Dispatch for the week ending 30 March 2025.

Mission elapsed time 20,753 days.

Good morning, beloved -

Maybe it's simply the onset of British Summer Time overnight, but I'm just bursting with energy. I know it seems incongruous with the ambient psychic weather of the moment, but then maybe that's the point? To meet the grim farce of mainstream public affairs with an upwelling, irrepressible, literally insurgent joy? To keep at it, generating connection and possibility and the conditions of life, until the very moment the choice to continue doing so is in one way or another taken out of your hands. There are worse programs to commit oneself to, you know?

This week's dispatch'll be a quick one, unlike last week's sprawling opus — there's just a few things I want to put out.

§ Planning continues for the forthcoming Lifepod podcast, with visual design by the great Chris Lee, audio engineering by the multitalented and boundlessly enthusiastic Laurence Green, and musical cues contributed by Agriculture (!).

Lifepod's fundamental mission is to extend the themes of the book in ways that are both encouraging and immediately useful, for those individuals and communities trying to build spaces of shelter, repair, mutual care and collective power. I'm going to be talking to folks who are doing the work of building the Lifehouse, concretely and metaphorically, and seeing if we can't glean some insight into how they achieve their results. The whole point is to share our Tales of Minimum Viable Utopia, and uphold people in making more of them.

That last bit speaks to something else about Lifepod I'm really excited by: one of the segments I want to include in each episode is a nanogrant program, where I award $100 each month to the most interesting submission of a Lifehouse-related project — no* strings attached and no questions asked. That's obviously not a whole lot, but it's just enough to buy basic tools or materials, or otherwise get started on some DIY/DIT effort intended to support and extend the ideas discussed in the book.

I'll share the fairly minimal terms and conditions of participation shortly — they're chiefly that, as the asterisk in the previous paragraph implies, you agree to release whatever you do with the nanogrant under a copyleft or equivalent license — but in order to make a monthly award, there first needs to be a selection to choose from. So send me your ideas! Share what you got! Candidates for funding could be anything relevant to the challenge of organizing communities to furnish themselves with care amid brutal ecological and political circumstances, so long as $100 would give you some space to get started prototyping it. The makings of a free community clinic, portable enough to packed onto a cargobike? A set of conventions for running an effective community meeting, rigorously field-tested? A compact way to build agroelectric arrays, from easily-sourced commodity materials? All of those things would work, and really just about anything else along these lines — if you've read the book, I'm sure you'll have a general idea of what would fly.

Each winning project will be announced on the podcast, and in time, I imagine it would be really nice to check in with how grantees have fared, and what use they've been able to make from the support. So consider this a prompt to share this call with folks you know, folks who could use just that little bit of seed money to help them get started on a project they have in mind?

One final note, and forgive me if it's a little cheesy: I'm funding the nanogrant program directly from my monthly Patreon takings...so the more of those there are, the more generously I can award. I'd hugely appreciate it if you'd consider helping this idea into life, through your continued (or even enhanced) financial support of this dispatch.

§ Against most of my better instincts, I've joined Bluesky, on a strictly experimental and contingent basis, and look forward to having conversations with you there so long as that continues to feel right.

I'm not at all OK with Bluesky's ownership or provenance, and would prefer to do such social-network-weaving as is necessary on Mastodon...but if we're being honest, the latter has felt to me like a really sour, joyless and unhealthfully self-involved space for some time. In fact I tend to think that even there, the medium remains the message: that this paradigm of social networking is fundamentally broken, or at least has a fundamental and insuperable tendency toward producing dynamics I personally want no part of. But by the same token, I believe in the work I put into Lifehouse, I believe in what I'm trying to do with Lifepod, and I want people to know about them. If the choice is between a compromised accessibility and righteous obscurity, as it presently appears to be, I'm afraid I'm choosing to be where the people and the conversation are. At least for now. Come say hi.

§ Finally, just a reminder that I'm doing Lifehouse talks at Alienated Majesty in Austin, Texas on April 4th; with John P. Clark at the John Thompson Legacy Center in New Orleans, on the afternoon of the 6th; with A. Naomi Paik at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago on the 9th; and at Joy Bomb Social Center in Gary, IN on the 10th — feel free to share these dates with those you know who might be interested. It'd be a solid hoot to see you at any of them. (As always, if you want to organize a get-together around any of these appearances, do get in touch, either on Bluesky per the above link, or on Signal, where I'm soixantehuitard.68.)

§ Right now, in addition to our slow tour of H is for Hawk, I'm reading Peter Gelderloos's The Solutions Are Already Here, which feels very Lifehouse-y indeed, and listening to crushing new albums from Daevar, Rwake and most excitingly of all Deafheaven (that title!). (FWIW, I haven't watched anything since seeing Flow last week, which I continue to urge you to see.)

And no, I have no idea what's going on with the way those links are rendering either. It's something that seems to have happened in Patreon since last week, and I hope they fix it soon. (For that matter, I'd like to be able to link the title of a work and have it remain correctly italicized! I know, I know: the gods don't love us enough for anything nice like that to be in the offing. Still.)

That's it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have

all my faith,

ag

ldn