Speaker 1: Als Media. Welcome to It could happen here a podcast
Speaker 1: that I introduced the same way almost every time. I
Speaker 1: don't know, you listen to the show, right, you're listening
Speaker 1: at like some point in the future, you probably know
Speaker 1: the things falling apart putting back together again Intro. I
Speaker 1: don't have to do it. We are doing something that
Speaker 1: we have done before and I guess we'll continue to do,
Speaker 1: which is talking to other anarchist media projects about their
Speaker 1: work and how things are going, and yeah, the general why,
Speaker 1: how what of it all? And today we're talking with
Speaker 1: the Collective Anarchist Writers, and very specifically we're talking to
Speaker 1: Shirley Branson, who is a writer, translator, and teacher currently
Speaker 1: living in so called New York. Carla joy Bergman who
Speaker 1: lives across the border in Canada and is a mom, writer,
Speaker 1: artist and loves crows. Very important. We'll be coming that
Speaker 1: back to that in a second. And Vicky osteriwhil who
Speaker 1: is a worker, writer and agitator based in Philadelphia, And
Speaker 1: all three of you, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Hi, thanks for having us, Thanks so much for having us,
Speaker 2: for having us, love your project. I also just wanted
Speaker 2: to give a shout out to our fourth member, Danny
Speaker 2: or listen, who's not here today because she's working paid work,
Speaker 2: who just rounds us out so beautifully and wanted to
Speaker 2: say her name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this, and partly I'm
Speaker 1: excited to talk about it because so the acronym for
Speaker 1: this is caw and there's a whole crow theme going on,
Speaker 1: and we love a crow here in Portland. It is
Speaker 1: maybe our big thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm in Vancouver.
Speaker 2: Well I was in Vancouver, just stopped from there, but
Speaker 2: Pacific Northwest and so it's pro highway, you know, thousands
Speaker 2: and thousands of crows.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I got it.
Speaker 4: I think the crow is like what ultimately sealed the
Speaker 4: project for us, honestly, Yeah, hell.
Speaker 5: Yeah it was. It really came together around around the
Speaker 5: Corvid theme, I think.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in the combination of enjoying shiny things, extreme intelligence,
Speaker 5: and never ending spite. I think you're all sort of
Speaker 5: motivating factors for all.
Speaker 2: Of us, and that they are collective and have meetings
Speaker 2: often throughout the day.
Speaker 4: A collective called the Murder, which is also pretty badass.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a huge thing in Portland here where we
Speaker 1: have the Mega Murder. So every every like morning, all
Speaker 1: the crows sort of fly off into their different like
Speaker 1: little murders, and they go they you know, they go
Speaker 1: out and hang out in the city. And then at
Speaker 1: a round sunset every day, all of the crows fly
Speaker 1: back into the city. They have their like giant mega
Speaker 1: murdering meeting. There's thousands and thousands of them. You know,
Speaker 1: you look up and you just see them like the herds,
Speaker 1: like that, the murders. The crow is flying past. And
Speaker 1: if you there's bificent spots in Portland where you can
Speaker 1: just go see all of the all all all the
Speaker 1: crows hanging out and you know, doing doing doing whatever
Speaker 1: the things crows do. When literally in entire cities where
Speaker 1: the crows gathered together every night.
Speaker 4: Oh no, it's a spokes council.
Speaker 1: I don't it's not a spokes assel because all of
Speaker 1: them are there. I feel like that's an assembly.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. On Vancouver called it's called the Crow Highway. Yeah,
Speaker 2: hell yeah, because it's so massive and goes forever and
Speaker 2: ever and ever.
Speaker 3: To their roost.
Speaker 2: Brief story on crows and resistance A really incredible story
Speaker 2: in Vancouver when a park was a colonial person created
Speaker 2: a park in the downtown, which was like displaced a
Speaker 2: lot of Indigenous people in their homes and designed this
Speaker 2: park that was filled with crows as well. They also
Speaker 2: brought in animals from Europe as well to make it pretty,
Speaker 2: and the crows made it really hard for these animals.
Speaker 2: And so the City of Vancouver for fifty years from
Speaker 2: nineteen hundred to nineteen fifty gave free range to the
Speaker 2: Vancouver Gun people to go into the park and shoot
Speaker 2: crows every day.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: And when I see like the amount of crows that
Speaker 2: are still alive, it's just some metaphor for Indigenous resilience,
Speaker 2: you know, Like it's just so powerful. So it's another
Speaker 2: reason why I'm like interested in and in terms of
Speaker 2: where I was like.
Speaker 4: Living, as I been gathering images for our project that
Speaker 4: I've been specifically trying to find images of crows attacking
Speaker 4: people because I think that's good. So it's like, you know,
Speaker 4: the follow up to what you were saying, Carla, is
Speaker 4: the crow's revenge.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the things that you know you kind of
Speaker 1: have to do here in Portland is you have to
Speaker 1: kind of like negotiate with the crows. You have to
Speaker 1: like you leave them like peace offerings and you sort
Speaker 1: of you know, when your friends come, you let you
Speaker 1: introduce them to the crows, or the crows know that
Speaker 1: you're okay. It's very sweet shiny things. Yeah, we love
Speaker 1: a crow based society. And speaking of a crow based society, yeah,
Speaker 1: do you want to, I guess, give a brief sort
Speaker 1: of overview of what Cause is before we get sort
Speaker 1: of more into it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm happy to take a spin at that as VICKI.
Speaker 5: By the way, Yeah, so cause of like I mean,
Speaker 5: it's an anarchist journal of arts and culture that is
Speaker 5: a collective of anarchist writers. It's also a Corvid appreciation
Speaker 5: working group. There's a lot of different acronyms for it.
Speaker 5: And what we are doing is we are bringing all
Speaker 5: for at first, just all four of our efforts together.
Speaker 5: So a lot of us work on separate podcasts. We
Speaker 5: have pedagological tasks, We have many activist projects that center
Speaker 5: around culture. You know, I have a newsletter, Surely has
Speaker 5: a Patreon, Kyla has a newsletter, Danny has has also
Speaker 5: has like an email list. There's just all these different
Speaker 5: projects and we realize that like for all of our
Speaker 5: talk about mutual aid and working collectively when it comes
Speaker 5: to writing and creativity, the market has been so fractured
Speaker 5: and so alienated and sort of turned into like everyone
Speaker 5: has an individual newsletter that they're competing with one another,
Speaker 5: you know, even though they don't want to be like
Speaker 5: they want to be. But that's sort of ultimately what's
Speaker 5: happening is that there's limited sort of customers. And there's
Speaker 5: also this other trend going on right now of this
Speaker 5: really exciting kind of worker owned journals, a lot of
Speaker 5: them local journalisms. There's some in New York and Chicago,
Speaker 5: and there's one in Ashville and all over the country
Speaker 5: as well as like on special topics like aftermath, which
Speaker 5: like does I think the other video games, and there's
Speaker 5: four or four media it is tech. There's just like
Speaker 5: all these different sort of sites doing this sort of thing,
Speaker 5: and I think in some ways all of us are
Speaker 5: sort of collectively reinventing the newspapers that have been sort
Speaker 5: of stolen and destroyed by capital, you know.
Speaker 6: In a big way.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So there's sort of two goals that we have, and
Speaker 5: I think Carla Carla speaks really eloquently to some of this,
Speaker 5: but one of which is to make writing radical culture
Speaker 5: work beautiful, joyful, fun and also critical like movement work,
Speaker 5: to make it sustainable for us and for anyone else
Speaker 5: who wants to share in this project, who we can
Speaker 5: sort of expand towards, but also to make it easier
Speaker 5: for people who are reading to have access to these things,
Speaker 5: like in one place, instead of having to, you know,
Speaker 5: decide who they care for and who they like in
Speaker 5: order to sort of, you know, do that mac of
Speaker 5: like who can I afford to subscribe to? Like I personally,
Speaker 5: I don't know if it's true for everyone else, but
Speaker 5: personally I usually have about two or three people I
Speaker 5: can afford to subscribe to a month, and I switch
Speaker 5: it out just like on a very arbitrary basis, you know,
Speaker 5: or something like that. That was very technical and financially focused.
Speaker 5: But what we're really excited to do mostly is support
Speaker 5: each other's work, because I think we all really love
Speaker 5: and admire each other's work and have for a long time,
Speaker 5: and this is just this really exciting opportunity. Instead of
Speaker 5: my writing just being for me, it's for Julie and
Speaker 5: Carla and Danino, and that just makes it feel more
Speaker 5: inspiring and exciting as well as a collective process.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean connected to the financial aspect. But I
Speaker 4: think when we are initially discussing this, the experience of
Speaker 4: being a writer is trying to find outlets for your writing. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and if you're trying to get paid for that, you
Speaker 4: have to sell it to people, right, And so it's
Speaker 4: very hard to get paid at all for writing, and
Speaker 4: it's very hard to place your writing in venues to
Speaker 4: publish it, especially if you're coming from an anarchist angle,
Speaker 4: because people do not really want to publish things that
Speaker 4: come to anarchist conclusions, Like they want you to do
Speaker 4: all the analysis and whatever, but they don't want you
Speaker 4: to think about like what an action is like.
Speaker 6: So like, you know, you could write for some of
Speaker 6: the lefty.
Speaker 4: So called lefty socialist whatever rags, but they don't. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they won't feature anarchists. They basically even just act as
Speaker 4: if anarchism doesn't exist, never exists, you know, never existed.
Speaker 6: They erase the whole history of it.
Speaker 4: The only serious kind of political forces some kind of
Speaker 4: democratic socialism. So to us, we wanted to create a
Speaker 4: place where we can do the writing we want to
Speaker 4: do without having to make compromises in what we want
Speaker 4: to say. Just to get published because that, yeah, just
Speaker 4: that game of like of shopping your stuff around is
Speaker 4: it's demeaning, It's totally time consuming. It distracts you from
Speaker 4: actually doing the work. So we were like, let's band
Speaker 4: together instead of each of us going off wasting our
Speaker 4: time trying to write.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think one of the other issues with
Speaker 1: this too also like the pay is just so bad,
Speaker 1: like even though almost especially the leftiscroops like page is
Speaker 1: so rancid, and all of the combinations of those things
Speaker 1: make it really really hard to just sort of be
Speaker 1: an independent writer. And also, okay, jumping back a second,
Speaker 1: so they're raising anarchism exists. This is why. The one
Speaker 1: that makes me always lose my mind is like I'm
Speaker 1: specifically gonna name Jocobin here because I don't like them.
Speaker 1: But like, one of the things that jack Wum will
Speaker 1: do is they'll be covering a strike that is organized
Speaker 1: by the IWW. It is an IWW union, that they
Speaker 1: will have pictures of the strike where there are a
Speaker 1: bunch of people holding IWW banners, and they will never
Speaker 1: mention that it was the IWW who organized the strike.
Speaker 1: So like, yeah, there is this real sort of conspiracy
Speaker 1: of silence, I guess about our politics and the stuff
Speaker 1: that we do in the world.
Speaker 4: It's so claring. Jacobin is definitely a big culprit. And
Speaker 4: then the podcast associated with the dig, like they will
Speaker 4: specifically will be talking about history where anarchists have been
Speaker 4: very involved, and then they just will not mention them.
Speaker 4: I'm like, and they sometimes there's really good history and
Speaker 4: now that podcast, but like this is an omission that
Speaker 4: they clearly are choosing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think, you know, self organization is effectively
Speaker 1: the only way out of this because why you just
Speaker 1: sort of I don't know, have to deal with all
Speaker 1: of the sort of media gatekeepers like sitting there in
Speaker 1: front of you with a stick going no anarchism of balk.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and even the projects that have sustained, that have survived,
Speaker 5: which are all really awesome, you know, like and exciting,
Speaker 5: Like very few of them have offered real sustainability, like
Speaker 5: on a professional level, and like I've been publishing like
Speaker 5: quote unquote professionally for fifteen years and like I'm the
Speaker 5: like newest writer on the scene, like from our crew basically,
Speaker 5: like we're incredibly experienced, and all of us have books out,
Speaker 5: all of us have edited volumes all of us have
Speaker 5: like podcasts, and like are people who I like, really
Speaker 5: respect whose names I think are big and important in
Speaker 5: the world of theory and activism and like in the
Speaker 5: anglophone world especially, And none of us can sustain ourselves
Speaker 5: as writers as such because of the way that just
Speaker 5: you know, both politically but also just like the way
Speaker 5: the market has come down. Yeah, and it just feels
Speaker 5: like something we could apply our politics to solving as
Speaker 5: a workplace issue rather than just sort of as like
Speaker 5: a you know, are you committed enough to sacrifice all
Speaker 5: your time issue? And so hopefully like that will also
Speaker 5: function to make more work available to produce and to
Speaker 5: platform and to yeah, to to sort of work as
Speaker 5: an example simultaneously.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, speaking of speaking of sustaining work as a platform,
Speaker 1: unfortunately the way we are sustained here is with these ads.
Speaker 1: So hold on and we are back, And this, I
Speaker 1: guess brings us to the kind of work that's happening here.
Speaker 1: And I was very excited because one of the things
Speaker 1: you all have done is an interview with Raouls of Becky,
Speaker 1: who is the author of like one of my favorite
Speaker 1: quotes of all time. I think I've said on this
Speaker 1: show like multiple times. I really ran into in a
Speaker 1: sort of completely unrelated book called Rhythms of the Patchacuti,
Speaker 1: which is about the sort of the water and gas
Speaker 1: wars in Bolivia. I talked about this book on the
Speaker 1: show like all the time. This quote goes roughly like
Speaker 1: struggle illuminates the divisions of a society like lightning illuminates
Speaker 1: the sky. And I love it. It's like it's like
Speaker 1: it's the best explanation of what happened during twenty twenty
Speaker 1: that I've ever seen. And this is sort of what's
Speaker 1: happening like right now too. Is like you have these
Speaker 1: sort of flashpoint moments where where you know, suddenly like
Speaker 1: all of how society works very briefly becomes visible and
Speaker 1: you have this sort of moment when you're illuminated by
Speaker 1: it to act. And so I'm I don't know, I'm
Speaker 1: really excited that y'all are talking to him, And yeah,
Speaker 1: because you talked at a bit more about what's been
Speaker 1: going on and what's to come.
Speaker 3: I'm sure. Thanks.
Speaker 2: That was a highlight definitely this year was talking to
Speaker 2: Raoul obviously, you know a podcastco We talked for quite
Speaker 2: a bit longer than what was on the show, and I.
Speaker 3: Think like reading his newest book that was.
Speaker 2: Translated and then doing that show with him, it was
Speaker 2: completely connected to me, like reaching out to Suley about
Speaker 2: doing Call, because there is a way that we that
Speaker 2: he talked about this whole idea of disappearing symmetries that
Speaker 2: those Bapatistas are working on, like this idea of really
Speaker 2: truly looking at all the fault lines within horizontality or
Speaker 2: automy that we don't actually enact in our day to
Speaker 2: day lives. And so I really started to reflect on
Speaker 2: my own life that way, and not so much Vicky
Speaker 2: at this point yet, but like Suley and Danny, both
Speaker 2: of them, like we just were blurbing each other's books
Speaker 2: and like supporting each other, connecting to publishers or trying
Speaker 2: to connect each other to publishers, and just like trying
Speaker 2: to disrupt a competitive nature that's running underneath even when
Speaker 2: we're all really committed to not being competitive, but there's
Speaker 2: it is, like there's a you know. So all is
Speaker 2: to say that for me, like collaboration is at the
Speaker 2: heart of we're doing here in a deep, deep way,
Speaker 2: and for me, collaboration just means that when something is
Speaker 2: created that wouldn't be created otherwise without this collaboration. So
Speaker 2: I'm just really excited to see what sparks and comes
Speaker 2: up individually, but also like with each other and even
Speaker 2: like through collaborations like the show with Raoul and like
Speaker 2: how that spreads seeds and ideas. Yeah, So like for myself,
Speaker 2: I'm going to definitely focus on collaboration in a deep way.
Speaker 2: I don't think I'll write very much solo stuff for
Speaker 2: the for call. I think it will always be in
Speaker 2: conversation with others and just trying to double down on
Speaker 2: on doing it together instead of individual pursuits.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's something I think this is useful for
Speaker 1: everyone listening to this, is that, like it's a lot
Speaker 1: easier to develop better ideas, and you know, it makes
Speaker 1: your writing more clear. It makes the way that you, you know,
Speaker 1: just the way you act in the world a lot
Speaker 1: more clear when you're working with other people and it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's it's the process by which the
Speaker 1: best stuff gets created.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I think that's really like true. And
Speaker 5: I think like I have for a long time now
Speaker 5: sort of accepted that writing is never going to support
Speaker 5: or sustain me and all I needed was a push
Speaker 5: from a few other people to be like, wait, what
Speaker 5: if we like actually tried to do it collectively, to
Speaker 5: be like, oh yeah, like I could actually try that,
Speaker 5: Like I don't have to just accept that, like I'll
Speaker 5: always have like a full time job plus whatever writing,
Speaker 5: like in whatever hours I can steal, you know, and like,
Speaker 5: you know, with great difficulty put out some writing sometimes
Speaker 5: and then always feel guilty when I'm not putting out
Speaker 5: enough to like sustain myself. Like that whole process. I
Speaker 5: think a lot of creatives right now know that struggle,
Speaker 5: you know, of having gigs and work and lots of
Speaker 5: other important things to do and and you know, sort
Speaker 5: of accepting that that's the conditions. And I think, like,
Speaker 5: what's so inspiring about, you know, because Carla and and
Speaker 5: as Carlo was just mentioning, they sort of brought I'm
Speaker 5: the last one on the on the crew, and I
Speaker 5: was sort of the closer, you know or whatever. But
Speaker 5: I think, like, I don't know what that means genuinely,
Speaker 5: but but I was broughtup. And I think just having
Speaker 5: them propose it already just as a project that we've
Speaker 5: been thinking of, has like changed the way I've been
Speaker 5: thinking about what is possible with the writing I'm already doing.
Speaker 5: And then so I think, like just to underline that
Speaker 5: point and go on and on, collaborations really really like
Speaker 5: important and supporting one another is so is so powerful.
Speaker 4: Yeah, when carl and I initially had like the seed
Speaker 4: conversation of this, like Carla said something about collectivizing as writers,
Speaker 4: like we talk about it with all these other other
Speaker 4: workplaces and industries and whatever, and it was like like
Speaker 4: when when she said that, I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: like that makes so much sense that we're off here
Speaker 4: doing our own thing. And as Vicky said, you do
Speaker 4: it sort of with the knowledge that it's not sustainable.
Speaker 4: You steal your time to do it.
Speaker 6: Right, Even the.
Speaker 4: Supposed jobs that are there to enable you to write
Speaker 4: actually make you do all this other work. So like
Speaker 4: the time for writing is always like endlessly deferred. And
Speaker 4: you know, we have that image also, like of the
Speaker 4: patron or something, or like Virginia Woolf says, you need
Speaker 4: money enough to have a room of one's own. But
Speaker 4: if we put ourselves together in this way, then we
Speaker 4: are trying to, yeah, I don't know, create more time
Speaker 4: for ourselves to write. And then like going back to
Speaker 4: something Vicky said earlier about like reinventing the newspaper, there
Speaker 4: was a time in anarchism where like I think we
Speaker 4: talked about this amongst ourselves, like where like every block
Speaker 4: had like a Yiddish anarchist newspaper, right. It wasn't like, yeah,
Speaker 4: you had one newspaper telling all the anarchists what to think.
Speaker 4: It was like it was hyper local in a way,
Speaker 4: and there was so many voices. And so I think
Speaker 4: that's another thing that we want to do, is like
Speaker 4: help for that proliferation, because in the sort of spirit
Speaker 4: of collaboration, like the reason to write as an anarchist
Speaker 4: for me is to have conversations to produce the possibility
Speaker 4: for people to like receive it and then contact me
Speaker 4: into and I get into conversations with people and learn
Speaker 4: things from them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's an angle there too, where like
Speaker 1: I think we're kind of okay, So I was a
Speaker 1: tiny baby when all this was happening, So I'm I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have to rely on y'all for this. But like
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things I get sort of
Speaker 1: reading the record about like the older anarchist movement, I
Speaker 1: mean When I say older, I mean like like anti
Speaker 1: anti globalization era stuff was like there seems like there
Speaker 1: was a lot more of a kind of like anarchist
Speaker 1: media sphere.
Speaker 3: Are you talking about like the late nineties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like like like to the two thousands, to.
Speaker 3: Some extent like a Battle Seattle.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I mean that was like the you know,
Speaker 2: the birth of anarchy again, right, yeah, I was definitely around.
Speaker 2: I'm in my late fifties, but the same struggle was there,
Speaker 2: like that that we're swimming in liberalism and like that
Speaker 2: socialist worker like capturing of the movement was just as
Speaker 2: powerful then, and it was you saw it at all
Speaker 2: the rallies and stuff, and you know, immediately anarchism was
Speaker 2: marginalized and pushed off as irrelevant and not practical for
Speaker 2: the revolution. And this is why it's clinch off and
Speaker 2: all these kind of sectarian movements in the That's my
Speaker 2: take anyway.
Speaker 1: I think that no, it makes sense. It makes sense.
Speaker 2: I mean I've hashed this out with so many older
Speaker 2: anarchists that I was part of Institute for Anarchist Studies,
Speaker 2: Like we talked about this a lot phenomena with Scott
Speaker 2: Crow and you can just see the direct line of
Speaker 2: where it went into sectarianism from this sort of rebirth.
Speaker 2: Sorry I went off on a different thing instead of
Speaker 2: like journals and media.
Speaker 1: But yeah, no, no, well this is good too, because
Speaker 1: like I think that's the other thing I've been realizing
Speaker 1: is like people don't I mean in my generation too,
Speaker 1: but like people younger than me don't really know the
Speaker 1: history of this stuff. Like all the time I have
Speaker 1: conversations with people where I start talking about like the
Speaker 1: Wojaca uprising, and they have no idea what I'm talking about,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, oh, no, we need to, like we
Speaker 1: need to like resuscitate the history of like the two
Speaker 1: thousands because stuff happened there.
Speaker 5: So I wasn't actually active at that point, but I
Speaker 5: was like very adjacent to some of that stuff at
Speaker 5: the moment. And some of that was actually because a
Speaker 5: lot of what was going on in the globalization movement
Speaker 5: in that period was happening through culture. I think most famously,
Speaker 5: like touring punk bands would also bring zene libraries with them,
Speaker 5: so they would have someone destroying zines and playing the show.
Speaker 5: And like, I mean I got radicalized through punk. I
Speaker 5: know a lot of people who did that. Was you
Speaker 5: know when I finally did, it was after that movement
Speaker 5: had largely crusted, But I think there was a lot
Speaker 5: of focus on culture, and also a critique of culture
Speaker 5: was also pretty central to how people were thinking and moving,
Speaker 5: And I think the explosion of social media and like
Speaker 5: posting and like the sort of quote unquote democratization and
Speaker 5: leveling of communication capabilities, which in some ways was more
Speaker 5: real in the early twenty tens than it is certainly
Speaker 5: than it is now. It wasn't totally like a made
Speaker 5: up narrative, but there was also it was also over
Speaker 5: relied on. I think people sort of reached for a
Speaker 5: kind of like, well, anyone who can use these tools
Speaker 5: to communicate, like, that's valuable. So critiquing sort of media
Speaker 5: in general, or critiquing sort of capitalist media is sort
Speaker 5: of beside the point because we can around it. We
Speaker 5: can sort of go we can you know, go on
Speaker 5: Twitter and subvert it, and we can like do all
Speaker 5: these you know, go sideways around it. So I was,
Speaker 5: you know, a participant in to Occupy Wall Street in
Speaker 5: two's eleven, which people also don't know anything about because
Speaker 5: that's just being older. But Occupy Wall Street was started
Speaker 5: by a magazine called Adbusters, which came out of the
Speaker 5: WTO movement and sort of managed to stick around, and
Speaker 5: that by twenty eleven. When they did that, we thought
Speaker 5: it was like a joke. It was like, oh, these
Speaker 5: culture jammers who like make fun of advertisements, like they
Speaker 5: started the movement. Like that's ridiculous, right, Like that's silly,
Speaker 5: and like this is not to defend Adbusters, I think, whatever.
Speaker 1: We yeah, there's some issues with them, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they also did I don't know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But also I think that reaction of like culture
Speaker 5: jamming is sort of stupid or like, you know, like
Speaker 5: talking about who wants to talk about culture? At this point,
Speaker 5: I think that that made sense in the context in
Speaker 5: which we were moving and organizing, but like, now, once
Speaker 5: again it is clear that by abandoning the cultural sphere
Speaker 5: in many ways, we have in fact lost a tremendous
Speaker 5: amount of ground. So I think it's actually really important
Speaker 5: to have cultural organizations that aren't just theory, that aren't
Speaker 5: just news, but that are like really talking about art
Speaker 5: and beauty and excitement and joy and fiction and all
Speaker 5: these things that we find really important. Because you know,
Speaker 5: I think a lot of people sort of think, well,
Speaker 5: it's a crisis moment. You know, the world's ending. Why
Speaker 5: would you do that? But like the world has been
Speaker 5: ending since fourteen ninety two, Like the world worth defending
Speaker 5: has been ending since then, and it hasn't ended yet.
Speaker 5: And one of the ways it hasn't ended is by
Speaker 5: indigenous and black and other marginalized cultures and stories and
Speaker 5: narratives and works of art has been an important mode
Speaker 5: of history and resistance just as much as organizing and struggle.
Speaker 5: And yeah, I think we can move some struggle into
Speaker 5: that terrain right now. And I think there's a lot
Speaker 5: of craving for it now because I think also for
Speaker 5: a while things felt really oversaturated. But the last five years,
Speaker 5: the internet doesn't feel helpful anymore. No, everything feels like
Speaker 5: streaming is a mess. Like everything's a mess. There's no
Speaker 5: access to culture that feels good. Everyone hates what they're doing.
Speaker 5: They know it's exploiting the artists. They know, you know,
Speaker 5: Spotify is giving people pennies, and that you know, Hbo
Speaker 5: and all those you know, all the all the streaming
Speaker 5: services you know support Amazon, and they're they're just miserable, right,
Speaker 5: And I think there's there's a real opening and a
Speaker 5: real desire for something else at this moment, at the
Speaker 5: same time that things are indeed quite on fire literally ecocidally,
Speaker 5: but also also sort of politically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, speaking of everything being on fire, we need to
Speaker 1: take an ad break and then we will come back.
Speaker 1: And I think the deliberate political intervention here.
Speaker 4: We are.
Speaker 1: We are back from capital healthscape to mild do less
Speaker 1: capital healthscape. Yu, you were gonna say.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wanted to just build on this culture thing,
Speaker 4: because when you know, when after October seventh, people are
Speaker 4: getting together to try to figure out how in the
Speaker 4: United States to do some kind of work and action
Speaker 4: and support and solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian liberation movement,
Speaker 4: Like people were sort of like, what the hell can
Speaker 4: we even do? And one of the things that I
Speaker 4: would say to people is like just putting up stickers
Speaker 4: and writing about Gaza on the walls, like in graffiti
Speaker 4: has a huge impact in it. It's overlooked often, I think,
Speaker 4: as like something that's effective. But we can see that
Speaker 4: there has been a giant cultural shift after October seventh
Speaker 4: in terms of people's awareness of the Israeli ginocide against
Speaker 4: the Palestinians and then support for the Palestinians. I think
Speaker 4: that it has to do really, you know, post October seventh,
Speaker 4: with the fact that this was like kind of plastered everywhere,
Speaker 4: and so it's easy to kind of think that that
Speaker 4: isn't action. But to me, in a way, doing something
Speaker 4: like that is more effective than the kind of marching
Speaker 4: in circles that we can do that we call protest.
Speaker 4: And you know, like going back to punk, I think
Speaker 4: also Punk has gets a bad rap sometimes because you know,
Speaker 4: in that line of like the kind of bookschin lifestylism.
Speaker 4: But I don't think we should downplay like punk created
Speaker 4: its own culture of people doing everything themselves to make
Speaker 4: it happen. It's where I got radicalized too, and they
Speaker 4: were like it was anarchist, right, It was like explicitly anarchist,
Speaker 4: and you were living in an anarchist way and like
Speaker 4: creating things in an anarchist way, and it was this
Speaker 4: whole other world. So like, if we put our anarchist
Speaker 4: energy into culture, it's part of making a world that
Speaker 4: we want to live in, you know, over and against
Speaker 4: this world, this hell world that we're also trying to
Speaker 4: destroy at the same time. So I think we shouldn't
Speaker 4: kind of just like dismiss this as as less important
Speaker 4: than the other kinds of actions that we can take.
Speaker 1: You're here, Yeah, And that brings me to something I
Speaker 1: wanted to sort of ask about, like more deliberately, which is, like,
Speaker 1: what's the kind of specific political intervention that you're trying
Speaker 1: to make into this moment with this project? And both sorts,
Speaker 1: I guess a bit more generally, too big question.
Speaker 2: I mean, I my work has always been about intervening
Speaker 2: around any kind of dominant narratives that things are just
Speaker 2: now bad, or that people don't know what anything, or
Speaker 2: pedagogically they're lacking. Like I've always tried to intervene around
Speaker 2: this idea that we've always been otherwise and we always are,
Speaker 2: and there's always cracks everywhere and eruptions of radical ways
Speaker 2: of being and knowing and doing, and so it's like
Speaker 2: a deepening of that. And I think probably on a
Speaker 2: systemic thinking, systemically is really about disrupting individualism or liberalism
Speaker 2: or empire, whatever you want, of colonialism to really like
Speaker 2: live it in the everyday.
Speaker 3: So that's partly that.
Speaker 2: And then on just a super practical level, like you know,
Speaker 2: all of us don't have wealth, don't have generational wealth,
Speaker 2: are working all the time to try to meet and
Speaker 2: meant and some of us are have housing insecurity and
Speaker 2: other real basic needs are insecure and health stuff and
Speaker 2: so like actually showing up for each of us is
Speaker 2: at the core of it. For me, Like I it
Speaker 2: feels so good in my body to know that I'm
Speaker 2: not just showing up to think about what to do
Speaker 2: for cow. For me, it's like in the act of
Speaker 2: collectivism for each other. And so I'm just open to
Speaker 2: what sparks and emerges with our work. I don't have
Speaker 2: an agenda except for to disrupt and intervene belief systems
Speaker 2: that are ideologically driven by empire. And I also came
Speaker 2: of age in the early eighties in the punk scene
Speaker 2: and had a venue space, and to me, punk is
Speaker 2: and I would say hip hop is well underground hip
Speaker 2: hop stuff is like always the way to disrupt being
Speaker 2: captured by empire or from liberalism is to keep that
Speaker 2: punk ethos of doing it together and keeping it low
Speaker 2: to the ground.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just like to build on that, Carl,
Speaker 5: because I think that was really beautiful. Second, everything that
Speaker 5: you said is it like many of us have a perspective.
Speaker 5: You know that huge structural change is going to need
Speaker 5: to come, and that often that will come through these
Speaker 5: big social movements, that these explosions of energy that you know,
Speaker 5: these lightning strikes, right, but you can't force those, you
Speaker 5: can't make those happen. Yeah, and in the meantime you can.
Speaker 5: I think I've spent a lot of my in the
Speaker 5: meantimes in trying to sort of organize stuff that sort
Speaker 5: of oriented towards mass movement, you know, and it just
Speaker 5: feels often feels like wheal spinning, you know, like I'm
Speaker 5: build I'm trying to build mass movement organizing like you know,
Speaker 5: like whatever that means. And in the twenty tens, like
Speaker 5: one of the things that happens from like twenty eleven
Speaker 5: are youdly two thousand nine, but definitely twenty eleven to
Speaker 5: twenty twenty was that wherever you were, it was never
Speaker 5: more than probably eighteen months before there was like something
Speaker 5: else going off in the streets. And so although those
Speaker 5: could be very hard, those waves could be very difficult,
Speaker 5: you still had a lot of periods where you know,
Speaker 5: you could just sort of be waiting and it would
Speaker 5: just sort of happened.
Speaker 3: Again.
Speaker 5: That was certainly what I was doing in that decade
Speaker 5: and in a way that I don't think I appreciated
Speaker 5: until it was over. Yea, because the last four years
Speaker 5: has been very different. The rhythm has been very different
Speaker 5: since the pandemic started. And I can't just say Panini
Speaker 5: on this podcast, Okay, everyone does it right, Yeah, since
Speaker 5: since the dynamics started, you know, those rhythms have been disrupted,
Speaker 5: and I think the Biden counter revolution against Way twenty
Speaker 5: which has also really disrupted those things. And in that
Speaker 5: space it has felt very clear to me personally, and
Speaker 5: I'm older, you know whatever. I'm like, you know, a
Speaker 5: movement elder at this point, just because our movements are
Speaker 5: so you focused now, because I'm actually old. Like the
Speaker 5: decade before twenty eleven, from like two thousand and one,
Speaker 5: you know, from nine to eleven until sort of occupies
Speaker 5: sort of how I periodize it a bit, There wasn't
Speaker 5: a ton of street movement. You had the Iraq War
Speaker 5: stuff that was really really big, and there were important
Speaker 5: exceptions to that in the US. I'm doing a potted
Speaker 5: history here. Obviously there's exceptions to this, but you definitely
Speaker 5: had all this time and the stuff that was sustained
Speaker 5: and remembered were largely like sort of cultural projects. And
Speaker 5: so like I think like now as we're moving into
Speaker 5: this era here in North America on Turtle Island of
Speaker 5: extreme repressive danger, right, like we shouldn't like joke about
Speaker 5: it or downplay it. Like we're facing a lot of
Speaker 5: extreme repression and fascists back in the streets in a
Speaker 5: big way. It doesn't feel like big political organizing of
Speaker 5: the kind that happened during the first Trump administration where
Speaker 5: people did a lot of marching in circles, but there
Speaker 5: were targets for the pressure, you know, like they don't
Speaker 5: feel as relevant now. But now I'm really off, way off.
Speaker 5: But no, I think so I think like I think
Speaker 5: like we're in this moment where the fascists both are
Speaker 5: quite empowered and very unfocused. They're they're confused. They don't
Speaker 5: really have us in their sights, like they think Liz
Speaker 5: Cheney is just as much a revolutionary as Assada Shakur
Speaker 5: or whatever, right, And like that leaves us some space
Speaker 5: to move and to build things that can maintain the
Speaker 5: spirit of resistance, that can reproduce a culture of resistance
Speaker 5: that can also organize. And another thing that has really
Speaker 5: been important for me recently with KA is that I've
Speaker 5: been doing an organizing project that I won't talk about
Speaker 5: the details of, but that the skills have largely come
Speaker 5: from punk music that I did in the twenties twenty
Speaker 5: is being in a touring punk band, and those skills
Speaker 5: have made this organizing really easy. And that's been a
Speaker 5: huge thing for me because I'm working with other people
Speaker 5: who are younger who don't have that experiential like, oh,
Speaker 5: how do you do this? I'm like, oh no, no, it's
Speaker 5: so easy. You just like do this. You know, here's
Speaker 5: these skills I learned just from doing music, And like,
Speaker 5: I don't think that's just like accidental, as Shirley was saying,
Speaker 5: like the DIY nature of some of that work, the
Speaker 5: culture work. You know, maybe the band wasn't revolutionary. The
Speaker 5: bands I was in certainly weren't like the revolution or whatever,
Speaker 5: but they gave me all of these powerful skills and
Speaker 5: ideas and concepts for doing really important work. And I
Speaker 5: think that that's also a reason to pursue DIY culture
Speaker 5: in a way that's genuinely sustainable and world building.
Speaker 4: I think like, if I can build off this too,
Speaker 4: and I'm going to try to do some tying together
Speaker 4: of things. But like one of the ways that I
Speaker 4: think about my contribution is to think about like let's
Speaker 4: not like.
Speaker 6: Don't look there, let's look over here.
Speaker 4: And that can mean of multiple things, which is often
Speaker 4: when people think politically, they're looking at these big moments
Speaker 4: or big actions or like top down solutions, which means
Speaker 4: that we take our attention away from these other places
Speaker 4: where we're doing all this stuff, like carlois saying, like
Speaker 4: we're already doing a lot of important kind of like
Speaker 4: life making work. And then also there's movements in our
Speaker 4: movements where we have to be like you all look
Speaker 4: over here while we do stuff over right, Like you
Speaker 4: don't want to be seen all the time, So we
Speaker 4: have to be able to direct our attention to the
Speaker 4: things that we do and then also keep some of
Speaker 4: that stuff under wraps. And that means it's hard sometimes
Speaker 4: to see and because it's so decentralized, and anarchism really
Speaker 4: functions through decentralization, like we're not always aware of how
Speaker 4: much power we actually have and what's going on at
Speaker 4: any one moment. And going back to the kind of moments,
Speaker 4: even tracing back to the Battle of Seattle, and I
Speaker 4: think it's like ever more present today in all of
Speaker 4: the kinds of organizing for street actions that are being
Speaker 4: done that a lot of the groundwork for any of
Speaker 4: these moments is done by anarchists, and then it's not
Speaker 4: either claimed by anarchists or it's stolen from anarchists. Like
Speaker 4: we make everything sort of run, and anarchism makes everything run,
Speaker 4: and then it just gets ignored because it's not about
Speaker 4: taking credit, it's not about kind of imposing itself. And
Speaker 4: so I think like that kind of in between of
Speaker 4: saying what we're doing and sharing that knowledge and then
Speaker 4: keeping under wrap so that we can keep chugging along,
Speaker 4: and then just also being aware of when our work
Speaker 4: is being stolen and then repurposed for something that goes
Speaker 4: against what we want.
Speaker 6: I think these are.
Speaker 4: All ways for us to prepare for those moments of
Speaker 4: like explosion or eruption where anarchy really manifests and then
Speaker 4: we can kind of taste freedom for a moment.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think the way I've always thought about it
Speaker 1: was just kind of like, is this like flame tending
Speaker 1: process where in these sort of low cycles, your job
Speaker 1: is to keep the flame alive, and eventually you know
Speaker 1: that you're going to see it, like you know, you're
Speaker 1: you're you're going to see the explosion again, right, You're
Speaker 1: going to see the flame for uh, But like that
Speaker 1: that doesn't happen unless the flame is still there and
Speaker 1: unless people have been tending it and people have been
Speaker 1: trying to make it grow. And you can't necessarily just
Speaker 1: like add fuel to it and be like, ah, it's
Speaker 1: gonna it's gonna grow now, right it. You know, you
Speaker 1: don't you don't really have control of how it sort
Speaker 1: of moves and grows it expands, but you have control
Speaker 1: over your ability to like make sure that it keeps going.
Speaker 3: Absolutely all about Bambers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think also, like I thinking about the
Speaker 1: punk metaphor a lot. Like one of the ways that
Speaker 1: I've been thinking a lot about like what we're doing
Speaker 1: here and it could happen here is we kind of
Speaker 1: took the like we took the ridge against the machine gambit,
Speaker 1: which is to say we were like we're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to go to try to go somewhat mainstream
Speaker 1: in order to I mean bridge but obviously like went
Speaker 1: way bigger than we did, but like we're gonna go
Speaker 1: try to We're going to go like somewhat mainstream so
Speaker 1: we can like spread this thing to a larger group
Speaker 1: of people. That's also very very dangerous in the sense that,
Speaker 1: like it's very easy to sort of just lose yourself
Speaker 1: in the kind of mire of like the field you've
Speaker 1: walked into. But on the other hand, the upside about
Speaker 1: it is that we're not the only people doing this, right,
Speaker 1: and there's all of you out there who are doing this,
Speaker 1: Like everyone on this call is doing this, like is
Speaker 1: doing the like like the DIY work that is going
Speaker 1: to be the core of what this whole thing becomes.
Speaker 1: And the more the more of these media products we
Speaker 1: get and the more that people are able to sustain
Speaker 1: themselves doing this, the more that we're sort of able
Speaker 1: to break like I don't know, just like the modelmaniacal
Speaker 1: substack control of like taking your money and giving it
Speaker 1: the transphobes kind of thing. The better shape we're going
Speaker 1: to be in in the years to come exactly.
Speaker 5: And speaking of which, one thing anarchists are famously bad
Speaker 5: at doing is accepting that we do wire money and
Speaker 5: asking for it. So I'm going to do that for
Speaker 5: the squad. Yeah, we are currently fundraising because it's actually
Speaker 5: really hard to make something sustainable for people. Yeah, so
Speaker 5: we have a fundraiser going on. If you like what
Speaker 5: we're talking about here, you can donate to our Indiegogo
Speaker 5: literally anything helps. Once we fully launch in February, we're
Speaker 5: going to have a pay what you want subscription model,
Speaker 5: so everything will be subscribed. But we really want to
Speaker 5: have three months worth of living wage for all of
Speaker 5: us to do two days a week on it, right,
Speaker 5: so we're not even you know, we're not talking full salaries,
Speaker 5: and that's forty five thousand dollars because four people for
Speaker 5: three months, it's not even a tremendous amount of money
Speaker 5: because we're including solidarity funds in that and like paying
Speaker 5: any writers who contribute, like lots of other stuff. So yeah,
Speaker 5: if you have a few bucks and you know, maybe
Speaker 5: you're thinking about, you know, getting off of one of
Speaker 5: those substacks or something, and you want to throw our away,
Speaker 5: we would be absolutely honored. I'm very excited to accept
Speaker 5: anything in this launch. And if you don't have that money,
Speaker 5: which is I know true for a lot of us,
Speaker 5: which is why we feel bad asking for the money
Speaker 5: because there are so many people who need it right now,
Speaker 5: you can subscribe online. You can find us on social
Speaker 5: media and keep in touch until we do launch, and
Speaker 5: then you can join and subscribe that way. That's also
Speaker 5: a really great way to support us. But if you
Speaker 5: have a few bucks you want to throw, if you
Speaker 5: want to give someone a present of a year's membership,
Speaker 5: you can get that for one hundred dollars for the holidays,
Speaker 5: you know, radicalize your uncle, you know, just with our work,
Speaker 5: we'd really really appreciate it.
Speaker 3: And yeah, thanks Vicky.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I don't know, I'm excited for this. There's
Speaker 1: already been a bunch of great stuff that's up on
Speaker 1: the site. We will have links to everything in the description. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you, Thank you three for coming on the show.
Speaker 1: And I'm really excited about this.
Speaker 3: Well, thanks for having us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for the chance to share it. And like
Speaker 4: I always say, like if anyone is interested and wants
Speaker 4: to get in touch, I'm happy to hear from you.
Speaker 2: And yeah, yeah, same and reach out to us too.
Speaker 2: A few ideas on what cost stands for. We love
Speaker 2: hearing from people. My favorite is kin the anarchist right,
Speaker 2: that's what it stands for. I don't know who came
Speaker 2: up with that.
Speaker 3: I think that might have been scherlier Vicky.
Speaker 2: But it's a good one TVD TBD, So yeah, send
Speaker 2: in what you think. And we also are going to
Speaker 2: have an advice column that's going to be lunched soon. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so send us questions or individually or whatever, but you know,
Speaker 2: disrupt individualism, reach out to us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thanks so much. And yeah, as a long time listener,
Speaker 5: first time caller, it's really exciting to be on here.
Speaker 5: So thank you Mia so much.
Speaker 1: That's not true old time.
Speaker 5: Second a right, sorry I was on. I just go
Speaker 5: on so many podcasts like.
Speaker 6: Sorry.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, anyway, it's really exciting to be here and
Speaker 5: talking to everyone, and we hope to meet y'all in
Speaker 5: the future and we'll have a well, we will have
Speaker 5: a discord community, we'll be having like writing class, We're
Speaker 5: gonna have a lot of like really exciting stuff. So
Speaker 5: even if you can't throw in money right now, please
Speaker 5: sign up to our website, cosh anythings dot com stay
Speaker 5: in touch and find out all the really cool stuff
Speaker 5: we're doing.
Speaker 4: And just to reiterate, like all the stuff that we're
Speaker 4: already doing is now going to have a home and call.
Speaker 4: So like my essays and podcasts, Vicki's review reviews and essays,
Speaker 4: and Carla's many projects which include pot podcasts and writing
Speaker 4: and these interviews, Danny's writing and classes.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is all moving there.
Speaker 3: Plus new things doing it together.
Speaker 1: Yeah in that spirit YouTube, dear listener, can can do
Speaker 1: things together and go to rup this world. So go
Speaker 1: do that now instead of listening to whatever else it's
Speaker 1: happening on the show. This ending exactly only well, but
Speaker 1: go go go tosruugh things.
Speaker 3: I get it, Thanks so much.
Speaker 1: It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 2: Foolzonemedia dot com or check us out from the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can
Speaker 2: now find sources for It could Happen Here listened directly
Speaker 2: in episode descriptions.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening.