Sign up to receive information about events organized by e-flux at e-flux Screening Room, Bar Laika, or elsewhere. Just incase you are not sure if this applies to you here are a few ways you can tell if your empathy muscle is overworked 5 indicators your desire to care for others has become self destructive. Which parts of New York would be at the forefront of a communist revolution, and which would double down into religious, hyper-patriarchal fascism? The book doesn’t shy away from dealing with the fact that New Yorkers are unlikely to get the worst brunt of the military blowback, especially compared to the periphery of the US’s internal empire. The novel is situated in an already present ecological and social collapse and the two poles of its tension — insurgency and the commune — cannot exist without each other.

A pluralist approach to a systemic economic vision gives us the ability to treat, with rigor, the question of institutional design at different levels, rather than assuming that one economic model holds the solution to all our problems. In the first interview, the interviewers speak with a trans woman and practitioner of “skincraft” (a noncriminalized, essential, reparative form of sex work) who has held memorials in the form of gathering oral narratives. As Nathan Schneider documents, cooperative movements are everywhere—from Barcelona to Bologna, Nairobi to New York, Jackson, Oakland, Boulder, Detroit, and points in between.Schneider, as a participant and an observer, is well-positioned to both tell the story of this movement and its milieu and document the attempts to salvage the dream of networked cooperation and digital democracy from Silicon Valley’s nightmarish trajectory.

Based on years of reporting, Schneider chronicles this economic and social revolution — from the taxi cooperatives in Colorado that are keeping Uber and Lyft at bay; to the mayoral administration in Jackson, Mississippi, that is giving citizens control over their economy; to the French hacker who is building a cooperative version of bitcoin; to the electricity coop members who are propelling an outdated system into the future. These are the book’s best moments, where you can feel the effect that this new world has had on its communities’ mental and physical health. In a reflective question, O’Brien asks the skincraft practitioner whether they enjoy being nostalgic and imagining themselves part of that heroic history.By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world’s governments. We were always making meals for a new Mum, grieving over another miscarriage, praying for a sick child, supporting someone through IVF. O’Brien begins with questions that allow the speakers to decide where to begin, while Abdelhadi usually offers the reader demographic cues (e. As these pioneers show, cooperative enterprise is poised to help us reclaim faith in our capacity for creative, powerful democracy.

Among the twelve interviewees are (present or past) sex workers, ecologists, teenagers, schizophrenics, silent rave organizers, rocket scientists, trans women, indigenous warriors, brothers, immigrants multiple times over, Palestinian liberation fighters, debt slaves, forum administrators, minimum wage workers, corporate saboteurs, photographers, gestators (child-bearers), Buddhists, logistics coordinators, cult survivors, and kudzu sauerkraut enthusiasts. Some fought in and around NYC, but some of the interviewees were also involved in struggles in Palestine, in China, and for indigenous sovereignty and against fascism in the rural parts of what was formerly the United States. A professor of media studies as well as a journalist, Schneider, and his collaborator, the scholar-activist Trebor Scholz, are responsible for some of the more inventive digital efforts unfolding under the name of “platform cooperativism,” which they define as an effort to develop “shared governance and shared ownership of the Internet’s levers of power. You often find yourself looking at the week ahead with dread as you wonder how you will manage all you have agreed to. As O’Brien herself explains elsewhere, communes are “self-organized communities based on collectivizing [social] reproduction during periods of prolonged insurgency.Our books provide timely reflections, clear critiques, and inspiring strategies that amplify movements for social justice. The book’s multiple narratives, equal parts hope and pain, merge into a prayer for collective survival and for the eventual flourishing of our powers of love and invention. I spent 15 years as a community organizer and never dreamed of seeing something that so bravely, brilliantly combines liberational nonfiction and radical documentary with the exuberance of the best speculative storytelling.

The fact of their sentience can now be assumed through the nature of their communication with each other about the “modeling of virtual worlds. The twelve denizens of the world whence Abdelhadi and O’Brien are reporting back are survivors and veterans of exhausting, traumatizing, bloody, unforgettable, complicated, and beautiful transformations. In this post-insurrectionary future, communes of various sizes have formed that are more or less premised on the principles of democratic municipalism and social ecology. In the 1930s, the United States managed to chart a narrow third course—a “new deal” that struck a fragile balance of corporate and union power—between industrial capitalism and the welfare state. In twelve fictional interviews, O’Brien and Abdelhadi discuss the slow communization of New York City — and the world — with sex workers, freedom fighters, teenagers, healthcare workers, and scientists.

Even in this non-capitalist reality—without wage slavery, overproduction, imperial genocide—the climate is fucked, natural disasters are rife, and organizational disagreements (about food consumption, say) and harm such as child abuse require conflict resolution. She completed a PhD at New York University, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements. The most frustrating moments of Everything are these—the ones where Schneider meets the hardest questions and falls back on rhetorical equivocation to avoid answering them. You can glance at someone you’ve never met and read them like a book; you know what makes people tick. In other interviews, the authority of the interviewer breaks as the interviewees criticize the questions, crack jokes, refuse to answer certain questions, and even demand that the interlocutor become the interviewed.