Left Unread

You know what I mean. Feel the rage. Feel your pulse burn beneath your skin. Feel the need to crash through the facade of alienation. The river is free. Sing the rage into reality! Life depends on it.

The following description is from the publisher of Chris Carlsson’s Nowtopia manifesto: Outlaw bicycling, urban permaculture, biofuels, free software, and even the Burning Man festival are windows into a scarcely visible social transformation that is redefining politics as we know it. As capitalism continues to corral every square inch of the globe into its logic of money and markets, new practices are emerging through which people are taking back their time and technological know-how. In small, under-the-radar ways, they are making life better right now, simultaneously building the foundation-technically and socially-for a genuine movement of liberation from market life.Nowtopia uncovers the resistance of a slowly recomposing working class in America. Rarely defining themselves by what they do for a living, people from all walks of life are doing incredible amounts of labor in their “non-work”time, creating immediate practical improvements in daily life. The social networks they create, and the practical experience of cooperating outside of economic regulation, become a breeding ground for new strategies to confront the commodification to which capitalism reduces us all.

The practices outlined in Nowtopia embody a deep challenge to the basic underpinnings of modern life, as a new ecologically driven politics emerges from below, reshaping our assumptions about science, technology, and human potential.

About the author: Chris Carlsson, executive director of the multimedia history project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, and community organizer. He has edited four collections of political and historical essays. His most recent book is After The Deluge, a utopian novel of post-economic San Francisco. He was long-time editor of Processed World magazine.

If you don’t want to read the book, here are some of the crucial ideas it contains.

What can we do to begin the change?

Start small by doing what you love to do, which has nothing to do with competition. How about some examples? Say you love to grow veggies. Get together and start with vacant lot gardening and community supported agriculture (CSAs).

Engage in slow food feasts

Read In defense of Food: An Eaters Manifesto

Watch The Real Dirt on Farmer John

Stop paving things over

Fuck waiting for our “representatives” to make changes. They’ll never make changes for us. Face it. Democracy is dead in the water. The brain dead “representatives” will never respond to our needs. These brain deads aren’t interested in our communities or our lives at all. The hard work is still ahead of us. Never misjudge the enormity of our task. We’re about to face a clash of dual power the likes of which humanity has never seen-–those of us who crave change in the depths of our being and those now in power who, noticing our engagement in emergent movements, will threaten to kill us.

Know that revolution isn’t about marching around with red flags and swooping down on fascism in some kind of bloc. Nevertheless, our efforts will face a huge showdown. Count on it. What will each of us be doing to accept responsibility for change?

New movements that have nothing to do with old dichotomies are emerging. Our responsibility is to stop listening to gloom and negativity and beginning to transform our culture,creating sustainable lives and overgrowing the government. For example, we can divert money now used to grow corn and wheat into localized agriculture.

For now we can remain in the old false dichotomy of utilitarian, functional and non-playful or reconnect to playfulness and beauty in our lives. Whether we realize it or not, this is the essence and deepest core issue in our bifurcated lives, which are all about going along to get along. It’s time to reintegrate without being motivated by dollar; to rethink how we make our way.

Forget the old traps

Sacrifice and suffering are the core American value. But life can be abundant and great and this can fuel the movement where we enjoy ourselves in vibrant and fulfilling lives, which goes beyond guilt tripping and negativity, which connects people with pleasure with enjoyment of life. We can create committees of enjoyment in our towns and cities.Full enjoyment not full employment. This change is going to take a lot of work but if everyone begins where they are, if everyone understands there are alternatives to suffering and ugliness it could become a wonderful world.

Forget self-righteousness

It’s not about “save this and stop that” which are a form of negative fundamentalism. Instead choose play, music, vibrancy. What we have here is nothing less than life force vs death force. Connect with others through pleasure and enjoyment, build and connect, as opposed to hunkering down and feeling defensive and stopping people in their tracks with self-righteous attitudes. We need to articulate enjoyment in our everyday life and get rid of the horrible cycle of self-righteous guilt tripping,.Are we DIY or are we living in a consumerist world secretly dreaming that things will one day get better? That future is now. The trick is not making it too difficult for ourselves and others. We can take some sense of our own power and do something as meaningful as we can rather than being all super- moralistic and self-righteous. Self-righteousness is fundamentalism with subcultural adornments.We have to resist that tendency toward self-righteousness. For example the testosterone brigade war between bicycles and cars only further shuts down and alienates. Instead, invite the curious to join in a pleasurable alternative.

The way to make huge improvements is by making connections and invitations in a spirit of openness and acceptance rather than hunkering down in smug subcultural purity. Self-righteousness speaks to our cultural alienation. We all have different ways of expressing ourselves. There is no one right way but as many ways as there are people.

Baby steps

As we begin to build a social foundation, an engagement of how we create our existence, we have to start small with baby steps.

Why all this space ridiculously used for cars, lawns, golf courses, and letting rain wash down sewer drains. Urban permaculture can transform our physical environment in cities. Want some ideas? Read a book by Maude Barlow.

With melting ice caps we need to get smart about harvesting rainwater. Already new technologies are being invented. For example depaving and biodiversity, graywater systems, bioswell, City Repair and Building Convergence. The latter two are thriving in Portland. Counterpulse in San Francisco does restoration work of open spaces and other voluntary projects. We are seeing more examples emerging, creating together with our hands structures of beauty.

These are leaps we ourselves have to make despite government with its authorities who take personal offense when people have fun. Their impetus is to sell you the experience of suffering, which represents their wealth.

Our real wealth is in our relationships and skills. re-orienting ourselves about what’s valuable. And value isn’t measured by money. In the old, decrepit system so much of the work we do, work that really matters, doesn’t have value at all in this capitalist society–motherhood, teaching, creating art, etc. Everything is skewed toward the needs of bureaucracy and distorted by corporations, which comes down to feeding the rich through the ongoing accumulation of capital.

This toxic reality is a systemic problem that goes beyond the individual. Each of us reproduces those relationships in our everyday lives. But some of us are beginning to break away and escape this toxic existence by moving outside monetary relationships.

Beware of “green capitalism” which brags about what they’re doing to “save the fuzzy animals.” Beware of the new age economy which is intent on making serious bucks. The new age economy hurts more than it helps.

How do we break out of all those facades and false logics and create a real life that meets our needs; how do we escape the slog through endless meaningless work in the crushing hostility of cars, consumption, and competition?

We break away by freeing ourselves from the wage-earning mentality which is motivated by the dollar. Which, contrary to our Puritanical brainwashing, doesn’t mean we stop working and become couch potatoes.

When we free ourselves from these coercive restraints, people actually work hard. Hard work is hard wired in our nature. Most of us get genuine satisfaction from doing interesting hard work, both mental and physical. Right now this natural tendency of human nature gets distorted and used against us by the corporate model.

Most people’s creativity is shunted and stifled by meaningless work they’ re force to do and stratifying the workforce and the workplace. What’s rewarded and what isn’t needs serious re-examination. If we lived our passions and pursued a meaningful existence, we wouldn’t be doing nothing. Human beings are creative creatures. Mutual aid is at the core of our being. If we take away alienation and the profit motive, we self-organize into productive, creative groups.

Commodity fetisism

We are taught from childhood to hold things more important than ourselves or others. Hence the abominable emptiness and isolation we all suffer.

We are naturally geared toward mutual aid and free cooperation, while the capitalist model has long exploited this natural behavior.

Resisting the Spectacle

The Situationists work with Spectacle. We live in a society of spectacle, an edited version of real life. We live in an epidemic of lack of self-confidence in our own experience. We live in a state of complete alienation because we don’t see how we’re connected, only that we’re invisible.

We are bombarded and numbed by the univocality of spectacle, which means one voice 24/7 speaking at you and brooking no dissent. This univoice repeats itself over and over and over. An example of univocality was the media’s monotonous repetitions and slogans supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003 while the millions of people took to the streets and afterwards saw scant coverage of the immense turnout against the invasion. Now, six years later, the media is beginning to say things that we’ve known and dissented against all along.

In this anti-human society, it takes courage to be yourself. Our experience of spectacle is to doubt ourselves and think we’re wrong and trivial outside what we see in movies. We can begin a new path that doesn’t have immediate rewards, but it takes a lot of strength. We can create a space where people can begin to connect with themselves again; where they breathe a sigh of relief: “Thank god I’m not alone.” We’re not as isolated as we thought. We’ve only begun the process of de-isolation, picking up where the Regan administration severed continuity of the 60’s ideas.These parties/demonstrations will alter how you think about cities and your own life. They continue to spread in a social explosion that happens in the moment, that changes people’s imaginations forever.

I know you’re afraid. So am I. But I’ll stand with you. Will you stand with me to retrieve our lives, happy and satisfied after all those millennia? (Of course this is a virtual invitation, “you” and “me.” But I mean it as a metaphor for everyone in your life and in mine–friends and strangers alike, allied and committed to turning away from their control.)