'The War on the Social Factory' with Annie Paradise and Manolo Callahan
Nov 11, 2024
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Annie Paradise, a grassroots researcher and author, teams up with Manolo Callahan from the Centre for Convivial Research and Autonomy. They delve into the struggle for community safety against militarization and police violence in Silicon Valley. Topics include the vital role of community narratives and workshops in fostering resilience, as well as critiques of the tech industry's links to the military-industrial complex. The conversation highlights the importance of self-defense initiatives and counter-knowledge in creating safer, autonomous communities.
The podcast highlights the grassroots mobilizations for community safety in Silicon Valley as a response to police violence and state control.
Annie Paradise discusses the role of alternative knowledge production spaces in fostering community agency against militarization and disinformation.
The conversation emphasizes the need for communities to define their own safety and enact collective self-defense strategies outside established systems.
Deep dives
Promotion of Acephalus and Independent Publishing
The discussion emphasizes the support for the project Acephalus, which features an erotic tarot inspired by the works of George Bataille. The creators aim to promote this unique oracle alongside a compilation of essays that touch on critical contemporary issues such as anti-fascism and expenditure. This initiative is positioned within a broader movement towards independent publishing during a time when leftist media faces significant challenges. They highlight the importance of collecting support through their Kickstarter campaign to ensure that this project could grow and thrive, appealing to both individual and bookstore supporters.
Counterinsurgency and Knowledge Production
The conversation revolves around the philosophy of counterinsurgency, particularly how the state manages populations through both formal and informal means. It reaches into the epistemology of societal control, linking it to contemporary security issues like police violence and displacement. Members of the Centre for Convivial Research and Autonomy share insights on how communities are developing spaces for knowledge production to resist state interventions. This collective action aims to challenge established narratives and assert community agency against trends of militarization and disinformation.
The Role of CCRA in Knowledge Spaces
The Centre for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA) emerged from a need to create alternative knowledge production spaces amid the commodification of education and social struggles. Originating from a blend of graduate student activism and grassroots resistance, CCRA seeks to disrupt the traditional educational frameworks that often disconnect intellectual pursuits from community needs. Through various initiatives, including workshops and autonomous learning, CCRA aims to reclaim historical knowledge and foster insurgent learning. The group highlights the importance of maintaining strong links between academic endeavors and community-oriented engagements to challenge existing narratives.
Concept of Community Safety
The concept of community safety is analyzed as a dynamic and strategic idea within contemporary socio-political contexts. This entails recognizing different components that support communities in organizing against violence and state control, such as fierce care and collective self-defense. The aim is to empower communities to define their own safety parameters and enact autonomous justice outside of dominant systems. As families and organizations collaborate, they create networks that resist criminalization and offer alternative forms of justice, fostering resilience against state-sanctioned violence.
San Francisco as a Laboratory for Policing and Technology
San Francisco is discussed as a critical site for the experimentation of new social warfare methods, reflecting the intersection of policing and technology. The dynamics between tech companies and law enforcement illustrate how data and surveillance are utilized in managing populations, leading to a reconfiguration of community norms and values. The conversation navigates historical connections between military practices and modern policing methods, addressing disparities in how different communities experience this control. Attention is drawn to the way capitalism leverages socio-economic divisions to justify increasingly militarized police practices, posing significant challenges to notions of safety and community.
Support the Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acephalous/acephalous-the-erotic-tarot-of-georges-bataille
But the 'War on the Social Factory': https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810146648/the-war-on-the-social-factory/
About the book:
A collective ethnography of grassroots mobilizations for community safety across the Silicon Valley
This is a narrative of struggle and solidarity and a collective toolkit for grassroots opposition to militarization, policing, and ongoing conditions of war in the current conjuncture of racial patriarchal capitalism. Grassroots researcher Annie Paradise presents here a collective ethnography of the mothers and community matriarchs whose children have been murdered by police across the San Francisco Bay Area as they develop and practice autonomous, creative forms of resistance.
The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley maps local families’ struggles to reclaim their households and their communities—to create a social infrastructure of care, justice, and safety outside state- and market-determined modes of “security.” Practices such as sustained vigil, testimony, and the production and circulation of insurgent knowledges are shown here to be part of interconnected justice efforts to demilitarize and decarcerate communities in the face of the multiple forms of violence enacted under late racial patriarchal capitalism. Paradise examines the expanding carceral processes of enclosure, criminalization, dispossession, expropriation, and disposability that mark the neoliberal "security” regime across the Silicon Valley and offers counter-counterinsurgent strategies and practices of co-generative, dynamic resistance.