Zach Whitworth

I’m from the Umpqua Valley of the Pacific Northwest. This is an in-progress space for sharing activities and updates. If you want to get in touch, send me an email (1025orchard [at] gmail [dot] com).

What I’ve been working on…
I’m currently engaged in long-term research on the utopian community of New Odessa (1881–1891) and its significance in the history of social movements, political philosophy, and Jewish life. My recent focus in the project is the epistemological writing of chemist and philosopher Peter Fireman (1863–1962), one of New Odessa's founding members. I've been reading Fireman's Sound Thinking (1947) and slowly translating his "Kritik der Marx'schen Werttheorie" (1892). I wrote a featured article for The Dry River issue 3 (Crybaby Press) on wildfires, electricity, and moral order in California, with emphasis on the 2021 Dixie Fire. I've contributed three entries on freedom, intentional communities, and esotericism to be published as part of An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping (Thick Press) in 2024. As part of a presentation at Otis College of Art and Design, I compiled a set of notes on personal websites and the appearance of the Internet. My short essay on the problem of claiming authority in relation to knowledge was printed in The Vendor (Onomatopee), describing the basis of my own struggles as an author. I'm also in the middle of writing projects on mutual aid and public health as well as a critique of eugenics thinking.

Some past activities…
I wrote a study of ritual architecture and the establishment of modern city centers for PROTOCOLS issue #10: TEMPLE (eds. Lauren Levy & Ben Ratskoff eds). My essay on Emily Ensminger’s utopian project Housepitality (2012–2020) was published in The Feral Fabric Journal volume 05: Labor (eds. Paulina Berczynski & Amanda Walters). Another piece of prose on language and war appeared in Plates issue 04: Craft (ed. Casey Carsel). An infrequently ongoing side project is the Authoritarian History Film Index, a spreadsheet of films on authoritarianism and its opposition, all of which are available to watch online for free. I continue to grow my “Links” document, a directory of helpful websites for those in orbit of the arts.

What I’m studying…
In the summer, I was awarded scholarships to attend the California Rare Book School at the University of California Los Angeles as well as the Summer Educational Institute for Digital Stewardship of Visual Information (SEI), further developing my foundations in the digital humanities and information science. I’m a co-organizer of the Community Reading Group, which has lately read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness, and Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader, among others. At the same time, I've been reading Karl Marx's Capital with the Maurin Academy for Regenerative Studies under the guidance of Jakob Hanschu. On my own, I'm reading Murray Bookchin's The Spanish Anarchists and Jean-Marie Guyau's The Ethics of Epicurus. My brother and I are also discussing James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State while building a small city in Minecraft together.

Last updated December 9, 2023.
After paying for a website through Format for years, I finally learned to code one by hand through a class at Index. Many thanks to Megumi Tanaka for getting me started. I am currently paying $15 USD a year for my domain and host the code on GitHub for free. My favicon is a portrait of me drawn by my former first-grade student, Taven.