Speaker 1: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation 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. Oh it could welcome here
Speaker 1: the podcast that happens ship. All right, well st Andrew,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna, I'm gonna I'm gonna pivot to you to
Speaker 1: to pull us out of this tailspin I've locked it into. Hello, Hello, listen,
Speaker 1: seen everyone today. I wanted to go on a bit
Speaker 1: of a post no meandering, I guess on um, some
Speaker 1: of the ideas and concepts that just kind of fluting
Speaker 1: on my head um surrounding sustainable city planning and city living.
Speaker 1: I want to see a lot of these ideas and stuff,
Speaker 1: UM kind of just crimp them from like all over
Speaker 1: the place, and in some cases they are a bit
Speaker 1: less i would say viable and others. But I do
Speaker 1: find like the work of for example, Low tech magazine
Speaker 1: Dot com and um and so on to be very
Speaker 1: inspiring in terms of all capabilities, Um, what potential there
Speaker 1: is an obsolete technologies? What though tech solutions exist for
Speaker 1: issues and what we can do as people to just
Speaker 1: kind of make living in urban sprawl or suburban hell
Speaker 1: a little bit less hellish. Yeah, that is definitely a
Speaker 1: topical of my heart as well as someone who lives
Speaker 1: in a city. I would like cities to be less hellish, yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems. And I would like suburbs and not exist
Speaker 1: so eternal. More on the suburbs, we have to ally
Speaker 1: with rural America and protracted suburbs. Yes, yes, yeah, my my,
Speaker 1: my crank proposal has always been reintroducing Macedons and just
Speaker 1: like just having Macedons just like walking through and destroying buildings,
Speaker 1: because that's that's what the suburbs deserves. Masterdons is in
Speaker 1: the actual animals. Yes, yes, I thought she meant like
Speaker 1: the social media platform. No, no, I think we need
Speaker 1: to clone leopards so that they breed as quickly as
Speaker 1: rabbits and just let them loose. Wasn't doctor Defer Schmitz
Speaker 1: raised by leopards? Sure? Why not? I would Robertino, who
Speaker 1: doctor difference riches. No, let's just let's just let's such
Speaker 1: as Okay, I I think I think we are. We
Speaker 1: are roughly the same, in the same age bracket for
Speaker 1: television we watched, so I'm movies to catch up on.
Speaker 1: I'm very familiar with the Good Doctor period. The platypus pilled,
Speaker 1: very very very platypilled, as they say, plati pilled. Let's continue, right, So, um,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of aspects of my evil plan
Speaker 1: to make the entire tri state area more sustainable, but
Speaker 1: I think I would want to start with something that
Speaker 1: tends to consume a lot of the energy in cities,
Speaker 1: and that is like heating and cooling. I mean, for me,
Speaker 1: living in a tropical country, heating has never been a consideration. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, the coolest it gets isn't like the I
Speaker 1: would say, like eighteen nineteen twenty degrees celsius area. Um so,
Speaker 1: and to me that is like chili. That's like layering
Speaker 1: up kind of thing, because I can't handle that kind
Speaker 1: of cool um, which is kind of wild to me
Speaker 1: that I have considered moving to Canada. I don't think
Speaker 1: I'll people to handle it. It does it does get,
Speaker 1: it does get much colder. I mean we when I
Speaker 1: was in Canada, we would have not not uncommonly have
Speaker 1: minus forty celsius weeks. So yeah, yeah, I've never I've
Speaker 1: never experienced minus degrees before. I don't know, you know,
Speaker 1: it's no, it is. Oh, it's fine, it's it's not
Speaker 1: a big deal. You just put on an extra pair
Speaker 1: of socks. You're good to go. Okay, So when when
Speaker 1: it when it hits negative forty degrees fahrenheit, you've experienced
Speaker 1: negative forty degrees. It's not like it's not like artic
Speaker 1: temp like negative negative forty Negative forty fahrenheit is the
Speaker 1: temperature of the surface of bars a sunny days. Negatives
Speaker 1: is the same as negative forty celsius. Oh is it?
Speaker 1: They actually converged at that point. Yeah, it's like you
Speaker 1: just yeah, it's just your hain like it's not even
Speaker 1: cold anymore. Like you just like your your face just hurts.
Speaker 1: It's it's great. Many times I'm going to call out
Speaker 1: my my my favorite meme again and have negative forty fahrenheit,
Speaker 1: negative forty selfius celsius clapping hands in the middle. Yeah
Speaker 1: classic anyway, Yes, yeah, I'm honestly, I can't even conceive
Speaker 1: of that kind of sound pretty. Um, I am an
Speaker 1: island boy, so that's so I operate it and as
Speaker 1: an island boy. Um. How to say that? Like heat
Speaker 1: is very very uncomfortable. Humidic humid heat is even more uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: Dry heat is also extremely uncomfortable. When you have a
Speaker 1: hot day combined with like sahara and dust in the
Speaker 1: air and no clouds in the sky, it is truly,
Speaker 1: truly miserable. I can't imagine, um, what life in a
Speaker 1: city would be like if um, you know, these sort
Speaker 1: of temperatures continue to climb as they are climbing, Um,
Speaker 1: as you see you know, global average temperatures rising by
Speaker 1: you know, a half degree or a degree or two
Speaker 1: degrees celsi. Yes, that's just ridiculous, let alone three or
Speaker 1: four degrees celsius increase, especially compounded with the far that
Speaker 1: in a city. There's this thing called the urban heat
Speaker 1: island effect. So cities are ten degrees so it's hotter
Speaker 1: than the surrounding countryside. And the reasons for the other
Speaker 1: numerous You know, you have like vehicles emitting heat constantly,
Speaker 1: you have air conditioners pumping heat into the air. You
Speaker 1: have concrete and covering every surface just like absorbing and
Speaker 1: radiating the sun's rays. And you have these urban canyons
Speaker 1: between tall buildings to prevent heat from escaping from and
Speaker 1: to keep it at the sort of street level. It's miserable, right,
Speaker 1: And the typical solutions, the individual solutions, the short term solutions,
Speaker 1: they just make the situation worse because, I mean, when
Speaker 1: you're feeling hot, and mean, I was just feeling hot
Speaker 1: just now, and I turn on the E C right
Speaker 1: when you're feeling hot, you know, you're sing the C,
Speaker 1: or you put on a fan, but not to wash
Speaker 1: a fan, but the A C continues and fuels this
Speaker 1: vicious cycle of heating the outdoors to cool the indoors,
Speaker 1: making experience spaces even more uncomfortable. So you end up
Speaker 1: with air conditioning use accounting for like one five of
Speaker 1: global energy electricity usage of building related globe electricity usage,
Speaker 1: and you end up with the thing that's spposed to
Speaker 1: be cooling us heating things even more because you know,
Speaker 1: as developing countries, you know they have access to one
Speaker 1: more air conditioning, especially and you know towlpping countries, and
Speaker 1: to be in the hotter side of the world, um,
Speaker 1: you know, the use of the air condition just continues
Speaker 1: to sky rop it and um the International Energy Agency
Speaker 1: actually estimated that it would take the amount of energy
Speaker 1: needed to cool buildings will triple by twenty fifty, which
Speaker 1: is equivalent to the current electricity demand in the US
Speaker 1: and Germany combined. Sue, on top of all that, you
Speaker 1: will have an issue of like heat and heat deaths. Right,
Speaker 1: the deaths and injuries caused by heat, I mean, heat
Speaker 1: stroke is becoming more and more of an issue in cities,
Speaker 1: especially when you know temperatures reach above twenty five degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: People you know, manual labels, people who work outside, people
Speaker 1: who just have to move around a lot, you know,
Speaker 1: experience the symptom the symptoms of heat stroke whenever there
Speaker 1: is like the spike in temperature. Right, and then even
Speaker 1: you know, if you don't experience like a heat stroke,
Speaker 1: heat is exhausting. It is energy draining, is utterly sapping,
Speaker 1: and it requires a lot out of your body to
Speaker 1: keep you cool and prevent you from like eating. And surprisingly,
Speaker 1: this overheating is you is not just like you know,
Speaker 1: a tropical issue or like a hot country issue like
Speaker 1: places like Moscow had like and asked meats a eleven
Speaker 1: thou people die due to heat wave in twenty ten,
Speaker 1: and so with all these heat waves and stuff, we
Speaker 1: need to like figure out what to do with all
Speaker 1: these giant concrete buildings. I mean, and for some people
Speaker 1: like eco brutalism is you know, wow, so cool to
Speaker 1: me personally, And this is just my subjective opinion. I
Speaker 1: find it ugly and disgusting and I hated but you know,
Speaker 1: to each stone right brutalism discourse, I mean, what what
Speaker 1: do you all think of rutalism. I think Yugoslavia and
Speaker 1: brutalism was cool. Every other kind of brutalism is just
Speaker 1: like my opinions on brutalism boiled down to thinking the
Speaker 1: game control is far. I had stayed in a Yugoslavian
Speaker 1: brutalist architecture hotel, which was one of the weirdest nights
Speaker 1: of my life because it was clearly made. It was
Speaker 1: like one of these gigantic, like people's hotels that was
Speaker 1: meant to pride everyone with vacations, and so there's like
Speaker 1: twenty thousand rooms and we were like the only three
Speaker 1: people there. So there was one person at the desk,
Speaker 1: and it's just cavern of empty rooms such this. Everything
Speaker 1: felt like a liminal space. It was. It was very odd.
Speaker 1: It can be, it can be very very uncanny. It
Speaker 1: wasn't like bad, it was like reasonably well constructed. It
Speaker 1: was just deeply strange. Wants to spend the night. I
Speaker 1: think that's what makes the game control so cool, is that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it plays with those uncanny feelings on brutalism while still
Speaker 1: being like very cool. Like it's still that Jacob Kella
Speaker 1: made a video vote right, yes he made a he
Speaker 1: he didn't make a video like I watched that recently.
Speaker 1: This is like the sort of house kind of thing,
Speaker 1: right right, right right, Yeah, yeah, I wanted to go
Speaker 1: that game because I mean that's what that's kind of
Speaker 1: like my issue with brutalism. It feels like a boss
Speaker 1: level in a video game, like you have to go
Speaker 1: through each level, clear what's all the minions and they
Speaker 1: get to the top and feed the boss. It's kind
Speaker 1: of unsettling, yes, and then like eco brutalism is just
Speaker 1: like oh what if trees tres Yeah, and it's like okay, cool,
Speaker 1: but I mean like one of my many occupations and
Speaker 1: I still maintain it seasonally. Um, I was a power washer,
Speaker 1: and I hate moss, and so to see moss all
Speaker 1: over buildings just really bothers me. Like I just want
Speaker 1: to get you know, my spring gun and just clear
Speaker 1: it all off. Um. And especially in like this climate,
Speaker 1: moss is like a very significant issue. So that makes sense,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, one of my pet peeves among many. So,
Speaker 1: I mean the many different ways we could combat the
Speaker 1: when heat island effects um that don't involve equo brutalism,
Speaker 1: and they can also help to facility, you know, creating
Speaker 1: more attractive spaces to live and to play. You know,
Speaker 1: obviously the solution isn't just like build those every building
Speaker 1: they does ever been built and make it more sustainable,
Speaker 1: you know, with vernacular materials and stuff. So of course
Speaker 1: new buildings should be built with those principles in mind. Um,
Speaker 1: But you know, it's not practical to us even sustainable
Speaker 1: to destroy all the buildings we've already built and rebuild them.
Speaker 1: You know, the best thing we can do is try
Speaker 1: to mitigate and adapt with what are we already have, um,
Speaker 1: greenery and I know it's just roasting eco brutalism just
Speaker 1: track slack trees and everything is an important part in that, right,
Speaker 1: because you know it, well, it causes evappo transpiration, which
Speaker 1: is like where what's evaporates from plants, leaves and cools
Speaker 1: the temperature. Um, you know it. We also improve people,
Speaker 1: it's like psychological well being. Um. And they just the
Speaker 1: nice look at um, the nice look at the keep
Speaker 1: things cool. In fact, they can help cause temperatures to
Speaker 1: drop by like two to three degrees celsius in the
Speaker 1: like the surrounding area. I think people certainly misinterpreted, but
Speaker 1: like this, this is one of the big things you
Speaker 1: can see with with racism in the U S. Where
Speaker 1: like you can literally like you can literally track racial
Speaker 1: divides in a lot of American cities by the by
Speaker 1: the temperature because like people places where not why people
Speaker 1: live just don't have trees. And you know this this
Speaker 1: has like a just this sort of like cascading series
Speaker 1: of environmental and social effects which are a disaster and
Speaker 1: environmental racism. Yeah, yes, released stark. Honestly, if you look
Speaker 1: at the heat maps or some of these cities and
Speaker 1: you could literally see, you know, where poor black folks live.
Speaker 1: You know, you can see the places with less trees,
Speaker 1: the places next to factories with like toxic here and
Speaker 1: often waste and that kind of thing. It's just you know,
Speaker 1: right there, and it sucks. Which is why, of course,
Speaker 1: part of any sort of efforts to improve cities and
Speaker 1: make things more sustainable would involve you know, social justice
Speaker 1: and would involve responding to an addressing the compounding effects
Speaker 1: of like environmental racism over the past several decades. So
Speaker 1: and part of the issue again sign things back to
Speaker 1: environmental racism is that a lot of the climate change
Speaker 1: policies that you know, ostensibly amends to fever, like high
Speaker 1: density urban and smart growth you know, like sustainable blocks
Speaker 1: and that kind of thing. They are not conceived or
Speaker 1: implemented in a way that involves the people being affected
Speaker 1: by them. You know. In fact, a lot of these
Speaker 1: like sort of green um projects raise the cost of food, energy, water, transport,
Speaker 1: housing for people in the area. You know, they create
Speaker 1: these sorts of like gentrified neighborhoods essentially whether the original
Speaker 1: inhabitants can no longer afford to live there. So if
Speaker 1: we wants to develop like a sustainable city or resiliencity,
Speaker 1: sustainable oversagain neighborhood, it requires social justice, It requires you know,
Speaker 1: at quity and you know, like the involvement of all
Speaker 1: affected through you know, consensus or democracy. UM just really
Speaker 1: shape the future that you know they will be experiencing
Speaker 1: because they're the ones being affected by it. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of other ways as well to heap proof
Speaker 1: as it were a city, UM reflective roofs and roads.
Speaker 1: UM can also helped reduce the absorptive powers of UM
Speaker 1: solar radiation by concrete and asphalt. So in fact, in
Speaker 1: some cities like l A and in New York, there's
Speaker 1: this wide reflective coating that UM has been implemented in
Speaker 1: some five thousand meters square of roof space that saves
Speaker 1: an estimated two thouso tons of CEO two per year
Speaker 1: from cooling emissions. I mean, all it takes really is
Speaker 1: just like that sort of white reflective coat, and it
Speaker 1: saves dividends in the long run. UM NASA had done
Speaker 1: some research on this and it demonstrated the results demonstrated
Speaker 1: that a white roof could be twenty three degrees celsius
Speaker 1: or forty two degrees fahrenheit cooler than a typical black roof.
Speaker 1: UM on a hot New York somebody UM and the
Speaker 1: places where like yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like glossed over that is crazy, that is absolutely
Speaker 1: absolutely mild. And then in cities where like we're like
Speaker 1: ten of the land area is like asphalt, you can
Speaker 1: imagine how that sort of UM that's sort of a
Speaker 1: lect of Zeiland can impact, um, the cooling or the
Speaker 1: heating of the area. Water. Of course, it's another like
Speaker 1: important aspect of cooling cities. UM. In Andalus, which was
Speaker 1: like the Muslim kingdom in Gebrian Peninsula in the fourteenth
Speaker 1: century UM, they used to have these sort of like
Speaker 1: courtyards with pools and fountains that would stimulate water evaporation
Speaker 1: and cool the air, and so like cities today, you know,
Speaker 1: take some hints from that. You know, you have ponds
Speaker 1: and pools and fountains and missing systems and stuff that
Speaker 1: can sort of chill things out. I mean we see
Speaker 1: that being UM implemented in China, where you have like,
Speaker 1: for example, UM water mister does at like bus stops,
Speaker 1: which can chill the air and you know, cool passengers
Speaker 1: as they wait. UM. And they found actually that adding
Speaker 1: water features and like cool coatings reduces the cooling requirements
Speaker 1: of an area by twenty nine and also lowers the
Speaker 1: overall averaging at temperature by one point five degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: So it's like honestly wild, like these little things can
Speaker 1: have such a major impact on temperature. Speaking of like
Speaker 1: old methods of cooling, UM, ancient methods of cooling, there's
Speaker 1: this Middle Eastern shading device called the mastra bil um
Speaker 1: or I think it's mastra ba, and it's basically an
Speaker 1: architectural element that is usually built by um wooden lattice
Speaker 1: work and sometimes stay in the glas as it's used
Speaker 1: to like catch and cool the wind through like having
Speaker 1: these basins of water in them is I mean, so
Speaker 1: I could try to describe it. It's like a window
Speaker 1: jutting out of a building UM with some decorated by
Speaker 1: lattice work, with jars and basins of water placed within
Speaker 1: them to let the wind pasture. And as the wind
Speaker 1: is passing through, it's caused an evaporative cooling then it
Speaker 1: chills out the interior and to these mastra bears um.
Speaker 1: They've been used since the Middle Ages by you know,
Speaker 1: the Coptic churches of Egypt and the Art Deco movement
Speaker 1: in Iraq, and and by you know, the architecture um
Speaker 1: in bad Dad, as well. And so these sort of
Speaker 1: construction methods, while they tend to be developed for you know,
Speaker 1: individual homes or individual buildings, um, they can in fact
Speaker 1: be implemented um with even the aesthetics of Islamic geometry
Speaker 1: to help to cool a building and produce its overall.
Speaker 1: See what twe missions. So I've been talking about heating
Speaker 1: and cooling and stuff for a while now, and speaking
Speaker 1: of I should probably to see it's off my rather.
Speaker 1: I think I heard either either it was you, Andrew,
Speaker 1: or maybe it was Robert talking about the ceramic kind
Speaker 1: of cooling idea. Yeah, I mean that's the thing, and
Speaker 1: like the part of the Americans Southwest, like New Mexico,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of like swamp coolers that are basically working, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: swamp cool swamp coolers. It only works in certain climates, right,
Speaker 1: Like you wouldn't really don't ye because if it's if
Speaker 1: it's too it's too humid, it's not gonna work. You're
Speaker 1: just gonna from more humid. Yeah. I think there's kind
Speaker 1: of a broader thing there architecturally, which is that like
Speaker 1: we have a lot of sort of like like we've
Speaker 1: we've we've lost a lot of in the way we
Speaker 1: do architecture. We've lost a lot of this sort of
Speaker 1: like building we we've lost a lot of sort of
Speaker 1: building techniques adapted to specific locations. Yeah yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: like that's something that has to be reversed, like immediately,
Speaker 1: because like our our current model of building houses out
Speaker 1: of oil is going to get us all killed. Really,
Speaker 1: what's what's the problem there? What's wrong? What's that? I mean?
Speaker 1: And toff with that, right, not just vernacular architecture, but
Speaker 1: vernacular clothing. I mean it's I mean as again, so
Speaker 1: when living in a tropical country, I see it for myself,
Speaker 1: like working people going to work where in like full
Speaker 1: long sleeve dress shoots and long long dress pants and
Speaker 1: you know, like formal shoes and it's honestly up you
Speaker 1: know sometimes like they have the whole tie like you know,
Speaker 1: pull up and everything. It's not it's entirely based on
Speaker 1: like European standards of professionalism, and um, it needs to
Speaker 1: be abolish. Abolish dress coods, alright, abolished, like this whole
Speaker 1: idea that you know, we have to dress this particular way, um,
Speaker 1: despite you know, the temperature, because it's more professional or whatever.
Speaker 1: For professionalism honestly. Yeah, we we have we have podcasting
Speaker 1: or in the vanguard of this, but we need help
Speaker 1: to destroy professionalism once and for all. Yeah yeah, ye
Speaker 1: show up to where can you be then suit? Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like vernacular buildings as well, you know, obvi,
Speaker 1: stay you had in in Africa, in different parts of Africa,
Speaker 1: you would have different structures that were particularly tigulets. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're in a in a tropical reinforest environment, you
Speaker 1: would have a bill in a steeler to you know,
Speaker 1: keeping mosquitoes out and maintaining a certain temperature within and
Speaker 1: maintaining comfort as well within or you know, in cooler
Speaker 1: regions you would have um certain construction that would keep
Speaker 1: heats within the building and prevent um excessive discomfort you know. Um.
Speaker 1: And they were also of course, like when it comes
Speaker 1: to like cooler areas, you will also expected to sort
Speaker 1: of keep yourself warm as well as you know, keep
Speaker 1: your building warm. In fact, it was more so keeping
Speaker 1: yourself personally warm, so keeping yourself lay up even when
Speaker 1: you're indoors. And of course that's kind of lost today
Speaker 1: people are expected to just you know, turne on the
Speaker 1: heater and vibe for the months of winter. But it
Speaker 1: isn't sustainable. A lot of things we enjoy today unsustainable.
Speaker 1: Keeps going back to that. But yeah, speaking of things
Speaker 1: that we enjoy that are not at all sustainable, how
Speaker 1: about cause get rid of cause? Please get rid of cause.
Speaker 1: I mean, cause are very convenient in terms of like,
Speaker 1: if you want to get somewhere very specific, um, you know,
Speaker 1: if there's a place you want to go, I'm the
Speaker 1: one you need to know. I'm a car. I'm a car.
Speaker 1: I'm a car. You know kind of thing. But my
Speaker 1: little musical interview there, thank you for appreciating it. But ultimately,
Speaker 1: like they honestly aren't sustainable. They honestly on something that
Speaker 1: we can maintain in the nail even well potentially in
Speaker 1: the neighborance, which the far future. I mean, people are
Speaker 1: already new the problems with gascars, already knew who my
Speaker 1: gascars are bad. But you know, things just just things
Speaker 1: are just sort of pivoted towards electric cars. And who
Speaker 1: electric cars, Let's get a bunch of electric cars. Who
Speaker 1: But electric cars aren't better. I mean the materials they require,
Speaker 1: the energy they require, it's quite frankly not sustainable in
Speaker 1: the long run, and it just lengthens the amount of
Speaker 1: time that we spend dependence on cause for short and
Speaker 1: long distance travel. And especially how in the States we've
Speaker 1: built our cities around the idea of a car, which
Speaker 1: has expanded the urban terrain unnecessarily. And if you look
Speaker 1: at like all the space taken up, like highways and overpasses,
Speaker 1: and how much of just like urban space is taken
Speaker 1: up but just been built around the idea of the car,
Speaker 1: it really kind of makes the whole idea of a
Speaker 1: city so much less useful. It's it's really it's really frustrating.
Speaker 1: And I think it's also working at the cars or
Speaker 1: so unbelievably dangerous. Yeah, yeah, we're very much used to
Speaker 1: like having these like death machines driving around at all times,
Speaker 1: and that that makes for like a very um cool
Speaker 1: like series of metal band song names or whatever. But
Speaker 1: the death statistics on funny when it comes to cause. No,
Speaker 1: and like the average transport transportation time having cars has
Speaker 1: not actually decreased, Like the amount of time it takes
Speaker 1: to get from place to place based on like where
Speaker 1: you live in your city has not actually increased because
Speaker 1: now everything has just spread further apart, so a hundred
Speaker 1: years ago would take you know, like a fifteen minute
Speaker 1: trek to get to like, you know, the market or something.
Speaker 1: It can take off times longer, especially if you're driving
Speaker 1: in like rush hour traffic to get just just just
Speaker 1: like a couple of miles, where even in some cases
Speaker 1: a decent jaw could get you there faster. Um, just
Speaker 1: because of how we've just designed the cities all around
Speaker 1: these rolling metal death cages. Um. Yeah, it's not it's
Speaker 1: it's not great. It's one of the reasons I don't
Speaker 1: currently have a car. Yeah, And that's kind of that's
Speaker 1: something that's shocking to a lot of people when I
Speaker 1: tell them that, really I have no intention if have
Speaker 1: a buying a car of ever owning a car. It's
Speaker 1: not something that I want. And I mean I live
Speaker 1: relatively close to like some of the major transport um
Speaker 1: arteries of the country, and you know, not has like
Speaker 1: this unique ish transportation system public transportation system. So we
Speaker 1: have these privately owned maxi taxis that um they're like
Speaker 1: vans with seats in the back, um and you know,
Speaker 1: you could you just kind of jump in um depending
Speaker 1: on where they're going, which rooted taken um and they're
Speaker 1: they're convenient enough for me and for my purposes, so
Speaker 1: I just you know, I go areyed to go um
Speaker 1: with them. But they're also gas guzzling in efficient machines.
Speaker 1: I mean they're better than you know, all those people
Speaker 1: driving cause I mean as an island, you know, like
Speaker 1: I don't know why we're so obsessed with having more
Speaker 1: and more cars on the road, um, But at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, they still aren't the best in
Speaker 1: terms of sustainability and in terms of viable, reliable, sustainable transport. UM.
Speaker 1: We also have like personal taxis as well, but they
Speaker 1: have the same problems as regular taxis. And what's frustrating
Speaker 1: is that we used to have a train line UM
Speaker 1: that went along the entire east West corridor of the country.
Speaker 1: That's where most of the people internata along the East
Speaker 1: West corridor, UM. But that was destroyed in the nineties sixties,
Speaker 1: I think, to make way for highways and a priority
Speaker 1: bus route. So instead of having a nice, convenient, cute
Speaker 1: little train that we could seek to go from place
Speaker 1: to place, you have to rely on buses and maxis
Speaker 1: and taxis. And cause yeah, that is quite that's not cool.
Speaker 1: That is quite not good, quite quite grim because we
Speaker 1: need to reconfigure. Seriously, I would love for them to
Speaker 1: bring back trains so able to take a train don't
Speaker 1: have to rely on I mean, government bureaucracy makes all
Speaker 1: things unreliable, but I think a train would have been
Speaker 1: slightly more reliable than a bus. Very much. On the
Speaker 1: pro train, on the on the pro train train, I've
Speaker 1: had a fewer, few fewer, fewer moments more happy then, right,
Speaker 1: the Portland's Max line and straightcar in a no face costume.
Speaker 1: It's very it's it's very fun. I think. Also, like
Speaker 1: another thing about about cars, right, this is just it's
Speaker 1: just just on a very pure political level, like cars
Speaker 1: is a thing that allowed suburbs to exist, and the
Speaker 1: existence of suburbs has produced just generation upon generation of
Speaker 1: like frothing reactionaries who are the source of like enormous
Speaker 1: percentages of the world's problems. And so if you get
Speaker 1: rid of those places, you produce less of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is just a political benefit for anyone who wants
Speaker 1: to not die exactly exactly. I mean, we don't think
Speaker 1: about it because there's already so many things to think about.
Speaker 1: But if you actually sat down on pondered the death
Speaker 1: tool of like cause. Um, we really and really brought
Speaker 1: to the forefront and really made it less of a necessity.
Speaker 1: I think one more people would be open to the
Speaker 1: idea of rejecting cause to keeping them as at most
Speaker 1: benign a novelty. Um that maybe one or two exists
Speaker 1: in the entire community, UM for use if needs be, UM,
Speaker 1: But otherwise I I don't see how each and every
Speaker 1: person in the world owning their own car is at
Speaker 1: all the best way to go. Also, cause are kind
Speaker 1: of ugly to me. Yeah, we really didn't design them
Speaker 1: to look cool, which just it's I mean, there's some
Speaker 1: cars that look kind of cool, like some of the
Speaker 1: more classic ones. But and that's part of the issue, right,
Speaker 1: they're getting uglier to me, And they're also getting larger,
Speaker 1: you know, people like Yeah, they're raising their drills more
Speaker 1: and more so, like you basically a pedestrian killing machine.
Speaker 1: We've effectively undone most of the benefits of making cars
Speaker 1: safer for passengers by making them much more dangerous for pedestrians,
Speaker 1: which is entirely a marketing choice. Like, if you like
Speaker 1: the fucking trucks they were making twenty five years ago,
Speaker 1: are just as useful, um and in a lot of
Speaker 1: cases more useful for like practical farm work for hauling
Speaker 1: and whatnot than the trucks they're making today. They haven't
Speaker 1: meaningfully gotten better, They've just gotten a lot larger for
Speaker 1: no real reason other than it makes people feel like
Speaker 1: big men. Well, and then you get these fun you
Speaker 1: get these fun you can you can look at the
Speaker 1: marketing people like explicitly talking about how like yeah, like
Speaker 1: they like basically explicitly playing into the fantasy of running
Speaker 1: over protesters and it's it's great. It's yeah, So get
Speaker 1: rid of cars and you won't have to deal with that.
Speaker 1: But Chris, how is that sustainable or viable? Good question?
Speaker 1: Introducing super blocks? Oh yes, superblocks are basically um neighborhood
Speaker 1: of nine blocks. So I don't think they have to
Speaker 1: be I think the philosophy and ideas behind super blocks
Speaker 1: could be implemented suit different um cities of different histories
Speaker 1: and different layouts, especially localized especially such like localized street
Speaker 1: cars within each city block, within within each superblock like
Speaker 1: system exactly. So, just to clarify, the idea of super
Speaker 1: blocks are basically um, you know, neighborhoods of nine blocks,
Speaker 1: where traffic is restricted to the roads on the outside
Speaker 1: of the block, which means that the interior of these
Speaker 1: super blocks entirely walkable. That, combined with the idea of
Speaker 1: a superblock being um mixed use, means that people are
Speaker 1: mostly able to access their basic necessities within their city block.
Speaker 1: Are you able to like spend more time, have more
Speaker 1: open space, to spend more time to meet with people,
Speaker 1: to talk, to do do activities, to you know, have
Speaker 1: some relief from noise pollution and air pollution from vehicles,
Speaker 1: and to really like connect people with the space they're
Speaker 1: living in and make the space they're living in more livable.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't live smack dab in the middle
Speaker 1: of like urban urban town, but I could imagine if
Speaker 1: people living in like New York or whatever, you know,
Speaker 1: you can't exactly step out of your apartment and play
Speaker 1: in the road on a typical day, if you have
Speaker 1: kids or whatever, you know, they can't exactly just go
Speaker 1: run outside. Um you will die exactly, so exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: And I mean people complaining about like, okays, lease, do
Speaker 1: some go outside as much? But I mean, look at outside,
Speaker 1: you know, look at what look at what has been created?
Speaker 1: Um and reflect on that. I mean, part of the
Speaker 1: assuer is um the way social media algorithms are designed
Speaker 1: to suck people into like cycles of addiction. But that's
Speaker 1: a whole another topic. Right, Um, I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people, more people will be willing to be able
Speaker 1: to pull themselves out to that sort of harmful algorithmic. Hell,
Speaker 1: if there was an outside pull themselves out too, you know.
Speaker 1: But honestly, cities, especially a notorious for like not having
Speaker 1: places you can be where you don't have to spend money,
Speaker 1: and that sucks. So I think, um, super blocks being
Speaker 1: places where you know, libraries and um, please some people
Speaker 1: can eat, maker spaces, community kitchens. It does seem to
Speaker 1: be missing or ignoring what we're gonna lose with super blocks,
Speaker 1: which is how how am I gonna roll down the
Speaker 1: streets smoking indow sipping on gin and juice if I'm
Speaker 1: not allowed to drive within my block? Wow? I think
Speaker 1: we can. I think I think you could just get
Speaker 1: a bike? Who's cruising all the bicycle? Have you tried
Speaker 1: smoking indow, sipping on gin and juice while riding a bicycle.
Speaker 1: It's it's impossible. Get a couple hold anything as possible
Speaker 1: as a Snoop Dogg eraser. No. But the the idea
Speaker 1: of having like community gardens, community like kitchens, like a
Speaker 1: maker spaces, libraries, all these within like this super block framework,
Speaker 1: you know, like green spaces. It does make actual urbans
Speaker 1: living the same attractive and not like you're just living
Speaker 1: in nested concrete boxes. Yeah. I mean people like living
Speaker 1: cities because that's where everything's happening, right, But yeah, you
Speaker 1: you want people to take part in the things that
Speaker 1: are happening, but the places aren't livable. Yeah, you don't
Speaker 1: have the table that will continue to complain about until
Speaker 1: the end of time, which the table in Chicago Trying
Speaker 1: Town that threatens to arrest you for sitting at it.
Speaker 1: Like it's yeah, like the hostility of this goes back
Speaker 1: to like racism because of course everyone does everything does.
Speaker 1: But you know a lot of these loitering laws and
Speaker 1: stuff which she designed to target black people and to
Speaker 1: target you know, poor people, um like vagrancy laws and
Speaker 1: that sort of thing, just hostile people's existence, and that
Speaker 1: gets into like hostile architecture and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: But I think with these super blocks, you know, we
Speaker 1: open up our spaces to make them welcoming to human
Speaker 1: ex systems, spaces that are not built around cars, built
Speaker 1: around commutes, built around week And this obviously is a
Speaker 1: transformation that requires more than just you know, vote for
Speaker 1: so and so and make this a degree and kind
Speaker 1: of thing. You need. You need something more substantial than that.
Speaker 1: You know, within these super blocks as well, you're you're
Speaker 1: able to take stock of how your block or whatever,
Speaker 1: you have a better mental sense of um community and
Speaker 1: able to take about a sense of even things like
Speaker 1: how your block can communally sustain themselves and you know,
Speaker 1: reduce waste and all these different things. This in conjunction
Speaker 1: with struggle against capitalism in the state. But you know
Speaker 1: that is implied. This is you know, m this is
Speaker 1: the show. This is it could happen here. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you expect and like electoralism, but that's not
Speaker 1: really what we do around here. I mean the benefits
Speaker 1: to these sort of like super blocks, you know, these
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes zon so people can walk within fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: to get the essentials. The benefits are innumerable. You know,
Speaker 1: that's the equality, less noise, healthy lifestyle, mental health boost
Speaker 1: But the issue is without a combination of you know,
Speaker 1: these projects and these activities with like anti capitalism and
Speaker 1: anti statism. It's it's tends to lend itself towards gentrification.
Speaker 1: And we've seen that in Spain, which is where UM
Speaker 1: some of these super blocks have been implemented. UM. They've
Speaker 1: created like these locations that are obviously more desirable because
Speaker 1: who doesn't want to live in a super block where
Speaker 1: you know, you actually sense of community because we're all
Speaker 1: desperate for that UM and at least an increase in
Speaker 1: property demand, higher prices, higher rent It basically creates these
Speaker 1: pockets of unaffordable neighborhoods, displacing local residents. So you have
Speaker 1: to get into the fight against gentrification in order to
Speaker 1: make this, you know, idea viable. The last thing that
Speaker 1: I want to get into really is as conventioned UM
Speaker 1: community gardens. I want to talk about urban farming because
Speaker 1: that is crucial. I mean, part of what UM makes
Speaker 1: cities cities in all the cases is the fact that
Speaker 1: they imports all their food. Right. They have the urban
Speaker 1: rural divide that you know delineates the two areas UM,
Speaker 1: but considering the transportation costs, the energy costs, all those
Speaker 1: things that compound UM two to stay in a city
Speaker 1: a city's food needs. We have to look to ways
Speaker 1: that we can sustain cities and sustain neighborhoods within cities, um,
Speaker 1: within themselves. Before I continue, I just want to point
Speaker 1: out that the future of urban farming is not in
Speaker 1: vertical farms. UM. They look very cool, you know, like
Speaker 1: those tall kind of like pillars of like letters or whatever,
Speaker 1: growing out sort of things, but the land that they
Speaker 1: save is usually canceled out by the land they need
Speaker 1: to produce the energy to power them, like, they're very
Speaker 1: energy intensive UM spaces. So until that issue is resolved,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if it will be considering you
Speaker 1: know how the energy requirements are just sort of built
Speaker 1: into the vertical the concentration of energy requirements built sort
Speaker 1: of into the foot of a farming design. UM, we
Speaker 1: have to look to more practical methods. Landownership tends to
Speaker 1: be a major hurdle UM when it comes to organizing
Speaker 1: community gardens and maintaining community gardens UM. I mean, like
Speaker 1: folks like Black Futures Farm, Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, and
Speaker 1: the Victory Garden Initiative. They've been working to like provide
Speaker 1: fresh produce to those in need, especially in urban food deserts.
Speaker 1: But in a lot of these projects, they go in
Speaker 1: good for some years and then the city suddenly spins around.
Speaker 1: It's like, we need this land for development, so they
Speaker 1: just snatch it up, and you know, those years of
Speaker 1: efforts just basically put on the dream um Community land
Speaker 1: trusts have been put forward as a potential um solution
Speaker 1: to that issue. But like a lot of these things,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a good band aid, I would say,
Speaker 1: but it's not necessarily marking the end of capitalism. Another
Speaker 1: issue that there is with the whole urban farming thing
Speaker 1: is that the culture that develops around them while they
Speaker 1: provide education and community and connection for people within them,
Speaker 1: and that is extremely valuable. I think some organizers fall
Speaker 1: into this habit of treating, of creating. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like shared delusion around community gardens, you know, claiming to
Speaker 1: be sort of feeding the people couldn't could And what
Speaker 1: already brought this to my attention was Inhabits Territories newsletter.
Speaker 1: We had an article on it last year, I think,
Speaker 1: on you know, urban community gardens, and it was written
Speaker 1: by Gibriel I've seen, the co founder of at Planta,
Speaker 1: which I find to be a very very creative name
Speaker 1: basically asked the question are we really feeding ourselves? I mean,
Speaker 1: these local food initiatives they do produce food that people eat,
Speaker 1: but it can be a bit harmful to be overly
Speaker 1: optimistic about our food autonomy at this stage, especially considering
Speaker 1: how reliant we still are on big agriculture. You know, like, yes,
Speaker 1: we are producing you know, organic nutritionally this dense crops
Speaker 1: and stuff, and that's great, that's helping people, but you know,
Speaker 1: oftentimes it usually just means that, you know, the people
Speaker 1: might be getting participants. I'm be getting like a salad
Speaker 1: or you know, a couple. To me too, it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily they're cutting down their grocery bill in a sustainable,
Speaker 1: long term way, because I mean, if you've tried God,
Speaker 1: then you know that, like when you're work here with
Speaker 1: a limited space, you know, you grow your food set
Speaker 1: it to me too, is it means it was a
Speaker 1: cool but they don't last forever, you know, and you
Speaker 1: have to wait until the next harvest to get more.
Speaker 1: To me too, its or whatever the case may be.
Speaker 1: Same for like letters or whatever. It's kinda rough, you know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't it helps for like a meal or maybe two,
Speaker 1: depending on like a living situation, but it doesn't meaningfully
Speaker 1: cut into our reliance and groceries and you know, food imports. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it definitely takes a bit to get to that point,
Speaker 1: and you have to do it with a combination of
Speaker 1: like food preservation and like canning, um, and like you know,
Speaker 1: like jarring and a whole bunch of other stuff to
Speaker 1: actually make that a worthwhile endeavor as opposed to just
Speaker 1: making like great, I spent three months making these tomatoes.
Speaker 1: Now they're ready for one meal and then they're all God,
Speaker 1: it would be like one salt. Yeah. Yeah, you do
Speaker 1: have to really kind of figure out how to grow
Speaker 1: enough to keep enough ready to be harvested for jarring
Speaker 1: and canning for future use um, and make sure like
Speaker 1: you're you know, harvesting them when they are ready so
Speaker 1: that you can you know, you don't lose stuff, and
Speaker 1: that you have like you know, an ongoing, ongoing process
Speaker 1: of like preserving the fit that you do grow for
Speaker 1: later um as well. So you can definitely take a
Speaker 1: lot a lot more like mental effort and planning than
Speaker 1: just you know, planting it and then you know, using
Speaker 1: it and cooking it when it's when it's all ready. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of energy and self is put
Speaker 1: into growing things like greens and roots and fruiting vegetables.
Speaker 1: And they're healthy, you know, they have the vita wins
Speaker 1: and micro nutrients. But you know, people still need meat, dairy, eggs,
Speaker 1: you know protein, yeah, heavy, high calorie dense stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: like potitoos and other starches like a really holy buloofu
Speaker 1: we eats and that kind of thing, and that just
Speaker 1: isn't being grown right now. You know, wheat and rice
Speaker 1: and soy and nuts and corn and sugar. These staples
Speaker 1: and stuff don't tend to be produced by these community
Speaker 1: gardens and by these garden plots. Not many many, not
Speaker 1: many legume patches at your local community garden. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. Like I'm in the process of grin um
Speaker 1: some pigeon peas right now, and they are taking a
Speaker 1: very long while. And what I realize is that, um,
Speaker 1: I mean, I just plan to them, so I'm being
Speaker 1: a bit impatient. But what I realized is that when
Speaker 1: they do growth, and I've seen you know, some much
Speaker 1: your pigeon peach trees and stuff, I know how big
Speaker 1: they tend to grow by time. Harvest rules around you know,
Speaker 1: you get all those different pods and you you know,
Speaker 1: you put in the world keep put. You pick all
Speaker 1: the pods and you pry open the pods, and you know,
Speaker 1: you put in some more alliteration into the sentence. And
Speaker 1: you know, you get those peas out. Once those peas
Speaker 1: out to the pod and you put them in a pot.
Speaker 1: They're not potent enough to who would you over for
Speaker 1: more than one meal? You know, like you pick like
Speaker 1: a trees worth of peas in a pod, and you
Speaker 1: know that's like sometimes like half of a meal. And really, honestly,
Speaker 1: respect to the people who are producing all our food
Speaker 1: right now, because I can't imagine having to be shelling
Speaker 1: peas all the time. It's kind of ridiculous. I mean
Speaker 1: it can be fun, but I can't imagine doing it
Speaker 1: all day. I mean, workers work, right, it's gonna yeah,
Speaker 1: work as hell, we know this, but yeah, so I
Speaker 1: mean community gardens they're good. You know, they have you know, education,
Speaker 1: the build community. They provide outdoor activity and stuff. But
Speaker 1: you know, I think what comunity gardens, urban gardens and
Speaker 1: stuff need to do is find ways to um and
Speaker 1: this this isn't a disparate The work has been done,
Speaker 1: you know, like massive support. I'm doing that myself kind
Speaker 1: of thing. But we've got to, like, as the article argues,
Speaker 1: we can't get caught up in the fluffing up of
Speaker 1: the reality for marketing purposes. You know, we need to
Speaker 1: look for ways that can actually um feed ourselves. That
Speaker 1: means getting into caloric foods that means um like like
Speaker 1: dried beans, potatoes, fruit trees, that kind of thing, grains, nuts,
Speaker 1: all that jazz. And also connecting with farms outside of
Speaker 1: the city, you know, local farms outside of the immediate
Speaker 1: urban landscape. Seeing what cooperatives can be developed that can
Speaker 1: work aid each other mutually to build more potent capacity
Speaker 1: for food. What's on me? So, I mean, get in
Speaker 1: touch with the soil, you know, get this sign your face,
Speaker 1: but also think about what more we can do to
Speaker 1: sort of take this to the next level. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that is um that is what I believe could in
Speaker 1: fact happen here. This has happened here. Good. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: nice to have a positive one of these. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: should do that more often. If all, if only we
Speaker 1: had the power power. Well, come back tomorrow when we'll
Speaker 1: be talking about another bad thing. And then abandoning you
Speaker 1: to deal with your thoughts about it. Wow, we we try,
Speaker 1: we try, we do try. This is us trying well,
Speaker 1: this is us having st Andrew try. You're welcome, Thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you very much. This is a topic I wanted
Speaker 1: to discuss for a long time in terms of because
Speaker 1: we get a lot of people talking about it like yeah,
Speaker 1: how you know and whatever like post collapse fantasy that
Speaker 1: you can imagine where we're able to kind of reconfigure society.
Speaker 1: How would you plan urban living? And you're like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot of actually really cool ideas for
Speaker 1: like keeping people close together can be a very ecological
Speaker 1: idea if you do it certain ways. It's just a
Speaker 1: lot of the ways you've defaulted to over the past.
Speaker 1: Like really three years has made it not that with
Speaker 1: the invention of the car really really screwing us over. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, thank you so much for talking about urban
Speaker 1: living and super super blocks and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: Where can where can people find more of your work
Speaker 1: in writing on the interwebs. You can find me on
Speaker 1: YouTube at seeing Andrewism, and you can find me on Twitter,
Speaker 1: which hopefully when you hear this, I am still not
Speaker 1: on at under School seeing true fantastic. Um, yeah you
Speaker 1: uh st Andrew just put together a really great episode
Speaker 1: about anti work stuff and the way that debacles has
Speaker 1: has happened and what we can learn from it and
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Um and while you should still
Speaker 1: actually care about anti work um and yeah, so we're
Speaker 1: definitely recommend the anti work video for recent recent recent stuff.
Speaker 1: Let's see. Um, if you want a d your brain
Speaker 1: into the addiction driven social media algorithm, you can follow
Speaker 1: us on Twitter and Instagram. It happened here pot and
Speaker 1: cools on media and uh yeah, let's uh go think
Speaker 1: about go think about microspaces and community gardens. That seems
Speaker 1: like a good a good way to dedicate your thoughts.
Speaker 1: Time and roll down the street smoking indow sipping that
Speaker 1: gin and juice while you still can on a bike
Speaker 1: on a personally used doing my moral judgements upon you
Speaker 1: before before the fascist anarchists take away your fees. Yeah. Look,
Speaker 1: if if if we can democratize military grade weapon rate
Speaker 1: the way the Ukrainians had, we can we can we
Speaker 1: can form neighborhoods that cannot be forced to live in
Speaker 1: the traffic the auto industrial complex really reduce frifless air
Speaker 1: travel what fantasy otherwise will end up in a mad
Speaker 1: box wield and I mean wants that right, well you
Speaker 1: know aspects of it. Yeah, alright, see what everybody podcast?
Speaker 1: Thank you? That is it is, It's true, It's true.
Speaker 1: Actually it could happen here. Posting to podcast is more
Speaker 1: or less the truth we have. We have Drake Robert
Speaker 1: out of bed at before they're cracking dat at a
Speaker 1: legend forty two am, um, and we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about actually something very fund I'm I'm I've been I've
Speaker 1: been wanting to talk about this for a long time
Speaker 1: because this is one I'm actually one of my favorite things.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, yeah, So I'm gonna I'm gonna tell a
Speaker 1: bit of a bit of a little story regarding one
Speaker 1: of my act all time favorite events and topics. So
Speaker 1: back in like ten, there was this a cheesy little
Speaker 1: online university science show made by the Rochester Institute of
Speaker 1: Technology called Can You Imagine Um. The The idea was
Speaker 1: to highlight some of the cool and weird things at
Speaker 1: the University UM in part to promote the Imagine r
Speaker 1: i T Festival, which was like the school's annual like
Speaker 1: innovation and Creativity Festival thing that they put on. So yeah,
Speaker 1: today I want to talk specifically about episode three of
Speaker 1: the web series because the contents of which overlap with
Speaker 1: some of my like artistic interests UM and like just
Speaker 1: my love of illusions and paradox and I will kind
Speaker 1: of tie you into some topics we all we always
Speaker 1: discussed on the show. So yeah, episode three, one of
Speaker 1: probably probably the most interesting episode UM. Episode RNK, opens
Speaker 1: with the hosts Kevin and Steph as they like stand
Speaker 1: awkwardly in a gloriously dated you like university film set
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's it's only twenties, it's only twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: but it was like obviously like made in the nineties,
Speaker 1: like like like like the set's like it's it's all.
Speaker 1: It's it's all very dated. What specifically are you? Oh,
Speaker 1: like they're they're like they're just like weird, like like
Speaker 1: weird like like dated science stuff on the walls, all
Speaker 1: the host of wearing like dorky orange T shirts like
Speaker 1: like over to over top of their regular clothes they have. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's all. It's all that kind it's all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. So like dorky orange T shirts
Speaker 1: with the letters r i T for Roger Cusister Institute
Speaker 1: of Technology. Um, of course, because everything in this online
Speaker 1: video series is perfect. Kevin is wearing his shirt over
Speaker 1: top of like a button down. It's it's, it's, it's great. Um.
Speaker 1: The first fifty seconds of the video are taken up
Speaker 1: with like plugging the upcoming r A T Imagine Festival
Speaker 1: with a with a co host Steph beautifully stumbling over
Speaker 1: her lines when she says the event's catchphrase, it's where
Speaker 1: the left brain and the right brain collide. And it's great.
Speaker 1: It's it's, it's, it's it's it's perfect. So after all
Speaker 1: the plugs and the vamping, the hosts get down to
Speaker 1: the fun engineering feat and they'll be showing us today,
Speaker 1: which is a neat little architectural experiment a part of
Speaker 1: the r I T campus called the A Sharing and Stairwell, um,
Speaker 1: of course, named after the impossible staircases depicted in Dutch
Speaker 1: artist m c Escher's artwork. So the video cuts two
Speaker 1: from the little like sound stage they're filming in to
Speaker 1: this boring, white, seemingly typical stairwell, our host Kevin ascending
Speaker 1: a fight of the gray concrete stairs. Um explains that
Speaker 1: what located in Building seven of the campus. The stairwell
Speaker 1: was designed by Filipino architect Raphael Nelson Abegondo and was
Speaker 1: one of the first structure is put up when our
Speaker 1: I T moved their campus from downtown Rochester to the
Speaker 1: more suburban Henrietta. UM when when he's taking when he's
Speaker 1: reaching the top of the stairs, he turns the quarter
Speaker 1: and then suddenly seems to appear at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the lower flight of stairs leading up to the landing
Speaker 1: that he just left from, all while continuing to talk
Speaker 1: about the architect behind this like kind of weird impossible feat. Um. So,
Speaker 1: as Kevin walks back up to camera, he says that
Speaker 1: the stairwell was built in the and it's been wowing
Speaker 1: ur I too students ever since. Um. It's it is
Speaker 1: very cool. It's like it's like you're like, okay, like
Speaker 1: you get you get the little like like you get
Speaker 1: the little architectural trick that they're doing. Um, but it's
Speaker 1: it is it is still pretty fun to see. Before
Speaker 1: episode three of Can You Imagine aired you could, you
Speaker 1: can already find a few articles on the school's UH
Speaker 1: website about the issuing stairwell, along with some like forum
Speaker 1: posts debating how the architecture in the stairwell works to
Speaker 1: like achieve the effect. Um all so floating around on
Speaker 1: YouTube was like a random segment of what looked like
Speaker 1: a like a PBS style late nineties documentary about the
Speaker 1: physics and architecture of the school and specifically the starewell
Speaker 1: that interviewed some like professors UM and some like architects
Speaker 1: and like of the symphysicist kind of discussing what like
Speaker 1: how to like bring paradox into the physical world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but but but around the time that Can't You
Speaker 1: Imagine episode aired, the now like infamous r RT stairwell
Speaker 1: was mostly unknown, so like, even despite it being very interesting,
Speaker 1: no one really knew about it until this episode of
Speaker 1: this little web series aired. Um. The little web episode
Speaker 1: dedicates around half its time to interviewing students, uh and
Speaker 1: righteously random people at the university about if they even
Speaker 1: know about the starewell's existence, um, and if they do,
Speaker 1: what like experiences they have with like me messing around
Speaker 1: with like the looping architecture, because yeah, you can, you can,
Speaker 1: you know, you can play a lot of games with
Speaker 1: this type of with this type of design. Uh So.
Speaker 1: The rest of the short video like tries demonstrate the
Speaker 1: disorienting ascent down and descent back up via the camera
Speaker 1: in various ways, like you know, like human chains or
Speaker 1: holding hands around the weird like movies loop types staircase,
Speaker 1: and like passing objects back and forth in a circle
Speaker 1: while inside and around the enclosed stairwell. Um, there's one
Speaker 1: where Kevin walks around with a cup to show that
Speaker 1: the stairs aren't like clearly like heavily slanted, like the
Speaker 1: water stays pretty pretty level as he walks all the
Speaker 1: way through, and we like we follow with him the
Speaker 1: entire time. Um So, yeah, Like the overall like nerdy
Speaker 1: and low fi style of the University video match with
Speaker 1: like the insane feet of Architectural Illusion is a really
Speaker 1: fun mixed like it's like it's like it's it's it
Speaker 1: is very like surreal, but not totally on purpose, because
Speaker 1: it's just all of these like regular college students showing
Speaker 1: this like really cool architecture by this really good architect
Speaker 1: and you're like, oh, yeah, they're just so chill about it.
Speaker 1: Uh it is, it is, it is pretty fun. It's
Speaker 1: pretty fun. Um. After the third episode of the Imagine
Speaker 1: Our i T video was posted. Finally, the mind boggling
Speaker 1: looping staircase of building seven in of of Our T
Speaker 1: started to gain a lot of confused appreciation UM and
Speaker 1: the dor Key University Science Show went vital. People started
Speaker 1: traveling from out of state even other countries to see
Speaker 1: the Asherian stairwell themselves and and film videos on social
Speaker 1: media as as they walked through it. This this one
Speaker 1: video of like people traveling to a different country and
Speaker 1: they're like harassing like the school staff to try to
Speaker 1: like tell them where it is, and they're like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, you're still doing this because it was like
Speaker 1: because like this film was this video is like like
Speaker 1: years old, but it's it still happens. People still travel
Speaker 1: there to to specifically see it. UM. There is like
Speaker 1: tense online discussion and debate on how the Filipino architect
Speaker 1: Raphael Avugando was able to achieve the effect and what
Speaker 1: kind of other bizarre architectural experiments he may have worked on,
Speaker 1: because you can find his Facebook page and you can
Speaker 1: find some stuff about him, but he has not really
Speaker 1: because like this this steroile is built in the late sixties,
Speaker 1: but you haven't you. So he even though he has
Speaker 1: an online presence, he's like he's like he's not like active,
Speaker 1: So it's unclear like what else he's actually been doing. Um,
Speaker 1: but I would I would, I would love to learn
Speaker 1: more about this architect and what else he's done, because this,
Speaker 1: it is it is really rare to have these very small,
Speaker 1: condensed but like high effort type like type builds and
Speaker 1: like the the existence of the whole thing. Posted some
Speaker 1: really interesting questions around how extremely clever paradoxical design can
Speaker 1: push the boundary of how we make assumptions about spatial physics, um,
Speaker 1: and how we visually and physically demonstrate things that we
Speaker 1: usually can only depict in two dimensions, right, Like you
Speaker 1: can you can easily depict the the issuing starwell in
Speaker 1: two dimensions, but when you're scaling that up to three dimensions,
Speaker 1: it's obviously more work like like that that is that
Speaker 1: is part of the paradox um Plus, you know, it
Speaker 1: also demonstrates the importance of art and how ideas once
Speaker 1: thought impossible or merely optical illusions can actually with enough data,
Speaker 1: can an effort break into our real reality. Uh. If
Speaker 1: a brilliant architect can manage to build this physically and
Speaker 1: like logically impossible structure. What other types of things can
Speaker 1: we actually do as possible? The video now has like
Speaker 1: over a million views on its original upload UM and
Speaker 1: videos about the R I T. Stairwell have ranked up
Speaker 1: as many as like twenty five million views. Yeah it's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Yeah, you know what else demonstrates the looping
Speaker 1: nature of time. Having to listen to all these ads
Speaker 1: that we do. Ye, we we are, we are back.
Speaker 1: I've I've rounded the corner and we are back where
Speaker 1: we came from. Um because of the fun paradox of architecture. UM.
Speaker 1: The one, the one other thing I should mentioned before
Speaker 1: we continue on this episode is that the entire thing
Speaker 1: is fake. It's false. No way, not this time we
Speaker 1: created it. Not this time, No, not this time. It's
Speaker 1: totally made up because of it's it's a staircase that
Speaker 1: breaks the basic rules of movement in physics. Kevin walks
Speaker 1: up the stairs and teleports to the lower stairwell. Belief them,
Speaker 1: that's not that's not that's that's not an architectural allusion.
Speaker 1: It's called good video editing, an adope after effects. It's
Speaker 1: not like, no, you're you're really gonna believe a video
Speaker 1: on the Internet and some well placed, falsified Internet posts
Speaker 1: over the very basic rules that governed our universe. But like,
Speaker 1: oh boy, did it fool millions of people? Uh? And
Speaker 1: if I played my cards right, I hope most of
Speaker 1: our listeners until the last few seconds. Um yeah, And
Speaker 1: uh so the whole the whole thing was a was
Speaker 1: a student like film and art project around around building
Speaker 1: a modern myth. Um the because it's sure, it's sure
Speaker 1: is interesting how good storytelling can overrule obvious logical processes.
Speaker 1: The tale of the a Sharan Stairwell is one of
Speaker 1: favorite case studies and how disincribation spreads and it is
Speaker 1: believed while all in defiance of the basic rules of reality,
Speaker 1: because it's not a matter of what facts are true,
Speaker 1: it's about what facts are compelling. And the idea of
Speaker 1: a logically impossible staircase being built by a brilliant Filipino
Speaker 1: architect is more interesting than it being someone's weird and
Speaker 1: disinformation art project. Um there. So yeah, Like I want
Speaker 1: to say, like how what what were you guys thinking
Speaker 1: as I was explaining the Issurian stairwell, Like where did
Speaker 1: you see this? Going Okay, So I had in the
Speaker 1: back of my head, okay, we should we should mention this.
Speaker 1: Garrison has been hyping up this episode for like I
Speaker 1: don't even a pretty amount of time. Nothing. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's a staircase and I'm like what it's like my
Speaker 1: my brain my brain started going because he said and
Speaker 1: I was like, my like my encounters just see brain
Speaker 1: flicked on and I was like, wait a second, all time,
Speaker 1: is this like some kind of like weird like we've
Speaker 1: redesigned the college campuses so they stop people stopped taking
Speaker 1: the dean hostage, a thing that used to happen constantly
Speaker 1: and with all my favorite party about this would happen
Speaker 1: constantly and you'd get New York Times articles calling it
Speaker 1: non violent. Great. Yeah, so yeah it was that was
Speaker 1: I was. Yeah, I spent more mental energy that I
Speaker 1: probably should have tried to figure out how it worked out,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know, maybe they just made it like
Speaker 1: if they just made it Acus Razor, it's obviously yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I was. I was seen the like I
Speaker 1: was in the like, okay, so they built a staircase,
Speaker 1: they built another the viewers cannot see my fingers. It
Speaker 1: was like a staircase. It doesn't tell. It was like,
Speaker 1: it was like, but you can't find videos of people
Speaker 1: traveling to the school to see if it's real, and
Speaker 1: they try it and they're so disappointed. They're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's no, it's just stairs. It doesn't it doesn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's is importing in a lot of ways because it's
Speaker 1: it's not even like a thing where like there's like
Speaker 1: another back staircase that you walk down. Then again, it's
Speaker 1: just it's just nothing. It's just stairs. I was hoping
Speaker 1: there was like actual clever is No, it's just it's
Speaker 1: not really, it's it's just. It was that meme where
Speaker 1: all the math doesn't add up in the person what
Speaker 1: is happening? I was like, all right, Garrison, you got
Speaker 1: us here. You made Robert get up before noon. What
Speaker 1: is happening? Well, the reason, the real reason I got
Speaker 1: up before I got Robert up before noon is because actually,
Speaker 1: UM have scheduled an interview with the creator of the
Speaker 1: Assarian stairwell, the actual one be like the online art
Speaker 1: project and building a modern myth idea UM, which we
Speaker 1: are now going to segue into. So yeah, what what
Speaker 1: follows is us talking with the creator of the Usherian
Speaker 1: Stairwell Project. Hello, we are we are back from our
Speaker 1: probably very very brief break. Um and with me along
Speaker 1: with Robert and Chris and Sophie is Uh Michael, the
Speaker 1: creator of the Sharian Stairwell Project and the Building the
Speaker 1: Modern Myths project. Hello greetings, Thank you so much for
Speaker 1: joining us to talk about one of my one of
Speaker 1: my favorite things actually is which is here a little
Speaker 1: to us to project? Um yeah, I've I've I've been
Speaker 1: a fan of this for a long time and found
Speaker 1: it to be really compelling and interesting. Um and I
Speaker 1: so I just walked through Robert and Chris and Sophie
Speaker 1: what what it what it was, but from the perspective
Speaker 1: of it being true for like for the good fifteen minutes,
Speaker 1: I was I was episode was going was going through
Speaker 1: talking about it as if it were completely real, but
Speaker 1: curious to hear how you did that it was. It
Speaker 1: was slightly baffling because again we were told nothing, and
Speaker 1: then what we got is Garrison is talking about a
Speaker 1: YouTube video about an architecture thing, and I was like,
Speaker 1: what here? Yeah, and then and then then talking about
Speaker 1: how oh yeah, and I guess one more thing is
Speaker 1: that it's actually fake, um, and it's part of this whole,
Speaker 1: this whole thing. So yeah, I would I would love
Speaker 1: to talk to you about both like how how you
Speaker 1: like logistically like made the project, but also like the
Speaker 1: underlying you're undering thoughts that like inspired you to do
Speaker 1: it in the first place, and then like retrospected now
Speaker 1: almost like ten years later, like how do you view
Speaker 1: the project as like happening you know, right before like
Speaker 1: the peak of online disinformation? Um? Right. So but first
Speaker 1: of all, I I just think we should probably start
Speaker 1: start at the beginning, like what what was your inspirations
Speaker 1: for this type of like online like very like it
Speaker 1: seems it seems it seems built to go viral in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. Yes, exactly. So this was around
Speaker 1: twenty eleven, I guess was when I first got the idea.
Speaker 1: It was for my master's thesis, my m f A
Speaker 1: for film at Rochester r I t and UM. The
Speaker 1: idea actually began from this like deep anxiety about how
Speaker 1: to discern fact from fiction? UM. At the time, like
Speaker 1: I came into film school like really into like realism
Speaker 1: in films like Romanian New Wave mckel hanaka dar Dan Brothers,
Speaker 1: like these are filmmakers who are like they're sort of
Speaker 1: like the modern day version of Italian nero neo realism,
Speaker 1: and they're trying to like depict like these um reality
Speaker 1: as it is. I wanted to like learn how to
Speaker 1: make those types of films um, so over like with
Speaker 1: each year, that's what I tried to get better. And
Speaker 1: the more I tried to do that, UM well, like
Speaker 1: a number of things were happening around that time. Right
Speaker 1: in class, they showed us that these mockumentaries called No Lies,
Speaker 1: which was made in nineteen seventy three by this guy
Speaker 1: called Mitchell Black actually won a student oscar at the time,
Speaker 1: and uh Delusions and Modern Primitivism two thousand one by
Speaker 1: this guy named Daniel Loughlin, UM and these Like I
Speaker 1: was like floored because I thought they were real, like
Speaker 1: real documentaries and um and it bothered me, like our
Speaker 1: teacher still this afterwards that these were actually scripted works
Speaker 1: of fiction with like really really good actors, and it
Speaker 1: like I went into kind of like existential crisis mode afterwards,
Speaker 1: like how do I even discern what's true from what's
Speaker 1: not if I got fooled by these things? Especially, like
Speaker 1: that's like my concentration. That's what I've been studying for years,
Speaker 1: and even I was not even able to tell that
Speaker 1: they were fake. Right, There was that going on, And
Speaker 1: then there was like smartphones were becoming a thing, Like
Speaker 1: I just looked it up. Smartphones didn't start out out
Speaker 1: selling flip phones still, so around this time, like it
Speaker 1: was becoming a thing where everyone would have the Internet
Speaker 1: in their pockets. So I guess there was that anxiety
Speaker 1: going on trying to think about, um, um, how we're
Speaker 1: starting to function and how we're how I remember when
Speaker 1: I proposed my thesis did the thesis committee, I um,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I was telling them was, um,
Speaker 1: I have this worry about how reliant we are on
Speaker 1: the Internet to determine what's true and what's not. And
Speaker 1: this is like like my professors found my concerns like
Speaker 1: really abstract and theoretical, Like why do you even care?
Speaker 1: Because this? Right? Like why did you about fact? Then ficture?
Speaker 1: It wasn't like fake news. That wasn't even a yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't. It didn't become part of the everyday lexicon,
Speaker 1: like you said, until twenty six when Trump started throwing
Speaker 1: that term around, and suddenly we hear about it every day.
Speaker 1: Um so there was that going on. Trayvon Martin was
Speaker 1: a thing and for the first time, like nationally, you
Speaker 1: could see like disinformation like on you know, just like
Speaker 1: exaggerated versions of different different accounts from like polarizing sides.
Speaker 1: So all that was going on, and so I wanted
Speaker 1: to it was it was like this film project was about,
Speaker 1: um trying to take something that was Are you familiar
Speaker 1: with with the difference between like a priori knowledge and
Speaker 1: a posteriori knowledge? Yeah? Okay, so so so like you know,
Speaker 1: for for anyone who might be listening that doesn't really
Speaker 1: know the exact difference. A priori edge is the type
Speaker 1: of knowledge that you can have without needing to make
Speaker 1: observations or conduct experiments or look at surveys or do
Speaker 1: any research of any any kind. Is a sort of
Speaker 1: knowledge you can know just by reasoning it out, but
Speaker 1: just by sitting in a room by yourself in the dark,
Speaker 1: you could figure things out. This is the sort this
Speaker 1: is a priori knowledge. Um So, for an example of
Speaker 1: that is like knowing that all bachelors are unmarried, right,
Speaker 1: or all triangles of three sides, that's a priori knowledge.
Speaker 1: An example of oppos stereori knowledge UM is something that
Speaker 1: you find out through observation or you need using one
Speaker 1: or more of your five senses. Right, like Joe Biden
Speaker 1: is the President of the United States. Um, the masses
Speaker 1: of Mars is six point four one seven one times
Speaker 1: ten to the twentys. You actually have to go out
Speaker 1: into the world and conduct surveys or do research. So
Speaker 1: that's opposterior knowledge. So the idea was to take something
Speaker 1: that was a priori false, something that could that could
Speaker 1: um be disproven by reason alone, Like you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: You wouldn't need to do any research in order to
Speaker 1: to know that it was false. You'd simply had to
Speaker 1: reflect on it and um think about it. Uh. So
Speaker 1: we could have picked anything, right, we could have. We
Speaker 1: could have said made up like a fake news report
Speaker 1: that leaves mathematicians that m I t having invented like
Speaker 1: a square with five sides something like that. You know, Um,
Speaker 1: I remember that weekend up there and sm now had
Speaker 1: this sketch. I think it was like, um, forget who
Speaker 1: it was. It might have been Kevin Nealon or something
Speaker 1: like that. The report was like scientists and mathematicians have
Speaker 1: discovered the new number. The number exists between five and six,
Speaker 1: and they're calling it the numbers spleen, you know, something
Speaker 1: like that, which is like just impossible. So, um, so
Speaker 1: come up with something that could be disproven by reason
Speaker 1: alone and at the same time surrounded with this wealth
Speaker 1: of online information um supporting its veracity. So, like you know,
Speaker 1: it was kind of a social experiment. So I was like,
Speaker 1: have we are we so far beyond rational thinking that
Speaker 1: even something that can be disproven a priori people would believe.
Speaker 1: And it was like, we didn't really know the answer
Speaker 1: to that, but we were going to commit to creating
Speaker 1: this thing as though it was real and but which
Speaker 1: was like logically impossible. So in a way it anticipated
Speaker 1: the age of like this information because it wasn't just yeah.
Speaker 1: The thing I kind of alluded to in my little
Speaker 1: scripted portion is that like, yeah, it wasn't just the
Speaker 1: YouTube video. There was also this extra online content that
Speaker 1: was created of whis yeah. Yes, like there was you
Speaker 1: can find like articles, forum posts, all this kind of
Speaker 1: stuff like like like if yeah, like so if you
Speaker 1: could look into it more and find these other things,
Speaker 1: but it's still contradicts the basic logical processes that we
Speaker 1: can use to discern what is real what is not,
Speaker 1: um interms of like yeah, in terms of like believing
Speaker 1: in a five studed square, like no, that's not what
Speaker 1: that that's that's not how like physics and like spatial
Speaker 1: like the spatial dimensions work. Um so yeah. And then
Speaker 1: in terms of all the extra material you filmed for it,
Speaker 1: there was like there was like I think I read
Speaker 1: around like nine hours of documentary footage. Was also a
Speaker 1: lot like a lot of footage, but it was only
Speaker 1: made into like probably a thirty minute thing. Um. We
Speaker 1: got our friends, like at the very very beginning, we
Speaker 1: got our friends to play along with it. Like so
Speaker 1: whenever you see posts about this, just comment like it's real, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was there. It was really great. And um, eventually
Speaker 1: people would actually start visiting this starewell like from all over,
Speaker 1: like from Canada. They crossed the border to get there
Speaker 1: because it's in upstate New York, right. Um. And I
Speaker 1: actually ran into a couple from India who happened to
Speaker 1: be visiting visiting New York and they were like, since
Speaker 1: we're here, we'd like to see this stare Well that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Um. Oh no, I know, I felt
Speaker 1: really bad for a lot of the visitors. So we
Speaker 1: actually had to come up with souvenirs so that they
Speaker 1: wouldn't leave empty handed, right, So we made fake We
Speaker 1: made postcards like saying I've been to the Share and
Speaker 1: Stailes and stuff like that program and um, well happened
Speaker 1: and the way we explained it, so a lot of
Speaker 1: people were really mad actually, you know, as you can
Speaker 1: imagine when they got there, but after um we would
Speaker 1: explain what we were doing of them with the project,
Speaker 1: Like a lot of them actually like started playing along
Speaker 1: and thought it was really cool, and they went home
Speaker 1: with their souvenirs and told their friends that they just
Speaker 1: saw this amazing thing. So you know, it kind of
Speaker 1: built that way for a little bit. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: telling kids that Santa isn't real exactly, and some of
Speaker 1: them will be like, play along with the okay, cool,
Speaker 1: this means I can play along with the myth to
Speaker 1: help you other kids happy. And some of them will
Speaker 1: be like, what, oh no, my entire reality is broken.
Speaker 1: And when you find out, is your trying to like
Speaker 1: pass it on exactly that. So a lot of that
Speaker 1: was going on, Like Shock the basketball player posted about
Speaker 1: it at some point, Joe Rogan talked about it on
Speaker 1: his podcast. They got kind of crazy. Wait wait, did
Speaker 1: did Joe Rogan know it wasn't real? Um, it's funny.
Speaker 1: You should see the clip of him doing it, because
Speaker 1: he was like it was him And who's the other guy,
Speaker 1: Bert Kreiser or something. Anyway, they were arguing about whether
Speaker 1: or not was real. The other guy was like, no,
Speaker 1: it's real. It's so real. Was like, all you guys
Speaker 1: are fucking idiots. You're all idiots. Let's google it right now.
Speaker 1: They google it and they look up an article and
Speaker 1: Joe Joe Rogan's like, Okay, yeah, alright, it's still fucking stupid.
Speaker 1: The guy who built it is fucking you know, I
Speaker 1: you have You have no idea how happy you have
Speaker 1: made me because I in my in my research, but
Speaker 1: like I have like read your thesis. I read all
Speaker 1: the lots of articles about this. I did not come
Speaker 1: across the Rogan clip, but I would right. Um, it's
Speaker 1: like way back right, it's like ten years ago. It's
Speaker 1: like a lot of stuff to dig through and I
Speaker 1: found it though. Again, Um, so I'd like to kind
Speaker 1: of go into like the logistics of like actually doing
Speaker 1: this in terms of like creating all the fake like
Speaker 1: web content, but also like you know, dreaming up this
Speaker 1: like family friendly science show that's made by our I T.
Speaker 1: And like how like you know the thing between like
Speaker 1: naturalism and realism and making it like playing not trying
Speaker 1: to replicate reality, but playing as if it were reality,
Speaker 1: and how those are two different things. Um. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: what we wanted to make it as real as possible
Speaker 1: and like that's what I was I'd been studying anyway,
Speaker 1: but in like a dramatic context, like making narrative films. Um.
Speaker 1: And the idea was to, um, there's this event at
Speaker 1: r I T every year which gets a lot of people,
Speaker 1: like thirty thousand people. Y'r go to the campus and
Speaker 1: look at like, um these uh whatever the students are
Speaker 1: working on. It's kind of like a mini like festival
Speaker 1: type of thing. Well, not many is pretty big, So
Speaker 1: we we wanted to make a video for that event. Um.
Speaker 1: As though we were promoting the event, Hey, come see
Speaker 1: the Assarian Stairwell when you get your r I T
Speaker 1: um and you know you normally for these like for
Speaker 1: these for these events, if you have a booth or something,
Speaker 1: you'll see reservations and you'll see like four people reserve
Speaker 1: fifteen people. Like we were like started getting nervous and
Speaker 1: we found out. We got a sense that this was
Speaker 1: gonna be big because like when I looked at like
Speaker 1: the reservations for like our non existent starewell there were
Speaker 1: like one thousand plus visitors. Um. Yeah, I still remember
Speaker 1: like going a campus that day at the festival Saturday,
Speaker 1: and like my friend Ira like comes up to me.
Speaker 1: He is like, Mike, people want to kill you, like
Speaker 1: cover get over here, and I was like trying to
Speaker 1: not show my faith anyway. Yeah that's what. So what
Speaker 1: the way, Like a lot of the legs of the
Speaker 1: project was just like word of mouth, I guess, and
Speaker 1: we actually ran out of money. Um, we didn't get
Speaker 1: to do like the web stuff on the scale that
Speaker 1: we wanted to, But it turned out that we didn't
Speaker 1: even have to. In fact, like within a few days
Speaker 1: or maybe a week or something after the original video
Speaker 1: came out, I posted a video explaining that it's a myth.
Speaker 1: Like I posted it and I was like, all right,
Speaker 1: I was a fun ride. I was gonna be over
Speaker 1: because here's a video of me explaining everything right, And
Speaker 1: people still didn't believe it. People were saying that my
Speaker 1: my video explaining was fake, that was a conspiracy. Like
Speaker 1: people were, you know, like the it's the actual myth
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, because it is. It is so much
Speaker 1: for a lot of people, they thought that is more
Speaker 1: compelling than the idea that it is this like you know,
Speaker 1: project around what is real what's not. They've got so
Speaker 1: invested in the reality of it that they'll explain away
Speaker 1: every other explanation, right right, um, exactly like my I
Speaker 1: had a teacher at Rutgers where I did my undergrad
Speaker 1: to Maudlin. He used to say that, you know, there's
Speaker 1: two types of thinking. There's reasoning and there's rationalizing. Reasoning
Speaker 1: is when when you start from a place of ignorance
Speaker 1: and you um, look at the best evidence and the
Speaker 1: best arguments you can find and follow that through to
Speaker 1: the you know, the rational conclusion. Rationalizing is when you
Speaker 1: start from what you want to believe and working backwards
Speaker 1: and looking for you know, right, looking for the arguments
Speaker 1: that are already support what you're saying. There. There was
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of rationalizing going on. I
Speaker 1: guess people wanted to believe it. Yeah, for for the
Speaker 1: how much how many people in this because they assume
Speaker 1: for all of the filming like like everyone was all
Speaker 1: like in on it. But yeah, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of great stuff around like all of like
Speaker 1: the Men on the Street segments are are are like
Speaker 1: perfectly done in terms of like people like just acting
Speaker 1: like regular university students, like talking about the stairwell and
Speaker 1: like how they've got like lost and then they're like
Speaker 1: looping around in a circle. Um. And all the segments
Speaker 1: with you with um like inside the stairwell with all
Speaker 1: like the very like the very clever thing. I assume
Speaker 1: you're using stuff like Adobe after effects. Um. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it is played. It's played so well like it's
Speaker 1: it's I think part of the part of why it's
Speaker 1: so successful is that it's not filmed like you would
Speaker 1: film something too high like like like for a lot
Speaker 1: of films when they like you want to do like
Speaker 1: like you know like like ah the term is like
Speaker 1: a wonner where they had like one long shot and
Speaker 1: then they like hide the transitions in between. You can
Speaker 1: you can obviously tell like they're filming it to make
Speaker 1: these transitions work versus the way you film. This is
Speaker 1: just how people would film it if they were filming
Speaker 1: this four reel um and they tell that, and it's
Speaker 1: it is so carefully done because it's not trying to
Speaker 1: be something it is. It is just being the thing
Speaker 1: so earnestly in terms of like how how the actors
Speaker 1: like stumble over their lines and the like the opening segment, um,
Speaker 1: like the aesthetics of like all of like the title
Speaker 1: cards and everything is just so it has this has
Speaker 1: this like aura of earnestness, which I think helps sells
Speaker 1: the whole project so so much. Yeah. Yeah, actually, speaking
Speaker 1: of the show and like the cheesy title cards and stuff,
Speaker 1: my girlfriend at the time was a producer for this
Speaker 1: show called this local show called Homework Cloudline and where
Speaker 1: kids call in with their homework and they answer questions
Speaker 1: about it. I studied the ship out of that show,
Speaker 1: just looking at how they built the sets and how
Speaker 1: it cheesy and how awkward like the hosts were, because
Speaker 1: a lot of it was like a lot of the
Speaker 1: realism I think of it is just um, yeah, the
Speaker 1: awkwardness of the people. How it's not um, it's not
Speaker 1: really meant to be and and like like the best
Speaker 1: the most convincing untruths, right is a combination of fact
Speaker 1: and fiction and you know a lot of and blending
Speaker 1: in the actors with real people you know, in in
Speaker 1: in the in the actual video stuff like that. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like it comes goes pretty viral. Um, you like pretty
Speaker 1: quick create a very easy explanation for No, it's not
Speaker 1: it's not real. It started this project. People still believe
Speaker 1: it for years and years. Um. As kind of the
Speaker 1: decade progresses and we go into like the era of
Speaker 1: dis information, everyone starts getting shown into their pockets. Everyone
Speaker 1: has Facebook with them wherever they go, everyone has Twitter
Speaker 1: with them wherever they go. How is kind of your
Speaker 1: views on like the ethics of the project and what
Speaker 1: it demonstrates in terms of like a case study and
Speaker 1: like a social experiment, Like how has that changed over
Speaker 1: the years from like you like ten years ago when
Speaker 1: you're drimming this up to you now after you know,
Speaker 1: we've had stuff like you know like January six and
Speaker 1: two and on. You know, all these types of things
Speaker 1: which I feel like if are almost like foreshadowed in
Speaker 1: this in this weird way by showing how successful your
Speaker 1: little project is. Yeah, I'm so a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of the criticisms that it was faced from the
Speaker 1: get go, like from R. I. T. Professors, even it's
Speaker 1: still facing right now. Like it's still the type of
Speaker 1: thing people bring up, which is essentially that, hey, there's
Speaker 1: so much disinformation out there. At the time, we weren't
Speaker 1: even using those terms disinformation, right, but basically people were.
Speaker 1: We're bringing up the same complaints, which is, there's so
Speaker 1: much disinformation out there, you're basically just adding to it.
Speaker 1: What what are you even doing? So I guess the
Speaker 1: idea is that, and you know, it's a very noble idea,
Speaker 1: which is what's our response to disinformation? Right? We should
Speaker 1: I guess the idea is we should call out every
Speaker 1: instance of it when we can flag posts, UM, report
Speaker 1: posts that violate community community standards, you know, speak out, um,
Speaker 1: provide counter evidence when you see fake news that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. And I think that's great, that's a good thing. UM.
Speaker 1: But disinformation, the problem of disinformation is at the time,
Speaker 1: this is kind of how I explained that, like ten
Speaker 1: years ago, I I described it as a pen as
Speaker 1: an epidemic, yeah right, or or like a cockroach infestation,
Speaker 1: like every time you kill one, ten more spring up
Speaker 1: and v this this notion of like we gotta call
Speaker 1: out every instance of disinformation and stomp it away. Is like,
Speaker 1: it's great, but you're focused on killing cockroaches. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like addressing the symptoms not the actual problem, right, I
Speaker 1: want to get to the cockroach's nest. Right. And whenever
Speaker 1: whenever I give talks about this um this project, people
Speaker 1: always approach me afterwards, you know, like wanting me to
Speaker 1: kind of because we we don't just talk about this project.
Speaker 1: We talked about like deep fake stuff, like we show
Speaker 1: speeches of Obama, like looking like the real Obama, but
Speaker 1: it's like completely fake, right, and people start to realize
Speaker 1: the holy sh it, like I don't even know what's
Speaker 1: real or not anymore, Like what can I trust? And
Speaker 1: they approached me expecting me to ease their anxiety somehow
Speaker 1: and kind of like guide them through how to discern
Speaker 1: what's true from what's not, as though my project was
Speaker 1: about finding some sort of solution, And I tell them that, like,
Speaker 1: my project wasn't about solving the problem. It was about
Speaker 1: seeing the problem, right, It's about it's about trying to
Speaker 1: get to the heart of the matter. And it's like
Speaker 1: to me, I think, like the heart of the matter,
Speaker 1: like the cockroach's nest is the I don't know, you
Speaker 1: are different ways to say, but basically, the the lack
Speaker 1: of critical thinking and individuals and like in this society
Speaker 1: we shaped together or um or lack of a willingness
Speaker 1: to think through things carefully. Maybe that's that's um. That's like,
Speaker 1: if we had a society of critical thinkers, this wouldn't
Speaker 1: be much of a problem. I think it's because so
Speaker 1: many people come at a lot of information from like
Speaker 1: when you would say, the rational viewpoint of like they're
Speaker 1: trying to use reason and stuff, like they're trying to
Speaker 1: think critically, they're trying to think logically, but they come
Speaker 1: at it in the terms of rationalizing stuff they already
Speaker 1: believe um. And I think that's a very prevailing type
Speaker 1: of idea in terms of like, yes, I'm gonna believe
Speaker 1: in this thing, so I'm gonna find evidence to support
Speaker 1: it um, which isn't critical thinking. I don't think. I'm
Speaker 1: not really why is that? Is itself a logical fallacy?
Speaker 1: But that is so calm, especially on the Internet, because
Speaker 1: the Internet encourages the backfire effects. You know, whenever someone
Speaker 1: calls it on something you want to be right, so
Speaker 1: you're gonna it's as soon as as soon as someone
Speaker 1: calls something you're going to backfire. You're going to like
Speaker 1: become even more entrenched in what you believe. Um when
Speaker 1: you you know, when when you explain to someone that know,
Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton is bad, but she doesn't eat the blood
Speaker 1: of children, Like, no, she does. I saw all this thing.
Speaker 1: I have to believe it because like all of the
Speaker 1: things aren't tied up in what makes you a person.
Speaker 1: And now all of these ideas that have that where
Speaker 1: used to be just be conspiracy theories that you can
Speaker 1: believe in for fun, are now so a part of
Speaker 1: like what people's sense of being are and how they
Speaker 1: have their entire world view that there's so much more
Speaker 1: because the Internet is such a bigger part of their lives.
Speaker 1: Everything on the Internet is a bigger part of the
Speaker 1: lives for each person. So it is more of an
Speaker 1: ontological threat because these things are so closer together now, right,
Speaker 1: They used to be much more of a distinction between
Speaker 1: the Internet and you because you can only ask the
Speaker 1: computer every once in a while. We can now carry
Speaker 1: on as a supercomputer wherever you go, so it is
Speaker 1: like a part of you, like you bring it with
Speaker 1: you almost everywhere. It's always in your pocket. So these
Speaker 1: things are so like stitched together that prying them apart
Speaker 1: and tell people know this thing you would carry around
Speaker 1: Actually probably most don't you see on it isn't isn't
Speaker 1: actually true like there is people can like believe that
Speaker 1: in their heads, but don't actually don't. Actually the belief
Speaker 1: hasn't actually impact them because like we all know that
Speaker 1: there's like well we all know that people can just
Speaker 1: go on the internet and lie, right, it is like
Speaker 1: part of the joke, but we still don't act like it.
Speaker 1: Like oftentimes we get so we get so like encased
Speaker 1: into the stories that we tell ourselves. Right, the part
Speaker 1: of our the is sharing stairwell is so good is
Speaker 1: that it's such a it's such a compelling story like that,
Speaker 1: Like the idea of like a brilliant architect bringing like
Speaker 1: you know, building this paradox in the real world is
Speaker 1: like is so much more fun than being like, yeah,
Speaker 1: some dude just knows how to use Adobe after effects.
Speaker 1: Like right, So you get so entrenched into storytelling because
Speaker 1: the story of like politicians eating eating the blood of
Speaker 1: children is so much more interesting than no, politicians just
Speaker 1: don't care about you like, and I think to the
Speaker 1: heart of that problem is so much more difficult than
Speaker 1: just you know, debunking things, because you can debunk things
Speaker 1: all day and does that actually matter? Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: there there's there's a secondary problem that like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's anohing like a lether level of it, which is
Speaker 1: that yeah, like everyone knows that there's this information now,
Speaker 1: like everyone does, but but that just makes it worse
Speaker 1: because now if you want to do this information, what
Speaker 1: you can claim is like, oh, hey, look at all
Speaker 1: these other times that all the stuff has been fake
Speaker 1: and then you know, and this is how you get
Speaker 1: everyone like doing frame by frame analysis of like a
Speaker 1: bombing and going oh, these are all crisis actors, and
Speaker 1: it's like you know, and you talk, you talk to
Speaker 1: these people and they're like, oh, yeah, no, I did.
Speaker 1: I did the research. Look, I like I saw through
Speaker 1: the lives and it's like, no, You've just completely made
Speaker 1: this thing up in your head. You can see the
Speaker 1: green screen compression and like, no, it's just regular video compression,
Speaker 1: and it's like, yeah, like everyone can be a detective now,
Speaker 1: so everyone can be so convinced to their own conclusions,
Speaker 1: even when the conclusions turned out to be not true. Right,
Speaker 1: it's a problem. If there was an exy solution, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't have the problem. Right. It's one of those things
Speaker 1: where it's like your projects a very good example of
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's it's a very demonstrative thing. You
Speaker 1: can like you you take someone along this journey and demonstrate, hey,
Speaker 1: this can happen to you, so you should watch out
Speaker 1: for us. Right, Look look at the story I crafted.
Speaker 1: Look how you become convinced it for these six minutes
Speaker 1: and then you think, oh, wait, no, you can't teleport
Speaker 1: to a bottom stairwell. That's not that's not how that works. Um.
Speaker 1: But because you take them on that journey, it's a
Speaker 1: very it's a I love it so much as like
Speaker 1: a demonstrative process, being like like this can happen, so
Speaker 1: watch out for it in the future. I think is
Speaker 1: honestly more useful than just debunking somebody because you can
Speaker 1: you can debunk all day and you can have the
Speaker 1: backfire effect and stuff. And you're right about the demonstrative stuff,
Speaker 1: because it's like if a bunch of film students and
Speaker 1: volunteers with no connections and no resources pulled this off,
Speaker 1: like We did like a tally of all the videos
Speaker 1: at the end of the year of um, you know,
Speaker 1: all the videos that ripped it off and posted on
Speaker 1: their own channels and all that. Um, it was like
Speaker 1: fifty million. Right. So if if a bunch of film
Speaker 1: students like had that much influence, what more can like
Speaker 1: people who are actually fund like and resources, right, what
Speaker 1: could they do? And we were just doing and ours
Speaker 1: was about like this innocuous, silly Stairwell, it wasn't about
Speaker 1: anything that would cause you know, anyone's death or anything
Speaker 1: like that or and like, you know, something like in
Speaker 1: Me and Mar where the ME and Mar military basically
Speaker 1: systemically systematically created fake articles and fake photos to create
Speaker 1: like to arouse disdain for the row hinge of people
Speaker 1: and basically they incited a genocide through Facebook just through
Speaker 1: fake news right in the Philippines where I live right now, um,
Speaker 1: which a lot of commentators call like the patient zero
Speaker 1: of disinformation because this guy called was elected president basically
Speaker 1: ran running his entire campaign on disinformation and after him
Speaker 1: was Brexit like a month later, and after that was
Speaker 1: Trump got the nomination. So like what's her named, Kate
Speaker 1: Katie Barth Barth or or something like that. The one
Speaker 1: of the executives of Facebook referred to the Philippines as
Speaker 1: patient zero in the era of disinformation because like, um
Speaker 1: and the thing that the president here right now was
Speaker 1: running on was basically like the same sort of um
Speaker 1: bothering and scapegoating of a certain group. And he said, basically,
Speaker 1: he's the guy who said, like, basically, if you're a
Speaker 1: drug user or a drug dealer, it should be okay
Speaker 1: to murder you and kill you. And that's what happened.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what happened. And because they were posting all
Speaker 1: these stories about um, you know, the same sorts of
Speaker 1: stories that you that that we saw in the US
Speaker 1: in twenties sixteen about undocumented immigrants or Muslims or something
Speaker 1: like that. This like, oh, this undocumented immigrant raped the
Speaker 1: five year old girl, you know, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And he would the the the organized campaign making up
Speaker 1: stories about drug addicts like murdering and raping people. Basically
Speaker 1: like got an entire nation too, well, not an entire nation,
Speaker 1: but basically this guy won the election. And you know,
Speaker 1: we have a country right now that basically lived through
Speaker 1: just atrocities the last five six years, you know, and
Speaker 1: like the double edged sort of this, like Chris mentioned,
Speaker 1: is like, yeah, this type same type of thing. Because
Speaker 1: it exists, people also like retractively apply it to like
Speaker 1: you know, like Sandy Hook was staged or like even
Speaker 1: stuff now with like you know the pandemic, right, people
Speaker 1: like what if what is? What is the pandemic is
Speaker 1: a real? What if all these people have just you know,
Speaker 1: conjured this thing into being and it's all a giant
Speaker 1: insifferation campaign, right, So it has this dual it has
Speaker 1: this double edged sword nature um which makes combat and
Speaker 1: information so challenging. It's like disiformation to combat information, to
Speaker 1: comment the idea of disinformation, and there's so many layers
Speaker 1: of it. Now this this this, it's just yeah, it
Speaker 1: makes it, It makes actually gett into the heart of
Speaker 1: it so much more challenging. It's been abstracted so many times.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that didn't didn't the New
Speaker 1: York Times weren't it the first people to come up
Speaker 1: with the term fake news? And then Trump started using
Speaker 1: it after Like we were watching pastificate, which newsiper was,
Speaker 1: but my memory if it was like it was, it
Speaker 1: was it was the media that came up with fake news.
Speaker 1: And then like Trump just took it and it became
Speaker 1: this like this just like demon they absolutely could not
Speaker 1: control and was just turned on them. Do you do
Speaker 1: you remember the context in which they used it. They
Speaker 1: were like they were I think they were calling like
Speaker 1: stuff that Trump said fake news. M M I am.
Speaker 1: I'm unsure at the moment who specifically coined that term,
Speaker 1: but I mean we definitely see in terms like even
Speaker 1: in even terms like desigeration, which used to be more
Speaker 1: tied to like a discording in philosophy, breaking like in
Speaker 1: like even even back even as back far as like
Speaker 1: the eighties, getting you know, turned into an actual like
Speaker 1: political term that everybody uses, so that it was actually
Speaker 1: somebody from buzz Speed. An editor at buzz Speed was
Speaker 1: one of that makes sense, is one of the ones
Speaker 1: who first popularized it. Uh was, Yeah, But there could
Speaker 1: be there could be you know, several other people that
Speaker 1: say that they coined it. I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 1: I even there's even u an illustration from eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: four by by Frederick Offer with reporter is carrying newspapers
Speaker 1: labeled humble lows, cheap sensation, and fake news. So it's
Speaker 1: I mean, in terms of in terms of just mashing
Speaker 1: words together. I'm sure it has has had a decent history,
Speaker 1: but definitely Trump is the one that like launched it
Speaker 1: into the zeitgeist, right right, right, Let's see, Robert, you've
Speaker 1: been pretty quiet. I know it's pretty early in the
Speaker 1: morning for you. Do you have any do you have
Speaker 1: any kind of thoughts to help us kind of generally
Speaker 1: start closing us out, not not not like super immediately,
Speaker 1: but generally having that direction. I mean no, not really
Speaker 1: kind of brought up everything. I would say, all right,
Speaker 1: all right, it's ah, yeah, I guess, uh, Mike, what
Speaker 1: have How is this project of impacted how you approach
Speaker 1: film and just like how you how you use the
Speaker 1: internet yourself in the past decade? M hmm, Well, I
Speaker 1: I'm fully aware of what we did. Every time I'm
Speaker 1: like looking at something, I'm like, they had done that?
Speaker 1: Could they have done this? And that, you know that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Um, I don't know if it's if yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't I'm not sure how it's how this project
Speaker 1: specifically had impacted me, other than just trying to think
Speaker 1: through things a bit more carefully, trying to go through
Speaker 1: things like, um, I mean like so we we basically
Speaker 1: came up with this idea of what eventually became troll farms.
Speaker 1: Right like me and like my classmates would Hey, we
Speaker 1: even make fake accounts and like talk about the stairwell,
Speaker 1: and um so, I don't know, like a few years
Speaker 1: later people we we learned that people were actually doing this,
Speaker 1: like to influence like elections around the world, and a
Speaker 1: lot of the strategy of like the control forms and stuff,
Speaker 1: um was to basically create caricature versions right of arguments
Speaker 1: from whatever side, like you know, whether they might present
Speaker 1: an argument from like the left or the right, but
Speaker 1: in like a caricaturized version of it. And um, so
Speaker 1: what people would see when they see that, they'd see
Speaker 1: an argument coming from the other side, and they'd ridicule it,
Speaker 1: like look at these people who just seem crazy espousing
Speaker 1: this whatever view, you know, or they might say things like, um,
Speaker 1: like yeah, if you're a Democrat, you want to abort
Speaker 1: babies that like the ninth month or something like that,
Speaker 1: which no reasonable person actually argued. So what happens is like, um,
Speaker 1: people talk about how the goal of Russia was to
Speaker 1: like polarize, you know, um, polarize the political spectrum. I
Speaker 1: think like the bigger goal and the the goal that
Speaker 1: we're going to be untangling for many many years. And
Speaker 1: the more um the more difficult problem to deal with
Speaker 1: was that they oversimple They successfully oversimplified discourse. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, Like they found a way to like
Speaker 1: oversimplify the type of discourse we're having because everyone's like
Speaker 1: arguing with such simplistic I'm not sure if I'm making sense.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like it's like the term I use
Speaker 1: is like politics as fandom, right, And that's why I
Speaker 1: think that like intersect not not exactly what you're saying,
Speaker 1: but like intersects with that type of idea of like
Speaker 1: condensing down actual discussions on like what you believe in
Speaker 1: um and what politics you want and how you want
Speaker 1: to put the world into this weird fandom lens of
Speaker 1: like this team versus this team which we we we
Speaker 1: we we we we We've had a degree of that
Speaker 1: for a long long time. But with the Internet and
Speaker 1: how how discussions on the Internet are designed to work, right,
Speaker 1: how algorithms want to boost her him, how there's always
Speaker 1: these short snippets just in mirrors the way people discuss
Speaker 1: like what Star Wars character is their favorite. It's just that.
Speaker 1: But for politics, um, so it's it's just this, like
Speaker 1: what if politics is just this idea of fandom, and
Speaker 1: you can debate what fandom is more valid than the other. Right,
Speaker 1: I like the Last Jedi more you like Rise of Skywalker.
Speaker 1: This means your version of reality is less good than mine.
Speaker 1: So when that objectively true, which is which is? But
Speaker 1: is that same idea but for how we like make
Speaker 1: social programs and how we address racism, and how we
Speaker 1: like give food to poor people, and how we do
Speaker 1: affordable housing and how we handle the police. So it's
Speaker 1: that type of idea which is just disinformation kind of
Speaker 1: impacts this in part because when you flood the zone
Speaker 1: with so much conflicting information that people can't really get
Speaker 1: a handle on or easily sort of like when they're
Speaker 1: when when you've when you've put that much confusion into
Speaker 1: the air, um, it makes people more likely to just
Speaker 1: kind of grasp its sides because everything coming out is
Speaker 1: way too complicated and messy, and it's it takes too
Speaker 1: much work what's actually true? So holding to some rubric
Speaker 1: of well I believe this, so that means these are
Speaker 1: the good guys, These are the bad guys. And I
Speaker 1: don't have to analyze it any deeper than that. I
Speaker 1: can reject information that comes from this group, where I
Speaker 1: can reject information that says this, um, because I just
Speaker 1: category categorically reject you know, anything that that fits in
Speaker 1: with that. Like, that's the benefit of disinformation for authoritarians
Speaker 1: of all stripes. You're seeing in Ukraine right now, where um,
Speaker 1: you've got all of these different authoritarian powers. You've got Turkey,
Speaker 1: you've got Russia, you've got um, you know, fucking the
Speaker 1: United States, at least to the extent that like we
Speaker 1: impact a lot of things internationally. Um. And you've got
Speaker 1: them all coming down on different sides of this issue
Speaker 1: and of what's happening in Ukraine. And because there's so
Speaker 1: much disinformation and misinformation about what's going on, people just
Speaker 1: kind of grasp at whatever side I'm have been more
Speaker 1: sympathetic to recently, I'm just going to believe whatever they
Speaker 1: say because it's way too complicated to actually analyze what's
Speaker 1: going on. Yeah, And this was this was the thing
Speaker 1: that that I mean, this was explicit on the left.
Speaker 1: I remember this. There was this around Umen. There was
Speaker 1: a whole thing about how like people people like talking
Speaker 1: about anti imperialism would would literally say like nuance, nuances liberalism.
Speaker 1: I don't like nuances liberalism, don't don't research this, don't
Speaker 1: think about this because nuances how liberals like you know,
Speaker 1: spread sort of pro promising change, proplicanda, Like I remember
Speaker 1: those people like every Frost just just straight up said
Speaker 1: this and this was a huge and you know, like
Speaker 1: I got a lot of shift for this because you know,
Speaker 1: like I remember when when when the Coon Bolivia happened,
Speaker 1: Like I made a giant thread that was trying to
Speaker 1: that was like, okay, we need to figure out like
Speaker 1: how specificly the CIA was involved in this, Like okay,
Speaker 1: so did they plan the whole thing? Was it? Like
Speaker 1: were they working with local partners? Wasn't a thing where
Speaker 1: someone else planned it and they signed off on it?
Speaker 1: And like to this day people think that I supported
Speaker 1: the coup because I was like, we should figure out
Speaker 1: who was who the actors were in the ground because
Speaker 1: no one like this, this this this this became like
Speaker 1: a like like like a tenant, like like an actual
Speaker 1: sort of like like political tenants of of how a
Speaker 1: lot of antimpurialism, like in the American left worked was you.
Speaker 1: You were not supposed to do nuanced, You were not
Speaker 1: supposed to look at who was Like you know, if
Speaker 1: if if you spent too long looking at what was
Speaker 1: going on in the ground, people would be like you
Speaker 1: you worked for the CIA, and that you know, I
Speaker 1: think like we we we've we've finally seen that basically
Speaker 1: blow up in their faces because you know, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: look how many of these people just like would up
Speaker 1: supporting Russia and then spent like three months saying that
Speaker 1: Russia would never invade Ukraine. That this happens. But it's
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's it's it's it's extremely depressing how
Speaker 1: people who otherwise are you know, like in a lot
Speaker 1: of way. It is like I've spent a lot of
Speaker 1: their time like trying to you know, filter out stuff
Speaker 1: from the media that's false, just go into this because
Speaker 1: they just do not want to deal with the complexity
Speaker 1: of reality. Yeah, just easier not to. Again, if there
Speaker 1: was a simple problem, we wouldn't mean, if there was
Speaker 1: a simple solution, we wouldn't need to discuss the problem. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I guess basically like just to like um, answer
Speaker 1: that question about how it I guess at the time,
Speaker 1: I'd say like we got an up close look at
Speaker 1: how things were going to be, Like you know, with
Speaker 1: with all these things, we we kind of anticipated the
Speaker 1: next few years. Um so yeah, that's basically what happened. Um,
Speaker 1: sorry to interrupt your clothing, but no, no, no, it's
Speaker 1: the it's the best note that that we can go. Um, Michael,
Speaker 1: do you where can people find you online? And if
Speaker 1: people want to look into us with your other projects,
Speaker 1: I mean you found me, Like if they want to
Speaker 1: find me, they'll find me, right, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: still don't know. You got my email, but Garrison is
Speaker 1: extremely good about this, Tope. Any people are that could
Speaker 1: uh yeah, well they can check out the YouTube channel
Speaker 1: like I'm gonna be posting some new films this year probably,
Speaker 1: Um so my name Michael Lock. Canna allow or just
Speaker 1: search the achariance there. Well, I guess that's a way. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll add your YouTube channel to to the description. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I just want to thank you so much for
Speaker 1: coming on to talk about your your project. Yeah, thanks
Speaker 1: for having me. All right, Well, that that does it
Speaker 1: for us today. You can follow us on the internets
Speaker 1: for some reason, um on Twitter, Instagram that happened here
Speaker 1: pod and Coolsive Media and yeah, go go create a
Speaker 1: myth that people will believe and travel from out of
Speaker 1: country to walk over some stairs because that sounds like fun.
Speaker 1: Go to something like that for fun funzies. All right,
Speaker 1: bye bye, it could happen here. Uh. It being a
Speaker 1: number of things. Uh. This is the podcast about things
Speaker 1: falling apart and also maybe putting them back together. And
Speaker 1: assuming there's not a nuclear war in the immediate future,
Speaker 1: you will probably be hearing this episode sometime in early March.
Speaker 1: I am Robert Evans, my co hosts as always well
Speaker 1: as often Chris and Garrison, And that's that's my job
Speaker 1: for the day. Done. I'm gonna I'm gonna sit back
Speaker 1: and chill. You guys want to take it from here, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll take it from here. We are doing one of
Speaker 1: our perennial things fall apart, but also we sort of
Speaker 1: put it back together again episodes. And joining us today
Speaker 1: is JAMS from Strange Matter is a new libertarian socialist
Speaker 1: cooperative magazine. J MC. Great to have you here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is really great. So I guess we should probably
Speaker 1: explain what the magazine is not, just in of itself,
Speaker 1: but also because it's a good lead in into um
Speaker 1: um into what we're gonna be talking about. So we
Speaker 1: basically there's five of us as co editors and we're
Speaker 1: all equal worker owners in it. It's a magazine called
Speaker 1: Strange Matters, and the point of it is to explore
Speaker 1: radical new ideas, not just in terms of politics and economics,
Speaker 1: which is going to be kind of half the focus
Speaker 1: is trying to figure out like you know, libertarian socialists
Speaker 1: talk a lot about dual power, which I know you'all
Speaker 1: talk about on the show a lot, talk about building
Speaker 1: independent institutions under the direct democratic control of the working
Speaker 1: class to control real resources and are not the state
Speaker 1: or capitalist firms. But like we talk a big game,
Speaker 1: but we actually know how to do that stuff, And
Speaker 1: do we know how to do stuff like run like
Speaker 1: you know, a big company as a as a self
Speaker 1: managed democracy, or do we know how to run a
Speaker 1: city as a as a radical democracy like rooted neighborhood
Speaker 1: councils or anything like that. The answer kind of is
Speaker 1: not really And there's a lot of like um open
Speaker 1: questions that we don't know yet the answers to, and
Speaker 1: that very few people are working on those answers. So
Speaker 1: Strange Matters is UM partly about discovering uh those answers,
Speaker 1: not because we the editors have the answers, but because
Speaker 1: we need like some kind of space within which we
Speaker 1: can bring lots of different people, different life experiences together, uh,
Speaker 1: in order to talk about the stuff and figure it out.
Speaker 1: And then the other mission of it is to be
Speaker 1: a kind of general interest literary intellectual magazine doing the
Speaker 1: kind of journalism and philosophy and poetry and memoir and
Speaker 1: stuff like that that uh that uh perhaps gets shut
Speaker 1: out of capitalist society because it's not commercial, because it's
Speaker 1: too weird, because it's like, I don't know, historiographical essay
Speaker 1: about it's been called doon or something like that, you know.
Speaker 1: And and we think that there should be a place
Speaker 1: for that, um, just because it brings delight and mean
Speaker 1: into people's lives, and it's what we're fighting for a
Speaker 1: more democratic society in order to do. So. That's basically
Speaker 1: our vibe UM. And the asking question is a collective
Speaker 1: editorial that we that we collectively drafted and edited, uh,
Speaker 1: talking about our political views in particular and the recent
Speaker 1: history of libertarian socialism UM. And then asked for me.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a writer who has written for a couple
Speaker 1: of other places like The Point in the Brooklyn rail Um,
Speaker 1: and I also was involved in the d S as
Speaker 1: Libertarian Socialist Caucus and also the Yeah yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 1: a lot of history there, trauma, you know, some some
Speaker 1: uh yeah, but any who uh and also the Symbiosis
Speaker 1: Federation UM, which is a federation across Mexico, the US,
Speaker 1: and Canada that is trying to put together. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a confederation of local organizations that are trying to
Speaker 1: do this kind of direct democracy stuff. Yeah. So I guess, well, okay,
Speaker 1: so the pandemic isn't I guess the perfect jumping in
Speaker 1: point for this. But I wanna go back and I
Speaker 1: guess getting into the meat of this piece because I
Speaker 1: think it's very interesting. I wanted to sort of talk
Speaker 1: about the origins of like what's called sort of neo
Speaker 1: anarchism and how it's sort of begin to decay after
Speaker 1: after the collapse of Occupy and after well, I guess
Speaker 1: the sort the sort of kind of revolutionary arc of
Speaker 1: the two tens, so basically before you do the decline
Speaker 1: at least is the way that we wrote it, and
Speaker 1: I kind of think that it's the way that I
Speaker 1: would tell it. Um, you have to kind of do
Speaker 1: the rise first, right, because like there was this moment
Speaker 1: from roughly the fall of Soviets in two roughly like
Speaker 1: two thousand and even kind of lingering in an afterlife afterwards,
Speaker 1: where it kind of looked anarchism is going to take
Speaker 1: over the world. And that's a bit of a joke.
Speaker 1: But it's also not a joke because in the context
Speaker 1: of like the radical left, which is of course obviously
Speaker 1: a kind of like you know, dissidents seen in any
Speaker 1: country where it happens to exist. Um, you know, everything
Speaker 1: receded in terms of the traditional parties because the fall
Speaker 1: of the Soviet style uh Leninists states uh, either through
Speaker 1: their collapse as in the case of the uss are
Speaker 1: or in the case of their transition to much more
Speaker 1: like clearly and obviously like state capitalist uh semi liberalized
Speaker 1: model like in China, like the you you basically had
Speaker 1: like this total recession, not just in Leninism interestingly, which
Speaker 1: obviously enough right, like you know, it's basically a global
Speaker 1: collapse of Leinists style of governments, but also in like
Speaker 1: social democracy. Um, because it's a lot of the I mean,
Speaker 1: it's actually kind of interesting why it's it's unclear why
Speaker 1: it is. Uh, people have different theories, but there you know,
Speaker 1: people often describe it in in um, you know Fisher's term,
Speaker 1: the writer Mark Fisher capitalist realism. The attitude in the
Speaker 1: nineties was that, uh, you know, there's there's only one
Speaker 1: world that's possible, and it's the best of all possible worlds,
Speaker 1: and that's the capitalist world where everybody's gonna have McDonald's
Speaker 1: in every country, and two countries that have the same
Speaker 1: McDonald's are never going to go to war, which we
Speaker 1: kind of found out the hard way this week that
Speaker 1: that's not really the case. Well, and if people had
Speaker 1: paid attention more to other parts of the world, they
Speaker 1: would know that, like, well, there were civil wars in
Speaker 1: a bunch of countries that had McDonald's. It didn't stop
Speaker 1: people from shooting each other, as as the United States
Speaker 1: should tell you, people will kill each other whether or
Speaker 1: not they have access to chicken McNuggets. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean I think like that that's that's a period
Speaker 1: that has it's full of the most wrong anyone has
Speaker 1: ever been. Like you got your frenchis Fukiyama like the
Speaker 1: most wrong person ever You've got. Yeah, You've you've got
Speaker 1: a lot of serve idealogues, you like, have sort of
Speaker 1: deluded themselves into thinking this stuff is over and yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think you're right that that sort of plays
Speaker 1: into this, you know, into sort of the collapse of
Speaker 1: of of I guess, the party state left, and then
Speaker 1: the way in which that, you know, the the alternative
Speaker 1: to that, I guess becomes neo anarchism, and anarchists practice,
Speaker 1: even if it's not necessarily ideology with all the groups,
Speaker 1: kind of seeps its way into the rest of the
Speaker 1: activist scene. Yeah. So basically the story that we tell
Speaker 1: is that there's some you know, the Stuffatheast of rebellion
Speaker 1: in triggers these uh it's not just that the stuff
Speaker 1: of East is are able to create their autonomous territory
Speaker 1: and chap us, but they it triggers this wave uh
Speaker 1: that UM. We use a term that sometimes it's used
Speaker 1: in academia called neo anarchism for this. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: there's an anarchist revival in the nineties, UM around the world,
Speaker 1: and it's not just people calling themselves anarchists. It's all
Speaker 1: these movements that were inspired by the libertarian socialist broadly
Speaker 1: speaking UM Sabathistas UM, adopting kind of similar methods in
Speaker 1: their local contexts in different countries, fighting against I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of things. Initially it's against like you know,
Speaker 1: neoliberal trade deals, but it also ends up being against
Speaker 1: like sweatshops, because that's basically what a lot of outsourcing
Speaker 1: is is. You know, if if they have unions in
Speaker 1: this country from a social democratic period, they shut down
Speaker 1: the factory fire everybody moved it to some place where
Speaker 1: some dictatorship is going to shoot anybody who tries to
Speaker 1: do a union. Uh, and then that you know that
Speaker 1: that lowers Uh. Logistics has gotten sophisticated enough by this
Speaker 1: point that you know, it ends up being cheaper for
Speaker 1: the company even though they have to transport goods all
Speaker 1: across the world and do just in time delivering that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. So UM. The a lot of the
Speaker 1: the the anti globalization movement that sprouted up around the
Speaker 1: two thousands was like UM, against all these things and
Speaker 1: usually using the kinds of wrecked actions, which is when
Speaker 1: you act kind of independent of the state and not
Speaker 1: trying to like, you know, convince politician to do something
Speaker 1: but taking direct action to get your results, your desired result, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and all this kind of stuff uh that
Speaker 1: we're at using like direct democratic consensus methods. Uh. In
Speaker 1: the way that they organized stuff, uh, that was that
Speaker 1: was all basically an artistic And so there was this
Speaker 1: way in which anarchist methods, anarchist tactics, anarchists like attitudes
Speaker 1: towards what activism even is, started filtering into all these
Speaker 1: other movements. And this has been happening a little bit
Speaker 1: the eighties too. So there was like the anti nuclear
Speaker 1: movement had a lot of this, the feminist movement had
Speaker 1: a lot of this. Um, there was a whole um
Speaker 1: stream of single other ecological movements were actually like pioneered
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways by anarchists in the nineties,
Speaker 1: um so, as well as indigenous movements in places like Mexico, Bolivia, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So the this is the kind of like rise of
Speaker 1: this neo anarchist movie you that we're talking about, which
Speaker 1: is not just about anarchists, it's about people who act
Speaker 1: and think like anarchists without necessarily identifying as it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's the kind of thing that I hope
Speaker 1: we can kind of more encourage as well in the
Speaker 1: next few decades, as those typicide ideas can be I want,
Speaker 1: I want to make sure that we can take these
Speaker 1: ideas and make them very approachable for people, even if
Speaker 1: they don't use the terms that we might use. You
Speaker 1: can still kind of suggest these types of thoughts, and
Speaker 1: this suggests these types of kind of lenses and viewpoints
Speaker 1: as much as we're about to get to how this
Speaker 1: sort of goes wrong or fails in some sense, Like,
Speaker 1: I think that was the strength of this movement was
Speaker 1: that it was it's tactics really easy to spread, and
Speaker 1: that led to a lot of people adopting me, led
Speaker 1: to it sort of becoming this I guess activist consensus
Speaker 1: that you know, like you using the consensus process. You
Speaker 1: you know, you have sn organizations, you have you do
Speaker 1: direct actions, you mobilize people. You don't have these sort
Speaker 1: of like article like parties. But that yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think I think the next part of the story that
Speaker 1: you want to tell us about, I guess how that
Speaker 1: fell apart and the consequences of that. Basically what ends
Speaker 1: up happening is that, like there was this moment of
Speaker 1: our ascent because I would identify myself as being definitely
Speaker 1: like part of these, uh, the this generalan of you.
Speaker 1: I mean I came, I hopped a board a lot
Speaker 1: later with like Occupy Wall Street, but a lot of
Speaker 1: the kind of explosion of movements that happened around the
Speaker 1: world in again not always right. It started with the
Speaker 1: Arab Spring, which started with somebody seeing themselves on fire
Speaker 1: in Tunisia and like you know, and then that spreads
Speaker 1: to um other countries in them the least and um,
Speaker 1: you know, protests against dictatorships and so on. But it
Speaker 1: starts getting kind of like transported beyond its initial Middle
Speaker 1: Eastern context. And what a lot of people don't know
Speaker 1: is that the uh, the Occupy Wall Street movement in
Speaker 1: North America, uh, and like other movements that you know,
Speaker 1: some of them were called occupy some of them, I'm
Speaker 1: one of them was my Don in Ukraine as a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, um, and other like you know, the
Speaker 1: the Hong Kong, the the the umbrella movements, yeah, the
Speaker 1: and all these kind of movements that that proceeded from
Speaker 1: after a lot of them were basically in a single
Speaker 1: kind of wave, a protracted wave of copycat movements. Uh
Speaker 1: that we're trying to adopt the same kind of tactics
Speaker 1: of like occupying public squares, uh, declaring them basically autonomous,
Speaker 1: and doing like direct democracy in those squares, modeling the
Speaker 1: kind of society that they that people wanted to create. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, in this moment where it seemed like you
Speaker 1: could have these direct democratic uh sorts of movements the
Speaker 1: the end in the US, there's like a direct line
Speaker 1: of succession from like Occupy Wall Street through to like
Speaker 1: Black Lives Matter through to like the anti pipeline and
Speaker 1: Aginist protest. There's a lot of like shared movement experience,
Speaker 1: a lot of the same people showing up to it
Speaker 1: or teaching the next generation UM in those movements. And
Speaker 1: I think this is something I mean, uh, it's difficult
Speaker 1: to find like sources on this, but I mean, y'all
Speaker 1: are involved in social movements. I think that that's like
Speaker 1: a rough that's roughly a description of of what's happened,
Speaker 1: right unless unless we're crazy. Yeah, I think, you know,
Speaker 1: I think I guess what you call the last wave
Speaker 1: that is occupied ice in Yeah, yeah, you know, like
Speaker 1: I remember like that was the sort of mix of
Speaker 1: I guess two crowds. One is you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: like I I remember, it was a bunch of you know,
Speaker 1: people who'd been in occupy and then also it was
Speaker 1: a lot of people who radicalized essentially about Trump. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was there was a pretty big new wave of people, yeah,
Speaker 1: around around just sixteen and that you know, And gess
Speaker 1: I guess the other thing that that that's going on
Speaker 1: through this period is the the the ascension of consension
Speaker 1: of the right and the return also not just of
Speaker 1: you know, not just the sort of the fascist right,
Speaker 1: but of Leninism and social democracy as well. Yeah. Um
Speaker 1: lappened around like when Bernie Sanders was getting more popular. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think I think, I think there's there's you know,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of there's like two threats here. There
Speaker 1: there's the sort of Bernie Sanders thread, and then there's
Speaker 1: you know, the the rise of the rise of the Tankies,
Speaker 1: which has to do with Syria and has to do
Speaker 1: with sort of this backlash against the Just and eleven
Speaker 1: revolutions that you know, like some some of that backlash
Speaker 1: turns into like just you know, like aired ones, like
Speaker 1: hard rightobbing. There's never like not a right wing but
Speaker 1: like air to wants turn into just like fire bombing
Speaker 1: cities and um and literally barrel bombing, you know, the
Speaker 1: peaceful protests stuff. Um can overthrow governments if the government
Speaker 1: is not willing to bomb and shoot people who gather
Speaker 1: on mass in the central square because they're afraid of
Speaker 1: what the world's response would be if they did start
Speaker 1: doing that. But you know when Bashar Alasad did that
Speaker 1: in Syria against the democratic opposition movements, UM, you know,
Speaker 1: that basically sent the signal nothing I mean nothing happened
Speaker 1: to us side, right, So that basically sent the signal
Speaker 1: that like oh he had a stress of years. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: right right, yeah, like like you can you can just
Speaker 1: shoot people and bomb them and like it. And that
Speaker 1: basically defanged the kind of central tactic that a lot
Speaker 1: of these movements were trying to do, which is to
Speaker 1: have like large numbers of people do nonviolent civil disobedience
Speaker 1: and then through those like direct actions, cultivate this culture
Speaker 1: of like direct democracy in the hopes that, um, you know,
Speaker 1: the assemblies that are created in that space could in
Speaker 1: some way become the germ of the organs that could
Speaker 1: run society, or at least that's like when it's taken
Speaker 1: to its logical conclusion. Because usually people who are involved
Speaker 1: in this, they get involved in it, they think the
Speaker 1: assembly stuff is really cool, they start learning more about it,
Speaker 1: they get radicalized by being in the assembly because like
Speaker 1: when you're in a direct democratic assembly and you're actually
Speaker 1: making the decisions like together, and then you come to
Speaker 1: an agreement and you execute the decision, you start asking
Speaker 1: yourself like why can't we do everything like this? Um?
Speaker 1: And then um, you know that that's what directs a
Speaker 1: lot of people in this kind of anarchistic direction. But yeah,
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why these movements starts to decline
Speaker 1: is because they get smashed, um. The but I think
Speaker 1: that there's always this other thing going on, which and
Speaker 1: I wonder how y'all felt about this, like reading it,
Speaker 1: like you know, there's there was this kind of both
Speaker 1: like an external critique at first from people like you know, Buskar, Sencrove,
Speaker 1: Jacobin and things like that, but then also like this
Speaker 1: increasingly over the years in the last half of the
Speaker 1: internal critiques of anarchism coming from anarchists themselves, of our
Speaker 1: people in this general kind of mil you libertarian socialism
Speaker 1: talking about how like anarchists didn't have solutions to the
Speaker 1: most pressing crises in the twenty one century. Like, if you, like,
Speaker 1: if you guys had to say, I know it's like
Speaker 1: kind of pretentious, but like, what is the most pressing
Speaker 1: crisis of the century? What are like the top three
Speaker 1: just off the top of your heads without thinking? What
Speaker 1: would you list if you have to list three two
Speaker 1: or three separate things? Climate change, creeping authoritarianism, and rampant
Speaker 1: disinformation about basic facts of reality. Sweet, okay, so let's
Speaker 1: tackle each one of those, right, Like what's what's an
Speaker 1: anarchist got to say about climate change? Well, okay, disrupt
Speaker 1: the pipelines, like you know, do uh, Like, you can't
Speaker 1: have infinite growth on a finite planet, so you have
Speaker 1: to have like, you know, we we have all the slogans, right,
Speaker 1: I mean we've all heard them like a million times.
Speaker 1: Yeah you have the diagnoses of the problem. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but then like, okay, so how are we going to
Speaker 1: like you know, I guess we're gonna build some co
Speaker 1: ops and then the co ops are gonna democratized production
Speaker 1: and then we can do d growth somehow, but like
Speaker 1: also disrupting existing production. But there's like a missing step here, right,
Speaker 1: because like, you know, the reason why we have all
Speaker 1: this production in certain ways, because the entire economy depends
Speaker 1: on it's been set up that way. Uh So you
Speaker 1: implied in the idea that we're gonna do de growth
Speaker 1: somehows that we need some way of constructing a different economy,
Speaker 1: and how do you construct a different economy right through
Speaker 1: some kind of planning? So really the question is like
Speaker 1: how do you do economic planning? Uh? Second one, um
Speaker 1: I gin a skip creeping authoritarianism for now because that's
Speaker 1: actually like feeding into the more the ending of the essay.
Speaker 1: But the but the other one, right disinformation? Another great question, right,
Speaker 1: like what do you do with social media? Like? Okay, again,
Speaker 1: anarchists talked in general a lot about like, okay, we're
Speaker 1: gonna democratize all the companies because we're democratizing everything. We're
Speaker 1: democratizing neighborhoods or democratizing cities. So it's kind of the
Speaker 1: same thing, turning everything into like a radical direct democracy. Okay,
Speaker 1: But if we're going to have social media, first of all,
Speaker 1: should we like was it a mistake to invent a
Speaker 1: centralized system instead of the more decentralized internet that created
Speaker 1: that existed before social media, Right, that's kind of a
Speaker 1: interesting question. But then assuming that we do, how do
Speaker 1: we restructure it? Not just in terms of how it's managed,
Speaker 1: but like, okay, we have the democracy of Facebook or whatever,
Speaker 1: and let's say that we're the workers at Facebook, what
Speaker 1: do we do, like, how do we structure it so
Speaker 1: that it's not a giant misinformation engine? Right? Like once,
Speaker 1: once you actually have like the responsibility and the power
Speaker 1: of being in the saddle, which is what we spend
Speaker 1: so much of our time kind of just trying to do,
Speaker 1: you have to actually make decisions about what to do.
Speaker 1: And honestly, there aren't that many. I mean, what do
Speaker 1: you what do you do with with the within with
Speaker 1: the utility like that? Like, for example, who ought to
Speaker 1: be in control of the utility? Like that? Is it
Speaker 1: really just the workers of Facebook? Aren't all the people
Speaker 1: who are users it don't they have a right to
Speaker 1: be making decisions about it too? And is it just
Speaker 1: an American institution just because it's an American LLC or
Speaker 1: is it like a global institution because everybody on the
Speaker 1: planets on it um is there? You know, are other
Speaker 1: ways that it could be reconfigured, like fundamentally in terms
Speaker 1: of how users use it. That would change the experience
Speaker 1: in some way to actually make it, uh, make you
Speaker 1: less liable to misinformation. But on the other hand, if
Speaker 1: you try to manipulate people in order to um, you know,
Speaker 1: not see something that's going to be misinformation, isn't that well,
Speaker 1: you know, like censorship or or or some other thing
Speaker 1: that we generally would oppose, right, like the tool of
Speaker 1: centralized social control. So they like, these are really deep questions,
Speaker 1: and again this is generally a kind of silence, and
Speaker 1: of course you know in that case, there's silence from
Speaker 1: the social democrats too, and there's silence from the Leninist
Speaker 1: I mean, well, the Lennis just kind of fantasized about
Speaker 1: turning Facebook into the tool of the central party state
Speaker 1: uses in order to crush dissent forever or whatever. But
Speaker 1: you know, social democrats are like list nationalized Facebook, and
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, yeah, sure we could, we could
Speaker 1: do that. And then you know, the n s A
Speaker 1: owns on Facebook. I'm sure that that's a that's a
Speaker 1: better scenario. Yeah, I mean I tend to think somewhat
Speaker 1: differently about what it means to have an anarchist solution
Speaker 1: to those problems. Like, for example, I don't I don't
Speaker 1: see anarchists or social democrats or leninists having any kind
Speaker 1: of stopping climate change solution um because I don't I
Speaker 1: don't realistically see the organizing potential um capable of actually
Speaker 1: stopping what's going on in any kind of reasonable time frame.
Speaker 1: And I certainly don't think that the existing you know,
Speaker 1: neoliberal structures or the authoritarian structures that exist in you know,
Speaker 1: other countries or in this country are going to stop
Speaker 1: it either. So when I think about solutions to climate
Speaker 1: change from an anarchist perspective, I think about how can
Speaker 1: anarchist to organizing help people deal with the consequences of
Speaker 1: climate change, and I see I tend to see the
Speaker 1: potential for actually like mitigating climate change coming more from
Speaker 1: there's as the consequences of this become more dire to people,
Speaker 1: if anarchists are better, are good at providing relief and
Speaker 1: helping people and organizing through that, and eventually there's some
Speaker 1: potential to actually get people organized to stop the causes
Speaker 1: of the problem. But um, I just don't. I'm not
Speaker 1: an optimist of about our ability to stop the worst
Speaker 1: of it at this point. Um, especially not after the
Speaker 1: most recent I p c C report. And I guess
Speaker 1: I'm kind of in the same boat when it comes
Speaker 1: to disinformation. UM. I And this is not just like anarchists.
Speaker 1: I feel like lack, as you've stated, at a like
Speaker 1: a good idea about like what do we do with Facebook,
Speaker 1: what we do with you do, what do we do
Speaker 1: with the way all of these things are set up
Speaker 1: in the harms that they do at scale. Um, Nobody
Speaker 1: and I include the people currently in charge, has any
Speaker 1: real good ideas for that because they haven't. Like I've
Speaker 1: been working in this space for a very long time,
Speaker 1: I've I've spent a lot of time talking with and
Speaker 1: debating with a lot of the folks who are leading
Speaker 1: minds kind of in the fight against disinformation, and I
Speaker 1: just don't feel like there's any sort of solution that
Speaker 1: is an immediate term solution because so many the problem
Speaker 1: is so advanced as it is, so as I guess
Speaker 1: that's kind of like where I land on a lot
Speaker 1: of this stuff is we certainly need to be thinking
Speaker 1: about solutions, but I kind of like, I think it's
Speaker 1: less likely that there's going to be like you were
Speaker 1: you were saying the kind of debate is between is
Speaker 1: there some way of like reforming or fixing making Facebook
Speaker 1: more democratic, or is it just we need to decide
Speaker 1: that maybe we don't have some of this stuff. And
Speaker 1: I tend to land towards that that, Like, well, I
Speaker 1: think the solution is going to be maybe maybe Facebook's
Speaker 1: a bad idea, maybe we should maybe we shouldn't have.
Speaker 1: There's aspects of it that are necessary, obviously, and I
Speaker 1: think aspects of things like Telegram and Twitter that are useful,
Speaker 1: But um, I think the they're also fundamentally tied to
Speaker 1: the algorithms that drive them, which is also what drives
Speaker 1: so much of the toxic aspects that I think if
Speaker 1: you're divorcing the medium from the algorithm, you're talking about
Speaker 1: something that is very different and longer than media. It's
Speaker 1: no longer than media. It's it's so radically different that
Speaker 1: it's just it's it's not even useful to compare them.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like it's like comparing Discord to Facebook.
Speaker 1: It's like they're not they don't operate the same way.
Speaker 1: That's the Yeah, that's exactly kind of where I where
Speaker 1: I tend to be on on that, And I know
Speaker 1: that's not like I I to the extent that like, uh,
Speaker 1: that's pessimistic. I guess I am kind of pessimistic about
Speaker 1: anarchisms ability to stop the worst of things that's happening.
Speaker 1: Where I kind of look at myself as an optimistic
Speaker 1: anarchist is in the I believe anarchism offers solutions when
Speaker 1: these things go as badly as they're going to do
Speaker 1: in a way that you know, the present systems or
Speaker 1: you know, more authoritarian systems that people propose can't solve
Speaker 1: the worst consequences of these problems as as well. That's
Speaker 1: that's kind of where I feel like it is can
Speaker 1: feel a lot simpler to default to like the dual
Speaker 1: power framework of a lot of these things, because otherwise
Speaker 1: the problems are so complex that you cannot approach them
Speaker 1: from from from every angle, because you really do need
Speaker 1: to simplify and condense them and collapse them into something
Speaker 1: that is more simplified, which often results in like a
Speaker 1: dual power kind of work for what you actually start doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think you have to. I think if you're
Speaker 1: an insurrectionist, if you're a revolutionary, whether it you're an
Speaker 1: anarchist or or you know, a Leninist or whatever, you
Speaker 1: have to be looking at what's actually happening in Ukraine
Speaker 1: right now and recognize that. All right, Well, to what
Speaker 1: extent do you think you're going to be able to
Speaker 1: organize people in such a way that allows them to
Speaker 1: deal with thermobaric weapons? You know? In what way are
Speaker 1: you going to organize people that allows them to effectively
Speaker 1: resist cluster musician munitions? Um? And I think that when
Speaker 1: you kind of look at it that way, which is
Speaker 1: what it would take to overthrow any of the large
Speaker 1: hegemonic powers in the world right now, a much more
Speaker 1: realistic set of solutions is all right, well, let's work
Speaker 1: on building power by building organizations and communities that are
Speaker 1: capable of taking care of themselves in the holes that
Speaker 1: these powers are increasingly going to be experiencing because because
Speaker 1: they too are crumbling. And that's much smarter than being like,
Speaker 1: all right, well, I'm gonna try to get a bunch
Speaker 1: of my friends with rifles and and arm up a
Speaker 1: couple of drones and and go up against you know,
Speaker 1: people who have access to m l R s, you know,
Speaker 1: weapons systems and whatnot. Yeah. No, I think that that's
Speaker 1: a really great point. Um. I the way that I
Speaker 1: would think about it is the starting with the big
Speaker 1: picture problems is a bit misleading because, as you said,
Speaker 1: like nobody, it's quite like that nobody has solutions to
Speaker 1: these problems, certainly the social Democrats. Yeah, you know, and
Speaker 1: I say this as somebody who's like half a social
Speaker 1: Democrat by temperament. Um, it would be really nice if
Speaker 1: we like did it a little social democratic government and
Speaker 1: they swooped in and you know, did like new deal stuff.
Speaker 1: I like new deal stuff. I like w p A
Speaker 1: stuff as much as the next uh. You know, um
Speaker 1: person who likes arts programs and infrastructure development. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: some infrastructure development, not others. Right, the war the war
Speaker 1: complex we can do a little without. But you know,
Speaker 1: the thing about it is those big problems. You're right,
Speaker 1: it looks like there's not going to be like a
Speaker 1: big solution, uh, and that we're going to kind of
Speaker 1: have to cope with the consequences of of it, at
Speaker 1: least at first. Yeah, even coping this is this is
Speaker 1: kind of where I think the real kind of substance
Speaker 1: of of of the problem that libertarian socialist are facing
Speaker 1: right now. Even coping would require a greater level of
Speaker 1: organization than we have proven able to muster up to now.
Speaker 1: Not because the methods that we choose don't work, because
Speaker 1: in fact, as you point out and as I actually
Speaker 1: really want to forcefully argue, and because because we do
Speaker 1: in the end of the essay, like authoritarian methods don't
Speaker 1: work and can't work for a lot of the specific
Speaker 1: problems that we face. Uh, And history shows that very definitively.
Speaker 1: But um, there is also a serious way in which
Speaker 1: even kind of developing these like you know, local highly
Speaker 1: like you know, rooted in a community, uh like direct
Speaker 1: democratic institutions that control real resources, scaling that up to
Speaker 1: the point where it actually could start replacing some of
Speaker 1: the gaps left behind by uh you know, uh states
Speaker 1: and capitalist firms that are too dysfunctional or too focused
Speaker 1: on their own goals to to to to meet those
Speaker 1: needs that would actually require us to be able, for example,
Speaker 1: to know how to build up a cooperative sector in
Speaker 1: a city, or how to kind of like network the
Speaker 1: tennis unions that already exist you know, across different uh
Speaker 1: you know, regions, maybe even across like a continent, and
Speaker 1: then construct like the way in which they self manage
Speaker 1: each other or or not each other self managed together
Speaker 1: the you know, the the larger group or it would
Speaker 1: require and you know, there's a lot of people working
Speaker 1: on these problems, but sometimes there is a kind of
Speaker 1: like you know, you'll you'll see this like obstacle in
Speaker 1: the road because for example, like what do you do
Speaker 1: when the it might not even be the state properly speaking, right,
Speaker 1: it might be like a posse that's funded by some
Speaker 1: rich billionaire asshole who's got like his uh, you know,
Speaker 1: his notion to some people are just better than others
Speaker 1: and that you should institute the dictatorship of the tech
Speaker 1: bros um, you know. And then that billionaire's funding a
Speaker 1: bunch of people who have got now like you know,
Speaker 1: some industrial access to industrial infrastructure, and they don't like
Speaker 1: the fact that you're doing your d I Y like
Speaker 1: you know, commune or whatever stuff in there on their turf.
Speaker 1: So how do you fight back against that? I mean,
Speaker 1: some of it you can fight back against that kind
Speaker 1: of our current level of capacity, but some of it
Speaker 1: does kind of require us to start thinking like, well,
Speaker 1: how do you how do you build up financial independence?
Speaker 1: What like, how do you build up the kind of
Speaker 1: independence where it's like if we get kicked off of
Speaker 1: the capitalist uh social media, for example, which is a
Speaker 1: great deal of what we use for fundraising, what kind
Speaker 1: of institutions could we create that would be like alternatives, um,
Speaker 1: that are not like the ones that the Nazis created
Speaker 1: when there was a purge of some of them that
Speaker 1: gab like highly dysfunctional, like you know, it didn't even
Speaker 1: work for them. Uh not that I mean, I'm happy
Speaker 1: about that, but like you know, my point is, like
Speaker 1: the same thing could happen to us, So what would
Speaker 1: you do? Um the like there there are all these
Speaker 1: kinds of things that are more little picture questions in
Speaker 1: a way, but they scale up relatively quickly to at
Speaker 1: least like medium sized questions where we need this kind
Speaker 1: of like um, these these because because part of what
Speaker 1: it is is also that like it's not that these
Speaker 1: questions are impossible, it's that they're kind of neglected. And
Speaker 1: there's um there, there's these uh the thinkers like Christian Williams,
Speaker 1: who is an anarchist from the Pacific Northwest, who wrote
Speaker 1: a pamphlet about this called Wither Anarchism, And there was
Speaker 1: another pamphlet, uh an Essay and CounterPunch by a person
Speaker 1: named Gabrielle Coon who's an autonomous Marxist basically like a
Speaker 1: libertarian Marxist Marxist anarchist type um called What Happened to
Speaker 1: the Anarchist Century? And both of those essays, which I
Speaker 1: highly recommend that people read, they may they make points
Speaker 1: basically like this, you know, like where where the focus
Speaker 1: on how to construct those institutions and the nitty gritty
Speaker 1: of how to do that has kind of receded from
Speaker 1: anarchism um as it's actually practiced. Uh In like so
Speaker 1: there's like a rhetoric of revolutionary transformation, but not always
Speaker 1: the attention to the nitty gritty of how you actually
Speaker 1: can like build resilient institutions that actually like carry that
Speaker 1: through which you know, a hundred years ago people talking
Speaker 1: about like the one big union and the general strike.
Speaker 1: But that's kind of like, um, well, a it didn't
Speaker 1: work in exactly the way that they were thinking it.
Speaker 1: What even in the most successful revolutions like in Spain
Speaker 1: and b it was also like the there's there's there's
Speaker 1: a certain way in which our tensions are focused on
Speaker 1: other things. And it's not that those things are bad,
Speaker 1: it's just that like there's been this kind of neglect
Speaker 1: of the question of large scale organization and how you
Speaker 1: do coordination, like you know, in order to tackle problems
Speaker 1: that are kind of like at the scale that that
Speaker 1: I was talking about before um And so basically the
Speaker 1: argument of the essay is that in the absence of that,
Speaker 1: like for the socialist movement that emerged after turned away
Speaker 1: from neo anarchist, I'm thinking basically that it had no solutions,
Speaker 1: which I don't think it's true either, but it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, like rather it was true in the moment,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't have to be true, but it was true,
Speaker 1: but enough people thought that it was that they turned
Speaker 1: to like the social democratic route. But with the failure
Speaker 1: of Corbin and Bernie that kind of burned a lot
Speaker 1: of people out too, and a lot of what is
Speaker 1: seems like it's coming up now, and I'm wondering, I
Speaker 1: wonder what you guys think of this. Like a lot
Speaker 1: of the people that we see showing up in movement
Speaker 1: spaces who we see kind of like getting politically activated
Speaker 1: for the first time or whatever, a lot of those
Speaker 1: people are really interested in Leninism and on specifically, because
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know how true that is.
Speaker 1: That's at least that that's that's that that that part
Speaker 1: is not true at least at least at least here
Speaker 1: in Portland. Plant no other no other part of the
Speaker 1: country like Portland, other than maybe Eugene. Like okay, that's
Speaker 1: that's fair. That's a little bit too. Like Portland. Portland
Speaker 1: is a big enough anarchist city that there are entire
Speaker 1: decade long like like into anarchist wors that no one
Speaker 1: else in the US has ever heard of, that are
Speaker 1: like the most important thing that's ever happened in Portland's
Speaker 1: Oh boy, welcome to the Green Red. Let me tell you, Chris,
Speaker 1: you have just piste off sixty people who could not
Speaker 1: explain to you if you gave them a year, could
Speaker 1: not explain to you why they're angry. And I mean
Speaker 1: to be to be fair, like I I am an
Speaker 1: anarchist in Chicago. When the first time I introduced too
Speaker 1: of my Twitter mutual together, they almost got a fist fight.
Speaker 1: So like, yeah, that's that completely scans Even with like
Speaker 1: ds A stuff, I feel like there's there was at
Speaker 1: least was a trend a little bit to stay away
Speaker 1: from some of the more Russia communist kind of like
Speaker 1: types of aesthetics and ideas because it is a turn
Speaker 1: off for so many people, and it does know just
Speaker 1: and it has like encouraging forefront a form of authoritarianism
Speaker 1: that maybe is not great. Yeah, I don't know, Like
Speaker 1: I've seen sort of both friends in Walka. So I
Speaker 1: think the last like a year has been very different
Speaker 1: than I think the previous five. I've seen it on Twitter,
Speaker 1: but I don't know how much it expands into as
Speaker 1: I think. I think it's like I saw things happens
Speaker 1: in the d s A is that the Leninists essentially
Speaker 1: took over the International Committee and they had this kind
Speaker 1: of delicious divisional label inside the d s A where
Speaker 1: like you have like you have a part of the
Speaker 1: d s A that's essentially a social democratic machine, and
Speaker 1: then you have the International Committee, which is which is
Speaker 1: the foreign policy wing essentially run by by essentially run
Speaker 1: by by the Leninists. And I think, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I think I saw it there. And the other thing
Speaker 1: I think I saw a lot of that I've seen
Speaker 1: even from people who are ordinarily not Stalinist, is what
Speaker 1: you know, part of what was talking about this is
Speaker 1: the sort of like climate Stalinism or like climate wow
Speaker 1: stuff like that. That is a huge problem that you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think I think part of it also
Speaker 1: just has to do with the fact that people don't
Speaker 1: like Okay, so like we we have actually existing uh
Speaker 1: climate Leninism, like we have it. It's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's China, like the CCP changed, it's literally changed. State
Speaker 1: ideology in in in the mid two thousand tends, as
Speaker 1: you know, as an attempt to deal to deal with
Speaker 1: with with with pollution climate change. It did nothing, Like
Speaker 1: they pressed every price. It doesn't it didn't like, it
Speaker 1: didn't work. Yeah, yeah, I mean they did corbon markets,
Speaker 1: they did. They literally just banned coal and entire provinces
Speaker 1: and it didn't work. They they changed your contratvaluations, I
Speaker 1: I people. Yeah, Like La lays this out specifically with
Speaker 1: China to an excruciating degree, like it like in detail.
Speaker 1: If you're really interested in this type of like climate
Speaker 1: left authoritarianism. They call it climate moun in the book,
Speaker 1: but you can call it climate climate Leninism, you can
Speaker 1: call it whatever. But they lay out how it could
Speaker 1: work and how use cases of it have not worked.
Speaker 1: Um to a pretty pretty intense degree. If you're interested
Speaker 1: in that, I would recommend reading the book Climate. Leviathan
Speaker 1: definitely influenced a large portion of the writing for this show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean to your point, I don't think that
Speaker 1: this is the only trend I do. I agree with
Speaker 1: you that out of like the conjuncture, there was this
Speaker 1: um I think that a lot of the more like
Speaker 1: establishment reformist aspects of the movement were discredited and that
Speaker 1: pushed people in different radical directions, like one of which
Speaker 1: very much is anarchism and libertarian socialism. I am seeing
Speaker 1: a lot more faces that are interested in in in
Speaker 1: those questions for sure. Uh. And that's kind of counter
Speaker 1: to the trend that I was describing from the last
Speaker 1: like five years of like, you know, people becoming more
Speaker 1: disinterested because of the real or perceived lack of solutions. However,
Speaker 1: I do think that it's important, and this is kind
Speaker 1: of following on Chris's Climate Leninism point, to understand that
Speaker 1: there's at least a counter trend where a lot of
Speaker 1: people are have not only moved away from libertarian socialism,
Speaker 1: have not only moved but they've also moved away from
Speaker 1: democratic socialism. And if you follow that pattern, which is
Speaker 1: a pattern that I at least have seen within the
Speaker 1: d s A, within various trade unions, in a lot
Speaker 1: of among a lot of like intelligencia type people like journalists, professors,
Speaker 1: blah blah, you see a very common set of arguments.
Speaker 1: And I think it's very clear that as the century
Speaker 1: proceeds and the crises get worse and start killing like
Speaker 1: even larger numbers of people than they already are, we're
Speaker 1: going to see this argument a lot more. Um and
Speaker 1: and the argument is something like this. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: a quote from a tweet. Uh And and you know,
Speaker 1: one could argue that the tweet doesn't matter, but you
Speaker 1: are naive if you think this is the tweet climate
Speaker 1: You are naive if you think climate change can ever
Speaker 1: be solved without an authoritarian government at this point. That's
Speaker 1: and that's that's the whole thing. So it's a it's
Speaker 1: a nasty little tweet because it's ambiguous, right, it has
Speaker 1: this like shocking and scandalous effects. You know, we need
Speaker 1: authoritarianism to to to solve climate change. The scandalous you know,
Speaker 1: bougois or whatever. But then it's like okay, wait, but
Speaker 1: what do you mean by authoritarian? Am I just being
Speaker 1: hysterical reactor. It's the same as saying you're naive if
Speaker 1: you think that, um, climate change can be solved without
Speaker 1: nuclear power, or climate change can be solved without really
Speaker 1: big hammers, Like we have authoritarian governments, we have nuclear power,
Speaker 1: we have really big hammers, and climate change does not
Speaker 1: be solved been solved. Is it possible that any of
Speaker 1: those things might be a part of a theoretical solution
Speaker 1: that may happen someday, Yes, but it hasn't. And there's like,
Speaker 1: if you're trying to say that authoritarian governments are better
Speaker 1: at dealing with climate change than the governments that currently
Speaker 1: dominate Number one, hell of a lot of authoritarian governments
Speaker 1: are responsible for our current situation are climate change. Number
Speaker 1: two the Soviet Union, which I suspect most of these
Speaker 1: people see as a guiding light. Horrible for the vironment,
Speaker 1: turned the largest body of water in Eurasia into a
Speaker 1: poison lake. Yes, right, not not not good at the environment,
Speaker 1: you know. And here's here's what's interesting about the thing.
Speaker 1: To me. The other thing that it's doing is kind
Speaker 1: of signaling that it's like patently ridiculous to oppose this
Speaker 1: idea without specifying what the idea is like and like
Speaker 1: in other words, authoritarianism like but like, I mean, let's
Speaker 1: let's be blunt right, what they're implying as a Leninist
Speaker 1: is the one party state, the secret police, press censorship,
Speaker 1: in the command economy. So does that help you fight
Speaker 1: climate cheese? That's actually an interesting and a kind of
Speaker 1: like you know, distant five thousand foot view, you know,
Speaker 1: from the God's eye view or whatever, like, uh, the
Speaker 1: that's an interesting technical question. Do these institutions actually help
Speaker 1: or hinder a response? But we're not even having that
Speaker 1: conversation because instead it's this kind of underhanded attempt to
Speaker 1: get you to think that. So again, does a tweet matter? Well,
Speaker 1: I think a tweet matters if it comes from a
Speaker 1: member of the National Political Committee of the d s A,
Speaker 1: because at least ostensibly if d s A is, which
Speaker 1: is who the person who did that tweet? Because at
Speaker 1: least ostensibly, if d s A is a mass movement,
Speaker 1: as it purports to be the mass movement of socialists
Speaker 1: in the US, and you know, and and the National
Speaker 1: Political Committee is ostensibly the leadership of the d s
Speaker 1: which I personally don't believe, but that's certainly how they
Speaker 1: think of themselves. Um. Then this indicates that the largest
Speaker 1: most important socialist mass movement in the US, at least
Speaker 1: self branded UH, has people in its leadership who believe
Speaker 1: that the secret police might help in addressing climate change.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting thing and it's also very disturbing. And
Speaker 1: the thing is this, this person is not actually like important,
Speaker 1: He's a symptom because this is something that's happening across
Speaker 1: the board. And a more intellectually serious version of this
Speaker 1: argument was put forward by the Marxist intellectual and historian
Speaker 1: um a professor of human ecology called Andreas mom And
Speaker 1: people who are really into like Mars Nerds stuff will
Speaker 1: probably have heard, Yeah, what a very good book called
Speaker 1: Fossil Capital. Everything he's written after Fossil Capital is a disaster.
Speaker 1: I like some of the sabotage. It's it's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a little romantic and impractical. He wrote an ethical
Speaker 1: discourse instead of a thing about like the risk of
Speaker 1: eco sabotage, which is the actual important part, also the
Speaker 1: degree to which it can matter because eco sabotage. There's
Speaker 1: this idea on the left that like what we need
Speaker 1: to do is be targeting fossil fuel infrastructure. And again
Speaker 1: it's like what it's It's like what that ds A
Speaker 1: dude said, Like, yeah, that could theoretically be a part
Speaker 1: of but also process. If it's like nine dudes who
Speaker 1: do it and then they go to prison or get shot,
Speaker 1: well that doesn't really fix climate change. I think the book,
Speaker 1: the book A Ministry with the Future really lays out
Speaker 1: all the all kind of like the best case scenario
Speaker 1: for all these types of things and how they can
Speaker 1: work together to overall trend in this direction. Because yeah,
Speaker 1: that type of like eco sabotage in conjunction with other
Speaker 1: like political effects can be impactful on what things happen,
Speaker 1: but it's won't necessarily be you know, it's not it's
Speaker 1: not as simple as we would like it to be,
Speaker 1: because yeah, it's it turns out a complex world has
Speaker 1: complex consequences and complex and I think I think this
Speaker 1: is you know, the trend that Mom was on, the
Speaker 1: trend on that you know, there's there's a big environmental
Speaker 1: authoritarian like thing among among liberals. This is a huge thing.
Speaker 1: In political science was a big thing, and in ecological
Speaker 1: studies that was essentially making a similar argument to to
Speaker 1: what I'm almost making this like, well, okay, you need
Speaker 1: some kind of air quotes vague authoritarianism to deal to
Speaker 1: climate change, and you know, it's it's it's it's basically
Speaker 1: this this attempt. There's like these people have have seen
Speaker 1: climate change, but they have no act solution to it,
Speaker 1: and so they wave their hands and pretend that like
Speaker 1: this like you know, the state is going to descend
Speaker 1: from this guy and save them, and it's not. And
Speaker 1: I think that's you know, I think I think we're
Speaker 1: we're sort of I don't know, I think as we
Speaker 1: just I guess kind of wrap this up because we
Speaker 1: unfortunately they're running out of time. But you know, this
Speaker 1: like this exact moment like these like few weeks are
Speaker 1: this moment of incredible like rupture on the left right,
Speaker 1: because we we have we've had we've had in some
Speaker 1: way social democrats be discredited by the fact that like
Speaker 1: Corbin and Sanders both lost, right, their political project has
Speaker 1: been discredited. Um, we've had a serious sort of anexist failures.
Speaker 1: But then you know, and in the last couple of weeks, right,
Speaker 1: it was all of the sort of big state like
Speaker 1: authoritarian people like tied themselves through a bunch of imperialists,
Speaker 1: and you know, May staked their whole entire politics off
Speaker 1: of them being the anti imperialist class. And then you
Speaker 1: know the state who's like a bunch of their press
Speaker 1: people like literally work for right and who who they've
Speaker 1: been arguing like is the counter imperialist powers does imperialism?
Speaker 1: And so like, Yeah, I think we have this moment
Speaker 1: where everything is in chaos, in which we have to
Speaker 1: be the ones that that that have solutions or have
Speaker 1: or have the tools to build them. And I think
Speaker 1: that's why that's why this project is important, because that's
Speaker 1: that's something that we need in this exact moment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's a tremendous value in being humble about
Speaker 1: seeking out solutions to these questions and not doing what
Speaker 1: so many do on the left and pretend that their
Speaker 1: tendency has an absolute answer, because all we have is theories.
Speaker 1: And the reason I know that to a point of
Speaker 1: certainty is that no one has solved any of these
Speaker 1: problems yet absolutely, And and so there is a tremendous
Speaker 1: degree of humility that people need to have in terms
Speaker 1: of like, all right, well we are attempting to arrive
Speaker 1: at the conclusions that can lead us to a better world,
Speaker 1: as opposed to we are trying to force through this
Speaker 1: thing that we know will work. Um, because you don't
Speaker 1: you know, if you're a Marxist Leninist and you think
Speaker 1: that we need climate MAU, you don't know that that
Speaker 1: will work because it hasn't yet. And if you're an
Speaker 1: anarchist who thinks the solution is bombing as many oil
Speaker 1: refineries as you possibly can, well, you don't know that
Speaker 1: you're ever going to get enough people on board for
Speaker 1: that to mean anything. Um. And I think that there's
Speaker 1: the conversations that we need to be having. I think
Speaker 1: it's it's important to see them as conversations as opposed
Speaker 1: to polemics aimed at just getting people in line behind
Speaker 1: this shining vision of a clear set of steps. Um.
Speaker 1: It's important to envision the end goal. I say that
Speaker 1: a lot. You know, we need to be looking and
Speaker 1: and accepting the possibility of a better future, but it's
Speaker 1: important not to be dogmatic about the road to get
Speaker 1: there because nobody, nobody really has a clear idea of
Speaker 1: what that looks like. Yeah, So the piece ends up
Speaker 1: and if you want to see the ending of it.
Speaker 1: It'll it'll be up in um in sometime in the
Speaker 1: next couple of weeks. But the basic gist of where
Speaker 1: it goes is precisely to the practical question, right, instead
Speaker 1: of like making these like polemical arguments that are rooted
Speaker 1: more in like kind of like what tribe you've decided
Speaker 1: to identify with within the broad family of socialism than
Speaker 1: in like actually trying to like solve problems for the
Speaker 1: people around you, right, or help contribute to the solutions.
Speaker 1: Like it's actually what we want to ask is like,
Speaker 1: if we have like the giant ecological crisis, Uh, how
Speaker 1: do you how do you actually do it? Is it
Speaker 1: by trying to force people from the top down to
Speaker 1: do it as Um under his mom kind of draws
Speaker 1: on the failed uh policies of war communism as and
Speaker 1: inspiration for that. Or is it potentially by having like
Speaker 1: democrat democratized institutions that incentivize people with carrots instead of sticks,
Speaker 1: like Naomi Klein basically uncovered in want of her journalism
Speaker 1: and this changes everything. So this is kind of like
Speaker 1: the debate that we have to start having in order
Speaker 1: to be able to together formulate these kinds of solutions. Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: well I think that's gonna do it for for us today. Um,
Speaker 1: what do we what do we we do? You got
Speaker 1: you guys gotta gotta gotta plug you want to throw up?
Speaker 1: Throw up before we roll out? Yeah. If if you
Speaker 1: want to follow us at at Strange Underscore Matters UM
Speaker 1: on Twitter. UM. We also have a Facebook and you
Speaker 1: can read our articles at Strange Matters dot co op,
Speaker 1: which is our website. Uh. And if anything that you
Speaker 1: read there that you've heard here inspires you at all,
Speaker 1: please consider donating. We're gonna be in the next month
Speaker 1: raising money, uh for for the magazine and we want
Speaker 1: to pair writers above market rate because we think market
Speaker 1: rates too low. So but in order to actually do that,
Speaker 1: and none of the money is going to the editors
Speaker 1: from the fundraisers, so if if, if we're going to
Speaker 1: be able to do that, we've got to meet our
Speaker 1: fundraising target. All right, Well support them and um, you know,
Speaker 1: figure out how to save the world. It's it's up
Speaker 1: to you. And I'm speaking to exactly one person right
Speaker 1: now and no one else, but I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be more specific. Welcome to it could happen here a
Speaker 1: podcast about things following apart and putting it back together again.
Speaker 1: And today we're doing one of our I guess increasingly
Speaker 1: less rare but still sort of uncommon putting things back
Speaker 1: together again episodes, and with me today is Ted men
Speaker 1: from Amazonians United, to talk about different kinds of union
Speaker 1: union workers organizing UM and the work that you all
Speaker 1: have been doing. So Ted, welcome to the show. Thanks
Speaker 1: for having me so all right, one of the things
Speaker 1: that I wanted to talk about right off the bat
Speaker 1: is that Amazonians United is running a very very different
Speaker 1: kind of organization. And then a lot of the union
Speaker 1: efforts that we've talked about on the show, and a
Speaker 1: lot of the sort of like I guess, classical sort
Speaker 1: of business union model stuff that that you know, we've
Speaker 1: we've we've we you know, than than what you see
Speaker 1: in the press, and then also that we've been covering.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to start off by asking you about
Speaker 1: solidarity unionism and how it sort of differs from other
Speaker 1: kinds of union organizations and campaigns. Sure, I think it's
Speaker 1: pretty simple. Actually, I think solidarity unionism is workers who
Speaker 1: believe in ourselves, and by that I mean and it's
Speaker 1: workers recognizing that we don't need someone to save us
Speaker 1: UM when because we are the ones doing the work,
Speaker 1: we know how to run our workplaces, We know how
Speaker 1: to do it best, and we also deserve the wealth
Speaker 1: that we've produce. So UM solidarity unionism to me is
Speaker 1: UH building organization with each other, where the fabric of
Speaker 1: our organization is our relationship and our solidarity as co
Speaker 1: workers engaging in struggle against UM, bosses, managers, owners, UM, everyone.
Speaker 1: That's that's telling us what to do while UH taking
Speaker 1: the lion's share of the wealth that we create. UM.
Speaker 1: And it's by uniting, coming together around issues that we
Speaker 1: care about, taking direct action in the workplace, UM building
Speaker 1: our confidence and our strength and our consciousness UM and
Speaker 1: our organization. To me, a solidarity unioniszone UM. It is
Speaker 1: distinctly different from business as unionism, which is the dominant
Speaker 1: form mainstream unionism, you know, legalistic unionism, whatever you want
Speaker 1: to call it, UM, that model that has been failing
Speaker 1: for several decades. UM actually is predicated on a deep
Speaker 1: distrust of workers, the disbelief that workers can organize ourselves,
Speaker 1: run our own workplaces, represent ourselves, defend ourselves and each other. UM.
Speaker 1: And in business union. I mean, you know, you you
Speaker 1: see the ads when they're posting, uh for union staff, job,
Speaker 1: come lead these workers, Come come join this union and lead.
Speaker 1: You're not even a worker in the workplace. How are
Speaker 1: you going to lead someone in there? Like you know,
Speaker 1: you're you're a lawyer, you're you know, you have a
Speaker 1: different professional expertise. You're not moving the packages with us
Speaker 1: from inside, with from within the U, the warehouse, and
Speaker 1: so um. Yeah, I think that's that's the main difference
Speaker 1: to me of the model. Do you are you a worker?
Speaker 1: Do you believe in workers? Do you trust and have
Speaker 1: faith that workers we ourselves can build our own organization,
Speaker 1: lead ourselves. Um? And um? And when or do you
Speaker 1: think workers need to be led, need to be represented,
Speaker 1: need to be told what to do? Um? Need to
Speaker 1: pay you to go and say that? Um? And uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I believe in workers almost. I'm a solidarity unionist. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think we were talking a bit before the
Speaker 1: show about this, and I think there's there's a lot
Speaker 1: of aspects about this that are I think very powerful
Speaker 1: in you know, in in in in secacy economy that
Speaker 1: haven't been unionized. And I haven't our unions ever treated
Speaker 1: from our people who are never sort of organized and
Speaker 1: to begin with, and I think that's you know something
Speaker 1: that there's there, there's the there's this problem that happens
Speaker 1: like with with a lot of unions where you know,
Speaker 1: you you you get you get this sort of beureacratic
Speaker 1: structure that builds up and the bereacratic structure that builds
Speaker 1: up like doesn't have doesn't necessarily have the same interests
Speaker 1: as the people in the union. And that's a real problem.
Speaker 1: And you get these entrenched like you know, you can
Speaker 1: get these in trenched caucuses you control unions, and you
Speaker 1: get this the sort of proliferation of of these people.
Speaker 1: And I think this is this was part of why
Speaker 1: a lot of the sort of the anti union techniques
Speaker 1: that you saw in like the sort of anti union
Speaker 1: persias in the eighties, I mean you've been seeing them
Speaker 1: for a while. Like why they started working in the
Speaker 1: eighties was that like you know, when when when when
Speaker 1: someone like starts ranting about union bureaucrats right like they're
Speaker 1: they're actually like there actually was a divide there, like
Speaker 1: there there there was a sort of like I guess
Speaker 1: like like there there was a sort of like a
Speaker 1: kind of fundamental class difference, which I think has a
Speaker 1: lot I mean, also has a lot to do with
Speaker 1: you know, when when you get into your sort of
Speaker 1: like more more revolutionary context that that has to do
Speaker 1: with why a lot of unions when you know, France
Speaker 1: is infamous for this, right Like, France has had these
Speaker 1: giant like comunist trade unions and every time a revolution started,
Speaker 1: the trade union just like sits there and does nothing.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and you have to sort of ask yourself like, okay,
Speaker 1: so why is this happening? And I think, yeah, soldier
Speaker 1: to unionism, it has it has a lot of answers
Speaker 1: to this sort of I guess you call it like that.
Speaker 1: There's there's a there's a sort of like right wing
Speaker 1: critique of unions that has to do with like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: so we don't want workers to organize, We don't want
Speaker 1: them to reflective power at all. But then there's also
Speaker 1: you know, but but the reason that it works in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases because it's able to tap into
Speaker 1: a sort of like into these structural problems that a
Speaker 1: lot of unions have. And I think so my understanding
Speaker 1: of how yells organizing has been going and correct me
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong that I've been interested in is that like,
Speaker 1: unlike a lot of other campaigns that you've seen, even
Speaker 1: specifically with Amazon, but like a lot of other the
Speaker 1: sort of the campaigns that are getting a lot of
Speaker 1: us like, you're not active, Like your goal isn't to
Speaker 1: just get like recognition as a collected bargaining in it. Right.
Speaker 1: That's another key part of our key difference between solidarity
Speaker 1: unionism business unionism. Um. In business unionism, you're what defines
Speaker 1: you as a union is whether you are legally recognized
Speaker 1: by the state, by the n l R b um,
Speaker 1: by the appointed government body. Yeah. Um. That is the
Speaker 1: point at which the folks in these organizations like, are
Speaker 1: we a union or are we not? Okay, let's let's
Speaker 1: do an election. Let's follow all these rules that, by
Speaker 1: the way, we're designed to demobilize us. Yeah, century ago.
Speaker 1: But let's follow these rules. Let's try to fight in
Speaker 1: the courts, uh, to be recognized as a union. And
Speaker 1: then once we're a union, then we can fight for
Speaker 1: a legal contract that has benefited a lot of people
Speaker 1: in different ways. I'm not you know what I mean, Like,
Speaker 1: but that approach is different than solidity unism where it's like,
Speaker 1: we know our power is in the workplace, on the
Speaker 1: shop floor, where our power is based on our unity
Speaker 1: and numbers as co workers. We see this when we
Speaker 1: walk out and within a month they give us a raise.
Speaker 1: Along would it have taken to get a raise if
Speaker 1: we went for an l ORB election. Yeah, what organization
Speaker 1: are we even building in that way? And so um our.
Speaker 1: Instead of seeking legal recognition and waging our uh uh
Speaker 1: struggle against bosses in the courts, we are choosing to
Speaker 1: wage engage in struggle in the shop floor where we
Speaker 1: are the experts, where we have the power, where we
Speaker 1: have the organis station, where we're doing the work, where
Speaker 1: that is our home turf. Um. We have more power there, Like,
Speaker 1: it makes more sense to build power where we have power,
Speaker 1: not in the institutions that were specifically designed to disempower
Speaker 1: us and give large employers to the the upper hand. Um.
Speaker 1: All the different ways that they can manipulate how the
Speaker 1: votes happen, what is considered part of the voting unit, um,
Speaker 1: the contract negotiation process, I mean all of these legal hurdles.
Speaker 1: I mean, for the vast majority of workers, you'll need
Speaker 1: lawyers to be even understand how to engage in that world.
Speaker 1: That's not our world. It was not built for us
Speaker 1: to be in. It was built to control us. And
Speaker 1: so um, it just doesn't make logical sense to try
Speaker 1: to wage our struggle in that arena. We should be
Speaker 1: in waging it in the play this is that we
Speaker 1: work and so um. That Yeah, that's I think another
Speaker 1: core UM principal solid or unism like build power where
Speaker 1: we have it um and that's the shop for Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think, I mean that's something that I've seen
Speaker 1: like in like when I was in college, there there
Speaker 1: was a big grad student union organization campaign and it
Speaker 1: kind of they had this huge problem which was that Okay,
Speaker 1: well they were trying to do they were trying to
Speaker 1: get a National Labor Relations Board like vote under Trump.
Speaker 1: But they couldn't do it because if you know, because
Speaker 1: because the National Labor Relations Board was controlled by just
Speaker 1: like the even even by National Labor Relations Board standards
Speaker 1: like like just unbelievably anti union, like viscerally anti worker forces.
Speaker 1: It was like, well, if we try to get a vote,
Speaker 1: like there's a chance they could just you know, like
Speaker 1: literally destroy the right, like destroy the organizing rights of
Speaker 1: all grad students of the country. And yeah, and you
Speaker 1: get you get that with the Nissan election or something
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, yeah, and definitely delayed it. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's it's you know, and yeah, I think this this
Speaker 1: is a trap that like a lot of people, even
Speaker 1: even people who are really highly organized, like get stuck
Speaker 1: in where you know, and like eventually, uh, the grand
Speaker 1: students just like essentially just started doing walkouts because that
Speaker 1: was you know, that that was the thing they could
Speaker 1: do when they start doing their own strikes, even til
Speaker 1: they weren't like legally recognized, because that was the thing
Speaker 1: that you could do to you know, actually fight in
Speaker 1: a terrain that wasn't just inherently rigged against you. So okay,
Speaker 1: so you've you've you've you've decided to take to take
Speaker 1: a fight in the workplace, like on the shop floor,
Speaker 1: where where you're where you're at your strongest. What does
Speaker 1: that actually look like in terms of actions, in terms
Speaker 1: of organization. Yeah, honestly, I think it's simpler and more rudimentary.
Speaker 1: Um then one might think or that you might read
Speaker 1: about and you know, I can that article or something analyzing.
Speaker 1: I think it comes down to comes down to building community,
Speaker 1: comes down to building culture and the principles of the
Speaker 1: community and culture that you build together with their coworkers
Speaker 1: is one where we value ourselves and each other. We
Speaker 1: respect ourselves and each other, and that means that we
Speaker 1: fight for what is fair in the workplace. That means
Speaker 1: that we maintain integrity. Anytime a boss disrespects one of us,
Speaker 1: we need to confront it. We we need to address it.
Speaker 1: H if not immediately, uh soon after. In numbers, UM,
Speaker 1: it means if we're getting overworked and underpaid, then we
Speaker 1: need to strategize and figure out how do we how
Speaker 1: do we come hell the employer to stop overworking and
Speaker 1: underpaying us, How do we hit them in a place
Speaker 1: that they are forced to respect and um as it
Speaker 1: goes In the world we are today, it's always the numbers,
Speaker 1: It's always the money, it's always the profit. So UM
Speaker 1: what that means on the day to day, I mean,
Speaker 1: m Amazon warehouses are a very isolating place. UM. Amazon
Speaker 1: has basically uh gigified warehouse work. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: the Uber for warehouse where you can pick up shifts,
Speaker 1: you can you know, extra shifts, you can take uh
Speaker 1: furlough days, you know, called them videos. UM many warehouses,
Speaker 1: Like you're work the ten twelve hour shift and you're
Speaker 1: for that entire time you're near one or two people max.
Speaker 1: Because they're spaced out and it's loud, and there's machinery
Speaker 1: and your packing boxes and and so UM. On top
Speaker 1: of that, you know that every day dehumanizing. It's also um,
Speaker 1: you're pushed to work faster and faster. UM. It's difficult
Speaker 1: to have you know, deep human interaction when you're busting
Speaker 1: your ass moving you know, thirty to forty five pound
Speaker 1: packages as quickly as you can. UM. And so the
Speaker 1: day to day of building and fighting in the workplace,
Speaker 1: building community means uh. For example, every week we have
Speaker 1: a pot luck during lunch, bring co workers together, new
Speaker 1: coworkers that you know, someone could start last week. That's
Speaker 1: something that we hear a lot. You know. Part of
Speaker 1: the challenge, it's the turnover is so high? How can
Speaker 1: you possibly organize the turnover was so high? Um. That
Speaker 1: is a specific weapon that boss is used against us.
Speaker 1: High turnover means what it means we frequently have new
Speaker 1: coworkers harder to build relationship and organization. It means that
Speaker 1: the job feels more precarious, so people are always uh
Speaker 1: afraid that we'll lose our job. You know, we could
Speaker 1: get fired. We could they could change uh, staffing numbers
Speaker 1: that could close warehouses. It create you know, as a
Speaker 1: tool higher turnover. They just they turn through workers. Okay,
Speaker 1: who who's willing to do the most work for the
Speaker 1: lowest pay and sacrifice the most of their body? Okay?
Speaker 1: If if you can't handle it, then you quit. If
Speaker 1: you can, then you stay in here. Okay, let's find
Speaker 1: the workers in society that are most able to you know,
Speaker 1: produce the most that so on and so forth and
Speaker 1: so basic things you know, having every day. Uh. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it's just like talking with your coworkers is something that
Speaker 1: is that they try to keep you from doing in
Speaker 1: the workplace, And by engaging conversation, you're already resisting that isolation,
Speaker 1: already resisting. UM boss is trying to just control everything,
Speaker 1: keep everyone divided. So weekly pot lunches, UM having meetings
Speaker 1: inside or outside of the workplace, coming together. What are
Speaker 1: the issues that we care about? UM? How do we
Speaker 1: bring how do we build more unity around these issues
Speaker 1: that we know many people care about. Isn't doing a
Speaker 1: petition people sign on together? Are we delivering the petition
Speaker 1: in the group. Um, if the management doesn't respond, it
Speaker 1: doesn't give us a reasonable response. How do we escalate?
Speaker 1: Do we need to walk out? Do we need to
Speaker 1: take other action? Um? Any time we see a manager
Speaker 1: disres disrespecting a coworker, UM, how do we post up
Speaker 1: next to them, pull out a notepads, start taking notes?
Speaker 1: Ask questions? UM, we're a witness, you know. How do
Speaker 1: we defend each other in all of these basic ways?
Speaker 1: How are we addressing um and being honest with ourselves
Speaker 1: and each other of uh? Just the depth of disrespect
Speaker 1: when they're waiting for us outside of the bathrooms to
Speaker 1: write us up for time off task, when they're telling
Speaker 1: us to work faster when you know we're already on
Speaker 1: a ten hour shift, we're on our ten of the
Speaker 1: ten hour shift. They send a bunch of people home
Speaker 1: and are forcing us to finish all the work for
Speaker 1: a small number of people. Do we continue putting up
Speaker 1: with it? Or do we immediately walk out? Or do
Speaker 1: we off with their co works about what we want
Speaker 1: to do? Just being mindful of being honest about what
Speaker 1: how we are being treated, what is fair, what is
Speaker 1: not and taking the necessary action to UH demand the
Speaker 1: the fairness, the respect that each of us deserve. I think,
Speaker 1: like that's what the workplace struggle looks like. Um, I don't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think it comes down to building that community
Speaker 1: with each other and then building the culture of not
Speaker 1: putting up with bullshit, defending each other, looking out for
Speaker 1: each other. Um, there's them, there's an US. UM. Make
Speaker 1: sure you know inside you're on UM and you know.
Speaker 1: I think that's the that's the foundation of it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that the aspect, especially of culture building is
Speaker 1: really interesting to me because I think that's something that's
Speaker 1: not really talked about much with with with the organizing.
Speaker 1: It's both because you know, a lot of like a
Speaker 1: lot of what is discussed with you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: especially not in academic circles. When when when you're when
Speaker 1: you're just you know, when when when you have people
Speaker 1: writing about union organizing, and when even when sort of
Speaker 1: like other union organizers are writing about unions, is that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't hear much about the cultural aspects, and you
Speaker 1: don't hear much about just resisting the actual like psychological
Speaker 1: degradation that you get. And that strikes me I think
Speaker 1: also as as yeah, as as you've been saying something
Speaker 1: that's that's very important not discussed enough as I mean
Speaker 1: both says just something that that is a goal in itself,
Speaker 1: like not having this sort of you know, not not
Speaker 1: having the just sort of horrible, demeaning and abusive sort
Speaker 1: of tyranny of the boss is just like existing as
Speaker 1: this kind of like normal force and the But then
Speaker 1: also like yeah that this destructly something that that is
Speaker 1: really important for anyone who's who's thinking about organizing is
Speaker 1: you know, getting getting people, getting people to organize around
Speaker 1: just like how get get people to organize around just
Speaker 1: the sort of like the psychological decordation, like I think
Speaker 1: is really important because otherwise you know, you get you
Speaker 1: can get you can just get these cultures where like
Speaker 1: I mean, I remember I had a job where I
Speaker 1: was in like we had a union, but like it
Speaker 1: didn't I mean I was so I was I was
Speaker 1: a temp workers where I wasn't in the union, like
Speaker 1: they had a union, and it just sort of didn't
Speaker 1: do anything, and no one like you and this this
Speaker 1: is a real source that sort of righting resentment because
Speaker 1: the union just didn't do anything, and then you know
Speaker 1: everyone's getting treated terribly like by by the bosses and
Speaker 1: by sort upper management and no one. But it never
Speaker 1: even like it never really like just on a culture level,
Speaker 1: never occurred to them to sort of like use the
Speaker 1: union for that, because it's not really what the union
Speaker 1: was there for. It was just the sort of like
Speaker 1: it was just this thing that existed and like occasionally
Speaker 1: when contracts came up, it would appear. And I guess,
Speaker 1: on on on that note, one of the things I
Speaker 1: was also wondering is what sort of so for for
Speaker 1: for for people who are who are interested in their
Speaker 1: own workplaces and starting doing this kind of organizing and
Speaker 1: starting to sort of, i mean just fight back against
Speaker 1: their bosses in ways that don't you know, either because
Speaker 1: they don't want to or because they literally can't, which
Speaker 1: I think is is true of a lot of people
Speaker 1: like who who want to organize outside of the business
Speaker 1: union model. How how do you how did you all
Speaker 1: start organizing like this? And what what sort of immediate
Speaker 1: lessons do you think people should should take away and
Speaker 1: should sort of bring in bring into their own organizing
Speaker 1: in the workplace. Yeah, um, I think of the base
Speaker 1: of the is the UM I guess I mentioned something
Speaker 1: like this earlier, but that we we can organize ourselves.
Speaker 1: We can. You know, if you're talking if you have
Speaker 1: two co workers that you're friends with, and UM, you
Speaker 1: say like, hey, let's meet up and talk about what's
Speaker 1: going on at work, you're starting to organize, you know. UM.
Speaker 1: And I think part of part of the damage, part
Speaker 1: of the harm that business unionism has done. And also
Speaker 1: just I don't know, hierarchical organizing Umlinsky and organizing UM.
Speaker 1: I think they're all part of uh sort of connected
Speaker 1: school of thought where it's like organizing and you know,
Speaker 1: building an union is something that like you need to
Speaker 1: be like professor rolls to or you know, they're experts
Speaker 1: at it U the experts, and then if you're not
Speaker 1: an expert, then you need to consultant expert to figure
Speaker 1: out how to do it. UM. And I think that's bullshit.
Speaker 1: I think it's if you're a worker, then uh, you
Speaker 1: can be a union organizer. If you're a worker and
Speaker 1: you talk with you know, another worker about what's going
Speaker 1: on in your workplace, like you're already starting to organize. UM.
Speaker 1: Like I said earlier, if you're calling a meeting, if
Speaker 1: you're you know, and and workers do this all the time,
Speaker 1: confronting management about disrespect. You know, I think it's very
Speaker 1: much more frequently on an individual basis. But it's a
Speaker 1: matter of like connecting your issue with a couple other
Speaker 1: coworkers and then figure out, Okay, well, um, what what's
Speaker 1: our next step? But we need more numbers? How do
Speaker 1: we you know, how do we build more numbers? Uh?
Speaker 1: If each of us can invite one more person, that
Speaker 1: six people, if you know, if the six of us
Speaker 1: can are starting a petition, we could probably get you know,
Speaker 1: signature a fifty or sixty, you know, like it's it's
Speaker 1: step by step and saying if we want to build organization,
Speaker 1: we can do it from the bottom up. We can
Speaker 1: start it um and we can figure this out. I mean,
Speaker 1: every even within the same company, even within the same
Speaker 1: company in the same city there you know, I work
Speaker 1: at UM a delivery station, Engage Park, other delivery stations
Speaker 1: in the city of Chicago have a completely different culture,
Speaker 1: you know, the neighborhood that it's in the workers that
Speaker 1: are the bosses, you know, And so even in the
Speaker 1: same company, the same type of workplace in the same city,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be a different story for how that workplace
Speaker 1: is gonna you know, get united, come together, UM, figure
Speaker 1: things out, build organization, and it's just anyone there the
Speaker 1: is thinking about that. That that kind of just begins
Speaker 1: the process of putting together the basics. All right, we
Speaker 1: need to start building up some numbers. We need to
Speaker 1: start having, you know, addressing some issues that people care about.
Speaker 1: And there's always i mean, there's always the you know,
Speaker 1: overworked and underpaid and that's gonna exist everywhere. You can
Speaker 1: always go after those issues, but frequently they're small ones.
Speaker 1: Like our first issue was a water petition uh or
Speaker 1: or or or at was access to water UM, and
Speaker 1: this is how we started as an organization UM. Basically,
Speaker 1: they were taking away bottled water. They said we were
Speaker 1: leaving around too much garbage. They're saying bottled water is
Speaker 1: only there for the summer, and now that's not the summer.
Speaker 1: That whatever. They're trying to save a few dollars a
Speaker 1: day on bottled water to make us you know, work
Speaker 1: without it UM, and we said that's fucked up. We're
Speaker 1: doing warehouse work like this, hard manual labor, and it's
Speaker 1: hot in here. We need a bottle water. It's you know,
Speaker 1: not just that broken on filtered fountain across the warehouse
Speaker 1: that you can't even get to while you're working. Um.
Speaker 1: And so, uh, just a few of us that we're
Speaker 1: talking at break It was like, okay, well there's six
Speaker 1: of us here. Well we're kind of you know, this
Speaker 1: is the this is the break room at work. They're
Speaker 1: like managers walking around their cameras in here, like, let's
Speaker 1: meet outside, uh and figure this out. UM. So you know,
Speaker 1: we we met at a at a Crispy Cream down
Speaker 1: on like ninety third um, and uh we just basically
Speaker 1: said like, well, how are we gonna get this water?
Speaker 1: We've been asking management? Uh, you know they've given us
Speaker 1: the same reasons. We need to do something bigger that
Speaker 1: that they can't ignore. Um, how about a petition? And
Speaker 1: so we just drafted it. The six of us we
Speaker 1: drafted it. We went around. We got hundred fifty signatures
Speaker 1: I think from our co workers are just like basic commands.
Speaker 1: We need bottled water stocked every day. They need to
Speaker 1: be you know, filters need to be clean. We need
Speaker 1: to get a be able to take a break to
Speaker 1: get this water. Um. And we delivered the hundred fifty
Speaker 1: signatures to management. UM. I think it was within thirty
Speaker 1: or forty minutes, they drove to a grocery store, bought
Speaker 1: you know, went to the nearest pizza, bought every case
Speaker 1: a bottle. Why they have brought it and passed it
Speaker 1: out to everyone. We're like, oh, okay, like that was
Speaker 1: you know, people like that's just hey, we gotta do
Speaker 1: a petition for this thing. We gotta do, you know
Speaker 1: what we should? Probably it was that I don't want
Speaker 1: to say easy, because it's definitely not easy to like,
Speaker 1: but the steps, the step by step of like how
Speaker 1: do you begin, how do you get something started? How
Speaker 1: do you start building some immunity? Um? These are steps
Speaker 1: that we have taken. These are you know, what we
Speaker 1: think is can be applicable UM with everyone's own kind
Speaker 1: of personal tweaks based on you know, your own workplace. UM,
Speaker 1: to start getting something going from more coworkers, to start realizing,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, like we should be in more control of
Speaker 1: what's happening around here because we're the ones that are
Speaker 1: doing all the work, were the ones that are suffering
Speaker 1: the most from it in our bodies getting ground down
Speaker 1: from doing it, And so um, yeah, I think that
Speaker 1: I think I look back to a previous question to
Speaker 1: but like how we started, how you engage in the
Speaker 1: struggle and just like what that looks like for building
Speaker 1: building something up from nothing to something like that's why
Speaker 1: that's what we you know what I mean, that's what
Speaker 1: we did. Yeah, from what I've seen, you all have
Speaker 1: been extremely effective like at at getting management to recognize it,
Speaker 1: but essentially getting them to like a seed to your
Speaker 1: demands because like this, this this kind of organizing like
Speaker 1: so solid you need what what I'm trying to say,
Speaker 1: this is all the area to unist works like it's
Speaker 1: not like like and you know and yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: a thing. I think one of one of the things
Speaker 1: you're talking about it is like, yeah, it's like when
Speaker 1: like when you win even on something fairly small, right,
Speaker 1: and you can show people that this works and that
Speaker 1: like you know, if if, if, if you actually come
Speaker 1: together on something, you can force management to do stuff
Speaker 1: like I think that also become becomes an important sort
Speaker 1: of like I don't know if catalyst is the right word,
Speaker 1: but it becomes it becomes becomes an engine that like
Speaker 1: feeds itself definitely, I mean, especially for a big company
Speaker 1: like Amazon, like I think the most common perspective at
Speaker 1: least at the start is like, this is such a
Speaker 1: big company, Like, what could we possibly do? They have
Speaker 1: a thousand warehouses, like what you know, they could choose
Speaker 1: to close one and open another one, you know, they
Speaker 1: do this, or they could suddenly you know and with
Speaker 1: two weeks notice like change the schedule from an evening
Speaker 1: time to overnight time, which is what they did to us. Basically, Um,
Speaker 1: what can we possibly do? And so you know, but
Speaker 1: I think it's like the moment, it's like there's a
Speaker 1: a lift, uh what do you call like the watershed
Speaker 1: a point, like the moment you kind of take that
Speaker 1: first collective action and then get what you want. Um.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh wait, it's not as like within this
Speaker 1: space like we can actually make our lives a lot
Speaker 1: better pretty quickly. Yeah, we just come together and do
Speaker 1: it ourselves and recognize the power that we have. UM.
Speaker 1: And I think it's like mhm. That's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why it works so well is because it is
Speaker 1: different from the mainstream approach, which UM bosses and these
Speaker 1: companies understand very well and can easily maneuver around, such as,
Speaker 1: oh if we do if if one of our managers
Speaker 1: does something wrong, what will happen next is will receive
Speaker 1: one of our lawyers, will receive a grievance from one
Speaker 1: of their representative lawyers, and you know, this business union,
Speaker 1: we'll have this many months respond and then we can
Speaker 1: do this and then you know, uh, we'll do this
Speaker 1: paperwork and have this legal back and forth and then
Speaker 1: maybe we'll address this issue six to twelve months down
Speaker 1: the line. UM, no disruption, you know, nothing to worry about. UM,
Speaker 1: Let the bosses run amuck and we'll get a six
Speaker 1: to twelve month ad start to you know, and maybe
Speaker 1: get a slap on the wrist and a fixed wherever
Speaker 1: you need to or pay a small fine. UM as
Speaker 1: opposed to that's business unions, like as opposed to Southern unism,
Speaker 1: where it's like they just disrespected us in a way
Speaker 1: that like we're not trying to put up with, Like
Speaker 1: we are hurting. We can't even finish the shift without
Speaker 1: hurting ourselves more. We're just gonna group up the walk
Speaker 1: out right now. UM, they're gonna figure out, they're gonna
Speaker 1: have to figure out how to get the rest of
Speaker 1: these packages out without us. UM. And when we come
Speaker 1: back tomorrow, Uh, we'll see, we'll see if they want
Speaker 1: to keep treating us the same way. UM. And so
Speaker 1: it's like to me, you know, we we've had basic
Speaker 1: basic management confrontations where either immediately uh you know, they
Speaker 1: were understaffing and we grouped up rolled into office just
Speaker 1: like with seven of us, not even like the whole shift, Um,
Speaker 1: seven out of fifty people rolling off and said you
Speaker 1: have too few people on the lines. You you need
Speaker 1: an add extra person. We've been asking you have it. Um,
Speaker 1: We've folded our arms. Within five minutes, they send an
Speaker 1: extra person over there, they're working the rest of the the shift. UM.
Speaker 1: In the in the business union approach, like I don't
Speaker 1: even know, like how you followed you know, understaffing grievance,
Speaker 1: Like what are the details? How does that happen? Does
Speaker 1: a union representative have to be contacted and then negotiate
Speaker 1: in some way? Um like that, Like let's just address
Speaker 1: this right now and fix it. UM. I don't want
Speaker 1: to wait for some outside activity. Let's just improve our
Speaker 1: working conditions right now, like confronting and addressing it. UM.
Speaker 1: I think it just you know that's something that Um,
Speaker 1: the bosses are less, it's less predictable for them, it's
Speaker 1: less in their control, it's less in their wheelhouse. Um,
Speaker 1: and I think that's a prey reason why it works better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think one of one of the things the
Speaker 1: thing this reminds me of. It reminds me of the
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that unions used to do when they
Speaker 1: were strong, Like it reminds me of like, yeah, you're
Speaker 1: you're like c I O like sit down, strike right,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, okay, if if the manager is something
Speaker 1: we didn't we don't like so and blows a whistle,
Speaker 1: everyone sits down, and like it's like it's that that
Speaker 1: kind of not just sort of like way to go
Speaker 1: to the legal channels, but just just like I immediately
Speaker 1: taking action is like it's it's something that it's like
Speaker 1: it's it's something that works, and it's you know, like
Speaker 1: that that's that's the kind of stuff that like build
Speaker 1: you built the original like labor movement. And it's really
Speaker 1: interesting to me that, like because because I think there's
Speaker 1: a lot of like I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: look back at that era sort of like nostalgically and
Speaker 1: go like, well, Okay, if unions were stronger, we could
Speaker 1: do this, but like that's not really true. You you
Speaker 1: can't actually just like like you can do the same
Speaker 1: things that like, you know, you're like nineteen three c
Speaker 1: I O was doing like and and and if you
Speaker 1: know and you don't you don't need the kind of
Speaker 1: institutional backing that that those people had. If if like
Speaker 1: if if you're organized enough in your in your specific location,
Speaker 1: I think that's a really interesting I don't know, I'm
Speaker 1: curious if you agree with us. It seems like it's
Speaker 1: skord of interesting lesson about like what happens to the
Speaker 1: labor movement, where like the more the more you get
Speaker 1: into this sort of like okay, well the the union
Speaker 1: is now two lawyers sitting down with each other, right
Speaker 1: the what what you're doing basically is and then like
Speaker 1: this is this is this is explicitly what the National
Speaker 1: Labor Relations Act was, right Like it was an attempt
Speaker 1: to get labor, labor and capital sit down at the
Speaker 1: table and stop fighting so that they could like you know,
Speaker 1: basically Selft production could go on. And like some sometimes
Speaker 1: sometimes that that you know, sometimes I favor the union. Right,
Speaker 1: sometimes you'd have the president be like like the actual
Speaker 1: like US president would be like, okay, you come you
Speaker 1: like steal company. You have to like give workers what
Speaker 1: they're asking for because our steel production shut down, right,
Speaker 1: But like you know, the problem with that is that
Speaker 1: it's based on like it's based on at all costs
Speaker 1: trying to sort of preserve like it's based on cost
Speaker 1: like trying to preserve the labor peace. And you know,
Speaker 1: I mean there's reasons for that too, Like yeah, like
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna like like obviously there's there's any time
Speaker 1: you take a direct action, there's a risk and yeah,
Speaker 1: like I'm not gonna like, you know, I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: be like like it's it's hard to be really mad
Speaker 1: at people who don't want to go on strike because
Speaker 1: they don't like because you know, how how am I
Speaker 1: going to defeat my family? Etcetera, etcetera. But like you know,
Speaker 1: bringing like having that kind of militancy in the workplace,
Speaker 1: just you know, without without any kind of formal recognition,
Speaker 1: I think is an extremely powerful tactic. And is I
Speaker 1: mean literally how the original labor movement like got built.
Speaker 1: It's difficult, though, and it can be yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's like I think you you posed kind of
Speaker 1: the question or or or kind of questioning the idea
Speaker 1: like where did how did the labor movement get to
Speaker 1: where it's at if the origins were more conscious Um,
Speaker 1: in the ways that you've been describing UM, I think that. UM.
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's definitely you know, the risk is
Speaker 1: always there. You're always confronting the power. I mean in
Speaker 1: the workplace when it comes down to it, like obviously
Speaker 1: the power dynamics shift, and it's more complex than you know,
Speaker 1: Bosses have more power than workers unless workers organized and
Speaker 1: workers have more power than bosses. That is true. And
Speaker 1: also for example, on the day to day, you know,
Speaker 1: the boss can fire anyone and then you're you know,
Speaker 1: however you end up dealing with it. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: you could be out anywhere between two or twenty paychecks
Speaker 1: until something is resolved legally or even through direct Actually
Speaker 1: there's obviously very directly oppressive power dynamic there. UM. And
Speaker 1: I think that UM. To speak truth to power, to
Speaker 1: directly confronted UM. Of course, it's frightening. I mean I
Speaker 1: would be lying if you know, like I'm I'm you know,
Speaker 1: talking on this on this podcast about doing this and yeah,
Speaker 1: we're doing this, and like you know, I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: pretend that like when we were even when we were
Speaker 1: in a forty person mass, you know, confronting management, addressing
Speaker 1: everyone together. It's still like, you know, there's there's there's
Speaker 1: still this power dynamic here and we're punching up like
Speaker 1: it's a punch, but like we're punging up to someone
Speaker 1: that's like a bigger, heavier uh um adversary. And so
Speaker 1: it's like they could swing back to like you gotta
Speaker 1: gotta be ready to and so UM. I think that
Speaker 1: what I'm describing on a kind of like face to
Speaker 1: face interpersonal, that moment in the workplace, I think on
Speaker 1: a broader scale also exists where it's like waging an
Speaker 1: extended you know, organizing struggle to be fighting this fight
Speaker 1: millions of times in many different ways and then continually
Speaker 1: trying to bring people together. You know, people move on
Speaker 1: because everything that's happening in life. They got evicted from
Speaker 1: their place, so they had to move to a different
Speaker 1: place far away. Okay, suddenly they had to leave a job,
Speaker 1: and they were someone that was contributing a lot to
Speaker 1: the organizing. Something happened. Someone has a family member that
Speaker 1: uh you know that thing you need to spend a
Speaker 1: little bit more time with. Um. Everything that's happening. Everything
Speaker 1: that's making you know, reducing our time as working people
Speaker 1: to take care of ourselves and each other, like all
Speaker 1: of this. We're fighting against all of this, and um,
Speaker 1: they're definitely ups and downs. They're definitely times it was
Speaker 1: like thing like where you know, and then it seems
Speaker 1: I get times, Uh, all of the struggles and life
Speaker 1: like it's like you take like two steps forward and
Speaker 1: then two steps backwards. Get that, and so you know,
Speaker 1: there's definitely a difficult reality permeating everything. You know, all
Speaker 1: of the organizing winds, the advents that we're talking about.
Speaker 1: We need to be fully honest about that and also
Speaker 1: recognize that there's still like nothing more. There's like nothing
Speaker 1: more beautiful powerful, There's there's no there's nothing that feels
Speaker 1: better than that moment when you when the power dynamic
Speaker 1: was like this and you pull something off and it's
Speaker 1: like like, oh, like you you just did what we
Speaker 1: wanted you know and more and then now like you're
Speaker 1: being real careful with us, like we we change things here,
Speaker 1: like our lives are better concretely, um, and we made
Speaker 1: it happen, and uh, you know, I think those are
Speaker 1: like celebrating the winds and like taking joy, not always
Speaker 1: thinking so far, Okay, we've got more to go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're always there's always more that um, we can and
Speaker 1: have to be building. And let's make sure that we're
Speaker 1: taking the time to recognize, um and celebrate each of
Speaker 1: the steps that we are UM advancing, so that you know,
Speaker 1: we we don't get lost in you know, assuming in
Speaker 1: the cycle of like seeking permanent infinite growth and organizing
Speaker 1: and being constantly stressed out about it, rather than like
Speaker 1: taking those breathers, taking those moments. Okay, like let's take
Speaker 1: this and strive, let's do this sustainable, let's not burn out. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, I think that's all part of figuring out
Speaker 1: how to how to how to make it happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think that's that's an important I think that
Speaker 1: that's an important thing to understand with any kind of organizing,
Speaker 1: which is that like yeah, if if if you like
Speaker 1: if if if if, there's never sort of a moment
Speaker 1: in which you're reflecting on or sort of or just
Speaker 1: celebrating like that the goals that you've actually accomplished, Right,
Speaker 1: you're just going to sort of be endlessly bashing your
Speaker 1: head against the wall. And you know that this is
Speaker 1: this is like, yeah, I mean this is this is
Speaker 1: sort of a burnout machine. This is a a way
Speaker 1: that you know, it's something that also just sort of
Speaker 1: feeds despair, which is that yeah, like you know, like yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: your your victory is a small victory, but it is
Speaker 1: a real one. And that's that's something that even in
Speaker 1: the face of sort of like the Cyclopean horror of
Speaker 1: like just the world that we're living in, like no,
Speaker 1: your your small victories dude lead up to bigger ones
Speaker 1: and yeah, and you know, and getting people to lose
Speaker 1: sight of that is a like it's it's in made
Speaker 1: your way. The system is held together by just sort
Speaker 1: of like manufacturing hopelessness, even when there there there are
Speaker 1: reasons for hoping, there are reasons to sort of look
Speaker 1: at what you've done and go, hey, we we won
Speaker 1: this thing. Definitely, Yeah, I think that's a I guess
Speaker 1: unexpectedly cheery for this show. I know, to end on
Speaker 1: do you have anything else? Yeah, I mean I think
Speaker 1: we touched on a lot um. I guess I have
Speaker 1: a usual pits or some version of it um, But
Speaker 1: I think um, maybe something to bring together different elements
Speaker 1: that we touched on and bringing some of the sheery,
Speaker 1: hopefulness and all so put out some encouragement too. I
Speaker 1: think now is a time where there's a whole lot
Speaker 1: of uncertainty and I'm uh you know, definitely and a
Speaker 1: global week to week or year to year scale, but
Speaker 1: also on an individual level. I think a lot of
Speaker 1: individuals right now, UM likely those that are listening UM,
Speaker 1: that that end up listening to this or um those
Speaker 1: that are like seeing what's happening around the worlds like,
Speaker 1: what is my role in all of this? What am
Speaker 1: I trying to do? Different people are joining different organizations
Speaker 1: and and and trying to figure out how they should
Speaker 1: be living their lives, what the what principles they should
Speaker 1: be living out, how they should be applying themselves to
Speaker 1: for example, UM, combat and dismantle UM, I don't know,
Speaker 1: uh capitalism and and and uh you know, the prison
Speaker 1: industrial complex and reverse climate destruction and find fascism and
Speaker 1: everything all of examples existential threats that we face. It's like, what,
Speaker 1: you know, what is my role? And I think, UM,
Speaker 1: if if you at all have the capacity and curiosity,
Speaker 1: UM two, engage in some of this deep work yourself
Speaker 1: for building community relationships, culture among UM. You know, just
Speaker 1: with workers, build building your own organization, building your own
Speaker 1: acts of resistance, building your own forms of of of
Speaker 1: you know, own forms of reclaiming your time and and
Speaker 1: minds and bodies, and build something beautiful that can you know,
Speaker 1: be part of a broader movement that that you know,
Speaker 1: lifts up working people, that kind of gets back what
Speaker 1: we are building and what we what we deserve. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, think about think about the logistics and the
Speaker 1: three think about warehouse work, UM, think about joining in
Speaker 1: UM and UH you know it's uh, it's hard work.
Speaker 1: It's hard manual labor, it's hard mental and emotional work. UM.
Speaker 1: But I think this is the future of what the winning,
Speaker 1: fighting uh successful labor movement UM will need. UM. And
Speaker 1: I think many people engaging and building more genuine, more
Speaker 1: worker focus, worker centered, worker run UH solidarity unions of
Speaker 1: our own democratic horizontal bottom up UM. I think building
Speaker 1: this way and connecting with each other, I think this
Speaker 1: is the way forward. I think this is the examples
Speaker 1: that we need. We need more people engaging in this work.
Speaker 1: We need more uh, more of that tension, energy and focus,
Speaker 1: Like how do we build the real stuff? UM, that's
Speaker 1: gonna be the powerful organizational influence to transform society and
Speaker 1: and avert these forms of extinction and continued extraction, exploitation,
Speaker 1: oppression of all of us. UM, join us, Join, join
Speaker 1: the struggle, get get some of these jobs. Talk to
Speaker 1: your co workers, build something that. It's really that simple. UM.
Speaker 1: And uh, yeah, that's my that's my every day pitch. UM. So,
Speaker 1: if if people want to find Amazonians United specifically, where
Speaker 1: where where can they find y'all? UM? So in Chicago.
Speaker 1: So Amazonians United Chicago Land UM is our name. We
Speaker 1: have a Facebook page, we have a Twitter. UM. Those
Speaker 1: are probably where we're most active, UM, and where you
Speaker 1: can follow and get into contact with us. Tweet out us,
Speaker 1: message us on Facebook. UM. If you're really so inclined, UM,
Speaker 1: you can email us at a you Chicago land at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com. UM. But otherwise, yeah, just look up,
Speaker 1: you know, follow our social media. You'll see what we
Speaker 1: post occasionally about what's going on. UM, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: feel free to reach out, get into contact, ask any
Speaker 1: questions you might have, UM, and you know, let's connect,
Speaker 1: let's build community. Yeah, and that's that's a Chicagoland at
Speaker 1: a Chicago Land on Twitter. By the way, yeah. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: sweet Ted, thank you, thank you so thank you so
Speaker 1: much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's really great. Um yeah, if you want to find
Speaker 1: us at you can find us at Happened here a
Speaker 1: pod on Twitter, Instagram and coos on media in the
Speaker 1: same places. Um yeah, go go go work nice with
Speaker 1: your coworkers, go do cool things, go be do all
Speaker 1: a better place. Yes, yes, yes, sure, um yeah, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, arned, arned me arties. This is me doing
Speaker 1: a priorate voice, which is kind of a bad, bad
Speaker 1: Irish voice. That's enough. That's enough of that. Um, hi,
Speaker 1: welcome to take it oppen here in the show where
Speaker 1: we're talking about things that could possibly happen and or
Speaker 1: are happening, and go your hartsed l D. I'm Carrison.
Speaker 1: Welcome to this tech centric episode. This is very exciting
Speaker 1: with me, is Chris to help us discuss libraries and
Speaker 1: a racy argent brain and and pay walls and all
Speaker 1: this all this fun stuff. So yeah, we're talking about
Speaker 1: kind of free access to information and uh, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like I really like libraries and I think a library
Speaker 1: based economy would be pretty cool. Yeah, you know, libraries
Speaker 1: for everything. Uh, food libraries you to take food, need
Speaker 1: a deposit compost um with the decent, decent system. Got
Speaker 1: the tool libraries so you can get you know, your
Speaker 1: angle grinders for taking apart in federal fences. You can
Speaker 1: get your you know, soldering irons for building your f
Speaker 1: GC nines, you know, all all of all of the
Speaker 1: basic stuff. And I guess book libraries are cool too, um,
Speaker 1: But we already have those, and we're gonna be We're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking with them a little bit. Where are
Speaker 1: we having a discussion on pay walls, piracy, ar and
Speaker 1: uh and how access to information is actually good? Um,
Speaker 1: contrary to what many people want to tell you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know though. Yeah. As a as the Internet became
Speaker 1: easier to access and information flow accelerated, there's been kind
Speaker 1: of questions and speculation on how physical book libraries will
Speaker 1: fit into our increasingly digital media landscape. Now, it's important
Speaker 1: to mention that the library is also one of the
Speaker 1: main ways for lower income people to access the internet
Speaker 1: UM with their you know collection of free to use
Speaker 1: computers as well as you know, a decent WiFi connection UM.
Speaker 1: And many many libraries also are expanding their scope to
Speaker 1: include stuff like maker spaces as well as you know,
Speaker 1: their printers and standard kind of office supplies. So libraries
Speaker 1: are already kind of beyond just places to get printed media.
Speaker 1: But of course it is that is kind of their
Speaker 1: one that has been their main their main premise. But
Speaker 1: you know, they've been, they've been including stuff regarding e books,
Speaker 1: computer use, WiFi access, all the stuff has been a
Speaker 1: part of libraries for like the past twenty years. Of Yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's it's not. It's not. It's not. It's not.
Speaker 1: It's not a new thing. But I think when when
Speaker 1: people think of libraries, we just think of books, are
Speaker 1: newspapers and stuff, but it is, it is definitely more
Speaker 1: than that. Because yeah, obviously physical libraries are mostly known
Speaker 1: for printing materials, and because we'll be talking about paywalls
Speaker 1: and piracy are um and and fears that access to
Speaker 1: free content will negatively impact creator's ability to make such content,
Speaker 1: I figured let's start by talking about book libraries, since
Speaker 1: they're one of the oldest examples of providing information for free.
Speaker 1: So based on kind of surveys and data collected from
Speaker 1: you from library users across the country, it would seem
Speaker 1: that libraries and loaned e books are actually a very
Speaker 1: powerful economic engine for the book business. Now, yes, libraries
Speaker 1: do have special deals to buy the books that you
Speaker 1: have in stock. Sometimes they're donated. But even beyond that fact,
Speaker 1: like library users, like the fact that libraries exist for
Speaker 1: the users in and of themselves, increase book sales. Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's a it's it's pretty fun. So even as
Speaker 1: far back as there's been studies that show that libraries
Speaker 1: do increase book sales. Now, yes, this is this is
Speaker 1: this is a capitalist argument. But sometimes when arguing with
Speaker 1: let's you know, let's call them normies, Um, you can
Speaker 1: convince them to agree with a lot of kind of
Speaker 1: like anarchy leaning improvements to the world by carefully using
Speaker 1: their own rhetoric against them. Right, this is this is
Speaker 1: like the same thing with the giving out free drugs
Speaker 1: and having safe drug in in like intake sites, and
Speaker 1: giving your houses to homeless people, you know, all all
Speaker 1: the type of stuff. You know, all of those things
Speaker 1: are cheaper for the taxpayers than what we're currently doing
Speaker 1: with how we use emergencies, like how for how we
Speaker 1: use emergency services spending. So, yes, it's a capitalist argument,
Speaker 1: but you can still kind of you know, paint someone
Speaker 1: into a corner to agree that like actual good improvements
Speaker 1: by using hey, this is actually cheaper, you know that
Speaker 1: that type of argument. So yeah, libraries, they do increase
Speaker 1: book sales, so that is mostly cool. There is there
Speaker 1: was a study that shows around this is studying around
Speaker 1: showed that library users report purchasing books by an author
Speaker 1: that they were introduced to through the library system, which
Speaker 1: debunks the myth that want a library bias books the
Speaker 1: publisher will lose future sales. Um. Instead, it confirms that
Speaker 1: the public library does not only incubate and support literacy
Speaker 1: as it's you know, generally understood in our culture, but
Speaker 1: it's also an active partner with the publishing industry for
Speaker 1: building up the book market and also including in that
Speaker 1: is the ever growing e book market, which I don't
Speaker 1: really like the books for reasons will kind of discuss
Speaker 1: in a bit for how I kind of have an
Speaker 1: aversion to the idea of like digital ownership, But the
Speaker 1: books are undeniably a very growing industry that also you know,
Speaker 1: does does support writers in a lot of ways. Um.
Speaker 1: But I think physical books are a lot cooler and
Speaker 1: more reliable. They are, as you can tell by my
Speaker 1: very nice physical book collection behind me, which you cannot
Speaker 1: listen to because this is a podcast and you can't
Speaker 1: listen with your ears unless you're on a lot of drugs,
Speaker 1: which good luck hearing the books behind me. People who
Speaker 1: listen to Yeah you too, but yeah, I'm not. I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about them. Um, this is an anti people
Speaker 1: who have jug induced cynthesia podcast. Now, Lucky Bastard's gonna
Speaker 1: get canceled. Oh yeah, that's what's gonna get me after all. Well,
Speaker 1: bleep that I can't belave you said that? Whoa Chris
Speaker 1: just said one of the just one of the most,
Speaker 1: one of the most one of the most horrible authors
Speaker 1: that I would never be caught dead reading any of
Speaker 1: their books. Um anyway. Ah So, the idea that like
Speaker 1: piracy and free information will like tank creative industries, and
Speaker 1: you know, the idea that you know, just having access
Speaker 1: to free version of media will hurt the ability to
Speaker 1: make more of the media is definitely proven wrong simply
Speaker 1: by the modern existence and popularity of nume uh in
Speaker 1: the United States, because we would not have anime Animal
Speaker 1: would not be what it is today without piracy. Uh
Speaker 1: and uh because in the in the specifically like two
Speaker 1: thousands late nineties, the piracy of anime became you know,
Speaker 1: big massive reason why it is the cultural jugg or
Speaker 1: not that it is. Today over half of nime related
Speaker 1: sales revenue comes from overseas, not not Japan, it comes
Speaker 1: from places like the States. Yeah, and you know, and
Speaker 1: it's also I think worth mentioning here, Like it wasn't
Speaker 1: even just that they were like pirating the show, right,
Speaker 1: they were pirating they were getting a worse version of it,
Speaker 1: oh because like you know, yeah, terrible resolutions like I
Speaker 1: mean literally like VCRs that people had figured out how
Speaker 1: to like right like get subtitles on. Like these versions
Speaker 1: of it are terrible. The translations are awful, and it's
Speaker 1: still just like absolutely like just catapulted anime from like
Speaker 1: an incredibly fringe thing for weirdos to a thing that
Speaker 1: is also still for weirdos, but it's still mainstream. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna take take this opportunity to plug
Speaker 1: our future episode just dissecting the politics of attack on
Speaker 1: tited dot dot dot do it's coming folks and strap
Speaker 1: in so yes, what not would not be the thing
Speaker 1: is today without without without privacy. And again but the
Speaker 1: majority of of sales revenue comes from not Japan. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a pretty pretty pretty clear. So the discovery
Speaker 1: of new books and authors through the library system UM
Speaker 1: is definitely searching right now, actually specifically due to e
Speaker 1: books and audio books being available online anytime, well like
Speaker 1: via library means. So there's like, you know, there's there's
Speaker 1: ways you can access you can quote unquote sorrow these
Speaker 1: types of things via via the library systems, despite them
Speaker 1: being like digital media, which again I prefer physical, but
Speaker 1: that's that's something we'll talk about later. So even even
Speaker 1: while lib visits to libraries and like physical bookstores, a
Speaker 1: pommeted during COVID nineteen digital library usage sword, which is
Speaker 1: you know that that that that that that tracks UM,
Speaker 1: more than four hundred and thirty million titles were borrowed
Speaker 1: from the Overdrive library platform in alone, and it would
Speaker 1: you know, you could you could assume that this would
Speaker 1: cause a drop in the purchasing of books during the
Speaker 1: same period, but the opposite is true. Actually, the overall
Speaker 1: purchasing of books also rose in twenty including an eight
Speaker 1: percent lift in these sales of print books. Despite a
Speaker 1: lot of people being out of jobs, out of work,
Speaker 1: you know that turns out people are boards. They're gonna
Speaker 1: spend money on books because books are cool, and even
Speaker 1: when they have access to library stuff, they still buy books.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a it's a simple truth that the
Speaker 1: library patrons are usually also book buyers. It's it's me.
Speaker 1: I am literally surrounded by books on all sides that
Speaker 1: they have me surrounded. I have no escape. And this
Speaker 1: is what happens when you grow up in a library.
Speaker 1: I mean I also grew up in a library. Mean
Speaker 1: I was, I was homeschooled. I a library. To my
Speaker 1: to to my left, I have books on urban exploration
Speaker 1: and Lemony Snicket. My right, I have books on alchemy.
Speaker 1: Behind me, I have books which I should I'll not
Speaker 1: name um. And behind me I have a massive techo
Speaker 1: comic books of Yeah, I have usually surrounded by books.
Speaker 1: It's the books are great and you you have them
Speaker 1: unless they burn up. You're gonna have them, no matter
Speaker 1: whether the Internet goes out, whether whether an online provider
Speaker 1: shuts down, You're gonna you're gonna have physical books. They
Speaker 1: are they are, they are pretty, they're pretty cool. So
Speaker 1: in libraries, and like the library system offers a really
Speaker 1: great way to discover new books, new series, new genres,
Speaker 1: or new authors, but for deciding whether to permanently purchase
Speaker 1: those titles. So it's it's this isn't just like an
Speaker 1: assumption used to hype up the idea of a library.
Speaker 1: But this has been proven by lots of studies, like
Speaker 1: the why I mentioned a few minutes ago from two
Speaker 1: US and eleven. Also there was the Panorama Projects Immersive
Speaker 1: Media and Books Consumer Survey which is a way too
Speaker 1: long with a title real Mouthful, which found that one
Speaker 1: third of responders bought a book that they discovered through
Speaker 1: the library in So it turns out you you discover
Speaker 1: a book, you turn it and you're like, hey, that
Speaker 1: book actually pretty good. I'll just buy a copy myself.
Speaker 1: I did that. I still do that all the time.
Speaker 1: It's ah, yeah, it's it's it's it's it's a thing.
Speaker 1: So why I own all my Star Wars books? This
Speaker 1: is why I have a beautiful copy of Splinter in
Speaker 1: the Mind's Eye, which I am very curious to see
Speaker 1: who will get that joke. I was trying. I was
Speaker 1: trying to think of the worst Star worst book that
Speaker 1: I have, and then you said that, I'm like, I
Speaker 1: can't I think actually have that. Well, there you go,
Speaker 1: there's there's two. There's two for you. Uh yeah. So
Speaker 1: in our kind of in our life technology driven world
Speaker 1: of like, you know, wanting things very quickly, you know,
Speaker 1: instant instant gratification. UM. Library users are no different. Right,
Speaker 1: they still have that instant gratification drive, and many times
Speaker 1: they will want a specific a book and they'll be
Speaker 1: happy to pay for it instead of waiting for at
Speaker 1: the library. Right, you can put a book on hold,
Speaker 1: await a month, or you can buy it for ten bucks,
Speaker 1: and oftentimes people will buy the book because we want
Speaker 1: things quickly. It's according to the same Panorama Project Immersive
Speaker 1: the Media and Books consumer survey, about of respondents said
Speaker 1: that they just bought books rather than waiting for them
Speaker 1: if they are unavailable from from the library at the time. So,
Speaker 1: and it's it's it's a great system. Like libraries are
Speaker 1: also frequently used just as like a really good browsing tool. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're unsure what you want to read next,
Speaker 1: you can go to the library look at stuff and
Speaker 1: to be like, okay, this is what I'm interested in,
Speaker 1: and then purchase it online or in person at a
Speaker 1: later date. And it's not just it's not not not
Speaker 1: not just physical books. Library users are also are also
Speaker 1: driving the purchase e books and physical books um and
Speaker 1: audio books. Audiobooks have been actually very big at library.
Speaker 1: I used to listen to a lot of audio books
Speaker 1: actually from the library because I would get c d
Speaker 1: s back when those great for road trips, back in
Speaker 1: the oldie days, when you had a c D I
Speaker 1: say with my gen z uh um outlook Yes, uh
Speaker 1: c d s classic classic. According to the Audio Publishers
Speaker 1: Association also known as the a P A just acronym,
Speaker 1: daily audiobo consumption has grown seventy one since, which is
Speaker 1: not surprising me. Like there's there's there's stuff like Audible
Speaker 1: and you know, big big platforms that are are making
Speaker 1: high quality audiobook content. Uh, but that's that's that's a
Speaker 1: lot um alone. Audio book a revenue grew by even
Speaker 1: even though the number of people who were commuting plummeted,
Speaker 1: right because a lot of people listen to audiobooks while
Speaker 1: like driving to work. So the number of you know,
Speaker 1: of commuting dropped in because there was this plague. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if you've heard about that, but they still
Speaker 1: that's true they're pretending it's not real. But if yeah,
Speaker 1: if if if, if you look at most if you
Speaker 1: look at you know, the the audiobook revenue, it grew
Speaker 1: despite their being much less much less um much less
Speaker 1: work commuting. And that was the eighth straight year of
Speaker 1: double of double digit growth in the audio book revenue sector.
Speaker 1: And it aligns with other kind of digital library usage statistics.
Speaker 1: So yeah, like libraries and booksellers, will they work in tandem.
Speaker 1: They they library's drive interest or content both physical and digital.
Speaker 1: You know, rising tide races, all all of those floaty
Speaker 1: things on the water. Um as the saying goes are
Speaker 1: it's a piracy joke, everybody. Yeah. Over Drive has found
Speaker 1: that when a reader uses one or more digital library
Speaker 1: apps like a Libby I've never heard of until I
Speaker 1: had to research on this podcast, but once you if
Speaker 1: you use more than one one or more digit digital
Speaker 1: library apps you're sixty, you are more likely to increase
Speaker 1: your book consumption year over year versus people who do not.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it turns out when you read more books,
Speaker 1: you want to read more books because it's fun. It's fun.
Speaker 1: So instead of instead of reading a book, I'm going
Speaker 1: to give our audio listeners an opportunity right now to
Speaker 1: listen to this carefully curated selection of ads unless they're
Speaker 1: by like, I don't know, the National Guard or whatever.
Speaker 1: So here you go, here's here's some ads, and we
Speaker 1: are back. What a lovely, lovely collection of audio treats
Speaker 1: to tickle your ears. Okay, okay, you're god speaking speaking
Speaker 1: of tickling your ears. Sonic the Hedgehog. So a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of the reasons why we're gonna so
Speaker 1: this this, this will make sense, I promise. Um, we're
Speaker 1: about to talk about fly genetics, ssh Sonic Hedgehog. We're
Speaker 1: talking about how like when people are allowed to like
Speaker 1: do piracy and allowed to do like their own things
Speaker 1: with media and actually boosts the overall kind of like
Speaker 1: the presence of the franchise. Right, So, Sonic the Hedgehog
Speaker 1: would not be a current cultural steak if it wasn't
Speaker 1: for fan culture and the use of like fan games
Speaker 1: and fan media related to Sonic. So the same thing
Speaker 1: with like anime, right, Um, you know, Sonic Sonic fan games,
Speaker 1: which were allowed to be existed for years, which they
Speaker 1: get encouraged, are the only reason why there's a good
Speaker 1: Sonic Games right now, Like Sonic Mania, which were just
Speaker 1: they just hired people who made fan game. Um, the
Speaker 1: person who redesigned Sonic the Hedgehog for the movie what
Speaker 1: used to make Sonic fan comics and then got hired
Speaker 1: to make the actual official Sonic comics. Then they got
Speaker 1: hired to fix them. They got hired to fix the
Speaker 1: horrible movie design. So yeah, say, it has been very
Speaker 1: good about like not being horrible about like copyright stuff
Speaker 1: and trademark stuff. They've like really encouraged it because it
Speaker 1: turns out when you when you yourself don't make good games,
Speaker 1: you need to rely on fans to actually make the
Speaker 1: good games. So we get so that's how you get
Speaker 1: beautiful creations like the Sonic Dreams Collection, which is a heartwarming,
Speaker 1: nostalgic look at Sonic through the Ages um, and other
Speaker 1: great games like Sonic Mania, which so we can compare
Speaker 1: this to like a Nintendo who unfortunately makes good games um,
Speaker 1: but also hates when fans make games or do like
Speaker 1: emulation or any like ports. They will clamp down on
Speaker 1: that so fast. If you ever emulate a Nintendo game,
Speaker 1: you know, watch watch your back. There will be there
Speaker 1: will be men in black students following you around just
Speaker 1: like to understanding of like how far this goes? Right,
Speaker 1: So Super Smash Bros And Bilet this game is like
Speaker 1: maybe older than Garrison. It is. I think I actually
Speaker 1: don't know what that trade, but yeah, literally old and Garrison. Right,
Speaker 1: this game has a still still to this day, Like
Speaker 1: copies of this game are extremely expensive because there's an
Speaker 1: enormous professional scene around it. Uh. Nintendo like basically was
Speaker 1: working to actively smash them because they were they were
Speaker 1: playing a yeah yeah, yeah, because they because they were
Speaker 1: playing on like an emulated like they're playing an emulated
Speaker 1: version of it for tournaments because it's emulated software. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And Nintendo again, who is literally getting like millions of
Speaker 1: views of completely free good publicity, was like, no, we
Speaker 1: hate you. Nintendo will like this when people use they're
Speaker 1: they're like there their content and stuff in ways that
Speaker 1: are not not not afficill and because they make decent games,
Speaker 1: they can actually get away with that, um sega, let's
Speaker 1: not make decent games that questioning. So they have to
Speaker 1: rely on fans doing that. But yeah, that's the reason
Speaker 1: why Sonic is still a thing, just because fans have
Speaker 1: have been able to you know, through through piracy, through
Speaker 1: emulation through creating, through ucing like Sonic code to code
Speaker 1: their own games all stuff. As is the reason why
Speaker 1: that's still like a cultural staple. That is releasing a
Speaker 1: new movie next month. But I'm very excited about I'm
Speaker 1: very excited about some Sonic that he had hug too.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be, It's gonna be. I'm thinking, I'm thinking
Speaker 1: it could we could finally clamp down on the video
Speaker 1: game Oscar this time. I feel it. Well, that's that's look,
Speaker 1: this is this this this is just because Ace Attorney
Speaker 1: got robbed. Okay, createst movie of all time. That is
Speaker 1: That is my little side bit about about about about
Speaker 1: sega Um. Yeah, we should also briefly mentioned that Nintendo
Speaker 1: just like put literally put a guy in prison for
Speaker 1: helping for helping jailbreak consoles, like put putting man in
Speaker 1: prison for this for modifying people's software and a game console.
Speaker 1: I guess the other thing I'll talk about is, like,
Speaker 1: I mean, part of the reason why I really don't
Speaker 1: like digital ownership of media is because you don't actually
Speaker 1: own the thing. You own a license to use the
Speaker 1: content as long as the online services active. So even
Speaker 1: if you buy a game on you know, the Nintendo
Speaker 1: Switch Store. You're not actually buying the game, you're buying
Speaker 1: a license to use the game. The same thing for
Speaker 1: whether you're buying media on like Amazon Prime, right, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's the same thing if you're if you're
Speaker 1: buying digital copy of it, it's a license to use it,
Speaker 1: so you can take you know, what Nintendo has done
Speaker 1: a few years ago is they shut down the U
Speaker 1: Shop channel, which means if you bought a game and
Speaker 1: it wasn't creantly downloaded, you can now you've just it's gone.
Speaker 1: You just cannot you cannot play it anymore because they
Speaker 1: just completely took service down, so you don't actually you're
Speaker 1: not you're not actually buying the thing, you're just buying
Speaker 1: a license to use the thing. Now. They did the
Speaker 1: same thing a few months ago for the w U
Speaker 1: Shop channel and the three D S channel. So yeah,
Speaker 1: rip ripped to that. If you if you if you have,
Speaker 1: if you bought games on there that we're not currently running,
Speaker 1: then you cannot get them anymore. They're just gone, like
Speaker 1: you can, they're just lost lost of time. Well and
Speaker 1: you know, and again, if if you if you modified
Speaker 1: the software on the game console, that you like nominally
Speaker 1: own in order to play the games that you bought
Speaker 1: and paid for. They will throw you in prison. Nintendo
Speaker 1: will send men in suits to come and get you
Speaker 1: and throw you in the prison. Yeah. Who he it's
Speaker 1: a it's a Mario. It's a Mario joke. Everybody. Um, yes, So,
Speaker 1: I mean it's the same thing with like subscription services.
Speaker 1: Like obviously, if you have a subscription service, you don't
Speaker 1: own the content you're watching. You are just getting permission
Speaker 1: to use it from a certain amount of time. So
Speaker 1: this is obviously. This is this is more obvious. Right,
Speaker 1: you don't owe what's on Netflix. You just are able
Speaker 1: to watch what Netflix has legal rights to show. But
Speaker 1: you even see this thing extended to like cars, like
Speaker 1: Toyota was was trying out a program and that this
Speaker 1: may even it may even still be active for some
Speaker 1: car is where you need a subscription service to use
Speaker 1: the key fob on your cars like automat, like like
Speaker 1: door locking, like fob, like you need a subscription to
Speaker 1: use that service of it. Just like why, Like it's
Speaker 1: it's just turning everything, it's turning everything into us to
Speaker 1: us like a subscription service. It's horrible, Like everything is
Speaker 1: becoming a new subscription service, a new a new thing
Speaker 1: to get your monthly payments for. It's it's it's awful,
Speaker 1: like you don't actually buy things anymore. It's just a
Speaker 1: subscription services and digital copies. It's not nothing is nothing
Speaker 1: is actually the thing anymore? Yeah, it's it's it's all
Speaker 1: just rent extraction and the entire economy. Instead of you know,
Speaker 1: having a thing, they figured out way, what if we
Speaker 1: just distract rent and then you also don't own it.
Speaker 1: The same thing with like Tesla cars you have to
Speaker 1: like buy buy you know, upgrades via software that are
Speaker 1: already built in and like subscribe to keep your car
Speaker 1: running nicely. Like what it's not like no, yeah, like
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna go on a very small game
Speaker 1: or rent here because this this is a this is
Speaker 1: the thing. A lot a lot of the worst practices
Speaker 1: for this rigidated gaming and this this was this was
Speaker 1: a big fight back in like the early thousand pens
Speaker 1: about okay, if you buy a game, right, do you
Speaker 1: own everything on the game. And there was a huge
Speaker 1: fight about you know, they have these like delayed DLC,
Speaker 1: like they have these new content packages that would be
Speaker 1: on the disc right that you've bought, but you can't
Speaker 1: access it unless you pay the money. And this was
Speaker 1: like a fight, and some gamers were like, you know,
Speaker 1: they're trying to fight it, right, but most gamers didn't care.
Speaker 1: And then they became the weaponized shock troops to the
Speaker 1: far right instead of you know, dealing with this ship.
Speaker 1: And now literally everything has fucking day and day one
Speaker 1: DLC on it that you buy the thing, you don't
Speaker 1: even get all you have to you have to buy
Speaker 1: the if you have to buy the season pass to
Speaker 1: get all the content in the future. It's like you
Speaker 1: have to buy the season pass for your car to
Speaker 1: work properly. Yeah, so this is just how capital it
Speaker 1: started with. Star started with the season pass for a
Speaker 1: sixty for a sixty dollar game to then buy season
Speaker 1: pass to get more of the game, and now it's
Speaker 1: for your fIF car. So yeah, that's fun. It's it's not,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of sucks. So but yeah, a lot
Speaker 1: of these, a lot of these like play to win practices,
Speaker 1: these like free models which then like which lead into
Speaker 1: like a subscription service based model. Um have did da
Speaker 1: have definitely started in online gaming, and it's yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's really frustrating because, as we'll talk about here in
Speaker 1: a bit, like the Sega model is like better, Like
Speaker 1: turns out when you encourage your fans to play around
Speaker 1: with the stuff, it only helps your property. Like that's
Speaker 1: the reason why they there's still Sonic March available now
Speaker 1: and it's not like a dead franchise. It's because they
Speaker 1: because they allowed that to happen. So it's actually really
Speaker 1: cool when we're allowed to access for information and play
Speaker 1: with it how we want to, instead of like having
Speaker 1: this weird strict copyright like rules for not allowing certain
Speaker 1: usage of certain things. Like it's it's it's not. It's
Speaker 1: not great when you're restricting like emulation, restricting fan games,
Speaker 1: restricting access to information. It's not. It's not. It's it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not fun. But yeah, this is kind of it's
Speaker 1: kind of place into why I am very skeptical of
Speaker 1: digital media, which to why I start started collecting blue
Speaker 1: rays and all of all the things they like, because
Speaker 1: I've botten things that Amazon Prime which are now no
Speaker 1: longer available on Amazon Prime and that sucks, so like
Speaker 1: why do that instead just buy your physical copy? Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: the thing is like it didn't and it's so true
Speaker 1: to some extent, like if you buy physical copies, like
Speaker 1: it didn't used to be like this, like blue rays
Speaker 1: used to it to some extent, still dubious most things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but like like if if you buy the physical copy
Speaker 1: of it, they will give you a code that lets
Speaker 1: you use the online version, a digital download code. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know that's a much better way of the
Speaker 1: thing working than uh instead of you know, you don't
Speaker 1: buying it, you don't have the physical product, and also
Speaker 1: they can take it away from you. Yeah, it's I'll
Speaker 1: circle back to this idea towards the end, but I
Speaker 1: kind of want to, I want I want to a
Speaker 1: little bit segue to like the idea of the type
Speaker 1: of like paywalling, subscription service issues, and like the restriction
Speaker 1: of for information regarding online news. So, you know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people, whether they be like reporters, editors, authors,
Speaker 1: or just annoying people online. Um, but there's a decent
Speaker 1: collection of people that perpetuate the notion that readers or
Speaker 1: consumers are actually responsible for the dire straits of the
Speaker 1: media industry. But the problem with journalism and many other
Speaker 1: media you know, industries. But the problem isn't that people
Speaker 1: aren't paying for news. The problem is that newspapers and
Speaker 1: outlets are being decimated and dismantled by hedge funds, capital
Speaker 1: investment firms, venture capitalists, and tech companies in search of profit. UM.
Speaker 1: You can look at how Facebook tricked a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of companies into switching over to video content and then
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of companies had to fire tons of
Speaker 1: people because there was a lie. You can look at
Speaker 1: how Sinclair Broadcasting dominates local news channels and websites UM,
Speaker 1: and how well established local papers are struggling while big
Speaker 1: companies buy up all the competition. So it's it's it's
Speaker 1: especially the venture capitalist thing is actually a really UH
Speaker 1: is a really interesting idea that has been documented decently well.
Speaker 1: And in the bed, I'll teach you how to bypass
Speaker 1: UH newspaper headlines via different methods. But there's this actually
Speaker 1: good article in the Washington Post UM that is titled
Speaker 1: as a secretive hedge fund gets its newspapers journalists are
Speaker 1: fighting back. It kind of just details all of the
Speaker 1: different hedge funds, adventure capitalists firms instead of like just
Speaker 1: totally destroyed so many local papers throughout the entire country.
Speaker 1: It's actually kind of surprising once you learn how many
Speaker 1: of these papers are just getting destroyed by like just
Speaker 1: a few, like just like a few hedge funds are
Speaker 1: just doing all this damage. And it's it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is why the current like journalism industry
Speaker 1: kind of sucks right now, is because of these types
Speaker 1: of practices. And I mean, like no one likes it,
Speaker 1: like no one's had be with it, Like everyone hates journalism.
Speaker 1: Journalists hate journalism, people who read journalism hates journalism, like
Speaker 1: activists hate journalism, like everyone's met at it um. And yeah,
Speaker 1: you can look at these these hedge funds and venture
Speaker 1: capitalists who are just like making it such an impossible industry. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then you know how you have like you have
Speaker 1: internet sites and culture sites like Vice, BuzzFeed and Cracked
Speaker 1: who had to frequently lay off large swaths of their
Speaker 1: editorial and writing teams, whether for like union reasons or
Speaker 1: because the company made failed attempt to chase some big
Speaker 1: tech companies or media giants you know, like proposed money,
Speaker 1: like in the Facebook switching over to video content kind
Speaker 1: of debacle that happened a few years ago, and like
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's understandable why these writers, artists, the
Speaker 1: journalists are frustrated because yeah, the work is hard and
Speaker 1: the salaries are low. Well, the work should be hard.
Speaker 1: Some people kind of slack off, but you know, for
Speaker 1: the good journalism is more is challenging, and salaries typically
Speaker 1: aren't great. But even if audience monetary is support, where
Speaker 1: the solution to making creative and writing industry is more profitable, again,
Speaker 1: the kind of anti piracy folks would still be missing.
Speaker 1: A fundamental point is that kind of the the pro
Speaker 1: paywell people want you to get it through your head
Speaker 1: that journalism is just like other types of things you buy,
Speaker 1: whether it be food, you know, alcohol or entertainment um
Speaker 1: saying you know all these things. You know, Netflix isn't free.
Speaker 1: You know, Coca Cola isn't free. Right, This isn't journalism's fault.
Speaker 1: It's just how the world works. You have to buy
Speaker 1: it to use it. It's you know, it costs money
Speaker 1: to make, you have to buy it to use it.
Speaker 1: It's just it's it's it's like it's dumb to think otherwise.
Speaker 1: This is kind of their framework. But I beg to
Speaker 1: differ because enjoying art and worthwhile journalism I think should
Speaker 1: always have the option of being free, because when information
Speaker 1: is in the public interest, it should just always be
Speaker 1: available to everybody, whether or not you've already used up
Speaker 1: your three free articles. Like this is really important, especially
Speaker 1: now when there's you know, the whole the whole war
Speaker 1: thing happening and finding like pay all the articles about
Speaker 1: it is incredibly frustrating. Uh. And yeah, I mean there
Speaker 1: was even when the there was a right wing right
Speaker 1: ring extremist who opened fire and killed someone at a
Speaker 1: Portland's uh black Lives Matter protests a few weeks ago. Uh,
Speaker 1: that that is you know, still definitely impacting the city
Speaker 1: because it was it's it's still very recent. But a
Speaker 1: lot of the news coverage, first of all, it wasn't great. Uh.
Speaker 1: There was a whole bunch of news coverage was like
Speaker 1: was parroting the police lies and framing the framing the
Speaker 1: attacker is like an innocent homeowner who was defending himself.
Speaker 1: It was pretty gross. But even when even when the
Speaker 1: news articles started to like correct their previous agree with errors, um,
Speaker 1: almost all of it was paid walled like all like
Speaker 1: all like a whole bunch of stuff was pay welled
Speaker 1: about it, and that's incredibly frustrating because this is like,
Speaker 1: you know, when information is in the public interest, it
Speaker 1: should be free to access. Like that's just there's like
Speaker 1: a good moral thing like uh and even um And
Speaker 1: we've seen it. We've seen this before. Back in when
Speaker 1: the plague was a new thing. News organizations across the
Speaker 1: country started to lift pay walls to share coverage of
Speaker 1: the coronavirus pandemic um, which was great and you know,
Speaker 1: you can you can obviously see that once that changed over,
Speaker 1: a lot of people who we're making this happen behind
Speaker 1: the scenes probably hoped that it just convince people to
Speaker 1: become paying customers. But it was still like, that's still
Speaker 1: the way things should be is to have have the
Speaker 1: option of it being free and then having the option
Speaker 1: to donate. And this actually seems to be kind of
Speaker 1: the trend. Uh. The University of Texas at Austin surveyed
Speaker 1: about like a thousand Chicago residents about their local news consumption,
Speaker 1: and they found that respondents were more willing to give
Speaker 1: a ten dollar donation to support a free news site
Speaker 1: than pay ten dollars for a subscription to access premium
Speaker 1: news content. So yeah, like that's and that I definite
Speaker 1: you share that same like, uh, that same idea, I
Speaker 1: will weigh sooner donate money to a newspaper that I
Speaker 1: enjoy that is also free that I will pay ten
Speaker 1: dollars a month to read subscription service based news. It's
Speaker 1: a it's because it turns out when you like this.
Speaker 1: This applies to all types of media. But like when
Speaker 1: you enjoy media, you want to support its creators, whether
Speaker 1: that be anime, whether that be Sonic the fucking Headgehog,
Speaker 1: whether that be whether that be news or books. Right,
Speaker 1: if you like something, you're gonna buy it. Right. I
Speaker 1: got to introduced to Lemony stick its books to be
Speaker 1: the library, and now I bought lots because I wanted to.
Speaker 1: I wanted to buy the books from the person that
Speaker 1: I like. Yeah, and there are entire like industries. I
Speaker 1: mean that literally just work on this person list. This
Speaker 1: is why free to play games work. Yeah, exactly. There
Speaker 1: there's another conversation with for you to play games here
Speaker 1: about like addiction and gambling and manipulation about that. But
Speaker 1: like that that's you know, like setting that aside for
Speaker 1: a second. It's like, yeah, these things if if if
Speaker 1: people didn't want, if didn't spend money on things they like,
Speaker 1: free to pay games would not work like fundamentally as
Speaker 1: a model. Yeah, no, definitely definitely the idea of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you get someone starts to enjoying the service, then they
Speaker 1: start paying for it, whether it be buying useless you know,
Speaker 1: skin for whatever third person shooter you have, or that
Speaker 1: be you know, buying books or copies of of the
Speaker 1: film or like anime, body pillows, whatever, like you do,
Speaker 1: you want to financially support the things that you enjoy.
Speaker 1: This is just a part of this is what humans do.
Speaker 1: So yeah, maybe more stuff should be have the option
Speaker 1: of being free. Uh, that definitely might take on it.
Speaker 1: Let's let's have a quick let's have a bit of
Speaker 1: an ad. Speaking of free content, this podcast is brought
Speaker 1: to you by these lovely sponsors, so you can listen
Speaker 1: for free while just skipping the ads. So good for you.
Speaker 1: We're back and now we're gonna talk about different ways
Speaker 1: of bypassing pay walls, specifically for online news, because paywalls
Speaker 1: frustrating and as someone who likes messing around with kind
Speaker 1: of computer e stuff, there's definitely a long list of
Speaker 1: ways to buy pass pay walls depending on what types
Speaker 1: of paywalls we are talking about. So types of pay
Speaker 1: walls there are. There are typically two general types of
Speaker 1: pay walls. There's hard pay walls and soft pay walls. Um.
Speaker 1: Hard pay walls require payment upfront, so usually some some
Speaker 1: form of subscription fee before accessing any content. Websites with
Speaker 1: hard pay walls, maybe we'll act you lead like a
Speaker 1: tiny snippet of the article, but you need access, you
Speaker 1: need you need to pay subscription to access the full
Speaker 1: the full content. Soft pay walls are are are typically
Speaker 1: allow you to read a number of articles before you
Speaker 1: need to buy buy a subscription. So it's ei there's
Speaker 1: you have a set number of articles that you can
Speaker 1: read for a fixed period or session. Um, there's you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of a lot of websites
Speaker 1: operate like this. Most of New York Times operates like this.
Speaker 1: A lot of a lot a lot of news sites
Speaker 1: have a soft pay wall model, which is great because
Speaker 1: typically a little bit easier to bypass first first method.
Speaker 1: This works some of the time. It depends on how
Speaker 1: the website is constructed, but you can try to stop
Speaker 1: the loading page before it fully loads. Uh, so generally
Speaker 1: a quick technique. It's effective on several different types of webpages. Uh.
Speaker 1: You have to stop your browser from fully loading the
Speaker 1: webpage as soon as your breaser displays the text element
Speaker 1: of the paywell to content. So you you know, enter
Speaker 1: a page U R L into the search bar, press enter,
Speaker 1: and then press the x icon or the escape key
Speaker 1: as soon as you see some of the text on
Speaker 1: screen before a paywall window pops up. UM. A major
Speaker 1: limitation of this is that stopping the website may not
Speaker 1: load all content elements, so it may only render like
Speaker 1: a portion of the text, or it may like miss
Speaker 1: out on like files like images, animations, or videos. Um.
Speaker 1: And it also depends on the order of which the
Speaker 1: website loads the page elements. So for example, if the
Speaker 1: website loads to pay well first, then this trick won't
Speaker 1: be successful. Also, you got be kind of pretty fast
Speaker 1: in order to make this one work. Typically this isn't
Speaker 1: the first way I do it, because there's generally generally
Speaker 1: easier ways. But if you can do this, then cool.
Speaker 1: It's definitely it's definitely a fast one if you can
Speaker 1: get it to succeed for soft paywall. So like I
Speaker 1: I will say The stopping the browser from loading is
Speaker 1: actually successful at some hard paywall sites because if they
Speaker 1: do like load a portion of the text to read
Speaker 1: as like a stippet, sometimes it will actually load the
Speaker 1: entire text, but then just block it off with a
Speaker 1: separate window. So sometimes with a hard paywall, you can
Speaker 1: actually stop it via this method, So that's always fun UM.
Speaker 1: But second method, generally more for soft paywalls, is for
Speaker 1: is to delete your pages cookies. So you know, websites
Speaker 1: store cookies to track your browser UM activities, including how
Speaker 1: much content you've accessed. So blog publishers, news newspaper sites
Speaker 1: can track the number of fage articles you've read using
Speaker 1: the cookies stored on your browser. If you hit the
Speaker 1: limit for for non subscribe ors, if like the limited
Speaker 1: articles allotted, then you can delete the website cookies to
Speaker 1: refresh the to refresh that counter and it will possibly
Speaker 1: reset the limit of articles UM. You can go to
Speaker 1: the privacy or security section of your web browsers, like
Speaker 1: the option that allows you to check the cookies and
Speaker 1: site for all data and then search for the website
Speaker 1: that you're looking for in the in the cookie management
Speaker 1: page and then click remove all. You can do this
Speaker 1: on like Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge if you want to
Speaker 1: use that for some reason. Um safari. Yeah, but this
Speaker 1: trick may not work very well on hard pay walls
Speaker 1: because it that's that they don't really use cookies for
Speaker 1: the same purpose. And also you'll have to, you know,
Speaker 1: do if you're doing if you're doing this for soft
Speaker 1: pay walls, you have to do it every time you
Speaker 1: you reach the limit. Um. And if this won't work
Speaker 1: if the website is using other kind of more advanced
Speaker 1: tools to track your activity, like I p logs, right,
Speaker 1: so if it's tracking your AP data instead of your cookies,
Speaker 1: then this probably won't work. So this one's this one.
Speaker 1: I mean you you should clear cookies every once in
Speaker 1: a while anyway, just like generally a good practice, but
Speaker 1: to do this all the time, it's kind of a
Speaker 1: kind of a bit of work, especially because the next
Speaker 1: method is typically easier and does the same thing, which
Speaker 1: is just reading articles inside a private or incognito mode
Speaker 1: or in the tour browser. Um. So, as as as
Speaker 1: as explained earlier, not all paywalls are about the same.
Speaker 1: If you know, if a website uses a soft paywall,
Speaker 1: you should be able to read a subscription based content
Speaker 1: through incongnito or private browsing, because it'll check the it'll
Speaker 1: it'll check the website into thinking you're a brand new visitor,
Speaker 1: granting you access to the content before it had before
Speaker 1: it racks up enough of views to uh to throw
Speaker 1: up the paywall window. So this is this is a
Speaker 1: lot easier than just manually to leading the companies every
Speaker 1: single time, because yeah, most web browsers do not transmit
Speaker 1: pre existing cookies onto an incognito or private mode browser mode,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't much of those back over. And then
Speaker 1: although the website will deposit new cookies on your browser
Speaker 1: during private browsing sessions, they will be removed as soon
Speaker 1: as you close the window. Uh. One bummer is that
Speaker 1: some news pages are getting wise and actually are programming
Speaker 1: their websites to be able to be able to detect
Speaker 1: if they're opened in a private or browsing mode or
Speaker 1: even on tour um and they just like won't open.
Speaker 1: They'll they'll say, sorry, you have to. We we've detected
Speaker 1: that you're using this in private browsing mode to view
Speaker 1: this content. Boot up a regular browser, which which really
Speaker 1: sucks for the tour users because a lot of people
Speaker 1: are like, hey, yeah, I'm in China, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: get past the great firewall and fuck you eat ship.
Speaker 1: You should have somehow paid a subscription service to us
Speaker 1: to see information on this site that is literally illegal here,
Speaker 1: Like it's great, it's really bad for people who are
Speaker 1: like actually facing government censorship who need to use tour
Speaker 1: to view content. So yeah, that that is Uh, it's
Speaker 1: what we call a major bummer, A major sucks a
Speaker 1: major Oh no, capitalism did a whoopsie. Um Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: this is definitely this is one of the modes I
Speaker 1: do most often. It's like I can typically get get
Speaker 1: a lot of sites to be able to view through
Speaker 1: incong unit or private or private browsing. But again it
Speaker 1: does depend on what the site is h is built
Speaker 1: to do. But bar far my favorite method. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: I'll mention. Another one that I don't really use very
Speaker 1: often is the paywall or removable extensions for for your browser,
Speaker 1: which is like third party browser extensions which try to
Speaker 1: automatically bypass paywalls. These are really hit and miss, um
Speaker 1: and it's they're also a really great way to get nice,
Speaker 1: fancy malware onto your computer. Um, so I would I
Speaker 1: typically steer clear of this, but there there is allegedly
Speaker 1: a browser extension called bypass paywalls for Chrome and Firefox
Speaker 1: that allegedly has been found to be effective, um that
Speaker 1: allows you to read the subscription based articles on hundreds
Speaker 1: of publications like New York Times, wire Wall Street Journal,
Speaker 1: Washington Post. Um it is, it is. It is free,
Speaker 1: but you have to manually load it onto your browser.
Speaker 1: And just typically amount a big fan of browser extensions
Speaker 1: in the first place, so I kind of steer clear
Speaker 1: of these, but some some some people, some people swear
Speaker 1: by them, so maybe maybe they can work. They're they're
Speaker 1: they're not only my thing, but my favorite method is
Speaker 1: archive websites, uh, specifically archived dot is. So there are
Speaker 1: internet archiving tools that preserve copies of web pages and
Speaker 1: social media posts for reference purposes, and you can use
Speaker 1: these tools to access pabled content and read subscription based
Speaker 1: news articles for free, including a lot of hard paywalled pages.
Speaker 1: Archive dot i S or archive dot is is my
Speaker 1: favorite one. Um. Also it's it functions under archive dot today.
Speaker 1: Uh just it just it depends on what surfers they're
Speaker 1: running at the moment. Of course, there's also the classic
Speaker 1: and pretty reliable archive dot org which has a nice
Speaker 1: calendar feature. But it's definitely good to check both of
Speaker 1: these because sometimes an article will be archived on archived
Speaker 1: dot is really easily and it won't be are available
Speaker 1: on archive dot org. Sometimes it will be on archive
Speaker 1: dot org and not archive dot is currently the one
Speaker 1: that's currently live. I think it's not pH It automatically
Speaker 1: switch is usually I could. I usually just type in
Speaker 1: our cave dot is um and it switches me over automatically.
Speaker 1: But yes, there is, there is, there is. There is
Speaker 1: a few of them. Yeah, yeah, you are right correct.
Speaker 1: It does automatically revert to archive dot phr at the moment,
Speaker 1: so yeah, But these are the ones I use the
Speaker 1: most because people who have access to hard paywlled content
Speaker 1: will often archives the hard paywlled stuff so it's available
Speaker 1: to people without the paywall. This this this can include
Speaker 1: the screenshot mode for archive dot is and the regular
Speaker 1: archival method for archive dot org. But both these are
Speaker 1: great um and they're also really good for looking at
Speaker 1: past versions of the articles, so you can look to
Speaker 1: see what how the articles have changed over time, and
Speaker 1: so are great research tools. And our chaive dot is
Speaker 1: is very easy to even upload stuff yourself, even if
Speaker 1: you don't have um the paywall, Like, even if you're
Speaker 1: blocked off from reading the full thing, you can try
Speaker 1: to submit it to our chave dot is and there's
Speaker 1: a good chance and actually grab an unpaid walled version
Speaker 1: of it because because of how because of how the
Speaker 1: site works. So let's go to urchive dot pH r
Speaker 1: or or urchived dot is, enter the web page u
Speaker 1: r L that you're wanting to access in the designated
Speaker 1: dialect box at the bottom. It's like save. It'll go
Speaker 1: through a little process, um, and then then you will
Speaker 1: then you'll be able to selec the screenshot mode or
Speaker 1: the webpage mode and be able to see what type
Speaker 1: of thing in archives? It's pretty it's pretty cool. Um.
Speaker 1: It's The last thing I'll mention is outline dot com
Speaker 1: and twelve foot Ladder. These are web based tools, but
Speaker 1: not specifically archival sites. They're generally used to just get
Speaker 1: to the text of an article it would via like
Speaker 1: web page nonsense and bypassing paywall stuff. Unfortunately, websites also
Speaker 1: gotten wise to this, so stuff like New York Times
Speaker 1: and Wall Street Journal have figured out a way to
Speaker 1: get to these sites blocked so you cannot use outline
Speaker 1: dot com or twelve foot Ladder on them, but they
Speaker 1: still work on stuff like the Washington Post. So it
Speaker 1: always depends, but I definitely generally will prefer the archive
Speaker 1: dot is and archive dot org method to viewing any
Speaker 1: kind of pay old content. Um. Yeah, and that's kind
Speaker 1: of my I mean, I'm not now, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to explain how to do like regular piracy on the
Speaker 1: podcast because I don't have enough time, but like it's easy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are there are lots of people who will tell you.
Speaker 1: I mean, like kiss Cartoon is like a very popular website,
Speaker 1: Like you don't even need to, like you don't even
Speaker 1: have to like properly tour and stuff anymore. There is
Speaker 1: like so much piraated media of help. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: like okay, so like you've gotta be a little bit
Speaker 1: careful when your parting stuff. Sounds like you can get
Speaker 1: copyright strike, but if you stream it, they don't copy
Speaker 1: and strike you for that. So yeah, yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: the other thing I will plug is a plex, which
Speaker 1: is a kind of an online movie hosting service like Netflix,
Speaker 1: except you upload all of the content to it, so
Speaker 1: let's say you buy Blu Rays, it comes it comes
Speaker 1: with the digital download code, So now you can upload
Speaker 1: the digital copy into PLEX and watch that wherever you want,
Speaker 1: as long as you're signed into to the PLEX account
Speaker 1: and you actually own the stuff on the service. So
Speaker 1: as long as the services online, you can use it
Speaker 1: because you actually own the stuff on it. UM. That
Speaker 1: includes if you have if you have pirated versions of
Speaker 1: movies downloaded, you can upload this versions onto Plex then
Speaker 1: then delete the actual hard copies of it on your
Speaker 1: hard drive and then just watch the ones in PLEX
Speaker 1: and you're totally fine. So PLEX is great for having
Speaker 1: like ease of access because right sometimes I don't want
Speaker 1: to sort through my Blu ray discs and make sure
Speaker 1: that I have a Blu ray player with me so
Speaker 1: to watch my stuff. So using PLEX is a great
Speaker 1: wet method to keep your stuff that you actually own
Speaker 1: accessible online to watch it as long as you sign
Speaker 1: into a web browser. Um. And the last thing I'll
Speaker 1: plug is library submission forms. So if you really want
Speaker 1: media and you don't wanna pay for it and you
Speaker 1: don't want to like pirate necessarily, you can get libraries
Speaker 1: to buy stuff. UM. I did this all the time
Speaker 1: when I was younger, I I found out that you
Speaker 1: can submit items for purchase via via via the library
Speaker 1: on the online forum, and I submitted so many comic books. Uh,
Speaker 1: most of the comic books, I would say, I'm not
Speaker 1: like a good majority of the comic books in the
Speaker 1: Molton County Library system are because of me. Every every Wednesday,
Speaker 1: when a new trade paperback would be released, I would
Speaker 1: upload it to the library submission form and they would
Speaker 1: buy it. Uh, and not just one coffee, they would
Speaker 1: buy like twelve copies. So there's so many Batman comics
Speaker 1: in the in the in the moultonom Coney system because
Speaker 1: I would studiously upload upload all that stuff so that
Speaker 1: I didn't need to pay for comics. I could just
Speaker 1: get them from the from the library. So definitely look
Speaker 1: into library submissions to kind of grow what your library
Speaker 1: had us in stock, and then also looking to see
Speaker 1: what other things your libraries doing, because I know more
Speaker 1: libraries are looking into building like maker spaces and like
Speaker 1: tool libraries to um have access to things that are
Speaker 1: not just like books. You know, power tools, and then
Speaker 1: you know how to access to even cool stuff like
Speaker 1: stuff like vacuum formers and like three, three printers, laser cutters.
Speaker 1: All these things are kind of growing. So look into
Speaker 1: what your library is doing, because oftentimes libraries have some
Speaker 1: pretty cool stuff. Um. So yeah, this is my little
Speaker 1: little bit on why I don't like paywalls, why I
Speaker 1: think content should be free because it actually helps creators
Speaker 1: in the long run. Any anyway, and how to get
Speaker 1: past news articles that don't want you to read them
Speaker 1: without paying too much money. Yep. And remember, folks, if
Speaker 1: your Pan invaded your country pirrating anime as reparations. If
Speaker 1: you're mad about this tweet, find me on Twitter and
Speaker 1: I write, okay, yeah, make sure your tweet and I right,
Speaker 1: okay if you have complaints about that take So yeah,
Speaker 1: that is that is my little my my little bit
Speaker 1: talking about piracy ar and uh and yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: morest we should, we should, we should? I think I
Speaker 1: think it's I've always had I've always hold this opinion
Speaker 1: that I think we can all learn a lot of
Speaker 1: lessons from the sonic the hedgehog. Um. And I think
Speaker 1: one of the greatest ones is that turns out when
Speaker 1: you make stuff available to use, uh for free and
Speaker 1: allow emulation, people like people like people like the stuff.
Speaker 1: More people enjoy it, and it will actually support official
Speaker 1: uses of it as well. So more stuff for free,
Speaker 1: more more library based economies, and having having gold rings,
Speaker 1: having an enormous number of gold rings makes you nearly invincible.
Speaker 1: That that is this is this is also true. I
Speaker 1: mean the multiple franchises exist with that exact premise. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it turns out when you have more, more libraries,
Speaker 1: more rings, people are happier. Yep, that's the episode. 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
Speaker 1: Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from cool zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: zone media dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to 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.