adam greenfield, lifehouse – review
your suburban neighbour wrote a new book solving climate change by proposing we put every charger in the same room
this is mostly an extensive full review, but for quality in readership, it begins with chapter 4: beyond hope
"the fundamental idea of the lifehouse is that there should be a place in every three- or four-city-block radius where you can charge your phone when the power’s down everywhere else" lifehouse unfortunately doesn't read like a book that takes the problem of climate change seriously at the systematic level even if it tries to, but it also doesn't read like one that creates any meaningful philosophical perspective. instead, its about greenfield very intentionally and stylistically falling into a narrative rabbithole where somehow climate change leads to immediate eschatological crisis everywhere instead of assuming that slow, localized and predictable problems in very specific places have (or more likely don't end up having) specific institutional solutions (as the actual assumption would entail), writing instead a programmatic pamphlet on the invention of a new model of social organization. except, as the anti-child of fourier, this new model does not propose new forms of organizing or new roles or new formations or create new ethical assumptions, instead its about a single institutional object that behaves just like an ngo, but is led by locals instead of private citizens.
"and it should be staffed, on a 24/7 basis, by volunteers who know the neighborhood and its residents well and have a developed sense for the matters that concern them most." – greenfield reminds us. not only that, but the book behaves as if greenfield is somehow immediately and situationally implicated by climate change at a level that requires a direct crisis-response, he speaks almost as if somebody ascended from the heavens and asked him personally to solve this problem, titled him mayor, granted him a divine plaque that names him as the arbiter of the solution to a global systems crisis and sent him off to write a miracle savor of a book with a hard yellow cover.
at the start of the final chapter, which is the best place to start this review, he takes an example of a local squat that happened to come about due to a power outage, a phone charger community that slowly became a local social spot, and somehow generalizes that into the lifehouse, turning it into a giant literal phone charging station because he cant think of any form of communal help that isnt already the cliche of a very non-dystopian limited crisis, like borrowing random tools or whatnot. its almost like reading the help manual of a person you really dont want to help, like "oh yeah thats dave, he's metaphysically inert, we kind of just left him there after the earthquake buried under the rubble, he's been posting on his facebook that evil spirits were personally involved in our reasons for abandonding him there" there’s something deeply suburban about the objects he gravitates toward: chargers, childcare rotation, shared tools, cooling centers. like a moth stuck to a lamp, greenfield is pointlessly attracted to socially thin coordination devices, the equivalent of a millenial infinite childhood, the objects of a false crisis, the equivalent of leaving your kid home with the ipad during a power outage whilst the american military is somewhere busting through metal doors trying to find the nuclear switch-off button.
chargers and freezers don’t generate social power, conflict mediation or mediate collective identity, or even enforce mythic continuity between neigbhours, they are devices related to convinience, a temporary convinience that ends fast. the thing that greenfield exposes by the concept of a charger crisis is that modern citizenry is so metaphysically dead that the biggest crisis a person can have is their phone, not because its a layer of social mediation but because there is nothing prophetic about today's dystopias, and that nothing is more violent than inconvinience, even if that inconvinience is actually brutal in a very direct and fundamental level, maybe even down to physiology. water grid failures are cowboy texas era's equivalent of cholera, so why is such a practically urban issue treated by thinkers today as if posessing the same aura as dante's inferno or the level of ontological continuity present in something like augustine's local circles? greenfield compensates with: "a life-house, even a large-scale network of lifehouses, is not the revolution. it cannot directly hold to account any of the actors we know are responsible for our peril." almost, behind this writing, you can just image greenfield grinning to himself "i did it, i wrote something nobody's insecurity-trigger rises at, i've stripped politics down to the idea that a place doesn't have any politics in it but if everyone in it agreed to hug eachother, the hug would go through! yes!"
"this is the most basic infrastructural good a lifehouse will need to furnish—not just to run a bank of phone chargers, like the bike outside c-squat, but to maintain the refrigeration of food, the operation of medical devices and, still more so, the relatively narrow range of conditions in which bodies can be sheltered from climatic extremes outside." the issue isn't that greenfield is focusing on food or trying to mediate the conditions of crisis, or that he mentions chargers. the issue is that he literally sounds like someone planning for a dystopia by filling his bunker up with crap, which is the ideological image of escapism during covid, or the historical equivalent of not voting when voting actually did something, of not attending a civil rights protest as someone who would actually be impacted and implicated by the concept of a non-populist protest. of course, he also mentions supplying water and electricity as more basic aspects of living together, but its odd to even imagine a sustained situation where the enviornment is violent enough to create the conditions where institutions simultaneously stop working, but widespread communal strategy becomes not just easy but possible (under the conditions where such forms of organizing have not existed for generations at a time)
greenfield, in trying to sponsor his own idea actually admits this himself shortly after the charger paragraphs: "both the physical facilities and the social networks to support a robust local mutual care effort are already in place. indeed, that care effort is at this point the merest extension or intensification of what people are already doing in their everyday lives." greenfield continues his odd fantasizing: "a community workshop, a drop-in center for young people or the elderly and a place for peer-to-peer modes of care like the “hologram” cassie thornton derived from her experience of the greek solidarity clinics to latch on" it is not fantasizing because its wrong, its insultingly desirable in today's negative social climate, but this doesn't make it intellectually justifiable, the only thing that would make it so is if greenfield was already involved in a commune and attached it to this piece of writing, and started personally attacking anyone who doesn't happen to plan to join it soon. only an ontological level of arrogance or some type of meta-joke in his friend group we aren't aware of could turn greenfield from a thinker that read a random paper from akpress released in 2019, to someone who has something interesting to say about communal organizing. the fact that thornton is cited as calling greek solidarity clinics a "hologram" as if thats doing something for this work is a part of this extended joke of intellectual desperation present in this writing
"there is no suggestion here that (for example) any facility will help a community survive sustained wet-bulb temperatures above 35°c if it is unable to maintain its own cooling, or shelter people from the total destruction of a runaway wildfire, or do anything at all for them if it is submerged beneath rising floodwaters." greenfield helps us to understand something really important, that the lifehouse doesn't currently have an anti-submersion mechanism, but with greenfield's proposal for collective power later down in the paragraph, i'm sure we could get something going if we all worked really hard to transfer and ration all the kitkats between eachother and to make sure all the ac's are still on.
or in other words, greenfield's extremely incessant google-level squabbling about basic health info does actually accidentally produce something useful, it lets us know how screwed we are on a political level that the very consideration of basic survival circumstances becomes a resource (as per his framing) rather than an outcome or obstacle. the only eschatological element in greenfield's unaesthetic realistic imagery is this exact aspect, that he's speaking in blood language (or the assumption that below your wheels bodies are already frozen, and the lifehouse itself may not exist). greenfield proposed mechanisms are realistic, but they are not real, partially because of the extent to which systemic organization will only strenghten instead of ease up, regardless of the systemic-level territorial consequences of such a fact.
"all a lifehouse can ever do is give people a space in which they might realize a vision of social ecology, tending to themselves and the planet by practicing and experiencing solidarity, mutual care and self-determination." greenfield after writing this, should come to realize shortly after that if a lifehouse is actually a simulation for experiencing solidarity (a heterotopia), and that if this object can only come about in those that require the experience of solidarity for basic survival, then its quite possible solidarity itself was already traded away long ago as a possible fact of ontology and self-determination. what, ideally would happen, if all lifehouse participants were suddenly liberated from their "solidarity", other than that a few decide they prefer to be stuck there, and other than the fact that a majority absolutely would go back to their now electricity-containing households and never speak to the others again? this concern is obviously not a boomer rant, it's an important question for self-determination, greenfield doesn't give us an image of what determination actually means, or a vision of the mediation between civil life and technology, or any concept of human nature, which leaves us having to pick up his scrappings along the way, fundamentally positioning this work as philosophically unserious.
luckily, greenfield doesn't contradict himself. "when everything goes sideways, we’re largely compelled to make do with the resources in our immediate vicinity. but there’s a good argument to be made for continuing to organize and work locally, too. at this most granular scale, it ought to be possible for us to reassert at least some control over our conditions and to witness the results of our efforts." he already sounds like he's thinking heterotopially, and is genuienly concerned with concern, and cares about care. this allows him to display that his idea of concern is actually tied to communality as spirit and not to communality as survival.
greenfield next turns his greedy, life-lit eyes to beautiful old frail churches. "for example, consider the 51,000-odd church buildings scattered across england, each of them located at the heart of a town, village or urban parish, and each generally built to abide across the centuries ... many of these structures would make exceptional lifehouses—it’s easy to imagine them restored to new purpose with solar panels shading the wonky gravestones, and perhaps a cluster of direct air capture units huffing away out back." greenfield reveals his true mastermind plan after all this time, to gentrify churches into a housing of the elderly project that houses more than just the elderly, into a care-home that is so metaphysically far from the concept of a church that ideology finally manages to penetrate that layer of reality and install fire alarms everywhere inside of if it.
in churches of the past, priests would be attacking sacred warriors, women would proclaim that they can see through jesus' eyes, paganites would invade the church and cook pigs at the stakes. the new life houses however, are greenhouses, or rather, ant houses, for people who allowed the world to fall apart around them by spending one too many dead days outside of the "lifehouse". or better yet, for people who need to join a church irreligiously before they can participate in basic human-level organizing. or for those who require a special room to act with aid towards others because of how far we've selected basic establishment and property away from this goal.
the good part is that greenfield is not just mocking about, he's really taking the whole stealing thing seriously, and for that very reason his claims are entirely legitimate. greenfield says "in some cases, it may be possible for a community to form a special-purpose land trust or the like: some legal instrument that would let it buy a derelict school or house of worship legitimately ... but gaining access to underutilized or abandoned structures, and occupying them over any meaningful period of time, will often mean summoning the courage to operate outside the bounds of law ... elaine brown explains how this worked for the black panthers: “if we wanted to open a clinic, we took over a piece of property, we didn’t pay rent. we would run an electrical line from wherever, didn’t pay for electricity. we’d go to the hospital and just steal supplies."
of course, the real act of courage isnt the annihilation of a church as a metaphysical symbol, but the annihilation of it for something as ultimately metaphysically satured as survival in contemporary modes of experience, which is something far more evil (in the good way) than racially justified militia squads. "the derelict middle school on the avenue is unambiguously worth more tonight, as a shelter for bodies at risk, than the land beneath it is to some sovereign wealth fund far across the sea at some abstract time to come. " the fact that he even has to say something like this is funny, not because it points to whether he is acutally unambigously right about this or not, but more-so because it shows just how far into jurisdictional scaffolding the anglophone tradition needs to go in order to justify the otherwise mostly very casual act of breaking the law just so you can have basic shelter for the night.
"not all decentralized networks preserve the features of robustness, resiliency and local autonomy that best suit a federation of lifehouses." seemingly, green doesn't realize that distributed networks already are categorically contained within decentralization as a term.
greenfield says about casa pueblo in adjuntas: "here is the most robust, real-world proof of the lifehouse concept possible: in the midst of calamity, a self-organized, autonomous local group used free power from the sun to shelter and care for those imperiled by the storm and its consequences. the experience of post-maría puerto rico is unequivocal on this point. locally and democratically managed microgrids give each community that operates one power over power itself and therefore all the capacity to protect life that flows downstream from it." what it almost looks like greenfield is doing is that he's trying to find a way to argue that decentralization is on average the better form of social operation during this contemporary era, and managing to find that excuse in situations that on average would lead to it being a better outcome.
for that philosophy to be accurate, greenfield would preferably have to delineate between examples where centralized grids operating have been beneficial in fact, or even to systematically weigh in the different speculative costs of each model. for example, texas powergrid failure in 2021 is due to its disconnection from federal inforcement. systematic covid vaccination required centralized planning, and the virus's spread was a result of a centralized world order. power grids themselves at their very core have been achieved through centralized mechanisms, and a part of that centralization is due to their depersonalizing, decontextualizing, automated and programmatically commanding logic.
greenfield writes: "technically, the north american power grid is decentralized. there are only indirect links between the two major and three minor interconnections that constitute it, each of which is itself composed of multiple system operators protected by any number of failsafes, cutouts and backups. but at any level experienced by ordinary consumers, the network is a centralized, hub-and-spoke affair. when a single transmission line falls to overload, storm or sabotage, all the clients on the far end of the break are left without power". and even though centralized power absolutely creates the type of fragility you wouldn't see in decentralized systems, decentralized systems don't have the type of efficiency in logic to actually scale in the first place, to achieve a situation where power becomes a problem of distribution and not of attainment. a part of what creates the conditions for nomadism which we see so little of today is the assumption of a resource to fight for. that's why in their current model, decentralized forms of organization appear as "aid" rather than as "capture" or "hostility", because those communities are extensive aids of an already existing centralized logic, not a fundamentally detached one. its true, to an extent, this ontology stains the core contradiction in these types of writings.
greenfield writes: "chris smaje, for example, argues that the push toward industrial synthesis of food is dangerously wasteful of time we don’t have, and that a return to “agrarian localism” is necessary if we want to feed ourselves adequately in the times to come." and then responds to his own claim: "the reason i don’t reject smaje’s vision out of hand is the same reason i trust the mutual care efforts we’ve previously discussed: they both turn on a fundamental faith in our capacity to organize the fulfillment of our needs on our own behalf." the same type of latent contemporary irony underscores this type of issue as well.
essentially, ascetic cosplay creates an ideology of faith, trust and sustenance. yet, the current system's ability to disperse resources, even when it's created global famines that have killed arguably directly tens of millions throughout recent history, is that same system that has conquered the ability for the decentralized assumption to even hold, and simultaneously, in reality, made it impossible to think of executing, just as much as it made it possible to actually consider to begin with. even the ability to strategize about removing ourselves from the centralized programme requires using the very tools and forms of logic the centralized programme asks of us to use. the basic contradiction isnt that mass decentralization should necessarily be hostile or destructive, but that the idea of mobilizing it becomes impossible. the nomadic movement towards self-actualization contradicts the entire structure of economy at the core layer, so that every self-hosted agrarian who was not already born into that condition is essentially some form of social cosplay.
green shows an awareness of this type of reliance himself, shading his own concept around an automatically fake programmatism: "as far back as the late 1960s, activist-architects like street farm proposed that cities could be places where a “profusion of sprouting, breathing, photosynthesizing, living things surround and entwine human dwellings.” there’s no reason why lifehouses couldn’t be devised with this sort of vision in mind—and in ways that were not possible in any earlier time, as well."
greenfield is also extremely obtuse and backwards about the acutal stuff that does work for anarchists (because god knows lighthouses – i mean lifehouses – are the first actual neighbour fantasy in the world, one that sounds both metaphysically ridicolous and genuienly not very strategically helpful in emergencies – which shows just how horrible neighbours are as a basic unit of social organization). bookchin's assembly and greenfield's own "the pragma" (which is an actually good attachment to lifehouses) are the two main actual concepts, and greenfield basically shows us throughout the whole book that the assembly sucks and still vouches for it. he lists all of its failures directly — 15m, occupy wall street, nuit debout in france, and rojava — calls them "dashed hopes" and acknowledges "the cringe factor clinging to any discussion of the assembly is real."
he also says consensus-based decision-making became "functionally difficult to honor in full" even within occupy sandy itself as it scaled. then, at the end, apparently recommends the assembly anyway as "the technology of permanent recourse par excellence", which is extremely on brand for this whole book. the pragma, however, does have merit. greenfield's solution to the "forever debate" in anarchist direct democracy is actually very simple, just make it about one thing. that's actually genius. "here you have the vegan lifehouse, here you have the non-alcoholic lifehouse, here is the one where people don't like to sleep". it solves individual nuances in a scalar way, by disposing of responsibility across the whole board and actually creating a helpful variety that mimics the character fragmentation found under neoliberalism, the constant expansiveness of potential icks or disturbances in the general population. even if the pragma doesn't actually help anyone survived probably much better than they otherwise would, it looks to be an insanely helpful hotfix for problems of general morale in apocalypticism.
the real contradiction this points to is that his description of neighbours suffers a cruical problem. the actual empirical record — including greenfield's own examples — shows that meaningful organizing coheres around shared identity, shared threat, or prior political formation instead of proximity, even if he constantly tries to frame it as an issue that suddenly implicates whoever you're near locally, which is even funnier, given that the basic means for survival definitely wont be organized in a way where your neigbour just happens to have them even if decentralized organizing is temporarily down, unless you're currently in the middle of a hurricane and being eaten by sharks, in which rare case your neighbour may indeed have a sandwhich.
the actual examples, which include common ground, occupy sandy and the panthers show thata none of the actual empirical forms of organization were neighbour-based, but rather, ideologically pre-sorted groups who happened to work locally, which is ironic, because it shows that greenfield's lifehouse coincidentally reverts its own basic empirical study, even if technically speaking, all of those were formed during a time where emergencies weren't as total as he speculates. yet at the same time, when has it ever been the case that neighbours genuienly aligned ideologically, other than like that one time christianity and maybe buddhism managed to roll around for a bit?
chapter 1: the long emergency
greenfield defines the long emergency as a cascade. he writes “the combined direct and indirect consequences of the heating that is already entrained by our past behavior… will in fairly short order exceed the capacity of our social, technical, political and economic systems… to contain them.” so for him its an uncontainable energy crisis, meaning mass migration, total failure of institutions, mass mayhem basically, a situation where the forms of organization as we know them are already displaced. yet, just because of covid, he has this eschatological vision that this crisis will result in a nearly gnostic scenario where the entire social layer folds in on itself, as he says “an extended excursion from everything we recognize as normal, of as yet unknown duration and resolution.”
so to a certain extent, he doesnt describe a crisis as a mass systemic individual collapse, but as a total mutation of possible current modes of living and all their combined logic, which are partially combined with an existing social austerity and lack of basic care between parties which would automatically worsen any crisis. for him, heat is the central problem not just because of what it does when it increases on its own, but because heat shows “the acute vulnerability of the infrastructural systems their lives depended on.” the existing collapse of social austerity then would not be able to hold things together and lead to an eventual situation where if the state withdraws from public goods, “there is only one possible response,” which is for people “to self-organize to provide their own commons.”
furthermore, organized abandonment itself is a product of this current time. social upheaval and racism and austerity and systematic disavowal of human care exists partially as influenced by its replacement by technological mediation, its unlikely to multiply if conditions make it more necessary, its currently the case precisely because conditions have gotten soft and removed enough to make it widespread and inconsequential. on the other hand, systemic austerity is a product of a cultural logic, not a systematic crisis. local cultures may produce genocidal scripts, thats never a reflection of global trend. global trends themselves may assume austerity-based patterns (like global north vs global south) that do not have the aesthetic assumptions of particular racial models
regarding the complex systems analysis, he actually argues that civilizations are almost like cats, in that “it is quite possible for them to ‘run in degraded mode’ for extended periods.” except, almost no point in history except the black plague has seem system level dysfunction. and even then its local to a specific point in the world. hes applying this catastrophe globally and says most will be impacted. how will phones even make sense then if a lot of the institutions that run them no longer make them legible? but more importantly, if its collapsing underneath but looks like it still works, hows that different from society still running? the thing about society still running is, its true that everything can collapse underneath and the entire logic of life change five times over in that fish in hot water effect where no one notices until theyre retrospected or until symbolic value gets diminished without proper replacements, but the tricky thing about social mobility is its actually extremely dynamic and flexible, we've already undergone severe terraforming of urban landscape in under a century of time and none of us felt much of a difference. whats even funnier is that green himself partially describes this exact same understanding of the issue when he says “what we now confront is an excursion that has become permanent.”, essentially collapsing "disaster time" and "normal time" into one.
meaning, transformations themselves may require more symbolic consequences to actually be registered than practical ones. upheveal, social movement and other issues of survival have historically always been centralized, rationed, rationalized, distributed among certain rules and boundaries, and we've consistently showed a mass disregard for systemic-scale suffering. it is quite possible that instead of a spontaneous neighbourhood-level dehierarchialized form of social organization, that our lives will continue to increasingly be governed by whatever abstracted authority sits in place to solve and perpetuate the issues its very existence in a certain territory causes, no matter the extent of enviornmental threat. in many ways its exactly the opposte, places that seem to suffer the most due to their environment such as the gulf states, instead of creating liberating structures like a lot of beach-island-sea civilizations have, actually turn as far away from democracy as possible. if energy is costly, heating is problematic, collapse is immanent and territorial danger strong, society usually tends to demarcate, increase in individuation and coercion and selfishness, and generally tend to pull away from whatever concept of "common good" exists, and delegate authority upwards even more.
at the same time, catastrophizing itself is an aesthetic and image-based rhetoric, catastrophes are always plural and spread, almost never singular, but they very rarely assume the logic that the main parts of the system become unusable, its usually the contrary, further non-essential assumptions of the system get denegrated, exactly the opposite of what he says. but yet, theres a difference between the idea that the catastrophe is plural and non-primary (non-essential), and that it is plural and essential (or in other words, total). greenfield seems to hold the latter view when he says "i also don’t want to suggest that the process of destabilization i describe will necessarily unfold in quite the same way in every place on earth. given the present reality of uneven development, it will likely be possible to maintain some pastiche of the late-capitalist lifeworld we recognize in many places". other than the fact that clearly for greenfield, a catastrophe always has the characteristic of global relevancy in "every account" rather than in just those accounts that actually suffer its cost (which would make far more sense), this quote is revealing for three additional reasons. first it suggests that what he sees as the capitalist lifeworld, rather than an existing experience of crisis, he sees as a certain postponment, dissolution etc of it.
secondly, he sees it as somewhat better or more well adjusted to the world than a post-catastrophic state, which is why he partially seems to hold this view to begin with. if capitalism is something that gathers up and bursts rather than manages to slide off misopportunity, then it becomes both greater than its alternatives periodically, but lesser than its alternatives total power, if it presents itself as a historical contingency whose only necessary characteristic is self-dissolution. and thirdly, his suggestion that its pastiche would be preserved is itself ironic, given that a lot of what we know of capitalism itself is already the preservation of a logic of pre-ww1 civil life, the preservation of an already-realized global threat response, which has apparently in contemporary times been collapsed into a supposed default state.
markets in many ways actually multiply and correspond to the logic of scarcity itself, they are very much in a way a response to global war and its scarce and terrifying reality rather than some sort of reward or prize that arsies as a result of it. a lot of solarpunk optimists actually forget this fact due to how comfortable they've symbolically become under the rubric of capitalism's commodificationary power. in many ways, you may expect that the high classes in an alternate world may not even necessarily want to live under any regime that sponsors itself as capitalism any more than they would want to be "involved" in the crisis in some way, if not even a harmful way.
"there’s a line of thought that putting things this starkly is bound to be counterproductive, if not actively reactionary in consequence ... the argument is that being hammered by the unrelenting facts produces a kind of lassitude in people, a blackened quietism that couples fundamental acceptance of the facts with an overcoming and total sense of one’s own powerlessness." you can actually see his own reactive sort of disposition, his intrinsic moralistic intuition, to "calm down" the "nervous citizens" of the first world, to create a kind of social scaffolding or compensatory rhetoric for a largely non existant and always totally existant crisis. who is he calming down, and why should they care? well, he's calming down the most pretentious, peasantry, pedantic, pitiful, stingy and self-preservationist archetypes, the same ones that arrived mostly in the existing boomer population as those same war survivors who hold that "the world is already bad enough". to those people, survival is an idea of basic accounting, of a basic caution towards all social systems.
naturally, there would be nothing to do but flail your hands in the air and moralize about whatever occurs to you, whilst intentionally shoving yourself in a bubble so unimaginative and already-scarce that you'd require an account that puts you into consideration to even take an organizational claim seriously. its the exact opposite instinct to that of actual organizing, which begins first as a motivation and only later grows into social accounting. and after all, he has to gain sympathy from this population of urbanistically domesticated civilians, because as he says “our lifeworlds contracted to the ambit of a square mile or so”, we are now at the mercy of apparently any random neighbour we are next to, rather than people with actual organizational skill, since instead of post-apocalypticism creating intelligence, greenfield would prefer to settle with preserving as much of the existing civil structure that made all the catastrophes possible as he can, because obviously, there's no issue at all with turning mutual aid into life accounting and institutions which are oriented only towards the care of somebody who's facing death as an ambient fact.