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But as we contest capitalist management of space, we contest and remake the capitalist state too. We insist that land use is not a mere technical or economic but a social and political problem, which means it is about how people get together to exercise power. This is a strategic orientation that privileges autonomous organizations and institutions, the practice of taking responsibility for our collective selves. It is neither state-phobic nor state-philic. It views the state as a terrain where resources are often more available to our enemies than to us, but one that we can—and we must—constrain to our will. It understands the history of reforms as concessions to revolutionary social movements and liberation as a project beyond rights, which achieves rights in its wake.
THE GROUP’S FIRST action was a collective letter that announced the formation of their association and demanded a meeting with their landlord. The letter focused not just on the rent increases, but on the landlord’s attacks against the building’s communal life: “Our children used to be able to play outside in the common areas, now they are forbidden…. We never had armed security, now we have a rent-a-cop who routinely interrogates us, despite knowing who we are.”15 It took months for Botz to agree to meet. When he finally arrived, as tenants recall, he stood cross-armed by their courtyard wall and insisted on his rights to collect market-rate rent. As he’d later reiterate to the press, he had no plans to “coddle” tenants who’d already “ been subsidized for thirty-two years.”16 Management retaliated by ignoring the maintenance requests of households who’d organized.
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Many of the tenants of Echo Park Lake were already connected to LA’s homeless services agency. They had done everything their caseworkers asked: collected documents, signed paperwork. They were told to survive outside and wait.46 But with no permanent housing available, they knew what was at the end of many of the city’s waitlists: a bed in a congregate shelter, whose cramped, shared spaces were infamous for noxious conditions and COVID outbreaks; an unshaded tent in a fenced “safe sleep site,” subject to twenty-four-hour surveillance; a “tiny home,” where two residents share a prefabricated shed smaller than the American Correctional Association’s standard prison cell for one.47 The converted hotel rooms in Project Roomkey, an emergency pandemic program, banned guests, pets, or more than sixty gallons—one trash bag’s worth—of personal belongings. Residents couldn’t gather or visit each other and had to abide by a 7:00 p.m. curfew, after which they were locked inside. To many, those options didn’t look like housing as the provision of a human need; they looked like incarceration for the crime of not being able to afford rent.
TO SOCIAL AND political demands, the state answers with technical and economic processes that only facilitate capitalist accumulation. Under this paradigm, the call for public housing is answered with privatization schemes. The call for community investment is answered with gentrification. The call to solve the housing crisis is answered with affordable and carceral housing. The actions of tenants in struggle point to the direction we can follow to overcome these contradictions. Just as tree roots slowly break up the sidewalks that order the spaces where we live, we can cultivate our movement over time, through the patient, everyday activity of organizing, which Ella Baker called “spadework.”
The tenant as a political category collects the landless and propertyless, the disenfranchised and undocumented, those placed outside the category of citizen, even outside of the category of human. To reclaim a place is to struggle for, with, alongside, and because some of us are made to be “out of place” by the logic of policing and property. By deepening relationships with our neighbors, we can resist displacement and build lasting institutions of tenant democracy. We fight dispossession not with possession but by cultivating new forms of belonging.
The 1980s were not kind to America. Sitting at the end of the longest period of economic expansion in history, what have we gained? Budget deficits are bigger. Trade deficits are bigger. What property we haven’t sold we’ve mortgaged. Our basic industries are being moved overseas at an alarming rate. We pretended for a time that junk bond traders and corporate disassemblers create wealth, but they don’t. America is turning into a service economy and telling itself that’s good. But it isn’t.
America was built on the concept of the frontier. We carved a nation out of the wilderness, using as tools enthusiasm, adolescent energy, and an unwillingness to recognize limitations. But we are running out of recognized frontiers. We are getting older and stodgier and losing our historic advantage in the process. In contrast, the PC business is its own frontier, created inside the box by inward-looking nerds who could find no acceptable challenge in the adult world. Like any other true pioneers, they don’t care about what is possible or not possible; they are dissatisfied with the present and excited about the future. They are antiestablishment and rightly see this as a prerequisite for success.
fair analysis
While Noyce’s ideas about technical management sound all too enlightened to be part of anything called big business, they worked well at Fairchild and then at Noyce’s next creation, Intel. Intel was started, in fact, because Noyce couldn’t get Fairchild’s eastern owners to accept the idea that stock options should be a part of compensation for all employees, not just for management. He wanted to tie everyone, from janitors to bosses, into the overall success of the company, and spreading the wealth around seemed the way to go.
This management style still sets the standard for every computer, software, and semiconductor company in the Valley today, where office doors are a rarity and secretaries hold shares in their company’s stock. Some companies follow the model well, and some do it poorly, but every CEO still wants to think that the place is being run the way Bob Noyce would have run it.
alas ... no longer
IBM people are a little smug, a little slow, and slightly overweight. Most IBMers are hired straight out of school and have never worked for another company. They are folks who drive Buick Regals and take them to the car wash every Saturday morning, paying extra to get the hot wax. Their contented mid—dle-class style bugs the hell out of Silicon Valley entrepreneur types, who want to do business with IBM and yet can’t understand that there are folks in the world—even in the world of computers—who aren’t, like them, madly driven to have a fortune and a Ferrari before their midlife crisis.
idk how accurate this is but i kinda like it lol
The whole marketing operation at Apple is now run by former salespeople, a dangerous trend. Marketing is the creation of long-term demand, while sales is execution of marketing strategies. Marketing is buying the land, choosing what crop to grow, planting the crop, fertilizing it, and then deciding when to harvest. Sales is harvesting the crop. Salespeople in general don’t think strategically about the business, and it’s this short-term focus that’s prevalent right now at Apple.
hmm kinda like this
This habit of sitting on a big pile of money originated at Hewlett-Packard in the 1940s. David Packard figured that careful management of inventories and cash flow could generate lots of money over time. Hanging on to that money meant that the next emergency or major expansion could be financed entirely from internal funds. Now every company in Silicon Valley manages its finances the H-P way.
OS/2 1.0 was designed to run on the 80286 processor. Bill Gates urged IBM to go straight for the 80386 processor as the target for OS/2, but IBM was afraid that the 386 would offer performance too close to that of its minicomputers. Why buy an AS/400 minicomputer for $200,000, when half a dozen networked PS/2 Model 80s running OS/2-386 could give twice the performance for one, third the price? The only reason IBM even developed the 386-based Model 80, in fact, was that Compaq was already selling thousands of its DeskPro 386s. Over the objections of Microsoft, then, OS/2 was aimed at the 286, a chip that Gates correctly called “brain damaged.”
"kids today dont know about this" sorta rant