Category Archives: New Utopia

Zhuangzi is a creative and flexible author, so it is no surprise that later in the same work, Confucius is ironically appropriated as the spokesman of Zhuangzis own position. This Confucius says he wants to become the disciple of an amputee, Royal Nag, because he looks at the way things are one [or whole] and does not see what theyre missing. He looks at losing a foot like shaking off dust. Royal Nag (and Zhuangzi) saw, long before contemporary epistemologists, that similarity and difference are standpoint dependent: Looked at from their differences, liver and gall are as far apart as the states of Chu and Yue. Looked at from their sameness, the ten thousand things are all one. In short, the common assumption that it is bad to be disabled makes sense only if we project our parochial and historically contingent human values onto the fabric of the universe.

One response to this critique would be that disabilities are bad, not because they are violations of the objective teleological structure of the universe, but because they are inefficient. Those who are disabled are simply less functional, less able to achieve their goals, than those who are normal. This leads easily to the conclusion that eliminating disabilities would be better, not just for society but for the disabled themselves. Contemporary technology seems to have put this almost in our grasp. With the advent of both genetic screening technologies and Crispr gene editing, we are approaching an age in which we may be able to design the human body; perhaps soon the new normal for the American family will be designer babies. We may be approaching a world in which illness is eradicated, a world of physical and mental harmony and homogeneity among all peoples. This, many would argue, is surely the stuff of a utopia a brave new world.

The seductiveness of this argument illustrates the danger of the hegemony of instrumental reasoning reasoning employed to find the most efficient way to a given goal. It is an important aspect of wisdom, but it also carries the temptation, especially in modern capitalist society, to reduce all of rationality to means-end efficiency. In some cases, means-end efficiency results in an inappropriate and inhuman standard.

To think that we have moved beyond this pitfall would be nice, but we havent. It is still very much with us. As the coronavirus pandemic began to overwhelm medical capacity in the United States in March, the disability activist and writer Ari Neeman argued that the triage guidelines that certain states were putting into use indicated that it was preferable to let a disabled person die simply because it would require more resources to keep that person alive. The principle of granting equal value of human lives, Neeman wrote, would then be sacrificed in the name of efficiency.

We do not mean, in this brief essay, to dismiss all of philosophy outside of Zhuangzi. The sayings of Confucius include a passage in which the master is a respectful and congenial host to a blind music master (Analects, 15.42), and the later Confucian tradition includes the stirring admonition, All under Heaven who are tired, crippled, exhausted, sick, brotherless, childless, widows or widowers all are my siblings who are helpless and have no one else to appeal to. Readers of the New Testament will recognize this as a core value in the teachings of Jesus. In fact, many figures and institutions in the Abrahamic traditions have been at the forefront of caring for the disabled, precisely by appealing to the Platonic view that humans ultimate value lies in their immaterial souls rather than their contingent material embodiments.

But in this time of rampant sickness and social inequality, and given our fundamental duty to extend equal treatment, compassion and care for others, we think Zhuangzi is an important and insightful guide, a Taoist gadfly, if you will, to challenge our conventional notions of flourishing and health. With the 30th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act approaching, this ancient Chinese Taoist reminds us that it is the material conditions of a society that determine and define disability. We have the power to change both those material conditions and the definition of disability.

John Altmann (@iron_intellect) writes about philosophy for general audiences and is a contributor to the Popular Culture and Philosophy Series of books. Bryan W. Van Norden (@bryanvannorden) holds a chair in philosophy at Vassar College and is the author most recently of Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto.

Now in print: Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments and The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments, with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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Was This Ancient Taoist the First Philosopher of Disability? - The New York Times

July is a big month for missions to Mars.

Three new spacecraft from NASA, China and the United Arab Emirates are due to lift off on their journey to the Red Planet.

That's because there is window between mid-July and mid-August when Earth and Mars are in a good position relative to each other to allow the shortest possible trip.

If the mission launches go as planned, the first of which is due this week, the spacecraft will arrive early next year.

They will join a slew of other orbiters, landers and rovers that are already probing the planet.

And each is tasked to look at questions that no other spacecraft has answered before as the race to find evidence of past life on Mars heats up.

The entry of China and the UAE into Mars exploration, a field that has so far been dominated by the US and Russia, will benefit future missions to the Red Planet, said Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist at Flinders University.

"The more nations entering [deep space exploration] increases the chance of success ... and builds up the library of proven engineering heritage."

Along with new science, these nations are also testing different types of technologies.

So let's take a quick look at what each mission has to offer.

NASA's Mars 2020 mission plans to put a new rover on the Red Planet called Perseverance.

If it survives the landing it will be the United States' 10th successful attempt to put a robot on Mars since 1975, and will join the Curiosity rover and Mars Insight probe.

Perseverance is the first rover ever tasked with finding evidence of past life on Mars, said Abigail Allwood, an Australian geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is in charge of PIXL, one of the seven instruments onboard the rover.

"Previous missions have been looking for evidence of water and evidence of habitability," Dr Allwood said.

"No mission has ever been given the mandate to look for evidence of life."

The rover, which looks almost identical to Curiosity except for its wheels, will descend towards Mars using the same 'seven minutes of terror' technique as its predecessor albeit using new terrain technology to help guide its landing.

All going well, it will touch down in an old lake bed known as Jezero Crater.

The rover is kitted out with several tools that will investigate the geology of the landform in minute detail, and use a drill to collect sediment samples to be returned to Earth for analysis in 2026.

The Mars 2020 mission will also be the first mission to attempt test flights of a small unmanned helicopter called Ingenuity.

The helicopter, which is strapped to the bottom of the rover, will be released once the rover lands.

"If that helicopter flight is successful it will be huge for Mars exploration," Dr Allwood said.

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Swarms of small helicopters could be used to map the surface where samples come from, and a successful flight could demonstrate a capacity that can aid human missions.

"[Unmanned aerial vehicles] could be the next thing we see before any human missions," she said.

The Perseverance rover will also be doing some of the groundwork for setting up a base.

Onboard are tools that will test a method of extracting oxygen from the atmosphere (which is 96 per cent carbon dioxide), identify resources such as subsurface water and minerals, and gather more data on dust storms and weather conditions.

The mission is currently slated to launch around July 30.

China's new mission will send the first orbiter/lander/rover combo to Mars.

Called Tianwen-1 which means Heavenly Questions it is the nation's second attempt to send a mission to the Red Planet.

China's first mission, the 'Yinghuo-1' Mars orbiter, was lost in 2012 when the Russian space agency spacecraft it was piggybacking a ride on failed and crashed back to Earth.

But now, China is using its own technologies that have been successfully used in its space program, including two Moon landings.

It will use parachutes developed for its Shenzhou crewed spaceflight program, and propulsion and autonomous guidance systems and designs used in its Chang'e-3 and Chang'e-4 moon landers.

If the spacecraft reaches Mars and touches down, China will become the third country to land on the Red Planet.

It's a very ambitious goal, said Andrew Jones, a space journalist who follows the China space program.

"The failure rate for Mars missions is around 50 per cent, so to try to combine [the orbiter/lander/rover] for your first attempt at a [solo] interplanetary mission is very challenging," Mr Jones said.

US: 7 orbiters, 5 landers, 4 rovers

Russia: 2 orbiters (1 joint with EU), 1 lander

EU: 2 orbiters (1 joint with Russia)

India: 1 orbiter

US: 3 orbiters, 1 lander, 1 probe

Russia: 7 orbiters, 6 landers (including joint EU project), 1 rover, 2 probes

EU: 2 landers (including joint Russian project)

Japan: 1 orbiter

China: 1 orbiter (joint mission with Russia)

*Excluding flybys

Landing on Mars is a lot more challenging than landing on the Moon.

The Red Planet has a thin atmosphere, which heats up the spacecraft but doesn't slow it down very effectively, so the timing of parachutes and rockets is critical.

Although the exact landing site of the Chinese mission has not been revealed, it is likely to be somewhere in an area known as Utopia Planitia.

"These are very low elevation areas so that gives more atmosphere to slow down the landing attempt," Mr Jones said.

The location is also good for the operation of the mission's solar powered rover.

Another potential touchdown area is Chryse Planitia, close to the landing sites of NASA'S Viking 1 and Pathfinder.

Like the new NASA mission, Tianwen-1 plans to explore the Red Planet's atmosphere, use ground-penetrating radar to peer below the surface, and look for evidence of past life.

"Having two ground penetrating radars in two different places on Mars brings a lot of science value."

But before even attempting a complex landing, the spacecraft must actually reach Mars

To do this, China is using its biggest rocket: the Long March 5. After one semi-successful flight and a failure, the rocket finally put a satellite into geostationary orbit late last year.

But the launch of the Tianwen-1 mission will be the first attempt at getting the rocket into an orbit that will put a spacecraft on a path to Mars.

"It shouldn't be that much different, but still it's something they haven't done," Mr Jones said.

While no official launch date from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center has been announced, Mr Jones predicted it would take off around July 23.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates is planning to become the first Arab nation to send a spacecraft to the planet.

If it is successful, the 'Al Amal' or 'Hope' spacecraft will join six other orbiters from the US, Europe and India currently surveying Mars from orbit.

Timed to arrive 50 years after the UAE was founded, it is also carrying the aspirations of its nation and Arab and Islamic science.

"The UAE is small compared to those other nations but they are putting so many resources into their space programs and they've made it really clear that these are priorities for them," Dr Gorman said.

About the size of a small car flanked by two solar panels, the hexagonal-shaped orbiter is on a two-year mission to explore the Red Planet's upper and lower atmosphere and weather.

Kitted out with three scientific instruments, it hopes to answer questions about why the Red Planet is losing its upper atmosphere to space, and to create a global picture of how the Martian atmosphere changes from day to day and season to season.

The spacecraft is scheduled to be launched from Tanegashima, a remote Japanese island on July 15 (AEST) according to latest reports from the UAE space agency.

Once it separates from its rocket, the spacecraft will rely on star-tracker sensors, which recognise constellations, to guide it to Mars.

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All going well, the three missions will reach Mars in February next year.

The Mars 2020 mission plans to touch down on February 18, while the Chinese Tianwen-1 mission will survey the Red Planet using a high-res camera onboard the orbiter before selecting a landing site in April.

But if the missions miss the launch window, they will not be able to fly for another two years when Earth and Mars are aligned again.

NASA's Mars 2020 mission has already been delayed twice. Originally it was planned to lift off around July 17, but with a current launch date of at least July 30 it has used up half the window.

A fourth mission to Mars which was also due to lift off this month the European Union and Russian Space Agency's ExoMars mission carrying the Rosalind Franklin rover has already been postponed until 2022.

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Three space missions heading to Mars, from NASA, China and UAE - ABC News

In mid-June, the Orleans Parish Sheriffs Office sent out a press release announcing that there were no known cases of coronavirus at the New Orleans jail. A week later, Christian Freeman, an inmate at the jail died in custody. During the autopsy, it was revealed that he had been positive for the virus at the time of his death.

Freemans death on June 25 and subsequent positive test raised questions about whether the virus had in fact been spreading in the facility undetected. As of last week, the cause of Freemans death had not been determined, according to a spokesperson for the Orleans Parish Coroners Office, who did not immediately respond to a request for an update.

But on Monday, the compliance director for the New Orleans jail, Darnley Hodge, sent a memo to U.S. District Judge Lance Africk, who oversees the jails federal consent decree, claiming that there were no known changes regarding the COVID-19 status of staff and inmates at the jail.

According to the memo, in response to Freemans positive test, all 55 of the detainees being held in Freemans pod were tested for the virus. All came back negative, with the exception of one test that is still pending.

In addition, all the staff that worked in the pod have been tested, and all came back negative.

The memo also says that Freeman, who had been in custody since December, had previously tested negative for the virus. It does not specify when that test was done.

Hodge declined to comment through a spokesperson from the Sheriffs Office, and it is unclear whether the jail plans to test the rest of the inmates in the facility.

The Sheriffs Office, which had been regularly releasing updates about the number of coronavirus tests administered and cases detected among the jails inmates, has not put one out since the June 18 release that announced there were no known cases.

At the height of the outbreak at the facility there were over 90 positive inmates, but Hodge and Sheriff Marlin Gusman have touted the jails program of mass testing and quarantine in response to the virus as a successful effort to prevent further spread of the virus.

Freeman was the second person to die in custody at the jail since officials claimed it was free of the disease. The first, Desmond Guild, died on June 19. Guild was negative for coronavirus when he died, according to the coroners office.

The two deaths come as Gusman is attempting to convince a federal judge to allow him to retake control of the jail from Director Hodge. Initially, Gusman asked the judge to throw out the consent decree altogether, claiming that The two deaths come as Gusman is attempting to convince a federal judge to allow him to retake control of the jail from Hodge, an appointed official who controls day-to-day jail operations as part of a court order in the consent decree case. Initially, Gusman asked the judge to throw out the consent decree altogether, claiming that it sought a jail utopia, reflective of the Court appointed Monitors personal preferences and idealistic aspirations, but later agreed to walk it back.

Emily Washington, an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center who represents the plaintiffs in the consent decree litigation against the Sheriffs Office, declined to comment.

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Memo: Following death of inmate who tested positive, Sheriffs Office says no new known cases of coronavirus at jail - The Lens

Representational image. | Image Courtesy: Deccan Chronicle

Jeffrey C Alexander is Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University and co-director of its Center for Cultural Sociology. He is among the worlds leading social theorists with a keen interest in the recent rise of authoritarian-populist regimes across the world. Ajay Gudavarthy, associate professor at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU, who recently published India after Modi: Populism and the Right are in conversation here on populism and the future of democracy in the United States and India.

You are known to have inaugurated cultural sociology as against sociology of culture, wherein you stress on performance and dramaturgy as central to how power works and is also resisted. Do you think the current rise of populism has foregrounded performativity in any manner discernibly different from when democracies were not necessarily populist?

Theres been a long intellectual tradition arguing that populism engages in the aesthetics of rule more than democratic power, much less socialism. I think this is deeply mistaken. The reason I created social performance theory is to argue against historicist or ideologically specific understandings of the social location of dramaturgy. Performance is part of any social action, everywhere, and it permeates every attempt at legitimate rule, which pretty much covers the exercise of power everywhere at every time. This is not to say, of course, that right and left populist performances are the same. The culture, codes, and narratives of left and right are very different, so the performances that evoke them would differ, too.

You made an incisive point that the Left does not take culture seriously as it equates it with conservatism. But surely Gramsci was a front-ranking political thinker who argued in favour of mobilising culture. How do you think the Left needs to negotiate the question of culture today?

Gramsci was a major influence on my thinking in the early days of my intellectual formation, when I was a radical activist as a New Left Marxist. New Left Marxism was always very critical of economistic Marxism, the term that Lenin rightly used against the Mensheviks to justify the need for an activist political party to wake up the working and peasant classes. Gramsci was deeply affected by Lenin but was much more willing to be explicitly cultural (rather than narrowly political) because he was also deeply affected by Antonio Labriola, the very creative and open-minded Italian Marxist thinker who was heavily influenced by Hegel.

When I moved from cultural Marxism to cultural sociology, I brought the thinking of Gramsci, and of course Hegel, with me. But there is a lot more that has gone into creating cultural sociology than Gramsci. Theres semiotics, structuralism, and post-structuralism, especially Foucault; theres the literary theories of narrative; theres performance studies and Austins performative speech act theory; theres aesthetic ideas about form and sensibility.

The challenge for the left is, first, to realise that not all culture is political, not attached to domination, and to appreciate that. People of all ideologies need traditions, codes, and collective meanings; they need vibrant and powerful material symbols; they need to be engaged, both as actors and audiences, in compelling social dramas.

The second challenge for the left is to build a new utopian culture of an alternative society. Socialism/communism played such a role for 150 years, but its utopian power as a transcendental symbol has disappeared, dying in the last two decades of the 20th century. This is notat allto say that a heck of a lot more social democracy would be a bad thing! The more the better. It is to say, rather, that the symbol of socialism has been profoundly tarnished, for better and for worse. Its also to say that equality in the socialist sense of Marx, what he himself criticised in The German Ideology as an empty abstract equality, is no longer a viable description of a good society.

For me, the new utopia would have to be rooted in ideas about civil society, self-governance, radical democracywhat I call the civil sphereand in a particular vision of multi-cultural incorporation.

The progressive social movements that exert performative power today are all rooted in these values.

Through the idea of civil repair you offer a way of moving towards solidarity between various social groups with the universal as a normative ideal more than anything else. But in todays politics it is the Right that is able to articulate the ideas of solidarity and universal better than Black Lives Matter and anti-caste movements in India.

I wouldnt be that confident in your suggestion that BLM hasnt been successful in its performance of civil solidarity and multicultural incorporation! As public opinion polling has stunningly demonstrated in the last two weeks, white American opinion has come to support BLM and racial justice by a far higher percentage than in the first wave of BLM protests in 2013. [US President Donald] Trumps version of racist and anti-egalitarian solidarity is losing support rapidly, and the stage is being set for a dramatic victory of the centre-left in the November presidential elections.

Yes, Trumpand far right populism everywhereoutperformed the left over the last decade, and he was able to ride a backlash against BLM and Americas first Black president into power in 2016. But the regulative (law, voting) and communicative (journalism, polls, civil associations) of the civil sphere stood up against Trumps right populism over the last three and a half years. Democrats won a tremendous victory in the Congress in 2018, and #MeToo became the most powerful feminist movement in recent history during the administration of Americas most misogynist president.

Both right wing and left wing movements appeal to solidarity. Right movements defined more primordial, localised, kin, race, gender, and caste forms of particularistic solidity. Left movements define and defend broader, more civil forms of (expanded) solidarity. Creating civil repair can be seen as an unsettling frontlash movement, led by political and cultural avant-gardes; it always creates backlash and resistance, and this opens the way for conservative, right populism, and even fascist movements to come to power. In my forthcoming book, Populism in the Civil Sphere (Polity, January 2021), sociologists from around the world make use of this theory to explore left and right populism.

I find the ideas of myth and meaning at the centre of how the right in India is mobilising itself. Would it be correct to argue that rather than as a general pattern there are moments in history that are more prone to the autonomy of symbols and cultural codes?

While I know your recent work on right-wing Indian political culture, Ajay, and I consider it pioneering, I dont agree, no, with the suggestion that some historical periods or social formations are more prone to the relative autonomy of culture. It would be like saying are there periods where people like to eat and have sex more than in other times? I dont think so!

You seem to be arguing that even neoliberalism and capitalism are built on certain kinds of myths, and globalisation was itself a trauma response to what transpired during the Cold War. But surely global trade flows and financial capitalism cannot be reduced to a social imaginary, even if one agrees that cultural discourses do structure economic transactions.

In fighting against the reduction of materialism, cultural sociology has never sought to create an opposite kind of idealist reductionism in turn. Each sphere of society has its own, relatively independent social processes, especially as differentiation increases over historical time. Capitalism has its own so-called laws, though theres not like the iron laws of physics that Marx claimed they were in his introduction to the third volume of Capital! The globalisation of capitalism is an example of this internally-logical development: where there are falling costs of labour and land, capital will flow! The financialisation of capitalism in the West is another example. Yet, at the same time, I would insist that capitalism itself requires, and in a sense is built upon, certain cultural codes and performances. This is well explored in Callons Actor-Network Theoretical studies, as it is also in Roger Friedlands work on institutional logics. Without certain powerful understandings of the self, exchange, and reciprocity, contemporary capitalism couldnt function. The greatest economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, put such non-rational phenomena as trust at the centre of entrepreneurialism and financial markets alike.

How do you see the future of democracy in the US in the next decade or so? Do you see the ebbing of authoritarian populism and alternatives to global neo-liberal regimes emerging?

Good social scientists must be aware that historical development is contingent. Marshall Sahlins, drawing on Althusser, spoke about the structure of the conjuncture. Look at the extraordinary contrast between the historical essays of Marx, like The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and the systematic theoretical works like Capital. That said, I believe that there are ample cultural and institutional reasons to believemore than merely to hopethat the right-wing populism will ebb in the US and that, at the same time, more solidaristic and egalitarian policies will be put into place to step the grotesque excesses of what is called (I dont like the term) neoliberalism. I am not convinced that neoliberalism emerged simply or perhaps even mainly for economic reasons; I think it came out of a particularly effective right-wing performative reaction to the decline of the socialist ideal in the 1980s.

Finally, your thoughts on democracy in India. You were particularly struck by Prime Minister Narendra Modi meditating in a cave. With an economy in recession, will cultural nationalist symbolism hold the same kind of power to generate meaning for representing the reality?

For intellectuals and citizens who remain deeply committed to democracywhether in its republican or liberal formthe fate of Indian democracy is one of the most critical questions of our time. Not only because of concern for the more than one billion people who live in India, but also because China is on the road to becoming a very politically threatening anti-democratic global power. Modern India shows for South Asia, just as Korean, Japan, and Taiwan show for East Asia, that democracy is not civilisationally limited, as the reactionary political scientist Samuel Huntington argued in his deeply misleading book, The Clash of Civilizations (1996). (By the way, I handed out anti-war leaflets inside of Huntingtons lecture class in 1968 while a student at Harvard!)

India is an Axial Age civilisation, a concept that my teacher Robert Bellah, and the great Israeli historical and comparative sociologist SN Eisenstadt, took over from Karl Jaspers interpretation of Webers comparative sociology of religions. Despite its egregious caste inequalities, Hinduism has inside of it critical and transcendental capacities and, despite its own egregious racial, religious, and institutional practices, British colonialism added to the critical and democratic capacities of contemporary Indian culture.

Gandhi is a good example of a great Indian leader and thinker who synthesised both, inventing a form of militant non-violence that has motivated civil sphere activism around the world. As long as India can maintaindespite Modis sometimes sinister desires and actionssome significant autonomy for its communicative and regulative institutions, India will move beyond Modi, his political party, and right-wing populist constructions of reality. When it will depends on what kind of political culture and performances the Indian Opposition can provide.

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'India Will Move Beyond Modi, his Party, and Right Wing Populism'Prof Jeffrey C Alexander - NewsClick

Futuristic Architecture of the 70s: Photographs of a Modern World with a Twist of Science Fiction

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The Manifesto of Futurism, written by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909, was the rallying cry for the avant-garde movement driven by the writers, musicians, artists, and even architects (among them Antonio Sant'Elia) in the early 20th century. After the manifesto's publication, Futurism quickly came to the forefront of public conscience and opened the way for many other cutting edge movements in the art world and beyond.

While the movement would undergo a significant decline in the years following World War II, it reinvented itself decades later during the Space Age, when faith in technology and industry were at a fever-pitch and the world's powers were racing to put humans on the Moon. All of a sudden, humanity had a new cultural panorama that inspired everyfacet of society--from musicians, to scientists, to architects. Withthe combination of engineering and art, not to mention the bountiful scientific achievements of the time, works of architecture turned into works of science fiction.

Recently, photographer Stefano Perego documented a series of works that exemplify the legacy left behind by the radical architects of the 1970s. Truly acolytes of their time, these architects sought to bring the future to the present through their designs, giving us iconic works such as the prototype Futuro House (Matti Suuronen, 1968), the Makedonium (Jordan Grabuloski + Iskra Grabuloska, 1974) or the spherical houses of the Bolwoningen community (Dries Kreijkamp, 1980-1985). All of these projects mix organic and geometric forms with materials like plastic, steel, and concrete to bring to life humanity's dreams for the future.

The formative role that science fiction played in architecture, along with film, art, and literature, is captured in a series of writings from the late 1950s and early 60s. Reyner Banham, in his 1958 article Space, Fiction, and Architecture, cited Lszl Moholy Nagy, affirming that "we need utopians of genius, a new Julio Verne, not to outline an easy-to-understand technological utopia but to outline the very condition of future men."[1] Banham reinforced the idea that this longing and aspiration would inspire the architectural imagination of an entire generation. In this same writing, he concludes that science fiction is "a part of the essential education to form the imagination of any technologist."[2]

Stefano Perego (1984) is an architectural photographer based in Milan, Italy. He collaborates frequently with architectural studios as well as artists and is co-author of a book SOVIET ASIA (Modern Soviet Architecture in Central Asia). His strong interest in the architecture of the later 20th century has centered his work Modernism, Brutalism, and Post-Modernism. You can see more of Stefano Perego's work by visiting his website and checking out his Instagram account.

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Futuristic Architecture of the 70s: Photographs of a Modern World with a Twist of Science Fiction - ArchDaily

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The membership of The Wing reads like a Whos Who of the worlds most influential women Alexa Chung, Kerry Washington and Gloria Steinem have all endorsed the female-only club.

When its London branch opened in Fitzrovia last September, it felt like the start of a new movement. It was the first Wing outside of America, where there are 11 clubs, and the event was marked with an evening celebrating the power of women at the ICA. Founder Audrey Gelman, Lena Dunhams best friend who used to work for Hillary Clinton, flew in from New York while heavily pregnant and delivered a speech to a room of women about why she set up the club in the wake of Trumps 2016 election as an antidote to the presidents politics and old boys networks. Gelman wanted the co-working space to be a utopia for women of all definitions, with a library just for womens books and regular talks from female role-models. In the US, speakers included Jennifer Lopez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The London clubhouse is based in a five-storey Edwardian townhouse, decked out in Oliver Bonas-style pastels with millennial pink walls, a checkerboard roof terrace, Peloton bikes and portraits of feminist pin-ups Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Amal Clooney and Michelle Obama on the walls. The annual membership fee is 1,836 (triple that of womens club AllBright in nearby Bloomsbury and more than Soho House), but there are scholarships for those who struggle to afford the fee.

Gelman assembled a crack team to make the London branch a hub. General manager Lucy Harrison was thrilled to be called up. I was besotted by the idea of The Wing, it was full of feminist energy, she says. She has worked in hospitality for 15 years and got the job after a 12-stage interview process.

The Wing: inside London's newest members' club for women

Less than a year later, The Wing is under scrutiny and women in London and the US are cancelling their memberships. There have been claims of misgendering and racism at the club, focusing on a donation that The Wing made to Black Lives Matter that contradicted the way staff felt they had been treated. As these allegations swirled, last month, Gelman resigned, saying it was the right thing for the business and the best way to bring The Wing along into a long overdue era of change. So what has happened at what was supposed to be a feminist utopia?

An Instagram account called Flew the Coup is a window into what some former members of the club and ex-staff feel went wrong. One post on the US operation reads: Our general manager would constantly ask for massages from our Spanish-speaking staff, most of whom spoke very little English. I went to the staff room and found our GM on the floor with her sweatshirt lifted up, no bra, with a Latina worker giving her a massage. There are also posts about the subsidised memberships. One says: I was talked down to by rich white members. One member told another scholarship recipient and myself that we didnt deserve to be there ... she said: I paid for you to be here. Another post raises faux-wokeness, where staff felt unable to raise issues of gender and race.

Among Flew the Coups calls to action is a petition calling for The Wing to match its $200,000 donation made to Black Lives Matter and give it to workers laid off due to Covid, many of whom felt they had been victims of racism. And US staffers claims have sent ripples across the Atlantic. In London, six managers and 30 staff on hourly rates say they have been made redundant and there is uncertainty over when the club will reopen. Since then, many have spoken out about their mistreatment on a mass Slack channel created to replace The Wing apps chat function, which has been paused. Claims include staff feeling bullied, non-English-speaking employees being spoken down to and workers being berated in public.

Gina Martin, who campaigned to make upskirting illegal, was invited to be a founder member of the club but has since asked to have her membership terminated. She never witnessed any mistreatment, but acknowledges it was an exclusive space used primarily by women with money, privilege and a certain level of power, so has every reason to believe those who came forward. She adds: For me, this is a classic example of what happens when you mix feminism (and a type which only benefits white women) and capitalism. It doesnt mix. I didnt want to be part of that anymore. Martin says shes not comfortable with a club claiming to be liberating and championing women if its not all women and marginalised people. You cant just cater to the top echelons and say youre changing the world.

The rooftop of the London outpost of The Wing (The Wing)

The Wing denies all claims against it and a representative says: No one has ever been fired for raising issues of race or pay doing so would be illegal and it has never happened. We have made several public statements about the impact that Covid has had on our business and the resulting layoffs while the company has had no incoming revenue. It says it is addressing issues as a company because it is necessary and overdue. For each of its London employees, The Wing has pre-paid 48 sessions of mental healthcare through Talkspace, an online therapy provider, and every person who has worked there can withdraw a $500 grant if they did not receive one during the earlier round.

We need to reinvent the business in a way that reconciles the real tension between intersectional feminism and capitalism, and reimagine what The Wing looks like in a post-Covid future, a spokeswoman for the company said in a detailed email. We fundamentally believe in The Wings mission even if we havent yet achieved it. We believe we can be a force for anti-racism. We are grateful for the role our team and our members have played in pushing us in that direction.

The email explains that The Wing has a culture code, aimed at creating an inclusive space and dialogue, and the company is elevating leadership from within to create a newly formed office of the CEO, composed of co-founder Lauren Kassan, Celestine Maddy, and Ashley Peterson. The Wing will go on, but we need to tear down the foundations, evolve, and rebuild the way forward ... We are committed to doing this work in order to rebuild The Wing as something that serves not one kind of us, but all of us.

When The Wing launched in 2016, Gelmans mission was clear. We really feel the most powerful way to advance women is to gather them together, she said, telling the story of how she had the idea when she was working in public relations and needed a place to charge her phone between meetings. At the opening of The Wings flagship in New York, she and Kassan hosted a sleepover with pillow fights and a complimentary beauty bar. The application form for The Wing asks prospective members who call each other Wing women or Winglets to describe how they have promoted or supported the advancement of women, then to answer what they think is the biggest challenge facing women today. The organisation quickly gained a paid-up community of 12,000 across seven international outposts thanks to investors including WeWork and AirBnb, and its members duly became the standard-bearers for millennial feminism. There were plans to open a second London outpost, two more in New York and one in Paris.

The Wing co-founder, Audrey Gelman (in pink, centre) with (L - R) Rachel Racusen, Laetitia Gorra, Lucy Harrison, Marianna Martinelli, Zara Rahim, Brittany Halldorson and Giovanna Gray Lockhart (Dave Benett/Getty Images for The Wing)

I think they had the best intentions, says Harrison, who met Gelman and Kassan on Zoom when she was being interviewed. And the media often rushes to blame female founders, but they tried to do too much, too fast. The problem wasnt with them. You need depth and support structures for staff under appearances and The Wing didnt have that, so when problems arose there was no way of dealing with them.

One former London staffer, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that tensions emerged with management early on. I was completely unsupported and had zero contact with line managers or bosses before opening, she says. I was bullied by my boss, despite never having had a warning in my career. The professionalism and procedures just were not there. It feels like Ive been chewed up and spat out after working there. And there was a shroud of secrecy around the allegations that were coming out of the US.

You could definitely sense that there was a hierarchy, says another former member, a Croatian brand strategist, remembering how management staff ignored and spoke down to non-English-speaking cleaners. It felt like you had these tier-A women trying to make the world a different place, and then you still had your staff who are people like my auntie, Croatian, cleaning your toilets. Those two worlds dont match fully.

Founding member Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a social justice advocate, says the US allegations were unsurprising to anyone who paid attention to the class and racial dynamics at the club, while an American member of the London club says The Wings predominantly white management managing people of colour made her feel uncomfortable. The clubs management was restructured six months ago, with five white women put in charge.

The American member says: In the States its really common to have a white front-of-house and a back-of-house thats people of colour, mostly Hispanic, and its absolutely unacceptable. One of the reasons I like living [in London] is that you rarely see that, but at The Wing it felt like I was going back home in a bad way. She recalls staff being berated in public.

Its sad, the Croatian member adds, because The Wing was ultimately a great idea. Women need spaces where they can meet and build connections and grow. The problem is this was built on a completely f***ed up premise of profit and hierarchy and classism. The feminist branding that it tapped into, that all of us are equal, you cant fulfil that if you dont live that. In the end they hurt a lot of people.

Shell be surprised if the club doesnt close. Covid-aside, theres too much damage. None of the London members shes spoken to have had emails since the doors closed in March. Everything was just about the US. I think thats extremely f***ed up, especially if youre building a brand based on membership and this plug of were in it together. At the end of the day it was a tier one, white American experience that they tried to cash in on. I took the bite, but Im out of it.

Though staff and members hope that The Wings overriding mission continues. Audrey Gelman is not excused but what she was trying to do was still admirable, says one. The execution failed. I hope they find a way to make it up to the staff they have wronged.

Here is the original post:

The Wing: how the 'feminist utopia' got it so wrong - Evening Standard

The best thing about social distancing? You have a valid excuse to stay home and read. Of course, some establishments are reopening, and that includes bookstores. Patronize them when you can and remember to wear a mask when you do. You'll want to be safe and courteous as you check out July's bumper crop of new titles.

"Say It Louder!: Black Voters, White Narratives, and Saving Our Democracy," by Tiffany D. Cross (July 6)

Cross is a veteran news analyst whose time on the campaign trail has convinced her that black voters can shape the future of the United States if they are not silenced. She examines the paradox of a system designed to exclude black lives that would not exist without them.

"Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir," by Lacy Crawford (July 7)

Sexually assaulted at 15 by two fellow students at a prestigious prep school, Crawford spent years putting her past behind her. But when she found out she wasn't the only victim, she came forward, only to learn about the extensive and sustained efforts by school leaders to cover up a culture of abuse.

"The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America's Forgotten Capital of Vice," by David Hill (July 7)

Hill, a native of Hot Springs, Ark., takes readers back to the 1930s to '60s, when that city was as rife with gang activity as Las Vegas or Miami. When Owney Madden came to town and decided to open a resort called The Vapors, casinos, brothels and racetracks followed. Hill interweaves this history with first-person accounts, including one from his grandmother.

"Antkind: A Novel," by Charlie Kaufman (July 7)

Once you enter the world of protagonist B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, who has seen a three-month-long film masterpiece that no one else has, you won't be able to extricate yourself until the 700-plus-page novel is finished. Kaufman (the screenwriter of "Being John Malkovich," "Anomalisa" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") crafts a mind-bending fever dream that's also a ripping good read.

"Want: A Novel," by Lynn Steger Strong (July 7)

Despite a PhD, a husband and kids, Elizabeth feels like she's reached a dead end: She's bankrupt and can't find a job in academia, while her husband struggles to get his carpentry business off the ground. But when she reconnects with her childhood friend, Sasha, old patterns resurface alongside an overwhelming desire for complete fulfillment.

"Utopia Avenue: A Novel," by David Mitchell (July 14)

This rock-opera of a book follows Utopia Avenue, a bizarre band whose members include Jasper de Zoet (yes, a descendant of the title character in Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet," set in 17th-century Japan). Mitchell's rich imaginative stews bubble with history and drama, and this time the flavor is a blend of Carnaby Street and Chateau Marmont.

"Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism," by Anne Applebaum (July 21)

Please listen to Applebaum, and not simply because she was previously a columnist at this newspaper. She's been sounding alarm bells about anti-democratic trends in Europe for a long time, and as an acclaimed historian of the Soviet Union (she won a Pulitzer in 2004 for "Gulag: A History"), Applebaum understands how and why authoritarianism takes hold.

"Hamnet: A Novel," by Maggie O'Farrell (July 21)

Imagine that a penniless Latin tutor married to a somewhat wild woman had a son they loved to distraction, who died of a plague. His name was Hamnet and a few years later the tutor would pen a play titled "Hamlet." But that's really as far as O'Farrell goes with the Shakespeare stuff in this brilliant examination of grief and family bonds.

"Afterland: A Novel," by Lauren Beukes (July 28)

Three years after a pandemic known as The Manfall, the world is run by women. Is it a better place? Not for mothers like Cole, who will go to any length to protect her 12-year-old son from a fate as a reproductive resource, sex object or "stand-in son." To evade Cole's sister, mother and son must race across a United States transformed by imbalance and despair.

"Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir," by Natasha Trethewey (July 28)

When a poet writes a memoir, take note. When that poet is Trethewey, former poet laureate of the United States, start reading immediately. The author was 19 when her stepfather shot and killed her mother at their home in Atlanta. While the book grapples with personal pain, its expansion into the societal ills of racism and domestic abuse lifts it to a new level of urgency.

The rest is here:

Ten books to read in July - Albany Times Union

Chris Packhams bid to get the courts to agree to hear a judicial review case against HS2 was heard yesterday andthe judges will give their verdict on it in three weeks.

But during those three weeks, HS2 will trash many more woodlands.

Now is the moment therefore to stand up against HS2,an icon of a dangerous vision of a tech-utopia.The struggle against this projectis conversely an act of facing up to the reality that the actual trajectory of our society is now bound to be non-utopian, given baked-in climate-degradation.

Sacrificed

Ive long been a staunch opponent of HS2. There are so many massive reasons to oppose it:the ecological devastation that building the line is wreaking;the vast slug of carbon that is going into the atmosphere from its construction, and that it is planned to run mainly on fossil power.

These first two considerations alone are enough to make it clear that HS2 makes our situation worse, is incompatible with a 2025 deadline for carbon-zero as called for by Extinction Rebellion.

Consider furthermore its extreme expense. For the same price tag as HS2, you could create perfect Dutch-style or better cycling infrastructure across the entire country, give every British citizen a free bike including free electric bikes for every OAPand still have plenty of money to spare.

Similarly, for a fraction of the money required to build HS2, we could re-open a bunch of old train lines to improve capacity: including the Great Central Main Line.

All this has been sacrificedfor the sake of knocking half an hour off the journey from Birmingham to London.

Lack

The project will also lock in and indeed incentivise unsustainable patterns of long-distance commuting.

This shows plainly that HS2 makes less sense than ever in the post-Covid world: where we can expect a permanent decline in commuting and in in-person business-meetings. HS2 is a white elephant in the era of the hegemony of Zoom! HS2 is old tech, yesterdays news.

At the same time Covid has shown us the true value of community, and of care; it is the beginning of a great relocalisation of our world. HS2 makes no sense in a world that is finally turning the corner on realising that speed and hyper-mobility are not everything, and in fact are not even good things!

But there are some who dont understand why HS2 is opposed by environmentalist organisations such as XR,and the popular naturalist Chris Packham. I think the real reason for that lack of understanding is that they dont understand why XR would oppose a train line asan alternative to planes -havent we got better targets to challenge than HS2?

It has occurred to me, only very recently, that this lack of understanding can be used to explain what XR is nowabout.

Collapse

How XRs emergency-response can and should be heard as a cri de Coeur, now that it is becoming clearer thatthe full post-Covid reset we desperately hoped for is not going to be forthcoming. Sunaks green investment package is dwarfed by his road-building package, let alone by HS2.

The world is already choosing not to reset deeply it is choosing this by, for instance, undertaking substantial polluter-bailouts.

HS2 has therefore just become a perfect target because the world is not about to stabilise. Because the future will be more local: either through choice, or through collapse. We need to make plain the moment that we have reached: one where mega-costly carbon-heavy mega-projects need to go extinct

So Ive suddenly gone from being a staunch opponent of HS2 to seeing the struggle against HS2 as one we must (and now can) win. Because the deepest reason for all of us to oppose HS2 with our bodies and with everything we have got is that such opposition makes clear that we are not signed up to a now-failed vision of a tech-heavy utopia.

A green industrial revolution is not going to save us. Maybe it could have done, a generation ago. But that ship has sailed. And now we are facing civilisational decline, perhaps collapse. Because the virus gave humanity its very last chance to be saved. And humanity said, on balance: no, were not going to be saved. Or at least: this civilisation is not going to be.

Rails

For this post-Covid world, we need to find iconic ways of representing this new story. Beyond a full imagined salvation, beyond that con, into a future where we need to focus on transformative adaptation and indeed on deep adaptation.

The way that groups such as XR most powerfully manifest a story is through actions. It now seems clear therefore that the struggle to stop HS2 takes on new significance. It is totemic for our new story.

HS2 itself tells a story of ultra-heavy-industry, of 2050, of a reformed business as usual at best. HS2 would put us on rails direct toward collapse. The struggle against HS2 tells a story of not being fooled by these tech-fix dreams. It tells our new story of no longer pretending that it is five minutes to midnight, and admitting instead that it is past midnight.

Hope dies; action begins. Pouring ourselves into the struggle to stop HS2 could just be the most powerful non-violent story-manifesting weapon we now have. A truly powerful one.We have the power to stop HS2 -and in the process truly to change the narrative and, if not turn the rising tide, at least stop fuelling it.

In these next three weeks, lets move to save some irreplaceable nature. And if the courts dont rule in Chris Packhams favour then, then the epochal struggle to stop HS2 will come down to Non-Violent Direct Action.See you not in the streets, but in the woods, where the rails would run...

This Author

Professor Rupert Read is a political liaison for Extinction Rebellion.

Read more here:

The struggle to stop HS2 - The Ecologist

Marc Kirschner, the co-

founder of Marquee TV, an arts-

oriented streaming service that launched in February, gets the question all the time: "People have been asking us when we were going to have 'Hamilton.'"

His answer: "Well, if we had 'Hamilton,' we would change our name to The Streaming Platform That Has 'Hamilton.'"

The platform that has Lin-Manuel Miranda's blockbuster is Disney+, which paid about $75 million for the live capture that premiered July 3. (In what surely must be a coincidence, Disney+ has dropped its free trial period.)

While watching theater on a screen now feels a bit weird, live telecasts were common in the late-'40s, 1950s and early 1960s, when programs like Playhouse 90, Studio One and The U.S. Steel Hour displayed the work of the finest playwrights, directors and actors.

Some of them are even streamable. Amazon Prime, for example, offers a 1957 telecast of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, once Broadway's royal couple, starring in "The Great Sebastians."

What about other options? While the state of theater streaming is in perpetual flux, here are answers to the most common questions. Be warned, however, that "Hamilton" is an outlier among Broadway hits.

Q: Where do I find musicals online?

A: There is actually a lot out there. The websites Filmed on Stage and Thespie can help point you to many of them, such as the West End production of "Gypsy," starring Imelda Staunton and available to buy or rent on Amazon, iTunes and YouTube. Musicals are a portion of the long-running PBS Great Performances series, while Netflix lists popular properties as different as "Shrek the Musical" and "Springsteen on Broadway." HBO will present the Spike Lee capture of "David Byrne's American Utopia" later this year.

Q: Aren't there one-stop shops?

A: Yes, and to nobody's surprise the popularity of subscription-based platforms has increased in recent months. The closest thing to a Netflix for theater is BroadwayHD, which has about 300 titles in its catalog, from hits like "Kinky Boots" to vintage nuggets, including Lee J. Cobb reprising his Willy Loman in a 1966 CBS telecast of "Death of a Salesman." The British-American Marquee TV is another service that offers all-you-can-watch for a weekly, monthly or annual fee. (Broadway On Demand is a newcomer in this market, and while its original interview programming seems promising, its high-profile stage offerings are underwhelming so far.)

Q: Why aren't all the big Broadway shows available for streaming?

A: Video recording a show is up to individual producers. They have tended to pass on the opportunity for two main reasons: cost, and the fear that streaming will cannibalize ticket sales. "To do what 'Hamilton' did would require a real outlay of cash from the producers," said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League. That show's three lead producers, who have made fortunes from it, financed the filming themselves; for others, a multicamera investment can be prohibitive.

Q: What about those National Theater and Royal Shakespeare Company captures?

A: Britain and many other European countries got a head start because digital initiatives were made a condition for state funding, to help achieve accessibility, equity and sustainability. "Most countries started with that top-down view of digital, whereas in the United States it's an upside-down approach, which is one reason everything has lagged behind so much here," said Marquee TV's Kirschner.

He also points out that video recording is prohibitively more expensive in America. "To capture a Broadway production costs five to 10 times what it would overseas," he said.

Q: Why can I watch some streams whenever I want but for others I have to log in at a specific time?

A: There are three basic types of streaming. With livestreaming, you watch a show as it unfolds live, usually by buying a ticket or making a donation ahead of time. With scheduled streaming, audience members watch a recording of a show at a specific time. Streaming on demand is either a subscription model la Netflix or timed access where customers buy a ticket and have, say, 48 hours to watch the show.

"Each show we license might have different options," Prignano said. "Some only offer livestreaming, others only offer live and scheduled streaming, etc. If a show has a movie deal or an impending movie deal, it's more difficult to get streaming rights, and it'll be really difficult to get on-demand."

Q: With no Broadway until Jan. 3, at least, will we run out of new material to stream?

A: "We have enough in the pipeline to take us well into next year, when we can start shooting again," said Bonnie Comley, co-founder and co-CEO of Broadway HD.

Producers are also looking at ways to capture shows performed in front of empty or socially distanced houses. Actors' Equity Association is in the process of reviewing pandemic-prompted agreements, including for Zoom shows, that were released in March.

"One was to allow theaters to exhibit online archives of their productions, another to allow producers to do remote work," said Lawrence Lorczak, a senior business representative for the union. "We're in the middle of reviewing the terms for those two to make them more accessible for the producers and theaters."

See original here:

Why can't we stream every Broadway show? - NWAOnline

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more, subscribe to Mother Jones' newsletters.

This piece was originally published in Gristand appears here as part of our Climate Desk Partnership.

The year 2020 seems to be drawn straight from the plot of some discarded dystopian novela book that never got published because it sounded too far-fetched. Not only is there a pandemic to contend with, unemployment nearing levels last seen in the Great Depression, and nationwide protests against police brutality, but its all happening in the same year Americans are supposed to elect a president.

Amid the chaos and tear gas, some people see a chance to scrap everything and start over, a first step toward turning their visions for a better world into reality. In Seattle, protesters in one six-block stretch of Capitol Hill, a neighborhood near downtown, have created a community-run, police-free zone, recently renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP. Its a scene of masked crowds, vibrant signs and street art, a no cop co-op giving away food and supplies, and newly planted community gardens. In Minneapolis, volunteers turned a formerSheraton hotel into a sanctuary offering free food and hotel roomsuntil they got evicted.

Were seeing a new resurgence of utopianism, said Heather Alberro, an associate lecturer of politics at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom who studies radical environmentalists and utopian thought.

Problems like climate change, the widening gap between the rich and everybody else, and racial inequality gives many the sense that theyre living through one giant unprecedented crisis. And these combined disasters create the exact conditions that give rise to all sorts of expressions of utopian thinking, Alberro said. From broad ideas like the Green New Dealthe climate-jobs-justice package popularized by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezto Seattles autonomous zone, people are offering up new plans for how the world could operate. Whether they came from literature or real-life experiments, these idealistic efforts can spur wider cultural and political change, even if they falter.

Based on President Donald Trumps tweets about Seattles CHOP (or Fox News websitesphotoshoppedcoverage of the protest) youd picture pure chaos, with buildings afire and protesters running amok. The reality was more like peoplesitting around in a park, screening movies like13th, and making art. Its a serious protest too, with crowds gathered for talks about racism and police brutality in front of an abandoned police precinct. The protestersdemandsinclude abolishing the Seattle Police Department, removing cops from schools, abolishing juvenile detention, and giving reparations to victims of police violence.

The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone #CHAZ is not a lawless wasteland of anarchist insurrectionit is a peaceful expression of our communitys collective grief and their desire to build a better world, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan tweetedlast week.

The protest zone goes by many names: Originally called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, it was later rebranded as CHOP. The barricaded area, which spans from Cal Anderson Park into nearby streets, is part campground, part block party. Tourists wander through, snapping photos of the street art.

A week earlier, protests in Cal Anderson Park, sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, were met by police officers spraying rubber bullets, mace, and tear gas. Then, last week, the police abandoned the area, and the protesters declared it their own, turning the Seattle Police Department into the Seattle People Department with a bit of spray paint.

The CHAZ follows along historyof anti-capitalist experiments that reimagined the way the world was run. In 1871, the people of Paris, sick of oppression, rose up to take control of their city for a two-month stint. TheParis Communecanceled debt, suspended rent, and abolished the police, filling the streets with festivals. The French government soon quashed their experiment, massacring tens of thousands of Parisians in The Bloody Week. Even though it was short-lived, the Paris Commune inspired revolutionary movements for the next 150 years.

In 2011, Occupy Wall Street protestors took over New York Citys Zuccotti Park for two months to highlight the problems of income inequality. Their encampment offered free food, lectures, books, and wide-ranging discussions. The radical movement ended up changing the way Americans talked, giving them anew vocabularythe 99 percent and 1 percentand its concerns about income inequality went on to mold the prioritiesof the Democratic Party.

Alberro compared Seattles CHOP to a community of 300 environmental activists in western France who set up camp at a site earmarked for a controversial new airport starting in 2008. One of manyZADs (zones dfendre) that have sprung up in France, the community ended up being not just a place to protest the airport, but to take a stand against what protesters saw as the underlying problemscapitalism, inequality, and environmental destruction. (The government ended up shelving plans for the airport in 2018). The point of these autonomous zones is not only to create these micro exemplars of better worlds, Alberro said, but also to physically halt present forces of destructionwhether thats an airport or, in the case of Capitol Hill, how police treat black people.

Seattle has alengthyhistoryof occupations and political demonstrations tracing back to theSeattle General Strikein the early 1900s. The Civil Rights era brought sit-ins and marches. Indigenous protesters occupied an old military fort in 1970 and negotiated with the city to get 20 acres of Discovery Park. Two years later, activists occupied an abandoned elementary school in Beacon Hill, demanding that it be turned into a community center (nowEl Centro de la Raza).

And it might not be a coincidence that the new protest zone appeared on the West Coast, often portrayed in literature as an ideal place to set up utopian communities, Alberro said. For instance, the bookEcotopia, published in 1975 by Ernest Callenbach, depicted a green societycomplete with high-speed magnetic-levitation trains!formed when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States. The book went on to become a cult novel, influencing the environmental movements focus on local food, public transportation, and renewable energy.

Ecotopiaisnt exactly an ideal parallel for the current wave of protests, as its utopia was white. Callenbach envisioned a segregated society where black people opted to live in the less affluent Soul City. Still, its apparent that some of its other messages live on. Alberro has talked to many radical environmental protesters for her research, and most of them havent read any of the green utopian books she asks about. But they repeat some of the ideas and phrases from that literature nearly word for word when describing the changes they want to see in the world.

Though Seattles protest zone is focused on racial oppression, not environmental destruction, Alberro sees a similar impulse behind all these projects. Many activists would argue that its all part of the same struggle, she said, arguing that people cant successfully take on environmental issues without addressing racism and other socioeconomic problems. There seems to be a cultural atmosphere that molds these different movements, even though they often dont come into contact with one another.

Read the original post:

2020 Is a Disaster. Some People See a Chance to Scrap Everything and Start Over. - Mother Jones