Recent Posts
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Yes, There IS a Future!
December 26, 2025
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Real Crimes and the Coming Violence
September 6, 2025
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Whither Modern Life?
June 27, 2025
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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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Since I’m planning to go to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December, it seems only appropriate that I should show up to local efforts to address the topic. After an intense flurry of dozens of messages sent via Facebook (and Twitter, were I using it, which I won’t) I thought the “Mobilization for Climate Justice” yesterday in Richmond would attract a couple of thousand people or so… But no, there weren’t even 300 people at the rally near the end of the BART line in Richmond. It wasn’t entirely the same old people, but it was one of those political experiences that reward the patient and frustrate anyone who thinks something as difficult as this is easy.
 The march starts, led by Henry Clark of the West County Toxics Coalition (in the black hat). I have friends who have doggedly organized against Chevron for years now, trying their best to connect to the local efforts against toxic emissions and pollution and for environmental justice, so I was surprised at how few locals attended the rally. I joked with Robert as we got back to SF that at least we felt better for having gone, and had to acknowledge that it wasn’t much different than the people who feel better for having gone to church. Leftist demonstrations seem to have fully collapsed as meaningful political forms now, and only the true believers can maintain any sense of efficacy in participation in them.
 Richmond elected a Green mayor last time around, and there's definitely a growing vision of a new life growing here. Continue reading Needed: Climate Change!
Funny to get a news feed indicating that “nowtopia” had popped up in an essay over on Counterpunch, written by a Torontoan… it’s a lovely essay, and flattering to see nowtopia becoming a useful noun already!
In May 2008 Nowtopia was published. It’s been a year and a quarter and I’ve had the great fortune to travel to many places and present the book, meeting incredible people, reconnecting with old friends, and it looks like I’m not finished yet! There is a good chance I’ll be making a trip to Buffalo this fall, and to Scandinavia for a mini-tour prior to the Copenhagen Climate Conference. The questions that I try to prepare myself for are the inevitable queries a couple of years from now: Was the analysis in Nowtopia wrong? Is this argument about a transition to a new way of knowing life really happening? What’s the evidence? And what about the notion that this is a process driven by a working class recomposing itself in terms of useful work?
I don’t actually think I’ll be able to answer those questions in two or three years. Part of my analysis gets me off the hook, because it doesn’t have to show up in a given amount of time to be “true.” On the other hand, if there is nothing happening that corresponds to my analysis, that might serve to debunk it, of course.
 A bit of Potrero Hill on Kansas, hidden from through traffic. Continue reading Ruminating on Nowtopia
 Paris Commune, 1871: citizens wait for shooting to stop. I live in San Francisco’s Mission District, going back to 1987. It’s a neighborhood undergoing intense gentrification, even with the current economic and housing crises. Sometimes I think with all the cafes and bars and trendy new galleries and boutiques that we’re sliding towards becoming a Greenwich Village.
There are different populations living here, among each other and side by side, but for the most part we don’t overlap or intersect that much. I’m basically invisibile when I walk past young Latino drug dealers on a nearby corner. They don’t see me (I’m not a customer) and I don’t see them (eye contact can lead to dangerous encounters, I learned growing up in Chicago and Oakland as a kid). Similarly, chronic alcoholic homeless men roll past my building all day, sometimes cajoling a buck out of me, but mostly not seeing me as I don’t see them. A few blocks away a modern-day “shape-up” goes on all day every day, where hundreds of mostly undocumented immigrant men stand on Cesar Chavez Blvd. hoping to be selected for some short-term day labor.
My partner Adriana has recently been going out to interview some of these day laborers, and also started a similar process with some of the “homeys” on the corner. Suddenly the boundaries of invisibility start to crumble. The individual lives, the specific voices, thoughts, and motivations of what were generic humans come into focus, no longer easy to ignore. The stories are unique, compelling, sometimes hard to believe. As Adriana is writing about this herself, I cannot divulge much, but yesterday she met some of the kids on the corner (they’re probably 18 or 19 at least) and they described themselves as “norteños,” those from Northern California, and they defend the campesinos, they are “Cesar Chavez’s bodyguards,” and as soldiers, when they’re doing time, their elders command them to learn their histories. Who knew? Fascinating that the local corner’s drug dealing crew see themselves in a politicized lineage that is almost overtly left-wing.
Continue reading Parallel Universes
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Hidden San Francisco 2nd EDITION!
NEW 2nd EDITION NOW AVAILABLE!
Buy one here
(Pluto Press, Spring 2025)
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