Recent Posts
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What the Hell
June 18, 2025
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As Darkness Engulfs Us
April 6, 2025
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AI, Risk, and Work
January 17, 2025
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“Things Are in the Saddle, and Ride Mankind”
December 29, 2024
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Forgotten Futures in Seattle
December 12, 2024
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Autocracy Defeats Neoliberalism
November 14, 2024
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History… We’re Soaking in It!
October 2, 2024
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A Numbing Spectacle
September 22, 2024
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War Is the Air We Breathe
July 15, 2024
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Silicon Valley: A Living History
May 6, 2024
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 June 14, 2025, h/t Polly Marshall for sending me this photo while I was home with COVID.
I’ve been extremely reluctant to write anything for months. We are drowning in bullshit. The maelstrom of AI-generated slop on all social media platforms is bad enough. But there’s also so many new independent journalists (no longer employed in real newsrooms) at substack, medium and other platforms clamoring for us to read (and donate to) them.
Makes you wish there was a decent newspaper where you could find a selection of these great writers regularly. Imagine a solid daily paper that honestly and critically covered the news, and that you could feel good about supporting. And it only cost a quarter every day! But there’s no such thing. The well-known newspapers are drastically overpriced and awful, full of propaganda and working to normalize this rapid further descent into barbarism. TV and cable shows are even worse. I still read some magazines, but these days I spend more hours reading books than anything else.
Podcasts are the place I find myself relying on for independent, thoughtful, in-depth coverage of things I can barely find in the printed press. And there are somewhere over 2 million podcasts now! How are you supposed to wade through all that? Who has time to puzzle it out? (Find my list at the end of this post.)
There’s such a shit-ton of words anywhere you care to look. Most of it is not worth a glance, while there are plenty of gems hidden here and there, to be sure. But ever more exasperated, I ask myself, what (and why) do I have to add to it? I’ve had the reasonable excuse that my father moving into assisted living at the end of February and requiring my regular presence at least two times a week, and sometimes more, has significantly altered the rhythm of my life. I haven’t had as much time as usual to ruminate and write. But I also haven’t felt called to do much writing either. And yet, here I am!
I don’t have any unique insight into the fascist efforts to remake the government to serve them, although I am going to write a bit about the deeper philosophical ideas that have given them space to work. We’re all watching in real time, to varying degrees resigned or stunned, enraged or skeptical, about the radical right effort to wreak havoc. Judges are blocking things at an unprecedented rate, but it’s like watching the little Dutch boy put his fingers in the dike that keeps springing new leaks. Or a not-funny game of Whack-a-mole. And if it is a systematic program to delegitimize the rule of law, what judicial decisions are going to halt the entitled and pointed provocations of misanthropic malevolence?
 Don’t see BART cars graffiti’ed too often, but when you do!…
 June 14, 2025
Literally millions of people are doing their civic-minded best to obstruct and impede the assholes, whether the new American Gestapo operating as ICE, or the old familiar thugs at the FBI or local police. Kudos to the folks in LA who have stood strong. Locally we have seen hundreds surrounding ICE facilities in the past days to block their cruel efforts to snatch and deport innocent people. Last Monday about 2500 gathered at the nearby BART plaza and marched up Mission Street in a show of solidarity with Los Angeles and a willingness to stand up to the government. I went down with COVID the next evening and am still laid up as I write this a week later.
 Great shot north on Dolores Street, June 14, 2025… Photo: Sue Bee
Tens of thousands marched in the sunny “No Kings” protest here in SF, and many millions more in cities and towns everywhere. All good. But none really touches the levers of political and police power that they’re using to rip up the meager social safety net, and criminalize countless people just trying to live their lives. It would be ironically funny to see libertarian anti-government blowhards becoming authoritarian control-freaks at the head of the state if it weren’t so harmful to so many. These are deeply warped people, many of whom have now embraced the bizarre assertion that empathy is a sign of weakness. These damaged people have lost their basic humanity and they’re trying to pretend that’s a good thing. How did we get to the place where some of the worst people, filled with resentment and hatred and fear, have grabbed all this power?
 Dolores Park, I always knew you were smart…
Continue reading What the Hell
I’ve been AWOL from this blog for months now. My dad moved into an assisted living facility in Millbrae and it’s been very time-consuming, to say the least. I had all sorts of problems with his health, the institution and its billing practices, and all the planning associated with leaving his home, watching my sister and brother-in-law get ready to relocate to the midwest, and organizing the imminent sale of his house. I think it’s starting to settle down now, and I’m hoping for a regular rhythm that will leave me some time to process my thoughts and perhaps occasionally share them here as I am wont to do…
Here’s the first of the placards I made for yesterday’s nationwide protests. It was good to be out in the sun with friends. It was a funny milling-about kind of demonstration, which was fine with me. I was far from the stage and the official speechifying, something I never care for anyway. I also attended briefly the “Tesla Takedown” rally in front of the dealership on Van Ness a week earlier, so I’ll pepper this with images from that too.
 My first sign for the April 5 protest.
 Rather than “hands off” all sorts of dumb things like NATO, I say “hands on” because we have some obvious changes to make…
But I thought I’d use this moment to post a short screed I wrote to accompany a link to the public statement by the OAH and AHA, the two main history organizations in the country.
In brazenly trying to put the (critical historical scholarship) toothpaste back into the tube (of social amnesia and self-congratulatory denial), the neo-fascists running the organized demolition of the administrative state attempt the impossible. Far too many deeply researched and brilliantly written works have appeared in the last half century, all contributing to a far more nuanced and critical understanding of the settler colonial society that is the United States of America, founded on slavery and genocide, and designed to reinforce white supremacy at every opportunity. As the two main historical organizations representing working historians argue, “Classifying collective historical scholarship as ‘toxic indoctrination’ or ‘discriminatory equity ideology’ dismisses the knowledge generated by the deep research of generations of historians.”
The book burning bonfires may not be far off, since the free circulation of books remains one of the most effective means of subverting the blathering, blatantly false propaganda being imposed by executive fiat. Let’s conserve and share our libraries, let’s do what we can to keep a bright flame of critical historical thinking burning. Perhaps one day the fires we kindle will overwhelm the puny minds trying so desperately to silence the winds of change that have already scoured the land and buried forever the old cliches of American history.
 The view from the International Space Station!
 Even further out there…
And from the Tesla Takedown protest on March 29…



Not always the most radical or politically interesting themes, but anything we do to puncture the myth of the grifter class of kleptocrats seems like worth doing…
 Democracy Wall, January 2025.
I’ve spent a lot of years writing about work, technology, revolution, organizing, politics, etc. From the early days of Processed World (1981-1994) to my book Nowtopia (2008) and in dozens of essays on this blog and on Foundsf.org, I’ve addressed how the shape and control of work is the linchpin of how we live, of how we make life together. As I dug into history I realized that it was more than a century ago when a key battle was lost: who decides what kinds of technologies we use, why, and to what purpose? Who decides what work we do, how we do it, how the benefits of our efforts are distributed, and what should we do going forward? It is obvious that nothing remotely resembling a democratic process exists for any of these questions. And yet most people, if asked (which we never are!), would probably agree that a democratic process would be appropriate when it comes to determining the texture and purpose of our lives.
Or as Jathan Sadowski puts it in his new and very valuable book The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism
… risk governance transforms the public into janitors cleaning up the messes of corporations, militaries, police forces, and others who would rather shoot first and never ask questions later. The default is to allow capital to innovate without needing to ask for permission—or at least to move forward with as few imposed guardrails as possible. (p. 166)
As I learned of the long and admirable history of labor agitation and organizing, with its many epic battles and violent confrontations, I concluded that unions as we know them are as much as part of the problem as any other institution in our society. Not because the unions are guided by bad people (though too often they are!), or even that the urge to unionize itself is misguided. I’m in favor of people getting organized!
But the logic of AFL-CIO trade unionism, born in the 1935 Wagner Act and massively curtailed by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and ensuing McCarthyite Red Scare, is to narrow union goals to contractual agreements on wages and benefits, and to ensure a base line of safety standards for workers. (Not that the miserable condition of workplace safety and health across U.S. factories, refineries, offices, campuses, and highways is anything to be proud of!) But unions agreed to let owners of capital decide how to organize factories, which technologies to implement, etc., during bitter 19th century battles between capital and labor—when capital had all the power of the state and its police and military, in addition to private armies, at its disposal in that class war. In the recent past unions have capitulated to decades of neoliberal cutbacks, deindustrialization, automation, globalization, and ultimately presided over their own political demise, unwilling to break out of the legal shackles that prevent workers from exercising the power they (should) have over economic life. For all its limitations, the unionization wave of the 1930s was at least based on widespread workplace occupations, secondary strikes and picket lines, boycotts, etc. All those effective techniques were specifically made illegal by Taft-Hartley in 1947.
 New Year’s Eve, Ocean Beach, Dec. 31 2024
If such militancy still existed and could prevail against the inevitable repression that the state and corporations would bring to bear, it’s still not clear that the working class, or its representative institutions, have much desire to wrest control over decisions about technology, production, or the very structure of the economy from the Lords of Capital. Perhaps with the coming disruptions that the Trump regime will impose on business, government, international borders, etc., not to mention the expected all-out assault on nonprofit organizations and anyone with even the vaguest of center-left politics, social opposition and revolt will be thrown back to basics. That is, finding power where it exists and can be wielded, at work, on the roads, at chokepoints throughout the just-in-time global economy. Once people begin to assert themselves in that direct way again, assuming they do, it’s long overdue to take up the deeper predicament we face over a profoundly unjust and uncontrollable technosphere, one that is using all the tools of behavior modification to keep people down and blaming each other for a fucked up capitalist world.
In the three books I’m going to discuss in this post, a process is unveiled starting with early industrialization at the beginning of the 1800s that has made the introduction of new technologies remarkably undemocratic. Technologies chosen by vested interests to protect and expand their power and wealth are trotted out as inventions and innovations but at no point are everyday people given a chance to evaluate the purpose, value, or potential consequences (good or bad)—not even elected representatives in government are given the opportunity. Any effort to address the consequences of a given technology or invention, no matter how life-altering it turns out to be, are well after the fact and treated by some as illegitimate regulations or impediments to their ability to profit freely. Obviously the current “large language model” system of artificial intelligence (AI) is a good example of a potentially powerful implementation of new software that might have far-reaching consequences in multiple areas.
In Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk the French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz provides a very useful look back at key technological introductions and the social conflicts that arose in the early 1800s. He helpfully frames his discussion with the term disinhibition by which he means two sides of the social integration of new technologies: contemplating danger and then normalizing it. He uses several key examples to show how regulations and safety standards and governmental authorizations were all used to legitimize technological faits accomplis, or technologies that were already being used, regardless of their demonstrably negative or risky qualities.
From a historiographical point of view, his work is doubly interesting because he is seeking to give voice back to the losers of history, to “reconstruct frameworks of intelligibility that their defeat rendered invisible. In so doing, it becomes clear that the opponents of these projects were not siding against innovation, but rather for their environment, their safety, their jobs, and for the preservation of forms of life they considered valuable.” (p. 8) Jathan Sadowski describes the way technologies are actually implemented in the 21st century: “Rather than a politics of refusal, we are given an ethics of acceptance. The driving concern is: How do you get people to trust a technology, integrate it into their lives, or just look the other way and not raise a fuss?” (p. 45)
The Luddites in the 1810s in England are the best example of a dynamic and widespread revolt against new looms and spinning machines that they knew would make their lives worse. No other group or movement has had a bigger impact historically on the question of technology and its social acceptance than the Luddites. Sadowski quotes the great historian of technology and labor processes David Noble saying, “the Luddites were perhaps the last people in the West to perceive technology in the present tense and to act upon that perception.” (p. 43)
 Someone has begun doing 3D art on Democracy Walll… the sign follows at a readable size.

Continue reading AI, Risk, and Work
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