It Could Happen Here Weekly 26

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. Oh it could welcome here

(00:29):
the podcast that happens ship. All right, well st Andrew,
I'm gonna, I'm gonna I'm gonna pivot to you to
to pull us out of this tailspin I've locked it into. Hello, Hello, listen,
seen everyone today. I wanted to go on a bit
of a post no meandering, I guess on um, some

(00:51):
of the ideas and concepts that just kind of fluting
on my head um surrounding sustainable city planning and city living.
I want to see a lot of these ideas and stuff,
UM kind of just crimp them from like all over
the place, and in some cases they are a bit

(01:12):
less i would say viable and others. But I do
find like the work of for example, Low tech magazine
Dot com and um and so on to be very
inspiring in terms of all capabilities, Um, what potential there

(01:33):
is an obsolete technologies? What though tech solutions exist for
issues and what we can do as people to just
kind of make living in urban sprawl or suburban hell
a little bit less hellish. Yeah, that is definitely a

(01:59):
topical of my heart as well as someone who lives
in a city. I would like cities to be less hellish, yeah,
it seems. And I would like suburbs and not exist
so eternal. More on the suburbs, we have to ally
with rural America and protracted suburbs. Yes, yes, yeah, my my,

(02:22):
my crank proposal has always been reintroducing Macedons and just
like just having Macedons just like walking through and destroying buildings,
because that's that's what the suburbs deserves. Masterdons is in
the actual animals. Yes, yes, I thought she meant like
the social media platform. No, no, I think we need

(02:42):
to clone leopards so that they breed as quickly as
rabbits and just let them loose. Wasn't doctor Defer Schmitz
raised by leopards? Sure? Why not? I would Robertino, who
doctor difference riches. No, let's just let's just let's such
as Okay, I I think I think we are. We

(03:09):
are roughly the same, in the same age bracket for
television we watched, so I'm movies to catch up on.
I'm very familiar with the Good Doctor period. The platypus pilled,
very very very platypilled, as they say, plati pilled. Let's continue, right, So, um,

(03:36):
there are a lot of aspects of my evil plan
to make the entire tri state area more sustainable, but
I think I would want to start with something that
tends to consume a lot of the energy in cities,
and that is like heating and cooling. I mean, for me,
living in a tropical country, heating has never been a consideration. Um.

(04:00):
I mean, the coolest it gets isn't like the I
would say, like eighteen nineteen twenty degrees celsius area. Um so,
and to me that is like chili. That's like layering
up kind of thing, because I can't handle that kind
of cool um, which is kind of wild to me
that I have considered moving to Canada. I don't think

(04:24):
I'll people to handle it. It does it does get,
it does get much colder. I mean we when I
was in Canada, we would have not not uncommonly have
minus forty celsius weeks. So yeah, yeah, I've never I've
never experienced minus degrees before. I don't know, you know,
it's no, it is. Oh, it's fine, it's it's not

(04:47):
a big deal. You just put on an extra pair
of socks. You're good to go. Okay, So when when
it when it hits negative forty degrees fahrenheit, you've experienced
negative forty degrees. It's not like it's not like artic
temp like negative negative forty Negative forty fahrenheit is the
temperature of the surface of bars a sunny days. Negatives

(05:11):
is the same as negative forty celsius. Oh is it?
They actually converged at that point. Yeah, it's like you
just yeah, it's just your hain like it's not even
cold anymore. Like you just like your your face just hurts.
It's it's great. Many times I'm going to call out
my my my favorite meme again and have negative forty fahrenheit,

(05:33):
negative forty selfius celsius clapping hands in the middle. Yeah
classic anyway, Yes, yeah, I'm honestly, I can't even conceive
of that kind of sound pretty. Um, I am an
island boy, so that's so I operate it and as

(05:57):
an island boy. Um. How to say that? Like heat
is very very uncomfortable. Humidic humid heat is even more uncomfortable.
Dry heat is also extremely uncomfortable. When you have a
hot day combined with like sahara and dust in the

(06:18):
air and no clouds in the sky, it is truly,
truly miserable. I can't imagine, um, what life in a
city would be like if um, you know, these sort

(06:39):
of temperatures continue to climb as they are climbing, Um,
as you see you know, global average temperatures rising by
you know, a half degree or a degree or two
degrees celsi. Yes, that's just ridiculous, let alone three or
four degrees celsius increase, especially compounded with the far that

(07:01):
in a city. There's this thing called the urban heat
island effect. So cities are ten degrees so it's hotter
than the surrounding countryside. And the reasons for the other
numerous You know, you have like vehicles emitting heat constantly,
you have air conditioners pumping heat into the air. You
have concrete and covering every surface just like absorbing and

(07:27):
radiating the sun's rays. And you have these urban canyons
between tall buildings to prevent heat from escaping from and
to keep it at the sort of street level. It's miserable, right,
And the typical solutions, the individual solutions, the short term solutions,
they just make the situation worse because, I mean, when

(07:47):
you're feeling hot, and mean, I was just feeling hot
just now, and I turn on the E C right
when you're feeling hot, you know, you're sing the C,
or you put on a fan, but not to wash
a fan, but the A C continues and fuels this
vicious cycle of heating the outdoors to cool the indoors,
making experience spaces even more uncomfortable. So you end up

(08:09):
with air conditioning use accounting for like one five of
global energy electricity usage of building related globe electricity usage,
and you end up with the thing that's spposed to
be cooling us heating things even more because you know,
as developing countries, you know they have access to one

(08:33):
more air conditioning, especially and you know towlpping countries, and
to be in the hotter side of the world, um,
you know, the use of the air condition just continues
to sky rop it and um the International Energy Agency
actually estimated that it would take the amount of energy
needed to cool buildings will triple by twenty fifty, which

(08:54):
is equivalent to the current electricity demand in the US
and Germany combined. Sue, on top of all that, you
will have an issue of like heat and heat deaths. Right,
the deaths and injuries caused by heat, I mean, heat

(09:16):
stroke is becoming more and more of an issue in cities,
especially when you know temperatures reach above twenty five degrees celsius.
People you know, manual labels, people who work outside, people
who just have to move around a lot, you know,
experience the symptom the symptoms of heat stroke whenever there
is like the spike in temperature. Right, and then even

(09:37):
you know, if you don't experience like a heat stroke,
heat is exhausting. It is energy draining, is utterly sapping,
and it requires a lot out of your body to
keep you cool and prevent you from like eating. And surprisingly,

(10:01):
this overheating is you is not just like you know,
a tropical issue or like a hot country issue like
places like Moscow had like and asked meats a eleven
thou people die due to heat wave in twenty ten,
and so with all these heat waves and stuff, we
need to like figure out what to do with all

(10:23):
these giant concrete buildings. I mean, and for some people
like eco brutalism is you know, wow, so cool to
me personally, And this is just my subjective opinion. I
find it ugly and disgusting and I hated but you know,
to each stone right brutalism discourse, I mean, what what

(10:46):
do you all think of rutalism. I think Yugoslavia and
brutalism was cool. Every other kind of brutalism is just
like my opinions on brutalism boiled down to thinking the
game control is far. I had stayed in a Yugoslavian
brutalist architecture hotel, which was one of the weirdest nights

(11:08):
of my life because it was clearly made. It was
like one of these gigantic, like people's hotels that was
meant to pride everyone with vacations, and so there's like
twenty thousand rooms and we were like the only three
people there. So there was one person at the desk,
and it's just cavern of empty rooms such this. Everything
felt like a liminal space. It was. It was very odd.
It can be, it can be very very uncanny. It

(11:31):
wasn't like bad, it was like reasonably well constructed. It
was just deeply strange. Wants to spend the night. I
think that's what makes the game control so cool, is that. Yeah,
it plays with those uncanny feelings on brutalism while still
being like very cool. Like it's still that Jacob Kella
made a video vote right, yes he made a he

(11:53):
he didn't make a video like I watched that recently.
This is like the sort of house kind of thing,
right right, right right, Yeah, yeah, I wanted to go
that game because I mean that's what that's kind of
like my issue with brutalism. It feels like a boss
level in a video game, like you have to go
through each level, clear what's all the minions and they

(12:15):
get to the top and feed the boss. It's kind
of unsettling, yes, and then like eco brutalism is just
like oh what if trees tres Yeah, and it's like okay, cool,
but I mean like one of my many occupations and
I still maintain it seasonally. Um, I was a power washer,

(12:38):
and I hate moss, and so to see moss all
over buildings just really bothers me. Like I just want
to get you know, my spring gun and just clear
it all off. Um. And especially in like this climate,
moss is like a very significant issue. So that makes sense,
you know, Yeah, one of my pet peeves among many. So,

(13:00):
I mean the many different ways we could combat the
when heat island effects um that don't involve equo brutalism,
and they can also help to facility, you know, creating
more attractive spaces to live and to play. You know,
obviously the solution isn't just like build those every building

(13:22):
they does ever been built and make it more sustainable,
you know, with vernacular materials and stuff. So of course
new buildings should be built with those principles in mind. Um,
But you know, it's not practical to us even sustainable
to destroy all the buildings we've already built and rebuild them.
You know, the best thing we can do is try
to mitigate and adapt with what are we already have, um,

(13:49):
greenery and I know it's just roasting eco brutalism just
track slack trees and everything is an important part in that, right,
because you know it, well, it causes evappo transpiration, which
is like where what's evaporates from plants, leaves and cools
the temperature. Um, you know it. We also improve people,

(14:13):
it's like psychological well being. Um. And they just the
nice look at um, the nice look at the keep
things cool. In fact, they can help cause temperatures to
drop by like two to three degrees celsius in the
like the surrounding area. I think people certainly misinterpreted, but
like this, this is one of the big things you
can see with with racism in the U S. Where

(14:35):
like you can literally like you can literally track racial
divides in a lot of American cities by the by
the temperature because like people places where not why people
live just don't have trees. And you know this this
has like a just this sort of like cascading series
of environmental and social effects which are a disaster and

(15:01):
environmental racism. Yeah, yes, released stark. Honestly, if you look
at the heat maps or some of these cities and
you could literally see, you know, where poor black folks live.
You know, you can see the places with less trees,
the places next to factories with like toxic here and
often waste and that kind of thing. It's just you know,

(15:21):
right there, and it sucks. Which is why, of course,
part of any sort of efforts to improve cities and
make things more sustainable would involve you know, social justice
and would involve responding to an addressing the compounding effects

(15:48):
of like environmental racism over the past several decades. So
and part of the issue again sign things back to
environmental racism is that a lot of the climate change
policies that you know, ostensibly amends to fever, like high

(16:08):
density urban and smart growth you know, like sustainable blocks
and that kind of thing. They are not conceived or
implemented in a way that involves the people being affected
by them. You know. In fact, a lot of these
like sort of green um projects raise the cost of food, energy, water, transport,

(16:34):
housing for people in the area. You know, they create
these sorts of like gentrified neighborhoods essentially whether the original
inhabitants can no longer afford to live there. So if
we wants to develop like a sustainable city or resiliencity,
sustainable oversagain neighborhood, it requires social justice, It requires you know,

(16:59):
at quity and you know, like the involvement of all
affected through you know, consensus or democracy. UM just really
shape the future that you know they will be experiencing

(17:20):
because they're the ones being affected by it. There are
a lot of other ways as well to heap proof
as it were a city, UM reflective roofs and roads.
UM can also helped reduce the absorptive powers of UM

(17:41):
solar radiation by concrete and asphalt. So in fact, in
some cities like l A and in New York, there's
this wide reflective coating that UM has been implemented in
some five thousand meters square of roof space that saves
an estimated two thouso tons of CEO two per year

(18:05):
from cooling emissions. I mean, all it takes really is
just like that sort of white reflective coat, and it
saves dividends in the long run. UM NASA had done
some research on this and it demonstrated the results demonstrated
that a white roof could be twenty three degrees celsius

(18:27):
or forty two degrees fahrenheit cooler than a typical black roof.
UM on a hot New York somebody UM and the
places where like yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, it's kind
of like glossed over that is crazy, that is absolutely
absolutely mild. And then in cities where like we're like

(18:51):
ten of the land area is like asphalt, you can
imagine how that sort of UM that's sort of a
lect of Zeiland can impact, um, the cooling or the
heating of the area. Water. Of course, it's another like

(19:12):
important aspect of cooling cities. UM. In Andalus, which was
like the Muslim kingdom in Gebrian Peninsula in the fourteenth
century UM, they used to have these sort of like
courtyards with pools and fountains that would stimulate water evaporation

(19:36):
and cool the air, and so like cities today, you know,
take some hints from that. You know, you have ponds
and pools and fountains and missing systems and stuff that
can sort of chill things out. I mean we see
that being UM implemented in China, where you have like,

(19:57):
for example, UM water mister does at like bus stops,
which can chill the air and you know, cool passengers
as they wait. UM. And they found actually that adding
water features and like cool coatings reduces the cooling requirements
of an area by twenty nine and also lowers the

(20:21):
overall averaging at temperature by one point five degrees celsius.
So it's like honestly wild, like these little things can
have such a major impact on temperature. Speaking of like
old methods of cooling, UM, ancient methods of cooling, there's
this Middle Eastern shading device called the mastra bil um

(20:46):
or I think it's mastra ba, and it's basically an
architectural element that is usually built by um wooden lattice
work and sometimes stay in the glas as it's used
to like catch and cool the wind through like having

(21:07):
these basins of water in them is I mean, so
I could try to describe it. It's like a window
jutting out of a building UM with some decorated by
lattice work, with jars and basins of water placed within
them to let the wind pasture. And as the wind
is passing through, it's caused an evaporative cooling then it

(21:29):
chills out the interior and to these mastra bears um.
They've been used since the Middle Ages by you know,
the Coptic churches of Egypt and the Art Deco movement
in Iraq, and and by you know, the architecture um

(21:52):
in bad Dad, as well. And so these sort of
construction methods, while they tend to be developed for you know,
individual homes or individual buildings, um, they can in fact
be implemented um with even the aesthetics of Islamic geometry
to help to cool a building and produce its overall.

(22:17):
See what twe missions. So I've been talking about heating
and cooling and stuff for a while now, and speaking
of I should probably to see it's off my rather.
I think I heard either either it was you, Andrew,
or maybe it was Robert talking about the ceramic kind
of cooling idea. Yeah, I mean that's the thing, and

(22:40):
like the part of the Americans Southwest, like New Mexico,
there's a lot of like swamp coolers that are basically working, right, Yeah,
swamp cool swamp coolers. It only works in certain climates, right,
Like you wouldn't really don't ye because if it's if
it's too it's too humid, it's not gonna work. You're
just gonna from more humid. Yeah. I think there's kind

(23:01):
of a broader thing there architecturally, which is that like
we have a lot of sort of like like we've
we've we've lost a lot of in the way we
do architecture. We've lost a lot of this sort of
like building we we've lost a lot of sort of
building techniques adapted to specific locations. Yeah yeah, yeah, And

(23:26):
like that's something that has to be reversed, like immediately,
because like our our current model of building houses out
of oil is going to get us all killed. Really,
what's what's the problem there? What's wrong? What's that? I mean?
And toff with that, right, not just vernacular architecture, but
vernacular clothing. I mean it's I mean as again, so

(23:50):
when living in a tropical country, I see it for myself,
like working people going to work where in like full
long sleeve dress shoots and long long dress pants and
you know, like formal shoes and it's honestly up you
know sometimes like they have the whole tie like you know,

(24:11):
pull up and everything. It's not it's entirely based on
like European standards of professionalism, and um, it needs to
be abolish. Abolish dress coods, alright, abolished, like this whole
idea that you know, we have to dress this particular way, um,
despite you know, the temperature, because it's more professional or whatever.

(24:38):
For professionalism honestly. Yeah, we we have we have podcasting
or in the vanguard of this, but we need help
to destroy professionalism once and for all. Yeah yeah, ye
show up to where can you be then suit? Um.
But yeah, like vernacular buildings as well, you know, obvi,

(25:00):
stay you had in in Africa, in different parts of Africa,
you would have different structures that were particularly tigulets. You know,
if you're in a in a tropical reinforest environment, you
would have a bill in a steeler to you know,
keeping mosquitoes out and maintaining a certain temperature within and

(25:21):
maintaining comfort as well within or you know, in cooler
regions you would have um certain construction that would keep
heats within the building and prevent um excessive discomfort you know. Um.
And they were also of course, like when it comes

(25:43):
to like cooler areas, you will also expected to sort
of keep yourself warm as well as you know, keep
your building warm. In fact, it was more so keeping
yourself personally warm, so keeping yourself lay up even when
you're indoors. And of course that's kind of lost today
people are expected to just you know, turne on the
heater and vibe for the months of winter. But it

(26:06):
isn't sustainable. A lot of things we enjoy today unsustainable.
Keeps going back to that. But yeah, speaking of things
that we enjoy that are not at all sustainable, how
about cause get rid of cause? Please get rid of cause.
I mean, cause are very convenient in terms of like,
if you want to get somewhere very specific, um, you know,

(26:30):
if there's a place you want to go, I'm the
one you need to know. I'm a car. I'm a car.
I'm a car. You know kind of thing. But my
little musical interview there, thank you for appreciating it. But ultimately,
like they honestly aren't sustainable. They honestly on something that

(26:54):
we can maintain in the nail even well potentially in
the neighborance, which the far future. I mean, people are
already new the problems with gascars, already knew who my
gascars are bad. But you know, things just just things
are just sort of pivoted towards electric cars. And who
electric cars, Let's get a bunch of electric cars. Who

(27:15):
But electric cars aren't better. I mean the materials they require,
the energy they require, it's quite frankly not sustainable in
the long run, and it just lengthens the amount of
time that we spend dependence on cause for short and

(27:37):
long distance travel. And especially how in the States we've
built our cities around the idea of a car, which
has expanded the urban terrain unnecessarily. And if you look
at like all the space taken up, like highways and overpasses,
and how much of just like urban space is taken
up but just been built around the idea of the car,
it really kind of makes the whole idea of a

(27:58):
city so much less useful. It's it's really it's really frustrating.
And I think it's also working at the cars or
so unbelievably dangerous. Yeah, yeah, we're very much used to
like having these like death machines driving around at all times,
and that that makes for like a very um cool

(28:19):
like series of metal band song names or whatever. But
the death statistics on funny when it comes to cause. No,
and like the average transport transportation time having cars has
not actually decreased, Like the amount of time it takes
to get from place to place based on like where

(28:40):
you live in your city has not actually increased because
now everything has just spread further apart, so a hundred
years ago would take you know, like a fifteen minute
trek to get to like, you know, the market or something.
It can take off times longer, especially if you're driving
in like rush hour traffic to get just just just
like a couple of miles, where even in some cases
a decent jaw could get you there faster. Um, just

(29:02):
because of how we've just designed the cities all around
these rolling metal death cages. Um. Yeah, it's not it's
it's not great. It's one of the reasons I don't
currently have a car. Yeah, And that's kind of that's
something that's shocking to a lot of people when I
tell them that, really I have no intention if have
a buying a car of ever owning a car. It's
not something that I want. And I mean I live

(29:29):
relatively close to like some of the major transport um
arteries of the country, and you know, not has like
this unique ish transportation system public transportation system. So we
have these privately owned maxi taxis that um they're like

(29:50):
vans with seats in the back, um and you know,
you could you just kind of jump in um depending
on where they're going, which rooted taken um and they're
they're convenient enough for me and for my purposes, so
I just you know, I go areyed to go um
with them. But they're also gas guzzling in efficient machines.

(30:16):
I mean they're better than you know, all those people
driving cause I mean as an island, you know, like
I don't know why we're so obsessed with having more
and more cars on the road, um, But at the
end of the day, they still aren't the best in
terms of sustainability and in terms of viable, reliable, sustainable transport. UM.

(30:40):
We also have like personal taxis as well, but they
have the same problems as regular taxis. And what's frustrating
is that we used to have a train line UM
that went along the entire east West corridor of the country.
That's where most of the people internata along the East
West corridor, UM. But that was destroyed in the nineties sixties,

(31:03):
I think, to make way for highways and a priority
bus route. So instead of having a nice, convenient, cute
little train that we could seek to go from place
to place, you have to rely on buses and maxis
and taxis. And cause yeah, that is quite that's not cool.

(31:26):
That is quite not good, quite quite grim because we
need to reconfigure. Seriously, I would love for them to
bring back trains so able to take a train don't
have to rely on I mean, government bureaucracy makes all
things unreliable, but I think a train would have been

(31:48):
slightly more reliable than a bus. Very much. On the
pro train, on the on the pro train train, I've
had a fewer, few fewer, fewer moments more happy then, right,
the Portland's Max line and straightcar in a no face costume.
It's very it's it's very fun. I think. Also, like

(32:09):
another thing about about cars, right, this is just it's
just just on a very pure political level, like cars
is a thing that allowed suburbs to exist, and the
existence of suburbs has produced just generation upon generation of
like frothing reactionaries who are the source of like enormous
percentages of the world's problems. And so if you get

(32:31):
rid of those places, you produce less of them. Yeah,
which is just a political benefit for anyone who wants
to not die exactly exactly. I mean, we don't think
about it because there's already so many things to think about.
But if you actually sat down on pondered the death

(32:53):
tool of like cause. Um, we really and really brought
to the forefront and really made it less of a necessity.
I think one more people would be open to the
idea of rejecting cause to keeping them as at most
benign a novelty. Um that maybe one or two exists

(33:15):
in the entire community, UM for use if needs be, UM,
But otherwise I I don't see how each and every
person in the world owning their own car is at
all the best way to go. Also, cause are kind

(33:37):
of ugly to me. Yeah, we really didn't design them
to look cool, which just it's I mean, there's some
cars that look kind of cool, like some of the
more classic ones. But and that's part of the issue, right,
they're getting uglier to me, And they're also getting larger,

(33:59):
you know, people like Yeah, they're raising their drills more
and more so, like you basically a pedestrian killing machine.
We've effectively undone most of the benefits of making cars
safer for passengers by making them much more dangerous for pedestrians,
which is entirely a marketing choice. Like, if you like

(34:21):
the fucking trucks they were making twenty five years ago,
are just as useful, um and in a lot of
cases more useful for like practical farm work for hauling
and whatnot than the trucks they're making today. They haven't
meaningfully gotten better, They've just gotten a lot larger for
no real reason other than it makes people feel like
big men. Well, and then you get these fun you

(34:43):
get these fun you can you can look at the
marketing people like explicitly talking about how like yeah, like
they like basically explicitly playing into the fantasy of running
over protesters and it's it's great. It's yeah, So get
rid of cars and you won't have to deal with that.

(35:05):
But Chris, how is that sustainable or viable? Good question?
Introducing super blocks? Oh yes, superblocks are basically um neighborhood
of nine blocks. So I don't think they have to
be I think the philosophy and ideas behind super blocks

(35:28):
could be implemented suit different um cities of different histories
and different layouts, especially localized especially such like localized street
cars within each city block, within within each superblock like
system exactly. So, just to clarify, the idea of super

(35:49):
blocks are basically um, you know, neighborhoods of nine blocks,
where traffic is restricted to the roads on the outside
of the block, which means that the interior of these
super blocks entirely walkable. That, combined with the idea of
a superblock being um mixed use, means that people are

(36:10):
mostly able to access their basic necessities within their city block.
Are you able to like spend more time, have more
open space, to spend more time to meet with people,
to talk, to do do activities, to you know, have
some relief from noise pollution and air pollution from vehicles,
and to really like connect people with the space they're

(36:33):
living in and make the space they're living in more livable.
I mean, I don't live smack dab in the middle
of like urban urban town, but I could imagine if
people living in like New York or whatever, you know,
you can't exactly step out of your apartment and play
in the road on a typical day, if you have

(36:54):
kids or whatever, you know, they can't exactly just go
run outside. Um you will die exactly, so exactly exactly.
And I mean people complaining about like, okays, lease, do
some go outside as much? But I mean, look at outside,
you know, look at what look at what has been created?

(37:15):
Um and reflect on that. I mean, part of the
assuer is um the way social media algorithms are designed
to suck people into like cycles of addiction. But that's
a whole another topic. Right, Um, I think a lot
of people, more people will be willing to be able
to pull themselves out to that sort of harmful algorithmic. Hell,

(37:38):
if there was an outside pull themselves out too, you know.
But honestly, cities, especially a notorious for like not having
places you can be where you don't have to spend money,
and that sucks. So I think, um, super blocks being

(38:00):
places where you know, libraries and um, please some people
can eat, maker spaces, community kitchens. It does seem to
be missing or ignoring what we're gonna lose with super blocks,
which is how how am I gonna roll down the
streets smoking indow sipping on gin and juice if I'm

(38:21):
not allowed to drive within my block? Wow? I think
we can. I think I think you could just get
a bike? Who's cruising all the bicycle? Have you tried
smoking indow, sipping on gin and juice while riding a bicycle.
It's it's impossible. Get a couple hold anything as possible

(38:43):
as a Snoop Dogg eraser. No. But the the idea
of having like community gardens, community like kitchens, like a
maker spaces, libraries, all these within like this super block framework,
you know, like green spaces. It does make actual urbans
living the same attractive and not like you're just living
in nested concrete boxes. Yeah. I mean people like living

(39:08):
cities because that's where everything's happening, right, But yeah, you
you want people to take part in the things that
are happening, but the places aren't livable. Yeah, you don't
have the table that will continue to complain about until
the end of time, which the table in Chicago Trying
Town that threatens to arrest you for sitting at it.
Like it's yeah, like the hostility of this goes back

(39:31):
to like racism because of course everyone does everything does.
But you know a lot of these loitering laws and
stuff which she designed to target black people and to
target you know, poor people, um like vagrancy laws and
that sort of thing, just hostile people's existence, and that
gets into like hostile architecture and that sort of thing.

(39:51):
But I think with these super blocks, you know, we
open up our spaces to make them welcoming to human
ex systems, spaces that are not built around cars, built
around commutes, built around week And this obviously is a
transformation that requires more than just you know, vote for

(40:14):
so and so and make this a degree and kind
of thing. You need. You need something more substantial than that.
You know, within these super blocks as well, you're you're
able to take stock of how your block or whatever,
you have a better mental sense of um community and

(40:37):
able to take about a sense of even things like
how your block can communally sustain themselves and you know,
reduce waste and all these different things. This in conjunction
with struggle against capitalism in the state. But you know

(40:58):
that is implied. This is you know, m this is
the show. This is it could happen here. I don't
know if you expect and like electoralism, but that's not
really what we do around here. I mean the benefits
to these sort of like super blocks, you know, these
fifteen minutes zon so people can walk within fifteen minutes
to get the essentials. The benefits are innumerable. You know,

(41:20):
that's the equality, less noise, healthy lifestyle, mental health boost
But the issue is without a combination of you know,
these projects and these activities with like anti capitalism and
anti statism. It's it's tends to lend itself towards gentrification.

(41:45):
And we've seen that in Spain, which is where UM
some of these super blocks have been implemented. UM. They've
created like these locations that are obviously more desirable because
who doesn't want to live in a super block where
you know, you actually sense of community because we're all
desperate for that UM and at least an increase in
property demand, higher prices, higher rent It basically creates these

(42:08):
pockets of unaffordable neighborhoods, displacing local residents. So you have
to get into the fight against gentrification in order to
make this, you know, idea viable. The last thing that
I want to get into really is as conventioned UM
community gardens. I want to talk about urban farming because

(42:29):
that is crucial. I mean, part of what UM makes
cities cities in all the cases is the fact that
they imports all their food. Right. They have the urban
rural divide that you know delineates the two areas UM,
but considering the transportation costs, the energy costs, all those

(42:54):
things that compound UM two to stay in a city
a city's food needs. We have to look to ways
that we can sustain cities and sustain neighborhoods within cities, um,
within themselves. Before I continue, I just want to point

(43:18):
out that the future of urban farming is not in
vertical farms. UM. They look very cool, you know, like
those tall kind of like pillars of like letters or whatever,
growing out sort of things, but the land that they
save is usually canceled out by the land they need

(43:39):
to produce the energy to power them, like, they're very
energy intensive UM spaces. So until that issue is resolved,
and I don't know if it will be considering you
know how the energy requirements are just sort of built
into the vertical the concentration of energy requirements built sort

(44:00):
of into the foot of a farming design. UM, we
have to look to more practical methods. Landownership tends to
be a major hurdle UM when it comes to organizing
community gardens and maintaining community gardens UM. I mean, like

(44:20):
folks like Black Futures Farm, Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, and
the Victory Garden Initiative. They've been working to like provide
fresh produce to those in need, especially in urban food deserts.
But in a lot of these projects, they go in
good for some years and then the city suddenly spins around.
It's like, we need this land for development, so they

(44:40):
just snatch it up, and you know, those years of
efforts just basically put on the dream um Community land
trusts have been put forward as a potential um solution
to that issue. But like a lot of these things,

(45:01):
I mean, it's a good band aid, I would say,
but it's not necessarily marking the end of capitalism. Another
issue that there is with the whole urban farming thing
is that the culture that develops around them while they

(45:21):
provide education and community and connection for people within them,
and that is extremely valuable. I think some organizers fall
into this habit of treating, of creating. It's sort of
like shared delusion around community gardens, you know, claiming to

(45:44):
be sort of feeding the people couldn't could And what
already brought this to my attention was Inhabits Territories newsletter.
We had an article on it last year, I think,
on you know, urban community gardens, and it was written
by Gibriel I've seen, the co founder of at Planta,
which I find to be a very very creative name

(46:09):
basically asked the question are we really feeding ourselves? I mean,
these local food initiatives they do produce food that people eat,
but it can be a bit harmful to be overly
optimistic about our food autonomy at this stage, especially considering
how reliant we still are on big agriculture. You know, like, yes,

(46:36):
we are producing you know, organic nutritionally this dense crops
and stuff, and that's great, that's helping people, but you know,
oftentimes it usually just means that, you know, the people
might be getting participants. I'm be getting like a salad
or you know, a couple. To me too, it's not
necessarily they're cutting down their grocery bill in a sustainable,

(47:01):
long term way, because I mean, if you've tried God,
then you know that, like when you're work here with
a limited space, you know, you grow your food set
it to me too, is it means it was a
cool but they don't last forever, you know, and you
have to wait until the next harvest to get more.
To me too, its or whatever the case may be.
Same for like letters or whatever. It's kinda rough, you know,

(47:23):
it doesn't it helps for like a meal or maybe two,
depending on like a living situation, but it doesn't meaningfully
cut into our reliance and groceries and you know, food imports. Yeah,
it definitely takes a bit to get to that point,
and you have to do it with a combination of
like food preservation and like canning, um, and like you know,

(47:46):
like jarring and a whole bunch of other stuff to
actually make that a worthwhile endeavor as opposed to just
making like great, I spent three months making these tomatoes.
Now they're ready for one meal and then they're all God,
it would be like one salt. Yeah. Yeah, you do
have to really kind of figure out how to grow
enough to keep enough ready to be harvested for jarring

(48:08):
and canning for future use um, and make sure like
you're you know, harvesting them when they are ready so
that you can you know, you don't lose stuff, and
that you have like you know, an ongoing, ongoing process
of like preserving the fit that you do grow for
later um as well. So you can definitely take a
lot a lot more like mental effort and planning than

(48:30):
just you know, planting it and then you know, using
it and cooking it when it's when it's all ready. Yeah.
I mean a lot of energy and self is put
into growing things like greens and roots and fruiting vegetables.
And they're healthy, you know, they have the vita wins
and micro nutrients. But you know, people still need meat, dairy, eggs,
you know protein, yeah, heavy, high calorie dense stuff, you know,

(48:55):
like potitoos and other starches like a really holy buloofu
we eats and that kind of thing, and that just
isn't being grown right now. You know, wheat and rice
and soy and nuts and corn and sugar. These staples
and stuff don't tend to be produced by these community
gardens and by these garden plots. Not many many, not

(49:21):
many legume patches at your local community garden. Yeah yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. Like I'm in the process of grin um
some pigeon peas right now, and they are taking a
very long while. And what I realize is that, um,

(49:42):
I mean, I just plan to them, so I'm being
a bit impatient. But what I realized is that when
they do growth, and I've seen you know, some much
your pigeon peach trees and stuff, I know how big
they tend to grow by time. Harvest rules around you know,
you get all those different pods and you you know,
you put in the world keep put. You pick all
the pods and you pry open the pods, and you know,

(50:05):
you put in some more alliteration into the sentence. And
you know, you get those peas out. Once those peas
out to the pod and you put them in a pot.
They're not potent enough to who would you over for
more than one meal? You know, like you pick like

(50:27):
a trees worth of peas in a pod, and you
know that's like sometimes like half of a meal. And really, honestly,
respect to the people who are producing all our food
right now, because I can't imagine having to be shelling
peas all the time. It's kind of ridiculous. I mean

(50:49):
it can be fun, but I can't imagine doing it
all day. I mean, workers work, right, it's gonna yeah,
work as hell, we know this, but yeah, so I
mean community gardens they're good. You know, they have you know, education,
the build community. They provide outdoor activity and stuff. But
you know, I think what comunity gardens, urban gardens and

(51:10):
stuff need to do is find ways to um and
this this isn't a disparate The work has been done,
you know, like massive support. I'm doing that myself kind
of thing. But we've got to, like, as the article argues,
we can't get caught up in the fluffing up of
the reality for marketing purposes. You know, we need to

(51:32):
look for ways that can actually um feed ourselves. That
means getting into caloric foods that means um like like
dried beans, potatoes, fruit trees, that kind of thing, grains, nuts,
all that jazz. And also connecting with farms outside of

(51:53):
the city, you know, local farms outside of the immediate
urban landscape. Seeing what cooperatives can be developed that can
work aid each other mutually to build more potent capacity

(52:14):
for food. What's on me? So, I mean, get in
touch with the soil, you know, get this sign your face,
but also think about what more we can do to
sort of take this to the next level. And yeah,

(52:37):
that is um that is what I believe could in
fact happen here. This has happened here. Good. Yeah, it's
nice to have a positive one of these. Yeah, we
should do that more often. If all, if only we
had the power power. Well, come back tomorrow when we'll

(52:59):
be talking about another bad thing. And then abandoning you
to deal with your thoughts about it. Wow, we we try,
we try, we do try. This is us trying well,
this is us having st Andrew try. You're welcome, Thank you,
thank you very much. This is a topic I wanted

(53:22):
to discuss for a long time in terms of because
we get a lot of people talking about it like yeah,
how you know and whatever like post collapse fantasy that
you can imagine where we're able to kind of reconfigure society.
How would you plan urban living? And you're like, well, yeah,
there's there's a lot of actually really cool ideas for

(53:42):
like keeping people close together can be a very ecological
idea if you do it certain ways. It's just a
lot of the ways you've defaulted to over the past.
Like really three years has made it not that with
the invention of the car really really screwing us over. Um.
So yeah, thank you so much for talking about urban

(54:03):
living and super super blocks and all this kind of stuff.
Where can where can people find more of your work
in writing on the interwebs. You can find me on
YouTube at seeing Andrewism, and you can find me on Twitter,
which hopefully when you hear this, I am still not

(54:26):
on at under School seeing true fantastic. Um, yeah you
uh st Andrew just put together a really great episode
about anti work stuff and the way that debacles has
has happened and what we can learn from it and
that kind of thing. Um and while you should still

(54:48):
actually care about anti work um and yeah, so we're
definitely recommend the anti work video for recent recent recent stuff.
Let's see. Um, if you want a d your brain
into the addiction driven social media algorithm, you can follow
us on Twitter and Instagram. It happened here pot and
cools on media and uh yeah, let's uh go think

(55:12):
about go think about microspaces and community gardens. That seems
like a good a good way to dedicate your thoughts.
Time and roll down the street smoking indow sipping that
gin and juice while you still can on a bike
on a personally used doing my moral judgements upon you

(55:33):
before before the fascist anarchists take away your fees. Yeah. Look,
if if if we can democratize military grade weapon rate
the way the Ukrainians had, we can we can we
can form neighborhoods that cannot be forced to live in
the traffic the auto industrial complex really reduce frifless air

(55:58):
travel what fantasy otherwise will end up in a mad
box wield and I mean wants that right, well you
know aspects of it. Yeah, alright, see what everybody podcast?

(56:31):
Thank you? That is it is, It's true, It's true.
Actually it could happen here. Posting to podcast is more
or less the truth we have. We have Drake Robert

(56:52):
out of bed at before they're cracking dat at a
legend forty two am, um, and we're going to talk
about actually something very fund I'm I'm I've been I've
been wanting to talk about this for a long time
because this is one I'm actually one of my favorite things.
Um yeah, yeah, So I'm gonna I'm gonna tell a
bit of a bit of a little story regarding one

(57:13):
of my act all time favorite events and topics. So
back in like ten, there was this a cheesy little
online university science show made by the Rochester Institute of
Technology called Can You Imagine Um. The The idea was
to highlight some of the cool and weird things at
the University UM in part to promote the Imagine r

(57:34):
i T Festival, which was like the school's annual like
innovation and Creativity Festival thing that they put on. So yeah,
today I want to talk specifically about episode three of
the web series because the contents of which overlap with
some of my like artistic interests UM and like just
my love of illusions and paradox and I will kind

(57:55):
of tie you into some topics we all we always
discussed on the show. So yeah, episode three, one of
probably probably the most interesting episode UM. Episode RNK, opens
with the hosts Kevin and Steph as they like stand
awkwardly in a gloriously dated you like university film set
like it's it's it's it's only twenties, it's only twenty thirteen,
but it was like obviously like made in the nineties,

(58:18):
like like like like the set's like it's it's all.
It's it's all very dated. What specifically are you? Oh,
like they're they're like they're just like weird, like like
weird like like dated science stuff on the walls, all
the host of wearing like dorky orange T shirts like
like over to over top of their regular clothes they have. Yeah, yeah,

(58:40):
it's it's it's all. It's all that kind it's all
that kind of stuff. So like dorky orange T shirts
with the letters r i T for Roger Cusister Institute
of Technology. Um, of course, because everything in this online
video series is perfect. Kevin is wearing his shirt over
top of like a button down. It's it's, it's, it's great. Um.
The first fifty seconds of the video are taken up

(59:00):
with like plugging the upcoming r A T Imagine Festival
with a with a co host Steph beautifully stumbling over
her lines when she says the event's catchphrase, it's where
the left brain and the right brain collide. And it's great.
It's it's, it's, it's it's it's perfect. So after all
the plugs and the vamping, the hosts get down to

(59:21):
the fun engineering feat and they'll be showing us today,
which is a neat little architectural experiment a part of
the r I T campus called the A Sharing and Stairwell, um,
of course, named after the impossible staircases depicted in Dutch
artist m c Escher's artwork. So the video cuts two
from the little like sound stage they're filming in to

(59:43):
this boring, white, seemingly typical stairwell, our host Kevin ascending
a fight of the gray concrete stairs. Um explains that
what located in Building seven of the campus. The stairwell
was designed by Filipino architect Raphael Nelson Abegondo and was
one of the first structure is put up when our
I T moved their campus from downtown Rochester to the

(01:00:04):
more suburban Henrietta. UM when when he's taking when he's
reaching the top of the stairs, he turns the quarter
and then suddenly seems to appear at the bottom of
the lower flight of stairs leading up to the landing
that he just left from, all while continuing to talk
about the architect behind this like kind of weird impossible feat. Um. So,
as Kevin walks back up to camera, he says that
the stairwell was built in the and it's been wowing

(01:00:27):
ur I too students ever since. Um. It's it is
very cool. It's like it's like you're like, okay, like
you get you get the little like like you get
the little architectural trick that they're doing. Um, but it's
it is it is still pretty fun to see. Before
episode three of Can You Imagine aired you could, you
can already find a few articles on the school's UH

(01:00:50):
website about the issuing stairwell, along with some like forum
posts debating how the architecture in the stairwell works to
like achieve the effect. Um all so floating around on
YouTube was like a random segment of what looked like
a like a PBS style late nineties documentary about the
physics and architecture of the school and specifically the starewell

(01:01:11):
that interviewed some like professors UM and some like architects
and like of the symphysicist kind of discussing what like
how to like bring paradox into the physical world. Yeah,
but but but but around the time that Can't You
Imagine episode aired, the now like infamous r RT stairwell
was mostly unknown, so like, even despite it being very interesting,
no one really knew about it until this episode of

(01:01:33):
this little web series aired. Um. The little web episode
dedicates around half its time to interviewing students, uh and
righteously random people at the university about if they even
know about the starewell's existence, um, and if they do,
what like experiences they have with like me messing around
with like the looping architecture, because yeah, you can, you can,

(01:01:54):
you know, you can play a lot of games with
this type of with this type of design. Uh So.
The rest of the short video like tries demonstrate the
disorienting ascent down and descent back up via the camera
in various ways, like you know, like human chains or
holding hands around the weird like movies loop types staircase,
and like passing objects back and forth in a circle

(01:02:15):
while inside and around the enclosed stairwell. Um, there's one
where Kevin walks around with a cup to show that
the stairs aren't like clearly like heavily slanted, like the
water stays pretty pretty level as he walks all the
way through, and we like we follow with him the
entire time. Um So, yeah, Like the overall like nerdy
and low fi style of the University video match with

(01:02:35):
like the insane feet of Architectural Illusion is a really
fun mixed like it's like it's like it's it's it
is very like surreal, but not totally on purpose, because
it's just all of these like regular college students showing
this like really cool architecture by this really good architect
and you're like, oh, yeah, they're just so chill about it.
Uh it is, it is, it is pretty fun. It's

(01:02:58):
pretty fun. Um. After the third episode of the Imagine
Our i T video was posted. Finally, the mind boggling
looping staircase of building seven in of of Our T
started to gain a lot of confused appreciation UM and
the dor Key University Science Show went vital. People started
traveling from out of state even other countries to see

(01:03:20):
the Asherian stairwell themselves and and film videos on social
media as as they walked through it. This this one
video of like people traveling to a different country and
they're like harassing like the school staff to try to
like tell them where it is, and they're like, oh
my god, you're still doing this because it was like
because like this film was this video is like like
years old, but it's it still happens. People still travel

(01:03:41):
there to to specifically see it. UM. There is like
tense online discussion and debate on how the Filipino architect
Raphael Avugando was able to achieve the effect and what
kind of other bizarre architectural experiments he may have worked on,
because you can find his Facebook page and you can
find some stuff about him, but he has not really
because like this this steroile is built in the late sixties,

(01:04:02):
but you haven't you. So he even though he has
an online presence, he's like he's like he's not like active,
So it's unclear like what else he's actually been doing. Um,
but I would I would, I would love to learn
more about this architect and what else he's done, because this,
it is it is really rare to have these very small,
condensed but like high effort type like type builds and

(01:04:25):
like the the existence of the whole thing. Posted some
really interesting questions around how extremely clever paradoxical design can
push the boundary of how we make assumptions about spatial physics, um,
and how we visually and physically demonstrate things that we
usually can only depict in two dimensions, right, Like you
can you can easily depict the the issuing starwell in
two dimensions, but when you're scaling that up to three dimensions,

(01:04:47):
it's obviously more work like like that that is that
is part of the paradox um Plus, you know, it
also demonstrates the importance of art and how ideas once
thought impossible or merely optical illusions can actually with enough data,
can an effort break into our real reality. Uh. If
a brilliant architect can manage to build this physically and
like logically impossible structure. What other types of things can

(01:05:07):
we actually do as possible? The video now has like
over a million views on its original upload UM and
videos about the R I T. Stairwell have ranked up
as many as like twenty five million views. Yeah it's
pretty cool. Yeah, you know what else demonstrates the looping
nature of time. Having to listen to all these ads

(01:05:28):
that we do. Ye, we we are, we are back.
I've I've rounded the corner and we are back where
we came from. Um because of the fun paradox of architecture. UM.
The one, the one other thing I should mentioned before
we continue on this episode is that the entire thing

(01:05:51):
is fake. It's false. No way, not this time we
created it. Not this time, No, not this time. It's
totally made up because of it's it's a staircase that
breaks the basic rules of movement in physics. Kevin walks
up the stairs and teleports to the lower stairwell. Belief them,
that's not that's not that's that's not an architectural allusion.

(01:06:11):
It's called good video editing, an adope after effects. It's
not like, no, you're you're really gonna believe a video
on the Internet and some well placed, falsified Internet posts
over the very basic rules that governed our universe. But like,
oh boy, did it fool millions of people? Uh? And
if I played my cards right, I hope most of

(01:06:33):
our listeners until the last few seconds. Um yeah, And
uh so the whole the whole thing was a was
a student like film and art project around around building
a modern myth. Um the because it's sure, it's sure
is interesting how good storytelling can overrule obvious logical processes.

(01:06:57):
The tale of the a Sharan Stairwell is one of
favorite case studies and how disincribation spreads and it is
believed while all in defiance of the basic rules of reality,
because it's not a matter of what facts are true,
it's about what facts are compelling. And the idea of
a logically impossible staircase being built by a brilliant Filipino
architect is more interesting than it being someone's weird and

(01:07:19):
disinformation art project. Um there. So yeah, Like I want
to say, like how what what were you guys thinking
as I was explaining the Issurian stairwell, Like where did
you see this? Going Okay, So I had in the
back of my head, okay, we should we should mention this.
Garrison has been hyping up this episode for like I

(01:07:41):
don't even a pretty amount of time. Nothing. Yeah, and
there's a staircase and I'm like what it's like my
my brain my brain started going because he said and
I was like, my like my encounters just see brain
flicked on and I was like, wait a second, all time,

(01:08:04):
is this like some kind of like weird like we've
redesigned the college campuses so they stop people stopped taking
the dean hostage, a thing that used to happen constantly
and with all my favorite party about this would happen
constantly and you'd get New York Times articles calling it
non violent. Great. Yeah, so yeah it was that was

(01:08:27):
I was. Yeah, I spent more mental energy that I
probably should have tried to figure out how it worked out,
Like I don't know, maybe they just made it like
if they just made it Acus Razor, it's obviously yeah,
I mean I was. I was seen the like I
was in the like, okay, so they built a staircase,
they built another the viewers cannot see my fingers. It
was like a staircase. It doesn't tell. It was like,

(01:08:50):
it was like, but you can't find videos of people
traveling to the school to see if it's real, and
they try it and they're so disappointed. They're like, oh, yeah,
it's it's no, it's just stairs. It doesn't it doesn't. Yeah,
it's is importing in a lot of ways because it's
it's not even like a thing where like there's like
another back staircase that you walk down. Then again, it's
just it's just nothing. It's just stairs. I was hoping

(01:09:10):
there was like actual clever is No, it's just it's
not really, it's it's just. It was that meme where
all the math doesn't add up in the person what
is happening? I was like, all right, Garrison, you got
us here. You made Robert get up before noon. What

(01:09:31):
is happening? Well, the reason, the real reason I got
up before I got Robert up before noon is because actually,
UM have scheduled an interview with the creator of the
Assarian stairwell, the actual one be like the online art
project and building a modern myth idea UM, which we

(01:09:52):
are now going to segue into. So yeah, what what
follows is us talking with the creator of the Usherian
Stairwell Project. Hello, we are we are back from our
probably very very brief break. Um and with me along
with Robert and Chris and Sophie is Uh Michael, the

(01:10:15):
creator of the Sharian Stairwell Project and the Building the
Modern Myths project. Hello greetings, Thank you so much for
joining us to talk about one of my one of
my favorite things actually is which is here a little
to us to project? Um yeah, I've I've I've been

(01:10:37):
a fan of this for a long time and found
it to be really compelling and interesting. Um and I
so I just walked through Robert and Chris and Sophie
what what it what it was, but from the perspective
of it being true for like for the good fifteen minutes,
I was I was episode was going was going through
talking about it as if it were completely real, but

(01:11:00):
curious to hear how you did that it was. It
was slightly baffling because again we were told nothing, and
then what we got is Garrison is talking about a
YouTube video about an architecture thing, and I was like,
what here? Yeah, and then and then then talking about

(01:11:21):
how oh yeah, and I guess one more thing is
that it's actually fake, um, and it's part of this whole,
this whole thing. So yeah, I would I would love
to talk to you about both like how how you
like logistically like made the project, but also like the
underlying you're undering thoughts that like inspired you to do
it in the first place, and then like retrospected now

(01:11:42):
almost like ten years later, like how do you view
the project as like happening you know, right before like
the peak of online disinformation? Um? Right. So but first
of all, I I just think we should probably start
start at the beginning, like what what was your inspirations
for this type of like online like very like it
seems it seems it seems built to go viral in

(01:12:02):
a lot of ways. Yes, exactly. So this was around
twenty eleven, I guess was when I first got the idea.
It was for my master's thesis, my m f A
for film at Rochester r I t and UM. The
idea actually began from this like deep anxiety about how

(01:12:25):
to discern fact from fiction? UM. At the time, like
I came into film school like really into like realism
in films like Romanian New Wave mckel hanaka dar Dan Brothers,
like these are filmmakers who are like they're sort of
like the modern day version of Italian nero neo realism,

(01:12:47):
and they're trying to like depict like these um reality
as it is. I wanted to like learn how to
make those types of films um, so over like with
each year, that's what I tried to get better. And
the more I tried to do that, UM well, like
a number of things were happening around that time. Right

(01:13:08):
in class, they showed us that these mockumentaries called No Lies,
which was made in nineteen seventy three by this guy
called Mitchell Black actually won a student oscar at the time,
and uh Delusions and Modern Primitivism two thousand one by
this guy named Daniel Loughlin, UM and these Like I
was like floored because I thought they were real, like

(01:13:32):
real documentaries and um and it bothered me, like our
teacher still this afterwards that these were actually scripted works
of fiction with like really really good actors, and it
like I went into kind of like existential crisis mode afterwards,
like how do I even discern what's true from what's

(01:13:52):
not if I got fooled by these things? Especially, like
that's like my concentration. That's what I've been studying for years,
and even I was not even able to tell that
they were fake. Right, There was that going on, And
then there was like smartphones were becoming a thing, Like
I just looked it up. Smartphones didn't start out out
selling flip phones still, so around this time, like it

(01:14:16):
was becoming a thing where everyone would have the Internet
in their pockets. So I guess there was that anxiety
going on trying to think about, um, um, how we're
starting to function and how we're how I remember when
I proposed my thesis did the thesis committee, I um,
one of the things that I was telling them was, um,

(01:14:41):
I have this worry about how reliant we are on
the Internet to determine what's true and what's not. And
this is like like my professors found my concerns like
really abstract and theoretical, Like why do you even care?
Because this? Right? Like why did you about fact? Then ficture?
It wasn't like fake news. That wasn't even a yeah,

(01:15:03):
it wasn't. It didn't become part of the everyday lexicon,
like you said, until twenty six when Trump started throwing
that term around, and suddenly we hear about it every day.
Um so there was that going on. Trayvon Martin was
a thing and for the first time, like nationally, you
could see like disinformation like on you know, just like

(01:15:24):
exaggerated versions of different different accounts from like polarizing sides.
So all that was going on, and so I wanted
to it was it was like this film project was about,
um trying to take something that was Are you familiar

(01:15:44):
with with the difference between like a priori knowledge and
a posteriori knowledge? Yeah? Okay, so so so like you know,
for for anyone who might be listening that doesn't really
know the exact difference. A priori edge is the type
of knowledge that you can have without needing to make

(01:16:04):
observations or conduct experiments or look at surveys or do
any research of any any kind. Is a sort of
knowledge you can know just by reasoning it out, but
just by sitting in a room by yourself in the dark,
you could figure things out. This is the sort this
is a priori knowledge. Um So, for an example of
that is like knowing that all bachelors are unmarried, right,

(01:16:28):
or all triangles of three sides, that's a priori knowledge.
An example of oppos stereori knowledge UM is something that
you find out through observation or you need using one
or more of your five senses. Right, like Joe Biden
is the President of the United States. Um, the masses

(01:16:49):
of Mars is six point four one seven one times
ten to the twentys. You actually have to go out
into the world and conduct surveys or do research. So
that's opposterior knowledge. So the idea was to take something
that was a priori false, something that could that could
um be disproven by reason alone, Like you wouldn't have

(01:17:12):
You wouldn't need to do any research in order to
to know that it was false. You'd simply had to
reflect on it and um think about it. Uh. So
we could have picked anything, right, we could have. We
could have said made up like a fake news report
that leaves mathematicians that m I t having invented like

(01:17:33):
a square with five sides something like that. You know, Um,
I remember that weekend up there and sm now had
this sketch. I think it was like, um, forget who
it was. It might have been Kevin Nealon or something
like that. The report was like scientists and mathematicians have
discovered the new number. The number exists between five and six,

(01:17:54):
and they're calling it the numbers spleen, you know, something
like that, which is like just impossible. So, um, so
come up with something that could be disproven by reason
alone and at the same time surrounded with this wealth
of online information um supporting its veracity. So, like you know,

(01:18:15):
it was kind of a social experiment. So I was like,
have we are we so far beyond rational thinking that
even something that can be disproven a priori people would believe.
And it was like, we didn't really know the answer
to that, but we were going to commit to creating
this thing as though it was real and but which

(01:18:36):
was like logically impossible. So in a way it anticipated
the age of like this information because it wasn't just yeah.
The thing I kind of alluded to in my little
scripted portion is that like, yeah, it wasn't just the
YouTube video. There was also this extra online content that
was created of whis yeah. Yes, like there was you

(01:18:57):
can find like articles, forum posts, all this kind of
stuff like like like if yeah, like so if you
could look into it more and find these other things,
but it's still contradicts the basic logical processes that we
can use to discern what is real what is not,
um interms of like yeah, in terms of like believing
in a five studed square, like no, that's not what
that that's that's not how like physics and like spatial

(01:19:18):
like the spatial dimensions work. Um so yeah. And then
in terms of all the extra material you filmed for it,
there was like there was like I think I read
around like nine hours of documentary footage. Was also a
lot like a lot of footage, but it was only
made into like probably a thirty minute thing. Um. We

(01:19:39):
got our friends, like at the very very beginning, we
got our friends to play along with it. Like so
whenever you see posts about this, just comment like it's real, Like, yeah,
I was there. It was really great. And um, eventually
people would actually start visiting this starewell like from all over,
like from Canada. They crossed the border to get there
because it's in upstate New York, right. Um. And I

(01:20:02):
actually ran into a couple from India who happened to
be visiting visiting New York and they were like, since
we're here, we'd like to see this stare Well that
sort of thing. Um. Oh no, I know, I felt
really bad for a lot of the visitors. So we
actually had to come up with souvenirs so that they
wouldn't leave empty handed, right, So we made fake We

(01:20:22):
made postcards like saying I've been to the Share and
Stailes and stuff like that program and um, well happened
and the way we explained it, so a lot of
people were really mad actually, you know, as you can
imagine when they got there, but after um we would
explain what we were doing of them with the project,
Like a lot of them actually like started playing along

(01:20:44):
and thought it was really cool, and they went home
with their souvenirs and told their friends that they just
saw this amazing thing. So you know, it kind of
built that way for a little bit. Yeah, it's like
telling kids that Santa isn't real exactly, and some of
them will be like, play along with the okay, cool,
this means I can play along with the myth to
help you other kids happy. And some of them will
be like, what, oh no, my entire reality is broken.

(01:21:10):
And when you find out, is your trying to like
pass it on exactly that. So a lot of that
was going on, Like Shock the basketball player posted about
it at some point, Joe Rogan talked about it on
his podcast. They got kind of crazy. Wait wait, did
did Joe Rogan know it wasn't real? Um, it's funny.

(01:21:31):
You should see the clip of him doing it, because
he was like it was him And who's the other guy,
Bert Kreiser or something. Anyway, they were arguing about whether
or not was real. The other guy was like, no,
it's real. It's so real. Was like, all you guys
are fucking idiots. You're all idiots. Let's google it right now.
They google it and they look up an article and
Joe Joe Rogan's like, Okay, yeah, alright, it's still fucking stupid.

(01:21:54):
The guy who built it is fucking you know, I
you have You have no idea how happy you have
made me because I in my in my research, but
like I have like read your thesis. I read all
the lots of articles about this. I did not come
across the Rogan clip, but I would right. Um, it's

(01:22:16):
like way back right, it's like ten years ago. It's
like a lot of stuff to dig through and I
found it though. Again, Um, so I'd like to kind
of go into like the logistics of like actually doing
this in terms of like creating all the fake like
web content, but also like you know, dreaming up this
like family friendly science show that's made by our I T.
And like how like you know the thing between like

(01:22:37):
naturalism and realism and making it like playing not trying
to replicate reality, but playing as if it were reality,
and how those are two different things. Um. Yeah, well
what we wanted to make it as real as possible
and like that's what I was I'd been studying anyway,
but in like a dramatic context, like making narrative films. Um.

(01:23:01):
And the idea was to, um, there's this event at
r I T every year which gets a lot of people,
like thirty thousand people. Y'r go to the campus and
look at like, um these uh whatever the students are
working on. It's kind of like a mini like festival
type of thing. Well, not many is pretty big, So
we we wanted to make a video for that event. Um.

(01:23:24):
As though we were promoting the event, Hey, come see
the Assarian Stairwell when you get your r I T
um and you know you normally for these like for
these for these events, if you have a booth or something,
you'll see reservations and you'll see like four people reserve
fifteen people. Like we were like started getting nervous and
we found out. We got a sense that this was

(01:23:45):
gonna be big because like when I looked at like
the reservations for like our non existent starewell there were
like one thousand plus visitors. Um. Yeah, I still remember
like going a campus that day at the festival Saturday,
and like my friend Ira like comes up to me.

(01:24:05):
He is like, Mike, people want to kill you, like
cover get over here, and I was like trying to
not show my faith anyway. Yeah that's what. So what
the way, Like a lot of the legs of the
project was just like word of mouth, I guess, and
we actually ran out of money. Um, we didn't get
to do like the web stuff on the scale that

(01:24:26):
we wanted to, But it turned out that we didn't
even have to. In fact, like within a few days
or maybe a week or something after the original video
came out, I posted a video explaining that it's a myth.
Like I posted it and I was like, all right,
I was a fun ride. I was gonna be over
because here's a video of me explaining everything right, And

(01:24:50):
people still didn't believe it. People were saying that my
my video explaining was fake, that was a conspiracy. Like
people were, you know, like the it's the actual myth
of it. Yeah, because it is. It is so much
for a lot of people, they thought that is more
compelling than the idea that it is this like you know,

(01:25:10):
project around what is real what's not. They've got so
invested in the reality of it that they'll explain away
every other explanation, right right, um, exactly like my I
had a teacher at Rutgers where I did my undergrad
to Maudlin. He used to say that, you know, there's
two types of thinking. There's reasoning and there's rationalizing. Reasoning

(01:25:34):
is when when you start from a place of ignorance
and you um, look at the best evidence and the
best arguments you can find and follow that through to
the you know, the rational conclusion. Rationalizing is when you
start from what you want to believe and working backwards
and looking for you know, right, looking for the arguments

(01:25:57):
that are already support what you're saying. There. There was
a lot of a lot of rationalizing going on. I
guess people wanted to believe it. Yeah, for for the
how much how many people in this because they assume
for all of the filming like like everyone was all
like in on it. But yeah, you know, there's a
whole bunch of great stuff around like all of like
the Men on the Street segments are are are like

(01:26:19):
perfectly done in terms of like people like just acting
like regular university students, like talking about the stairwell and
like how they've got like lost and then they're like
looping around in a circle. Um. And all the segments
with you with um like inside the stairwell with all
like the very like the very clever thing. I assume
you're using stuff like Adobe after effects. Um. And yeah,

(01:26:42):
it's it is played. It's played so well like it's
it's I think part of the part of why it's
so successful is that it's not filmed like you would
film something too high like like like for a lot
of films when they like you want to do like
like you know like like ah the term is like
a wonner where they had like one long shot and
then they like hide the transitions in between. You can
you can obviously tell like they're filming it to make

(01:27:03):
these transitions work versus the way you film. This is
just how people would film it if they were filming
this four reel um and they tell that, and it's
it is so carefully done because it's not trying to
be something it is. It is just being the thing
so earnestly in terms of like how how the actors
like stumble over their lines and the like the opening segment, um,

(01:27:26):
like the aesthetics of like all of like the title
cards and everything is just so it has this has
this like aura of earnestness, which I think helps sells
the whole project so so much. Yeah. Yeah, actually, speaking
of the show and like the cheesy title cards and stuff,
my girlfriend at the time was a producer for this

(01:27:46):
show called this local show called Homework Cloudline and where
kids call in with their homework and they answer questions
about it. I studied the ship out of that show,
just looking at how they built the sets and how
it cheesy and how awkward like the hosts were, because
a lot of it was like a lot of the
realism I think of it is just um, yeah, the

(01:28:08):
awkwardness of the people. How it's not um, it's not
really meant to be and and like like the best
the most convincing untruths, right is a combination of fact
and fiction and you know a lot of and blending
in the actors with real people you know, in in
in the in the actual video stuff like that. It's like, yeah,

(01:28:32):
like it comes goes pretty viral. Um, you like pretty
quick create a very easy explanation for No, it's not
it's not real. It started this project. People still believe
it for years and years. Um. As kind of the
decade progresses and we go into like the era of
dis information, everyone starts getting shown into their pockets. Everyone
has Facebook with them wherever they go, everyone has Twitter

(01:28:53):
with them wherever they go. How is kind of your
views on like the ethics of the project and what
it demonstrates in terms of like a case study and
like a social experiment, Like how has that changed over
the years from like you like ten years ago when
you're drimming this up to you now after you know,
we've had stuff like you know like January six and
two and on. You know, all these types of things
which I feel like if are almost like foreshadowed in

(01:29:15):
this in this weird way by showing how successful your
little project is. Yeah, I'm so a lot of a
lot of the criticisms that it was faced from the
get go, like from R. I. T. Professors, even it's
still facing right now. Like it's still the type of
thing people bring up, which is essentially that, hey, there's

(01:29:39):
so much disinformation out there. At the time, we weren't
even using those terms disinformation, right, but basically people were.
We're bringing up the same complaints, which is, there's so
much disinformation out there, you're basically just adding to it.
What what are you even doing? So I guess the
idea is that, and you know, it's a very noble idea,

(01:30:02):
which is what's our response to disinformation? Right? We should
I guess the idea is we should call out every
instance of it when we can flag posts, UM, report
posts that violate community community standards, you know, speak out, um,
provide counter evidence when you see fake news that sort
of thing. And I think that's great, that's a good thing. UM.

(01:30:24):
But disinformation, the problem of disinformation is at the time,
this is kind of how I explained that, like ten
years ago, I I described it as a pen as
an epidemic, yeah right, or or like a cockroach infestation,
like every time you kill one, ten more spring up
and v this this notion of like we gotta call

(01:30:46):
out every instance of disinformation and stomp it away. Is like,
it's great, but you're focused on killing cockroaches. Yeah, it's
like addressing the symptoms not the actual problem, right, I
want to get to the cockroach's nest. Right. And whenever
whenever I give talks about this um this project, people
always approach me afterwards, you know, like wanting me to

(01:31:10):
kind of because we we don't just talk about this project.
We talked about like deep fake stuff, like we show
speeches of Obama, like looking like the real Obama, but
it's like completely fake, right, and people start to realize
the holy sh it, like I don't even know what's
real or not anymore, Like what can I trust? And
they approached me expecting me to ease their anxiety somehow

(01:31:30):
and kind of like guide them through how to discern
what's true from what's not, as though my project was
about finding some sort of solution, And I tell them that, like,
my project wasn't about solving the problem. It was about
seeing the problem, right, It's about it's about trying to
get to the heart of the matter. And it's like

(01:31:51):
to me, I think, like the heart of the matter,
like the cockroach's nest is the I don't know, you
are different ways to say, but basically, the the lack
of critical thinking and individuals and like in this society
we shaped together or um or lack of a willingness
to think through things carefully. Maybe that's that's um. That's like,

(01:32:17):
if we had a society of critical thinkers, this wouldn't
be much of a problem. I think it's because so
many people come at a lot of information from like
when you would say, the rational viewpoint of like they're
trying to use reason and stuff, like they're trying to
think critically, they're trying to think logically, but they come
at it in the terms of rationalizing stuff they already
believe um. And I think that's a very prevailing type

(01:32:39):
of idea in terms of like, yes, I'm gonna believe
in this thing, so I'm gonna find evidence to support
it um, which isn't critical thinking. I don't think. I'm
not really why is that? Is itself a logical fallacy?
But that is so calm, especially on the Internet, because
the Internet encourages the backfire effects. You know, whenever someone
calls it on something you want to be right, so
you're gonna it's as soon as as soon as someone

(01:33:01):
calls something you're going to backfire. You're going to like
become even more entrenched in what you believe. Um when
you you know, when when you explain to someone that know,
Hillary Clinton is bad, but she doesn't eat the blood
of children, Like, no, she does. I saw all this thing.
I have to believe it because like all of the
things aren't tied up in what makes you a person.
And now all of these ideas that have that where

(01:33:23):
used to be just be conspiracy theories that you can
believe in for fun, are now so a part of
like what people's sense of being are and how they
have their entire world view that there's so much more
because the Internet is such a bigger part of their lives.
Everything on the Internet is a bigger part of the
lives for each person. So it is more of an
ontological threat because these things are so closer together now, right,

(01:33:43):
They used to be much more of a distinction between
the Internet and you because you can only ask the
computer every once in a while. We can now carry
on as a supercomputer wherever you go, so it is
like a part of you, like you bring it with
you almost everywhere. It's always in your pocket. So these
things are so like stitched together that prying them apart
and tell people know this thing you would carry around
Actually probably most don't you see on it isn't isn't

(01:34:04):
actually true like there is people can like believe that
in their heads, but don't actually don't. Actually the belief
hasn't actually impact them because like we all know that
there's like well we all know that people can just
go on the internet and lie, right, it is like
part of the joke, but we still don't act like it.
Like oftentimes we get so we get so like encased

(01:34:26):
into the stories that we tell ourselves. Right, the part
of our the is sharing stairwell is so good is
that it's such a it's such a compelling story like that,
Like the idea of like a brilliant architect bringing like
you know, building this paradox in the real world is
like is so much more fun than being like, yeah,
some dude just knows how to use Adobe after effects.
Like right, So you get so entrenched into storytelling because

(01:34:50):
the story of like politicians eating eating the blood of
children is so much more interesting than no, politicians just
don't care about you like, and I think to the
heart of that problem is so much more difficult than
just you know, debunking things, because you can debunk things
all day and does that actually matter? Yeah, I think

(01:35:10):
there there's there's a secondary problem that like, you know,
there's anohing like a lether level of it, which is
that yeah, like everyone knows that there's this information now,
like everyone does, but but that just makes it worse
because now if you want to do this information, what
you can claim is like, oh, hey, look at all
these other times that all the stuff has been fake
and then you know, and this is how you get
everyone like doing frame by frame analysis of like a

(01:35:30):
bombing and going oh, these are all crisis actors, and
it's like you know, and you talk, you talk to
these people and they're like, oh, yeah, no, I did.
I did the research. Look, I like I saw through
the lives and it's like, no, You've just completely made
this thing up in your head. You can see the
green screen compression and like, no, it's just regular video compression,
and it's like, yeah, like everyone can be a detective now,

(01:35:51):
so everyone can be so convinced to their own conclusions,
even when the conclusions turned out to be not true. Right,
it's a problem. If there was an exy solution, we
wouldn't have the problem. Right. It's one of those things
where it's like your projects a very good example of
like it's it's it's it's a very demonstrative thing. You
can like you you take someone along this journey and demonstrate, hey,

(01:36:13):
this can happen to you, so you should watch out
for us. Right, Look look at the story I crafted.
Look how you become convinced it for these six minutes
and then you think, oh, wait, no, you can't teleport
to a bottom stairwell. That's not that's not how that works. Um.
But because you take them on that journey, it's a
very it's a I love it so much as like
a demonstrative process, being like like this can happen, so

(01:36:36):
watch out for it in the future. I think is
honestly more useful than just debunking somebody because you can
you can debunk all day and you can have the
backfire effect and stuff. And you're right about the demonstrative stuff,
because it's like if a bunch of film students and
volunteers with no connections and no resources pulled this off,

(01:36:56):
like We did like a tally of all the videos
at the end of the year of um, you know,
all the videos that ripped it off and posted on
their own channels and all that. Um, it was like
fifty million. Right. So if if a bunch of film
students like had that much influence, what more can like
people who are actually fund like and resources, right, what

(01:37:21):
could they do? And we were just doing and ours
was about like this innocuous, silly Stairwell, it wasn't about
anything that would cause you know, anyone's death or anything
like that or and like, you know, something like in
Me and Mar where the ME and Mar military basically
systemically systematically created fake articles and fake photos to create

(01:37:48):
like to arouse disdain for the row hinge of people
and basically they incited a genocide through Facebook just through
fake news right in the Philippines where I live right now, um,
which a lot of commentators call like the patient zero
of disinformation because this guy called was elected president basically

(01:38:14):
ran running his entire campaign on disinformation and after him
was Brexit like a month later, and after that was
Trump got the nomination. So like what's her named, Kate
Katie Barth Barth or or something like that. The one
of the executives of Facebook referred to the Philippines as
patient zero in the era of disinformation because like, um

(01:38:37):
and the thing that the president here right now was
running on was basically like the same sort of um
bothering and scapegoating of a certain group. And he said, basically,
he's the guy who said, like, basically, if you're a
drug user or a drug dealer, it should be okay
to murder you and kill you. And that's what happened.

(01:38:58):
That's exactly what happened. And because they were posting all
these stories about um, you know, the same sorts of
stories that you that that we saw in the US
in twenties sixteen about undocumented immigrants or Muslims or something
like that. This like, oh, this undocumented immigrant raped the
five year old girl, you know, that sort of thing.

(01:39:18):
And he would the the the organized campaign making up
stories about drug addicts like murdering and raping people. Basically
like got an entire nation too, well, not an entire nation,
but basically this guy won the election. And you know,

(01:39:40):
we have a country right now that basically lived through
just atrocities the last five six years, you know, and
like the double edged sort of this, like Chris mentioned,
is like, yeah, this type same type of thing. Because
it exists, people also like retractively apply it to like
you know, like Sandy Hook was staged or like even

(01:40:03):
stuff now with like you know the pandemic, right, people
like what if what is? What is the pandemic is
a real? What if all these people have just you know,
conjured this thing into being and it's all a giant
insifferation campaign, right, So it has this dual it has
this double edged sword nature um which makes combat and
information so challenging. It's like disiformation to combat information, to

(01:40:23):
comment the idea of disinformation, and there's so many layers
of it. Now this this this, it's just yeah, it
makes it, It makes actually gett into the heart of
it so much more challenging. It's been abstracted so many times.
And one of the things that didn't didn't the New
York Times weren't it the first people to come up
with the term fake news? And then Trump started using
it after Like we were watching pastificate, which newsiper was,

(01:40:46):
but my memory if it was like it was, it
was it was the media that came up with fake news.
And then like Trump just took it and it became
this like this just like demon they absolutely could not
control and was just turned on them. Do you do
you remember the context in which they used it. They
were like they were I think they were calling like
stuff that Trump said fake news. M M I am.

(01:41:10):
I'm unsure at the moment who specifically coined that term,
but I mean we definitely see in terms like even
in even terms like desigeration, which used to be more
tied to like a discording in philosophy, breaking like in
like even even back even as back far as like
the eighties, getting you know, turned into an actual like
political term that everybody uses, so that it was actually

(01:41:32):
somebody from buzz Speed. An editor at buzz Speed was
one of that makes sense, is one of the ones
who first popularized it. Uh was, Yeah, But there could
be there could be you know, several other people that
say that they coined it. I don't know, I mean,
I even there's even u an illustration from eighteen ninety

(01:41:56):
four by by Frederick Offer with reporter is carrying newspapers
labeled humble lows, cheap sensation, and fake news. So it's
I mean, in terms of in terms of just mashing
words together. I'm sure it has has had a decent history,
but definitely Trump is the one that like launched it
into the zeitgeist, right right, right, Let's see, Robert, you've

(01:42:19):
been pretty quiet. I know it's pretty early in the
morning for you. Do you have any do you have
any kind of thoughts to help us kind of generally
start closing us out, not not not like super immediately,
but generally having that direction. I mean no, not really
kind of brought up everything. I would say, all right,
all right, it's ah, yeah, I guess, uh, Mike, what

(01:42:42):
have How is this project of impacted how you approach
film and just like how you how you use the
internet yourself in the past decade? M hmm, Well, I
I'm fully aware of what we did. Every time I'm
like looking at something, I'm like, they had done that?

(01:43:04):
Could they have done this? And that, you know that
sort of thing. Um, I don't know if it's if yeah,
I don't I'm not sure how it's how this project
specifically had impacted me, other than just trying to think
through things a bit more carefully, trying to go through

(01:43:26):
things like, um, I mean like so we we basically
came up with this idea of what eventually became troll farms.
Right like me and like my classmates would Hey, we
even make fake accounts and like talk about the stairwell,
and um so, I don't know, like a few years

(01:43:49):
later people we we learned that people were actually doing this,
like to influence like elections around the world, and a
lot of the strategy of like the control forms and stuff,
um was to basically create caricature versions right of arguments
from whatever side, like you know, whether they might present

(01:44:12):
an argument from like the left or the right, but
in like a caricaturized version of it. And um, so
what people would see when they see that, they'd see
an argument coming from the other side, and they'd ridicule it,
like look at these people who just seem crazy espousing
this whatever view, you know, or they might say things like, um,

(01:44:33):
like yeah, if you're a Democrat, you want to abort
babies that like the ninth month or something like that,
which no reasonable person actually argued. So what happens is like, um,
people talk about how the goal of Russia was to
like polarize, you know, um, polarize the political spectrum. I
think like the bigger goal and the the goal that

(01:44:58):
we're going to be untangling for many many years. And
the more um the more difficult problem to deal with
was that they oversimple They successfully oversimplified discourse. You know
what I'm saying, Like they found a way to like
oversimplify the type of discourse we're having because everyone's like

(01:45:20):
arguing with such simplistic I'm not sure if I'm making sense.
It's like it's like it's like the term I use
is like politics as fandom, right, And that's why I
think that like intersect not not exactly what you're saying,
but like intersects with that type of idea of like
condensing down actual discussions on like what you believe in

(01:45:43):
um and what politics you want and how you want
to put the world into this weird fandom lens of
like this team versus this team which we we we
we we we we We've had a degree of that
for a long long time. But with the Internet and
how how discussions on the Internet are designed to work, right,
how algorithms want to boost her him, how there's always
these short snippets just in mirrors the way people discuss
like what Star Wars character is their favorite. It's just that.

(01:46:07):
But for politics, um, so it's it's just this, like
what if politics is just this idea of fandom, and
you can debate what fandom is more valid than the other. Right,
I like the Last Jedi more you like Rise of Skywalker.
This means your version of reality is less good than mine.
So when that objectively true, which is which is? But

(01:46:31):
is that same idea but for how we like make
social programs and how we address racism, and how we
like give food to poor people, and how we do
affordable housing and how we handle the police. So it's
that type of idea which is just disinformation kind of
impacts this in part because when you flood the zone

(01:46:53):
with so much conflicting information that people can't really get
a handle on or easily sort of like when they're
when when you've when you've put that much confusion into
the air, um, it makes people more likely to just
kind of grasp its sides because everything coming out is
way too complicated and messy, and it's it takes too
much work what's actually true? So holding to some rubric

(01:47:17):
of well I believe this, so that means these are
the good guys, These are the bad guys. And I
don't have to analyze it any deeper than that. I
can reject information that comes from this group, where I
can reject information that says this, um, because I just
category categorically reject you know, anything that that fits in
with that. Like, that's the benefit of disinformation for authoritarians

(01:47:40):
of all stripes. You're seeing in Ukraine right now, where um,
you've got all of these different authoritarian powers. You've got Turkey,
you've got Russia, you've got um, you know, fucking the
United States, at least to the extent that like we
impact a lot of things internationally. Um. And you've got
them all coming down on different sides of this issue

(01:48:01):
and of what's happening in Ukraine. And because there's so
much disinformation and misinformation about what's going on, people just
kind of grasp at whatever side I'm have been more
sympathetic to recently, I'm just going to believe whatever they
say because it's way too complicated to actually analyze what's
going on. Yeah, And this was this was the thing

(01:48:22):
that that I mean, this was explicit on the left.
I remember this. There was this around Umen. There was
a whole thing about how like people people like talking
about anti imperialism would would literally say like nuance, nuances liberalism.
I don't like nuances liberalism, don't don't research this, don't
think about this because nuances how liberals like you know,

(01:48:43):
spread sort of pro promising change, proplicanda, Like I remember
those people like every Frost just just straight up said
this and this was a huge and you know, like
I got a lot of shift for this because you know,
like I remember when when when the Coon Bolivia happened,
Like I made a giant thread that was trying to
that was like, okay, we need to figure out like
how specificly the CIA was involved in this, Like okay,
so did they plan the whole thing? Was it? Like

(01:49:04):
were they working with local partners? Wasn't a thing where
someone else planned it and they signed off on it?
And like to this day people think that I supported
the coup because I was like, we should figure out
who was who the actors were in the ground because
no one like this, this this this this became like
a like like like a tenant, like like an actual
sort of like like political tenants of of how a

(01:49:24):
lot of antimpurialism, like in the American left worked was you.
You were not supposed to do nuanced, You were not
supposed to look at who was Like you know, if
if if you spent too long looking at what was
going on in the ground, people would be like you
you worked for the CIA, and that you know, I
think like we we we've we've finally seen that basically
blow up in their faces because you know, oh, hey,
look how many of these people just like would up

(01:49:45):
supporting Russia and then spent like three months saying that
Russia would never invade Ukraine. That this happens. But it's
I don't know, it's it's it's it's extremely depressing how
people who otherwise are you know, like in a lot
of way. It is like I've spent a lot of
their time like trying to you know, filter out stuff
from the media that's false, just go into this because

(01:50:09):
they just do not want to deal with the complexity
of reality. Yeah, just easier not to. Again, if there
was a simple problem, we wouldn't mean, if there was
a simple solution, we wouldn't need to discuss the problem. Yeah. Yeah,
So I guess basically like just to like um, answer
that question about how it I guess at the time,

(01:50:32):
I'd say like we got an up close look at
how things were going to be, Like you know, with
with all these things, we we kind of anticipated the
next few years. Um so yeah, that's basically what happened. Um,
sorry to interrupt your clothing, but no, no, no, it's

(01:50:53):
the it's the best note that that we can go. Um, Michael,
do you where can people find you online? And if
people want to look into us with your other projects,
I mean you found me, Like if they want to
find me, they'll find me, right, I don't know. I
still don't know. You got my email, but Garrison is
extremely good about this, Tope. Any people are that could

(01:51:14):
uh yeah, well they can check out the YouTube channel
like I'm gonna be posting some new films this year probably,
Um so my name Michael Lock. Canna allow or just
search the achariance there. Well, I guess that's a way. Yeah. Yeah,
I'll add your YouTube channel to to the description. Yeah,
and I just want to thank you so much for

(01:51:35):
coming on to talk about your your project. Yeah, thanks
for having me. All right, Well, that that does it
for us today. You can follow us on the internets
for some reason, um on Twitter, Instagram that happened here
pod and Coolsive Media and yeah, go go create a

(01:51:56):
myth that people will believe and travel from out of
country to walk over some stairs because that sounds like fun.
Go to something like that for fun funzies. All right,
bye bye, it could happen here. Uh. It being a

(01:52:25):
number of things. Uh. This is the podcast about things
falling apart and also maybe putting them back together. And
assuming there's not a nuclear war in the immediate future,
you will probably be hearing this episode sometime in early March.
I am Robert Evans, my co hosts as always well
as often Chris and Garrison, And that's that's my job

(01:52:46):
for the day. Done. I'm gonna I'm gonna sit back
and chill. You guys want to take it from here, Yeah,
I'll take it from here. We are doing one of
our perennial things fall apart, but also we sort of
put it back together again episodes. And joining us today
is JAMS from Strange Matter is a new libertarian socialist
cooperative magazine. J MC. Great to have you here. Yeah,

(01:53:07):
this is really great. So I guess we should probably
explain what the magazine is not, just in of itself,
but also because it's a good lead in into um
um into what we're gonna be talking about. So we
basically there's five of us as co editors and we're
all equal worker owners in it. It's a magazine called
Strange Matters, and the point of it is to explore

(01:53:32):
radical new ideas, not just in terms of politics and economics,
which is going to be kind of half the focus
is trying to figure out like you know, libertarian socialists
talk a lot about dual power, which I know you'all
talk about on the show a lot, talk about building
independent institutions under the direct democratic control of the working
class to control real resources and are not the state
or capitalist firms. But like we talk a big game,

(01:53:53):
but we actually know how to do that stuff, And
do we know how to do stuff like run like
you know, a big company as a as a self
managed democracy, or do we know how to run a
city as a as a radical democracy like rooted neighborhood
councils or anything like that. The answer kind of is
not really And there's a lot of like um open
questions that we don't know yet the answers to, and

(01:54:14):
that very few people are working on those answers. So
Strange Matters is UM partly about discovering uh those answers,
not because we the editors have the answers, but because
we need like some kind of space within which we
can bring lots of different people, different life experiences together, uh,
in order to talk about the stuff and figure it out.
And then the other mission of it is to be
a kind of general interest literary intellectual magazine doing the

(01:54:37):
kind of journalism and philosophy and poetry and memoir and
stuff like that that uh that uh perhaps gets shut
out of capitalist society because it's not commercial, because it's
too weird, because it's like, I don't know, historiographical essay
about it's been called doon or something like that, you know.
And and we think that there should be a place
for that, um, just because it brings delight and mean

(01:55:00):
into people's lives, and it's what we're fighting for a
more democratic society in order to do. So. That's basically
our vibe UM. And the asking question is a collective
editorial that we that we collectively drafted and edited, uh,
talking about our political views in particular and the recent
history of libertarian socialism UM. And then asked for me.

(01:55:20):
I'm I'm a writer who has written for a couple
of other places like The Point in the Brooklyn rail Um,
and I also was involved in the d S as
Libertarian Socialist Caucus and also the Yeah yeah, yeah, but
a lot of history there, trauma, you know, some some

(01:55:43):
uh yeah, but any who uh and also the Symbiosis
Federation UM, which is a federation across Mexico, the US,
and Canada that is trying to put together. It's a
it's a confederation of local organizations that are trying to
do this kind of direct democracy stuff. Yeah. So I guess, well, okay,
so the pandemic isn't I guess the perfect jumping in

(01:56:05):
point for this. But I wanna go back and I
guess getting into the meat of this piece because I
think it's very interesting. I wanted to sort of talk
about the origins of like what's called sort of neo
anarchism and how it's sort of begin to decay after
after the collapse of Occupy and after well, I guess

(01:56:25):
the sort the sort of kind of revolutionary arc of
the two tens, so basically before you do the decline
at least is the way that we wrote it, and
I kind of think that it's the way that I
would tell it. Um, you have to kind of do
the rise first, right, because like there was this moment
from roughly the fall of Soviets in two roughly like

(01:56:53):
two thousand and even kind of lingering in an afterlife afterwards,
where it kind of looked anarchism is going to take
over the world. And that's a bit of a joke.
But it's also not a joke because in the context
of like the radical left, which is of course obviously
a kind of like you know, dissidents seen in any
country where it happens to exist. Um, you know, everything

(01:57:16):
receded in terms of the traditional parties because the fall
of the Soviet style uh Leninists states uh, either through
their collapse as in the case of the uss are
or in the case of their transition to much more
like clearly and obviously like state capitalist uh semi liberalized
model like in China, like the you you basically had

(01:57:41):
like this total recession, not just in Leninism interestingly, which
obviously enough right, like you know, it's basically a global
collapse of Leinists style of governments, but also in like
social democracy. Um, because it's a lot of the I mean,
it's actually kind of interesting why it's it's unclear why
it is. Uh, people have different theories, but there you know,
people often describe it in in um, you know Fisher's term,

(01:58:05):
the writer Mark Fisher capitalist realism. The attitude in the
nineties was that, uh, you know, there's there's only one
world that's possible, and it's the best of all possible worlds,
and that's the capitalist world where everybody's gonna have McDonald's
in every country, and two countries that have the same
McDonald's are never going to go to war, which we
kind of found out the hard way this week that

(01:58:26):
that's not really the case. Well, and if people had
paid attention more to other parts of the world, they
would know that, like, well, there were civil wars in
a bunch of countries that had McDonald's. It didn't stop
people from shooting each other, as as the United States
should tell you, people will kill each other whether or
not they have access to chicken McNuggets. Yeah, you know,

(01:58:47):
I mean I think like that that's that's a period
that has it's full of the most wrong anyone has
ever been. Like you got your frenchis Fukiyama like the
most wrong person ever You've got. Yeah, You've you've got
a lot of serve idealogues, you like, have sort of
deluded themselves into thinking this stuff is over and yeah,
and I think you're right that that sort of plays
into this, you know, into sort of the collapse of

(01:59:10):
of of I guess, the party state left, and then
the way in which that, you know, the the alternative
to that, I guess becomes neo anarchism, and anarchists practice,
even if it's not necessarily ideology with all the groups,
kind of seeps its way into the rest of the
activist scene. Yeah. So basically the story that we tell

(01:59:32):
is that there's some you know, the Stuffatheast of rebellion
in triggers these uh it's not just that the stuff
of East is are able to create their autonomous territory
and chap us, but they it triggers this wave uh
that UM. We use a term that sometimes it's used
in academia called neo anarchism for this. Um. You know,

(01:59:53):
there's an anarchist revival in the nineties, UM around the world,
and it's not just people calling themselves anarchists. It's all
these movements that were inspired by the libertarian socialist broadly
speaking UM Sabathistas UM, adopting kind of similar methods in
their local contexts in different countries, fighting against I mean

(02:00:14):
a lot of things. Initially it's against like you know,
neoliberal trade deals, but it also ends up being against
like sweatshops, because that's basically what a lot of outsourcing
is is. You know, if if they have unions in
this country from a social democratic period, they shut down
the factory fire everybody moved it to some place where
some dictatorship is going to shoot anybody who tries to
do a union. Uh, and then that you know that

(02:00:35):
that lowers Uh. Logistics has gotten sophisticated enough by this
point that you know, it ends up being cheaper for
the company even though they have to transport goods all
across the world and do just in time delivering that
kind of thing. So UM. The a lot of the
the the anti globalization movement that sprouted up around the
two thousands was like UM, against all these things and

(02:00:58):
usually using the kinds of wrecked actions, which is when
you act kind of independent of the state and not
trying to like, you know, convince politician to do something
but taking direct action to get your results, your desired result, um,
you know, and all this kind of stuff uh that
we're at using like direct democratic consensus methods. Uh. In

(02:01:19):
the way that they organized stuff, uh, that was that
was all basically an artistic And so there was this
way in which anarchist methods, anarchist tactics, anarchists like attitudes
towards what activism even is, started filtering into all these
other movements. And this has been happening a little bit
the eighties too. So there was like the anti nuclear
movement had a lot of this, the feminist movement had

(02:01:39):
a lot of this. Um, there was a whole um
stream of single other ecological movements were actually like pioneered
in a lot of ways by anarchists in the nineties,
um so, as well as indigenous movements in places like Mexico, Bolivia, etcetera.
So the this is the kind of like rise of
this neo anarchist movie you that we're talking about, which

(02:02:00):
is not just about anarchists, it's about people who act
and think like anarchists without necessarily identifying as it. Yeah,
I mean that's the kind of thing that I hope
we can kind of more encourage as well in the
next few decades, as those typicide ideas can be I want,
I want to make sure that we can take these

(02:02:20):
ideas and make them very approachable for people, even if
they don't use the terms that we might use. You
can still kind of suggest these types of thoughts, and
this suggests these types of kind of lenses and viewpoints
as much as we're about to get to how this
sort of goes wrong or fails in some sense, Like,
I think that was the strength of this movement was

(02:02:42):
that it was it's tactics really easy to spread, and
that led to a lot of people adopting me, led
to it sort of becoming this I guess activist consensus
that you know, like you using the consensus process. You
you know, you have sn organizations, you have you do
direct actions, you mobilize people. You don't have these sort

(02:03:04):
of like article like parties. But that yeah, And I
think I think the next part of the story that
you want to tell us about, I guess how that
fell apart and the consequences of that. Basically what ends
up happening is that, like there was this moment of

(02:03:24):
our ascent because I would identify myself as being definitely
like part of these, uh, the this generalan of you.
I mean I came, I hopped a board a lot
later with like Occupy Wall Street, but a lot of
the kind of explosion of movements that happened around the
world in again not always right. It started with the
Arab Spring, which started with somebody seeing themselves on fire
in Tunisia and like you know, and then that spreads

(02:03:46):
to um other countries in them the least and um,
you know, protests against dictatorships and so on. But it
starts getting kind of like transported beyond its initial Middle
Eastern context. And what a lot of people don't know
is that the uh, the Occupy Wall Street movement in
North America, uh, and like other movements that you know,

(02:04:07):
some of them were called occupy some of them, I'm
one of them was my Don in Ukraine as a
matter of fact, um, and other like you know, the
the Hong Kong, the the the umbrella movements, yeah, the
and all these kind of movements that that proceeded from
after a lot of them were basically in a single
kind of wave, a protracted wave of copycat movements. Uh

(02:04:30):
that we're trying to adopt the same kind of tactics
of like occupying public squares, uh, declaring them basically autonomous,
and doing like direct democracy in those squares, modeling the
kind of society that they that people wanted to create. Um,
you know, in this moment where it seemed like you
could have these direct democratic uh sorts of movements the

(02:04:51):
the end in the US, there's like a direct line
of succession from like Occupy Wall Street through to like
Black Lives Matter through to like the anti pipeline and
Aginist protest. There's a lot of like shared movement experience,
a lot of the same people showing up to it
or teaching the next generation UM in those movements. And
I think this is something I mean, uh, it's difficult

(02:05:11):
to find like sources on this, but I mean, y'all
are involved in social movements. I think that that's like
a rough that's roughly a description of of what's happened,
right unless unless we're crazy. Yeah, I think, you know,
I think I guess what you call the last wave
that is occupied ice in Yeah, yeah, you know, like

(02:05:33):
I remember like that was the sort of mix of
I guess two crowds. One is you know, I mean,
like I I remember, it was a bunch of you know,
people who'd been in occupy and then also it was
a lot of people who radicalized essentially about Trump. Yeah,
there was there was a pretty big new wave of people, yeah,
around around just sixteen and that you know, And gess

(02:05:53):
I guess the other thing that that that's going on
through this period is the the the ascension of consension
of the right and the return also not just of
you know, not just the sort of the fascist right,
but of Leninism and social democracy as well. Yeah. Um

(02:06:14):
lappened around like when Bernie Sanders was getting more popular. Yeah. Yeah,
And I think I think, I think there's there's you know,
there's a couple of there's like two threats here. There
there's the sort of Bernie Sanders thread, and then there's
you know, the the rise of the rise of the Tankies,
which has to do with Syria and has to do
with sort of this backlash against the Just and eleven
revolutions that you know, like some some of that backlash

(02:06:36):
turns into like just you know, like aired ones, like
hard rightobbing. There's never like not a right wing but
like air to wants turn into just like fire bombing
cities and um and literally barrel bombing, you know, the
peaceful protests stuff. Um can overthrow governments if the government

(02:06:59):
is not willing to bomb and shoot people who gather
on mass in the central square because they're afraid of
what the world's response would be if they did start
doing that. But you know when Bashar Alasad did that
in Syria against the democratic opposition movements, UM, you know,
that basically sent the signal nothing I mean nothing happened
to us side, right, So that basically sent the signal

(02:07:21):
that like oh he had a stress of years. But yeah, yeah,
right right, yeah, like like you can you can just
shoot people and bomb them and like it. And that
basically defanged the kind of central tactic that a lot
of these movements were trying to do, which is to
have like large numbers of people do nonviolent civil disobedience

(02:07:41):
and then through those like direct actions, cultivate this culture
of like direct democracy in the hopes that, um, you know,
the assemblies that are created in that space could in
some way become the germ of the organs that could
run society, or at least that's like when it's taken
to its logical conclusion. Because usually people who are involved
in this, they get involved in it, they think the
assembly stuff is really cool, they start learning more about it,

(02:08:02):
they get radicalized by being in the assembly because like
when you're in a direct democratic assembly and you're actually
making the decisions like together, and then you come to
an agreement and you execute the decision, you start asking
yourself like why can't we do everything like this? Um?
And then um, you know that that's what directs a
lot of people in this kind of anarchistic direction. But yeah,

(02:08:23):
one of the reasons why these movements starts to decline
is because they get smashed, um. The but I think
that there's always this other thing going on, which and
I wonder how y'all felt about this, like reading it,
like you know, there's there was this kind of both

(02:08:44):
like an external critique at first from people like you know, Buskar, Sencrove,
Jacobin and things like that, but then also like this
increasingly over the years in the last half of the
internal critiques of anarchism coming from anarchists themselves, of our
people in this general kind of mil you libertarian socialism
talking about how like anarchists didn't have solutions to the

(02:09:10):
most pressing crises in the twenty one century. Like, if you, like,
if you guys had to say, I know it's like
kind of pretentious, but like, what is the most pressing
crisis of the century? What are like the top three
just off the top of your heads without thinking? What
would you list if you have to list three two
or three separate things? Climate change, creeping authoritarianism, and rampant
disinformation about basic facts of reality. Sweet, okay, so let's

(02:09:34):
tackle each one of those, right, Like what's what's an
anarchist got to say about climate change? Well, okay, disrupt
the pipelines, like you know, do uh, Like, you can't
have infinite growth on a finite planet, so you have
to have like, you know, we we have all the slogans, right,
I mean we've all heard them like a million times.
Yeah you have the diagnoses of the problem. But yeah, yeah,

(02:09:56):
but then like, okay, so how are we going to
like you know, I guess we're gonna build some co
ops and then the co ops are gonna democratized production
and then we can do d growth somehow, but like
also disrupting existing production. But there's like a missing step here, right,
because like, you know, the reason why we have all
this production in certain ways, because the entire economy depends

(02:10:19):
on it's been set up that way. Uh So you
implied in the idea that we're gonna do de growth
somehows that we need some way of constructing a different economy,
and how do you construct a different economy right through
some kind of planning? So really the question is like
how do you do economic planning? Uh? Second one, um
I gin a skip creeping authoritarianism for now because that's

(02:10:39):
actually like feeding into the more the ending of the essay.
But the but the other one, right disinformation? Another great question, right,
like what do you do with social media? Like? Okay, again,
anarchists talked in general a lot about like, okay, we're
gonna democratize all the companies because we're democratizing everything. We're
democratizing neighborhoods or democratizing cities. So it's kind of the

(02:11:00):
same thing, turning everything into like a radical direct democracy. Okay,
But if we're going to have social media, first of all,
should we like was it a mistake to invent a
centralized system instead of the more decentralized internet that created
that existed before social media, Right, that's kind of a
interesting question. But then assuming that we do, how do

(02:11:21):
we restructure it? Not just in terms of how it's managed,
but like, okay, we have the democracy of Facebook or whatever,
and let's say that we're the workers at Facebook, what
do we do, like, how do we structure it so
that it's not a giant misinformation engine? Right? Like once,
once you actually have like the responsibility and the power
of being in the saddle, which is what we spend
so much of our time kind of just trying to do,

(02:11:43):
you have to actually make decisions about what to do.
And honestly, there aren't that many. I mean, what do
you what do you do with with the within with
the utility like that? Like, for example, who ought to
be in control of the utility? Like that? Is it
really just the workers of Facebook? Aren't all the people
who are users it don't they have a right to
be making decisions about it too? And is it just

(02:12:04):
an American institution just because it's an American LLC or
is it like a global institution because everybody on the
planets on it um is there? You know, are other
ways that it could be reconfigured, like fundamentally in terms
of how users use it. That would change the experience
in some way to actually make it, uh, make you
less liable to misinformation. But on the other hand, if

(02:12:26):
you try to manipulate people in order to um, you know,
not see something that's going to be misinformation, isn't that well,
you know, like censorship or or or some other thing
that we generally would oppose, right, like the tool of
centralized social control. So they like, these are really deep questions,

(02:12:46):
and again this is generally a kind of silence, and
of course you know in that case, there's silence from
the social democrats too, and there's silence from the Leninist
I mean, well, the Lennis just kind of fantasized about
turning Facebook into the tool of the central party state
uses in order to crush dissent forever or whatever. But
you know, social democrats are like list nationalized Facebook, and

(02:13:06):
it's like, you know, yeah, sure we could, we could
do that. And then you know, the n s A
owns on Facebook. I'm sure that that's a that's a
better scenario. Yeah, I mean I tend to think somewhat
differently about what it means to have an anarchist solution
to those problems. Like, for example, I don't I don't
see anarchists or social democrats or leninists having any kind

(02:13:29):
of stopping climate change solution um because I don't I
don't realistically see the organizing potential um capable of actually
stopping what's going on in any kind of reasonable time frame.
And I certainly don't think that the existing you know,
neoliberal structures or the authoritarian structures that exist in you know,

(02:13:50):
other countries or in this country are going to stop
it either. So when I think about solutions to climate
change from an anarchist perspective, I think about how can
anarchist to organizing help people deal with the consequences of
climate change, and I see I tend to see the
potential for actually like mitigating climate change coming more from

(02:14:13):
there's as the consequences of this become more dire to people,
if anarchists are better, are good at providing relief and
helping people and organizing through that, and eventually there's some
potential to actually get people organized to stop the causes
of the problem. But um, I just don't. I'm not
an optimist of about our ability to stop the worst

(02:14:34):
of it at this point. Um, especially not after the
most recent I p c C report. And I guess
I'm kind of in the same boat when it comes
to disinformation. UM. I And this is not just like anarchists.
I feel like lack, as you've stated, at a like
a good idea about like what do we do with Facebook,
what we do with you do, what do we do

(02:14:55):
with the way all of these things are set up
in the harms that they do at scale. Um, Nobody
and I include the people currently in charge, has any
real good ideas for that because they haven't. Like I've
been working in this space for a very long time,
I've I've spent a lot of time talking with and
debating with a lot of the folks who are leading

(02:15:15):
minds kind of in the fight against disinformation, and I
just don't feel like there's any sort of solution that
is an immediate term solution because so many the problem
is so advanced as it is, so as I guess
that's kind of like where I land on a lot
of this stuff is we certainly need to be thinking
about solutions, but I kind of like, I think it's

(02:15:40):
less likely that there's going to be like you were
you were saying the kind of debate is between is
there some way of like reforming or fixing making Facebook
more democratic, or is it just we need to decide
that maybe we don't have some of this stuff. And
I tend to land towards that that, Like, well, I
think the solution is going to be maybe maybe Facebook's
a bad idea, maybe we should maybe we shouldn't have.

(02:16:00):
There's aspects of it that are necessary, obviously, and I
think aspects of things like Telegram and Twitter that are useful,
But um, I think the they're also fundamentally tied to
the algorithms that drive them, which is also what drives
so much of the toxic aspects that I think if
you're divorcing the medium from the algorithm, you're talking about

(02:16:24):
something that is very different and longer than media. It's
no longer than media. It's it's so radically different that
it's just it's it's not even useful to compare them.
It's like it's like it's like comparing Discord to Facebook.
It's like they're not they don't operate the same way.
That's the Yeah, that's exactly kind of where I where
I tend to be on on that, And I know

(02:16:46):
that's not like I I to the extent that like, uh,
that's pessimistic. I guess I am kind of pessimistic about
anarchisms ability to stop the worst of things that's happening.
Where I kind of look at myself as an optimistic
anarchist is in the I believe anarchism offers solutions when

(02:17:06):
these things go as badly as they're going to do
in a way that you know, the present systems or
you know, more authoritarian systems that people propose can't solve
the worst consequences of these problems as as well. That's
that's kind of where I feel like it is can
feel a lot simpler to default to like the dual
power framework of a lot of these things, because otherwise

(02:17:29):
the problems are so complex that you cannot approach them
from from from every angle, because you really do need
to simplify and condense them and collapse them into something
that is more simplified, which often results in like a
dual power kind of work for what you actually start doing. Yeah,
and I think you have to. I think if you're
an insurrectionist, if you're a revolutionary, whether it you're an

(02:17:50):
anarchist or or you know, a Leninist or whatever, you
have to be looking at what's actually happening in Ukraine
right now and recognize that. All right, Well, to what
extent do you think you're going to be able to
organize people in such a way that allows them to
deal with thermobaric weapons? You know? In what way are
you going to organize people that allows them to effectively

(02:18:13):
resist cluster musician munitions? Um? And I think that when
you kind of look at it that way, which is
what it would take to overthrow any of the large
hegemonic powers in the world right now, a much more
realistic set of solutions is all right, well, let's work
on building power by building organizations and communities that are

(02:18:35):
capable of taking care of themselves in the holes that
these powers are increasingly going to be experiencing because because
they too are crumbling. And that's much smarter than being like,
all right, well, I'm gonna try to get a bunch
of my friends with rifles and and arm up a
couple of drones and and go up against you know,
people who have access to m l R s, you know,

(02:18:56):
weapons systems and whatnot. Yeah. No, I think that that's
a really great point. Um. I the way that I
would think about it is the starting with the big
picture problems is a bit misleading because, as you said,
like nobody, it's quite like that nobody has solutions to
these problems, certainly the social Democrats. Yeah, you know, and

(02:19:20):
I say this as somebody who's like half a social
Democrat by temperament. Um, it would be really nice if
we like did it a little social democratic government and
they swooped in and you know, did like new deal stuff.
I like new deal stuff. I like w p A
stuff as much as the next uh. You know, um
person who likes arts programs and infrastructure development. Well, you know,
some infrastructure development, not others. Right, the war the war

(02:19:44):
complex we can do a little without. But you know,
the thing about it is those big problems. You're right,
it looks like there's not going to be like a
big solution, uh, and that we're going to kind of
have to cope with the consequences of of it, at
least at first. Yeah, even coping this is this is
kind of where I think the real kind of substance

(02:20:06):
of of of the problem that libertarian socialist are facing
right now. Even coping would require a greater level of
organization than we have proven able to muster up to now.
Not because the methods that we choose don't work, because
in fact, as you point out and as I actually
really want to forcefully argue, and because because we do

(02:20:27):
in the end of the essay, like authoritarian methods don't
work and can't work for a lot of the specific
problems that we face. Uh, And history shows that very definitively.
But um, there is also a serious way in which
even kind of developing these like you know, local highly

(02:20:47):
like you know, rooted in a community, uh like direct
democratic institutions that control real resources, scaling that up to
the point where it actually could start replacing some of
the gaps left behind by uh you know, uh states
and capitalist firms that are too dysfunctional or too focused
on their own goals to to to to meet those

(02:21:08):
needs that would actually require us to be able, for example,
to know how to build up a cooperative sector in
a city, or how to kind of like network the
tennis unions that already exist you know, across different uh
you know, regions, maybe even across like a continent, and
then construct like the way in which they self manage

(02:21:31):
each other or or not each other self managed together
the you know, the the larger group or it would
require and you know, there's a lot of people working
on these problems, but sometimes there is a kind of
like you know, you'll you'll see this like obstacle in
the road because for example, like what do you do
when the it might not even be the state properly speaking, right,

(02:21:52):
it might be like a posse that's funded by some
rich billionaire asshole who's got like his uh, you know,
his notion to some people are just better than others
and that you should institute the dictatorship of the tech
bros um, you know. And then that billionaire's funding a
bunch of people who have got now like you know,
some industrial access to industrial infrastructure, and they don't like

(02:22:13):
the fact that you're doing your d I Y like
you know, commune or whatever stuff in there on their turf.
So how do you fight back against that? I mean,
some of it you can fight back against that kind
of our current level of capacity, but some of it
does kind of require us to start thinking like, well,
how do you how do you build up financial independence?
What like, how do you build up the kind of
independence where it's like if we get kicked off of

(02:22:35):
the capitalist uh social media, for example, which is a
great deal of what we use for fundraising, what kind
of institutions could we create that would be like alternatives, um,
that are not like the ones that the Nazis created
when there was a purge of some of them that
gab like highly dysfunctional, like you know, it didn't even
work for them. Uh not that I mean, I'm happy

(02:22:55):
about that, but like you know, my point is, like
the same thing could happen to us, So what would
you do? Um the like there there are all these
kinds of things that are more little picture questions in
a way, but they scale up relatively quickly to at
least like medium sized questions where we need this kind
of like um, these these because because part of what

(02:23:17):
it is is also that like it's not that these
questions are impossible, it's that they're kind of neglected. And
there's um there, there's these uh the thinkers like Christian Williams,
who is an anarchist from the Pacific Northwest, who wrote
a pamphlet about this called Wither Anarchism, And there was
another pamphlet, uh an Essay and CounterPunch by a person

(02:23:40):
named Gabrielle Coon who's an autonomous Marxist basically like a
libertarian Marxist Marxist anarchist type um called What Happened to
the Anarchist Century? And both of those essays, which I
highly recommend that people read, they may they make points
basically like this, you know, like where where the focus
on how to construct those institutions and the nitty gritty

(02:24:01):
of how to do that has kind of receded from
anarchism um as it's actually practiced. Uh In like so
there's like a rhetoric of revolutionary transformation, but not always
the attention to the nitty gritty of how you actually
can like build resilient institutions that actually like carry that
through which you know, a hundred years ago people talking

(02:24:22):
about like the one big union and the general strike.
But that's kind of like, um, well, a it didn't
work in exactly the way that they were thinking it.
What even in the most successful revolutions like in Spain
and b it was also like the there's there's there's
a certain way in which our tensions are focused on
other things. And it's not that those things are bad,

(02:24:42):
it's just that like there's been this kind of neglect
of the question of large scale organization and how you
do coordination, like you know, in order to tackle problems
that are kind of like at the scale that that
I was talking about before um And so basically the
argument of the essay is that in the absence of that,
like for the socialist movement that emerged after turned away

(02:25:06):
from neo anarchist, I'm thinking basically that it had no solutions,
which I don't think it's true either, but it's like,
you know, like rather it was true in the moment,
but it doesn't have to be true, but it was true,
but enough people thought that it was that they turned
to like the social democratic route. But with the failure
of Corbin and Bernie that kind of burned a lot
of people out too, and a lot of what is

(02:25:27):
seems like it's coming up now, and I'm wondering, I
wonder what you guys think of this. Like a lot
of the people that we see showing up in movement
spaces who we see kind of like getting politically activated
for the first time or whatever, a lot of those
people are really interested in Leninism and on specifically, because
I don't know, I don't know how true that is.
That's at least that that's that's that that that part

(02:25:48):
is not true at least at least at least here
in Portland. Plant no other no other part of the
country like Portland, other than maybe Eugene. Like okay, that's
that's fair. That's a little bit too. Like Portland. Portland
is a big enough anarchist city that there are entire
decade long like like into anarchist wors that no one

(02:26:10):
else in the US has ever heard of, that are
like the most important thing that's ever happened in Portland's
Oh boy, welcome to the Green Red. Let me tell you, Chris,
you have just piste off sixty people who could not
explain to you if you gave them a year, could
not explain to you why they're angry. And I mean

(02:26:31):
to be to be fair, like I I am an
anarchist in Chicago. When the first time I introduced too
of my Twitter mutual together, they almost got a fist fight.
So like, yeah, that's that completely scans Even with like
ds A stuff, I feel like there's there was at
least was a trend a little bit to stay away
from some of the more Russia communist kind of like

(02:26:53):
types of aesthetics and ideas because it is a turn
off for so many people, and it does know just
and it has like encouraging forefront a form of authoritarianism
that maybe is not great. Yeah, I don't know, Like
I've seen sort of both friends in Walka. So I
think the last like a year has been very different

(02:27:17):
than I think the previous five. I've seen it on Twitter,
but I don't know how much it expands into as
I think. I think it's like I saw things happens
in the d s A is that the Leninists essentially
took over the International Committee and they had this kind
of delicious divisional label inside the d s A where
like you have like you have a part of the
d s A that's essentially a social democratic machine, and

(02:27:38):
then you have the International Committee, which is which is
the foreign policy wing essentially run by by essentially run
by by the Leninists. And I think, I don't know,
I think I saw it there. And the other thing
I think I saw a lot of that I've seen
even from people who are ordinarily not Stalinist, is what
you know, part of what was talking about this is
the sort of like climate Stalinism or like climate wow
stuff like that. That is a huge problem that you know,

(02:28:03):
I mean, I think I think part of it also
just has to do with the fact that people don't
like Okay, so like we we have actually existing uh
climate Leninism, like we have it. It's it's it's it's
it's China, like the CCP changed, it's literally changed. State
ideology in in in the mid two thousand tends, as
you know, as an attempt to deal to deal with

(02:28:24):
with with with pollution climate change. It did nothing, Like
they pressed every price. It doesn't it didn't like, it
didn't work. Yeah, yeah, I mean they did corbon markets,
they did. They literally just banned coal and entire provinces
and it didn't work. They they changed your contratvaluations, I
I people. Yeah, Like La lays this out specifically with
China to an excruciating degree, like it like in detail.

(02:28:48):
If you're really interested in this type of like climate
left authoritarianism. They call it climate moun in the book,
but you can call it climate climate Leninism, you can
call it whatever. But they lay out how it could
work and how use cases of it have not worked.
Um to a pretty pretty intense degree. If you're interested
in that, I would recommend reading the book Climate. Leviathan
definitely influenced a large portion of the writing for this show. Yeah,

(02:29:13):
and I mean to your point, I don't think that
this is the only trend I do. I agree with
you that out of like the conjuncture, there was this
um I think that a lot of the more like
establishment reformist aspects of the movement were discredited and that
pushed people in different radical directions, like one of which
very much is anarchism and libertarian socialism. I am seeing

(02:29:35):
a lot more faces that are interested in in in
those questions for sure. Uh. And that's kind of counter
to the trend that I was describing from the last
like five years of like, you know, people becoming more
disinterested because of the real or perceived lack of solutions. However,
I do think that it's important, and this is kind
of following on Chris's Climate Leninism point, to understand that
there's at least a counter trend where a lot of

(02:29:58):
people are have not only moved away from libertarian socialism,
have not only moved but they've also moved away from
democratic socialism. And if you follow that pattern, which is
a pattern that I at least have seen within the
d s A, within various trade unions, in a lot
of among a lot of like intelligencia type people like journalists, professors,
blah blah, you see a very common set of arguments.

(02:30:21):
And I think it's very clear that as the century
proceeds and the crises get worse and start killing like
even larger numbers of people than they already are, we're
going to see this argument a lot more. Um and
and the argument is something like this. I mean, there's
a quote from a tweet. Uh And and you know,
one could argue that the tweet doesn't matter, but you

(02:30:42):
are naive if you think this is the tweet climate
You are naive if you think climate change can ever
be solved without an authoritarian government at this point. That's
and that's that's the whole thing. So it's a it's
a nasty little tweet because it's ambiguous, right, it has
this like shocking and scandalous effects. You know, we need
authoritarianism to to to solve climate change. The scandalous you know,

(02:31:06):
bougois or whatever. But then it's like okay, wait, but
what do you mean by authoritarian? Am I just being
hysterical reactor. It's the same as saying you're naive if
you think that, um, climate change can be solved without
nuclear power, or climate change can be solved without really
big hammers, Like we have authoritarian governments, we have nuclear power,

(02:31:28):
we have really big hammers, and climate change does not
be solved been solved. Is it possible that any of
those things might be a part of a theoretical solution
that may happen someday, Yes, but it hasn't. And there's like,
if you're trying to say that authoritarian governments are better
at dealing with climate change than the governments that currently
dominate Number one, hell of a lot of authoritarian governments

(02:31:50):
are responsible for our current situation are climate change. Number
two the Soviet Union, which I suspect most of these
people see as a guiding light. Horrible for the vironment,
turned the largest body of water in Eurasia into a
poison lake. Yes, right, not not not good at the environment,
you know. And here's here's what's interesting about the thing.

(02:32:12):
To me. The other thing that it's doing is kind
of signaling that it's like patently ridiculous to oppose this
idea without specifying what the idea is like and like
in other words, authoritarianism like but like, I mean, let's
let's be blunt right, what they're implying as a Leninist
is the one party state, the secret police, press censorship,

(02:32:33):
in the command economy. So does that help you fight
climate cheese? That's actually an interesting and a kind of
like you know, distant five thousand foot view, you know,
from the God's eye view or whatever, like, uh, the
that's an interesting technical question. Do these institutions actually help
or hinder a response? But we're not even having that
conversation because instead it's this kind of underhanded attempt to

(02:32:54):
get you to think that. So again, does a tweet matter? Well,
I think a tweet matters if it comes from a
member of the National Political Committee of the d s A,
because at least ostensibly if d s A is, which
is who the person who did that tweet? Because at
least ostensibly, if d s A is a mass movement,
as it purports to be the mass movement of socialists
in the US, and you know, and and the National

(02:33:16):
Political Committee is ostensibly the leadership of the d s
which I personally don't believe, but that's certainly how they
think of themselves. Um. Then this indicates that the largest
most important socialist mass movement in the US, at least
self branded UH, has people in its leadership who believe
that the secret police might help in addressing climate change.

(02:33:39):
That's an interesting thing and it's also very disturbing. And
the thing is this, this person is not actually like important,
He's a symptom because this is something that's happening across
the board. And a more intellectually serious version of this
argument was put forward by the Marxist intellectual and historian

(02:34:00):
um a professor of human ecology called Andreas mom And
people who are really into like Mars Nerds stuff will
probably have heard, Yeah, what a very good book called
Fossil Capital. Everything he's written after Fossil Capital is a disaster.
I like some of the sabotage. It's it's I mean,
it's a little romantic and impractical. He wrote an ethical

(02:34:22):
discourse instead of a thing about like the risk of
eco sabotage, which is the actual important part, also the
degree to which it can matter because eco sabotage. There's
this idea on the left that like what we need
to do is be targeting fossil fuel infrastructure. And again
it's like what it's It's like what that ds A

(02:34:43):
dude said, Like, yeah, that could theoretically be a part
of but also process. If it's like nine dudes who
do it and then they go to prison or get shot,
well that doesn't really fix climate change. I think the book,
the book A Ministry with the Future really lays out
all the all kind of like the best case scenario

(02:35:03):
for all these types of things and how they can
work together to overall trend in this direction. Because yeah,
that type of like eco sabotage in conjunction with other
like political effects can be impactful on what things happen,
but it's won't necessarily be you know, it's not it's
not as simple as we would like it to be,
because yeah, it's it turns out a complex world has

(02:35:24):
complex consequences and complex and I think I think this
is you know, the trend that Mom was on, the
trend on that you know, there's there's a big environmental
authoritarian like thing among among liberals. This is a huge thing.
In political science was a big thing, and in ecological
studies that was essentially making a similar argument to to
what I'm almost making this like, well, okay, you need
some kind of air quotes vague authoritarianism to deal to

(02:35:48):
climate change, and you know, it's it's it's it's basically
this this attempt. There's like these people have have seen
climate change, but they have no act solution to it,
and so they wave their hands and pretend that like
this like you know, the state is going to descend
from this guy and save them, and it's not. And
I think that's you know, I think I think we're

(02:36:11):
we're sort of I don't know, I think as we
just I guess kind of wrap this up because we
unfortunately they're running out of time. But you know, this
like this exact moment like these like few weeks are
this moment of incredible like rupture on the left right,
because we we have we've had we've had in some
way social democrats be discredited by the fact that like
Corbin and Sanders both lost, right, their political project has

(02:36:33):
been discredited. Um, we've had a serious sort of anexist failures.
But then you know, and in the last couple of weeks, right,
it was all of the sort of big state like
authoritarian people like tied themselves through a bunch of imperialists,
and you know, May staked their whole entire politics off
of them being the anti imperialist class. And then you
know the state who's like a bunch of their press
people like literally work for right and who who they've

(02:36:56):
been arguing like is the counter imperialist powers does imperialism?
And so like, Yeah, I think we have this moment
where everything is in chaos, in which we have to
be the ones that that that have solutions or have
or have the tools to build them. And I think
that's why that's why this project is important, because that's

(02:37:17):
that's something that we need in this exact moment. Yeah,
I think there's a tremendous value in being humble about
seeking out solutions to these questions and not doing what
so many do on the left and pretend that their
tendency has an absolute answer, because all we have is theories.
And the reason I know that to a point of
certainty is that no one has solved any of these

(02:37:39):
problems yet absolutely, And and so there is a tremendous
degree of humility that people need to have in terms
of like, all right, well we are attempting to arrive
at the conclusions that can lead us to a better world,
as opposed to we are trying to force through this
thing that we know will work. Um, because you don't

(02:38:00):
you know, if you're a Marxist Leninist and you think
that we need climate MAU, you don't know that that
will work because it hasn't yet. And if you're an
anarchist who thinks the solution is bombing as many oil
refineries as you possibly can, well, you don't know that
you're ever going to get enough people on board for
that to mean anything. Um. And I think that there's

(02:38:20):
the conversations that we need to be having. I think
it's it's important to see them as conversations as opposed
to polemics aimed at just getting people in line behind
this shining vision of a clear set of steps. Um.
It's important to envision the end goal. I say that
a lot. You know, we need to be looking and
and accepting the possibility of a better future, but it's

(02:38:41):
important not to be dogmatic about the road to get
there because nobody, nobody really has a clear idea of
what that looks like. Yeah, So the piece ends up
and if you want to see the ending of it.
It'll it'll be up in um in sometime in the
next couple of weeks. But the basic gist of where
it goes is precisely to the practical question, right, instead

(02:39:03):
of like making these like polemical arguments that are rooted
more in like kind of like what tribe you've decided
to identify with within the broad family of socialism than
in like actually trying to like solve problems for the
people around you, right, or help contribute to the solutions.
Like it's actually what we want to ask is like,

(02:39:24):
if we have like the giant ecological crisis, Uh, how
do you how do you actually do it? Is it
by trying to force people from the top down to
do it as Um under his mom kind of draws
on the failed uh policies of war communism as and
inspiration for that. Or is it potentially by having like
democrat democratized institutions that incentivize people with carrots instead of sticks,

(02:39:46):
like Naomi Klein basically uncovered in want of her journalism
and this changes everything. So this is kind of like
the debate that we have to start having in order
to be able to together formulate these kinds of solutions. Yeah, alright,
well I think that's gonna do it for for us today. Um,
what do we what do we we do? You got

(02:40:07):
you guys gotta gotta gotta plug you want to throw up?
Throw up before we roll out? Yeah. If if you
want to follow us at at Strange Underscore Matters UM
on Twitter. UM. We also have a Facebook and you
can read our articles at Strange Matters dot co op,

(02:40:30):
which is our website. Uh. And if anything that you
read there that you've heard here inspires you at all,
please consider donating. We're gonna be in the next month
raising money, uh for for the magazine and we want
to pair writers above market rate because we think market
rates too low. So but in order to actually do that,
and none of the money is going to the editors
from the fundraisers, so if if, if we're going to

(02:40:50):
be able to do that, we've got to meet our
fundraising target. All right, Well support them and um, you know,
figure out how to save the world. It's it's up
to you. And I'm speaking to exactly one person right
now and no one else, but I'm not going to
be more specific. Welcome to it could happen here a

(02:41:23):
podcast about things following apart and putting it back together again.
And today we're doing one of our I guess increasingly
less rare but still sort of uncommon putting things back
together again episodes, and with me today is Ted men
from Amazonians United, to talk about different kinds of union
union workers organizing UM and the work that you all

(02:41:44):
have been doing. So Ted, welcome to the show. Thanks
for having me so all right, one of the things
that I wanted to talk about right off the bat
is that Amazonians United is running a very very different
kind of organization. And then a lot of the union
efforts that we've talked about on the show, and a
lot of the sort of like I guess, classical sort

(02:42:06):
of business union model stuff that that you know, we've
we've we've we you know, than than what you see
in the press, and then also that we've been covering.
So I wanted to start off by asking you about
solidarity unionism and how it sort of differs from other
kinds of union organizations and campaigns. Sure, I think it's

(02:42:28):
pretty simple. Actually, I think solidarity unionism is workers who
believe in ourselves, and by that I mean and it's
workers recognizing that we don't need someone to save us
UM when because we are the ones doing the work,
we know how to run our workplaces, We know how

(02:42:51):
to do it best, and we also deserve the wealth
that we've produce. So UM solidarity unionism to me is
UH building organization with each other, where the fabric of
our organization is our relationship and our solidarity as co

(02:43:17):
workers engaging in struggle against UM, bosses, managers, owners, UM, everyone.
That's that's telling us what to do while UH taking
the lion's share of the wealth that we create. UM.
And it's by uniting, coming together around issues that we

(02:43:39):
care about, taking direct action in the workplace, UM building
our confidence and our strength and our consciousness UM and
our organization. To me, a solidarity unioniszone UM. It is
distinctly different from business as unionism, which is the dominant

(02:44:02):
form mainstream unionism, you know, legalistic unionism, whatever you want
to call it, UM, that model that has been failing
for several decades. UM actually is predicated on a deep
distrust of workers, the disbelief that workers can organize ourselves,

(02:44:28):
run our own workplaces, represent ourselves, defend ourselves and each other. UM.
And in business union. I mean, you know, you you
see the ads when they're posting, uh for union staff, job,
come lead these workers, Come come join this union and lead.
You're not even a worker in the workplace. How are
you going to lead someone in there? Like you know,

(02:44:50):
you're you're a lawyer, you're you know, you have a
different professional expertise. You're not moving the packages with us
from inside, with from within the U, the warehouse, and
so um. Yeah, I think that's that's the main difference
to me of the model. Do you are you a worker?
Do you believe in workers? Do you trust and have

(02:45:12):
faith that workers we ourselves can build our own organization,
lead ourselves. Um? And um? And when or do you
think workers need to be led, need to be represented,
need to be told what to do? Um? Need to
pay you to go and say that? Um? And uh. Yeah.

(02:45:32):
I believe in workers almost. I'm a solidarity unionist. Yeah.
And I think we were talking a bit before the
show about this, and I think there's there's a lot
of aspects about this that are I think very powerful
in you know, in in in in secacy economy that
haven't been unionized. And I haven't our unions ever treated

(02:45:53):
from our people who are never sort of organized and
to begin with, and I think that's you know something
that there's there, there's the there's this problem that happens
like with with a lot of unions where you know,
you you you get you get this sort of beureacratic
structure that builds up and the bereacratic structure that builds
up like doesn't have doesn't necessarily have the same interests

(02:46:16):
as the people in the union. And that's a real problem.
And you get these entrenched like you know, you can
get these in trenched caucuses you control unions, and you
get this the sort of proliferation of of these people.
And I think this is this was part of why
a lot of the sort of the anti union techniques
that you saw in like the sort of anti union
persias in the eighties, I mean you've been seeing them

(02:46:37):
for a while. Like why they started working in the
eighties was that like you know, when when when when
someone like starts ranting about union bureaucrats right like they're
they're actually like there actually was a divide there, like
there there there was a sort of like I guess
like like there there was a sort of like a
kind of fundamental class difference, which I think has a

(02:46:57):
lot I mean, also has a lot to do with
you know, when when you get into your sort of
like more more revolutionary context that that has to do
with why a lot of unions when you know, France
is infamous for this, right Like, France has had these
giant like comunist trade unions and every time a revolution started,
the trade union just like sits there and does nothing.
And yeah, and you have to sort of ask yourself like, okay,
so why is this happening? And I think, yeah, soldier

(02:47:20):
to unionism, it has it has a lot of answers
to this sort of I guess you call it like that.
There's there's a there's a sort of like right wing
critique of unions that has to do with like, well, okay,
so we don't want workers to organize, We don't want
them to reflective power at all. But then there's also
you know, but but the reason that it works in
a lot of cases because it's able to tap into
a sort of like into these structural problems that a
lot of unions have. And I think so my understanding

(02:47:44):
of how yells organizing has been going and correct me
if I'm wrong that I've been interested in is that like,
unlike a lot of other campaigns that you've seen, even
specifically with Amazon, but like a lot of other the
sort of the campaigns that are getting a lot of
us like, you're not active, Like your goal isn't to
just get like recognition as a collected bargaining in it. Right.

(02:48:08):
That's another key part of our key difference between solidarity
unionism business unionism. Um. In business unionism, you're what defines
you as a union is whether you are legally recognized
by the state, by the n l R b um,
by the appointed government body. Yeah. Um. That is the

(02:48:34):
point at which the folks in these organizations like, are
we a union or are we not? Okay, let's let's
do an election. Let's follow all these rules that, by
the way, we're designed to demobilize us. Yeah, century ago.
But let's follow these rules. Let's try to fight in
the courts, uh, to be recognized as a union. And

(02:48:56):
then once we're a union, then we can fight for
a legal contract that has benefited a lot of people
in different ways. I'm not you know what I mean, Like,
but that approach is different than solidity unism where it's like,
we know our power is in the workplace, on the
shop floor, where our power is based on our unity

(02:49:17):
and numbers as co workers. We see this when we
walk out and within a month they give us a raise.
Along would it have taken to get a raise if
we went for an l ORB election. Yeah, what organization
are we even building in that way? And so um our.

(02:49:38):
Instead of seeking legal recognition and waging our uh uh
struggle against bosses in the courts, we are choosing to
wage engage in struggle in the shop floor where we
are the experts, where we have the power, where we

(02:49:59):
have the organis station, where we're doing the work, where
that is our home turf. Um. We have more power there, Like,
it makes more sense to build power where we have power,
not in the institutions that were specifically designed to disempower
us and give large employers to the the upper hand. Um.
All the different ways that they can manipulate how the

(02:50:22):
votes happen, what is considered part of the voting unit, um,
the contract negotiation process, I mean all of these legal hurdles.
I mean, for the vast majority of workers, you'll need
lawyers to be even understand how to engage in that world.
That's not our world. It was not built for us

(02:50:45):
to be in. It was built to control us. And
so um, it just doesn't make logical sense to try
to wage our struggle in that arena. We should be
in waging it in the play this is that we
work and so um. That Yeah, that's I think another
core UM principal solid or unism like build power where

(02:51:08):
we have it um and that's the shop for Yeah,
and I think, I mean that's something that I've seen
like in like when I was in college, there there
was a big grad student union organization campaign and it
kind of they had this huge problem which was that Okay,
well they were trying to do they were trying to
get a National Labor Relations Board like vote under Trump.

(02:51:29):
But they couldn't do it because if you know, because
because the National Labor Relations Board was controlled by just
like the even even by National Labor Relations Board standards
like like just unbelievably anti union, like viscerally anti worker forces.
It was like, well, if we try to get a vote,
like there's a chance they could just you know, like
literally destroy the right, like destroy the organizing rights of

(02:51:52):
all grad students of the country. And yeah, and you
get you get that with the Nissan election or something
like that. Yeah, yeah, and definitely delayed it. Yeah, and
it's it's you know, and yeah, I think this this
is a trap that like a lot of people, even
even people who are really highly organized, like get stuck
in where you know, and like eventually, uh, the grand

(02:52:14):
students just like essentially just started doing walkouts because that
was you know, that that was the thing they could
do when they start doing their own strikes, even til
they weren't like legally recognized, because that was the thing
that you could do to you know, actually fight in
a terrain that wasn't just inherently rigged against you. So okay,
so you've you've you've you've decided to take to take
a fight in the workplace, like on the shop floor,

(02:52:36):
where where you're where you're at your strongest. What does
that actually look like in terms of actions, in terms
of organization. Yeah, honestly, I think it's simpler and more rudimentary.
Um then one might think or that you might read

(02:52:57):
about and you know, I can that article or something analyzing.
I think it comes down to comes down to building community,
comes down to building culture and the principles of the
community and culture that you build together with their coworkers

(02:53:19):
is one where we value ourselves and each other. We
respect ourselves and each other, and that means that we
fight for what is fair in the workplace. That means
that we maintain integrity. Anytime a boss disrespects one of us,

(02:53:41):
we need to confront it. We we need to address it.
H if not immediately, uh soon after. In numbers, UM,
it means if we're getting overworked and underpaid, then we
need to strategize and figure out how do we how
do we come hell the employer to stop overworking and

(02:54:03):
underpaying us, How do we hit them in a place
that they are forced to respect and um as it
goes In the world we are today, it's always the numbers,
It's always the money, it's always the profit. So UM
what that means on the day to day, I mean,
m Amazon warehouses are a very isolating place. UM. Amazon

(02:54:26):
has basically uh gigified warehouse work. You know, it's like
the Uber for warehouse where you can pick up shifts,
you can you know, extra shifts, you can take uh
furlough days, you know, called them videos. UM many warehouses,
Like you're work the ten twelve hour shift and you're
for that entire time you're near one or two people max.

(02:54:48):
Because they're spaced out and it's loud, and there's machinery
and your packing boxes and and so UM. On top
of that, you know that every day dehumanizing. It's also um,
you're pushed to work faster and faster. UM. It's difficult
to have you know, deep human interaction when you're busting
your ass moving you know, thirty to forty five pound

(02:55:10):
packages as quickly as you can. UM. And so the
day to day of building and fighting in the workplace,
building community means uh. For example, every week we have
a pot luck during lunch, bring co workers together, new
coworkers that you know, someone could start last week. That's

(02:55:32):
something that we hear a lot. You know. Part of
the challenge, it's the turnover is so high? How can
you possibly organize the turnover was so high? Um. That
is a specific weapon that boss is used against us.
High turnover means what it means we frequently have new
coworkers harder to build relationship and organization. It means that
the job feels more precarious, so people are always uh

(02:55:55):
afraid that we'll lose our job. You know, we could
get fired. We could they could change uh, staffing numbers
that could close warehouses. It create you know, as a
tool higher turnover. They just they turn through workers. Okay,
who who's willing to do the most work for the
lowest pay and sacrifice the most of their body? Okay?
If if you can't handle it, then you quit. If

(02:56:17):
you can, then you stay in here. Okay, let's find
the workers in society that are most able to you know,
produce the most that so on and so forth and
so basic things you know, having every day. Uh. Sometimes
it's just like talking with your coworkers is something that
is that they try to keep you from doing in

(02:56:38):
the workplace, And by engaging conversation, you're already resisting that isolation,
already resisting. UM boss is trying to just control everything,
keep everyone divided. So weekly pot lunches, UM having meetings
inside or outside of the workplace, coming together. What are
the issues that we care about? UM? How do we

(02:56:59):
bring how do we build more unity around these issues
that we know many people care about. Isn't doing a
petition people sign on together? Are we delivering the petition
in the group. Um, if the management doesn't respond, it
doesn't give us a reasonable response. How do we escalate?
Do we need to walk out? Do we need to
take other action? Um? Any time we see a manager

(02:57:20):
disres disrespecting a coworker, UM, how do we post up
next to them, pull out a notepads, start taking notes?
Ask questions? UM, we're a witness, you know. How do
we defend each other in all of these basic ways?
How are we addressing um and being honest with ourselves
and each other of uh? Just the depth of disrespect
when they're waiting for us outside of the bathrooms to

(02:57:42):
write us up for time off task, when they're telling
us to work faster when you know we're already on
a ten hour shift, we're on our ten of the
ten hour shift. They send a bunch of people home
and are forcing us to finish all the work for
a small number of people. Do we continue putting up
with it? Or do we immediately walk out? Or do
we off with their co works about what we want
to do? Just being mindful of being honest about what

(02:58:07):
how we are being treated, what is fair, what is
not and taking the necessary action to UH demand the
the fairness, the respect that each of us deserve. I think,
like that's what the workplace struggle looks like. Um, I don't. Yeah,

(02:58:28):
And I think it comes down to building that community
with each other and then building the culture of not
putting up with bullshit, defending each other, looking out for
each other. Um, there's them, there's an US. UM. Make
sure you know inside you're on UM and you know.
I think that's the that's the foundation of it. Yeah.

(02:58:49):
I think that the aspect, especially of culture building is
really interesting to me because I think that's something that's
not really talked about much with with with the organizing.
It's both because you know, a lot of like a
lot of what is discussed with you know, it's it's
especially not in academic circles. When when when you're when

(02:59:10):
you're just you know, when when when you have people
writing about union organizing, and when even when sort of
like other union organizers are writing about unions, is that, Yeah,
you don't hear much about the cultural aspects, and you
don't hear much about just resisting the actual like psychological
degradation that you get. And that strikes me I think

(02:59:31):
also as as yeah, as as you've been saying something
that's that's very important not discussed enough as I mean
both says just something that that is a goal in itself,
like not having this sort of you know, not not
having the just sort of horrible, demeaning and abusive sort
of tyranny of the boss is just like existing as

(02:59:55):
this kind of like normal force and the But then
also like yeah that this destructly something that that is
really important for anyone who's who's thinking about organizing is
you know, getting getting people, getting people to organize around
just like how get get people to organize around just

(03:00:18):
the sort of like the psychological decordation, like I think
is really important because otherwise you know, you get you
can get you can just get these cultures where like
I mean, I remember I had a job where I
was in like we had a union, but like it
didn't I mean I was so I was I was
a temp workers where I wasn't in the union, like
they had a union, and it just sort of didn't
do anything, and no one like you and this this

(03:00:42):
is a real source that sort of righting resentment because
the union just didn't do anything, and then you know
everyone's getting treated terribly like by by the bosses and
by sort upper management and no one. But it never
even like it never really like just on a culture level,
never occurred to them to sort of like use the
union for that, because it's not really what the union
was there for. It was just the sort of like

(03:01:03):
it was just this thing that existed and like occasionally
when contracts came up, it would appear. And I guess,
on on on that note, one of the things I
was also wondering is what sort of so for for
for for people who are who are interested in their
own workplaces and starting doing this kind of organizing and
starting to sort of, i mean just fight back against

(03:01:23):
their bosses in ways that don't you know, either because
they don't want to or because they literally can't, which
I think is is true of a lot of people
like who who want to organize outside of the business
union model. How how do you how did you all
start organizing like this? And what what sort of immediate

(03:01:44):
lessons do you think people should should take away and
should sort of bring in bring into their own organizing
in the workplace. Yeah, um, I think of the base
of the is the UM I guess I mentioned something
like this earlier, but that we we can organize ourselves.

(03:02:06):
We can. You know, if you're talking if you have
two co workers that you're friends with, and UM, you
say like, hey, let's meet up and talk about what's
going on at work, you're starting to organize, you know. UM.
And I think part of part of the damage, part

(03:02:30):
of the harm that business unionism has done. And also
just I don't know, hierarchical organizing Umlinsky and organizing UM.
I think they're all part of uh sort of connected

(03:02:52):
school of thought where it's like organizing and you know,
building an union is something that like you need to
be like professor rolls to or you know, they're experts
at it U the experts, and then if you're not
an expert, then you need to consultant expert to figure
out how to do it. UM. And I think that's bullshit.
I think it's if you're a worker, then uh, you

(03:03:15):
can be a union organizer. If you're a worker and
you talk with you know, another worker about what's going
on in your workplace, like you're already starting to organize. UM.
Like I said earlier, if you're calling a meeting, if
you're you know, and and workers do this all the time,
confronting management about disrespect. You know, I think it's very

(03:03:36):
much more frequently on an individual basis. But it's a
matter of like connecting your issue with a couple other
coworkers and then figure out, Okay, well, um, what what's
our next step? But we need more numbers? How do
we you know, how do we build more numbers? Uh?
If each of us can invite one more person, that
six people, if you know, if the six of us
can are starting a petition, we could probably get you know,

(03:03:59):
signature a fifty or sixty, you know, like it's it's
step by step and saying if we want to build organization,
we can do it from the bottom up. We can
start it um and we can figure this out. I mean,
every even within the same company, even within the same
company in the same city there you know, I work

(03:04:21):
at UM a delivery station, Engage Park, other delivery stations
in the city of Chicago have a completely different culture,
you know, the neighborhood that it's in the workers that
are the bosses, you know, And so even in the
same company, the same type of workplace in the same city,

(03:04:44):
it's gonna be a different story for how that workplace
is gonna you know, get united, come together, UM, figure
things out, build organization, and it's just anyone there the
is thinking about that. That that kind of just begins

(03:05:05):
the process of putting together the basics. All right, we
need to start building up some numbers. We need to
start having, you know, addressing some issues that people care about.
And there's always i mean, there's always the you know,
overworked and underpaid and that's gonna exist everywhere. You can
always go after those issues, but frequently they're small ones.
Like our first issue was a water petition uh or
or or or at was access to water UM, and

(03:05:28):
this is how we started as an organization UM. Basically,
they were taking away bottled water. They said we were
leaving around too much garbage. They're saying bottled water is
only there for the summer, and now that's not the summer.
That whatever. They're trying to save a few dollars a
day on bottled water to make us you know, work
without it UM, and we said that's fucked up. We're

(03:05:51):
doing warehouse work like this, hard manual labor, and it's
hot in here. We need a bottle water. It's you know,
not just that broken on filtered fountain across the warehouse
that you can't even get to while you're working. Um.
And so, uh, just a few of us that we're
talking at break It was like, okay, well there's six
of us here. Well we're kind of you know, this

(03:06:13):
is the this is the break room at work. They're
like managers walking around their cameras in here, like, let's
meet outside, uh and figure this out. UM. So you know,
we we met at a at a Crispy Cream down
on like ninety third um, and uh we just basically
said like, well, how are we gonna get this water?
We've been asking management? Uh, you know they've given us

(03:06:35):
the same reasons. We need to do something bigger that
that they can't ignore. Um, how about a petition? And
so we just drafted it. The six of us we
drafted it. We went around. We got hundred fifty signatures
I think from our co workers are just like basic commands.
We need bottled water stocked every day. They need to
be you know, filters need to be clean. We need
to get a be able to take a break to

(03:06:56):
get this water. Um. And we delivered the hundred fifty
signatures to management. UM. I think it was within thirty
or forty minutes, they drove to a grocery store, bought
you know, went to the nearest pizza, bought every case
a bottle. Why they have brought it and passed it
out to everyone. We're like, oh, okay, like that was
you know, people like that's just hey, we gotta do

(03:07:17):
a petition for this thing. We gotta do, you know
what we should? Probably it was that I don't want
to say easy, because it's definitely not easy to like,
but the steps, the step by step of like how
do you begin, how do you get something started? How
do you start building some immunity? Um? These are steps

(03:07:38):
that we have taken. These are you know, what we
think is can be applicable UM with everyone's own kind
of personal tweaks based on you know, your own workplace. UM,
to start getting something going from more coworkers, to start realizing,
oh yeah, like we should be in more control of

(03:07:58):
what's happening around here because we're the ones that are
doing all the work, were the ones that are suffering
the most from it in our bodies getting ground down
from doing it, And so um, yeah, I think that
I think I look back to a previous question to
but like how we started, how you engage in the
struggle and just like what that looks like for building

(03:08:19):
building something up from nothing to something like that's why
that's what we you know what I mean, that's what
we did. Yeah, from what I've seen, you all have
been extremely effective like at at getting management to recognize it,
but essentially getting them to like a seed to your
demands because like this, this this kind of organizing like

(03:08:41):
so solid you need what what I'm trying to say,
this is all the area to unist works like it's
not like like and you know and yeah, it's it's
a thing. I think one of one of the things
you're talking about it is like, yeah, it's like when
like when you win even on something fairly small, right,
and you can show people that this works and that
like you know, if if, if, if you actually come

(03:09:03):
together on something, you can force management to do stuff
like I think that also become becomes an important sort
of like I don't know if catalyst is the right word,
but it becomes it becomes becomes an engine that like
feeds itself definitely, I mean, especially for a big company

(03:09:24):
like Amazon, like I think the most common perspective at
least at the start is like, this is such a
big company, Like, what could we possibly do? They have
a thousand warehouses, like what you know, they could choose
to close one and open another one, you know, they
do this, or they could suddenly you know and with

(03:09:44):
two weeks notice like change the schedule from an evening
time to overnight time, which is what they did to us. Basically, Um,
what can we possibly do? And so you know, but
I think it's like the moment, it's like there's a
a lift, uh what do you call like the watershed
a point, like the moment you kind of take that

(03:10:06):
first collective action and then get what you want. Um.
It's like, oh wait, it's not as like within this
space like we can actually make our lives a lot
better pretty quickly. Yeah, we just come together and do
it ourselves and recognize the power that we have. UM.

(03:10:26):
And I think it's like mhm. That's one of the
reasons why it works so well is because it is
different from the mainstream approach, which UM bosses and these

(03:10:47):
companies understand very well and can easily maneuver around, such as,
oh if we do if if one of our managers
does something wrong, what will happen next is will receive
one of our lawyers, will receive a grievance from one
of their representative lawyers, and you know, this business union,
we'll have this many months respond and then we can
do this and then you know, uh, we'll do this

(03:11:07):
paperwork and have this legal back and forth and then
maybe we'll address this issue six to twelve months down
the line. UM, no disruption, you know, nothing to worry about. UM,
Let the bosses run amuck and we'll get a six
to twelve month ad start to you know, and maybe
get a slap on the wrist and a fixed wherever
you need to or pay a small fine. UM as
opposed to that's business unions, like as opposed to Southern unism,

(03:11:30):
where it's like they just disrespected us in a way
that like we're not trying to put up with, Like
we are hurting. We can't even finish the shift without
hurting ourselves more. We're just gonna group up the walk
out right now. UM, they're gonna figure out, they're gonna
have to figure out how to get the rest of
these packages out without us. UM. And when we come

(03:11:51):
back tomorrow, Uh, we'll see, we'll see if they want
to keep treating us the same way. UM. And so
it's like to me, you know, we we've had basic
basic management confrontations where either immediately uh you know, they
were understaffing and we grouped up rolled into office just
like with seven of us, not even like the whole shift, Um,

(03:12:13):
seven out of fifty people rolling off and said you
have too few people on the lines. You you need
an add extra person. We've been asking you have it. Um,
We've folded our arms. Within five minutes, they send an
extra person over there, they're working the rest of the the shift. UM.
In the in the business union approach, like I don't
even know, like how you followed you know, understaffing grievance,

(03:12:33):
Like what are the details? How does that happen? Does
a union representative have to be contacted and then negotiate
in some way? Um like that, Like let's just address
this right now and fix it. UM. I don't want
to wait for some outside activity. Let's just improve our
working conditions right now, like confronting and addressing it. UM.

(03:12:53):
I think it just you know that's something that Um,
the bosses are less, it's less predictable for them, it's
less in their control, it's less in their wheelhouse. Um,
and I think that's a prey reason why it works better. Yeah,
And I think one of one of the things the
thing this reminds me of. It reminds me of the
kind of stuff that unions used to do when they

(03:13:14):
were strong, Like it reminds me of like, yeah, you're
you're like c I O like sit down, strike right,
it's like, well, okay, if if the manager is something
we didn't we don't like so and blows a whistle,
everyone sits down, and like it's like it's that that
kind of not just sort of like way to go
to the legal channels, but just just like I immediately
taking action is like it's it's something that it's like

(03:13:35):
it's it's something that works, and it's you know, like
that that's that's the kind of stuff that like build
you built the original like labor movement. And it's really
interesting to me that, like because because I think there's
a lot of like I think a lot of people
look back at that era sort of like nostalgically and
go like, well, Okay, if unions were stronger, we could
do this, but like that's not really true. You you
can't actually just like like you can do the same

(03:13:57):
things that like, you know, you're like nineteen three c
I O was doing like and and and if you
know and you don't you don't need the kind of
institutional backing that that those people had. If if like
if if you're organized enough in your in your specific location,
I think that's a really interesting I don't know, I'm
curious if you agree with us. It seems like it's
skord of interesting lesson about like what happens to the

(03:14:20):
labor movement, where like the more the more you get
into this sort of like okay, well the the union
is now two lawyers sitting down with each other, right
the what what you're doing basically is and then like
this is this is this is explicitly what the National
Labor Relations Act was, right Like it was an attempt
to get labor, labor and capital sit down at the

(03:14:40):
table and stop fighting so that they could like you know,
basically Selft production could go on. And like some sometimes
sometimes that that you know, sometimes I favor the union. Right,
sometimes you'd have the president be like like the actual
like US president would be like, okay, you come you
like steal company. You have to like give workers what
they're asking for because our steel production shut down, right,
But like you know, the problem with that is that

(03:15:02):
it's based on like it's based on at all costs
trying to sort of preserve like it's based on cost
like trying to preserve the labor peace. And you know,
I mean there's reasons for that too, Like yeah, like
I'm not gonna like like obviously there's there's any time
you take a direct action, there's a risk and yeah,
like I'm not gonna like, you know, I'm not gonna

(03:15:23):
be like like it's it's hard to be really mad
at people who don't want to go on strike because
they don't like because you know, how how am I
going to defeat my family? Etcetera, etcetera. But like you know,
bringing like having that kind of militancy in the workplace,
just you know, without without any kind of formal recognition,

(03:15:45):
I think is an extremely powerful tactic. And is I
mean literally how the original labor movement like got built.
It's difficult, though, and it can be yeah, yeah, you know,
and it's like I think you you posed kind of
the question or or or kind of questioning the idea

(03:16:07):
like where did how did the labor movement get to
where it's at if the origins were more conscious Um,
in the ways that you've been describing UM, I think that. UM.
I mean it's it's definitely you know, the risk is

(03:16:29):
always there. You're always confronting the power. I mean in
the workplace when it comes down to it, like obviously
the power dynamics shift, and it's more complex than you know,
Bosses have more power than workers unless workers organized and
workers have more power than bosses. That is true. And
also for example, on the day to day, you know,

(03:16:52):
the boss can fire anyone and then you're you know,
however you end up dealing with it. Uh, you know,
you could be out anywhere between two or twenty paychecks
until something is resolved legally or even through direct Actually
there's obviously very directly oppressive power dynamic there. UM. And

(03:17:20):
I think that UM. To speak truth to power, to
directly confronted UM. Of course, it's frightening. I mean I
would be lying if you know, like I'm I'm you know,
talking on this on this podcast about doing this and yeah,
we're doing this, and like you know, I'm not gonna

(03:17:41):
pretend that like when we were even when we were
in a forty person mass, you know, confronting management, addressing
everyone together. It's still like, you know, there's there's there's
still this power dynamic here and we're punching up like
it's a punch, but like we're punging up to someone
that's like a bigger, heavier uh um adversary. And so

(03:18:02):
it's like they could swing back to like you gotta
gotta be ready to and so UM. I think that
what I'm describing on a kind of like face to
face interpersonal, that moment in the workplace, I think on
a broader scale also exists where it's like waging an

(03:18:23):
extended you know, organizing struggle to be fighting this fight
millions of times in many different ways and then continually
trying to bring people together. You know, people move on
because everything that's happening in life. They got evicted from
their place, so they had to move to a different
place far away. Okay, suddenly they had to leave a job,

(03:18:43):
and they were someone that was contributing a lot to
the organizing. Something happened. Someone has a family member that
uh you know that thing you need to spend a
little bit more time with. Um. Everything that's happening. Everything
that's making you know, reducing our time as working people
to take care of ourselves and each other, like all
of this. We're fighting against all of this, and um,

(03:19:09):
they're definitely ups and downs. They're definitely times it was
like thing like where you know, and then it seems
I get times, Uh, all of the struggles and life
like it's like you take like two steps forward and
then two steps backwards. Get that, and so you know,
there's definitely a difficult reality permeating everything. You know, all

(03:19:32):
of the organizing winds, the advents that we're talking about.
We need to be fully honest about that and also
recognize that there's still like nothing more. There's like nothing
more beautiful powerful, There's there's no there's nothing that feels
better than that moment when you when the power dynamic

(03:19:55):
was like this and you pull something off and it's
like like, oh, like you you just did what we
wanted you know and more and then now like you're
being real careful with us, like we we change things here,
like our lives are better concretely, um, and we made
it happen, and uh, you know, I think those are

(03:20:18):
like celebrating the winds and like taking joy, not always
thinking so far, Okay, we've got more to go. Yeah,
they're always there's always more that um, we can and
have to be building. And let's make sure that we're
taking the time to recognize, um and celebrate each of
the steps that we are UM advancing, so that you know,

(03:20:42):
we we don't get lost in you know, assuming in
the cycle of like seeking permanent infinite growth and organizing
and being constantly stressed out about it, rather than like
taking those breathers, taking those moments. Okay, like let's take
this and strive, let's do this sustainable, let's not burn out. UM.
You know, I think that's all part of figuring out

(03:21:04):
how to how to how to make it happen. Yeah,
And I think that's that's an important I think that
that's an important thing to understand with any kind of organizing,
which is that like yeah, if if if you like
if if if if, there's never sort of a moment
in which you're reflecting on or sort of or just
celebrating like that the goals that you've actually accomplished, Right,

(03:21:27):
you're just going to sort of be endlessly bashing your
head against the wall. And you know that this is
this is like, yeah, I mean this is this is
sort of a burnout machine. This is a a way
that you know, it's something that also just sort of
feeds despair, which is that yeah, like you know, like yeah, okay,
your your victory is a small victory, but it is
a real one. And that's that's something that even in

(03:21:50):
the face of sort of like the Cyclopean horror of
like just the world that we're living in, like no,
your your small victories dude lead up to bigger ones
and yeah, and you know, and getting people to lose
sight of that is a like it's it's in made
your way. The system is held together by just sort
of like manufacturing hopelessness, even when there there there are

(03:22:12):
reasons for hoping, there are reasons to sort of look
at what you've done and go, hey, we we won
this thing. Definitely, Yeah, I think that's a I guess
unexpectedly cheery for this show. I know, to end on
do you have anything else? Yeah, I mean I think

(03:22:34):
we touched on a lot um. I guess I have
a usual pits or some version of it um, But
I think um, maybe something to bring together different elements
that we touched on and bringing some of the sheery,

(03:22:58):
hopefulness and all so put out some encouragement too. I
think now is a time where there's a whole lot
of uncertainty and I'm uh you know, definitely and a
global week to week or year to year scale, but
also on an individual level. I think a lot of
individuals right now, UM likely those that are listening UM,

(03:23:21):
that that end up listening to this or um those
that are like seeing what's happening around the worlds like,
what is my role in all of this? What am
I trying to do? Different people are joining different organizations
and and and trying to figure out how they should
be living their lives, what the what principles they should
be living out, how they should be applying themselves to
for example, UM, combat and dismantle UM, I don't know,

(03:23:47):
uh capitalism and and and uh you know, the prison
industrial complex and reverse climate destruction and find fascism and
everything all of examples existential threats that we face. It's like, what,
you know, what is my role? And I think, UM,
if if you at all have the capacity and curiosity,

(03:24:18):
UM two, engage in some of this deep work yourself
for building community relationships, culture among UM. You know, just
with workers, build building your own organization, building your own
acts of resistance, building your own forms of of of

(03:24:38):
you know, own forms of reclaiming your time and and
minds and bodies, and build something beautiful that can you know,
be part of a broader movement that that you know,
lifts up working people, that kind of gets back what
we are building and what we what we deserve. UM.
You know, think about think about the logistics and the

(03:25:00):
three think about warehouse work, UM, think about joining in
UM and UH you know it's uh, it's hard work.
It's hard manual labor, it's hard mental and emotional work. UM.
But I think this is the future of what the winning,

(03:25:24):
fighting uh successful labor movement UM will need. UM. And
I think many people engaging and building more genuine, more
worker focus, worker centered, worker run UH solidarity unions of
our own democratic horizontal bottom up UM. I think building

(03:25:48):
this way and connecting with each other, I think this
is the way forward. I think this is the examples
that we need. We need more people engaging in this work.
We need more uh, more of that tension, energy and focus,
Like how do we build the real stuff? UM, that's
gonna be the powerful organizational influence to transform society and

(03:26:11):
and avert these forms of extinction and continued extraction, exploitation,
oppression of all of us. UM, join us, Join, join
the struggle, get get some of these jobs. Talk to
your co workers, build something that. It's really that simple. UM.

(03:26:31):
And uh, yeah, that's my that's my every day pitch. UM. So,
if if people want to find Amazonians United specifically, where
where where can they find y'all? UM? So in Chicago.
So Amazonians United Chicago Land UM is our name. We

(03:26:53):
have a Facebook page, we have a Twitter. UM. Those
are probably where we're most active, UM, and where you
can follow and get into contact with us. Tweet out us,
message us on Facebook. UM. If you're really so inclined, UM,
you can email us at a you Chicago land at

(03:27:15):
gmail dot com. UM. But otherwise, yeah, just look up,
you know, follow our social media. You'll see what we
post occasionally about what's going on. UM, and uh, you know,
feel free to reach out, get into contact, ask any
questions you might have, UM, and you know, let's connect,
let's build community. Yeah, and that's that's a Chicagoland at

(03:27:37):
a Chicago Land on Twitter. By the way, yeah. Um yeah,
sweet Ted, thank you, thank you so thank you so
much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah,
that's really great. Um yeah, if you want to find
us at you can find us at Happened here a
pod on Twitter, Instagram and coos on media in the

(03:28:00):
same places. Um yeah, go go go work nice with
your coworkers, go do cool things, go be do all
a better place. Yes, yes, yes, sure, um yeah, thank you,
thank you, arned, arned me arties. This is me doing

(03:28:32):
a priorate voice, which is kind of a bad, bad
Irish voice. That's enough. That's enough of that. Um, hi,
welcome to take it oppen here in the show where
we're talking about things that could possibly happen and or
are happening, and go your hartsed l D. I'm Carrison.
Welcome to this tech centric episode. This is very exciting

(03:28:55):
with me, is Chris to help us discuss libraries and
a racy argent brain and and pay walls and all
this all this fun stuff. So yeah, we're talking about
kind of free access to information and uh, I don't know,
like I really like libraries and I think a library

(03:29:15):
based economy would be pretty cool. Yeah, you know, libraries
for everything. Uh, food libraries you to take food, need
a deposit compost um with the decent, decent system. Got
the tool libraries so you can get you know, your
angle grinders for taking apart in federal fences. You can
get your you know, soldering irons for building your f

(03:29:37):
GC nines, you know, all all of all of the
basic stuff. And I guess book libraries are cool too, um,
But we already have those, and we're gonna be We're
gonna be talking with them a little bit. Where are
we having a discussion on pay walls, piracy, ar and
uh and how access to information is actually good? Um,
contrary to what many people want to tell you. Yeah,

(03:29:58):
I know though. Yeah. As a as the Internet became
easier to access and information flow accelerated, there's been kind
of questions and speculation on how physical book libraries will
fit into our increasingly digital media landscape. Now, it's important

(03:30:18):
to mention that the library is also one of the
main ways for lower income people to access the internet
UM with their you know collection of free to use
computers as well as you know, a decent WiFi connection UM.
And many many libraries also are expanding their scope to
include stuff like maker spaces as well as you know,
their printers and standard kind of office supplies. So libraries

(03:30:41):
are already kind of beyond just places to get printed media.
But of course it is that is kind of their
one that has been their main their main premise. But
you know, they've been, they've been including stuff regarding e books,
computer use, WiFi access, all the stuff has been a
part of libraries for like the past twenty years. Of Yeah,
like it's it's not. It's not. It's not. It's not.

(03:31:03):
It's not a new thing. But I think when when
people think of libraries, we just think of books, are
newspapers and stuff, but it is, it is definitely more
than that. Because yeah, obviously physical libraries are mostly known
for printing materials, and because we'll be talking about paywalls
and piracy are um and and fears that access to
free content will negatively impact creator's ability to make such content,

(03:31:25):
I figured let's start by talking about book libraries, since
they're one of the oldest examples of providing information for free.
So based on kind of surveys and data collected from
you from library users across the country, it would seem
that libraries and loaned e books are actually a very
powerful economic engine for the book business. Now, yes, libraries

(03:31:46):
do have special deals to buy the books that you
have in stock. Sometimes they're donated. But even beyond that fact,
like library users, like the fact that libraries exist for
the users in and of themselves, increase book sales. Um,
it's it's a it's it's pretty fun. So even as
far back as there's been studies that show that libraries

(03:32:08):
do increase book sales. Now, yes, this is this is
this is a capitalist argument. But sometimes when arguing with
let's you know, let's call them normies, Um, you can
convince them to agree with a lot of kind of
like anarchy leaning improvements to the world by carefully using
their own rhetoric against them. Right, this is this is
like the same thing with the giving out free drugs

(03:32:28):
and having safe drug in in like intake sites, and
giving your houses to homeless people, you know, all all
the type of stuff. You know, all of those things
are cheaper for the taxpayers than what we're currently doing
with how we use emergencies, like how for how we
use emergency services spending. So, yes, it's a capitalist argument,
but you can still kind of you know, paint someone
into a corner to agree that like actual good improvements

(03:32:53):
by using hey, this is actually cheaper, you know that
that type of argument. So yeah, libraries, they do increase
book sales, so that is mostly cool. There is there
was a study that shows around this is studying around
showed that library users report purchasing books by an author
that they were introduced to through the library system, which

(03:33:13):
debunks the myth that want a library bias books the
publisher will lose future sales. Um. Instead, it confirms that
the public library does not only incubate and support literacy
as it's you know, generally understood in our culture, but
it's also an active partner with the publishing industry for
building up the book market and also including in that
is the ever growing e book market, which I don't

(03:33:36):
really like the books for reasons will kind of discuss
in a bit for how I kind of have an
aversion to the idea of like digital ownership, But the
books are undeniably a very growing industry that also you know,
does does support writers in a lot of ways. Um.
But I think physical books are a lot cooler and
more reliable. They are, as you can tell by my

(03:33:59):
very nice physical book collection behind me, which you cannot
listen to because this is a podcast and you can't
listen with your ears unless you're on a lot of drugs,
which good luck hearing the books behind me. People who
listen to Yeah you too, but yeah, I'm not. I'm
not talking about them. Um, this is an anti people
who have jug induced cynthesia podcast. Now, Lucky Bastard's gonna

(03:34:24):
get canceled. Oh yeah, that's what's gonna get me after all. Well,
bleep that I can't belave you said that? Whoa Chris
just said one of the just one of the most,
one of the most one of the most horrible authors
that I would never be caught dead reading any of
their books. Um anyway. Ah So, the idea that like

(03:34:50):
piracy and free information will like tank creative industries, and
you know, the idea that you know, just having access
to free version of media will hurt the ability to
make more of the media is definitely proven wrong simply
by the modern existence and popularity of nume uh in

(03:35:10):
the United States, because we would not have anime Animal
would not be what it is today without piracy. Uh
and uh because in the in the specifically like two
thousands late nineties, the piracy of anime became you know,
big massive reason why it is the cultural jugg or
not that it is. Today over half of nime related
sales revenue comes from overseas, not not Japan, it comes

(03:35:34):
from places like the States. Yeah, and you know, and
it's also I think worth mentioning here, Like it wasn't
even just that they were like pirating the show, right,
they were pirating they were getting a worse version of it,
oh because like you know, yeah, terrible resolutions like I
mean literally like VCRs that people had figured out how
to like right like get subtitles on. Like these versions

(03:35:58):
of it are terrible. The translations are awful, and it's
still just like absolutely like just catapulted anime from like
an incredibly fringe thing for weirdos to a thing that
is also still for weirdos, but it's still mainstream. Yeah,
I'm gonna I'm gonna take take this opportunity to plug
our future episode just dissecting the politics of attack on

(03:36:19):
tited dot dot dot do it's coming folks and strap
in so yes, what not would not be the thing
is today without without without privacy. And again but the
majority of of sales revenue comes from not Japan. So yeah,
that's that's a pretty pretty pretty clear. So the discovery

(03:36:43):
of new books and authors through the library system UM
is definitely searching right now, actually specifically due to e
books and audio books being available online anytime, well like
via library means. So there's like, you know, there's there's
ways you can access you can quote unquote sorrow these
types of things via via the library systems, despite them

(03:37:04):
being like digital media, which again I prefer physical, but
that's that's something we'll talk about later. So even even
while lib visits to libraries and like physical bookstores, a
pommeted during COVID nineteen digital library usage sword, which is
you know that that that that that that tracks UM,
more than four hundred and thirty million titles were borrowed

(03:37:25):
from the Overdrive library platform in alone, and it would
you know, you could you could assume that this would
cause a drop in the purchasing of books during the
same period, but the opposite is true. Actually, the overall
purchasing of books also rose in twenty including an eight
percent lift in these sales of print books. Despite a

(03:37:47):
lot of people being out of jobs, out of work,
you know that turns out people are boards. They're gonna
spend money on books because books are cool, and even
when they have access to library stuff, they still buy books.
It's a it's a it's a simple truth that the
library patrons are usually also book buyers. It's it's me.
I am literally surrounded by books on all sides that

(03:38:09):
they have me surrounded. I have no escape. And this
is what happens when you grow up in a library.
I mean I also grew up in a library. Mean
I was, I was homeschooled. I a library. To my
to to my left, I have books on urban exploration
and Lemony Snicket. My right, I have books on alchemy.
Behind me, I have books which I should I'll not
name um. And behind me I have a massive techo

(03:38:32):
comic books of Yeah, I have usually surrounded by books.
It's the books are great and you you have them
unless they burn up. You're gonna have them, no matter
whether the Internet goes out, whether whether an online provider
shuts down, You're gonna you're gonna have physical books. They
are they are, they are pretty, they're pretty cool. So
in libraries, and like the library system offers a really

(03:38:54):
great way to discover new books, new series, new genres,
or new authors, but for deciding whether to permanently purchase
those titles. So it's it's this isn't just like an
assumption used to hype up the idea of a library.
But this has been proven by lots of studies, like
the why I mentioned a few minutes ago from two
US and eleven. Also there was the Panorama Projects Immersive

(03:39:15):
Media and Books Consumer Survey which is a way too
long with a title real Mouthful, which found that one
third of responders bought a book that they discovered through
the library in So it turns out you you discover
a book, you turn it and you're like, hey, that
book actually pretty good. I'll just buy a copy myself.
I did that. I still do that all the time.

(03:39:37):
It's ah, yeah, it's it's it's it's it's a thing.
So why I own all my Star Wars books? This
is why I have a beautiful copy of Splinter in
the Mind's Eye, which I am very curious to see
who will get that joke. I was trying. I was
trying to think of the worst Star worst book that
I have, and then you said that, I'm like, I

(03:39:57):
can't I think actually have that. Well, there you go,
there's there's two. There's two for you. Uh yeah. So
in our kind of in our life technology driven world
of like, you know, wanting things very quickly, you know,
instant instant gratification. UM. Library users are no different. Right,

(03:40:18):
they still have that instant gratification drive, and many times
they will want a specific a book and they'll be
happy to pay for it instead of waiting for at
the library. Right, you can put a book on hold,
await a month, or you can buy it for ten bucks,
and oftentimes people will buy the book because we want
things quickly. It's according to the same Panorama Project Immersive
the Media and Books consumer survey, about of respondents said

(03:40:43):
that they just bought books rather than waiting for them
if they are unavailable from from the library at the time. So,
and it's it's it's a great system. Like libraries are
also frequently used just as like a really good browsing tool. Uh.
You know, if you're unsure what you want to read next,
you can go to the library look at stuff and
to be like, okay, this is what I'm interested in,

(03:41:04):
and then purchase it online or in person at a
later date. And it's not just it's not not not
not just physical books. Library users are also are also
driving the purchase e books and physical books um and
audio books. Audiobooks have been actually very big at library.
I used to listen to a lot of audio books
actually from the library because I would get c d

(03:41:26):
s back when those great for road trips, back in
the oldie days, when you had a c D I
say with my gen z uh um outlook Yes, uh
c d s classic classic. According to the Audio Publishers
Association also known as the a P A just acronym,

(03:41:49):
daily audiobo consumption has grown seventy one since, which is
not surprising me. Like there's there's there's stuff like Audible
and you know, big big platforms that are are making
high quality audiobook content. Uh, but that's that's that's a
lot um alone. Audio book a revenue grew by even

(03:42:11):
even though the number of people who were commuting plummeted,
right because a lot of people listen to audiobooks while
like driving to work. So the number of you know,
of commuting dropped in because there was this plague. I'm
not sure if you've heard about that, but they still
that's true they're pretending it's not real. But if yeah,
if if if, if you look at most if you

(03:42:32):
look at you know, the the audiobook revenue, it grew
despite their being much less much less um much less
work commuting. And that was the eighth straight year of
double of double digit growth in the audio book revenue sector.
And it aligns with other kind of digital library usage statistics.
So yeah, like libraries and booksellers, will they work in tandem.

(03:42:57):
They they library's drive interest or content both physical and digital.
You know, rising tide races, all all of those floaty
things on the water. Um as the saying goes are
it's a piracy joke, everybody. Yeah. Over Drive has found
that when a reader uses one or more digital library

(03:43:19):
apps like a Libby I've never heard of until I
had to research on this podcast, but once you if
you use more than one one or more digit digital
library apps you're sixty, you are more likely to increase
your book consumption year over year versus people who do not.
So yeah, it turns out when you read more books,
you want to read more books because it's fun. It's fun.

(03:43:41):
So instead of instead of reading a book, I'm going
to give our audio listeners an opportunity right now to
listen to this carefully curated selection of ads unless they're
by like, I don't know, the National Guard or whatever.
So here you go, here's here's some ads, and we
are back. What a lovely, lovely collection of audio treats
to tickle your ears. Okay, okay, you're god speaking speaking

(03:44:08):
of tickling your ears. Sonic the Hedgehog. So a lot
of a lot of the reasons why we're gonna so
this this, this will make sense, I promise. Um, we're
about to talk about fly genetics, ssh Sonic Hedgehog. We're
talking about how like when people are allowed to like

(03:44:30):
do piracy and allowed to do like their own things
with media and actually boosts the overall kind of like
the presence of the franchise. Right, So, Sonic the Hedgehog
would not be a current cultural steak if it wasn't
for fan culture and the use of like fan games
and fan media related to Sonic. So the same thing
with like anime, right, Um, you know, Sonic Sonic fan games,

(03:44:52):
which were allowed to be existed for years, which they
get encouraged, are the only reason why there's a good
Sonic Games right now, Like Sonic Mania, which were just
they just hired people who made fan game. Um, the
person who redesigned Sonic the Hedgehog for the movie what
used to make Sonic fan comics and then got hired
to make the actual official Sonic comics. Then they got
hired to fix them. They got hired to fix the

(03:45:13):
horrible movie design. So yeah, say, it has been very
good about like not being horrible about like copyright stuff
and trademark stuff. They've like really encouraged it because it
turns out when you when you yourself don't make good games,
you need to rely on fans to actually make the
good games. So we get so that's how you get
beautiful creations like the Sonic Dreams Collection, which is a heartwarming,

(03:45:37):
nostalgic look at Sonic through the Ages um, and other
great games like Sonic Mania, which so we can compare
this to like a Nintendo who unfortunately makes good games um,
but also hates when fans make games or do like
emulation or any like ports. They will clamp down on
that so fast. If you ever emulate a Nintendo game,

(03:46:00):
you know, watch watch your back. There will be there
will be men in black students following you around just
like to understanding of like how far this goes? Right,
So Super Smash Bros And Bilet this game is like
maybe older than Garrison. It is. I think I actually
don't know what that trade, but yeah, literally old and Garrison. Right,
this game has a still still to this day, Like

(03:46:22):
copies of this game are extremely expensive because there's an
enormous professional scene around it. Uh. Nintendo like basically was
working to actively smash them because they were they were
playing a yeah yeah, yeah, because they because they were
playing on like an emulated like they're playing an emulated
version of it for tournaments because it's emulated software. Yeah yeah.

(03:46:43):
And Nintendo again, who is literally getting like millions of
views of completely free good publicity, was like, no, we
hate you. Nintendo will like this when people use they're
they're like there their content and stuff in ways that
are not not not afficill and because they make decent games,
they can actually get away with that, um sega, let's

(03:47:05):
not make decent games that questioning. So they have to
rely on fans doing that. But yeah, that's the reason
why Sonic is still a thing, just because fans have
have been able to you know, through through piracy, through
emulation through creating, through ucing like Sonic code to code
their own games all stuff. As is the reason why
that's still like a cultural staple. That is releasing a
new movie next month. But I'm very excited about I'm

(03:47:27):
very excited about some Sonic that he had hug too.
It's gonna be, It's gonna be. I'm thinking, I'm thinking
it could we could finally clamp down on the video
game Oscar this time. I feel it. Well, that's that's look,
this is this this this is just because Ace Attorney
got robbed. Okay, createst movie of all time. That is
That is my little side bit about about about about

(03:47:49):
sega Um. Yeah, we should also briefly mentioned that Nintendo
just like put literally put a guy in prison for
helping for helping jailbreak consoles, like put putting man in
prison for this for modifying people's software and a game console.
I guess the other thing I'll talk about is, like,
I mean, part of the reason why I really don't

(03:48:09):
like digital ownership of media is because you don't actually
own the thing. You own a license to use the
content as long as the online services active. So even
if you buy a game on you know, the Nintendo
Switch Store. You're not actually buying the game, you're buying
a license to use the game. The same thing for
whether you're buying media on like Amazon Prime, right, it's
it's it's it's the same thing if you're if you're

(03:48:30):
buying digital copy of it, it's a license to use it,
so you can take you know, what Nintendo has done
a few years ago is they shut down the U
Shop channel, which means if you bought a game and
it wasn't creantly downloaded, you can now you've just it's gone.
You just cannot you cannot play it anymore because they
just completely took service down, so you don't actually you're
not you're not actually buying the thing, you're just buying

(03:48:50):
a license to use the thing. Now. They did the
same thing a few months ago for the w U
Shop channel and the three D S channel. So yeah,
rip ripped to that. If you if you if you have,
if you bought games on there that we're not currently running,
then you cannot get them anymore. They're just gone, like
you can, they're just lost lost of time. Well and

(03:49:10):
you know, and again, if if you if you modified
the software on the game console, that you like nominally
own in order to play the games that you bought
and paid for. They will throw you in prison. Nintendo
will send men in suits to come and get you
and throw you in the prison. Yeah. Who he it's
a it's a Mario. It's a Mario joke. Everybody. Um, yes, So,

(03:49:32):
I mean it's the same thing with like subscription services.
Like obviously, if you have a subscription service, you don't
own the content you're watching. You are just getting permission
to use it from a certain amount of time. So
this is obviously. This is this is more obvious. Right,
you don't owe what's on Netflix. You just are able
to watch what Netflix has legal rights to show. But
you even see this thing extended to like cars, like

(03:49:54):
Toyota was was trying out a program and that this
may even it may even still be active for some
car is where you need a subscription service to use
the key fob on your cars like automat, like like
door locking, like fob, like you need a subscription to
use that service of it. Just like why, Like it's
it's just turning everything, it's turning everything into us to

(03:50:16):
us like a subscription service. It's horrible, Like everything is
becoming a new subscription service, a new a new thing
to get your monthly payments for. It's it's it's awful,
like you don't actually buy things anymore. It's just a
subscription services and digital copies. It's not nothing is nothing
is actually the thing anymore? Yeah, it's it's it's all
just rent extraction and the entire economy. Instead of you know,

(03:50:38):
having a thing, they figured out way, what if we
just distract rent and then you also don't own it.
The same thing with like Tesla cars you have to
like buy buy you know, upgrades via software that are
already built in and like subscribe to keep your car
running nicely. Like what it's not like no, yeah, like
I'm gonna I'm gonna go on a very small game

(03:50:59):
or rent here because this this is a this is
the thing. A lot a lot of the worst practices
for this rigidated gaming and this this was this was
a big fight back in like the early thousand pens
about okay, if you buy a game, right, do you
own everything on the game. And there was a huge
fight about you know, they have these like delayed DLC,
like they have these new content packages that would be
on the disc right that you've bought, but you can't

(03:51:20):
access it unless you pay the money. And this was
like a fight, and some gamers were like, you know,
they're trying to fight it, right, but most gamers didn't care.
And then they became the weaponized shock troops to the
far right instead of you know, dealing with this ship.
And now literally everything has fucking day and day one
DLC on it that you buy the thing, you don't
even get all you have to you have to buy

(03:51:40):
the if you have to buy the season pass to
get all the content in the future. It's like you
have to buy the season pass for your car to
work properly. Yeah, so this is just how capital it
started with. Star started with the season pass for a
sixty for a sixty dollar game to then buy season
pass to get more of the game, and now it's
for your fIF car. So yeah, that's fun. It's it's not,

(03:52:05):
it's it's kind of sucks. So but yeah, a lot
of these, a lot of these like play to win practices,
these like free models which then like which lead into
like a subscription service based model. Um have did da
have definitely started in online gaming, and it's yeah, it's
it's really frustrating because, as we'll talk about here in
a bit, like the Sega model is like better, Like

(03:52:28):
turns out when you encourage your fans to play around
with the stuff, it only helps your property. Like that's
the reason why they there's still Sonic March available now
and it's not like a dead franchise. It's because they
because they allowed that to happen. So it's actually really
cool when we're allowed to access for information and play
with it how we want to, instead of like having
this weird strict copyright like rules for not allowing certain

(03:52:52):
usage of certain things. Like it's it's it's not. It's
not great when you're restricting like emulation, restricting fan games,
restricting access to information. It's not. It's not. It's it's not.
It's not fun. But yeah, this is kind of it's
kind of place into why I am very skeptical of
digital media, which to why I start started collecting blue
rays and all of all the things they like, because

(03:53:13):
I've botten things that Amazon Prime which are now no
longer available on Amazon Prime and that sucks, so like
why do that instead just buy your physical copy? Yeah, Well,
the thing is like it didn't and it's so true
to some extent, like if you buy physical copies, like
it didn't used to be like this, like blue rays
used to it to some extent, still dubious most things. Yeah,

(03:53:33):
but like like if if you buy the physical copy
of it, they will give you a code that lets
you use the online version, a digital download code. Yeah. Yeah,
and you know that's a much better way of the
thing working than uh instead of you know, you don't
buying it, you don't have the physical product, and also
they can take it away from you. Yeah, it's I'll

(03:53:53):
circle back to this idea towards the end, but I
kind of want to, I want I want to a
little bit segue to like the idea of the type
of like paywalling, subscription service issues, and like the restriction
of for information regarding online news. So, you know, there's
a lot of people, whether they be like reporters, editors, authors,
or just annoying people online. Um, but there's a decent

(03:54:16):
collection of people that perpetuate the notion that readers or
consumers are actually responsible for the dire straits of the
media industry. But the problem with journalism and many other
media you know, industries. But the problem isn't that people
aren't paying for news. The problem is that newspapers and
outlets are being decimated and dismantled by hedge funds, capital

(03:54:38):
investment firms, venture capitalists, and tech companies in search of profit. UM.
You can look at how Facebook tricked a whole bunch
of companies into switching over to video content and then
a whole bunch of companies had to fire tons of
people because there was a lie. You can look at
how Sinclair Broadcasting dominates local news channels and websites UM,

(03:54:58):
and how well established local papers are struggling while big
companies buy up all the competition. So it's it's it's
especially the venture capitalist thing is actually a really UH
is a really interesting idea that has been documented decently well.
And in the bed, I'll teach you how to bypass
UH newspaper headlines via different methods. But there's this actually

(03:55:21):
good article in the Washington Post UM that is titled
as a secretive hedge fund gets its newspapers journalists are
fighting back. It kind of just details all of the
different hedge funds, adventure capitalists firms instead of like just
totally destroyed so many local papers throughout the entire country.
It's actually kind of surprising once you learn how many
of these papers are just getting destroyed by like just

(03:55:45):
a few, like just like a few hedge funds are
just doing all this damage. And it's it's like, yeah,
I mean, this is why the current like journalism industry
kind of sucks right now, is because of these types
of practices. And I mean, like no one likes it,
like no one's had be with it, Like everyone hates journalism.
Journalists hate journalism, people who read journalism hates journalism, like

(03:56:06):
activists hate journalism, like everyone's met at it um. And yeah,
you can look at these these hedge funds and venture
capitalists who are just like making it such an impossible industry. Uh.
And then you know how you have like you have
internet sites and culture sites like Vice, BuzzFeed and Cracked
who had to frequently lay off large swaths of their
editorial and writing teams, whether for like union reasons or

(03:56:28):
because the company made failed attempt to chase some big
tech companies or media giants you know, like proposed money,
like in the Facebook switching over to video content kind
of debacle that happened a few years ago, and like
it's it's it's it's understandable why these writers, artists, the
journalists are frustrated because yeah, the work is hard and

(03:56:49):
the salaries are low. Well, the work should be hard.
Some people kind of slack off, but you know, for
the good journalism is more is challenging, and salaries typically
aren't great. But even if audience monetary is support, where
the solution to making creative and writing industry is more profitable, again,
the kind of anti piracy folks would still be missing.

(03:57:10):
A fundamental point is that kind of the the pro
paywell people want you to get it through your head
that journalism is just like other types of things you buy,
whether it be food, you know, alcohol or entertainment um
saying you know all these things. You know, Netflix isn't free.
You know, Coca Cola isn't free. Right, This isn't journalism's fault.

(03:57:32):
It's just how the world works. You have to buy
it to use it. It's you know, it costs money
to make, you have to buy it to use it.
It's just it's it's it's like it's dumb to think otherwise.
This is kind of their framework. But I beg to
differ because enjoying art and worthwhile journalism I think should
always have the option of being free, because when information
is in the public interest, it should just always be
available to everybody, whether or not you've already used up

(03:57:54):
your three free articles. Like this is really important, especially
now when there's you know, the whole the whole war
thing happening and finding like pay all the articles about
it is incredibly frustrating. Uh. And yeah, I mean there
was even when the there was a right wing right
ring extremist who opened fire and killed someone at a

(03:58:15):
Portland's uh black Lives Matter protests a few weeks ago. Uh,
that that is you know, still definitely impacting the city
because it was it's it's still very recent. But a
lot of the news coverage, first of all, it wasn't great. Uh.
There was a whole bunch of news coverage was like
was parroting the police lies and framing the framing the

(03:58:36):
attacker is like an innocent homeowner who was defending himself.
It was pretty gross. But even when even when the
news articles started to like correct their previous agree with errors, um,
almost all of it was paid walled like all like
all like a whole bunch of stuff was pay welled
about it, and that's incredibly frustrating because this is like,
you know, when information is in the public interest, it
should be free to access. Like that's just there's like

(03:58:58):
a good moral thing like uh and even um And
we've seen it. We've seen this before. Back in when
the plague was a new thing. News organizations across the
country started to lift pay walls to share coverage of
the coronavirus pandemic um, which was great and you know,
you can you can obviously see that once that changed over,

(03:59:20):
a lot of people who we're making this happen behind
the scenes probably hoped that it just convince people to
become paying customers. But it was still like, that's still
the way things should be is to have have the
option of it being free and then having the option
to donate. And this actually seems to be kind of
the trend. Uh. The University of Texas at Austin surveyed

(03:59:41):
about like a thousand Chicago residents about their local news consumption,
and they found that respondents were more willing to give
a ten dollar donation to support a free news site
than pay ten dollars for a subscription to access premium
news content. So yeah, like that's and that I definite
you share that same like, uh, that same idea, I

(04:00:02):
will weigh sooner donate money to a newspaper that I
enjoy that is also free that I will pay ten
dollars a month to read subscription service based news. It's
a it's because it turns out when you like this.
This applies to all types of media. But like when
you enjoy media, you want to support its creators, whether

(04:00:24):
that be anime, whether that be Sonic the fucking Headgehog,
whether that be whether that be news or books. Right,
if you like something, you're gonna buy it. Right. I
got to introduced to Lemony stick its books to be
the library, and now I bought lots because I wanted to.
I wanted to buy the books from the person that
I like. Yeah, and there are entire like industries. I
mean that literally just work on this person list. This

(04:00:45):
is why free to play games work. Yeah, exactly. There
there's another conversation with for you to play games here
about like addiction and gambling and manipulation about that. But
like that that's you know, like setting that aside for
a second. It's like, yeah, these things if if if
people didn't want, if didn't spend money on things they like,
free to pay games would not work like fundamentally as

(04:01:08):
a model. Yeah, no, definitely definitely the idea of like, yeah,
you get someone starts to enjoying the service, then they
start paying for it, whether it be buying useless you know,
skin for whatever third person shooter you have, or that
be you know, buying books or copies of of the
film or like anime, body pillows, whatever, like you do,

(04:01:29):
you want to financially support the things that you enjoy.
This is just a part of this is what humans do.
So yeah, maybe more stuff should be have the option
of being free. Uh, that definitely might take on it.
Let's let's have a quick let's have a bit of
an ad. Speaking of free content, this podcast is brought
to you by these lovely sponsors, so you can listen
for free while just skipping the ads. So good for you.

(04:01:51):
We're back and now we're gonna talk about different ways
of bypassing pay walls, specifically for online news, because paywalls
frustrating and as someone who likes messing around with kind
of computer e stuff, there's definitely a long list of
ways to buy pass pay walls depending on what types
of paywalls we are talking about. So types of pay
walls there are. There are typically two general types of

(04:02:14):
pay walls. There's hard pay walls and soft pay walls. Um.
Hard pay walls require payment upfront, so usually some some
form of subscription fee before accessing any content. Websites with
hard pay walls, maybe we'll act you lead like a
tiny snippet of the article, but you need access, you
need you need to pay subscription to access the full
the full content. Soft pay walls are are are typically

(04:02:38):
allow you to read a number of articles before you
need to buy buy a subscription. So it's ei there's
you have a set number of articles that you can
read for a fixed period or session. Um, there's you know,
a lot of a lot of a lot of websites
operate like this. Most of New York Times operates like this.
A lot of a lot a lot of news sites
have a soft pay wall model, which is great because

(04:03:00):
typically a little bit easier to bypass first first method.
This works some of the time. It depends on how
the website is constructed, but you can try to stop
the loading page before it fully loads. Uh, so generally
a quick technique. It's effective on several different types of webpages. Uh.
You have to stop your browser from fully loading the
webpage as soon as your breaser displays the text element

(04:03:22):
of the paywell to content. So you you know, enter
a page U R L into the search bar, press enter,
and then press the x icon or the escape key
as soon as you see some of the text on
screen before a paywall window pops up. UM. A major
limitation of this is that stopping the website may not
load all content elements, so it may only render like
a portion of the text, or it may like miss

(04:03:43):
out on like files like images, animations, or videos. Um.
And it also depends on the order of which the
website loads the page elements. So for example, if the
website loads to pay well first, then this trick won't
be successful. Also, you got be kind of pretty fast
in order to make this one work. Typically this isn't
the first way I do it, because there's generally generally

(04:04:05):
easier ways. But if you can do this, then cool.
It's definitely it's definitely a fast one if you can
get it to succeed for soft paywall. So like I
I will say The stopping the browser from loading is
actually successful at some hard paywall sites because if they
do like load a portion of the text to read

(04:04:25):
as like a stippet, sometimes it will actually load the
entire text, but then just block it off with a
separate window. So sometimes with a hard paywall, you can
actually stop it via this method, So that's always fun UM.
But second method, generally more for soft paywalls, is for
is to delete your pages cookies. So you know, websites
store cookies to track your browser UM activities, including how

(04:04:48):
much content you've accessed. So blog publishers, news newspaper sites
can track the number of fage articles you've read using
the cookies stored on your browser. If you hit the
limit for for non subscribe ors, if like the limited
articles allotted, then you can delete the website cookies to
refresh the to refresh that counter and it will possibly

(04:05:08):
reset the limit of articles UM. You can go to
the privacy or security section of your web browsers, like
the option that allows you to check the cookies and
site for all data and then search for the website
that you're looking for in the in the cookie management
page and then click remove all. You can do this
on like Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge if you want to
use that for some reason. Um safari. Yeah, but this

(04:05:33):
trick may not work very well on hard pay walls
because it that's that they don't really use cookies for
the same purpose. And also you'll have to, you know,
do if you're doing if you're doing this for soft
pay walls, you have to do it every time you
you reach the limit. Um. And if this won't work
if the website is using other kind of more advanced

(04:05:54):
tools to track your activity, like I p logs, right,
so if it's tracking your AP data instead of your cookies,
then this probably won't work. So this one's this one.
I mean you you should clear cookies every once in
a while anyway, just like generally a good practice, but
to do this all the time, it's kind of a
kind of a bit of work, especially because the next
method is typically easier and does the same thing, which

(04:06:16):
is just reading articles inside a private or incognito mode
or in the tour browser. Um. So, as as as
as explained earlier, not all paywalls are about the same.
If you know, if a website uses a soft paywall,
you should be able to read a subscription based content
through incongnito or private browsing, because it'll check the it'll
it'll check the website into thinking you're a brand new visitor,

(04:06:37):
granting you access to the content before it had before
it racks up enough of views to uh to throw
up the paywall window. So this is this is a
lot easier than just manually to leading the companies every
single time, because yeah, most web browsers do not transmit
pre existing cookies onto an incognito or private mode browser mode,

(04:06:59):
so it doesn't much of those back over. And then
although the website will deposit new cookies on your browser
during private browsing sessions, they will be removed as soon
as you close the window. Uh. One bummer is that
some news pages are getting wise and actually are programming
their websites to be able to be able to detect
if they're opened in a private or browsing mode or

(04:07:20):
even on tour um and they just like won't open.
They'll they'll say, sorry, you have to. We we've detected
that you're using this in private browsing mode to view
this content. Boot up a regular browser, which which really
sucks for the tour users because a lot of people
are like, hey, yeah, I'm in China, I'm trying to
get past the great firewall and fuck you eat ship.

(04:07:40):
You should have somehow paid a subscription service to us
to see information on this site that is literally illegal here,
Like it's great, it's really bad for people who are
like actually facing government censorship who need to use tour
to view content. So yeah, that that is Uh, it's
what we call a major bummer, A major sucks a

(04:08:01):
major Oh no, capitalism did a whoopsie. Um Yeah, but yeah,
this is definitely this is one of the modes I
do most often. It's like I can typically get get
a lot of sites to be able to view through
incong unit or private or private browsing. But again it
does depend on what the site is h is built
to do. But bar far my favorite method. Oh yes,

(04:08:23):
I'll mention. Another one that I don't really use very
often is the paywall or removable extensions for for your browser,
which is like third party browser extensions which try to
automatically bypass paywalls. These are really hit and miss, um
and it's they're also a really great way to get nice,
fancy malware onto your computer. Um, so I would I

(04:08:43):
typically steer clear of this, but there there is allegedly
a browser extension called bypass paywalls for Chrome and Firefox
that allegedly has been found to be effective, um that
allows you to read the subscription based articles on hundreds
of publications like New York Times, wire Wall Street Journal,
Washington Post. Um it is, it is. It is free,

(04:09:04):
but you have to manually load it onto your browser.
And just typically amount a big fan of browser extensions
in the first place, so I kind of steer clear
of these, but some some some people, some people swear
by them, so maybe maybe they can work. They're they're
they're not only my thing, but my favorite method is
archive websites, uh, specifically archived dot is. So there are

(04:09:27):
internet archiving tools that preserve copies of web pages and
social media posts for reference purposes, and you can use
these tools to access pabled content and read subscription based
news articles for free, including a lot of hard paywalled pages.
Archive dot i S or archive dot is is my
favorite one. Um. Also it's it functions under archive dot today.

(04:09:49):
Uh just it just it depends on what surfers they're
running at the moment. Of course, there's also the classic
and pretty reliable archive dot org which has a nice
calendar feature. But it's definitely good to check both of
these because sometimes an article will be archived on archived
dot is really easily and it won't be are available
on archive dot org. Sometimes it will be on archive
dot org and not archive dot is currently the one

(04:10:10):
that's currently live. I think it's not pH It automatically
switch is usually I could. I usually just type in
our cave dot is um and it switches me over automatically.
But yes, there is, there is, there is. There is
a few of them. Yeah, yeah, you are right correct.
It does automatically revert to archive dot phr at the moment,
so yeah, But these are the ones I use the

(04:10:32):
most because people who have access to hard paywlled content
will often archives the hard paywlled stuff so it's available
to people without the paywall. This this this can include
the screenshot mode for archive dot is and the regular
archival method for archive dot org. But both these are
great um and they're also really good for looking at

(04:10:53):
past versions of the articles, so you can look to
see what how the articles have changed over time, and
so are great research tools. And our chaive dot is
is very easy to even upload stuff yourself, even if
you don't have um the paywall, Like, even if you're
blocked off from reading the full thing, you can try
to submit it to our chave dot is and there's
a good chance and actually grab an unpaid walled version

(04:11:16):
of it because because of how because of how the
site works. So let's go to urchive dot pH r
or or urchived dot is, enter the web page u
r L that you're wanting to access in the designated
dialect box at the bottom. It's like save. It'll go
through a little process, um, and then then you will
then you'll be able to selec the screenshot mode or
the webpage mode and be able to see what type

(04:11:38):
of thing in archives? It's pretty it's pretty cool. Um.
It's The last thing I'll mention is outline dot com
and twelve foot Ladder. These are web based tools, but
not specifically archival sites. They're generally used to just get
to the text of an article it would via like
web page nonsense and bypassing paywall stuff. Unfortunately, websites also

(04:12:00):
gotten wise to this, so stuff like New York Times
and Wall Street Journal have figured out a way to
get to these sites blocked so you cannot use outline
dot com or twelve foot Ladder on them, but they
still work on stuff like the Washington Post. So it
always depends, but I definitely generally will prefer the archive
dot is and archive dot org method to viewing any
kind of pay old content. Um. Yeah, and that's kind

(04:12:24):
of my I mean, I'm not now, I'm not going
to explain how to do like regular piracy on the
podcast because I don't have enough time, but like it's easy. Yeah,
there are there are lots of people who will tell you.
I mean, like kiss Cartoon is like a very popular website,
Like you don't even need to, like you don't even
have to like properly tour and stuff anymore. There is
like so much piraated media of help. Yeah, and it's

(04:12:45):
like okay, so like you've gotta be a little bit
careful when your parting stuff. Sounds like you can get
copyright strike, but if you stream it, they don't copy
and strike you for that. So yeah, yeah, I guess
the other thing I will plug is a plex, which
is a kind of an online movie hosting service like Netflix,
except you upload all of the content to it, so

(04:13:06):
let's say you buy Blu Rays, it comes it comes
with the digital download code, So now you can upload
the digital copy into PLEX and watch that wherever you want,
as long as you're signed into to the PLEX account
and you actually own the stuff on the service. So
as long as the services online, you can use it
because you actually own the stuff on it. UM. That
includes if you have if you have pirated versions of

(04:13:28):
movies downloaded, you can upload this versions onto Plex then
then delete the actual hard copies of it on your
hard drive and then just watch the ones in PLEX
and you're totally fine. So PLEX is great for having
like ease of access because right sometimes I don't want
to sort through my Blu ray discs and make sure
that I have a Blu ray player with me so
to watch my stuff. So using PLEX is a great

(04:13:49):
wet method to keep your stuff that you actually own
accessible online to watch it as long as you sign
into a web browser. Um. And the last thing I'll
plug is library submission forms. So if you really want
media and you don't wanna pay for it and you
don't want to like pirate necessarily, you can get libraries

(04:14:09):
to buy stuff. UM. I did this all the time
when I was younger, I I found out that you
can submit items for purchase via via via the library
on the online forum, and I submitted so many comic books. Uh,
most of the comic books, I would say, I'm not
like a good majority of the comic books in the

(04:14:30):
Molton County Library system are because of me. Every every Wednesday,
when a new trade paperback would be released, I would
upload it to the library submission form and they would
buy it. Uh, and not just one coffee, they would
buy like twelve copies. So there's so many Batman comics
in the in the in the moultonom Coney system because
I would studiously upload upload all that stuff so that

(04:14:52):
I didn't need to pay for comics. I could just
get them from the from the library. So definitely look
into library submissions to kind of grow what your library
had us in stock, and then also looking to see
what other things your libraries doing, because I know more
libraries are looking into building like maker spaces and like
tool libraries to um have access to things that are
not just like books. You know, power tools, and then

(04:15:15):
you know how to access to even cool stuff like
stuff like vacuum formers and like three, three printers, laser cutters.
All these things are kind of growing. So look into
what your library is doing, because oftentimes libraries have some
pretty cool stuff. Um. So yeah, this is my little
little bit on why I don't like paywalls, why I
think content should be free because it actually helps creators

(04:15:36):
in the long run. Any anyway, and how to get
past news articles that don't want you to read them
without paying too much money. Yep. And remember, folks, if
your Pan invaded your country pirrating anime as reparations. If
you're mad about this tweet, find me on Twitter and
I write, okay, yeah, make sure your tweet and I right,
okay if you have complaints about that take So yeah,

(04:15:57):
that is that is my little my my little bit
talking about piracy ar and uh and yeah, I mean
morest we should, we should, we should? I think I
think it's I've always had I've always hold this opinion
that I think we can all learn a lot of
lessons from the sonic the hedgehog. Um. And I think
one of the greatest ones is that turns out when
you make stuff available to use, uh for free and

(04:16:20):
allow emulation, people like people like people like the stuff.
More people enjoy it, and it will actually support official
uses of it as well. So more stuff for free,
more more library based economies, and having having gold rings,
having an enormous number of gold rings makes you nearly invincible.
That that is this is this is also true. I
mean the multiple franchises exist with that exact premise. Um. Yeah,

(04:16:44):
so it turns out when you have more, more libraries,
more rings, people are happier. Yep, that's the episode. Hey,
we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could
Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For

(04:17:05):
more podcasts from cool zone Media, visit our website cool
zone media dot com, or check us out on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here,
updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources.
Thanks for listening.