This is a shortened version of an article I wrote in the wake of the 2003 Mayoral campaign in San Francisco, and published in The Political Edge. With all the excitement and promise of the occupation movements around the world, I still find myself balking at the slogans and framing, whether the “corporate greed” idea I critiqued in the previous entry, or the incessant clamor for “jobs”… if you want to pursue a radical reformist strategy in the here and now, i.e. in capitalism, please, AT LEAST demand a basic minimum income for all (say $1,500/mo for all residents of the planet) rather than asking to be put to work on agendas over which we have no control… anyway, here’s the piece, with an old graphic Jim Swanson drew in the early 1990s (can that really be 20 years ago?) when we were blasting demands for “jobs” at Processed World.

“Jobs” Don’t Work!

With mind-numbing regularity, we are expected to trudge to the polls and cast votes for politicians who promise to pursue policies that will “fix the economy” and “create jobs.” Predictably, nothing much changes. Why do we expect politicians and their policies to affect “the Economy,” when the rest of the time we treat it more like the weather, something that gets “better” or “worse” according to events beyond anyone’s control? The label “economy” is used to cloud in abstraction specific choices made by specific people that shape the rest of our lives for better or more usually, for worse. By framing our own daily lives of work within the abstract framework of “the Economy” we disconnect ourselves from a deciding, subjective role in determining our own activity and instead leave ourselves as unaware and relatively helpless pawns of forces beyond our knowledge or control. “The Economy” becomes a mystifying category, full of nonsensical and inexplicable categories that only experts can decipher; it is our era’s religion, an explanatory framework that offers fictional and strangely “natural” explanations for what are simple (albeit confusing), observable relations between human beings. Politicians and economists who claim they will fix “the Economy” are playing the role of contemporary priests in the Church—they and they alone are competent to communicate with the higher power that ultimately controls our lives.

This underlies the emptiness of our democracy. Clearly there is little democracy in our lives when it comes to “the Economy.” Our much-vaunted “freedom of choice” supposedly allows us to “choose” any jobs we want. By this “free choice” we exercise our tiny influence over the giant “invisible hand” of the market. But as we all know, most of us are only “free” to take one shitty job or another (or several!). In taking a job, no one asks for our ideas about what kind of work the enterprise should do, how the company impacts the environment locally and beyond, or what quality standards our work should meet. We have no say over who works there or how hiring is decided. In fact, on the job we lose most of the basic rights we take for granted as citizens in a democracy, including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from search and seizure, freedom from random drug testing, right to due process, trial by peers, and so forth. On the job we are wage-slaves—if we depend on our wage, our condition can easily be construed as a version of slavery “with a human face.”

Curious, then, that people across the political spectrum, especially “progressives,” are so ready to demand “jobs” without a murmur of qualification or criticism (at best, the demand is qualified as being for “good jobs”). Most jobs today are a waste of time at best, if they aren’t actually pernicious. As a social mechanism for allocating tasks that keep us all alive, “the Economy” and its foundation on “jobs” could hardly be less efficient, less fair, or a bigger waste of time and resources. One of the most glaring failures of the so-called free market is the well-paid elevation of patently useless and/or dangerous activities and the unpaid denigration of vital human tasks. Juxtapose bankers and weapons designers to child care workers and nursing home employees, for example. Even within ostensibly useful human work, for example, doctors and nurses, at least half of their work time is spent fulfilling the parasitic, useless demands of insurers and the bureaucracies of business, instead of providing the medical care that so many can no longer afford.

Graphic by JR Swanson, c. 1991, for the Committee for Full Enjoyment.

San Francisco’s current economy is awash in the inflated equity of a housing market unmoored from historic values. This has greatly rewarded the lucky fraction that owns at the expense of the majority of renters. Meanwhile people work in offices, restaurants, stores, and hotels where real wages are stagnant or actually falling. In a city with a dozen major hospitals and tens of thousands of medical workers, at least a quarter of the residents are uninsured and prone to destitution through catastrophic illness or injury. A construction boom fueled by the dot.com frenzy, sustained after the frenzy’s collapse by the spiraling inflation in real estate and long-term infrastructure programs of the city (San Francisco airport, BART, and MUNI expansions, Bay Bridge retrofit, Moscone Convention Center expansion, Transbay Terminal) is also helping to keep economic collapse at bay for the moment.

But all the signs for a major reckoning are before us: Unsustainable debts (government, corporate, and individual); absurd investment in useless office towers and unneeded hotels and shopping centers; stagnant or falling incomes and savings; soaring rates of illness and unmeasured workplace injuries; radically increasing homeless population; food programs serving more meals than ever—the list goes on.

Newspapers regularly report “outsourcing,” the increasing transfer of even high-tech and service sector expertise to India, China, and other low-wage, high-skilled areas. These new boom zones have been knit together precisely by the globalization spearheaded by San Francisco–based multinationals (Standard Oil of California, now Chevron-Texaco, Pacific Bell, now AT&T (again), Southern Pacific Railroad, now merged into Union Pacific, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo have all fled, though Bechtel, Levi’s, The Gap, and PG&E are still homegrown, world-spanning engines of economic exploitation and environmental devastation). “Competing” in the twenty-first century means lowering wages and giving tax breaks, creating conditions for the maximum profitability of business. If lower costs and bigger tax “incentives” are offered somewhere else, most jobs these days are pretty easily moved.

Primary education in San Francisco, not to mention the rest of the U.S., is abysmal. The destruction of public education corresponds to a destruction of skilled work and a reduced need for intelligence at work. (To say nothing of the problems created by thoughtful, critical citizens!) Beyond some thousands of programmers and the skilled trades, most jobs are easily learned in a day or two, and most workers are easily replaced—skills are much less important these days than attitude. And even if you have great skills and a Mormonesque enthusiasm for your job, chances are the company will move or restructure or change its focus to increase profitability—leaving you out of work and wondering what to do next. In those increasingly rare examples of stable companies that provide decent, steady wages, and benefits, there’s still a total absence of self-management or worker participation in determining what the company does, what its ecological impact is, how it connects to subcontractors and suppliers and their practices, and so on.

In 1991, former police chief Frank Jordan was elected mayor. As soon as he took office, he began trumpeting the northeast Mission district as a new “industrial zone” (Northeast Mission Industrial Zone, or NEMIZ) for the emerging biotech sector. This chimerical planning never really took hold due to neighborhood objections and an indifferent business community. The NEMIZ eventually filled up with the short-lived “Audio Alley” and other dot.com startups, only to empty out again after the dot.com bubble burst. In this new era of “vaporware” the Mission’s warehouses and garages are again brimming with hi-tech peasants. Meanwhile, a mile eastward a whole “new neighborhood” (anchored by a forty-two-acre parcel for the biomedical campus of the University of California) called Mission Bay was started during Willie Brown’s regime. Again, the assumption is that by investing public money in a fancy new campus and giving incentives to the developer (Catellus Corporation, a spinoff of the former Southern Pacific Railroad real estate division—“owners” of a real estate empire spanning the west, gained through corrupt land grants provided by the federal government in the nineteenth century as an “incentive” to build the railroads!), jobs and housing will be created. For over a decade, San Francisco has been waiting for the biotech ship to come in.

But that ship is just another in a long line of Potemkin-village promises of so-called “good jobs”:

On bad days Toby said he worked as a “pipette bitch.” With no interests other than computers, a few select hormones, and science fiction novels, Toby was perfectly poised to work as a low-level researcher in yet another lab where the muckety-mucks studied genetic tagging. And so that’s where he found himself most days, holding his trusty pipette over a box of clear gel attached to some electrodes . . . Usually he thought about nothing at all. He didn’t achieve a Zen-like state of pipette-mediated calm. There was no enlightenment. He simply immersed his entire consciousness in the tiny movements of his body, the precise measurements and procedures . . . After almost a year of unbroken routine . . . Toby realized he could spend an entire 24-hour period without ever having a single, extended thought . . . he didn’t have the kinds of multilayered or complex ideas he used to have back when he was hacking hormone pathways in graduate school.

Here he was, a hypereducated twentysomething, his whole life before him, and his supposedly professional middle-class job had turned his brain into nothing more than basal ganglia . . . according to all the usual news sources, his job was hot. Supposedly Toby was at the center of an economic revolution in biotech. The most-wanted jobs of the new millennium were in genomics; cities like San Francisco were developing vast office parks full of proto-wet lab spaces and special cold rooms for all the code-crunching clusters . . . Toby [felt] like he worked at McDonald’s: The plastic gloves were practically the same. But more important, there was an almost unbridgeable gulf between what he actually did for a living and the hype about it. Reading the papers was like looking at one of those glossy ads suggesting that women kicked off welfare would have great futures if they just took jobs at fast-food restaurants. Look at our shiny kitchens! Full of happy people in hair nets and gloves making toasty burgers and crispy fries! Fast food is at the center of the restaurant economy! Just like biotech. (* Annalee Newitz, “Techsploitation: Pipette Bitch Blues,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 18, 2004.)

This pattern of exaggerated expectations attached to what are quickly discovered to be boring, routine, mind-numbing jobs is all too common, and yet rarely reported with such clarity and wit. Another place to find compelling accounts is among the “Tales of Toil” featured from 1981–1994 in San Francisco’s Processed World magazine (full disclosure: I was a participating collective member). From word processing to desktop publishing and web design, jobs in new technologies paid relatively well until the field filled with thousands of people following the false promise of “good jobs,” only to find that high pay rates had disappeared. Irrespective of the pay, the crucial issue of content—of what we do, why, for whom or what, and usually how—is never confronted. And with almost no exceptions, the creative component of any job is what disappears soonest, replaced by management-controlled pacing, productivity demands, routinization, and bureaucratization.

This year’s Mayoral candidates are all promising to create “jobs.”  But if public monies are invested in training citizens to become so skilled and desirable as workers, we would still have to question which world economy we are getting prepared for. And just how this training would make San Francisco workers so well-paid (that is, expensive for their employers) that they could afford to live here! Everything going on in economic development—locally, nationally, or internationally—indicates the key trends continue to be lower wages and higher productivity (that is, longer hours, harder work).

A real alternative is called for. Tens of thousands are occupying public plazas across the U.S. and the world.  While participants have reported frustration at the absence of concrete alternatives, many people around the world are confronting the same problems. And clearly the answers require a break with the dynamics of a world economy that pits city against city, country against country, human against human. The role of government, so diminished as the power of corporations has grown unchecked during the past quarter century, requires revision. Limiting local government to public spending on infrastructure and training for the benefit of private business is clearly self-defeating. Limiting local economics to a system in which private capital employs people as wage-laborers is to guarantee that the logic that imprisons us in a suicidal and degrading system will only grow stronger.

With my tongue only partly in cheek, I propose that San Francisco take the lead in visionary urban transformation. “Jobs” as we know them are an obsolete way of organizing life. I propose a complete rethinking of what municipal government does, no longer “governing” so much as facilitating, allowing us to grow together, to begin building a life outside and against the Economy. If we are nearing a collapse in housing and other asset bubbles fueled by the insane expansion of credit, as it seems we are, then visionary citizens need to start redesigning the role of local government now, while we still have time and resources and before the coming depression and collapse begins. Not entirely seriously, but not altogether frivolously either, I propose the following New Department of Public Commons for a New Municipality, all of which can and should be integrated into our public education system for children and the continuing education of adults. A casual examination will reveal that there is a lot of work to do! But not the kind that generates private profits and sales.

Department of Public Commons

Overall, the city must focus its efforts on an economic strategy that grows the commonwealth and steadily shrinks the private sector. This is a program of decommodification, reframing work as a shared adventure in shaping and extending the quality of our lives.

A.    Division of Public Space In charge of plazas, parks, and common lands, and their expansion, maintenance, and programming, this division would administer public libraries, tool and technology libraries, and public workshops, amply stocked with materials recycled from existing stocks. It would also begin the process of converting many streets into gardens and parklands (see “H” below).

B.    Division of Agriculture With the goal of San Francisco feeding itself as much as possible, it will expand community gardens, urban farming, and aquaculture projects, working with the Division of Public Space to reappropriate the vast acreage dedicated to moving and parking cars. Relationships will be cultivated between existing slow-food restaurants, local farmers, and local markets to create an unprecedented abundance of outstanding, healthy, tasty food, eliminating hunger and radically reducing dependence on fast-food outlets.

C.    Division of Aquifer and Liquefaction Management (and Deconstruction) Irresponsible building patterns on historic mudflats and landfill should be removed before the next big quake; plans will be made for how to manage collapsing streets and buildings and how to reuse areas prone to liquefaction. Expanded use of existing aquifer will promote local self-reliance and reduce current dependence on quake-vulnerable aqueducts.

D.    Division of Creeks and Wetlands Working with the three previous divisions to open streets to make creeks visible, restore wetlands, and establish areas for aquaculture, farming, fishing, and recreation.

E.    Division of Highest-Ever Tides and Seawall Construction Preparation is needed for rising sea levels and catastrophic high tides from global warming. Technologies to protect the city from inevitable flooding should be explored now. Also, San Francisco’s strong technology-savvy population can take the lead in developing techniques for adapting existing transportation and structures to widespread flooding.

F.    Division of Work Reduction Most work done in this culture is a waste of time, if it’s not actually dangerous and counterproductive. This division will facilitate the creative reappropriation of our time and talents, redirecting our work (which is inherently social after all) toward socially determined needs and desires (see “I” below).

G.    Division of Co-ops and Collectives Businesses will be encouraged to convert themselves from private ownership to worker-owned and -run co-ops and collectives. As much as possible, such enterprises should be encouraged to contribute to the commonwealth without measurement or pay . . . from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs and desires.

H.    Division of Recycling and Reuse This important division will be responsible for innovation in more than just recycling garbage, but also in spawning whole industries to rehabilitate and reuse the discarded junk of the twentieth century. Long-term goal: Stop importing new junk!

I.    Division of Crackpot Realism Thousands of techies, artists, and tinkerers live in San Francisco. Already this city has served as world HQ for rapacious exploitation of huge swaths of the planet. It’s time to make it up. Technology transfer of global-warming-reducing technologies: energy efficient transit, shelter, appliances, and communications. Reengineering technologies to last at least twenty-five years with minimum maintenance and energy use (see “J” following). (Bechtel engineers, for example, should be encouraged to direct their own time and creativity towards projects of social importance—something useful for a change!)

J.    Division of No Home Is a Castle Housing is one of the most intractable problems facing any social transformation toward equality. A focused effort will be made to raise everyone’s dwellings to a shared standard of space, safety, comfort, and beauty. Land trusts will be established to remove all land from the market, and housing will be owned and controlled by those who live in it. Reengineering every dwelling to be as self-sufficient as possible in water, power, and waste management (fertilizer manufacturing for “B” above).

K.    Division of Free Mobility
•    First on the agenda will be the creation of a Bicycle Library with a fleet of 5,000 yellow bicycles. A municipal contest will be held annually for bike design and local manufacture with local materials.
•    To support the Bike Library—a network of 100 bike huts and repair shacks will maintain the publicly owned fleet of bikes.
•    The Panhandle will be expanded and extended on converted streets in dozens of directions to crisscross the city with greenways. The DFM, with the Division of Creeks and Wetlands and the Division of Public Space, will build green corridors along the natural terrain of creeks and shorelines, with meandering bike and multiuse paths.
•    Public transit will be free, with radical expansion of routes for full city coverage. Rapid development and adoption of new transit technologies based on wind, solar, biofuels, and magnetic, “frictionless” tracks will revolutionize energy use.

L.    Division of Public Memory
•    Publicly owned and produced media will be expanded, and multiple daily newssheets and Web sites advanced, with independent editorial boards elected by districts.
•    There will be oral history collection booths, and the Living Archive of San Francisco history will be available online and at a new city museum. Satellite museums in every neighborhood, where techniques of oral history collection and digitizing of archival materials is shared and learned, will reduce social amnesia.
•    Public history forums will be held regularly throughout the city, debating various points of view on how life has changed over the years in San Francisco.

M.    The James Brown Memorial Division of Feeling (Good)
•    Everyone will have free comprehensive health care—state-of-the-art preventive care covering medical, dental and mental for all. San Francisco is a town overrun with care practitioners of widely differing quality and philosophy. A clearinghouse and licensing system will help residents get what they need.
•    We will encourage the public declaration of desires, whatever they may be.
•    Fear abatement will get top priority with programs to help people overcome fear of others, fear of disapproval, fear of speaking out, fear of not owning enough, fear of losing possessions.
•    There will be a vigorous program of shame and guilt reduction.

N.    Division of Public Art This division will involve itself in all urban projects, ensuring a high level of artistic participation in urban design, food preparation, historical presentation, and transportation design. Sculptures, paintings, multimedia installations, soundscapes, and new art experiments will fill the city, eliminating the visual blight of advertising in favor of art.

After strolling into the city center during a break we came back on a Calandria, a charming horse-drawn carriage still used in Guadalajara but mostly for tourism.

I just finished several days of networking and discussing in Guadalajara at the 10th annual “Towards Car-Free Cities” Conference. It’s not clear where the next one will be, or when, though my great friend Thiago Benicchio of Ciclo Cidade in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is planning one for 2013. I had a great time, as I always do at these kinds of confabulations. This is my second one, after my 2008 experience in Portland where I first met some of my Guadalajara friends.

They produced a number of charming promos like the one above, but we learned after the fact how close the whole thing came to being cancelled. Just three months before the Sept. 5 opening, there was no money, no publicity, and a barely functioning group producing the event. Two of the main organizers had dropped out for personal reasons, and a whole new team had to step into their absence and make it happen. Probably this was for the best, since now there are a number of women occupying key roles in the much more horizontal organizing group, and frankly, they did a fantastic job of producing the conference. Dozens of workshops with simultaneous translation, a good deal of media coverage, thousands of attendees during the week, and a real buzz around Guadalajara and even nationally across Mexico, all arose from their fine efforts.

A mural at the Iteso University to support the conference.

The future is the target of this ongoing international effort to move us “towards car-free cities.” How do we consciously redesign cities to move away from the seemingly inevitable domination of the private automobile? What are the alternatives? What are the mechanisms to move us? Do we engage with government and policy-making, or do we build grassroots, direct-action movements, or both? And if both, how do they reinforce each other or not? And can we really talk about mobility and transport in the absence of a more comprehensive critique of how we reproduce life in all its facets?

We emerged from the light rail system to a closed amusement park with this tell-tale children's ride, cars going round a gas pump! Perhaps this will be a relic someday!

My organizer friends gave me the great honor of giving my presentation in a most unusual location: in a pseudo-plaza amidst intersecting underground car tunnels! Somehow the organizers convinced a deputy mayor to sign off on closing one of the tunnels to cars, since the only access to the plaza is to walk or bicycle down one of the tunnel entrances on the roadway. About 300-400 people came, and the police diverted thousands of cars onto surface detours for the three hours of closure. Not surprisingly, this generated a fair amount of antagonism in the media, with journalists badgering the organizers (and me too, a little) about the inconvenience we “unjustly” created. But as I answered in various interviews, this kind of tension is actually quite productive. No one was really put out that far (Guadalajara is a big traffic jam, routinely), so another couple of hours of bad traffic can hardly be seen as a great tragedy. It’s actually perfectly “normal” here, as in most major cities. But because there was an identifiable “cause” of this road closure, the tension was productive, it generated questions, “who did this? what do they want? what is it to talk about ‘car-free cities’?” and so on. In fact, the media swarmed the conference organizers with questions and paid much more attention to the whole conference thanks to the unusual use of the subterranean plaza, and the consequent road closure. In other words, it worked like a charm!

Getting ready for my "muscular" presentation!

If you were in the back you probably couldn't see very well... projecting onto the big sheet didn't work in the bright evening light, so we moved a smaller screen into place.

Traffic diverted from tunnel to subterranean plaza.

The view from street level down into the plaza, two hours before the presentation.

Milling about in the traffic tunnel after the Talk.

The Conference demographics were skewed towards youth, with a surprising number of teens and folks in their 20s. I really enjoyed meeting a crowd of teenagers and learning that they had invented at their high school a “bike train” wherein they ride to school, going from house to house picking up their classmates until some 60-80 are riding together to school. Quite impressive! Most of the conference was held at Iteso University on the southern edge of Guadalajara, and that brought in hundreds of curious students to various workshops and lectures. Notably missing from the week’s events were the bike commuting construction workers and laborers, panaderos (bread deliverers) and other bike couriers, and the vast population of poor working class who depend on the widely disrespected public transit system.

Another view of the deserted tunnel and the traffic jam above.

The underground light rail system worked fine for us, but we heard it is pretty horrible at rush hour.

Of all the policy wonks, transit geeks, and bicycle activists who were in attendance, my favorite speaker was Miguel Valencia. He’s a chemical engineer who has been working at the Autonomous University of Mexico and he has an extremely articulate critique which goes well beyond the typical clichés of transit wonkdom. He built a much broader and deeper edifice on his rejection of the principles of modernism and industrialism. He went on to say that life has to slow down and the very notion of “the job” is part of the problem. Rather than belabor the obvious problems of cars and cities tied up in traffic, he emphasized the deeper assumptions about economic growth and urban design that are rooted in pre-WWII modernist thinking. He clearly advocated a “relocalization” agenda, putting transport into a larger agenda of social transformation and transition. I listened to him in Spanish (foregoing the translation headphones) so my understanding of him was well short of 100%, but later he mentioned that he had been in communication with Jan Lundberg (of Culture Change) and Richard Register (Berkeley) for at least a couple of decades. Clearly his thinking is rooted in a green city, post-petroleum, sensibility. His critique was as much of the capitalist organization of life as it was the obvious depradations of automobiles and the infrastructure that supports them.

Roxana Kreimer of Argentina is the author of a book “The Tyranny of the Automobile,” and she gave the final keynote talk. I was not impressed, in spite of attending with relatively high expectations. Regrettably she lost me early, with bad use of statistics (comparing the number of deaths in autos to those in trains to make a case that cars are worse), and a repetitive and all-too-familiar critique of cars based on the death, disease, and societal mayhem they are directly responsible for. We left before she was finished, shaking our heads at the “sky-is-falling” Helen Calidicott approach that pounded the audience with arguments about cars causing fatalities and injuries, as though we all didn’t already know it.

Which highlights the biggest problem of these gatherings—too many people preaching to the converted, repeating the same tired points that have been said so many times previously. As Thiago wrote me in an email a couple of days before I got here, after he’d arrived and had been quickly swept up in local activities in Guadalajara:

“It’s really global and people are really starting to talk [about] the same things all over the world, at different levels of perception. I just don’t know how much it can reach the “outer world” and how much we’re talking [to] ourselves [about] things that we already know. At least, it’s a great exercise to spread the words and thoughts.”

It is heartening to see the surge of visionary activism here in Guadalajara, and to realize it is happening in fits and starts in places as diverse as Sao Paulo and Oslo, Norway, San Francisco and Quito, Ecuador. We got reacquainted with Anna Nygard here too, whom we’d first met in Oslo (she’s actually a Swede), where she’s helped launch the Planka.nu project there. I wrote about planka during my Scandinavian trip in 2009, a group that is committed to free transit for all (they favor having taxes pay for all public transit) and supportive of fare evasion (they offer an insurance policy against fare evasion tickets!). Unfortunately we missed her Talk but everyone said it was excellent.

We saw this odd religious flyer posted to the wall... Guadalajara's congested streets might "drive" a bicyclist to religion I guess!

Old friend Jason Meggs was here too. Imagine my surprise to walk in on his workshop to find him showing a series of impenetrable powerpoint slides and advocating for more on-the-ground statistical research about how people get around! Here’s one of the stalwarts of Bay Area activism, who was a crucial character in getting the bike/ped lane added to the new Bay Bridge east span with his incessant pressure and rides across the bridge a decade ago. Now he’s living in Bologna, Italy, where the University is supporting him while he studies eastern European cities and their relationship to bicycling. But Jason has long been a guy seeking that balance between wonky advocacy work and the soaring passions that sent him to jail dozens of times in the 1990s, so it was lovely to see him still going.

Eric Britton, founder of Carfree Day, gave a week’s worth of daily workshops to local bureaucrats, which somehow managed to cover most of the Conference costs. He made a splash in the Saturday newspaper, denouncing local politicians for failing to take advantage of all the free, high quality “transportation consultants” on hand during the conference. And he insisted that he could turn Guadalajara into the most bike and ped-friendly city in Latin America in a month, with the funds being squandered on another of a series of pointless bridges being built over big intersections around the city.

There is no question that a new vision of modernity and the future is taking shape globally, and one of the arenas of this emergence is the movement for bicycles and car-free cities. Miguel Valencia’s critique of modernism was on point, but he didn’t try to reclaim or reinvent the concept, perhaps because our confidence in a better future is at low ebb. It is hard to believe the future will be better in light of the collapse of social democracies in the face of relentless neoliberal redistribution of wealth to the rich, and the rising tide of climate chaos to boot. But it is precisely in the transition towns idea, for relocalization and resilience, reduced consumption/waste of energy and other resources, an extension of social rights to everyone regardless of nationality or race, etc., that we CAN imagine a world much better than the one we’re in now. No doubt the “Car-Free Cities” movement will have to break out of its dependence on a narrow slice of the population to contribute to this broader social transformation. And after ten years of meeting, this latest iteration of the Conference held many clues as to the directions that such a break-out might take.

My sweetheart Adriana Camarena brought a great idea forward that emerged from a conversation with her mother: the young people who attend could be encouraged to speak to the maids and gardeners who work at their parents’ homes, and insist that they be paid a regular day’s wages to come to such a future Conference, rather than working. Who better to describe the failures of existing transit options and to envision their radical improvement than those people who depend on buses and other options every day? They spend up to 2 or 3 hours a day moving across vast cities to get to low-wage jobs in rich people’s homes. Imagine allying with them and inviting them into the process of social transformation, of which the transit component is just one (vital) part? Clearly the car-free agenda needs to integrate more aggressively a class component, and this might be a good beginning…

Adriana enjoying the ride in the horse-drawn Calandria....

Jason Meggs, me, Gloria, and another friend during our drunken carousing around Guadalajara on a tour of Cantinas organized as part of the conference... a great evening!

An old bike sits on a type of altar in one of the cantinas.

My concluding slide from my presentation in the tunnel...

February 16, 2003, protesters fill Market Street in San Francisco, opposing the impending attack on Iraq.

(My presentation at the “Towards Car-Free Cities,” Guadalajara, Mexico, September 8, 2011)

“Whose Streets? OUR Streets!” yell rowdy demonstrators when they surge off the sidewalk and into thoroughfares. True enough, the streets are our public commons, what’s left of it, but most of the time these public avenues are dedicated to the movement of vehicles, mostly privately owned autos. Other uses are frowned upon, discouraged by laws and regulations and what has become our “customary expectations.” Ask any driver who is impeded by anything other than a “normal” traffic jam and they’ll be quick to denounce the inappropriate use or blockage of the street.

We meet here at the “Towards Carfree Cities Conference” to address how cities are designed, with an overriding interest in redefining what is proper and customary with respect to how streets are used. Part of the emergence of social movements in cities around the world to contest the car, whether bicycling, pedestrians, or street closures, is in response to the seeming inevitability of cars dominating our public space. But automobiles didn’t always fill our streets.

Bicyclists have been working to make space on the streets of San Francisco for bicycling, and to do that they’ve been trying to reshape public expectations about how streets are used. Predictably there’s been a pushback from motorists and their allies, who imagine that the norms of mid-20th century American life can be extended indefinitely into the future. But cyclists and their natural allies, pedestrians, can take heart from a lost history that has been illuminated by Peter D. Norton in his recent book “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.” He skillfully excavates the shift that was engineered in public opinion during the 1920s by the organized forces of what called itself “Motordom.” Their efforts turned pedestrians into scofflaws known as “jaywalkers,” shifted the burden of public safety from speeding motorists to their victims, and reorganized American urban design around providing more roads and more space for private cars.

Critical Mass in San Francisco, August 2007.

But before we look at how motor cars took over our thoroughfares and our imaginations, let us go further back into history, to the end of the 19th century. It was an era of horses, wagons, and streetcars, muddy streets and wooden sidewalks. Different kinds of self-propelled velocipedes and bicycles were invented in the 1870s and became massively popular in the 1890s with the invention of the safety bicycle. In San Francisco, and around the United States, a movement emerged primarily among bicyclists demanding “good roads.”

In 1875 these "boneshakers" were all the rage.

Bay City Wheelmen, 1894, in San Francisco's Mission District.

An 1896 newspaper illustration of the notoriously bad road conditions in San Francisco at the time.

On July 25, 1896, thousands of cyclists filled the streets in the largest demonstration seen in San Francisco’s history. In the last decade of the 19th century, San Francisco was a muddy, dirty town, long past its glory years as a boomtown, but still one of the ten largest cities in the U.S. The streets were full of horseshit and between the ubiquitous cable car slots and tangled web of streetcar rails, pedestrians and bicyclists had a hazardous course to traverse en route to their destinations. After months of organizing among the thriving bicycling clubs of the city, a huge parade was organized that drew as many as 100,000 spectators.

The "Good Roads' bike parade-protest of 1896.

The Pasadena Cycleway, an elevated wooden bike path, in 1900.

Meanwhile, in 1900 an elegant bikeway was built along the Arroyo Seco corridor north of the Los Angeles River. It was the keystone of a plan to link Los Angeles and Pasadena with an eight-mile “great transit artery.” Pasadena Mayor Horace Dobbins dedicated public funds to an elevated, multilane, wooden cycleway, including streetlights and gazebo turnouts. The 15-cent toll didn’t dissuade hundreds of cyclists who showed up to the opening, going on to ride through a beautiful pre-urban Los Angeles landscape. More than 20 percent of the population were already regular bikers in 1900, and of course the weather was ideal. Cycleways were going to crisscross the area and provide a stylish and modern system for personal transport. As the 20^th century unfolded, the automobile rushed into the picture. Within a few years bikeway expansion was scrapped and even the Arroyo Seco Cycleway was soon turned into a motorway (now it is better known as the Pasadena Freeway).

As thousands of Californians became motorists, patterns of city life began to change. The chaotic crisscrossing of pedestrians, horses and horse-drawn wagons, streetcars, cable cars, and steam railroads, already joined by increasing numbers of bicyclists, now saw an influx of private automobiles.

As city centers choked with traffic congestion, and automobile injuries and deaths soared, a struggle to reshape city streets took place. Police and parents wanted to control speeds to promote safety. Highway engineers wanted to widen and streamline city streets to promote through traffic at higher speeds. Auto companies promoted the “freedom of the open road” and claimed that street improvements must properly be directed to bettering driving conditions since most of the money for road building and maintenance was derived from gasoline taxes. Bicycles and pedestrians were the obvious losers in this era, as highway engineers—reinforced by auto industry propaganda—focused on widening streets, increasing parking, creating parkways and highways (later freeways), while society subtly shifted the blame for car-related fatalities to careless pedestrians and cyclists, or individual bad drivers.

This video was shot on Market Street in San Francisco in April 1906, four days before the huge earthquake and fire destroyed almost everything you can see here. But it does a great job of showing the chaos of streets prior to their standardization by automobiles and government imposition of new rules.

Before cars entered the public streets, customary practice gave priority to people on foot. Going back for centuries, public roads were open to everyone and pedestrians enjoyed a type of seniority rights. Horse-drawn wagons, horse-drawn omnibuses or streetcars, and finally electrically powered streetcars moved thousands and then millions of people into and around the growing cities of the world.

The automobile quickly threw all the old patterns into disarray…

For decades, over 40,000 people have died each year in more than a million car crashes on the streets of the United States. This daily carnage is utterly normalized to the point that few of us think about it at all, and if we do, it’s like the weather, just a regular part of our environment. But it wasn’t always this way. Back when the private automobile was first beginning to appear on public streets a large majority of the population, including politicians, police, and business leaders, agreed that cars were interlopers and ought to be regulated and subordinated to pedestrians and streetcars.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the speed with which conditions on urban streets changed at the dawn of the motorized era. Here’s a quote from the California Automobile Association’s Motorland magazine in August 1927 describing the rapid growth in car ownership:

• In 1895 there were four cars registered

• in 1905 there were over 77,000 in use,

• in 1915 the total had risen to 2.3 million, (300% increase in 10 years)

• in 1925 there were 17,512,000 passenger automobiles on the highways, (another 750% increase)

Auto industry advertising shifted the blame for car deaths and injuries from drivers to irresponsible children playing in streets that "ought" to belong to automobiles exclusively.

But even with this huge increase in cars, only about 10% of the population was driving at this time, and the vast majority of the public moved through cities on public streetcars or on foot. The common usage of the streets by all was considered sacrosanct and attempts by motordom and/or police to regulate people’s use of the streets was widely resisted. Plenty of police didn’t agree that pedestrian behavior should be criminalized on behalf of motoring:

New York police magistrate Bruce Cobb in 1919 defended the “legal right to the highway” of the “foot passenger,” arguing that “if pedestrians were confined to street corners or certain designated crossings, it might tend to give selfish drivers too great a sense of proprietorship in the highway.” He assigned the responsibility for the safety of the pedestrian—even one who “darts obliquely across a crowded thorofare”—to drivers…

By 1916 “jaywalker” was a term becoming used to describe people who walked across streets against the new rules. “Jaywalker” carried the sting of ridicule, and many objected to branding independent-minded pedestrians with the term… The New York Times objected, calling the word “a truly shocking name.”

Anti-jaywalking campaigns came to San Francisco too.

In a 1920 safety campaign, San Francisco pedestrians who thought they were minding their own business found themselves pulled into mocked-up outdoor courtrooms. In front of crowds of onlookers they were lectured on the perils of jaywalking.

As the 1920s continued, more and more cars were being sold, and the streets were both crowded and contested. Streetcar operators blamed cars for clogging thoroughfares and slowing down their lines, causing late runs and generally inconveniencing passengers. Motorists parked everywhere, jamming curbsides two-deep, when they weren’t weaving through chaotic urban streets. Cars were seen as reckless invaders of public space, slaughtering women and children, and driven by self-centered, inconsiderate louts. Attempts to regulate and standardize traffic patterns began during this era, with lanes, crosswalks, traffic signals, and parking regulations slowly emerging as “solutions” to the problems created by tens of thousands of private cars filling the streets.

Newspaper photos campaigned to educate citizens about "proper use" of the streets, increasingly dedicated to private automobiles.

When a business slump hit in 1923-24 and car sales plummeted, the press speculated that the market for private automobiles was already “saturated”. The car industry cleverly redefined ‘saturation’ from the market to the street. They claimed that the so-called “saturation” was a problem of space, and that the solution was to re-design streets and cities to accommodate many more cars.

"Jaywalkers" cross against signal at 5th and Market, San Francisco, 1942.

As late as the mid-1920s there was a wide consensus to control cars, slow them down, subordinate them to other uses. Over 70% of urban commuters used streetcars while only 11% used cars in San Francisco. The same 1927 San Francisco traffic study showed that one-third of 1.1 million daily commuters into the downtown area arrived on foot …

By the end of the decade the story had completely changed. During the years from 1924-1930, national business leaders had created new associations, with the full support of the government, which shifted the discussion by appealing to American individualism and patriotic appeals to freedom to gain the upper hand. The streets of America, which had been seen as public utilities that should be regulated for the common good, were reconceptualized as “products” that could be purchased by the motorists paying gasoline taxes. Traffic engineers were no longer tasked with designing streets to serve the most people most efficiently. Instead, they were to respond to market “demand” as exemplified by private car owners who supported the redesign of cities to accommodate wider streets and ample parking lots.

By the 1930s the new organization of urban life was taking shape. Cities everywhere were widening streets, building wide boulevards, increasing curb parking, and altering the rules of the road to restrict pedestrians and give more rights and space to cars. Separated, elevated freeways were the vision of the future, but it would take some years before they began to build them all over the country.

Black dotted lines on sidewalks indicate where they would soon be narrowed to make more room for cars in this 1939 photo of Capp Street in San Francisco.

In the 1939 Golden Gate Int'l. Exposition (Treasure Island World's Fair) this grim image of 7th and Howard is meant to show San Francisco in 1999!

After WWII, in the United States a massive federal program built the interstate highway system, a series of freeways that crisscrossed the country many times over east-west and north-south, with ring roads around every major urban center. Streetcar systems which had been going bankrupt since the 1920s finally were municipalized and often modernized with buses replacing streetcars. The conversion of U.S. life to fully auto-centric was nearly complete by the late 1950s.

The first transcontinental paved road in the U.S. finished well before WWII was dubbed the "Lincoln Highway," here used to advertise a brand of gasoline.

The U.S. was the overwhelming dominant power in the world during this same era, a period when countries were ranked as “developed” or “developing” and if in the latter category (as Mexico and all of South America was) it was considered urgent to adopt the patterns of growth that had been pioneered by the U.S. Car manufacturing emerged in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, in Mexico and Brazil by the 1970s, and in Asia by the 1980s. The so-called “world car,” assembled in factories across the planet, became the norm in the 1980s too, and everywhere national economies turned to the private car as the literal motor of domestic development.

The triumph of the car and the full conversion of urban life to revolve around private automobiles is the story of the 20th century. But it was also in the 20th century specifically in the late 1950s and 1960s that citizens in some places, notably New York, Boston, and San Francisco, organized to stop the onslaught of freeway building that was destroying their city’s neighborhoods.

Freeway revolt in SF

1948 trafficways plan for San Francisco, with plans for freeways crisscrossing the city and destroying many of its best neighborhoods.

On November 2, 1956 the San Francisco Chronicle graciously published a map of the proposed and actual freeway routes through San Francisco even though its accompanying editorial was already chastising protestors:

“The remarkable aspect of these protests and claims of injury is their tardiness. They concern projects that have for years been set forth in master plans, surveys and expensive traffic studies. They have been ignored or overlooked by citizens and public official alike—until the time was at hand for concrete pouring and when revision had become either impossible or extremely costly. The evidence indicates that the citizenry never did know or had forgotten what freeways the planners had in mind for them.”

Top image shows the final plans to complete crosstown freeways in San Francisco around 1960, but the bottom map shows what was finally completed (including the dotted sections of freeways that were destroyed after the 1989 earthquake).

Just three years earlier San Francisco had opened its first section of freeway. On October 1, 1953 the Bayshore Freeway opened and San Franciscans could now drive three unmolested miles of “divided no-stop freeways” from Alemany to Bryant. But as the plans unfolded, public opposition grew. By the time the Embarcadero Freeway along the city’s waterfront was under construction in 1958, a loud opposition had formed, going on to campaign for its removal after its completion. Over 30,000 people signed petitions at meetings organized in a half dozen neighborhoods. In 1959 the city government voted to cancel 7 of 10 planned freeway routes through the city, much to the shock of the California Department of Highways and the federal government. But that was not the end of the freeway revolt.

Some of the proposed extensions for the double-decker freeway to connect the Embarcadero with the Golden Gate Bridge (note the unfinished Embarcadero Freeway at lower left).

Freeway protesters march along waterfront with unfinished Embarcadero Freeway behind them. In distance is Ferry Building where it was walled off by the double-decker freeway.

Freeway builders continued to resurrect various routes, encountering persistent, well-organized resistance by San Francisco neighborhoods. In 1964 the battle came to a climax over the Panhandle-Golden Gate Park Freeway plan, with a May 17 rally to save the Park. Months later, in a final, climactic 6-5 vote, the Board of Supervisors rejected the Park Freeway on October 13. The only African American Supervisor, Terry Francois, cast the deciding vote, delivering a point-by-point six-page rebuttal to the pro-freeway arguments. The Supervisors’ Transportation Committee had received a petition with 15,000 signatures, 20,000 letters and telegrams, and had received opposition from 77 community organizations.

Taking down the freeway north of Market Street in early 2000s.

Today, San Francisco’s freeways have changed again, thanks to the Loma Prieta 1989 earthquake. The much maligned Embarcadero Freeway has been removed. A raging debate over the future of the Central Freeway ramps that went north across Market was finally resolved and they were replaced by the surface Octavia Boulevard. New offramps were added to a freeway to serve a new waterfront roadway and the new baseball stadium in 1997, but no new freeways will be built in San Francisco. The rapid rise in value in both areas where freeways were removed, along the now open waterfront, as well as the rapidly gentrifying Hayes Valley/Civic Center area, show that profits can be drawn from forward looking urban planning, de-emphasizing cars and re-emphasizing neighborhood, community, and nature. We even have a new urban farm on former on- and off-ramps.

The Hayes Valley Farm was started on the former on- and off-ramps of the Central Freeway.

From freeways to food...

Freeway Revolts in Guadalajara and Vancouver

Vancouver's "Gateway Sucks" campaign, which gave rise to the Car-Free Vancouver Day, going on 7 years now.

Car-Free Vancouver Day started seven years ago as a part of the years-long campaign to stop a $10 billion freeway and port expansion plan that will bulldoze local farms, neighborhoods, and indigenous sites, in addition to wrecking a couple of extant urban wilderness zones at Burns Bog and Surrey Bend. The “Gateway Sucks” campaign emphasizes that this plan, which is still proceeding, will lock in more urban sprawl and sabotage the local greenhouse gas reduction plan, all to increase trade in raw goods and disposable junk.

The East Vancouver neighborhood was the first to propose a day-long closure of the its main corridor Commercial Drive as a way to demonstrate popular opposition to further freeway building. Car-Free Vancouver Day has grown to encompass five separate neighborhood street closures in different parts of the city, and is a product of grassroots organizing, with hundreds of volunteers working hard for months to produce an exciting day of urban reinhabitation.

Vancouver's Critical Mass has been a big contributor to the shifting values of that northwestern city.

On a visit here in December 2010 to Guadalajara, I had the pleasure of discovering a vibrant grassroots movement to block the construction of a new 23-kilometer elevated freeway through the heart of the city.

The anti-freeway campaign in Guadalajara.

This movement leaned primarily on people who live along the proposed route of the freeway, but found crucial support and activism from Ciudad Para Todos (City For All), a three-year-old group of bicycle and transit activists who are Guadalajara’s most vocal opponents to the reign of the car.

A few months ago the campaign achieved its first success when the freeway plans were scrapped. Compared to San Francisco’s decades-long freeway revolts, or Vancouver’s still-going campaign to halt the Gateway project, Guadalajara is an inspiring success story that happened in less than one year! (Though it is not over yet, with possibilities of the plan being resuscitated after next year’s election, so the movement must keep going.)

In June 2010, just before our hosts this year left for York, England for last year’s Car-Free Cities Conference, the Jalisco State Government published a video online describing the new freeway (La Via Express) plan. The Jalisco state government (which encompasses the city of Guadalajara) declared its intention to build a freeway on the same railroad line that a previous city government had proposed for a linear park and garden corridor with bicycle and pedestrian zones. The corridor conveniently cuts through the city and is used by laborers riding bicycles 20-30 kilometers a day between home and work.

This car was installed along the proposed route as part of the protests...

Pedicab vendor crosses tracks that would all be destroyed by the proposed freeway.

The Guadalajara activists brought the government video with them to England and showed it to the gathered planners and activists on the first day (maybe some of you remember?) and made two guerrilla video responses. The guerrilla videos made by Ciudad Para Todos quickly began to circulate and galvanized local opponents, but neighbors of the proposed Expressway had already begun organizing before they even saw the video. During our December visit we met Dr. Alicia Jaik, an energetic former medical doctor, now running a small corner store along the proposed route. Her neighbor is a local politician and when he asked her what she thought of the proposal she declared her dismay. “What should we do?” asked the politician. “Get to work!” was her immediate response. Signs sprung up along the houses up and down the street.

Neighbors oppose freeway along Avenida Inglaterra.

A short time later Étienne von Bertrab was walking along the rail line with a local journalist and was thrilled when he saw the signs. With the journalist in tow, he knocked on Dr. Alicia’s door and after realizing they had much to discuss, he was invited to a meeting called a few days later. At the meeting Etienne and his colleagues presented their videos, their larger critique, and the plans that had been created by the previous municipal government for a linear park. They were met with great enthusiasm. “What can we do? When can we start? Can we do it this Saturday?” demanded the neighbors. Nobody anticipated an action plan emerging so quickly, but they saw a good thing when it appeared. “Why not?”

Park area made by neighbors.

That Saturday was the first gardening party, beginning with the removal of tons of accumulated trash. From that July meeting regular Saturday work parties kept happening. There are now hundreds of new trees planted and at least eight different neighborhood associations involved. Neighbors have established new relationships with each other, and public feasts have become a regular feature of the Saturday work parties and other days.

At a nearby university campus students have been eager participants as well. Painstaking work with local businesses gained further support, many of them angered by the backroom dealing going on with big connected Mexican companies ICA, Cemex, and Grupo Mexico. A press conference of two local business associations was held on December 2 supporting demands for more transparency, public hearings, and technical evaluations of the freeway plans before anything begins. Meanwhile, the facts on the ground were getting better every weekend.

One of the leaves hanging on the tree in the park...

The down-to-earth politics of this already successful Freeway Revolt in Mexico are a shining example to climate change activists everywhere. As Dr. Alicia put it to us, “Aqui, nadie es nadie, todos somos todos.” (Roughly translated as “Here, nobody’s a bigshot, we’re all in it together.”) She was emphasizing that they weren’t relying on the political parties or their representatives, to the contrary, they were disallowed in this campaign. Our friends in Ciudad Para Todos underlined the same point: The local diputado (elected representative in the state government) could participate as a citizen, but they wouldn’t support his offer to bring in work crews, equipment, and resources, whereby his political party would colonize the effort for their own ends. Dr. Alicia told us, “Before neighbors wouldn’t really talk to each other. Now we’re a community!”

A dead tree across from her small store had come back to life with several dozen fluttering hand-written “leaves.” One of our favorites said “Leave the closet and let’s be citizens all the time.” It’s just such a reinvigorated—and visionary—citizenship that is the foundation of the transition that we must make in the face of Climate Chaos, the Energy and Economic Crises, and the generally dissatisfying daily lives we lead in the second decade of the 21st century.

As we discuss the seemingly unrealistic idea of “car-free cities” it helps to remember the rich history that we are already living. Streets have not always been controlled and dominated by car industries. Private cars are a disaster for human and non-human life, and it’s high time we reconnect to the long history that has been resisting this monster. Life was very different before the car and it will be very different AFTER the car too!

The last slide of the presentation...

Thank you!

Another guest editorial, this one from my pal Iain Boal… a timely rumination on today’s sell-off of the internet by the Obama appointees on the Federal Communications Commission…

“Internet service giants like Comcast and Verizon want to offer premium and privileged access to the Internet for corporations who can afford to pay for it…For many Americans – particularly those who live in rural areas – the future of the Internet lies in mobile services. But the draft Order would effectively permit Internet providers to block lawful content, applications, and devices on mobile Internet connections. Mobile networks like AT&T and Verizon Wireless would be able to shut off your access to content or applications for any reason. For instance, Verizon could prevent you from accessing Google Maps on your phone, forcing you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it costs money to use and isn’t nearly as good. Or a mobile provider with a political agenda could prevent you from downloading an app that connects you with the Obama campaign (or, for that matter, a Tea Party group in your area).

It gets worse. The FCC has never before explicitly allowed discrimination on the Internet – but the draft Order takes a step backwards, merely stating that so-called “paid prioritization” (the creation of a “fast lane” for big corporations who can afford to pay for it) is cause for concern. It sure is – but that’s exactly why the FCC should ban it. Instead, the draft Order would have the effect of actually relaxing restrictions on this kind of discrimination.

But grassroots supporters of net neutrality are beginning to wonder if we’ve been had. Instead of proposing regulations that would truly protect net neutrality, reports indicate that Chairman Genachowski has been calling the CEOs of major Internet corporations seeking their public endorsement of this draft proposal, which would destroy it. No chairman should be soliciting sign-off from the corporations that his agency is supposed to regulate – and no true advocate of a free and open Internet should be seeking the permission of large media conglomerates before issuing new rules.

After all, just look at Comcast – this Internet monolith has reportedly imposed a new, recurring fee on Level 3 Communications, the company slated to be the primary online delivery provider for Netflix. That’s the same Netflix that represents Comcast’s biggest competition in video services. Imagine if Comcast customers couldn’t watch Netflix, but were limited only to Comcast’s Video On Demand service. Imagine if a cable news network could get its website to load faster on your computer than your favorite local political blog. Imagine if big corporations with their own agenda could decide who wins or loses online.”

The tireless tribunus populi, Alexander Cockburn, as editor of a dissenting online newsletter, knows what is at stake, and in the fortnight since he sounded the following clarion call in CounterPunch the stakes have become even clearer as the first full-blown popular cyberwar unfolds, with its unlikely epicenter at Ellingham Hall, the ancient seat of Norfolk gentry in the Waveney Valley of East Anglia, where Julian Assange is under “manor-house arrest”, the guest of Vaughan Smith, a ex-Grenadier Guardsman, crack shot and organic farmer. In honor of two fallen photojournalist colleagues – in Iraq and the Balkans – Smith founded the Frontline Club in London as a hub for unembedded journalism. It is a converted Victorian plumbing factory with a restaurant sourced from the Norfolk estate, a suite of members’ rooms upstairs, and a event space on the third floor hosting over 200 talks and screenings a year. While he was staying in one of the flats for visiting independent journalists, Julian Assange could feel the noose tightening. Cockburn understands the connection between l’affaire Assange and the meeting today of the FCC in Washington D.C.:

“The WikiLeaks sites have vanished—though more than 1,400 mirror sites still carry the disclosures. Amazon, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and the organization’s Swiss bank have shut it down, either on their own initiative or after a threat from the US government or its poodles in London and Geneva. Attorney General Eric Holder is cooking up a stew of new gag stipulations and fierce statutory penalties against any site carrying material the government deems compromising to state security. Commercial outfits like Amazon are falling over themselves to connive at the shutdowns, actual or threatened.

As I outline at greater length in my Beat the Devil column in the current Nation, one of the biggest lessons for us all  comes in the form of a wake-up call on the enormous vulnerability of our prime means of communication to swift government-instigated, summary shutdown.

So here we have a public “commons”—the Internet—subject to arbitrary onslaught by the state and powerful commercial interests, and not even the shadow of constitutional protections. The situation is getting worse. The net itself is going private. As I write, Google and Facebook are locked in a struggle over which company will control the bulk of the world’s Internet traffic. Millions could find that the e-mail addresses they try to communicate with, the sites they want to visit, the ads they may want to run are all under Google’s or Facebook’s supervision and can be closed off without explanation or redress at any time.

Here in the US certainly, we need a big push on First Amendment protections for the Internet: one more battlefield where the left and the libertarians can join forces. But we must do more than buttress the First Amendment. We must also challenge the corporations’ power to determine the structure of the Internet and decide who is permitted to use it.“

This is a guest post from my good friend Eddie Yuen, who was in Cancun for the COP-16 Climate Conference… it follows on my extensive coverage a year ago from Copenhagen, so I wanted to keep it going, even if I wasn’t there and didn’t follow it so closely this year… thanks Eddie!

Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid crashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and rendered extinct 70% of all life on Earth. In December of 2010 in Cancun, a mere geological stone’s throw from the Chicxulub crater that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, a conclave of political and corporate leaders presided over a conference that failed to slow down the next great extinction event on this planet.

But for this geographic coincidence it’s unlikely that this conference will be remembered as anything more than another tedious and predictable step towards a future of managed climate chaos and accelerated global enclosures. Cancun is most significant, though, not as the scene of a crime but as a laboratory of climate apartheid.  Whatever fearsome predation the Yucatan of the late Cretaceous may have harbored, the Cancun of the early Anthropocene is the model of a
naturalized social order even redder in tooth and claw.

Even to use the language of “climate talks” is like speaking of the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. As linguist Noam Chomsky said years ago, the mere utterance of this phrase validates the discourse that there is such a process. This particular conference, rightfully overshadowed by the Wikileaks saga, was both anti-climactic and anti-climatic, in the words of Laura Carlson, director of the American Policy Program in Mexico City. The Indigenous Environmental Network summed it up nicely:  “The Cancun Agreements are not the result of an informed and open consensus process, but the consequence of an ongoing US diplomatic offensive of backroom deals, arm-twisting and bribery that targeted nations in opposition to the Copenhagen Accord during the months leading up to the COP-16 talks”.

Hidden in the dismal wonkery of the summit, however, an important shift has taken place. The Economist of Nov 25th, 2010 pronounced the end of any effort by states to seriously seek to lower emissions. We are in a post mitigation world now, and elite effort will focus on adaptation. Some analysts estimate that the current ratio of prevention to adaptation in terms of funds spent is about 80 to 20, and this will likely be reversed.  But what kind of adaptation to climate change are we talking about?  Cancun in this regard is the perfect site for this conference, as it presents a vision of the future that elites are very comfortable with. Exclusion zones of concrete walled leisure, ringed by layered barricades and social apartheid. Like Dubai or Beverly Hills, its obvious who is a worker and who a consumer, and enough of the workers are security guards to ensure that “safety” and property will always be respected. Outside kilometer zero, in the city of 700,000, the highest suicide rates in Mexico. Inside the Hotel Zone, debt ridden Americans lounging on eroding beaches are convincing themselves that they’re having a good time.

The elites like this model, but it’s fragility is evident. Cancun itself can only take so many more category 5 hurricanes before it will be retired like Mazatlan or Atlantic City. When this happens, new frontiers of commodified leisure, whether in Colombia, Sri Lanka or Myanmar, will be developed, but even so the economic and political costs of the 2 degree Celsius average temperature rise that the world leaders have deemed acceptable are staggering.

How can we understand the utter failure of the leaders of the world’s nation states, with the sole exception of Bolivia, to make even a perfunctory effort to assuage the crisis? It’s certainly not climate denialism, as few if any countries are host to a political entity such as the US Republican Party. On the contrary, global elites know full well what is happening. China and many other Asian countries, where 9 of the 10 most at-risk cities are located, are run by engineers and
technocrats. Can it be attributed primarily to a lack of vision – a systemic inability to look beyond electoral cycles and quarterly profit reports, something that liberal, communist and even fascist elites all seemed able to do not so many decades ago? Is it due primarily to a lack of cohesion amongst global elites resulting from the vacuum caused by the US’s precipitous fall from hegemonic status? Or is it the failure of the boosters of green capitalism to pitch a plausible new bubble opportunity to global finance capital? Whatever the combination of these factors, there is a “growing acceptance”, as The Economist says, “that the effort to avert serious climate change has run out of steam”.

As insane as this is, it’s not hard to see why Northern elites are warming to the idea of managed climate change. After all, they know that in this game of “lifeboat ethics”, we’re not all in the same boat. As Mike Davis has eloquently described, the existing inequalities between North and South will be exacerbated by temperature rise – and ideologically “naturalized” in the process.

The consolidation of this approach is perfectly symbolized by the city of Cancun. A concrete blight on the “Mayan Riviera”, chosen by computer under the Echeverria regime that presided over the massacre of Tlatelolco plaza in 1968, Cancun boasts the most anti-democratic geography for a global summit since the WTO meeting in Qatar. From their orbit in the Moon Palace, state delegates, corporate lobbyists and credulous journalists were free to discuss the  finer points of carbon markets and neo-liberal nature without even a mention of the alternative solutions proposed in the Cochabamba Accord from earlier in the year.

The “acceptable” level of sacrifice allowed for by the Cancun agreement is breathtaking even by the standards of global capitalism. These include the predictable starvation and displacement of millions, the obliteration of entire eco-systems such as coral reefs from the planet, the desertification of the Amazon, the disappearance of the glacial fed rivers of Asia and South America, the extinction of up to 35% of global species, and the advent of the “sea of slime”, to name a few. We are enjoined, however, by governments, media and many environmental groups, to hail the signs of progress at Cancun, and to engage in the conceit that these summits are where serious people must come to hammer out policy. But is it really better that climate talks are now on “lifeline” rather than “zombie” mode if questions of climate debt are off the table and the collapse of biodiveristy is seen only as an “accounting” problem?

In what may ultimately be a positive sign, however, the dedicated social movement participants who did make the journey to the gates of Cancun were not discouraged either by the tedium inside or the barricades outside. The spectacle of the expulsion from the Moon Palace of dissenting and indigenous voices, as documented by Democracy Now!, says all we need to know about the legitimacy of the conference.

Many activists were disappointed with the street level climate movement after Copenhagen, but there were no expectations for a major mobilization this time around. Instead, campaigners, many from the vibrant social movements of Mexico, understood that life, and politics, is elsewhere. Issues such as the commodification of nature, new rounds of enclosures justified by REDD, and climate apartheid are crucial, but will only truly be challenged and acted upon outside of the framework of “climate talks”. The facts on the ground, and in the atmosphere and oceans, will ensure that there will be climate movements in the next century. These may not take the form that many expected before Copenhagen, but the coming century of global defrosting will be nothing if not surprising.
Eddie Yuen teaches in the Urban Studies Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is the co-editor, with George Katsiaficas and Daniel Burton-Rose, of Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement (Soft Skull Press).

References:

The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/17575027?story_id=17575027

Indigenous Environmental Network
http://redroadcancun.com/?p=1700

three good articles:

http://www.counterpunch.org/carlsen12092010.html

http://ecosocialismcanada.blogspot.com/2010/12/dispatch-from-cancun-de veloping.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/bond12132010.html

and a great one from last year:

http://www.countercurrents.org/davis290110.htm

Video from Center for Biological Diversity:

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/mammals/polar_bear/starving _bears_video.html

Interview on Global Defrosting with Colin Duncan on Against the Grain

http://ia700104.us.archive.org/12/items/ES080523/ES_080523_Show_LoFi.m p3

Part 1: intro to TED, my speech at the conference
Part 2: Highlights of other TEDx Amazonia Talks, especially from Amazonians
Part 3: Critical look at the Entrepreneurially Minded TED speakers

I was so happy when tropical rains began falling on us.

Ironically, we had come to the most fecund place on earth, facing a world economy based on a logic—endless growth–that has generated one of the greatest species extinction pulses in the history of the planet. Could we explore new ways of working and living that could ensure a quality of life for all species, without addressing the elephant in the room, the economic system based on perpetual growth? Apparently that was the hope, since few of the participants took on that larger question (notably, the two economists Enrique Leff and Hugo Penteado, as well as yours truly, DID try to attack dysfunctional economic thought). Opposing capitalism and growth wasn’t the stated purpose of our gathering, to be sure. TED is an organization rooted in the quasi-libertarian high-tech boom that started with the personal computer and accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s, and as such, seems to be a self-selecting culture of a subsection of the global elite that favors entrepreneurialism as the answer for the world’s problems, including the topic of this gathering in the Amazon.

Hugo Penteado's chart put it to economics: what is dependent on what exactly?

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and it’s a very specific brand that has been spreading itself globally with enormous success, especially during the past 8 years (it actually started back in the 1980s). The x after TEDx indicates that it is an independently organized event, licensing the format and reputation of the main TED organization, which is centered in the U.S. Former WIRED magazine publisher Chris Anderson took the helm of it in the early 2000s and absorbed it within his not-for-profit foundation. Their motto is “ideas worth spreading,” and you can find hundreds of their Talks online, free to watch, and many are indeed brilliant. That said, you won’t hear a lot anti-capitalist rhetoric or thinking at a TED conference. In general, they are fellow travellers of Stewart Brand and his early 1970s Whole Earth Catalog, followed by the new computer culture that accelerated in the 1980s after the emergence of the personal computer. Ideologically they share a belief that the gray bureaucracies of government and old-school corporate giants are the problem (on their website they advertise that the TED Talks are “untainted by corporate influence”), but the answer lies in independent entrepreneurialism rather than in any kind of social or collective action. Brilliant investors and inventors will continually produce technological breakthroughs that will solve the problems humanity and the planet face. (Fred Turner’s fantastic history of this is in “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Milleniallism”—highly recommended!)

This TEDx event drank deeply from this long-running river of self-congratulatory entrepreneurialism. Let’s face it, the past thirty years has been a long nightmare (for people like me) of triumphant business ideology, and the folks at WIRED magazine, the Long Now Foundation (Brand and Kevin Kelley’s thinktank) and other quasi-libertarian tech culture types have been an important wing of that, complementing the straight-forward glorification of wealth and greed as pushed by Reagan, Bush, Wall Street, et al.

I saved a grouping of TEDx speakers for my last entry. These contributors include some of the people I made great friends with, but also represent the cutting edge of modern capitalism, in terms of their use of games, business, participation, and crowd-sourcing. I’ve been saying for the past couple of years, “better is better than worse,” and many of the efforts described here are bettering things in their own ways. But I’m interested in the way they also begin a process of renovating capitalism, of advancing this crazy, exploitative system’s capacity to capture new activities, new ways of thinking, and channel them back into the typical forms of products and commodities, markets, wage-labor, and monetary relations.

Rafael Kenski gave a presentation that revolved around the Portuguese word “Divertaçao,” which is usually translated as “fun.” He described a variety of multimedia projects and games, highlighting the successful ones for their ability to attract participants by being fun to use. In some basic way this parallels my own political thinking for the past years: that a politics of sacrifice and suffering is a dead-end. We need a political practice that is enjoyable in itself, and creates a contagious attraction through the pleasure of participation. Interestingly, this is what a lot of game-designers are trying to do too, but not to overthrow capitalism, but to bind us more tightly to it.

Paul Bennett is a congenial fellow who I got to talk to a lot. He’s from London, and is the creative director for IDEO, a multinational design consultancy with clients everywhere, including Brazil. He gave a talk that used the Amazon as a design metaphor, and encouraged us to seek the small idea that can become large. He showed slides of daily improvisations by Brazilians that he saw as great models for product design, and in particular gave high  marks to his client, the flip-flop and bag maker Havaianas (and he gave me a pair later too!)

Paul Bennett of IDEO talking about Brazilian design.

The hairs on my neck were standing up through a lot of Paul’s presentation, as he matter-of-factly described the launch of the OpenIDEO platform. It’s a separate website from their main corporate home, and offers for free a human-centered product design guidebook, targeted at NGOs and innovators in the Global South. It’s a powerful combination. On one hand, you take the latest in design process technology and open it up for free to anyone. Then you solicit ideas from the world (“What global challenge do you think innovation leaders should work to solve right now?” and “How can today’s technology address the environmental challenges we’re all facing?” are current queries on OpenIDEO). Bennett described a recent successful effort that gathered more than 500 ideas from submissions, which were eventually whittled down to 17 good ones, most of which are now being test-marketed and prototyped in various markets around the world. He didn’t describe the licensing procedures, the intellectual property agreements or waivers that one has to sign off on to get the IDEO push, nor how potential profits would be divided. Even if they offer very generous terms to the idea originators, it’s still a fantastic deal for IDEO, gaining huge attention, participation, and a river of ideas from unpaid world citizens.

I recognized it immediately in the same light as I recently wrote about the Levi’s campaign here on my blog too, an attempt to capture the enormous creativity and wealth being generated in urban environments but often remaining outside of the commodity circuit. My effort in Nowtopia was to describe a growing trend of refusing the logic of business, of working very hard precisely when we’re NOT at our stupid jobs, and exceeding the narrow logic of being “mere workers” when we’re doing it. Negri and Hardt also write about capitalism’s difficulties in measuring or capturing these new forms of wealth creation in their latest volume Commonwealth. And here in the Amazon we had a representative of the one of the world’s more successful product design corporations describing how they are co-opting that wide world of creative wealth, but framing it as a nearly philanthropic activity of their own, giving away their professional know-how for the good of the world.

The autorickshaw challenge.

Sustainable Dance Floor!

Stef Van Dongen is a contagiously enthusiastic young entrepreneur. He started a company called Enviu and sees himself as rooted in the “co-creation economy.” In fact his firm has been involved in some interesting projects. “We believe in the economy of  the crowd!” he declared. One project he shared that got a warm reception was the “Sustainable Dance Club” which consists of dance floor built on electric sensors that generate electricity as the dancers bounce up and down on the floor. Their slogan for this project is “People, Planet, Party!” and you can imagine how easy a sell that is among the global dance club culture. Facing a greater challenge, they launched a project to change the noisy, polluting technology of the ubiquitous autorickshaws (TukTuks) that fill the cities of Asia. They launched a “Hybrid TukTuk Battle” among a half dozen design faculties on campuses in India and Holland and after the dust settled two winners emerged, one with the 2-stroke engine and another for the 4-stroke engine. A partnership was established between Enviu and an Indian entrepreneur, leading to the founding of SocioEnviro, whose goals are stated on the Enviu website:

SocioEnviro has developed a business model around three pillars: financial services, advertising and clean technology. By offering fair loans and advertising income to rickshaw drivers, we aim to create better and more sustainable income for the drivers. The installing of clean technology will further increase the income potential and also decrease the environmental footprint of the rickshaw eco-system.

The new hybrid TukTuks.

So the Indian entrepreneur and our friends at Enviu will be developing new cleaner vehicles along with a more aggressive system of small business loans and advertising, all of which is promised to improve the lives of the poor rickshaw drivers, as well as reducing CO2 emissions and providing cleaner city air. Who could complain? Well, me for one. Because an idea like this could have been given away to the drivers in combination with encouragement to form cooperatives and collectives, depriving the middlemen of an endless stream of profits from interest payments and advertising revenues (only a fraction of which will go to the drivers under this system). The drivers could have been given a path towards complete autonomy and relative self-sufficiency but instead, this green entrepreneurialism seems committed to creating new forms of dependency and exploitation. Maybe I’m wrong but that’s what it sounds like.

Zoe Melo

Zoe Melo used to be a top model in the 1980s and lived life in the proverbial fast lane for a couple of decades. Now she’s older and wiser, and has long since abandoned that crazy life. I got to know her a bit in the Amazon and we became friends. Since she abandoned her alienated life as a model, she has become a product designer and gallery owner. After ten years away from her native country Brazil, living in Los Angeles, she is now returning to open a branch of her product design firm in Sao Paulo. She specializes in using sustainable materials, local and healthy sources, and is quick to state her aversion to exploiting nature or other people. But she is also a very typical modern entrepreneur, employing subcontractors to make products for clients. From her point of view, she respects their independence, and wouldn’t want to put them into a wage-labor relationship where she’s the boss and they’re her employee. But the so-called independence of the subcontractor is a fake independence anyway. In Italy and France and some parts of the U.S. and the UK, this model is better known as precarity. No one has any guarantee of work, but everyone must be continually available to work. Moreover, each individual has to constantly upgrade and renovate their skills as to be more employable when potential contractors do come around. The insecurity and lack of stability is a given, but there is no support either for the range of additional costs to reproduce labor, from medical and dental to the taxes that support the unemployment, disability and other “safety net” systems. No doubt Zoe herself suffers the same predicament, wondering where the next revenue will come from, watching the ebb and flow of projects and overheads with no certainty that she’ll come out in the black or sink into the red. But for sure, this is no model of personal and social emancipation, except in the narrowest capitalist sense of being free to sell (or not) your labor to whomever you choose in the open market. (I am in a similar boat in San Francisco as a small prepress book and magazine designer, never sure if my clients will stay in business or if I will get extra work or no work.)

Biologist and author Joan Roughgarden is now retired in Hawaii, but she ran for office in 2000 in the first district elections for San Francisco supervisor since the 1970s. After attending her first gay pride march in 1998 her resolve to change from Jonathan to Joan was strengthened and soon she carried out her desire to transition from male to female. She presented a compelling critique of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, an argument she’s developed more fully in her book “Evolution’s Rainbow.” She shows how Darwin’s assertion, parroted ever since, that males are “passionate” and females “coy” is patently false, and that there is an incredible diversity of roles, behaviors, and gender realities in the animal kingdom, not to mention that homosexual behavior is extremely common among many species. But I was disappointed when she concluded her argument by using microeconomic categories of “demand curves” and “real prices” to describe how baby birds differentiate themselves to their parents and get fed. I doubt Joan is really committed to those metaphors, neo-social Darwinian as they are, but it’s a commentary on how hegemonic neoliberal economics is in this time that a radical contrarian biologist who is also a transsexual would use such concepts to bolster her own arguments.

Aaron Koblin is from San Francisco and he’s an engaging fellow, an artist and computerist. He devised the famous software that showed daily airplane flights across North America as a series of flashing beams of light on a dark continent. He described his project of using Amazon Mechanical Turk to have thousands of people do small things as part of something much larger, but without knowing anything about what they were actually contributing to. To me it sounded exactly like the labor process of the Department of Defense, or even object-oriented programming, where dozens to thousands of skilled technical workers do finite tasks that satisfy some part of their desire to solve problems, but they never really know if they’re designing nuclear bombs, drone missile navigational systems, or what. Aaron’s projects are quite benign compared to that, at least so far! He offered 2 cents to anyone who would send him an original line drawing of a sheep facing left. He received thousands of them. Later he packaged them in collections of hundreds and sold them for $20 a block, earning a big profit and incurring the wrath of some of the original contributors. For him it was primarily an art project, a demonstration of the possibilities of a broad crowd-sourced creative process. Later he did another project having thousands of people collaboratively draw a forged $100 bill, which later everyone was free to download and use as they saw fit.

These kinds of projects make me uncomfortable. I don’t like the idea of a master entrepreneur hiring basically anonymous, brainless labor to do narrow tasks for teensy bits of money, and then use the results for any purpose. The methodology is bothersome, and based on what Aaron showed, the results don’t do much for me either. I suppose you could strike great subversive blow to the status quo, at least in theory, but there was no evidence of any such purpose lurking in the middle of the thousands of sheep or squiggles that became the $100 bill. Mostly it seems to reinforce the kind of alienated labor that we’ve been doing all along, and worse, it establishes the notion that you’ll work for fractions of money so infinitesimal that any notion of a minimum wage is forgotten.

Demos Helsinki promoting a "Superpower of Happiness" in Brazil!

Simo and Roope, the guys from Demos Helsinki, had come even a longer way than I did. Their consultancy works on quality of life issues with a particular focus on trying to understand happiness. Coming for a long-established social democracy in which the basics of life are guaranteed to all, from clean water and good housing, education, and medical care, they realized their prescription for happiness might be a bit out of place. But they went ahead and gave it a shot anyway, and it was quite amusing when they gave a rousing pitch for Brazil to become a “Superpower of Happiness” especially considering that Finland, along with Sweden and Norway, is considered among the more depressed countries in the world! I liked their argument though it is mostly couched in terms of what policy changes can be made at the governance level: e.g. more free time, longer vacations, shorter workdays, support for bicycling vs. private cars, more childcare support, more time off to raise children and care for elderly, etc. Why not? But coming from the land of Nokia, it seems a long way to the Brazilian Amazon, and their prescriptions might have universal application if we were able to see the planet more universally in terms of distribution of wealth, resources, technologies, etc.

Lastly, Edgard Gouveia, Jr. was easily the most charismatic guy I met at TEDx Amazonia. He’s about 6’5” with his big afro, and has one of the most beautiful smiles you’ll ever see. He is on fire with warmth and creative ideas and it only took him about 15 seconds to get the audience on their feet when he took the stage. A minute later we were all tied in pretzels trying to keep in contact with the people on either side of us with our left and right hands, as well as our left and right feet, and then he said we had to tip our head to reach yet another person!

Edgard got all of us out of our seats...

He got everyone laughing and then launched into his own creative use of game-playing applied to practical dramas. His best example was the massive flooding that afflicted southern Brazil a year ago, and how it had left the region under water and paralyzed for weeks. He and his colleagues devised some games to get the locals to start taking matters into their own hands, and before too long a whole series of challenges were being pursued by teams in many of the submerged areas, often with the younger teenagers taking the lead. “Build a bridge over this creek, but you can’t use any money and must get all the materials and labor donated. You have 3 days.” And the job would be done in 1 day! He was passionate about bringing people together in practical projects, but using online social networks and gaming metaphors to promote an activist and engaged population. I was really impressed and quickly came to share his excitement, but the more I thought about it later, the more skeptical I grew. And then a few days ago someone pointed me to the Gamepocalypse Talk by Jessie Schell, which plays the logic out to its logical (capitalist nightmare) conclusion. This is not to say that Edgard is trying to generate a world of game-playing to serve the needs of capitalist marketers, but that his use of it and enthusiastic adoption is probably not going to find it easy to avoid co-optation by the larger society’s rush to the same kinds of ideas.

Human ecological reinvention depends on adapting better to natural systems, but the latest business schemes to capture the value of all these experiments and keep them safely within the logic of commodities and privatized resources undermine the deeper transformation, don’t they? Is planetary and human survival only possible if we proceed through price signals and market relationships (or games) or can we reinvent a democracy that represents our best interests but also those of all species, as this conference set out to do? Heady questions to be sure.

I hope I haven’t written too harshly about people I just spent a lovely time with. I want to separate genuine human affection and an all around respect for everyone I met, from my disdain for some of the assumptions embedded in some of their Talks. In other words, I hope my new friends from this event will read what I write as comradely criticism, rather than a personal attack on anyone. I don’t doubt anyone’s good intentions and only want to challenge the comfort zone so many appeared to have with business models as the appropriate way to organize human and planetary life.

Farewell for now friends!

First off let me say that if you’ve recently discovered this blog, or had some reason to go back through my older entries (it starts back in 2004) during the past year and a half or so, I apologize for all the lost photos and truncated entries that were littering it. I had no idea! So having noticed recently that I had 1,100 broken links, probably over 1000 of them photos that were no longer showing up (due to moving the blog from one host to another a while back), I finally spent the requisite dozens of hours to fix it.

The blog is fixed! All the beautiful photos are back! All the writing is complete! Check it out! (If you’re especially fond of photo-rich entries, they really get going in 2006 and keep gaining ground from then.)

Second day of our first heat wave all summer. It says it’s 90 degrees out there! I went up to the top of Twin Peaks yesterday around 5 pm, first time in weeks that I could even see it for more than a half hour at midday. The fog has been relentless (on the bright side, it’s free air conditioning all summer!). Here’s a few shots, two from Twin Peaks, and one from the freeway as we returned from a trip to Kings Canyon a week ago, with the big fog hanging over the City.

The late afternoon light really makes San Bruno Mountain look great, and it was so clear that Montara Mountain behind it in the distance stood out too!

The fog has hung over us all summer! This view from east of the Bay Bridge, across the Port of Oakland towards SF.

I’ve mostly been at home all summer, working on FoundSF and also the new book that’ll come out next spring with City Lights. Here’s the cover:

I’ve also been having a blast working on the 2nd edition of Vanished Waters for the Mission Creek Conservancy. I got to meet a lot of stakeholders for an updated chapter at the end of the book that they commissioned me to write, and my sense of that part of town and the larger dynamics of urban growth, redevelopment, planning, etc., have all gained greater nuance from these discussions.

I’m going to do separate posts on a couple of fun things we did this month, one was going to Kings Canyon and the other was taking a ride on the Alma down the southeastern shoreline of San Francisco. Tons of great photos from both of those trips…

But here in town there are a couple of things that went down during the past few weeks to comment on. One, the “Fix Fell” protests, are ongoing. The 2nd annual Street Cart Food Festival happened, right outside my front door!

First, Fell Street:

A new group emerged in the wake of the Gulf oil spill to mount a protest at the hazardous spot by the BP/ARCO cheap gas station at Fell and Divisadero where the bike lane connecting the Wiggle to the Panhandle passes by. Over two months they’ve showed up every Friday to block the entry driveways that cause motorists to double park in the bike lane while they wait to buy gas. Very symbolic and a logical place to register outrage at the nightmare of the Gulf Oil Spill while also insisting on changing local transit patterns to promote cycling at the expense of auto-driving. Weekly protests, arrests, and a slowly growing campaign have already produced a new green-painted lane which has made it somewhat better. But the demands have grown now, and the protesters insist on closing the curb cuts permanently on Fell, and putting in a dedicated, separate bikeway (on Fell, which is basically the surface freeway going from east to west) to connect the heavily used Wiggle route through the lower Haight with the delightfully safe and green Panhandle. Here’s a few shots from last Friday’s action:

Seems like no problem with there's no cars...

I turned out at the beginning of this and had to leave after about an hour. As you can tell if you sit through the 10-minute video, it took many hours to complete this particular protest, ending with a bunch of fire department personnel sawing off u-locks from protesters necks. I’m not personally attracted to this kind of tactic. The time it takes, the legal bills, the burnout, all seem like major impediments to me. And that’s the larger message of this culture. If it’s not convenient, fuggeddaboutit… So these guys are engaged in a series of actions that are inconvenient for all concerned, the participants as well as the city’s resources. Raising the costs this way has historically brought a response, so time will tell if the more thorough-going vision of a transformed Fell Street will be achieved under this pressure. I hope so!

Me and Hugh doing our duty!

Here is the just released minimum program by Fix Fell:

In the short term, the minimum the city must do is the following:

-close motor vehicle access to/ from Scott St. at Fell to eliminate danger from speeding cars down the hill and left turning conflict.   Allow full permeability for people on foot and bicycle.

-remove approx 36 parking spaces along the south side of Fell St. between Scott and Baker to provide safe, separated space for bicycle circulation.  If local n’hood opposition is an issue, investigate use of DMV lot for residents in evenings to compensate.

-DPW take action to revoke Fell St. driveway permits to both the 76 and Arco stations based on documented safety impacts- both businesses would retain an ingress and egress on Divisadero

-prohibit left turns from Fell St. onto Divisadero or provide separate signal phase

-Undertake turn volume and safety studies to determine potential conflicts between tow company and supermarket parking entrances and bicycle circulation.  Shut these entrances if minimum safety standards are not met

-Prohibit left turns onto Baker, or install separate phase

-construct an attractive, two way bikeway on the south side of Fell St. between Scott and Baker, with possible extension along Panhandle to GGP, buffered with landscaping.

We hope you will give us feedback on this platform, and support these efforts by contacting the Mayor and your supervisor, and getting involved with our ongoing protests!

Ride safe out there and take the lane!

I’m in discussion with some of these guys, and others, and want to figure out some other tactical approach. Not just for this issue of one gas station at one intersection, but as a way of attacking a culture that chooses to murder 40,000-50,000 people annually as a “natural” and “normal” outcome of the transportation choices made by planners, bureaucrats and Americans who are religiously and fanatically attached to their cars. To say nothing of the cancer epidemic that we’re living in, mostly resulting from environmental pollution and toxic exposures, often also related to the auto and oil industries. The strategic goal of altering the streetscape of this near-freeway is a fine target. It’s a crucial piece of the de facto east-west bike corridor and we should be able to reorient it to maximize the safety and convenience of bicyclists, which ultimately would not cause any great hardship to motorists anyway!

But as usual, I’m dismayed by this campaign too. I don’t think political efforts driven by moral outrage appeal to people who don’t already share the same values. I don’t share the palpable sense of urgency that these guys put out. As noted above, tens of thousands of people die each year on the highways and streets of North America. Many thousands more planet-wide. The structural imperatives that keep the system running, no matter how many (human) bumps are in the road, are far deeper and more intractable than a moral campaign can excise. So the protesters are not wrong, and their demands are perfectly reasonable. But the larger question of political agency, mobilization, and vision, are not adequately addressed here. One of the participants responded to this line of thinking by arguing that the answer was to have more people participate in the blockades. If 500 or 1000 people did it instead of 5-10 or 20, it would be more effective. Well, sure. But why aren’t these tactics attracting those larger crowds? Just saying they *ought to* doesn’t solve the problem.

In fact, the tactics and style chosen largely reinforce a kind of neo-Christian sacrificialism that I abhor, and cannot participate in. Some might say I’m just chicken, I just don’t want to be arrested, I don’t want to take any risks. Yes and no. I’m not afraid, but I don’t think my getting arrested is an effective tactic for the strategic goals that I have. Besides, it is demonstrably a waste of time and money to get tangled up in the legal system. But my own reticence, as someone who has engaged in many kinds of political action over decades, probably highlights something that other people who are less inclined towards political action feel even more strongly. I don’t feel excited or hopeful by the thought of participating in this. I feel small and powerless and kind of dumb actually. I want to participate in things that are unpredictable, that open space up, that generate excitement because they’re changing life already. That’s a tall order, to be sure. But these kinds of forms, whether picket lines, sit-ins, nonviolent civil disobedience, etc., are all extremely well-known and tired forms that have been used time and again. The system is at ease with them, and has a well established system of managing them.

I’m not claiming to have a box of new tactics to replace them with. For that reason I turned up as a body to hold a sign for a while on Friday night. But I didn’t love doing it, and found myself leaving long before it got “hot.” In any case, I am a strong supporter of a radically redesigned Fell Street. In fact, I’ve been a proponent of a “City of Panhandles” (crisscrossing dedicated bikeways, at least three each going north-south, east-west, and a couple of diagonals) for more than 20 years!

OK, the other topic of today is the Street Food Cart Festival that was held by La Cocina, a neighboring organization a block from where I live on Folsom Street in the Mission. It was fun to step out my front door and find this massive fair going on, with thousands of people gnoshing on all sorts of delectable foods. The festival benefits La Cocina, whose mission is to help poor and unsupported people, mostly women, to start their own food businesses. They incubate the effort, give them training in various aspects of running a small food business, help them with branding and licensing and all that, and they also maintain a beautiful industrial kitchen for all the various start-ups to use while they’re getting going. We used the kitchen for one of our Feasts a few years back.

The view from my front doorstep.

Anyway, it was a madhouse again, even though they expanded the space by a half dozen blocks. Must’ve been 40,000 people during the day, and there was sure a whole lot of eating going on! It’s a lovely re-use of public space. Compared to the struggle over the Fell Street Traffic Sewer, here we had an often busy Folsom Street closed for the day, filled with dozens of booths and thousands of people, hanging out, talking, sharing bites, making a public space out of what’s usually a thoroughfare. What a delightful phenomenon! Why can’t we close some streets and do this permanently? I hope we’re heading in that direction! (Oddly, a lot of the vendors are fancy local restaurants who I guess as a benefit to La Cocina, turn out and kind of “slum it” for a day, selling some of their gourmet goodies for $3-8 as street food…) Here’s a whole bunch of folks hanging out with each other and getting the food into their mouths!

By the end, it all ends up like this:

Haven’t had much time or mental focus for blogging lately. But sometimes things crop up that are just begging for a good rant. The current ad campaign by the multinational clothing corporation Levi’s is a case in point. The fact that Levi’s is originally a San Francisco company lends a certain extra twist to this saga. And that they could say “Everybody’s Work is Equally Important” at a time when so much work that is handsomely rewarded is not only NOT important, it is ruining the planet while it is destroying the humans doing it! It’s an astonishingly bizarre statement to make in a society that has grown ever more hierarchical and class-divided during the past few decades, in which people who ARE doing the important work, like childcare, hospice care, public school teaching, driving public transit, etc., are being demonized and attacked and in many cases, left at the bottom in terms of pay and social esteem.

“We Are All Workers” proclaim the ads in bus shelters, on billboards, and seemingly everywhere all of a sudden. “Everybody’s Work is Equally Important” says a neon sign in the window of their Valencia Street workshop (itself a wet dream: free screen-printing, photocopying and art resources for anyone to use). Back in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a quintessential Rust Bowl town abandoned in the early 1980s by the steel industry and verging on total collapse, Levi’s has ridden in as a white knight. After a big nonprofit pulled out, Levi’s agreed to put up $1 million to bolster the efforts of John Fetterman, the youthful and burly 6’8” mayor to bring the city back from the brink of ghost town status, putting their money into a community center, the public library, and an urban farm! On Youtoob there are a dozen videos produced by Levi’s, from one-minute ads to five-minute mini-documentaries on Braddock, designed to evoke a series of complicated emotions and speak to needs and ideas that have been buried during the past twenty years of shrill neoliberal triumphalism.

The first time I saw the “We Are All Workers” ad, featuring a small African American boy in an oversized adult workshirt, I was shocked. Who or what could be sponsoring an ad with that as a title? I felt that typical ripped-off feeling when my own words, sincerely uttered with real meaning on many occasions, were reflected back at me as a vapid advertising slogan. And then the puzzlement. Why Levi’s? What are they getting at? Don’t they want to hide all the sweatshop work that goes in to their products? Isn’t it the point of the modern capitalist economy to disguise the relationship between work and product? Aren’t we supposed to be kept blissfully ignorant of what it takes to produce the common items of our lives? Aren’t the objects supposed to be the lively characters and the people who make them completely invisible? Has Levi’s broken with the playbook of fifty years of capitalist consumer marketing?

Yes and no. I think they spent a lot of time and money with focus groups, testing this whole campaign out, long before it appeared to us publicly. I think they, or at least their advertising agency, realized that something is developing that has so far been out of sight and out of mind in terms of mass culture. There is a deep frustration with the stupidity of work that rarely gets mentioned. But most people live it every day, and have to pretend to like their jobs (if they have one), to pretend to care about the company they work for, to want it to be more profitable (even if they are faced with stagnant wages and shrinking benefits), etc.  The desire to do real work with a sense of its purpose and ultimate utility to our lives, and to do it with a lot of control over the process and its results, including who we do it with and how it affects the natural environment, has led many people to engage more fully with work they do when they’re not “at work.” This is what I wrote about in Nowtopia.

The Levi's Workshop on Valencia Street near 17th, in San Francisco.

Peering in to the energetic scene within.

Michael Hardt and Toni Negri writing in the 3rd volume of their theoretical trilogy Commonwealth argue that there is so much productive activity going on outside of traditional economic measurement that capital is seeking new ways to capture that value. I think this whole Levi’s campaign is a cutting-edge example of this effort. I find it unimaginable that the designers of this campaign haven’t been studying their Hardt and Negri, and who knows, maybe they even read Nowtopia!

Here’s how Hardt/Negri put it on page 140-141: “Capital expropriates cooperation as a central element of exploiting biopolitical labor-power. This expropriation takes place … from the field of social labor, operating on the level of information flows, communication networks, social codes, linguistic innovations, and practices of affects and passions… Capital is predatory, as the analysts of neoliberalism say, insofar as it seeks to capture and expropriate autonomously produced common wealth.”

The Levi’s workshop is a fascinating experiment in this effort to “capture and expropriate autonomously produced common wealth.” Dan Connor is labeled as a Levi’s photographer in the online video, “Pre-Print Opening July 1, 2010,” where he describes their strategy: “The point is to come into a town, find a bunch of nonprofits that are in that area, and work with them, to create an environment that is collaborative, an artspace, to kind of talk together, work on projects in a collaborative nature…”

The place opened in July and will close at the end of August. (Locals in the Mission are suspicious that the short time of their renting the place conveniently avoided their having to get a normal business permit and encounter the shitstorm of neighborhood chainstore opposition that their competitor American Apparel ran into when they tried to open a store a few blocks up the street a year ago.) But it’s not a regular store. It’s a community workshop with a beautiful old letterpress, silkscreening tables and screens, a free photocopier for zinesters to help themselves to, and a surprising largesse of resources. Frankly, the workshop is the kind of fantasy place that anyone involved in radical publishing or printmaking and community politics has dreamed of forever. The catch of course is that this is a Levi’s facility. While they’ve been relatively open and uncensorious, encouraging dozens of local artists to come in and do whatever they want, even offering some of them modest amounts of money to produce art there, they are using the place as a showcase to gain brand loyalty and they’re freely using the folks who come in as advertising props. They have a marquee outside bragging about who is going to be there “making art” in coming days, and a lot of the output is connected to various local nonprofits. There’s even a spinning wheel with three local nonprofit groups who get the cash when you buy some jeans or a shirt there (because in spite of everything, they do have a couple of shelves of clothes for sale). It’s as though they’ve hit upon this new strategy for capturing a whole stratum of productive energy in the ultra-hipster Mission, co-opting it to their own purposes while also inserting the corporation into it as the provider of hardware, free space, and endless paper and ink and other resources, but at the last moment they can’t resist also doing what they’ve always done: sell bluejeans!

Few of these were actually created at the workshop, but they had 'em displayed to encourage free use of their copier.

The payoff for Levi's: This guy was shooting while I was taking photos. First he was roaming among the various "workers" and then he went upstairs to get this overview shot...

Hardt and Negri describe the problem of capturing the immeasurable wealth, which maybe this Levi’s workshop is managing to do.

“Furthermore, the results of biopolitical production, including social subjectivities and relations, forms of life, [do generate] value, but it is immeasurable, or rather it constantly exceeds the units of any accounting scheme; it overflows the corporation’s double-entry ledgers and confounds the public balance sheets of the nation-state. How can you measure the value of an idea, an image, or a relationship? The quantitative indicators of professional economists offer little … in particular since production of the common constantly exceeds not only relationships of control but also frameworks of measure. Useful economic indicators instead would have to be qualitative.”

“Join us, roll up your sleeves, and get to work.” They have a half dozen slogans like this. Another one is “Ready to Work” echoing the millions of unemployed who would be glad to get a job rather than being thrown on the discard pile like they were a broken piece of plastic. Yet another version is splashed across big billboards near the Bay Bridge: “Made Strong for the New Work,” with three men wearing the requisite branded clothing while posing among machines and in brick rooms as though waiting for them to come back to life. What is this “new work”? One guy stands in front of an out-of-context motor in an otherwise empty room. The guy on the right is sitting on an old motorcycle in another empty room, probably a former factory work space. The guy in the middle is walking through some kind of archway with a cityscape behind him—is he entering an empty factory or leaving a dying city? These guys aren’t working exactly, they’re waiting. They’re embodying the precariousness of modern worklife, a dangerously accurate portrayal of the lassitude and emptiness that fills all too many lives in an economy with 22% unemployment. Waiting for the New Work that hasn’t yet started, or if it has, only in brief fits and starts, enough to keep you from total penury, maybe even enough to keep the payments going on the credit card where you charged the new Levi’s you bought, or so the ads imply…

But precarity is a permanent state now. The lost world of full-time work for stable employers actually making things that other people can use and will buy, is now reduced to phantom references floating in and around an ad campaign. The images are meant to invoke a (false) sense of nostalgia, but one that has a real yearning in it, a persistent wish for a stability and security that were never available to most of the world and only to a fraction of the American working class during the peak of U.S. global power. That time is definitively over.

But in good old American bootstrapping ideology, Braddock is being showcased as an example of the can-do spirit, the circular fantasy that once you’ve been kicked to the ground by the decisions of a tiny elite who control wealth and power, you can work yourself to the bone to regain your former middle-class comforts. I’m pretty sure Mayor Fetterman, who looks like he was part of Survival Research Laboratories or some equally edgy urban art project (and is an Ivy League grad to boot), knows better. The Braddock website features a stark and gritty urban aesthetic but has a photo of a big urban garden as the first thing you see, with the slogan under it, “Reinvention is the only option.”

So if you were the Mayor of Braddock, or even just someone who moved there to be involved in a radical effort to reinvent the place, how would you respond to the sudden appearance of a major corporation who offers serious money with the only caveat that they can make and use representations of you for their own marketing purposes? Not an easy call. Because anyone facing that level of economic collapse and urban decay knows that they need serious resources to get out of the hole. You can only bootstrap yourself so far, and without serious capital (in this culture) to work with, you’ll probably hit a wall.

Obviously Levi’s is co-opting Braddock and its Mayor. Does that mean he’s lost all autonomy and is now a fully captured entity of Levi’s? I doubt that too. Maybe he thinks he’s playing Levi’s and as long as their money stays in the buildings and facilities they’ve invested in, Braddock comes out way ahead no matter what dumb advertisements Levi’s runs for a few months or even a year or two… Time will tell for Braddock’s gamble.

Here's another weirdly edgy slogan: There's Work to be Done and Undone! Whew! That's putting it mildly... how about we eliminate advertising, insurance, banking, real estate, military production.... for starters?

But here in San Francisco, the naïve young hipsters who are flocking to the Levi’s store are doing what comes natural. They’re playing, they’re making art, they’re finding friends and community in practical projects that are based on their own sense of meaning and purpose. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we always had access to practically unlimited resources to make our zines, our posters, our t-shirts, our creative fantasies? Why don’t we have such workshops as a matter of course? And not limited to printmaking and clothing, but a whole range of tools and machinery so we could begin to make the world we want to live in, a world of our own design? Levi’s is tapping that yearning, but will soon pull it all away, just like Lucy always pulls away the football just as Charlie Brown is really ready to give it the kick of his life.

Hardt and Negri say “the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to be the industrial working class… the metropolis primarily generates rent, which is the only means by which capital can capture the wealth created autonomously.” And it isn’t coincidental that during the past two years of economic breakdown, mass foreclosures, and rising unemployment, San Francisco rents have remained in the stratosphere. Aggregate capital is doing a fine job of exploiting the flourishing, unmeasurable creative output of San Francisco’s residents through the harsh regime of rents here. Now we have Levi’s opening a temporary workshop to experiment with a new form of cooptation, simultaneously more overt and more opaque, more insidious and more subtle. How will this play out? Can we turn this inside out? Or does it automatically turn us inside out? Love to hear your thoughts…

I’ve been heavily influenced by Copenhagen since my first (adult) visit in 1977. It took a while to realize that it probably set in motion most of my many years of cycle activism, which is importantly about much more than merely bicycling… watching this video strongly reminded me of how the texture of urban life gets SO much better when you have these kinds of conditions… Summertime in Denmark is pretty dang awesome too!

Critical Mass made it to see the sunset at Ocean Beach on May 28.

It’s a bit strange to start writing about the bucolic uses of public space in San Francisco (Critical Mass and Carnaval) while the worst environmental disaster in history is ongoing. Who has not already had days of obsessing about the oil pouring into the Gulf, followed by numbness, distancing, and then another round of intense rage and grief?  The sheer hubris of BP and the venal complicity of the Obama Administration is breathtaking. A person commented on my last entry Technology and Impotence over at Streetsblog, defending Obama and his minions. They are in denial about the overwhelming evidence that has been reported everywhere from Newsweek to local papers that BP and Obama’s general-in-charge have been working in lockstep to deny journalists and photographers access to areas of great damage, to prevent ecologists from getting in to count wildlife casualties, and generally have been running the whole thing like they run the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, putting more time and money into controlling the way the news appears in the media than actually addressing the problems their policies are creating. The Israeli attack on the Gaza Relief Flotilla is another example of bald-faced manipulation in the face of overwhelming evidence (the soldiers who were attacking ships in international waters were “attacked”? Do they think the whole world is crazy?) Increasingly we live in a world of manufactured news and images, in which our ideas and “knowledge” are almost completely dominated by state and corporate propaganda. That’s not new, to be sure, but it’s getting worse all the time. The attempt to black out news and images of the oil spill is being handled exactly like government efforts to hide the casualties of war.

Now we find out that since it’s not working as well as they’d like, BP  has hired Dick Cheney’s former press secretary–a woman who was once the spokesperson for the U.S. Dept. of Energy under the Bush Oil Cabal and apparently knows how to spin and hide the most blatant incompetence and corruption. I just learned about this website “If It Was My Home” where you can see how huge the spill is by placing it in any part of the world you want to (hat-tip to Mona for the link). It’s a handy one-stop website where you can also see the live webcam of the ongoing oil torrent and a running counter of the number of gallons that have poured out (22.5 million and counting as I write this).

Bicyclists are reeling a bit this weekend because a couple of days ago a guy deliberately drove his SUV into 4 different cyclists before crashing and running away. He got caught today when he went to the police to claim that he had been carjacked, but he’d left his wallet, keys, and cellphone in the car when he ran away. Remarkably, they are booking him on murder charges, something that almost never happens when a motorist assaults bicyclists, but this was so aggressive and random, plus he went after four different cyclists on different streets, so maybe they’ll follow this through.

There’s an ongoing low-level roar online from the 101st Fighting Keyboardists against bicycling, most notably on SFGate and a few other local sites, but in real life the supposed overwhelming hostility to cyclists is hard to find. We had a fantastic Critical Mass last week, as usual characterized by hundreds of bystanders, motorists, and pedestrians cheering us as we rolled by. It was the first time in a year or more that a published route was shared ahead of the ride. It was supposed to go to the 7 beaches of San Francisco, but in the end we only made it to about 4.

Critical Massers enjoy sunset at the beach, May 28 2010.

Instead of following the proposed route and looping to South Beach (and joining the protesters who were outside the Giants-Arizona game) the riders in front went straight up Market, then west on Geary in a beeline, north on Van Ness until the irresistable vortex of the Broadway Tunnel got ‘em again. What is it about that damn tunnel these days? Why does Critical Mass have to go back and forth through it EVERY TIME?? Joel P. worked hard in the front, and got some help from a guy he picks apples with (who seemed to have some influence with the testosterone-laden young men who led the ride into the tunnel) who brought the riders back west whereupon we went north on Van Ness, then took the waterfront to Crissy Field.

An inexplicably "militant" moment in the Presidio, May 28, 2010.

I saw at least six different tandems in this Critical Mass... quite unusual!

From there we took a magical ride up through the Presidio during the golden light before sunset, passing Baker Beach, China Beach, and finally going the last leg on Geary to the Cliff House and down to the beach. Wheeeee! What a lovely ride!

A rare trip to the western edge of the City during Critical Mass.

This was before the big Memorial Day weekend, which in San Francisco’s Mission District is also the big Carnaval. And lo and behold, this year, for the first time in a decade, we had fantastic, sunny, warm weather! I enjoyed Carnaval more this year than I have in a long time, probably because I had the great pleasure of hosting Willy Lizarraga’s charming “Birth of Carnaval on the Streets of San Francisco” at our May 19 Shaping San Francisco Talk. I didn’t get out that early, but by 11:30 or so it had been going for an hour and a half and was only about 2/3 done. So I caught a bunch, but at the start my friends were picnicking in the middle of Folsom Street, taking full advantage of the rare closed street.

Mona, Adri, and Carin

Can we start depaving now?

So the rest of this post is a gallery of images from Carnaval, including a number of crowd shots which I found at least as charming as the participants in the parade.

Adriana found us a fresh coconut full of cold juice! yum! and the meat was good too!