Notes on My Book, The Pacific Circuit, in the Present Moment

After nine (long) years, the book comes out March 18

When I started work on The Pacific Circuit, my 9-year-old daughter was a newborn and Donald Trump was still the sure-to-lose Republican candidate. Yikes. Times have changed. I’ve put a lot into this book, and I think it says meaningful things about why our cities are the way they are and why environmental justice—construed broadly enough—holds the key to a different, better kind American city.

Pulitzer Prize winner Hua Hsu called it “dazzlingly imaginative.” Rebecca Solnit called it a “glorious, gripping urban history” that “everyone should read.” Jenny Odell says it is “a masterful feat of research and storytelling.”

I would love for you to buy The Pacific Circuit, read it, gift it, use it, email me about it, put it on your syllabus, pick it for your book club, and/or come to one of the launch events. Now is the time.

But if you need convincing, in today’s newsletter, I wrote a little bit about how I think the book fits into the current moment.

This last decade is best characterized by the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of “liquid modernity.” Slightly paraphrased, he says we now live in times where anything can happen, but nothing can be done. Donald Trump’s election, a pandemic that shut down the world, chainsawing through the Federal government, spiraling housing costs, a hot land war in Europe, the destruction of Gaza, the emptying of our downtowns: truly anything can happen.

But when individual people look around at the mechanisms for democratic control of their lives… they find that that the levers of power have melted away. Nothing can be done. The international systems of finance, trade, and production reside in a different dimension from political action. The big fights in cities might seem like they are with a mayor or a developer or someone with a different view on apartment buildings, but the underlying structures are controlled from and for elsewhere.

It’s kind of like the big newspapers. Yes, sure, there are union fights to be had, editorial conflicts to be resolve, etc. But the heart of the whole enterprise has been scooped out by forces far beyond any single paper. The social project of the news now lives and dies via private equity or billionaire ownership.

And so it is—with varying details—with so much of American life. My book looks at how and why we got to where we are. Specifically, it details how the development of global supply chains, working with a rising Silicon Valley, created a new and more distant power structure, what I call “the Pacific Circuit.” That trans-oceanic system fed dollars into our increasingly financialized economy, juicing the mortgage boom (and eventual bust) as well as the unbridled rise of venture-backed technology companies. My microcosm is the neighborhood of West Oakland, right up against the Port, and once the stronghold of the Black Panthers.

People in Oakland saw some of these changes coming. I draw on Huey Newton’s early insights into “the technology question,” as he put it. Logistics makes it possible to produce products that we love through a system that we, more or less, hate. Nations, he also observed, don’t play the same role in the globalized, technologized system he called “intercommunalism.” These conditions would force many more people, he thought, to become subject to the conditions of the Black ghettoes that the nation created during and after the Great Migration: Precarious employment, poor health, terrible debt burdens, hostile governmental interventions. He wasn’t wrong.

The services and stores that are part of a healthy urban ecosystem have been hollowed out by tech companies. Rather than shopping from a network of trusted humans and local businesses, you have a pile of Amazon boxes and a slate of apps on your phone. That is to say: logistics—born in World War II, containerized in Vietnam, and scaled up for the last 50 years—has gone inside all of us. We’re nodes in a network of flows of material, feeding production and distribution systems that are located far from where we actually live.

This has done some incredible things. We have access to so many products now at much lower prices. And I don’t want to minimize the pleasure people take in their stuff. Two, it’s created thick cultural, migratory, and economic bonds between the cities of the West Coast and different Asian countries. There’s a new and heretofore unseen demographic reality in places like the Bay Area. And I believe in the possibilities of that kind of cross-cultural ferment.

But man, the downsides. Our cities are in huge trouble for multiple reasons. Nowadays, cities are filled with wildly expensive assets we call homes. It’s almost impossible to keep a restaurant or retail store open. City governments have no idea how to house or even care for homeless people living in their cars or in tents. All the products have to get from Asia to Target and Walmart, and that happens through ports like the one in Oakland. Massive fleets of trucks grab boxes off ships and head for warehouses, and they pass through West Oakland. The neighborhood has long been a sacrificial landscape, a place that all levels of government intentionally polluted in an effort to crowd out the largely Black residents. While they’ve made remarkable progress on air quality, so much of the land there remains so badly polluted, it can’t be used. Much of it sits there now, empty and inducing despair.

The book centers the life of Margaret Gordon, a longtime activist and environmental justice leader in West Oakland, who has been working in the neighborhood for 35 years. At this moment, it’s worth considering that Ms. Margaret did not come up close to power. The Black women community leaders she learned from in Hunters Point (the Big 5) didn’t have access to the halls of power either. They couldn’t just participate in politics and expect good results. They had to create new political realities to have any chance to help the neighborhood.

So, who better to help everyone get a handle on liquid modernity than people who’ve always had to come from the outside and make the system respond to their demands?I ran into Ms. Margaret at a party a couple weeks ago, and I loved how mad she was about what’s happening in this country. Her impulse wasn’t to get sad or tune out, but to get in the trenches and fight. She was fired up.

There’s only one Ms. M, but many environmental justice leaders share this orientation. I don’t always have that same first impulse to go to the barricades. I sometimes think the movement is too oppositional instead of trying to build new opportunities.

But at a time when so much is being dismantled, don’t you want to learn from the tactical experts on slowing down the bad things? (There is a reason that the Trump administration immediately targeted environmental justice players inside and outside the government.)

I also believe in the core idea of environmental justice. EJ is a way to reckon with the physical aftereffects of racist practices in this country. Right wing forces can try to hide the history of segregation or redlining or police brutality, but the land in historically Black neighborhoods keeps the score. There is the lead in the soil. There are the toxics buried in the empty lots. These environmental realities haunt these neighborhoods and no amount of intentional forgetting or obfuscation can make the heavy metals and solvents go away.

There’s a lot more to talk about in this book from the Third World Liberation Front to the proposed coal export terminal in West Oakland to the model of longshore unionism to the way that Silicon Valley’s semiconductor companies led the way on outsourcing to Asia. I’ll address some of those things here in the newsletter over time. (A microseason of book content, perhaps.)

I believe Oakland — concentrating as it does, the good and bad of this country — can give us a view into the future. We’re part of a long struggle for democracy, for multiracial democracy, for fairness in labor, for environmental justice, for state capacity that serves the people, for transnational solidarities.

Sometimes, I am floored that fascism has risen again, that Elon Musk and Steve Bannon have both thrown Nazi salutes with no discernible consequences, that eugenicists are targeting disabled people, that bigots are trying to erase our trans community.

But then I remember that the forces of resistance have a long history, too. This book, I hope, honors those who came before me here on this land. And I hope their stories inspire us for our turn in the conflict. I think some new coalitions may emerge from this current moment, and I would not be at all surprised if they are guided by the radical frequencies of Oakland.