The World Social Forum celebrated its ninth reunion in Belem, Brazil in the Amazonian state of Pará from January 26 to February 1, 2009. A lot of expectations are piled on to this peculiar event. 91,000 delegates registered, a majority from Brazil, and probably a majority well under 35 years old. But there are hundreds of regular attendees, folks from India, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Japan, Ecuador, Bolivia, France, Senegal, and dozens of other countries, giving the global south an ample representation. Notably few in number were Americans from the U.S., which I considered something of a relief. There are many representatives of major and minor NGOs and a healthy number of old-style socialist militants too.

The event is a big chaotic mess. It took place on two university campuses, the Federal University of Pará and the Federal Rural University of Pará, separated by about a mile and a half that you could theoretically walk, but most people took the free bus, paid a dollar for a regular bus ride, or took a taxi for about 4-6 dollars. There was also a crazy “put-put” ferry system of small wooden boats that ran from one campus to the other on the Guamá River, which was exotic and fun until you arrived and were stuck for a half hour while the skipper maneuvered his boat into the overcrowded dock area, trying to get a tiny corner to let his passengers out. The Forum program was over 135 pages, mostly small print on large newsprint sheets, listing over 2,000 workshops and roundtables and meetings. In fact, the program was deemed useless by many attendees, as the events were listed at the wrong times, wrong places, and most people I spoke with learned that few of the events they were interested in or in some cases, presenting, were listed at all. (This was true of the three workshops held by Ecologia Urbana of Sao Paolo, one of which was my Nowtopia talk, none of which were listed in the official program.)

This banner was planted alongside the road on the UFRA campus, but I never saw any of the folks behind it (typically, you could find signs and indications without information on how to meet the people).

A discussion on urban reform and a much-cited idea, "The Right to the City."

Random snapshot of delegates at Urban Reform talk.

Behind the scenes there are several organizational efforts, an administrative office that runs most of the time from Sao Paolo, and is horribly understaffed and overworked. There is also a mysterious International Committee (IC), which is some kind of self-selecting group with representatives from many parts of the world, and many different organizations, but seems to be unaccountable and lacking in transparency. Apparently this IC makes the decisions about where and when the WSF will be held, and what the theme and scope of it will be, and has some say over how the “movement of movements” is brought together and given space to produce all the workshops and discussions and performances that made up the four days of the event. The Brazilian government says it spent $13 million to support the event with extra security in Belem (the city was chock full of police and military), and in subsidizing the facilities, some travel expenses for various delegations, and more. (Though I was in daily contact with some folks who were insiders, it remained opaque and difficult to understand what exactly the process of self-governance was.)

The big theme of this one was the Amazon, with the first day dedicated to presentations and workshops and performances by and about the people of the Amazon and its rich resources. A major effort was made to integrate the Indians from all the nine countries in the region, and to foreground the questions of native people’s rights, resistance to dam construction and deforestation, and a celebration of diverse cultures and different stages of development. The global economic crisis was of course an elephant in the room too, but the gathering was not capable of a coherent response to that. I heard a rumor of some discussions and meetings going on towards the conclusion that involved various tribal leaders and some of the IC, seeking ideas on different ways to structure a democratic process going forward, perhaps drawing on experiences of Amazonian tribal cultures to help invent some new political forms. Jai Sen of the Indian group India Institute for Critical Action Centre in Movement (CACIM), told me about having a great meeting privately with some Indian chiefs from Rondônia (far west of Amazonia), primarily getting to know them and hear what their issues are, how they see this historic moment.”¦

Trying to summarize this event is impossible. As I left I spent some hours poring over the newspapers that were published during the last days of the Forum. There I learned a lot about the politicians and the official proclamations, the “real news” that occurred in Belem, and got something of an overview of developments. But the overwhelming sensation during the four days was of being in a sprawling political summer camp. The official meetings were far less significant than the endless serendipitous encounters that were nonstop. On the campuses, in the hallways, cafes, and restaurants, and along the waterfront at other establishments far removed from the official sites, meetings and parties continued without a break. Encounters with strangers was the norm, but it was also the case that various friends who had been at previous World Social Forums set up regular gathering points. I gravitated to Jai Sen’s convergence at the Restaurant Palafita (a place on stilts over the River, near the historic center), where many delegates spent the evenings dining and drinking and occasionally dancing. My pal Jeff Conant and his colleague Marcela Olivera from Cochabamba (Food & Water Watch), as well as Javier Taks (Red Temática de Medio Ambiente) from Montevideo, (all involved in what I think they called the Rede Vida, or Life Network) were primarily focused on presenting water issues and building political coalitions to push for water-as-commons. They came to the Palafita many nights too.

View from the ferry moving from UFPA to UFRA.

Libyan leader Qaddafi had his own distribution guy with books on a cloth...

I was lucky because I had Thiago from the Sao Paolo office of the Forum who helped me and my pals get an apartment, got me a press credential, and generally made a complicated situation pretty comfortable and manageable for us. Meanwhile, he was working about 14+ hours a day and was holding up surprisingly well in spite of having so many people making so many demands on him. His Paulista pals from Ecologia Urbana befriended me, as did a number of cyclists from Brasilia and Belem itself, so I had a great time hanging out during and after the Forum with Brazilian Critical Mass (Bicicletada) cyclists.

A women's rights discussion.

Not sure what point these cavewomen were making in front of the media center, but they were visually quite entertaining! (They reminded me a lot of women's street theater I filmed in 1988 in Sao Paolo.)

Rooaaaarrr!

I had a number of random encounters that really enriched my visit. Berto walked up and started talking to me in great English as we got off the Po-po ferry from one campus to the other. He lives in a city of about 100,000 near Belem (Belem itself is 1.5 million!) and is quite involved in political efforts to save the Amazon. He was so warm and curious, like many locals I met at the World Social Forum. They were having the time of their lives!

Berto, a Paranense who warmly chatted me up as we got off the ferry.

On the Cotijuba tractor ride I chatted with Diego, another local with a real enthusiasm for languages, who had a sweet idiosyncratic English. He was with a couple of Swedes and a boisterous local woman. He’d had a lot of trouble finding what he was looking for at the WSF” the most common lament. Johanna from Sweden explained to me that her visit had been a bad use of her time from her employer’s point of view. She said she could have been getting work done all week at her job” she was happy for the vacation-like trip, but didn’t expect to go again to the WSF, and she would suggest to her employer not to send anyone” but I didn’t find out who she worked for” some Swedish NGO I presume. I met Elizabeth from Portland on the first leg of my flight home. She came with her boyfriend unaffiliated with any organization (he’s involved in sustainable furniture, she works in childcare), and she was very frustrated by her experience in Belem. Typically, they couldn’t find anything and when they did find the place where something was supposed to be, it was often cancelled or moved. My Sao Paolo friends lamented the wide dispersion over two separate campuses, so if something you attended didn’t turn out, it was hard to switch to something else because it would be miles away.

I had an interesting, brief chat with a German parliamentarian, Sascha Raabe (SPD-Frankfurt), while waiting in the interminable line at the Belem airport. I gave him a brief account of Nowtopia and he was quick to affirm that we have different politics, but as the conversation continued, we managed to make it interesting for us both anyway. After being separated in mid-discussion he really wanted to finish his point about why water can’t just be free” because people waste it like crazy” and it set me off on a whole thought process later about my own dogma regarding money. As he was describing it, clearly he’s seeing it as a feedback mechanism with regard to scarce resources. I agree we need some way to encourage more conservationist behavior and negative consequences for profligacy are probably always going to be useful.

Typical scene on the streets of the UFRA campus.

My friends who’d been at previous World Social Forums told me this was the first one to be explicitly anti-capitalist. Previous ones had been focused on anti-neoliberalism but hadn’t been comprehensively anticapitalist. I briefly met Walden Bello there, thanks to Teivo, one of the insiders in the International Committee. I noticed that David Harvey was speaking but I didn’t make it to the workshops where he was supposed to speak (I wanted to say howdy, since he’s my daughter’s thesis advisor). The big South American “left-wing” presidents held a summit during the WSF. Brazil’s Lula hosted Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Fernando Lugo (Paraguay) and Rafael Correa (Ecuador). All agreed that neoliberalism is to blame for the global financial crisis and together they declared the end of the dictatorship of the “Market-God,” and the necessity of a common exit from the crisis for South American countries. Lula cemented his role as the favorite of U.S. rulers by arguing for free trade and against tariffs and domestic trade barriers. Burnishing his national populism at the same time as he defended free trade, he specifically criticized an Obama announcement to use only U.S.-made steel in public works projects. All of this was on the January 31 edition of Público, a daily paper put out by “F.S.M. Communicāo” which given its broad left and popular tone, including interesting essays from academics, seems to have been a project of the Social Forum, or at least a part of it.

On the cover is a big picture of Lula with the headline “Lula demands end to commercial barriers,” while below the fold the Governor of the state of Pará where the Forum was held, Ana Julia Carepa, is seen at a press conference announcing plans to plant one billion trees in a major reforestation program in her state. I was pretty surprised to read her comments going well beyond anything I ever heard from a Brazilian politician regarding the Amazon or Indians. She publicly declared the Amazon is an indigenous territory with a rich biodiversity. “The view of the Amazon as a green hell devoid of people doesn’t correspond to the truth. There are already 20 million residents and these people have relations among themselves. In other words, the Amazon has people!” To govern an Amazonian state like Pará is challenging, first by its geographic size, then by the pressure of agribusiness and exploration for forest and mineral resources, she said. “It is a predatory and neocolonial economic model implanted here since the second half of the 20th century””¦ She highlighted her administration’s commitment to construct a new model of development for the Amazon, pushed by struggles and social movements that, embedded in the agenda of the World Social Forum, daring to accept the imperative to construct another world. “Sustainable Amazon” the challenge of the future: strategies of local development in the context of a global crisis” was the theme of the first roundtable of the Local Authorities Forum which took place just before the World Social Forum (there was a parallel and overlapping gathering of the Local Authorities Forum of the Amazon).

Clearly the presence of the World Social Forum creates a lot of momentum that pushes local politicians to at least look like they’re doing something! A friend who was part of the follow-up International Committee meeting on Feb. 2 told how the day had been dominated for some hours by a major fight over the Forum’s next location. African delegates had been promised it two years ago, and it’s likely to be in Dakar, Senegal. But some Brazilians and others, imagining that Obama would be an enthusiastic supporter of the Forum, and that the presence of the WSF would push him to the left, urged the IC to consider instead the U.S. as the next host. It’s a nonstarter of course, given the ridiculously restrictive visa system enforced by the U.S. now, but beyond that, the political fantasy that Obama is somehow with the movement of movements you could see in Belem is simply bizarre.

This camp provided a central gathering point for a lot of local hippies, but more importantly, a number of Nowtopian-like initiatives, countercultural practices that weren't as prominent as typical leftist demands and iconography.

A Free Seed exchange at the Peace Camp.

An Agroecology campsite.

Couldn't follow the discussion, but the camp dwellers seemed to be solving some kind of problem as I passed by.

A permaculture demonstration hut from afar.

The same permaculture hut closer.

Joāo Pedro Stédile, coordinator of the global peasant organization Via Campesina and member of the National Directorate of the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento Sem Terra” MST) attacked the left presidents for supporting banks and capitalists more than the people, for too much lip service and not any real action. The crisis is hitting South America, too, of course, and it shows how integrated the economies are with the world. Neoliberalism is still very influential in terms of shaping a debate that leaves politicians on the defensive whenever they try to invest in or expand the public sectors (unless it’s to surreptitiously bolster certain private interests). Stédile said at a January 29 press conference “The Amazonian populations have to counterpose a popular project; to recover the sovereignty of the people over the Amazon’s wealth; to renationalize [the big mining company] Vale so they don’t mess with forest anymore. We of the MST defend zero deforestation. From here on out, no tree should fall. In the degraded areas, we demand agrarian reform, land distribution to rural workers, and to make reforestation programs as well as new agriculture that doesn’t depend on deforestation.”

In another interesting article Amanda Meta reported on a demonstration in Belem by representatives of schools, NGOs and social movements in Paraguay, Ecuador and Bolivia against Brazilian multinationals like Petrobrás and Odebrecht (both supported by the Lula government via National Bank of Economic and Social Development subsidies), claiming they are directly responsible for environmental and social damages in their countries. Interesting that my friends at Ecologia Urbana also had a panel dedicated to exposing Petrobrás, Brazil’s national oil company, as a murderous corporation. Petrobrás sent over a dozen employees to the gathering to denounce the criticism being leveled at them, but Ze Paolo of Ecologia Urbana was prepared. He had his credentials in order (a Ph.D. in economics) and he used Petrobrás’s own statistics from their annual report to make his case. By the end of the meeting, though a number of the oil workers left unconvinced and remained hostile to the Paulista ecologists, the company’s chief greenwasher, a woman responsible for their public relations, offered to help Ecologia Urbana! We’ll see if that was sincere or not in the months and years to come. (It doesn’t seem impossible to me that someone in that role sincerely might want to help “the opposition”; if you have to lie for your job everyday and you know it, you might want to make amends or get even at some point”¦ Of course she might have been disingenuous and only trying to manipulate them.)

Another newspaper was also published regularly at the World Social Forum” TerraViva which in the trilingual edition I have, starts with a hilarious editorial in Portu-Spanglish, or is it Spanglinol? In it the iconography and rhetoric of the left was rather prominent, but there is also a tone of self-critical urgency. Ultimately the WSF raises a lot of hope and expectations that there could be some kind of unified political movement that helps organize the many disparate and local efforts that dot the planet. If Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest is right, then there are more than a million organizations worldwide that share a basic purpose of trying to repair the planet’s ecology, to alter the way we live on earth. The World Social Forum invites people to come and then leaves us all hanging, because there both is and isn’t a center, a place where the diverse thinking and acting can somehow congeal into a coherent set of proposals to move everyone forward in a new, comprehensive and radically new direction.

Brazilian and U.S. rappers found a home too.

My own frustration over the call for a Global Labour Charter is perhaps indicative of the underlying dynamics. The old left in its institutional form (unions or parties) shows up and meets with professional NGO staffers, and together they shape a conversation that is rooted in several decades of institutional evolution. The problem, predictably, is that they cannot wrap their heads around a deep break with the framework they’ve worked so hard to establish. The conversation at the meeting I attended led me to write my rant a couple of posts back. Interestingly, the network on Labour & Globalization published a 10-point summary that is actually more sophisticated and nuanced than anything I heard at the meeting. Perhaps outside of the open space in which various national trade union reps aired out their parochial positions, a deeper conversation took place in private afterwards.

Points 7, 8 and 9 of the summary lay out these complementary (and contradictory) ideas:

7.) L&G Network members agree that the climate change crisis will change the way people live and work. Trade unions must develop pro-active campaigns on climate change or decisions will be made by corporations and government without participation by workers and their organizations.

On the next one, #8, the old defensive posture is reiterated: “A top priority for participants in the L&G Network debate has been to defend existing jobs; to promote shared work where necessary through the reduction of workweek without loss of pay; and to demand the creation of new jobs. Job creation programs must focus on sustainable employment such as “green jobs” and jobs in public and social services.” The problem here is that existing jobs ARE THE PROBLEM! Sharing dumb, destructive work is no solution. Nor is demanding that capital provide more jobs. Jobs Don’t Work! Even sustainable “green jobs” still reinforce the basic subordination to capital and the initiative of the monied to determine what work gets done, how and by whom. Aren’t we ready to jettison this insane system that leaves even the organized working class as passive spectators of their own lives?

In #9, the summary statement credits network participants for demanding more public investment for social security and social protection programs” which is hard to be against in a situation where millions are being disemployed and lives are being routinely destroyed. But the most hopeful avenue out of this impasse might lie in the last sentence in this section:  “A more inclusive social and solidarity economy also has been identified as a possible common goal of all existing forms of work, included informal and autonomous ones.” Funny that it is presented almost as an afterthought, when it ought to be the front and center of any agenda for human liberation with respect to our capacity to reproduce life with our shared labor.

Whenever the WSF itself lost my interest, I could always walk into the nearby forest.

I was reading Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy along the way, a really great book. He’s making a basic degrowth argument without using that term much, and like a lot of folks these days he wants to be positive about alternative currency ideas, seeing money as a mechanism of social exchange that can be made to serve other purposes than capital accumulation. I remain skeptical about that, but it was funny that he also admitted that most alternative currency schemes so far have only worked in college towns and mostly only for getting things like massages. I appreciated many of his practical examples, from the growth of local agriculture and farmers’ markets (and the useful work they require) to the invention of a bicycle-powered food processing device in Guatemala. He also understands that our era is one of extreme atomization, and any chance for radical politics will require new networks to emerge: “By some surveys, three-quarters of Americans confess that they don’t know their next-door neighbors. That’s a novel condition for primates; it will take a while to repair those networks.”

Getting to know one’s planetary neighbors through the World Social Forum is a good beginning. Far from sufficient, it is a necessary precondition for the emergence of a new kind of political agency, one that can reinvent political and economic life outside the pernicious logic that traps us now. I’m curious to hear what initiatives emerge from the many invisible networks that have been meeting and consolidating themselves in the spaces opened up by the Forum.

Some talented stencil artists were making themselves heard during the WSF too.

Waiting out the daily rain on Feb. 1 at Prédio Central.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5VLp5RbjEI&feature=related]

One of the oddities of my visit to Belem was first encountering predictably chaotic streets with little room for pedestrians or bikes, but then hearing that Belem was considered one of the more bike-friendly places in Brazil. Turns out both are true. There is a huge population of daily cyclists, often two to a bike, who are using it as their main means of transportation. My friend Thiago was commuting to the World Social Forum every morning around 7 a.m. and told me I should get there to see the streets full of bikes “like China!”

This couple passed our bus in Icoaraci, a suburb of Belem.

There are also dedicated bikeways in the center median of many major boulevards and they are heavily used for commuting and daily errands. The bikeways are one way in each direction, separated by a grassy and tree-filled median, and usually enclosed by orange metal barriers for the full distance between intersections, making it impossible to enter or exit in mid-block (seems sensible in light of the heavy traffic on the six-lane roads that surround the bikeways).

Can you spot the three bicyclists in the bike lanes in the midst of this mess?

A clearer shot of the mid-boulevard bike lanes in Belem.

I had the pleasure of getting to know Raoni, Marcelo, Fabio, and Sergio, all local cycle activists–it was thanks to them the inspiring “bicycle museum” was installed at the World Social Forum. They have a local club and go on regular treks into the countryside. Marcelo was indefatigable at the WSF; when he picked me up (in a happy coincidence) with his bike taxi at the UFRA gate and rode me across the whole campus, he told me he’d been going nonstop for 25 hours! He was very patient explaining things to me in Portuguese, and I hung in there trying to understand, probably getting about 30% or so. As another local bike stalwart who had no English got across to me, the bike itself is a universal language (well… sort of!).

Me and Marcelo in his Bike Taxi at the Universidade Federal Rural do Para.

The view from inside.

Space opens in the pedestrian-crowded road while a dark storm approaches.

Raoni threw himself into organized bikes and cyclists and made some excellent edits/improvements to the text I whipped up. Playing on the World Social Forum slogan “Another World Is Possible,” I called it “Another Traffic Jam is Possible,” and we had the “pleasure” of waiting on stage for 2.5 hours, enduring 20-odd speeches (mostly of the barking left variety, usually going WAY beyond the 5 minute limit) before finally Joao Paolo and Raoni delivered the 1.5 minute speech in Portuguese while I was the potted plant at their side, holding Ze’s reflective sign saying “Respect: One Less Car.” Here is the final version after some last-minute on-stage additions from Raoni:

Another Traffic Jam is Possible!

Did you hear the frogs along the roads in Belem as you were waiting for traffic to clear (so you could reach UFPA or UFRA)? Could you turn arouund and talk to the people behind you? It’s a shame that a gathering of 100,000 people seeking to create another world continues to depend on the same transit technology that is destroying the planet. Some of us have experienced a different kind of “traffic jam” and we want you to know it is a great improvement! We hear the frogs and talk to strangers, and experience the city and traffic in an entirely new way.

There were some glimmers of hope at the Belem World Social Forum. At the UFRA campus a system of bicycle taxis was introduced, hinting at much greater possibilities. Those possibilities, in turn, were asserted in a defiant celebration on Friday, January 30 in the Amazon’s first-ever Critical Mass (or Bicicletada). One hundred cyclists seized the streets, shrugging off a steady rain, and rode all over Belem, invading a gas station, crashing a ban on bikes at a restricted public park, exchanging cheers and waves with Belem’s citizens everywhere, and with WSF delegates at luxury hotels. “Mais adrenalina, menos gasolina!” and “Mais Bicicletas, menos carros” echoed through the streets, altering forever the imaginations of countless people, who now have at least a small taste of that other transit world that is not only possible, but already here.

We invite you to fight for the human right to breathe clean air, to come and go safely and comfortably, and above all, to leave a healthy planet for future generations. We are making a quiet statement against oil wars when we ride our bikes and to further this statement we demand that the World Social Forum ban cars from its future sites and instead, provide a fleet of “library bicycles” for the use of delegates (plus a fast and frequent system of electric shuttles for those who can’t or won’t bicycle). Other worlds ARE possible, but they are ALREADY HERE if we only have the vision and the will to start changing now. Isn’t it time to break with private cars and the gasoline-powered engine NOW, not after some unknown future revolution? The planet depends on it, and bicyclists demand it!

Look for cycle activism in your city, and if there isn’t any, start it!

signed,
Critical Mass cyclists from San Francisco, Sao Paolo, Brasilia and beyond…
Belem, Para, February 1, 2009

In the darkness of the stage, Raoni adds our cyclist sensibilities to a long afternoon of speechifying.

Joao Paolo lets it fly.

The text was given to the big WSF final process as a resolution from our “assembly of cyclist activists” so we’ll see if it moves the process forward or not.

A long shot of the crowd from the stage, two hours before we finally got to give our speech.

A gallery of crowd close-ups so you can see the faces of the WSF.

"I am a woman who loves women" says the sign--a nice addition.

Who is that guy with his finger in his nose?

Early on they hung in there while rains fell, but the crowd diminished a lot by the time we got to talk.

The spirited Critical Mass last Friday was seen by a lot of people I talked to (including, in a taxi ride  in Rio two nights ago, David Stang, brother of Sister Dorothy Stang, murdered by “The Consortium” of right-wing ranchers who want to stop her sustainable agriculture experiments and decades-long fight on behalf of the landless poor in Brazil’s north), but was not much integrated with the thousands of daily cyclists in Belem and surroundings. On my last day I went with new friends to a beautiful river beach with big waves on the island of Cotijuba. To get there we bused from the center to the end of the line at the northern edge of the metropolitan area in a town called Icoaraci. It was even more bike-centric than Belem, so I took this gallery of shots:

Bikes turn the corner in front of street vendor in Icoaraci.

A fisherman commutes home for lunch?

Bike walks Man...

Dropping off his girlfriend.

A man and his bike.

Is it hers?

The everyday bike in Belem.

Fishmonger frieght bike, Icoaraci.

Here’s JP with Carina and Gabriella, with whom I spent a lovely day going to the beach:

Carina, Gabriella and Joao Paolo, all from Ecologia Urbana.

Ruins as usual were quite picturesque. The first is in Icoaraci facing the waterfront, the second is on Cotijuba in front of the dock area:

A building crumbles into the wet green ruling order in Icoaraci.

An elegant ruin at the dock in Cotijuba, horsedrawn taxis in front.

As we travelled to the island, some river dwellers disembarked to homes like this. Fantastic mangroves and other air-root trees along the shore too.

Life on the river.

River dwellers at home.

Mangrove art...

Air roots better than air guitar!

Your ornithological quiz for today.

Once on Cotijuba, we took this tractor-drawn “bus” to the nothern shore to Praia do Vai-Quem-Quer (” ‘Go Who Wants To’ Beach”):

Tractor bus on Cotijuba.

Praia do Vai-Quem-Quer

Joao Paolo asleep in background, as usual!

After romping in the weird freshwater surf for 30-40 minutes (SO refreshing!) we all fell asleep on the beach and I foolishly got very sunburned. When we returned to the mainland, we stopped for a special dinner “Fish on a Tile” (Peixe Na Telha), which came with rice and farofa, plus a local fare pirao, a thick gooey dish made from manioc roots and fish sauce. It was the best dinner I had in Belem but I have to admit I am not very impressed by Brazilian cuisine. This fish was excellent, but the thick creamy sauce was too heavy, especially when combined with pirao and farofa (a Swede I met in Brazil 20 years ago called farofa “sawdust”–it apparently has no nutritional value, but is great to make your meal more filling, and when well toasted can taste great).

Fish on a tile, and rice and pirao.

On my way out of town I had fun shopping at the famous riverside market Ver-o-Peso (“See the Weight”), especially enjoying a quick loop through the fish market, which I remembered being amazing from when I was here 20 years ago. Didn’t have my camera, but saw a lot of fish like this guy’s in Icoaraci:

Fresh fish in Icoaraci.

The last memorable cuisine story in Belem is ice cream! I ate a lot of exotic fruit ice creams–Acai, Mangaba, Teperiba, Araca, Castanha do Para, and my old favorite Marajuca (passion fruit). They really have great flavors, great ice creams. JP helped me sample raw acai beans (eh) and fresh unsweetened cupuacu (like sour bubble gum around a pit) too.

Free range chickens along the river.

At dinner we had a lovely sunset to stimulate our appetites…

I just couldn't get enough of the clouds and skies in Belem.

Leaving turned out to be a mess–TAM Airlines was unprepared in the small airport to handle such a crush of people. So I was a half day delayed getting back, spent the night in a fancy hotel in Rio unexpectedly, but made it home late last night and am writing now in the Santa Monica public library after an enjoyable lunchtime book presentation at Google a block away. The cool thing was going through Sao Paolo in super clear morning air and getting these mindboggling shots from my airplane window:

This isn't even the whole of the view, thousands upon thousands of skyscrapers spanning the horizon in every direction in this megacity called Sao Paolo.

This is zoomed in a bit to get a better sense of the scale.

I’ll be posting a longer article on the World Social Forum in a few days. Lots of scattered thoughts and notes, and still digesting a lot of reading and thinking, but hope to have a reasonably interesting overview/summary, and analysis/reportage, by the end of my stay here in Los Angeles. I’ll be at FarmLab at noon Friday, LA Ecovillage Friday evening, Booksoup in West Hollywood Saturday night, and CalArts in Valencia Monday morning. Come say hello!

Under steady rain, 100 cyclists took to the streets of Belem in the first Bicicletada in the Amazon!

It was a great night! Pai d’Egua! (That’s a charming idiomatic expression that local Belem cyclists have taught us: literally Father of the Mare, but translates as “Cool!” The Paulistas were charmed by this as much as me!) I don’t think anyone knew if it would work or not, and when it turned out to be a rainy night, doubts must have been raised. But one hundred enthusiastic cyclists took to the streets of Belem last night, bringing the global Critical Mass movement to the Amazon and the World Social Forum, under the Brazilian name “Bicicletada”.  They chanted and sang, we rode all over town, into a gas station, past the center’s Praca da Republica, and eventually into one of the city’s most posh public parks where Raoni had had his bike’s tires slashed by disturbed security guards the day before when he stopped there for lunch and had a tiff with them about rolling his bike into the gated park. The chants were funny and boisterous: “Mais Adrenalina, menos gasolina!” (More adrenaline, less gasoline!), “Mais Bicicletas, Menos Carros” (more bikes, less cars), and a few others that I’ll try to add later when I get someone to remind me of them… one was a song, “Motorista! Motorista! Olha a bike! Olha a bike! Deixa o Carro aí-í! Deixa o carro aí – e Vem Pedalar! Vem Pedalar!” (“Motorist, Motorist, Watch out for bikes! Watch out for bikes! Leave your car there! Leave your car there… and come and pedal, come and pedal”–to the tune of the nursery rhyme Frêre Jacques.)

The Bike Lift is an increasingly universal gesture of Critical Mass cyclists, here in the pouring rains.

Several times we passed local tourist hotels full of WSF delegates. Here we are at the Crown Plaza, with delegates cheering us from the balconies while we all chanted "Mais Bicicletas, Menos Carros"!

We took over this big Shell station for a half hour, which was taken in good spirits by all.

Allan was one of the locals from Belem who normally takes treks to the countryside on weekends, but found a new thrill in a Bicicletada in his home town... and it was his farewell too, because he's moving to Brasilia soon to work for the Supreme Court as a techie.

Bertina and Nicholas from Lyon, France. I met Bertina at the Big CM in Rome last May and here we found each other again at the mouth of the Amazon! small world...

The contrast between Critical Mass and the wider experience of the World Social Forum was pretty palpable. The excitement and energy, the camaraderie in the streets, the actual riding and being out in public instead of sitting indoors hearing familiar litanies of problems and “solutions,” all work towards something deeper and more interesting. One of my main concerns with the WSF is that it would consist of so many predictable and oft-repeated ideas. Seems that is true. But to reduce the WSF to the 2,000+ workshops is to miss the real event I think. Something rather different is happening in the halls, gardens, bars, and restaurants around the area. The authentic, unvarnished, unrehearsed conversations are the real deal here, and they happen informally, outside of the presentations. I’ve only poked my head into a dozen Talks, and as an avowed classroom-phobe, I quickly withdraw. It’s all very “educational” and the brief snippets of talk that I heard was always remarkably uninformative unless you came in knowing nothing at all. Was the World Social Forum really designed to be a place where you come and present the altogether familiar critiques of capitalist barbarities and ecological calamities? Because that’s a big majority of what’s out there. I really hope to find out I’m wrong, and that there are lots of great conversations happening in the formal sphere too, but I haven’t yet. During Critical Mass I met Paula from Lima, Peru, an anthropologist who is here and then heading to do more graduate work in Sao Paolo. She attended a number of the indigenous-led events (I missed them all) and was quite disappointed at the lack of new thinking, new information, or anything that departs from what’s been said for the past decade at these kinds of events.

Critical Mass was preceded by my Nowtopia Talk at a forum hosted by Ecologia Urbana of Sao Paolo, and though I felt I wasn’t as crisp and coherent as I wanted to be, and had to drastically shrink the argument for time and translation issues, it still was very well received. Earlier in the day Ecologia Urbana EU) hosted two other panels, one on the national oil company Petrobras, which they called Petrobras: Assassino! (Petrobras: Murderer!). Apparently Petrobras sent a dozen or more of their employees to harangue the presentation, and to cheer their own counter-speakers. Ze Paolo, one of my hosts from EU, has a Ph.D. in Economics (“But that’s fiction!” I exclaimed when he told me) and with that credibility he depended on stats he gleaned from their own annual report to make the arguments about the devastating role of Petrobras on the ecology and economy of Brazil. Interestingly, the chief greenwasher for Petrobras, a woman, approached them afterwards with what seemed to be a sincere desire to work with them. I can believe it. A lot of corporate pr people know they’re dishing out bullshit and given the chance, might easily become moles or even turn against their employers more substantially. Here’s a photo at the end of the night at the bar, with Jean Paolo on the left and Ze Paolo on the right.

At midday they gave a Talk on Green Cities, and I thought they did a really good job, very coherent and direct, discussing the impact of energy, transit and consumption choices on the possiblities of a green city transformation, but arguing compellingly that it is possible to do it, even on a Planet of Slums (they quoted Mike Davis on that), and specifically in a mega-city like Sao Paolo, if you take it one street and one neighborhood at a time. I was able to understand a lot of the presentation, as I was later able to follow my good friend Thiago’s wonderful addition to my Nowtopia talk, where he went on at some length about fear and isolation and the importance of Nowtopian initiatives for breaking those down and bringing people into social processes that reinforce themselves towards greater convivility and cooperation. I was surprised I could understand as much as I did (on the other hand, I still draw a complete blank about half the time when someone says something to me!)

Post-Nowtopia talk group portrait!

So among the hundreds of events here, I snapped a few photos of signs just to capture the breadth.

This sounds like it could be interesting....didn't get to see it though.

If you’re trying to keep up with any kind of serious schedule of attending all these meetings and discussions, you are approaching exhaustion by now! Even if you’re not, like me, being so far from home in a strange muggy climate with unusual surroundings and language demands is pretty exhausting in itself! Here’s a couple of shots:

These guys are grabbing 40 winks between sessions. With such an overwhelming schedule, anyone trying to attend a lot of events is becoming incredibly exhausted.

I’ve been happy to have this media center to work in. It’s air-conditioned and the internet always works!

My workplace here in Belem. This gym was lined in fabric and is now air-conditioned! Very comfy, and a very reliable internet connection too! Thank you WSF!

And now a couple of nature shots for the day…

Heavy rains provide lots of habitat for herons, grazing in a flooded field with a sleeping delgate barely visible in the vehicle in the background.

OK, ornithologists! Name this bird!

OK, a final note: I wrote a much longer entry a bit ago, and for the 3rd consecutive time, it got wiped out when I tried to save it. Something is wrong with the software, and it’s making me crazy! This time I wrote a lot of it here in the WordPress editing window, thinking that would save me, maybe it was a MS Word thing, but I got hosed anyway. So I’m trying to rewrite it, but a lot of good words got lost… SHIT!!!

The panel on the proposed Global Labour Charter here at the World Social Forum on January 29 demonstrated in stark terms the historic dead-end of trade unionism. The Charter was cautiously embraced by some, dismissed by others, but in any case, has yet to be written by a broad effort (Peter Waterman, who invited me to participate via the New Delhi group CACIM, has a draft with some things you’d expect, like a 6-hour day, 48-week year, Global Labour Rights including right to strike and engage in solidarity actions, a Global Basic Income Grant, a campaign for the defense and extension of Commons and common ownership, and what I liked best, a Global Campaign for Useful Work to deal with useful production, socially-responsible consumption, and environmental sustainability” I’d probably write this a lot more assertively, but at least he had it in there; there were another half dozen points included too.) To be sure, the participants were radical and well-intentioned, but their ideological commitment to their function (negotiators for “labor power” under/within capitalism) blinds them to an epochal opportunity to seize the initiative. If there was ever a time to break with logic of capital, to go on the offensive and to begin a global process of reinventing life itself, this is it! Especially what work we do: workers movements should be leading a redesign of our lives on relocalized and ecological principles of cooperation, generalized abundance, and enjoyable work.

Instead, nearly every speaker yesterday (most of whom were union officials, a preponderant number from metal worker unions for some reason) spoke in clichés about the need to connect as trade unionists with social movements, to organize migrant labor, to bring ignored groups of workers like sex workers into unions, and so on. The South African speaker, the head of the S.A. Communist Party (I think), spoke with a note of bitterness about the lack of solidarity from northern country unions towards southern country unions, especially with regard to neoliberal “free trade” negotiations (e.g. WTO; he noted that many northern trade delegations do not include trade unionists, which the South Africans consider a basic necessity for a coherent negotiation). (He was backed up at length by one of his comrades in the back of the room, who continued the critique of northern unions’ lack of solidarity.) In light of the unfolding global Depression it seemed strangely “yesterday’s news” and in any case, extremely narrow. As global climate change and ecological collapse quicken their pace, quibbling over sectoral and regional biases of various unions seems to miss the point entirely.

There were also speakers from Nepal, Colombia (head of Nat’l. Organization of Indigenous), Belgium, India, South Korea, Norway, Nigeria, and Italy, with about 40+ in attendance from England, Japan, France, Brazil, and some others I didn’t get. So quite a broad representation, which itself was interesting, but the tone of the discussion was terribly disappointing. I admit I chimed in to say that the work we are all doing, globally, is making the mess, and that if we don’t get out front on the reinvention of work, and continue to abdicate to Capital, we can only lose. Some cheered me, I think mostly Italians (hah!) but the conversation didn’t really change direction as I (perhaps arrogantly) thought it might”¦ alas. (I probably wasn’t as compelling as I wanted to be.)

The Int’l Metalworkers Union South Asia representative was one of the more thoughtful contributors, noting that the geography of production has changed, serving to decentralize and informalize work places across the world. He contrasted the growing irrelevance of unions (he didn’t actually characterize them as irrelevant, but his comments indicated an awareness of their diminishing role) with “new” marginal sectors that have used the internet and new communications technologies AND skills to make themselves heard. As he noted, all of society is having the ground disappear beneath their feet, and all existing institutions, to remain relevant, will have to forge new alliances, especially with less formal groups. He also intelligently noted that the old male-dominated trade unionism has not come to grips with the fact that globalization has feminized workplaces everywhere, and that women migrant workers are probably the largest category of unorganized workers. Later, from the audience, another guy from India who Peter Waterman told me represented a Left Union organization that had emerged in recent years, gave a lengthy speech dismissing any notion that trade unions were anything less than crucial institutions as powerful and relevant today as ever, maybe more so. He insisted that everything involving resistance and struggle against capitalism in India for the last 100 years depended first and foremost on trade unions! I was a bit flabbergasted that anyone could make such a claim, since there are countless examples in history of unions being impediments to social struggles, and their ongoing role in disciplining workers to the needs of capital is hardly invisible.

The leader of the Hyundai branch of the South Korean metalworkers union repudiated the tone of nationalism that permeated a lot of comments, but had been holding back the discussion even among these folks going back to 2005. He lamented the slow progress they’d made on efforts to unify their efforts, noting that Capitalism was moving at a much faster speed.

Indeed, the ponderous conversation that went on in the sweltering heat of a classroom in the Prédio Central on the UFRA campus (outside in a nearby tent some kind of New Age/religious ceremony was going on, occasionally emitting loud chanting over which we struggled to be heard), confirmed a sense of missed opportunity. A big broom and a “dustbin of history” seemed to be closing in on the gathering as it concluded”¦ I don’t doubt that many of these individuals will make important contributions to real social struggles in the future, but the framework of their discussion, and their apparently years-long effort to advance the conversation, demonstrated a deeper impotence than anyone there would care to admit. For myself, the urgency of merging conversations about work (labor) and ecology grows stronger, while my patience for blathering bureaucrats and tired old formulas is more or less exhausted.

Four planes and 24 hours in transit but I made it without much trouble”¦ Kicking myself that I didn’t have my camera ready when we were soaring over the Amazon from Manaus to Belem, especially towards the end when an incredible view at dusk opened up to the west. Multiple giant rivers and vast interlocking estuarial canals, all heavily forested, all quite close to Belem, were framed by a thick layer of fluffy white clouds, a weird set of horizontal gray ellipse clouds in front of them, and then a high storm layer above it all, with the sun pouring through randomly in all directions. It was breathtaking! I had been assigned to a middle seat and thus, had put my bag away, out of reach, and couldn’t easily get my camera when I ended up in the window with the amazing view”¦ alas. You’ll just have to take my word for it!

Hanging around in Manaus for a couple of hours I met some other U.S. folks heading here, an environmental lawyer and a NGO staffer for Amazon Watch. I am now sitting in a school room at the Universidad Federal do Para, some Italians and Spaniards discussing how to properly write various documents that will be used to register the 80,000+ delegates who are already pouring into town. I come to the World Social Forum with curiosity and some modest excitement. I don’t know if this sprawling gathering aspires to invent a new form of global self-governance, but they still promote the slogan “another world is possible,” so it opens questions without necessarily providing an answer. The slogan may be better updated to a plural version to acknowledge the resistance to yet another hegemonic program for life, allowing instead for many other possible worlds”¦

My first take on Belem this time is very different from my memory, but then I haven’t yet been to the historic center where I have this vivid memory of watching torrential equatorial rains falling on ancient Mangueiras (mango trees) and hundreds of mangoes falling into the rushing black runoff, hungry kids scrambling to grab as many as they can and stuff them in their shorts for safe keeping (that was 20 years ago!). Today a taxi took me on a long ride across the city (from the plane it was really quite big, many dozens of 15-25 story buildings dotting the urbanscape from the air), which resembled many other rides I’ve had like this in the past into such cities as Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Rome or Naples”¦ a seedy, crumbling cityscape, lots of the trappings of modernity, but somehow already sliding beyond that into a post-prosperity seediness, many structures covered in tags and inartistic graffiti, others just succumbing to the endless humidity and tropical decay that relentlessly confronts any attempt at permanence here. I started reading China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station” on my way here and the dark, hybrid alien/animal/human/machine life forms in New Crubazon City seemed weirdly premonitory for what I might find here in this odd outpost just below the equator, on the shores of the Amazon as it meets the southern Atlantic.

I’m a bit worried that it’ll be mostly a giant convention of leftists, assembling the usual litany of demands and spending a lot of time spinning wheels and waxing eloquently about injustice and so on, but if I’m lucky it’ll be a fantastic gathering full of endlessly challenging conversations that while not able to solve the problems of the world, might start framing better questions and better solutions too”¦ Reading also Bill McKibben’s “Deep Economy,” a smart book that goes head-on against Growth, dovetailing with the skype interview I did a couple of days ago with Fernanda and Mario from DecrescitaFeliz (Happy DeGrowth) somewhere on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The Nowtopian arguments also parallel and overlap this line of thought, of course, but it’s interesting to me how powerfully this new way of thinking seems to be bubbling up from below in many quarters. I’m extremely interested to find it here in Belem, and if I can’t, to add it to the mix as best I can”¦

I hope to have a good opportunity to do that in conversation with folks from India and England on the Global Charter for Labour. Peter Waterman is one of the conveners of this discussion, and he’s trying to push it beyond and outside the many other efforts that are likely to appear here, from the “Decent Work” campaign endorsed by the ISO, to the numerous trade union confederations (esp. from Global South) that tend to ignore or dismiss the vast numbers of precarious workers, ambulantes, etc. StreetNet is a group that has been organizing among the street vendors in India, so I’m excited to learn more about their thoughts and approach. Gratifyingly, some online comments on Peter’s pre-WSF documents were quite committed to challenging the regime of work as defined by Capitalism, and to make a new approach to global labour contingent on a serious reappraisal of what we do. Whew! I think I’ve found some people I can finally have a good conversation with!… it’s a bit odd that I’m such a loner, only organizationally affiliated (with the Global Commons Foundation) as a flag of convenience, but I hope that doesn’t leave me in a bad position in these conversations. Waterman seemed to know what I’ve been up to all these years, so I think I’ll get a good chance to partake”¦

or maybe not! Having arrived and had a quick look at the overwhelming program booklet, with over 2000 events and workshops, I will be surprised if any focused conversation really happens here… but anyway, it’s still good to be here…

Today I walked around a bunch and took photos to get a sense of the place… here’s a gallery:

Equatorial rains pour down on Belem, this view from my balcony.

The Workers' Party of President Lula has put these up around town.

19th century low-rise structures, often covered in graffiti, sit side by side with typical highrise apartments.

The old harbor in Belem, as the rain is starting again.

Dinner time at the Harbor!

The street's residents demand signalization!

On my walk around town today I came upon this charming neighborhood where the neighbors are organizing for a traffic signal… much more to come on streets and street conditions here in Belem in a later post at the sf.streetsblog.org site… and much more to come here in the next days about the World Social Forum, the chaos and the excitement, the politics and the confusion…

I’ve been working on other things, thus dropped the blog-ball a bit lately… one reason is I’ve actually been employed to write 3 blog posts a month over at sf.streetsblog.org, so that’ll get in the way of putting things here. (The Jane Martin piece was the first one.) I agreed that I might re-post some things here after two weeks, but here’s the latest one I did for them on depaving and history.

The REALLY BIG NEWS is that the long-promised Shaping San Francisco wiki is up and running and ready to visit! It’s at FoundSF.org, which we’ve renamed it, in light of our new partnership (not quite signed yet) with the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society. I also posted the Spring Bike Tour calendar in case anyone is waiting for that. And I’m trying to finalize the March-May Talks series, overcoming a number of glitches… will post that here soon.

I’m getting out of town this Friday, heading to Belem, Brazil for the World Social Forum, and when I get back on Feb. 4, I will only get up again the next morning to head to Los Angeles where I have a bunch of Nowtopia appearances lined up til I finally come home late on Feb. 9.

Meanwhile, the weather here in San Francisco, while I was expecting to be indoors continuously, has been eerily summer-like. Here’s some shots I took at random last Saturday, late in the day, as I rode over to the lower Haight. First a couple of shots of Dolores Park, nowadays chock full of young hipsters whenever the weather is suitable…

Dolores Park, January 17 09, wintery light, summery air, just north of 19th Street.

Winter light pours over Liberty Hill onto sunbathing denizens on the slopes above 19th Street in Dolores Park, Jan. 17, 2009.

After that I ended up over at Alamo Square and took this iconic photo, happily with humans in it for a change, followed by a strange look at City Hall due to the new architectural landmarks that sprouted behind it in the past few years.

The most typical SF photo... Alamo Square towards Downtown.

SF City Hall from Fulton Street next to Alamo Square. Federal Bldg to right and new turquoise hotel at 5th and Howard to left.

Another task on my plate is to finish a rewrite on an article I’ve been collaborating with Francesca on, for Antipode magazine, called “Nowtopia: Strategic Exodus?” The new writing has to address the “virtual spine of the commons” as I dubbed it in the book, the net, but also networking more broadly. On my way to the World Social Forum, I’m acutely aware of what an abundance of writing and thinking is going on covering the broad topic of networking politics. A couple of interesting articles I read were Social Movements 2.0 by Brendan Smith, Tim Costello & Jeremy Brecher, and The Alternative’s Alternative by Evgeny Morozov. Smith and Costello spoke at a recent Networking Politics conference I attended at Berkeley, and I really appreciated their argument, most of which is reprised in this piece at the Nation. A key to their ambivalent embrace of new online networks is that so far, it’s easy enough to get huge numbers of people to sign petitions and donate money, but really rare to translate such behaviors “into solidarity built on trust and a willingness to take economic or physical risk on another’s behalf.”

“We’re drawing closer to the point where the majority of online tools are so simple that technical experts are beginning to fade into the background. The web is no longer the exclusive dominion of the young and highly educated, and as this trend continues it will allow social movements to cheaply and easily reach out to increasingly diverse constituencies.”

But along with these transformations they correctly note that existing organizations, often quite hierarchical and top-down, will have to cede control to self-organizing individuals. I recall ten years ago when I was working on the first iteration of the ILWU website (they later hired some big firm to do a revamp) there was a great deal of confusion and nervousness about how to present the union on-line. At the time some union leaders were quite resistant to even including the union’s constitution on line, and to this day, they are hostile to an open forum where members can speak to each other directly on the union’s official site. As the authors put it: “The destruction of hierarchies online means that top-down organizations will face increasing pressure from members to permit more rank-and-file debate and input. This is a healthy process and a long time in coming… Organizations that resist this trend will become increasingly irrelevant online and offline.”

The Morozov article, addressing the upheavals in Greece, comes at some of the same issues from a different angle, looking at how the social movements we tend to see as cutting-edge are themselves being outflanked by the new social software tools:

“…close observers of the riots on the Internet could not help noticing that the anti-globalists ““ the usual suspects of any loud public mischief ““ were hardly visible in the virtual space. This could have been strategic: their members may have preferred to act behind the curtains and avoid publicity. Yet another explanation is also possible: professional anti-globalists have simply been outnumbered by thousands of “freelance radicals”, who have skilfully exploited the Internet, bypassing the cantankerous anti-globalist media in its entirety raising many questions about its usefulness and its future role…

As access to the Internet became more widespread, the anti-globalization activists from all over the world found themselves connected to its giant protest grid and it seemed logical to build a  lean, fast, and cheap reporting network to take advantage of it…The most impressive of such networks- the Independent Media Center (or Indymedia)– sprang up in the wake of the Seattle anti-WTO protests of 1999, acquiring a cult status in the anti-globalization community overnight. Since then, Indymedia has been busy supplying their contributors with reporting equipment, organizing media trainings, and helping their stringers get their stories out to the general public. The years that followed – with a plenty of protest action around WTO and G8 summits – marked the renaissance of the alternative media.However, by 2008 the usefulness of such initiatives seems less obvious; what looked novel in 1999 looks unnecessarily centralized and hierarchical today.”

It’s a fascinating moment in history. Just as the economy is collapsing, and old systems seem to reaching their logical conclusion, there’s a weird kind of yearning for old, known answers. Hence the frenzy these past days (around here anyway) for the Obama inauguration (I guess it goes to show how out of touch I am with mass culture… I don’t feel a thing beyond a mild curiosity to see how few weeks or months it takes for his popularity to plummet and the gauze over people’s eyes to fall away…), and this weirdly naive, disconnected sense of hopeful optimism… for a Democrat? A guy who has appointed entirely old guard criminals and incompetents? Wow, talk about suspending disbelief!

But the new epistemology, which is only going to get really interesting when it starts to find a political voice beyond endless adhocracy, indicates that historic agency is now less organizational and more individual, but as individuals aggregate online and off, they will confront many old familiar problems that organization builders and organizers in general have had to face in years past.  The real reason for hopefulness right now, for me, is that more and more people are asserting themselves in various ways, and not just leaving it to the traditional structures and forms. To be sure, they constitute a small minority in the broad population, but in the fissures and uprisings that are appearing, there is an urgency, an untried sense of possiblity for whole new ways of self-organizing. I’ve often pointed to Global Guerrillas, and here I go again, but his writings on the rise of new kinds of super-empowered individuals and groups also reinforce the sense that historic agency has shifted downward. Oddly, it is close to the age-old anarchist fantasy of a society run from below, horizontally, and on an as-needed basis…  Perhaps Ad-hoc-cracy is a fine model to embrace at this moment of great pressure and unknown futures?…