The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley

This is a narrative of struggle and solidarity and a collective toolkit for grassroots opposition to the twenty-first century’s militarization of care. Social activist and researcher Annie Paradise presents here an ethnography of the mothers and community matriarchs whose children have been murdered by police across the San Francisco Bay Area as they develop and practice autonomous, creative forms of resistance.   The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley maps local families’ struggles to reclaim their households and their communities—to create a social infrastructure for care outside state- and market-determined modes of “security.” Practices such as sustained vigil, testimony, and insurgent knowledges are shown here to be part of interconnected justice campaigns to demilitarize and decarcerate communities in the face of the multiple forms of violence enacted under late capitalist racial patriarchy. Paradise examines the expanding carceral processes of enclosure, criminalization, dispossession, expropriation, and disposability that mark the neoliberal "security” regime across the Silicon Valley and counterinsurgent strategies of mutual aid and co-generative, dynamic resistance to those forces.