Your Cart Isn’t Just Full of Gear. It’s Full of History.

Jogging through Alexis Madrigal’s book The Pacific Circuit and the hidden costs of all our stuff.

There’s a run I liked to do during the pandemic.

I’d head down to the Oakland estuary, past the encampments along the sidewalks. It’s gritty space, but soon gives way to the manicured waterfront of Jack London Square. As my creaky legs began to warm up, I’d catch my reflection in the windows of restaurants and boutiques, empty with the lockdowns.

Soon, I’d cross the train tracks to head up Market Street into West Oakland proper. To outsiders, West Oakland sometimes stands as a shorthand for urban fears—violence, poverty, gangs. But on foot the story changes.

The historic heart of Black Oakland is covered in trees. Beds of succulents spill out before stately Victorians and homey bungalows. This is where the Black Panther Party held rallies in De Fremery Park, a lovely open space, bordered by leafy city blocks. Mandela Parkway, once an elevated freeway torn down after Loma Prieta, stretches wide, its bike path meandering between traffic-calmed lanes.

I’d loop back down to 7th Street where the faded paint is still there on Esther’s Orbit Room, once a crown jewel of Black Oakland’s jazz era.

And then the port. Where the city opens up into something entirely different. Where the air warms ten degrees on the wide, black tarmac, horizon broken only by great stacks of containers. Behind them, massive cranes tower over the huge bulk of container ships, feeding rows of trucks that will fill millions of square feet in warehouses with commodities on their way to us.

Here the rhythm changes. Here life moves on a different timeline and scale. Here neighborhoods are replaced by logistics of globalized scale and speed.

APL Belgium at the Port of Oakland in April 2018. Wikimedia Commons, accessed April 6, 2025.

That juxtaposition of leafy neighborhood and massive port, of the local and global, is the subject of

Alexis Madrigal

’s new book, The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City. The book examines and articulates something I’ve clumsily sensed running through West Oakland: that much of my own life—my job, my possessions, my exercise routines—are stitched directly into something much larger than myself.

And that’s almost certainly true for you as well.

So I wanted to share a few thoughts on the book, especially timely with the new tariffs upending a global economy that runs through the Pacific Circuit.

Building the Circuit

A journalist and co-host of Forum, a popular talk show on California public radio, Madrigal traces from Oakland an interconnected web that links American ports to East Asian manufacturing and facilitates the largest movement of goods in human history.

The pun behind the book’s title signals trade is both a circular flow, of containers moving back and forth, and new technological algorithms pulling more parts of the globe into that system while pushing it deeper into our lives.

The circuit was not an accident. The United States invested heavily in propping up anti-Communist regimes in Asia with trade agreements and foreign aid that encouraged industrialization abroad while stoking demand at home.

Meanwhile, military spending during the Korean and Vietnam Wars spurred on the Bay Area’s nascent tech and logistics sectors. From this bloody military-industrial logic came a generation of Stanford grads that helped firms like Hewlett Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor grow into multinational behemoths.

In the decades that followed, companies like Nike and Apple perfected this outsourcing and automation playbook: design here, build there. By the 1990s, the trans-Pacific flow was the main current in the world economy.

“It is our goal to be in every single country there is. We look at a world without any boundary lines. We don't consider ourselves basically American. We are multi-national; and when we approach a government that doesn't like the United States, we always say, Who do you like; Britain, Germany? We carry a lot of flags.”
— Ford executive

The high cost of cheap running shoes

Endurance retail as we know it today was born in the Pacific Circuit. It’s what lets you browse 16 varieties of near-identical running shoes, made in Vietnam, marketed in Oregon, and sold online. It’s what lets you shop in Seattle for a carbon-fiber bike assembled in Shenzhen using carbon fiber from Japan and shipped across the ocean in a steel container.

When you load your cart at Running Warehouse, paw the goods at REI, or peruse the aisles at Decathlon, you participate in the Pacific Circuit.

This all comes with a cost.

As Madrigal details, West Oakland was a sacrificial zone on the altar of global trade. The fact that the neighborhood was largely Black was reason enough to for it to be deemed blighted and targeted for redevelopment.

Homes were razed (some with a literal Army tank), industrial zoning crept into residential blocks, toxic waste was dumped into the ground, diesel trucks choked the air. By the 1990s, a resident of West Oakland lived, on average, fifteen years less than someone in the wealthy hills.

Madrigal shifts between personal narratives of neighborhood activists and the cosmic story of global trade. We float between the history of shipping and Silicon Valley, the exploitation of women workers in East Asia and fights over Oakland City Council commission seats, the 2017 Warriors NBA Championship parade and the history of longshoreman unions.

If this seems like a lot to cover in a book, well, it is.

The book could be tighter, but the roving focus is Madrigal’s point. You can’t untangle the local with the global. At least, you can’t in Oakland, which birthed the global economic system we find ourselves in today.

Surrounded by stuff, starved of meaning

Americans have benefitted greatly from this system. We’re showered in cheap stuff, our homes filled with gadgets that make life easier. Incredible wealth has pooled in coastal areas like the San Francisco Bay, New York, Seattle, and Houston.

Yet for many Americans, the moral logic has grown thin.

The Pacific Circuit made us wealthier, but not equally. It also made us unhealthy, alienated, isolated, and anxious. It meant jobs that afford less and less dignity, and more and more risk. It corroded communities and friendships into message-board relationships. It scorched our air, water, and forests. It encouraged us to meet fewer people, dine out less, work more, and expect that life will be worse for our children.

We gained abundance, but abundance of things we don’t really need. I take myself as an example. As I write this, I have within my apartment god knows how many pairs of running shoes, running shorts, and t-shirts. What I don’t have is enough living space for my daughter. Or a job within easy commute distance. Or interaction with the neighbors on my block. Or confidence I could move closer to family without sizable economic cost. I am surrounded by stuff and starved of meaning.

Enter the tariffs

One of the great ironies of Madrigal’s book is that it arrives at the very moment the free-trade system has been upended.

This past week, the Trump administration announced the highest import taxes in nearly a century, a direct assault on the Pacific Circuit. All industries, including the endurance sport industry, evolved into interlocking networks of assembly and consumption. They now face costs no one alive has experienced.

Madrigal holds a progressive view. After reading him, you’ll better understand why elected officials on the left have been quiet about the Trump tariffs. It’s hard to defend a global trade system we should rightly view with ambivalence.

But the solutions offered in The Pacific Circuit are local: real-estate cooperatives funded by reparations not to people but to neighborhoods bearing the blunt of globalization. This feels possible if supported by national industrial policy that focuses on supply of what we really need: housing, health, and better transit. Though I fear Madrigal’s ideas will be in tension with the nascent supply-side progressivism espoused by Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and others. As always, one can see the political fault lines of the future in Oakland.

So Madrigal raises exciting questions. Can we build while bringing production closer to people and making those people co-authors of its design? Can we balance the needs of the market with those of other ecologies? Can we dance together again on 7th Street, singing the joy of existence on this beautiful slope of city along the bayside?

Naive, perhaps. But for that, I’d be willing to give up a few running shoes.

With new tariffs hitting endurance gear—from shoes to socks to bikes—how are you thinking differently about what you buy? Are you changing anything about how you shop, train, or think about gear? Drop a comment below—I’d love to hear how you are processing this shift.

More on The Pacific Circuit:

• A conversation with Madrigal and Noni Session on

  EastBay_Yesterday
  ’s podcast: “People of the Pacific Circuit”

• Madrigal speaking on Forum about how Oakland concentrates and clarifies the problems facing the US

• Madrigal’s 2017 podcast on global trade, Containers

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading.