Speaker 1: Colson Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 2: the podcast where we talk about how even when there's
Speaker 2: bad things happening, there's people who are doing good things.
Speaker 2: And that has been happening as long as there have
Speaker 2: been people. There've been people doing bad things, and then
Speaker 2: people be doing good things, and then there'll be people
Speaker 2: doing morally ambiguous things and critiquing the idea of dividing
Speaker 2: things into good and bad.
Speaker 1: But I'm willing to do it anyway.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Margaret Kiltroy, and my guest this week
Speaker 2: is Corey Doctor.
Speaker 1: Oh, Hi, how are you Hi. Nice to be back
Speaker 1: with you, Margaret. Yeah, this totally separate day.
Speaker 2: We're definitely not just recording one minute later where we
Speaker 2: were left off. I actually want to something you were saying,
Speaker 2: the Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI and how it is
Speaker 2: number one selling nonfiction book in Canada right now. Like,
Speaker 2: I think people have this idea that writing books is
Speaker 2: sort of old fashioned or doesn't necessarily like change things
Speaker 2: as dramatically, Like if you hang out with just direct
Speaker 2: action activists in particular, they're a little bit like, yeah,
Speaker 2: writing books, whatever, all that matters is stopping this following
Speaker 2: like project that is destroying the world, and I used
Speaker 2: to a little bit buy into that, but then I
Speaker 2: talked to some of my elders and they helped correct
Speaker 2: me on this. But it's interesting because it's a slower change.
Speaker 2: And so I'm wondering if you can kind of point
Speaker 2: to some of the things that have happened throughout your career,
Speaker 2: like things the slow shifting of culture, whether through your
Speaker 2: fiction or nonfiction, Like what's the point of books? Sell
Speaker 2: me on writing books. You don't actually have to because
Speaker 2: that's what I do, but do it anyway.
Speaker 1: So I guess from my worm's eye view, right, because
Speaker 1: we all have the bird's eye view about books right
Speaker 1: where we can see sometimes a book comes out and
Speaker 1: there are things attributed to it, whether that's Uncle Tom's
Speaker 1: cabin or you know. My favorite example a book from
Speaker 1: before they invented good titles, which is called The History
Speaker 1: of the Standard Oil Company, Parts one in two, which
Speaker 1: sounds extremely boring but was in fact the book that
Speaker 1: killed Johnny Rockefeller's empires, written by Tarbell and serialized in
Speaker 1: a national magazine, became a giant bestseller. And Tarbell was incredible.
Speaker 1: She was like an order and an early suffragist and organizer,
Speaker 1: but she was also like the first woman in America
Speaker 1: to get a science degree. And her dad was a
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania oilman who'd been ruined by Rockefeller, and so she
Speaker 1: like it was her vendetta, and so she just like
Speaker 1: went and read all the footnotes and all of his
Speaker 1: financial filings and figured out how he was cheating and
Speaker 1: wrote this book. Again, amazing book, written before they invented titles.
Speaker 1: So it was the History of the Standard All Company,
Speaker 1: Volumes one and two. Just a fucking banger still today,
Speaker 1: like genuinely like a really good book. So you know,
Speaker 1: we can talk about how this stuff, like how books
Speaker 1: change things, right in that kind of macro sense where
Speaker 1: we can all take the bird's eye view, but from
Speaker 1: the worm's eye view of having written a bunch of books.
Speaker 1: I every now and again, and increasingly now that I'm
Speaker 1: old and I've written more than thirty of them, and
Speaker 1: I've been at it for more than a quarter of
Speaker 1: a century, run into people who very kindly seek me
Speaker 1: out to attribute some or all of the work that
Speaker 1: they do that makes a difference in the world to
Speaker 1: an experience that they had reading my books. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I'm very careful to say, like the work was the
Speaker 1: important part, right, Like I might have given them a
Speaker 1: shove in the right direction. They met my work at
Speaker 1: the right moment and it made a difference for them.
Speaker 1: But you know, the credit is due to them. I'm
Speaker 1: not trying to take credit for their work here, right,
Speaker 1: but totally. I like it started going to cons like Defcon,
Speaker 1: just big Hacker Con in the desert in Vegas, and
Speaker 1: I would run into people and this was like maybe
Speaker 1: starting fifteen years ago or maybe even longer, where I
Speaker 1: would run into people who were It was quite disorienting
Speaker 1: because they were like grown ass adults and they would say,
Speaker 1: I read little Brother in middle school, and now I'm
Speaker 1: a hacker and I work on helping people bright their shits.
Speaker 2: And like now they're you're peer, and you're like, wait,
Speaker 2: hold on, how am I older than you?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, now I've made my peace with I have
Speaker 1: two artificial hips, I had cataract surgery. I'm just a
Speaker 1: fucking old guy. So you know you taught me yoga. Yeah,
Speaker 1: surely you had done yoga before that though, It's true,
Speaker 1: but yeah, yeah, a person who is like sat in
Speaker 1: trees to stop them from being cut down is surely
Speaker 1: done yoga, and I'm also hugged a tree at one point,
Speaker 1: right right right. It's like saying I taught you tie
Speaker 1: dying or something. I'm convinced I did not. I gave
Speaker 1: you your first tofu. Definitely not so like jokingly I
Speaker 1: call this my botnet, but there really is like a
Speaker 1: little army of people who some of their cues they
Speaker 1: took for me. And it was, you know, in the
Speaker 1: sense that an avalanche has a lot of little pebbles
Speaker 1: that start rolling and then eventually something big happens. I
Speaker 1: can see that there's stuff happening in the world where
Speaker 1: I was one of the pebbles. Yeah. So you know,
Speaker 1: this movement to like seize the means of computation, make
Speaker 1: computers work for people and not for their bosses. I
Speaker 1: think there are a lot of participants in that who
Speaker 1: got their start or were inspired to keep you sure
Speaker 1: by reading some of my work, and some of them
Speaker 1: are quite famous for it. The most famous example of
Speaker 1: this is if you watch Citizen four, which is the
Speaker 1: Academy Award winning documentary about Edward Snowden made by Laura Poitras.
Speaker 1: When she's in Hong Kong with him, and he's just
Speaker 1: revealed his identity, and he's about to go underground and
Speaker 1: go live with these Hong Kong activists because they know
Speaker 1: that his identity is going to become public in a
Speaker 1: day when they published that. He did this with the
Speaker 1: intention of going public, and he is grabbing the things
Speaker 1: he's going to need to go underground. He takes a
Speaker 1: copy of my novel Homeland, the sequel to a Little Brother,
Speaker 1: off the bedside table and puts it in his go
Speaker 1: Bagow and Ed and I have since become friends, and
Speaker 1: he wrote the introduction to a reissue of Little Brother
Speaker 1: and Homeland that I'm extremely proud to have. And you
Speaker 1: Ed did what he did for reasons that he wrote
Speaker 1: about in a memoir that's a very very good memoir
Speaker 1: in which my work plays an infinitesimal role, but it
Speaker 1: played a role, right right. Ed had a journey where
Speaker 1: he went from being kind of a chud right if
Speaker 1: you like. This was one of the things that when
Speaker 1: he first came out and we knew who he was,
Speaker 1: and like people found his old ars Technica phost where
Speaker 1: he's like being a bit of an edge lord because
Speaker 1: he was like a kid who aspired to join the
Speaker 1: Special Forces. Right, Yeah, that was like who he was, right,
Speaker 1: but he became someone totally different, and that journey was
Speaker 1: something that a bunch of us helped him down and
Speaker 1: then he did something hugely consequential and important. And so
Speaker 1: you know, I feel like that's you know, when I
Speaker 1: think about the role my work has played, it's not
Speaker 1: the same as the direct action. I didn't leak a
Speaker 1: bunch of documents that revealed the extent of US A spying.
Speaker 1: I didn't risk a firing squad, but I played a
Speaker 1: small role in that extremely important historic juncture. Well.
Speaker 2: I like it because I think that in a weird way,
Speaker 2: writing fiction, when you're not trying to write the book
Speaker 2: that takes down the thing. I mean, we're all trying
Speaker 2: to write the book that takes down the thing. But
Speaker 2: just like doing anything else, we don't take down the
Speaker 2: thing by ourselves. We do it all together. And I
Speaker 2: feel like, in a weird way, even though writing books
Speaker 2: like usually there's only one or two names on it,
Speaker 2: but like ideas don't come from nowhere, Like I love
Speaker 2: that we all get to be part of this great
Speaker 2: woven together like movement of movements and all trying to
Speaker 2: do this stuff together, and I also like how like
Speaker 2: like your work influences is mine, but I also like
Speaker 2: don't have the same politics as you, right sure, and
Speaker 2: like that's great. I love recommending your books. I'm never like, oh,
Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't agree with the following minutia
Speaker 2: of like you know, I'm like, no, like, we need
Speaker 2: books about how we unfuck the world and we need
Speaker 2: them now.
Speaker 1: And something else you were saying last episode was about oh,
Speaker 1: you mean a whole week ago?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, huh yeah, oh no, it's two days ago.
Speaker 2: This podcast comes out twice a week.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no.
Speaker 2: I The other thing I took after you was too
Speaker 2: much of a workload. My newsletters only once a week,
Speaker 2: and that's already you know, a lot. But then I
Speaker 2: of my three podcasts a week. Something you were talking
Speaker 2: about before was this idea you brought up, utopian writing,
Speaker 2: and that's not something that people did much of, or
Speaker 2: it got around much, this idea of like what if
Speaker 2: we did things different? Like I feel like for the
Speaker 2: past couple decades until more recently, we mostly saw fiction
Speaker 2: how bad things can get right, And it seems like
Speaker 2: now that things are getting the bad that everyone predicted.
Speaker 2: I remember when reading nineteen eighty four, I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: TV that spies on you whatever or well right, and
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh no, I have a TV that spies
Speaker 2: on me, and it's just literally cheaper than buying a monitor.
Speaker 2: So I choose to have a TV that spies on
Speaker 2: me because it's cheaper than buying a monitor.
Speaker 1: I would quival with the word choice there. I would
Speaker 1: say something like, you are being bulldozed into it or whatever, right, Sure, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's true because I'm like, I don't actually consent
Speaker 2: to all this stuff that's happening, just because I want
Speaker 2: to participate in society instead of completely remove myself from it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but you choose to write what if we could be better?
Speaker 2: And I find that really important because right now I
Speaker 2: think that a lot of us are struggling with imagining
Speaker 2: what we can do besides have flock cameras and endless
Speaker 2: data centers as exactly the wrong moment for data centers,
Speaker 2: exactly the wrong moment for like, let's add way more
Speaker 2: power to the grid.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm curious what brings you towards writing what if we
Speaker 2: could be better.
Speaker 1: Well, I think one of the things that unlocked it
Speaker 1: for me is distinguishing between a dystopia and a story
Speaker 1: with dystopian furniture in it, because like a dystopia, that's orwell, right,
Speaker 1: that's the bootstamping on the human face forever, Yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: Like that's of course, that's dystopian. Yeah, but it is
Speaker 1: not dystopian to imagine that things will break down right, right, okay,
Speaker 1: and it is hopeful to imagine that when they break
Speaker 1: down we can fix them again. The idea that like
Speaker 1: this moment we're at where we have a civilization that,
Speaker 1: at least, if it were more equitably distributed, could meet
Speaker 1: everyone's basic needs, could provide a good quality of life,
Speaker 1: could advance the useful arts and sciences in ways that
Speaker 1: would be beneficial to people, and you know, both by
Speaker 1: delighting them but also by treating their illnesses and so on,
Speaker 1: like that this is a contingent moment we arrived at,
Speaker 1: that we threaded a bunch of needles that we will
Speaker 1: never thread again, and if this breaks down, we'll never
Speaker 1: rebuild it, right, or that we are like fallen from grace,
Speaker 1: and that the people who built this were better than
Speaker 1: us and we have like devolved generation on generation to
Speaker 1: the point where we could never like a very kind
Speaker 1: of renaissancey like, oh, you know, the Greeks could fly
Speaker 1: and you.
Speaker 2: Know whatever, right, Like right, the Victorians could go and
Speaker 2: fight polar bears with their bare hands.
Speaker 1: Sure, right, Yeah. So this idea that there's like this
Speaker 1: stuff that our ancestors did that we will never recover,
Speaker 1: that's very dystopian to me, right, Whereas the idea that
Speaker 1: this stuff that our ancestors built will break down, that's
Speaker 1: not pessimistic. That's just like acknowledging the second law of thermodynamics, right,
Speaker 1: like things fall apart, right, the second law of thermodynamics
Speaker 1: should not be up for grabs, unless maybe if you're
Speaker 1: writing fantasy, certainly not if you're writing science fiction. But
Speaker 1: the idea that we can beat back entropy, that we
Speaker 1: can like build collective projects that bring us to a
Speaker 1: place where we can meet our needs and solve our
Speaker 1: problems and take care of one another, that like that
Speaker 1: feels to me like a very optimistic thing, especially if
Speaker 1: we can do it under conditions of extremis and difficulty,
Speaker 1: Because it's easy to imagine, for example, that like in
Speaker 1: a society with rule of law where we have relatively
Speaker 1: stable political situation, where you have people who are you know,
Speaker 1: have their basic needs met and so on, that you
Speaker 1: could embark on a research program that ends up doing
Speaker 1: something to you know, help people with cancer or come
Speaker 1: up with a vaccine for some horrible disease or whatever. Right,
Speaker 1: it's harder to imagine that, like in conditions of breakdown, Right,
Speaker 1: it's hard to imagine, like, if you're in Ukraine at
Speaker 1: this moment or Russia at this moment, how you would
Speaker 1: do that because so many of your resources are being
Speaker 1: turned to pointless war, and you know you're in Russia especially,
Speaker 1: the rule of law is breaking down because the war
Speaker 1: is very unpopular. And so there's this you know, whatever
Speaker 1: rule of law persisted before is now being jettisoned in
Speaker 1: the name of you know, crushing descent so that the
Speaker 1: country can prosecute its war to a lesser extense. Happening
Speaker 1: in Ukraine where we're seeing the disruption of regular elections
Speaker 1: and so on. Yeah, So, like, for me, a very
Speaker 1: hopeful story is a story in which people in extremists, right,
Speaker 1: people surrounded by dystopian furniture find the collective will, the ingenuity,
Speaker 1: the gumption, right, sure, yeah, the stick toitiveness to actually say, well, fuck,
Speaker 1: all of society is just shut down, and we still
Speaker 1: need an MR and a vaccine. We're just gonna fucking
Speaker 1: do it, right, And like, that's a very hopeful thing, right,
Speaker 1: like to snatch victory out of the jaws to defeat
Speaker 1: that way is not utopian in the sense that utopia
Speaker 1: literally means no place right everything that can happen. I
Speaker 1: think it's a very achievable, hopeful aspiration. And when you
Speaker 1: think back to the ancestors who created the circumstance in
Speaker 1: which we had stable politics, the rule of law, and
Speaker 1: the political and fiscal breathing space to embark on ambitious
Speaker 1: research projects to address human needs, they built that stuff
Speaker 1: in a moment of adversity, right, Like they start from
Speaker 1: peace and then build it. They got the peace by
Speaker 1: building it, right, And so yeah, it's easier to do
Speaker 1: that stuff when you have peace and stability, but it can't.
Speaker 1: It's not a prerequisite. It's never been a prerequisite. And right,
Speaker 1: if they did it, we can do it well.
Speaker 2: And it's just because something's hard doesn't mean that we
Speaker 2: shouldn't try to do it and believe in ourselves to
Speaker 2: do it.
Speaker 1: No, this this makes sense.
Speaker 2: It's like something that they bring up a lot as
Speaker 2: people watch trans writes and LGBT rights disappear at a you.
Speaker 1: Know, terrifying pace.
Speaker 2: Right, But it's like, yeah, but we got those rights
Speaker 2: in the case of gay men during more or less
Speaker 2: a genocide, right, right, Like people were fighting while literally
Speaker 2: dying in mass and like, you know, everything that we've gotten,
Speaker 2: we have built, we have fought for, we have gotten
Speaker 2: and so it's like, yeah, it's gotten harder again, and
Speaker 2: it it's really annoying. It's really annoying because I want
Speaker 2: to be fighting climate change and instead I have to
Speaker 2: be fighting fascism. Like this is like really frustrating, but
Speaker 2: we've done it before.
Speaker 1: And the movement that defeats fascism, right, we'll have the solidarity,
Speaker 1: the infrastructure, the membership, the trust relationships to fight climate change.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the things that like I'm at
Speaker 1: great pains to talk to people about in this moment
Speaker 1: of changing political views and changing political climate and reality
Speaker 1: is that shopping isn't politics. You can't vote with your
Speaker 1: wallet and that, like and they're like, well, what about
Speaker 1: boycott's And I'm like, boycott is not going to the
Speaker 1: grocery store and then thinking really hard about what you're
Speaker 1: going to buy. That wasn't BDS, That wasn't the boycott
Speaker 1: against apartheid. It is an articulated political movement that it's
Speaker 1: not a thing you do on your own. A boycott
Speaker 1: is a thing where you have to go to meetings, right,
Speaker 1: you have to somewhat some boring fuck is reading Robert's
Speaker 1: rules of orders. There is a stupid argument about who's
Speaker 1: going to wash the cups afterwards? Like that's how like
Speaker 1: boycotts are not. They are ineluctively collective action. And you know,
Speaker 1: the Montgomery bus boycott was not three hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: consecutive days of people deciding to walk to work. It
Speaker 1: was an organized movement mostly run by black communists who
Speaker 1: had specific goals that they articulated on a national stage.
Speaker 1: They had just kind of material stuff like carpools, but
Speaker 1: they also had like an organization that would go and
Speaker 1: lean on bosses that disciplined workers for being late because
Speaker 1: they were taking a carpool instead of the bus.
Speaker 2: I like that phrasing lean on Yeah, that does a
Speaker 2: lot of lifting, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And it may seem like, well, that was a lot
Speaker 1: of overhead that they had to put in to like
Speaker 1: take in a carpool. But the overhead was a feature,
Speaker 1: not a bug. Because when after three hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: days they broke segregation on that bus line, they had
Speaker 1: a movement that became the basis of the civil rights movement. Right,
Speaker 1: those people became the backbone of the civil rights movement.
Speaker 1: And this is that brian Ne no quote about developed underground.
Speaker 1: You know, five thousand people bought the record, but they
Speaker 1: all started a band. You know, five thousand people were
Speaker 1: involved in organizing the Montgomery bus boycott, and they all
Speaker 1: started a group somewhere in America that fought, you know,
Speaker 1: for racial justice. So you know, like the fact that
Speaker 1: you have to get involved in organize politics to fight
Speaker 1: for trans rights again is very frustrating because we thought
Speaker 1: we'd want a bunch of those fights, right, and that
Speaker 1: movement will serve us well in fighting fascism, and then
Speaker 1: the anti fascist move will service well in fighting climate emergency, right,
Speaker 1: because like the infrastructure of a movement is itself a
Speaker 1: useful thing to have over and above the immediate goals
Speaker 1: that the movement pursues.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, you're right, And like I forget this all
Speaker 2: the time, right, because it's so easy to get lost
Speaker 2: in immediate fights and like crisis and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: But like I remember, I showed up to Asheville a
Speaker 2: day or two after Helene because I have a basement
Speaker 2: full of prepper stuff and my friends needed it. So
Speaker 2: it drove down there with a van and you know,
Speaker 2: talked with people who are organizing, and it really was
Speaker 2: direct and clear. The degree to which any given town
Speaker 2: was resilient was the degree to which there were organized
Speaker 2: people there. Like basically, someone was like, look, if that
Speaker 2: town had anarchists and they were getting stuff done, that
Speaker 2: town did better. And it wasn't like they went to
Speaker 2: the anarchist meeting. There's other groups that were doing this
Speaker 2: as well. But it was like the harm reduction group, right,
Speaker 2: the people who sit around and figure out how do
Speaker 2: we distribute needles, have a system by which they distribute things,
Speaker 2: and they have people who trust them. And so then
Speaker 2: I show up into Ashville and they're like, hey, you
Speaker 2: have a van, we know you, we trust you. Go
Speaker 2: drive it up into the county to the harm reduction
Speaker 2: the rural harm reduction group that is doing this stuff.
Speaker 1: Now you're you're.
Speaker 2: Absolutely right, and I want to talk to you about
Speaker 2: one of the ways you've described on fucking the world.
Speaker 1: Before you do this, I want a little sidebar here.
Speaker 1: Have you ever read Eric Flint? No, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: The name sounds familiar, so Eric, he's dad.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Eric was a Marxist meat packing union organizer from Chicago
Speaker 1: who wrote left wing military science fiction for Baine Books,
Speaker 1: the home of the most reaction or military fiction in
Speaker 1: the world. So he was an incredible guy. We were
Speaker 1: on a panel together at a World con on labor
Speaker 1: politics and science fiction about how little labor organizing shows
Speaker 1: up and even during an era in which there's a
Speaker 1: lot of labor organizing. And his thesis was that the
Speaker 1: core readership of science fiction, which were people who knew
Speaker 1: something about electronics and engineering, had such high demand as
Speaker 1: workers in that moment that they just never thought about
Speaker 1: labor politics because they were getting from scarcity what you
Speaker 1: would otherwise need solidarity to get, and so they didn't
Speaker 1: really think of it. It's just the samething that happened
Speaker 1: to computer software engineers thirty years later or forty years later.
Speaker 1: So Eric wrote this long running series. The first film
Speaker 1: is called I believe sixteen thirty seven. It's a year,
Speaker 1: and it is about a strange event in which some
Speaker 1: kind of time storm hits a town in Virginia that's
Speaker 1: a union coal mining town on the evening that the
Speaker 1: head of the United mind Workers union is wring the
Speaker 1: coal boss's daughter at the union hall, and the union
Speaker 1: hall and the whole town are transported back to the
Speaker 1: middle of the Thirty Years War. Okay, yeah, no, I
Speaker 1: have to read this. So they've got a coal mine,
Speaker 1: they've got a power plant, they've got the school library
Speaker 1: which explains how to build a civilization from scratch, and
Speaker 1: all of the groups within the town become factors in
Speaker 1: this movement in the middle of the Thirty Years War
Speaker 1: to build a new egalitarian democratic project in the middle
Speaker 1: of the Thirty Years War in Central Europe. So like
Speaker 1: among other things, the girls cheerleading squad are also the
Speaker 1: ski shooting team, and they hire themselves to King Olaf
Speaker 1: of Sweden to hunt mercenaries because the mercenary chiefs it's
Speaker 1: like before effective ranged weapons. So we have not reached
Speaker 1: the point yet in which the guy who's in charge
Speaker 1: of the mercenary band has learned that you don't sit
Speaker 1: on a horse with a giant plume on your head
Speaker 1: if you're elading people, so like they're just sitting there
Speaker 1: with fucking targets on them. And so the girls ski
Speaker 1: shooting team, who know how to work as an organization,
Speaker 1: wipe out all the mercenaries in Central Europe and in
Speaker 1: exchange for King Oloff agreeing that in all the territory
Speaker 1: conquers there will not be an established church and they'll
Speaker 1: be freedom of religion. Right, So this is how they
Speaker 1: get there, and then they liberate all the camp followers
Speaker 1: and do feminist consciousness raising with them, right, But the
Speaker 1: mineworkers know how to work as a unit, so the
Speaker 1: mineworkers become the backbone of this like democratic paramilitary in
Speaker 1: the middle of the Thirty Years War across Entry, they
Speaker 1: blew up the Tower of London at one point. Is
Speaker 1: so fucking good, and Eric like he wrote like ten
Speaker 1: of these and he roped all these like hard right
Speaker 1: military science fiction motherfuckers into working on the series with
Speaker 1: him because it was such a fucking romp. And all
Speaker 1: these guys are history weirdos and they're just like, ah,
Speaker 1: I just want to write about like this Spanish duke.
Speaker 1: I've got like this series hate on and I want
Speaker 1: to pitch him against the United Mine Workers. I don't
Speaker 1: care that you are communist. Eric, We're just going to
Speaker 1: do this together. And it's like David Drake writing these
Speaker 1: with Eric Flint. They're so good. And I'll say the
Speaker 1: last thing I'll say about Eric is two thousand and
Speaker 1: seven at the World Come in Los Angeles, we were
Speaker 1: on a panel together and we were at the planning
Speaker 1: stage for it, and I had just watched the DNC
Speaker 1: where Obama gave his speech Yeah, and I was like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, this guy is incredible. He is going
Speaker 1: to change the world. And Eric was like, kid, let
Speaker 1: me explain something to you. I'm from Chicago. He is
Speaker 1: a Chicago machine democrat. He is not a fresh faced kid.
Speaker 1: He is a cynical operator who will not co govern
Speaker 1: with a movement. He will, immediately upon being elected, shut
Speaker 1: down all public accountability and accountability to people within his
Speaker 1: movement and govern autocratically in back rooms, wheeling and dealing
Speaker 1: and making grand bargains. So Eric flot was right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: one hundred percent right. It was prophetic. I spent the
Speaker 1: next like eight years just hearing Eric's voice in my head.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, it's amazing honestly, even actually specifically this raising
Speaker 2: a politician who will not co govern with a movement,
Speaker 2: and it is something that we're seeing potentially different, Like
Speaker 2: I have not seen this many people excited about electoral
Speaker 2: politics in a long time, with this current rise of
Speaker 2: the DSA from a thing that you know, some people
Speaker 2: who like to go to meetings too much go to
Speaker 2: to As you were pointing out, sometimes by going to
Speaker 2: meetings a lot, you can start trying to accomplish things.
Speaker 1: It's not just about learning to shout stack at the
Speaker 1: most obnoxious moment. There's actually like reasons to go right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and oh god, it even kind of gets into
Speaker 2: that whole like all wars logistics thing.
Speaker 1: Sure army travels on its stomach, quartermasters win and lose
Speaker 1: the war.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you wrote a book that is an ode
Speaker 2: to gorilla urban planning and the DSA ushering in a
Speaker 2: better world. But not as dry as that sounds. But
Speaker 2: I think people have been listening to you for this long.
Speaker 2: Not that you want to know how to put a
Speaker 2: plot on things, and two you know how to complicate
Speaker 2: things right in this story you're not presenting just like
Speaker 2: here's the person who's always right. You actually do a
Speaker 2: pretty good job of a flawed protagonist in that where
Speaker 2: I find myself being like, ah, this boy isn't listening.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's the point. The point is the boy is
Speaker 1: it listening? Yes, coming of age requires not being of
Speaker 1: age when you start.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, totally. So you wrote this book called The
Speaker 2: Lost Cause, and it's about the idea that some twenty
Speaker 2: thirty years in the future, kind of on the tail
Speaker 2: end of a green new deal, there's a backlash, but
Speaker 2: specifically as in crises get worse, the solutions that people
Speaker 2: are finding is by coming together collectively and building new
Speaker 2: physical infrastructure. And it makes the reader think about physical
Speaker 2: infrastructure in a way that I'm used to kind of
Speaker 2: being like keep around old stuff. That's how you like
Speaker 2: as like a more environmentalist thing, right, Like if someone's like, oh,
Speaker 2: I want to redo my kitchen green and you're like,
Speaker 2: maybe not redoing your kitchen is the green thing to
Speaker 2: do here, right, Sure, But when you're talking about on
Speaker 2: an actual physical housing level, it seems like this book
Speaker 2: makes the argument that like, well, actually, the future demands
Speaker 2: that we have energy efficient, good at filtering smoke, and
Speaker 2: good at maintaining heating and cooling infrastructure, which is just
Speaker 2: not what we have built in this country historically.
Speaker 1: Well. Yes, and the more dense we make our housing
Speaker 1: in the places where people live, the less housing we
Speaker 1: have to put in places where our horizontal brothers and
Speaker 1: sisters live. That was John Muir's name for them. So
Speaker 1: you know, if we want to maximize how much habitat
Speaker 1: we have, we should maximize how dense our cities are.
Speaker 1: And also you know there's the energy efficiencies and whatever,
Speaker 1: and I just like very urban and also like if
Speaker 1: you hate cities, the more that people who don't hate
Speaker 1: cities can go live in cities, the more space there's
Speaker 1: going to be for you to live. It's the same
Speaker 1: as like, if you love driving, you should love bicycles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the more drivers there are in bicycles, like, the
Speaker 1: more of a free rain you're going to have to drive. Right. Oh,
Speaker 1: this is such a good point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, have you ever read There's no reason you would have,
Speaker 2: but it's about exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: But it's a terrible book.
Speaker 2: It's a book called My Journey with Aristotle to the
Speaker 2: Anarchist Utopia from the nineties by Graham Purchase. So there
Speaker 2: was this green syndicalist in the nineties whose work I
Speaker 2: think you would dig but kind of maybe in a
Speaker 2: like here's the people who came before, talking about very
Speaker 2: similar things. Someone gets conked on the head during a
Speaker 2: mining strike.
Speaker 1: It's always miners, I know.
Speaker 2: Wakes up A thousand years of the future by a
Speaker 2: guy named Aristotle who is like, the world has split
Speaker 2: up into like syndicates instead of countries, and this syndicate
Speaker 2: they've taken all of their territory, put basically everyone into
Speaker 2: a city that is made out of biodegradable plastic, and
Speaker 2: everything is bicycle highways. Everything else is forest. And there's
Speaker 2: like one guy who's like, I don't want to live
Speaker 2: in the city, and so he keeps the forest intact.
Speaker 2: And one of the ways he does is he builds
Speaker 2: the raised pathways. And like, I read this and it's
Speaker 2: just terrible writing, no offense, Graham Purchase. I doubt you're listening,
Speaker 2: but I think you know that it was not fiction.
Speaker 2: Is not what you were born to do here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So this is the thing that reminded me of it
Speaker 2: because I was thinking about it. Is like hiking, and
Speaker 2: sometimes you build raised walkways and they seem so intrusive,
Speaker 2: and then you're like, actually, this is the less intrusive
Speaker 2: way to get a lot of people to this area,
Speaker 2: plus handicap accessibility. Ye, but it's like a way to
Speaker 2: walk lighter on the land is sometimes by building infrastructure
Speaker 2: rather than everyone being an American frontiersman who goes out
Speaker 2: and has the house in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, look, the alternative to lighting old dead
Speaker 1: shit on fire is digging up minerals and making solar panels.
Speaker 1: And like, I'm not going to say that digging up
Speaker 1: minerals is always or even usually a good way to like,
Speaker 1: you know, walk lightly on the land, but i am
Speaker 1: going to say that, like, if we can figure out
Speaker 1: how to do that in the most just way possible,
Speaker 1: then this gets us away from a millennia old tradition
Speaker 1: of setting old dead shit on fire, which like, frankly,
Speaker 1: is just not a thing we can keep doing. And
Speaker 1: if you love a fire, if you love like a fireplace,
Speaker 1: if you can get everyone to stop lighting old dead
Speaker 1: shit on fire when there's a better alternative, then there's
Speaker 1: like more fiscal space in the atmosphere for the co
Speaker 1: two from your fire. Yeah, And so like you should
Speaker 1: be on the side of it. Like again, like when
Speaker 1: you have a thing that you like doing that is
Speaker 1: the default that because everyone's doing it is killing us.
Speaker 1: All you should want a better default so that you
Speaker 1: can do your special boy thing you do the special
Speaker 1: point gets the special fire in the special car, and
Speaker 1: the special huh you know, single family in the special
Speaker 1: suburb for the people who love that shit, you know,
Speaker 1: And like, yeah, the problem isn't that we have a
Speaker 1: suburb or some suburbs. The problem is we have like
Speaker 1: all suburbs, right, and so the more urbanized we can be,
Speaker 1: the more like again, I think fiscal space is the
Speaker 1: right way to think about this. Like just the whether
Speaker 1: we have like the capacity, the resource capacity, the carrying
Speaker 1: capacity to sustain it is a matter of like whether
Speaker 1: everyone does it or some people do it. And when
Speaker 1: we think of it as a privilege, right, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: all the good people get a big house and the
Speaker 1: shitty people get the tiny apartment, that feels unjust. But
Speaker 1: when it's like, well, all the people who want to
Speaker 1: live in a big, bustling city, like I live in
Speaker 1: a six hundred square foot flat up six flights of
Speaker 1: stairs in East London. I also have our movie theater
Speaker 1: on my corner. I have fifty amazing restaurants within a
Speaker 1: five minute walk. I can cycle to to Leicester Square
Speaker 1: in fifteen minutes on a separated bike path. I am
Speaker 1: living the fucking dream. You can walk more everywhere. People
Speaker 1: are interest like I take so many pictures now. It's
Speaker 1: funny because I lived in LA for ten years. I
Speaker 1: moved from London to LA for ten years and moved
Speaker 1: back again because my wife quit her job in London,
Speaker 1: took a job or in LA and took a job
Speaker 1: back in London where she started at the BBC. And
Speaker 1: I take so many pictures now, and it's because I
Speaker 1: see new things every day. I love seeing new things
Speaker 1: every day. They're delightful, you know, like it's just so
Speaker 1: great to live here. And you know, like the fact
Speaker 1: that London has a green belt means that I can
Speaker 1: be in the countryside if I feel the need to
Speaker 1: be in the countryside in under an hour, right, And
Speaker 1: I was just like for my birthday a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks ago, we rented a cabin in the literal hundred
Speaker 1: acre Wood and we went to the hundred Acre Wood
Speaker 1: and stayed in a cabin, an off grade cabin on
Speaker 1: a little pond in the hundred acre wood.
Speaker 2: And it's just like sharing infrastructure is more efficient. Everyone
Speaker 2: owning a lawnmower is one of the worst ideas that
Speaker 2: everyone ever came up with.
Speaker 1: Totally.
Speaker 2: I don't want to maintain, well, I don't really want
Speaker 2: to maintain a lawn, but I don't want to have
Speaker 2: to maintain all of these two stroke engines in order
Speaker 2: to have the cops not called on me.
Speaker 1: So everyone needs to have two stroke engines, Like I
Speaker 1: think drill is a better example actually, so like so
Speaker 1: because I own a home in Los Angeles and you.
Speaker 2: Need to drive pretty regularly, well three times a year,
Speaker 2: I going to make a hole in a wall.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, I'm a little bit more active with my space.
Speaker 1: Is I like, you have a reason to own a drill?
Speaker 1: I have a reason to own what I call the
Speaker 1: minimum viable Yeah, yeah, totally a trashy reobie. It is
Speaker 1: a device that every time I use it, I'm like,
Speaker 1: how is that this has not like exploded and showered
Speaker 1: me in shrapnel? Right now, I've used good drills, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I've done construction projects where we had professional tools. I
Speaker 1: know the difference. There's no reason for me to own that.
Speaker 1: But if the library was circulating twenty five drills in
Speaker 1: my neighborhood and they were location aware and I could
Speaker 1: figure it like, you wouldn't have to return them. You
Speaker 1: just get a message from your neighbors saying, hey, can
Speaker 1: I come over and grab the drill? Looks like you're
Speaker 1: done with it, and then whenever it needs maintenance, you
Speaker 1: take it back to the library. And because the library
Speaker 1: is buying it for this like non market use, you
Speaker 1: buy it so it gracefully degrades back into parts stream,
Speaker 1: so that the telemetry gathers about its usage is used
Speaker 1: to improve the next version of the drill that's made right,
Speaker 1: so that it's like the people's drill, comrade, and it's
Speaker 1: the best fucking drill you can imagine. It's better than
Speaker 1: the drill that Margaret Kiljoy, who actually does construction projects,
Speaker 1: would ever be able to afford. Because it's overbuilt. It's
Speaker 1: built for community use, and like, far from being a punishment,
Speaker 1: it's a reward for living in a society, in the
Speaker 1: same way that like, if you live in a good society,
Speaker 1: you don't have to carry toilet paper around with you right,
Speaker 1: wherever you need to take a ship, there's always toilet paper.
Speaker 1: It is the mark of a failing society that everyone
Speaker 1: needs toilet paper in their bag, not a successful one.
Speaker 1: And wherever we're talking about things where it makes more
Speaker 1: sense to have like a stochastic cloud of a thing
Speaker 1: rather than everyone gets their own, Like everyone should have
Speaker 1: their own fucking underwear, right, but everyone doesn't need their
Speaker 1: own drill. And the people who like again, like if
Speaker 1: you want a drill, like, there's more fiscal space for
Speaker 1: your amazing drill if all of us are not, you know,
Speaker 1: using conflict minerals to have our shitty minimum viable drills
Speaker 1: that we take out four times a year. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: And so like that is a vision of kind of
Speaker 1: circulating abundance. It's what the seriously wrong podcasters call library socialism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's such like a materially rich way of thinking about things.
Speaker 1: It's not a world where you have less, it's a
Speaker 1: world where you have more, but you don't have to
Speaker 1: have a bunch of drawers full of things you hate.
Speaker 1: You just like magically, like you stretch your arm out
Speaker 1: the day you need a drill in your hand lands
Speaker 1: on the best drill you will ever use in your life, right,
Speaker 1: you know, that's fucking great. It's the opposite of the
Speaker 1: self reliance that people, like even leftists often fall for. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and like I'm guilty of it.
Speaker 2: I lived off grid for a long time, and so
Speaker 2: I learned by being broke, I had to be self reliant.
Speaker 2: And so then I started taking pride in that. Right,
Speaker 2: But I shouldn't have to be. And even when I
Speaker 2: was quote unquote self reliant, I wasn't. Like, you know,
Speaker 2: when during the pandemic, I couldn't afford the copper to
Speaker 2: run the solar panels down to the field that I needed,
Speaker 2: and a like trans woman in Finland that I met
Speaker 2: once who made tech money, was like shit, transgirl in
Speaker 2: need COVID pandemic doesn't have electricity, gave me the money
Speaker 2: for the wire, you know. Like, I'm not self reliant.
Speaker 2: I never have been. Self reliance is a lie.
Speaker 1: Somewhere in there. There's a joke about going from DC
Speaker 1: to AC that I'm not. I can't quite find so.
Speaker 2: Well. Actually I had to step up the voltage way
Speaker 2: more than I'm used to.
Speaker 1: I had to run ninety six DC volts. Your gender
Speaker 1: affirming inverter. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: No, if you need something to fixed, call it trans girl.
Speaker 2: We've been forced out of society.
Speaker 1: But also if you if you have any Internet security
Speaker 1: problems or need your Linux system administer, yeah, or yes, exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: more terrible noise music, or need to know something about trains. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: But I think we're kind of run out of time.
Speaker 2: And I think that if people want to explore your ideas,
Speaker 2: they should read your books. You also post a lot
Speaker 2: to what you post your essays to Blue Sky and
Speaker 2: master it on. Yeah, and now that you're a public intellectual,
Speaker 2: I'm going to make fun of you by calling you this.
Speaker 1: Ah, but like at least it's not thought leader. Fuck me,
Speaker 1: thought leader. Oh yeah, no, thought leaders much Now I
Speaker 1: hear the word. It is that when I hear thought leader,
Speaker 1: I reached for the culture. I reach for it. It
Speaker 1: was a Nazi, right, it wasn't it. It was like
Speaker 1: I think, so, yeah, it's unfortunate, like Cuba boss uniforms
Speaker 1: and that line and maybe the Austrian autubawn I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but yeah, people should read your books. People should
Speaker 2: read The Lost cause I know I got a lot
Speaker 2: out of it. I want to talk to you about
Speaker 2: walk Away. One day I'm going to talk to you
Speaker 2: more about walk Away and methods of what it means
Speaker 2: to step out of society to create alternate societies, what
Speaker 2: works and doesn't work with that, And one day I'll
Speaker 2: talk to you more about those things.
Speaker 1: I would very much enjoy talking with you about those things.
Speaker 1: Come anything you want to plug now, same as last time,
Speaker 1: pluralistic dot net my five six times a week newsletter,
Speaker 1: open licensed ce C republished as you say on blue Sky,
Speaker 1: masted on Medium, Tumblr, I'm the last Tumbler user in
Speaker 1: the world. It's full text RSS and so on. My
Speaker 1: books are available everywhere they're sold. I write for McMillan.
Speaker 1: They're one of the Big five, so if there's a bookstore,
Speaker 1: they either have them or can get them. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's it. You know, be excellent to each other.
Speaker 1: As the guy went to high school, Keanu Reeves says, WHOA,
Speaker 1: But we never met each other. He was in Okay.
Speaker 1: We used to have thirteen grades in Ontario, so he
Speaker 1: was in grade thirteen when I was in grade nine,
Speaker 1: and we were in an alternative school where he attended
Speaker 1: specifically because they'd let him be away making movies most
Speaker 1: of the time, so I literally never saw him once.
Speaker 1: But he was attending this school when I attended it.
Speaker 2: So one of the reasons I didn't want to leave
Speaker 2: Twitter was that Bill Winters from the same movie following
Speaker 2: me on Twitter.
Speaker 1: He's a big eff supporter. Yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 2: He yeah, reposted some of my stuff about why an
Speaker 2: archo capitalists are not anarchists.
Speaker 1: Nice. I really wanted to go see them in Waiting
Speaker 1: for Goodo. You know that Bill and Ted that he
Speaker 1: and Reeves just waiting for Godot on Broadway, well made. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, I will talk to y'all soon and next week
Speaker 2: I will be back with a much probably more regular episode,
Speaker 2: but we will see by everyone.
Speaker 1: Thanks Margaret. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a
Speaker 1: production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media, visit our website Foalzonemedia dot com, or check
Speaker 1: us out on the I Heard Radio app, app a Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts.