Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compiletion episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Hey, every buddy, America, Hey Americans, America,
Speaker 1: How is American? That is the podcast? And that was
Speaker 1: that was a horrible is ship. That was maybe your
Speaker 1: talk ten worst. This is it could happen here a
Speaker 1: podcast where an incompetent Rube Fox up starting the show
Speaker 1: and then we talk about how things are falling apart
Speaker 1: or how to make things not fall apart, or some
Speaker 1: version of things in between those two facts. Yep, yep.
Speaker 1: That's a kind of kind of not great time going
Speaker 1: on right now. A lot of people are That was
Speaker 1: our second That was our b pitch for the name.
Speaker 1: Kind of time going on right now? Actually not that
Speaker 1: far from what was. Yeah, I mean, it's like, especially
Speaker 1: especially right now, there's there's a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of trials going on, m feet on stuff, and the
Speaker 1: ad Our Very trial is happening, the one about you know,
Speaker 1: Unit Unite the Right is going on, and of course
Speaker 1: the kind ofn't have his trial as of as of
Speaker 1: recording is um. People, the jury is still in deliberation. UM,
Speaker 1: So no idea what's going to be the result by
Speaker 1: the time this episode up. I've actually been like not
Speaker 1: commenting on it or neither to think about it. There's
Speaker 1: nothing we can do about it. There's nothing you can do.
Speaker 1: And like a lot of people, there's been discussion about
Speaker 1: how much civil unrest there's going to be depending on
Speaker 1: the result of the trial. I know there's been a
Speaker 1: lot of like National guards sent to Wisconsin. It's been
Speaker 1: you know, FBI door Knox and activists tombs trying to
Speaker 1: scare people so they don't you know, go out and
Speaker 1: ride or whatever. Discussion online the people you know planning
Speaker 1: protests in response to in response to whatever the result is. Um.
Speaker 1: I know just today there was a post from I
Speaker 1: think the Ohio Proud Boys claiming that they be sending
Speaker 1: like like, uh, was it hundreds or thousands of like
Speaker 1: people armed with like a RS to Wisconsin or yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's a fucking post. People are saying, like, you
Speaker 1: should take it seriously because it's from a Proud Boys
Speaker 1: internal chat, and it's like, we've got three hundred guys
Speaker 1: heavily armed heading to and there's already X number of
Speaker 1: guys there, and we're gonna kill a lot more Communists
Speaker 1: than Kyle Rittenhouse did. And YadA, YadA, YadA, and ya.
Speaker 1: If I could give you one piece of advice now,
Speaker 1: and who knows where the world is at the point
Speaker 1: of which this episode drops, it's when people talk about,
Speaker 1: say when if you are at a protest and someone
Speaker 1: starts talking about the Proud Boys and the Proud Boys
Speaker 1: are coming or the Proud Boys you're here, if you
Speaker 1: don't immediately see uncontrovertible visual proof that they have access
Speaker 1: to showing it, assume it's nonsense. Okay, Yeah, that is
Speaker 1: my advice as someone who has heard a thousand times
Speaker 1: people say versions of the Proud Boys are coming. Okay,
Speaker 1: insist on evidence or ignore it. But you know, whenever,
Speaker 1: whenever these big civil you know, unrests and types of
Speaker 1: stuff happens, there's always an increased chance that there will
Speaker 1: be some kind of protest related shooting. Especially people are
Speaker 1: definitely absolutely it may happened by the time this episode dropped.
Speaker 1: Especially people are bringing guns, people people bring firearms under
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of there's you know, for the
Speaker 1: demonstrations outside the courthouse, there's been you know, guns there.
Speaker 1: Um there's been you know, an increasing uh in the
Speaker 1: rate of shootings at protests on the West Coast throughout
Speaker 1: the past few months. Um. So I'm gonna be kind
Speaker 1: of talking about, you know, some things that you can
Speaker 1: do if you're at home and you feel competent enough
Speaker 1: in the aftermath of one of one of these shootings.
Speaker 1: You know, if if if you know, if a proud
Speaker 1: boy does bring a bring a gun and shoot somebody,
Speaker 1: what you can actually do a video if you're in
Speaker 1: a situation where you've been following something happening all day,
Speaker 1: there's a shooting and like low quality footage starts coming
Speaker 1: out of somebody killing someone or someone's else, here's what
Speaker 1: to do next if you want to maybe be a
Speaker 1: positive part of that, of that process, well not of
Speaker 1: that process, but of like the aftermath of it. You know.
Speaker 1: And and because because the universe is cruel, I I
Speaker 1: originally wrote this road right up about the written house shooting. UM,
Speaker 1: because the universe is a cruel place and it's gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, continue to This particular incident is going to
Speaker 1: continue to be impactful. Even though it's not the first,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna be the last one of these. It
Speaker 1: is still impactful because of how much of a symbol
Speaker 1: has been turned into. So I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people forget about how how chaotic the night on the
Speaker 1: internet was the day of Kenosha shooting. UM like it was.
Speaker 1: It was wild being online as that was going on.
Speaker 1: Uh No, one had no idea what was going on.
Speaker 1: People could not agree on who the shooter was beforehand.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of pictures floating around. It was.
Speaker 1: It was, it was. It was a nightmare. Uh we know,
Speaker 1: we knew that people were shot, we couldn't know how
Speaker 1: many or who. Like it was, it was pretty bad
Speaker 1: and chaotic, And it is always that way in the
Speaker 1: wake of a shooting. UM, And it is the in
Speaker 1: any given shooting. Always keep in mind when you're when
Speaker 1: you're online or in person and there has been a
Speaker 1: shooting and people are saying things about said shooting other
Speaker 1: than we should take cover from the shooting. If they're
Speaker 1: saying anything else about it, Um, you have to assume
Speaker 1: they're probably not either wrong or not entirely accurate. Um,
Speaker 1: because it's hard to be. It happens constantly. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's not it's something against any of them. I can
Speaker 1: remember a moment when you and I were out last
Speaker 1: year Garrison and there was a shooting I don't know,
Speaker 1: like forty ft away, um if nobody hurt, thankfully, but
Speaker 1: like the the immediate report from it was some guy
Speaker 1: had gotten pulled an a R fifteen out of his
Speaker 1: car and uh. And I think the thing I said
Speaker 1: to you was, I'll bet you right now it's a
Speaker 1: nine millimeter handgun. And sure enough, within minutes there was
Speaker 1: a photo. Yeah. It's and it's not that those people
Speaker 1: were like dumb or bad. It's that, like shootings are scary,
Speaker 1: guns getting pulled is scary, and people funk up um
Speaker 1: in in their recollections. Um. It's the same way in which,
Speaker 1: like if a bear comes after you, uh, you may
Speaker 1: exaggerate the size of that bear in your head because
Speaker 1: you're scared as ship because it's a bear. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: so I was home on AUGUSTUM just and I I
Speaker 1: was I was actually about to go out to to
Speaker 1: uh a cover a purchase in Portland, but then I
Speaker 1: saw this happened on my phone on Twitter. It was
Speaker 1: like I cannot go out. I will be more useful
Speaker 1: at home. UM. So, with with some so much uncertainty
Speaker 1: online or the details of the actual shooting, it was
Speaker 1: it was clear that trying to provide concrete information would
Speaker 1: be crucial in the hours to come. So I spowed
Speaker 1: it up my computer and started to try to begin
Speaker 1: to search for you know, information and verifiable stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: So I spent I spent all night looking looking for
Speaker 1: details about the shooter you know, um, uncovering his supposed
Speaker 1: identity um. Ultimately about an hour before the police announced
Speaker 1: their investigation even started um and and twelve hours before
Speaker 1: the police announced the shooters arrest um And also to
Speaker 1: my surprise at the time, I discovered that the shooter
Speaker 1: was the same age as me. Um. Yeah that was that.
Speaker 1: That was That was a night so um Because because
Speaker 1: I mainly use Twitter and most of the video of
Speaker 1: the instant was on Twitter, I started, uh my my
Speaker 1: investigation by looking at Twitter. Uh. My first goal was
Speaker 1: to find as as many videos of of the shooting
Speaker 1: that I could and collect pictures of all of the
Speaker 1: alleged suspects, all all the people who were claiming this,
Speaker 1: this is this is the shooter. I think I think
Speaker 1: I got a picture of the shooter. Who's here's what
Speaker 1: he is? Um. So, I I kept my eye on
Speaker 1: trending terms. Uh. So, I searched under the hashtags like Kenosha,
Speaker 1: Kenosha shootings, Knosha shooting, Kenosha protests, boogaloo was trending a lot,
Speaker 1: A lot of people thought the shooter was a boogloo boy.
Speaker 1: Um was not um and also uh hashtag militia. So
Speaker 1: the search has brought up a lot, a lot of
Speaker 1: photos of of multiple young men, most of whom were
Speaker 1: carrying long guns, and a lot of unconfirmed reports that
Speaker 1: the shooter was a Boogaloo boy was trending on Twitter.
Speaker 1: This was the main the main thing that night was
Speaker 1: boogloo boy shot. All this stuff that that was the main,
Speaker 1: the main trending topic. A lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: confucting details, and I did not want to kind of
Speaker 1: add the misinformation, so I decided to not make any
Speaker 1: posts but whatsoever about the end of the of the
Speaker 1: shooter until I was one percent confident um that I
Speaker 1: had the correct idea, which takes a while. It's it's
Speaker 1: not you know, Twitter wants you to post stuff quickly
Speaker 1: as soon as you find it out out, and it's
Speaker 1: way better to hold off your information and wait until
Speaker 1: you are absolutely sure it's the right time to post
Speaker 1: it and because it's the correct, correct stuff. Because mismismisidentifying
Speaker 1: a suspect, you can have a serious, serious consequences for
Speaker 1: any individual um involved. It's when when the worst things
Speaker 1: you can do is is mis misidentifying any any suspect.
Speaker 1: So I was looking through all the videos that I
Speaker 1: collected for kind of unique um or identifying clothing that
Speaker 1: that the shooter may have been wearing. The first video
Speaker 1: I found useful was from a right wing videographer named
Speaker 1: Drew hernandez Um who a few months later called from
Speaker 1: Bloodshed at the Capitol. He also testified at the Written
Speaker 1: House trial. This video did not actually show any any
Speaker 1: actual shooting. It had a wounded person on the ground
Speaker 1: being treated by a medic and a man standing over
Speaker 1: the scene with with with a gun um and wearing
Speaker 1: a green shirt, a tan baseball cat jeans and like
Speaker 1: purple latex gloves, he had, he had a he had
Speaker 1: a black and orange bag. Um. The person in the
Speaker 1: green shirt then runs towards the camera while talking on
Speaker 1: the phone, and he says into the phone, UM, I
Speaker 1: just shot somebody or I just killed somebody. It's hard
Speaker 1: to tell where he's actually saying if it's it's one
Speaker 1: of those things where if you think about it, you
Speaker 1: can hear both ones. Yeh. But but he he says
Speaker 1: something like I just killed somebody on the phone and
Speaker 1: he runs past the camera. So this this this, this
Speaker 1: was the first kind of really important piece of information
Speaker 1: personal that was brought up in the trial too. And
Speaker 1: he he was like, I don't remember what I said.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, okay, Yeah. And to be honest, like, even
Speaker 1: if if this was I don't think any of us
Speaker 1: believe this was legitimate self defense. But like, even if
Speaker 1: it was, either of those things would be perfectly acceptable
Speaker 1: things to say. It's a surprising moment, and you probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't remember what you said. I don't necessarily think he's
Speaker 1: lying about that. It turns out he he was. He
Speaker 1: was on the phone with the person who bought him
Speaker 1: the gun of a en of his um. So, but
Speaker 1: but that this was my first important piece of information,
Speaker 1: you know, the the night of Right, this is before
Speaker 1: anyone's analyzed any of this stuff. So this is the
Speaker 1: first video that I can find. It's like, okay, here's
Speaker 1: a person admitting on camera that they shot somebody. Um,
Speaker 1: and we're wearing a few potential identifiers, namely the green shirt,
Speaker 1: baseball cap, and bag. Um. So now I can search
Speaker 1: for all of those items together and the rest of
Speaker 1: the footage collected throughout the night. Looking over the top
Speaker 1: viral videos of the night showing multiple people getting shot. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is from this is from later on after the
Speaker 1: first person gets killed, we can see someone in a
Speaker 1: baseball cap, black and raunch bag and what could be
Speaker 1: a green shirt running through a street. Um. Somebody runs
Speaker 1: over to the individual with the gun and kind of
Speaker 1: punches them in the head, not knocking his hat off.
Speaker 1: So now the person running with the gun does not
Speaker 1: have a hat. Individual with the gun he keeps running,
Speaker 1: but trips and falls on the ground before people try
Speaker 1: to disarm him. Uh. Four more shots are fired from
Speaker 1: the suspect, and uh. One more person dies as a
Speaker 1: result of this. Other person gets their arm nearly blown off. Uh.
Speaker 1: There is one continuous video of all of this happening.
Speaker 1: Extremely useful having having one video of this whole shot. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: so the shooter, who appears to be the same person
Speaker 1: is the other video because of the green shirt and
Speaker 1: the hat at the beginning, continues to get onto his
Speaker 1: feet and runs off again. Uh and the orange orangine orangine,
Speaker 1: a black bag swings in front of him as he's running,
Speaker 1: and a purple glove is also visible. Um. Multiple vehicles
Speaker 1: drive past, like police vehicles. Um. The shooter then walks
Speaker 1: up pretty close to police vehicle and he just he
Speaker 1: just he just with with with the rifle and nothing,
Speaker 1: nothing happens. He he like he wait, he waves to
Speaker 1: the cops and they just keep driving and he walks away.
Speaker 1: So after finding watching these videos, I had, you know,
Speaker 1: I had no reason to believe the shooter was in custody. Um,
Speaker 1: and I had a good idea of his clothing and attire.
Speaker 1: So now it's time to compare this information that I gathered,
Speaker 1: uh two pictures of the supposed you know suspects circulating
Speaker 1: on Twitter. Um. But but first I think now it's
Speaker 1: it's the time to listen to people selling new stuff,
Speaker 1: you know who doesn't oh boy trampled to another state
Speaker 1: to show up armed in a community to threaten people.
Speaker 1: They don't do it. I'm saying they don't. That's good, Okay.
Speaker 1: The products and services who supports Hello Fresh Black Coffee Patrol?
Speaker 1: What do you actually? A number of our sponsors will
Speaker 1: show up unwanted in your community armed. I forgot the
Speaker 1: Washington State Highway and the FBI have both dropped dads.
Speaker 1: Now we also highway patrol to forget about those motherfuckers
Speaker 1: like Kyle Rittenhouse. A number of our sponsors may show
Speaker 1: up in your home neighborhood with another one also Black
Speaker 1: Liffle Coffee, Kyle's favorite brand of coffee. Remember, well it
Speaker 1: was until they disavowed him. But here's here we're bad.
Speaker 1: So there was there was a lot of pictures of
Speaker 1: suspects on Twitter, some of them who look nothing like
Speaker 1: the person we now know who shot those people. Um,
Speaker 1: funny how that happens. It's uh, well it's not funny.
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty pretty, pretty pretty bad. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's not great just to share stuff like like that
Speaker 1: when these things happened. Um, which is why I said
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna share anything until no, um, I know
Speaker 1: that it's it's it's actually worth posting about. So in uh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go through go through all some some some
Speaker 1: of the pictures and stuff of of I'm going through
Speaker 1: at least one of the pictures of one of the
Speaker 1: people people claimed to be the shooter. So in one
Speaker 1: picture circulating, you see someone in a green shirt, a
Speaker 1: baseball cap, and big, big, big black rifle. But this
Speaker 1: man's also wearing shorts, a black hat, not a tan.
Speaker 1: One has no bag, appears to be wearing like a
Speaker 1: tactile vest that is also green. So not the guy,
Speaker 1: even though he's wearing a green shirt and hat. Not
Speaker 1: the same dude. Was be pretty easy to check. Not
Speaker 1: you don't. You really don't need to share that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. Pretty sure, Pretty sure a lot of people
Speaker 1: own green shirts. Yea. So two other photos that were circulating,
Speaker 1: they're claiming to be the guy. We had a green shirt,
Speaker 1: a tan baseball cap put on backwards, jeans um one
Speaker 1: of the one of the pictures has a bag in
Speaker 1: front of which is an orange and black one where
Speaker 1: one of them doesn't. One picture has purple gloves, other
Speaker 1: picture doesn't. But these dudes look pretty similar despite the
Speaker 1: same differences. I'm pretty sure this is this, this is this,
Speaker 1: this is the same guy. But you know, I'm a
Speaker 1: decision at the night, so this is probably the same dude.
Speaker 1: Um And he does appear to match the shooter a
Speaker 1: lot better. And there was a few few clear fixed
Speaker 1: pictures of his face um here, but honestly, the face
Speaker 1: of if if you look at all the pictures of
Speaker 1: the Connection shooting that night, the pictures of the suspect
Speaker 1: are really unclear because the way that the light hit
Speaker 1: his face, he looks like an incredibly generic white boy.
Speaker 1: Um like, extremely generic. It is hard to tell any
Speaker 1: any I identifying features from his face because they look
Speaker 1: like he looks like every every white every white boy.
Speaker 1: It's really hard to say everyone you went to high
Speaker 1: school with, who I don't know sniffed a girl's chair
Speaker 1: when he likes that's that's Kyle rittenhouse visual. Now that
Speaker 1: I decided that I have, like I have a decent
Speaker 1: collection of pictures of who I believe the actual actual suspect,
Speaker 1: is time time time to figure out who the suspects
Speaker 1: like name actually is. And this is this is one
Speaker 1: of the one of the harder things but often you
Speaker 1: can have a lot of help in ways that you
Speaker 1: might not expect. Um Often, once you can get a
Speaker 1: good picture of someone you know, it'd be like, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: this this is actually the dude. Once it gets shared enough,
Speaker 1: often somebody knows who this is already. You know, the
Speaker 1: internet is a pretty big place. I believe the first
Speaker 1: I believe the first person to actually like like I
Speaker 1: was the I was the person to like prove online
Speaker 1: who who Kyle written that kind right knows was the shooter.
Speaker 1: The first person to actually tie Kyle's name to the
Speaker 1: shooter UM was a neighbor of his on Facebook. Um.
Speaker 1: They they saw pictures of the shooter on on Facebook
Speaker 1: and said, hey, I think this I think I recognized
Speaker 1: this guy. I think I think this is my neighbor. UM.
Speaker 1: So often, once you start, once you have like enough
Speaker 1: pictures and those can spread, people will feel to find names.
Speaker 1: It isn't as hard as you would think that. The
Speaker 1: hard part is is finding out what personal connections are
Speaker 1: making those links and finding out where where where those are.
Speaker 1: But stuff, stuff spreads in a weird way, and right
Speaker 1: for this, you know, I find I was able to
Speaker 1: prove that it was Kyle pretty quickly. Um, for a
Speaker 1: few reasons. So after I was doing my my my
Speaker 1: clothing comparisons to figure out this is to prove, like
Speaker 1: he said, this is the actual person who who did
Speaker 1: these things. Um. The other thing I I found that
Speaker 1: was not it was not viral at all, um, but
Speaker 1: just because I was digging through so much stuff, was
Speaker 1: this meme shared by uh I by some like small
Speaker 1: boogaloo account. Um. It was a picture of the shooter.
Speaker 1: UH compare right beside a collection of Blue Lives Matter
Speaker 1: pictures of someone who looks kind of similar, linking to
Speaker 1: a Facebook page or no, not not linking it was
Speaker 1: it was it was screenshot from the Facebook page. And
Speaker 1: I can tell because of the font and it was,
Speaker 1: like I said, like a written house's photos. So this
Speaker 1: was the first This is the first thing I saw
Speaker 1: on the like buried deep inside like Twitter's, Twitter's, Twitter's images.
Speaker 1: But by using all of like these a hashtag terms
Speaker 1: was this meme and and and and then the meme
Speaker 1: said so y'all think he's still a boogaloo. No, no
Speaker 1: he wasn't. But because because of all of the pro
Speaker 1: police stuff, because Google is generally are not not that
Speaker 1: fond fond of police. Yeah so so yeah, um, given given.
Speaker 1: So you know, if someone was to look at this,
Speaker 1: you know, look at this meme itself, he's like, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, the job was done. You know, information, This
Speaker 1: dude looks vaguely similar ish to the guy on this
Speaker 1: written house Facebook. Um, the gun looks kind of similar
Speaker 1: because one of the pictures of the Facebook was was
Speaker 1: a guy holding was a guy holding in a r um.
Speaker 1: But you know, just something looking similar or even holding
Speaker 1: a similar gun in one picture from a Facebook account.
Speaker 1: That's not enough to be sure about publishing a positive
Speaker 1: I d that there's's there's there's no actual really, there's
Speaker 1: no like definitive proof there because honestly, if I was
Speaker 1: to look at these two guys faces, they don't look
Speaker 1: incredibly similar because faces can distore it with lighting and
Speaker 1: compression that it's it's it's. It can be really difficult.
Speaker 1: And this is where you know, trying to idea shooter
Speaker 1: is hard and requires complex judgment calls and posting inaccurate
Speaker 1: information or like incomplete information um can have you know,
Speaker 1: extremely harmful effects. And there's there's a lot a lot
Speaker 1: of examples of this happening in the past. You know,
Speaker 1: probably the biggest example, or the most notorious one of
Speaker 1: false identification is the Boston bombing incident. Um. So, you know,
Speaker 1: right after the right after thirteen bombing, you know, thousands
Speaker 1: of users on sites like Reddit and four chan became
Speaker 1: combing through footage to try to identify potential suspects. Screen
Speaker 1: Caps of the people they deemed suspicious went viral online
Speaker 1: on on various social media sites. Unfortunately, the slew thing
Speaker 1: work done on four Chan and Reddit was incredibly shoddy
Speaker 1: um and seemingly had way more to do with like
Speaker 1: racial paranoia than actual detective work and evidence gathering. The
Speaker 1: New York Post subsequently published a picture on front page
Speaker 1: that that originated on Reddit that users had declared that
Speaker 1: that was showing the two suspects with without doing any
Speaker 1: further verification. So it's it's it's real bad how stuff
Speaker 1: can spread from me out like this that's completely unverified
Speaker 1: to you know, a newspaper, even as one as unreputable
Speaker 1: as the Post, that's still a very popular paper. The
Speaker 1: Post also claimed that the law enforcement we're looking for
Speaker 1: those two to uh two individuals in that picture, um.
Speaker 1: One of the one of the people identified by the
Speaker 1: post was harassed online. UM police police later told him
Speaker 1: just to delete his social media accounts entirely because there
Speaker 1: was no use at that point. UM. When the FBI
Speaker 1: did officially release photos of the unnamed suspects, Reddit users
Speaker 1: again false he identified these people? What one of the
Speaker 1: people they false he identified went went missing for weeks
Speaker 1: prior UM his his family received media inquiries about the false,
Speaker 1: unverified rumors of their son's involvement. UM, and rumors of
Speaker 1: of of involvement were spread by reporters from Politico News,
Speaker 1: Squeak Newsweek, NBC News, and BuzzFeed. UM. Eight days after
Speaker 1: the bombing, this guy was actual does have the bombing.
Speaker 1: This guy was actually found dead and his family said
Speaker 1: it was a suicide. UM. It was not not one
Speaker 1: of the shooters, not one of the bombers. UM. Again
Speaker 1: why even more than the tactics you could use to
Speaker 1: try and you know, verify things online, the most useful
Speaker 1: thing you can take out of this is if there
Speaker 1: is a mass shooting or other active violence and people
Speaker 1: on social media are saying it is this person, don't
Speaker 1: share it. Don't just don't share it. Just wait, especially
Speaker 1: in sharing it if they have don't have anything to
Speaker 1: verify this at all. So yeah, like I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna don't again, that is the overwhelming thing.
Speaker 1: We were not gonna you know. That's why you know
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna share this Kyle rittenhouse um boogloomy because
Speaker 1: there's no proof for it. It's it's not there now. Eventually,
Speaker 1: after digging, I would realize that this meme comes from
Speaker 1: his neighbor saying that she thinks the suspect is him.
Speaker 1: So that's that's what this meme was created. Um but
Speaker 1: still there there there was no no proof for it,
Speaker 1: so I don't I didn't share it. So all the
Speaker 1: Boston bombing stuff was like going through my mind as
Speaker 1: I know found this and was trying to dig for
Speaker 1: dig from my details. So yeah, I knew that I
Speaker 1: could not post a name on the social media um
Speaker 1: or any info until I until I could prove it
Speaker 1: like without a shadow but doubt that this is the
Speaker 1: same person because a lot a lot of times it
Speaker 1: is possible. It just requires work in time, you know,
Speaker 1: And a big part of doing this on Twitter is
Speaker 1: like you want to get it out fast, so you're
Speaker 1: the first person to do it. So that you know
Speaker 1: you can go vital on your thread of identifying this killer,
Speaker 1: and like, no, that's not the reason to do image verification.
Speaker 1: It's not to go viral on a thread. It's because
Speaker 1: whenever that's your goal you're gonna do, you're gonna do
Speaker 1: shitty fast work that is gonna end up causing some
Speaker 1: kind of horrible consequence, like in the case the Boston bombing.
Speaker 1: And to be even extra clear, the primary use for
Speaker 1: this that kind of what you're teaching people image verification,
Speaker 1: which is something that like like Belling Cat, which is
Speaker 1: has been like kind of a part time employer of mine.
Speaker 1: Um is an open source journalism collective that's broken some
Speaker 1: of the biggest stories in the last couple of years.
Speaker 1: And in the classes we teach a class on image verification.
Speaker 1: And the point is just whenever someone is sharing a
Speaker 1: piece of what is like supposedly breaking news based on
Speaker 1: video or images that have been taken at the side
Speaker 1: of a whatever, image verification tactics can help you to
Speaker 1: know whether or not it's whether or not either it's
Speaker 1: true or false, but also just whether or not the
Speaker 1: image the information they're presenting gives you any reason to
Speaker 1: believe it, like it's you might be full of shit,
Speaker 1: like that's super important. Yeah, Like there's there's a thing
Speaker 1: that happens like and any time there's something that looks
Speaker 1: like a war starting. There's like this video of a
Speaker 1: bombing from two thousand fourteen in Gaza that goes around
Speaker 1: it's like every time. Yeah, um, there's there's actually five
Speaker 1: or six different kinds of things that are like that Chris,
Speaker 1: that are like, oh this is There's actually footage from
Speaker 1: like a rush in video game that people keep keeps
Speaker 1: getting like mistaken for action combat footage and it's like, no,
Speaker 1: it's fucking from a video game. This has been on,
Speaker 1: this has been three wars now. There's this famous footage
Speaker 1: of like a fucking um an air soft battle at
Speaker 1: night with glowing with soft pets with the glowing pellets
Speaker 1: and it it kind of it kind of looks because
Speaker 1: it's black and white and not a great camera, it
Speaker 1: kind of looks like tracer fire. And it's there's like
Speaker 1: three Wars that people have said like, look, this is
Speaker 1: still combat footage from it happens all the time. And
Speaker 1: again grant account to follow is a hoax I on Twitter.
Speaker 1: They do really good work pointing out just like kind
Speaker 1: of more like more like less high stakes kind of
Speaker 1: image image verification stuff. Um So, but before I get
Speaker 1: into the actual like verification work of like proving, Hey,
Speaker 1: I can actually prove that that by by not just
Speaker 1: someone's face, I can prove that this shooter is the
Speaker 1: same guy from from from the Facebook page. Um, I'll
Speaker 1: explain that next first short short ad break and then
Speaker 1: we will fit finish up with this actually will proving section.
Speaker 1: Yeah you know who is not Kyle? Oh wow, you
Speaker 1: have really dropped the ball out all of the transitions today. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I am not proud of myself or my place in
Speaker 1: society at the moment. Um. Here's ads, We're back. I
Speaker 1: feel terrible. Garrison. And So, even even though the booloo
Speaker 1: meme was not hard evidence, uh it did. It did
Speaker 1: provide a lead. So after seeing the meme, I did
Speaker 1: the first most obvious thing that I could see was
Speaker 1: compare the gun in in the two frames. Uh they
Speaker 1: do look similar. Uh they're not. They're not identical. Uh
Speaker 1: the optics are different for each rifle. Um. But the
Speaker 1: rest of it, but the stock, the grip um and
Speaker 1: the barrel do do seem do seem to be do
Speaker 1: seem to be, if not, if not identical, at least
Speaker 1: extremely similar. Again, still not enough to make a positive
Speaker 1: idea on an individual basis, Like this person is its person,
Speaker 1: So that the next step is to scour the actual
Speaker 1: Facebook account itself that is alluded to in this meme
Speaker 1: and see what I can find there. The goal obviously
Speaker 1: being to find statements or pictures that will tie this
Speaker 1: person in the images of the shooter to the person
Speaker 1: on the account. So that's you know, clothing, location, intention,
Speaker 1: you know, all these types of things that could tie
Speaker 1: the pictures of the shooter to the pictures of person
Speaker 1: on on on this account. Um So Kyra no houses
Speaker 1: old public Facebook profile was mainly made up of Blue
Speaker 1: Lives Matter and pro police images going back as far
Speaker 1: as um with a few uh then recent pictures of
Speaker 1: him holding his Air fifteen style rifle. Uh those the
Speaker 1: the the rifle pictures were like from June. The shooting
Speaker 1: happened in late August. Um it appears I think it
Speaker 1: came out in the trial that he got his rifle
Speaker 1: around like may um So, yeah, a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of pro police stuff, a lot
Speaker 1: of them blue lining blue lives, matters type things UM.
Speaker 1: His public his his public page is is relatively sparse
Speaker 1: UM and there was no public friends list to look through. UM.
Speaker 1: One one noteworthy piece of information was that he did
Speaker 1: he did list another name for himself as Kyle Lewis
Speaker 1: believe his mother's maiden name. Sure but uh but even so,
Speaker 1: even though I wasn't able to view a friends list
Speaker 1: and there wasn't many public posts, uh, this is his
Speaker 1: page is by no means a dead end. I could
Speaker 1: still see everyone that has commented on, shared, or liked
Speaker 1: his public posts because like so, he did not have
Speaker 1: he he did not many have any pictures himself on
Speaker 1: his page that that I could use for verification. He
Speaker 1: didn't have like not nothing that I could tie to
Speaker 1: the shooting besides the actual guns. So not not tons
Speaker 1: of useful not tons of useful stuff. But there's perhaps
Speaker 1: there's still other other leads to look through. Like every
Speaker 1: one who's liked, shared, or uh commented on his posts,
Speaker 1: So I opened up new tabs for every single person
Speaker 1: that interacted with Kyle's posts. While looking over their pages,
Speaker 1: I was searching to see if any of them had
Speaker 1: listed Kyle as a relative with a focus on anyone
Speaker 1: with the last name of written House or Lewis um
Speaker 1: and and you know, ideally was looking forward to see
Speaker 1: if anyone had pictures of Kyle or someone who seems
Speaker 1: to be Kyle. Uh. One post from May eighteen eventually
Speaker 1: eventually proved useful. One comment read, Kyle, you sure do
Speaker 1: look like a Louis. So there's the alternate last name.
Speaker 1: And two people had liked that comment, Kyle himself and
Speaker 1: and uh and someone who is his mom which or
Speaker 1: would would later find out is his mom. Um. Uh.
Speaker 1: So she said that lived. She said that she lived
Speaker 1: in uh is it anatok Illinois? Probably Antioch, Illinois, which
Speaker 1: matches uh with Kyle's uh Illinois based pro police posts.
Speaker 1: He made a lot of like Chicago Blue Lives Matter posts,
Speaker 1: so I assumed that Kyle was from Illinois. And also, um,
Speaker 1: uh Antioch is that you said whatever Antioch to to
Speaker 1: Wiscon's Antioch to Kenosha is only like three minute drive,
Speaker 1: so that is also like, okay, that's that's that's that's
Speaker 1: pretty close. That is that is doable? Um. So it
Speaker 1: was the next I went. I went through a lot
Speaker 1: of the relatives pages, but I'm gonna focus just on
Speaker 1: the person who I found out who was, um, Kyle's mom,
Speaker 1: because they're the one that had the most useful information, right.
Speaker 1: A lot of other information I looked through just didn't
Speaker 1: turn out to be useful, right, So I'm not not
Speaker 1: including all of that here. Um uh. One post from
Speaker 1: from uh Wendy's mom uh featured a younger Kyle wearing
Speaker 1: a police outfit. Um. I'm sure people have seen this
Speaker 1: sure online before. I think I was probably I was.
Speaker 1: I was probably the first person to share this photo
Speaker 1: of Kyle in this in this younger Kyle wearing this
Speaker 1: this police this police costume, an unbelievably cringe e photo,
Speaker 1: like the side of the fact that he took two lives,
Speaker 1: Like just yeah, I mean we all have photos we
Speaker 1: took when while an r OTC. Like so yeah, ideally
Speaker 1: we would we would give There's actually there's actually a
Speaker 1: lot more of these photos. There's photos of him touring
Speaker 1: so this is this stuff. I also found that night
Speaker 1: photos of him like touring a target with police as
Speaker 1: he's in a police uniform. He was part of like
Speaker 1: a police Young Cadets program. He was he was like twelve. Um,
Speaker 1: so that's where he got this outfit, and he like
Speaker 1: tagged around with police for like a day or something,
Speaker 1: and this photos of him like in a target with police.
Speaker 1: Even when I was like a shitty right wing kid,
Speaker 1: that sounded like a nightmare. So so yeah, so Kyle's
Speaker 1: the person who I figured out was Kyle's mom posted
Speaker 1: this this photo of of her and Kyle, which which
Speaker 1: Kyle liked, and then in another picture of another picture
Speaker 1: from from Kyle's mom, I found, uh, it's a family
Speaker 1: picture including Kyle wearing what I would say is like
Speaker 1: an army green shirt kind of similar, but it's a
Speaker 1: green shirt like I have. I have shirts that are
Speaker 1: pretty similar to that. I'm not gonna that's not gonna
Speaker 1: be anything so super definitive until we got there's one
Speaker 1: one picture that that proved to be much much more,
Speaker 1: much more useful U of Kyle on or someone who
Speaker 1: assumed was Kyle. You don't, you don't you don't actually
Speaker 1: see his face, but he is wearing horribly cringe e
Speaker 1: American flag crocs, which which Kyle, which which so and
Speaker 1: and and on. On Kyle's page, there was also pictures
Speaker 1: of him wearing those same crocks. So like even even
Speaker 1: though I can't see the face, the crocs the same
Speaker 1: probably the same guy. He's also wearing a tan baseball cap. Um.
Speaker 1: And on this I can actually see that it has
Speaker 1: an American flag on the front of the cap, which
Speaker 1: I did not notice on anything else before. So that's,
Speaker 1: you know, that's something different. But again not that that's
Speaker 1: that's not that's not that's not like a red flag.
Speaker 1: That's just you know, a thing to a thing of note.
Speaker 1: Um because the bay the baseball cap is tan um
Speaker 1: and it has like white mesh on the sides. Um.
Speaker 1: The one. The one thing I did, I did make
Speaker 1: one post before I actually did any kind of I
Speaker 1: claiming to do I identity stuff. I did ask my
Speaker 1: Twitter followers if there's any pictures of the back of
Speaker 1: the Shooters cap um, and I got them to to
Speaker 1: send me those, and then I got one picture of
Speaker 1: of the back that actually has uh. I couldn't see, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: the back of the Shooters cap also has the flag
Speaker 1: on it, so I was able to actually show that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the baseball cap on the back of it, uh.
Speaker 1: But they're both tann baseball caps. They both have whitemush
Speaker 1: on the side they both have to have an American flag.
Speaker 1: And then I got another picture that was even closer
Speaker 1: that showed a tear on the brim of the hat.
Speaker 1: And if you zoom in on one of the beach pictures,
Speaker 1: you could also see a tear on the same position
Speaker 1: on the hat. So this is this hat? Is the
Speaker 1: hat is the same hat? The hat was definitely it
Speaker 1: was definitely in both locations. So at this point, based
Speaker 1: on the gun, based on the hat, based on the
Speaker 1: location being very close to kenosha um and being closed
Speaker 1: on the rough facial similarities, um, there was there was
Speaker 1: enough enough to enough to to um enough to put
Speaker 1: put stuff together to be like, Okay, I I think
Speaker 1: I think this is this is probably this is probably
Speaker 1: fine in saying I think this is probably the dude. Um,
Speaker 1: So at this point I wasn't wasn't again, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna post this immediately, and I'm not going to post
Speaker 1: something by saying this is who it is without providing
Speaker 1: the evidence. So instead of like running a thread tweet
Speaker 1: by tweet, I read the whole thread out and then
Speaker 1: tweet the whole thread at the same time. UM. So,
Speaker 1: so I I put to the thread documenting my relevant stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: I I wrote the first eight posts the same time
Speaker 1: and posted them together with all the evidence of uploaded
Speaker 1: um and then and then uh, as I was writing
Speaker 1: the threat, I came across another piece of evidence. There
Speaker 1: was one I was going through one of the live
Speaker 1: streams of of that night from a channel called the
Speaker 1: Rundown Live, which I've not heard anything of before or since. Then. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know one of the many streamers that were
Speaker 1: out um, and you can see you can see Kyle
Speaker 1: inside the frame and then like pans away, but the
Speaker 1: people are still talking. Um. So so Kyle, Kyle is
Speaker 1: actually off camera now, um, but he I think someone
Speaker 1: like asks him his name and he and the person
Speaker 1: who I think is Kyle replies Kyle. Now, of course
Speaker 1: it's off camera, so it's not you can't be totally sure.
Speaker 1: There's there's enough context clues and that plus only other evidence.
Speaker 1: I'm like, Okay, this is enough to add to the
Speaker 1: thread because it again it's it's not enough proof by itself,
Speaker 1: but it combined with everything else, completes a much fuller picture.
Speaker 1: So I posted my like niner yeah, like eight or
Speaker 1: nine thing thread on being able to prove its Kyle
Speaker 1: via you know, comparing stuff like the gun, uh, the hat,
Speaker 1: the shirt and demonstrating my work tracking across Facebook and
Speaker 1: how it's able to like link these two people together. Um.
Speaker 1: Twenty two minutes after I posted the threat identifying Kyle Kosha,
Speaker 1: police announced that they were that they were starting an
Speaker 1: active investigation. UM. I soon added a court document to
Speaker 1: my thread about a traffic violation by someone named cow
Speaker 1: written house, filed a few days before the shooting. The
Speaker 1: traffic violation thing also included stuff like a dress, which
Speaker 1: I I blacked out the addressed for that just because
Speaker 1: sharing the sharing for reasons I'll soon explain. Because again,
Speaker 1: if it's if it's a it's a track of violation,
Speaker 1: if people really want it, they can find it themselves,
Speaker 1: right It's it's not making impossible to find it. And
Speaker 1: this was able to confirm it. It was in the
Speaker 1: same location um antioch Um. And also this this proved
Speaker 1: that Kyle was seventeen at the time. Uh. This is
Speaker 1: how we knew that he was seventeen years old at
Speaker 1: the time of the shooting was because of this traffic
Speaker 1: violation document found online. So the the address on the
Speaker 1: violation document was the same one I had linked to
Speaker 1: Kyle's mom by doing other like ocean address work, I
Speaker 1: was able to find out where what what her address was. Um,
Speaker 1: so so yeah, that was That was most of my
Speaker 1: work that night. Uh. It took about I don't know,
Speaker 1: like tooh maybe you know it. It's hard. It's hard
Speaker 1: to break up. Uh, it's timing it. It took about
Speaker 1: half an hour to get from the boogaloom me to
Speaker 1: finding the matching baseball cap on on Kyle's mom's Facebook page,
Speaker 1: about another half hour to write out the thread, and
Speaker 1: you know, about an hour of work previous to that
Speaker 1: about you know, trying to find out the actual you know,
Speaker 1: footage and categorize it. And Okay, this is the clothing
Speaker 1: he's wearing. Here's the clothes I I need to look
Speaker 1: for on social media right see see see see if
Speaker 1: I can find these shoes, these pants, this, this shirt,
Speaker 1: this hat, this bag, that kind of stuff. Um and
Speaker 1: I was able to find enough of those items to
Speaker 1: make it pretty pretty clear that it was it was
Speaker 1: you know linked. Um and that makes you Garrison, one
Speaker 1: of the first people in the world to get to
Speaker 1: no way more about kyle rittenhouse than you ever wanted
Speaker 1: to know. A lot more. This nightmare has been going
Speaker 1: on longer for you. Yeah, and so, and I want
Speaker 1: to know a few other ways to do image verifications,
Speaker 1: specifically on Kyle that that I didn't do, but other
Speaker 1: people did after after I had after I said, hey,
Speaker 1: this is part of the guy. So afterwards people found
Speaker 1: other kind of evidence on Kyle's TikTok um and snapchat.
Speaker 1: So it turns out Kyle was snapchatting his night in Wisconsin, um,
Speaker 1: which we would find out later. So he was that
Speaker 1: he was snapchatting from kenosha Um and Garrison. First off,
Speaker 1: I do feel as the representative of zoomers in in
Speaker 1: this call. Why are you Why are you guys all
Speaker 1: using the snapchats? Huh? I don't use I don't use
Speaker 1: the snapchats. Um. Well, I'm making you answer for the
Speaker 1: crimes of your generation, the crimes like the snap Now. Well,
Speaker 1: technically speaking, I have one friend who I only talked
Speaker 1: to you through Snapchat, and we both only use it
Speaker 1: for that and we don't know why we use snapchat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a few people who are like snapchat, people who
Speaker 1: only text or snapchat, and I don't. I don't get it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: except neither of us are like that. We just specifically
Speaker 1: there's got a signal anyway, So yeah, the Snapchat, there's
Speaker 1: also uh TikTok Um. There was a footage of of
Speaker 1: Kyle attending a Trump rally at TikTok Also him like
Speaker 1: assembling and testing out his gun was on a Snapchat.
Speaker 1: I believe eclips that it were also shared on TikTok
Speaker 1: so I could have got a lot more closer details
Speaker 1: of the gun if if I looked on if if
Speaker 1: on Snapchat or or TikTok Um, and I think, if
Speaker 1: this is this is a good advice that I've taken
Speaker 1: since then, and for other people looking to do this stuff.
Speaker 1: If if a suspect looks as young, um, you know,
Speaker 1: Snapchat and TikTok might be or and and Instagram might
Speaker 1: be apps that are worth we are worth checking out
Speaker 1: for information as opposed to like Facebook. Right. I lucky,
Speaker 1: lucky enough there was enough stuff on Facebook on this
Speaker 1: instance typically probably because you know, Kyle's family was conservative
Speaker 1: so and he was conservative, so higher chance of being
Speaker 1: on Facebook there. But you know, in general, if someone's
Speaker 1: younger and maybe look on younger apps. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, good thing to think about you know,
Speaker 1: whenever these like chaotic panic moments happen, you know, missifforation
Speaker 1: can spread very very quickly. UM. Cannot stress enough how
Speaker 1: dangerous and I responsible it is when a suspect is
Speaker 1: named without proper verification. UM. You know. Uh, last last September,
Speaker 1: uh Ian Miles Chung falsely identified a suspect in the
Speaker 1: shooting of two l A Police officers. Of this resulted
Speaker 1: in the falsely accused got a man and receiving many
Speaker 1: death threats online. I think emails chalnging to this like
Speaker 1: again a few months later. He he was doing this
Speaker 1: a lot. Last year he was doing it. He was
Speaker 1: really bad about trying to identify people. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: doing solid solidarification work is possible, but extreme caution needs
Speaker 1: to be taken. UM. I need to be very mindful
Speaker 1: of the consequences of your actions when when you're doing
Speaker 1: this work. Yeah. I also want to put out Garrison
Speaker 1: is very good at this. That that's why it took
Speaker 1: two hours and a half hours. It's going to take
Speaker 1: it takes a lot longer. Yeah, Like honestly, like I
Speaker 1: was like it. Finding Kyle was just the right mix
Speaker 1: of things in one moment. Often it doesn't often it
Speaker 1: doesn't go that fast, and it doesn't need to be
Speaker 1: right like a big The problem is that if people
Speaker 1: think about it needing to be like a fast paced thing,
Speaker 1: that's where that's where the mistakes happen. I was just
Speaker 1: lucky to have enough like dominoes fall in the right
Speaker 1: place too. I identify how the night of having having
Speaker 1: his neighbor say, hey, this guy looks similar to my neighbor,
Speaker 1: extremely useful in in in in the long run, right
Speaker 1: like that that happened faster than that happens in a
Speaker 1: lot of cases, and so that really accelerated things. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it will be easy sometimes like a good example of
Speaker 1: when it's harder. We have a decent amount of footage
Speaker 1: about the individual who placed bombs outside of the Capital
Speaker 1: bomber before the sixth um. That person has not been
Speaker 1: identified and the FBI seems to have no goddamn cluse.
Speaker 1: But also what they were way more intentional, and they
Speaker 1: were smart. Whoever they are, they're very capable. They were
Speaker 1: the only thing that we have on them is their shoes. Basically,
Speaker 1: those are those are kind of the polls of this
Speaker 1: right on one like that with with Rittenhouse, you've got
Speaker 1: this situation where it's like all of the information you
Speaker 1: need to identify the is there openly online. UM. And
Speaker 1: part of ops sex if you're doing things that are
Speaker 1: crimes UM is to make sure that is to limit
Speaker 1: that that that whatever it is you are going to
Speaker 1: to the to the crimes in UM. There nothing exists
Speaker 1: on the Internet that connects that to your name and face,
Speaker 1: and that that doesn't That doesn't always mean black block.
Speaker 1: That can mean other clothing, especially if you've been photographed
Speaker 1: in black block a book. I think like if you
Speaker 1: look at if you look at UM, the guy who
Speaker 1: dropped off bombs at January six, he's not wearing black
Speaker 1: block because black block draws attention. He's wearing like grays.
Speaker 1: He's he's wearing that guy that well, that individual person
Speaker 1: is either a former FED or former Special Forces. They
Speaker 1: were very capable, leaning towards FED who showed up in
Speaker 1: clothing they had never weren't worn before and paid for
Speaker 1: used in cash, probably from a variety of places. UM.
Speaker 1: That clothing was burned as soon as they got away.
Speaker 1: They were of the state as early as it was
Speaker 1: possible to do so, plant them and then immediately get
Speaker 1: out like, um. And you know, by the time the Capitol,
Speaker 1: right by the time their bombs had been found, they
Speaker 1: were they were if they were smartly gone, you know,
Speaker 1: like that's how anyway whatever, Like Like oftentimes it can
Speaker 1: be if someone knows what they're doing, this, this process
Speaker 1: can be a lot harder, like in the case of
Speaker 1: the people of of the guy who left the bombs
Speaker 1: at the capitol. Um. You know, Kyle, it was not
Speaker 1: you know, wasn't wearing much identified clothing, wasn't even wearing
Speaker 1: a mask because COVID was for cox. Um. So you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of these things that that made this process, um,
Speaker 1: you know, easier than a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: other verifications. But like I said, there still was a
Speaker 1: lot of false ideas going around that night. UM, and
Speaker 1: so it kind of still happens. I'm kind of on
Speaker 1: the fence myself as to whether or not it would
Speaker 1: have been safer like for our country or the society
Speaker 1: or whatever you want to call it. If um, like,
Speaker 1: how much more damage or less damage would have been
Speaker 1: done if Kyle Rittenhouse had been someone who showed up
Speaker 1: in impeccable like clothing that he could not be identified
Speaker 1: from fucking ran off and was never caught, and we
Speaker 1: just knew there was the shooting of protesters in Kenosha
Speaker 1: um by somebody. UM Like, I don't know how much
Speaker 1: better or worse that is for society if that happens.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm thinking about terrible things. But sorry,
Speaker 1: first off, I want to apologize. Sometimes talking about this
Speaker 1: stuff winds up seeming like advice for how to commit crimes.
Speaker 1: That's not the intent. It's just when you talk about
Speaker 1: what makes something difficult to identify, your kind of by
Speaker 1: default talking about like here's how to here's how to
Speaker 1: get commit a crime and get away with it, um.
Speaker 1: And it's the kind of thing like if you're doing
Speaker 1: verification work, one of the things that helps is to
Speaker 1: kind of put yourself in the mindset of somebody who, Okay,
Speaker 1: if I'm in this situation and I do this, um,
Speaker 1: what are the decisions that I might make afterwards? Um?
Speaker 1: And you can kind of try to uh think through
Speaker 1: this person. Like it can be helpful, especially if you're
Speaker 1: trying to like track someone through a day. So you know,
Speaker 1: someone was at this point at a protest at X
Speaker 1: hour because they shot somebody, Um, you know, think through. Okay,
Speaker 1: what else happened that day? Where their other protests? Where
Speaker 1: their other gatherings like or is this one in a
Speaker 1: series of events? Can I go look for you know,
Speaker 1: videos from other things in the area that this person
Speaker 1: might have also been at and might have worn the
Speaker 1: same clothing. Um, there's anyway. Image verification is fun, catch
Speaker 1: the fever. It is. It is a fun thing to do.
Speaker 1: It's good to if if if you're not able to
Speaker 1: attend in person demos for like like physical reasons or whatever,
Speaker 1: or like mental reasons, doing the stuff from home is
Speaker 1: is another way of getting involved, especially already out tracking
Speaker 1: down bad people after they after they do bad things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you can, you know, if you want to learn
Speaker 1: more about this with you know, the benefit of also
Speaker 1: visual aids um belling cat has if you just type
Speaker 1: image verification belling Cat. There's gunners and advanced guides to verification. Um.
Speaker 1: There's talk about like manual reverse image search tools and
Speaker 1: like how well they work. There's quizzes, So go go
Speaker 1: there if you if you find this interesting, Um, it
Speaker 1: can be quite a hoot. Um. But you know what
Speaker 1: else is quite a hoot? Ending a goddamn podcast which
Speaker 1: I'm doing. Now we're done, goodbye. Welcome to America. It's
Speaker 1: not great. Here's a podcast, right, this is this is
Speaker 1: it could happen here the podcast Welcome it is. If
Speaker 1: you're an international listener and you're not American, that was
Speaker 1: really get the fuck off of our podcast, just like
Speaker 1: left people all like, are you going to do one
Speaker 1: for every other country? I think they're being rude for
Speaker 1: barging in the internet is clearly American soil. I would
Speaker 1: pay good money for a wacko things. But with Roberts
Speaker 1: saying all the all the countries of the world, well,
Speaker 1: you know what you need to do in order to
Speaker 1: be able to pay good money for something Garrison, you
Speaker 1: need to you need to. You need to get money
Speaker 1: by by working well to be born rich. But if
Speaker 1: you're not born rich, you have to work. And a
Speaker 1: lot of people are saying what if we did, what
Speaker 1: if we didn't? And now they have a subreddit and
Speaker 1: that's what we're talking about today anti work. Uh, not
Speaker 1: just the subreddit, but that's why we're talking about it
Speaker 1: today because the anti work subreddit has grown hugely um
Speaker 1: and it's got like a milli it's or it's it's
Speaker 1: like doubled. It's been around for years. It's more than doubled.
Speaker 1: It's it's almost. It's almost. Yeah, it's it's it's well,
Speaker 1: well I'll have the numbers for later. Yeah, yeah, okay, great.
Speaker 1: Um So, Garrison, why don't you kick us off? Now
Speaker 1: that I've let everyone know what to expect, I will
Speaker 1: stop working um in solidarity with the anti work movement.
Speaker 1: Thanks Robert um. So. Yeah, if the past few months,
Speaker 1: if you're anything like us um and and if you're
Speaker 1: online in the same ways that we are, you've you've
Speaker 1: probably seen like a flurry of posts and screenshots depicting
Speaker 1: text conversations between like an employee and their boss. Typically,
Speaker 1: the boss like asks them to come in when they
Speaker 1: said they were going to have to have to be
Speaker 1: have to have having to have time off or something.
Speaker 1: The employee objects, the bosston gets mad and makes threats
Speaker 1: and demands the employee be a better team player or
Speaker 1: some bullshit like that. Um and and then like the
Speaker 1: employee said something like, well you know what, actually I quit,
Speaker 1: good luck filling the shift now by and then the
Speaker 1: boss like pleads that the now former employee comes back
Speaker 1: and offers like concessions and end of screenshots. So pretty
Speaker 1: soon this type of like screenshotted text conversation became like
Speaker 1: a meme format with with people joking and obviously like
Speaker 1: staging fake ones as well. Uh, you know, similar to
Speaker 1: the scene I just described. But but but by all accounts,
Speaker 1: this trend started incredibly like sincerely with with genuine text
Speaker 1: conversations showcasing like worker abuse um and and uh you know,
Speaker 1: bosses being unreasonable and cruel um and some people putting
Speaker 1: their jobs just to stand up for themselves and um,
Speaker 1: all the stuff is kind of tied up in the
Speaker 1: worker shortage kind of miss the great resignation as as
Speaker 1: a lot of pundit yes, yeah, people of people resigning.
Speaker 1: And then you know a lot of like big companies
Speaker 1: complaining about worker shortages um and and. Central to this
Speaker 1: like text conversation online kind of meme trend thing and
Speaker 1: and and employee resignations is a sub credit called anti work.
Speaker 1: So the antiwork subredit has has been a growing place
Speaker 1: specifically the past year. Um. Their motto is unemployment for all,
Speaker 1: not just for the rich. Uh. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: good good it is it is a solid it's a
Speaker 1: solid botto of their their their own like a description
Speaker 1: is uh a subredit for those who want to end work,
Speaker 1: are curious about ending work, want to get the most
Speaker 1: out of a work free life, want more information on
Speaker 1: anti work ideas, and want personal help with their own
Speaker 1: jobs slash work related struggles. So back in back in February,
Speaker 1: um it only the subur it's been around. But back
Speaker 1: in February it had like two hundred and thirty five
Speaker 1: thousand UM subs, and now it has over one point
Speaker 1: one million UM It's grown. Most of that growth has
Speaker 1: been in the past two months. Uh it's it has
Speaker 1: kind of kind of exploded in popularity. Um And actually
Speaker 1: it got it got so big, and there's so many
Speaker 1: posts on it that they have to they have they
Speaker 1: have now they have to like restrict text message conversation
Speaker 1: screenshots to only being allowed to be posted like on
Speaker 1: one day a week, just because of the intense influx
Speaker 1: of of these posts, you know, some of them genuine,
Speaker 1: others maybe not so much. Um And And even though
Speaker 1: the suburn it may not be the biggest in terms
Speaker 1: of like subscribers, um it's it has more like daily
Speaker 1: posts than something like the Wall Street BET's suborb it
Speaker 1: has so even though it doesn't have as many subscribers,
Speaker 1: the amount of actual like posting on it is higher
Speaker 1: than a lot of other suborates as well. So it
Speaker 1: is it is growing in popularity, like in in multiple ways.
Speaker 1: It feels a little bit right now, like the social
Speaker 1: media equivalent of a of a sort of damolea. It's
Speaker 1: like Wall Street Bets made a not insignificant uh splash
Speaker 1: earlier this year. It was it was quite a thing
Speaker 1: for the national economy for a little while there. Um
Speaker 1: and Anti Work hasn't had that moment, but I kind
Speaker 1: of feel like it might be getting close to critical mass,
Speaker 1: Like something, something might come out of this um which
Speaker 1: I think would be rad. For for the record, I
Speaker 1: think would be rad absolutely. And you know, it may
Speaker 1: not be one big thing, but it could be a
Speaker 1: lot of smaller things, right. You know, sometimes it's harder
Speaker 1: to see bigger change when you're like having more anarchist
Speaker 1: adjacent I is and and and the and the Anti
Speaker 1: works that when it does does try to keep itself
Speaker 1: being a radical subred and does trying to fight off
Speaker 1: neoliberal sentiments and stuff. And there have been there have
Speaker 1: been some complaints. I've seen a people being like, ah,
Speaker 1: the liberals have gotten in and and people are talking
Speaker 1: about like, well, I just really want a life that's
Speaker 1: like I'm not stressed all the time and I have
Speaker 1: enough money for for bills and stuff. Really, people have
Speaker 1: been talking about like, oh, this job, Like I I
Speaker 1: left my old job and I got into a better situation.
Speaker 1: That's good. And there's complaints about that. And I think
Speaker 1: it is important to like push against de radicalizing the subredit,
Speaker 1: But I don't think it's bad that you're getting a
Speaker 1: lot of liberals in there who are not turned off
Speaker 1: by the name anti work um, and I think that's
Speaker 1: I think it's positive that that they're even if they're
Speaker 1: you know, they're not coming at it from kind of
Speaker 1: a revolutionary perspective. But hey, it's okay to quit my
Speaker 1: job if if the conditions are shipped and try to
Speaker 1: find a place where I'm treated better. If that's their
Speaker 1: in road to this kind of thought, I still think
Speaker 1: that's pretty pretty awesome. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, because I mean
Speaker 1: it's not realistic for every single person. Well and actually
Speaker 1: it is realistic for every single person to quit their job,
Speaker 1: but it's it's not realistic for only a few people
Speaker 1: to write and sometimes if if not, if if everyone's
Speaker 1: not gonna do it, like literally everyone, then he knows
Speaker 1: some people can't can't afford to quit their job um
Speaker 1: right now because they have like kids, defeat or whatever
Speaker 1: um for themselves or you know, there's a lot there's
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons, which I'll kind of talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more about later. So and so the term
Speaker 1: anti work just does not does not come from the
Speaker 1: sub credit UM and anti work has been like a
Speaker 1: post left term for a while now, and it kind
Speaker 1: of kind of applies to a broad spectrum of like
Speaker 1: anarchist adjacent kind of thought around Hey, if we're gonna
Speaker 1: if we're gonna question like capitalism, uh and the state,
Speaker 1: we should probably also question just the idea of work
Speaker 1: itself and how it functions and how the state kind
Speaker 1: of works only possible with the state. And it's that
Speaker 1: specific line line of thinking. UM. A few examples of
Speaker 1: like of like you know, seminal anti work books UM is.
Speaker 1: One of them is Bob Blacks The Abolition of Work. UM.
Speaker 1: Crime Think has a really good book just called work,
Speaker 1: which is another another one that gets referenced a lot,
Speaker 1: even even in the subredit And also Bullshit Jobs by
Speaker 1: David Graber, and uh, bullshit Jobs was also kind of
Speaker 1: partially inspired by Bob Blacks The Abolition of Work. Um,
Speaker 1: all of those are are great resources and uh specifically
Speaker 1: like bullshit Jobs is great and like a in like
Speaker 1: a for a modern outlook on this, like Bob Black's
Speaker 1: book was written, was written a while ago, and the
Speaker 1: Bullshit Jobs is definitely very timely and even even even
Speaker 1: crimes thinks work book also also addresses stuff or even
Speaker 1: though it wasn't not written within the past. I think
Speaker 1: it is maybe slightly older than than a decade, but
Speaker 1: I think that they are updating it with more information
Speaker 1: about like the gig economy and stuff like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's not as it's characterized as as anti
Speaker 1: work is often characterised by critics. It's not saying like
Speaker 1: nobody should have to do anything in a way. It's
Speaker 1: not actually we'll talk about Diogenes later. Um, but it's
Speaker 1: not everyone should just like lay around and do nothing.
Speaker 1: It's people shouldn't have to do the thing that we
Speaker 1: call work, which is destroy your body or your mind
Speaker 1: or both. Uh, most of your waking hours, most of
Speaker 1: your life in the hope that you'll get ten years
Speaker 1: as an old person to not do that, like and
Speaker 1: and and and a little bit that that that's bad.
Speaker 1: That's a bad way to be a person, like a
Speaker 1: bad way to have to be And it's not bad
Speaker 1: to do that, it's it's bad that you have to
Speaker 1: do that. Yeah, yeah, and I mean and and there
Speaker 1: is a there is a little bit of it that
Speaker 1: is about finding time to chill out. It was going
Speaker 1: to apply a lot of you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: the ways if you have to keep a job, you know,
Speaker 1: the different ways you can you can go about that
Speaker 1: job that does that makes it so doesn't like kill you.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite ways of about anti works just
Speaker 1: like anti capitalism put into actual practice. So it's sort
Speaker 1: of you know, just debating online about anti capitalism as
Speaker 1: some you know, future things like no, like what can
Speaker 1: you do to actually you know, make capitalism less important
Speaker 1: part of how you live your life every day, which
Speaker 1: means you know, not obsessing over careers and all these
Speaker 1: kind of other things. So I think I think first
Speaker 1: of all, it might be useful to kind of think
Speaker 1: about like what do we actually mean by work, because
Speaker 1: works kind of a works like a it's it has
Speaker 1: a lot of definitions, depend depending on what like you
Speaker 1: depend depending on like what you mean by it, right?
Speaker 1: Is it just like wage labor? Is it just forced labor? Um?
Speaker 1: You know, is cooking for yourself or your family considered work?
Speaker 1: But not always? But you know, like at times when
Speaker 1: I when when I when I'm like relaxed, I can
Speaker 1: I quite enjoy cooking for friends and family. But but certainly,
Speaker 1: but certainly it can feel like work sometimes, especially if
Speaker 1: you especially if you just got home from like a
Speaker 1: work shift. So in a way, like work creates more work. Um,
Speaker 1: And it's it's not it's it's it kind of it's
Speaker 1: doesn't It isn't just it isn't just about like wage
Speaker 1: labor or something. It can kind of apply to a
Speaker 1: lot of ways about how you live your life. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of looking laying down wood chips or sad.
Speaker 1: If that's like your job, every day can be like
Speaker 1: a miserable, backbreaking process. If you actually have a huge
Speaker 1: yard or like own a little bit of land and
Speaker 1: you're making your own garden, that can be an intensely
Speaker 1: like the best part of your week. It can be Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's not. The problem is not the individual tasks necessarily,
Speaker 1: it's what work is as a as a a platonic
Speaker 1: kind of concept in our society. Yeah. Not and and
Speaker 1: again one of the things, and I think this is
Speaker 1: one of the things speaking of you talked about David
Speaker 1: Graber earlier, who's an anarchist anthropologist and widely seen to
Speaker 1: be like one of the most brilliant anthropologists of his generation.
Speaker 1: He recently deceased, but a book that he wrote before
Speaker 1: he died with another and another fellow, came out recently
Speaker 1: called The Dawn of Everything that talks a lot about
Speaker 1: how yeah, these ideas, that kind of capitalism has a
Speaker 1: vested interest in you believing that the world was always
Speaker 1: hard in the way that it's hard, by which I
Speaker 1: mean like, in order to get basic necessities you have
Speaker 1: to make somebody else rich um or find some grift
Speaker 1: of your own. And as opposed to like, yeah, life
Speaker 1: is always hard, but life wasn't didn't always involve labor
Speaker 1: the way we think about it. Labor has not been
Speaker 1: a constant in human civilization. In fact, most of human
Speaker 1: civilization people have not done a thing that we would
Speaker 1: recognize as labor. And I think also even if you
Speaker 1: go towards things that like look more like labor to us, right,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know, like look look like if you
Speaker 1: look at like feudal levies, right, you're a peasant. You
Speaker 1: have to get some amount of grain to your lord.
Speaker 1: But like, okay, we work way longer than medieval peasist did.
Speaker 1: And not only do we work longer, is something greater
Speaker 1: and David Beno talk about in that book is like yeah,
Speaker 1: like not only do we work much longer, like the
Speaker 1: amount that we work would have been considered absolutely, like
Speaker 1: even even if feudal lord would look at that much
Speaker 1: work and go no, like this is this is this
Speaker 1: is like and you know, and I think there's there's
Speaker 1: another grip hasn't. As another point um he wrote a
Speaker 1: piece called Turning Modes of Production inside Out, where he
Speaker 1: has his argument that like, okay, so if if you
Speaker 1: take you know, if you take like Plato, right, you're like,
Speaker 1: you take any of the Greek philosophers, even the conservative ones,
Speaker 1: and you show them this the thing, the thing that
Speaker 1: we do every day. Right, you're you know, you have
Speaker 1: you're you're completely under the command of another person for
Speaker 1: like at least a third, probably more of your day yeah,
Speaker 1: I monitor you and Garrison's bathroom breaks. I look at
Speaker 1: your texts with family and friends. Um, it's it's really
Speaker 1: it's an incredibly strict surveillance state. From Robert Evans. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is like like you know, if you show a
Speaker 1: Greek person that this is like this is the apocalypse
Speaker 1: to them, this is this is the worst thing that
Speaker 1: could possibly happens. Every single person in society has like
Speaker 1: essentially been reduced to a slave, and you know that's
Speaker 1: bad and it doesn't have to be like it's not
Speaker 1: that they've been because I want to push back on
Speaker 1: that terminology because it can go to some uncomfortable places.
Speaker 1: It's not that they are treated as a slave. It's
Speaker 1: that in the hours in which they are expected to labor,
Speaker 1: there's a societal expectation that they act as the property
Speaker 1: of whoever owns the business or manages them. Right. The
Speaker 1: idea of like if it if it like that attitude
Speaker 1: from like like working in a kitchen or or working
Speaker 1: at a fast food restaurant, like if you lean, if
Speaker 1: you're if you can lean, you can clean, Like that
Speaker 1: attitude is saying you do not have any autonomy when
Speaker 1: you are at work. You are the property of the
Speaker 1: of the employer while you are at work. Um, I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: and and I think and I think, you know, but
Speaker 1: I think there's a specific thing with Greece is that, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you the only way you could do that
Speaker 1: to someone in Greece is if you owned them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like you know, I'm like, the grease has wage labor, right,
Speaker 1: but the only people who like has wege labor, but
Speaker 1: it has wage labor for slaves. And that's like it right,
Speaker 1: like this, you know, and this is this is not
Speaker 1: like obviously not to say that, like you know, we're
Speaker 1: like having a job is the same thing as slavery,
Speaker 1: but it's it's to say that, like the kinds of
Speaker 1: things that we think of as normal, like are things
Speaker 1: that like the people who you know, the people who
Speaker 1: run the system and the people who you know get
Speaker 1: cited all the time to justify stuff would have looked
Speaker 1: at as like the worst thing that could possibly have
Speaker 1: happened to a society. Yeah, sure, like daily life for
Speaker 1: a very substantial chunk of of the American workforce is
Speaker 1: that would be a nightmare to large percentages of the
Speaker 1: human population prior to the modern period. Like it's it's
Speaker 1: and and if you think about it that way, like
Speaker 1: one of the things Graber does a good job of
Speaker 1: going into UM is like the way in which uh
Speaker 1: and this is also something that comes up in in
Speaker 1: in tribe by you or the way in which, like
Speaker 1: during the early period of colonization of North America, UM,
Speaker 1: it was very common for you know, Europeans to leave
Speaker 1: the cities and in towns being established behind um and
Speaker 1: and join up with indigenals, with the tribes. The reverse
Speaker 1: never happened, like like, not willingly, not without kidnapping being
Speaker 1: a part of it. UM. And it's because like their
Speaker 1: attitude was, they were looking at the lives these people
Speaker 1: were living in these cities and like, well, why would
Speaker 1: you agree to do that? And um, this is turning anyway, Garrison,
Speaker 1: you should you should take us back on the rails.
Speaker 1: This is getting more but first products. You know what
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with the fact that human beings
Speaker 1: are forced to labor for basic necessities in order to
Speaker 1: keep up a system that steals the freedom of the
Speaker 1: many in order to provide impossible liberty to the few.
Speaker 1: You know what isn't related to that. The advertising lutely
Speaker 1: industrial complex not has nothing to do with it, totally unrelated.
Speaker 1: Why would you say that? Garrison? By the way, did
Speaker 1: you know that McDonald's muffin is turning fifty years old
Speaker 1: and it's giving the breakfast they're they're they're they're selling
Speaker 1: it for its original price of sixty three cents during
Speaker 1: breakfast hour six a m. To ten thirty am, exclusively
Speaker 1: on the McDonald's app. That I can't, I can't do
Speaker 1: you guys? Do you guys want egg mcmuffins for sixty
Speaker 1: three cents? That's the original price. I wonder what else
Speaker 1: the McDonald's app is looking at on my phone? Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's some mats. Oh, we're back and we're talking about
Speaker 1: anti work. We're talking about how works kind of bullshit
Speaker 1: for our jobs. Um yeah, yeah, we sure are, We
Speaker 1: sure are. So you know, like there is there there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people who like enjoy stuff like gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking,
Speaker 1: and even like you know, just fighting, fighting computer programming
Speaker 1: just for their own sake. Like a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff that we like quote quote needs need for uh
Speaker 1: society to function. A lot a lot of those things
Speaker 1: people like doing as hobbies in their spirits. For example,
Speaker 1: if you're a police officer, gunning down a man in
Speaker 1: cold blood might be kind of like your day job
Speaker 1: and like frustrating, and there's a lot of ship you
Speaker 1: have to deal with. If you're a mash shooter, though,
Speaker 1: you just love it. You know, you're just doing it.
Speaker 1: That is that That is exactly what the cow writtenhouse
Speaker 1: thing is though like like like like like actually like
Speaker 1: literally that that that is what that is. This is
Speaker 1: we I mean, we're not going to get the verdict today.
Speaker 1: It doesn't look like not today, which by the by
Speaker 1: the time this airs, it may already be done. Um.
Speaker 1: But anyway, like a lot of a lot of people
Speaker 1: like doing those things without getting paid, and sometimes you know,
Speaker 1: often like costing themselves money, right, A lot of these
Speaker 1: hobbies are you know, are costly in their own in
Speaker 1: their own right, um. And I think it's interesting to
Speaker 1: you know, think, think of a society where you're well,
Speaker 1: you're free to do those things when you feel like it,
Speaker 1: and you don't need to drag yourself out of bed
Speaker 1: at you know, earlyer than wanting to work to work
Speaker 1: a ten hour shift as like a cash register. And
Speaker 1: it's not just even when you feel like it. Because
Speaker 1: there will be things that you have to do. Even
Speaker 1: if I will discuss this like toget yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: in any but like yeah, but it's not it's it's
Speaker 1: not work if you're if you're going out and harvesting
Speaker 1: food that feeds you in your community, that's not like
Speaker 1: work in the sense that we talk about modern work.
Speaker 1: The amount of extra energy we have by not having
Speaker 1: ten hour horrible shifts that drain ourselves mentally and physically
Speaker 1: and more in with you know, the amount of most
Speaker 1: of the work that we people do, as shown in
Speaker 1: David Graper's bull bullshit Jobs, is like not necessary. Like
Speaker 1: a lot of like a lot of the work that
Speaker 1: we do as a whole is not There's there's some
Speaker 1: squibbling about because the book was based off of a study,
Speaker 1: like a survey that kind of showed a lot of
Speaker 1: very significant chunk of the workforce thinks their job is
Speaker 1: like pointless and doesn't do anything. And there's been some
Speaker 1: criticisms of that, but it is undoubted that a very
Speaker 1: significant amount of total labor time spent is stuff that
Speaker 1: isn't necessary ry for really like reason of like making
Speaker 1: people's lives better. And another part of like anti work
Speaker 1: theories is looking is looking at our society as it's built,
Speaker 1: you know, because it is it is HyG to anarchism
Speaker 1: and be like how much of this is actually necessary?
Speaker 1: Like how do we do we really need a mac rib?
Speaker 1: Like do we do we go? What do you? What
Speaker 1: do you? What do you? Garrison? Do we do not
Speaker 1: need a macrib? We do not? Did the company training?
Speaker 1: And they the company training says you can't attack someone
Speaker 1: for their religion, and Garrison just attacked the McRib, So
Speaker 1: that actually is you know, it is a religion for
Speaker 1: a lot of people. Did you just see that there? There?
Speaker 1: They they did sell a macribb n FT a few
Speaker 1: weeks ago. Um and tell me that ship that is
Speaker 1: so upsetting, thank god damn it. Yeah yeah, just saying
Speaker 1: society with no money would not have n f T s. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so gosh. But you know, think thinking of like anti
Speaker 1: work as as the theory. You know, it's about cutting
Speaker 1: down those those unnecessary things that fill people's time. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know and for a more you know, forward
Speaker 1: forward looking sense. It's it's a general kind of like
Speaker 1: a like abolition of the producer and consumer based society. Um.
Speaker 1: So you know, life is not dedicated to the production
Speaker 1: and consumption of of goods and commodities. So you know
Speaker 1: this this applies not not just a capitalism but also
Speaker 1: to you know, like state socialism um where you know,
Speaker 1: work is still you know a big part of state
Speaker 1: socialism UM. And you think, you know it's humans, it's
Speaker 1: it's it posits the future that humans can be way, way,
Speaker 1: way more free when they you know, can reclaim their
Speaker 1: time from jobs and employment um, instead of you know,
Speaker 1: spending a lot of their time doing that and spending
Speaker 1: spending a lot of like not just time, but also
Speaker 1: just like their energy. Right because even if you work,
Speaker 1: you know, eight hours a day, you still have a
Speaker 1: majority of the day to yourself. But you're exhausted. You
Speaker 1: can't doom it, you can't do much right it. It
Speaker 1: drains you of everything. So you know, the main point
Speaker 1: one of the main points of like of the abolition
Speaker 1: of work, I say by Bob Black is but like
Speaker 1: there's no one should work because because work is as
Speaker 1: defined as like as like as like a forced labor
Speaker 1: practice um. Is. You can kind of track this to
Speaker 1: being the source of most of the mystery in the
Speaker 1: world from you know, in in individual people, um, who
Speaker 1: are forced to do this. So like this is where
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of their pain comes from.
Speaker 1: Um is this I is this is this forced labor concept? Um?
Speaker 1: I think I think a good a good way. You know,
Speaker 1: there is you know the point that Robert brought up
Speaker 1: earlier is like you know, what about the tasks that
Speaker 1: aren't fun? You know what about what about the stuff
Speaker 1: that isn't isn't maybe as as enjoyable. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's there's there's a list of list of things
Speaker 1: that the standard rep. Who's going to clean up the poop? Right?
Speaker 1: That's that's the thing. So you know I I kind
Speaker 1: of I I kind I kind of look at this
Speaker 1: as like the I kind of kind of look at
Speaker 1: this as like whenever I have to turn the compost,
Speaker 1: which is not my favorite thing to do. I I
Speaker 1: don't look forward to having to turn over our massive, shitty,
Speaker 1: rotting compost bile not not my favorite thing. Um. But no,
Speaker 1: but now like if there's if if there's like friends
Speaker 1: around and we're playing music and we're all we have
Speaker 1: like some like have I have have like an iced
Speaker 1: tea or a dr pepper and we're like talking as
Speaker 1: we're turning the compost. It's a lot more doable. You know,
Speaker 1: it's there's there's because it's it's it's one task that's
Speaker 1: going to help all of us in the future. Um
Speaker 1: and I'm not getting watched over by a boss to
Speaker 1: fill a certain quote so I can pay my rent, right,
Speaker 1: It's it's this, it's this. It's this thing that helps
Speaker 1: everybody and I and I do it because I want
Speaker 1: I want the goal of it to succeed. So there's there's,
Speaker 1: there's gonna there's is gonna be tasks that are less
Speaker 1: pleasant than others. You know, what we can do is,
Speaker 1: you know, imagine a world where the amount of work
Speaker 1: actually needed to be done is greatly reduced so that
Speaker 1: the tasks that are necessary and some of them unpleasant,
Speaker 1: can be spread out, um and among more people, because
Speaker 1: less people will be wasting upwards of eight hours a day,
Speaker 1: five days a week doing mostly pointless time filling work.
Speaker 1: Because yeah, there's there's gonna be things that sucked, and
Speaker 1: we'll be able to do those a lot better if
Speaker 1: there's more people and we don't have to waste our
Speaker 1: times doing stuff that is is honestly a lot more
Speaker 1: bullshit than actually scooping bullshit. Wow, what a good joke.
Speaker 1: Speaking it's time. It's time to scoop up some more ads. Wait, really,
Speaker 1: haven't we done too? No, we only only one. Alright,
Speaker 1: we went a while without doing one. Guys, listen to
Speaker 1: the products because everyone loves a service. It's not like
Speaker 1: the thing we're talking about is bad. It's different than that.
Speaker 1: So it's fine. Yeah, we're back and we're still still
Speaker 1: talking about anti work. Um, I do. This is something
Speaker 1: that the Crime Think workbook points out, and you know
Speaker 1: it is a pretty it's pretty obvious thing I've I've
Speaker 1: certainly thought of this before is that, you know, we've
Speaker 1: been told that the like technological progress will soon liberate
Speaker 1: humanity from the need to do work or from you know,
Speaker 1: having to do work as much um. And today we
Speaker 1: have the capabilities that you know, our ancestors couldn't have
Speaker 1: even imagined for free, the amount of work that we
Speaker 1: could get done. Um. But these predictions still like aren't true.
Speaker 1: We're still working more than ever. Even though we have
Speaker 1: developed so much um technologically, we're still working more than ever.
Speaker 1: And if I think it's silly to think that we'll
Speaker 1: we'll we'll reach like a magic threshold where somehow now
Speaker 1: we have less work to do because we'll have like
Speaker 1: I don't know, like robots being a server at Adam
Speaker 1: Adam McDonald's or whatever. Right, we're there's still there's still
Speaker 1: is forcing people into this thing because this is the
Speaker 1: only way that we can live. Right this. We've we've
Speaker 1: built our whole society around getting work for money, So
Speaker 1: this is the only the only thing that we can do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: David Creeper. One of the things he's arguing in Bullshit
Speaker 1: Jobs is that basically, you know, okay, so so if
Speaker 1: if you have like you have the Soviet economy, right, okay,
Speaker 1: so the Soviet economy has has a policy of of
Speaker 1: full employment. And for a little bit they were like, okay,
Speaker 1: what if we make everyone work less? And then they
Speaker 1: stopped and then like everything went to ship, So you know, okay,
Speaker 1: but if if if you can't make people work less
Speaker 1: hours and everyone has to work, what do you do?
Speaker 1: It was like, okay, well you pay a bunch of
Speaker 1: people to like stand in a doorway. Right now, we
Speaker 1: also do this And then one of the graps, like
Speaker 1: the funniest points that he brings up is that the
Speaker 1: total number of bureaucrats in the x U s s
Speaker 1: are like increased dramatically after the us R fell, which
Speaker 1: is incredible, and you know what what it points to
Speaker 1: is that like, yeah, you know, Greverer called this total
Speaker 1: beer auctratization, which is that, you know what, what we did,
Speaker 1: instead of like giving our seals more free time, is
Speaker 1: created this just like endless, enormous, incredibly violent bureaucracy that
Speaker 1: all of us have to spend all of our time,
Speaker 1: like dealing with bullshit from our insurance companies, and like
Speaker 1: fighting with like the Comcast service person and all of
Speaker 1: this just like you know, incredibly violent, de humanizing stuff
Speaker 1: that you know, it's it's it's a make work program, right,
Speaker 1: it's but it's a make work program that just the
Speaker 1: work that it makes everyone is making everyone's lives miserable.
Speaker 1: And we could just not do this. Mh yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean we could. It's always more complicated than that, right,
Speaker 1: because the thing that is when we talk about anti work,
Speaker 1: I think that's on the other side of this is like, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: what if you get a kid, how are you going
Speaker 1: to feed that kid? Like what if like, yeah, how
Speaker 1: are you going to keep him in a house, Like
Speaker 1: how are not just if you have a kid, But like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you people die in our society when they do not
Speaker 1: have access to adequate resources. And the only way to
Speaker 1: have access to adequate resources is to be born rich
Speaker 1: or to work. Those are your options. Yeah, that is
Speaker 1: why without without robust mutual aid and the commitment by
Speaker 1: a lot of people to try to make sure that
Speaker 1: a lifestyle is sustainable outside of you know, this system,
Speaker 1: Like it's not impossible, but it's somewhere along the line
Speaker 1: there has to be input. I mean, yeah, like we've
Speaker 1: we've been talking about Yeah, we were talking about antiwork
Speaker 1: as like as kind of like a broad hopeful like
Speaker 1: future goal in some other you know, post scarcity, well
Speaker 1: not not post scarcity, but like it's post like a
Speaker 1: post crumbling, post kind of collapse future. But I think
Speaker 1: you know, for us now, as you know, the antiworks
Speaker 1: is about people now, right, the antiworks it is not
Speaker 1: about a future world. I think the anti work now
Speaker 1: is like an alternative to the obsession with living your
Speaker 1: life with the goal of a career. Yes, it's about
Speaker 1: trend you know, it's it's like a project to radically
Speaker 1: reframe the how we think of work and leisure. Um,
Speaker 1: it's like like like like a cognitive antidote to like
Speaker 1: the like this culture of like hustle and hard work,
Speaker 1: which is like taken over our minds and and and
Speaker 1: our time. So it's like for for those who can't
Speaker 1: just resign from their job for whatever reason, whatever moment,
Speaker 1: the anti work is about like thinking of this movement
Speaker 1: as like the antithesis to the mainstream capitalist hustle culture.
Speaker 1: You know that that includes like slacking off more, finding
Speaker 1: ways to waste time, possibly even finding ways to steal
Speaker 1: or scam your boss. I I've I've read certain certain
Speaker 1: alleged ways of doing this inside the antiwork Garrison car
Speaker 1: for Days where they got it from. But yeah, no,
Speaker 1: but like you know, like there is you know, like
Speaker 1: ways to like scam scam whatever corporation you work for,
Speaker 1: right that There's been examples shared in the anti right
Speaker 1: in in the Anti Works I brut it. So you know,
Speaker 1: it's about actually like finding, you know, making sure that
Speaker 1: you hate your work because you should, and then figuring
Speaker 1: out how to live your life with that in mind.
Speaker 1: And I think what one of the really hard parts
Speaker 1: about this is for people who like kind of like
Speaker 1: their job? Who who? Who? People who are like you
Speaker 1: think like either like their job or think it's like
Speaker 1: kind of important or like they're special to have it, right,
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, you're like, I'm lucky to have such
Speaker 1: a good job, because like, when you're stuck in that mindset,
Speaker 1: you can often put in like a lot of extra
Speaker 1: unpaid labor because you think it's important because you're like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: this is worth doing because it's gonna have some like
Speaker 1: benefits to the world. So you end up like putting
Speaker 1: in actually more work that you don't actually get paid for.
Speaker 1: And like it's about trying to kill that instinct as well.
Speaker 1: So that's a whole, a whole way to think about
Speaker 1: like working, because like we're gonna be stuck. A lot
Speaker 1: of people are gonna be start doing it for for
Speaker 1: for a while. So how can you kind of reframe
Speaker 1: what we do on the job and how kind of
Speaker 1: jobs live in our minds when we are at home.
Speaker 1: And I think the best thing about what you've said,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, is the idea that like this is
Speaker 1: not the importance is not on whether or not this
Speaker 1: this it causes everyone to stop having to work immediately
Speaker 1: like whether or not it leads to you know, directly
Speaker 1: to Like, the measure of success of this movement isn't
Speaker 1: that nobody ever has to work again. That's a that's
Speaker 1: a long term goal. The measure of the success of
Speaker 1: this movement is that people accept in mass that no,
Speaker 1: the American dream as it's sold to people is not
Speaker 1: a good thing too. It's not a thing. To aspire
Speaker 1: to work is bullshit, and we should aspire to a
Speaker 1: society that doesn't do it. It's getting back, honestly, like
Speaker 1: it's getting back to some of the ship that people
Speaker 1: were talking about in like when The Jetsons was on TV,
Speaker 1: the idea that like, well, with labor saving devices, the
Speaker 1: like a hard work week will be four hours and
Speaker 1: like that's the way life will be for everybody, and
Speaker 1: like um, and the it's the acceptance that like, no,
Speaker 1: a better future involves me not having it. No one
Speaker 1: having to spend forty hours a week of their limited
Speaker 1: human life working at a fucking sonic or like listening
Speaker 1: to some middle manager brate them for not answering phones
Speaker 1: fast enough. Um, that doesn't exist for any human being
Speaker 1: in a world that is achievable and better than the
Speaker 1: one that we live in, like convincing people of that
Speaker 1: and getting that to be whyly accepted. Is I think
Speaker 1: what I think what is what I would consider the
Speaker 1: terms of victory in in this particular struggle. Yeah, kind
Speaker 1: of moving on from this side of things into like
Speaker 1: the great resignation and the other kind of things that
Speaker 1: people are doing. So um, in August alone, four point
Speaker 1: three million Americans voluntarily left their jobs um and the
Speaker 1: rate of people quitting increased to a a decent, a
Speaker 1: decent record high of like a two point nine percent,
Speaker 1: according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. So and
Speaker 1: this this, this, this has been a growing trend. You
Speaker 1: can look at like I think June was like a
Speaker 1: like a little under four million. August was four point three.
Speaker 1: It's like it was you know, it's it's ramping. I
Speaker 1: don't know what if. I don't know if we have
Speaker 1: data for September or October. Yet this was the most
Speaker 1: recent one I could find. Um. So yeah, like it's stuff,
Speaker 1: stuff is stuff is going up. People are because because
Speaker 1: people are like a big part of the antibo. And
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, if your job sucks, you can quit
Speaker 1: it and probably find another one that pays better in
Speaker 1: decent time, especially especially especially right now, Like right now,
Speaker 1: if your job was really terrible, you have a decent
Speaker 1: chance of finding a better one. Um. This wasn't the
Speaker 1: case like two years ago. Um, it is the case
Speaker 1: that at this moment, so a lot of the antiquos
Speaker 1: spa and it's like, yeah, quit your job, like say
Speaker 1: fun you to your boss and leave because if they're
Speaker 1: being shitty then they don't deserve to have you. Um.
Speaker 1: So resigning has been been a big part of this,
Speaker 1: and there has there has been attempts at other kind
Speaker 1: of organized stuff and this kind of falls into in
Speaker 1: my opinion, this kind of falls into the same kind
Speaker 1: of traps as sole internet organizing kind of always does.
Speaker 1: So the big thing that they're organizing for is called
Speaker 1: Black Friday Blackout, which is about kind of trying to
Speaker 1: get everyone to as many people as possible to not
Speaker 1: work Black Friday, um and not buy anything on Black Friday. Um. So,
Speaker 1: like a post from the subrendt here is like spread
Speaker 1: the word call sick if you're forced to work black
Speaker 1: on Black Friday, spend time with your family instead, remain
Speaker 1: at home and participate in your favorite activity on Friday. November,
Speaker 1: talk to your family and friends about about your work
Speaker 1: life struggles. Pass up flyers, join our slash anti work. Um,
Speaker 1: So this is you know, I think this kind of
Speaker 1: falls into the same like you know, general strike organized
Speaker 1: online stuff that we talked about before. How kind of
Speaker 1: like a lack of like real like in person solidarity
Speaker 1: and like non internet you know, networking and organizing results
Speaker 1: and stuff like this just you know, like proposed like
Speaker 1: one day strikes or actions that are ultimately kind of
Speaker 1: non effectual, right, Like they can be like a good
Speaker 1: symbol sometimes, but like you know, they're not. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not really gonna matter that much even
Speaker 1: even if it works. Well, what I think it'd be
Speaker 1: cool if literally no store was open on Black Friday
Speaker 1: because everyone quit. Yeah, that would be rad. But that's
Speaker 1: that's not I don't that's not gonna really happen. Um,
Speaker 1: it would be fun if it did, but like, realistically,
Speaker 1: it's it's not, it's not gonna happen. And there is
Speaker 1: people on the subward who also point this out there
Speaker 1: there there was there was a reply to this post
Speaker 1: that was like, oh look, another online call for a
Speaker 1: general strike with no union support whatsoever. Don't worry y'all
Speaker 1: this one, this one is definitely gonna work. Um. So
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, like there's a lot of people in
Speaker 1: the sub also recognize that like without like actual like
Speaker 1: organizing support um and in person stuff and you know
Speaker 1: networks to support people on like you know, lengthy strikes.
Speaker 1: These types of things are kind of are mostly symbolic
Speaker 1: actions that will have, you know, in the end, little
Speaker 1: little impact. Um. They may make you feel powerful as
Speaker 1: you're doing them, which is you know, which is good.
Speaker 1: That is a lot of activism is actually just just
Speaker 1: about you feeling powerful in that moment um. But you know,
Speaker 1: as as an end goals, remember it's important to be
Speaker 1: remember to think like it's not it's that this isn't
Speaker 1: you know, this isn't gonna reach whatever anti work utopia,
Speaker 1: which and I know people people organizing it aren't thinking that,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's it's it's important to keep this
Speaker 1: within context of like the limits of of of online organizing.
Speaker 1: You know. So a lot a lot of people like
Speaker 1: recommend you know, focusing on organizing your own workplace and community, um,
Speaker 1: discussing you know, discussing having discussions with with unions kind
Speaker 1: of in in your area. Um, and yeah, a part of,
Speaker 1: part of, part of kind of the part of the
Speaker 1: reply to to this original like a black Friday blackout
Speaker 1: post that that someone that someone wrote was was Seriously though,
Speaker 1: I would love for an actual gent general strike to
Speaker 1: kick off. But these online calls for gen general strikes,
Speaker 1: it's no union involvement, no demands, no supports for strikers
Speaker 1: of any kind, no nothing whatsoever beyond social media hashtags
Speaker 1: don't do anything. Focus on organizing or workplace and community
Speaker 1: discussed with unions which might be sympathetic to what criteria, uh,
Speaker 1: what criteria they might need from such a drastic action.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of unions on strike right now, so
Speaker 1: if there ever was a time to kick one off,
Speaker 1: it's now. Most general strikes in the past started off
Speaker 1: with specific strikes that started pulling in other union unions
Speaker 1: and solidarity than anything else. Focus on that and we
Speaker 1: might get somewhere. I think. Is it's a decent Is
Speaker 1: a decent advice for the people who are really dedicated
Speaker 1: onto this kind of like general strike thing is Yeah?
Speaker 1: That is that is? That is um, pretty pretty good
Speaker 1: advice in my opinion. I want to say something kind
Speaker 1: of briefly just in general about general strikes, because I
Speaker 1: think we've talked about it a lot on here, but
Speaker 1: they're really really hard. I mean, there there, there's there's
Speaker 1: an example, like and like just to just to get
Speaker 1: a picture of like how how actually hard it is
Speaker 1: to pull off. There was there was one in Sudan
Speaker 1: in in summer nineteen and you know, I mean this
Speaker 1: is this is in the middle of the revolution, right
Speaker 1: the the Sudan is incredibly highly organized, as incredibly militant.
Speaker 1: People have been like you know, I mean people like
Speaker 1: the like the chance in the street is like you
Speaker 1: cannot kill us. We already dead, like you know they
Speaker 1: and you know, and and it's the whole revolution is
Speaker 1: being led by the Student Professional Association, which is an
Speaker 1: association of like seventeen trade unions. Right, so this this
Speaker 1: is a population that is enormously better organized than like
Speaker 1: anything really that exists in the US. And you know,
Speaker 1: in in the middle of the summer at the army
Speaker 1: opens fire and starts killing protesters, and so they call
Speaker 1: general strike and you know, the turnout is massive, right,
Speaker 1: they have millions, millions upon millions of people show up
Speaker 1: to the strike, and on day one is successful, and
Speaker 1: then on day two of the strike, people start having
Speaker 1: to pull out, especially people the informal sector, because even
Speaker 1: with the level of organization they have, they can't support everyone.
Speaker 1: And by about day three, most of the strike is
Speaker 1: collapsed because even even with levels organization they had, even
Speaker 1: with you know, the coordination, even with the fact that
Speaker 1: they're in the middle of revolution, they just they couldn't
Speaker 1: support particularly people in the informal sector. So this stuff
Speaker 1: is really really really hard, and yeah, it is even
Speaker 1: it is definitely hard. Yeah, like even even highly organized,
Speaker 1: highly motivated people who are you know, like literally willing
Speaker 1: to fight to the death will lose. And that's that's
Speaker 1: something that you have to sort of keep in minds
Speaker 1: think when you're talking about this, because a lot of
Speaker 1: people are more focused on the kind of their individual resignations,
Speaker 1: finding other ways of making money, and just slacking off
Speaker 1: at work in general, because those are a lot a
Speaker 1: lot easier than trying to organize a general, a mass
Speaker 1: at general strike right now. And I think one of
Speaker 1: the really optimistic things about this whole anti work thing
Speaker 1: in including including the suburn, is that it has made
Speaker 1: some big executives kind of nervous. Um. There was a
Speaker 1: fantastic article by Yahoo Finance that by fantastic I mean
Speaker 1: funny for me. You know, they did not think it
Speaker 1: was as funny. Um about they talked with like the
Speaker 1: Golden Sacks CEO of and uh and they pointed to
Speaker 1: the anti work subarate it of being what was the
Speaker 1: what was the phrase, um, a long run risk to
Speaker 1: to labor force participation? Good? This is see that that
Speaker 1: When I first read that in the article, I just
Speaker 1: like flashed to my head in my head to that
Speaker 1: scene from Starship Troopers where Neil Patrick Harris puts his
Speaker 1: hand on the brain bug. It goes, it's afraid some raid. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he said, uh, we see some risk that workers were
Speaker 1: elected will elect to maintain out of the workforce for longer,
Speaker 1: provided they can afford to do so. Of pretty pretty
Speaker 1: good stuff. And I think and everything that's worth mentioning
Speaker 1: that hasn't been talked about very much is that so
Speaker 1: this is actually kind of working in some sense, Like
Speaker 1: the last few months in general, last few months particular
Speaker 1: have seen basically like the highest levels of wage increases
Speaker 1: that we've seen in decades. So you know, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we haven't overthrown capitalism yet. But like, if you can
Speaker 1: keep quitting your job, keep quitting your job at at
Speaker 1: your regular job, work less, keep doing it, it's working. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is stuff I wish we need to in the future.
Speaker 1: I would like us to be focusing more on stuff
Speaker 1: like that, like this that is legitimately, as you point out, Chris,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of reasons to be very optimistic about
Speaker 1: about some of the numbers that we're getting from what
Speaker 1: is happening to labor right now. Um, and it is
Speaker 1: important as we all like right now we're all miserable
Speaker 1: because we're sweating through the rittenhouse case, it is important
Speaker 1: to talk about stuff like that that like, yeah, some
Speaker 1: ship people is doing is hitting home. Some motherfucker's have
Speaker 1: found the glowy vulnerable spot on the Boss Monster and
Speaker 1: it's yeah, it's just not working. Yeah. Like again, as
Speaker 1: we started the series with, like yeah, general strike is
Speaker 1: is kind of the best available solution, um or a
Speaker 1: path to a solution that I can find. Um But anyway,
Speaker 1: uh what what what what what? What? I think I
Speaker 1: think that that does it for us today. I know
Speaker 1: special special like sequel stuff happening. Uh so tune in
Speaker 1: tomorrow for our list, and like like all of the
Speaker 1: best sequels, this one will be directed by James Cameron. UM.
Speaker 1: So we're all very excited to bring our pal j
Speaker 1: sch the pod, to bring our pal James and the
Speaker 1: reanimated corpse of Stan Winston. Um. It's going to be amazing.
Speaker 1: So check it out by everybody. Fuck work, Hey, hey, hey, hey,
Speaker 1: good introduction. I'm Robert Evans. This is it could happen here.
Speaker 1: That was Chris Garrison's also here, so is Sophie, who
Speaker 1: is changing her name to Sophie. What is your new name?
Speaker 1: Sophie dot Com Arena, Sophie dot Com Arena. She's doing
Speaker 1: this to deal with the trauma of the fact that
Speaker 1: Los Angeles just agreed to change the name of the
Speaker 1: Chase Bank Arena to the Crypto dot Com Center. Oh,
Speaker 1: Staples Center, Sorry, I'm getting my arena's named after Veno
Speaker 1: Brand's mixed up Nay. Speaking of the pointlessness of work,
Speaker 1: there are people laboring right now who worked at Staples
Speaker 1: so that Staples would have enough money to name a
Speaker 1: place where people go do sports after a place where
Speaker 1: people get fucking pencils. Um. And now Staples has declined
Speaker 1: enough that it's just crypto dot com. Fucking Crypto dot Com,
Speaker 1: book Upon, Look Upon the Worst Cryptocurrency e formerly Mighty
Speaker 1: Staples in despair, fucking the osman dius of the Office
Speaker 1: supply World. I don't know, whatever, what are we talking about?
Speaker 1: We're going to no that comes in the middle, but
Speaker 1: right now we're gonna go to a place where they
Speaker 1: banned crypto mining for the most part. So and that
Speaker 1: that place is China. And I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: specifically a lot of us been going on the Chinese Internet,
Speaker 1: what's been going on Chinese labor because so Garrison Garrison
Speaker 1: told me we're doing the Atgework episode, and I went, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there's you know, there's a version of this
Speaker 1: in China. And then I realized that like a almost
Speaker 1: no one has heard of lying flat and be it
Speaker 1: rules and see that nobody really know in the US
Speaker 1: knows what's going on in the Chinese Internet because it's
Speaker 1: effectively siloed. And I mean, you know, there's there's there's
Speaker 1: there's there's lots of different way to silo. I mean
Speaker 1: there's there's literally the Great Firewall, there's factors in different languages,
Speaker 1: people use different apps, and you know, the Internet has
Speaker 1: become this sort of like you know, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a bunch of bubbles that don't interact with each other. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the wald Garden thing, and it's you know, the sort
Speaker 1: of national level wald Garden stuff is I think in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways, way more dangerous than the stuff
Speaker 1: you know that like people complaining about if what sucond
Speaker 1: Audie logical bubble and like that's bad. But the fact
Speaker 1: that we have bubbles like this where it's like you know,
Speaker 1: the like with with like actual they basically borders but
Speaker 1: online Yeah, yeah, because they're enforced by governments with forces. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the place it was always going to go. Um, once
Speaker 1: we decided not to be rad with the internet, which
Speaker 1: everyone collectively decided in I'm going to say one thousand four. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you think do you think do do you think?
Speaker 1: Do you think that was nine eleven fault? Nine eleven
Speaker 1: played a role. Nine eleven did play a role. Um,
Speaker 1: the dot com boom played another role. Um, there were
Speaker 1: there there there were a number of factors. Um, but
Speaker 1: we can all blame it on let's blame it on
Speaker 1: low tax and continue so anti work in China before
Speaker 1: we get into lying flat, which is China's version of
Speaker 1: anti work. Isn't the right word because this actually started
Speaker 1: a few months before sort of anti work blew up
Speaker 1: in the US. But before we fully get into that,
Speaker 1: to understand what's going on here, we need to talk
Speaker 1: about something called involution. And did you say that again?
Speaker 1: Like inval involution in involution? Yeah, so this this, this
Speaker 1: is this is originally this is a very obscure anthropological
Speaker 1: developed by my old nemesis, Clifford Geertz, who's one of
Speaker 1: the most famous and most important anthropologists in history, who
Speaker 1: also sucks ass and I hate him. I thought your
Speaker 1: nemesis was Noam Chomsky. Yes, also, but for different reasons.
Speaker 1: Should I cancel the hit sub sub nemesis something I
Speaker 1: have many? I have many nemesses that I have been
Speaker 1: on the side God here, Jodi Dean episode at some point. Now,
Speaker 1: thank you. I appreciate allies in my one person intellectual wars,
Speaker 1: although this does seem to be a pretty boring intellectual war.
Speaker 1: Yeah said most of them. Yeah yeah, but what what
Speaker 1: what Gears was describing? Basically, so she doesn't feel work
Speaker 1: in Java? And what are you describing what what involution means.
Speaker 1: It's the system where people keep working harder and harder
Speaker 1: for there's no increase in output, and so that there's
Speaker 1: no there's no rewards for working harder. And so you know,
Speaker 1: in Java, you'd have these plantations, right, and the plantations
Speaker 1: would get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. But
Speaker 1: because each new person was only like harvesting just enough
Speaker 1: to feed themselves, you never actually got any productivity increases.
Speaker 1: And so you know, yeah, there's no there's no output
Speaker 1: increases and in really the case in America in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways. Yeah, and what's interesting, Well, okay, so
Speaker 1: the reason I want to talk about this also is
Speaker 1: because basically everyone who's been writing about this sormation news
Speaker 1: outlets has missed about half of the story of how
Speaker 1: how this like incredibly obscure anthropological term that like I
Speaker 1: don't like again, I was an anthropology major. I don't
Speaker 1: think I ever ran into involution while like while I
Speaker 1: was studying anthropology. Yeah, and no one has ever heard
Speaker 1: of this, Like fucking everyone in China has like it's
Speaker 1: like a treatise they can spout at you about this now. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and you know I want to talk a bit
Speaker 1: about how to emerge. And part of this is because
Speaker 1: you know, in the last about two years, people be
Speaker 1: getting increasingly piste off at you know, just the sort
Speaker 1: of incredibly comp editive nature of Chinese society and particularly work.
Speaker 1: And you know a lot of this is because everyone's
Speaker 1: working what's what's called, which is nine am to nine pm,
Speaker 1: six days a week. And as actually do you make
Speaker 1: this good? When I say everyone, that's like an average schedule.
Speaker 1: The schedules get a lot worse than that, but the
Speaker 1: nine six is the one that sort of gets the
Speaker 1: attention because a lot of people work in especially the
Speaker 1: tech industry. This is you know, as we do. But
Speaker 1: you know, everyone focused on the tech industry, everyone ignores
Speaker 1: a bunch of market workers who also do this and worse.
Speaker 1: And you know, there's just a normal societal pressure to
Speaker 1: sort of keep moving and keep competing and keep working.
Speaker 1: And simultaneously, you know, people in China today are working
Speaker 1: like basically as hard as anyone's worked in China since
Speaker 1: like people would literally collapse a bostion in the fields
Speaker 1: and the great leap forward, like that's a lot of
Speaker 1: people are working this hard. And but but instead of
Speaker 1: you know, getting rewards for this. Chinese growth rates have
Speaker 1: been collapsing for a decade, and yeah, this is you know,
Speaker 1: this is this is the thing that you get. In
Speaker 1: the U s too, was like well okay, people were like, well,
Speaker 1: if you work out to get into the middle class,
Speaker 1: but then you know everyone's working nine six, No one's
Speaker 1: getting into the middle class. The like, China has incredibly
Speaker 1: low rates of social ability, and you know it into
Speaker 1: this comes involution. But the weird part of what what's
Speaker 1: happening here is that involution doesn't enter the Chinese discourse
Speaker 1: through like people complaining about work. It's it's actually a
Speaker 1: product of a bunch of middle class people complaining about
Speaker 1: Chinese industrial policy. And this is the hardest story that
Speaker 1: nobody really talks about, even though I think it's it's
Speaker 1: really interesting because again, like this, you know, anti anti
Speaker 1: work in in the US stars and the left right involution,
Speaker 1: which is the thing that's going to bring about sort
Speaker 1: of the Chinese version of anti work is the right
Speaker 1: way is originally right wing discourse, um and and it's interesting,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a right wing, very nationalist discourse that
Speaker 1: gets you know, the right wing part of it gets
Speaker 1: essentially expunged and it gets pulled left. So originally, you know,
Speaker 1: China is h I don't have a more elegant way
Speaker 1: of saying this than China's leaders and more online than ours,
Speaker 1: like significantly more like they actually that's right, that's hard
Speaker 1: to abash it. It's people people like like local government
Speaker 1: offices right have like they have these like internal sites
Speaker 1: that like show them what people are posting. And this
Speaker 1: this goes from the from the bottom levels, it goes
Speaker 1: away to the top. Like people actually listen to bloggers,
Speaker 1: like like they're there, you know some of them, some
Speaker 1: of the people I'm about to talk about it are
Speaker 1: incredibly influential. And there's a bunch of arguments in the
Speaker 1: early two thousands about how China is gonna industrialize and
Speaker 1: these are basically online arguments. Um and the guys who
Speaker 1: win that argument, right, she Shanping basically takes their industrial
Speaker 1: policy and implements it, which is you know, which is
Speaker 1: which is scales? Like how online these people are that Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: people are taking acont policy from like literally, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's not solely that I don't take
Speaker 1: a policy. People arguing on the internet. This is this
Speaker 1: is an incredibly online society and it you know, but
Speaker 1: the worst part is that for a while it works.
Speaker 1: You know that the ECHINAR policy basically is they're getting
Speaker 1: increased the size of the Chinese economy by investing in
Speaker 1: sort of high tech industry and moving up the value chain.
Speaker 1: This this has been very standards or Chinese second on
Speaker 1: policy for a while. Um, the problem is in the
Speaker 1: last about decade, it's it's it's stopped working. And you know,
Speaker 1: the CCPs response was to do more financialization, and this
Speaker 1: piste off the like the the online they were they
Speaker 1: were called like the industrial Party. This this is off
Speaker 1: those guys because you know, the whole thing was don't financialize,
Speaker 1: just keep investing in like building airplanes and stuff, and
Speaker 1: the Chinese economies will work itself out. And but eventually
Speaker 1: even they can't keep making this argument because you know,
Speaker 1: I mean like like he doesn't tend right, Like the
Speaker 1: Chinese GDP growth rate was ten percent and now it's
Speaker 1: like maybe five and last year, I mean last year twenties,
Speaker 1: so you know it was really low. But I mean
Speaker 1: the Chinese growth rate has been imploding. And so what
Speaker 1: you get out of this is is this group of
Speaker 1: people called the Cooists based on this guy named Cow. Okay,
Speaker 1: so how is the guy who who who essentially introduces
Speaker 1: the concept of involution and he's arguing that this is
Speaker 1: happening because I'm gonna quote him here, people can't get
Speaker 1: quote a peaceful life, get a pretty girl, live in
Speaker 1: a big house because of the US. And so there's
Speaker 1: the solution to this, basically is is to deal with
Speaker 1: but to destroy America as a hedgemon. And then once
Speaker 1: you do that, you know you can get all of
Speaker 1: these things. And as you can tell, like, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: peaceful life, get a pretty girl, live in a big house.
Speaker 1: This this is like a very conservative framing of this. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this is this is the Chinese equivalent of
Speaker 1: two point five kids in a white picket fence. And
Speaker 1: it has all of this sort of associated gender politics
Speaker 1: and class politics to go along with that. And you know,
Speaker 1: and when when Cow and the Cows you're talking about involution,
Speaker 1: what they're talking about is they're literally they literally mean
Speaker 1: Chinese diegnated economy, right, so that they're talking about, okay,
Speaker 1: that you have more inputs, you have labor, technology inputs,
Speaker 1: but the output for input is declining, and the only
Speaker 1: way to restore economic growth the chief prosperity is by
Speaker 1: solving a decline output by defeating the Americans. But you know,
Speaker 1: and this this is kind of a big deal. And
Speaker 1: for a while in sort of like twenty this this is,
Speaker 1: this is going places, but very quickly people are like,
Speaker 1: my life fucking sucks, Like I don't care about this
Speaker 1: econ ship or this like grand national struggle against the
Speaker 1: world hedgemon, Like I care about the fact that, like
Speaker 1: my life is this incredibly pointless, ever escalating rat race
Speaker 1: with like literally no rewards. Yeah, that would that would
Speaker 1: concern me too, if that were a thing that we
Speaker 1: were capable of feeling in our country. Yeah, it's why
Speaker 1: there there's been some really funny stuff with involution, where
Speaker 1: like you read accounts of it and you'll get like
Speaker 1: anthropologists going like, oh, yeah, this is this is the
Speaker 1: thing that this is the thing that's unique to China,
Speaker 1: and it's like have have you worked a job in
Speaker 1: in the US? Like, but you know involution, you know
Speaker 1: what happens to it over over the course of sort
Speaker 1: of it goes from being the general you know, it
Speaker 1: goes it goes from being this thing that's about like
Speaker 1: very specific like technical industrial arguments about industrial policy too
Speaker 1: is when one anthropologists put it, quote the experience of
Speaker 1: being locked in competition that one ultimately knows as meaningless.
Speaker 1: And so people are, yeah, we couldn't, we couldn't imagine that.
Speaker 1: This is yeah, and it's you know, and people people
Speaker 1: start talking about finding individual solutions to this, and so
Speaker 1: you know, then this is things like working last, moving
Speaker 1: to lower tier cities, getting less protgious jobs. Um, but
Speaker 1: you know, and I want to think about this again
Speaker 1: because this this is a really interesting thing where you
Speaker 1: have a very incredibly right wing, nationalistic and sort of
Speaker 1: like like middle class like nostalgia kind of like you know,
Speaker 1: like Milt aggressive foreign policy thing and then it just
Speaker 1: flips and and part of how it flips and this
Speaker 1: is a part of the story that is almost completely ignored,
Speaker 1: but I think it's really important. Did you guys know
Speaker 1: about There's the YouTuber named leads It. She she's the
Speaker 1: biggest Chinese YouTuber. She has sixteen million followers, and most
Speaker 1: of her followers are not on YouTube because you know,
Speaker 1: YouTube like blocked by the firewall, but she has she
Speaker 1: has fifty five million followers on the sort of Chinese
Speaker 1: version of TikTok, and yeah, she has across the world.
Speaker 1: She has a hundred million followers, right she she's she's
Speaker 1: one of the biggest media stars in the world. And
Speaker 1: her origins are kind of unclear. The like official biography
Speaker 1: basically says that like when she was twelve, instead of
Speaker 1: going to high school, she's being a waitress, and then
Speaker 1: she had to like you know, but she she she'd
Speaker 1: gone to the city and then she had to return
Speaker 1: to Revels to take care of her grandma. And she
Speaker 1: makes his videos that are these like very soft and
Speaker 1: calming videos or like calming music of her going into
Speaker 1: the woods and like harvesting materials and making fires out
Speaker 1: of logs and like cooking things. Okay, and it's it's
Speaker 1: it's just like it's you know, it's it's very much
Speaker 1: this this really utopianism. There's there's basically no industrial technology
Speaker 1: like cottage coor returned to nature. Yeah. Yeah, I know
Speaker 1: a lot of people who watched it like that just
Speaker 1: to like soothe them after a day of work. Like
Speaker 1: see somebody like dig a cave and turn it into
Speaker 1: like a bath or something. Using just hand tools or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's it's interesting this kind of almost like turned
Speaker 1: into a sub genre. But she's by far the biggest
Speaker 1: like version of this. And you know, so she she
Speaker 1: gets picked up by a media company and from goes
Speaker 1: viral and you know, and interesting because so she's doing
Speaker 1: this because so she she has to go back to
Speaker 1: take care of her grandma, and so she like opens
Speaker 1: a store and she's trying to support herself but and
Speaker 1: like her grandma by opening a store, and so the
Speaker 1: videos were like a way to promote the store. And
Speaker 1: then you know, now she has a hundred million followers
Speaker 1: and she she gets adopted as this kind of like
Speaker 1: like national culture ambassador, I guess by the state. Sure,
Speaker 1: And and it's justestly you know, so there's nothing overtly
Speaker 1: political about these videos at all, right, which is especially
Speaker 1: offering and like trying to sell is this you know,
Speaker 1: this like fantasy of retreat from industrial majority into world life.
Speaker 1: And I think it's really easy to look at that
Speaker 1: esthetic can go like this is basically fascist, Like this
Speaker 1: is reject majority embraced tre it issues. Some people online
Speaker 1: when they see that immediately sees after I was like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: it's eco fascist. Um, yes, I think that. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think, you know, and I think like that interpretation,
Speaker 1: I think is actually a lot of y I got
Speaker 1: picked up by the Chinese, by Chinese media companies and
Speaker 1: then like sort of by the Chinese state because you know,
Speaker 1: like having an actual positive utopian image of rural life
Speaker 1: is politically useul with them and something that's like not
Speaker 1: hasn't been true since like we've had this for a
Speaker 1: long time. Yeah, well no, and I think I would
Speaker 1: say this. I think this is the thing that's different
Speaker 1: in China is that there hasn't been like a positive
Speaker 1: conception of rural life really since I guess the Great
Speaker 1: le Forwards and then are like there were some people
Speaker 1: in the Cultural Revolution, but then they actually went there
Speaker 1: and we're like, oh god, this sucks, and so you know,
Speaker 1: so they didn't even a new one they come up
Speaker 1: with this. But you know, the thing that's different about
Speaker 1: China than the US is that China's might get worker
Speaker 1: population should like is almost the entire size of the
Speaker 1: population of the US. I mean it's it's like twenty
Speaker 1: million people, right, I mean it's it's enormous and a
Speaker 1: huge number of these people. You know, I'm some of
Speaker 1: these people are going from like city to city. You're
Speaker 1: like town of town, but a lot of these people
Speaker 1: are coming from from rural villages into cities. And you know,
Speaker 1: I mean these are this is this is the background
Speaker 1: of the Chinese workforce. And like these people like they
Speaker 1: see their family once a year because you know, like
Speaker 1: they can't afford to go home, so they go home
Speaker 1: once a year for New Year's because they get some time.
Speaker 1: Often they come back and and this is where you know,
Speaker 1: like these videos are an obvious fantasy, but you know,
Speaker 1: they suggest an alternative to work in the capitalist city
Speaker 1: that's sort of plausible, you know, especially if you come
Speaker 1: from rural village. And this is where this whole thing
Speaker 1: completely backfires on the Chinese ruling class. And you know,
Speaker 1: because this this, this this cowisted involution discourse is about
Speaker 1: diffuse with this style of rural rural utopianism into a
Speaker 1: movement that is going to shake the foundation of work itself.
Speaker 1: But first, but first, ads again all sudden not connecting
Speaker 1: to anything we're talking. Why Garrison don't even bring that up.
Speaker 1: There's no needs, there's no reason for people to think
Speaker 1: about about the fact that about that. Don't think anyway,
Speaker 1: here's about ads. Yeah, think about the Washington State Highway
Speaker 1: Patrol primary sponsors. If it could happen here, if it
Speaker 1: happens to you, you'll want the Washington State Highway Patrol
Speaker 1: the border. It's so funny. Anyway, we're trying to but
Speaker 1: I think it's we're working on it. People. I think
Speaker 1: it's hilarious. Yeah, please don't, please don't join the Washington
Speaker 1: State Highway Patrol. We're back. And I don't know about y'all,
Speaker 1: but I thought I knew what I was talking about,
Speaker 1: and I after those ads, I am fully Washington State
Speaker 1: Highway Patrol build. I'm on board. Let's do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In April of a guy in Chinese social media makes
Speaker 1: a post and I'm just gonna started. So, yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna read this post because it's kind of short
Speaker 1: and it rules. I haven't been working for two years.
Speaker 1: I have just been hanging around, and I don't see
Speaker 1: anything wrong with This pressure mainly comes from the generation
Speaker 1: with your peers and the values of the older generation.
Speaker 1: These pressures keep popping up, but we don't have to
Speaker 1: abide by these norms. I can live like Diogenes and
Speaker 1: sleep in a wooden bucket. I can live like Heracletus
Speaker 1: in a cave thinking about logos. Since this land has
Speaker 1: never had a school thought that upholds human subjectivity, I
Speaker 1: can develop one of my own. Lying down is my
Speaker 1: philosophical movements. Only through lying flat can humans become the
Speaker 1: measure of all things based. Oh my god, that's the best.
Speaker 1: I love that. Can I talk about Diogenes now? So
Speaker 1: my my man Diogenes is he's from this trennd in
Speaker 1: Greek philosophical thought during kind of the high period of
Speaker 1: Greek civilization where a bunch of things come out of it.
Speaker 1: You kind of get anarchism, Western anarchism out of it,
Speaker 1: you kind of get you get elements of like Puritan
Speaker 1: culture from it, because there are a lot of them
Speaker 1: are very much anti like the pleasures of sex and
Speaker 1: like anything pleasing, and like you don't you don't do
Speaker 1: anything that feels good because then you become dependent on it.
Speaker 1: Like there's whole bunch of ship going on um. And
Speaker 1: Diogenes was like one of the one of the first
Speaker 1: motherfucker's who were kind of playing around in this in
Speaker 1: this philosophical space. And when he gets into so his
Speaker 1: early life is his dad is uh kind of a grifter.
Speaker 1: It sounds like we know that he got in trouble.
Speaker 1: He and his dad got exiled for debasing currency, which
Speaker 1: could be as simple as they were watering down for
Speaker 1: lack of a better term, like the gold or silver
Speaker 1: and currency with less precious metals and hiding it in
Speaker 1: order to make a profit, right and like keep the
Speaker 1: extra gold. That could be what they were doing. It
Speaker 1: also could have been like it could have been political
Speaker 1: because some people who were doing this in Sinope, I
Speaker 1: think is the city which is now in Turkey. We're
Speaker 1: doing it for political reasons. We don't really know why.
Speaker 1: But there's actual documented archaeological evidence of this, including right
Speaker 1: around the time he would have been a child. We
Speaker 1: found from that period a cash of debased gold and
Speaker 1: silver coins that had been destroyed, so someone had like
Speaker 1: realized they've been debased and destroyed them so they couldn't
Speaker 1: be used. So there's evidence. Anyway, he and his dad
Speaker 1: get exiled, which means from an early stage he goes
Speaker 1: from being someone of means, if your dad's making the currency,
Speaker 1: you're not probably not like a poor family um. And
Speaker 1: then they get kicked out of their city state and
Speaker 1: they're like kind of stateless. And so Diogenes evolves over
Speaker 1: time and like gets into philosophy. He tries to there's
Speaker 1: this I always forget the name of the guy that
Speaker 1: he he loved it first. But there's this philosopher who's like,
Speaker 1: you know this cynical like that's the school of thought
Speaker 1: he comes from. He's like a cynic um that Diogenes
Speaker 1: really wants to study from. And the guy like assaults
Speaker 1: him as as Diogenes is like, hey, man, I want
Speaker 1: to learn from you, Like he like hits him or something.
Speaker 1: This keeps happening, and eventually he's like this guy is
Speaker 1: like why do you keep doing this? And Diogenes is like,
Speaker 1: you have something I can learn from, uh, And so
Speaker 1: I don't really care what you do to me. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna keep persisting. And so he becomes this
Speaker 1: guy's student, YadA YadA. And the guy who he becomes
Speaker 1: the student of is like kind of a poser because
Speaker 1: he's talking about like we need to give up you know,
Speaker 1: these kind of like pleasures of of like civilized life
Speaker 1: and and return to a more simple time and like
Speaker 1: not enjoy all of these, you know, the benefits of wealth,
Speaker 1: but he like he's also a rich guy and he
Speaker 1: doesn't give up his money. And Diogenes is like poor
Speaker 1: as hell um and stays that way. Um. And so
Speaker 1: he becomes famous for he goes to Athens and he
Speaker 1: becomes famous for a bunch of like troll ship. We
Speaker 1: don't actually have He wrote like ten books, we don't
Speaker 1: have any of them, so we don't actually like know
Speaker 1: what he actually wrote in his philosophy. We just have
Speaker 1: stories from other philosophers and it's all Diogenes being a
Speaker 1: fucking troll. So like um. On one occasion. He one
Speaker 1: of his big things was he believed that people that
Speaker 1: if if something was an acceptable behavior, it was an
Speaker 1: acceptable behavior everywhere, right. And so the start of this
Speaker 1: was in an ath you were supposed to go buy
Speaker 1: your food in the market, but you weren't supposed to
Speaker 1: eat it there. That was like considered rude, like like
Speaker 1: like like kind of obscene almost, And Diogenes would like
Speaker 1: get food and then usually by begging, because he was
Speaker 1: that was the way he got everything. He had no money,
Speaker 1: he would like get food and he would eat it
Speaker 1: right in the middle of the market. And everybody was like,
Speaker 1: that's disgusting, and Diogenes would be like, well, if it's
Speaker 1: okay for me to eat, it must be okay for
Speaker 1: me to eat here. That's great. Diogenes took it a
Speaker 1: little bit further than that, because yeah, yeah, I can
Speaker 1: see a few ways you can take this. He extended
Speaker 1: that too. If it's fine for me to urinator ship,
Speaker 1: it's fine for me to do anywhere. And he defended
Speaker 1: himself masturbating it. We can get people in public as
Speaker 1: if this is okay for me to do in my bedroom,
Speaker 1: why can't I do this here? Right? Um, it's very
Speaker 1: like he's he's he's a troll um Diogenes, And he's
Speaker 1: also like again, the stories we have him is he
Speaker 1: is like uber an aesthetic, so like, at one point,
Speaker 1: for a long time, the only thing he owns is
Speaker 1: a wooden ole that's his cup and and for his food.
Speaker 1: And then, according to you know legend, he sees this
Speaker 1: poor peasant child drinking from like cupped hands and he
Speaker 1: throws away his bowl and he's really angry and he's like, god,
Speaker 1: damn it, I spent all this effort carrying around something useless,
Speaker 1: Like I said, ship, in my hands. He's he's a
Speaker 1: very entertaining character and a very like yeah, yeah, he's
Speaker 1: absolutely an eugle um and he's yeah, he's just kind
Speaker 1: of like an endearing piece of ship. Is like his
Speaker 1: the the idea you get, but also like smarter than
Speaker 1: I mean, because because fundamentally, what Diagenes is doing is
Speaker 1: he's he's saying, like, hey, all this stuff that we
Speaker 1: think is important and good about our culture and and
Speaker 1: like valuable, what if it wasn't, what if none of
Speaker 1: it matters. He's like he's provoking the thick and he's
Speaker 1: he's big into like one of his his Like the
Speaker 1: things he comes back to a lot is that like
Speaker 1: dogs are clearly happier than us and like better creatures
Speaker 1: than us, so we should just seek to be like dogs. Um.
Speaker 1: And one of the ways he might have died is
Speaker 1: getting bitten by a dog and his bike getting infected.
Speaker 1: We don't really know how he died. Um. The ever
Speaker 1: thing about Diogenes, this guy fucking hates rich people. Oh
Speaker 1: he's he's and he's very funny about it. So Alexander
Speaker 1: the Great apocryphal Lee, maybe this probably never happened, But
Speaker 1: the story is that Alexander the Great comes to Athens,
Speaker 1: you know, while he's on his his blitz through conquering
Speaker 1: the known world, and finds Diogenes. Alexander the Great was
Speaker 1: like raised by Aristotle, right, so he knows his philosophy. Guys,
Speaker 1: like he's he's he's seeking Diogenes out because he's a
Speaker 1: fan of this dude, probably through stories that were told
Speaker 1: to him in the same way that like I'm telling
Speaker 1: them to you now. So he comes up to Diogenes
Speaker 1: and he's like, oh my god, I'm Alexander the Great.
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan. If I couldn't be Alexander the Great,
Speaker 1: I would want to be Diogenes um. And Diogenes response, well,
Speaker 1: if I couldn't be Diogenes, I would just want to
Speaker 1: be Diogenes, which is a fucking flex again but probably
Speaker 1: never happened. But like, I want to, I want to
Speaker 1: read this meme that Garrison sent me, because it happens.
Speaker 1: It's absolutely a perfect encription to what what this whole
Speaker 1: thing is sort of about. So, okay, this is me.
Speaker 1: The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper.
Speaker 1: He was seen by the philosopher It or not a process.
Speaker 1: Guest name Aristippus, who is living matter some dead ass Greek,
Speaker 1: some guy who's about to get absolutely destroyed. He's living
Speaker 1: comfortably like flattering the king. Aristipis says, if you would
Speaker 1: learn to be subservient to the king, you would not
Speaker 1: have to live on lentils. Theogenus supplied, learn to live
Speaker 1: on lentils, and you will not have to be subservient
Speaker 1: to the king. Oh, sorts of based ship like that
Speaker 1: my favorite. But know our Plato is like, is like
Speaker 1: trying to determine, trying to define like a human in
Speaker 1: the simplest way possible. Yes, yeah, like the Platonic idea.
Speaker 1: And he was, so he comes to the conclusion that like, well,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a it's a it's an unwing biped um.
Speaker 1: And Diogenes supposedly goes grabs a plucked chicken and says,
Speaker 1: behold a man, Like I found a dude, rules um.
Speaker 1: He would he would famously walk around town in broad
Speaker 1: daylight with like a what do you call it, like
Speaker 1: a lantern, like looking around and people like, what are
Speaker 1: you looking for? It's like I'm looking for a man.
Speaker 1: He would like, look at a dude and you're like
Speaker 1: I'm looking for a man. And as it is to say,
Speaker 1: like none of you motherfucker's are people like you all
Speaker 1: think that you're human beings, but you're really just pieces
Speaker 1: of ship. It's just an amazing asshole. Sorry that that
Speaker 1: we should move back to anti work, but that's what yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but and this is this is the funny that both
Speaker 1: both both American and Chinese like anti work people both
Speaker 1: fucking love Diogenestely. Yeah, you know, very popular on our
Speaker 1: slash anti work. Yeah, and you know, and the thing
Speaker 1: I was reading about the like you know, learned to
Speaker 1: live on lentils and you'll never like after such a
Speaker 1: game by King that that's a lot of what lying
Speaker 1: down becomes. So very rapidly, this whole thing spreads into
Speaker 1: this like really it's a sort of astounding, you know,
Speaker 1: it starts out of the meme and it spreads incredibly quickly,
Speaker 1: and the CCP gets like really really mad about this.
Speaker 1: Um so, so it's like so this this starts in April, right,
Speaker 1: and in May there's they have this like enormous media
Speaker 1: blitz where like like the party is like outlet basically
Speaker 1: and Guandong publishes like a four page long attack on
Speaker 1: the concept of lying down, like the cc the end
Speaker 1: of the newspapers everywhere published this stuff like the CCP
Speaker 1: like bands flat weed yet yeah, and it's funny becase
Speaker 1: it's like if they do this, but it's too late,
Speaker 1: Like it's yeah and you know so, so part part
Speaker 1: of the lying down is is about, you know, you
Speaker 1: have this incredibly fast paced, intense work culture, you have involution,
Speaker 1: You're working more and more and you're getting nothing out
Speaker 1: of it. Lying flat is just going no, like you
Speaker 1: just lie down down, you refuse to work. But it's
Speaker 1: it's it's also it's more than that. And I think
Speaker 1: this is this goes back to the sort of broader
Speaker 1: conception of anti work. So on one of the slogans
Speaker 1: of this movement is don't bribe property, don't buy a car,
Speaker 1: don't get married, don't have children, and don't consume. And
Speaker 1: you know that the last part of this is implied
Speaker 1: is don't work. And you know there's a lot of
Speaker 1: sort of going on here. I mean, you have you know,
Speaker 1: it's not just sort of a critique of like we
Speaker 1: work too hard. It's about you know, it's about the
Speaker 1: sort of fall system. It's about the sort of patriarchy
Speaker 1: involved in this. It's about this sort of like force
Speaker 1: capitalist consumption. It's about like, you know, the fact that
Speaker 1: like literally a quarter of Chinese of China's economy or
Speaker 1: Chinese GDP is like all this real estate bullshit that
Speaker 1: everyone knows is going to collapse and even when it
Speaker 1: gets built like sucks. Thank god we don't have anything
Speaker 1: like that here. Yeah, I know, it's great. It's one
Speaker 1: of one of the fun things about larding histories. You
Speaker 1: could just watch every country do exactly the same thing
Speaker 1: with their housing market, like Japan do. It's like, it's
Speaker 1: greats like you also think this will work? What what?
Speaker 1: What extra fun thing is you get to watch every
Speaker 1: country do the same thing with farms and it always
Speaker 1: ended the same anyway. Yea. So there's there's a lot
Speaker 1: of you know, in order to sort of like facilitate this,
Speaker 1: you know, you get back to the Diogenes, so a
Speaker 1: lot of it what's happening is people sharing tips about
Speaker 1: how to make the cheapest food you can possibly survive
Speaker 1: on so you don't have to work, and so you know,
Speaker 1: and people the guy who wrote the Diogenes post like
Speaker 1: he spends thirty dollars a month. And he does this
Speaker 1: by only eating dried ramen and eggs and like rice. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: one way to do it. This is like the most
Speaker 1: extreme example. I actually don't even think it's the most
Speaker 1: extreme example. A lot of people. One of the things
Speaker 1: that happens a lot is a bunch of people just
Speaker 1: like have left their jobs to become monks. This, this
Speaker 1: is like a whole thing. Yeah. I got to be
Speaker 1: a Buddhist, like honestly, like absolutely like, and I used
Speaker 1: to live in a place in the middle of fucking nowhere,
Speaker 1: one of the most like isolated places I've ever lived
Speaker 1: that like had power um and one of the people
Speaker 1: who was like by neighbor they were within several miles
Speaker 1: of us, was a monastery. This is in the United States,
Speaker 1: And like I went there once because I heard they
Speaker 1: made good wine to try and get some of their wine,
Speaker 1: and like, none of them would answer the door. I
Speaker 1: could see them inside all staring at me. They didn't
Speaker 1: do ship, And my my overwhelming thought was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems like a pretty good way to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I see why you guys have picked this life. It
Speaker 1: was also during the election back from the r N
Speaker 1: C and the d n C and was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems smarter than what I'm doing. Yeah, so there's
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, yeah, that'd mean the stream example,
Speaker 1: like if people going to become monks. But like one
Speaker 1: of the things that's happening a lot is again you know,
Speaker 1: China hasn't known with micro worker population, and people are
Speaker 1: just like fuck this, I'm going back to my village
Speaker 1: and so and you know, and this is you know
Speaker 1: this this this, this is where they really screwed up
Speaker 1: with the YouTube stuff because you know, people were people,
Speaker 1: you know, they were gambling that that you know, you
Speaker 1: could just sell this as an aesthetic, and you know,
Speaker 1: you can sell it as an aesthetic like Chinese TikTok
Speaker 1: has this integrated thing in it where like if if
Speaker 1: you if you if you plug like something to buy it,
Speaker 1: like you can like click it and it'll just it'll
Speaker 1: take you like to a link like to to to
Speaker 1: to the thing it's selling, you know. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't make a norse amount of money on this,
Speaker 1: but you know, the the the other side of that
Speaker 1: sword is a bunch of people were like I don't
Speaker 1: have to work this, Like I don't have to work
Speaker 1: in a city, I can just go home. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know, and you know and you know, so you know,
Speaker 1: as as you're talking about the antiwork stuff, it's not
Speaker 1: actually possible for a lot of people to leave their jobs.
Speaker 1: So the solution to this was there there's a culture
Speaker 1: that to fell up called petting fish, which and but
Speaker 1: but before you talk about petting fish, you said something about,
Speaker 1: uh plugging things on TikTok and you know who, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, like plugging like advertisements, and you know who
Speaker 1: also plugs plugs advertisements? Chris, Oh, no, is it us
Speaker 1: to Joe Rogan. But our new sponsor is the Joe
Speaker 1: Rogan Experience, brought to you by Honda. Honda drive a car,
Speaker 1: do fascism? Honda? Really yeah, Honda Garrison. Look, we don't
Speaker 1: We're not nearly a big enough podcast to get fucking
Speaker 1: to get a Toyota ad. Are you crazy? Yeah? That's
Speaker 1: what we can dream big, Yeah, I mean that is
Speaker 1: the dream to sell Toyota's. I mean we could become
Speaker 1: used car salesmen in the valley. All right, here's that
Speaker 1: AhR back cut that head and fish monk, Chris, handle it,
Speaker 1: keep it all in baby, Yeah, so there's there's all
Speaker 1: this thing called the petting fish, which is like Chinese
Speaker 1: slack off culture, and it's you know, somet of people
Speaker 1: sharing tips how to slack off at work, and it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of the equivalent like I love that it's
Speaker 1: called petting fish. And then also like, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of the Chinese equivalent of like boss makes a dollar,
Speaker 1: I make a dime. That's why I shoot on company time.
Speaker 1: So people do just a lot of like they have
Speaker 1: a lot of like genuinely fun things they do. Like
Speaker 1: people people started putting like fake beatings on their calendars
Speaker 1: and people wouldn't bother them. They like they just like
Speaker 1: people like that. That is also that's that's that's also
Speaker 1: what I do. Yeah, yeah, I mean the if you
Speaker 1: want to make I love the term petting fish as well,
Speaker 1: but if you want to like make it sound cool.
Speaker 1: They're waging an insurgency from within capitalism by by by
Speaker 1: trying to take resources away from their employers, um without
Speaker 1: being spotted. Yeah, there's a there's a thing in Volume
Speaker 1: one of Capital about this that I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: I could pull this up, and then I was that
Speaker 1: is too much work. I'm not going to do it,
Speaker 1: so I don't have the thing in volume one where
Speaker 1: talks about struggling between about labor time. But instead you
Speaker 1: get a bunch of people like the Smike, smuggling whiskey
Speaker 1: into work, taking through our lunch breaks. My favorite one,
Speaker 1: absolutely favorite drink at work, especially if your nurse, Oh boy,
Speaker 1: you probably killed about fifty people. This is gonna be crossed.
Speaker 1: Fingers crossed. So you know how like companies all have
Speaker 1: these like these really annoying like mindfulness fitness things. So
Speaker 1: one of these people started doing was okay, so you
Speaker 1: know the thing like you have to drink eight hour,
Speaker 1: eight times a day. So they would set these alarms
Speaker 1: that's like, oh, I have to go drink my water.
Speaker 1: And so like every like every like fifty minutes or something,
Speaker 1: they just go up and like spend twenty minutes getting
Speaker 1: water and they sit back down. It's like you've just
Speaker 1: eviscerated enormous part of your work day. And and the
Speaker 1: product of this, you know, this CP is really piste
Speaker 1: off about this. And you know you get these giant
Speaker 1: billboards to say no lying flat, no petting fish on
Speaker 1: them or something. It would have been liter really incomprehensible
Speaker 1: like a year ago. It's amazing. And you know, and
Speaker 1: I think this is something you know in the U
Speaker 1: s anti work, like the actual political class kind of
Speaker 1: has been ignoring it. I mean, you see a couple
Speaker 1: of acial antists in China, Chesing Ping like made a speech.
Speaker 1: It was like, you know, he have a private speech
Speaker 1: a bunch of hog people in the party, and so
Speaker 1: a part of it a printage like a month ago
Speaker 1: or something I've I've lost track of all time. But
Speaker 1: like like like specifically in this speech that Esping is
Speaker 1: making that is published in the official like theoretical journal,
Speaker 1: he's like explicitly saying like don't lie flat and saying
Speaker 1: quote happy life is earned through heart, hard work. And yeah,
Speaker 1: and he also has this, he has his ranch, but
Speaker 1: like denouncing welfare ism, which is great the the communist
Speaker 1: vanguard there. Yeah, yeah, preaching the immortal science. Yeah, socialism
Speaker 1: with Chinese characteristics. Motherfucker's don't be a welfare queen follows.
Speaker 1: Even thought it's great, you know, but it's interesting people,
Speaker 1: this is the one people are really freaked out about.
Speaker 1: Like I saw, I saw like an American writer about this,
Speaker 1: who you know, they wrote like an article about this
Speaker 1: whole thing, and then they were like, this is gonna
Speaker 1: this is gonna cause inflation. It's like, this is gonna
Speaker 1: be the driver of like what people just use the
Speaker 1: word inflation to mean whatever scary thing they want. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well they're they're like, oh, this will this will increase
Speaker 1: wages and that will lead to inflation and we'll get
Speaker 1: the seventies again. And I'm like, God, maybe, but a
Speaker 1: tallow disco again? Did you ever think of that guy
Speaker 1: that we that were are reserves of a tallow disco
Speaker 1: are critically low? Do you wonder what a tallow disco is?
Speaker 1: No idea? That's a shame. All right, let's continue what
Speaker 1: what what type of like is there is there like
Speaker 1: any like you said this kind of stuff started to
Speaker 1: like move left words. Is there any like actual like
Speaker 1: leftist organizing in these types of places? So so this
Speaker 1: is the thing I was getting to, which is that, like,
Speaker 1: you know, people are starting to do reading groups. But
Speaker 1: the problem, the problem with leftist organizing and China is that,
Speaker 1: you know, so state policy in the past three years
Speaker 1: has been like if you poke your head above ground,
Speaker 1: you get arrested. So you know, I mean, for example,
Speaker 1: there was there was a strike at Jasick and you know,
Speaker 1: a bunch of student groups who've been organizing for a
Speaker 1: long time like tried to do all drety with it,
Speaker 1: and they all got arrested. The people who are people
Speaker 1: who let the strike got arrested. All the students who
Speaker 1: are doing so ald Aretay got arrested. People like people
Speaker 1: got arrested for like like dancing with like university students
Speaker 1: got arrested for like dancing with the people who were
Speaker 1: like cleaning the floors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like the yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's it's incredible and like you know, and the
Speaker 1: other thing that you can see about this was so so.
Speaker 1: For example, there was there was a guy doing like
Speaker 1: delivery driver organizing. It was kind of weird. He was
Speaker 1: like kind of an entrepreneur kind of doing delivery driver organizing.
Speaker 1: Like he got arrested, and then you know, like a
Speaker 1: couple of weeks later, this is people like, oh, we're
Speaker 1: gonna like do things to improve the conditions of of
Speaker 1: of delivery drivers and know who knows if that's going
Speaker 1: to happen, but like you know, basically like any anyone
Speaker 1: out for some reason that the people in the tech
Speaker 1: sector have been able to get away with more for
Speaker 1: reasons that are probably class based, and I think this
Speaker 1: doesn't take them seriously in the way they do with
Speaker 1: students factory workers. But you know, and actually I mean
Speaker 1: the fact that the tech workers like kind of recently
Speaker 1: like that there's a tech worker thing calling for like
Speaker 1: like democratic control of production, which is wild. But other
Speaker 1: than those guys like you can't you know, you can't
Speaker 1: stick your head up, you get flattened. So this has
Speaker 1: sort of been the result of this, which is this
Speaker 1: like you know, the sort of the like lying flat
Speaker 1: is this, you know, it's this mass to centralized movements
Speaker 1: that you know, there's there's no one to hit with
Speaker 1: a hammer, and you know, and and I think, like, okay,
Speaker 1: so one of one of the other quotes that's that's
Speaker 1: been going around about lying flat is it's it's a poem.
Speaker 1: It doesn't poem as well in English, but this, this
Speaker 1: is the best we've got. Lying flat is to not
Speaker 1: bow down. Lying flat is to not kneel. Lying flat
Speaker 1: is to stand up horizontally. Lying flat is a straight spine.
Speaker 1: And so you know, what was basically happening here is
Speaker 1: is it's a combination of the tendencies you see in
Speaker 1: the US, where you know, a bunch of people terrible jobs,
Speaker 1: realizing that everything is pointless. And then also, this is
Speaker 1: a way you can, like, this is the way you
Speaker 1: can like fight your boss without like the police showing up.
Speaker 1: And so there's there's some interesting like political stuff. So there,
Speaker 1: there's there, there's there's there's if if you look at that,
Speaker 1: there's there's a bunch of memes here because they're great.
Speaker 1: So there's there's been a thing with these people talking
Speaker 1: about how people are leaks, which are like their leaks,
Speaker 1: they're harvested over and over again and they're being exploited
Speaker 1: and like the plants, yeah, like leaks like yeah, you eat.
Speaker 1: And so they have this thing that's leaks that life
Speaker 1: flat cannot be so easily harvested. It's just like a
Speaker 1: knife go like try like a machete, like trying to
Speaker 1: swing out a bunch of leaks, but leaks are flats,
Speaker 1: so they can't hit them. And what I like, I
Speaker 1: like all of this. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: you know, and so and so what the product of
Speaker 1: this is that yeah, like this this this this has
Speaker 1: this stuff has actually been effective enough that the CCP, like,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, the CCP is is taking it seriously,
Speaker 1: but you know, there's not much they can do about it,
Speaker 1: because like if someone's just like, oh, I'm going to
Speaker 1: go from a job that's really high stressed to one
Speaker 1: that's less high stress, like what are you're gonna are
Speaker 1: you just gonna arrest them? Like what what are you
Speaker 1: gonna do? And so this, yeah, this, this has been
Speaker 1: building for a while now and I don't know who
Speaker 1: who knows exactly like where it's going to go, but
Speaker 1: it's it's it's already you know, it's something that people
Speaker 1: can do as an individual in a place where organized
Speaker 1: political action is impossible in a way such that you
Speaker 1: know that their individual actions have a collective effect, but
Speaker 1: one that can't be just you know, pounded down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it is certainly interesting to see two completely separate,
Speaker 1: like anti work style movements around basically around the same
Speaker 1: same exact time, with the same exact points. If you're different,
Speaker 1: if you're someone who's interested in massive global revolutionary change,
Speaker 1: this should probably be a thing that you are looking
Speaker 1: at and studying and thinking a lot about, because perhaps
Speaker 1: while we're arguing about ship that people started talking about
Speaker 1: in the eighteen seventies. This, this might be a better
Speaker 1: thing to do than than that, because because it's it
Speaker 1: seems like there's some potential here. Yeah, and I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, if if if you if you
Speaker 1: know any any any any actual revolutionary project that makes
Speaker 1: the world better is going to have to be international.
Speaker 1: And that's been you know, that that that that that's
Speaker 1: been the bane of all revolutionary movements forever. But you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so we have you know that we we have something
Speaker 1: to change the American working class agrees on, which is
Speaker 1: Diologenes is based in work sucks. Yeah. So as you
Speaker 1: go forward into your life this week, um, take a
Speaker 1: page from Diogenes as his book and the people ship
Speaker 1: on the floor of a free people or yeah, free
Speaker 1: people are in h and M. Go walk into one
Speaker 1: and just just just go absolutely ruin that tile. I mean,
Speaker 1: fuck it. This is why my my my biggest political
Speaker 1: advice to friends who has always been learned to run fast,
Speaker 1: because if you learn to run fast, you can do
Speaker 1: so many more fun things in a store and then
Speaker 1: run fast that it's done right. The problem is that
Speaker 1: a lot of people like, who who want to do
Speaker 1: this can't run fast enough? So learn to run fast
Speaker 1: to do this there, It's like Moose said, all political
Speaker 1: power comes from being able to ship really fast and
Speaker 1: from the doors of a free people. Just get that
Speaker 1: out of there. The immortal side, look, I think I
Speaker 1: think I think we should leave with with the the
Speaker 1: real immortal science, the the immortal words of a skeleton
Speaker 1: from the share zone. Just walk out. You can leave work,
Speaker 1: social things, movie, home, class, dentist, clothes shops, to fancy
Speaker 1: weed store cops if you're quick, friendships if it sucks.
Speaker 1: Hit the bricks yeah yeah, As as some comedian who
Speaker 1: I can't remember now said, always have an exit plan
Speaker 1: like that that that should be your thought for everything
Speaker 1: everything in the world. Hit the fucking bricks. Get out anyway,
Speaker 1: Get out of this podcast episode now, Welcome to it
Speaker 1: could happen here podcast about things falling apart from what
Speaker 1: you can do about it. My name is Christopher Wong,
Speaker 1: and today I'm gonna be talking about sabotage. But this
Speaker 1: is not the episode on abotage that you expect. I
Speaker 1: will not be discussing, for example, the destruction of machinery
Speaker 1: throwing monkey wrenches, slow down strikes, or the myriad of
Speaker 1: other tactics that workers have used since time immemorium to
Speaker 1: strike back at their bosses. No, instead, I'm going to
Speaker 1: be talking about a four more common and infinitely more
Speaker 1: dangerous form of sabotage, corporate sabotage. Now, the most conficuous
Speaker 1: form of corporate sabotage is the mass destruction of a
Speaker 1: corporation zone products. The fashion company Burberry, for example, destroyed
Speaker 1: three hundred and seventy million dollars of its own product
Speaker 1: in one year alone. Louis Vutton and Chanel also systematically
Speaker 1: destroy their own sold stock every year, joining H and
Speaker 1: M and literally lighting their own sold products on fire
Speaker 1: in order to prevent anyone from using them. Quote business
Speaker 1: insider Rischemont, the owner of Cadalier BoNT Blanc, destroyed more
Speaker 1: than four hundred million pounds of watches over a two
Speaker 1: year period after an excess in goods in the Asian markets.
Speaker 1: Nike has also admitted at a New York store slashed
Speaker 1: unsold trainers before throwing them away, and last year, an
Speaker 1: Urban Outfits employee said he was instructed to pour green
Speaker 1: paints on the unsold stock. These of course, are only
Speaker 1: the stories that have made it into the press, and
Speaker 1: this behavior is by no means limited to high fashion.
Speaker 1: Grocery Stores routinely throw away normous quantities of unsold goods,
Speaker 1: and when communities realized they could feed people in need
Speaker 1: by taking the still good products from grocery store dumpstairs,
Speaker 1: the stories began to destroy their food intentionally. But these
Speaker 1: acts of destruction, as callous and horrifically greedy as they are,
Speaker 1: are by no means the extent of corporate sabotage. To explain,
Speaker 1: I turned to the work of the economist Thorston Veblen.
Speaker 1: Feblen is perhaps best known today for the theory of
Speaker 1: conspicuous consumption, but he wrote extensively on corporate sabotage in
Speaker 1: the first part of The Engineers and the Price System,
Speaker 1: a work that is broadly ignored even by his followers.
Speaker 1: Feblen wrote a section call on the Nature and Uses
Speaker 1: of Sabotage from that work. Writers and speakers who dilate
Speaker 1: on the militarious exploits of the nation's businessmen will not
Speaker 1: commonly allude to this voluminous running administration of sabotage, This
Speaker 1: conscientious withdrawal of efficiency that goes into their ordinary day's work.
Speaker 1: We are not used to thinking of the ordinary work
Speaker 1: of a corporation being sabotage. But for Veblen there was
Speaker 1: no other explanation for what he was seeing. In the
Speaker 1: wake of World War One, there was an enormous explosion
Speaker 1: and unemployment, an enormous need on half of the population.
Speaker 1: But even as the unemployed begged to be let in
Speaker 1: to create the products that could build the needs of
Speaker 1: their fellow humans, business owners steadfastly refused to open their factories.
Speaker 1: As Veblen explained, but for reasons of business expediency, it
Speaker 1: is impossible to let these idle plants and idle workmen
Speaker 1: go to work, that is to say, for reasons of
Speaker 1: insufficient profit to the businessmen interested, or in other words,
Speaker 1: for reasons of insufficient income to the vested interest which
Speaker 1: controlled the staple industries and so regulate the output of product.
Speaker 1: Feblen was not alone in observing these are similar conditions.
Speaker 1: John Maynard Keynes, writing during the depression, observed newly precisely
Speaker 1: the same thing. For Canes, the solution simply was to
Speaker 1: have the government step into increased demand. But for Veblen,
Speaker 1: dismissed the core of the problem. The real problem was
Speaker 1: at a core of absentee owners had the ability to
Speaker 1: shut down the factories in the first place by simple
Speaker 1: virtue of their ownership, Feblin argued, was simply sabotage, no
Speaker 1: different from the hated strikes of the I w W
Speaker 1: that's so racked and perturbed the capitalist ruling class of
Speaker 1: his time. At least, the workers could argue that they
Speaker 1: were simply fighting for a better share of what they
Speaker 1: had created. Absentee owners, on the other hand, who had
Speaker 1: no actual involvement in the production process whatsoever, simply carried
Speaker 1: out sabotage on an enormous scale in order to secure
Speaker 1: their own returns, and this was true even in times
Speaker 1: they weren't marked by mass depressions. In order to make
Speaker 1: payments to capitalists, Feblin argued, who expect a certain rate
Speaker 1: of return on their investment, corporations must maintain prices at
Speaker 1: such a level that they can meet their returns, and
Speaker 1: the only way they can do this is sabotage. For
Speaker 1: the good of business, it is necessary to curtail production
Speaker 1: of the means of life on pain of unprofitable prices
Speaker 1: at the same time, that the increasing need of all
Speaker 1: sorts of necessities of life must be met in some
Speaker 1: passable fashion on pain of popular disturbances, as it will
Speaker 1: always come of popular distrust when they passed a limit
Speaker 1: of tolerance, the sabotage Febran argue was simply a product
Speaker 1: of the price system. Any production that was too efficient
Speaker 1: would simply and inevitably be sabotaged for private gain, because
Speaker 1: in order to maintain prices that would maintain the returns
Speaker 1: of investors, it was necessary when sure that production never
Speaker 1: became too efficient to produce too many goods. Feblen used
Speaker 1: as his example the twentieth century post office, but we
Speaker 1: could just easily point to Trump sabotaging the post office
Speaker 1: in due a bid to privatize the service by causing
Speaker 1: it to collapse and prevent mail and votes from being
Speaker 1: counted as part of his attempt to win the two
Speaker 1: thousand twenty election. In their book Capitalist Power, Condition, Shaan
Speaker 1: Bickler and Jonathan Needson take Feplin's argument and expand on it,
Speaker 1: noting that capitalism, far from encouraging productivity at large, makes
Speaker 1: things inefficient on purpose. They used the example of public transportation,
Speaker 1: which is by bay, essentially any measure a significantly more
Speaker 1: efficient way of moving people around the US. As an example,
Speaker 1: in the US and the nineteen forties, a hundred electric
Speaker 1: rail lines were brought up and destroyed by car companies.
Speaker 1: Those same companies likewise twice destroyed incredibly efficient and popular
Speaker 1: electric cars, once in the nineteen thirties and again in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties because the profit rate was lower than
Speaker 1: that of gas cars. They then set out to cause
Speaker 1: everyone to forget that they had actually done this until
Speaker 1: Elon Musk figured out a way to sell electric cars
Speaker 1: that was profitable, namely by selling himself as a brand
Speaker 1: and not the cars themselves. Now, if capitalism was simply
Speaker 1: destroying its own products in order to create Elon Musks,
Speaker 1: you could argue that the system at least produced advancements
Speaker 1: before it stopped them. But the most violent forms of
Speaker 1: sabotage are reserved for productive systems that are simultaneously efficient
Speaker 1: and outside of capitalist control together. Perhaps the best known
Speaker 1: example of this is the East British East India companies.
Speaker 1: The industrialization of the Indian textile industry, not to be
Speaker 1: outmatched by their British forebearers, American settlers and their allies
Speaker 1: in the American military sterminated the buffalo herds of the
Speaker 1: Great Plains in an attempt to starve out the indigenous
Speaker 1: tribes that lived there. In doing so, they destroyed an
Speaker 1: enormously productive and sustainable agricultural system. They did so precisely
Speaker 1: because the system was efficient, so efficient, in fact, that
Speaker 1: it allowed indigenous tribes to repeatedly defeat the American army
Speaker 1: and defence of their lands. We are used to thinking
Speaker 1: of capitalists as the system of production, but here, amidst
Speaker 1: the fields of buffalo corpses something else, entirely capitalism appearing
Speaker 1: in its true form, a system of organized sabotage. To
Speaker 1: fully untangle what this means, let us return to Veblin.
Speaker 1: Feblin divided capitalism into two separate processes. The first he
Speaker 1: called industry. Industry, Feblin argued, has existed long before capitalism
Speaker 1: and will continue to exist long after. It has a
Speaker 1: bit clear and nietzs and put it quote when considered
Speaker 1: an isolation from contemporary business institutions. The principal goal of industry.
Speaker 1: It's reason, according to Veeblin, is the efficient production of
Speaker 1: quality goods and services for the betterment of human life.
Speaker 1: Industry is an inherently collective undertaking. The basis is cooperation
Speaker 1: and integration, the creation of communo knowledge that allows production
Speaker 1: and scientific advance to occur, and coordination and cooperation between
Speaker 1: people to create things for each other. Left to its
Speaker 1: own devices, industry would simply produce goods for people. It
Speaker 1: has no concern for profitability, rates of returns, or capitalization. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: capitalism is defined by private ownership. This is what Veblen
Speaker 1: calls business. Business is a system of power that extracts
Speaker 1: wealth from industry by means of sabotage production to serve
Speaker 1: human need. The basis of industry is useless to business
Speaker 1: unless it can be turned into a revenue stream. It
Speaker 1: does this by taking control of industry and its products
Speaker 1: and the restricting access to it particular and NICHS input it.
Speaker 1: The most important feature of private ownership is not that
Speaker 1: it enables those who own, but that it disables those
Speaker 1: who do not. Technically, anyone can get in someone else's
Speaker 1: car and drive away, or given order to sell all
Speaker 1: of Warren Buffett shares in Berkshire hathaway. The purpose of
Speaker 1: private ownership is wholly and only an institution of exclusion.
Speaker 1: An institutional exclusion is a matter of organized power. As
Speaker 1: we can see from the genocide on the plains. This
Speaker 1: power is no abstract force. Beblin tends to focus on
Speaker 1: the power of absentee owners to stop production, and for
Speaker 1: good reason, but business stands in the way of industry
Speaker 1: in more immediate ways too. After all, the purpose of
Speaker 1: cooperative industry is to make goods to improve our lives.
Speaker 1: And yet in between us and the proceeds that industry
Speaker 1: creates to serve our needs, there is a cash register
Speaker 1: in a cop Even the creators of a Louis Vetton bag,
Speaker 1: or for that matter, a tomato, have no claim on
Speaker 1: it once business takes over, and business would rather destroy
Speaker 1: it than see it fall into their hands. The famous
Speaker 1: Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kirpotkin was writing along similar lines
Speaker 1: to Feblyn just a few years before Feblen, it seems,
Speaker 1: have been exposed to anarchist ideas through its association with
Speaker 1: the industrial workers of the world. In early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: it was not altogether unusual for economists to move in
Speaker 1: radical circles. The great Italian economist Piero's rap for smuggled
Speaker 1: pens and papers to Antonio Gramsey, while Grumsey, the head
Speaker 1: of the Italian Communist Party, was a prisoner with the
Speaker 1: Italian Fascist regime. Grapha would later extract the writings that
Speaker 1: Crumpsy had written in prison, unleashing Gramsey's prison notebooks onto
Speaker 1: the world. But Feblin was unique even among these economists
Speaker 1: for the extent that he incorporated radical theories directly into
Speaker 1: his work. As you've seen, was his adoption of sabotage
Speaker 1: as a way of thinking about capitalism. This led Veblin
Speaker 1: to call the end of the system of what he
Speaker 1: described as vested interests and absentee owners. Feblin solution, however,
Speaker 1: which he described as a quote Soviet If technicians would
Speaker 1: manage production for all, society leaves a lot to be
Speaker 1: desired for. So let us return to the source, her
Speaker 1: spotkin and the conquest of bread. The minds, so they
Speaker 1: represent the labor of several generations and derive their sole
Speaker 1: value from the requirements of the industry of a nation
Speaker 1: and the density of the population. The minds also belonged
Speaker 1: to the few, and these few restrict the output of
Speaker 1: coal are prevented entirely if they find a more profitable
Speaker 1: investments for their capital. Machinery, too, has become the exclusive
Speaker 1: property of the few, and even when a machine and
Speaker 1: contestedly represents an improvements added to the original rough invention
Speaker 1: by three or four generations of workers, and nonetheless belongs
Speaker 1: to a few owners. And if the descendants of the
Speaker 1: very inventor who constructed the first machine for lace building
Speaker 1: a century ago were to present themselves today at a
Speaker 1: lace factory and bail or Nottingham and demand their rights,
Speaker 1: they would be told hands off, this machine is not yours,
Speaker 1: and they would be shot down if they attempted to
Speaker 1: take possession of it. Here we see the competition between
Speaker 1: two different kinds of rights. On the one hand, the
Speaker 1: right of industry, the right of creativity, the right of
Speaker 1: those who produce and care for each other to be
Speaker 1: able to determine where the proceeds of their labor go.
Speaker 1: From industry's point of view, this is to each other,
Speaker 1: to those in need, into society as a whole. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, there is the right of property, the
Speaker 1: right of men with guns to throw oysters into the
Speaker 1: ocean because it's not profitable for anyone to eat them.
Speaker 1: Capitalism has developed a myriad of iterations precisely the same principle,
Speaker 1: and the world is now infested by them. Patent trolls haunt.
Speaker 1: They already fraught waters of intellectual property, buying up patents
Speaker 1: for cheap or on rare occasions, creating something themselves for
Speaker 1: the sole purpose, or preventing anyone else from using it,
Speaker 1: making money by suing anyone who dares try. Large corporations,
Speaker 1: of course, stu precisely the same thing, see for example,
Speaker 1: Disney's War and the concept of anything, anything at all,
Speaker 1: falling into the public domain, the sabotage, and on this
Speaker 1: all four of our interlocutors, Veblen, Popkin clear needs and
Speaker 1: degree as long as private ownership exists, because sabotage is
Speaker 1: all private ownership really is. But it is not simply
Speaker 1: enough to answer corporate sabotage with their own sabotage. As
Speaker 1: Veblen pointed out, this is simply the ordinary state of
Speaker 1: affairs enter capitalism. For Capotkin, the answer was simple. This
Speaker 1: rich endowments, painfully one builded, fashioned, or invented by our ancestors,
Speaker 1: must become common property so that the collective interests of
Speaker 1: men may gain from it. The greatest good for all,
Speaker 1: There must be appropriation the well being of all, the
Speaker 1: end expropriation. The means how precisely to go about doing
Speaker 1: such a thing as been the subject of endless debate
Speaker 1: for nearly two hundred years. And I am not arrogant
Speaker 1: enough to propose to solve the problem here. But a
Speaker 1: system where a company can prevent even the US government
Speaker 1: from attempting to produce ventilators by simply buying up the
Speaker 1: company that won the contract and refusing to fill the
Speaker 1: order to maintain the value of the ventilators it was
Speaker 1: already producing. Is a system based on nothing less than
Speaker 1: ensuring that people will die for or five percent rate
Speaker 1: of return. If we are to have any hope of
Speaker 1: stopping the ravages that climate change promises for our future,
Speaker 1: we cannot afford to be sabotaged at every stop. Hey,
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen.
Speaker 1: Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
Speaker 1: media dot com, or check us out on the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: podcasts you can find sources for It could happen here.
Speaker 1: Updated monthly at cool Zone media dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.