Fall 2025 Reading Group: Lifehouse

General Discussions
1

Kicking off the third edition of our reading group with Social.coop. Let’s read a book together over 3-4 sessions this fall :fallen_leaf:!

Book

Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire (2024) Adam Greenfield

298×450 15.6 KB

Proposed Reading Plan

Session 1: OCTOBER (pages 1-56)

  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: The Long emergency

Session 2: NOVEMBER (pages 57-164)

  • Chapter 2: Mutual Care
  • Chapter 3: Collective Power

Session 3: DECEMBER (pages 165-214)

  • Chapter 4: Beyond Hope
  • Conclusion
4 Likes
2

Creating a hold for the first one: [HOLD] CoSocial Reading Group: Intros and Lifehouse plan · Luma and asked folks about availability here: CoSocial Community Cooperative: "It looks like Lifehouse is our pick! We have fou…" - CoSocial

3

If there is any interest in inviting the author for one of these sessions, I’m connected to him on social media and happy to pass on an invite.

5 Likes
4

Hi all, looking forward to kicking this off! Even if you haven’t read the book I’d encourage you to attend!

Here are some discussion questions and a pad to take notes:

Session 1

Discussion Questions

(I got a little blurby, we don’t have to follow these, just some potential discussion starters!)

Introduction

  • In the intro the author sets up a challenge as one where there is a disconnect between the scale of crises we face (Climate Change most notably) and our individual power or ability to act. Then talks about what get presented as the dominant models of individual and collective action (electoral politics, consumer action, demonstrations, individual moral choices). Do you agree or disagree with this? What are your thoughts or experiences with popular models of action?

  • The book opens with the example of Occupy Sandy, a mutual aid project after Superstorm Sandy hit New York as an example of “localized self-action”:

    • Within a week: 2 churches became distribution hubs, 700 regular members volunteered to serving approx. 20,000 meals, and distribute goods to 30ish recovery centres, overall: $700,000 supplies, $1.3million in donations, and 60,000 volunteers were involved.
    • What stands out about this example? Are there examples from your neighbourhood or experience? Have you been involved in a project before?

Chapter 1 - The Long Crisis

  • Throughout the chapter the author argues that “the society we live in on the edge of a catastrophic transition to a new order of being catalyzed by widespread economic systemic breakdown,” and that there is a difference between understanding intellectually and accepting emotionally.

    • Is this an idea you’ve heard before? Does this align with how you have been approaching the climate crisis? Why or why not?

  • A big focus for the author is on the impact of heat on us as individuals (on our bodies) and on our communities, on our food systems, on our landscapes. Is that how you experience the already occurring impacts of the climate crisis? Are there others?

  • In the latter portion of the chapter the conversation turns to the role of the state in a “long emergency” as well as the outsize role of hyperscalers cloud computing infrastructures.

    • For you, what is relevant or important to think about at the intersection of digital infrastructure and the “long crisis”? The government or the state?

  • He uses the concept of “Organized Abandonment” from Harvey and RWG to talk about the conscious disinvestment in infrastructure that has already happened, but could continue in more stark terms, to think about the question: Is the state likely to respond to “Big Heat” (aka the challenges of this moment)?

    • Have you seen organized abandonment shows up in your lives? Was this concept helpful or clarifying?

  • At the end of the chapter he brings up what may be responses to confronting the sober facts of where we are at in addressing global warming: doomerism, despair, or a “return” to rugged individualism… It is clear that is not what he wants most people to experience but he doesn’t quite get to describing the alternatives.

    • What was your experience at the end of this chapter? How do you deal with the facts of the challenges we face? Is there an emotional component for you?

Pad

1 Like
5

Notes from our first meeting

Session 1

Announcements

  • See CoSocial code of conduct. Also open to proposals for additional reading group rules.
  • Invite to enable video. No recording and no transcription in use.
  • Notes
    • Someone take notes. Volunteers?
    • Let’s try this pad with read/write permissions for everyone?): Plan to post notes publicly after this session on CoSocial Discourse General Discussions and summarize into a blog post
    • Goal is for notes capture the discussion, excluding who says what

Introductions (if needed) and Catch-ups

Notes

  1. First impressions
  • Description of our sense of powerlessness was good in that it affirms the feelings I had already, but of course it made it difficult to keep going. I felt like I “checked out”
  • Sets the stage but I hope it gets more actionable. “Hope” as in people are just hoping it will get better rather than something people are working towards.
  • It was quite heavy, and expected some setup, but our conventional ideas about collective action probably won’t do anything. The discussion of Occupy Sandy got me thinking about other things.
  • His writing about mutual aid in the wake of Sandy lends to thoughts about where hope is coming from. Raises the question of how we define hope. Adam has been discussing online meditation groups with the idea of bolstering ourselves. Urban planning: emergency planning and resilience planning. Sense of detachment that comes from professional training in urban issues.
  • Somatic practices are a huge part of learning how to manage anxiety and calming our nervous systems, but not particularly well-known. Important for individuals and collectively.
  • The scale of the climate crisis: compounding crisis. Chomsky: Crisis of Democracy. Issues with democracy are at the foundation of how we tackle these things. Frustration from trying to engage.
  • Yannis Varoufakis did a TED talk on constraining discussion to the political sphere, but all the action is at the economic sphere, which is a tyranny ruled by capital; how can we democratize the capital sphere?
  • Experiencing the thing which is front and centre in the climate topics right now, which is immigration.
  • Interleaving crises: democracy, losing in the political sphere. Collective action models are insufficient to meet the moment.
  • Political constraints on legal protest – picketing, what options are available?
  1. Mutual Aid Campaigns
  • Within a week Occupy Sandy set up two churches as distribution centers, $1.2 million raised
  • Friends with radios and maintain grassroots contacts. Volunteer at a repair cafe and bring sewing machine and help patch clothing and other items. Neighborhood Emergency Teams (NETs) | Portland.gov
  • Sandy had interesting dynamics: hit a very wealthy place, affected different parts of the city in different ways, so was unlike most other climate disasters in that way. The disaster affected wealthy people, but they weren’t there.
  • Raises the question of response when where there is industrialized infrastructure vs where there is not.
  • DWeb YVR for people into Mesh Computing – “good neighbor Kitsilano”: Good Neighbour Kitsilano | Kitsilano Neighbourhood House focused around the community centre. Community Resiliency
  1. Catastrophic Change

  • Events — flooding, wildfires

  • COVID is not gone

  • David Wallace-Wells article on legacy of COVID, 5 years on: COVID affected different places differently in urban vs rural areas, susceptibility to dying and who is vulnerable

  • hard to remember details about a crisis several years after the fact – traumatic for so many people

  • Disempowering time because so much we required illuminated our dependency on global supply chains, large corporations, government agencies

  • Alternatives to highly-specialized equipment

  • Does lifehouse just lead us to “prepper culture”? And is there something against that

  • Churches and neighbourhood houses (multi-use tool for social service delivery → coming out of history in Vancouver (and elsewhere))

  • Loss of faith in government agencies: vaccine mandates & lockdowns

  • Why churches don’t provide aid the way they did historically? Before the industrial revolution, pastors knew the parishoners, but urbanization took away the ability for churches to help, tithing no longer worked, governments introduced the poor house system.

  • Johnny Cash: “socialist but not communist” : 20 acres of land with no down payment

  • Decrease the distress of people who are displaced. The Dawn of Everything: “freedom of mobility” is one of the fundamental human rights and we have lost sight of that in our modern state.

  • not rugged individualism, but more like “anarchist prepping”

  • anarchist collectives

  • ham radio licenses

  • play with mesh and radios

  • “the prepping I think we need is building the emotional capacity to be in relationship with people we don’t necessarily like”

  • build a story, building things that are not intimidating, that feel fun

  • we can invest in relationships before we “need them”, be doing skill aquisition together, sense of what folks are good at, to work appropriately

  • room to exercise those muscles of being around people you don’t agree in, but that doesn’t deplete us, or look like the left eating itself

  • socializing cloud computing and AI and make it part of the commons, in the meantime: more open and self-hosted infrastructure

  • example: Tonga offline for months, banks could not process transactions, had someone fly to the island every day.

  • example: rogers tap to pay going offline

Not being able to buy anything, how fragile that is (esp. in Canada with duopoly)

Books (+ideas)

The Quaking of America — Abbie Richards, TikTok disinformation researcher. Important to have a somatic effort to not get mired in hopelessness. “Somatic Abolitionism”

Yanis Varoufakis TED Talk: Yanis Varoufakis: Capitalism will eat democracy -- unless we speak up | TED Talk

Related to coops: Employee Ownership Trusts. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives wrote on this recently:

Polycrisis – Adam Tooze

book by Amitav Ghosh – talks about dynamics of mutual aid
maybe this one? The Great Derangement https://amitavghosh.com/books/the-great-derangement/

David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth
On covid:

We heard that we could buy twenty acres of land with no money down, and a house and barn, and they would give us a mule and a cow and furnish groceries through the first year until we had a crop and could pay it back…

Neighbourhood house: https://www.ubcpress.ca/asset/60868/1/9780774865838_excerpt.pdf

1 Like
6

Hello! I’m excited for our next session tomorrow. Please do join, no matter how far you got in the reading. Here are some ideas for discussion.

Discussion
What are your initial thoughts or questions, or discussion questions that resonate with you?

Chapter 2: Mutual Care

  • Author offers definitions of mutual aid, distinguishes it from charity, and describes concrete examples. What stands out for you as important aspects of mutual aid?
    • Common Ground Collective, New Orleans in response to Katrina disaster
    • Sandy Occupy, NYC
  • What are benefits and shortcomings of mutual aid?
    • Dean Spade’s criteria for success
    • Author argues mutual aid is not a panacea
  • Author argues that in order to extend mutual aid longer term, the concept of care is needed. Do you agree? How does care help extend mutual aid?
    • Care is defined as continuous acts of nurturance, maintenance and repair, with an affective commitment.
    • A matter of collective self-provision, not done in isolation
    • “Survival programs” like Breakfast for Children, People’s Free Food Program, Community Learning Center by Black Panther Party for Self Defence (BPP), US national, vulnerability to premature death
    • Health clinics, legal support clinics, small urban farms by Solidarity Network, Greece national, post 2008 financial crisis

Chapter 3: Collective Power

  • Murray Bookchin, US writer in the 1960’s warned about the planetary crisis and conceived Social Ecology. What is your take on his analysis?
    • Planetary crisis caused by “social pathologies” of domination - patriarchy, statism and capitalism.
    • Reorganize society and its institutions to eliminate the possibility of domination - either of nature by humanity or any human being by another
  • Social Ecology - Would you agree or disagree that Communalism and Libertarian Municipalism are well suited to the Long Emergency?
    • Communalism
      • Balanced community, face-to-face democracy, humanistic technology and decentralized society.
      • Structured around towns, neighbourhoods, cities and citizens’ assembly
      • Freely confederated
    • Libertarian Municipalism, locally scaled Communalism
      • eliminates statist municipal structures
      • popular assemblies making policy decisions in direct democracy
      • all management, plans, regulations necessary for stewardship
  • How can we learn from recent experiments, challenges and innovations with the concrete practice of assemblies? “…the throughline consists in people doing something about conditions of life they had come to find intolerable.”
    • ~2000s Horizontalism - leaderless organizations, distributes power to those that show up and participate. Attention paid to new forms of democratic process that allow initiatives to rise from below, attain solidarity without stifling dissent or compelling action.
    • 2011 Movement of the squares - Tahrir Square, Occupy
    • 2014 New Municipalism, Municipalist civic administrations Madrid, Barcelona
    • 2012 Rojava - Eco-socialist, feminist autonomous region in Syria - largest scale, longest running modern example of governance by popular assembly, based on Bookchin’s Social Ecology principle and introduced by Kurdish leader A. Ocalan.
2 Likes
7

Notes from Session 2

Chapter 2: Mutual Care

  • Fascinating to have examples and how we got to these thoughts. Looking forward to the next section and how we get there in practice!

  • Mutual aid: What felt important?

    • Horizontality

    • Equals

    • Active participation (for example chosing your own role, removing that placing as part of a coordinating role)

  • Paying attention to root causes and paying attention to what you are trying to dismantle

  • The well-known secret about Red Cross effort: not as effective, not going door-to-door (mutual aid version was 1% or Red Cross payroll)

  • Issues with mutual aid, ways that it might not be a panacea:

    • Not long-lasting

    • Could not be successful if there isn’t popularity (no statutory access to care)

    • Power-plays (pg. 75)

    • Privacy

  • Are these real-life? or common failure modes?

  • Previous experiences

    • Encampment support network

    • Bike brigade deliveries

    • Covid organizing in buildings
      … weren’t able to structurally challenge what produced conditions (e.g., housing policies in Canada)

  • Turn to “care” to think about duration

    • Repair cafe monthly (come have a snack and fix yr jeans)

    • Hard to talk about because feels a bit “well duh” (we all think it’s obvious)

  • What about hostile government actions toward mutual aid (e.g., food not bombs or handing out water to migrants criminalized)

  • Really want to get to discussion of how to anticipate and prepare to attacks and respond

  • Likes the framing of care as “a matter of collective self-provision, not done in isolation”, free breakfast program

  • Greek medical care through solidarity clinics

    • relationship to Syriza

    • originally wanted to pull in the solidarity clinics to health system – basically took it over and shut it down

  • Way to think about what a state form gets you

    • taxation as a way to do collective bargaining (e.g. healthcare) or collective purchasing for less than you could purchase separately (e.g., access to a community centre)

    • Healthcare for all Oregon: Single-payer

    • Vancouver Budget with proposed arts, culture, board cuts in the name of “no increases to property taxes”

Chapter 3: Collective Power

  • Murray Bookchin is a vibe, sounds like an “Uh-huh”

  • We do have cultural forms and ways of countering dominance (or keeping people humble):

    • reminder of Dawn of Everything

    • other religious orders

    • also maybe like Elinor Ostrom and graduated sanctions (escalate over time vs. nuclear option first)

    • Rojova also focuses on the sanctions that escalate but must start at a local level

  • What are ways of countering power / boss-mindset

  • A bit about communalism and municipal-libertarianism

  • What is the power of using citizen assemblies and direct democracy to counter the long democracy

    • Why would they work for now?

    • Or, where can they put them so they have power to act now, at our current level of demobilization?

    • Put them at the grassroots level because it will be at the local and immediate level

    • Is the first step that you have to win power?

    • His view: Lack of power at the municipal level, people got sucked up in government

  • Quote “Bookchin distinguishes between the gov and the state…”

  • Rojova participation of women: both 40% in a main body and also in the second women-only body

  • Parts that we are interested in:

    • Graduated and local sanctions first (vs. carceral)

    • Man and Woman co-mayors (Imperfect but useful tools)

    • Horizonalism

  • Commonalities between horizonalism and what is enabled by decentralized technologies?

    • e.g., small autonomous groups that are networked

    • networked, decentralized model

    • that model alone is not enough though

    • shared values + the model is what required

  • How to get the shared values??

    • Rojova: emphasis on tackling domination issue, feminism within an ethnic group (Kurds), and sidestepped some issues that might have to be negotiated for a inter-group conversation

  • Outcomes:

    • framed as for everyone? (universal) or for only a specific group?

    • needing the governance structure to account for participation from all groups (equity)?

  • Question: did the women’s arm of the militia come first? or did it come after?

Books (+ideas)

8

Thanks @tasha — I’ve fallen behind on this due to some family stuff and was out of town for a while. Unfortunately I have some more family stuff (good things this time, daughter coming to visit) and I just realized I missed tonight’s session. I hope it was a good one. These book meetings are the best.

2 Likes
9

Notes Session 3

Ch 4 - Beyond Hope

  1. not keen on how many things are presented as hopeless/useless
  • Indirect actions are not enough
  • Direct actions are crushed by armed forces
  • wanting more practical steps and a Lifehouse in our neighbourhood
  • Concrete actions
    • repair cafe, feeds people too. has colocated tools
    • making an inventory
      • Effort during Covid - spaces for rent in London
      • Things currently being done
      • Skillset inventory of neighbourhood could be interesting to assemble
      • Meshstastic - has skill-set inventory?
  1. love the vision of Lifehouse offerings
    1. baby steps toward that
      2. repair cafes
      3. public electricity/water
      4. community childcare
      5. food banks
      6. maker spaces

  • Membership organizations can be a place to exchange/inventory skills.

  • what are small steps in this direction?

  • Return to coworking spaces (not capitalized version), like Z-Space. Shared infrastructure

  • 1RG Space in Toronto. They also make food together

  • Maker space has kitchen and community dinners.

  • Vancouver maker spaces

  • Local vintage arcade repair, help each other

  • Lifehouse may be missing entertainment-related activities that bring people together

  • Being in community/bringing people together enables exchange of skills, more human way than creating a list

  • Food buying club brings people together in the building. Bulk orders.

  • key step is to start the community. producing/building autonomy can follow.

  • Free time is a barrier.

  • Childcare offered during conference had no takers. Additional challenges exist.

    1. using existing community centers/churches/community action agencies Oregon Housing and Community Services : What are Community Action Agencies (CAAs)? : For Providers : State of Oregon
    2. mesh networks advertising/offering skills to neighbors
  1. Lifehouse governance
    1. decentralized
    2. assemblies

  • flagged some shortcomings with assemblies and introduced pragma.

  • In US, community action agencies - every county has one

  • Is there some equivalent in BC?

    • WorksBC (job assistance)
    • non-profits do some of this work
    • Neighbourhood houses

  • Aspect of the Lifehouse could be to provide services to people being harmed by the roll-out of AI

  • Connecting organizations needed, not reinventing the wheel

    • some organizations are charity oriented, not mutual aid
    • pragmatic approach
    • ownership and autonomy of effort is important

  • Alternative spaces (e.g. occupying unused spaces)

    • online spaces are an obvious alternate space

  • How to build connections

    • building something together
    • continuity in time, meeting multiple times
    • series of classes in community center do work
    • meshtastic network

Book: The Spirit of Hope Byung-Chul Han

https://www.wiley.com/en-br/The+Spirit+of+Hope-p-9781509565214

  • current vs future needs
    • meeting current needs builds the community we will need in future crisis
    • anarchist prepping, Margaret Killjoy podcast - The World is Ending
  1. does it have to end in violent takedown?
  • Dark
  • Inoculate labor, anticipate a negative response. Social movements can learn this from labor movements
    trying to replace or shame the status quo/state - leads to the state having bad feelings about it

Conclusion

  1. reiterate the need for people to be involved in decisions and actions meant to make a difference
  2. is exhaustion and burnout necessary?
  3. true point: we cannot make it our job to reach/save everyone, but every little bit helps
1 Like
10

Thanks all! This was another great round of reading together.

We had chatted about potentially reaching out to the author to see if he could attend a Q&A. However, given shifting availabilities, those of us who attended last night thought we should just wrap up here.

In the new year we talked about turning to Lucy Suchman’s work, based on the suggestions here: Fall 2025 Reading Group: Selecting a book - #9 by dawn

1 Like