Recorded on December 4, 2025, this video features a Social Science Matrix Distinguished Lecture, “To Know a Place,” presented by journalist and author Alexis Madrigal.
Madrigal has long explored how technology, culture, and environment shape our lives; from his work co-founding The COVID Tracking Project to his books Powering the Dream and The Pacific Circuit. In this talk, Madrigal turns his attention to the question of how we come to know a place. Drawing on his background as a reporter, writer, and thinker of cities, landscapes, and histories, he explores different ways of writing about and understanding place, revealing how perspective, memory, and narrative inform the stories we tell about the world around us.
About the Speaker
Alexis Madrigal is a journalist in Oakland, California. He is the co-host of KQED’s current affairs show, Forum, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he co-founded The COVID Tracking Project. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of Fusion and a staff writer at Wired. His latest book, The Pacific Circuit, came out in March 2025 from MCD x FSG. He is the proprietor of the Oakland Garden Club, a newsletter for people who like to think about plants. Madrigal authored the book Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.He has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Information School and UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine as well as an affiliate with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.He was born in Mexico City, grew up in rural Washington State, and went to Harvard.
Podcast and Transcript
Watch the panel above or on YouTube. Or listen to the audio recording via the Matrix Podcast below (or on Apple Podcasts).
(upbeat electronic music)
[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
[MARION FOURCADE]
Thank you for joining us today. Uh, my name is Marion Fourcade. I’m the Director of Social Science Matrix.
Our Distinguished Lecture is a once-a-year opportunity to highlight an outstanding public thinker whose work sparks important conversations in the wider public sphere, and sometimes across the disciplines as well. So today, we are delighted to welcome Alexis Madrigal, a journalist based here in Oakland and co-host of KQED’s show, Forum. His wide-ranging work including his two big books, Powering the Dream, on green technology, and the more recent Pacific Circuit, reflect a deep curiosity about how technology and society intertwine, and are really always, always through a very original perspective.
Uh, so we are very honored to ask him for this year’s distinguished lecture, and I want here to acknowledge my predecessor, Cori Hayden, who had the brilliant idea, actually, of reaching out to Madrigal last spring. This is our last event of this semester, so let me just give you a quick preview of our coming activities in the spring. Very, very, very shortly, I just want to draw your attention to two, you know, two Matrix — first coming, Matrix on Point on corruption in America, and our California Spotlight in February on higher education under attack, and there are a lot more, but we also have several, you know, quite a few Author Meets Critics that are going to be that are either already scheduled or are going to be scheduled.
So let me now introduce our speaker. So Alexis Madrigal is a journalist based in Oakland. So as I said, he’s the co-host of KQED’s leading talk show in the Bay Area, Forum, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, where he co-founded the COVID Tracking Project.
I want to honor this project because it get, really got me through Covid. It was an incredible public service that kept me hooked at the time, at a time of great upheaval and uncertainty. And, of course, I, along with Cori, have been a huge fan of his writings at The Atlantic, and they are indeed the reason why I became a subscriber a few years ago, and why you should.
Previously, Madrigal was the Editor-in-Chief of Fusion and a staff writer at Wired. His latest book, I think part of the talk will rely on it — The Pacific Circuit came out in March from MCD x FSG. Right?
It is an ambitious gripping, and very human history of Oakland as a key node in the Pacific supply chain. Madrigal is also the proprietor of the Oakland Garden Club, a newsletter for people who like to think about plants. He’s been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, and also at the Center for the Study of Technology, Science, and Medicine in Society, as well as an affiliate with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
He was born in Mexico City, grew up in rural Washington State, and went to Harvard. So without further ado, I will turn it over to you. Thank you very much.
[ALEXIS MADRIGAL]
Thanks so much.
(audience applauding)
This is also my last big talk of the year, too. What a lovely place to do it too. I’ve spent several stints at Berkeley as a visiting scholar ’cause I never went to grad school.
Ugh. And I love it here so much. I’ll try not to get distracted by the view that’s behind you that you don’t get to see.
But it’s, this is like my favorite light of the year. You know, there was a time in my career when I was largely writing about technology. And I wrote about startups, and I wrote about big companies, though it was really nothing like today, where startups are worth billions of dollars, and big companies are worth trillions, where the weight of the technology industry has taken over the stock market, and also maybe sent the Earth off its axis too.
But back then, there was a debate about whether social media created new social conditions or merely reflected what was going on. And in this debate, there was this fierce sub-debate, some of you might remember, about whether people should refer to the world outside the screen as real life. That’s because people, I think, studying technology wanted to argue that what was happening there on Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else was also real life, and there was even a magazine, a great little magazine called ‘Real Life Mag.’
Which was about, quote, ‘Living With Technology.’ And in Real Life Mag, you know, one author described, quote, “The cultural concept, debunked over and over again, and yet somehow emotionally convenient of a real world,” scare quoted, “beyond the screen.” “To sustain these fantasies,” this author wrote, “one needs to bracket the understanding that,” quote, “Our lived reality is the result of the constant interpenetration of the online and the offline,” as Nathan Jorgenson has put it.
I wanna reverse this idea and note that there was an incredible allure to the idea that there was nothing special beyond the screen. Then whatever you were doing on your phone, whatever was happening on your feeds, whatever you could access through this piece of glass, it was as relevant a thing to study, as complex a topic, as important a subject as anything that was happening out there in what many folks, including myself, began to call the physical world, or the three-dimensional world, or, and I only rarely committed this sin, meet space. And perhaps this idea that there was nothing special about the reality outside our screens or that the interpenetration of the digital and physical made them one and the same was one that we needed to begin to take the study of social media seriously.
Twitter had to be put on a level with other weighty topics like climate change, and I would still argue it should be there. The mapping of the relationship from a social media app to the real world is important, and as all these folks would note, it was also bidirectional. Academics and journalists and just regular people had to understand the sort of cyber skin that had grown on the world, shaping all that it draped over, and I really do think it was a significant achievement putting the cybernetic nature of our current physical world front and center.
But I really think it was only a temporary maneuver, and it should be rolled back. This is really a talk in honor of real life of the real world. Because no matter what theorists said, people kept using those terms.
Was it emotional convenience, or was it something more important, a kind of deep truth that kept rising to the surface? Here’s the first part of what I think it was, the real world is alive, and the phone world is not. And what makes it real is that there are other living beings with their own goals who you meet on whatever terms, not the terms of service inside a screen.
Bodies are real and alive. Trees are real and alive. Mosquitoes are real and alive.
Perhaps the term shouldn’t be in real life but with real life, because that’s how we live outside the screen. The other part is that place really matters, and place matters because of the inescapable history of every spot on Earth. I tend to describe what came before and my recognition of it as a kind of haunting, and I mean this mostly, playfully mostly.
Places are, to borrow Jorgenson’s language, the result of the constant interpenetration not just of digital and physical, but of the past and present. Couple of my favorite artists, Helen and Newton Harrison, like to ask these two questions: How big is here? And how long is now?
And you could, like, apply that to Instagram posts, I suppose, and you’d draw a network of data centers, and you’d keep going backwards maybe, and you’d get to the sand that got made into the silicon that went into the chips and the other sand that went into the glass. Like, you could do that, and it’d probably be interesting, but it wouldn’t tell you much about the here and now of Instagram. And this is so different for real places, for the real world.
Out here, we find a superposition of so many places and systems. My wife and I have a little shop on College Avenue now called Local Economy, kind of all part of this thinking about place, and if I ask of that place, like, “How big is here? And how long is now?”
I can find so much. Because here is Claremont Creek, where our water comes from, running in pipes past the shop down College to the river where our water also comes from, eventually running to the Pacific Ocean, where our water also comes from, to the wall we had to cut open in the back room to install a sink, where our water also comes from. Here’s really a node in a logistics network.
It’s a community space. Here is an old building on a ghost streetcar line. Here to your microbiome is you, and all these heres are not stacked like dolls, but they’re connected together by complex and often mysterious piping.
There’s just so much to learn about here. Now is the rushing narrows that contains all of our histories and ancestries and genealogies. It’s the point at which we can nudge the trajectory of the world.
So now is an X-millisecond slice of perception, as a neuroscientist might say, and now is also the product of 3.8 billion years of life reproducing itself in an unbroken chain. The astrobiologist Sara Amari Walker says, “You’re actually just an object that’s very large in time.” So perhaps we could also ask, how big is now, and how long is here?
You can probably see why I’m interested in place, in knowing this particular place, a bioregion of this Earth, because I’m a technophile who quit in kind of the ways that matter, and like an ex-smoker, I bring the convert’s zeal, you know? Every tree, an opportunity to atone. Every blade of grass worth touching.
I feel like concentrating on the big here and the long now have rescued me from a world of technology that’s more alienating in its current form than I could have ever imagined when I was a kid connecting to a BBS while living at the end of a long country road in Washington. I’m obviously not the first person around here to become fixated on knowing place. You know, there’s a really proud history that I associate with the term bioregionalism, popularized by Bay Area legends like Peter Berg and his Planet Drum work and also by the poet Gary Snyder.
And Snyder’s book of essays, The Practice of the Wild, is amazing, been very influential for me. And of course, he was deeply influenced by indigenous traditions both here and across the world, and what he was invested in was that people really learn to live where they live. And he meant, of course, the flora and the watersheds and the animals, but he also meant the culture, which for him grew directly out of the place.
And he believed that a more ecologically sane world would fit our political jurisdictions to our bioregions, especially to the watersheds. Importantly for our purposes here, that required taking the time and doing the work to know and understand all kinds of things about a place. This is Snyder writing, “Bioregional awareness teaches us in specific ways.
It is not enough just to love nature or to want to be in harmony with Gaia. Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place, and it must be grounded in information and experience.” That’s ecological and hydrological knowledge.
It’s deep familiarity with our specific Bay Area social history. It’s understanding the projections that inform our local future, and it’s an intimate kind of knowing, both intellectual and embodied. You know, for good reason, Robin Wall Kimmerer has become the most influential carrier of this message in recent years.
This is Kimmerer, “America has been called the home of second chances. For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the second man may be to set aside the ways of the colonists and become indigenous to place.” This is from Braiding Sweetgrass.
But can Americans, as a nature of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore. Can’t really presume to give you what Americans might do.
I mean, look around, kind of a wild and unpredictable people, you know. But with my preamble done, I do want to give you my version of knowing this place with my mind and with my body, and let this be an offering then to the place, to the real world, to real life to life. We call this place the East Bay, but for me, it is the center of my own personal geography, and Oakland is the center of the center.
So, let’s begin then with a little talk of Oakland, a crossroads city, backlot of the future, a place destined in some ways to provide the infrastructure for the gleaming automatic city of San Francisco. A city by the water, but not of the water. In fact, turned away from the water.
Really a place where the water was more of a front in the battle with global forces. Oakland, a place that’s always been working. Maybe it’s a city that’s really a borough.
Definitely a city that’s infused with Berkeley and the American South and several countries in Asia. Oakland’s polyglot, multiethnic, multiracial, and I suggested that living in Oakland actually infuses people with a certain Oaklandish sensibility of politics almost. Oaklandish people are highly conscious of the ways that institutional discrimination has structured every aspect of American society and also of the tremendous cultural ferment that those circumstances have produced.
The pain and pleasure of belonging and not belonging, of longing for some other home and making a new one, of forgetting and of remembering. While San Francisco and Silicon Valley have dedicated themselves to the new, to the future, Oakland’s not so sure, and that’s because we’ve learned the hard way. Much of my work has taken place on the waterfront itself over the last decade, and we’re gonna get there.
But as I look ahead, my work is actually shifting geographies a little bit. The Oakland waterfront has been the center of the center of the center, but what do I even call that geography? It’s not really the San Francisco Bay Area.
It’s not really Northern California. It’s more specific and stranger like a gerrymandered district or maybe more hopefully an estuary. One way I can explain it is that one day a message arrived in my mind that I actually recognized two gods, the mountains that delineate my life, Mount Diablo that way, Mount Tamalpais, which we could see this way.
And between those two mountains, that’s where my real life was, has been, and will be. When I say this message arrived, I wouldn’t even really call it a thought. I can’t find its roots or other networks of neural firings it could be attached to.
And when I looked in for, in my mind for a why I might believe in these particular gods, it was just a single image, kind of more dream than memory, a ridgeline and a kind of luminescent wind, not actually glowing but somehow kinda sensible like I imagine a dog might see smell. And there was this realization that everything around here must bend to the will of the mountain, and in that trace, in that wisp, I think the ridge belonged to Diablo out there looming dominant and lonely. I didn’t ask for the message either.
I’m, like, not a religious person in any way, and I once said that to an eco-feminist liberation theologist, and she replied, ‘But you are a spiritual person.’ I didn’t know I was. Diablo’s obviously not my only god.
On the other side, my daily life looks to and upon Tam. I mean, Tam has so many faces, and in my mind, the mountain’s aslope from the Golden Gate to its very peak, an elongated eccentric mountain. But I know that’s just one view, and if you look from the city or from the north or from Angel Island, there’s a different mountain.
So, everywhere I look for Tam, and I track her comings and goings into the fog, into light and shadow. If you were to plot all the tracks of my life, something like Mega, Strava, or maybe there’s just some data place out there that actually has this, nearly everything I do and the vast majority of the people I love and care about are located between these two mountains. Diablo 20 miles to the east, Tam 20 miles to the west, and in between, the city, the East Bay, what humans have built here in these desperate and frenzied decades.
I live actually almost exactly on the line between the two highest peaks, like within a couple hundred yards. And my friend Robin Sloan, novelist, jokes it must be like a lay line out there somewhere. I think I might be drawn myself to what Gary Snyder called the visible fact of the mountain, that the mountain just is.
And for all humans before us, the mountain is, and for us, it will always be, is. To look upon these mountains is to see beyond our own time, beyond the biological, beyond the technological, because the mountains exist in a temporality we can ourselves only imagine. Like, we can fake an understanding of deep time, but there’s no million-year module in our brains.
We can only simulate that kind of thinking about not quite endlessness. Yet here we are, these strange beings coursing with loops and longing, contemplating the mountains with neurons working on that millisecond animal scale. Nothing actually makes me feel more biological than running up a mountain.
Inside every cell of my body has to be recruited to the challenge of ascent, and that multicellular cooperation is old enough to be forgotten and automatic. But it really is what the self is, a version of the self that predated neurons, that’s hunkered down deep in our cells. And yet that self can only exist in relation to this world and the place and the places that I run.
I should confess now that I actually spent the summertime training for and executing a solo ultra-marathon from the summit of Diablo to the base of Mount Tam, 57 miles. I delivered a little tiny stone from the top of Diablo to, to Tam. And I still, even though I’ve already done it, I can’t tell you why I did it.
Just like I don’t understand the messages that I received. But I can tell you some things that I learned running between the two mountains, training on the hills and valleys, and the Bayshore Trails. I mean, for one, I have run everywhere.
Across the San Rafael Bridge, across the Bay Bridge to Treasure Island and looping back past the IKEA and across Emeryville. I’ve run up and down the Bayshore to Richmond and the Rosie the Riveter Museum, the old Craneway Pavilion. I’ve run Mandela Parkway and into the port and looped it while it stood there empty on a Sunday, sideshow loops covering the road, cranes at rest.
All the detritus of logistics grinding into dust in the gutter of Middle Harbor, Shoreline Road. I’ve run hundreds of times up Strawberry Creek Canyon behind the university, building a kind of internal time-lapse as the seasons change but I remain, my memories getting embedded in this landscape and the landscape embedding in my own memory. One time, actually, I ran through the valley at night, it was part of my training to figure out how to run at night.
And halfway down, a single coyote began to howl. As I kept running, soon the entire valley revealed itself to be lousy with coyotes. Their cries were all around me, echoing off the canyon, and for the first time, I understood what it meant to have your blood run cold.
I run up Diablo with sweat pouring from my body in buckets, circled by flies like Linus from Charlie Brown. I run through Briones through clouds of black flies, just holding my arms in front of my face like a boxer and screaming from the sheer nastiness of their bodies on mine, picking them squirming out of my beard. I’ve run through the Ashby BART station, past the glorious Mildred Howard sculpture that finally got put in just as Howard herself was being pushed out by gentrification.
I’ve run every glorious trail in Redwood, trees high above me, ruddy dust coating my shoes in a sweaty paste, the quiet, all-encompassing. I’ve run three miles in blistering heat to visit a patch of special Oakland Calochortus, mariposa lilies, which are my favorite. I’ve run the mudflats of San Leandro in pouring rain, my fingers fumbling with energy bars, clothes soaked.
A miserable counterpoint to the happily skittering water birds dancing where the water meets the land. I’ve run in the Southern Oakland hills near the gun range, where every now and again, I’m reminded we’re in America. I could go on, I really could go on, but I will stop.
(laughter)
My point is, running has pulled bioregional knowledge inside me. I mean that in a really quite literal way, that running pulls the environment into you, because it’s not your body alone that trains. You need the ground and the air and the trails and the gravel paths, all of the places you’ve moved your body through.
Training merges the body into Bay Farm Island or the Tamalpa Trail or Marina Bay, or the Embarcadero. These places have literally gone inside my legs and heart, all those strides, the bottoms of my feet pushing against earth, the filling of my lungs with air, the blood rushing to where it’s desperately needed. And these moments of emplacement on the earth are now encoded in my body.
The trails are in the fibers of my heart and in the muscles of my legs and the patterns of my brain. My body is inseparable, really, from the landscape. And wasn’t that, in a kinda more general form, one of the key realizations of ecology?
You know, there was another 1960s era, a San Francisco publication called Man Not Apart, that we’re not people living in a diorama, we’re part of a living world and that living world is a part of us, not just in this moment but reaching back through time. I’ve been a bit haunted by Andrew Alden’s book on the geology of Oakland called Deep Oakland. It’s a good haunted, I would say, but he describes our Bay’s long-term oscillation between Bay and the river valley that it’s actually often been in the fullness of deep time.
Like, our shorelines, that our shorelines would not be fixed is something that I think we all kinda understand, but to truly imagine sand blowing over from a San Francisco not on the water, and that that sand piling up over the eons created the material on which downtown Oakland now sits, gives me this chills, and it also helps me prepare, maybe a little, for sea level rise, to think of the place that I love as that dynamic. And also to know that this sand is what lets the buildings of downtown Oakland rise, so that one day I can walk beneath them with a million people celebrating the idea of Oakland, the warriors on floats and people shouting, “My town!” People long since vanished, many no longer in Oakland, Team Gone too, along with many of the businesses once there, and yet that city still exists inside me too.
How long is now? It’s not enough to me to understand just the physical and biological elements of a place, you know, Humans Not Apart. Another astrobiologist, you can tell I’m interested in astrobiology, Adam Webb, says, you know, “We are what the biosphere is doing now.”
So let us talk of what we’ve done to Oakland, to the parts of Oakland that used to be the shoreline and those that are the shoreline now. So a lot of my work down there has really focused on the global forces I call the Pacific Circuit and how they’ve transformed Oakland and the people who live closest to the port and how they’ve dealt with those changes. For me, the Pacific Circuit’s core is the network of container ports connecting Asian manufacturing with American consumers and corporate know-how, a system that’s generated at the most valuable companies the world has ever known.
You could mark the beginning of it as containerization, which enabled the integrated supply chains that Silicon Valley has specialized in. You know, we often focus on the kind of physical parts of that, stuffing things into boxes, which can be loaded on ships, trains, or trucks, and all the systems around that, which vastly reduced the amount of labor needed on the waterfront and expanded how much land a port needed to take up. You know, that’s kind of the port part.
But just as important were the information and communication technologies that were necessary to make the system run, the Silicon Valley part. And it’s important to say that Silicon Valley chipmakers were building assembly plants and factories in Asia literally at the dawn of the industry, and those same products were making the control of those places from Northern California easier. It was, to a certain way of thinking, a virtuous circle.
Logistics offered an incredible new opportunity to build new production systems. Almost always left out of that story is that there was another component to the system that was also required, and that was a vast shoreline in close proximity to San Francisco that could be turned into an environmental sacrifice zone, and that’s the West Oakland part. West Oakland had long been the most diverse and also the most working class of Oakland’s neighborhoods.
Black people had built a thriving commercial corridor along 7th Street that still resounds in the hearts and minds of people today. A new form of blues emerged there. It was a place where you could go not only to get soul food, but also to visit the dentist or find a union, go to a political meeting.
It was really kind of a town square for Black life in the East Bay. Can kind of sound nice when you describe the sanctuary that black people built amidst depression, but we can’t forget another truth right alongside that one, which was that black people were segregated in the Bay Area, especially in the years after the New Deal. The political trade for an America with socialistic tendencies was an America in which segregation reigned from sea to shining sea.
West Oakland was, in addition, red-lined. That is to say, marked for disinvestment by the federal government alongside a variety of private entities and other levels of government. And it was really worse than red-lining.
In 1937, the federal government engaged in a massive data collection effort to analyze every block of every urban area in the country, and it was this data that actually fed into the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and FHA’s different efforts at risk rating, mapping and red-lining neighborhoods within cities. They drew on the Chicago School of Sociology’s beliefs that cities grew from the inside out, that racial invasion was a primary, maybe the primary factor in driving urban change, and that black people specifically were a detriment to property values. Hence, the inner city became a metonymy for black America because the inner city was where segregated black populations were left to their own devices, right as the government funded suburban developments for white people.
Just to put a fine point on it, there were 350,000 suburban homes backed by the FHA built in the Bay Area from the ward in 1959, and only 100 non-whites were living in them at the end of that period, but we’re at Berkeley and you can all read Richard Rothstein to get the full story on that. Here, let me add a little different element that I think gets short shrift in most histories. In Oakland, that data-gathering effort that I mentioned, it was led by a guy named I.F. Shattuck.
You probably recognize the name from Shattuck, and he wrote a report based on all the data for the City of Oakland. He suggested two key things. One, that a freeway be rammed through the area of West Oakland to segregate the blacker west end from the whiter east.
And two, that industrial facilities should be sited near the dense residential neighborhoods of West Oakland to, quote, “crowd out” residents by reducing their quality of life. To Shattuck and his ilk, crowding out would solve the problem of assembling properties for industrial concerns who would support Oakland’s tax base and also what he saw as the problem of black people living in the city. And of all the injuries visited upon black people in this country, red-lining, predatory lending, racial steering, unjust policing, segregation, many more you can probably name, I think using pollution as public policy might be the most underrated.
Citing heavy industry near black families’ homes was direct, not just financial violence, and it took place at an almost unbelievable scale in community after community and continued unabated for decades. As it was in Oakland, so it was all over the Bay Area. Look at the archipelago of black communities here.
East Palo Alto up to Bayview-Hunters Point, Marin City, Richmond, Oakland, down to Russell City. All of them were near the water, most of them directly attached to waterfront work, and all of them subject to terrible injurious living conditions, and it was all intentional. This was the world in which the main character in my book, Miss Margaret Gordon, was born.
Miss Margaret, many of you probably know, an environmental justice leader in West Oakland, works here at Berkeley now too and she was my guide to not just the place of West Oakland, but also how Oakland worked. So when I go back and listen to some of my earliest recordings of her from now 10 years ago, she was really giving me the whole game, putting me onto everything that would later become the book. And honestly, I was not yet deep enough in West Oakland, the lore of it, at that point to understand how rich those early conversations were.
It actually took me half a decade of work interviewing people, learning the place, digging in archives to even really begin to approach what Miss Margaret was trying to tell me about the place, what she already knew in her mind and her bones and her heart and her lungs. There’s really one thing I’ve come to believe with a really fierce conviction that the story of West Oakland is known by the culture-keepers of West Oakland. People there don’t need historians and journalists to tell them the truth of what happened.
They were there, their ancestors were there, and we can fill in details we can pull receipts from predominantly white institutions, and I think that’s a useful role for us, but those third-generation Oaklanders, the people whose parents came on the railroad for the war work, who passed down the stories of the Jim Crow South and the North’s separate but equally nasty depredations, they don’t need me to tell them about how the scale of the federal government’s interventions in the area were enormous, how thousands of housing units were destroyed, how the American state encircled the neighborhood with freeways and rammed BART through its thriving cultural district and maintained a heavy industrial zoning designation in the densest residential neighborhood in Oakland. And built an enormous container port for global shipping directly attached to the neighborhood, and bulldozed whole city blocks to build a postal logistics facility, calling in a cut-rate demolition man who did the job in front of neighborhood children and downtown elites with a literal World War II tank. They know the story, if not the details.
Truly the story of the country of sacrificing black lives for economic growth, while white business owners prospered. Or as Miss Margaret would put it, “One was down, and one was up.” Some people have made a ton of money from the port’s operations, that’s for sure.
But to the residents of West Oakland, all the economic growth meant was thousands of trucks going through and idling in their neighborhood, belching diesel particulate matter into the lungs of their children. Over time, asthma rates climbed up, people got sick, and researchers called the combined effect on the health of residents of places like this weathering, except the weather was racism, environmental racism, institutional racism, can’t go for a walk outside racism, have no grocery store racism, been up all night with sick kids racism. This was a hard place to live for a lot of years.
Some people loved it despite its flaws. Some people hated it. Art came out of it.
Many people died unnecessary deaths. But no one could say that the west part of West Oakland was being done justice by our country, despite the struggles and contributions of its people. And then in 1989, the earthquake hit.
The freeway that had cut off the west part of West Oakland, as envisioned by racist planners since 1937, collapsed. A new range of community efforts began, and Miss Margaret, who moved to the neighborhood shortly after, found herself in the middle of many of them. One of the things that was sprouting up in the neighborhood during those years of intense crosswinds was a program called the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project.
Miss Margaret actually started volunteering through their community planning process. And the idea behind that organization was that the residents of West Oakland knew what the problems in the neighborhoods were, but their voices had been ignored. They knew they needed to take what everyone knew and turn it into data that could be processed by regulators, politicians, and citizens alike, and that’s what they set out to do.
They brought together dozens of community members to list the problems where they lived, and the list that they developed really could be summed into two buckets, air quality and toxic exposure on the one hand, and gentrification and displacement on the other. To use the old language of Shattuck, like you don’t have to squint much at those two issues to see a new version of crowding out. To go through some of the stats from West Oakland at the time, there were more than 400 contaminated sites in West Oakland.
That’s one reason why there’s still so many empty lots as you ride the West Oakland BART into the West Oakland station. Children were seven times more likely to be hospitalized because of asthma than the average Californian. 82% of residents lived within an eighth of a mile of an industrial facility.
Five times the toxic chemicals per capital, per capita were created in West Oakland than in the rest of the city, and the children of the ZIP code were the most likely to have lead poisoning. Yet, only 8% of the city’s lead abatement funding went to West Oakland. Despite all that, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the money that had been created in the dot-com boom was flowing over into the area.
So even 20 years ago, people were not only fighting to push pollution out, but to keep themselves in this historic neighborhood, which had provided sanctuary for people’s parents and aunties and cousins, where they’d gone to dance class and eaten Thanksgiving dinner. The project’s first campaign was shutting down a yeast factory. I didn’t know this about yeast factories, but they’re disgusting.
You can think about that every time you’re putting it in your bread. Every 18 hours, the factory spewed a toxic, carcinogenic, and disgusting-smelling chemical into the air. They got the plant closed down, that drew more people to the effort.
And so despite losing their initial funder shortly thereafter, Miss Margaret stayed on to tackle the next big problem, which was the trucks, the trucks going into and out of the port. Decades before, Huey Newton, who lived, you know that one big tall building by the lake in Lake Merritt? He lived on the top floor there, looking over on the Oakland Estuary and therefore the port.
And he wrote an essay called The Technology Question, in which he argued, among other things, that supply chains dispersed ethical responsibility. At a time when Silicon Valley was the building the transistors that were often used in the military-industrial complex, Newton wrote, “The US capitalist has been able to spread out his entire operation. You put together his machinery and parts.
Thus you are not building a bomb, you are building a transistor.” One might have an ethical reaction to working directly on a bomb, but supply chains, the spread out made it harder to see the impacts of whatever anyone was doing. The scale and fluidity of production and logistics just make it hard to pick out who’s responsible for what.
For example, the Port of Oakland, in becoming a crucial node in the global supply chain of goods, required thousands of individual people to drive in and out of the port, spewing emissions. None of them was directly responsible for the disease burden in Oakland, but collectively, the system was making people sick just as it enriched others. So Miss Margaret and her organizing partner, a guy named Brian Beverage, took over the work of fighting the port.
People from West Oakland stood on the streets counting trucks. They documented how trucks idled outside of schools and ruined roads and sidewalks. They put air quality monitoring equipment inside Ms. Margaret’s home and found that her family was exposed to five times the particulate matter that other neighborhoods were.
As the 2000s wore on, they knew they had to build an actual coalition to win against the port. Ms. Margaret, as an old friend of hers told me, is a, quote, “Feisty little woman.” But she also knew she had to develop allies.
Sometimes those folks were old friends, like a woman named Gloria she’d known since they were in Hunter’s Point together as little kids. Some of them were people who worked with the truckers, like a baseball hat-wearing small businessman named Bill Labooty. Sometimes they were higher up.
As they maneuvered to create legislation, she found herself relying on then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. But she had no more important ally in the fight than a guy named Tony Iton, who took over as the county health officer in 2003. One of the first things that he did was to look at the county’s records of death certificates.
These deaths were also data that could tell them who was dying when. They mapped the life expectancy of people living in different parts of the city, and the results were, or at least should have been, shocking. If you were a Black person living in West Oakland, you’d die more than a decade before a Black person in the Oakland hills.
If you were a Black person living in West Oakland, you’d die up to 15 years before a white person in the hills. And it wasn’t actually because of gang violence, or drugs, or AIDS, or infant mortality. People in the flatlands were dying of the same things as people in the hills, just sooner: heart disease, cancer, respiratory illnesses.
That term kept coming up again, weathering. With these different types of data in hand, they began to lean on the port. Ms. Margaret got appointed by Ron Dellums to the Port Commission in 2007, and she’s still the only person ever to serve from the actual community impacted by the port’s operations.
They made major reforms both at the hyperlocal and state levels. One, they got the trucks upgraded to be cleaner. Two, the truckers were routed away from residential areas and overall truck trips were reduced.
Three, Schwarzenegger got legislation passed requiring container ships to switch to cleaner fuels when they got near California. And four, ships were required to plug into electrical power on the shore rather than running their engines while in port, burning fuel. So nasty, it’s basically asphalt at room temperature.
Ms. Margaret was instrumental in pushing through all of these initiatives. By 2015, diesel particulate emissions from trucks were down 98% from 2005. Emissions from cargo ships were down 75%.
The port had undergone a transformation and made West Oakland’s air radically cleaner. The reforms have actually been adopted acro– around the country, and Ms. Margaret is a national expert now on reducing the health impacts of the still booming logistics industry. It’s really and genuinely a triumph, an unlikely and incredible triumph.
And it really has remade this place, and it’s been an honor to tell that story with Ms. Margaret and so many others from West Oakland. But as Ms. Margaret would say, “There’s always another fight.” And I wanna turn to our city’s other set of problems, and we’re gonna thread all these stories together.
But first, I’m gonna drink a sip of water. In Oakland, you may have noticed, there is a great emptiness to a lot of city life. Bars and cafes and restaurants keep closing.
You often have the feeling of being alone among tall buildings. The sadness of blocks of ground floor retail filled with nothing but discarded dreams. One small business owner I know posted a receipt from so-called Small Business Saturday.
She made two sales, her worst ever Small Business Saturday in 20 years. And in the comments to her post, there are dozens and dozens of people saying similar things. These businesses and people are the backbone of a city, and yet they can barely survive.
And it’s not just in Oakland, it’s happening in cities all across the country. The economic historian Martha Poone said to me, “The city is based on exchange. It’s a place that allows you to meet and gather.
That’s the origin of the city, and that commercial model of life is gone.” What happened? I mean, we all know, it’s rampant inequality that’s pouring money upwards, pushing the middle class into precarity and the working class into immiseration.
And it’s also the Pacific Circuit sucking more and more dollars into apps and out of stores. The changes that brought began to transform retail many years ago. I mean, big box stores and Walmart were sort of the charismatic surface manifestations of the phenomenon.
But coastal cities had actually seemed resilient. They were growing and increasingly rich, and our dense patchwork of businesses didn’t get knocked out by the big box era. Money flowed steadily into the narrow sliver of real estate along the Pacific.
But the pandemic inaugurated a new time and perhaps pulled the future forward some years. Logistics came for the very idea of restaurants and the other low-key semi-public spaces that make a city a city. Internet entrepreneurs flaked off the profitable parts of urban businesses and cast off the weight of the positive externalities they generated.
What did they care if a cafe was more than a place to get a sandwich? They could sell you the sandwich easier, deliver it right to your mouth almost. The logic of logistics began to extend down into the marrow of our households.
Everybody with a phone is part of these networks for moving people and goods. A Chinese manufacturer can now direct something to you right to your house, bypassing any local business not involved in delivery. Uber and the Uber for everything apps can take you anywhere or bring anything to you.
And while that’s added some convenience to our lives, which I think is undeniable, there’s been a terrible collective effect. It’s now harder to open a shop selling anything. It’s harder to run a restaurant.
It’s harder to keep public transit running when it’s bleeding riders to apps. Just a couple weeks ago on forum, the mayor of San Jose floated the idea to me that it might be cheaper to subsidize Waymo than to keep their public transportation systems running. The Pacific Circuit hasn’t only changed cities, it’s also changed us.
There is such a thing as the logistical self now. Logistical figures, as the architectural researcher Claire Leister calls them, or maybe it’s us, were people who understand ourselves as nodes in a network of flows, less citizens of Oakland or San Jose than delivery or pick-up points across a variety of apps. One doesn’t wander the city, but draws on the whole world’s resources to deliver whatever is desired.
People who lived in big cities used to love having a guy, this guy of any gender, but having a guy who had access to niche products or services. Now, there’s always an app, a website, and then a delivery. Instead of a friendly set of trusted people across a metropolitan region, there is a data trail and a recycling bin filled with Amazon boxes.
It’s sad. This atomization, this running of the whole world on a different set of rails that bypass any sense of collectivity. There’s a story that Kurt Vonnegut tells.
It goes viral every once in a while. It seems like every six months, I see it going viral. And it’s about a time when he goes out to buy an envelope and his wife asks why he doesn’t buy 100 envelopes and keep them in his office, you know, that logistical thinking.
But Vonnegut has no intention of doing that. He says, “I’m gonna have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people, see some great-looking babes.”
That hasn’t held up as well. “and a fire engine goes by and I give them the thumbs up and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And of course, the computers will do us out of that.
And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. “You know, we love to move around. And we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
Cities are so good at building solidarity. Not the hard solidarity of getting into the streets in the interest of others, but the soft one of building human allegiance for no reason at all. With an exchange of money, there’s also the inefficient interchanges of life.
City life is filled with all kinds of little gives and takes, with grocery checkers, the bookstore people, a Japanese steel specialist who carries obscure gardening tools, the vintage store lady with an eye for French chore coats, the guy selling Street Spirit outside the café, the barista with an eyebrow ring and heart of gold, the woman who says, smiling, “Why, this dog? He’s a Maltipoo.”
(audience laughing)
If you want a hopeful note, I’ll give you a hopeful note. For all that we’ve lost in real life, I actually do think we’re approaching a natural breaking point in this massive arc of history. I don’t know how it’s gonna go, but I am optimistic.
On the one side, you have logistical forces, billionaires, liquid capital, artificial intelligence, of course, and they’re offering some sense of the new, of technological progress, and maybe somewhere in their future, there’s a better life for some of us, too. A more immediately satisfied, less lonely, less complex life, one with less and less and less friction. But there’s a problem.
The base reliability of anything you see on your screen is going down with each passing day. Like, right now is as good as it’s gonna be for the foreseeable future, and I think it’s gonna get much, much worse. That’s not to say whatever’s on there won’t be engaging, commercially successful, or even interesting in some ways, but the ability to believe your own eyes or your own belief that you’re communicating with another human is disappearing.
And it’s disappearing so that a small number of companies can become the most valuable entities the world has ever known in reaching a tiny number of people beyond comparison. Matched up against that, on the other side, and where I locate myself emphatically, there is the local. There’s the grass, the more than human world, the dog, the feeling of hugging someone, that thing where you walk into a room with friends and acquaintances and they all go, “Hey!”
It’s being a regular. It’s being a stranger meeting new people. It’s knowing the seasons by the smell of the air and the blooming of particular flowers.
This isn’t an atechnological vision, and it’s not a rural vision either, but it is a local vision, and I’ve never believed more strongly in the future of the local, of place, of the real world than I do right now. The side I’m describing is the side of real life, not simulations of life. It’s on the side of living beings, beings that have goals we can only dimly grasp, beings we can never fully know.
There are trees that have been alive since Jesus was executed by the Roman Empire. There are bowhead whales that have been alive since Moby Dick was written. There are communities of aspen trees that might as well be immortal.
The marigold that I have tattooed on my left arm is from the Florentine Codex. It’s the first place marigolds appear in the Western canon, and it looks just like the ones in my yard. We’re so much deeper in time than we like to pretend, so much more enmeshed in all the histories, geological, biological, hydrological.
Now is so long. Here is so big. Let’s just say for all the power and all the weight of money in the technological machine, the forces of the real world are adaptive and thrilling and powerful too.
But not all of them come without consequences. As much as people would like to ignore the social history of our cities that I talked about earlier in this lecture, the way that racism structured every single city in the Bay, the seas are making sure that we cannot forget. The very same places where our chemicals are buried, where Black people were forced to build lives, are now on the frontlines of sea level rise.
And like ghosts, the chemicals buried on these degraded lands are going to be pushed up as the weight of the water presses in on the lands. Here at Berkeley even have called the phenomenon toxic tides, and we’re gonna be dealing with those repercussions long before the waters over top the seawalls will end up building. You can bury things, you can pave over them, you can call them a park or a parking lot, but it turns out that the social history of race in America is inexplicably interwoven with our ecological crisis and the future of the city.
The only solution I can see is reparations, a reparations of place that enfolds many and unfolds over decades. In our region, it seems to me the answer is to resuscitate our land so they become assets for the people who were harmed by the discriminatory mid-century system. A program that actually repaired the places where black people have lived would make black lives better, and it would, like a curb cut, make everyone’s lives better.
We can’t fall into a cynicism that a gain for someone is a loss for everyone else, and my work on the Pacific Circuit has convinced me that we must stand with this place, our place. Not allowing it to be merely a box on a map or a node in a network, or a number of miles on a Strava recording, but a specific piece of earth with all its histories. Its legacy is woven into its trees and the chemistry of its soil, the peel of its paint and the poems carved into its walls.
And then we can ask, do we fight for this place or do we leave it behind? What do I need? What are the people who live here now and once lived here need from me?
I am an immigrant’s son and I believe in change and the future, and I don’t think you have to stay wherever fate plopped you down on this earth, but this is my place. I am of this place. I have become of this place.
Both feet here, both feet moving along the shore and up the mountains and through the streets. Perhaps it’s part of my belief in standing with life against the forces of not life, that you must honor the ancestors. Not just those in your own family tree, but those who have tended to and are embedded in your home, human and non-human alike.
We who live here are lucky to live on the edge of a vast wilderness. I will never forget one time, I was running out on the eastern span of the Bay Bridge when I spotted someone with a huge fish on one of the piers at the landing of the old bridge, and I ran over there and there were these two guys holding up a four-foot-long shovelnose guitarfish. It’s this kind of narrow ray that feeds on the bottom and swims like a shark, and the people who fish the bay know what lives in these waters.
Birders may have a more obvious and gentle connection with the more-than-human world, but the fishers possess a similar kind of specialized knowledge and deep connection. They understand the currents, the way the bait fish move, and the crabs on the sea floor. They know the small hours and the lonely piers.
The swimmers too know this coastline in a way that makes me envious. They know how the water moves, how to go with the tides, and they get views of our bay that no one else does. I’ve long been awed by the elders up in Point Richmond who simply walk into the bay and then emerge an hour later having made the waters their own in ways I can only imagine.
The bay is not a pool though. I know a swimmer out of the Dolphin Club, and a few years ago, she jumped into the water at Fort Mason. After a second, she felt a bump from below and then a chomp on her calf as a seal tested her out.
Then the animal was gone as quickly as it had manifested next to her in the water, leaving her to cry out in the shallows of the bay. It was like the bay itself had bitten her, a silent painful reminder of how life can be. I use these stories to illustrate that throughout these waters, there is life both known and unknown, and these are wild creatures, which means that the shoreline is actually a wild land urban interface.
Let’s bring Gary Snyder back one more time. He wrote, “Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and non-living beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness.
Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the assembly of all beings is in no way regressive.” That is to say the future does not have to be a state of technology. It does not have to rely on a product.
It does not need to be made in a fab in Taiwan or coded by a 19-year-old in Palo Alto. The future can be a new imagination for this place because one thing we know is how we imagine the bay can have tremendous consequences for what happens to it. When we imagine the bay only as an industrial resource and part of the arsenal of democracy for shipbuilding, it became that, and this had consequences all over the country as different communities were pulled to our bay shore looking for work.
So, how do we imagine a new era for this place and for the bay? We know the key conditions: for all humans, not some, for the health of all living creatures, not some, for the whole, not the parts, for an economy that is not shortsighted but draws on the older sense of the word “economy,” something much closer to stewardship, for plans and behaviors that work in concert with the vast hydrogeological and climatic forces at play in this world, not against them. Snyder wrote, “A place on earth is a mosaic within larger mosaics.”
The land is all small places, all precise, tiny realms, larger and smaller patterns. Our gorgeous Bay Area is our specific bay area, but it is also part of the pattern of cities, of estuaries, of California coastline, and of coastlines everywhere, which means reimagine this one place and we reimagine everywhere else too. I spent 10 years on this project, 15 thinking about its themes and contradictions, and where I’ve landed is this.
The country we need will not run from history, but learn from respect and eventually transcend what was wrought in the past. It’s history, but it’s something more too. Real life is built over time, place built over place, and it’s this sediment that creates the richness of the real world.
You cannot turn it off and turn it back on again. The apple rots once a bite has been taken. Not everything has a just-so place on a rectangle of glass or in an economic system.
In the real world, so much escapes our attempts at enclosure, so much diffuses into the place whether we know it or not. What is dust even but time, really the accumulation of being skin and hair, tiny dead bugs, and even tinier living ones? Can I pretend my efforts here to excavate how I have known this place, how I know it are some kind of cathedral, but perhaps an altar made of dust, of bits of life and death?
These offerings aren’t enough to solve any of our region’s problems, but maybe knowing more can make the streets feel less haunted. Those unexplained empty lots, those odd mounds by the waterfront, those underground chemical plumes, those daylighted streams. I feel like I have tried to recognize the hands and minds and lungs of the people who form this place, in struggle and in joy.
I may not be able to give the ghosts of the bay peace, but I’ve given them care. Thank you.
(applause)
(upbeat electronic music)
[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
Maximilian Kasy received his PhD at UC Berkeley and joined Oxford after appointments at UCLA and Harvard University. His current research interests focus on social foundations for statistics and machine learning, going beyond traditional single-agent decision theory. He also works on economic inequality, job guarantee programs, and basic income. Kasy teaches a course on foundations of machine learning at the economics department at Oxford. Learn more at his 