The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future

by Cassie Thornton

In an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and to die, with neoliberal 'self-care' offering little more than a bandaid, how can we take health and care back into our hands? In The Hologram, Cassie Thornton puts forward a bold vision for revolutionary a viral, peer-to-peer feminist health network. The premise is three people - a 'triangle' - meet on a regular basis, digitally or in person, to focus on the physical, mental and social health of a fourth - the 'hologram'. The hologram, in turn, teaches their caregivers how to give and also receive care; each member of their triangle becomes a hologram for another, different triangle, and so the system expands. Drawing on radical models developed in the Greek solidarity clinics during a decade of crisis, and directly engaging with discussions around mutual aid and the coronavirus pandemic, The Hologram develops the skills and relationships we desperately need for the anti-capitalist struggles of the present, and the post-capitalist society of the future. One part art, one part activism, one part science fiction, this book offers the reader a guide to establishing a Hologram network as well as reflections on this cooperative work in progress.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Health, Politics, Theory

96 pages, Paperback

Published July 27, 2020

Reviews

[Amanda Lichtenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is all kinds of heartbreak — and hope. I've had the pleasure of connecting with the author, Cassie Thornton, a few times throughout my 30s through mutual friends and I remember her once describing her vision for The Hologram, but reading and seeing it concretized in both theory and practice has been quite moving and provocative. This book will inevitably ask you to ponder difficult questions about giving and receiving care within a fiercely capitalist system. The concept emerged way before the pandemic, but when it upended our collective lives, the participatory system of networked care that Cassie envisioned became even more urgent and necessary, as the systems within which we've all tried to navigate to varying degrees of success buckled under the weight of our immense needs. Inspired my alternative models of care necessitated by the economic collapse in Greece, The Hologram describes a world in which a "hologram" (person) selects three individuals each responsible for a realm of health to meet regularly and talk so that when a big decision of any kind comes up, the group is aware-enough of the hologram's patterns and concerns to make informed decisions. This exchange of care is bound up in the fact that while the hologram is a receiver-only in one group, they become a member of a "triangle" for another hologram separate but linked up with an ever-widening network of caregivers and receivers. The concept alone is a provocation against everything we've been taught to believe about what we give and receive in a capitalist system. Reading parts of this, I balked at some of the imaginings and expectations of a vision of care pulled apart and re-gridded on a new plane of existence where money and work do not exist -- or at least are not centered in the equation of time, space and life. It was heartbreaking for me me to think about how often I've played the role of a "triangle" within friend groups, but very rarely the "hologram," actively, in fact, denying that level of care or intimacy to take place as a form of self-protection and perceived self-preservation. This was a very humbling feeling to stumble upon in this read. It was also heart-wrenching for me to realize while reading this that the whole project is predicated on Cassie's profound experience of disenfranchised states of non-care throughout her life and of experiencing chronic debt and money anxiety from a very young age, growing up in exurbs of Chicago, peering into windows of the rich with both longing and disgust, and getting the message over and over again that she was somehow a failure for living with such precarity for most of her life. This thread of feeling led to inquiry such as "How do we imagine our own care, before or after an emergency, within a set of completely unstable conditions?" The book offers several thinking, feeling and doing exercises to sort through some of these basic and related questions around wish-making and wanting within the apocalypse ever-unfolding before our tired eyes. Reading Cassie's thoughts on the evolution of her social practice work has been fascinating, but I especially loved reading the speculative-fictionalized Wikipedia entry of this project from the future (after the US collapses from the weight of its impossible-to-sustain-brutality). And also hearing from others who participated in or have studied more closely the evolution of this work over time. The essay by Magdalena Jadwiga Hartelova was especially insightful in terms of articulating the context within this work has emerged and where it might go, describing a revolution built on transformed relationships and the activity of committing time to building "worlds underneath" this one. The project focuses on interdependency offers a "different, generative understanding of debt, dependence and what it might mean to make in investment" in our social wealth. This, of course, is a gargantuan undertaking of the mind-body-spirit-soul, and one that requires an enormous amount of energy and will to steer the collective body further and further away from brutality and pain and closer and closer to the healing shore. I will be thinking about the ideas in this book for years and years to come, and wonder if one day I can throw myself into this revolutionary project myself.

[Frank Keizer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This struck me, even if I, having healthcare myself, am not in the same precarious position. Inspired by the Greek Solidarity Clinics in the wake of imposed austerity and financial breakdown (or rather, colonization), Cassie Thornton devises a peer-to-peer health system that could work in the US context where people are even more pressed for time and where squatting is no option without running into law enforcement quickly. Far from a call to hole up and selfcare, this book is actually an acute cry to thoroughly politicize mental, physical and social health and to unlearn patterns - around individualized debt and the refusal to ask for support - that are deeply entwined with capitalist profitmaking and accumulation. The concept of the hologram - a network of three people who care for a third person - predates COVID-19 but becomes even more acute now. This crisis is ongoing, connected to other crises and calls for transformation and building a world 'underneath this one' where we can thrive. How this is made to last is perhaps one that only comes up under capitalism, but it's a hopeful book nonetheless.

[javisitu · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 :)

El sitio del que parte el libro es bastante interesante: los procesos de autoorganización popular en el ámbito de la salud primaria tras la crisis en Grecia y el quiebre del sistema sanitario. Lo que pasa es que la propuesta de la tía es bastante eeuu y clase media, como si nos tuviera todavía que convencer que hay algo más allá de la sanidad privada. Además, su propuesta se dibuja en un escenario individualista como es eeuu. Lo más interesante vuelve al final: cómo las comunidades migrantes de periferias de las ciudades de eeuu y en latam han hibridado esta propuesta como sus propias prácticas de cuidados y de autoacompañamiento dentro de espacios de organización

[Jillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's about being lost, sick and disconnected in a capitalist world. But, luckily, it doesn't leave us there, wondering, angry. It is workbook and art project based on wholistic, communal health care system triangles, formed independently to help a person through their life, modelled on mutual aid clinics that sprung up in crevices and between-spaces in post-austerity Greece.

[Julia Wagner]

I love this proposal for anti-capitalist social infrastructure