Esteemed reader: you’re in so deep now! Perhaps you’re a diehard zine fanatic. Perhaps you’re even a publisher yourself. But perhaps you just picked up this copy of Slingshot because it was free at that one rad bookstore or coffee shop or food coop near you, and you’re still not sure what exactly this big scribbly beauty even is! Regardless, we adore your attention. But also we challenge you: go farther! Read another beautiful / scribbly / lefty / independent publication before the next slingshot finds its way to your hands. Smash the institutions of your own habits! Read new things so you can think new things! Explore! Explore! Explore! And if your explorations lead you (yes, you!) to scribble, paste, and copy a zine of your own, send it our way for review! We’ve documented some of our recent encounters below, as a place for you to start.
Fluke 21: The Colossus Compendium $5+postage
PO box 1547 Phoenix, AZ. 85001
Three interview pieces on underground artist Buzz Burr to commemorate his passing. People who dig train culture, installation art and weirdos from rural areas will find nourishment. Some of the info works better for those already in the know. The pages drip with emotion and love….maybe wear a bib while consuming?? (egg)
Ouch! Vol. 3
By Ouch! Collective ouchcollective.com Emerging in a tumultuous time to be queer, Ouch! Vol. 3 weaves together the voices of queer, trans, and nonbinary poets and writers from around the world, alongside surreal and sometimes erotic imagery, engaging with themes of grief, joy, and transformation, asking “what it means to move forward in life when it feels like everything is collapsing.” And perhaps more importantly, “What kind of world could we live in without joy and creativity?” The printing is gorgeous, full color and glossy, guiding the reader to new landscapes, offering a written and visual aesthetic that captures the terrifying uncertainty of staying alive in a world that says it doesn’t want you. And yet, here we are. In the words of BEE LB (they/them) whose work appears on p. 4, “the sun melts like butter across the golden haze of field / and my boots kick up dust, dirt // take me far from home.” (H-Cat)
The Wax Paper – Vol 4, No. 14 12 (14×2) Folded pages – $7 thewaxpaper.com
These pages are 14″ x 22″ folded, so it’s a true broadsheet format. (For reference, Slingshot is 11″ x 18″ folded.) I rarely discuss the packaging at this level but Wax Paper is so large it actually changes the way you have to read it. I had to fold it into quadrants, something I haven’t done since I read the Village Voice on the A-train in New York. That was way back before they went all digital in 2017. It returned to print in 2021 as a quarterly, but today I think I’d rather read Wax Paper. The experience of reading in quadrants is that of folding, unfolding, rotating, flipping, and refolding — one handed if you’re strap-hanging. Imagine that while trying to follow the narrative of a story whose bits and pieces are hidden in different sections of the newspaper. But it was very immersive: Continued next page. But Wax Paper is no ordinary newspaper. Despite their homage to Studs Terkel, the content is primarily what I’d call “high lit”, but well varied. The art was alternately colorful, strange and grotesque. I liked that too. I never know what to say about poetry but I did chase Jordan Jame’s prose across 6 separate pages. Someone shot Kris Kristofferson and I needed to know how that story ended. No spoilers. (Jose)
I briefly met Ms. Sackett at a zinefest and I was immediately taken by the art in this one. Each page contains one or more small individual paintings on prepared corrugated cardboard. The edges are rough, and each one has a partially visible gesso layer below a thin base layer of pink and peach paint that looks like it was put on with a dented roller. The irregularities in color and material provide a continuity of style and presence you rarely see in hand drawn, fully analog comics. Her drawing style reminds me of James Kochalka. So thanks for the opportunity to name check him. We haven’t talked in years.
The plot chronicles her 90 day trial of an unnamed SSRI. It’s not a clinical trial, so it’s not about dosage and blood levels. There are no tales of dizziness, blurred vision and constipation. There were no horrific side effects, at least not that she shared. It’s just the context for 90 days of her life: cats, cookies, Metro cards, weather, positive affirmations and various social interactions. I’ve known a lot of people who have tried SSRIs. It’s not for everyone but it seems to have done Maddie some good. I wish her well. (Jose)
Most of this issue is built around an interview with Danny Noonan’s friend Nicole and an array of “ugly” vegetable pictures. What makes a vegetable ugly and why do we as Americans have such idealized versions of vegetables? It’s a rhetorical question. The evils of marketing are pervasive and wholly responsible. Or are they? Do we have some preference for the symmetry and the golden ratio built into our idea of beauty? Noonan explores the topic both in word and deed. This issue has more pictures than usual — all vegetable portraiture of course. They’re bulbus, asymmetrical, splotchy, russeted, cracked, wrinkled and occasionally anthropomorphic.
Some years ago I worked at a farmers market. The ugly vegetables were hard to sell. People wanted to touch them, look at them and even take pictures of them but nobody bought them. They just handled them until they were dented and bruised. So I took them home: the potato with ears, the wrinkly tomato, and those leggy carrots. If you were wondering, they do all taste the same as their more regular counterparts. Like us, on the inside they are more alike than not. (Jose)
I do appreciate a silly zine once in a while. Life can’t all be introspection and coping mechanisms. Rebecca just likes Soda. I met her briefly at a zine fair and her first question was “What’s your favorite soda?” All I could tell her was that I haven’t drank any soda in over a decade. Most of it is cloyingly sweet and tastes entirely unlike food — even less so than candy. If you read the bottle you find a list of ingredients which always starts with water and usually ends with phosphoric acid. Everything in between reads more like a solvent than a beverage. How the hell did we get acclimated to drinking this?
I drink tea, black tea with nothing — no sugar, no honey, no milk. I prefer the darkest, most cloudy and bitter tea I can find: Irish breakfast, Assam, Yorkshire etc. It’s the means to my highly caffeinated ends. But Rebecca finds joy in her fizzy sugar water. Neither of us is an aesthete. But she and her zine remain bubbly and delightful. (Jose)
Have you ever looked deep into the abyss and seen the very eye of true madness? This zine goes way beyond the freakiness of the old Zap Comix. Everything is intensely psychedelic and dense with imagery. Cody Rapp a.k.a. Jared Cody Wolf isn’t limited to a particular media. He mixes drawings with collage, and colored pencil with pen and ink or acrylic all in screaming technicolor.
It’s stylish; simultaneously H.R. Giger and S. Clay Wilson but just as weird as Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin. I studied each page carefully. It’s difficult to catch every image, and every broken line of text; in multiple languages no less. Slowly it dawned on me. There are dicks everywhere. Not in a pornographic way (not all the time anyway) more of a Daniel Johnson way. But what I realized I was seeing (other than dicks) were homages to other art, artists and music.
The only thing lacking here is a narrative voice. Where Moscoso managed to tell stories Cody manages very little continuity from page to page other than dicks, guns, spacemen and random references to Mithra. TLDR: It’s really trippy man! jamhotradiofm.com/why-i-create-jared-cody-wolf
Before you google “healing modality” let me tell you that curanderismo is a Latin American shamanistic healing tradition. (Calm yourself, this isn’t about ethnobotany.) This zine dives right into the violent crimes of Hernando Cortés in his conquest and colonization of Mexico. It explains very directly the function of spiritual activism and its goals of collective liberation. I think it’s the first zine I’ve ever read that includes a religious invocation on the topic of radicalism. These are deep waters.
After defining terms it dives right into the tale of a lone curandera living on Suavie Island. But that was just a paragraph, a teaser. The next page is entirely devoted to rites and rituals. Maybe that’s unfair of me to want more anthropology, but I really wanted to hear more about individual curanderas. I didn’t get that, but I did get a good reading list should I want to pursue further learning, and I think I do. (Jose)
A flyer came in the mail, a man in a tiger mask surrounded by a mesmerizing swirl. At the bottom was a QR code that read “scan me.” It looked more like a warning than an invitation, but nonetheless here I am with a zine that defies categorization.
It opens with a short biography of rockabilly hero Pat Capocci. Pat could time travel back to 1955 and play the same Fender Telecaster and blend right in. But this isn’t a rockabilly zine. On the whole, it sweats pure randomness. There are doodles, scratch and sniff pics that I’m afraid to sniff, and an interview with a random hat embroiderer.
Then it got weirder. Someone’s cat writes a column. An Orangutan threatens us in Español. Two rogue accordionists wrestle. I think I saw a Chupacabras. Then there is that brief news break: “Scientists Discover Gaping Hole in Uranus.” On the whole, it reads like it was written on a dare. (Jose)
I got an email from Food Fortunata, and then two issues of Ear Of Corn came in the mail. Food Fortunata is the godfather of tardcore; a genre with a mixed reputation even in the punk community. But he’s in Encyclopedia Metallum and I’m not. So I have to envy Dave Schall in all his strange and subversive glory. The most remarkable thing about Ear of Corn is that since its inception in 1989 it’s largely kept the same formula. That’s over thirty five years, fifty seven issues, and tens of thousands of words and it’s never drifted off course. That’s despite the fact that Ear of Corn is not even Food’s solo project. This time around credited contributors are Duncan, Tex, and Francois; be they real or be they imagined. Just as others did twenty years ago, they wrote poetry, prose, reviews and interviews.
Just like in issue #1 there is still punk poetry here, but now it’s about PFAS. There are fewer interviews but there are also fewer G.G. Allin’s in the world. There’s a smattering of zine and book reviews but the meat and potatoes in these two issues are album reviews. These are also very short; almost like haiku. They include everything from Devo box sets to obscure punk bands beneath the radar (and possibly contempt) of Razorcake. As an underground icon, Food has access to things you can’t imagine, and probably shouldn’t. But Ear of Corn remains both highly influential and highly readable, which keeps me coming back. (Jose)
There’s something to be said in this era of disposable digital journalism for longform media. When you read a record review today it usually can fit on a matchbook. When you watch a video it’s 30 seconds long. Copy This Cassette! bucks the trend and goes long. After two pages of introduction the opening article is a 12 page interview with Joshua James Anderson from AntiquatedFuture. That’s followed by 6 pages of interview Q&A with Marc Masters, the author of the book High Bias. D. Blake Werts is no novice. He formerly ran the zine Copy This! which goes back to 2014 and was heavy on the interviews. That solid journalistic foundation makes this zine …is to cassette culture what Creem magazine was to rock n’ roll. It makes sense. LPs were only up to about 50 minutes long. The humble cassette was up to 120. Good mixtapes make for long attention spans.
Speaking of long, the other half of the 56 pages was entirely filled with cassette reviews. It opened with the comment that “you won’t find much punk/scream/metal here.” Sure enough, the most distorted guitar in the lyrics was from The Silver Doors. Sure, D. Blake Wertshas is a little bit of a grumpy old man when it comes to young fellas screaming their guts out into an SM58. But he comes by it naturally, and as he says “Razorcake already does a superb job… ” (Jose)
Murder and Mayhem looks like the kind of zine you used to find on the sidewalk after a big punk show. We’ve all found one. It had sneaker prints on the cover and was all crumpled, gritty and smelled funky. I don’t think Trey Ballz minds that. I sort of imagine him to be a little crumpled and gritty.
Trey is basically incoherent but he has good taste in music. He reviews records and then desecrates a grave. He rants and raves. He commits slander, and then visits a nice museum. The ads are for boutique punk labels and clown porn. I don’t even know what to say about clown porn. I’ve never typed those two words in that order before. Clown. Porn. This zine has more racial slurs than I am comfortable with. I imagine Trey is hard to be friends with but I’m glad he exists. (Jose)
This is not a zine, not technically. These are liner notes to the album Counter Arguments, Volume 1, by the artist The (Un)civil Society. Hey but that’s OK though. Plenty of cool bands have put out overgrown liner notes as zines with their albums; Firewater and Mike ill come immediately to mind. (Also the image of a man smoking in a gorilla mask I can’t quite place.)
When hacks like myself write record reviews we infer an artist’s influences. It is certainly true that it’s our opinion, but that’s not an objective truth. Moreover, we are not always in agreement with the artist. But that’s not an objective truth either! Curse you John Locke! All of that is to say, sorry dude, I just don’t hear Raymond Scott, strangely I hear Todd Rundgren. But I’m glad you’re having a good time. That’s what it’s really all about. (Jose)
I briefly debated: is Taco Rat supposed to be one word or two? On the inside cover are two ads: one for Arty with Tapes of Hell, a horror VHS thing and another for The Weird People Show, on WSCA-LP up in Portsmouth, NH. I think that sets the stage more or less. The Whiskey Joe album “Live on the Radio” was recorded on that very program. I should mention there’s a bit of a poop motif here. The main feature is a biography of a man named Barry that painted on toilet seats. The cover reads “In Crapper We Trust.” The back cover is a collage of toilets and a plunger. It’s not full bore coprophilia, but definitely a theme of sorts.
Food Fortunata wrote some of the record reviews which is how this came my way. That’s certainly a seal of approval. I thought this zine was run by Mike Scholarry, but this one is credited to “Patterson.” Perhaps the Scholarry Brothers are too busy running a record label, making music and broadcasting unhinged, gritty country music into the ether. (Jose)
The senseless death of August Golden made it all the way to Rolling Stone magazine. But the write up that the Restless Legs Inquirer gives here is the only coverage you need to read. August was one of the many residents of Nudieland, a DIY venue/squat in Minneapolis, MN. As in the last issue, the images are a series of masterful candids. They capture something rare and fleeting; not punk rock, but the visage of youth itself. None of the photos are labeled, but August is pictured at least three times, four if you count the pile of cut flowers at the end.
This issue starts with a tale about August, and Hippie Greg the landlord. Then Emily died, and Paul died. But they all loved that hopeless city to death. The danger of an open door is that anything can come through it. Its greatest strength is also its greatest vulnerability. I prefer to think they make that choice knowingly. To some degree every home is a safe little bubble separate from the mad world outside. Some beast reached in and took one of the kids, and like a true monstrosity it was random and horrible and there are no goddamn answers.
I’ve never understood why when punks get together they always seem to write pop music. It’s not what’s in my heart, not even now, after all these years. I think the answer is that it’s what’s in their hearts. They’re happy, or at least they are trying to be. (Jose)
Let’s start by pointing out that oakjournal.org and oakjournal.com are very different websites. After that admittedly bad start I conducted my usual research. I quickly found that I recognized a few authors’ names: Sascha Engel, James Morgan, Clare Follmann, and John Zerzan of course.
Oak is a serious glossy magazine mostly focused on anarchist and anti-civ theory. But it’s not purely academic like similar publications. Oak seems to make more room for application over theory. It’s a more interesting area for me personally. Arguing endlessly about Kropotkin’s zeitgeist makes me weary. It’s a pursuit for the young.
The strongest article here was about the Forest Defenders in Atlanta. It opens with a quote from Tortugita “We’re not going to beat them at violence. They’re very, very good at violence. We’re not.” Then to prove him right, the Atlanta PD shot him to death while he had his hands up. Those details are from the article written under the pseudonym, Dandelion. What strikes me most is how much of that article, like some of the others, might legitimately be called journalism. It makes the overall theme much more accessible than dry explorations of thought. Perhaps this is the path forward for sharing these kinds of ideas? People still read right? (Jose)
This zine came in with a bundle of older zines by the enigmatic Lee P. at Sheer Spite. There is nothing more enigmatic than a well-adjusted human being. The oldest of the batch is a reprint of Pals, the Radical Possibilities of Friendship. That came out in 2013, and went through a major revision in 2015. I read them all for context. Buried in the middle is the best writing prompt I’ve seen in years “Thanks for holding my hand when we saw the UFO. I’m sorry about everything that happened after that.” We have a new kitten and this is the only zine in the stack he felt the need to chomp. His bloodlust is insatiable. They are teeny, tiny squeezable little predators. I feel like Lee is someone who would be surprisingly OK with kitten chomps.
The zine goes all in: trauma memes, self-criticism, personal analogies, Arthur Rinmbaud… yes all the way to the bottom with French poets, the cop in your head and SSRIs. Lee pulls no punches and treats the topic as serious as your personal therapist, if your therapist was Hyperbole and a Half. It’s as readable as this topic gets. (Jose)
Node Pajomo $1 – 24 pages
PO Box 2632, Ballingham, WA 98227
This is the final issue of Node Pajomo. In way of explanation, it reads that “it takes too much time, energy, resources and mental space” to continue. I can confirm that reading a stack of zines is a big commitment of time. There are only 200 copies of this issue, and there will not be a reprint. Smoke ’em while you got ’em folks. Always recommended as fuck.
As in previous issues the topics constitute the most random mailbag ever: road trips, found media, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, sad British people, hate, collage, sad collage, sad British collage… every possible permutation is represented in this oversized issue.
In light of that announcement the reviews take on an additional layer of gravitas. His review of Asymmetrical Anti-Media #16 states that “Now that Node is dead this is `The Only Review Zine That Matters” thus naming the work of Jason Rodgers as his heir and successor. The king is dead, long live the king. (Jose)
Zionist nova mob in Israel has pulled yet another “By way of deception you shall engage in war” terror stunt with their false front infiltration of consumer electronic supply chains, secreting high explosives in rechargeable non-removable batteries of consumer pagers and hand held walkie-talkies because Hezbollah wanted to avoid mobile phone communications that can be intercepted and even tracked to a specific device for communication direct via hellfire missile. These devices caused dozens of deaths and thousands of causality’s (permanent blindness, blown off hands, destroyed pelvis’s). Can you hear me now?
By design, modern ‘smartphone’ networks have to track and intercept communications from specific device’s whether they are on or off or they could not function as communication devices.
Booby trapped, or socially engineered exploitation objects have long played a history in state murder. Poison wells, smallpox blankets, exploding cans of food, bomb shiny toys for the children…. The Trojan horse even, were socially engineered item exploits.
With near field communication ‘tap-to-pay / tap-for-ticket’, ‘smartphones’ can track what you buy, where you go, and depending on how dependent you are on it, track your bio-metrics…
With geolocation (that’s how the state claims they grabbed up all those folks around the ‘insurrection’ Jan6 2021), everything (if you use one of these devices) you buy or search for, and who you communicate with is tracked for commodification unless you try to block it and that too is commodifiable data.
What happens to all this data? Used to convince people to buy stuff? Sure! But with all this data humans struggle to make sense of it. Labor saving devices have been built to deal with this problem.
Some of the latest are the so called ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) labor saving for the folks that want to sell you more stuff, that is, and maybe even propagate their socially engineered propaganda exploit agenda…
Some of the AI programs that the Zionist entity are using in their mass slaughter on Gaza and Lebanon are named ‘Lavender’ and ‘where’s daddy’. These programs integrate demographics, including mobile device data, into an AI targeting assassination machine which goals are mass slaughter and genocide of anybody that stands in the way of said Zionist entity.
The vast majority of Americans – 97% – now own a cellphone of some kind. Nine-in-ten own a smartphone. More than eight-in-ten Americans get news from digital devices.
GO SLINGSHOT!!
So the next time you’re checking out the mobile device that looks so good as a bump on that cute persons butt, think, “it probably wont blow their ass off with 4 grams of PETN” (yet). But its blowing out their minds as you gape!
A little over ten years ago, on April 1, 2014, activists fighting for housing and equality, part of the “Heart of the City” collective, staged a protest in San Francisco’s Mission District. Wearing bright blue, yellow, and red costumes, they blocked a private bus provided by Google to transport its workers at 24th and Valencia Streets, bringing it to a stop.
The “G-Muni Dancers” performed acrobatic moves and bounced bright exercise balls in a playful but defiant routine in front of the blocked shuttle. This action made national headlines. Sara Shortt, director of the Housing Rights Committee, said, “This is a fun way to show how private companies are using public land for free while pushing people out of their neighborhoods.”
Meanwhile, in Oakland, protests were more intense. People smashed bus windows, slashed tires, and one protester even vomited on a Yahoo bus windshield. These were clear signs of the rising anger in communities being displaced by the tech industry.
In her paper Infrastructural Activism: Google Bus Blockades, Affective Politics, and Environmental Gentrification in San Francisco, Manissa M. Maharawal describes Infrastructural Activism as the disruption of systems like transportation to drive political change. The tech bus blockades in San Francisco exemplified this concept by making the normally hidden and unacknowledged presence of tech-specific transportation networks starkly visible.
These private buses, designed to blend into the city and operate quietly, transported high-paid tech workers to their Silicon Valley offices while bypassing the broader community. By blocking them, protesters not only disrupted the daily routine of these buses but also raised public awareness of their impact, prompting a deeper examination of whether such services should even be allowed to operate.
What was once presented as a neutral, harmless service — just a bus shuttling employees to work — was exposed as a symbol of privilege and exclusion. The protests made visible the ways in which access to infrastructure shapes urban space, determining who gets to remain in the city and who is forced out. They revealed how seemingly invisible systems distribute power and resources, redrawing the boundaries of belonging and exclusion.
But despite the determined efforts of groups like Heart of the City, the tide of evictions and displacement continued. And today, much of the activism against tech and gentrification has quieted down, swept away by the forces it sought to counter.
Why do bus blockades and anti-tech protests from a decade ago still resonate today? Is there a distinction between capitalism and tech — or is Big Tech’s immense power simply a new face of capitalism’s familiar brutality?
The answer lies in recognizing what sets the tech industry apart. Rising rents and rampant urban displacement are visible symptoms of a deeper sickness. What distinguishes Big Tech from traditional forms of capitalist exploitation is its unprecedented capacity to consolidate power at a global scale, concentrating it into the hands of a select few.
Tech doesn’t merely accumulate wealth — it reshapes society in its own image, actively replacing people with machines, stripping human presence and emotion from the world and substituting it with profit-driven algorithms.
This is more than an economic shift; it’s a social and cultural one. With its reach, technology exerts control not just through the workplace but through the threads of our everyday lives. Its tools of surveillance and data extraction amplify existing inequalities. Unlike traditional forms of capitalism that still left space for human relationships and community, the tech-driven model aims to erase the human element entirely. It intrudes into our daily interactions, shaping how we communicate, what we consume, and even how we understand ourselves.
Tech companies are creating a world where everything is judged by profit, data, and efficiency, and anything that can’t be tracked, turned into numbers, or sold is pushed out. That’s why fighting Big Tech isn’t just one part of resisting capitalism — it’s at the heart of it.
Of course, it wasn’t Tech that invented displacement or gentrification. It didn’t create capitalism or billionaires. Attacks on the working class have been happening for generations, no matter which industry holds power.
If it wasn’t Tech, wouldn’t another industry have caused the same damage? The real question is: how do we fight capitalism itself? How do we push back against displacement and restore security for the working class?
In 2024, Tech is capitalism. It has outgrown its role as just another industry and become the new blueprint for how power operates. The empty buildings and hollowed-out neighborhoods aren’t accidents—they’re a feature of how Big Tech’s presence reshapes the world around it.
Big Tech’s staggering wealth isn’t just contained within its own companies — it spills over, transforming the entire regional economy. That concentration of capital creates a gravitational pull, attracting speculators of all kinds: real estate developers, legal firms, private equity, and venture capitalists.
Once Tech sets up shop in a community, an entire ecosystem of profiteers descends, eager to cash in on the rising property values and economic activity that follow. This speculative frenzy turns cities into gold mines for developers, pushing up rents and driving out long-time residents, small businesses, and working-class families.
The rise of AI, championed as progress by tech leaders and hyped by mainstream media, is celebrated as a major leap forward. But underneath all the hype is a capitalist’s dream come true: more automation, cheaper labor, and the power to dismantle the idea of secure employment entirely.
Take Google, for example. Its products, touted as digital tools of convenience and connectivity, have become instruments of control and surveillance. The Israeli military reportedly uses Google Photos’ facial recognition technology as part of its mass surveillance system targeting Palestinians in Gaza. Since 2021, Google Cloud has been building infrastructure for the Israeli government under the controversial Project Nimbus, one of the largest technology projects in Israel’s history. And just this past March, the Israeli Ministry of Defense signed a new contract with Google, seeking “consulting assistance” to expand its Cloud access and allow “multiple units” to leverage automation technologies for military use.
What separates a tech company like Google from a traditional “defense” contractor at this point? Or take Apple, with its omnipresent “Apple Pay.” When a tech company facilitates more financial transactions than some national banks, what’s the difference between Silicon Valley and Wall Street? Meanwhile, social media giants like Meta act as global media empires, curating narratives and influencing elections.
Across the supply chain, these companies are exploiting land and labor, mistreating factory workers, and sourcing conflict minerals with little regard for human rights. Social media platforms have turned a profit by amplifying hate speech and sowing division.
Toxic e-waste from discarded electronics is piling up across the globe, leaching into soil and water, with tech companies showing minimal accountability. The common thread is clear: Big Tech isn’t just producing products. It’s driving the very crises it claims to solve, fueling a cycle of extraction, exploitation, and expansion that knows no boundaries.
We need to confront a fundamental truth: technology — whether it’s facial recognition software, AI, or social media algorithms — isn’t neutral. These tools are being wielded not to “connect the world” but to control, surveil, and exploit it.
If we’re serious about challenging capitalism, that means setting our sights on Big Tech itself. And for activists in the Bay Area, this isn’t just a theoretical position — it’s a strategic imperative. We’re uniquely positioned to disrupt their operations and infrastructure in ways that activists in other regions simply cannot.
But how do we actually do it? The power of these corporations is expanding by the day — through their influence on policy, policing, increased surveillance, and our deepening dependency on their products, even within activist spaces. What does effective disruption look like in practice?
To genuinely dismantle this capitalist-tech nexus, we can’t act as isolated individuals. We’re facing some of the wealthiest, most resourceful, and most entrenched institutions on the planet. Yet, paradoxically, that power is also their weakness. Capitalism is fundamentally unstable and brittle. The environmental, social, and spiritual costs of this system are felt by nearly everyone — the 99% — even if we may not articulate it in those exact terms. The question isn’t whether there will be a breaking point, but when and where it will occur.
The truth is, revolutions rarely ignite from a single, explosive moment. More often, they’re set off by a chain reaction — a series of small, localized actions that ripple outward, creating cracks in the system until it eventually collapses under its own weight. What will be the tipping point? It’s hard to say. But perhaps, it will begin where tech’s influence is most concentrated and visible — right here, in the Bay Area.
So, how do we move forward? The key is to employ guerrilla tactics that can ignite larger movements and build working-class solidarity. Small, targeted actions aren’t just about disruption — they’re about amplifying the voices of activists and communities worldwide, proving that resistance is still possible, even in the stronghold of the tech empire.
Our goal is to set off a ripple effect of defiance — but we have to be strategic. One wrong move, and getting caught in the so-called “justice” system can derail a campaign, draining resources and momentum.. That’s why nimble, precise actions are essential. They keep us out of trouble while still pushing the fight forward.
The point is to inspire. Blocking tech buses or staging creative protests won’t dismantle the system overnight, but these acts send out ripples — gestures of defiance that challenge the supposedly invincible status quo and show that resistance is alive. Think back to the G-Muni dancers a decade ago, who used art and music to disrupt business as usual.
We need that same energy: small sparks that, multiplied, can set larger fires. These seemingly minor actions lay the groundwork for something bigger — a network of resistance that chips away at the foundations of the empire, piece by piece.
These corporations aren’t just faceless entities—they’re our neighbors. That proximity gives us a chance to disrupt not only their image but also their infrastructure and operations, shifting the balance in ways activists elsewhere can’t.
But before we move forward, we need to ask: How do we distinguish between tech workers — who are often exploited themselves — and the broader corporate structures they serve? It’s too easy to blame the “techies” behind computer screens and feel morally superior, but that’s a distraction from the deeper realities of capitalism.
Like workers in any industry, most tech employees are part of the broader working class. Many are trapped by debt — student loans, skyrocketing rents, or familial obligations — that funneled them into tech just as people get pushed into any job. And, like millions of others, they’re just there for one thing our broken system dangles as bait: healthcare.
Our focus in direct actions should be clear: target the corporations, not the workers. Getting tangled in petty confrontations with employees clinging to a precarious stability is counterproductive. We need to disrupt the flow of capital, expose corporate complicity in perpetuating inequality, and challenge the structures of multinational power.
It’s also crucial to recognize that some tech workers themselves have taken bold political stands. When Google employees staged a global walkout over sexual harassment policies or Amazon workers went on strike demanding better conditions, they put their jobs — and often their livelihoods — on the line. And when some organized in solidarity with Gaza or fought to curb AI’s surveillance power, they risked professional backlash and reputational damage in a cutthroat industry.
Techies may seem more privileged than factory or fast-food workers, but privilege isn’t the same as power. Many can’t unionize due to aggressive anti-labor tactics, and those who try face the same union-busting strategies that crush organizing efforts across industries.
Ultimately, one of our goals should be to educate, agitate, and inspire tech workers to join the resistance — preferably from within. They deserve the benefit of the doubt.
So, with all of this in mind, what does resistance to Big Tech in the Bay Area actually look like? Collective action and mutual aid must be at the heart of our strategy. We need to organize within our communities and activist circles, raise awareness about tech’s exploitative practices, build networks of support, and engage in direct actions that disrupt Big Tech’s operations.
This means thinking creatively and strategically — focusing on actions that interfere with their business models, target key points of infrastructure, and draw attention to the very structures that perpetuate economic inequality and environmental harm.
Think in terms of Infrastructural Activism: not just protest, but interference. We have to get inside the machine and jam it, whether by disrupting the bus shuttles, delaying tech-sponsored events, or generally making the Bay Area an inhospitable environment for business as usual. Each of these actions can send a powerful message that reverberates beyond local borders — one that shakes the foundations of an economy built on greed and corporate control, with tech sitting at the top.
We’ve seen positive results from direct action. Some notable acts of resistance include:
January 2018: Buses carrying Apple employees to Cupertino were attacked, possibly with pellet guns. Some windows were shattered. The incidents happened during morning and evening commutes on Highway 280, forcing Apple to reroute its buses, extending commutes by 30 to 45 minutes. A Google bus was also targeted. No injuries were reported.
May 2018: housing activists in San Francisco escalated protests against the tech industry by blocking over a dozen buses transporting tech workers to Silicon Valley. Protesters used electric scooters to form a barricade at a busy intersection in the Mission District. Dressed in white hazmat suits, they lit an orange smoke grenade on top of the scooter pile, blocking a Google shuttle bus.
2023: in San Francisco, an activist group called Safe Street Rebel found a simple way to disable driverless cars: placing traffic cones on their hoods. Safe Street Rebel carried out these “coning” protests to disrupt the increasing presence of driverless cars, which they saw as using the city as a testing ground for unproven technology.
February 10, 2024: in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a Waymo robotaxi (owned by Google) was destroyed by a crowd. Seen as a symbol of unchecked tech growth and corporate dominance, the autonomous vehicle was surrounded by dozens of people who smashed its windows, spray-painted graffiti, and set it on fire.
These acts of defiance against tech companies made international news, inspiring people around the world. The message was clear: the people of the Bay Area won’t stand by as these corporations harm their communities and the planet.
Sometimes, I wonder if we’ve lost the fight already. But then I think about the protests, the moments of resistance, and I remember: hope isn’t about winning—it’s about refusing to surrender. How do we continue to push back in ways that build momentum instead of burning us out? Consider these points:
Small disruptions matter: Even seemingly minor actions can have a cumulative impact, especially when they disrupt daily operations. Tech bus routes are public and should not be allowed to pass through our communities unchallenged. Coordinated protests, road blockages, or symbolic demonstrations along these routes can disrupt business as usual and serve as a visible reminder that the industry’s grip on the region is not uncontested.
Engage tech workers thoughtfully: Many tech employees, while contributing to the machinery of harm, may not be fully aware of the damage their work enables. However, like police, even if some individuals are decent, they work within a system of systemic harm and therefore are accountable. Hold them accountable, but do so with the possibility of dialogue and remain open to genuine conversations.
Leverage insider knowledge: If you’re a tech worker who sees the harm firsthand or know someone who does, use your access to expose these companies’ unethical practices. Whistleblowing, leaking sensitive documents, or even subtly highlighting internal contradictions can sow discord and make it harder for companies to maintain their manicured public image. Every revelation disrupts their carefully managed narrative and chips away at their power.
If you have hacking skills or strong tech knowledge: Use them to sabotage, undermine, or repurpose Big Tech products — and teach others to do the same.
For everyone else: stop supporting their products — yes, it’s possible.
Build alliances with other movements: The fight against tech is connected to the fight against climate change, racial injustice, economic inequality, and more. Collaborate with other groups to build a stronger front.
Stay united and refuse to normalize Tech power: Keep reminding your community that the fight continues — spread the word, start conversations, and keep the resistance alive.
Take action at whatever level aligns with your comfort and risk: Take action at whatever level fits your comfort and risk: Sometimes a message scrawled in chalk can speak as loudly as spray paint—impact is all about context. A water balloon can be as effective as one filled with paint, and deflating a tire can disrupt just as much as slashing it. What matters is that every act, no matter how small, contributes to the larger struggle.
Reduce risk when necessary: Sometimes smaller, coordinated actions spread across different locations can have as much, if not more, impact than one large, dramatic protest. Consistent, low-risk efforts can be just as powerful over time.
Think outside the box: Simple approaches can be highly effective. For example, use legal loopholes to disrupt tech. A group of five people can block a tech bus by continually crossing a crosswalk at a stop sign. Just keep turning around and crossing again. Pedestrians have the right of way!
Art also plays a key role in this fight. We need to see art in our neighborhoods, supporting the fight. And let’s remember, resistance isn’t just about confrontation — it can be joyful too. Shout out to all the activists who mix joy with defiance, showing us that another world is possible. Fighting capitalist power structures should be fun!
We also need to challenge the idea that this tech-dominated system is unchangeable. We can imagine and create alternatives — communities that prioritize people over profit, and sustainability over endless growth. The battle against Big Tech in the Bay Area can set an example, but we need to act now.
Whether you’re in the Bay Area by choice or circumstance, living in the global center of Big Tech comes with a unique responsibility. It’s critical to recognize the broader, global stakes — but also to understand how these seemingly distant issues are directly linked to the local power structures that fuel and sustain them.
In 2024, Big Tech isn’t just part of capitalism — it is capitalism. These corporations, with their immense reach and influence, have become adversaries of humanity and the planet, driving environmental destruction, social inequality, and authoritarian control.
Living in the heart of the tech industry means we’re uniquely positioned to fight back in ways that resonate far beyond this region. Many of Big Tech’s headquarters, transport lines, and facilities sit right in front of us, hiding in plain sight, just waiting to be fucked with. By disrupting their local operations, we send a message of defiance that ripples across the globe. Each act of resistance brings us one step closer to the world we imagine.
Disenfrachisement has permeated the psyche of citizens on the border between the US and Mexico as a result of over a century of outside interests that have never lived here enacting policy that has denied residents knowledge about their history and culture. El Paso, Texas, also known as La Frontera, is uniquely situated in many ways. One of a few American cities on a national and state border, it is landlocked in the Chiuanuan Desert. Since the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war between the US and Mexico, it is not just as an annexed region, but a conquered territory. While Spain exercised hegemony on the native peoples here from California to most of South America, it was during James K. Polk’s presidency that we saw Manifest Destiny truly take shape. Manifest Destiny encouraged the United States to declare war on Mexico in 1846 and ultimately sieze Mexico City in 1848.
I grew up here in La Frontera — the Borderlands. It’s about an hour to 2 hours in any direction to get to the nearest town, with El Paso being the only major city for miles. It’s about 16 hours from the west coast and another 14 hours from the gulf coast and just about 4 hours south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. We’re relatively isolated out here, and if you weren’t looking for it, you’d miss the fact that Juarez, Mexico is the city’s conjoined twin, with a militarized and literal line in the sand forcibly separating the two sisters.
A thick, metal fence crowned with barbed wire stands tall on the northern bank of the Rio Grande. You can see colorful neighborhoods and people going about their day in Juarez, so close as neighbors, yet so far apart. My hometown of the Borderlands is land-rich but cash-poor and susceptible to outside financial interests. Dialect, history, culture, and family is shared here. The current United States’ and Texas’ hegemonic division imposed upon the area divides people from themselves and their home.
In grade schools I saw little to no emphasis on the culture or heritage of the Frontera and there were heavy reminders about the state of Texas having jurisdiction over our educational institutions. The educational system emphasized East Texas cities like Houston, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio that are 12-14 hours away by car.
While in school, my favorite subject was, is, and always has been history. We can learn a lot about where we were, where we are, and where we’re going. I think that it’s amazingly fascinating, and no other subject excites me more than the general topic of history does. The older I get, the more excited I get with the idea of being able to contribute to the human narrative of experience.
There were odd disparities in the sociocultural perspective of my history classes. The lessons they taught focused on US History, World History, and Texas History (which focused solely on East Texas). They focused on the colonial era all the way up to Reconstruction and promptly ended there. World history focused on ancient societies like Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. There were only small and brief references to the Maya, Inca, and Aztec societies. It felt as though the world revolved around the US experience and its position in the wider world with heavy ethnocentric ideologies.
I wish I had learned more about La Frontera and 20th century history. It’s so juicy with information, but that knowledge seemed so far out of reach. To this day I find it extremely frustrating that all the history that I’d learned up to graduating high school was so limiting. The pedagogy of the classes repeated and reiterated the same information year after year, and it made the world feel so small. I wondered “why do they skip everything else, and what are they keeping from us? What do they know that we don’t, and what do they stand to benefit from our lack of information?” These are the questions that keep me up at night and drive me to learn more.
Knowledge is power. Life experience, curiosity, interest, and circumstance motivate learning and engagement. This is how I learn and engage with the world around me. This methodology has served me well in my academics and within my life outside of school, but the wider world is more or less unforgiving when it comes to learning. I consider myself to have a balance of book-smarts and street-smarts. I didn’t grow up street-smart, but being sheltered allowed me to become book-smart. Delaying my education and living in the Bay Area for the last 10 years allowed me to become wiser and to work on expanding my “street” skills. It gets easier, and honestly, I never stop learning.
I’m an intellectual first and foremost, and a growing scholar second. I’ve always let my curiosity drive me, even outside of academics. An intellectual, in my opinion, is someone that never stops learning. A scholar is someone that shares what they learn (in a more direct sense, presents research and navigates the academic system in which to do so). I’m beginning my career as a scholar and it’s right where I need to be. Modes of teaching differ from an academic context/environment vs. real-world education ie. “trial by fire”. School offers a lot more theory and demonstration and evidence. Real-world education is tangible, immediate, hands-on, and “do or die”. However, one of the greatest lessons I learned is to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. This lesson was taught to me in an academic setting and I began to apply it in my daily life. Through trial and error, I got to master going outside of my comfort zone. I began to explore the world with greater and greater confidence, and I began to lean into the inevitable awkward situations that challenged me to be better.
As a problem solver, and looking back on my educational history, I’m appalled at what school boards and state and federal legislators deem acceptable pedagogy in grade schools. Disenfranchisement leads to acceptance of the status quo and no change in the curriculum. Information has been kept from people about who they are and where they live. This is the problem that I experienced growing up in grade school.
My solution and my mission is to make the pedagogy of local history and information more readily available in grade schools across La Frontera. If you don’t feel connected to where you live, you’re more likely to consider it as worthless and let outside powers and influences, like policymakers and real estate companies that have no idea what it’s like to live on La Frontera make decisions about what happens to the land and people there.
My grandmother was also born and raised in the borderlands and her journey and work as an educator inspires me. Her experience with language discrimination in school in the 1950’s drove her to teach people about her culture. She retired from her dream job as a middle school teacher at a Spanish-immersion school in Ohio. I hope to inspire more teachers to do the work she did in Ohio for schools in the borderlands.
I am thankful that I was not disciplined nor shamed for speaking Spanish in my Texas grade school. If I’d had easier access to knowledge of my cultural heritage, I would’ve found that my family roots are deep in La Frontera and I’d like to think I would’ve been active in my community as a result. There’s nowhere else like it, and treating it like a dirty secret and commercializing the land hurts rather than helps the community that lives in the Borderlands.
The conflation of “wellness” (the state of being in good health, especially as an actively pursued goal) and cosmetics (treatment intended to restore or improve a person’s appearance) is lucrative. Consumption in both markets continues to rise year after year and their combined industry is expected to soon reach $2 trillion.
For years, my personal consumption habits matched these figures. Even as someone who rarely wears makeup, skincare and other beauty products such as shampoo accounted for most of my spending after rent and transportation. I had long been resisting my capitalistic impulse to just “get a new one”, making an effort to buy my clothes and household goods used and sparingly, but the allure of beauty and personal care products remained for me.
Frustrated with the ruthless marketing and pressure to over-consume personal hygiene and cosmetic products, I swore off buying any skincare, haircare, or makeup products for a year. I felt I was subverting the belief that capitalism had instilled into me, which was that I was supposed to need all this stuff to care for myself.
I do not believe that revolution is a matter of consumer choice; however, I’ve enjoyed rejecting beauty products as a challenge to compulsive and wasteful consumption practices and I’ve been pleasantly surprised that I am able to meet most of my hygiene needs with ingredients that I can purchase with food stamps. For me, this has been a small act of rebellion, wherein I get to play with food and reject overbearing beauty standards.
What follows are a few suggested alternatives to highly marketed personal care products, all of which can be bought with EBT:
1) I stopped using shampoo. After some adjustment time, my hair stopped getting greasy in the way that it did between washes when I used shampoo, but it also doesn’t feel squeaky clean in the way that I was used to it feeling after shampooing. I’m fine with that. I spray diluted apple cider vinegar on my scalp and upper third of my hair and then wash it out in the shower. Every 4 months or so if I really feel like I need it (like if my hair gets really actually dirty for some reason) I may use a super super diluted shampoo.
2) I occasionally also apply honey to my scalp. I like the scrubby feeling of the raw honey if my scalp is itchy, but this can leave hair feeling less clean as the honey is moisturizing.
3) For conditioner, I work a tiny bit of olive or coconut oil into the ends of my hair before showering or going in the ocean. I also have made a mask using arrowroot powder mixed with a tiiiiny bit of coconut or olive oil (really really tiny as it goes a long way!), and a little honey and water. I apply this mixture to the bottom third or so of my hair — just the ends, but I have long hair.
4) I wash my face with raw honey — I hadn’t heard of people doing this but was curious if it would work since I know honey has antibacterial and moisturizing properties — it seems to work fine for me. I sometimes leave the honey on as a sort of mask and also sometimes use a tiiiiny bit of baking soda for deeper cleaning or exfoliant. Refilling an 8 oz. container at the co-op with local honey has cost me around $6. One thing to note is that I don’t wear foundation, so I’m not sure what people might use for makeup remover but perhaps you could use coconut or olive oil, which could also be purchased in a refillable container.
5) For household cleansing as well as washing sports bras, I use white vinegar and baking soda. This makes for an astoundingly effective soak and is an exciting throwback to elementary school science class.
These are just a few examples of homemade solutions. Do your own research and find what works for you! A majority of the literature I’ve come across on this topic is contributed by individuals seeking to avoid toxins and synthetics, so that can be a good thing to keep in mind when researching methods. For instance, I know there are a lot of alternative recipes for deodorant out there (I think most are based on baking soda and essential oils), and most are contributed by people trying to avoid aluminum.
I came across a book at the library called Low Tox Life: A Handbook For A Healthy You and Happy Planet — the author is coming at it from this “low-toxin” perspective, but she turned me on to some ingredients / recipes.
Another book I’d recommend which I also found at my local library is one from the early 70’s called The Intelligent Consumer: How to Buy Food, Clothes, Cars, Houses, Vacations, Appliances at the Least Cost to Yourself and the Environment by Christopher and Bonnie Weathersbee.
I don’t view any of these practices as all-or-nothing. I don’t snub products that I come across in free piles or that are given to me. Oftentimes, I use any products I come across or obtain in a diluted form. I also use skin and haircare products more occasionally and less religiously than marketing might encourage us to. Using less of a product is still cutting down on consumption, and making incremental change is more than making no change. I refuse to depend on any one particular product or to compulsively purchase products in the hopes of magically changing my appearance. We don’t need all this shit!
In response to the 2020 George Floyd Rebellion, police forces across the United States are preparing to crack down on future uprisings. The state is expanding its capacity for domestic war, in addition to its war-making capabilities abroad. This is how we might understand the current $3.39 billion building program of police training facilities – over 80 projects and counting across the U.S. – and the construction of San Pablo’s $44 million Cop Campus, in particular. These “cop cities,” as the police training facilities are called, are part of a state-led strategy for securing American imperialism domestically.
Beginning with Atlanta, where Anarchist forest defenders and New Afrikan revolutionaries have tenaciously resisted construction of the first well-publicized Cop City, there is now a nationwide movement to oppose this expansion of police power. Those of us organizing to halt construction of the San Pablo Cop Campus see ourselves as part of this wider movement.
For our work to be effective, we must apply the hard-won insights of the abolitionist tradition to our struggle in the Bay Area; must study the historical texts of revolutionaries like George Jackson, Safiya Bukhari, and Russell Maroon Shoatz who have organized against police institutions and prisons; and connect with other Stop Cop City movements nationwide as well as with our Black and Indigenous comrades struggling for survival and liberation. We must collectively theorize and strategize, build the musculature of the organized abolitionist movement in the Bay, and force our demands for decarceration and liberation upon the state.
Approved by the San Pablo City Council, the budget for San Pablo’s Cop Campus derives $28.8 million from lease revenue bond proceeds, $10.4 million from the city’s general fund, and $4.3 million from federal COVID-19 relief funds. Policing is also San Pablo’s biggest expense – in the financial year 2023/2024, it cost $15.6 million, or 41% of the annual budget. The city has the highest concentration of cameras surveilling public spaces in Contra Costa County. Meanwhile, the West Contra Costa Unified School District, which encompasses San Pablo, has laid off dozens of teachers and staff, with a $14.1 million reduction in salaries in 2024/2025, and another round of cuts forthcoming. The Doctors Medical Center, San Pablo’s only hospital, was closed in 2015.
Why would a municipality deprive its people of education and healthcare, while surveilling them and funding its armed agents? Because of the logic of capital accumulation. As capital circulates in its search for ever-increasing profits, it takes up and abandons specific geographic regions at will; establishing wealth and social goods like education and healthcare in some areas, and locating working and impoverished peoples and social harms like pollution in others. In short, San Pablo has undergone what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment”–the systematic withdrawal of capital and social goods from the community.
San Pablo has a majority Latine population (56.5%), with Black and Asian peoples coming in close after, and white people accounting for a small minority. In other words, San Pablo has the sort of population which constitutes the economic base of the Bay Area. Richmond, CA, immediately to the south, has similar demographics and continues to suffer from the toxic emissions of its Chevron oil refinery. Crucially, these are mostly racialized peoples; migrant and housing insecure individuals who are demonized by the mainstream media and Democratic and Republican parties; who are projected as “illegals,” criminals, drug addicts and distributors. In a capitalist empire like the U.S., these racist ideas legitimate the abandonment of working people and surplus populations and offer justification for the egregious violence against them.
So why would the government of San Pablo abandon its people? Because it is not interested in fulfilling their needs. That is not how governmental power is maintained. Instead, San Pablo’s ruling class aims only to accumulate wealth and protect their private property. The latter entails a massive, intensive police operation on the part of the state, given that the impoverished class created by capitalism poses a threat to that property. Basically, the state and capital know that they are exploiting the masses, so they are ready to preempt resistance to exploitation. Cop Campus therefore must be built to protect the wealth of private interests and the power of politicians and administrators.
Organizing to Stop Cop City
If you canvass the people of San Pablo and ask them what they think about the $44 million police training facility being built in their neighborhood, you will discover a few things. First, San Pablo residents largely do not know about the training facility. This is by design–so long as governments can allocate funds for prisons, military installations, cop training facilities, etc. without popular awareness, they will do so. They already know that their initiatives will be unpopular, so they appreciate discretion. When this is impossible, they hire PR firms and undertake attempts at dissimulation.
Second, when residents are made aware of the Cop Campus, they are very likely to oppose it. People in San Pablo, especially racialized people who have experience with police, understand that the campus will be a threat to their health and safety. Abolitionists do not need to be afraid to talk to people–our vision of community public safety as an alternative to policing is, in fact, highly rational. Abolitionists can offer the following facts. That increased policing doesn’t decrease social harms or reported “crimes.” In 2020, for instance, the United States spent $115 billion on police budgets, more than any other country’s military budget except for China. Therefore, if more policing means more safety, the United States should already have one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Additionally, police target Black and brown people, migrants, indigenous people, and the poor specifically, incarcerating and killing them at disproportionate rates. And the institutions which fund the police are misappropriating their tax dollars which could be used for education, public health, and jobs programs. Police supporters, meanwhile, must resort to copaganda–to imagined scenarios in police procedurals and frantic false reports about drug smuggling and mass murders on the news.
Cop supporters are in fact a rare, if rabid, minority in cities like San Pablo. They are either personally linked to police forces, wealthy enough to benefit from policing, or conservative ideologues. The only pro-police idea with traction among the population comes in the form of a desire for public safety. As such, a San Pablo resident might ask the following question of a canvasser: “if you don’t want the police to be expanded, how do you propose we stop crime?” For the police, it is vital that the citizenry conflates policing with public safety in this way.
What confuses people is that the same cop who may murder or imprison them might, on other occasions, help them with directions or locate their stolen property. The cop may perform mental health checks, or even apprehend a murderer–though this is rare and the idea that cops stop killers is truer on TV than in reality. Notably, these interventions can go awry, and murderers and abusers are often, themselves, cops.
It’s crucial that we as abolitionists develop a political response to the desire for public safety. We need to develop a practical, organized way to address the need for safety independently of the state, while clarifying for people that the essential function of police is to inflict violence against the opponents of capital. To borrow a term from Ahjamu Umi, an organizer with the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, we need “revolutionary community defense.” This entails an autonomous, noncarceral infrastructure for deescalating conflicts and addressing harms within the community, the provision of medical services, cop watch programs, and self-defense practices which prioritize feminine and queer people.
The abolitionist movement to Stop Cop City San Pablo must perform two crucial tasks: develop practices of community care, mutual aid, and collective deliberation to address social harms, while at the same time mounting an audacious resistance to police power. These are necessary conditions, supposing it is even possible, in the present situation, to prevent the facility’s construction.
What’s more, we must achieve these conditions while also reckoning with the political situation on the ground. We must respond to the actually existing Stop Cop Campus / Stop Cop City Bay Area movement, with all its contradictions, and the many faults and foibles of its participants. In what follows, I will outline three contradictions which the Bay Area abolitionist movement will have to overcome to build a genuine resistance to the Cop Campus and propose some ways to address them.
It may not be possible to list all of the political tendencies which make up the Stop Cop Campus movement. The movement involves, minimally, different anarchist strands, socialist, communist, and decolonial formations, and a variety of nonprofits. This latter tendency includes nonprofits which are explicitly liberal and those which use abolitionist concepts.
The presence of nonprofits within what is fundamentally a movement against capital and the state is a profound contradiction. It is crucial to grasp that, on a structural level, nonprofits are a counterinsurgency force. This is a historical fact with a well-documented scholarship—see Robert Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America and the volume The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. As Dylan Rodriguez argues in the latter book, nonprofits including the Mellon, Ford, and Soros Foundations, were established in the 1960s and 70s in order to harness and restrict the potentials of U.S.-based progressive activisms. The nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) is a counterrevolutionary invention with strategic significance: the state and philanthropic capital offer wealth and access to power to would-be reformers. In return, these reformers are disciplined against a politics of revolutionary self-organization.
As Dylan Rodriguez puts it, the NPIC, through the massive funding injected into it by capital and the state, “grounds an epistemology–literally a way of knowingsocial change and resistance praxis–that is difficult to escape or rupture.” Nonprofits are taught to prize the patronage of donors, in order to advance their interest in “social change.” The NPIC strategically extends the pedagogy of the empire, creating hierarchically ordered social formations with executive directors, paid career organizers, fealty to foundation donors, and turf-based zero-sum thinking. Nonprofits therefore jealously guard their status against autonomous leftist organizations, accusing them of being “outside agitators.” At the same time, the NPIC serves as a replacement to the welfare state in the era of neoliberal capitalism. Nonprofits offer band-aid solutions to the social harms inflicted by capitalist imperialism, shoring up the status quo without impeding profit-seeking.
Crucially, this is a political critique of nonprofits, not a moral one, strictly speaking. The point is not that nonprofits are evil, but that they operate with clear functional imperatives and limitations. This gets us to the second aspect of the contradiction. Once we grasp that the NPIC is a counterrevolutionary invention, we need to produce an organized and strategic political solution to the problem that it poses. This is where leftists often go wrong. They reduce the problem to a moral one—they write polemics against nonprofits and attack them publicly, for no strategic gain and with the cost of alienating politically underdeveloped community members. An awareness of the fact that nonprofits, as institutions, pose a political problem means that we actually need a strategy to outmaneuver and out-organize them. Therefore, we need to avoid errors where we needlessly take up losing fights against nonprofits, or where we needlessly cede political ground to them. Practically, we need to organize ourselves outside of the NPIC, and politically educate autonomous leftist organizers on its nature. We need to raise the level of consciousness as regards the NPIC within abolitionist political spaces. Then, once this is done, we can collectively figure out how to deal with some given nonprofit on a case-by-case basis.
The most important practical consideration when it comes to outmaneuvering nonprofits is that we can usually avoid contact with them altogether. Take the city of San Pablo. San Pablo is a city of 32,000 people, the vast majority of whom have had little to no interaction with nonprofits. These are all people we can canvass, phonebank, meet with, befriend, and organize into a collectivity. These possibilities are completely open, so long as those of us on the left can organize ourselves to perform the necessary outreach. Whether a given nonprofit “permits” us to perform this outreach is irrelevant. If our message does not resonate with the masses, we will find out through canvassing. If our message does resonate with people, given their common stake in a future without police terror, we have a material basis for building an organization for abolition and revolutionary community defense.
Once we have organized ourselves, we can then proceed to make collective political decisions. Once we have made some political decisions—formulating our abolitionist politics and strategy—our organization will be able to decide how to relate to this or that nonprofit. We can meet with nonprofit organizers on an individual basis and decide whether, and to what extent, we are strategically aligned. If we are not aligned (and we likely won’t be), then we can refrain from working with them. Some nonprofit organizers are actually conscious of the political limits of the NPIC—lower-level employees will have ample opportunities to witness how their organization’s good intentions are disciplined by philanthropic capital and politicians. These are people we may be able to work with, since they do not politically identify themselves with the nonprofit. In the best case, they might willingly subvert the nonprofit’s directives, in support of the wider abolitionist movement. On the other hand, there are also nonprofit employees who politically identify with their nonprofit. These individuals tend to have a material stake in the NPIC—they are usually paid more, and they might enjoy having the ear of their favored politician. We can expect these nonprofit “organizers” to mislead and undermine the abolitionist movement at every opportunity.
The second contradiction which the Stop Cop Campus/ Stop Cop City Bay Area movement will have to work through is its political, social, and personal diversity. In fact, once we have properly accounted for this diversity, we can grasp it as a strength rather than a weakness. The left, broadly conceived, thrives when we can debate ideas with one another. We need a lively and dynamic revolutionary culture, to invent new ideas and practices that we can use to overcome capitalist social forces. We need Anarchists, Communists, Pan-Africanists, Chicanos, and Socialists all working together to the greatest possible extent. To claim otherwise means underestimating the divide-and-rule strategy of capitalist imperialism.
The current problem facing the Stop Cop Campus movement is that, up until now, we have failed to develop the social practices which collective deliberation requires. Literally, we have struggled with basic social skills. We have would-be revolutionaries who struggle to interact socially—who argue violently with their comrades, alienating community members and newer abolitionists we need to join our movement. It cannot be understated: political organizing requires considerable emotional self-regulation. If a person cannot regulate themselves so to connect with a larger collective, this will significantly hinder their organizing capabilities. Moreover, we need to bring curiosity to our organizing spaces. If a group has a different political approach than our own, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are untrustworthy. It may mean they have potentially helpful information that we don’t know ourselves. As such, we need to conduct social investigation to find out. If in the end it turns out that strategic unity with the other group is impossible, then we will learn this for certain, and we can act accordingly.
We need to be conscientious of the fact that zero-sum thinking and proprietary behavior are bourgeois social norms. Selfishness and mistrust is the norm under capitalism. Therefore, we should reject the following style of arguments: “our organization X should lead the movement,” “our organization is more authentic,” “we should use the movement to grow X organization.” We should reject claims of “outside agitators” and cop-jacketing. Instead, we need to evaluate arguments on their logical and practical merits.
Finally, we need to engage in activities which make our political organizations accessible to the masses. In San Pablo, a city with a majority Latine population, language accessibility is indispensable. If we cannot create Spanish-language meeting spaces and materials, then we will not be able to organize the larger part of San Pablo. Additionally, if we cannot reach people in their communities through canvassing, and create spaces for popular education and collective decision-making, we will have no means to engage community members in their self-defense and liberation. As such, we will not be able to adequately oppose Cop Campus.
The key contradiction, in the case of Cop Campus, is that the state will use every available means to build the facility. The people, meanwhile, must oppose it with all their might, since its construction will lead to increased state violence, surveillance, and repression. The only means to practically oppose the facility is through disruptive power—economic disruption through strikes and boycotts, or direct action which undermines, disorganizes, or dismantles state capacity. In other words, we need leverage. Without it we can raise awareness, perform mutual aid, and create a culture of opposition to state violence, but we will not pose any material impediment to the police state.
How, exactly, to surmount these contradictions and build disruptive power against the San Pablo Cop Campus is an open question for the author of this piece. Supporting direct action groups is one potential avenue of attack. Organizing workers and renters is another. Whatever avenue and actions we take, we must be thoroughly committed to abolition and the safety and wellbeing of the people of San Pablo.
Traveling by airplane has become so commonplace that many of us (in the united states’ imperial core) don’t blink an eye at the concept of a 5-day excursion to x,y,z via Boeing jumbo jet. While the normalization of frequent airplane travel is just one symptom of wider systemic issues (globalized capitalism and a dominant culture of transience), I believe it is worth interrogating. Max Liboiron, a scholar of settler-colonialism and discard studies, said in an interview that “one of the characteristics of dominant systems, like colonialism, is that what it takes to be true, good, and right becomes so naturalized, so normal, that it is inherited as common sense.” I wonder: what lies beneath the ‘common sense’ of near-ubiquitous air travel?
Of course, we’ve heard that flying emits a ton of carbon, and we recognize that carbon emissions contribute to climate change, which is, literally, an existential threat to life on earth. But it isn’t just the abstracted ‘carbon’ emissions that we have to contend with – it is also the culture around air travel, which propagates a particular manner of moving through the world, that deserves further investigation.
What is this phenomenon of assumed access to the world? Who gets it? Who doesn’t? And what sorts of relationships and engagements with places are fostered?
A note, first, that it is – obviously – a privileged position to be able to consider traveling for pleasure or vacation. If you find yourself in this position, where you can feed yourself, access resources, and pass through a militarized border, remember that many do not have the mobility you do. And the existence of the tourism industry – reliant as it is upon global capitalist hegemony – is part of the reason why. An open and accessible world for the consumer-vacation is a product of colonialism, and its normalcy is an illusion. There are people where you’re going. Not to mention that the companies that make passenger aircrafts, the two largest being Boeing and Airbus, are also military contractors – in other words, the corporate beneficiaries of the tourism industry are war profiteers. Case in point: Boeing makes the F-15 war planes the Israeli government is currently using to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
But I don’t blame anyone,individually, for taking opportunities to explore the world in this way. This is a systemic issue, and traveling is compelling! But that’s part of the problem, I think. Privileged “consumers” are sold this notion of a fulfilling life necessarily including traipsing off to some far off land – but in this equation the far off land often becomes a commodity-experience to be purchased and consumed, not a place with a people who have the agency to say they don’t want you there. Further, I wonder, when we spend our (rare) time off work traveling in a superficial mode, how does our relationship to our home-place suffer?
My hope for this little essay is that it sparks a pause, a moment of thoughtfulness, as you consider how to spend your time and energy. When we refuse superfluous travel, what space is opened up in our lives to root down and contribute to local flourishing?
Let’s dig deeper into the idea that traveling, as it is commonly practiced under capitalism, can turn a ‘place’ into a commodity. This can be thought of as a process of simplification, a flattening. This happens, in part, through a divorcing of a geographic location from its relational contexts. What is a place? Anywhere you go, you will find a landscape with an ecology and people, living within webs of meaning: political, cultural, social, ecological. But traveling for tourism and vacation encourages a superficial and simple engagement with other places: there is a prioritization of ease, which thrives on simple money-for-commodity exchanges, in contrast with the effort and time that would be required to engage across cultural difference (between travelers and locals) in a deeper way.
Here’s a hypothetical example to illustrate. Chances are, if you bought a plane ticket to Guatemala, you did not have to first build relationships with local people and be invited, perhaps only after you’ve demonstrated some sort of trustworthiness and cultural competency, and proven that you will act respectfully and be accountable for your actions amongst the community in that place. No, you just buy the ticket and show up. Likely, you will pay for a taxi to Antigua (because that’s what the travel bloggers recommend) and either book a hotel or stay at the hostel with the German and Australian travelers. You buy dinner at the restaurant that appeals to you because it is air conditioned, sells IPAs, and is decorated like your favorite hipster spot at home. You chat a bit with the waitress (in English) and feel momentarily connected, forgetting that they are working right now so they have to be nice to you. You know no one well enough to be corrected if you make a generalization about Mayan culture, or if you litter, or appropriate a symbol without understanding its significance. And this doesn’t only undermine/harm local culture and sovereignty, but it also cheapens your life and experience: you will remain in your assumptions and generalizations, you will miss opportunities for authentic relationship-building and learning, and you will return home mostly unchanged.
“Hey, I just wanted a vacation – what’s the real harm,” you might ask. Well it is an issue of land rights and colonization, ultimately. Again, I turn to Max Liboiron, who says: “colonialism is about settler access to Indigenous land (which includes Indigenous ideas, cosmologies, and life) for settler goals, including benevolent ones.” Even if you mean well, assuming you have access to a place because you paid for a plane ticket is colonial thinking – your access (if you’re one of the few to have access) to the world is predicated on the imposition of capitalist-colonial cultural norms, backed up by the violent reach of the military. You might be oblivious and good-hearted, but your presence in a place you aren’t in relationship with is a facet of a world-order that undermines the agency of local people. Maybe they do want you there – then great! But, normally, the opportunity for that consent is bypassed.
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Winona LaDuke, in her book To Be A Water Protector, writes: “Privileged by the fossil fuel economy, which has put all things on steroids, we are transient, we move. Few people live in the same place as their ancestors, and many more of us have historical amnesia.” … “Transience means that we do not come to know and love a place; we move on, and as such are not accountable to that place. Always looking for greener pastures, a new frontier, I fear we lose depth, and a place loses its humans who would sing to it, gather the precious berries, make clean the paths and protect the rivers,” … “My counsel is stay, make this place your home and defend this land.”
As I hinted at earlier, the normalization of air-travel is only part of the issue. Transience, enabled by commodity-based lifeways, also impacts how we live in our home-places. What does it mean to be accountable to a place? To tune in to our localities, moving beyond superficial consumer-based lifeways?
I am in a phase of my life where I am trying to heal my connection to place. I was born in Minneapolis, to young, midwestern parents, but I have lived in the Bay Area since I was 6 months old. My three younger siblings were all born here. My life has been formed by and wrapped up in this landscape, its ecologies, and the urban infrastructure built atop/within these contexts. And yet it is so easy to be an alienated consumer on this land, to never learn to identify the beings that surround me in this ecology, to never learn the histories. What do I owe to this place? What is my relationship to it? Our historical amnesia and ecological disconnection is a symptom of settler colonialism, but I believe it is possible to (partially, incompletely) address this systemic issue in the patterns of our everyday lives.
I am starting to identify the rivers that we drink from in this watershed. Pay attention to the soils and people and ecologies that produce the food that I eat (and be cognizant when what I’m consuming has been produced by the huge, anonymous and unaccountable global supply chain). I am trying to tune in to the seasonal shifts and note the migrating birds that pass by, and remember that most of the Bay Area is in “zone 10” when I am thinking of which plants will grow best in my (mostly hypothetical at this point) garden. I decided not to fly for the year of 2024, and I have mostly kept that commitment. We are imperfect, but trying matters. Rooting down in this way – tuning in to my local place, and turning away from commodity-lifeways – will bring more space and resources with which to engage in direct struggle against things like the construction of Cop Campus in San Pablo, or participate in the creative proliferation of a world in opposition to the death-cult of globalized capitalism.
When we heal our connection to place, perhaps a new vision for visiting other places will emerge as well. I believe there exists a meaningful and nourishing way to travel, to move through the world and make connections across different geographies and cultures. I even believe this is important and necessary! Let’s envision what this could look like together.
What is needed now is for anti-militarism to be the focal point of our struggle/movement. Militarism as an ideology rooted in a culture of patriarchy, command, hierarchy, fear, impunity, greed, deceit, theft, debt and ultimately violence and killing. The War System maintains the existing political and economic power realities. The war system, and its wider culture of domination, injures nearly everyone. Trauma is endemic, even for the victors with blood on their hands.
War is the biggest polluter, oil consumer, waster of life and love. The sea is warming, the protozoa dying, the sixth extinction coming. The forests are burning, the droughts spreading, the alarm sounding.
A shift of focus and priorities is the fierce urgency of now.
The peace system aspires to “Full Spectrum Cooperation.” Peace envisions gender rebalancing in decision making, democracy, restorative justice, accountability, honesty and often reparations. Caring, sharing, helping and healing are the virtues of peace. Compassion and Empathy are the needed … and Courage. A “turning of hearts” is the experience bridging old divisions.
The need is not to dominate. Recognize multiple overlapping sovereignties and centers of power from families to workplaces to nations and the regions of the world.
A future without war requires undoing social inequalities. How can we have a world without conflict if one third of the world prospers at the expense of the other two thirds?
