turning 07 · a lay-by · leave your headlights on
Turning 07, and the only free market on the road
Nothing For Sale
A ring of cars in a lay-by with their headlights on, and everything laid out in the middle is free. Take what you need, leave what you can, and nobody is counting either.
The Outskirts is lit by your headlights. This turning is lit by everybody’s. Nobody who came out here brought enough light on their own, so everybody pulled into the lay-by in a ring, nose in, and left their lamps on, and the middle is as bright as a room. No two of those lamps match — an old estate on halogen, a newer van on LEDs, a hatchback running on one yellow fog lamp — so everything laid out in the middle throws a whole fan of shadows, one for every car, each with a slightly different colour at its edge.
Everything on the tables is free. It is the only free market on the road, and the only one where the word means that.
Solidarity, not charity
That phrase is the mutual aid movement’s rather than ours, and our Mutual Aid entry quotes it from a talk about Autistic mutual aid. The difference it names is the whole of this lay-by. Charity comes down, from somebody who has to somebody who has been judged to deserve it, and it wants to know you deserve it first. Mutual aid goes sideways. Sparrow, writing at Unstrange Mind, puts it like this:
Mutual aid is not charity. It is not a handout or an act of pity. It is a profound, ongoing, messy practice of loving each other into the future.
Sparrow, Mutual Aid: How We Survive, How We Transform, as our Mutual Aid entry quotes it
And our own Mutual Aid page ends its opening on the thing that actually helps:
showing up for each other, laterally, with no proof of worthiness required.
Our Mutual Aid page
On the tables
Everything laid out here is ours, and every one of them is free by its own page’s account, which was checked table by table before anything went on one. Our library says why the tables are here at all:
Knowledge is infrastructure. Access to it is mutual aid.
Our Library page
BOOKS
Our library
Books from the edges, music, bookmarks, and reading lists by and for neurodivergent and disabled people. First table, because the library page is where the argument for all the others is written down.
START HERE
The Autism and Neurodiversity Starter Pack
A download: foundational ideas, why so many of us are burnt out, and ways forward. By David Gray-Hammond and Helen Edgar.
LEARN
Our courses
Made out of surviving bad systems and building better ones, including free training for educators who want to stop replicating harm.
PRINT A STACK
Broadsides
Single sheets made to be carried, handed over and pinned up in rooms where nobody is going to open a laptop. CC0, so print as many as you like and give them away.
PIN IT UP
Zine walls
Walls of declarations: short lines, one idea each, made to be read fast by somebody who has not got long.
Two things of ours are not on a table, on purpose. Our mutual aid grants are not take-what-you-need: they have an application, limits on who can apply and a waiting list, and a lay-by that suggested otherwise would be promising something they cannot do. They are on our Mutual Aid page, which also says why they exist. And our Things Library argues for a library economy — tools, clothes, furniture, everything held in common — without yet listing anything to borrow, so there is nothing of it to lay out.
The rules of the lay-by
- Nothing here is for sale, and nothing is a swap. Taking something does not put you in anybody’s debt, and nobody will ask for anything back. Out at Sithen there is a whole page about the old rule that eating what the fair folk offer leaves you theirs; this lay-by is that rule turned inside out, on purpose.
- Nobody asks what it is for. No form, no proof, and no question about whether you need it enough.
- Leave what you can, and nothing is a perfectly good amount.
- Nothing is counted. Not what anybody took, not what anybody left, not who came.
- Leave your headlights on if you have them. If you walked, there is light enough. That is what a ring is for.
Whose this all is
Every table is ours, and every quotation names who wrote it. The starter pack is David Gray-Hammond’s and Helen Edgar’s. The line about mutual aid not being charity is Sparrow’s, at Unstrange Mind. Solidarity, not charity belongs to the movement. Details are in the liner notes.
The lay-by is invented. Free shops, free tables and mutual aid networks are not, and they are mostly run by the people who need them.
Job marker — a spare torch left on a tailgate
You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.
The job: Not charity
Before the code: Nothing For Sale's first heading is a phrase of the mutual aid movement's: solidarity, not what?
Hint 1
It is the first heading in the room.
Hint 2
It is the thing that comes down from above and wants to know you deserve it.
Last hint
Seven letters, and it begins with a C.
Give me the answer
The answer is Charity. Charity. Solidarity, not charity: charity comes down from somebody who has to somebody judged to deserve it, and mutual aid goes sideways, with no proof of worthiness required. That is the whole of the lay-by, and it is why nobody there asks what you need anything for.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
Quest code: SOLIDARITY
That is the one.
Charity. Solidarity, not charity: charity comes down from somebody who has to somebody judged to deserve it, and mutual aid goes sideways, with no proof of worthiness required. That is the whole of the lay-by, and it is why nobody there asks what you need anything for.
Quest code: SOLIDARITY