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(I promise you, this is going somewhere.)

The school district insisted I see a psychiatrist, who wasn’t great, but to his credit told my parents, “You should trust him, he really isn’t going back there. You need to find an alternative.” Well, conventional private schools were out of the question. There were Friends schools around – two of them, excellent – but even putting expense aside I just bounced off their social universe. My parents were getting fairly desperate, when somehow they heard of a place that seemed to offer some hope.

It was a failing, hippie-era experiment in egalitarian education called the Miquon Upper School, which makes it sound a lot grander than it was. It was in a ramshackle house in Chestnut Hill, an hour away across town – I had to take two commuter trains to get there in the morning, and two to get back, which was its own kind of education. And it didn’t have grades in either sense, i.e. neither year-based distinctions of curriculum, or letter-based evaluations of performance. You called teachers

by their first name. You took whatever classes you felt ready for, with whoever else was there, from 12 to 18. There was lots of hands-on craft. It was the kind of place where students had a smoking room (!), and put on their own production of “Ubu Roi.” It literally saved my life.

There were many wonderful things about Miquon. I orbited a set of older students who seemed impossibly glamorous to me, who drove and smoked and made films and listened to the Specials and Black Flag and had sex (sometimes at school!). But the very best thing about Miquon for me was the library. It had been lovingly accumulated over two decades, and was filled to overflowing with the cultural and intellectual fruits of the American ‘60s and ‘70s.

This meant everything from James Baldwin and Tom Stoppard to “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and War Resisters’ League material on how to evade the draft. But it’s now clear to me that one thing I first found in the library there had more consequence for the rest of my life than anything else, and that was “The Whole Earth Catalog.” I’d just never seen anything remotely like it. It blew my mind.

There was a rich tranche of parallel texts in the library as well – unless I’m very badly mistaken, for example, it was the first time I saw Ken Isaacs’ brilliant “How To Build Your Own Living Structures” (and the last time for many years, as well, until the internet returned it to me lifetimes later). There was, in short, access to a whole way of thinking about and intervening in the material world I’d barely been exposed to. http://letsremake.info/PDFs/k_isaacs.pdf

If I can summarize what I learned from that first scatty, ADHDish, mostly-looking-at-the-pictures encounter with this current of thought and praxis, it was that you didn’t have to accept the material world of tooling and shelter and vehicles as some eternal, received truth. People who felt left out of the mainstream deal could, with some effort, design themselves genuine alternatives. And these alternatives were generally what we’d now call lightweight, modular, extensible & user-configurable.

And what was very clear to me, and most exciting, was that people equipped with these alternative technics could step outside of the monstrous waste and inhumanity it was even then clear to me (at the age of 13, in 1981-82) was the purpose and motor of the mainstream economy. It would be years before I heard the expression #POSIWID, but I already understood the truth it encapsulated, and I wanted nothing to do with the purpose I saw unfolding in the world.

And so I read Illich, and Freire, and “Shelter.” I read about New Babylon and Christiania and Drop City. When I saw posters of Clifford Harper’s legendary Visions illustrations a few years later, tacked up in the place I was living, they immediately made sense to me. https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/antecedents-of-the-minimum-viable-utopia-cliff-harpers-visions-series/

And years later still, when I saw Joseph Grima’s show Adhocracy at the Galata Greek School in Istanbul, that too made perfect sense to me. The idea that we could now collectively work hands on with the kind of open-source design languages, frameworks and toolkits someone like Ken Isaacs had to develop on his own, more or less in isolation? Electrifying. https://www.spacecaviar.net/articles/adhocracy

And what was most encouraging of all was that I kept seeing traces of this way of thinking about material and spatial agency show up in the real world, in contexts like the Zuluark architectural collective’s work for el Campo de Cebada in Madrid… https://aplust.net/blog/el_campo_de_cebada_madrid_spain/

…or raumlaborberlin’s Floating University. https://raumlabor.net/floating-university-berlin-an-offshore-campus-for-cities-in-transformation/

But what was profoundly frustrating to me was that I couldn’t find a way to talk about these projects that inspired me so deeply in any of the first three books I was privileged enough to be able to publish, except glancingly. These books were about the emerging reality of networked digital information technology, and the colonization of everyday life by information processing. They were largely and necessarily critical, not affirmative. There was no opening onto what moved or thrilled me.

And the conversations we were collectively having about technology had started to feel fairly surreal, decoupled as they were from any consideration of the ecological damage that was piling up all around us, or the overdetermining reality of global heating – surreal, and quite literally insane.

In the weak signals I kept picking up from practices like Zuloark and raumlaborberlin, in the new politics of the horizontal turn (especially as they unfolded after 15M, Occupy and the movement of the squares generally), in the instant infrastructure of protest camps and the appropriation and adaptive reuse of spaces sacrificed by late capitalism, I finally thought I saw a cogent response to the circumstances of ecological peril, and a throughline I could build an argument around in print.

And I think, or frankly hope, that’s what I’ve been able to do in “Lifehouse”: not only draw some lines between a particular set of ecological, political and social pressures & a praxis of response to those pressures, but affirm and honor everything I first learned about in the musty stacks of the Miquon Upper School library. That part of writing the book has been unalloyed joy, and the pleasure will be redoubled if folks who encounter these inspirations in the book pick them up and extend them.

If you’ll forgive me, I’m going to cap off this week’s thread as I plan to for all the book threads that I’ll be posting in the weeks to come: with a link to the publisher’s site. That way, if any of this strikes sparks for you, you can pre-order the book, and judge for yourself whether or not I’ve been able to contribute to the lineage of thinking and doing that’s inspired me now for four-fifths of my time on Earth. See you next week! https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2536-lifehouse

While we’re at it, though: thank you always Sarah Braun, Amy Whipple (PBUH), Allison Caesar, Buddy Coursey, Martel Fein (PBUH), Patrick Prawl, and even Neil “Shitman” Silverman, for furnishing me a first model for living with verve and style and fierce individuality. Cancer took Amy, fuck cancer, and heroin took Martel, fuck heroin, but the rest, impossibly, would all be about 60 now. I hope they’re out there somewhere, living wild and free.

(It occurs to me that @RodneyAnonymous just might recognize some of those names from the early Abe’s Steaks scene. I would be remiss, too, if I did not remember my English teacher at Miquon, Anne Greenberg, lost too to cancer these many years, PBUH. She was the very first person to ever recognize me as a writer. Thanks, Anne, wherever you now wander.)

@stevereally I’m sure they do! Cheers Steve.

@BillySmith SWEET

@jmeowmeow Never late – always discovering.

@adamgreenfield Design Patterns (via software) was my door into sense-making peer discussions serving understanding and context, and eventually connected me with the systems dynamics folks and cooperative governance advocates circling around Wiki.

The co-op house I never quite joined at least connected me with a job and introduced me to queer punk music.

Appreciation for your encouragement. I keep returning to "learning together" groups which have been key for my journey.

@KerryMitchell Whoah! Never heard of that. It looks like it was published in the same oversized format as “Shelter”?

@adamgreenfield Just a regular 8.5x11. There was some connection with Whole Earth - the editor was an art director for the Whole Earth Epilogue. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/santafenewmexican/name/al-perrin-obituary

@adamgreenfield which, now that I read that back, is not so surprising.

@kataclyst Let’s take this to DM?