- Wasn't that an incredible vibe?

Hi, I'm Clara Jeffrey.

I'm the editor of Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

And I'm here basically because Mother Jones was founded 50 years ago in 1976, sort of the midpoint of the decade we're here to discuss.

And it was founded by a bunch of Bay Area journalists who were inspired by Watergate and the role that investigative reporting could play holding the powerful to account.

Our founders had the foresight, like the founders of KQED, to know that corporate media could never be a sufficient watchdog of elite power structures, nor tapped into the grassroots organizing.

And they wanted to chronicle the political and cultural upheaval happening all around them.

And boy, was there a lot of that because while the '70s was a dynamic and tumultuous time for the whole country, it was especially that in the Bay Area where a storied history of organizing radical politics, Bohemian countercultures, ways of immigration and a frontier mentality all combined to challenge every traditional power structure.

And so while the Summer of Love gets the big press, it's somewhat hazily romanticized as a crucible of social change and rebellion, but it was really in the '70s that the participants of those movements attempted to build the world that they had imagined and dreamed about and to turn those ideals into durable culture and politics.

But what did they think they were building and what did they accidentally build?

Today, we're living through an intense period of backlash to all the liberation movements that took off in the '70s.

And so I'm here tonight to talk with these amazing folks that we've gathered to talk about the past, but also what lessons we can take from those foundational times that can help us today and what things we might try and avoid or remedies that they figured out and we can appropriate.

So I am going to bring out this amazing panel of guests.

If you guys can please all give them a round of applause and I will introduce them once they're seated.

Thank you.

All right.

I'm just going to start all the way to my right with Chris Carlsson, who's a writer, historian, longtime chronicler of all things about San Francisco's radical and political history.

He's the editor of 10 Years That Shook the City, San Francisco from 68 to 78, a collection of essays telling the bottom up history of the city and the folks who were organizing so much change then.

He's also the author of, among many other books, frankly, History of San Francisco, Hidden History of San Francisco.

And he was one of the co-founders, co-organizers of Critical Mass and runs Shaping San Francisco, which is, it's hard to describe it.

It's sort of an amazing portal of writing, walking tours, events, just incredible ways to learn about the city.

So check that out.

I know I will be doing more of that in the future.

Gwenn Craig came to San Francisco in 1975 and quickly became part of the emerging LGBTQ movement.

She was a close collaborator and mentee of Harvey Milk and helped lead the campaign against the 1978 Briggs Initiative, which was a measure to ban LGBTQ folks from teaching in San Francisco's public schools.

She later became the first black woman to serve as president of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club.

And then we have Ericka Huggins, who's an activist, educator, poet, and former leader of the Black Panther Party.

From 73 to 81, she was the director of the renowned Oakland Community School where she helped develop an innovative model of community-based education.

She was the first black person and the first woman appointed to the Alameda County Board of Education, and she has also served as an instructor at SF State, Cal State East Bay, Peralta Community College District, and has lectured on the wellbeing of women and social change among many other things.

And finally, Fred Turner is a historian of media technology in American culture and a professor at Stanford University.

His work has explored how countercultures and media transformations reshaped American society.

He's the author of Echoes of Combat about trauma and the Vietnam War, The Democratic Surround about multimedia and American liberalism, and From Counterculture to Cyberculture, exploring how Bay Area countercultures led to the evolution of Silicon Valley in the digital world we live in, for better or for worse.

Chris, I'm going to start with you, kind of help us set the stage here because the book that you edited gathers stories from all the various movements, the ones represented on the stage with many, many more.

What made the Bay Area such fertile ground for so much political and cultural experimentation?

- Well, I mean, all of us who live here know that this has been a place that's attracted all sorts of radicals and people who wanted to reinvent the world in various capacities, whether through literature and poetry or music or dance or politics or technology, what have you.

That's been an ongoing truth of San Francisco Bay Area, really going back into the 19th century.

Outsiders have always come here to reinvent themselves and make a new life, make a new way of being in the world and hopefully drag the rest of the world along with it.

And so you come through the 60s and it's always a little bit of an issue to periodize things.

The 70s, obviously so many things about the 70s are rooted in earlier times.

I think particularly in the case of our book, we started with the strike at San Francisco State in 1968, 69, which starts with George Murray getting fired, a black professor who was part of the Black Panther Party and gone to Cuba and said some stuff that pissed off the rulers of California at the time.

So he was cashiered from his job and that led to a student movement that really emerged from around the Black Student Union and eventually many other groups came together in the Third World Alliance and staged a student strike to reinstate him that went on for quite a while.

And then the faculty went out soon after that.

And what happened is that the police were unleashed on them.

This was the beginning of the Tac Squad invented by the San Francisco Police Department, the tactical squad with Joe Alioto as the mayor sending them out there to bash heads.

And the violence was so extreme that it drove tons of students into this radicalizing process.

Of course, Vietnam's on TV every night at the same time.

And so for a lot of those students, many of whom were probably there to avoid going to Vietnam, at least as one of their impulses, they ended up leaving San Francisco State in various ways with or without graduating and moving into the social movements of the '70s in San Francisco and showing up in all sorts of different struggles.

So you have, of course, famously the I Hotel, the International Hotel, that was a 10-year fight from 67 to 77 with the elderly Filipinos who were the residents of that hotel had been there for decades, going back to the teens and 20s when we first imported, literally imported hundreds and thousands of Filipino farm workers, men to be farm workers that is.

And when they weren't out migrating up and down the West Coast to pick fruit and vegetables, they were often in San Francisco in what was once a 10 block long Manila town.

And that was all along Kearney Street and separated Chinatown from downtown.

And the last remnant of that was the I Hotel, the International Hotel that was at Jackson and Columbus.

And so there's this epic battle.

I won't tell you all the details, but the student movement that emerged from the State strike, a lot of those people ended up being activists around fighting to preserve and protect the elderly folks who lived in the I Hotel, which culminated in a brutal eviction in 1977.

That's just one example, but there are dozens of them.

All of the redevelopment struggles that took place during that era, there was essentially a separate government that had been created by federal law and reinforced by city government to create the redevelopment agency that had basically autonomous control over whatever it wanted to do, its own lawyers, its own police force, its own legal capacity to use eminent domain and take your property.

And it was a tremendous amount of corruption, a tremendous amount of evil behavior during that time.

But what was the function of that agency was to destroy intact working class communities.

So the first place that it destroyed was the old Italian neighborhood where the produce market used to be.

And now we have the Golden Gateway Apartments that came in as the first redevelopment project in the late '60s.

Then it went after the South of Market.

It went after the Fillmore District, the biggest Black neighborhood in San Francisco with the most vibrant culture and was pretty successful at decimating neighborhoods and really displacing people.

But the struggles around that were very much influenced by and informed by all these young students who had come out and got involved in those social movements.

So people were engaged already very early at that process, but that's a time when space was cheap in San Francisco.

It was not that hard to live here and to find cheap rent.

I mean, I moved in in the first day of 1978 and my rent was 125 bucks a month at Haight and Cole.

And at that point, Haight Street was 50% boarded up.

And the whole length of Haight Street from the Golden Gate Park to Market Street was owned by African Americans.

And the lower Haight didn't exist at all.

It was known as the Fillmore.

It was part of the extended Fillmore District, which had been this really vibrant Black community for a very long time.

So you have that whole movement going on too to present, fight against the Redevelopment Agency and really extend some kind of community control over the shape of our city.

That was really the aspiration of that time.

But these kinds of movements were a big part of that time.

Another key movement, of course, is the movement around ecology.

We had a horrible oil spill under the Golden Gate Bridge when two Chevron tankers crashed into each other in 1971 and oils going all over the beaches of the Bay and out to Stinson Beach and people figured out for the first time ever how to clean birds using Dawn liquid and all that stuff.

That's where that starts is that huge oil spill.

And of course you have this sort of shift after being the epicenter of conservation movements going back to the founding of the Sierra Club in the 1890s and all through the 20th century, these kind of patrician organizations that want to go out to the woods or go out to the mountains.

Great.

We should all go out to the mountain.

It's a good idea.

But the preservation of open space was really driven by wealthy people.

And there's a lot of episodes and I won't go into all the details about that.

But as you get to the 1970s, that whole trajectory begins to shift and it shifts on the basis of two different logics.

One is the Vietnam War and the decimation of Vietnam with Agent Orange and defoliants.

I mean, basically we engaged in biological and chemical warfare.

It's war crimes flat out, but nobody's prosecuted for that.

So you have this movement that's against the war, but starts to put the connection together with Dow Chemical and the use of these horrible chemicals in Vietnam.

And then we already heard about chemical soaked agriculture from Rachel Carson's book in 1963.

And then in the mid '60s, the farm workers movement erupts in the middle of the Central Valley.

And what we have mostly forgotten to tell ourselves in that history is that as that farm workers movement, first their strike failed.

I mean, their efforts failed at the beginning and then they engaged in the great boycott.

Some of you might be old enough to remember going through a parking lot into a supermarket pretty much anywhere in the United States for several years and having activists, leftists usually, standing out there saying, "Please don't buy the grapes.

Please support the farm workers in California.

They're trying to get a union, but what they're really trying to do, the number one demand was to stop spraying them with DDT while they worked."

- Chris, I'm curious, you've sort of written about how Bay Area environmentalism had a different or a more sophisticated understanding about how societal and natural systems are connected.

And I'm just wondering if you could tease that out.

I think you're beginning to, but what was the difference maker between environmentalists here and folks elsewhere?

- Well, again, unfortunately we have to escape the boundaries of the 1970s to make sense of it.

But if you go back to the 50s, we have famously in San Francisco the freeway revolt, when people realized that the plan is to decimate many of our most beloved neighborhoods and parks even like the Panhandle with elevated freeways.

I mean, it was a madness that the highway engineers just like, "We don't care.

Cars will go faster.

That's fine.

We need cars to go faster."

And so people started organizing and there was over 70,000 people signing petitions and then this whole movement that really said, "No, we have a right to have a say over the quality of our lives and that we don't want these massive monstrosities crisscrossing our city."

And as a result, you still can't get from one bridge to the other by freeway, which is actually a deliberate choice of the people that live here.

So that's one important movement.

Another one, of course, is the eruption of the Save the Bay movement in the early '60s where you have for the first time, after a hundred years of a consensus that filling the bay was a good idea because it stank and it was full of human waste and industrial sewage.

And it was just nasty.

You didn't really want to spend time on the water or near the shoreline, which much earlier was known as the city front, not the waterfront because you first would arrive by boat.

And so people started to organize in 1963 and by 65, laws started to change.

And then by the late '60s, Reagan was essentially bludgeoned and coerced into signing the permanent law to create the only regional management agency of its kind, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

And so those movements were so deeply rooted in the culture here that there was a really strong sensibility about our engagement with urban ecology, with nature in the city, with the idea that all of these species have a right to live, not just humans, and that we actually coexist with each other and depend on each other and need to be able to really protect that web of life.

And that movement has gone a very long way since that time.

And nowadays we have natural areas and we have all this work going on on restoration work and really preserving natural species.

And so the work in the Presidio, the work in Mission Bay, the work on San Bruno Mountain over the years has been astonishing at the successes.

And if we only give a little more room for nature, nature will come roaring back and people really came to understand that.

The other piece, just to add the last little bit of that is the anti-nuclear movement, which is where I cut my teeth in the mid '70s.

That was kind of, again, chemistry and nukes.

That was going to solve all our problems a little bit like AI today.

And no, these are actually problems.

We have to actually have a social movement that says we are smart enough to make decisions about the direction of science and technology.

And that kind of a culture has existed here for a very long time.

And many of us are worried about it dying out in this current era of tech fascism raising its ugly head and trying to impose itself on all of us.

But I actually think it's deeply rooted in our daily lives here and we have the ability to really reverse course on a lot of the worst stuff going on even now.

- Thanks.

Gwenn, I'm just going to turn to you and ask, what did San Francisco make possible for queer people such as yourself when you arrived here in the mid '70s?

What was the thing that was different?

- Well, I came when there was a great migration going on of a large number of gay men and lesbians coming into San Francisco.

And I think I soon realized that the common thread that was running through is we were all looking for a place where we could be our authentic selves and be open about who we were.

It wasn't so much a political quest.

It was more a self realization.

A lot of people were more, they were talking about just wanting to be better selves.

And a lot of that did have to do about being openly gay.

Some people remained openly gay only in the gay milieu, but a lot of times they were encouraged because of the empowerment they felt from the togetherness of being in community to come out.

And you certainly had people like Harvey Milk who did preach a message of how coming out was so important and so empowering, not only to the individual, but to us as a community and a growing political movement.

When I first came to San Francisco in 75, I came at just the time that people were starting to talk about changing the structure of city hall, the seat of power.

And instead of having a board that was constructed by citywide elections and by appointments a great deal of the time, they wanted to devise districts made up of the neighborhoods of the city.

And they asked neighborhoods to think in terms of who they were, what their natural boundaries were and who they saw themselves allied with in terms of the neighborhoods around them.

I'm more like this particular neighborhood, but we don't feel so much in sync with this neighborhood perhaps to this side of us.

And districts started to meld together, formulations were made.

And out of this kind of movement came the first district elections in San Francisco, and it was a powerful movement.

And from these first district elections, we got people like Harvey Milk.

We got the first African American woman elected to the board of supervisors.

We got the first Asian American, Gordon Lau elected to the board of supervisors.

And it became a very, very diverse board of supervisors for the first time representing all corners of the city.

And it was around this time that it was followed shortly thereafter by the emergence in another part of the country of a woman named Anita Bryant.

And we started to see that there was a backlash happening in the country and there were places where we started to see positive change over passing ordinances to protect the rights of lesbians and gay men and transgender and bisexual people, not so much transgender people yet.

This was a coming movement.

But where they had passed those ordinances, there was a backlash to take them back.

They took it back in Dade County, Florida.

And then it happened in Wichita and other cities.

But it was most famous what happened in Florida.

And Anita Bryant was their star spokesperson.

And people in San Francisco, lesbians and gay men said, "This is very disturbing.

Just when we feel on the cusp of being able to be open and feel powerful and feel a part of the structure of government, we see that this could all be taken away by the people who are against us."

And meetings started to happen and out of that grew a number of notable leaders and Harvey Milk was an important part of all of that just around the same time that he was first running for the board and then new to the board.

And we thought this could come to our shore and it did soon thereafter.

And the man named John Briggs who had gone down to Florida to watch what Anita Bryant was doing and then came back and put together actually a statewide initiative.

It would've made it so that not only in San Francisco, but throughout the state of California, anyone who was gay or lesbian would not be allowed to teach in California schools.

So - Tell me a little bit about the organizing against that because coming out was a very effective and pretty innovative way and not just in San Francisco or Oakland or LA, but people were somehow organizing and coming out in much smaller, more conservative communities.

How did that roll out as a strategy or was it just organic?

- Well, Harvey always preached that coming out was essential.

And as I said, not just as a political tool, but once we were in this fight on a statewide basis, he saw that it was essential that people not engage in a fear of who we were and therefore think we can't have these people in our schools.

We can't have these people around our children.

The campaign that Anita Bryant and others in these places had built up was that you can't trust lesbian and gay people to be around children.

They are by nature pedophiles.

They are by nature going to recruit, as they called it.

And so we needed for them to know, you know gay people.

They are your neighbors.

They are your coworkers.

They're in your family.

And if you don't think you know them, if you don't have people in your immediate community, then we need to come to your community and let you know who we are, who our real selves are.

So coming out became a very important part of who we were.

In the local campaign in San Francisco against the Briggs Initiative, and we always recognized that our campaign in San Francisco was a very important component of the statewide campaign because we believe that we had to contribute a very large sum of the votes needed to win statewide.

So we took our campaign extremely seriously and we engaged in having people go and not just drop literature at the door, but to canvas, which means to knock on doors and talk to people.

And I was one of the co-managers in the campaign.

And as I would send people out to go and go to precincts and do this, I always thought these are brave soldiers because they must know that knocking on the door and saying, "I'm here to ask you to vote no on Six."

Proposition Six, it was, probably meant that the person who opened the door was going to assume I'm talking to a gay person.

And you didn't know what kind of reaction you were going to get, not in 1978.

And for some people, they might think, "This is my first encounter with a gay person."

And their reaction might be what swung that campaign.

And I think it really did make the largest difference in how it was that we won and we won with a great majority in San Francisco.

- Ericka, I just wanted to turn to you because next month is the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party.

And it was initially organized and maybe still best well known for community self-defense, but certainly by the '70s, it was building these amazing systems of mutual aid and education and community survival.

And much of that was run by women.

And I have to admit, in doing some research for this panel, I became quite annoyed at how many things did not give the women of the Panther movement their fair due.

I listened to a two hour lefty podcast in which finally at the end, the guest said, "Maybe we should talk about the women."

So I want to just ask you what that was like, what the women of the Panther movement were doing and how that kind of mutual aid ethos came about.

- Well, we lived in the United States and we were not allowed to be human.

The programs, the community survival programs were based in what people needed and often what they asked us to do.

By the way, 66% of the members of the party were women.

Women are just so attuned to humanity.

I can't explain it here because we only have 40 minutes left.

I can only say that as a mother and a grandmother and a friend and a partner, I'm a woman who cares about humanity, and that's what the party drew.

By the way, there is a book that you might want to read co-authored by myself and Steven Shames called Comrade Sister: Women of the Black Panther Party.

And the stories are all the women's stories.

The photographs are Steven's.

Those stories that we worked on, every time I would read one, I would cry.

Why?

Because these were women that got up at 4:00 in the morning and got in a van and went to a school or two or three schools over the week and fed the babies.

That's what the elders said, "Can you children feed the babies?"

And we said, yes.

Did we know how?

Did we know where the food was going to come from?

Did we know where the money was?

But we didn't have a meeting about having a meeting about a meeting.

We just found ways at the big box stores to say, "You know you can give some stuff away.

Come on now."

We went to UC Berkeley or UCLA or whatever the big campuses were in our 40 locations across the country.

And we said, "Can you give us food for the children?"

And they did.

What were we seeing by opening the free medical clinics?

Women who had no prenatal care, people who were suffering, whose children were suffering because they were immigrants and they couldn't go to a hospital and say, "I have no money.

I have no insurance."

The free ambulance program was started in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

This is my favorite story.

So people were dying on their front porches when the ambulance came and they had no insurance and no cash money.

And three women that I've talked to, and I just loved them, said, "Well, we weren't going to have that in Winston-Salem.

We're not going to have people dying."

And one of the first free ambulance program ambulances was actually a hearse.

We were so creative.

Well, a body can fit in there, get them to the hospital.

And then this philanthropist from New York, I think, gave them money to buy an ambulance.

And what did they do?

They went to a very racist little community college outside of Winston-Salem, and about five of them became EMTs.

That's the beginning.

You save lives.

You don't sit around waiting for somebody to tell you what to do.

I was 18 when I joined the Black Panther Party, and I had a friend who's passed on, who was 14, and she joined the Black Panther Party with her parents' blessings.

We were not seen the way J. Edgar Hoover saw us.

We were not hated in our communities, which is why the government did not like us.

People loved us, and that is frightening if you want things to remain in place.

- They were particularly terrified by the fact that you were feeding kids.

- That's right.

- Because - The parents loved us.

The communities loved us, and there was no gain for us.

First of all, Black Panther Party members had no money.

We shared housing, we shared food.

We lived collectively, not because it was cute, but because we couldn't afford to pay rent individually.

We were African American people trying to be of use in our communities.

And I think we did a really good job.

However, that fear was the impetus for counterintelligence program.

And so having read many, many of the FBI documents, they said things like J. Edgar said, I'm quoting, paraphrasing the quote, but it's honestly just about what he said.

"I'm not afraid about the Black Panther Party talking about defending themselves.

It's that breakfast program that scares me.

Smart man, because he knew what that would mean in a larger scale.

And so for instance, I'm sitting here thinking about the '70s.

Well, I was arrested in 1969 and incarcerated for two years for a government setup that I can prove now that held me there.

So I did walk out.

It was in the 1970s and I though, I'm going to pick up where I left off and I'm going to do good things.

That's how the women of the Black Panther and every single one of us that I know, and we worked really, really hard to have men see.

I think within the Black Panther Party, some of the strongest feminists I've ever met.

The other thing I want to say is that the Black Panther Party was one of the organizations that accepted people as they are.

And so I come into the Black Panther Party as a woman and became a member of the Black Panther Party.

And I was a mother.

I'm still a mother.

I'm a grandmother, but I'm also queer.

Always have been all my life.

Nobody told me anything about I couldn't.

I love poetry.

I love music.

Nobody said, Ericka, that's stupid.

It embraced me and everybody I know as we were.

And so when you were talking about Harvey, I was remembering how brokenhearted we all were when that happened because he was Harvey.

He was a real human being.

So I guess what I'm saying is that the '70s aren't just a decade carved out of long periods of time in the United States, but here we are.

Here we are.

And what will we do?

What will we each do?

Not activists or politicians.

What is it that we will leave here tonight and decide to do or to go back to or to continue doing with a brave heart?

That has nothing to do much with what you asked me, but.

- All right.

Well, I want to come back to the school that you founded and so many other things.

But Fred, I just wanted to turn to you and kind of maybe start to think about at least eventually how these movements then inform the time that we're in now.

But first, in the '70s, the countercultural ideas like decentralization and individualistic determination and all that started to shape the dawn of what we now think of as the internet age and the personal computing age.

But why?

Or who is the avatar for that that you look to most?

- Well, it's a fascinating story.

When we entered the 1970s, Silicon Valley is an industrial center.

It has a kind of military industrial complex and it's a countercultural center.

It's 40 minutes south of San Francisco and it's got communes in the hills, but it's not where the tech action really is.

The tech action is in Boston and it's around Route 128, which sort of circles Boston.

And what's fascinating, AnnaLee Saxenian has written a lot about this at Berkeley, is that Boston didn't take it over.

Silicon Valley took off.

In 1971, it got the name Silicon Valley.

It wasn't simply because things were invented here, though they were.

It's because that communal ethos of collaborating, doing things together, taking chances, being a brave heart applied to business as it did to other things.

There are a lot of folks we could cite as avatars of this process.

We might start with Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs was a commune guy.

He lived on a commune called the All One Commune for a year, believed very, very much in kind of a collaborative consciousness oriented way of being in the world and went on to found Apple Computer.

The job story flags a movement that I think we should be alert to from the 60s to the 80s through the 70s.

In the late 60s and early 1970s, we saw the largest wave of commune building in American history.

Between 1967 and 1973, a very conservative estimate suggests that three quarters of a million Americans left their homes and moved onto communes, some in the city, but more in the country.

They headed back to the land as the saying went at the time.

And what they hoped to do was leave politics behind.

They thought politics were bankrupt, institutions were bankrupt, big technology was bankrupt.

But when they headed back to the land, they thought they could build small communities around shared technologies, small technologies and consciousness.

They though, "We don't need rules.

We don't need bureaucracy.

We don't need institutions.

What we need to do is get our heads together," as the saying went at the time.

"How did you get your head together?

"Well, you listened to certain kinds of music and you took LSD, which is a classic example of a small government provided technology.

Folks may not know that LSD came to the Bay Area through the Veterans Administration hospitals.

Yeah.

It was brought to us as a truth serum.

It had an unintended effect.

In any case, the notion of a community built around consciousness and shared mindsets as opposed to bureaucracy, rules and the like failed miserably.

The communes were, for the most part, incredibly painful places.

I wrote a book called From Counterculture to Cyberculture to focus on communes because I though, well, it'll be great.

Communes, people are happy, free love, they're independent.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

Communes were some of the most conservative, segregated, heteronormative places I've ever studied.

They were as intensely restrictive as many of the suburbs that these folks were trying to escape.

But what's interesting to me is that that dream, as the communes fall apart in 73, 74, 75, by 75, there are very few communes left and most of them are authoritarian or religious.

But as the communes fall apart, what rises up is the tech world.

And as the tech world rises up, it adopts the dream of the commune world and says, "Well, it failed then, but we're going to build computers.

We're going to connect computers and we're going to create in this world of interlinked computers a community of consciousness that no longer needs politics, that no longer needs to deal with bodies or the kinds of differences that come with bodies that will leave behind some of the political and cultural problems that define America in the period."

And I think now we can see how that's begun to end up.

It's begun to end up in a world that to me looks a lot like the communes I studied.

It's a world of incredible dissensus, not consensus, dissensus.

Marshall McLuhan said we would be a global village.

We would be able to unite ourselves with shared communication technologies.

And we were talking earlier in the evening about how when you do that, you remove all the buffers between folks.

And if you do that and you take away rules, you take away systems for exchanging resources among people who don't have equal resources and have very different needs and ambitions, take those things away.

What you're left with in the communes and now in a political sense is a kind of rule by cool.

You're left with a casual authoritarianism.

And it was very powerful on communist.

It's very powerful in our country today.

It's a real problem and it bubbles up out of the search for a world without politics, a world without institutions in which consciousness and technology alone would provide social order.

- Stewart Brand was sort of a pivotal figure in this transition.

In founding the whole Earth Catalog, it was initially imagined I have gleaned from following some of your writings as a sort of compendium for communal living, like here's how to build something or find something or buy something.

But it also sort of feels like a weird distillation of what the internet would become, like here's where I can find something or build something or buy something.

And I wonder when that movements collapsed, how did he personally take that movement?

Yeah.

- So for folks who might not know, Stewart Brand was a countercultural figure.

He was a peripheral member of the Merry Pranksters.

He was a multimedia artist.

He helped stage the Trips Festival and he's a very active, active guy.

And as the commune movement started building, he was living or at least visiting a lot in the hate and he wanted to do something to help the commune movement get going.

And so he and his then wife Lois traveled to different communes to see what they needed.

And they put together a list of tools that they thought folks needed and that folks told them they needed.

They created a mimeographed list and they turned that into a bound 66-page document called the Whole Earth Catalog, which appeared in 1968.

It was about 66 pages.

Four years later, coming out twice a year, it was several hundred pages long.

It had won the National Book Award.

It had sold more than a million copies, and it was a kind of bible of the counterculture.

What was interesting about it was that you couldn't buy anything in the catalog.

Each listing in the catalog told you how to get it independently.

You couldn't order anything through the catalog.

It was just an information resource.

Another interesting feature was that in 1968, 69 and 70, you wouldn't know where the communes were, wouldn't know how to find them if you're interested in them.

Well, you buy the catalog and there are all those addresses where you can write and get information from.

Those folks are living on communes and suddenly you have a sort of hidden map of the commune world.

That was really important.

And Steve Jobs, I think, would later refer to it as a kind of prototypical search engine.

And folks from the Whole Earth world did in fact go to work later in the tech world very, very directly.

Stewart Brand became very active.

He had the first Hackers Conference in 84, but other folks like the first programmer at Amazon used to be a guy who worked in the Whole Earth Catalog store.

Yeah.

- I feel like we're given an incredibly limited time to talk to the four of you.

I just want to kind of go through a few quick maybe moments that came from each of these movements.

And Chris, what are the physical manifestations in the city that we can still see today from this ecological movement?

What is either there or maybe not there?

- Well, I mean, one real practical one is Rainbow Grocery, just a few blocks away, which is one of the stores that was originally part of the People's Food System.

It actually started as a part of an ashram first.

It integrated with the People's Food System, which was a network of multiple independent collectively run food stores that were dedicated to providing as best they could brown rice, brown sugar, getting away from white stuff, of course, and really developing a critique of the modern agricultural system and the chemically soaked agriculture.

And then they were also involved in hiring people who needed a job that didn't have any papers or who had just got out of jail.

So a lot of people just out of prison came and got jobs in the people's food system, and it was very successful for about six or seven years.

And the rainbow got out early.

They didn't feel comfortable with the left politics.

It got to be a lot of debates and a lot of hard left politics emerged in there, and it ended badly with a shootout and sort of a fight over who was going to control it.

And I could tell you that whole story separately another time, but that's one really.

There's other avenues also as another remnant of that time.

So that's a really practical way that people started engaging with food differently.

And of course, we have the capitalist co-optation of all that in the form of pornographically perfect piles of produce at Whole Foods.

And so that wouldn't exist if there hadn't been this creation of a market by people engaging in the ecology of food production and recreating a different logic of who produces it, what's our relationship with the people producing it and distributing it, et cetera.

So that's kind of one of the more dramatic ones.

And then of course you have the Bay itself.

We would not like being near the Bay if all this stuff hadn't happened back then.

And in the early '70s, there was still such a thing as a liberal Republican, odd species that has now gone extinct.

They call themselves moderate Democrats now.

That was the people who basically signed into all the major environmental legislation while Nixon was the president, and that was the people who kind of brought it forward.

So the physical environment we're in today, it's really good compared to what it was back in the '60s.

It was far worse then.

- And a lot of city parks, big and small, right, or San Bruno Mountain, small patches of land sort of hilltop.

- That came directly from a ballot propositions that were passed in 73.

It failed, 74 it passed, which created a fund based on a property tax assessment to acquire the remaining open spaces in San Francisco.

So when we take a walk to the top of Bernal Heights or to Twin Peaks or any of the other hilltops around Grandview Peak out in the sunset, thank you friends whose shoulders we stand on who did all that work and kept these places for us for today.

And we're blessed with having been able to take over the Presidio as well.

And now, of course, again, watch out.

There's horrible people with bad plans for that, but there's incredible ecological restoration work that's gone on there over the last 25 years, mostly with volunteer work under the guidance of certain, some of the park rangers and people who are involved in it and people with deep ecological knowledge.

And today, all these species are coming back to life.

The web of life that once occupied the northern peninsula of this area of the earth is not all together gone.

And some places in little pot patches here and there, it's doing really well thanks to the incredible amount of work that's gone on for really 50 years or more.

San Bruno Mountain being another amazing example of that.

If you have never taken a hike on San Bruno Mountain in Oak Canyon, you definitely want to get out there and experience that.

- Ericka, the Oakland Community School, the curriculum that was forged there and some similar efforts, the college level, can you just tell me about how that sort of reverberated not just to that community and those kids and families, but kind of throughout California and even in broader?

- After I was home for a while from prison, Huey Newton asked if I would be the director of the Oakland Community School, and I said yes, because I've gone to school to be an educator.

And it was a pivotal time in my life, those 10 years, well, almost 10 years I spent.

The school was an elementary with no tuition, three meals a day, transportation, a really lovely connection with Children's Hospital So that parents would not have to pay if they didn't have cash, if they didn't have insurance, the children would not suffer.

We didn't have any money for the school, but people donated money and we learned to write grants from a dear friend at the San Francisco Foundation.

I want to say that I've run into the very much grown up students and/or their children and they say things like, "Without that school, I wouldn't have been who I am today."

All schools could do that, but what is it that we're pouring money into?

It isn't schools.

So I can tell you the long list of people that came to visit the school to understand how it worked, to take it back, to spread it around the country, and they did.

It's replicated everywhere.

I was in Lisbon, Portugal, and the school was reinvented there.

It's not impossible to do the things that we did, and we do stand on a number of shoulders.

- Gwenn, I'm wondering, the battle that you fought against Anita Bryant and her ilk came back in some ways or felt the same with the fight for marriage equality, and now feel like we're fighting it again with the sort of weaponization of trans folks and trans kids in particular.

Yes.

And yet some of the methods maybe that was successful then are somewhat unavailable in the sense that we're talking about children and those children may have a different relationship to how much they're willing to share about their journey or their parents certainly could be.

And I also feel like somehow societally, we're not recognizing that these are the exact same tactics, like the exact same.

- Yes.

- And what can we do to help explain that to people better?

- The demonization of trans people has really shaken me.

And in a way, it sort of took me by surprise that they go this far.

And a lot of it does have to do with the deliberate undertaking to make sure that the general populace does not come to know trans people.

There's very few places where people see trans people, and let's not even talk about trans kids, as just an integral part of commonplace life.

They aren't characters in your TV shows that make people see, well, they're talking about these trans people and these trans kids, but that Alice character seemed very nice and didn't seem so strange.

And I can come to understand why this isn't so awful and why people, they're not Monsters.

And no, it's not just that they choose to be different.

It's a societal barrier that it's very difficult at this juncture for people to come to grips with, it seems.

And a lot of it, I think, is a right wing movement to make sure it stays that way, that people remain depicted as evil and strange and deliberately different and deliberately trying to be a part of something they shouldn't be a part of.

There are boys who want to be in girls' sports.

They're boys who want to win girls medals, and that's the way they want to frame the argument.

And so people can say, "Well, that's not right.

We've got to go down to that school board and say, Stop this."

And it's going to take a little deliberate effort on our part, I think, to say, "We need to stand up and say, No, you're wrong.

And we are very much with these children and these adults and these soldiers and these police officers, even people who are being thrown out of places.

But the tide that we're in these days with people like our Secretary of Defense and other who are deliberately saying, separate these people from society, make sure that they are departed from your presence so you don't know who they are and so you don't get to interact with them.

And that's a tactic that we'd never had before and we're learning that we have to develop new strategies and we haven't quite come to grips with exactly what we need to do about it.

- Fred, I'm going to jump all the way to Elon Musk and the rise of technofascism.

- That's a dark jump.

- Because on this issue, but more broadly, the spread of this kind of hate is turbocharged in a way that it just wasn't in the '70s or really prior to recent years.

And when you are kind of documenting and wandering through these worlds, can you just say a little bit about the sort of technofascism that you're seeing emerging and this sort of ideology of extinction sometimes and just the extreme nature that we're seeing come from people in this community?

I - Think to get to that place, we have to just step back for just a second and say that what unites, I think, the folks on the panel who lived through 70s who did the good work and who are doing the good work is a concern with organizing with institutions.

We talk a lot about individual liberation and in some ways the left owns individual liberation.

One of the things that we're seeing now is predatory use by the right of that turn toward individualism for purposes of gaining control of institutions.

- Yes.

- And I think that's the kicker here.

And so what you describe when you see Musk and you see the kind of hate that you see in that world, and I do travel in tech worlds and I do see and hear things that astonish me, but what I see in those places is an effort to muster a particular, very authoritarian, very familiar from the '30s, '40s, Italy, Germany, from our own time during the Vietnam War, a muster a particular style of masculine, predatory, cruelty, but cruelty offered as a form of pleasure and distributed differently.

Clearly, Pete Hegseth's style of cruelty is offered to me and to Chris.

It's not necessarily offered to the other panelists because we come in that body type.

And I think that that's something that we see across our culture.

We certainly see it in the tech world, and I think that's a challenge.

I often get asked how to resist this.

And I would say that we resist it in tech as in other places by resisting one of the strands of the counterculture.

And that's the strand that says all we need to have for a future is the right technology and the right consciousness.

And then we can be free individuals.

We never need to do politics and we can get rid of those difficult, awkward things called institutions.

I think what was so scary about the Black Panthers and about the breakfast program and about the school was that it was a school.

It was an institution.

And so the question I have very much echoes Erica's, I think, is what can we do to build the institutions that preserve the values that we care about?

- I want to thank you all.

I frankly could go on for another hour at least talking to all of you, and I have so many unused questions in this little dossier of mine.

And I would like to thank KQED for bringing this group of people together and for this amazing series.

Please support public media and also please subscribe to Mother Jones.

And there's an amazing spate of live events to come.

You can find that out on KQED's website and just thank you to each of you.

I really enjoyed learning from you and I wish we could have more time together.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

Thank you.