Readings: The Dark Side of SF Tech and Legacies of the Left

May Day! May Day! The Dark Side of SF Tech and Legacies of the Left - Two Authors Read

Richard A. Walker will read from his new book Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area. Walker is professor emeritus of geography at the University of California. He has written on a diverse range of topics in economic, urban, and environmental geography. He is coauthor of The Capitalist Imperative (1989) and The New Social Economy (1992) and has written extensively on California, including The Conquest of Bread (2004), The Country in the City (2007) and The Atlas of California (2013). Walker is currently director of the Living New Deal Project, whose purpose is to inventory all New Deal public works sites in the United States and recover the lost memory of government investment for the good of all.

Phil Cohen reads from his book Archive That Comrade! Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance. Cohen played a key role in the London counterculture scene of the 1960s. As “Dr. John” he was the public face of the London street commune movement and the occupation of 144 Piccadilly, an event that briefly hit the world’s headlines in July 1969. He subsequently became an urban ethnographer, and for the past forty years he has been involved with working-class communities in East London documenting the impact of structural and demographic change on their livelihoods, lifestyles, and life stories. Currently he is research director of LivingMaps, a network of activists, artists, and academics developing a creative and critical approach to social mapping. He is also professor emeritus at the University of East London and a research fellow of the Young Foundation.