The Nowtopian

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April 28, 2007

April Buzzes

It's been an incredible frenzy lately. Not only making good progress on my rewrite, but all the events and socializing and general pleasure of living to the fullest... Here come a lot of photos of recent weeks...

First let me start out with a brief account of last night's lovely Critical Mass. It's April, the crowd was huge (betw. 3000 and 4000 by my crude reckoning), swelled by the recent hubbub in the news and the great weather. A very bucolic evening unfolded, heavily covered by news media since suddenly once again the ride was newsworthy. Apparently the Channel 5 coverage breathlessly claimed that it was thanks to the 40+ police that last night's event didn't go awry, but if you were there, or saw it go by, you saw a huge crowd of happy cyclists, remarkably supportive and enthusiastic bystanders and very tolerant motorists, with fewer than usual exceptions. A lot of folks turned up to show that the ride is a sensible repudiation of the stupid daily life in cars, but also a rebuke to the absurd news coverage that is still repeating blatant lies about the March ride aftermath... but what are you going to do? I thought the SF Bike Coalition reps did a good job of refusing the media's framing and turning the discussion back to the wholly inadequate conditions for bicycling on city streets every day. Anyway, here's three shots from last night, first on Montgomery, then Bay Street (which was actually earlier) and finally on Market heading up to Duboce. Apparently the ride went all the way to the beach through Golden Gate Park, and then back again to finish around 9:30. (I went to the movies! Saw a FANTASTIC documentary on the film editor Edward Murch--highly recommended!)

I'm now ensconced in the SF Int'l Film Festival. One of my great pleasures every year is going to this festival, and this year is going to top all previous years. My pals J & K set me up with a CineVisa for the whole shebang, so I'm going to 39 movies! I've seen 3 already, of which Murch was the hands-down best. The opening night film "Golden Door" was beautiful and poignant and very well acted... but left me wanting a little something more, a bit more edge. Adriana, as an immigrant herself, thought it very resonant and gave it an enthusiastic reception. We also went to see the very silly "Black Sheep" last night--a horror film about New Zealand sheep becoming genetically engineered with human genes and turning into carnivorous killers... very funny at moments, hilarious send-ups of vegetarians and animal rights activists (who could use a bit more humor after all), but overall, a C- for this one. More reviews in coming days...

We had our 3rd biannual Slow Food Feast of Fools and Friends last Sunday the 22nd. Another great night on the "By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea" theme... a whole menu from the sea, great presentations by Amy Franceschini and Kirk Lombard, great music by Rupa and the April Fishes, and a live mural painted by Mona Caron, plus video clips, poetry, song, and yours truly doing some kind of ersatz Jennifer Beals imitation preceding my "dessert safety drill" performed to the tune of Kitchen Motors (a long lost brilliant single from circa 1980).... Here's some shots by Phil Maisel and the black and white picture of Mona painting with Ginger Murray to the left by John Agoncillo...

The day after the feast, after returning various wine glasses and other equipment, we got to spend the afternoon relaxing at Shelter Cove in Pacifica... What a spectacular spot, a lost little enclave right on the beach at the south-western tip of Pacific behind cliffs and basically off-limits to those who don't have a reason to be there... we did! Here's some pictures of the place, the views, and the gorgeous sunset we watched drop into the ocean (no green flash though)...

On Thursday I went my pal Susanne Z. on a lovely ride along the Eastshore State Park bikeway that covers the entire distance from Emeryville to Richmond, culminating in the really moving and wonderful historical monument to Rosie the Riveter and the WWII shipyards in Richmond. This is a fantastic public monument and I urge everyone to visit it... it's super informational and a lovely layout in the park overlooking the bay. Here's a few shots of it:

This sign says: "You must tell your children, putting modesty aside, that without us, without women, there would have been no spring in 1945."

Here's the view out across the bay from the bizarre and amazing Albany Bulb... followed by a view back towards El Cerrito hill across the mudflats from Richmond... lots of restored wetlands and ecological treats to see along this ride.

In addition to the Feast we had that amazing "When the Mission Was Low and Slow" Talk/video on April 11, then I spoke at the American Association of Geographers conference at the Hilton, I've have a couple of meetings with the new SF Museum folks (which is looking very promising), and tomorrow at 9 a.m. I have to show up at Berkeley City College to speak at the "Crisis in the California Commons" conference. On May 2, this coming Wednesday I'll be presenting along with Grey Kolevzon and Glenda Drew at our Talk on "Enclosures, Immigration and Food" at CounterPULSE at 8 p.m. And amidst all that, rewriting the book and going to movies!... I'm not complaining, that's for sure!... (and also, Go Warriors!)

Posted by ccarlsson at 01:24 PM | Comments (4)

April 11, 2007

Tempestuous Cyclists and a Stunning Victory

There's an editorial in the SF Bay Guardian today, but they don't seem to have included it on their website, so I'm going to post it below... The Committee for Full Enjoyment chimed in on the recent frenzy surrounding Critical Mass...

But before we get to that, I want to congratulate Jeff Schmidt on his remarkable victory over his former employer, the American Institute of Physics, publishers of Physics Today. When his book appeared he explained how he'd written a lot of it on the job at Physics Today, and that was their excuse for firing him. But the content of the book is so damning to the entire profession, it's not surprising they tried to suppress it, or at least punish him for writing it. The whole story is posted online here, and the victory letter announcing the capitulation of the magazine is here.

Jeff was a long-time subscriber to Processed World magazine, and some years ago now he published a very important book: Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives. In it, Schmidt really unpacks the deep compromises at the heart of the professional's middle class existence. Hilariously (and alarmingly) he advises studying the US Army's Prisoner of War survival manual as a way to maintain your intellectual independence while going through graduate school... I'm quoting him in several spots in my forthcoming book. Here's one of my favorites:

"Professionalism—in particular the notion that experts should confine themselves to their “legitimate professional concerns” and not “politicize” their work—helps keep individual professionals in line by encouraging them to view their narrow technical orientation as a virtue, a sign of objectivity rather than of subordination.”

Jeff Schmidt’s dissection of professionalism illuminates the powerlessness that characterizes crucial aspects of the careerist experience: “Professionals control the technical means but not the social goals of their creative work. The professional’s lack of control over the political content of his or her creative work is the hidden root of much career dissatisfaction… Professionals are licensed to think on the job, but they are obedient thinkers.” Schmidt further argues that by leaving unchallenged the employer’s control of the political content of his work, the professional “surrenders his social existence, his control over the mark he makes on the world." This is a core aspect of the deep dissatisfaction experienced by many so-called successful professionals. Reclaiming their dignity and full humanity often leads such professionals to disengage, to walk away from apparently successful lives.

So check it out... Physics Today had to pay him a half million dollars and offer him his job back. This all came about in response to a huge campaign amongst physicists across the world, really encouraging my endless hopes for a revolt among the technicians!

And I still think Critical Mass is a bit of that too... and after all those comments on the last post, I'm sure there'll be some more after this... so here's the editorial, as promised:

Tempestuous Bicyclists Stir San Francisco’s Teapot

Our local road/culture war has erupted again, this time thanks to some unsavory gossip columnists at the monopoly paper in town. Wildly distorted accounts of two confrontations at the March Critical Mass have been presented as evidence that bicyclists are anti-social, out-of-control, and generally immature scofflaws. Such accounts serve to frame a narrative that is in sharp contrast with the actual experience of tens of thousands of bicyclists, pedestrians, and motorists on the last Friday of every month, not just in San Francisco but in hundreds of cities worldwide where Critical Mass rides take place regularly.

Suddenly “normal” life is suspended as thousands of bicyclists, talking, singing, playing instruments and boomboxes, smiling and laughing, take the streets. Bells tinkle, people wave, traffic stops, encouragement is shouted, and uncounted conversations of unknowable depth and breadth happen by serendipity and choice. These are much more characteristic of the Critical Mass experience than the relatively rare confrontation between an overheated, impatient motorist and a self-righteous, antagonistic cyclist.

Cheap “journalism” of the type practiced by Matier & Ross just obscures the truth that our transportation system is designed to promote mayhem, anger and alienation. Every day, motorists crash and die, confront one another angrily, or are left cowering in isolation. The fact that such events can also happen during Critical Mass should come as no surprise.

The sheer exuberant pleasure of a mass, rolling occupation of city streets month after month is hard to understand unless you’ve been a part of it. For the dozens of online flamers that have ferociously denounced Critical Mass, it’s inconceivable that an event that doesn’t behave according to the staid norms of a placid democratic society can have any justification. “Critical Mass doesn’t make demands! No one is in charge! The participants don’t all behave like obedient school children! They are destroying the Cause of Bicycling for the law-abiding cyclists!” And so on.

In February and again in March, Critical Mass bicyclists rode for 2-3 hours through San Francisco streets, enjoying the city in ways unplanned for by traffic engineers, police, or city bureaucrats. It’s a remarkable re-invention of urban life in an organized coincidence that is mostly spontaneous in spite of its predictability — surprising every time, and inspiring most of the time.

Critical Massers are engaged in that most rare of activities: an act of collective imagination and invention that is considerably greater than a sum of its parts. And part of its magic is the convivial, friendly, enthusiastic reception the vast majority of motorists, pedestrians and people in their homes give the riders as they roll by.

For those motorists or bicyclists who think Critical Mass is about a fight between cars and bikes, THINK AGAIN! We are all in this together, and a monthly demonstration of how much better life could be is an invitation to everyone to try something different. There is a well-defined etiquette among Critical Mass riders that thanks stuck drivers for their patience, that promotes an atmosphere of friendly camaraderie on all sides, and invites the curious to join us next month at the foot of Market (April 27, 6 p.m.), on a bicycle, for an experience that just might change your life!

--Committee for Full Enjoyment, April 11, 2007

Posted by ccarlsson at 04:07 PM | Comments (9)

April 04, 2007

Gossips Hit a Nerve

We're enduring another Critical Mass tempest in a teapot here in San Francisco. Unlike New Yorkers, who have doggedly faced down intense police and legal harassment for years now, but are still routinely arrested and have their bikes stolen month after month, we in SF have had an easy time of it. In fact, as I already posted in my last entry, the March 30 ride was fantastic, leaving from the foot of Market around 6:20 or so, twisting and turning brilliantly through downtown, whipping around City Hall and out through the Mission, all the way to the Excelsior via San Jose Ave., back through the Bayshore/Industrial district, north on 3rd Street after an intelligent regrouping at Jerrold and 3rd... by then the ride was down to about 800 or so. I left a bit later, about 8:15, as we passed 16th at 3rd, where I turned west on 16th. At that point it was still an amazing euphoric ride, full of good cheer, and nary a bad incident reported.

As I heard it from a friend who kept going, the ride went towards the ballpark, then through downtown again, into North Beach, through the Broadway Tunnel (ugh) west through Pacific Heights, before turning south again near Alta Plaza. No more than several dozen riders were left by then, and some of them apparently got into an altercation with a woman in her SUV. According to Kate McCarthy of the Bike Coalition, via my pal Joel who got her account:

"She says the typical aggressive push through the crowd by the driver was all over and done with AND THEN, after she drove a block farther, she hit a cyclist and that's when the crowd went crazy and the lousy p'lice got involved. She heard the cop tell the injured cyclist that the only way they'd even take a report is if the guy was taking a ride in an ambulance."

So this story gets twisted by gossip columnists for the SF Chronicle, long-time Critical Mass baiters and haters Matier and Ross. Two worse excuses for writers would be hard to find. Their bread and butter is inflaming politicians and the public over the trivial and the stupid. In this case, the woman's car was trashed after she'd hit someone and tried to escape, but M&R wrote a piece making her sound like an innocent passerby. Even in their piece, quoting the police, she supposedly 'tapped' a bicycle... how does a 3,000 lb. SUV "tap" a bicycle? It was laughable when the piece was published this morning, and it's worse now.

It seems to have set off a mini-storm of vitriol and abuse by the 101st Fighting Keyboardists of the Bay Area, sitting at their computers waiting for someone to blame for their miserable lives. Of course! Must be those goddamn bicyclists! They're out there having a good time, free of the debt ball and chain that keeps these morons attached to their cars, jobs, and boring lives. They have friends, they're changing life, they're engaged in making something real and tangible and worthy...

I got a letter from someone I don't know today, somehow expecting me to be responsible for this event. I reprint my exchange below.

Hello,

I am new to San Francisco, and an avid bike rider. I have enjoyed Ccritical Mass' rides and activities thoroughly in other cities around the country. However, after reading the San Francisco Chronicle's article today on the outrageous and VIOLENT behavior of some of the riders acting in your name, there is no way on this great earth I would ever join the SF rides or organization.

Acting in anger, as the folks did who attacked a minivan carrying an unsuspecting family with small children, is not in keeping with the principles of non-violent resistance practiced by Critical Mass. The violence spewed by not just a few, but MANY bike-riders involved in this event is nothing less than disgusting and ridiculous, and I and others I know in this city will have nothing to do with it.

Your organization should be deeply ashamed. While I understand that Critical Mass has no official accountability due to the decentralized structure, someone on behalf of your organization owes this family, and the entire city of SF, a public apology. If you can't agree on who should sign this apology, one idea is to circulate the apology, petition-style to get signatures from as many of your riders as possible who disagree with the horrendous actions of those acting in your name. If it were my organization (I am the Director of a statewide nonprofit based here in SF), I would also be inclined to pay for the damages incurred by this family on their vehicle in this horrific attack.

My jaw is still dropping in shock. I have rarely heard of anything more obnoxious and stupid in all my life as what happened on this fateful evening. How terrified and afraid for their lives those poor children must have been! To say nothing of the significant financial cost that this family must now bear, for no other reason than being in the wrong place at YOUR time.

I hope someone from your organization will act accordingly and responsibly to make amends in this situation. It is the only right thing to do.

Please DO NOT suscribe me to your list, I have no interest in you whatsoever.

Sincerely,
K.J.A.

Mr. A,

I don't know you and you don't know me. Why you addressed this silly letter to me is not clear. Why do you believe a gossip column in the Chronicle has given you an accurate picture of events? I wasn't there, having peeled off around 8:15 at 16th and 3rd, after a really remarkable, peaceful, lovely, long, mellifluous ride... How many bicyclists passed how many cars and pedestrians and bus riders without any bad vibes during the evening, preceding this apparent confrontation? Tens of thousands at least... I'm sorry for the woman and her children, but this is a wildly biased account of what happened, which neither you nor I have any real idea about...

show me any public event where there is always perfect behavior by all the participants... I can guarantee one thing: no bicyclists have ever attacked a car without serious provocation... that the gossip columnists (they are NOT news reporters, please note) tell a sob story about some poor woman and her children who were brutally attacked is a laughably inaccurate account. That just doesn' square with any experience I've had here, or NYC, or Minneapolis, or Milan, or Rome, or Mexico City, or Berkeley, or anywhere I've ridden in Critical Mass.

All that said, if you're so worked up and you have a statewide nonprofit (hungry for publicity I'm sure) why don't YOU organize a petition, commending Matier and Ross for their objective reporting, lamenting the Bad Bicyclists, and raise the money? As you note, there is no one ELSE who is responsible, and since you're so concerned that SOMEONE take that responsibility, it seems appropriate that it be YOU.

--Chris Carlsson

Anyway, looks like we'll have the mayor grandstanding for a while now. At least the Bike Coalition folks did a fine job of emphasizing the incredible bias in the reporting, the missing facts about the driver hitting the cyclist, and even more importantly, stressing the overall rotten conditions for bicycling in San Francisco that prevail as an everyday reality. Another friend who I mentioned the above letter exchange with suggested that he'd be willing to make a donation to the repair when AAA starts helping covering burial costs for the cyclists who have been killed by DUI drivers in the past few years. The bizarre assumption that still prevails is that bicyclists are hazardous scofflaws (but child-like in their choice of transport) that are causing traffic problems, rather than the everyday absurdity of wall-to-wall cars being the overwhelmingly biggest problem facing urban life. The follow-up article in Thursday's SFGate is a bit less skewed, but after fomenting this shitstorm, they've got some 'pologizin' to do... how many more cyclists are going to be hassled and even hurt in the next few days by the (male and female) macho jackasses who got their pea-brain worldviews validated by this fabricated story?

Posted by ccarlsson at 11:56 PM | Comments (14)

April 02, 2007

April Moon

Critical Mass last Friday night was another really remarkable ride... I want to send special thanks out to whomever got in front and made so many great decisions about twists and turns, taking us on a wonderfully snaking ride through downtown before we eventually made it all the way down Mission Street (after a nice ride through the center of the Civic Center right at City Hall before zigzagging around it), where we turned west on Cesar Chavez and then for the first time ever in local Critical Mass history we went out San Jose all the way under I-280, quite a ways west before turning back on to Alemany Blvd. Remarkably many hundreds made the whole trek, including another lovely set of choices through the Bayshore/Barneveld/Jerrold nexus to a long-awaited stop at Jerrold and 3rd. Hundreds showed up there! A magical night... here's a shot of people whipping down San Jose where it's basically a freeway going under another freeway...

Some of my pals from the Alemany Farm and Bike Kitchen have planted a lovely garden on a derelict patch of land at Stanyan and Fulton. After bringing it along over the past few months, the absentee landlord, an old San Franciscan woman who now lives in Hawaii, ordered her property management company to tear out the garden and leave the land as it was, abandoned and covered in trash!... a pointless and vindictive approach to a good use of nearly public land... Here's a couple of shots of their weekend encampment which garnered universal support from neighbors and passersby...

A week ago I walked up Bernal Heights and caught this lovely sunset moment, apparently settng the Bank of America building on fire!

Last night the wind was gusting incredibly strongly as we walked up Bernal, rushing to reach the top before the sun disappeared behind the hills, and just made it! The wind howled as we embraced and for a brief amazing moment, a three-way kiss between us and the wind filled us with wonder... no photos for that one! Walking quickly to the east, the full moon rose over the bay, and we had a lovely walk up and down the eastern staircases... and you notice I'm saying 'we'?... here she is, arriving home to a pile of chocolate, my spring delight, Adriana...

I've disappeared from blogging a bit lately, partly thanks to Adriana, but more because I'm deep into rewriting my book finally. The energy it takes to blog is pretty similar to what it takes to concentrate on writing the book, so I'm going to leave you with my intro to the book in this entry, but may not post too much for the next little while...

In the past couple of weeks I got a great sports fix too, with 1st round games of the NCAAs followed by sitting courtside for the Warriors-Phoenix game last Thursday...

Can't beat sitting right on the edge of the game, especially when it's such a thrilling barnburner as this one was: 45-33 at the end of one quarter! final: 124-119 Warriors, a fantastic up-and-down, high scoring, great passing game...

Made my semi-regular ride up Twin Peaks last week too, into the dense fog... I got to play Corcovado at the top:

even in dense fog the wildflowers are in full effect up there:

So here's the working introduction to my new book... back again one day soon, hopefully with a nearly finished manuscript. But then again, I often can't resist posting when something strikes me... so probably I'll be back sooner than later...

A New Politics of Work

Nowtopia is a book about a new politics of work. It profiles tinkerers, inventors, and improvisational spirits who bring an artistic approach to important tasks that are ignored or undervalued by market society. Rooted in practices that have been emerging over the past few decades, Nowtopia’s look at work breaks new ground by identifying self-emancipatory class politics outside of wage-labor. Engaging with technology in creative and experimental ways, the “nowtopians” we meet here are involved in a guerrilla war over the direction of society. They are also establishing or re-animating human communities, networks, and circuits from which new initiatives will continue to emerge well into the future.

A lot of words have been written trying to describe the new social fractions that keep emerging from the complex and multi-layered hierarchies and conditions of modern life. Slackers, bohemians, Generation X, Y and Z, “no collar” workers, and many others try to capture the rootless, temporary, partial identities that have supplanted old ideas of the working class. These new fractional identities designate a wider sense of self with vaguely dissident politics but one that is still linked to employment, however tenuously. Radical workers’ movements of the past two centuries have always been firmly rooted in the capitalist workplace. In fact, workers as such have been defined by their relationship to capitalist production. Today’s radical impulses are being developed outside the constraints of wage-work, envisioned and enacted by people who are determined to escape the bounds of being “mere workers”. Traditional theories tend to dismiss such efforts as simply hobbies, or lifestyle choices, failing to see the deeper trajectory of exodus from capitalist society that such work defines.

I am investigating what people are doing vis-à-vis work, specifically the self-directed work carried on outside of wage-labor. I make no claim to being comprehensive, or that my relatively small selection of interview subjects is necessarily the “real story;” other investigations based on different assumptions, questions and individuals could produce rather different insights. But I argue that the people I talked to reflect a deeper shift. They represent a different kind of “working class” response to the conditions of life at the beginning of the 21st century precisely because their response is taking place in their “free” time, outside of their wage-labor-defined jobs. This corresponds to some insights of writers analyzing “immaterial labor” performed by self-employed, temporary and occasional workers, people whose working lives are blurring with their non-working lives. I asked about the work people are doing unremunerated, usually collaboratively and in networks of intensive social cooperation, with an eye towards how those practices stay “free” of market logic or get reincorporated into commodified, economically defined behaviors. Commonly there is an ongoing conflict, or at least tension, at the point of contact between these different ways of engaging in work. It may seem surprising or paradoxical, but my investigation reveals how hard people work when freed from the coercive constraints of wage-labor and arbitrary hierarchy.

The subjects of my inquiry are all engaged in local efforts, firmly rooted in their daily lives and physical locales. Such local examples could be dismissed as meaningless anomalies in the context of an ever-expanding, voracious world market whose logic continues to disrupt and destroy human and natural life in favor of profit and plunder. But as the geographer David Harvey has noted, examples of “militant particularism” like we find in Nowtopia start local but can spread across society with surprising speed. The new apparatus of global production helps speed up the extension of market society of course, but inevitably it is also speeding the spread of social opposition, the sharing of experiments and alternatives. Our moment in history is at least as exhilarating as it is daunting.

We meet a wide range of people in this book who are grappling with the split between making a living and expressing their full humanity partly through freely chosen work. Ben Guzman makes TV commercials in Los Angeles as a video editor to earn his money, but his real passion led him to co-found the Bike Kitchen, one of dozens of do-it-yourself bike repair shops that have emerged around the world during the past decade. Robin Haevens is now teaching public high school, but started out providing free after-school bike repair classes in one of San Francisco’s most troubled neighborhoods. She’s been in the middle of the ‘outlaw bicycling’ subculture for over a decade, self-publishing and putting into practice the anti-business DIY culture. Guillermo Payet is a former dotcom entrepreneur who has dedicated his time and know-how to creating a open source software project to help local agriculture and the small farmers who are its backbone to build an alternative food system (localharvest.org). Will Doherty is a drop-out from a large computer company who founded the Online Policy Group, an organization that freely provides computer resources for politically edgy groups. Meanwhile, anonymous programmers around the world are engaged in complex collaborations that are leading to an unprecedented communications infrastructure that might someday be the backbone of a self-managed society.

Dozens of people have literally jumped on the biodiesel bandwagon by making their own wagons (and fuel), from the five women who drove across the U.S. in the mid-1990s on waste veggie oil to make a documentary “Fat of the Land,” to the hundreds of trips made since by biofueled bus caravans. Claudia Eyzaguirre, a teacher, responded to 9-11 by co-founding the Berkeley Biodiesel Collective. The tinkering and experimenting that went on in hidden pockets during the past few decades has been seized upon and expanded radically during the past ten years of grassroots biofuels activism, leading to the much publicized “arrival” of biofuels as promoted by the government and major multinationals. But the story is far from finished.

In the yearning for a life beyond money, the annual Burning Man festival has drawn to the northern Nevada desert tens of thousands of revelers seeking authentic connections and artistic freedom. Part-time secretaries, biochemists-turned-janitors, retired professors, social workers, handymen, mechanics, legal aides, and many more job holders escape to the desert to remake themselves and discover new relationships in a commerce-free environment.

Urban horticulture is emerging on the foundation of widespread gardening initiatives in cities across the continent. Immigrants and the poor have reclaimed abandoned and deindustrialized zones with traditional and inventive practices, coaxing food and life from blasted landscapes, creating new human communities in the process. Nan Eastep is part of the City Slicker Farms in West Oakland, producing small crops in vacant lots to provide fresh produce in areas that have been excluded from the new gourmet food movements. Mark Leger is a long-time white-collar worker, but has built on his childhood memories of California’s Central Valley to help sustain and expand a burgeoning community garden movement in Brooklyn, New York (in his free time). Pam Peirce is a founder of the now-defunct San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), and was previously an important figure in the People’s Food System that grew in the wake of the communalist tide of the late 1960s and ‘70s. She has participated in the nonprofit efforts to institutionalize the grassroots food and gardening movements, in the wake of which remain over 100 locally-controlled public gardens with their associated communities and political processes.

Efforts to break away, to create pockets of utopia, socialism in one state, or any number of other co-ops and collectives and social alternatives, have always flourished on the margins of capitalist society, sometimes ebbing and other times flowing, but never to the extent that a radically different way of living has been able to supplant market society’s daily life. The pull of business, of buying and selling, of surviving economically, all exert enormous pressure on the initiatives described in Nowtopia, too. Nowtopians, and anyone determined to free themselves from the constraints of economically defined life, face the same historic limits that have beset all previous efforts to escape. Can the emerging patterns of creativity and technological inventiveness and new communities go beyond the co-optation and re-integration that has absorbed past self-emancipatory movements? I don’t think this book can answer that definitively, but by framing this moment historically and theoretically, I hope to make my own contribution to strengthening their capabilities and perhaps increasing their power to go further than previous efforts towards a world of our own making.

Posted by ccarlsson at 01:42 PM | Comments (1)