Adam Greenfield

Mark Zuckerberg has evidently named his own AI assistant “Agrippa,” implying of course that he himself is Augustus – founder and first imperator of the Roman Empire, who the historical Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa served as lieutenant, executor and alter ego. I don’t know what’s more profoundly cringe, that rather revealing fact, Meta’s infantilizing depiction of its agents as cuddly, marshmallow-proportioned cartoon characters or the utter banality of its proposition that agential deployment is justified by some perceived need to “brainstorm and get things done.” In fact this whole worldline needs to collapse, the sooner the better.

As someone who regularly helps elderly, low-vision, low-English-literacy & other folks who are struggling to understand them manage their phones (I know @jessamyn@glammr.us does this too), I cannot begin to explain to you the rage I feel at the designers & development organizations who foist these UI choices on a public not remotely equipped to navigate them. The controls are overwhelming, still. They’re couched in jargon, still. They’re hidden somewhere non-obvious, down the end of a four-node decision tree. Fifteen years after I left the industry things have only gotten worse. And the worst bit of all – as I always insisted then, based on my own extended observation – is that *users internalize the blame for their inability to comprehend the UI*. They wind up feeling stupid and incompetent. They wind up bewildered and scammed. They feel terrified to hit the wrong button, and then not be able to find it again. It’s so, so hard to watch. It breaks my heart, and it makes me furious.

I’ve detected a new note in mainstream opinion writing these past few months, in big liberal outlets like the Guardian and the New York Times, which I’d broadly characterize as “whistling past the graveyard.” You’ll notice now that columns and op-ed pieces are larded with little asides, varyingly apologetic or ha-ha funny or frankly cynical, vaguely acknowledging the terrible, terrible straits we’re in, collectively…but then the piece kind of resumes its previous direction of travel, makes some trivial point, and nothing further is said about the matter of greater consequence engulfing us all. It’s like some remnant of integrity or sense compels the writer to at least gesture at the thing that’s in front of us, but they can’t or don’t want to take it in in its full enormity, and so they just move on to the TV review or the analysis of fashions at the US Open or whatever. I can’t unsee the pattern now, and it scares the crap out of me.

The sordid Platner undoing only underlines the point I’m always trying to make: *stop “believing in” politicians* and *stop outsourcing the work of making change*. Look, I, too, love Zohran and AOC, and will always have something of a soft spot for Bernie. But the work of making a world fit for us is not theirs to undertake. It’s ours.

This is what, and all, it takes to be a designated terrorist organization anymore: being a “cadre of radical hackers and tech developers [that] provide a full spectrum of services – including encrypted chats and email, web hosting, secure video conferencing and streaming, anonymity shields, and a suite of other technological tools – to Marxist, anarchist, and other left-wing extremist groups in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.” NB: That’s just about every one of us on here, is it not? Incredible overreach, incredibly pernicious and incredibly dangerous. https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/08/designation-of-autistici-inventati-as-a-specially-designated-global-terrorist/

I’m really proud of what everyone managed to do together these past 24 hours, and so very grateful to everyone who pitched in. These may well be dark times, but there’s no reason anyone should have to endure them alone. Taking care of each other is something we have the power to do. HAIL.

Only now that I’ve shipped the final draft to my editor Nick do I feel fully comfortable sharing this with you: a link to pre-order my next book, direct from the publisher. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful. (Note that the title, cover, etc., may have changed by the time you get your hands on it.) As well, I’m delighted to have been able to do this with the heads at Ill Will. What an honor, what excellent company to be in. https://store.illwilleditions.com/products/the-tetrad-value-in-a-more-than-human-world-by-adam-greenfield

I know that I sometimes have trouble making myself understood, but that concrete examples of what I’m trying to get across help a lot. So let me just say now that, where for *years* I’ve been using the expression “the second- and third-order consequences of global heating,” *this is (part of) what I meant*: problems with infection control, with the failure of sensitive equipment, with the inability to prescribe certain otherwise-efficacious drugs because they have a dangerously diuretic effect, or otherwise work differently, in high temperatures. This is it. It’s happening. We’re here. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/25/four-doctors-nhs-heatwave-crisis

Happy solstice everyone! I hope you don’t have to throw any elders from the top of a cliff.

Shipped the final draft to my editor. Whew. Dang.

The fundamental problem is that (a) I’m trying to write what is now *plainly* a work of philosophy that (b) reads like The Road, when (c) I am neither a philosopher nor Cormac McCarthy. Send help.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@gwynnion/116992907972982610 122 million percent this.

“The British public should begin taking ‘small but important steps’ to secure and protect water, power supplies and basic phone signal in case of further severe weather emergencies, national crises or cyber-attacks, Downing Street has said.” Government can encourage people to do this at the atomized, household level, but evidently cannot countenance anything more collective? Again: the Lifehouse must be built, today and every day. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/14/britons-urged-small-steps-prepare-potential-national-crises

(Pictured: AG, 2028.)

I will eat my hat if anyone with a coherent left-wing politics of any sort killed Ann Widdecombe. I cannot imagine anyone giving enough of a shit about Ann Widdecombe to wish her physical harm – certainly not when there are far more relevant and consequential actors one might possibly direct their anger at. (Do not understand this to be in any way an endorsement or condonation of that sort of violence.)

It bothers me that, on a close reading, this handout has trouble distinguishing who it thinks “they” are – the Greens or their low dishonest opponents.

I’m actually getting amped about this book.

Kurious UAW/MF addendum for game nrrrds & grognards: “In 1969, Columbia University history major Jim Dunnigan, who would later found Simulation Publications, Inc., published a simulation game in the March 11, 1969 edition of the Columbia Spectator named ‘Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!’ The game was based on recent disturbances at Columbia University and allowed the players to play either as protestors or administration with victory determined by winning over various stakeholder groups.” I’d buy that for a dollar! With an SPI hex-grid map, to be sure.

I’m not even particularly a Kirby fan, though I would absolutely accept his characterization as one of the most important artists of the 20th Century. But it’s been a minute since I’ve felt such an overwhelming sense of love for a place, and for pop culture, and for the ways they intersect. Localism is so often depicted as (and, of course, not infrequently *is*) a reactionary and xenophobic clinging to identity over any kind of curiosity about other places and lifeways. But there’s a healthy version of it, too, and it was palpable this afternoon at Essex and Delancey. My heart just about exploded with love.

An issue that confronts the would-be urban walker determined to traverse a megacity from one boundary to the other: do you outfit and equip yourself for ordinary urbanity, or for the walk? I’m halfway minded to adopt some of the practices and tactics I use in #ultrarunning and #ultralight hiking, but by the same token poles and hydration bladders and so on stick out like a sore thumb. You want to be able to move through crowds, duck into bodegas, pet the local cats, etc.

@kworker@kolektiva.social @fishsauce@mastodon.social This is so good. While I agree with Crimethinc.’s analysis of the game and its genesis, as you’d expect, I also have a certain amount of reverence built up for Jim Dunnigan – he looms far larger, albeit mostly indirectly, in the story of my own life than can be accounted for in a flat reading of the politics of simulation. That CRT is like a piece of the mid-seventies dropped into 1969. It must’ve given them a little frisson.

One of the questions I’m minded to ask is: what might a 21st century-native psychogeography look like, a psychogeography beyond Hawksmoor churches and the Place Saint-Sulpice? I guess we’ll find out, together.

@GrimmReality@beige.party It’s been like this for quite some time. But hey, there’s still a musical about an adjudicated child molester running in the West End, evidently to some acclaim. Folks aren’t great at holding their entertainers to account.

@pete@social.coop There’s a sound list of sources here as well. https://bookshop.org/lists/walking-as-artistic-practice

@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green @Christo_459@mastodon.me.uk Dude. It’s not even OK to be antisemitic to a Zionist. Hate the Zionism, fine – the Jew, not so much. That’s kinda the point?

@kworker@kolektiva.social @fishsauce@mastodon.social I wouldn’t want to push the analogy too far, but it’s interesting to consider the SPI of just a very few years down the road as The Man – the Establishment hairier game designers like Steve Jackson were trying to dethrone. @nyrath@spacey.space who was there at the time may have more insight into such dynamics, if indeed there were any!

@synlogic4242@social.vivaldi.net The very same.

@pete@social.coop Namechecked explicitly in the dedication!

@sleepfreeparent@kolektiva.social @Hex@kolektiva.social ☝️☝️☝️

@kklevine@union.place Anyone who chooses a film *because* it makes them feel existentially hollow is my kinda people. Wanna come see “Come and See” with me?

@kklevine@union.place “artificial intelligence.”

@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green no harm, no foul. 👊

@cbmilstein@kolektiva.social You may dig their appearance on Lifepod! https://lifepod.transistor.fm/s1/1

@cpm@spore.social It was upsetting, tbh, when people I knew started recognizably showing up as minor characters in Gibson novels.

(“So, like what are we going to do? Are we going to organize students? I couldn’t stand students”: lol lol.)

@pete@social.coop hott, cheers!

@fishsauce@mastodon.social @kworker@kolektiva.social \^.^/

@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green define “no one”?

@kklevine@union.place oof

@kworker@kolektiva.social right???

@catch56@kolektiva.social With all possible gentleness: are you Jewish? Because otherwise, I’m sorry, but this is a textbook case of mansplaining. I promise you, I don’t need the history of antisemitism explained to me.

Muting this now! Thanks for playing.