SFBG: Yes, I noticed that you specifically mentioned self-empowerment through learning to use technology several times in the book -- for example, when you were talking about the biofuel movement, or the bike builders. Nowtopia’s pragmatic approach to technology is reminiscent of the Whole Earth Catalog. Do you consider your book to be a direct descendant?
CC: Yeah, there’s clearly a heritage there with the Whole Earth Catalog. But I also refer to Fred Turner’s brilliant book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, which talks about the split in the 1960’s between the “New Communalists” – the back-to-the-land types represented by the catalog and the rest of the environmental movement. I think the New Communalists established the approach I talk about now. But Turner also critiques them for turning away from organized politics and for thinking they can solve the problems of the world with their own lifestyle choices. With this approach you just end up with “green” products, like the Apple computer.

SFBG: Nowtopia feels very optimistic, not just because it highlights practical work that people already do to build a better world, but because of this stance on technology. Is this optimism that people can change their world a direct challenge to anti-civilizationists like Derick Jensen and John Zerzan, who have gained such popularity during the Bush years?
CC: I think that anti-civilizationists are on the wane, and I hope that this book will help drive a couple more nails in the coffin. There’s always despair, of course, that things can’t change, or that a nuclear bomb or global warming will destroy the human race. But anti-civilization seems to say, “Bring it on!” I can’t understand that, because I want to live well. I want to enjoy life! There’s an anti-human stance with the anti-civilizationists that says that everything humans do will always be wrong for the Earth and that we need to return to a pre-civilization wilderness. With this book, though, I show that the tinkering people do with technology can actually be quite good at finding solutions to environmental problems.

SFBG: But the tinkering that the Whole Earth Catalog advocated seems to have mostly led us to Apple Computer, Patagonia Fleece – products that have turned environmentalism or utopian thinking into an aesthetic. How can the movements you talk about in Nowtopia escape cooptation by capital?
CC: Well, that is the big task ahead, because besides these specific products you mention, there is the larger philosophy that comes from Whole Earth Catalog that you can solve society’s problems by shopping well. The main difference is that I try to show that change is a result of PRODUCING and not consuming. The people who are farming vacant-lots or running bike programs in Nowtopia are CREATING something together outside of the workplace. Now, I don’t know what to do tomorrow except to keep building these relationships that escape the logic of remuneration for work.
The point is, I don’t have to exhort people to do anything. People are already taking their time and skills outside of the marketplace because it is interesting to them. Now, to go to a society based entirely on these Nowtopian moments is hard and would come after a long discussion.

SFBG: After a long discussion, or after a long, violent revolution?
CC: When I write my prequel to After the Deluge I’ll let you know! I don’t know… I imagine that some force would be required, yet I think when things turn violent, everyone loses. You have to escape that paradigm the way that Critical Mass was able to escape the paradigm of protest, because it was about the pleasure of being together with people and reinhabiting the urban space on a new basis. Part of the point of Nowtopia is that the time is now to rethink revolution.

SFBG: So, could Nowtopia be seen in some ways as the prequel to the post-economic utopia you fictionalized in After the Deluge? Are the seeds of the future world all there?
CC: Nowtopia is the prequel to the prequel. It’s the best I could do to show what is happening now and a potential way out of this quagmire. After the Deluge takes place 150 years in the future, so it’s a long way off. But I am working on a real prequel. It’s called When Shells Crumble. In it, I want to take lessons from the Iranian Revolution, the Paris Commune…I want to look at how authority disintegrates. Authority is tenuous at all times but in times of crises, like after an earthquake or economic collapse or some crisis of legitimacy, it can fall apart completely. As that happens, human relations based on mutual aid assert themselves, because they are always there underneath.

SFBG: As a historian and as a utopian thinker, did you think After the Deluge was a likely future or a very wishful future?
CC: I can’t say it is likely, because the realistic side of me won’t go there. But it’s not impossible, and part of the point is that it is at least plausible. The human characters are recognizable and the parts of life that are unpleasant are still there. But what happens when you take the buying and selling of human labor out of the world? Then it becomes interesting. Part of the reason I wrote it, really, was to answer the question, “What do you WANT?” because people always say, “You’re a good critic but what do you WANT the world to be like?”

SFBG: Well, what is the single most important thing that you want to be done to radically change the world we live in right now?
CC: I’d eliminate the buying and selling of human time. That’s the question I pose in After the Deluge: What would you do if you could do whatever you wanted to do when you woke up every morning?

SFBG: Good question. What would YOU do?
CC: I’m already doing it!

SFBG: Living the dream in San Francisco! But on your daily bike ride through the City, does your utopian knowledge of how much better things could be inspire you? Or does it haunt you?
CC: It’s more sustaining than haunting, for sure. There’s so much we could be doing! I was just on KALW the other day, talking about planning that the City’s doing for future bike lanes. The Bike Coalition was there talking about the lanes and there was this anti-bike lane guy debating them, and here I was saying, “Let’s dig up the streets. Lets daylight the creeks. Forget bike lanes, lets create wildlife corridors!” I realized how far out there I really seem and how the things I’m talking about don’t even have a political voice at this point. Nowtopia is also about these interesting initiatives that don’t have a voice in politics but that are already happening anyway. What if all of these movements were united as a political program?