Chris Carlsson, Nowtopia
Nowtopia: How pirate programmers, outlaw bicyclists, and vacant-lot gardeners are inventing the future today
What: Nowtopia Book Release and Tour
Who: Chris Carlsson
When: April through December 2008
Where: United States
Website: TBA
PRESS INQUIRIES: 510-910-5627
Outlaw bicycling, urban permaculture, biofuels, free software, even the Burning Man festival are windows into a scarcely visible social transformation that challenges politics as we know it. As capitalism continues its inexorable push to corral every square inch of the globe into its logic of money and markets, new practices are emerging that are redefining politics. In myriad ways, people are taking back their time and technological know-how from the market and in small under-the-radar ways, are making life better right now. In doing so, they also set the foundation—technically AND socially—for a genuine movement of liberation from market life. The social networks thus created, and the practical experience of cooperating outside of economic regulation, become a breeding ground for new strategies and tactics to confront the everyday commodification to which capitalism reduces us all.
Nowtopia uncovers resistance and rebellion amidst fractions of a slowly recomposing working class in America. Rarely self-identifying as mere ‘workers,’ people from all walks of life are doing incredible amounts of work in their “free” “non-work” time. This unpaid work is creating immediate practical improvements in daily life. More interesting still, these myriad initiatives constitute a more thorough-going refusal of politics and economics as usual. In Nowtopia, Marx’s concept of the General Intellect is freshly applied to the disparate initiatives that are percolating largely out of public sight. Building on the investigative methodology developed by autonomist Marxists in Europe and the U.S.A., Carlsson recontextualizes the so-called “middle class” as an example of working class recomposition. The practical rebellions outlined in this book embody a deeper challenge to the basic epistemological underpinnings of modern life, as a new ecologically-driven politics emerges from below to reshape our assumptions about science, technology and human behavior.
The semi-conscious war between these life-affirming, self-emancipating behaviors and the coercive domination of money, property, and survival amidst contrived scarcity is the core investigation of this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Carlsson is a San Francisco author, Nowtopian, outlaw bicyclist and wannabe vacant-lot gardener. He has edited four collections of political and historical essays. His most recent book is After The Deluge, a utopian novel of post-economic San Francisco. He was one of the original founders and long-time editor of Processed World magazine. He also helped to start the Critical Mass bicycling movement in San Francisco.
UPCOMING EVENTS
April 9, 2008 - Book Release Party, Counterpulse, San Francisco, 7:30 p.m.
May 13, 2008 - CUNY, New York, NY
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
“Chris Carlsson is one of our most original and compelling voices for radical social change in America. Nowtopia opens a window onto today’s vibrant subcultures of technical experimentation and cooperative work, in everything from biofuels to bicycling, gardening to the webworld. More than tinkerers and bohemians, these renegade innovators are pioneers of new ways of living beyond the market and
ordinary jobs. Carlsson moves effortlessly from tales of personal liberation to a trenchant analysis of the reconfiguration of class. Nowtopia is a ringing appeal for the liberation of human creativity from the noose of wage-work—before it’s too late.”
—Richard Walker, Professor of Geography,
University of California, Berkeley, Author of The Capitalist
Imperative, The Conquest of Bread and The Country in the City
“The revolution is underway, quietly and noisily, in a million ways, and Chris
Carlsson—writer, instigator, bicyclist, boulevardier, urbanist, insurrectionist—
has added to it in dozens of ways. This book is one of his finest, which is a lot to say of the main founder of the Critical Mass bicycle rides that spread from San Francisco around the world; it’s cheerful, hopeful, subversive, full of fun facts to know and share and very useful in carrying out your own revolution of everyday life and recognizing it all around you, already, a standing—or walking, or pedalling or dancing—invitation to join in full enjoyment of our freedoms and potentials.”
—Rebecca Solnit, author, Hope in the Dark,
River of Shadows, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“This book explains clearly and colourfully just how ordinary revolution is, a book that shows us how millions of people live not only within capitalism, but are creating through their activity the bases of what could be a different world. Amidst destruction and war, it is important to see our own strength and creativity. This is an exciting and lovely book.”
—John Holloway, author, Change the World Without Taking Power
“How can today’s manifold projects for a new commons help realise the old dream of a world without bosses? Chris Carlsson’s thought-provoking book is a must-read for everyone grappling with that question.”
—Steve Wright, author, Storming Heaven: Class composition
and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism
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