Alexis Madrigal
LightNews LightNews
banner
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
Alexis Madrigal
@alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
4.9K followers 830 following 1.3K posts
Book: The Pacific Circuit
Job: Co-Host, KQED Forum
Life: Local Economy, Oakland Garden Club
Posts Replies Media Videos
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
Without downloading any new pics describe your gender.
November 20, 2025 at 4:57 AM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
Went to see for myself. Lots of reporters (shoutout out @kqednews.kqed.org Erin B and Adhiti B). Things seem to be alternating between loitering slow protest and spiky moments of intensity. Jumpy, as Erin described it.
October 23, 2025 at 7:28 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
That's where Federal immigration authorities are going to be setting up camp, according to our reporting www.kqed.org/news/1206108...
October 23, 2025 at 2:34 AM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
Are there protests yet at the single, small road link from the Coast Guard island to the rest of the Bay?

This almost seems like inviting a long-term protest there.
October 23, 2025 at 2:33 AM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
We’ve got a fascinating event at our community space Local Economy tomorrow with some of the immigration judges who were recently fired in San Francisco and some Polish counterparts

luma.com/2th83vpt
October 13, 2025 at 9:43 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
If you’re in the Bay Area (and even beyond), just a heads up that the new community space we’re opening up in Oakland has opened up memberships ahead of our October open.

We’ve got so much good programming on tap.

Way more info here:
www.thelocaleconomy.com
August 17, 2025 at 10:41 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
If you’re in the Bay Area (and even beyond), just a heads up that the new community space we’re opening up in Oakland has opened up memberships ahead of our October open.

We’ve got so much good programming on tap.

Way more info here:
www.thelocaleconomy.com
August 17, 2025 at 10:40 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en...
I don’t think I can actually describe this, but it is the album cover of Snoop’s Doggystyle
June 15, 2025 at 11:56 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
The fact is: there is no bigger news story in our region today. None. And that is true in just about every American metro outside Minnesota and maybe Washington, DC.
June 14, 2025 at 11:44 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
I don't know why I never thought to investigate the stagecoach era of California logistics. www.parks.ca.gov/pages/22491/...

www.parks.ca.gov?page_id=25066
A map of California showing the Butterfield Overland Mail & Other Stage Lines 1850s-1860s. The Butterfield line is in red an runs from San Francisco down through southern California and to Fort Yuma at the Mexico border.
June 7, 2025 at 4:33 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
That’s cool. I had a little plastic lens years ago that I loved. Hard to get enough light, but the vibe was impeccable
June 5, 2025 at 1:51 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
Bay Area! Y’all know there have been grant cuts to arts orgs, and that includes the remarkable Berkeley publisher, Transit Books. We’re hosting a little party for them this weekend in Oakland. Come!

www.eventbrite.com/manage/event...
A flyer for an event in Temescal Alley for the publisher Transit Books at Womb House Books. The event is Saturday, May 24, 5pm to 8pm. It’s a fundraiser, pop up, and party!
May 21, 2025 at 2:50 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
I’ll just add this from my book …
As the system’s flow stopped up, key elements also got out of bal- ance on both sides of the Pacific. John McLaurin, president of the Pacific Merchants Shipping Association (PMSA), told me the retailers he repre- sented were struggling with every step of the journey. “When they’ve got product in China, they can’t get a box. When they get a box, they can’t get a ship. When they get a ship, they can’t get a berth,” McLaurin said. “When they get a berth, they can’t get a truck. When they get a truck, they can’t get a chassis. And when they get a chassis, they can’t find a warehouse to take it to.”
April 27, 2025 at 5:51 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
And it turns out it is often like that! Chassis were a famous example in shipping for a while. I also liked this quote from peak pandemic supply chain trouble. These systems are all about balance and flow.
April 12, 2025 at 2:39 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
“Locating the output of LLMs on a spectrum from poetry to ideology…”

This is either gonna be my most or least favorite book this year, I think. (I am betting most)

www.upress.umn.edu/978151791932...
Text: How generative AI systems capture a core function of language Looking at the emergence of generative AI, Language Machines presents a new theory of meaning in language and computation, arguing that humanistic scholarship misconstrues how large language models (LLMs) function. Seeing LLMs as a convergence of computation and language, Leif Weatherby contends that AI does not simulate cognition, as widely believed, but rather creates culture. This evolution in language, he finds, is one that we are ill-prepared to evaluate, as what he terms “remainder humanism” counterproductively divides the human from the machine without drawing on established theories of representation that include both. To determine the consequences of using AI for language generation, Weatherby reads linguistic theory in conjunction with the algorithmic architecture of LLMs. He finds that generative AI captures the ways in which language is at first complex, cultural, and poetic, and only later referential, functional, and cognitive. This process is the semiotic hinge on which an emergent AI culture depends. Weatherby calls for a “general poetics” of computational cultural forms under the formal conditions of the algorithmic reproducibility of language. Locating the output of LLMs on a spectrum from poetry to ideology, Language Machines concludes that literary theory must be the backbone of a new rhetorical training for our linguistic-computational culture
April 10, 2025 at 6:19 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
Here’s another thing about these jobs from a paper by Joshua Cohen (who works at Apple) et al … turnover is huge. 3% a week. Imagine if your whole department turned over every 8-9 months. And that’s excluding the 8% who didn’t last a week.

pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1...
April 8, 2025 at 12:47 AM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
This is exactly right! The hiring managers of SV companies just said the quiet part out loud over and over. Screenshot is from my book. But also check out the documentary The Global Assembly Line

youtu.be/Eq1KJxBI2jQ?...
This new population had to try to scrape together a living in an expensive new place. Many immigrant women, Asian and Latin alike, entered the workforce. Silicon Valley hiring managers looked out for them specifically because they were seen as high-productivity workers. The San Francisco State historian Karen Hossfeld interviewed many women working in the plants, who related stories of discrimination and the simple difficulty of making life happen with kids and a job. Domestic managers followed the same sexist rules as their counter- parts abroad. “Just three things I look for in hiring: small, foreign, and female,” a manager told her. “You find those three things and you’re pretty much automatically guaranteed the right kind of work force. These little foreign gals are grateful to be hired—very, very grateful—no matter what.” Other researchers found hiring managers describing the ideal worker as “the ‘FFM’—or ‘fast fingered Malaysian.’” With attitudes like that within Silicon Valley companies, it is no surprise that in the manufacturing heyday of the semiconductor indus- try, Asian and Latin women were clustered at the bottom of the eco- nomic hierarchy, doing only the most manually intensive jobs. Labor organizers found that companies liked to splinter off the different eth- nic groups. “Company A would hire almost entirely southeast Asians. Company B would hire mainly Latinos,” one activist recalled. “You had segregation between corporations and facilities, by occupation, by shift, by job assignment, right across the board.” By and large, they hired very few Black workers
April 8, 2025 at 12:27 AM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
Another historical reality: this kind of electronics assembly has almost always been done in Asia. Fairchild begins assembly in Hong Kong in 1963! And just look at these maps (a slide from a talk I am giving tomorrow at UW)… Global supply chains have been the norm since the birth of electronics.
April 8, 2025 at 12:08 AM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
Just pulling into Seattle on the train for this event at the Ravenna branch of Third Place Books! 7pm! With the legend Angela Garbes!

www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/alexis...
April 7, 2025 at 8:26 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
I just want people to read all of these things from small American companies.

You can argue the US should build this kind of manufacturing ecosystem, but can’t say it seems even remotely likely to happen.., and even if we did, it would produce wildly more expensive products.
April 7, 2025 at 7:49 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
People who have read it have said some amazing things about it. Here are some thoughts from Rebecca Solnit, Hua Hsu, Steven Johnson, and Jenny Odell.

If it sounds interesting, you can order it here or anywhere books are sold: us.macmillan.com/books/978037...
March 18, 2025 at 4:33 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
In the book, I trace the history of these developments and pull us through into the present, where we're dealing with the social and economic consequences of the Pacific Circuit's development. It's both a hyperlocal story set along 7th Street in Oakland and an oceanic one.
A map showing the world from a West Oakland perspective
March 18, 2025 at 4:33 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
As part of my book research, my mom (thanks Mom!) and I digitized the extant issues of the Spokesman newspaper, which was produced in Hunters Point in San Francisco from 1965 and 1969, and then created an index of it.

I really want to get this into the hands of Hunters Point families. (1/x)
March 6, 2025 at 1:50 AM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
If you can’t make that one, there are a bunch of others both in the Bay and in other places.

Ticket info is at:
www.thepacificcircuit.com
March 5, 2025 at 10:22 PM
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
There is also a slate of events that you can come to for the book, both here in the Bay and elsewhere. Ok.

You can resume doomscrolling now.
February 26, 2025 at 11:06 PM