Category: Nowtopia - Nowtopian

War Is the Air We Breathe

I’m sitting in an old 1830s farmhouse near the border between New Hampshire and Massachusetts. It’s over 90° and quite humid, as it has been since I arrived five days ago. It seems the heat wave will only intensify in the next days. I spent a lot of time here in the 1980s and early […]

General Ludd to General Intellect

The Luddite Tribunal held at Oakland’s Tamarack Cafe on November 9, 2023. (l to r) Brian Merchant, Safe Street Rebel, Wendy Liu, Paris Marx, and Veena Dubal.

I’ve been called “Luddite” from time to time, though I have always refused the category of “technology” as having any particularly useful reference point. Criticizing technology, […]

Chronicle of Deaths Foretold

The disastrous new center bike lane on Valencia Street.

San Francisco street engineers have begun implementing what the world’s best-known bicycling diplomat, Copenhagenize’s Mikael Colville-Anderson, called the “worst infrastructure I have ever seen anywhere in the world.” The new center-of-the-street two-way cycle path on Valencia from 23rd to 15th is a disaster. It […]