Chapter 3
Recorded on December 1, 2067, in the Bronx.
M. E. O’Brien: Hello, my name is M. I will be having a conversation with Tanya John for the New York Commune Oral History Project. It is the first day of December 2067, and this is being recorded at Tanya’s apartment in the Crotona Commune. Hello Tanya.
Tanya John: Hello M.
O’Brien: Could you introduce yourself, however you’d like?
John: Sure. I’m a coor of the Crotona Commune and serve as a rep in the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly. Hold on, I’m getting a call. [Long pause.] Okay, sorry about that. I shouldn’t have to take any more calls.
O’Brien: You have an implanted phone?
John: Yeah, of-c. Where was I? You don’t have a phone?
O’Brien: No, I guess I just use my watch. What’s a coor?
John: A coor is a sysadmin. A ranner? The word comes from “coordinator,” I think. Basically, I make sure fec doesn’t get in the way of other fec.
O’Brien: Like you administer the commune?
John: Right.
O’Brien: You were introducing yourself.
John: Yeah, I work a lot. I am an auntie to tons of kids. I play music. I like parties. I’m good at managing things. I love my commune. I’ve been around. My new hobby is making drugs.
O’Brien: Drugs?
John: Synthetic hallucinogens. I’m taking a class in neuropsych.
O’Brien: You play music?
John: Yeah, I DJ. I’ve run parties here in the Bronx for twenty years. My big gigs though are on the Jakarta Circuit.
O’Brien: Jakarta, the city?
John: I guess? The Jakarta Circuit is clubs, a dance party scene. It’s big all along the rim of the Indian Ocean. The music is a wild mix, evolved from these dance barges that would run back and forth along the coast from Karachi, running through Colombo, Chennai, Kolkata, and then turn around in Bangkok. This scene was made by the kids that would take the barges back and forth, and then crash in the shanties and communes along the circuit. Then the dancing went online, and it got popular. It’s very catchy, very exhilarating. These days the servers are offshore near Jakarta. I play a show once a month or so. They are big.
O’Brien: Big?
John: Maybe twenty thousand kids come out on average?
O’Brien: I am confused. These were in person and now they aren’t?
John: Yeah. Ugh. I’ll try to explain again: they came out of the dance barges of the forties, but later became full sensory. In some cases, the same boats. Like now some of the old shipping freighters that had become international dance clubs now just house the server systems for immersion parties today.
O’Brien: Like online virtual clubs?
John: Right.… You should look this up.… You wanted to talk about the Free Assembly? The first one—of Crotona Park?
O’Brien: Yes! I’m sorry I am still a bit confused about the clubs. Let’s loop back around to that at some point. Maybe let’s start with your growing up.
John: Sure. I’m from the Bronx. I grew up in the Bronx River Projects. My dad was from Karachi. My mom was from the DR. My mom was a teacher, taught music in high school. My dad used to do food delivery and then he got sucked into running for one of the orgs.
O’Brien: Orgs?
John: Street organizations. The gangs. My dad worked for one of the old gangs, MS-13, doing pickups.
O’Brien: What were you like as a kid?
John: I got into music and parties early. I had a lot of friends, I got along with everybody really well. As a teenager I was into sex. Dated a lot. Enjoyed the drama. Always had something going on. I had fun.
O’Brien: How did you get involved politically?
John: I wasn’t really that political. Like I wasn’t in any political groups. I mostly liked to dance. I got really into organizing parties. I ran these monthly parties that would move around. They were totally wild. We were one of the first that started syncing between implants and externals. Like full sensory immersion, aug sense, but onsite. We had all these DJs coming in from all over. The music scene was blowing up in Nigeria around then, and we got in that just as it got really popular here. It was so fucking fun. That’s kind of how I spent my late teen years and early twenties. Made plenty of money from it. Calling them parties may not give the right sense. They would go on for a weekend. Everyone would live together in big empty buildings, and we would cook and eat together, and then people would dance or sleep based on their drug cycle. But also like we’d do like these workshops, and discussion groups, and fec.
O’Brien: Did it ever get messy, like serious conflict?
John: We took fights onsite really seriously. We put a lot of work into negotiating between the orgs to not get into it at the parties and had these resolution forums for people to work it out. The NYPD was no-go across a lot of the South Bronx at that point, so everyone needed support to address problems that came up, and we did that through the party organizing.
O’Brien: What was your party called?
John: Oh, we changed the name around a lot. Initially I called it Thalassa, but we changed the name a half a dozen times and people knew it was the same party. Despina, Galatea, Proteus.
O’Brien: Those are … moons?
John: That was the joke. Moons of Neptune. Some of our first aug sets were underwater. So, a roundabout joke, I guess. It made sense when we were tweaking.
O’Brien: Underwater dance parties. That is amazing. Could you explain, for people who don’t use implants or augmented environments, how tech worked at the parties?
John: Sure. By the time I got into the dance scene, this was maybe when I was thirteen or fourteen, in ’44 and ’45, wet tech had become a huge part of music. This meant kids had these head implants. We would have surgery rooms at the parties, for kids to get new augs. There were a few veteran medics from the war in Iran, where auggie implants were big on the US side of things. The medics knew a lot about how to do simple, quick neural implants. And lots of soldiers stateside were stealing and selling anything they could get their hands on, so we had a steady source of auggie supplies of all sorts. The tech was actually pretty sturdy, and infections and complications pretty minimal, because it was all designed for field combat conditions. Well, sometimes kids died but a lot of people were dying, things were a mess during that time, and the tech was a lot of fun, so we dealt with the death. These medic vets taught a lot of people how to work with the tech, and kids were mad scholastic about it.
O’Brien: What were the augment implants like?
John: Usually bugs in your ears, another for your eyes, and then one on the back of your neck. They added additional sounds and visual elements to what you heard and saw, like added to your reality. Many people know about this now from phones, but then it wasn’t much in civilian life besides the dance scene. So, when we’d have dance parties there would be the music in the external environment from speakers, and light shows from drones flying around, but then there would be this whole other level to the show in transmitting to people’s implants that would reshape what we saw and heard, so it would make all these levels of experience that the DJs could play with. And kids could talk to each other, add to the environment with glove controllers, so what everyone saw could be mutually shaped by each other. You could select what your implants took in, so like only seeing stuff your friends made, or a narrow bandwidth from the DJ, or whatever.
O’Brien: That sounds really interactive.
John: It was genius. All the circuits these days do this, but my parties were some of the first that did it in North America. The first of the really genius DJs were coming out of Lagos, but because of the heavy use of auggies by the US Army in Iran, all these vets in the Bronx had it already, so we became one of the first of the big dance scenes to take all this up.
O’Brien: That is all fascinating. Were you paying any attention to what was happening nationally and internationally at the time?
John: Yeah. I didn’t think of myself as focused on that sort of thing at the time. But I got really into talking with dance kids and DJs, and at the time this was heavily a scene based on traveling circuits. A lot was going down, like kids’ squats getting raided and people getting locked up, and I remember trying to get a handle on the bigger context. I think one turning point for me in thinking about the international context was in 2051. The US military decided to tank the whole Internet, like everywhere. They burned most of the satellites, crashing them into the atmosphere, had a virus that wiped out most of the servers, they just tried to fry the whole thing.
O’Brien: Yes, I wanted to ask you about that. I thought with the discussion of aug tech you may know something about it.
John: They were desperate. This was during their occupation of NYC. The civil war was going poorly, they were losing ground all over, and everyone hated them everywhere. I don’t know their thinking. But they crashed the Internet, and the cell networks, and basically any way we could talk to each other. It was really terrible for our parties, because it became so much harder to get DJs in from Africa. Two things started to emerge to replace the old Internet at that point, but they were both just starting, and it would be years before they really worked. Both replacements, strangely, were kind of connected to the dance scene.
So, one replacement was aug meshes. All these veterans had full shielded comm systems built into their heads, and they could have these encrypted, unblockable channels with each other to talk and share data. There were a lot of vets around, particularly in a place like the Bronx, and a lot of them came to our parties because our parties were very cool. We figured out how the vets could link to people’s digits and phones, and suddenly we had this mesh network that traveled through all their auggies and couldn’t be shut down. It only worked locally, but piece by piece we started linking it up to cover the borough, and later the city.
O’Brien: You said there were two replacements for the Internet?
John: Right. The other innovation was the dance barges. I don’t honestly know how they pulled it off. But I knew a lot of kids coming in who had spent months on the barges in West Africa, the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, the Jakarta Circuit I described before, and another along the coast of China. It was this whole global world, and our scene in the Bronx was very tied up with it. So, when the Internet went down they built these huge servers on the barges and set up these hacked satellite uplinks and transmitters to all the port cities. It was patchwork and broke all the time, but it managed to reestablish international communications. The dance kids would show up in new cities with link protocols on their auggie chips and get a city partially back online.
Years later, I think in 2055, the NYPD tried again to shut down the Internet in the city. This time everyone got hooked up to the meshes, and it became the beginning of the nets we all use now. But originally it was dance kids and vets who made it happen.
O’Brien: That is an incredible story.
John: I know, right! I used to say dancers were the neural links of the new world.
O’Brien: Switching gears a bit—how did you get involved with the street gangs?
John: I started dating this guy when I was nineteen, so in 2049. Lawrence Sands. Sex was great. He sold military hardware to the orgs. Through that I got to know a lot of them, got pretty tied up with the scene. At this point things were starting to shift in their fights with police. For a long time, the politics were hard to parse. Like when I was a teenager it felt like the fighting was over drug turf and who would collect the taxes, and the gangs were fighting each other as much as the police.
O’Brien: But that was starting to change?
John: Yeah. By the time I really started to know the orgs—around 2050—it was mad political, and all about abolition and “we care for our own,” and all that fec and spittle. At this point Lawrence and I were really into negotiating these truces between the orgs, and they started ranning together to take out police stations. All through the winter of 2050 the police were losing it, like I think the orgs destroyed five police stations that year. Then the US army came in, and rounded up everyone in camps, and for a few weeks the fighting was reduced to drones sniping at each other. But the Army couldn’t stay, things were getting too hot down south. For the next two years or so the orgs were in a constant shooting war with police. Like for days at a time, whole neighborhoods would be under lockdown because the orgs and the police were doing this block-by-block thing, and no one could go outside. It was a mess. Older people were really freaked out by it all. People were already mostly caring for each at the neighborhood-level during all that, and the communes were springing up.
O’Brien: Were you involved in the communes?
John: Not really. Not initially. The parties became a bit of a hub around healthcare and people finding housing and stuff. We’d always invite reps from the communes to talk with the kids who’d come to dance. On the blocks around the main stage, they’d set up tables and do all sorts of stuff. Crotona was the big commune in the Bronx. I think Hunts Point started in ’52 after they took the Market. I was also getting to know a lot of the leadership in the orgs and introduced them to a few of the politicos from the Crotona Commune. There were a lot of conversations happening all the time about what was coming. After Hunts Point started distributing the food, it felt like we were right on the cusp of something. I would like to think our parties played a role bridging everybody, or at least everybody who liked to dance.
O’Brien: How did the planning for the Free Assembly start?
John: The NYPD was a bit on the run. They started abandoning the Bronx. This was 2053 or so. The orgs were kind of running things, but they were also getting all political.
O’Brien: Could you explain what you mean by “political”? We were both using it earlier, but what exactly are you describing?
John: Well, Crotona Commune had these old heads, like nationalists and commies, who were always showing up everywhere and always talking about how we should all work together. They had these, I don’t know, agendas? Platforms? Ideas of how things should work in the future? The dance scene I was in initially had none of that. We just took care of each other and believed in that. The street orgs might occasionally name-drop the Panthers, but they were mostly about making money for a long time. But what we started to see was a convergence between these different currents.
Ultimately the Free Assembly was where it all came together, but it was slowly percolating for years before then. By 2050 you would start hearing like young thugs and tweakers repeating something they had heard a commie from the Crotona Commune say, like they were really thinking about it. I was kind of one of those kids too. Like I was always coor of the parties, but I started thinking about our work using some of the concepts the olds from Crotona were spouting. But I’d also argue with them.
O’Brien: What were those arguments like?
John: I remember this one chap, Cassandra, was an old commie. We would fight about her opinions about our parties and how we needed discipline and whatever. But slowly she started actually paying attention to what was happening in the orgs, and at the parties, like actually thinking about what things could look like on the ground. And she kind of had to shift gears, from thinking about there being this future party that would run everything—party like a political org, not party like a dance party—to seeing what was beginning to emerge. It was—it was really direct. Like care for each other, off the pigs, abolish the prisons, whatever it was, to do it directly and all at once. That’s what I mean when I say political, this convergence around what was slowly becoming a shared vision of direct revolution, direct communism.
O’Brien: How did these convergences happen concretely? Like where did people talk to each other?
John: Honestly? For a while it was literally inviting people to our parties, and these arguments people would have, sitting around plastic furniture we would set up in the streets around the party. I tell you: dancers were the neurons of the new mind. Eventually that evolved into assemblies and all.
O’Brien: Do you know what made this politicization possible?
John: Probably a lot of factors. I’m not cert. It started in the forties, and then I was pretty exclusively in the dance scene before I met Larry and started connecting to the orgs. One big turning point I remember clearly was Hunts Point in 2052 or so. It was really inspiring to everyone, really gave a sense that anything was possible. The Hunts Point militants were like wild cards, a bit out of nowhere—like, not just old political heads like the Crotona Commune and not just drug dealers with artillery like the orgs. They had all this energy and really believed anything was possible. I think it was people from Hunts Point that first proposed the idea of a Free Assembly. A lot of them are still around, you should talk with them. Hunts Point had been doing something like it [assemblies] every week, but the idea was a really big one, like bringing everyone together. The dance kids got into it. I think our experience of taking care of each other at the parties had a big impact in beginning to shift our thinking about what was possible.
So, everyone was getting into the idea of the assembly, and trying to bring in others, trying to make it citywide. Like we’d send out these little teams to pitch the vision of an assembly. So we’d have these cars full of like one enthusiastic tweaked-out dance kid, someone from one of the communes, and some jacked street fighter from an org. I guess it was kind of the vision the Crotona Commune had been pitching, but shaped through what was happening in Hunts Point, with a heavy dose of dance solidarity. It was like they were pitching the new world, and it would start with the Assembly—the Free Assembly of Crotona Park. I loved those conversations, like they were turning my mind upside down. These delegations went to the other communes—in Harlem, Newark, Brownsville, Jackson Heights—like we’d go every week trying to negotiate to get them to come. And then students at BMCC [Borough of Manhattan Community College] were doing this long occupation, so we invited them. And then all the orgs and paramilitaries. We even sent a car down to Alabama to invite some of them to come up.
O’Brien: What was happening in the other boroughs?
John: Because of the dance scene, I actually knew a lot about what was happening around the city. Like, at that point the subways weren’t really working, and no one had jobs, so a lot of people just stayed in their neighborhood and a lot of struggles had this whole hyperlocal thing going on. A few of the orgs had strong international connections, but there had kind of been a breakdown in citywide org coordination so a lot of them were actually very isolated in the Bronx. But because of our parties, actually tons of kids rolled in from Harlem, Queens, Brooklyn. I heard a lot about what was happening.
Queens got all divided up in these little fiefdoms. Like, the kids had to snake their way through these endless checkpoints, since every little neighborhood got under the control of some different cult, or political group, or gang, or church, or these sort of protocommunes. A lot of struggles over access to water and sewage and such. I think Jackson Heights was the only really true commune, like where they weren’t a cult in disguise and had full-on pop assemblies and could actually reliably take care of each other. I think the Jackson Heights Commune was like, most of the neighborhood.
Brooklyn had all these alternative land projects happening, like they tore up their streets to make farms and had tons of co-ops. But it was still all money-based, and from what I gather everything was heavily infiltrated by the NYPD, and no one could turn their sustainable living projects into fighting organizations. I mean, the tech they pulled together was helpful for the communes, but they were utterly useless when it came to politics. The Brownsville Commune just executed all their suspected informants and undercovers. I think that got too ugly, honestly, but they emerged as the only force that could actually effectively fight the cops in Brooklyn. And Staten Island was just a nightmare. I think only here in the Bronx were the lines super sharp. Initially that was about the orgs and the cops fighting over drug turf, but it became more and more political as time went on. The hard part here was getting everyone else on board, like the olds.
O’Brien: That is all super interesting. You have a really good overview and understanding of how all these rapidly changing pieces fit together. I can see why you would make an excellent organizer and coordinator. What was your role in planning the Free Assembly of Crotona Park?
John: I was in my twenties at this point, and really good at running the parties. I knew how to get people working together. So, I pretty much took on and ran all the logistics for the Free Assembly. We didn’t know how many people would end up coming. I think in the end we guessed there were nearly seventeen hundred people who passed through and participated in one way or another, and over four hundred who stayed for the whole month. Most of those people were representing other collectives, residential communes, worker councils, orgs, schools, whatever it was. If you were only representing yourself or a few friends you could watch but not talk so much. It was really a space for all of the networks to sort it out together. Mostly our operations were centered in the park.
O’Brien: People stayed in Crotona Park?
John: Not quite. All our meetings were in the park, but mostly people were sleeping in the surrounding neighborhood. The NYPD had been completely cleared out of Crotona and were scared to come back. It was the summer of 2055 and the weather was perfect. We set up this big tent city in Crotona Park for the meetings, and all the apartment buildings nearby hosted people. Everyone came from all over, like what later became the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly. But Crotona was the first one, the first major gathering like this. I hear it became a template for other efforts around the world. Which … is not something you can say about very much from the US side of the insurrection.
In most ways we were way behind. Like, the revolution was already a decade old in Lima or Xinjiang, and the US was very deeply divided and had some really hard things to sort out about whiteness and all. But in this one way—the assembly as a social form—I think we did offer a model to everyone else. I ran childcare, security, training facilitators, food, everything. Well, my team ran it all. I enlisted all the dance kids. Like, we were an army of tweakers just working that whole year to pull it together.
O’Brien: What was the planning like?
John: We had a dozen working groups, and they started meeting weekly, and later daily, each morning. No one was working at all by that point, and the communes were taking care of everybody’s basics. They got food from Hunts Point and served it in cafeterias, had nurses setting up clinics in some old storefronts on the block, had big assemblies in the biggest room in the neighborhood to figure out how to keep the power on or the toilets flushing. Who was in the commune was usually pretty loose, like all the buildings walking distance from an old elementary school, or something like that, and to be in a commune, you ate most of your meals at the canteen. Slowly they became more integrated, more formal, but they still have this surrounding area of people that depend on the commune for their basic needs but aren’t fully in it. Remember, this was at a moment when the stores and supply chains and everything had basically broken down completely, so the commune infrastructure was literally the main means of survival.
O’Brien: You were starting to talk about the planning for the Free Assembly?
John: Oh, yeah. We had core ranners in each group, who would generally have no real decision-making power but would put in the hours. We worked really hard to get a lot of older people involved. We knew a lot of the olds around Crotona were just terrified of everything, and we thought this could be a good way to tie people in. One team finding housing for people, one team dealing with food, one team with water and sewage, one with childcare, that sort of thing. A truce council ran security. I was really into resolution tables at this point, like strategies for addressing conflict. The first phase of the Assembly was all about working through all the old fec and spittle that had built up between people. We had this format to raise and hold conflict and it mostly helped. At least to get people to tolerate each other. Also, facilitation. Our core facilitation team was at least forty people.
I can tell you about my aunt, she kind of stands out for me as a neighborhood person who was changed by this process. My aunt was an old, like she was in her sixties when the Crotona Assembly happened. So maybe she was born in the nineties? Eighties? I’m not sure. She was too scared to leave her home. It had been so bad for her for a long time. She was scared of diseases, and getting shot in crossfire, and a lot of other things. I think she probably had schizophrenia, but you could carry on a conversation with her easily, and actually, all her fears were very well founded. Like they were things that happened to people all the time. She had this little apartment she had been in for forty years at Murphy Houses on Crotona Avenue. I know my mom would scrounge for groceries for her through the forties, and then after Hunts Point, I would bring her building food from there once a week.
O’Brien: It sounds like she was very isolated.
John: Definitely. I got it into my head to get her roped into the Assembly planning. She started leaving her house for planning meetings. My aunt was really into sewing. She had trained as a tailor when she was younger, and an old boyfriend of hers had this industrial sewing machine. So, she got a group of old women to sew our meeting tents. Like, initially that was just joining tarps to make bigger tarps, but then they started making them more and more elaborate. Like, these huge patterns of stars and street maps and everything cut out of tarps and trash fabric and even leaves from trees. Then she ended up working with some Latin Kings, one of the OG street orgs she had always been terrified of. The Kings took on getting the metal poles and erecting the tents. It was wild watching her control her panic attacks and then go into these meetings with kids a third of her age and tell them how the tents were designed.
O’Brien: That sounds really moving.
John: It gets better! I remember when the tents went up and we all stood under them and looked up at these beautiful patterns above us, like an old cathedral. Her face just lit up, and it was like the new world belonged to her too, it wouldn’t leave her behind. She made something so magical. People coming to the Assembly commented on how beautiful they were. The Crotona Commune still sets them up in the park for special occasions. Through connecting to the Crotona around that process, my aunt started getting better mental health care, started eating with other people, and lived the last part of her life connected to other people.
O’Brien: That’s a great story. What is her name?
John: Abigail John. She passed away last year.
O’Brien: I’m sorry.
John: It’s okay. I’m really proud of her.
O’Brien: What happened at the Assembly?
John: Basically, the Free Assembly was a month of intense meetings between every major armed tendency in the Mid-Atlantic. The meetings happened in the tents in the park, usually thirty to fifty people in a tent there to talk about some specific topic, with smaller breakout groups.
O’Brien: What sort of topics?
John: Everything you could imagine. How to distribute food, how to keep water running, how to defend against the pigs, what to do about the holdouts, who should have guns, military strategy, everything. Like we were discussing how to do everything necessary that had once been done by the stores, the jobs, the entire government, and putting everything they did on the agenda to actually sort it out, what we were fighting for and how we were going to get there. Like, I facilitated a six-hour meeting about how to deal with child abuse allegations in the communes. At this point there were communes of some sort in every borough, and it had completely broken open people’s ideas of family. And no one liked the old child protective services system, they had done so much harm. So, we were arguing about what could be done, what should be done, if someone thought a kid was being abused. All of life was up for debate in a way.
So, we would meet all day. Then every night there’d be one general assembly where all the various groups would report on their decisions, and it would get argued about. After that everyone would go back to their factions and try to convince their comrades to go along with whatever they had hashed out. The first week was just trying to get people not to shoot each other. It was resolution tables around the clock. After that, things started to settle down. We made all the participants do shifts with cooking, cleaning, childcare, and I think that helped. All these old politicos and jacked gangsters doing dishes together, I think it helped settle people, helped make people listen to each other a bit more. The facilitation team were fucking heroes, I’m telling you.
O’Brien: What did you all decide?
John: Kind of the beginning of everything! A lot came out of that month. People say it was a major turning point; when the rev really came together. The communes agreed to a mutual cooperation and defense pack. We hammered out a platform, some mix of communization and oppressed nationality self-determination fec. I didn’t really like the platform, honestly. But it won over the org leadership, and they more or less dissolved themselves into training the People’s Army of the Free Assembly. I think it also helped that basically everyone was fighting the NYPD at this point, so we had a deep sense of camaraderie through that experience.
O’Brien: “The People’s Army”?
John: That’s what we called the armed defense efforts of the communes, but it wasn’t like the North American Liberation Front or formal armies. It wasn’t really an army at all. Basically, we decided the only way to defend the New York Commune was to arm and train nearly everybody who had given up property and power—that was the criteria—in how to use a gun. The orgs did the training, but in the third week of the Assembly we decided to form this “council of grandmothers” as we called it, like literally, really old women. Well, elder feminized people. But mostly women. They made the military decisions and decided when someone had to be disarmed. The army was just literally everyone who the grandmothers hadn’t decided to disarm.
O’Brien: Were any of the meetings virtual or augmented?
John: No, not really. For someone who has spent a lot of my life online in augmented environments, we decided that people really needed to be present and really, really face-to-face. People would report back to their communes or their orgs at night, and a lot of that happened over phones and such, but the meetings themselves were overwhelmingly face-to-face. The Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly, that I work with now, is generally online. But when anything gets tense, or really serious, we set up some extended face-to-face assembly for a few days or a couple of weeks. The Free Assembly of Crotona Park was an early reflection of that intuition that people needed to live and work together in one place to sort things out. I think my sense of that came out of doing our resolution tables at the parties, and seeing how people who were living together, even just for a weekend, could work things out.
Talking about all this, I have to say. It was so fucking exhausting. Like, so many meetings. They went on. For weeks. I loved it, but I also hated it. I feel exhausted thinking about it. I can’t believe I did it. Never want to sit through that many meetings again. And every time I thought they’d be over someone would bring up some fec and we’d be right back at it, and I was this close to losing my mind. I was so fucking tired when that was all over.
O’Brien: What in your mind is the legacy of the Free Assembly of Crotona Park?
John: It was definitely the most exhilarating and life-changing thing I was ever a part of. I think that was true for everyone. Like, up to this point in New York, at least, there were all these struggles breaking out everywhere, and a lot of sense that the old world was falling away and couldn’t last. But it wasn’t until the Free Assembly that we started really having this direct sense that we could actually build a new one, like make a world that could carry us through all this. And I say “we,” and I’m talking about the organizers and the communes and the street orgs, but I’m also kind of talking about everybody. Like, there were at least a million people in networks that were represented in the discussions of the Free Assembly. That’s a substantial portion of the population of the Mid-Atlantic. And coming out of the Free Assembly, all those people felt like they were part of something that linked us all together. Though the political platform we hashed out there had a lot of problems—I personally think it was steeped in a kind of subtle racial essentialism that was a part of the political underdevelopment of the orgs—it was solidly a commitment to do away with money, property, and police, and the state and all that. That was crystal clear, and I can say through the month of discussions everyone slowly came to understand what that meant, what could be possible through that, and that this new world was worth fighting for, and it was worth dying for, and above all it was worth living for.
O’Brien: That’s beautiful. It gives me goosebumps hearing you.
John: I told you about my aunt before. I could tell you about another person who comes to mind, when I think about how the Assembly changed things. I had a much younger sister, fourteen years younger. Her name is Monique. So, I was born in 2030, she was born in 2043. When she was coming up, it was like everything was hell. The cough hit hard when she was four or five, the hunger came after. She had all these awful health problems from what a disaster the hospitals were and not getting enough food and everything. My parents were always hustling to try to figure out how to keep her alive. She grew up reading fantasy novels, watching old stream shows; my parents were worried about her getting hurt in the streets and kept her in. She had cognitive disabilities, developmental disabilities. She tried to come out as a girl to our parents when she was five or so, and it didn’t go well. It was a hard childhood.
O’Brien: Your family dealt with a lot of suffering.
John: No more than usual. So yeah, then they all came to the Free Assembly. So, she was twelve at the time? And she totally dived into the youth workshops at the Assembly. Like, she loved it so, so much. Her youth group put on this play about the history of revolution in the Caribbean. They prepared the play all month, and then performed it in the last days of the Assembly. She played this psychiatrist from Martinique who went to Algeria. Like, she gave a whole speech in the play to hundreds of people. It was so wild! I have never seen her speak to a group before. Our parents moved into the Crotona Commune later that year, and my sister’s health improved steadily through her teen years. She transitioned to be a girl her first year in the commune.
She still has chronic fatigue but she’s doing really well. She is, what, twenty-four now? She works in this big garden or little farm they have in Crotona Park. She spends a lot of time just sitting out there, enjoying the view, carrying on conversations with whoever comes by. On days the weather is bad she goes and plays games with younger kids or reads them books. She is exploring what other kind of three-hour she could do to help contribute to our commune and is getting help in sorting that out. But she has a good life now, a life made possible by the Assembly, by the commune, and I feel like I did something good in my time by contributing to making that possible for her.
O’Brien: That’s lovely.
John: I know! Oh, she also sings. She sings at the music events I organize for our commune. It reminds me of when she gave that speech. That was the first time she talked to a group, but now she does it all the time.
O’Brien: How did the dance scene change since the Free Assembly of Crotona Park?
John: It got way more international. Like, there are still dance barges doing circuits or going back and forth on the ocean, but way more of it is online now. Music genres are much more likely to take shape spanning continents, with kids in tight friend groups that include people a thousand miles away they may not meet until someone takes a dance barge across the ocean for their sojourn. Plus, there is this whole other side of it, around the communes, like the events my sister sings at. Most of the communes have clubs or dance parties every weekend. But the scenes are really different. The dance barges and the giant virtual online parties have their own special vibes, in the types of music, in the age bracket of their main audience, and in the tech you need to join.
In contrast, the commune dance parties are really meant to include everyone. So, they rarely have much in the way of drugs or alcohol, you don’t need implants, and they weave together all this music from across multiple generations. But it’s usually the same DJs, the same people, doing both kinds of parties. I DJ these huge parties on the Jakarta Circuit, but I also bottom line these Sunday night dances here at Crotona Park where olds, like, salsa together or get down to classic house. Music and dancing have always been important to community and struggle, but it’s really so appreciated and precious in the life of the communes. A lot of people really into music bridge these two very different sides to our work, our art.
O’Brien: That is lovely to hear about.
John: Yeah, I’m kind of proud of it. Crotona Park was one of the first communes that really welcomed in dance kids and saw the possibility of bridging this whole specialized world of dance with the question of intergenerational community building. That started happening after the first Free Assembly. I like to think I played some role in making that all possible.
O’Brien: Let’s stop there.
John: Sounds good. You should swing by on Sunday night for a salsa-reggaeton night. It’s a great scene.
O’Brien: I’d like that.