INTRODUCTION

The Hologram. Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-pandemic Future by Cassie Thornton is not only a book that accompanies an artist’s project. It is the result of years of practice, writing, research, physical and mental exercises around how capitalism is making the majority of people’s life miserable. It can also be a manual for practicing social activism, and a sci-fi short story, all at the same time. Yet all those different formats meet in something that we usually call art, but in this case art that operates on a 1:1 scale. [1] I will try to explain why in the following text.

Is it possible to claim our lives outside of financialisation? Can we think about tools to use and share ‘in conspiracy’?

I met Thornton in 2016 when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from the Netherlands together with my partner, who was hired by a tech start-up. We moved with our two bags full of Hollywood-framed dreams, and eventually we ended up in a city where according to a report by the San Francisco Federal Reserve, people who earn a lower income are more luckily to commit suicide if they live within a wealthier neigborhood. [2]

I learned very soon how in the United States of America it is so easy to get indebted: the more you spend, the more you get credit from the bank, the more you must pay back to the very same bank you get the money from. And then it repeats. This is the modality banks and the financial industry in general (and here it should be mentioned healthcare, education, housing, and all the other basic services), keep people on the hook until the end of their lives.

My socialist Italian brain was not ready to deal with that, and when I got to know Thornton’s work, it sounded like it came from the future. A future which somehow looked darker rather than brighter.

FROM THE INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY IN EXILE TO THE HOLOGRAM

The Hologram was one of the strategies elaborated by the Intentional Community in Exile (ICE) a project developed by Thornton in Oakland, CA as part of the series ‘Heavy Breathing’, which took the form of a ‘new mutual aid society built to sustain radical, creative and political practices within a hostile economic system’. [3] Starting from a shared condition of precarity as artists and activists living constantly at high risk of eviction, the group’s attempt was to elaborate a toolkit to exit economic precarity by attempting to build human relationships instead of accumulating goods and capital. The public performance, which was the moment the group chose to present the outcome of the workshop, was announced with the following statement. As you will read, it may sound very familiar to those living in major Western cities.

‘The entire time I have lived in “x” I have been precarious and indebted. I have only survived, and thrived, because of the networks of solidarity and mutual aid I have participated in. Now, as the city, “x” gentrifies beyond the imagination, I’m being forced to leave. I don’t want to let those networks die. If people like me are going to survive in this world, we need to imagine and create better non-monetary common resources.’

I had the possibility to follow the process of the ICE because I was invited as an observer and respondent to one of the closed sessions which happened in Oakland, CA. I remember that I felt so hopeful to see what people could actually do with the excuse of making art. I was glad to be part of that group, whether at the same time I acknowledged my precarious and fragile condition as a person living far away from the usual safety net. It was painful. Ultimately, the recognition of that pain represented a change of paradigm and it caused me a certain discomfort. [4] However, as a transformative moment, I still treasure it very much. With that experience still fresh, eventually both Thornton and I left the Bay Area for different reasons. I can not speak for her, but my choice was motivated precisely by that desire of refusing to deal with that constant feeling of not being, doing, and living enough, anymore. 

'REVENGE FANTASY':
THE HOLOGRAM AS AN EXPERIMENT IN RADICAL HEALTHCARE

Thornton ended up in Greece in the middle of a crisis that, despite the attempt of the Syriza-led government to renegotiate the austerity measures imposed by the European troika, decimated the welfare system, with healthcare as one of the most curtailed services.

With the embryonic idea of The Hologram back on her mind, she encountered the Greek Solidarity Clinics movement, an experiment in radical healthcare, which consists in doctors, nurses and other health professionals, offering autonomous and free access to basic healthcare.

In the book’s introduction, Thrornton describes how painful it was to hear about the effect of the crisis on people’s lives, but also she mentions the encounter she had with a group of middle-aged women who welcomed ‘the crisis’ as a sort of relief. They referred to ‘the crisis as the birth of their new lives as radicalized people within activist communities, [...] who were now more than just workers and consumers’. [5] This passage describes precisely the same feeling I had when I first experienced the methodology of the ICE in Oakland: the thin line between oppression and liberation.

As the Social Solidarity Clinics movement is rethinking access to healthcare, at the same time is re-defining the roles of each person involved, starting from the language used to describe their process. Patients are now called ‘incomers’ for example, and they have a say in which treatment they need to receive.

Incomers meet for 90 minutes with 3 different healthcare workers: a general physician, a psychotherapist and a social worker (or a non-practitioner volunteer if no social worker is available). After the meetings incomers receive a survey which comprehends a series of questions about their broader health such as family life, nutrition, exercise and so on.

The idea is to get as much information as possible from every incomer in order to get a hologram perceived as a tridimensional image of health. [6]

If we were to stop producing money, to stop growing our human capital, we would die. Is this true? After reading the book, I believe that the answer is no.

Thanks to the experience in Greece, Thornton started developing a protocol for the development of The Hologram as an integrative care model for the distribution of mental, emotional, social and physical care where the currency is time.The person in need (who decides to become the hologram) invites 3 friends who become the Triangle. Members of the Triangle do not have to be necessarily related to each other, but they should commit to periodic meetings, either in person or online, in order to support the hologram. The text describes very precisely the process and ideas behind the rise of the hologram, it gives specific guidelines and questions to address, in order to practise it, and not getting lost while doing it. Additionally, if one is not sure how to invite someone to be part of the experiment, there is a model letter one can use to invite potential members for the Triangle.

At this point one might ask: ‘This sounds very intriguing, but when and how the healing actually happens?’. The Hologram is a way to exist without the commodification of our bodies, therefore when there is an attempt to dismantle hierarchical and authoritarian structures, such as debt for instance, I would consider it already a success. Thornton affirms that ‘the real healing (if we even want to say it!) comes when the person who is at the center of care turns outward to then care for someone else. [...] to allow people to feel that they are not broken and that their healing is bound up in the health and liberation of others’. [7]

To sustain her argument, the book includes feedback written by several participants who approached the project either as a hologram or as part of the Triangle. In particular it is worth mentioning the words of Richard Houguez, who describes his experience in approaching The Hologram as a practice in ‘radical hairdressing’: ‘I was attracted to The Hologram course because of my experiences of the hairdresser-client relationship. It is widely recognized as an extraordinary relationship in that it can often span a long duration of time, be founded on trust, proximity and intimacy, yet to be outside of models of family, friendship and romantic partnership.’ [8]

Thornton wrote a book that is a call for action, a manual to follow word by word, it represents the feasible utopia. The Hologram is an undercommoning practice [9] which uses the very same broken system we live in to imagine a new method, so everyone could thrive, but together. The result of using The Hologram is that one is not afraid to fall into depression if she gets a bad day, because she can be cured with no money, but solidarity.

At the time of this writing, we are still in the middle of a global pandemic that for a moment forced capitalist forces, such as airlines for example, to completely stop operating with the consequences of massive financial loss. Would you have ever imagined this would be possible for months? I am aware that things are still very difficult for many people in the world, but what if there is even the most remote possibility that something like The Hologram becomes a counter-virus which is going to spread around as the new collective social technology to be used?

The Hologram as a feminist peer-to-peer practice might be the vision the world needs. Those who said capitalism could not be stopped is because there has been no such vision. As Laurie Penny recently wrote: ‘these men never imagined the future beyond the image of themselves on top of the human heap, cast in gold. For weeks, the speeches from podiums have suggested that a certain amount of brutal death is a reasonable price for other people to pay to protect the current financial system.’ And then she continues describing how people are coping during the first months of the pandemic: ‘What happens is that women and carers of all genders quietly exhaust themselves filling in the gaps, trying to save as many people as possible from physical and mental collapse. The people on the front line are not fighters. They are healers and carers. The very people whose work is rarely paid in proportion to its importance are the ones we really need when the dung hits the Dyson. Nurses, doctors, cleaners, drivers. Emotional and domestic labor have never been part of the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the species—not even when they imagine its grave.’ [10]

Now that we are aware of how the apocalypse could possibly look like, we should organise and perhaps use The Hologram as the guide we need to claim our future, in a moment when access to proper healthcare does not seem so obvious for an increasing number of people everywhere.

I would like to conclude with a passage taken from the Wikipedia Entry from the Future chapter, which sounds less like an oracle considering the circumstances we live in: ‘But quickly The Hologram morphed into a type of party-line, where women, trans people and revolutionaries of all sorts sat on couches, at home, all over the world as they discussed how good they felt about the erasure of power.’ [11]

INTRODUCTION

The Hologram. Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-pandemic Future by Cassie Thornton is not only a book that accompanies an artist’s project. It is the result of years of practice, writing, research, physical and mental exercises around how capitalism is making the majority of people’s life miserable. It can also be a manual for practicing social activism, and a sci-fi short story, all at the same time. Yet all those different formats meet in something that we usually call art, but in this case art that operates on a 1:1 scale. [1] I will try to explain why in the following text.

Is it possible to claim our lives outside of financialisation? Can we think about tools to use and share ‘in conspiracy’?

I met Thornton in 2016 when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from the Netherlands together with my partner, who was hired by a tech start-up. We moved with our two bags full of Hollywood-framed dreams, and eventually we ended up in a city where according to a report by the San Francisco Federal Reserve, people who earn a lower income are more luckily to commit suicide if they live within a wealthier neigborhood. [2]

I learned very soon how in the United States of America it is so easy to get indebted: the more you spend, the more you get credit from the bank, the more you must pay back to the very same bank you get the money from. And then it repeats. This is the modality banks and the financial industry in general (and here it should be mentioned healthcare, education, housing, and all the other basic services), keep people on the hook until the end of their lives.

My socialist Italian brain was not ready to deal with that, and when I got to know Thornton’s work, it sounded like it came from the future. A future which somehow looked darker rather than brighter.

FROM THE INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY IN EXILE TO THE HOLOGRAM

The Hologram was one of the strategies elaborated by the Intentional Community in Exile (ICE) a project developed by Thornton in Oakland, CA as part of the series ‘Heavy Breathing’, which took the form of a ‘new mutual aid society built to sustain radical, creative and political practices within a hostile economic system’. [3] Starting from a shared condition of precarity as artists and activists living constantly at high risk of eviction, the group’s attempt was to elaborate a toolkit to exit economic precarity by attempting to build human relationships instead of accumulating goods and capital. The public performance, which was the moment the group chose to present the outcome of the workshop, was announced with the following statement. As you will read, it may sound very familiar to those living in major Western cities.

‘The entire time I have lived in “x” I have been precarious and indebted. I have only survived, and thrived, because of the networks of solidarity and mutual aid I have participated in. Now, as the city, “x” gentrifies beyond the imagination, I’m being forced to leave. I don’t want to let those networks die. If people like me are going to survive in this world, we need to imagine and create better non-monetary common resources.’

I had the possibility to follow the process of the ICE because I was invited as an observer and respondent to one of the closed sessions which happened in Oakland, CA. I remember that I felt so hopeful to see what people could actually do with the excuse of making art. I was glad to be part of that group, whether at the same time I acknowledged my precarious and fragile condition as a person living far away from the usual safety net. It was painful. Ultimately, the recognition of that pain represented a change of paradigm and it caused me a certain discomfort. [4] However, as a transformative moment, I still treasure it very much. With that experience still fresh, eventually both Thornton and I left the Bay Area for different reasons. I can not speak for her, but my choice was motivated precisely by that desire of refusing to deal with that constant feeling of not being, doing, and living enough, anymore. 

'REVENGE FANTASY': THE HOLOGRAM AS AN EXPERIMENT IN RADICAL HEALTHCARE

Thornton ended up in Greece in the middle of a crisis that, despite the attempt of the Syriza-led government to renegotiate the austerity measures imposed by the European troika, decimated the welfare system, with healthcare as one of the most curtailed services.

With the embryonic idea of The Hologram back on her mind, she encountered the Greek Solidarity Clinics movement, an experiment in radical healthcare, which consists in doctors, nurses and other health professionals, offering autonomous and free access to basic healthcare.

In the book’s introduction, Thrornton describes how painful it was to hear about the effect of the crisis on people’s lives, but also she mentions the encounter she had with a group of middle-aged women who welcomed ‘the crisis’ as a sort of relief. They referred to ‘the crisis as the birth of their new lives as radicalized people within activist communities, [...] who were now more than just workers and consumers’. [5] This passage describes precisely the same feeling I had when I first experienced the methodology of the ICE in Oakland: the thin line between oppression and liberation.

As the Social Solidarity Clinics movement is rethinking access to healthcare, at the same time is re-defining the roles of each person involved, starting from the language used to describe their process. Patients are now called ‘incomers’ for example, and they have a say in which treatment they need to receive.

Incomers meet for 90 minutes with 3 different healthcare workers: a general physician, a psychotherapist and a social worker (or a non-practitioner volunteer if no social worker is available). After the meetings incomers receive a survey which comprehends a series of questions about their broader health such as family life, nutrition, exercise and so on.

The idea is to get as much information as possible from every incomer in order to get a hologram perceived as a tridimensional image of health. [6]

If we were to stop producing money, to stop growing our human capital, we would die. Is this true? After reading the book, I believe that the answer is no.

Thanks to the experience in Greece, Thornton started developing a protocol for the development of The Hologram as an integrative care model for the distribution of mental, emotional, social and physical care where the currency is time.The person in need (who decides to become the hologram) invites 3 friends who become the Triangle. Members of the Triangle do not have to be necessarily related to each other, but they should commit to periodic meetings, either in person or online, in order to support the hologram. The text describes very precisely the process and ideas behind the rise of the hologram, it gives specific guidelines and questions to address, in order to practise it, and not getting lost while doing it. Additionally, if one is not sure how to invite someone to be part of the experiment, there is a model letter one can use to invite potential members for the Triangle.

At this point one might ask: ‘This sounds very intriguing, but when and how the healing actually happens?’. The Hologram is a way to exist without the commodification of our bodies, therefore when there is an attempt to dismantle hierarchical and authoritarian structures, such as debt for instance, I would consider it already a success. Thornton affirms that ‘the real healing (if we even want to say it!) comes when the person who is at the center of care turns outward to then care for someone else. [...] to allow people to feel that they are not broken and that their healing is bound up in the health and liberation of others’. [7]

To sustain her argument, the book includes feedback written by several participants who approached the project either as a hologram or as part of the Triangle. In particular it is worth mentioning the words of Richard Houguez, who describes his experience in approaching The Hologram as a practice in ‘radical hairdressing’: ‘I was attracted to The Hologram course because of my experiences of the hairdresser-client relationship. It is widely recognized as an extraordinary relationship in that it can often span a long duration of time, be founded on trust, proximity and intimacy, yet to be outside of models of family, friendship and romantic partnership.’ [8]

Thornton wrote a book that is a call for action, a manual to follow word by word, it represents the feasible utopia. The Hologram is an undercommoning practice [9] which uses the very same broken system we live in to imagine a new method, so everyone could thrive, but together. The result of using The Hologram is that one is not afraid to fall into depression if she gets a bad day, because she can be cured with no money, but solidarity.

At the time of this writing, we are still in the middle of a global pandemic that for a moment forced capitalist forces, such as airlines for example, to completely stop operating with the consequences of massive financial loss. Would you have ever imagined this would be possible for months? I am aware that things are still very difficult for many people in the world, but what if there is even the most remote possibility that something like The Hologram becomes a counter-virus which is going to spread around as the new collective social technology to be used?

The Hologram as a feminist peer-to-peer practice might be the vision the world needs. Those who said capitalism could not be stopped is because there has been no such vision. As Laurie Penny recently wrote: ‘these men never imagined the future beyond the image of themselves on top of the human heap, cast in gold. For weeks, the speeches from podiums have suggested that a certain amount of brutal death is a reasonable price for other people to pay to protect the current financial system.’ And then she continues describing how people are coping during the first months of the pandemic: ‘What happens is that women and carers of all genders quietly exhaust themselves filling in the gaps, trying to save as many people as possible from physical and mental collapse. The people on the front line are not fighters. They are healers and carers. The very people whose work is rarely paid in proportion to its importance are the ones we really need when the dung hits the Dyson. Nurses, doctors, cleaners, drivers. Emotional and domestic labor have never been part of the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the species—not even when they imagine its grave.’ [10]

Now that we are aware of how the apocalypse could possibly look like, we should organise and perhaps use The Hologram as the guide we need to claim our future, in a moment when access to proper healthcare does not seem so obvious for an increasing number of people everywhere.

I would like to conclude with a passage taken from the Wikipedia Entry from the Future chapter, which sounds less like an oracle considering the circumstances we live in: ‘But quickly The Hologram morphed into a type of party-line, where women, trans people and revolutionaries of all sorts sat on couches, at home, all over the world as they discussed how good they felt about the erasure of power.’ [11]

INTRODUCTION

The Hologram. Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-pandemic Future by Cassie Thornton is not only a book that accompanies an artist’s project. It is the result of years of practice, writing, research, physical and mental exercises around how capitalism is making the majority of people’s life miserable. It can also be a manual for practicing social activism, and a sci-fi short story, all at the same time. Yet all those different formats meet in something that we usually call art, but in this case art that operates on a 1:1 scale. [1] I will try to explain why in the following text.

Is it possible to claim our lives outside of financialisation? Can we think about tools to use and share ‘in conspiracy’?

I met Thornton in 2016 when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from the Netherlands together with my partner, who was hired by a tech start-up. We moved with our two bags full of Hollywood-framed dreams, and eventually we ended up in a city where according to a report by the San Francisco Federal Reserve, people who earn a lower income are more luckily to commit suicide if they live within a wealthier neigborhood. [2]

I learned very soon how in the United States of America it is so easy to get indebted: the more you spend, the more you get credit from the bank, the more you must pay back to the very same bank you get the money from. And then it repeats. This is the modality banks and the financial industry in general (and here it should be mentioned healthcare, education, housing, and all the other basic services), keep people on the hook until the end of their lives.

My socialist Italian brain was not ready to deal with that, and when I got to know Thornton’s work, it sounded like it came from the future. A future which somehow looked darker rather than brighter.

FROM THE INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY IN EXILE TO THE HOLOGRAM 

The Hologram was one of the strategies elaborated by the Intentional Community in Exile (ICE) a project developed by Thornton in Oakland, CA as part of the series ‘Heavy Breathing’, which took the form of a ‘new mutual aid society built to sustain radical, creative and political practices within a hostile economic system’. [3] Starting from a shared condition of precarity as artists and activists living constantly at high risk of eviction, the group’s attempt was to elaborate a toolkit to exit economic precarity by attempting to build human relationships instead of accumulating goods and capital. The public performance, which was the moment the group chose to present the outcome of the workshop, was announced with the following statement. As you will read, it may sound very familiar to those living in major Western cities.

‘The entire time I have lived in “x” I have been precarious and indebted. I have only survived, and thrived, because of the networks of solidarity and mutual aid I have participated in. Now, as the city, “x” gentrifies beyond the imagination, I’m being forced to leave. I don’t want to let those networks die. If people like me are going to survive in this world, we need to imagine and create better non-monetary common resources.’

I had the possibility to follow the process of the ICE because I was invited as an observer and respondent to one of the closed sessions which happened in Oakland, CA. I remember that I felt so hopeful to see what people could actually do with the excuse of making art. I was glad to be part of that group, whether at the same time I acknowledged my precarious and fragile condition as a person living far away from the usual safety net. It was painful. Ultimately, the recognition of that pain represented a change of paradigm and it caused me a certain discomfort. [4] However, as a transformative moment, I still treasure it very much. With that experience still fresh, eventually both Thornton and I left the Bay Area for different reasons. I can not speak for her, but my choice was motivated precisely by that desire of refusing to deal with that constant feeling of not being, doing, and living enough, anymore. 

'REVENGE FANTASY': THE HOLOGRAM AS AN EXPERIMENT IN RADICAL HEALTHCARE 

Thornton ended up in Greece in the middle of a crisis that, despite the attempt of the Syriza-led government to renegotiate the austerity measures imposed by the European troika, decimated the welfare system, with healthcare as one of the most curtailed services.

With the embryonic idea of The Hologram back on her mind, she encountered the Greek Solidarity Clinics movement, an experiment in radical healthcare, which consists in doctors, nurses and other health professionals, offering autonomous and free access to basic healthcare.

In the book’s introduction, Thrornton describes how painful it was to hear about the effect of the crisis on people’s lives, but also she mentions the encounter she had with a group of middle-aged women who welcomed ‘the crisis’ as a sort of relief. They referred to ‘the crisis as the birth of their new lives as radicalized people within activist communities, [...] who were now more than just workers and consumers’. [5] This passage describes precisely the same feeling I had when I first experienced the methodology of the ICE in Oakland: the thin line between oppression and liberation.

As the Social Solidarity Clinics movement is rethinking access to healthcare, at the same time is re-defining the roles of each person involved, starting from the language used to describe their process. Patients are now called ‘incomers’ for example, and they have a say in which treatment they need to receive.

Incomers meet for 90 minutes with 3 different healthcare workers: a general physician, a psychotherapist and a social worker (or a non-practitioner volunteer if no social worker is available). After the meetings incomers receive a survey which comprehends a series of questions about their broader health such as family life, nutrition, exercise and so on.

The idea is to get as much information as possible from every incomer in order to get a hologram perceived as a tridimensional image of health. [6]

If we were to stop producing money, to stop growing our human capital, we would die. Is this true? After reading the book, I believe that the answer is no.

Thanks to the experience in Greece, Thornton started developing a protocol for the development of The Hologram as an integrative care model for the distribution of mental, emotional, social and physical care where the currency is time.The person in need (who decides to become the hologram) invites 3 friends who become the Triangle. Members of the Triangle do not have to be necessarily related to each other, but they should commit to periodic meetings, either in person or online, in order to support the hologram. The text describes very precisely the process and ideas behind the rise of the hologram, it gives specific guidelines and questions to address, in order to practise it, and not getting lost while doing it. Additionally, if one is not sure how to invite someone to be part of the experiment, there is a model letter one can use to invite potential members for the Triangle.

At this point one might ask: ‘This sounds very intriguing, but when and how the healing actually happens?’. The Hologram is a way to exist without the commodification of our bodies, therefore when there is an attempt to dismantle hierarchical and authoritarian structures, such as debt for instance, I would consider it already a success. Thornton affirms that ‘the real healing (if we even want to say it!) comes when the person who is at the center of care turns outward to then care for someone else. [...] to allow people to feel that they are not broken and that their healing is bound up in the health and liberation of others’. [7]

To sustain her argument, the book includes feedback written by several participants who approached the project either as a hologram or as part of the Triangle. In particular it is worth mentioning the words of Richard Houguez, who describes his experience in approaching The Hologram as a practice in ‘radical hairdressing’: ‘I was attracted to The Hologram course because of my experiences of the hairdresser-client relationship. It is widely recognized as an extraordinary relationship in that it can often span a long duration of time, be founded on trust, proximity and intimacy, yet to be outside of models of family, friendship and romantic partnership.’ [8]

Thornton wrote a book that is a call for action, a manual to follow word by word, it represents the feasible utopia. The Hologram is an undercommoning practice [9] which uses the very same broken system we live in to imagine a new method, so everyone could thrive, but together. The result of using The Hologram is that one is not afraid to fall into depression if she gets a bad day, because she can be cured with no money, but solidarity.

At the time of this writing, we are still in the middle of a global pandemic that for a moment forced capitalist forces, such as airlines for example, to completely stop operating with the consequences of massive financial loss. Would you have ever imagined this would be possible for months? I am aware that things are still very difficult for many people in the world, but what if there is even the most remote possibility that something like The Hologram becomes a counter-virus which is going to spread around as the new collective social technology to be used?

The Hologram as a feminist peer-to-peer practice might be the vision the world needs. Those who said capitalism could not be stopped is because there has been no such vision. As Laurie Penny recently wrote: ‘these men never imagined the future beyond the image of themselves on top of the human heap, cast in gold. For weeks, the speeches from podiums have suggested that a certain amount of brutal death is a reasonable price for other people to pay to protect the current financial system.’ And then she continues describing how people are coping during the first months of the pandemic: ‘What happens is that women and carers of all genders quietly exhaust themselves filling in the gaps, trying to save as many people as possible from physical and mental collapse. The people on the front line are not fighters. They are healers and carers. The very people whose work is rarely paid in proportion to its importance are the ones we really need when the dung hits the Dyson. Nurses, doctors, cleaners, drivers. Emotional and domestic labor have never been part of the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the species—not even when they imagine its grave.’ [10]

Now that we are aware of how the apocalypse could possibly look like, we should organise and perhaps use The Hologram as the guide we need to claim our future, in a moment when access to proper healthcare does not seem so obvious for an increasing number of people everywhere.

I would like to conclude with a passage taken from the Wikipedia Entry from the Future chapter, which sounds less like an oracle considering the circumstances we live in: ‘But quickly The Hologram morphed into a type of party-line, where women, trans people and revolutionaries of all sorts sat on couches, at home, all over the world as they discussed how good they felt about the erasure of power.’ [11]

INTRODUCTION

The Hologram. Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-pandemic Future by Cassie Thornton is not only a book that accompanies an artist’s project. It is the result of years of practice, writing, research, physical and mental exercises around how capitalism is making the majority of people’s life miserable. It can also be a manual for practicing social activism, and a sci-fi short story, all at the same time. Yet all those different formats meet in something that we usually call art, but in this case art that operates on a 1:1 scale. [1] I will try to explain why in the following text.

Is it possible to claim our lives outside of financialisation? Can we think about tools to use and share ‘in conspiracy’?

I met Thornton in 2016 when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from the Netherlands together with my partner, who was hired by a tech start-up. We moved with our two bags full of Hollywood-framed dreams, and eventually we ended up in a city where according to a report by the San Francisco Federal Reserve, people who earn a lower income are more luckily to commit suicide if they live within a wealthier neigborhood. [2]

I learned very soon how in the United States of America it is so easy to get indebted: the more you spend, the more you get credit from the bank, the more you must pay back to the very same bank you get the money from. And then it repeats. This is the modality banks and the financial industry in general (and here it should be mentioned healthcare, education, housing, and all the other basic services), keep people on the hook until the end of their lives.

My socialist Italian brain was not ready to deal with that, and when I got to know Thornton’s work, it sounded like it came from the future. A future which somehow looked darker rather than brighter.

FROM THE INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY IN EXILE TO THE HOLOGRAM 

The Hologram was one of the strategies elaborated by the Intentional Community in Exile (ICE) a project developed by Thornton in Oakland, CA as part of the series ‘Heavy Breathing’, which took the form of a ‘new mutual aid society built to sustain radical, creative and political practices within a hostile economic system’. [3] Starting from a shared condition of precarity as artists and activists living constantly at high risk of eviction, the group’s attempt was to elaborate a toolkit to exit economic precarity by attempting to build human relationships instead of accumulating goods and capital. The public performance, which was the moment the group chose to present the outcome of the workshop, was announced with the following statement. As you will read, it may sound very familiar to those living in major Western cities.

‘The entire time I have lived in “x” I have been precarious and indebted. I have only survived, and thrived, because of the networks of solidarity and mutual aid I have participated in. Now, as the city, “x” gentrifies beyond the imagination, I’m being forced to leave. I don’t want to let those networks die. If people like me are going to survive in this world, we need to imagine and create better non-monetary common resources.’

I had the possibility to follow the process of the ICE because I was invited as an observer and respondent to one of the closed sessions which happened in Oakland, CA. I remember that I felt so hopeful to see what people could actually do with the excuse of making art. I was glad to be part of that group, whether at the same time I acknowledged my precarious and fragile condition as a person living far away from the usual safety net. It was painful. Ultimately, the recognition of that pain represented a change of paradigm and it caused me a certain discomfort. [4] However, as a transformative moment, I still treasure it very much. With that experience still fresh, eventually both Thornton and I left the Bay Area for different reasons. I can not speak for her, but my choice was motivated precisely by that desire of refusing to deal with that constant feeling of not being, doing, and living enough, anymore. 

'REVENGE FANTASY': THE HOLOGRAM AS AN EXPERIMENT IN RADICAL HEALTHCARE

Thornton ended up in Greece in the middle of a crisis that, despite the attempt of the Syriza-led government to renegotiate the austerity measures imposed by the European troika, decimated the welfare system, with healthcare as one of the most curtailed services.

With the embryonic idea of The Hologram back on her mind, she encountered the Greek Solidarity Clinics movement, an experiment in radical healthcare, which consists in doctors, nurses and other health professionals, offering autonomous and free access to basic healthcare.

In the book’s introduction, Thrornton describes how painful it was to hear about the effect of the crisis on people’s lives, but also she mentions the encounter she had with a group of middle-aged women who welcomed ‘the crisis’ as a sort of relief. They referred to ‘the crisis as the birth of their new lives as radicalized people within activist communities, [...] who were now more than just workers and consumers’. [5] This passage describes precisely the same feeling I had when I first experienced the methodology of the ICE in Oakland: the thin line between oppression and liberation.

As the Social Solidarity Clinics movement is rethinking access to healthcare, at the same time is re-defining the roles of each person involved, starting from the language used to describe their process. Patients are now called ‘incomers’ for example, and they have a say in which treatment they need to receive.

Incomers meet for 90 minutes with 3 different healthcare workers: a general physician, a psychotherapist and a social worker (or a non-practitioner volunteer if no social worker is available). After the meetings incomers receive a survey which comprehends a series of questions about their broader health such as family life, nutrition, exercise and so on.

The idea is to get as much information as possible from every incomer in order to get a hologram perceived as a tridimensional image of health. [6]

If we were to stop producing money, to stop growing our human capital, we would die. Is this true? After reading the book, I believe that the answer is no.

Thanks to the experience in Greece, Thornton started developing a protocol for the development of The Hologram as an integrative care model for the distribution of mental, emotional, social and physical care where the currency is time.The person in need (who decides to become the hologram) invites 3 friends who become the Triangle. Members of the Triangle do not have to be necessarily related to each other, but they should commit to periodic meetings, either in person or online, in order to support the hologram. The text describes very precisely the process and ideas behind the rise of the hologram, it gives specific guidelines and questions to address, in order to practise it, and not getting lost while doing it. Additionally, if one is not sure how to invite someone to be part of the experiment, there is a model letter one can use to invite potential members for the Triangle.

At this point one might ask: ‘This sounds very intriguing, but when and how the healing actually happens?’. The Hologram is a way to exist without the commodification of our bodies, therefore when there is an attempt to dismantle hierarchical and authoritarian structures, such as debt for instance, I would consider it already a success. Thornton affirms that ‘the real healing (if we even want to say it!) comes when the person who is at the center of care turns outward to then care for someone else. [...] to allow people to feel that they are not broken and that their healing is bound up in the health and liberation of others’. [7]

To sustain her argument, the book includes feedback written by several participants who approached the project either as a hologram or as part of the Triangle. In particular it is worth mentioning the words of Richard Houguez, who describes his experience in approaching The Hologram as a practice in ‘radical hairdressing’: ‘I was attracted to The Hologram course because of my experiences of the hairdresser-client relationship. It is widely recognized as an extraordinary relationship in that it can often span a long duration of time, be founded on trust, proximity and intimacy, yet to be outside of models of family, friendship and romantic partnership.’ [8]

Thornton wrote a book that is a call for action, a manual to follow word by word, it represents the feasible utopia. The Hologram is an undercommoning practice [9] which uses the very same broken system we live in to imagine a new method, so everyone could thrive, but together. The result of using The Hologram is that one is not afraid to fall into depression if she gets a bad day, because she can be cured with no money, but solidarity.

At the time of this writing, we are still in the middle of a global pandemic that for a moment forced capitalist forces, such as airlines for example, to completely stop operating with the consequences of massive financial loss. Would you have ever imagined this would be possible for months? I am aware that things are still very difficult for many people in the world, but what if there is even the most remote possibility that something like The Hologram becomes a counter-virus which is going to spread around as the new collective social technology to be used?

The Hologram as a feminist peer-to-peer practice might be the vision the world needs. Those who said capitalism could not be stopped is because there has been no such vision. As Laurie Penny recently wrote: ‘these men never imagined the future beyond the image of themselves on top of the human heap, cast in gold. For weeks, the speeches from podiums have suggested that a certain amount of brutal death is a reasonable price for other people to pay to protect the current financial system.’ And then she continues describing how people are coping during the first months of the pandemic: ‘What happens is that women and carers of all genders quietly exhaust themselves filling in the gaps, trying to save as many people as possible from physical and mental collapse. The people on the front line are not fighters. They are healers and carers. The very people whose work is rarely paid in proportion to its importance are the ones we really need when the dung hits the Dyson. Nurses, doctors, cleaners, drivers. Emotional and domestic labor have never been part of the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the species—not even when they imagine its grave.’ [10]

Now that we are aware of how the apocalypse could possibly look like, we should organise and perhaps use The Hologram as the guide we need to claim our future, in a moment when access to proper healthcare does not seem so obvious for an increasing number of people everywhere.

I would like to conclude with a passage taken from the Wikipedia Entry from the Future chapter, which sounds less like an oracle considering the circumstances we live in: ‘But quickly The Hologram morphed into a type of party-line, where women, trans people and revolutionaries of all sorts sat on couches, at home, all over the world as they discussed how good they felt about the erasure of power.’ [11]

INTRODUCTION

The Hologram. Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-pandemic Future by Cassie Thornton is not only a book that accompanies an artist’s project. It is the result of years of practice, writing, research, physical and mental exercises around how capitalism is making the majority of people’s life miserable. It can also be a manual for practicing social activism, and a sci-fi short story, all at the same time. Yet all those different formats meet in something that we usually call art, but in this case art that operates on a 1:1 scale. [1] I will try to explain why in the following text.

Is it possible to claim our lives outside of financialisation? Can we think about tools to use and share ‘in conspiracy’?

I met Thornton in 2016 when I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from the Netherlands together with my partner, who was hired by a tech start-up. We moved with our two bags full of Hollywood-framed dreams, and eventually we ended up in a city where according to a report by the San Francisco Federal Reserve, people who earn a lower income are more luckily to commit suicide if they live within a wealthier neigborhood. [2]

I learned very soon how in the United States of America it is so easy to get indebted: the more you spend, the more you get credit from the bank, the more you must pay back to the very same bank you get the money from. And then it repeats. This is the modality banks and the financial industry in general (and here it should be mentioned healthcare, education, housing, and all the other basic services), keep people on the hook until the end of their lives.

My socialist Italian brain was not ready to deal with that, and when I got to know Thornton’s work, it sounded like it came from the future. A future which somehow looked darker rather than brighter.

FROM THE INTENTIONAL COMMUNITY IN EXILE TO THE HOLOGRAM

The Hologram was one of the strategies elaborated by the Intentional Community in Exile (ICE) a project developed by Thornton in Oakland, CA as part of the series ‘Heavy Breathing’, which took the form of a ‘new mutual aid society built to sustain radical, creative and political practices within a hostile economic system’. [3] Starting from a shared condition of precarity as artists and activists living constantly at high risk of eviction, the group’s attempt was to elaborate a toolkit to exit economic precarity by attempting to build human relationships instead of accumulating goods and capital. The public performance, which was the moment the group chose to present the outcome of the workshop, was announced with the following statement. As you will read, it may sound very familiar to those living in major Western cities.

‘The entire time I have lived in “x” I have been precarious and indebted. I have only survived, and thrived, because of the networks of solidarity and mutual aid I have participated in. Now, as the city, “x” gentrifies beyond the imagination, I’m being forced to leave. I don’t want to let those networks die. If people like me are going to survive in this world, we need to imagine and create better non-monetary common resources.’

I had the possibility to follow the process of the ICE because I was invited as an observer and respondent to one of the closed sessions which happened in Oakland, CA. I remember that I felt so hopeful to see what people could actually do with the excuse of making art. I was glad to be part of that group, whether at the same time I acknowledged my precarious and fragile condition as a person living far away from the usual safety net. It was painful. Ultimately, the recognition of that pain represented a change of paradigm and it caused me a certain discomfort. [4] However, as a transformative moment, I still treasure it very much. With that experience still fresh, eventually both Thornton and I left the Bay Area for different reasons. I can not speak for her, but my choice was motivated precisely by that desire of refusing to deal with that constant feeling of not being, doing, and living enough, anymore. 

'REVENGE FANTASY':
THE HOLOGRAM AS AN EXPERIMENT IN RADICAL HEALTHCARE

Thornton ended up in Greece in the middle of a crisis that, despite the attempt of the Syriza-led government to renegotiate the austerity measures imposed by the European troika, decimated the welfare system, with healthcare as one of the most curtailed services.

With the embryonic idea of The Hologram back on her mind, she encountered the Greek Solidarity Clinics movement, an experiment in radical healthcare, which consists in doctors, nurses and other health professionals, offering autonomous and free access to basic healthcare.

In the book’s introduction, Thrornton describes how painful it was to hear about the effect of the crisis on people’s lives, but also she mentions the encounter she had with a group of middle-aged women who welcomed ‘the crisis’ as a sort of relief. They referred to ‘the crisis as the birth of their new lives as radicalized people within activist communities, [...] who were now more than just workers and consumers’. [5] This passage describes precisely the same feeling I had when I first experienced the methodology of the ICE in Oakland: the thin line between oppression and liberation.

As the Social Solidarity Clinics movement is rethinking access to healthcare, at the same time is re-defining the roles of each person involved, starting from the language used to describe their process. Patients are now called ‘incomers’ for example, and they have a say in which treatment they need to receive.

Incomers meet for 90 minutes with 3 different healthcare workers: a general physician, a psychotherapist and a social worker (or a non-practitioner volunteer if no social worker is available). After the meetings incomers receive a survey which comprehends a series of questions about their broader health such as family life, nutrition, exercise and so on.

The idea is to get as much information as possible from every incomer in order to get a hologram perceived as a tridimensional image of health. [6]

If we were to stop producing money, to stop growing our human capital, we would die. Is this true? After reading the book, I believe that the answer is no.

Thanks to the experience in Greece, Thornton started developing a protocol for the development of The Hologram as an integrative care model for the distribution of mental, emotional, social and physical care where the currency is time.The person in need (who decides to become the hologram) invites 3 friends who become the Triangle. Members of the Triangle do not have to be necessarily related to each other, but they should commit to periodic meetings, either in person or online, in order to support the hologram. The text describes very precisely the process and ideas behind the rise of the hologram, it gives specific guidelines and questions to address, in order to practise it, and not getting lost while doing it. Additionally, if one is not sure how to invite someone to be part of the experiment, there is a model letter one can use to invite potential members for the Triangle.

At this point one might ask: ‘This sounds very intriguing, but when and how the healing actually happens?’. The Hologram is a way to exist without the commodification of our bodies, therefore when there is an attempt to dismantle hierarchical and authoritarian structures, such as debt for instance, I would consider it already a success. Thornton affirms that ‘the real healing (if we even want to say it!) comes when the person who is at the center of care turns outward to then care for someone else. [...] to allow people to feel that they are not broken and that their healing is bound up in the health and liberation of others’. [7]

To sustain her argument, the book includes feedback written by several participants who approached the project either as a hologram or as part of the Triangle. In particular it is worth mentioning the words of Richard Houguez, who describes his experience in approaching The Hologram as a practice in ‘radical hairdressing’: ‘I was attracted to The Hologram course because of my experiences of the hairdresser-client relationship. It is widely recognized as an extraordinary relationship in that it can often span a long duration of time, be founded on trust, proximity and intimacy, yet to be outside of models of family, friendship and romantic partnership.’ [8]

Thornton wrote a book that is a call for action, a manual to follow word by word, it represents the feasible utopia. The Hologram is an undercommoning practice [9] which uses the very same broken system we live in to imagine a new method, so everyone could thrive, but together. The result of using The Hologram is that one is not afraid to fall into depression if she gets a bad day, because she can be cured with no money, but solidarity.

At the time of this writing, we are still in the middle of a global pandemic that for a moment forced capitalist forces, such as airlines for example, to completely stop operating with the consequences of massive financial loss. Would you have ever imagined this would be possible for months? I am aware that things are still very difficult for many people in the world, but what if there is even the most remote possibility that something like The Hologram becomes a counter-virus which is going to spread around as the new collective social technology to be used?

The Hologram as a feminist peer-to-peer practice might be the vision the world needs. Those who said capitalism could not be stopped is because there has been no such vision. As Laurie Penny recently wrote: ‘these men never imagined the future beyond the image of themselves on top of the human heap, cast in gold. For weeks, the speeches from podiums have suggested that a certain amount of brutal death is a reasonable price for other people to pay to protect the current financial system.’ And then she continues describing how people are coping during the first months of the pandemic: ‘What happens is that women and carers of all genders quietly exhaust themselves filling in the gaps, trying to save as many people as possible from physical and mental collapse. The people on the front line are not fighters. They are healers and carers. The very people whose work is rarely paid in proportion to its importance are the ones we really need when the dung hits the Dyson. Nurses, doctors, cleaners, drivers. Emotional and domestic labor have never been part of the grand story men have told themselves about the destiny of the species—not even when they imagine its grave.’ [10]

Now that we are aware of how the apocalypse could possibly look like, we should organise and perhaps use The Hologram as the guide we need to claim our future, in a moment when access to proper healthcare does not seem so obvious for an increasing number of people everywhere.

I would like to conclude with a passage taken from the Wikipedia Entry from the Future chapter, which sounds less like an oracle considering the circumstances we live in: ‘But quickly The Hologram morphed into a type of party-line, where women, trans people and revolutionaries of all sorts sat on couches, at home, all over the world as they discussed how good they felt about the erasure of power.’ [11]

REFERENCES

[1] 1:1 scale is a definition theorised by Stephen Wright in the book Toward a Lexicon of Usership, (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013) which explain how certain kind of practices do not use any surrogate, representation or object to situate themselves into the (art) world. Being either a coffee company, or in our case an alternative healthcare system, those projects are what they are, and their art proposition as well.

[2] Cassie Thornton, “Feminist Economics and the People’s Apocalypse.” Guts, no. 8 (2017). http://gutsmagazine.ca/feminist-economics/ Accessed 24 September 2020. 

REFERENCES

[1] 1:1 scale is a definition theorised by Stephen Wright in the book Toward a Lexicon of Usership, (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013) which explain how certain kind of practices do not use any surrogate, representation or object to situate themselves into the (art) world. Being either a coffee company, or in our case an alternative healthcare system, those projects are what they are, and their art proposition as well.

[2] Cassie Thornton, “Feminist Economics and the People’s Apocalypse.” Guts, no. 8 (2017).
http://gutsmagazine.ca/feminist-economics/
Accessed 24 September 2020. 

REFERENCES

[1] 1:1 scale is a definition theorised by Stephen Wright in the book Toward a Lexicon of Usership, (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013) which explain how certain kind of practices do not use any surrogate, representation or object to situate themselves into the (art) world. Being either a coffee company, or in our case an alternative healthcare system, those projects are what they are, and their art proposition as well.

[2] Cassie Thornton, “Feminist Economics and the People’s Apocalypse.” Guts, no. 8 (2017). http://gutsmagazine.ca/feminist-economics/ Accessed 24 September 2020. 

REFERENCES

[1] 1:1 scale is a definition theorised by Stephen Wright in the book Toward a Lexicon of Usership, (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013) which explain how certain kind of practices do not use any surrogate, representation or object to situate themselves into the (art) world. Being either a coffee company, or in our case an alternative healthcare system, those projects are what they are, and their art proposition as well.

[2] Cassie Thornton, “Feminist Economics and the People’s Apocalypse.” Guts, no. 8 (2017). http://gutsmagazine.ca/feminist-economics/
Accessed 24 September 2020. 

REFERENCES

[1] 1:1 scale is a definition theorised by Stephen Wright in the book Toward a Lexicon of Usership, (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013) which explain how certain kind of practices do not use any surrogate, representation or object to situate themselves into the (art) world. Being either a coffee company, or in our case an alternative healthcare system, those projects are what they are, and their art proposition as well.

[2] Cassie Thornton, “Feminist Economics and the People’s Apocalypse.” Guts, no. 8 (2017). http://gutsmagazine.ca/feminist-economics/ Accessed 24 September 2020.