“A community is the mental and spiritual connection of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives.”
work. Create.connect. thrive.
A work club. In your neighborhood. Filled with soul.
Life Thrives
in the analog
Tillage is a better way to work, create, connect, and thrive in San Francisco. A work club. In your neighborhood. Filled with soul. Parkside, we are coming to you first. Opening late spring/early summer.
The Membership benefits:
- Walking distance from where you live; coming first to Parkside
- 24/7 access
- Signal-free zones
- Library for reading, writing, & contemplation
- Office for deep work, calls, & small meetings
- Lounge for connecting & conversations
- Onsite spiritual director & vocational coach
- Private meeting spaces
- Sound-proof phone booths
- Curated member-only events
Tillage is obsessed with cultivating spaces for thriving in San Francisco through intentionality, proximity, and durability. You might say we cultivate serendipity. But we wouldn’t be here in this moment without our own ever-growing list of friends supporting us as we build Tillage in San Francisco.
“A community is the mental and spiritual connection of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives.”
Wendell Berry
Our Addiction
to Optimization
Leads to Isolation
We have whittled away our souls on the altar of more.
We have asked to be sorted, sifted, and filtered into affinity groups, cohorts, and echo chambers of like-minded souls.
We wrap our lives in technology, ceding our autonomy to an algorithm that can optimize our lives — when to produce, when to sleep, what to eat, who to date, what to believe, what to buy, and ultimately, when to die.
Playlists personalized just for me.
Ads curated just for me.
Internet “truth” made just for me.
Soon, music, movies, and books generated for an audience of one. Me.
What happens to our humanity when our lives are so perfectly personalized that we never experience the discomfort of bumping up against someone else’s life?
Hold Up.
Do I spy a Luddite?
This is no anti-tech screed being pecked out on an L3 Smith-Corona portable manual typewriter in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods of Lincoln, Montana. You are reading this on the World Wide Web after all.
Nor is this a nostalgic look back to yesteryear through rose-colored glasses. We do not think dial-up is nostalgic.
The Membership at Tillage works in tech. We work in finance. We work at non-profits. We are artists, service providers, small business owners, care givers, and stay-at-home parents. We are, you might say, San Francisco.
What is going on here, I think, is a warning shot across the bow of our community to say that the hockey-stick growth of our current technological moment is and will likely continue to outpace humanity’s ability to adapt well. And when humanity feels something as relentless and overwhelming as this tsunami of progress, there are typically two types of reactions. Pull hard in the opposite direction—get off the grid, become a farmer, smash the stocking frames. Or, capitulate into the current cultural river—fawn over an imminent AGI utopia where no one works, everyone has plenty, and human vice has somehow magically disappeared.
These are the typical responses. And they are both wrong.
“I am moreover a Luddite, in what I take to be the true and appropriate sense. I am not “against technology” so much as I am for community. When the choice is between the health of a community and technological innovation, I choose the health of the community. I would unhesitatingly destroy a machine before I would allow the machine to destroy my community.”
an essay by Wendell Berry
Don’t Play the Game.
Save Your Humanity
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion – put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,
by Wendell Berry
Life Thrives
In the analog
Tillage is a better way to work, create, connect, and thrive in San Francisco. A work club. In your neighborhood. Filled with soul. Parkside, we are coming to you first. Opening late spring/early summer.
The Membership benefits:
- Walking distance from where you live; coming first to Parkside
- 24/7 access
- Signal-free zones
- Library for reading, writing, & contemplation
- Office for deep work, calls, & small meetings
- Lounge for connecting & conversations
- Onsite spiritual director & vocational coach
- Private meeting spaces
- Sound-proof phone booths
- Curated member-only events
“It all turns on affection now,” said Margaret. “Affection. Don’t you see?”
work. create.
connect. thrive.
A work club. In your neighborhood. Filled with soul.
