"The wheel is turning right now"

It was so fun to chat with Alexis Madrigal this week, to hear about our book of the month, The Pacific Circuit, and discuss everything that went into writing it. 

We covered a lot of ground over the course of an hour: the rebuilding of America’s cities; how hard it is to learn what your subjects know; the important role the Korean War played in shaping 21st century life… and yet somehow we still left lots on the table.

Still, if you’ve ever wondered whether or not to blame your mayor for the bad stuff in your city (maybe, yes, but also…) or worried that life has become too complicated, or considered how we might go about building and rebuilding our own communities then this might be a good one for you.

Added bonus: in passing he recommended a lot of books that I immediately want to go read.

Here’s an edited version of our chat.

Bobbie: As I wrote before, at first I found the book overwhelming. It felt so full of stuff, so full of all these different elements, that I struggled to keep up at first. It felt like all your obsessions crammed into one place. But then once I settled in, it came together. 

And always at the center is Oakland, West Oakland, this area you cover in detail. Did you always know this was a book about West Oakland, about these specific people?

Alexis: I am very jealous of books that have very narrow scope. I was jealous of that in my first book, which was just about the history of renewable energy: I was sort of like ‘Ah, but I’ve got to cover this kind of solar and that kind of solar and wind power.” So this time, I was like, OK, I got it. Ten years ago. I was like, I'm just gonna write a book just about this little stretch of Seventh Street in West Oakland. This is how I'm going to scope down massively: I'm just going to write about this little area which I know is super interesting, and I know some details about why it's interesting. I know some people there, and everything will pass through this little spot. 

But of course, what was interesting about that place was that it's this intersection of so many things. It's where Huey Newton got in the gun battle that made the Black Panthers a global phenomenon. It's where one of the first attempts at automation via the post office gets going. It's where the BART [the Bay Area’s rail network] and the regional dreams of San Francisco are most contested. It's also the Port of Oakland and the rise of container shipping. And of course, it's also a place that is one the many ground zeroes of the financial crisis and mass gentrification of the 21st Century. 

So I knew going in that this place was interesting for a reason. 

How unique is this story to Oakland, though? And how much of it is a universal experience?

What was surprising was how much each of those factors did, in fact, contribute to the life of this neighborhood. It just made me realize that modern society is so complicated that essentially, you could do a version of this for any place. It wouldn't have all the same characters, it wouldn't have all the same features, but it would have its own set of characters and features. 

One of my goals with the book was to stop having people think that what's happening on their block is the mayor's fault exclusively. The mayor may or may not suck, but that's not where most of the action is. In today's world all of these forces at all the different geographical, governmental, social, technological realms are all pressing on everywhere, all at once. You know, that's why the world is so confusing. And it's also why I think if we don't know the histories of particular places, it just feels like you're moving through like a haunted world where things are moving and you don't know why or how. 

There’s so much specific local history in the book. How much did you know about it going in, and how much did you have to discover along the way?

I knew the container shipping story, the Panther story, just the raw proximity… I knew that those things were real. I didn't know the details of the destruction of this neighborhood as a thriving commercial corridor: I didn't know the detail and the texture of it all, but I knew the outlines and I knew that it was a deeply meaningful place—for Black Oakland particularly, but all of Oakland. With a book like this, you're never going to know all the texture and detail, and you have to fill in so much of that kind of work and research. 

But if I go back to my earliest recordings with Miss Margaret, who's sort of the central character, this environmental justice leader, a very charismatic, tenacious, difficult personality, I knew from literally the first couple hours of talking with her the kind of general outlines of most of the story. Then it was more about almost like translating the shorthand that she was using to talk about all these different things, to spell all that out, to document it, to go into all these different institutions, whether they were libraries, archives, other people's minds, and pull those things out and document, you know? Get the receipts for the neighborhood. That was really the first four or five years of work on the book: just trying to get to zero on what Miss Margaret already knew at the beginning.

One thing that surprised me was the predictions and insights made by the Black Panthers. I know a little bit about them, but I didn’t know that they had these particular viewpoints on technology.

So there's this essay that Huey Newton writes in the early 70s called “The Technology Question.” The Panthers have sort of evolved away from a more traditional Maoist-Marxist kind of organization. They've retrenched to Oakland and Huey has been through all kinds of legal troubles and other things. 

He's reconceptualizing the underlying philosophy of the Panthers, and he comes up with this thing he calls intercommunalism, which basically says the nation state has more or less been attenuated, replaced by a US-centered corporate empire, and that corporate empire no longer cares about occupying territories—what it cares about is selling to people as consumers and using the labor of these people to continue to sort of enhance the sort of technological society that then continues to reproduce itself. 

He calls that version of it reactionary intercommunalism, and he proposes that the opposition could be revolutionary intercommunalism, which would—city by city, basically—see a local, enlightened populace, become a network of marginalized people. Maybe it begins with Black people in Oakland, but also he’s looking at Chinese people in Hong Kong, who are then under British imperial rule. Maybe it would be people around the world. He mentions all kinds of folks who could be brought into that coalition. 

And he made one really crucial observation, which is about the way supply chains were developing. He's specifically looking at the way that Silicon Valley was working, and that they were making it very difficult to see the ethics of what anybody was doing with their life. For those who don’t know, this is just a quick Silicon Valley history: transistors were massively supported both by the Department of Defense as well as our space program, and so the early customers for many transistors are either NASA or it's our Department of Defense's like intercontinental ballistic missiles. 

So at one point he says that transistors are part of this war machine that is very clear to people at that time in the Bay Area. On the other hand, you're not building a missile, you're building a transistor. The fact that you developed all these supply chains that made it possible for us to obscure the ethics of modern society, and what it was and who was extracting from, and who would be on the receiving end of prospective violence as a result of the supply chains. 

To me, that was like a really brilliant set of observations about how the modern world was changing. I had read much later theoreticians about this stuff, you know, people who are writing in the anti globalization movement of the 90s and 2000s, who are basically saying the same thing, but in less interesting ways. That one that was that, to me, it was one of my favorite finds in the whole book. 

How does that all come together today? What does it mean for West Oakland, for any city, really? We’re seeing all those movements and ideas that were planted years ago happening in our lives today.

People don't realize how hard I think it has gotten to run the basic institutions of social and civic life in a city. It's tough. Right as the book was coming out, Oakland had gotten this Conde Nast Traveler thing of “best food city in the world.” [Actually a readers’ choice award for best food city in America.] I know a lot of restaurateurs in the city, and they're like “we can barely fucking survive.” So what are we talking about here? 

You have this detachment between the kind of the goods that people want from urban life—they want great places to go see friends and see shows and all this stuff—and what it's actually possible to provide, precisely because so many of our needs can be fulfilled within this app economy. We've forgotten that we need these other set of rails over here, which are the actual city itself. 

The resilience of that system, of commercial city life, has gone down and down and down and down, and the pandemic wiped out an even bigger chunk of it. So now you have this space where—even in a resurgent kind of Bay Area where AI investment is booming, and there's a new round of nerdy kids who are moving in and all that—we're no longer independent. There's so much empty urban space, where no one can afford to make a business run there. 

If you can make a business run there, it's a luxury restaurant, or it's a personal trainer charges everybody $200 an hour. The things that you can actually provide are only luxury goods, and yet everyone still lives in the city… and so it forces you even more back to your phone.

I wrote about this in a recent newsletter—that even you are not immune to this, right? There’s one passage where you meet some Filipino sailors who are talking to you about their experiences, and you bring them a shopping list of the stuff they’re looking for… but you’re still buying it all from Amazon.

It's been very frightening to me to think about what if all these things that I love about this place truly do go away because no one can afford to do it anymore. Even things that I think are totally brilliant and wonderful, like the pop-up scene… it goes back further than the pandemic, but it explodes during the pandemic. I've come to realize that the reason the pop-up scene is so hot is because none of the young chefs can ever afford to open a fucking restaurant. 

Which is such a bummer. You have all these people who are so committed and good and want to do it, and people want to eat their food, but they can't. Where are they going to get $250,000 to outfit a new restaurant and then move in? Nobody is able to do that, except for these big restaurant groups and national chains and all this stuff. And so instead, somebody gets a foothold, like Tacos Oscar on 40th, and then they just host all their young friends who make the rent. So even the exciting things are kind of signs of this, like, deeper problem that we have with our urban space.

And again, this is not just an Oakland issue. This is a modern issue.

Brian Goldstone wrote a great book called There's No Place For Us. It's about homeless people in Atlanta. And to your point, what really struck me about that book… our laws are better here [in California] around all kinds of stuff, but the core mechanics of income to rent, especially for poor people in this country, are so bad that it swamps many of the protections that people have. Even in the most liberal city you cannot make up for it, even though a lot of the dynamics that are being experienced in downtown Atlanta right now—a red state, different demographics, much, much, much cheaper housing, but also much, much lower incomes—are different. 

He pointed out that there's not a single metro area in the United States where two people making minimum wage can afford two bedroom apartment, and so if you're a family and you're both minimum wage, there isn't a single place where you can actually do that. That just wasn't true in the past. The world is worse in this respect; it wasn't as bad in the past. 

I think that's one thing that's been really difficult for a lot of older folks—older than millennial, let's call it—to kind of wrap their heads around: That really this housing problem is so bad that it is essentially a tax on everything else in society. It’s the other thing that's driving this stuff, aside from profitable business being hived off by the internet thereby leaving brick and mortar places kind of screwed. It's both those things working together, that is, that has really made things so difficult.

The Pacific Circuit really lays out this idea that many of us “know” but haven’t quite internalized—that the United States really used war and money to force many Asian countries to be, essentially, vassal states that would drive the US economy.

Where the scales really fell off my eyes was the Korean War. People often call it “The Forgotten War” but of course, millions died in the war. I mean, we bombed it to hell. There were no buildings standing in a decent chunk of North Korean cities. MacArthur, a World War II general, basically says “this is the worst shit I've ever seen in my life.” This was just an absolutely brutal, terrible war, and on top of it it was preceded by a purging of the left in what we now call South Korea, largely to make Korea a capitalist state that could then be used by American companies for production. 

Thanks to Margaret O'Mara's book (which is amazing) called The Code about Silicon Valley—a wonderful one-volume history of the technology industry—which really put me on to the idea that the Korean War is really what makes Silicon Valley take off. It plows so much money into Stanford and its associated ecosystem. 

And this is the policy of the United States. And in Malaysia and Indonesia and all these places, they're also saying “you must be good workers, so that American companies will come here—and so we're going to brutally repress labor unions and any other kind of work on organizing that might happen, because this is sort of the deal we have with the United States.” 

You know, I knew some of that story: my dad is from Mexico, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about maquiladora plants [factories that aren’t subject to normal transnational tariffs]. I still remember the first conversation I had about them with my dad when I was nine years old. Like, the idea of all these plants along the border, and was it good for the country? Was it bad for the country? How could that be used? I truly have such a distinct memory of talking with my dad about this stuff in 1991. So clearly this has been a thing I've been thinking about for a long time. 

I think what I didn't get into in the book—and I wish I had gotten into it in greater depth, but it was one step too far, it didn't actually touch back on Seventh Street—was how many of those Asian economies used that investment to change themselves. But not all of them. There's a whole other book to be written about why were some Asian states able to take that American investment and turn themselves into a Taiwan or a South Korea, and why did the same thing not exactly happen for a Malaysia or an Indonesia, or some of these other places. I would love to read that book, because there's a whole story to it, and I got bits and pieces of it along the way.

The wheel is turning right now, American control over these places. This moment right now around Taiwan is where we really see: is this place still fundamentally controlled by the United States, and therefore we consider it like a friendly ally and therefore we're going to protect it from the Chinese because they produce all our semiconductors? Or are we going to try and somehow onshore all that stuff and leave the Taiwanese hanging out to dry? The very era that this book kind of covers is coming to an end around Taiwan, to that sense of what American power looks like in Asia. I wish it was like a happier end. 

Can we see turning points when they arrive? What are we seeing now?

It'll be really interesting to see the long term impacts of the tariffs, not just the tariffs alone, but the whole complex of rhetoric and negotiation. Those things were kind of an attempt to break the Pacific circuit. 

An interesting thing I’ve been tracking is the way that it didn't actually seem to do anything, which is kind of a shocker. It did nothing to the stock market: trade went massively up ahead of the tariffs, and then dropped, and now it's sort of stabilized. So we did all this shit, and then what happened? Maybe in the long term, it does do something, and there's some mantra, but it in the immediate aftermath it seems like the system snapped back into place and is cranking away. 

This new iPhone, you know, just came out. It's still rolling. So to me, that would be on the Huey Newton side of the ledger to say maybe nation states don't matter as much as we thought. Or at least the American style nation state, not a communist party-style nation state. So I think that is a turning point. 

As it relates directly to the technology industry, I do feel like there's a moment coming, and we technology writers have been writing about it for a long time: You and I both know this, that the melting of reality is a real thing. As AI becomes ever more sort of ubiquitous, and tools easier to use, and all these things that are happening, my money is on the idea that people will find new value in turning their screen off and going outside, because, you know, it's real. It's a real thing that you're dealing with right in front of you. And I just think that is a new value proposition for local shit that didn't exist five years ago, and it’s a pretty big one. 

Knowing that you're talking with an actual human being, versus not—for people who care about that—is going to be a really powerful draw. I’m hoping that it sends people back out into the streets a little bit, particularly in places that have enough density. I think we might be quite close to that turning point. 

That gets onto one of your new projects. Because you’re trying to alter this yourself, right? You have a new community space in Oakland opening up called Local Economy.

With my wife, Sarah Rich, we decided that we wanted to open up some kind of community space. There’s a great bookstore called East Bay Booksellers—one of the great bookstores in the Bay Area… we have so many, but this one is mine—and a space opened up literally next door. And we looked at the space. 

We are very close with our block, with a crew of people who have had these dinners on Monday nights for years, and so we have done a lot of different community building stuff in our own sort of personal lives and our hyperlocal space. But we were like, what if we were able to open a space that would be membership-supported, so that instead of trying to make a third space survive on the transaction revenue of retail or cafe, instead, you pay monthly dues—like an old Italian social club or something. There's a long tradition of them in Oakland that specifically say we make the space, we put on events, we open it up and we make sure that there's interesting things happening there.

And, and there has just been tremendous support for it, like crazy. We thought we might have 100 or 150 members when we opened. We are opening on October 1 and we have 250 people who are members already, and we have 350 people on a waitlist because we're not sure how big the space is going to be when we open it. And, you know, we have tons of events that are all filling up with people. 

And it's fascinating, the hunger for it. There's such a hunger for this stuff, and there's also not many channels for it. So if we can be a conduit for that, I think it really helps battle the isolation that people feel. I'm very excited about it. I have mild regrets about my, like, sleep schedule and things like that, but doing the space or trying to build this thing… it feels like the right thing to do.

OK, last question. What are some books that inspired you in writing The Pacific Circuit?

I have a few, is that OK? One amazing book that I think has important things to say about our current moment, particularly as it relates to Gaza and all these things, is Black Against Empire [by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin] which is about the Panthers, but it's about how the Panthers movement built by latching on to anti-Vietnam War sentiment… that is a really, really interesting book. It's impeccably sourced on the origins of the Panthers, and particularly the period before I'm all that interested in them, the very beginnings of the Panthers, totally worth reading. 

Another book that really inspired me, that is, I think, one of the top 10 books of the last 50 years, is Evicted by Matthew Desmond. It’s sitting on top of his academic research, but it’s the fit of storytelling and writing with rigor, and an argument about the way that evictions were themselves a driver of poverty and instability, and that evictions were also racially structured. That book is essentially perfect. One thing about doing Forum, the radio show I host, is that I read a lot of non-fiction books. And many of them are very good, but very few of them are perfect. Evicted is perfect. It's so, so rare to run across a book that is like that.

I guess we didn't talk that much about this today, but there's a lot in the book about it—about the way that kind of real estate finance has structured opportunities for black people in America. For that there are two books that I think are really significant.

One is called A Nation of Realtors, which is all about how American capitalism turns every person into someone who knows too much about real estate—and it doesn't have to be that way. The other is really, really important, I think maybe the most important book that I read in the course of writing The Pacific Circuit.

It’s called American Apartheid, and the reason why it's so important is it was written by two sociologists, Massey and Denton, and it really shows that segregation of black people is so far beyond segregation of any other people in the history of the United States. It’s just not even close… and I think the repercussions of that are essentially the sundering of the country. We, as a nation, segregated black people in ways that created horrible divisions, inequalities, and any effort to rectify those things causes massive reactionary backlash. I don't have an answer for that one at all, but I just think it's worth reading, chapter and verse, what it was really like in the late 20th century, and having someone do this statistical work so you can really just know it in your bones.

⌘

Thanks so much to Alexis (and to you, if you made it to the end of our conversation.)

I’ll be back next week with news of our October book of the month, which is a fun look at something totally different.

Onwards

Bobbie