[NetBehaviour] Fwd: Full moon feelings

[Ruth Catlow]

I think this might still be relevant 6 months later ;)

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ruth Catlow <ruth.catlow at furtherfield.org>
Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2023 at 22:22
Subject: Full moon feelings
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <
netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>


Hello all, from the stormy dark of the year, here in East England.

At dawn, a few mornings back, we saw the fullish moon drop into the arms of
a tree silhouetted on the horizon. It inspired me to reflect on the moiling
feelings of the year. Then it inspired me to share these four books that
produced very different feelings - energising, humbling, interrupting, and
delightful.

1. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman. (2019).
Recommended by our friend Cassie Thornton, artist, debt activist and
initiator of The Hologram peer to peer feminist healthcare network.

This is a book about black intimate life in New York and Philadelphia at
the beginning of the twentieth century, 35 years after the abolition of
slavery. The author brings her literary imagination to historical archive
materials. It's a total revelation about the myriad modes and flows of
fierce informal battles against personal and institutional oppression
across generations.

2. Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living (2021) by
Vanessa Machado De Oliveira. Recommended by our friend Dani Admis,
researcher and curator (of the collective environmental justice project
Sunlight Doesn't Need a Pipeline).

This book is a manifesto and workbook that shows how profoundly out of
balance our ecosocial world has become as a result of colonialism, resource
extraction etc. It also reveals all the psychological moves we make to feel
OK about how we are each implicated and the limits we feel to our agency.
It strips away any safe or comfortable perspectives on the terrible harms
inflicted by the modernist idea of progress and the different parts we
might play in it.

3. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival
of the Indian Nations,(1991) by Jerry Mander. I read this after coming
across Mander's Obituary in Marc's subscription to Resurgence magazine.

This book blew my mind. It was written before anyone knew what the Web
would become and is a historic and prophetic analysis of the combined harms
of unregulated social tech development, and the primacy of profit,
protected through corporate law. It also demonstrates the role that the
lying and cheating of so-called civilised states and business has played in
the devastation of the environment, democracy and indigenous cultures over
the last 250+ years. Mander was an anti-globalisation activist, known as
"the Adman for Progressive Causes" so he communicates all this with great
clarity and verve.
The argument that interrupted me most profoundly was that since the mid
1950s tech conglomerates have sold consumer-citizens on the edge-case
benefits of technologies (a good recent example is the medical diagnostic
ability of AI) while the known or predictable hazards to society have been
suppressed, minimized or defended as an unfortunate sacrifice worth making
for inevitable "progress".

4. The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay (2020).
We (a bunch of us at Furtherfield) have spent the last few years LARPing
interspecies justice scenarios in Finsbury Park in North London (more to
follow on this in the new year). We encountered a series of fascinating
challenges and questions like: what do we actually already know and feel
about what matters to other living beings? What difference would knowing
more make?* Is multi-species democracy worth exploring, and if not, why
not? What actions might be taken by whom to change interspecies relations,
and ecosystems-care for the better?

McKay's novel is an Aussie black comedy sci-fi that explores what might
happen to humans if they could be hypnotised by whales, bullied by wild
dogs, and could hear the glee of midges as they sucked their blood. It is
an incredible, funny, delightful, impressive work of imagination that did
what we were trying to do too - exploring what it might feel like to
acknowledge the sentience of all other beings,  with their own experience,
and to live in relationship with them.

*While our LARP involved a fictitious device that allows all flora and
fauna to communicate freely with each other I am highly suspicious of all
the recent AI projects that claim to allow us to communicate with animals
and plants. That's because I don't see the problem (with mass species
extinctions and ecosystems collapse and injustice) as a knowledge problem
but a relating-and-care problem.

Wow! Thank you if you got this far.
All the feelz, including warm, respectful and well-wishing ones.
Ruth
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