By Daniel Burton-Rose

OF ALL SAN Francisco's visionaries, Chris Carlsson has the most comprehensive grasp of the city's peculiarities and potential. As an organizer, he's a hub around which the city's dissident communities rotate. As an editor and writer, he cogently illuminates San Francisco's past, present, and future.

Carlsson's biography reads like a bibliography. For more than 20 years, he coproduced Processed World, a journal that sought to direct white-collar anomie against capital itself. He coedited Reclaiming San Francisco, a powerful invocation of the ghosts of opulent oligarchs and the community campaigns that complicated their desires, and with collaborators he compiled Shaping San Francisco's complimentary CD-ROM that preserves a dazzling array of local history in an interactive digital format. An original member of Critical Mass, the bicycling conspiracy that has been clogging downtown traffic for more than a decade to protest car culture and seize public space, Carlsson assembled Critical Mass: Bicycling's Defiant Celebration as a tribute to this now global phenomenon. His most recent books are After the Deluge, a utopian novel set in 22nd-century San Francisco, and The Political Edge, a collection of diverse perspectives on the implications of the oddball coalitions of Matt Gonzalez's insurgent mayoral campaign.

The common thread throughout this prodigious output? The inquiry "Why is life so inadequate when we are so creative?" and a celebration of everyone who fulfills their potential by refusing to accommodate banality and despair.

Bay Guardian: Many lovers of literature are rightfully wary of fiction that appears to favor political vision over insights into the human spirit. Regarding After the Deluge, can you reassure us?

Chris Carlsson: There isn't a preponderant focus on the psychological development of characters, but there are individuals who will keep you moving through this depiction of a transformed urban environment. The primary character arc, if you're cognizant of the city's past and live in it presently, is that of the city.

BG: How did your intimate knowledge of San Francisco's past inform this extrapolation into the future?

CC: I have a strong sense of the underlying ecology of the city. The future city is one in which nature has reemerged. The human beings that live there have figured out that it's a lot easier to live and work with nature than to combat it. The biological infrastructure in this future vision comes out of the biotech boom which is currently taking place. I'm not in favor of it politically – it's a disaster. But I don't think we can stop them. Our best hope is that we can find ways of diverting these developments to our own purposes.

The other piece is San Francisco's culture of creative dissent. The city flatters itself that this has always been here, but because it does so, it keeps attracting people who come with dissent as their mission. This will carry on for the city's life – it's part of what made this city and continues to define it.

BG: The Political Edge, which you edited, is a broad survey of pockets of dissent in the city, visible through the lens of the Gonzalez mayoral campaign. What conclusions do you reach about the possibility of these forces coalescing to change local structures of power?

CC: I'm pretty skeptical of elections as arenas in which to do politics. I'm frustrated that we live in a culture in which the definition of politics is elections and candidacies. There's an absence of critical thinking about all the political moments we live through day-to-day; it's in the everyday politics that I see a basis for something new to come forward. Gonzalez functioned as Reagan did in his milieu: as a cultural signifier. You could recognize that he's one of you, because of certain winking and nodding and cultural references, without him having a clear program. I don't think you can win without a presentation of how much better life can be, and a clear vision of how to bring this about.

BG: Beyond an autopsy of the campaign, what does the book offer?

CC: It was obvious to me that if we didn't deal in depth with the issues raised in campaign, it would quickly be remembered as something it wasn't. The book is a presentation of the complicated reflections of people who'd always had a disdain for electoral politics and then found themselves involved in them. It also argues for a notion of politics broader than cyclical elections and candidacies. There were other pieces that ought to have been discussed in a progressive election campaign – be it the existence of the Green Party's ecological agenda or the displacement of the black community in the city – but were not. Bringing them out in the book gives us a chance to start thinking about the problems of representation and the possibilities of a comprehensive citizens' campaign to improve our lives.

BG: Which brings us back to utopias. Why is it important to create such idealistic visions?

CC: In dark times like the ones we're living through, it's important to be able to imagine another way of life. It's difficult to do, especially when the media repeats ad nauseam that this is the best of all possible worlds – if you imagine change, it can only be for the worse. It is incumbent on radicals to discuss change as a positive vision, an exciting alternative to the world as it is, so as to invite people to improve our lives together. It's pretty easy to see positive things in one's own daily life – a community garden or a bicycle project – but it's difficult to have a larger vision. These examples of human cooperation and common sense, however, can be used as a basis of a completely different way of organizing life. This would entail abolishing what is currently called "the economy": the buying and selling of human time.

A lot of us get very glib when we do finally get around to having a conversation about the world we want to live in. We can get rid of a lot of what we want to get rid of. Our volition can take care of many things. But it won't take care of everything. The difficult problems will need to be continually worked out.

BG: In After the Deluge you leave ambiguous the means by which this ideal world came about.

CC: The point of departure for the project was: I cannot start with the premise of scarcity and hardship. I want to start with a premise of abundance and ease. That sets it apart from every utopian novel I've ever read, whether it's Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed or Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. Beyond that, I didn't want to dogmatically describe a certain series of events, as if to say that if they were properly implemented we could have the world we'd like. Instead, I stick to some individual stories and, through them, give an idea of what's taken place. The backstory is a huge die-off.

BG: Do the principles you advocate require a die-off to be put into practice?

CC: No. I use it as a mechanism of delegitimization for the previous order. I do think it likely that there will be cataclysmic events out of control of the powers that be which will cause the larger edifice of oppression and stupidity that organizes the planet today to crumble away. The world ready to burst forth at that moment is one in which people take care of one another in a simply human way.

BG: You just put out the final issue of Processed World, a collaborative journal that has spanned a quarter century. What insights do you have from that experience?

CC: Processed World is about the great public secret of work: how dumb our jobs are compared to our own intelligence. It was founded on the dichotomy between what you do to pay the bills and what you would do if you were free to be a completely creative and engaged human being. Those things are almost always light-years apart.

The crucial missing element in our society is horizontal channels of communication. Processed World created a forum which doubled as an organizing project in the white-collar sector. We wanted to disrupt capital at its point of circulation: the places where people handled paperwork about property and money. Instead of promoting an AFL-CIO trade union, which is about fixing this moment in history to preserve a particular job forever, we pursued the impulse of those with an affirmative life purpose, because they had interests and identities outside the office. Organization took place around being stuck in the office. We shared sabotage and time-theft techniques, with the conscious idea [that] we're doing humanity a favor by diverting a company's resources from commodity production to our own creativity.

Chris Carlsson speaks June 1, 6:30 p.m., Potrero Branch Library, 1616 20th St., S.F. Free. (415) 355-2822. After the Deluge can be downloaded as a pdf free of charge at www.fullenjoymentbooks.com.