Sunset on the Puget Sound.
Had a sweet trip to Seattle for Adriana’s birthday over Thanksgiving weekend. She won some hockey tickets at a curling bonspiel so we went to see “our” San Jose Sharks beat the Seattle Kraken at the arena now known as “The Climate Pledge,” a name no one I asked could explain. I learned later that the name is a new one for an old arena built as part of the original World’s Fair in 1962—an event that crept into my 5-year-old brain even though I don’t have direct memory of it. But somehow the Space Needle and the Monorail made an early impression on me.
The Climate Edge?
Space Needle and Monorail… The Future! in 1962…
My father, who was born in 1932 in the depths of the Depression, and grew up poor in rural Connecticut, was always quite interested in World’s Fairs. He took us to the New York World’s Fair in 1964, a trip we made by passenger train from Chicago. I have a poignant 7-year-old memory of waking up at dawn on the clickety-clacking train, probably somewhere in Ohio, and sitting with my father watching the countryside flow by. I loved riding the train and later I remember the big geodesic dome at the World’s Fair, the exhibit that later went to Disneyland called “It’s a Small World” with the children’s voices singing in a big chorus “it’s a small small world… after all…” The 1964 World’s Fair also featured videophones, various corporate representations of the World of Tomorrow (General Motors, Boeing, General Electric, etc.). I’ve learned in recent years about the 1915 World’s Fair in San Francisco, and the way such fairs functioned before mass media to advertise new technologies, new ways of seeing the world, and pioneered the forms of mass-marketing and advertising that later became commonplace in large stores, and by way of radio and then television.
In Seattle they had a World’s Fair in 1962 and as it was during the Kennedy administration with its prominent push to put a “man on the moon” by the end of the decade, the space-as-future theme was central. The Space Needle remains an iconic symbol of Seattle’s skyline, but I hadn’t ever visited it until this short trip. The monorail that leaves from below the Space Needle was just as much part of the “future” that the 1962 World’s Fair was so successful at promoting. When you enter the tower today, paying a hefty $38 per person, you walk up a spiral ramp past a series of displays showing how the Space Needle “played” during its construction and opening 62 years ago.
Welcome to the Future!
I can’t remember watching The Jetsons, though I’m sure I did. I was born in 1957, the peak year of the baby boom, and I’ve shared with 6.4 million others countless “typical” experiences of the last half of the 20th century. Technology, fast cars, guns, American exceptionalism, teevee and the steady expansion of “major league” mass spectator sports, Hollywood and eventually computers and the internet… it’s the air I breathed alongside everyone else. But I didn’t buy it. Sure I like sports (hell, I went to Seattle to see a hockey game!), and I’ve certainly been a relatively early adopter of many of the technologies that have come along. But I’m enraged by the smug complacency that surrounds me, that thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, that feels entitled to be entertained by endless cruelty both fictional and horribly real. I supposed I’m most dismayed by the utter emptiness of the glowing futures I’ve been sold since childhood. Nobody who knows me would characterize me as believer in the American Dream—I doubt if anyone would even tar me with the shameful label of “patriot.”
from Democracy Wall on Valencia Street in San Francisco.
But here I am. I’ve made my life in San Francisco, a city that gives its bohemian residents a pass, allowing us to imagine that we’re different, that we live in an enclave on the “left coast” where we don’t support the Empire, and stand strong against the reactionary racists and misogynists who dominate U.S. culture. That’s true enough. But we live and work and create and contribute to this culture, not another one. It’s the odd reality of life in the U.S. these days that critical thinkers who repudiate nearly everything this country does benefit alongside those who are ardent cheerleaders for the militaristic barbarism the government imposes on vast swaths of the rest of the world. We are all taxpayers here, and the system is set up so that the lion’s share of those taxes go to supporting the violence inflicted abroad by “our” military and at home by “our” police and the vast system of racist incarceration they support.
Democracy Wall installation.
Another commentary on Democracy Wall…
In Seattle on November 30, 2024, we were exactly 25 years after the last time I spent a couple of days in that city. In 1999 I joined my friends in the Committee for Full Enjoyment (Not Full Employment) to contribute our bodies and drumming energies to the blockades that stopped the World Trade Organization (WTO) from meeting. I took part on Nov. 29-30 and went home the morning of December 1, while thousands of others continued to push into the “no protest” zones, encircle the local jail holding hundreds of protesters, and giving moral support to the trade negotiators from African and Asian countries who ultimately refused to be coerced. They refused to consent to the terms of a new regime of corporate domination defined by the U.S., Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia. It was soon after this failure that the WTO voted to allow the People’s Republic of China to join, the world powers assuming that the erosive capacity of markets and money would inevitably shape China into a cooperative junior partner to the world capitalist elite. Ha ha ha ha ha ha… that worked so well!
This 4×6 postcard is what we handed out in Seattle. Here is the text.
The remarkable success of the WTO protest in 1999 was a big surprise to nearly everyone. A new book I picked up there called One Week to Change the World is a compilation of oral history interviews by DW Gibson, an excellent (if necessarily partial) retrospective account of those exciting days. I wrote about it a few months later, in an essay published in 2000. Gibson’s book includes the recollections of NGO organizers, union leaders, direct action network veterans, trade representatives, police, government officials. I was quickly swept back to those heady days and the intense aftermath when everything that happened came under such intense scrutiny and criticism. The euphoria that erupted on N30 1999 is captured beautifully here, as well as the bewilderment of the police chief, the mayor, even the mainstream NGO people who were as outflanked and stunned by the nonviolent force that the Direct Action Network successfully organized and brought to bear. It was a moment when autonomous affinity groups united in a shared strategy had the tactical edge on lumbering police in armored personnel carriers, when nimble videographers were able to shape the news narrative, when early cellphone adopters were a step ahead of the lesser-technologized authorities.
It was also the birthplace of the Indymedia Center. For the first time, activists with camcorders and their own media resources could record interviews, shoot images in the streets, and get it widely disseminated on the same day via a hub of internet links. This was incredibly exciting at the time and led to the launching of parallel Indymedia hubs in many other places in the following months and years. (The San Francisco Bay Area still has its own website a quarter century later.) But it was also the birthplace for what became our ubiquitous social media world. The success of a bottom-up demonstration of crowd-sourced news and information set the wheels in motion. Eventually tech-savvy programmers with the backing of capital invented Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, et al, and what had been an experiment in unbridled democratic self-representation became grist for the Surveillance Capitalist economy, yet another chapter in capitalism’s ability to absorb its opposition by commodifying everything that we do (and are).
from the Turtles and Teamsters exhibit at Seattle’s MOHAI museum.
These are all from the MOHAI exhibit looking back 25 years at the WTO protests. It’ll be there until April 2025.
The early Seattle breakthrough wasn’t going to last of course. Less than a year later in Washington DC we “summit hopped” along with thousands of others to protest the IMF/World Bank meetings. But the police were not taken by surprise there. Instead they broke into the Convergence Center and confiscated the materials that protesters were going to use to “lock down” access points like they had in Seattle. In the following year police in Gothenberg Sweden and Genoa Italy would open fire on protesters, showing there weren’t any limits to what they would do to protect the oligarchic planning process from outside disruption. When 9/11 happened, of course, the movement’s momentum was abruptly halted and quickly dissipated. War and the jingoistic fear and hysteria that erupted after the planes slammed into the World Trade Center reshaped public opinion with reliable speed. Two years later, many of the same techniques that were used to shut down Seattle were used again to bring San Francisco to a halt in March 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. When the invasion was over in a few days, the anti-war movement lost its momentum too. But the war went on, and in some ways is still going on (Syria finally overthrowing Assad is a long-tail consequence of the invasion of Iraq, not to mention the horrifying genocide Israel is carrying out in Palestinian territories, its attack on Lebanon, etc.). Demoralization set in and when the Occupy moment erupted in 2011, it wasn’t a product of months of careful face-to-face organizing like the WTO protest and even the anti-Iraq war had been. It was more spontaneous and less formed, for better and worse. When it succumbed to police clearance months later, many of the participants were already seeking a new way to proceed that didn’t require lengthy campouts in cement plazas. And no one knew how to handle the divergent class dynamics that beset many of the Occupations—with hungry unhoused people gladly pouring in for the well-organized free kitchens and safe camping spaces, but there being little political cohesion among the different participants. After Occupy subsided, protests erupted in places like Brazil, Turkey, Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Chile. Vince Bevins’ book If We Burn analyzes how so many protests that erupted in horizontalist anarchistic ways were co-opted by organized right-wing movements leading to the surge of right-wing populists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, and others. The George Floyd protests in 2020 during the peak of Covid19 felt like a corner was finally being turned, but four years later, reaction and regression is the tone of our times.
I feel a bit schizophrenic since my personal life continues to be quite pleasant in the day-to-day rhythm I live by, albeit it feels awful to live through genocide. But Gaza is not unique and throughout my life there have been dozens of episodic slaughters, barbaric invasions, and horrific attacks on non-combatants by crazed soldiers and the men who direct them. I can’t remember any period in my living memory when the U.S. military wasn’t bombing someone somewhere; the perpetual expansion of the war machine and its voracious appetite for wealth and resources has only accelerated over the years.
What happened to our hopeful futures? The silly Jetsons’ future was never more than a cartoon (in every respect), but the sense that we could change the course of history and wrest the controls from corporate oligarchs felt palpable in 1999. It was never likely that we could succeed, but we had a brief taste of other possibilities. They recurred in 2003 and 2011 and 2020… they will again. How can we learn from all the ways we were undone in the past? Who is we anyway? Can we forge a collective identity that will have the capacity to reinvent life? Isn’t that what I’m always writing about here?
Leaning against the glass at the top of the Space Needle.
Quite the views from up there…
From the Puget Sound ferry…
The Venture Capitalist-crypto-narco-AI cabal that is concentrating its efforts on controlling the Trump regime are riding high for the moment. But they are delusional about themselves and their power, and have little understanding of how life is actually lived in the vast hinterlands of North America, let alone in the rest of the world. Their venal corruption and petty squabbling will undermine any project they may seem to share even if we can be sure they’ll cause a lot of harm along the way.
A Tech Bro on the move…
Another beautiful post on Democracy Wall…
Somehow I still think a future worth living is something we CAN create. But like my most reliable comment-leaver, Martin, or Bifo who I enjoy reading on Substack, I simultaneously think the door may have already closed. Certainly the ability to form complex thoughts and find ways to collectively respond to such thoughts seems far more precarious today than it did at the turn of the century. The turns and twists since those heady days in 1999 have surely narrowed our options, drastically reduced the time for action, and foreclosed many of the possibilities we once entertained. The path is narrow, the time is short, and the likelihood of “success” by any definition is very slim at best. And yet, here we are. What else is there to do? However insurmountable it all seems, or is, it’s also true that the systems that dominate our lives and choices are incredibly fragile. The furious wrath directed at any dissent, only growing more frenzied with every passing month, surely indicates just how weak they are. There are cracks wherever you look. Shattering the systems we live with now is surely a fraught path toward any kind of liberated life. But we can be sure there’s no worthy future to be found by trudging into the abyss with the racists, misogynists, militarists, and technophiles.
Incipient revolt?
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