Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw
Bicyclists and Vacant-lot Gardeners are
Inventing the Future Today
a talk and book discussion with Chris Carlsson
Friday, May 9, 2008 at 7:30 pm
at The Brecht Forum
451 West Street *
New York City
* travel directions below
For more information go to http://www.brechtforum.org
or call (212) 242-4201
Outlaw bicycling, urban permaculture, biofuels, free
software, even the Burning Man festival, are windows
into a scarcely visible social transformation that
challenges politics as we know it. As capitalism
continues its inexorable push to corral every square
inch of the globe into its logic of money and markets,
new practices are emerging that are redefining
politics. In myriad ways, people are taking back
their time and technological know-how from the market
and in small under-the-radar ways, are making life
better right now. In doing so, they hope to set the
foundation--technically and socially--for a genuine
movement of liberation from market life. The social
networks thus created, and the practical experience
of cooperating outside of economic regulation, become
a breeding ground for new strategies and tactics to
confront the everyday commodification to which
capitalism reduces us all.
In Nowtopia, Chris Carlsson uncovers resistance and
rebellion amidst fractions of a slowly recomposing
working class in America. Rarely self-identifying
as mere "workers," people from all walks of life
are doing incredible amounts of work in their "free"
"non-work" time in order to create immediate practical
improvements in daily life. And, these myriad
initiatives constitute a thorough-going refusal of
politics and economics as usual. In Nowtopia, Marx's
concept of the General Intellect is freshly applied
to the disparate initiatives that are percolating
largely out of public sight. Building on the
investigative methodology developed by autonomist
Marxists in Europe and the U.S.A., Carlsson
recontextualizes the so-called "middle class" as an
example of working class recomposition. With the
practical rebellions outlined in this book, Carlsson
posits a deeper challenge to the basic epistemological
underpinnings of modern life, as a new ecologically-driven
politics emerges from below to reshape our assumptions
about science, technology and human behavior.
Chris Carlsson is a San Francisco author, Nowtopian,
outlaw bicyclist and wannabe vacant-lot gardener.
He has edited four collections of political and
historical essays. His most recent book, After The
Deluge, is a utopian novel of post-economic San
Francisco. He was one of the original founders and
long-time editor of Processed World magazine. He
also helped to start the Critical Mass bicycling
movement in San Francisco.
Admission--sliding scale: $6/$10/$15
No one turned away for inability to pay
Online reservations at http://brechtforum.org/node/1570?bc=
*****
Travel Directions
The Brecht Forum is at:
451 West Street *
(between Bank and Bethune Streets in the far West Village,
1-1/2 blocks north of West 11 Street)
New York City
* Note: West Street is the same as the West Side Highway;
but easily accessible via the greenway.
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