Reimagining Technopolitical Futures: Building Alternatives in the Present
A workshop with Luis Felipe R. Murillo, Erin McElroy, and Paul Schweizer (Moderated by Peter Maravelis / City Lights)
Date and time
Location
Gray Area / Grand Theater
2665 Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94110Refund Policy
About this event
- Event lasts 2 hours 30 minutes
City Lights and Gray Area present
Reimagining Technopolitical Futures: Building Alternatives in the Present - A Workshop
with Luis Felipe R. Murillo, Erin McElroy, and 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
Free to the public - Seating limited - Registration Required
A looming sense of crisis is casting our present to test, our past to deep questioning, and our collective futures as an impossibility. Crises compound and multiply across social, technical, ecological, and political dimensions, making it very difficult for us to find common ground and purpose in a common planet. This is all happening while tech companies from Silicon Valley concentrate unprecedented wealth, infrastructural, and political power.
What if the unfolding crises are, first and foremost, byproducts of a crisis of political imagination? What if this impossibility to think, act, and respond politically, technically, and ecologically beyond markets and States is at the source of our incapacity to create and 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 and developing and utilizing the imagination in service of their activism and 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, and Paul Schweizer will discuss the trajectories of their work and how their research intersects the histories and practices of collective political struggles.
---10 minute Break---
2:10 pm - Methods and Practice
Each of the speakers will explore constructive technical and political strategies. Participants will be encouraged to discuss their experiences in processes of positive political, technical and ecological change. The session will also offer suggestions of how community building works and 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 and 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" and "Beyond Molotovs". We invite you to discuss with us how the three books challenge us to think with common technical and political alternatives for a common planet:
- "Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures "
https://www.sup.org/books/anthropology/common-circuits
- "Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times "
https://www.dukeupress.edu/silicon-valley-imperialism
- "Beyond Molotovs: A Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Strategies"
City Lights will be on hand to sell copies of the books.
About the participants:
Luis Felipe R. Murillo is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at University of Notre Dame and author of "Common Circuits: Hacking Alternative Technological Futures." His work is dedicated to the exploration of the intersections between anthropology, computing, and politics.
Erin McElroy is Assistant Professor in Geography at University of Washington, author of "Silicon Valley Imperialism" and co-editor of "Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance." At UW, McElroy runs the Anti-Eviction Lab, where much of the student and community partner driven research focuses upon Landlord Tech Watch—a platform dedicated to producing collective knowledge about landlord-driven data grabbing and algorithmic techniques.
Paul Schweizer is a geographer and 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 and 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" and point us to brighter, innovative horizons. A digital world in relentless movement—from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing—has been captured and reinvented as a monoculture by Silicon Valley "big tech" and 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, and 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 and biographical sketches of hackers who participate in them, Murillo describes the social and technical conditions that allowed for the creation of community projects such as anonymity and privacy networks to counter mass surveillance; community-made monitoring devices to measure radioactive contamination; and 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.
——————
Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and 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, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Romania and the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley technocapitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents, and generates extreme income inequality in order to expand its reach. In Romania, dreams of privatization updated fascist and anti-Roma pasts and socialist-era underground computing practices. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways Romanians are resisting Silicon Valley capitalist logics, where anticapitalist and anti-imperialist activists and 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 and geographic growth.
——————
Beyond Molotovs – A Visual Handbook of Anti-Authoritarian Strategies
Edited by International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies and kollektiv orangotango
Published by transcript / distributed 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, and scholars from around the world, focusing on the sensuous and emotional dimension of their strategies. From the collective art and aesthetics of feminist movements in India, Iran, Mexico, and Poland, to sewing collectives, subversive internet art in Hong Kong, and even anti-authoritarian board games, the contributions open new perspectives on moments of resistance, subversion, and creation. Indeed, the handbook itself is a work of anti-authoritarian art.
The editors behind the »International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies« and »kollektiv orangotango« are: Aurel Eschmann, Börries Nehe, Nico Baumgarten, Paul Schweizer, Severin Halder, Ailynn Torres Santana, Inés Duràn Matute, and Julieta Mira.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation