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Reimagining Technopolitical Futures - Building Alternatives In The Present
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| With Luis Murillo (Prof., Univ. of Notre Dame), Erin McElroy (Prof., Univ. of Washington), Paul Schweizer (Geographer & Educator), Peter Maravelis (Dir., City Lights Booksellers & Publishers). |
| Gray Area, 2665 Mission St, Grand Theater, San Francisco |
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May 11 (Sun) , 2025 @ 01:00 PM
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FREE |
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| DETAILS |
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City Lights & Gray Area present
Reimagining Technopolitical Futures: Building Alternatives in the Present - A Workshop
with Luis Felipe R. Murillo, Erin McElroy, & Paul Schweizer (Moderated by Peter Maravelis / City Lights)
Sunday, May 11, 2025, Doors 12:45, Start Time 1:00 pm
Gray Area, 2665 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110
https://grayarea.org/
Free to the public - Seating limited - Registration Required
A looming sense of crisis is casting our present to test, our past to deep questioning, & our collective futures as an impossibility. Crises compound & multiply across social, technical, ecological, & political dimensions, making it very difficult for us to find common ground & purpose in a common planet. This is all happening while tech companies from Silicon Valley concentrate unprecedented wealth, infrastructural, & political power.
What if the unfolding crises are, first & foremost, byproducts of a crisis of political imagination? What if this impossibility to think, act, & respond politically, technically, & ecologically beyond markets & States is at the source of our incapacity to create & sustain common projects? In what ways do they prefigure the Zapatista vision of a common "world where many worlds fit?
This workshop is intended for those interested in broadening their perspectives & developing & utilizing the imagination in service of their activism & community building. It will be arranged into three parts.
Doors at 12:45 pm
1:00 pm - Research-Action-Journeys
Luis Felipe R. Murillo, Erin McElroy, & Paul Schweizer will discuss the trajectories of their work & how their research intersects the histories & practices of collective political struggles.
---10 minute Break---
2:10 pm - Methods & Practice
Each of the speakers will explore constructive technical & political strategies. Participants will be encouraged to discuss their experiences in processes of positive political, technical & ecological change. The session will also offer suggestions of how community building works & the role we each play.
---10 minute Break---
3:00 pm - Possible Futures
The final session will explore how we generate visions of the future. It will explore different methods & thought processes that can bring about social breakthroughs.
This event assembles the knowledge base contained in three recently published books that tackle some of the most urgent issues of our day---"Common Circuits", "Silicon Valley Imperialism" & "Beyond Molotovs". We invite you to discuss with us how the three books challenge us to think with common technical & political alternatives for a common planet:
- "Common Circuits"
https://www.sup.org/books/anthropology/common-circuits
- "Silicon Valley Imperialism"
https://www.dukeupress.edu/silicon-valley-imperialism
- "Beyond Molotovs"
https://www.transcript-publishing.com/978-3-8376-7055-4/beyond-molotovs-a-visual-handbook-of-anti-authoritarian-strategies/?number=978-3-8376-7055-4
City Lights will be onhand to sell copies of the books.
About the participants:
Luis Felipe R. Murillo is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at University of Notre Dame & author of "Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures." His work is dedicated to the exploration of the intersections between anthropology, computing, & politics.
Erin McElroy is Assistant Professor in Geography at University of Washington, author of "Silicon Valley Imperialism" & co-editor of "Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance." At UW, McElroy runs the Anti-Eviction Lab, where much of the student & community partner driven research focuses upon Landlord Tech Watch-a platform dedicated to producing collective knowledge about landlord-driven data grabbing & algorithmic techniques.
Paul Schweizer is a geographer & popular educator. As part of kollektiv orangotango, he collaborates in collective art processes in public spaces, curating "This Is Not an Atlas" (notanatlas.org), a global platform of counter-cartographies as well as "Beyond Molotovs - Exhibition of Anti-Authoritarian Strategies." He currently studies methods of activist mapping with social movements in Europe & Brazil.
Peter Maravelis is the Events Director at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers where he has been curating the event series for the last 30 years.
About the Books:
Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures
By Luis Felipe R. Murillo
Published by Stanford University Press
How hackers facilitate community technology projects that counter the monoculture of "big tech" & point us to brighter, innovative horizons. A digital world in relentless movement-from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing-has been captured & reinvented as a monoculture by Silicon Valley "big tech" & venture capital firms. Yet very little is discussed in the public sphere about existing alternatives. Based on long-term field research across San Francisco, Tokyo, & Shenzhen, Common Circuits explores a transnational network of hacker spaces that stand as potent, but often invisible, alternatives to the dominant technology industry. In what ways have hackers challenged corporate projects of digital development? How do hacker collectives prefigure more just technological futures through community projects? Luis Felipe R. Murillo responds to these urgent questions with an analysis of the hard challenges of collaborative, autonomous community-making through technical objects conceived by hackers as convivial, shared technologies. Through rich explorations of hacker space histories & biographical sketches of hackers who participate in them, Murillo describes the social & technical conditions that allowed for the creation of community projects such as anonymity & privacy networks to counter mass surveillance; community-made monitoring devices to measure radioactive contamination; & small-scale open hardware fabrication for the purposes of technological autonomy. Murillo shows how hacker collectives point us toward brighter technological futures-a renewal of the "digital commons"-where computing projects are constantly being repurposed for the common good.
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Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies & Frictions in Postsocialist Times
by Erin McElroy
published by Duke University Press
In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, & economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area & how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork & archival research in Romania & the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley technocapitalism devours space & societies, displaces residents, & generates extreme income inequality in order to expand its reach. In Romania, dreams of privatization updated fascist & anti-Roma pasts & socialist-era underground computing practices. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways Romanians are resisting Silicon Valley capitalist logics, where anticapitalist & anti-imperialist activists & protesters build on socialist-era worldviews not to restore state socialism but rather to establish more just social formations. Attending to the violence of Silicon Valley imperialism, McElroy reveals technocapitalism as an ultimately unsustainable model of rapacious economic & geographic growth.
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Beyond Molotovs - A Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Strategies
Edited by International Research Group on Authoritarianism & Counter-Strategies & kollektiv orangotango
Published by Columbia University Press
Authoritarianism operates on a visceral level rather than relying on arguments. How can we counter authoritarian affects? This publication brings together more than 50 first-hand accounts of anti-authoritarian movements, activists, artists, & scholars from around the world, focusing on the sensuous & emotional dimension of their strategies. From the collective art & aesthetics of feminist movements in India, Iran, Mexico, & Poland, to sewing collectives, subversive internet art in Hong Kong, & even anti-authoritarian board games, the contributions open new perspectives on moments of resistance, subversion, & creation. Indeed, the handbook itself is a work of anti-authoritarian art.
The editors behind the International Research Group on Authoritarianism & Counter-Strategies & kollektiv orangotango are: Aurel Eschmann, Brries Nehe, Nico Baumgarten, Paul Schweizer, Severin Halder, Ailynn Torres Santana, Ins Durn Matute, & Julieta Mira.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation
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