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For me, the distinction arises out of my very first moments of involvement with the Occupy Sandy #mutualaid effort, in the last days of October 2012. My partner & I – wanting to volunteer to do recovery work in *some* capacity, having been outright rejected by the Red Cross, & having rocked up at the 520 Clinton distribution hub with little more than desire & energy – were immediately greeted & welcomed as we approached, in a way that would put most customer service-oriented businesses to shame.

But this was far from the only way this sprawling disaster relief and recovery effort made space for people as whole human beings. This quality was also, and every bit as importantly, expressed at the other end of the process, in interactions with the individuals, families and communities that had been hit hardest by the storm and were in most acute need of relief. The way Occupy Sandy approached this stood in the sharpest contrast with the way top-down relief agencies went about doing so.

Where agencies like the Red Cross distributed generic aid packages impersonally, and in a manner that inscribed a vertical savior/saved relation between people, the Occupy Sandy approach started with a natural conversation. (There were other salient differences in approach, too, as you’ll see in the book, but this is the one I want to drill into today.) When OS volunteers met someone who’d been displaced or otherwise injured by the storm, they started by simply asking: “How are you doing?”

They didn’t assume that people needed help. They didn’t arrogate to themselves the task of deciding what form that help should take. They didn’t impose themselves on the situation like a savior come down from above. They inquired – that I saw, with surprising gentleness and attention to the right moment – if the people they met needed anything. The power of this pivot cannot be underestimated. To put it in somewhat technical terms, it transformed the subject of care from passive recipient into

an active, agential co-creator of their own safety. And many of the people who’d experienced this did in fact go on to join the Occupy Sandy effort themselves, as volunteers. This is the key to that effort’s widely-noted effectiveness, or one of them, anyway. This is what allowed people who were very possibly undergoing the worst moments of their lives, in objective terms, to experience them instead as woven through with a sense of purpose, power and possibility.

And this, I believe, speaks to a real deficit in what are otherwise some of the most inspiring intellectual projects of the past half-century or so: those loosely clustered around the ideas of “open” and “openness.”

However unwise it may be to present such a broad diversity of projects and aims with such brutal schematicity, I think it’s fair to say that most “open” projects – whether Wikipedia or the open-source hardware community or even many nominally “participatory” political formations – are merely open to newcomers in a formal sense. And very often, as I’ve seen & heard directly & for myself, the convenors of some such project wonder why there doesn’t seem to be the community uptake they’d hoped for.

I do not mean this as a judgment upon these projects or their initiators and maintainers – just the opposite, in fact: as I say, they are some of the most inspiring developments of my adult lifetime, and involve some of the best people I’ve ever met. But neither can we pretend that there aren’t very severe challenge gradients in place, that prevent all but a relatively small minority of people from availing themselves of the offer of openness.

You know what this challenge gradient consists of, because we speak about these things all the time hereabouts. Folks are exhausted by the necessity of earning a living under the conditions of late capitalism. Their time is already spoken for: they are bound in a web of obligations to people who need them. They may physically be unable to access the project space, or find it uncomfortably homogenous when they get there. They may feel othered, from the moment they walk (or roll) through the door.

They may not speak the dominant language in the space fluently, or feel anxiety at the thought of doing so. All of these situations, and many more, function as real, material barriers to participation. There is, in short, what @inquiline@union.place refers to as “the burden of participation,” and that burden is distributed unequally among the bodies who compose the participatory project. Again: you know this.

But if we want to make good on the (very considerable) promise of nominally “open,” participatory institutions, we have to do the work that Occupy Sandy did seemingly effortlessly: the work of meeting people where they are, in dignity and respect for the whole human being. We need, in other words, to transform our open institutions into *invitational* institutions.

I do not suggest this will be easy, or unvexed by any of the complications that invariably attend human sociality & collective endeavor. But it’s not optional, either. In fact, a large part of the reasoning behind bothering to articulate the idea of the #pragma in the first place is to unlock the invitationality of the Lifehouse as a space & an idea. Each local hub has to be free to vary in its presentation and affects, in order to feel authentically like the effort of the people who make it up.

Anyway, you can read more about invitationality, and the other qualities that I think made Occupy Sandy so successful and such an excellent example, in the book. And I hope you’ll let me know about examples of this quality that you yourself have experienced, and maybe together we can try to identify some of the principles at work so we can put them to use elsewhere. See you next Sunday for another thread on the #Lifehouse, and how I see it working to support us in the time of troubles we face!

The activism deployed in such moments is no longer that of what Tilley, somewhat infelicitously, calls “WUNC displays” — i.e. demonstrations of a movement’s worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment, designed to convince a governing body to make concessions, or to otherwise move public sentiment.

It's no longer supplicatory. It has stopped asking, or waiting, for someone else to swoop in and set things to rights. I think of this quality of Occupy Sandy (as well as the other movements I write about in the book, from the Black Panther survival programs to the solidarity clinics of Crisis-era Greece) as “deep activism,” a mode of being in the world that more directly engages questions of collective power. It’s just such deep activism that I think our moment of climate breakdown calls for.

To celebrate these moments, to elucidate their guiding logic, and to knit them together into something like a coherent approach to the peril we find ourselves in: these were the motivations behind writing this book. But I can tell you that the act of doing so has worked something like deep activism in my own life, opening up lines of flight that might not otherwise have been available to me – and whatever else, if anything, results from its publication, I’ll always be grateful for that.

I can easily imagine that there are a large number of individuals and communities with exactly the need for affordable, reliable, off-grid, multi-way communication this project proposes to offer them, but who would never know it from the description on that page. And, again, this is not to single out this project – as a matter of fact, the more some proposition diverges from the things people are used to, the simpler and more straightforward its explanatory copy needs to be.

This goes for projects in cooperative economics, for guerrilla healthcare initiatives like Cassie Thornton’s Greek-inspired “hologram,” and most especially for anything technical. If such projects are to succeed in achieving liberatory ends, the challenge gradient confronting the newcomer needs to be as shallow and gradual as is practically achievable. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13qfwcg

In practice, that will very often mean inviting someone from outside the project team to review your promotional and explanatory materials, with an eye toward ensuring they’re all written in an appropriate register of language, explain the context and the motivation behind some proposed intervention, and so on. *If you run a project like this, and you’d like help with making it more invitational, feel free to reach out to me.* I may be able to offer some useful advice.

No promises, of course. But I’ll do what I can to help, or tell you plainly if I’m not in a position to. : . )

@austingovella

@austingovella Is there anything in particular you’re looking to do?

@magitweeter BOOYAH to you and BOOYAH to @AdrianRiskin

@dana This is how we do it.

@adamgreenfield open communal structures can nurture more creative cultures, too

@adamgreenfield got to

@simulo I always kind of choke on “universal,” but this is interesting and helpful, cheers.

@simulo (In my own personal experience, Wikipedia is actively hostile to newcomers, has its own tacit rules and barriers to participation, and, as we’ve been discussing here lately, centers niche topics that are of intense interest to its core community in exclusion of topics that are highly germane but which that core community finds uninteresting, e.g. the history of feminism. This is surely a community that could stand to pick up what you’re putting down.)

@adamgreenfield These are just curious questions, to be clear - thanks for sharing your perspective!