Resisting Fascism & Ecological Collapse with Writer-Organizer-Activist CHRIS CARLSSON
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with acclaimed author and activist, and San Francisco legend, Chris Carlsson about his new novel, When Shells Crumble. It begins in December 2024, when the US Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the Presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican, who proceeds to demolish democracy and install a fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than your usual dystopian tale—it focuses on how to resist political cynicism and defeatism, and rebuild on planetary wreckage. It is a world-building project filled with wisdom, sadness, and joy. We specifically put this fictional text in conservation with his brilliant non-fiction work, Nowtopia, which offers a radical redefinition of “work” that restores dignity and value to their proper places.
Chris Carlsson, co-director of the “history from below” project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, photographer, public speaker, and occasional professor. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the seminal and infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson co-founded Critical Mass in San Francisco, which both led to a local bicycling boom and helped to incubate transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. In 1995 work began on “Shaping San Francisco;” since then the project has morphed into an incomparable archive of San Francisco history at Foundsf.org, award-winning bicycle and walking tours, and almost two decades of Public Talks covering history, politics, ecology, art, and more (see shapingsf.org). Beginning in Spring 2020, Carlsson has hosted Bay Cruises along the San Francisco shoreline.
His latest novel, When Shells Crumble was published by Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn, NY at the end of 2023. At the dawn of the pandemic, he published a detailed historical guidebook of the city, Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories (Pluto Press: 2020). His full-length nonfiction work Nowtopia (AK Press: 2008), offers a groundbreaking look at class and work while uniquely examining how hard and pleasantly we work when we’re not at our official jobs. He published his first novel, After The Deluge, in 2004, a story of post-economic utopian San Francisco in the year 2157. He has edited six books, including three “Reclaiming San Francisco” collections with the venerable City Lights Books. He redesigned and co-authored an expanded Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay after which he joined the board of the Mission Creek Conservancy. He has given hundreds of public presentations based on Shaping San Francisco, Critical Mass, Nowtopia, Vanished Waters, and his “Reclaiming San Francisco” history anthologies since the late 1990s, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the internet.
Duration:
1h 6m
Broadcast on:
25 Jun 2024
Audio Format:
mp3
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liutalks with acclaimed author and activist, and San Francisco legend, Chris Carlsson about his new novel, When Shells Crumble. It begins in December 2024, when the US Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the Presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican, who proceeds to demolish democracy and install a fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than your usual dystopian tale—it focuses on how to resist political cynicism and defeatism, and rebuild on planetary wreckage. It is a world-building project filled with wisdom, sadness, and joy. We specifically put this fictional text in conservation with his brilliant non-fiction work, Nowtopia, which offers a radical redefinition of “work” that restores dignity and value to their proper places.
Chris Carlsson, co-director of the “history from below” project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, photographer, public speaker, and occasional professor. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the seminal and infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson co-founded Critical Mass in San Francisco, which both led to a local bicycling boom and helped to incubate transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. In 1995 work began on “Shaping San Francisco;” since then the project has morphed into an incomparable archive of San Francisco history at Foundsf.org, award-winning bicycle and walking tours, and almost two decades of Public Talks covering history, politics, ecology, art, and more (see shapingsf.org). Beginning in Spring 2020, Carlsson has hosted Bay Cruises along the San Francisco shoreline.
His latest novel, When Shells Crumble was published by Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn, NY at the end of 2023. At the dawn of the pandemic, he published a detailed historical guidebook of the city, Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories (Pluto Press: 2020). His full-length nonfiction work Nowtopia(AK Press: 2008), offers a groundbreaking look at class and work while uniquely examining how hard and pleasantly we work when we’re not at our official jobs. He published his first novel, After The Deluge, in 2004, a story of post-economic utopian San Francisco in the year 2157. He has edited six books, including three “Reclaiming San Francisco” collections with the venerable City Lights Books. He redesigned and co-authored an expanded Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay after which he joined the board of the Mission Creek Conservancy. He has given hundreds of public presentations based on Shaping San Francisco, Critical Mass, Nowtopia, Vanished Waters, and his “Reclaiming San Francisco” history anthologies since the late 1990s, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the internet.
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Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.
Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:
“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times. This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”
David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues. Twitter/X @palumboliu Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Website · Instagram
Today, we speak with acclaimed author and activist and San Francisco legend, Chris Carlson, about his new novel "When Shells Crumble". The novel begins in December 2024, when the U.S. Supreme Court nullifies the popular vote in the presidential election and awards the presidency to an authoritarian Republican who proceeds to demolish democracy in a stall of fascistic state that hastens ecological havoc. The novel is much more than your usual dystopian tale. It focuses on how to resist political cynicism and defeatism and rebuild on planetary wreckage. It is a world-building project filled with wisdom, sadness and joy. We specifically put this fictional text in conversation with Carlson's brilliant non-fiction work "Nautopia", which offers a radical redefinition of work that restores dignity and value to the proper places. Speaking of places produced in collaboration with the creative process and is made with support from Stanford University, I alone am responsible for his content. So the first question, obviously, what inspired you to write this novel? I was looking at your bio and I saw that you published a novel "After the Day Luge", which was published in 2004, so here we are two decades later. In fact, this book, "When Shell's Crumble", the new novel that came out just at the end of last year, was originally set out to be the prequel. After I finished "After the Day Luge", I realized I had a trip trilogy in mind and this was the prequel and I obviously sat on it for almost two decades. And as I wrote this new novel, I realized that it's only marginally a prequel because it's too far apart in time. The other novel was set 150 years in the future. It was a green city utopia, San Francisco has generalized abundance, there's no markets, there's no money, there's basically elevated wooden bikeways just across the city, there's wild corridors, restored creeks and lagoons, the oceans have come up 12 feet, there's the gondolas everywhere that are so weird bio boats, there's all this biotech in that book because part of the vision that I had when I was writing that 20 years ago was that like it or not, and I'm one of the knots, there's a ton of capital flowing into biotech and all of its various myriad forms. I thought clay that out, even if we have a big revolution in some decades from now, there will be all this biotech in place and actually my vision somewhat speaks to the current novel as well. When we think about the natural or quote unquote "natural", really unnatural, "evon flow of capitalist crisis" and the inevitability of unfortunately war and depression on our horizon as a way to destroy lots of capital to reset the terms of capital accumulation for the next round, assuming capital comes out of the other end of it, which let's hope not, but we've hoped a long time for that not to happen and to keep happening. My guess, my dust sort of personal theory of the near future is that the next round of accumulation will be based on a biologically founded system of capital accumulation and a lot of technological shift will move away from fossil fuels and away from metal and heavy materials that require so much depredation of the earth and towards some sort of biological system. So the thing they can wrap themselves in the mantle, we're green, we're great, capital's fine, it's not the problem, it's just now that we're green everybody can be happy again. And I can easily imagine some version of that having a brief moment of success on capitalist terms. And once we've solved the problem with the stupidity of wage labor and the organization of life as we know it, we'll be left with whatever the term of fear is that got creative and so that was the vision of that future novel and so this new one really sets that in motion but I've made some assumptions on the beginning of this novel is that there's already a giant biotech firm called Biogenma. Exactly. Yeah. It's a little bit like the Google of biotech that doesn't really exist, there's companies out there but none of them really have that level of preponderance and certainly not in the consumer market. So this company has a mythical product that I invented called and this IntelliJoe is produced by essentially urban peasants who are given a deal where they get a free apartment and if 5,000 are bonus, if they agree to live in a place where they are have to spend most of their time, most of their days tending these little trays of seedlings in their windowsill that are fully technologized with wires and whatnot and special inputs and all this stuff and every day they tend these are called prosper plants with a registered trademark on prosper. And they're essentially under the thumb of the company Biogenma or anything goes wrong anything doesn't go they don't produce enough of the plant at the end of the 10 month cycle. They just get rid of them and they leave and they have already signed a contract that says yes they'll make their apartment in three days and not under the terms of this special. It's almost like this current Odyssey, this local tech horrifying guy has about building these zones for the grays, the fascists of the tech world that are going to take over and pull chunks of the city by buying it and then excluding everybody doesn't agree with them and making them wear special uniforms and so there's a little bit of that. They're monetarily in my novel but not very not fully developed but these apartment buildings anyway belong to Biogenma. So then there's this movement called the urban peasants alliance, the UPA and that's one of the sort of social movement characters that I invent out of whole cloths. And I found myself having to do that because I've been so dismayed at the absence of proper social movements in our era. There are obviously the work you've been doing around Gaza and the uprising that's going on across the world to really try to put a halt to the genocide as soon as possible is a good example of how it's always there, it's just below the surface, the possibility of major social movements emerging and up and really altering the course of events sometimes. Sometimes they emerge and don't alter the course of events very much at all. So that's part of the frustration is we don't know how to gain the leverage we need to really do exactly. I tend to for a long time back in the early days of my life I was involved with processed world magazine I was one of the founders and that magazine was founded on the notion that what we do our work produces this world and most of the work we do is a waste of time. We should just stop tomorrow and we'd be better off for it not just individually by changing my job but actually socially we need to change the aggregate division of labor and how would you do that? The possibility that is for people who actually go to work every day to stop doing it and do something else and so I've been advocating for that since I was 23 or even earlier and now I'm 67 and it hasn't gained a lot of traction to say the least. So in my novel then I try to find people who are in motion at the workplace in places of employment where they are beginning to challenge the direction of events and we see some incipient versions of that with the tech workers, coalitions and alliances and the Google workers protesting some of the military production all that's well I find that hopeful for sure but in the novel the urban peasants launch of the people that have been thrown out and so that's one sort of social movement and another one is the League of Urban Farmers and then they have a canopy council which is like the coordinators for each part of the city that helps figure out how to produce more food in urban spaces and those are two of the social movements that are in place as the book begins as you start in but then the drama that rips you from the first pages is the fact that the Republicans steal the next election through predictable fraud at the level of state legislatures and Supreme Court and so people are in motion then in San Francisco for whatever that's worth protesting it but it turns out it's happening all over the country and so the new government comes in and I just ignore Trump and Biden they're not part of the picture of Biden dies and should have died in February according to my novel of this year and then the new president is Azah Hutchinson who did run there are some hilarious when I put his as a presidential candidate and he wasn't even running at that point and then he started running oh my god my books can exactly yeah the name sounded familiar yeah and then I gave him a vice presidential choice of Susanna Martinez who was the Republican governor of New Mexico some time ago and that they run on a whole new day for citizenship just what you'd expect out of a bunch of kneeling mouth politicians to say that they're going to do something good for Latinos and immigrants who are actually of the politics are actually the opposite of that there's two key states Wisconsin Arizona where the state legislatures throw out lots of votes in Arizona and cause the tide to tip towards Republican and Wisconsin they just invalidate the whole vote give it to the Republican and the US Supreme Court upholds that using the same doctrine they threw out last year against their preemptive state legislature's control over elections inside the states and so that sets off this frenzy of protests all over the country and rise in the streets and lots of protests is happening everywhere including from the right who are trying to like back it up their force and strength and so you have really mass violence in many places and in the Bay Area and every one of these big regions that has this happened there's a czar appointed or a homeland security general who becomes the de facto governor of the territory and in the Bay Area they create a zone at the whole word executive airport yeah kind of green zone and so people are forced to report there to serve for the new homeland security forces than one of my main characters who's part of this sprawling black family that's been living in San Francisco since World War II is Frank Robertson and he's the youngest of the family but he's already in his 60s and he's near retirement as a cop and then he ends up joining UCSF, the University of California Police Department just drives around in a car all day in Mission Bay it's a super cushy either he's in a cure type job where all he has to do is rouse people with shopping carts from entering the zone not a pleasant job so that's Frank and though he gets impressed into serving he suddenly finds himself put into the forces of homeland security a couple of things one is you seem absolutely prescient I mean I'm thinking here I'm at Stanford and there's a famous what's called the dishwalk it's up on the hill and I don't know my wife is a Stanford alumni so I'm taking that award so you're up there and I've been here 32 years you used to look down just all these engineering just computer sizes and that and then gradually but decisively all the hospital all the biotech stuff has become the hegemon and it's really we're going to give you the key state mortality this is exactly what you're talking about and our former disgraced president on the board of Genentech so you nailed it man it's so prescient and so real and what's the quality of life that's a completely vacated question it's just the sheer existence is all the counts and taps into the whole sustainability mantra right we just want to stay what capitalism of course this keep this engine going and as you say keep the pattern of you expend energy tightly constrained into this one formula so I just wanted to thank you for that I'm definitely going to read this novel would you change anything from that after the day lose knowing now what you know or would you basically say now I had it spot on then and don't screw with it after the day you just like whimsically imaginative because it's said in this world that's 75 years after a great die off that I put in that novel had to do with some biotech rogue biotech lab in Texas that's something escapes from and it ends up killing everybody that doesn't have THC in their blood street yeah yeah oh my my dad and friends were like oh my god that's exactly finally some good news right and I was a little bit more of a pot everyone I was writing that book I gave up part of a little while ago because I just don't it's too strong now it's not the same exactly but I was very involved with that for most of my wife I just want to find economic activities I think the main thing I'd have to change is I think the oceans are going to come up higher than I had in that but I predicted that book 12 feet when I wrote it in 2003 and four or two and three and 12 feet doesn't seem like enough anymore it's all going so much faster I saw Kim Stanley Robinson give a talk when he was two thirds of the way through his climate change trilogy and he come out in front of the crowd and he stands there and just stares at us for sixty seconds it doesn't say a word and finally he says ice melts a lot faster than we do then he went on like things he'd put in his book were already happening things that he was thinking for 40 years in the future exactly for all things that drama so that's the one thing I would definitely change in that book but I think the rest of it I would just leave it alone there's certain things you think about a first novel in a different part of my life yeah put in there that I might feel embarrassed about a little bit cardboardish moments and characters or dialogues or whatever that could be obviously improved staying with this book any book you write you can look at it exactly I could have been a lot better but I'm famously a person who's I'm I get a lot of done I have 10 books in print and I'm a huge sprawling history site with 2,300 screens of content and ever growing and so on and so I will always able to do all this while I have this incredibly comfortable life from what works very hard exactly one of my many fake organizations that I've been part of and running and founding for so many years and I was the committee for full enjoyment not full employment no I think especially as one gets older you realize that you have less time but you create more time maybe this wartime there and I would love to have you read something but before you do I want to as again part of my appreciation of your work roughly the same generation and I grew up in the Bay Area and I see in the latest novel so much of a kind of looking backwards at what happened in the 60s and the 70s and the things that were so hopeful and then got driven underground in the horrible 80s and 90s but that seemed to be burning fruit again but I think what you're not up brilliantly is that it's not nostalgic in a kind of sentimental way but it brings the positive sentiments out but tests them politically like what will actually work in this new landscape that we're facing today and what's the status of things like communalism or the environment or the human body and you really are so shrewd it's not accepting things whole cloth but rather saying what will actually work and having your characters go through all this themselves and these wonderful combinations of characters playing off each other almost being different voices of hope or cynicism that I appreciated so much and the fact also that you bring in non-human life in a really capacious way so I just wanted to put that out there because it's a long novel but I think it had to be because your tribe it has all those ambitions there could you read us just one passage just to start things off maybe yeah this is very early in the book and this is when Frank my my police officer young youngest of a large clan he's actually here's niece Janet who's the urban farmer who's another major protagonist in the book Janet Pierce is her name but she's a the niece of a frank so they have some overlap here and there throughout the story and they obviously are in the same San Francisco and large family there is a family tree at the beginning of the book that shows you this or the range of all this and that just goes back to my historian hat where I'm really fascinated by the the way people arrive in San Francisco and how they develop life here and particularly Black San Francisco because I just let me before I read my excerpt I want to give you a tiny digression which is that I grew up in Oakland and before that in the south side of Chicago so I always have this sense like I was adjacent to and immersed in Black America as a child and once I reached college age and I moved away from home and went to college which I went to the Sonoma State at first I entered White World which I have never been at it was just a weird experience to be completely in White World after being in a very integrated life even growing up with some of the temptations and James Brown and I'm Black and I'm proud as being the major sonic environment and so I arrived in San Francisco after several years in the Sonoma County and traveling on the first day of 1978 and I landed in the Hade Ashbury when it was still 50% Black and the lower Hade which is what we call it today was the Fillmore District and the Fillmore District was 100% Black really going back to the like late 50s and mid 50s and onwards starting at World War II and continuing there's always been an everything in San Francisco integrated to some extent but there's also like for Dr. Ponderan Plation groups but the like Page Street from the park all the way to Market Street was Black owned when I arrived in 1978 and that it changed really rapidly over the next short few years so I've basically always feel a sense of loss for the diminishment of the Black San Francisco I personally experience that as loss I don't I'm unhappy about it and my own quality of life has been diminished because of it so I that's something I want to emphasize but anyway so here's Frank, it's a family that the parents arrived as many did during World War II to work in the shipyards they hooked up realized they get better housing if they have if they get married so they were having a relationship and then they got married they ended up having six children and Frank's the youngest of their children he's now in his 60s so here we go and he's leaving his girlfriend Sheila's place Frank left Sheila's and went home to the house he shared with his mother on Marlin's street in Hunter's Point drawing his extra uniform and changes of clothes clothes into a duffel bag he organized his toiletries and got ready to go moms they're sending us to Hayward he loudly announced to his hundred-year-old increasingly deaf mother he explained about the mobilization or following the declaration of a national emergency she was watching TV where she had seen the basics already who is this new president what is going on I've never heard of anything like this before Frank tried to explain the Republicans seized the government and they were using force to protect it he didn't want to help them but he couldn't see how he could refuse to go his entire department had been ordered to appear his mother was worried of course but he reassured her as best he could I'll be fine moms nothing's gonna happen around here he hoped he was right the door swung open and walked Leon his son Frank always saw his own face in Leon's though his son was several inches taller darker and much thinner Frank what the hell's going on Frank grimace as he continued organizing his belongings I've been mobilized they're sending me to the new homeland security base in Hayward how the hell does that work you're a UCSF cop you don't work for the feds why do you have to go Leon was exasperated Frank turned to his son soon to turn 30 years old and suddenly saw him in a new light he was a successful businessman having taken on a share of the cannabis empire from large Larry Lansing years ago Leon it's complicated I don't want to go but I've been ordered to appear they've issued a regional emergency declaration so that means everyone has to follow the orders of the authorities or be arrested it's hard to believe I know I can hardly believe it myself his voice trailed off softly he was in shock his police training with this militarized deference to authority was running on autopilot and he didn't see any other course of action Frank Leon could see his father falter a bit you could resign couldn't you why don't you just stay here and call in sick at least too late for that frank side I'm not hiding either I'll go and see what's happening maybe to lead better if I'm there recalling times he'd been able to cool things down as a street cop and later during his patrols on the campus Leon looked out at his chirping phone Janice texting me she's asking about you Frank tell her I'm fine I'll call you guys later Frank kissed his mother goodbye grabbed his bag and left you look after granny okay he called over shoulder to Leon yeah of course he replied granny how you doing he asked an allowed voice oh okay she smiled at her grandson you gonna stay here for a while I got to go now but I'll come back tonight and bring dinner Leon headed out the door and found Frank sitting in his car texting on his phone you sure about this Frank Leon asked him again Frank looked up she was at work there's swamp of getting new buildings and materials for the big camp they're building in Hayward he reported this looks worse than I thought and he anxiously backed up by giving a small wave to Leon before long he was rolling over the Bay Bridge and then down the Nimitz freeway towards Hayward listen to the radio didn't help it was filled with official bulletins and news flashes about riots in Los Angeles New York Chicago Seattle Washington Baltimore and Philadelphia and Cincinnati protesters were shot by a vigilante mob who were occupying City Hall and declared themselves a legitimate government reports of white mobs attacking protesters were coming in from dozens of cities in the Midwest and south in the big cities national guard call-ups were being used to end the riots shit is this the new civil war Frank set out loud shocked at the chaos coming over the radio he exited the freeway amid a steady stream of white hummers and personnel carriers with ICE logos and homeland security stenciled on them hundreds of other police officers were also driving in from around the Bay Area he parked at the Southland Mall and followed the signs for new arrivals police at an empty store on the second floor of the mall next to a virtual reality playground on one side and a footlock around the other he got in line behind a half dozen others man this is weird said the one behind him he turned to see who had spoken and found a stocky Latinx woman in a Berkeley police uniform no shit what do you think they've got planned Frank asked you a cop she queried him he realized he was in plain closing since he hadn't shaved that morning he probably didn't look too sharp oh yeah UCSF police department I got their call rather suddenly this morning long before my ship was started she relaxed a bit and gave him a tight smile okay yeah I have no idea what they think they're doing how many they call from your department they requisitioned about one third of the Berkeley police department no idea I think it was a third of us too nobody explained anything to me they gave me orders to get here by noon it was Frank's turn at the registration table idea and badge bleed ID and badge please he pulled out his wallet his badge and handed them over the homeland security uniform perk filled in fields on the computer and asked Frank do you understand what's happening sir no you are being drafted into a homeland security strike for you'll be serving for six months with possible extensions lasting up to a maximum of 18 additional months the most you'll have to serve will be two years two years wait a minute I'm supposed to be retiring next year I'm sorry sir there's no provision for that our retirement age is 75 now as president Hutchinson decreed last week social security pensions and retirement are delayed until 75 what how can I haven't heard anything about that's but it Frank this is outrageous sir sir please calm down the printer began worrying an laminated ID that soon appeared here's your new batch take your belongings and report to building be at the Hayward executive airport there they will assign you to your new unit he handed Frank his badge and some paperwork next Frank was stunned drafted how was that even possible at his age there must be some way to appeal this he walked slowly away from the intake facility trying to get his bearings he suddenly thought of his mother alone on Marlin Street who would live with her now his sister Linda and her partner Rhonda lived a mile away and were in and out regularly his son and Janet and other grandkids were nearby and visited a lot too and there was a state-provided nurse who came over every other day to help bathe his mother and check her vital but he felt bad about it she was a hundred years old he should stay with her till the end maybe he could get a special release who would have talked to he drove from Southland the short distance into the airport waving his badge under the handheld scanner of the soldier at the security gate he went to the building B main desk where he explained about his centenarian mother in his own age and tried to get someone to release him from the draft but the clerks were young soldiers who knew nothing they were not able to help and didn't think there was anyone who could affect a change in Frank's status once you were drafted and at building B you were in Frank stepped outside completely exasperated he called his sister Linda who picked up right away limda it's hard to believe but i've been drafted what what do you mean and he explained that Kafka asked hour and a half he'd spent since arriving in Hayward they actually expect me to live in a barracks and they say i'm stuck for six months at least in maybe two years but they can't do that you're too old and what about moms what do they say about that nothing it's completely bureaucratic it's the fucking military nobody here can do anything or so they say it's unbelievable Frank felt like it was exploding not good for the blood pressure or the heart he thought hey soldier what are you doing bark to security guard no lottery out here get to your assigned barracks Linda i gotta go i'll call you later make sure you guys figure out a schedule of moms okay i won't be back for a while and he hung up wow so for our listeners benefit Frank is really the central character i would say and he's so interestingly delineated because you say you were just reading he's been drafted fuck even worse he gets promoted he's promoted because they want a front man they want a person of color fronting and they want a native san francisco he becomes the informant much to his chagrin and he's constantly toggling between how much information to give and not to give what will benefit the people and protect the people versus what will endanger them so he's working out this historical process as he's subjected to it at the same time and i love the description of the family because it's exactly that the his mother and then his children and their children and a sense of commitment to the community which is going to which might be his downfall he survives i don't want to give up with that entire plot but he's a beautifully delineated character and we follow his moral choices throughout yeah i think i yeah you're right i mean although i think you've given a little more credit than i did as i was writing him because i wanted him to be basically go along get a long cop act so he can't just go along get a long period because he's got a compromise got to deal with the the conflicts that he's going to run into as a black man but and so that gets up a little bit on the liberal end of the spectrum a little bit more thoughtful little bit more alterity and his worldview that he might have otherwise but he's essentially conformist who's taking the easy path at every turn and he's not happy about anything that he's having to do he wants an easy way out and there's really not one presenting itself and then when they later promote him that he's very confused by it and he doesn't at first understand that they're the way they're using him it takes his sisters reading him the right act a certain point to really wake him up to the back that he's just a pawn in their system but he's never really a strong defender of the community really not he's inadvertently trying to help his family a certain key moments and they use him as best they can to get something out of him right he's not thinking oh i've got to help San Francisco survive this onslaught really he's just trying to do his best to make it less awful for him and everybody who's near him so i find him to be an interesting character because he to me captures something of what most people are like and there are that's the cope with a world that they don't have any control over and any real say over the terms of the moral quandaries they're faced with they just i'm just gonna do the best i can here might end up from the outside looking like i'm an asshole or i'm doing something really morally compromised but it's the best i can do under the circumstances of who am i what can i do that's everybody's date and the other key role that i wanted him for in the reason i really start the book through his eyes in a way is i actually feel when we think about anything that we might use the term revolution ambitiously to describe you really can't have one anymore unless the people who have the guns and the official status of the troops of repression turn they have to be subverted somehow and so i think a certain number of radicals tend to forget this and find it very easy to just demonize everybody who wears a uniform or works for the state and i understand that i've done it myself but i hate it to stay it but i don't think we can win on strictly not uprising against the guns like they're gonna they just feel everybody and so you need people with the guns to turn the guns on either on themselves or on their co-repressors and some point they have to actualize they have to split they have to become demoralized they have not believe in what they're doing and until that moment where you don't have a very good chance that once that starts happening then everything opens up and everything's possible so that was one of the subplots of the book is the show frank as a way inside the police would i never been a cop i don't know the first thing about what it's actually like to do their daily meetings or the military for that matter but i'm using my fertile imagination i tried to try to put myself in that role and see what would happen if i face this when i face that that's a lot of writing fiction for me i don't know if it's like that for everybody but for me it's i don't know what i'm doing i don't know where the story's going i'm just sitting out at the keyboard and starting to type and i'm putting myself in the predicament of okay today i'm writing from frank's point i'm ready for janice i'm writing from this other person's point of view and then what happens in front of me who do i meet who do what are the interactions that come up now i have ideas about where i want things to go vaguely but the very specific evolution of the plot and the interaction between people comes because i'm actually in the room with them and they're saying those things and i didn't know they were going to save them until they said them and now they're saying i'm going to say oh okay yeah of course and then that other person enters the room i didn't even know they were in the book and now their character was insisting on being in my book how did you get here i'm stuck with you oh my god that i don't know that have a lot in this book when you were talking about guns you know i have to agree with you um and i'm just thinking about the reports from palestine and the the heavy number of iof soldiers committing suicide there's something going on in that respect and and you're right i've i've probably sentimentalized frank in the in the months since i finished the book um so thank you for that corrective so turning to a more positive set of characters tell us about the plumbers yeah that was one of those kind i didn't know i was going to do that again it's just stumbled into it by accident but there's a guy who starts out in the early part of the book being the sort of hippie-ish young volunteer of one of the community gardens and he's like a kind of white hippie-ish guy and you meet him first there and then the next time you see him he's actually being held at hayward exactly the airport is another prisoner who gets taken away and then in the wake of all that those interactions he becomes a plumber he's encouraged by jannett who's the niece of frank and is a big organizer with the league of urban farmers and she's a big farmer at alimony farm and runs several other gardens out in the baby hunter's point of charitable areas including one that i called the dog patch which is just funny because there is a neighborhood that we refer to as dog patch but the dog patch is along the southern shore of islas creek where today is there is people out there are people out there fishing regularly and it's somewhat abandoned not quite abandoned tier 94 area and so i turn that into a giant urban farm in the book and that becomes a site of many interesting things that happen there there and it islas creek but jay our former erstwhile urban farmer she's encouraged by jannett why don't you look old look at the plumbers i hear they're oh they've got some openings you can get a job with the plumbers union that would be a really important thing to change the politics of that and that's a little bit of a backhanded slight yeah which is famously one of the right wing unions in san francisco and actually not only right wing but super racist in their history wouldn't even let chinese join the union until like late 1960s they were so racist and so they remain a very as many of the building trades do a really reactionary force in urban politics who just want to force them at wherever they can if you go back to their freeway revolt over 60s you know that was led by essentially housewives who at that point were still able to live on the single wage logic of of the nuclear family the 1950s who were in the parks and in the zones of the city that suddenly were being targeted by engineers to put freeways through it but who was pro-free but when they had the big vote and it went five to five fine votes four five votes against it in terry france while the first black supervisor cast the ballot cast the vote in the board supervisor did not allow the golden gate park panhandle freeway to be built and it was shocking news it's headline news across the united states that san francisco's had said no to building a freeway what's going on but who was for it in that moment it was the trade unions and the so-called left of the board of supervisors and the pro-labor mayor jack shelly they were all for it because all they want to do is force them at yeah who build and they don't care about anything else it just give me a job with a high wage and shut the fuck up yeah so that kind of attitude is what needs to change from a long arc of politics that we're just really just getting going with and if you go back to seattle 25 years ago and seems certain turtles finally found a way to get together that didn't last very long you still have this endless ability by the right and by the corporate america to drive a wedge between anybody who cares about what do we do and why are we destroying the planet and then who say oh what are you anti-jobs yeah exactly yeah let me tell you right now i have to fight john to them yeah the jobs that they're talking about right not to the problem the organization of life through wage labor is the problem you're never going to solve it by asking for please give me better work please make let me do nice things that's not going to do anything that's just like laughably naive so the trade union movement then in the book back to the book uh there's the wall there's sort of you see it through the plumber's union and so i create a whole situation where there's a young radical movement inside the plumber's union who takes over the union to rank and file a revolt which i did that's has happened many times and san francisco unions as well as more national unions and once they take it over they don't fully take it over right it's never completely done so you still have the other types of folks in the older guy old guard who holds some of the executive board seats that are not happy that these young guys want to talk about water politics or environmentalism or changing how we deal with sewage or any of these guys they really want to hear about it they just want to draw well just do your draw a man and so that's a real split never that's not going away anytime soon so that exists in the book as well but the the young plumbers are are clearly capable of thinking of more radical agenda and they actually some of them end up becoming uh muscle if you will for this movements that are on the ground in the city which are largely people dealing with urban agriculture and the defending the so-called urban peasants who are the ones who've been thrown out of bio-genmo and are left homeless and and wondering what to do and how to take care of themselves and they're very practical because many of them are actually immigrants from central and south america or mexico and they understand they got this short term deal but now they're left wondering what to do next and so they organize towards integrating with the farming movement and urban farming and agriculture in general so a path that i think we'll inevitably have to take up in a much more serious way as human beings because first of all again bringing in the history hat for a moment it's worth remembering that at the end of world war two forty five percent of all the fresh vegetables and fruits the united states with grown in city gardens forty five hundred spend and obviously populations much smaller than in the amount of food grown is much smaller but today it's less than three percent and it could easily be somewhere between those two numbers approaching a third of all of our fresh produce could be coming out of city gardens if we so chose to use our land that way right now we choose to use our land like covering 50 percent of every city and asphalt for the maintenance of parking for private automobiles and the movement of some vehicles sometimes it's like what is a land they're my favorite slogan is always one lane for food which i snuck that into the novel too so that's a rallying cry for the league of urban farmers one lane for food take up a half of every street and turn it into linear farms but after the great flood if you will as i recall it's the radical plumbers who come up with a solution with how to basically rectify this huge catastrophe right yeah there's uh it's not quite a solution but it's a theory of how they might solve some of the problems uh it's a little bit late in the book and we're a little bit this is a little bit of a spoiler alert moment so i'm just going to say spoiler alert so if you don't want to know more details about what happens later in the book close your ears for a while but there is a big earthquake that happens the big quake on the on Christmas Eve in 2026 and it leads to the destruction of a lot of plumbing of course and a lot of the literal shit in the city that depends on that plumbing ends up forming a new lagoon where there has been historically a tidal lagoon of course the oceans have come up so there's a lot of pressure from groundwater rising in addition to tidal influxes through king tides and others and i i've counted where all the king tides are like actually the book is very added about king tides are going to hit for the next three years and the plumbers realized that there's this massive shit lake covering a good part of the north mission today where rainbow grocery is and all those the area that got really flooded just through uh a year ago john where where the water was up to the windows on cars right under the freeway there right across from rainbow grocery on division street so that's now permanent like we're stuck with it this is morass of sewage and dirty water and garbage and there's no way to drain it and there's no way these things still are coming in from various broken plumbing systems throughout the this particular corner of the city and so the plumbers are looking at them and it smells really bad it's a huge health crisis it's january of 2027 what are we going to do and they realize that there's prognesic cases of rain as well as high tides coming at the same time so they've rushed to help get crews of volunteers to clear the way for the waters to come tumbling down the city's hills and flood and push out as much of this inch of the bay during the high tide is possible and that's a little bit of thinking about the hydrology of the city in a way that plumbers generally haven't been but these radical plumbers do and a lot of the book does work on the idea of sometimes it takes something catastrophic for us to really reboot and reset things and sit on another path i want to get to the witches butter because that is if you will pardon me the glue or the book in some ways i wonder if you have a passage about witches butter that's wonderful this is pretty short but basically just to say quickly that witches butter is a real fungus you can find it in the tilden park and various other places around the bay area during wet periods it's a beautiful little yellow ball looks like a little cluster of yellow little nodules and then when it dries out it's like black and crusty and ugly so i you know i was hunting for a fungus i should pause briefly just to say that and you said something nice about this already i really wanted nature to have its own voice its own role to play as an agent of history not just like the background or something that's the context or quote-unquote the environment but actually something that takes a role actively in trying to shape the course of history i believe that's actually going to happen that where he's happening all the time and is going to be more profound as we go along as we become better to understand i just read a book by this woman karen backer called gaiya's web and she does a pretty good job of describing all these ways that we want to monitor the earth and do digital governance on a global scale but she's also quite clear that most of this would be used against that goal by the existing power structure and so if we don't radically change how we organize our lives this whole idea of using technology for a good like this if stupid but so there's this kind of way that we want to but she has a previous book called the sounds of nature and she and then along with ed yong's great work on various types of understanding the intelligence of nature and other books by france wall and other people we are so underestimated how intelligent the world is around us and we've the sort of history of animistic religions of really understanding us as part of a web of life and that these are our kin native typically indigenous sensibilities about where we are in the world i feel like that's the real world that modern life and christianity has done so much to eliminate trying to make us oblivious to and for most people stuck staring into their screens all day that they are oblivious with but in this novel is my chance to connect to that sensibility and try to find a way to bring it in to the conversation at least it's the story so i did it and i didn't know how it was going to do it i just knew i wanted nature to have a voice and i start writing and i get this kind of crazy biotech idea like there's this fungus that's on the main scientist's mind is one of these ideas she has that she brings with her to this big company when she gets bought out she's going to start up called hemp battery because she's invented the hemp battery and see she brings this thing and it's on the back burner in the biotech company the biogenmo and then some but unknown hardies of workers organizing inside of that company smuggle it out smuggle the idea because not being developed typically corporations take over ideas and they don't develop them because they're not immediately profitable they don't care so somebody smuggles it out goes to a bio hacker lab in the south of market run by a guy who's originally of Vietnamese descent but he's been in the San Francisco most of his life named dad don't and he's now in his late fifties and he's running this hacker lab where all these people are just having fun messing around with stuff and a lot of it's about adding genes and subtracting them and manipulating them and using crisper and all the stuff that's out there it's basically anybody in their house gets set up a lot now so let's have fun in the story and see what happens so they get a hold of this idea that that is the way it first emerges as taking witches butter is a good candidate for becoming a malleable fungus that could be used as a building material that's a the commercial idea behind it and they take it and they start adding stuff to it and we don't know what till much later in the book and i don't don't want to spoil that for you but they create this vat of essentially gray putty-ish thing and you don't really know what's i didn't even know when i invented it what it was going to be but it starts to take on a life of its own here we go Janet when i introduced the Janet Pierce or niece of frank and dad the guy i just mentioned said they heard crows speak one day this happened earlier in the book already it was connected to the putty like fungus they'd grown but then it never happened again viro's snacks and dishes became the talk of the staff at lary's and leons and local farms where it was being shared widely her recipes for the chips this was made out of those stuff this putty dis fungus her recipes for the chips as well as pasta and fresh cheese derived from the witches butter were very popular and batches of witches butter were being nurtured in half dozen locations now in the secret solar kitchen a few days ago viro was busy baking when maria came in here try this and she thrust a large wooden spoon of warm dough to maria who gladly ate it without hesitation what is it the latest we can make cookies out of witches butter too viro looked happy since she'd been stuck in hiding she needed a way to contribute it and she'd found it but the witches butter grows back as fast as i can use it i've never seen anything like it if i take a pound or two to try different things and then i return a few hours later the place where i took something already grown back wow that's unusual maria was chewing happily on her dough sample that says they can't decide what the nutritional properties are every experiment they've run on raw witches butter indicates that it has some basic vitamins a d even some c there's a decent amount of protein too but when i hadn't run tests on the chips or the pasta the results are completely different there were huge increases in protein and basic elements like zinc manganese and iron appeared too like we can't explain it but it's like a super food especially after i cook it when you're cooking do you do a lot of tasting do you put the stuff in your mouth and then it goes back to the batch you're working on as maria suddenly curious huh what do you mean i don't put it in my mouth and then spit it back into the pot if that's what you mean but i eat from the spoon that i use to stir things i suppose my saliva might have mixed with what i was cooking the only in tiny amounts we should try some more experiments what happens if we introduce human fluids to batches of witches butter isolated from the cooking process and what happens if the same batch is cooked and of course what happens if we cook with some without it having ever known any human sweat or saliva or even skin but the witches butter was created in part by the massaging and chanting we did last year we brought it from a vat of gray clay to that cream colored putty when that put intelligel in that one batch it turned bright canary yellow remember the original witches butter became very familiar with our skin our sweat and even proudly some aerosolized saliva and possibly other fluids like a drip from someone's nose who knows we weren't being careful and had no reason to assume there was any reason to take precautions for your explain maria was pottering this when she had an aha moment what if the witches butter is adapting to human physiology by becoming more nutritious for us when we use it is that possible as euro knowing she had no scientific understanding how would it do that how does that even work now it's such tell me more about how you came up because it becomes a anexis for all these different characters wondering what this is what to do with it and what i love one of the most powerful moments in the book is when some people begin be a bit suspicious about how you're mucking around with this stuff can you make it create light and energy and it sounds wonderful but isn't that kind of preferring its original nature a whole question of what nature is and how we live with it or in it or through it could you talk more about it because it's such a rich metaphor i think yeah one idea i had that little passage alludes to it where it replaces itself almost as fast as you can eat it was i was reminded i'm actually by marriage to the mother of my daughter many years ago we weren't married but we were together for a long time her grandfather was al cap the cartoonist who did a little app oh my gosh yeah and then little app where you might remember the schmoo and yeah move was on my mind as i started thinking about witches butter is an edible item i was like oh yeah it'll be like a schmoo you can't you cannot eat it up it just keeps reproducing itself as fast as you eat it and a more you eat it the more it reproduces oh yes perfect because it's a metaphor for generalized abundance right and that's what we all dream should be possible on the planet that we live on which is so beautiful and abundant and we treat it like a source of nothing but scarcity of a first moment wasn't he the guy who had a job testing mattresses the little adnor yeah that was his job full-time job perfect there's the Beverly hillbillies was stolen from the the conistor had a family lawsuit against the company that the Beverly hillbillies yeah yeah they lost but sort of goes hey how so that was one idea about it and then i started more and more thinking about this just like i kind of think creatively about it as best i could and i'm not a real scientist as you can tell i'm just not and i tried to get biologists to read my early draft nobody ever responded that i gave it to they just didn't have time to look at it's too big that's embarrassing thing to ask people read a book that's two hundred and fifty thousand words but i just decided to run with it anyway and then i came upon some other work for my friend of mine who's been working with the stuff figure this guy elia prego goni and various people who think about how systems of less complexity become more complex they actually can assemble themselves into more complexity over time there's a whole thread of advanced thinking going on around this stuff that's way beyond my pay grade or or my can i don't know this stuff very well but i did do a brief deep dive into it as i was writing the novel because it's like wow this is perfect so i purline some of those things those concepts and help it helped me think about how this is not such a far-fetched idea that something could emerge in my case i made it emerge through accidental genetic manipulation and then it becomes a life form of its own and begins assembling its own direction and going in its own way and actually in some moment in the book there's a point where i'm having this view from on eye above above the whole earth where the atmosphere out if you're familiar with the work of david abraham who wrote the spell of the sensuous and becoming animal to really highly recommended books for if you want to get inside of this the sense of animism as a light a living force in the world he's probably one of the most politically beautiful writers on that and the very scientifically grounded guy and a magician a lot of really interesting stuff in his books but i decided that yeah i'm going to take one of his things that he really impressed upon me which is to think about the atmosphere of the earth as this one thing then we all that we are all knit together by and i'm constantly having it inside of me you have it inside of you every single mouth of every single tree is sharing this with us and passing it back and forth every animal everything that's here is doing that and if you start looking at that way you wanted an integrative view of the life of a much bigger thing than our corporeal entities which are already not in where we get so individualistic and yet we're comprised of dozens and dozens of species that who live inside of us who we where our moods are obviously altered by them our intelligence is shaped by them so it goes on and on so i had a moment where here where the atmosphere is noticing that there's this new life form of during us africa i won't say how that gets described but you can read the book for that but i i do have a moment where it's oh this guy whatever you want to call it the totality of life on earth as earth recognizes something new is happening in san francisco which is this strangely mutated form of a fungus and the fungus then does go back to being a building material also it's it's part of uh what happens on essentially a squatter community in san burn a mountain which i've always felt close to because i i had a lot of time after good friend david schooly over there who's the guru of the mountain and and there's all these amazing things about that ecologically where it's one of the original it's the last remnant of the real eco niche that was once the whole mother that's what and there's an indian shell mound there and there's these amazing canyons with old very old oak forest in them and a lot of stuff so anyway i have a squatter community develop over there that has the the witches better actually grows them homes and i just have fun with that right and i let it i let it do a lot of different things it's becomes this this sort of source of fruit during growing problems with feeding people during this harsh military regime and that it also becomes a communication system where people begin to try with other species they don't quite know they are like i tried to make it happen you're in a little boat and the seals come up and they start barking at you but you don't know why one of the characters this maria scientist woman she's out on a little boat and so what's going on they come right up to her and they want us to talk to her right because they can feel somehow that there's an open channel communication even if she can't fully understand anything they're saying or understand what the point of it all is she starts to recognize something as a foot something's happening here and so that's i feel like that's maybe how this would go if we really were going through this kind of a moment i've had friends sending me pictures looking at witches butters you know the book because i think what i wanted to say is that it becomes a a voice of nature a way that nature begins to intervene exactly not just human society but the society of life all of us in different life forms and it begins to help us find ways to be able to talk to each other and in some curious unexpected way exactly and with the the episode where it first hit me was i think it's the crows that are warning people of the approaching danger of the army or the cops or something like that so it becomes a sort of a life force against the non-life force that the anti-life force yeah really beautifully i can imagine people scoffing at that as easily as enjoying it so it's always one of those things right a little bit of cringe factor myself because i'm not a boo guy at all hilariously not and yet the roots will love this but i'm thinking i immediately thought about sungai and in the force about how they telegraph when there's a toxin in the earth there will spread it up to other of the trays etc yeah yeah it's not far-fetched at all yeah the the mother tree stuff and Suzanne some art and that Richard Powers over story novel all that gets to that quite well and the wood wide web is some people have referred to it yeah which has got some scientists debunking it completely it's an argument that's out there it's fine i i don't discount at all that there's a great deal of communication going on in nature amongst quite a lot of different species there's somebody just read a piece where i think that sort of that guy as well but she talked about the honeybee their scientists who have decided that honeybee hives make democratic decisions together about where to move and they can trace it electrically through those pulses between the different bees with each other in a debate and slowly but surely a debate settles on a location and then they all go to that location actually the pattern is very close to how neurons firing on our brains is that's pretty fascinating to imagine whether that's what it really is much trying to be done much debate but people who are inclined towards a cartesian view of where the only things with intelligence and ability to communicate everything else is just dumb matter it's just a little false and exactly you know they can really hold on to that incredibly anymore that's and so if that's true then it begs lots of questions and there's obviously the animal rights movement's been quite strong for a long time and i've never really partook in that very much but i also recognize that if you're going to take it really consistently then it's likely what about plants rights because race cream too did you get a chance to listen to the episode we did with Paco Calvo no i will when we log off yeah so we had him in conversation he wrote the book plantissabians so we had in conversation with john burrows who's an indigenous legal scholar in canada i think you'd really enjoy that conversation i'll try to get out that sounds right up my alley yeah but you mentioned richard powers and in some ways it brings us back to something i've remarked on at the beginning of our conversation which is when i read the over story and i when i teach it especially i tell my students but he's talking about earth first he's talking about the first wave of activism for the environment and it's both its beauty and its failures and in some ways i think your novel does a similar service of doing a paying respect to and appreciating those early instantiations of understanding what was happening with the earth but also showing some of the ways it fell short but giving us hope that we could regenerate certain things if we are smart and if we open our minds to new knowledges largely coming from indigenous communities and epistemologies but other sources as well i just wanted to put you up in league with richard powers and the over story they're flattering but i really want to thank you so much for this novel and tell people you have to read it but one thing i wanted to to ask you about before i let you go is i want and i told you this when we started communicating about this interview how would you put it in conversation with nootopia which is a great book i appreciate that yeah let me just i'll just give a brief overview of nootopia so that people have a sense of it it was published in 2008 and it was a logical outgrowth of my many years doing process world which is 1981 to 94 and then we did a couple more in the beginning of the few thousands just for fun process world was about the underside of the information ages told by the alienated wage slaves of the modern office and beyond it was full of humor and poetry and satire and political analysis and fake ads and all sorts of great stuff so if you don't process world online you can see the whole thing at the internet archive go to archive.org and search for process world magazine or collective and you'll find them all nowotopia the subtitle is how pirate programmers outlaw bicyclists and vacant lot gardeners are inventing the feature today and right there in the title you can see that it overlaps with the novel because some of those characters who i saw as agents of history for the non-fiction treatment or reappear in this book as actual actors even though it's a little hard to find them in my real life anymore which is what my frustration but nowotopia is essentially about how people take their time and their technological know-how out of the market and when they're not at their idiotic jobs trying to make a living for money they work really hard trying to address the actual problems in our lives whether it's the ecological crisis or the crisis of social enemy or the emptiness of everyday life whatever you want to call it that's what people are up against in their real lives and then in that in so doing it's not just a hobby a lot of the time it's actually what makes their life worth living like the same way playing music does to a musician like when you're a person who has a job as a programmer or some office person or lawyer even or whatever and then in your free time quote unquote is when you're feeling alive you're really doing what matters to you that's a pretty vital reality that people that we have done a poor job of theorizing as a society who is especially amongst people with radical politics because we get hung up on the idea that it's the working class movement that has to change the world through organizing in the factories and the officers or the loading docks and the schools and oh sure of course that needs to happen too but where is it that people feel passionate where is there where is what makes them moves what makes them excited to be alive as human beings it's not being a worker precisely not being a worker and there are theoreticians about this John Holloway is a great theory on this very topic parallel has a book called crack capitalism which I think is a very parallel to nowtopia and we're good pals so there's this idea that the radical political moment is to escape the categories of capital to escape being merely a worker and becoming a fully human person engaged in changing the world through the activity you carry on which we generally refer to as the work and a lot of it does feel like work a lot of the time and then the contradictions for all these projects whether they're creating a DIY bike kitchen putting a lot of energy into being in the community garden and you find the people on either side of you one of them came from the south black person from the deep south who knows all about color greens and black eyed peas and things you've never heard of and the person on the other side of you is from Cambodia or El Salvador and they brought all these vegetables and fruits you've never heard of and they're growing their stuff and you're becoming friends and you're having these conversations and in that case in the same similarly end of DIY bike kitchen you might find yourself with some ten-year-olds and the guy will geezer like me a white guy and then I'm talking to these kids who are black but what do I know and then suddenly we have something in common we want to go on a ride together through the city and we're creating relationships and those relationships of exactly what we've lost for the last half century that's what capitalism is so good at is dissolving human relationships and turning us all into isolated individuals and so that atomization and fragmentation that we've lived through the antidote to it is essentially what I you know I'm from an Italian-autonomous Marxist party is the recomposition of the working class. All of us who produce the world are the working class I mean whether you make a ton of money for Google or you make almost nothing you know doing back kitchen work here in San Francisco we have to sell ourselves to a job to survive that means you're in a proletarian you're in the working class the wage level is irrelevant it's not about how much you make it's what the relationship is to power over how we produce life and most of us are easily producing a life that we don't agree with in so many ways and we don't even bother to ask ourselves how many ways we don't agree with the world we're forced to live in because there's no mechanism for that there's no democracy about what we do and how we do it and why and the fun and all questions why are we here what are we up to what what's the point of all this and so when people are doing stuff in their free time they are recreating a different logic or creating new relationships and new ways of addressing the the predicament in the world and the bigger deeper issues in that of course again from a somewhat Marxian point of view is this notion of the general intellect and so that got a lot of play for a while back there several decades ago and now it's it comes up over and over again since then and the idea of the general intellect is that it's everything of the apparatus of life you know that is to say all the human labor that preceded us built this world and much of that world we can't understand or grasp at all and yet we're able to interact with it because of our ability to be part of the general intellect we know what to do with a cell phone we know what to do with getting the TV to work we know how to take a bus to ride the bar drive a car all of these things are part of what is the ongoing reproduction of an apparatus and the apparatus is the embodiment of a lot of dead labor people who came before us who did all this stuff and sometimes there's moments where we might contest the general the direction of the general intellect goes to say that we don't like where it's going so good examples that I like to quote and I did in Naotopia and this book the novel is trying to play this out more intensively in the in Naotopia I talked about the fact that today health care for all of its worlds it's a fasterist bad organization and profiteering and misery nevertheless is radically better and different than it was in 1965 and one of the major reasons for that is the second wave feminism where women got together in small groups and started talking about their feelings and their health their physical health and at that point men and white lab coats had very little understanding women's physiology it turns out I knew some of the most basic things but they really didn't have any deep knowledge of women's physiology and women began appropriating that knowledge for themselves by self-examinations and communication and this is a radical movement that changed health care across the board and as it turns out it dovetail with movements to creating multilingual health care and and all kinds of other things like that so today the fact that you can get acupuncture or Ayurveda medicine or homeopathy or whatever you would not have been able to get that stuff easily in the 1960s now it's like everybody in their grandmother has access to every quack possible thing out there better for better and for worse frankly but there it is that's a broad product of a movement from below contesting the direction of science and technology and medical care another great example that's forgotten and now we have to reinvent it is the anti-nuclear move we basically brought the anti then the nuclear power movement to a halt in the 1970s because it was not just stupid way to boil water it still is and the idea that it's a solution for climate change and global one is ridiculous it's econingly ridiculous to hear people talk about it that way i just tried to make bonkers this eco-modernist agenda more and more of the awfulest stuff in order to solve one tiny narrow problem that we can identify so now you're just like delusional the anti-nuclear movement was a great example of people who didn't have any right to invade that space at all who weren't scientists they weren't government officials they weren't running the big companies and yet we organized on the ground millions of us most of us are under 30 of the time and really had a major impact and changed the direction of energy production of science and that was pro-solar back then i never in the 1970s like oh if everybody had solar energy we'd have the revolution and then in the 1990s i helped start critical mass it was like if everybody writes a bicycle we'll have a revolution you know but i didn't buy either of those at the time in both cases that was wrong but it does have an impact even the bicycle movement really has helped make urban life somewhat better than it would have been otherwise every bike is a knot of cars we like to see one left car and that's a little less carbon going into the atmosphere every single person has chosen to ride a bicycle is the way to get around it is a little tiny step in the right direction it's not the answer you can't solve it through consumer choices you can buy all the light bulbs you want won't make any difference at all you could never ride a plane again and the planes are gonna still go so we have to have a more higher level of aggregate choices around the division of labor the technology technologies we might use and that's what i was trying to really illustrate is that these kind of graphis movements are part of that process of saying that we actually have a right to democratically control the direction of science and technology yeah and in the novel i'd say let's say that's even further advanced in terms of social actors and social movements and let's see what they they come up with this has been such a wonderful opportunity to share ideas and learn from you chris and i have many plots boiling my brain i want you you know come down address my students here we are in the belly of the beast and it's it's strangling the minds of so many people who into it a much broader world it's exactly as you say when they're not working they go out and they do things and it just gives them life and they say why why are the proportions so skewed in the wrong direction we'll have many more conversations this has been a great start thank you so much for being on the show it's a great pleasure i look forward to check in checking out some of the back issues that i haven't checked out yet so i'll be exploring all the way i've ever heard a few of your shows and they're all great and i really again want to appreciate the fact that you've been dogged in your work on Gaza like very few people could keep that level of engagement and commitment up through the incredibly hard times that we've watched go on there and just to stay on it day in and day up for so long i have two notes to you for that take care have a good day bye bye bye please take a moment to like this episode and subscribe to this podcast this will help bring it to other people's intentions you might also follow me on twitter at polembo liu and let us know about any subjects you would like us to cover or people or groups you'd like us to interview.
