emancipatory potential” of technology.
29. 09 June 2015. The “way of the warrior” and the Yaskawa Motoman MH24 industrial robot.
30. 14 June 2015. “Overmining” the liberal subject — that imagined ordinary person so many of our notions of cityness are predicted upon — via the “fleet-in-being,” a concept of naval force projection in the Age of Sail. Liturgy and Circuit des Yeux live in Islington.
31. 21 June 2015. My Berlin, from Tegel to Tacheles.
32. 28 June 2015. Celebrating the SCOTUS decision in Obergefell v. Hodges while drunk on Wyborowa in the forecourt of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science. Best-named affinity groups of Queer Nation San Francisco circa 1991. Police abolition and the public defense. RIP Patrick Macnee.
33. 01 July 2015. Karl Rove, technological development, “history’s actors” and the creation of facts on the ground that others are compelled to account for and adapt to. Forging new and better realities.
34. 05 July 2015. Travel and privilege. Privilege and travel.
35. 12 July 2015. Exploring the governmentality literature via a close reading of West Side Story’s “Gee, Officer Krupke.” This one’s a keeper.
36. 13 July 2015. A quick note asking new subscribers to introduce themselves to me.
37. 19 July 2015. Paul Mason’s rather silly Postcapitalism. The drawn-out failure of Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project, amid all-but-universal revulsion for Holacracy, the “leaderless” management system he attempted to implement there. In the Weekend section: The Look of Silence; scoring tickets for Hussein Chalayan’s Gravity Fatigue at Sadler’s Wells; Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience, 1950s-1990s at the Black Cultural Archives.
38. 26 July 2015. My liner notes for Philly hardcore band Ruin’s new double-disc retrospective on Southern Lord. On design’s final capture by late capitalism. The neoliberal logic of “responsibilization” and the Internet of Things. Learning how to understand the back end of your life as something other than a grim parade of erasure and loss.
39. 02 August 2015. Just what is a “regeneration bootcamp,” and why is the GLA holding one?
40. 07 August 2015. A call for readers interested in “demystifying, unpacking and understanding” the entire domain of blockchain-based technologies, including cryptocurrency, so-called "smart contracts" and distributed autonomous organizations.
41. 09 August 2015. “It was an electric world, and I'll miss that part of it always. But it was sad, too. We broke the things we were given. We broke each other. For all the energy we put into self-perfection, it sure seemed to me like we broke ourselves”: A look backward, from after the end of all things. This one’s a keeper.
42. 16 August 2015. What it feels like to actually build a WikiHouse. Marking the twentieth anniversary of my departure for Basic Training in the United States Army at Fort Knox, KY. With the YPG/YPJ against ISIS.
43. 23 August 2015. The Corbynite maneuver and the future of the Labour Party. Overreaching T&Cs on all your phone apps. The flipside of Metcalfe’s Law and the erosion of once-universal networks. I confess to kinda liking Hood By Air. Sodalities, strike funds, bothies, burial societies, phalansteries and hospitality ethics.
44. 30 August 2015. The ostensible fifth Velvet Underground record and the wages of mediocrity.
45. 06 September 2015. I have a stalker. Ways of responding meaningfully to the refugee crisis.
46. 13 September 2015. Orwell and Corbyn. Making sense of the writhing hypermesh that is the world. The moment at which the book about cities I thought I was writing became a book about technology and capital-letters Everyday Life.
47. 19/20 September 2015. A first attempt at cataloguing these dispatches. (Recursive!) My travel schedule for the fall of 2015.
48. 27 September 2015. Fetishizing Brutalist social-housing icons for the chattering classes. The organized finkery of the government’s “Prevent” counter-radicalization program. Finding cause for optimism in a rope bridge built by drones.
48. 04 October 2015. We move into our present flat. On not getting a job I was up for at the RCA, and what I would have done with the position had I landed it. Teaching at the Bartlett.
49. 11 October 2015. On my late Philly friend Al, his amazing sneaker sculptures and the existence of wild and hitherto-unsuspected talents in every last one of us. Joining Instagram despite knowing better.
50. 18 October 2015. The alien megastructure orbiting Tabby's Star, KIC 8462852. This one’s a keeper.
51. 25 October 2015. Presenting the Bartlett class I taught with Usman Haque during the 2015-2016 school year, “Architectures of Participation.” My travel schedule for the winter of 2015-2016. Nurri’s film Tender screens in NYC.
52. 01 November 2015. A trip to Moscow. Presenting the fundamentals of information-security hygiene to queer activists and other interested parties. Gathering at the Solovetsky Stone in Lubyanka Square to read off the names of those lost to the Gulag. Andrey takes me to drop a few kopeks at the splendid Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines. Back in London: notes on Chalayan’s Gravity Fatigue; meeting Don Letts (!).
53. 08 November 2015. On to Chicago. Wondering whether I was being a useful idiot in Moscow. Steaks and successive subterranean speakeasy Mezcals with my friend Alaina; the case of Lou Reed and the perils of committing too hard to a bit.
54. 15 November 2015. “Another dispatch stained by the thing that has happened in the world,” in this case the coordinated terror attacks in Paris.
55. 22 November 2015. Hanging out at Sophie’s on East 5th Street with Jamie, my friend of thirty years. The aural comfort food of the dive bar jukebox.
56. 29 November 2015. “I Don’t Like Mondays,” the American culture of school shooters and police murder. A reader characterizes the emotional tenor of these dispatches as “sorrowful,” whereupon I argue that it’s more complicated than that.
57. 06 December 2015. On the Master Bullshit Matrix. This one’s a keeper.
58. 13 December 2015. Intersectionality, fandom and the internet as a foam of mutually incomprehensible identity spaces.
59. 20 December 2015. Difficulty accessing knowledge that one has theoretically mastered, trouble understanding when interpretive grids conflict with one another, and other problems of the self-taught.
60. 27 December 2015. On the ember days.
61. 01 June 2016. I always like Madrid. I like the ¡Viva Gramsci! graffiti in el Campo de Cebada. I like the Monument to the Lawyers of Atocha. I like the enormous steaks and surly service at Casa Paco. I like the improbable concrete fungus of Torres Blancas, its top like some blatant coronal mass ejection. I like The Garden of Earthly Delights.
62. 09 November 2016. “Mourn, then organize.” Joan Baez shows us the way.
63. 02 December 2016. Announcing Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, now available for pre-order from Verso.
64. 11 December 2016. Weaponized post-factuality, the uses to which AI-driven “perfect spurious interpolations” can be put when deployed with malice, and the epistemological shitstorm about to hit. Conversely: the actual achieved miracle of the NHS.
65. 18 December 2016. An extended ode to the powerful goodness of Schott motorcycle jackets.
66. 26 December 2016. The Snowman as a meditation on the disappearance of entire lifeworlds.
67. 31 December 2016. Learning to play guitar; music as a way of reaching affective states we don’t have names for.
68. 08 January 2017. A little neurotic stutter-step of anxiety as I ship the final copy for Radical Technologies to my editor.
69. 15 January 2017. The Zen concept of “beginner’s mind” and the gloriously stupid core of “No Fun.” The kinds of bodily performance that are required as a register of adult competence. RIP Mark Fisher.
70. 22 January 2017. The Women’s March, Ceausescu and mass public protests as magickal spell-breaking operations. Richard Spencer getting punched will never not be funny.
71. 29 January 2017. 198 methods of nonviolent action, should Nazi-punching not sit quite right with you. Showing up for each other.
72. 05 February 2017. Heideggerian “thrownness,” the OODA loop and the often-astonishing agility of the malicious actor. Principles for coordinated resistance in a time of shards.
73. 16 April 2017. Sloterdijk’s Foams, the outward-jetting oceans of Enceladus and the ethics of space exploration, as seen from the vantage point of post-conquista, forcibly Christianized Mexico.
74. 02 May 2017. A program of launch events for Radical Technologies.
75. 27 September 2017. Advice to a friend whose colleagues dismissed her work as “depressing”; dealing with people who respond to your contributions pissily or in bad faith. A calendar of West Coast book events.
76. 10 March 2018. The quiet desperation of hygge, “sparking joy” and other neoliberal theories of fulfillment, as divined from a sweep through the grim shelves of the Somerset House branch of Rizzoli. Richard Mosse and Trevor Tweeten’s Incoming at the Barbican Curve; Zayne Akol’s astonishing Gulîstan, Land of Roses; finding myself a convert to pourover Chemex coffee.
77. 22 April 2018. Kristin Ross's splendid translation of Mauvaise Troupe Collective’s The Zad and NoTAV; thumbing through a copy of Moshe Safdie’s Beyond Habitat I saw on Meejin Yoon’s desk; N. Katherine Hayles's Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious. Announcing my fiftieth-birthday drinks.
78. 28 April 2018. Notes on what I call the “Received Commons Aesthetic,” and its deployment as sign of ad-hoc/bottom-up community, very much rather than the substance thereof. Dopelord at the Underworld in Camden. This one’s a keeper.
79. 02 May 2018. My media diet for the first half of 2018. (Apparently the only fiction I read in that entire stretch was the Anna Kavan classic Ice, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and KSR’s New York 2140. Huh.)
80. 26 May 2018. My application to study toward a PhD in the Cities Programme of the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics has been accepted.
81. 05 June 2018. On turning fifty.
82. 31 December 2018. Taking up doom yoga. Pushing past the lethal trans-Odinist politics of so much of neofolk, to see if there’s any version of it I can live with. Learning to love solitude and silence in the outdoors. Becoming a card-carrying Wobbly. RIP Pete Shelley.
83. 16 January 2019. BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE LIFESTYLE TEAM. This one’s a keeper.
84. 03 April 2019. Epping Forest, loud in the hours of darkness; overnighting there illegally as a form of Buddhist calisthenics.
85. 02 May 2019. Trip report from my two-day solo traverse of Dartmoor from Okehampton to Ivybridge. Includes grid references and gear notes.
86. 08 May 2019. The shallowness of hauntological discourse, as epitomized by the disappointing A Year in the Country. Reactionary currents in contemporary British thought and writing about the land.
87. 19 May 2019. Signing the contract for my next book. The importance of specific, even technical language in evoking sense of place. Understanding people who draw their referents from (e.g.) Disney IP rather than the older, common folk culture.
88. 26 May 2019. A few days in Copenhagen. Crossing the Stadsgraven canal to discover the deep Christiania. Capping the visit with BBQ and beer from the mighty Warpigs.
89. 02 June 2019. The work of Forensic Architecture and the production of truth at Umm al-Hiran.
90. 09 June 2019. “Ron Swanson engineering,” or designing tools and systems in a time of plenty for intended operation in a time of scarcity. The People’s Republic of Walmart and the surprising resurrection of the planned economy. Fusing Amazon’s consumer-facing front end to the Big Factory on the other side of the Pacific.
91. 16 June 2019. Ultrarunning. Asymptotic sensory reduction vs. threshold experience as strategies of transcendence. Mastering the art of pain management.
92. 23 June 2019. Contemporary resurgences of conspiracy thought, the sharp turn toward astrology among young queerfolk and the flat-Earth duncery circulating in certain corners of hiphop culture. The Continuous Mortality Investigation.
93. 30 June 2019. My youth as a Kinsey-zero tourist in queer political spaces. Marriage equality: assimilation, or ass immolation?
94. 07 July 2019. Kicked in the guts by the end of MAD Magazine. Life lessons from ultrarunning.
95. 11 September 2019. A very brief query about doing a dispatch in zine form. It came to naught.
96. 15 October 2019. “I have to tell you that a piece of my heart died yesterday, and not a small one”: the Turkish invasion of northern Syria and the effective end of the experiment in Rojava. Quibbling about hope with Harvey Milk.
97. 27 October 2019. Trying to think service-delivery infrastructures as meshworks, or “hybridized agglomerations of deeply bastard heritage, whose elements were laid down by many different hands, at different times, at different scales and degrees of completion.” Reckoning with cruelty with the homeless of St Pancras Station.
97. 16 December 2019. Notes on the 70 hours, 36 minutes and 58 seconds I spent playing Death Stranding, from the many OH HIDEO KOJIMA NO moments to the beauty of collaborating on the repair of the broken world.
98. 22 December 2019. Looking back on the decade that was.
99. 23 December 2019. Giving in to my persistent, neurotic need to cull the audience of people who aren’t going to bother reading these dispatches, I ask for an explicit indication of your continuing interest, and manually unsubscribe all of those who don’t answer. Not, perhaps, one of my finest moments.
100. 21 March 2020. Mutual aid in the face of the pandemic. Announcing Quarantine Theory Club.
101. 17 May 2020. Tripping over a gym and a (separate) hill-running club for fascists, and wondering why physical-culture scenes with aesthetics that appeal to me are so often like that. Taking up a practice of Buddhist meditation for the first time in many years. A watchword for a sangha of one. RAKTA and Deafkids at SESC Pompeia.
102. 10 September 2020. Announcing the launch of my pamphlet “At The End of The World, Plant A Tree” as a benefit for Libreria bookshop.
103. 18 March 2021. On intersectionality, and who the lethal violence we tolerate in our societies generally comes to rest on.
104. 24 March 2021. Using the Chomsky-Foucault debate of 1971 to understand what’s amiss with the “ethical AI" discourse. Sideswiping the ecocidal fuckery of NFTs.
105. 02 April 2021. Microdosing on the outdoors: a £20 shanzhai camping hammock as the antidote to lockdown cafard. Soliciting your thoughts about financial support models. New GY!BE; recent Wrekmeister & Deafheaven.
106. 08 April 2021. Updates on my stupidly conjoined PhD and book projects. Announcing this Patreon. Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor; May Our Chambers Be Full, from Emma Ruth Rundle and Thou. RIP Paul Ritter.
107. 18 April 2021. Neurotypical (or even orthoneural) politics. Defining municipalism against Charles Tilly's definition of a social movement. "Deep activism," or the moment when a social movement pivots from making claims on power to the direct provision of services and service infrastructures.
[...]
NNN. 06 November 2025: A 25,000-word close reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “Nomadology: The War Machine.” And this is only Part I!
NNN. 23 November 2025: On seeing Swans, and being inspired by M. Gira (71) to take up the electric guitar.
NNN. 12 December 2025: Hitherto-unpublished notes on the tacit ideology of the blockchain, originally supposed to appear in Radical Technologies (and which I very much regret not including).
NNN. 11 December 2025: A few heterogeneous practices that succeed in ways I think my own does not — including Craig Mod, Ignota Books, Studio D Radiodurans, Merveilles and LOM — and what might be learned from the way each of them goes about doing what they do.
NNN. 24 December 2025: Thinking further about an extraordinary work of analysis and synthesis posted by Erin Kissane on her wreckage/salvage site.
NNN. 11 January 2026: Contemporary material culture, seen through the lens of the Wuben G5 rechargeable pocket flashlight.
NNN. 30 January 2026: Considering object-oriented ontology yet again, as it’s now deployed by Silicon Valley venturebros.
NNN. 8 February 2026: Is it legitimate to think of a film as one of your favorites if you’ve only seen it twice in fifteen years? Notes on Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse.
NNN. 22 February 2026: A reasonably granular account of training for my first ultra, including how to go about ensuring that you take on enough all-important carbs without triggering the dreaded “GI distress.”
NNN. 14 March 2026: A passage — too defensive by half, but otherwise not without its merits — that I eventually decided to excise from the coda of The Tetrad.
NNN. 4 April 2026: On finishing my first-ever ultra run, the 2026 Lea Valley 50K; launching Lifepod, the podcast about taking care of ourselves in a world on fire; clarifying who is and who is not working toward building the Lifehouse as I understand it.
NNN. 12 April 2026: A review of Stewart Brand’s grandiosely-titled Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One.
NNN. 26 April 2026: Coming home to RPGs after forty-five years, through the grimm magick of MÖRK BORG.
NNN. 11 July 2026: Bringing Luca Weste’s MA project, a pleasant Clissold Park talk, a wonderfully-laden cargo bike I saw and raumlabor’s Floating University together in a proposal for the School At Hand.
NNN. 31 August 2026: Welcome to adamgreenfield.site