This means I will have even more free time than usual.
I will be taking the time this month to read Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown. This book has been recommended by Thena and at least 1 other person on our community calls, and I’ve heard a general excitement related to this title when I’ve brought up the idea of a December Book Club in the last few days.
So I invite you to acquire this book and read it somewhat synchronously with me and others. Fun things we can do:
-schedule synchronous quiet time “co-reading” jams with discussions to follow (EXCITING)
-take turns reading a chapter or several out loud and pause/reflect whenever it feels appropriate(WOW)
-reading on our own time and meeting to discuss (INTERESTING)
I’ll ask for a general hand-raising of interest during our Community Call tomorrow on December 1st, but feel free to do so in the comments here as well. Based on the responses, we can gauge when might be a good time to have our first meeting.
Definitely interested in engaging with this in some fashion! I may have a tough time being synchronized with you/the group, but the text seems super interesting and I have a personal goal of spending mornings reading during this month off. <3 <3 <3
This is why I vote for doing the reading during the jam. That reduces the commitment barrier to basically the same as showing up to the jam. Have done this with other groups, and found you can actually cover a lot of ground. Especially if the material is dense with ideas (which I think this book will be).
Took a raise of hands at our Community Call today.
It seems like 8ish people will be ordering a paper copy from AKPress.
Our first meeting will be on Friday, 1pm Pacific. There is no homework: we will be reading out loud from the introduction (or from another section if we feel like it). I have an e-book copy, I can probably just send it out to people so we can all read together, or I can sharescreen etc
Thank you to everyone who attended! We had some really lovely discussion.
We read through about 6 digital pages, ending on the sentence:
“My hope is that this content will deepen and soften that intelligence such that we can align our behavior, our structures and our movements with our vision of justice and liberation, and give those of us co-creating the future more options for working with each other, and embodying the things we fight for - dignity, collective power, love, generative conflict, and community.”
Due to popular demand, we will be meeting again on Monday at 1pm Pacific for another 1.5hour readalong. Come hang! Don’t worry if your copy hasn’t shown up yet.
Today in the #BookClub we read up to the section Ok, But Who Are You? in the Introduction. (page 29 in the paperback)
We decided to finish reading the Introduction on our own independently before the next book club (Monday 12/14), as well as the two mini-chapters thereafter: Principles of Emergent Strategy and Elements of Emergent Strategy. At that next book club we will revisit any segments from those two (Principles and Elements) we found particularly compelling, and continue our reading from the chapter Fractals.
We will be reading the chapter FRACTALS before our next meeting on Friday.
Salient things we discussed this time include a shared desire to make sure that reading this book does more than just provide an opportunity for us to congratulate ourselves for already having an inclination towards emergent strategy. Rather, we should strive to find ways to improve and challenge our current assumptions and practices.
We discussed Complex Movement’s characterizations of Ferns and Wavicles. Ferns, and the value of modeling a fractal, and displaying a self similarity at any scale, and seeding intentionality into SourceCred’s growth. Dandelion was particularly inspired to consider Cred scores in the context of Wavicles as a way of building malleability into our perception of our Cred scores. William made a neat graph to try to illustrate the point (see attached). distribution_cred|690x258
A note I want to capture from last Friday’s meeting:
We are going to have to do our Inner Work, individually and organizationally. If we don’t work with our shadow/subconscious, we will have subconscious actors sabotaging our conscious effort to revolutionize technological systems. The first step is to collectively acknowledge the truth of this. Then we can begin working individually and collectively on our shadow material. Individuals cannot be atomic in a fractal effort. We’ve gotta recognize our own selves as complex systems from which emergence occurs. Each individual fractally represents the socio-economic systems we are attempting to iron out. To therapize our software/society and to therapize ourselves are one and the same.
Today’s book club meeting (Thursday Jan. 7th, 2021) surfaced a lot of fantastic conversations, which I highly recommend people listen to if they can, so I’m proactively sharing the audio recording file (see below).
We started reading the chapter Interdependence and Decentralization, on page 83 in the paperback hard copy. We made it through halfway page 87, ending on this line which references the culture of western/U.S. capitalist society focusing on competition and independence:
Do we compete well enough to make good money so we can live a good life?
I pointed out how this mindset is indeed pervasive, how it is a byproduct of the focus on independence, and how this is an example of the importance of us (all) creating a new culture of interdependence instead. My proposal for doing something to aid that is collectively writing a Declaration of Interdependence together, and making it easy for many people to co-sign and spread it widely.
That was just one of many great conversations, on many important topics. Again, I highly recommend the audio recording. It is in Audacity format, however, so if someone wants to convert it into a simple audio file to share more easily and make it more accessible, that would get some massive Props & Cred from me.
“Do you already know that your existence–who and how you are–is in and of itself a contribution to the people and place around you? Not after or because you do some particular thing, but simply the miracle of your life. And that the people around you, and the place(s), have contributions as well? Do you understand that your quality of life and your survival are tied to how authentic and generous the connections are between you and the people and place you live with and in?”
