Call white voters bigots or don’t. But in good times and in bad, in peacetime and in war, in sunshine or in shadow, white America votes for those candidates it believes are most likely to keep people of color “in their place”—either outside the country altogether, or in the most servile and subordinate condition possible within it.
—Kevin Baker, “Losing My Religion,” Easy Chair column, Harper’s Magazine, March 2020
I am finally sitting down to write a new blog post at the end of February 2020. My new bookHidden San Francisco just came out, and I just hosted yesterday the inaugural Twilight “City Front” Bay Cruise too. I hang out with my almost 3-year-old granddaughter twice a week, and Shaping San Francisco continues to chug along, underfunded but sustained by our commitment; the reward is that it is interesting and engaging most of the time.
I often feel a palpable nausea when I wake up to another day of life in the U.S. And I don’t have much to complain about personally. My personal situation is very comfortable thanks to my land trust apartment and its relatively eviction-proof low rent, and my low cost of living thanks to not owning an automobile, and paying the minimum for a high-deductible health insurance. I can proudly say that I’ve made it from 23 to 63 years old without having to have a regular 40-hour+ job (in fact, I’ve not had any “real jobs” all that time beyond self-employed small business gigs and the occasional college class to teach). I’ve enjoyed a remarkably free life, intellectually and socially, and I continue to enjoy the fruits of that freedom every day. A lack of financial hardship of course has been a blessing throughout, not because I ever got rich or had a lot of money, but because I was able to save some of my limited income (and the small payout I got from the only time I owned property) by keeping my overhead as low as possible. Lucky me. But the world around me, in San Francisco, in California, in the United States, and certainly across the planet, is going to hell. And there is nothing on the horizon that gives me much hope that we can halt this disaster and turn towards a liberatory abundance rooted in our common wealth.
The bizarre ritual of American politics is fully underway, and it’s difficult to discuss politics or political issues without it devolving into a comparative popularity contest of the various candidates. My own long-time antipathy for electoral politics and especially presidential politics, makes this spectacular ritual all the more repellent. But like everyone, I too succumb to the daily reporting on the horse race, much the same as I follow a baseball pennant race, or the NBA regular season. But in the case of presidential politics it’s hard not to try to interpret the polls and primary votes as having some larger political meaning, if only because so much of the U.S. population that chooses to pay attention to politics invests nearly all its energies into this narrow and symbolic “choice.” The half that tunes out is mostly tuned out of any sense of politics or historical agency. In any case, there is a shortage of broad grassroots organizing going on outside of the “electoral imperative.”
Like most people with a critical mind and a heart, I have been a bit traumatized by Trumpism, especially its blatant white supremacist ideology. On one hand, I saw the turn to xenophobic nationalism and racist trolling as more of the same that we endured in the 1980s under the equally dim-witted TV president Reagan. But this is decades later, and the revanchist efforts to restore American primacy launched by the ruling class in the mid-1970s through the embrace of the marketizing, privatizing neoliberal attack on the social and the public has largely run its course. We’re left with a profoundly atomized and fearful population. The bonds of solidarity and mutual aid, probably strongest among the poorest and most oppressed communities, have largely been destroyed among working- and middle-class people. Most seem to accept the prevailing sense that There Is No Alternative, and that you’re on your own. Instead of Freedom = Slavery we get Kleptocracy = Meritocracy, and for some bizarre reason an awful lot of people actually believe it (it may be one of Trump’s most useful qualities, his willingness to openly and brazenly flaunt the norms that keeps the corruption buried, most recently in his flurry of pardons for white-collar criminals who were convicted of all the things he’s been doing all along). The bigger public secret remains War = Peace, which masks the insane expansion of the U.S. military budget, and the pointless murders, slaughters, and lost wars that should have long ago discredited the Pentagon and its apologists.
We are on course to fill the world’s oceans with more plastic (in terms of sheer weight) than life. In the face of this ecocidal absurdity, private investors in major oil companies are expanding plastic production by over 40% in the near future. The United States claims to be the best of all possible societies, even when things are deteriorating all around us in such dramatic fashion—from the collapse of daily news sources to the brutal unhousing of ever more of our neighbors, the rapacious destruction of the limited environmental protections we managed to develop since the 1970s, the abandonment of public lands and public resources to venal profiteers, etc. etc.
A surprisingly large number of people continue to believe in their underlying well-being, especially if they own a house. Somehow the decades-long inflation of property values is expected to continue forever, and the long-term disconnection between income and the cost of shelter is to be ignored. For the 40% of the population that cannot handle a $500 emergency due to lack of savings or resources, property values offer no hope, and for most of the bottom half of the population, endlessly rising housing prices and rents only exacerbate an already untenable situation.
Thought about in this way, maybe Bernie Sanders has a chance. But even if he were to win, and somehow bulldoze the inevitable obstruction in Congress (where millionaire Nancy Pelosi and her plutocrat allies will be among the most intransigent), the idea that jobs and economic growth are in themselves a good thing will go unchallenged. A Green New Deal may finally begin to direct our daily productive lives towards some of the real transformations that are already decades too late. But it also threatens to complicate even further urgent attempts to break with the growth paradigm that drives capitalist accumulation and ensures that we will eventually go headfirst into the abyss.
So I’m happy to see Sanders doing better than anyone else in the current campaign. Some friends on the left are certain his candidacy is doomed to repeat the McGovern 1972 catastrophe, and they may be right. It’s hard to imagine enough young voters turning out to swamp the gerontocracy and its millions of elderly white supremacist voters. Though they do conveniently keep dying, there are deep currents running through whole swaths of the country that are too easily tapped by demagoguery and open appeals to whiteness, America First, and other ideological ghosts that have chased us all through the 240 years of U.S. history.
If this election turns on anything, I think it is a generational opportunity to repudiate for once (and let’s hope, for all) the persistent white racism that has had its last gasp of self-congratulatory power while firmly planting its head into its collective ass during the Trump era. Surely there must be a substantial majority who are sick of the backward-looking, reactionary, incredibly dumb people who are running the show, Trump only being the figurehead for a brazen strata of comfortable criminals. Their criminality takes all the usual forms—stealing public resources and money, exploiting millions of people while brutalizing others, destroying common wealth in pursuit of their own profits, and irretrievably destroying a potentially abundant future that should belong to everyone on earth. So sure, vote the bums out. But voting is not enough, not nearly enough.
Bente Wohnsen Carlsson November 5, 1936 – October 28, 2019
Me and my mom on Mother’s Day, May 2019.
My mother, Bente, died October 28, 2019. I am very sad and will miss her forever. Losing a parent is the most normal of human experiences, and among the most daunting. She was nearly 83, and I thought for a number of years that she or my father could drop unexpectedly at any time and I needed to be prepared. Two weeks before she died she took a bad fall, and as so often happens when the very elderly take a fall, things unraveled. I wrote this a few weeks ago, but wasn’t ready to make it public til today, a month after her death.
During her two weeks in the hospital, we learned a lot about Kaiser’s assembly line medical care, the erroneous assumptions it produces that lead to degraded care at skilled nursing facilities (through no fault of the individuals who work in those understaffed, under-resourced facilities) and how hard it is to properly advocate for our parents when things start breaking down. The saddest loss is the relationship between my mother and my granddaughter, which had just begun to solidify. But relationships between great-grandmothers and great-granddaughters are rare, and almost by definition, cannot last. They played together for two and a half years—pretty good really, but my granddaughter’s memories of my mom will be fully shaped by the many videos and photos we have of them. She’s a child of the digital world, the over-documented childhoods that will allow little to disappear in the fog of memory. She will “know” her childhood in a way that few of us born in the 20th century do (unless our parents made home movies of our earliest days).
Mom and Halloul when she was just a few months old in 2017.
At my dad’s birthday lunch in January 2019.
My mom came to the United States after marrying my father on December 22, 1956, when she was already 6 months pregnant with me. At a memorial we held on Day of the Dead, my father surprised us with his account of their serendipitous meeting at the end of a train line in northern Germany where he’d overslept and missed his connection. After traveling together to Copenhagen, he left as planned to visit his relatives in Sweden, but came back after a few days and went straight to my mother’s parents’ home at the edge of Dyrehaven in Klampenborg, a suburb north of Copenhagen. After he was well received and fed dinner, my mother, who was working as a nurse trainee, called in and told her parents to have my dad meet her at Hellerup station at midnight. He was there, and after walking around a bit in the warm Scandinavian midsummer middle of the night, in a passionate interlude my mother and father conceived me in a public park. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 11, 1957.
My mother and father on their wedding day, Dec. 22, 1956
My mom, dad, grandmother, aunt, and grandfather, Dec. 22, 1956, in Denmark.
I have no memories of my first couple of years in Brooklyn. I have a dim memory of flying to Denmark in 1960 or 1961 on Scandinavian Airlines to visit my mother’s mother (MorMor in Danish). The plane had white linen tablecloths and full silverware, including a special “pusher” for kids in lieu of a knife, a utensil that remained in our kitchen drawer for another decade. At my grandmother’s I had to sleep in a crib for which I was already too tall, my head and feet uncomfortably smashing the top and bottom. My earliest memory in Chicago, after we moved there in 1959, was when my father carried me up a rickety wooden stairway to see fireworks shooting off over the opening of a nearby Co-op grocery store. Later, redevelopment bulldozers leveled many square blocks across the street from our place in Hyde Park, and I vividly remember an old-fashioned circus setting up its BigTop tent in the vacant lot, with elephants and caged tigers, clowns and acrobats and the whole bit. I was taken to see the show and my mother bought me a small stuffed bear that was attached to a dowel. It slipped from my grasp and fell through the bleacher seats into the darkness below. It felt like the end of the world as I bawled in abject despair, until a nice person brought it out and gave it back to me.
Digital Commons, Digital Blinders, and a Fraught Social Future
This blog post is really too long, I admit it, at over 8500 words… but it’s based on nine different books that all spoke to each other that I read in the past months, and it all dovetails rather strongly with my own personal history, where this blog begins. At the end I list the nine books with links, and I encourage you to read all of them!
Random graffiti on Harrison Street in San Francisco, summer 2019.
“Are You Doing the Processing, or Are You Being Processed?” —Processed World #1, April 1981
This … signals the metamorphosis of the digital infrastructure from a thing we have to a thing that has us. (p. 204, Zuboff)
…“smart” is a euphemism for rendition: intelligence that is designed to render some tiny corner of lived experience as behavioral data. Each smart object is a kind of marionette; for all its “smartness,” it remains a hapless puppet dancing to the puppet master’s hidden economic imperatives. Products, services, and applications march to the drumbeat of inevitabilism toward the promise of surveillance revenues hacked from the still-wild spaces that we call “my reality,” “my home,” “my life,” and “my body.” (Zuboff, p. 238)
Almost four decades ago I was
working at an “information desk” at 4th and Mission in San
Francisco in the lobby of the Downtown Community College Center (it
later became part of City College of SF). From there I was able to
take a class learning a new skill: word processing! Upstairs we were
taught to use magnetic cards in the shape of old IBM punch cards to
record our typing. When we wanted to edit or fix errors on our
document we reloaded the magnetic card next to the IBM Selectric
typewriter, and by counting down lines and across words and letters,
we arrived at what we hoped was the spot where the change was to be
made, and inserted it. When we later printed the document again we
could see if we were correct.
From
this training, I was suddenly eligible to work for any of the many
multinationals in downtown San Francisco who were hungrily seeking
newly skilled modern office workers, and the starting wages were
twice what I’d been getting at the info desk, $12 vs. $6 in 1980.
Before long I was on a longterm “temp” job at Bank of America at
1455 Market (a building that weirdly is now home to Uber’s HQ and
San Francisco’s Department of the Environment) where I worked on a
glowing green CRT terminal connected to a DEC minicomputer. I worked
on a team of word processors producing manuals to train bank tellers
in Florida how to use BofA’s computer systems (this was still
several years before interstate banking was deregulated and in 1980
BofA did not yet formally own any banks in Florida).
When
that gig ended, I hopped around among Arthur Anderson accountants, T.
Rowe Price brokerage, and other forgettable corporate offices. When
my friends in Berkeley asked if I would be interested in working at
their hippie computer collective (Community Memory) I said yes,
provided it was a four-day week. I became the 3rd employee of their
for-profit marketing company Pacific Software, and spent the next
year and a half producing marketing literature for their two
state-of-the-art software programs, a relational database system and
a packet-switching program that facilitated communications across the
early internet. I typed and printed an endless procession of
nondisclosure agreements for everyone from defense contractors to
banks and government agencies to other software companies, all eager
to see the best software computer-loving hippies could make.
Community
Memory had started in the mid-1970s as an effort to create a public
access computer network with public terminals in places like
libraries, community centers, and even Leopold’s Records. The
assumption back then was that the government, the military, and IBM
would never allow computers to become available to the general
public, and there was little sense that a vast publicly accessible
Internet could grow based on telecommunications hardware and the
worldwide web (first invented in the early 1990s). Hobbyists and
tinkerers around the 1970s Homebrew Computer Club (which later begat
Apple and Microsoft among many others) were all trying to invent
small, accessible machines that anyone could build and play with,
without really knowing what they would be used for. This was also the
post-Watergate era when Senate hearings had revealed vast spying by
government agencies on citizens, sparking outrage and promises of
reform. Behind the scenes, the Pentagon’s efforts to advance
cybernetics, computing, and networks were proceeding rapidly, and the
Arpanet connected a number of prestigious universities and research
facilities—students at those universities were among the early
experimenters, including the Berkeley-based Community Memory group.
By
the time I became the secretary for its marketing arm, the collective
had developed two very sophisticated pieces of software for their
planned public network, that were also at the cutting edge of the
beginnings of the commercial computer business. When I went to work
there, too, I had already been publishing, as part of a different
collective, Processed World magazine for almost a year.
In
the pages of Processed World we gave voice to our expectations
that as the newly automating office developed, proletarianized white
collar workers would band together to resist, subvert, and sabotage
the new organization of work, and hopefully find the collective power
to shortcircuit capitalism at the point of circulation. My early word
processing skills helped me learn phototypesetting, and through
serendipitous events we had acquired a machine and it was in our
house. This was the foundation on which Processed World could
publish, and a few years later, it was the foundation of my
self-employed small business life that I turned to after Community
Memory, and spared me years of languishing in the dungeons of
corporate America.
At
Pacific Software I had an early experience of the now-familiar saga
of the tech startup. All of us were given shares in the company but
one day in 1981 came the Monday morning massacre… after rapid
expansion to over 25 employees and great expectations of future
profitability, the company ran out of money and backers and we went
from 25 to 5 employees in one brutal wave of firings. Our stock was
worthless of course. I was supposed to remain and do the work of five
of the fired workers. That sounded pretty bleak, so I waited til the
next day to announce my resignation, with an offer: I’d stay for
three weeks to train three people to do the work they expected of me,
provided they laid me off and did not contest my unemployment
benefits claim at the end of the three weeks. That bargain was
struck, and I never had a “real” job again, though self-employed
small business life is certainly full of its own compromises and
dissatisfactions. But I always controlled my own time and from then
on, any time-saving efficiencies resulting from my skills and
personality benefited me directly without harassment from bosses or
coworkers who expected me to “look busy” when I finished tasks
early.
During those short years as a temporary corporate nomad (I even worked briefly in the Boston area for a big defense contractor Bolt, Beranek and Newman) I honed my bad attitude towards the stupidity of modern work. The activities that I carried out on my various jobs were nearly always pointless. It was hard to fathom how these big-name corporations could be so completely inefficient and redundant at every turn. The obsession with behavior, attitude, appearances, etc., overwhelmed any concern for the purpose of the work, or carrying it out in a timely manner. Bosses were always dumber than the temps, and were usually sad individuals with very limited horizons for whom bossing the temps was a brief high point where they had some authority and power. The pettiness of their reigns was the most prominent characteristic of the office environment (captured well years later in TV’s The Office). For the most part, though, their efforts to assert control and to establish their credibility as small-time tyrants rarely succeeded. It was very easy to hide both on and off the job in those days.
Since that confusing period at the dawn of neoliberalism, things have definitely gotten much worse. Processed World weathered the 1980s only to finally run out of steam around 1994 (with a couple of surprising returns to form for two issues in 2001 and 2005, after which the effort ended for good—I recently wrote a brief political history of the magazine here). During the 32 issues we published steadily from 1981-1994 we covered every angle we could on the reorganizing of the modern workplace, as well as the occasional eruptions of dissent and organized and disorganized revolt in that period. We knew that workplace surveillance was growing with keystroke counting and automated systems of observation. We knew that government surveillance was ongoing, tracking movements against nuclear war, nuclear power, and dirty wars in Central America and the Middle East, as well as ongoing domestic policing. This earlier surveillance system depended on public and private contractors who were spying on political activists and groups. But the gross incompetence of the average corporation informed our sense of what was certainly a parallel incompetence by government and private surveillance efforts. We didn’t really fear repression in that era, so much as find it ridiculous.
Sandcastle festival at Parksville, British Columbia Community Park… a Russian, Dimitry Klimenko, and an American, Sue McGrew, had some fun together making this..
Who took Lenin’s head on the day after the festival?
By
the time the 1990s began, and the Cold War collapsed with the demise
of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, it was clear that the U.S.
was becoming giddily belligerent on the world stage. The first Gulf
War gave the warmongers and their cheerleaders on CNN and network TV
a brief sense that they had finally overcome the Vietnam Syndrome’s
public aversion to war. The rise of Clinton and Blair as
pseudo-progressive avatars of neoliberal hegemony reinforced the
trajectory launched by Reagan and Thatcher towards
hyper-individualism, a breakdown in social solidarity, and an ever
more frayed sense of community and connection among atomized people
who no longer knew their neighbors or coworkers very well, if at all.
The enormous disruptions in formerly stable economic lives resulting
from the rapid globalization of the 1990s and 2000s, with its
attendant race to the bottom that predictably emerged as formerly
unionized work was shipped out to low-wage regions like China and
Mexico, left a much more unequal society in its wake.
