Author: Slingshot robot #1

By Robin

Recycling has for decades been a cornerstone of the environmental movement. As it got popular, businesses and municipalities began to embrace the concept in the 1980s as new clean air and water regulations forced closure of old, leaky dumps. Recycling in the US created over 1.5 million jobs, through 60,000 companies and 40,000 government programs with the impact of $300 billion in sales for the industry.

First it was local…

To recall what small-scale, local recycling used to be not that long ago, Urban Ore, the feisty Berkeley reuse company, reminds us, “the small businesses and non-profit enterprises that previously handled “end-of-life” for electronic equipment did more than simply repair, refurbish or recycle it. They also provided employment and training to workers from disadvantaged communities, encouraging young people to learn skills and computer literacy. They sold low cost machines to schools, community organizations and families, enabling volunteers to provide thousands of hours annually for training youth and under-employed residents.” Now ever-larger companies benefit from poorly-planned electronic scrap laws favoring large businesses, capitalizing on the rapid obsolescence of digital products. 

What is it with the war on jobs poor people depend on? Increasingly there’s no place in our communities for folks wanting to make money by collecting & redeeming deposits on bottles and cans. CalRecycle, the state recycling agency, in January admitted that it now has a $529 million surplus because so many Californians live in “recycling deserts” with no convenient options for eco-friendly folks to get their nickel & dime deposits back on beverage containers, so they just send them out with other recyclables on trash pickup day. Beverage recycling rates have declined for 8 years as many recycling centers have closed statewide due to market woes and climbing land prices. The system seems nearly broken but at least State Senator Wieckowski (Fremont) is investigating CalRecycle and its dubious accounting practices. 

Recycling scales up (and out)

With landfill space increasingly scarce and pricey, and with tighter domestic clean air rules for incinerators, corporate and government officials promoted recycling in the 1980s as a way to reduce the waste stream and even earn money. As China’s economy was starting to boom it began to take discards, especially paper and plastics, from more industrialized countries and turn them into new products and packaging for its home and export markets. By 2017, China was buying over half the world’s mixed paper waste, with the U.S. shipping 15 million tons of mixed paper there per year. 

But in early 2018 China banned 24 grades of waste materials, including mixed paper and post-consumer plastics, and insisted on far less contaminants in other materials they did import. SE Asian countries briefly opened imports, but now these U.S. waste products have no value and just pile up. At least the disruption of export markets speeded regulation of plastic waste: 186 countries agreed to place restrictions on the international movement of plastic waste in 2019, and clearly the trade is unsavory. News of the Pacific Ocean “plastic gyre” of floating plastics (70% eventually sinks) also helped focus attention on the problems of plastics. 

• Maybe we should all have to live with the products and trash we produce, the detritus of our consumer society’s throwaways, instead of sending everything “away”?

If countries increasingly have to deal with their own waste, corporate players are stepping up to sell solutions. “Extended Producer Responsibility” (EPR), a classicgreenwashing name, is modeled on Scandinavian laws but has been Americanized to benefit beverage producers and the big-business trash industries chasing the most valuable recyclables and squeezing out smaller, established community recyclers. Urban Ore has been central in outing this dangerous trend.

Big trash hauling companies make much more from their monopoly contracts with town & cities by discarding, rather than recycling, and also kick back some of their fees to cities, which can use the money. They do all they can to make traditional recycling appear uneconomical and shaky, so that EPR contracts appear to be better deals, ushering in privatization. The tempting sales pitch for EPRs is that “producers” will be held responsible for dealing with products & packaging after consumers are done with items, and thus have an incentive to design higher quality, more recyclable products using less resources and packaging. Recycling costs would be built into prices, pleasing taxpayers, garbage ratepayers and local governments. 

As Urban Ore reveals, it’s all a shell game: “Actually EPR producers want monopoly control of the recovery system. Then they hire smaller ‘Stewardship’ organizations to get the job done cheaply… No existing EPR regulations require redesign. Stupid products like plastic straws can continue to be made. Thus in EPR ‘responsibility’ becomes permission to pollute.” This has played out previously in British Columbia in scary fashion: “The results: a hostile takeover of the recycling industry… Fully developed EPR can be a way for manufacturers to keep making unrecyclable products, and to avoid oversight.” 

EPR seems like a classic case of modern “disruption” capitalism, since consumers do the feel-good chores of recycling beverage containers, forfeiting most of the deposits they’ve paid, while ever-larger companies — with minimal investment, labor or materials costs — scoop up the most profitable recyclables in a market already reeling from huge changes in the overseas markets. 

As fossil fuel companies watch (and fight) the rise of regulation, hybrids & all-electric vehicles, they also seek to hedge their bets and use “their” oil & gas to pivot and become petrochemicals companies. As recycling pioneer Gretchen Brewer of San Diego warned, “Remember that the plastics industry is the petroleum industry, is the chemical industry, is the pharmaceutical industry, is the weapons industry, is the military-industrial complex.”

Every day is trash day

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – of course! Be careful about what you buy, buy what you can reuse and repair, buy what you can recycle. Get back to buying in bulk and reusing bags & containers. Cut way down on single-use plastics you bring home. On the national level let’s fix the misleading number coding on containers, consumer plastics and packaging which implies that these are recyclable when very few really are. Be aware: more & more plastic creeps into the waste stream all the time, ending up in landfills, rivers & oceans — plastic labels on aluminum cans, plus plastic-aluminum foil hybrids that contaminate a valuable recyclable metal; the flood of plastics we’ve used & tossed in the Covid era, plastic bags, containers & other products… 

Stay tuned & do what you can.

———————————————

INFO:

• epa.gov/recycle

•nytimes.com/2019/02/16/style/plastic-free-living.html

• plasticoceans.org

• upstreamsolutions.org

• urbanore.com

•wastedive.com/news/epr-good-bad-ugly/519582/

•greenpeace.org/aotearoa/story/oil-companies-are-ploughing-money-into-fossil-fuelled-plastics-production-at-a-record-rate-new-research/

•carbontracker.org/reports/the-futures-not-in-plastics/

Compiled by Jesse D. Palmer

We cannot build a new world virtually, over zoom, on-line — our grassroots movement for liberation, tolerance and cooperation have to be be in-person, physical and grounded in free spaces. It is easy to feel isolated and hopeless because it seems like things keep getting worse and no one can stop it — but while each of us is small, people all over the world are organizing with those around them for something better. You can find your crew out there somewhere. It is in this spirit that Slingshot compiles the radical contact list published in each year’s organizer and on-line at slingshotcollective.org.

Here’s some new spaces as well as updates to the contact list. You’ll find other deviants at these places organizing their lives around things that matter more than computers, money and the rat race — creativity, experience, adventure, dirt and passion. If you visit a space, support them with your energy, money and life force. 

The BBC – Tucson, AZ

A community center hosting autonomous projects including a radical library, prison uprising tracking project, mutual aid project, Anarchist Black Cross prison project, Jewish zine archive, collective print studio, needle exchange and community garden. “Through the guiding principles of consent, collaboration, harm reduction, and autonomy we hope to build our capacities to support individual and collective needs for health, stability, comfort, joy and knowledge.” 101 E. Ventura, Tucson, AZ 85705 bbctucson.org

Midnight Books – Los Angeles, CA

A new bookstore / community space in uptown Whittier that hosts events. “We strive to offer revolutionary literature as well as work to provide aid for those in need.” 7201 Greenleaf Avenue, Suite D, Whittier, CA, 90602 midnightbooksla.com

PO Box Collective – Chicago, IL

Creative collective and intergenerational social practice center featuring radical art making, mutual aid and events. “We embrace a horizontal organization model that centers marginalized voices, confronts systems of oppression while fostering mutual growth & healing.” 6900 N Glenwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60626 poboxcollective.us

Etc. – Greensboro, NC

Community center and art collective that hosts music and events. 1333 Grove St. Greensboro, NC 27403. etc.gso

Vortex Souvenir – Wichita, KS

An independent art gift shop with zines. Inspired by the Wichita Vortex which was a collective of radical artists, poets, writers. See also poem by Allen Ginsberg. 607 W Douglas Ave, Wichita, KS 67213 vortexsouvenir.com

Bridge Community Cafe – Ypsilanti, MI

A cafe featuring art that hosts events. They aim to be a safe space for community by breaking down borders and building bridges around the world.  217 W. Michigan Ave. Ypsilanti, MI 48197 bridgecommunity.cafe

Controversial Coffee – Seaside, OR

A cafe in a small town that is “is a safe space for all LGBTQIA+”. 111 Broadway Seaside, OR 97138 503-739-0158

Librairie du Tiers Monde – Algiers, Algeria

A bookstore with radical books and author events. “Lots of third world literature like editions of Fanon that I’ve never seen before.” 08 Place Émir Abdelkader, Alger Ctre 16000 213-021-71-57-72 m.librairie-du-tiers-monde.webnode.fr

Affinity Collective – Dowra, Ireland

An 8-acre rural anarchist social space / housing co-op with an event space, library, free store and open lab. Dowra, County Cavan, Ireland N11 ND89 affinitycollective.info

Three new spots in South Korea

• Seendosi 4F and 5F, 31, Eulji-ro 11-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul

• Cafe Yeorm 53-3 Gajaeul-ro 6-gil, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul

• Space Bisugi 137beon-gil 7 Maljil-ro Seogwipo-si, Jeju

Corrections to the 2022 Organizer

• The flyover Social Center / Carbondale, IL Tool Library got evicted.

• The Birmingham Alabama Free Store has permanently closed.

• Brewing Grounds for Change in Milwaukee, WI has closed.

• Riverwest Public House Coop in Milwaukee, WI has closed. 

• We left Impetus Records at Delaware Ave. Claymont, DE 19703 off the list by mistake. 

• Spartacus Books moved to a better location. They are now at 1983 Commercial Drive, Vancouver, BC V5N 4A8.

• We got mail returned from That Social Centre in Ireland. Not sure if it closed. 

• A reader wrote in to say there is something fishy / sectarian about the people’s Forum in NYC and we shouldn’t include them in the organizer.

• Window Cafe Byeol Kkol at Seoul Innovation Park, 1F Miraechung, 684, Tongil-ro, Nokbeong-dong, Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul, South Korea still exists — it closed only briefly but reopened.

• Anarchistische Bibliothek / Archiv / Institut für Anarchismusforschung has a new location – 

Sanettystraße 1/3 1080 Vienna, Austria.

• Cafe Trans in Seoul, S. Korea has closed.

By Jesse D. Palmer

There are always paths open for making life better for ourselves, those around us and the planet if we can keep our hearts open, value the right goals and seize opportunities. It is easy to feel lost and powerless in the face of seemingly constant crisis — climate catastrophe, poverty, racism, homelessness, war. The system keeps us overwhelmed at jobs that destroy the environment to make a few oligarchs even wealthier.  Life shouldn’t be like this.

We need to detach from the machine and refuse to go with the program.  The constant rat race makes it hard to find time to envision, dream and discuss where we want to go and how we can get there.  Let’s put down the phone and stop running around to the next thing — instead maybe light a candle, breathe, meditate, hold hands and think for a moment.

Alternative values are essential. The system reduces life to chasing money and organizes everything around competition, efficiency, and isolated individualism. People end up like machines serving machines. But we are not machines — we’re animals, we are nature — sweaty, earthy, passionate. 

How about we focus on human goals: freedom, adventure, beauty, pleasure, taste, smell, sound and touch. Sharing and cooperating with those we love. Wandering and trying new things — just to experience them ourselves. Keeping close to the earth and getting our hands dirty gardening, building stuff, fixing bikes and turning the compost. 

In a culture that worships sterility, obedience and conformism, I prefer to be with freaks and people living life off the beaten track. Sometimes when I’m feeling discouraged with world news, I wonder what can I possibly do? I want to try to share and export the day-to-day experience of living in the East Bay where so many people aren’t worrying about socially approved goals but instead are doing their own thing making art, free piles, music, labyrinths, bike parties.

It doesn’t help to wallow in doom. We’re all human — we’re all in this together. The sharpest things that appear to divide us like borders and politics are just made up. Everyone wants the same things — self-determination, self-actualization, safety and enough to get by. I am so exhausted how the worst humans qualities — greed, violence and hate — dominate our lives. These qualities are actually rare and the exception — most people are decent and most interactions we have with others go just fine. This is not the impression you get if you look at mass media. If aliens visited earth, they would be be most struck by our inventiveness, diversity, curiosity and the way we naturally tend to help each other. The pandemic has pushed a lot of interactions on-line which is not healthy for social relations. How can grassroots radicals organize more opportunities for face-to-face interaction?

One of the biggest dangers flows from dehumanizing other people. When someone is an other, you can treat them carelessly like an object — something to make a profit from or harm.  When you see each person as like yourself — part of a we — the question becomes how to build community. Rather than concentrating on ourdisagreements, what do we have in common?  Those in power want to emphasize social divisions — rural/urban, red state/blue state, black/white — to turn ordinary people against each other so we don’t unite against this unjust system. 

The struggle for a better world isn’t just about endless activist meetings — but only seeking personal satisfaction also gets boring. We’re social creatures — we yearn for a connection to something larger than ourselves. Maybe some people can ignore the pain of the world, but most people notice and it harms us to see so much plastic, droughts, floods and strangers suffering. 

Fighting back to create something new requires overcoming our fears — of sticking out, discomfort and risk, or even just spending time that doesn’t end up making any difference. The pay-off is that bravery in the face of domination and destruction can make our lives meaningful when we’re confused and drifting. Enough feeling scared and stuck and frustrated. It’s time to move in a positive direction. 

If you want to draw for the 2023 Slingshot Organizer, please email us by April 20.  Slingshot includes art from dozens of people and artists do not have to be local. Also, please send suggestions of new radical contact list spaces and corrections by May 27.

If you are in the Bay area, join Slingshot for two art party weekends to put the organizer together by hand May 28-29 and June 4 at 3124 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley. You can drop by for an hour or stay all day. 

Selling the organizer enables Slingshot to print and distribute this newspaper for free. If you know of a store in your area that might be able to carry the organizer let us know. 

Slingshot is thinking about making a third type of organizer for 2023. Up until now we’ve had a pocket sized organizer with a paperback binding, and a spiral bound desk calendar that is twice as big. For 2023, we’re thinking about spiral binding some of the pocket sized organizers. Spiral binding is considerably more expensive than paperback book binding, so a spiral bound pocket organizer will probably retail for $12. Let us know if you think it’s a good idea.

And also – PRODUCT RECALL – the August Month-at-glance in the 2022 organizer the numbers are wrong – please tell your friends and fix it by hand. We’re sorry for the error. 

By Sparrow

At the ad agency where I work, the owner brags to clients that we could serve ads to their intern’s mom. It’s not an exaggeration. The vast swathes of user data collected by social media platforms, websites, apps, and the smart devices that colonize our homes grant modern advertisers a staggering ability to target ads to hyper-specific audiences. 

In the past several months, tech companies have come under public scrutiny with a series of scandals—from the whistleblower leaks in October 2021, which exposed (among other things) Facebook’s inconsistent policy enforcement, to the revelation in January 2022 that Apple was skirting its own privacy policies to allow certain companies to continue to collect data from people who had opted out of tracking. Yet while these scandals have brought questions of user privacy and safety to the forefront, popular discourse proceeds from the perspective of the user or tech companies. The ad industry—the financial engine of this system and the ultimate purchaser of user data—remains an inscrutable behemoth. 

When we approach questions of user privacy without a strong understanding of how modern advertising works, how advertisers access data, and how they exploit it in the service of capital, our proposed solutions address only data collection and security, without addressing that data’s ultimate use and abuse. I hope that by using my vantage point from within the ad industry to explore these questions, I can add valuable context to the conversation around privacy and surveillance advertising. 

From Mad Men to the Metaverse

Historically, advertisers had a limited ability to target ads to specific audiences. If my agency wanted to reach the intern’s mom in 1985, we might have bought ad space in Better Homes and Gardens magazine or on a billboard near her house or on NBC during an episode of Cheers. But a whole new ad frontier emerged with the birth of the internet and digital advertising. 

Modern digital advertising functions on a system of real-time ad buying, wherein algorithms hold near-instantaneous auctions each time a user is eligible to be served an ad. While traditional advertising methods rely on buying ad space in a context where interested customers are expected but not guaranteed to see the ad, digital ad exchanges allow advertisers to buy ads on a case-by-case basis, dependent on whether the consumer is likely to be interested or receptive to the ad in the first place.

This subtle difference is critical: If a jewelry company buys an ad in a print magazine, they pay a flat fee for that ad space and everyone who reads the magazine will see the ad, regardless of whether they’re interested in jewelry. If the same company buys a targeted ad on Facebook, they pay for each time someone sees the ad, but instead of the ad being seen by everyone on Facebook, they can select targeting parameters and exploit Facebook’s user data to show the ad only to people who are interested in jewelry (or whatever other criteria they choose). 

User data forms the backbone of this system. The more an advertiser refines their ability to target receptive users, the less money they “waste” on people who don’t make purchases, and the higher the return on investment for the brand when people do make purchases.

In 2022, in addition to all the strategies my agency could have used in 1985, we could also reach the intern’s mom by targeting members of a Facebook group for parents of the intern’s university. Or we could set up a page on the client’s website showing off intern projects and then serve ads to the people who have visited the page. Or we could use social media to target first degree connections of the client’s employees. Ultimately, advertisers’ ability to create extremely specific targeting parameters is as limitless as the data they have access to.

In modern advertising, advertisers and the mega-corporations at the center of the privacy debate are locked in an incestuous relationship. Tech companies control advertisers’ access to digital ad space. Together with Amazon, Meta (née Facebook) and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) hold a triopoly on digital ads—GroupM estimates the three companies facilitate 80-90% of all digital advertising in 2021. By the same token, advertisers provide tech companies’ main source of cash flow, with advertising sales bringing in 81% of Alphabet’s 2021 annual revenue. For Meta, that number jumps to a whopping 97%.

The algorithms of all three platforms further reinforce the value of user data by favoring ads that are more relevant to users, making well-targeted ads literally cheaper to buy. Not coincidentally, all three platforms also happen to directly offer advertisers access to a dazzling hoard of user data. 

Thus, the parasites feed each other. The relentless pursuit of profit incentivizes advertisers to constantly refine their audience targeting capabilities and incentivizes the platforms to continue to collect user data and sell advertisers ever-increasingly precise mechanisms of exploiting that data.

Data Points

So, what data are we talking about exactly? At the risk of sounding alarmist, pretty much anything, since in theory any device with an internet connection can collect data on people. Broadly speaking however, there are two overarching categories: first and third party data.

First party data refers to data that a company or brand collects about their own customers, such as email addresses or phone numbers. Most loyalty programs exist to populate these lists, by getting high value customers—that is, customers likely to make valuable purchases—to share their personal information in exchange for discounts or access to special deals. Another example of first party data is when companies track website visitors, like with the site we set up earlier to find the intern’s mom. Via a piece of code installed on their website, brands can pipe a log of visitors directly into an advertising audience. 

Third party data on the other hand is collected by outside actors—including apps and smart devices, the ad platforms themselves, and a whole sub-industry of companies dedicated to compiling data specifically for advertisers. The most common categories include demographic data, like age or gender; behavioral data, such as the amount of time someone spends on a given social media site; interest data, ranging from broad categories like “beauty” or “cosmetics” down to specific parameters like “pink lipstick”; and geographic data, which encompasses not only where a person is at the moment the ad is served to them, but also the places that they have traveled within a given time period.

It’s a common misconception that companies like Meta and Google sell user data to advertisers. While companies that sell data certainly exist, Meta and Google are not technically among them (I reference Meta and Google here specifically, but this also applies to most social media and major tech companies in general). What these companies actually sell is access to user data, meaning that an advertiser can use Meta’s data, for example, to target ads bought through the Facebook ad platform, but they cannot at any point view the data directly or use it on another ad platform. But this distinction, while important for the sake of understanding the relationship between tech companies and advertisers, is ultimately semantic. Whether a company sells user data directly or “just” access to it, the end result is the same.

If my agency targets the intern’s mom by serving social media ads to the first-degree connections of the people who worked at our client’s company, we rely exclusively on data that advertisers can access via a social media sites’ ad platform, without ever owning the data ourselves. Moreover, it’s data that users voluntarily supply to the social media site when they list their job in their profile and connect with their acquaintances.

When used for something like my boss showing off to a client, it seems fairly innocuous. But just imagine how easily it could instead be used more nefariously: for example, to serve union-busting ads to the friends and family of workers trying to unionize. Regardless of whether the advertiser or tech company has access to the raw data, and regardless of people’s ostensible consent to their data’s collection, the very use of this data represents a massive and predatory privacy invasion.

To an Ad Free Future

Advertising is one of capital’s most ubiquitous instruments of control. It influences where we spend our money, the food we eat, how we pass our time, the people we vote for, even the values we hold. When we trust the ad industry with user data and the ability to target highly specific audiences, they will always use it to manipulate us and to profit off us. Granting advertisers access to any form of user data inherently invites abuse.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the advertising industry will abandon targeted advertising any time soon. Although a bill introduced to the US Congress in January 2022 would ban surveillance advertising, its chances of being enacted are slim—at least in part thanks to how heavily political campaigns rely on serving targeted ads to constituents.

There are basic steps everyone should take to protect their privacy against advertisers. All social media sites have privacy settings of some sort which you should check regularly, although the level of control they actually provide the user is often quite vague. A good ad blocker will block not only ads but the tags that track you across the internet. Likewise, switching to a privacy conscious, open-source browser like Firefox grants inbuilt customizable tracking protection. A VPN adds extra security, preventing companies from accessing your location, which is sometime used to serve ads even when users have opted out of tracking. Furthermore, autonomous tech collectives offer alternatives to tech companies’ monopoly on the internet, with non-ad funded options for secure email, collaboration, and document sharing, just to name a few. 

But what makes this problem so critical is its inescapability: completely avoiding surveillance advertising in its modern iteration requires either a high level of tech literacy or an abstinence from tech altogether. Furthermore, individual solutions don’t address the root of the problem or combat surveillance advertising as a system.

On a cultural level, we should reduce our consumption habits across the board. Advertisers and tech companies are incentivized as agents of capitalism to convince us to over-consume—everything from food to clothing to “content.” Consciously reducing our consumption undermines the power that advertisers exert over us, limits their ability to steal our data and profit from its exploitation, and frees us to build and immerse ourselves in alternate systems.

Beyond this, we need to become more comfortable with inconvenience. A lot of people like personal ads because they’re incredibly convenient: companies can serve you an ad for the exact thing that you’re looking for at the exact time that you’re looking for it. Likewise, tech companies also use the data they collect to customize the content you see, save your settings, and personalize your overall experience with the brand. 

But it’s these very “benefits” that ultimately reveal themselves as self-serving scams. Companies only care about things like your convenience or “brand experience” insofar as that brand experience leads to a return on investment for the brand.

Take for example the ever-mysterious social media algorithms, supposedly designed to enhance user experience by prioritizing relevant content. The most widely publicized of the 2021 whistleblower leaks revealed that Facebook’s own data had indicated for years that Instagram’s algorithm was psychologically addictive and harmful to users’ mental health, particularly among tween and teen girls. But as recently as March 2021, Mark Zuckerberg had publicly denied the accusations that their platforms had negative impacts on mental health.

Similarly, among the slightly less well publicized leaks was the revelation that in 2018, Zuckerberg had personally rejected proposed measures to fix the Facebook algorithm’s proclivity to promote outrage. He cited concerns that the fixes might cause users to interact with the platform less.

In both cases, the apparent “bugs” were ignored or suppressed because they directly serve the explicit purpose of the algorithm: to keep people on the platform as long as possible, because the longer someone is on a given platform, the more opportunities the platform has collect their data and serve them ads.

We must reject experiences that are constantly curated to our convenience, mediated by algorithms and advertisements, and designed to extract maximum profit. We can’t divorce discussions about social media and algorithms from tech companies’ relationships with advertisers. The very real harm inflicted by Meta, Google, and their ilk, allegedly in order to bring us a maximum level of convenience, is incentivized by advertisers at every turn. We must strive, both individually and in our communities, to reclaim our attention and our privacy.

Fundamentally, the most integral part of the advertising “ecosystem” is not the platforms, as advertising leaps from medium to medium, nor the advertisers, who spend and manipulate while never producing anything tangible, but the people they call “consumers.” Advertisers may provide the financial capital, but value is derived from the users themselves—giving users a surprising degree of power. Advertisers know this and ad industry publications have spent much time and energy over the past year fretting about the shift to privacy as a fundamental threat to modern advertising. Without so-called “consumers,” the advertiser-tech partnership becomes nothing but an insatiable ouroboros, eating its own tail.

Book Review: Social Contagion, By Chuang (Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co, 2021)

Review By Carob Chip

Social Contagion is a new book focusing on the COVID pandemic in China, written by a collective of anti-state Chinese communists. Their blogs and journals have highlighted struggles of workers across China against the government and factory bosses.

The book is named after its main essay, “Social Contagion,” which went viral online before getting revised and published here. In it, Chuang trace how the development of capitalism in China (and elsewhere) has created the conditions for a pandemic like COVID by exploiting labor and land.

In addition to their essays, there’s a casual interview with their friends in Wuhan about the lockdown, and a helpful English translation of a blog post from a mainland left group.

Social Contagion makes several provocative arguments which can richly inform our thinking and action. Based on their interviews and first-hand accounts, Chuangargue that the COVID virus was not contained in China primarily through authoritarian state measures, but mostly through largely voluntary mass mobilization of people to achieve the state’s goal of suppressing it. While Chinese media claims this globally as a triumph of state machinery, Chuang paint a different picture where the state’s power is far more distributed – reliant on village/building committees and private security guards with few ties to the Communist Party.

In the West, we are flooded with narratives of China as a draconian, all-knowing state, sometimes inflected with anti-Asian xenophobia. There’s also an emerging tankie boosterism which views China as the torchbearer of international socialism. (Twitter main characters Qiao Collective are the most prominent promoters of the latter line.) What all these perspectives lack is an analysis of China’s state-building from the perspective of the workers on whose backs it is built.

According to Chuang, “the Chinese Communist Party functions as a vanguard for the global capitalist class.” As the class war against workers and the rural poor intensifies, and the bill for decades of environmental plunder comes due, the Chinese government is building new tools to stay in power. Social Contagion expands our knowledge of what these tools might be and what (admittedly meager) flickers of resistance are happening in mainland China. Workers everywhere must build upon this hope to abolish global capitalism once and for all, before a pandemic abolishes us!

Book Review: How to Blow up a Pipeline

Book Review: How to Blow up a Pipeline, By Andreas Malm (Verso Books, 2021)

Review By Ninetails

Have you ever sat down to read a book that you swear you read decades ago, only to sit down to reread it and discover it was just published a few weeks ago? I had that experience with this book — I swear I read a book by the same name, with the same author, in the late 1980s, however, it seems I have fallen into an alternate reality in which this book didn’t get published until 2021, and in which emissions have continued to accelerate — with over 60% of all CO2 emissions occurring after 1995! Compared to the version of this book I clearly remember reading in the late 1980s (which doesn’t exist in this reality, apparently), How to Blow Up a Pipeline(2021) goes well beyond being a mere instruction manual interlaced with cheesy melodrama, and rather offers a new philosophy for living. Malm rejects the lie that has been peddled by our oppressors that nonviolence is the only path forward, and he lays out a pretty compelling argument that the time for pacifism is over; the oil companies are committing mass murder every day they continue to enforce a supply chain that accelerates the burning of carbon. There is no safe level of emissions. A very tough choice is upon us. I mean, back in my universe, we nipped this all in the bud back in the early 1990s, when a radical flank at the Battle of Rio put pressure on the UN to enforce a global ban on investor-ownership in the energy sector — which worked surprisingly well — with the whole sector being rapidly converted to small, locally-owned co-ops, allowing us to easily achieve net-zero emissions by Year 2000 (it’s wild how easy the transition to renewables is when you don’t have corporate profit imperatives enforcing accelerated fuel burning… It is so messed up that you all still allow fossil fuel investments…). You should probably try to find a copy of this book before it gets banned by the authorities.

Book Review: Building the Population Bomb, By Emily Merchant (Oxford University, 2021)

By Big Yew

The myth of “the population bomb,” or the belief that population in and of itself drives ecological destruction remains pervasive. Yet, there is little evidence that more people inherently generate more emissions, or that reducing the number of people on the planet would reduce emissions. 

In Building the Population Bomb (2021, Oxford University Press), Emily Merchant offers a well-researched history of the concept of the “population bomb,” showing how this concept was invented by eugenicists in the middle of the twentieth century, and then the concept was promoted by American businessmen as a means of forestalling environmental regulation. 

Likewise, as Merchant explores, the myth of overpopulation has been used to harm reproductive rights, especially for people of color. One example of how this has played out has been the genocide in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico, where racist doctors used the myth of “overpopulation” as an excuse to justify sterilizing roughly 25% of Puerto Rico’s population from 1930-1980. The myth of overpopulation has largely been leveraged to rob people of color of their reproductive rights and cannot be untangled from its role as a white supremacist organizing tool. 

Ultimately, the idea that “reducing population” will solve climate change is nonsense invented by corporations to keep us at each other’s throats. The corporate imperative to make more money next quarter than they did last quarter guarantees that these corporate actors will continue to accelerate emissions even if the population goes down.

Reductive equations that link population and emissions distract us from publicly addressing the activities that directly fuel emissions, while obscuring tactics that actually need to happen to get us to a net-zero society.

Time to focus directly on the pragmatic changes that are needed to get to a fully net-zero emissions society. Attention needs to be directly on the corporations that are fighting every day to lock fossil fuel consumption in place.

Time to yeet the Nazi-derived rhetoric of “excess population” from the climate movement. Time to put an end to investor-ownership in the energy sector. We need to yeet the capitalists, not each other’s reproductive rights.

By Hanna Gill Scott

When ecological data is made accessible and modeled in ways that are accurate and easy to interpret, people are better able to take collective action in caring for and sustaining the ecological systems that keep our planet habitable. 

We currently have public access to a vast array of of ecological datasets and models including the C-MIP (climate futures), ECCO (ocean currents), GRACE-FO (aquifer compaction), HABMAP (deadly algal blooms), MDMAP (ocean debris), the NSIDC (arctic ice melt), and so many more. We even have the technology to allow every tree on the planet to be tracked from space! Why aren’t we using these data and tools technology to make collective decisions? 

What if all we got better at unflinchingly looking at ecological information, and made it a daily practice to keep track of these measurements? Kids easily learn hundreds of Pokémon — once things are organized into a logical model, it gets easier to track and understand the data. Could ecological data become the backing of game systems that are fun and get people motivated to direct attention towards ecological care and direct labor away from ecocide? 

What if we had an ecological well-being index (EWI)? What if scientists were on the radio each day (instead of economists), interpreting and making predictions using ecological data? Why don’t we talk about shifts in the ecology as readily as we talk about sports matches? Why don’t we have more types of festivals and rituals that center ecological care? How could planetary well-being become the center of culture? 

We need strategies that systemically center ecological care, not “fix it later” engineering stunts. There will never be some “magic” technology that makes up for a lack of ongoing ecological care. 

We need to re-design our entire system of value. This needs to happen in every sector, at every level. We need everyone’s help, from all professions and walks of life. We need makers, philosophers, educators, policy tinkerers, media crafters, hackers, and performers. We need to shift the center of our society, we need to re-root ourselves. This can only happen with a diversity of approaches, with all hands working towards a common goal: keeping our plant alive, lush, and habitable. 

Can we dismantle the toxic system of dumping our attention into finance capital and instead direct that attention into the urgent care our planet’s ecology needs? 

How can we draw our collective attention back down to Earth? How can we, as a culture, become more engaged in the ecological systems that sustain and nurture us? How can we rebuild our social relationships with ecological systems, and shift towards engaged, collective management of every aspect our of planet’s ecology? 

It is possible to change trajectory, but just like every other form of steering, it is going to be a matter of how we direct our attention. Is it possible to direct our collective attention towards caring for the planet before it is too late?

By Gerald

More than 300 people participated in a “Shut Down the Town” demonstration in East Oakland against school closures on March 5, 2022. There was a militant spirit among the the march that started at Roots, the site of a school that has been shut down. Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) has a history of closing down schools of majority Black and Latino students. The effects of chronic school closures and mergers have disrupted the education of many students and fed into the School to Prison Pipeline. This is widely understood by the teachers, students, parents, and the Oakland community at large.

The Good

2000 people logged into the meeting where the School Board announced they intended to shut down 15 schools. In response, all hell broke out. There have been numerous Town Hall meetings, demonstrations, rallies, and a Hunger Strike. Community Day, Parker, and Grass Valley elementary schools went on one day strikes with the cooperation of parents. The kids even walked out. All this in spite of the OUSD administration, Democratic Party politicians, and the California Teachers Association (CTA) constantly preaching that shutting down schools is a “management prerogative”. “Trust the experts”, they say. “They know what they’re doing”. Indeed, and we know what they’re doing. They are attacking us.

The Bad (Shane this part’s for you)

California is a “deep-blue” state, the Democratic Party has a super-majority in the state legislature and a Democrat occupies the Governor’s mansion. California is flush with a state budget surplus upwards of 30 billion dollars. Considering these facts, as workers we must draw the conclusion that the Democrats are for the public school closures the Oakland School Board recently voted for. This will come as no surprise to teacher union activists, who’ve for years seen hallways and classrooms and even whole campuses sacrificed to the private sector and their Charter School Industry or their Real Estate Developers. All completed through cushy legislation (Prop. 39 & AB 1840) passed by our “friends” in Sacramento, and/or the Democrats on the School Board. It’s Democratic Party machine politics!

And with this Democratic Party machine we see a patronage system within the structures of labor including: the Trade Union Bureaucracy, the elected School Board, and Employer’s Admin. Why has the leadership of Oakland Education Association union been hesitant to speak against school closures at both the rally/press conference organized by ILWU Local 10 (Longshore workers are facing similar attacks from private sector) and the East Oakland post-march rally? Then there is the bosses side. OUSD officials Kyla Johnson-Trammell, Shanthi Gonzalez, Gary Yee, and Clifford Thompson are all Democrats. What conclusions should we draw as workers? The result is class collaboration. The Democrats are the dirty bathwater of a labor movement still in its infancy. US workers need to usher in a new era of labor movement struggle For this to happen the bathwater has to be drained. 

To top it all off OUSD did zero community engagement before the decision was made. As Activists interested in reversing these closures we have to consider the roadblocks this deep-blue structure puts up to prevent a meaningful movement from emerging. Case in point, at the East Oakland march against school closures one didn’t see a large Democratic Socialists of America contingent with the big red banners, which was strange considering there was a rather large DSA contingent at a march at Oscar Grant Plaza a month earlier in February.

The Ugly

OUSD board president Gary Yee was seen with a developer at Community Day. Teachers took photos and placed them on Instagram. Our enemies are relentless. The OUSD Superintendent is a graduate of “Chiefs for Change” a Bush regime creation with Democrats (Bi-partisan effort w/ Ted Kennedy). 

Even though our pressure significantly decreased the number of schools that will be closing from the original threat of 15 to 3, schools are still on the chopping block. Three schools is still too many! Recall! No tested leadership!