Thornton, Cassie. _The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future_. Vagabonds 002. London: Pluto Press, 2020. # Progressive Summary This book is a four-part course in how to rebuild mutual solidarity, organised around the themes of trust, wishes, time and patterns. It prepares us for the massive battle to save the world from capitalism. # Key Points We are living in a crisis created by a "global capitalism that puts its own reproduction ahead of ours." It's a culture that "bases dignity on our ability to pay for services." It is "a brilliant technology of weaponized avoidance", helping us avoid 3 basic truths: 1. Humans are fundamentally cooperative and interdependent. 2. We live on land and are part of that land. 3. We will die. In 2017, she was inspired by an initiative in Greece called the Group for a Different Medicine (GDM) which helped a worker co-operative called VIO.ME start their own health center called Workers' Health Centre (WHC). In the WHC, patients are known as incomers. They are invited to become a member of the clinic's governing assembly. > In the writing of the GDM the incomer’s active participation in their own health and community is itself a central form of their health treatment. The healing begins by undoing the subordination and alienation they have experienced not only in capitalist society but also in the conventional medical system where they are typically seen either as a body, or a worker, or a person, but never as all three at once. There were "four endeavors for a different medicine": - A new reception protocol that greets incomers in empowering ways. Incomers are encouraged to be discerning and proactive about their own needs, and to internalize the values of the clinic (the power of solidarity). - Joint sessions that put providers and receivers of care in a new context that eroded divisions and hierarchy. - Organizing group meetings for people with diabetes. For 10 months, anyone could come in and talk about every aspect of their disease. At the end of 10 months, all members had their diabetes under control, and two had major life changes. - An integrative model in which incomers meet with three health practitioners on their first 90-minute visit: a general physician, a psychotherapist and a social worker. By asking lots of holistic questions about the incomers' situation, the practitioners try to create a "hologram" of the person. ## Trust To rebuild our capacity to trust each other, we have to unlearn 3 bad lessons: - Bad support - Our experiences of receiving bad support (support that turned out to be even more costly than the benefits) makes us unwilling to seek support, or worse, to provide bad support ourselves - Atrophy of the sharing muscle - Sharing hardcore resources is a muscle that has to be exercised. Because it is so undervalued, we are prone to assume that it is easy. - Falienation - If we think that we have personally failed, we are unlikely to speak up and connect with others. Even if we are successful, we may be alienated by our inability to provision for ourselves without paying for it. ## Wishes We are pre-disposed to pay more attention to problems. Unfortunately, this means we spend very little energy on wishing and visioning. In the context of neoliberal capitalism, wishing can seem like a distraction from crisis management and survival. For the Hologram, wishing is a revolutionary act. ## Time Under capitalism, time is the most valuable resource, apart from our bodies. The hardest part about the Hologram project is being able to set aside time for it, time that could otherwise be spent for work, survival or pleasure. The Hologram invites us to think about how we might stay in relationship with each other over time, and how we can grow our holograms fractally over time. This happens in 3 stages: 1. You are the Hologram (by inviting 3 people to act as your triangle) 2. You care for your caretakers (by encouraging them to form their own triangles) 3. You become triangular (by becoming part of someone else's triangle) # Resonances # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes ## Greek Solidarity Clinics > I met a group of middle-aged women who cited “the crisis” as the birth of their new lives as radicalized people within activist communities, people who had found a purpose, who were now more than just workers and consumers. They felt powerful, connected and interdependent for the first time. To them, there have always been problems, but after they witnessed massive unemployment, huge taxes, home foreclosures and cuts to all public services they were forced to deal with what was earlier hidden. > As I sat in the Solidarity Clinic waiting rooms, talked with doctors, observed assemblies and accompanied incomers as they met with practitioners, I learned that most of the care given didn’t need professional expertise—it was human connection, the provision of empathy and attention within what otherwise feels like an uncaring and alienating world where “the crisis” becomes lodged in the body. > Based on my study of the Workers’ Health Center, I am striving to create a platform for collective healthcare, accountability and solidarity that can serve anyone falling between the widening cracks of highly regulated capitalist police states, regardless of where they live. ## Four part course in Holography > At its broadest and most ambitious scale The Hologram is intended as an open-source, peer-topeer, viral social technology for dehabituating humans from capitalism. Capitalism is not only an economic system, it’s a cultural and social system as well, which deeply influences how we relate to one another, how we interact, how we imagine ourselves and one another, even how we talk and feel. The Hologram relies on us disentangling ourselves from capitalism’s influence, and that of white supremacy, colonialism, (cis hetero) patriarchy and other systems of domination, and it also helps us in this untangling. > > For this reason, in addition to the social practices involved in forming groups of four and doing the work of “social holography,” The Hologram is also a delivery mechanism for ideas about how we can reinvent our world by developing new daily habits that incorporate radical re-interpretations of these four themes: Trust, wishes, time, and patterns. ## Trust > We’re constantly told to trust corporations and politicians we know are ripping us off just so we don’t have to learn to trust ourselves and one another. ### Bad support > Bad support, which is usually given by corporations but also sometimes by austerity-minded governments and institutions, begins when you’re led to believe that you are receiving some kind of help that will allow you to thrive, but then this “help” reveals itself to take more than it ever gives. Often and obviously this comes in the form of extortionate debt, a life-line that’s actually a noose. But it can come in other forms too: a dream job that turns into a nightmare, etc. The worst part of this lesson is that it trains us to expect bad support or unexpected punishment when we are most in need, so we may start to avoid seeking any kind of support and believe in self-reliance which is impossible for a cooperative species. Worse still, we may reproduce this pattern when we are asked for support, because it is all we know: we become bad support for others. This may happen because we fear our support for others will be bad and so we never learn to offer it. Or when we offer support, we’re so scared of making a mistake that we overdo it and exhaust ourselves. Or offer non-transformative support that maintains the status quo. ### Atrophy of the sharing muscle > If we can only accept help from corporations or institutions, we lose the skills and practices involved in asking for and offering help from people in our community. Having relationships where our central resources are carefully shared is fundamentally intuitive to humans, a cooperative species. But like language, which must be learned, these practices are far from innate. They take energy, time and practice. Central resources include housing, money and our skilled labor. Sharing them requires lifelong practices of communication and negotiation. Unfortunately, since sharing is so devalued in this society, we are led to believe that it’s easy or automatic. But when we do not actively practice sharing our resources we lose the muscles needed to do so, and we may even forget that this kind of hardcore interdependence is possible or desirable. Indeed, it can seem like a threat. Attention and care are also central resources and, while we all have the capacity to produce and receive them, it’s not automatic and requires practice and structure. > We are in for the fight of our lives in the years to come to save the world from capitalism, but whatever post-capitalism we hope to build can’t be magicked into existence and will not be handed to us. To better be able to join the struggle for it, and to prepare to take our place within it as cooperative, interconnected animals, we need to practice new forms of trust. It is simple as an idea and much harder as a practice because we have all been taught toxic lessons. So, experimenting with sharing hardcore resources, starting with time and energy, may feel uncomfortable or dangerous. It is only with repetition and persistence that we can “remember” or rebuild some of these skills that we had to shed to survive a hyper individualistic financial landscape. ### Falienation > If we don’t have experiences sharing resources, or sharing our stories of struggle in an unfair financial and social landscape, we may feel like we alone are failures: failienation. > > If we feel that our inability to thrive is our personal responsibility and that we alone have failed (instead of realizing that the systems of support have failed all of us), we may not want to share our story or ask for help because we assume that we would be a burden on other people (if we assume they are not feeling like failures themselves). This is a self-defeating defense mechanism and often manifests in everyday life as being anti-social or even incurious toward others. > > It’s vital to recognize that falienation also affects the fortunate. Let’s say that you’ve worked out a way to survive well enough in this brutal financial landscape and your material needs are covered or exceeded. This can be alienating in part because your security comes largely from your ability to purchase what you need, rather than relying on others, and partly because you are living in a society where some people’s comfort comes at the expense of others. In a system where only some are permitted to thrive we come to resent one another in all directions, which maximizes distrust and makes it even harder to learn to share central resources. ## Wishes > Sybille Peters is an artist who has theorized wishes as a fundamental part of rigorous research practices. > I think that in some way we often use our own personal crises as a distraction when we are afraid of what we might wish for. So long avoided in the name of survival, we may not know our wishes, or we may not recognize them, especially if our wishes do not comply with what is on offer. > Making wishes in the apocalypse feels risky. But maybe the apocalypse in one way came from too many neglected wishes. > I don’t think wishes can live in a vacuum. Wishes are social. We create them together as we survive and learn what we want to escape and what we want to go toward. We hold them together. > This project asks all participants to uphold a forceful optimism: we will survive better together. We can create a world where our wishes are contingent on each other’s fulfillment, not on endless competition. And we suspect that the wishes we each have, when put together, can give us the energy and sustenance we need to engage in the ongoing crisis. We can solve each other’s problems as we go toward our dreams, and getting closer to what we want will give us the energy to continue to deal with the never-ending list of emergencies. ## Time > Capitalism is, among other things, a brilliant technology of weaponized avoidance. For our purposes, it helps us avoid at least three basic truths: > > 1. Humans are fundamentally cooperative and interdependent. > 2. We live on land and are part of that land. > 3. We will die. > > What would it mean to live without forgetting these truths? > If time is money, then being the hologram, or participating in a Hologram, is like burning money. It’s a sacrifice that reveals your divestment from the accelerationist value system. Through the sacrifice we become different animals that can survive and see beyond the current economic landscape. If we use this collective work as an excuse to disentangle from capitalism’s way of valuing our time, and of valuing us, we may begin to see what we are or what we could become without it. ## Patterns > According to an abolitionist framework, whenever broken systems crumble we have two types of work to do. One is to support the destruction of what isn’t working and perhaps mourn its loss. The other is to create cooperative systems and ways of living that will work in the future and allow us to thrive. > We are able to reproduce our lives within capitalism and other systems by  forming habits of behavior, of thought, of hope, of fear and of relationship.  These habits also do their part to reproduce those broader systems. These sys-  tems keep us so busy and on edge of survival (physical, emotional, social) that  we rarely have the consistency of time to examine let alone change our habits,  even if they don’t actually serve us well. > Within capitalism we have habituated ourselves to imagine that when we receive something, even if it’s a life-giving object or service, we are obligated to reciprocate something considered to be of equal value, whether it is for chewing gum or toothpaste, massage or rent. Maybe the impulse for fairness comes from a good place, but in many ways this habit is deeply unhelpful. For instance, most of our most important relationships, with friends or parents, are necessarily unequal in terms of the time, energy and “resources” one of us commits relative to the other. We have programmed ourselves to imagine that you must give something equivalent to what you receive, but that’s not always appropriate. Sometimes people give and they don’t want anything in return. In fact, this inclination is absolutely essential to society and life. It works because, as the saying goes, what goes around comes around: giving without the need for reciprocal exchange is something we all benefit from and we all do, but not always with the same people. But in spite of the fact this is central to our lives, it’s hard to see and trust because our brains are so patterned by our experience of capitalism that insists that all value comes from competitive or at least equivalent exchange. We feel compelled to give, or even guilty if we don’t reciprocate. This is a big, gross pattern. > The Hologram necessarily relies on and makes possible the creation of new patterns. When three people turn their care and attention on one it fundamentally challenges many of the habits we have formed to survive under capitalism. We cannot change our habits alone. It is partly for this reason that we consider the hologram a teacher and not just a subject of care: when she allows herself the vulnerability and generosity to accept help in identifying, breaking and forming new patterns, she offers an opportunity for the whole triangle to learn how such a process might work. Even accepting such care, or learning to provide it, necessarily means we have to break many patterns and habits. In The Hologram we quite literally rewire our brains, together. ## Appendix > ... the revolution toward which The Hologram strives is not one confined to the dream of able bodies marching triumphantly through the streets in a single event under a great leader. It is, rather, a revolution built on transformed relationships and the activity of commiting time to building “worlds underneath this one.”