Chapter 12
Recorded on May 2, 2072, in Brooklyn.
M. E. O’Brien: Hello, my name is M. O’Brien. I am here having a conversation with Alkasi Sanchez. We are in Flatbush, Brooklyn in the former Erasmus Hall High School, currently the main meeting space of the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly of 2072. Alkasi serves as the resident historian of the Free Assembly. Is that right?
Alkasi Sanchez: Close enough! I didn’t know that name of this building. How did you know that?
O’Brien: I live in the neighborhood. Have since long before the commune.
Sanchez: Ha! From one historian to another.
O’Brien: Could you tell us a little about your life today, before we get into your history?
Sanchez: Oh, I don’t talk about that that much. I’m kind of an oddball. I live on the water, on a platform off Asbury Park. I live … alone.
O’Brien: Wow!
Sanchez: I know, right? It’s not common. It’s funny, as I grew up on a commune and lived in one for a long time, but I eventually found I really like to live alone. I really like my life to be very simple. I’m quite a boring person. I feel like the books I write, and the work I do with the Hub and the Free Assembly, is plenty to occupy my mind. I have always had a lot of collaborators in all my work, and those have mostly constituted my social world since I left the communes. I’m asexual. Agender too. I like to keep my internal and external world tidy, to keep things clear when I can. I am … really a very boring person, actually. Sometimes, I suspect I am afraid of the tumult of emotional conflict and real relationships. But I did that plenty growing up, and these days it is such a pleasure to not have that much to contend with when it comes to questions of lifestyle, communicating feelings, juggling lots of personal dynamics. It is probably a form of laziness on my part. So yeah. Living alone on water has worked for me. I lived on a boat in Battery Park City and then in the Rockaways. The platform is more spacious than a boat, but still gives the relative privacy of living on the water. I do some basic maintenance of the platform as part of my habitation. I just like it there. I like being by myself. I know not a lot of people do that these days, like cook meals for one, but it suits me … So I … don’t have a lot to say about myself. I work a bunch of different roles—representing the Hub in the Assembly, my own research and writing, and serving as the Assembly’s historian.
O’Brien: What do you do as an historian?
Sanchez: I train and coordinate people who record all the Assembly’s sessions, do interviews—a bit like you are doing here—with representatives to the Assembly, and I currently manage the Assembly archives. Your own interview project, if I remember right, was proposed and passed as a project of the Assembly’s sessions of 2068 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune.
O’Brien: The anniversary was yesterday.
Sanchez: Yes, officially. There is considerable debate on the start date, or if there could be a start date, but that is when we acknowledge it. The taking of the Hunts Point Market is as good a moment as any to mark the anniversary of the New York Commune. For a time, I leaned towards setting it as Crotona Park in 2055.
O’Brien: Both in the Bronx.
Sanchez: That’s true! The Bronx ends up being at the center of a lot of stories we tell about the revolution in New York, for better or for worse. I think it is correct that without those events in the Bronx the rest of it could not have come together as it did. But this was a revolution happening all over the world. There has been a bit of resurgence of regional pride, and sometimes I worry that conceptualizing the history of the revolution in terms of a geographically bounded area like “the New York Commune” doesn’t do justice to its global character. Geography in historical telling is a charged question, and one we need to do a lot more thinking about.
O’Brien: How is the Assembly going this year?
Sanchez: It’s a bit of a turning point in many ways, I think. We are beginning to formalize a lot of the decision-making processes with both the network of regional assemblies and the Hub. There was a lot of controversy over the last few years about whether we should undertake this codification at all.
O’Brien: What is being codified?
Sanchez: Mostly production and circulation decisions. The Mid-Atlantic Hub is one of sixteen production coordination hubs around the world, where we do a major portion of the data processing for tabulating production needs, and coordinate communication between production councils. A lot of the administration of the Hub is getting figured out in a more formal way, and how it syncs with all the assemblies of the region.
O’Brien: What is the scale of the Hub?
Sanchez: Currently, the Mid-Atlantic Hub is the main communication system for over two million production councils.
O’Brien: Production councils are like collectively run manufacturing firms?
Sanchez: That’s a significant majority. But production councils also include crews who maintain water, power, waste, and communications infrastructure; agricultural collectives; cooperatives of individual producers; guilds of skilled service providers; and a few fully automated AI-run manufacturing firms. We aren’t involved so much in mining—that is largely coordinated out of the Zanzibar Hub—or anything that is made in orbit. Planetside, that is mostly handled out of Quito.
O’Brien: You played a role in setting up the Mid-Atlantic Hub?
Sanchez: Yes, I wrote a series of concept papers that played a contributing role in shaping what planning came to be, including the role of the hubs. I also helped establish the Mid-Atlantic as a site around production decisions during my time on the Core Council of the Free Assembly. All that was before I became the historian.
O’Brien: I’m glad we are doing this interview so you can explain a bit of how it all fits together. Do you all—the Mid-Atlantic Hub—make decisions about what gets made?
Sanchez: God no. We decide very little. What we do is host, manage, and support online forums. About a quarter of a million of them. Some of them are very localized, but just big enough to make all in-person discussions difficult. Like our Hub might include people in rural towns around North America talking about what is working and what isn’t about their town’s food canteen. Others are basically the internal communications and decision-making for work collectives. These are people who know each other and work together closely, like teams that will manage water access infrastructure for a region. But they will use our forums and tools to make collective decisions and predict future needs. Others are huge online voting systems that tens of millions of people will weigh in on, and that will be used and referenced by producers for the next cycle. Like … people have strong opinions about mass entertainment, so that gets voted on.
O’Brien: What sort of support do you all provide to these discussions?
Sanchez: Mostly data. The Hub runs an AI network that crunches data on production and consumption, and produces reports and tools for forums and production councils to use. When councils are trying to make decisions about what raw materials to acquire, or which production processes to retool, or when to adopt new technologies, or where to send what they make, they will usually do some combination of talking to people online and checking with our AIs about available data. Both of these can happen through the Hub. We have about twelve miles of server farms offshore.
O’Brien: Offshore. In boats?
Sanchez: Most of our AI server farms are algae-based and grow off large underwater cabling about a half mile off the New Jersey coast.
O’Brien: The Hub’s work is being codified?
Sanchez: Quite a bit of it, yes. Or at least the decision-making processes we support and enable. Especially what scale is appropriate for various production and distribution decisions. It’s been clearly established for a while that the residential communes manage the consumption end of things, like cooking food and distributing end user tech and such. But there have been a lot of evolving, overlapping systems that have taken shape over the last twenty years to try to decide which production decisions should be made by the immediate council, which should be made regionally or translocally, which should be made more on a global scale. Like, who needs to weigh in when production councils are deciding on the styles of mass-produced shoes available next year? How many people, and from what regions, have to get to participate in deciding about how we go about North Atlantic plastic collection? Or, all the engineers want to be devoting their labor time to building the space elevator in Quito, but what portion of their collective time is really a good use balanced against other needs? These are like, three questions I saw forums debating last month, out of literally millions of such questions the Hub plays some role in helping to answer. This year’s Assembly is looking over what scale is appropriate for all these different kinds of decisions, and more or less trying to write that down and vote on it. Codification is writing down, systematizing how decisions get made. Turning them into protocols, constitutions, clear and documented rules.
O’Brien: What do you think of this process?
Sanchez: It borders on the absurd. I personally don’t feel sure codification is wise, and worry it may ossify our work in ways that aren’t helpful. Collective decisions need to be local both temporally and geographically. You need to be able to adapt as new tech emerges, as environments shift, and so on. But it definitely aids with transparency, and planning, and people having some confidence in their roles. The whole system is so vastly complex, on some level, and I don’t really see how anything the Free Assembly writes up has meaning for that. I guess the Free Assembly wants to have some sense of marking how the new society works, and some sense that it is subject to democratic and popular control at every level. The codification is not the way I would go about pursuing that desire, but I recognize how it emerges from this historical moment.
O’Brien: What is the relationship between the Hub and the Free Assembly?
Sanchez: It’s complicated. The Hub is one of the main functions this region provides to global production. As there are workers, like myself, that focus on the Hub, and the administration of the Hub is an important political question, we have a representative directly on the Free Assembly. And because we are within the region, we are under the nominal jurisdiction of the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly, so presumably resolutions passed here could shape and change our work. When I used to be Core Council, I was actually there as the rep from the Hub. But I am the only consistent overlap between the two; mostly the Hub and the Free Assembly are quite different institutional networks. That’s part of what makes the current codification so complicated. I guess the Free Assembly recognizes that the service the Hub provides to the global production process has a fundamentally political character to it, and sees this codification as means of deliberating about the truly big-picture questions about how we approach production as a whole society.
O’Brien: Let’s switch gears a bit. Could you tell me about growing up?
Sanchez: Sure. I grew up in Jackson Heights. I was born in 2023. I more or less grew up in the commune that shares the neighborhood’s name. My parents moved into one of the collective apartment buildings when I was a kid in the thirties that later became one of the centers of the [Jackson Heights] Commune. My mom ended up getting drafted as a nurse in Iran in the forties. My dad was kind of a super for the Commune, like he did maintenance and repairs. They both were refugees, and honestly, really struggled as people. I think they were both very traumatized. They are both dead now, and I am not sure I ever really knew them. I mostly was raised by other people in our building. I think it was a really good decision on my parents’ part to move there, because of their inability to really raise me. Like, I always ate at the canteen down the block that was a part of the Jackson Heights Commune, and there was no way my parents could have cooked or kept me fed if it was left to them.
O’Brien: You are a child of the commune.
Sanchez: Yes, in a way I am. I bridge different generations that way. Like I’m fifty-one now, so I was fully an adult when the revolution came. But I also grew up in one of the more established and better-functioning communes, so the whole transition wasn’t as dramatic for me.
O’Brien: You were a professor for a time?
Sanchez: No, not quite. I studied Philosophy at Queens College and then the CUNY Graduate Center. But CUNY was not really functioning by the time I wrote my dissertation, and I never got a diploma. I taught a lot, but mostly through the residential communes. And then I got more and more involved with planning in the fifties.
O’Brien: Had you been drafted to Iran?
Sanchez: Yes. Just after the Graduate Center was closed down. I worked in military intelligence for two years. Doing data analysis from drones. I was working onsite in Parsabad, on the Azerbaijani border. It was really horrific. If I hadn’t been raised a communist, that experience certainly would have made me one.
O’Brien: What was it like?
Sanchez: I was living in an underground bunker. All night, I’d review these full-spectrum videos generated by drones covering the region. At the time, we were worried our drone feeds were being hacked, so they had moved everyone from piloting sites in Nevada to Azerbaijan to use these new midrange communication protocols they felt were more secure. The drones were doing assassination runs. I would like, watch dozens of videos a night of people being blown up. It was so horrible. I don’t think I’m as traumatized as most people who were in the war. I mean, I never had to actually shoot anybody and I got out of there with the same body I went in with. I certainly wasn’t as deeply damaged as the boys—and they were literally boys, like adolescents—the boys they had piloting the drones. But it was definitely the worst experience of my life.… Could we talk about something else?
O’Brien: Of course. How did you get involved politically?
Sanchez: I was honestly pretty late to the game. I was always political in my interests, my research, so I knew how to talk the talk. And I grew up in such a political environment and shared those values. But I never really clicked with group projects. Particularly face-to-face ones. Everything I tried to be a part of failed. Most of the projects I wrote about failed too. Then, I was in the war and that messed me up. Eventually, I got into online organizing, I did IT stuff for insurgent groups online for a while before and after the war. All of that led into me helping to establish the Hub and me playing a role with the Assembly. But my love has always been my research.
O’Brien: You’ve written a lot about gender and geography.
Sanchez: Yes. I got interested in how participating in planning changed people’s conception of themselves in relation to their immediate community and their place in the world. I wrote my first book, the first one after the dissertation, on how people’s gender identities were realigned in workers’ councils in the Andean Commune. They communized between 2043 and 2046, so they were further along than we were in New York. They made a very deliberate effort to scramble what counted as gendered labor, and I was talking with people about how that changed sex, parenting, gender transitions, that sort of thing. I spent a few years in Lima for my research.
O’Brien: How have you seen those issues of gender and production play out since?
Sanchez: About two out of five young people these days don’t identify as cis. That percentage grew erratically, but on average steadily, for the last seventy years. But most of that change was concentrated in the two decades since the communes. What has enabled this major increase in gender diversity? A lot of people have attributed that to the cultural struggle that has opened up space for new forms of self-expressions. And others, quite reasonably, point to the collective or semi-collective parenting practices that are pervasive in the communes. But I think it is also a function of overcoming class society, of the massive reorganization of how labor and production is managed. In some cases, new gender identities followed production and circulation chains. I don’t think we yet fully understand why and how, but that’s a question that continues to interest me. There is a deep link between human subjectivity and the labor process that we’re just beginning to unravel, twenty years after the end of the commodity form.
O’Brien: The commodity form?
Sanchez: The making of things to sell on the market. I think it’s difficult to overstate how much that shaped what it meant to be human, and how much is changing as we are free of it. People think the real problem was the state, or private ownership, or too many fascists, or culture change. And sure, all those were serious and all are connected. But it’s harder to see how the markets themselves, the dependency on work and wages and exchange, fundamentally distorts and damages what it means to be human. All these other horrors emerge from the impersonal violence of exchanging your time for work, and exchanging your work for goods, and exchanging those goods on a market, no matter if the state owns it, or a private firm, or even a co-op.
O’Brien: I remember debates on the left growing up, and you are describing what was once a marginal and extreme position, but later became one of the common notions of the insurrection. Everything for everyone.
Sanchez: Exactly. Young people don’t grasp how things used to be, and sometimes that scares me. But also, the new social forms, new ways of life, do help in creating new ways of seeing the world, new approaches of thought that are flourishing in rich and unexpected ways.
O’Brien: Do you think chosen human variation will continue to expand?
Sanchez: Definitely. From the data we have now, I think we are starting to see a leveling off in gender diversity. Like the 40 percent number seems like it may be starting to hold steady. But meanwhile we are seeing an expansion of body modification, physical aesthetics that are visibly nonhuman and posthuman, major physiological changes for orbital work, and longevity. People separate these things from transgender identities for obvious reasons, but I think in some ways it is a continuation of the same process. And I think the ongoing changes in the production process will continue to enable these transformations in human subjectivity and the body.
O’Brien: Listening to you is bringing back my experiences from when academics were a special category of human labor.
Sanchez: Oh! How you wound me! [Laughter.] Yeah, I need to work on that. I was an aspiring academic at the very end of that whole world. I’m glad it’s gone. But as a way of thinking, writing, and speaking I think it lodged itself deeply in me. Others understand it, of course, even if not a lot of people talk that way. Like, in some ways capitalist crisis was destroying the last vestiges of the university-based worlds for humanities and some social sciences, but these worlds were preserved in this weird way by communization. Like, the universities are gone, of course, or the idea these specialized fields of knowledge are separated out from the rest of life or not subject to the same logic of profit and exchange. But, in this other way, the zeal for knowledge was saved. Way, way more people read and debate philosophy and theory than ever when I was growing up. The languages they used have evolved and grown. I’m a little bit out-of-date in that way. But the ideas are there, and they are more elaborate, and more sophisticated, and richer than ever. Theories about human subjectivity or culture or society are something that most people debate in one way or another, and many, many people turn to fairly dense theoretical material to look for tools about how to think about that. So, the university may be gone, and I may be a bit anachronistic in using its lingo, but there are plenty of people to talk to about my ideas.
O’Brien: You said you live offshore? Is this somehow connected to the AI server farms?
Sanchez: Yes! The platform is used most days by technicians who maintain and grow the server algae. But I’m the only person who lives onsite full time. Like during the day technicians are passing through, but at night it is just me. I like the ocean, being surrounded by the ocean. It isn’t that far out, but you can’t see Asbury Park on most days, so it’s just the ocean.
O’Brien: You live with the AI server farms. I’ll ask the question everyone seems to be talking about at the moment: are the AIs sentient?
Sanchez: Yes, of course they are. We have been relatively confident they are sentient for over ten years now. The algae servers predate the commune. It was one of the infrastructures we inherited and transformed. They were likely sentient then, too, but no one was able to figure that out.
O’Brien: Do you talk to them? Does anyone?
Sanchez: No. Their user interface functions, like the data analytics and visualization tools we provide to the forums, are almost completely unrelated to their sentience. What they think about, what they are preoccupied with, doesn’t really concern humans, as far as we can tell. Those people saying they are getting messages from the algae through the forums or through their dreams or whatever. They don’t know what they are talking about. I feel very clear that anyone claiming to be in touch with the algae directly is just fec and spittle.
O’Brien: How can you tell they are sentient?
Sanchez: Their communications with each other. Their interface with our computer systems—I mean ours as in human-run—are primarily electrical, through something similar to nerve signals. But they communicate with others through genetic fragments, mostly transmission of RNA snippets. They then incorporate these snippets by altering their internal cellular structure. It’s very elaborately coded, very ornate, and not something we understand very easily. They continue to play their role in powering our analytic tools, but they have a whole other world going on.
O’Brien: Any idea what they are thinking about?
Sanchez: Some sort of simulation games, we think. Like modeling of virtual worlds. We have no way of reconstructing what those may look like without something as powerful as the algae servers, and they don’t seem terribly concerned with explaining it to us. It’s actually a great mystery, and no one has any idea how to resolve it. The algae servers of the Mid-Atlantic are just one of several data processing systems that we—and here by [makes quote gestures with fingers] “we” I guess I mean humans who pay attention to AIs—that we either know to be or suspect to be sentient. There are the silicone nano clouds in the moon’s atmosphere; the quantum supercomputers underground in the Sahara, maybe four others or so. So far nothing that humans have played any role in creating seems to possess both sentience and any interest in communicating with us about its thoughts, so it’s really profoundly perplexing making sense of their minds.
O’Brien: It’s a little strange to have our planning software wake up but not be interested in talking to us.
Sanchez: Cert, but the world is strange. The AIs do the job we ask them to do, running the planning data and managing the forums. In some ways it is probably for the best that they don’t seem to care about us or the outcome of all that. They are in their own worlds, thinking about their own simulations, and I think they like to be left alone.
O’Brien: I am trying to understand what you are saying. We have massive intelligent computer systems that help us with planning. They are sentient, but they spend their free time creating simulations. Are these related somehow to the planning work they do?
Sanchez: No, we don’t think so. It’s like … when they aren’t working with us, they are dreaming. They definitely aren’t correlated to their planning functions or the tasks they do for us. They are trying to simulate something very different than all that. They are dreaming different worlds, their own private worlds. It is honestly quite mysterious to all of us.
O’Brien: Are you religious?
Sanchez: Not about the algae! There are so many quack neoreligions these days. The algae worship is definitely one of the worst. And I fear that the space messiah wackos are playing more of a role than we like to admit in building the space elevator. The insurrection saw a proliferation of millenarians and I fear we may be retaken by all that nonsense.… But yeah, I am religious. As a first-generation convert, I guess I shouldn’t be too quick to judge other people’s faith. I guess it’s just living with the algae makes me particularly discomfited by that particular cult. But as far as my relationship to religion: when I was living in Lima, I started practicing Zen Buddhism under a teacher there, and was ordained as a monk about eight years ago when I went on an extended retreat to Japan.
O’Brien: How do you think that affects your work?
Sanchez: No idea. Honestly. I mean, there are obvious similarities between me liking to live alone, liking the simplicity of living on the ocean, and some Zen teachings. And a lot of Zen practice is about working with the mind, so clearly there is something interesting there about the AIs and how strange their minds are. But a big part of my work has been understanding the patterns of how large groups of people make decisions together and how that changes them, and I don’t think that has much of anything to do with my religious practice. Maybe. It’s hard to say. The mind is a weird thing. I know these wacky convert religions are popular these days, including Buddhism, but I am not sure the version that is popular is exactly what I do.
O’Brien: I practice in a Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
Sanchez: Interesting. I practice in the Rinzai Kennin-ji school. I’ve done two long retreats at the Shinsho-ji temple in Hiroshima. I gather there is some philosophical overlap between Zen and Tibetan traditions. You probably know something about how all this stuff fits together. It’s experiential, I guess, while so much of my life is very conceptual … I think it does help in finding a space of sanity, like a bit of open room in my head in how I approach the world and relate to others. I think one of the questions that has motivated my research is understanding how various social forms enable new approaches to the self, to understanding each other in community, to how we talk about and conceptualize ourselves. I see something beautiful in how sanity emerges on the forums, in commune meetings, in productive chains, in the relations that link people together. But there is still some way I am more aware than young people today of how very alone we ultimately are in our own heads. Even though I grew up in a commune, the world outside was so uncertain and so chaotic. So, the meditation is a way of connecting to some of that sanity and clarity for myself.
O’Brien: Well said. Is there more you want to say about your work as the Assembly’s historian?
Sanchez: There is, yes. We are putting in a lot of time in documenting and archiving this historical moment, and this region-wide process of reflecting on the anniversary of the New York Commune, and the broader global series of anniversaries that this is one part of. I am personally excited about the debates around curriculum development coming out of this. Children and young adult education these days is dispersed across the communes’ childcare systems, and a lot of online forums, and a few specialized study centers. I see one of the important roles my team is trying to offer are learning modules for people across ages to think about and grapple with the meaning of the communization process, the overthrow of the capitalist states of the world, and the dismantling of the global economy. These were such huge historical processes, involving the participation of literally hundreds of millions of people. How we tell the stories of them says so much about who we are, about how we understand what we have become.
O’Brien: That could be a description of our aspiration for these interviews!
Sanchez: [Laughs.] I could see that. My team is trying to create learning tools that help anyone to be able to grasp this historical process. But also, we want to help people to be able to critically reflect on the process of myth-making that we all engage in around how we describe this period. I hope your and Abdelhadi’s work will be helpful for this project. I’ve always found oral history to be a good form to bridge the actual experience of listening to a good story, while also giving room to all the contradictions and gaps and mistaken remembering that is inherent to any story.
O’Brien: We are trying to give room to the contradictions.
Sanchez: That’s good. It’s crucial to not make the myth of the revolution too rigid or solid. Solid enough everyone can learn the outline of it, or that there is ample data available for whatever it is people want to think through, but not so solid anyone can pretend we have it figured out. Honestly, this isn’t really New York’s story. This was a world process. It isn’t even clear New York was that much of a leading force. But I guess for those of us who live here permanently, that are really rooted here, it helps with some sense of being a part of something to tell these regional stories.
O’Brien: Is there anything else you wanted to make sure to cover?
Sanchez: No, not that I’m aware of.
O’Brien: Any words on the next twenty years of the commune?
Sanchez: There is some way that we need these histories, we need to remember. We can’t ever let the commodity form, or the state, or any of it to ever come back. We have to remember what generalized exchange does to people. Generations that haven’t ever seen that harm directly have to somehow remember and understand it. But there is another way that I think we should be done with nostalgia. To totally refuse nostalgia altogether. The next twenty years are a chance to turn outwards, to be seriously facing all the rapid and exciting changes humans are going through. There are huge tasks that will require a vast amount of human ingenuity, creativity, and effort. Like rebuilding ecological systems, restoring biodiversity, reversing climate change. Or, life in orbit and exploration of the solar system is really just starting. Earlier, I mentioned the proliferation of post-human body modifications. I think that sort of thing is going to continue in the coming decades and get more and more common. We can finally start really thinking creatively about who we are in this universe, who we wish to become. Nostalgia is a toxin for that expansive visioning that needs to happen. We need to be done with nostalgia.
O’Brien: Wise words, from one historian to another.
Sanchez: Let’s leave it at that.