Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about
Speaker 2: it happening here, which is, you know, these days normally
Speaker 2: about the fact that it's happening here, But today we're
Speaker 2: here to talk about a show where it happens somewhere else,
Speaker 2: a place that people aren't yet but may one day
Speaker 2: be in the future. We're talking about the Martian Revolution,
Speaker 2: with the great Mike Duncan of the Revolutions podcast Mia
Speaker 2: Wong joining me on this interview. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Mike, Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about this because you know, I've kept
Speaker 2: up and been listening to Revolutions for years, and I
Speaker 2: started seeing messages earlier this year that, like, Mike Duncan
Speaker 2: is doing this fictional revolution podcast on the Martian Revolution,
Speaker 2: and it seems to map really really closely with a
Speaker 2: lot of stuff that's happening right now in the United States.
Speaker 2: And I'm wondering, kind of to what extent did you
Speaker 2: anticipate that being an initial reaction to this when you
Speaker 2: started really finally laying down like the text for these episodes.
Speaker 3: I did not expect that at all, not at all.
Speaker 3: What has been happening to me, has been one of
Speaker 3: the most surreal six months of my life in terms
Speaker 3: of what I am writing and dropping out into the world.
Speaker 3: And then I turn on the news three weeks later,
Speaker 3: four weeks later, and I'm just watching exactly what I
Speaker 3: wrote down in the show come to life. It is
Speaker 3: horrifying and I hate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, welcome to the club.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, I mean, you guys have to change the
Speaker 3: name of your show because there's no good about it.
Speaker 2: Man, We're just here. It's just going.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know, I've had the notion to do this Martian
Speaker 3: Revolution series for years, Like I think I first came
Speaker 3: up with it back during like the French Revolution days,
Speaker 3: is when I was like, you know, what would be
Speaker 3: a really cool thing to do. It's like, once I've
Speaker 3: got all these under my belt, just like make up
Speaker 3: a fictional revolution that kind of follows along like many
Speaker 3: the plot points of previous revolutions. And so this has
Speaker 3: been kind of like years in the making and a
Speaker 3: lot of the sort of like plot points and ideas
Speaker 3: that I wanted to do. You know, I wanted it
Speaker 3: to be like a monopoly corporation because I also wanted
Speaker 3: to do some like social commentary and like what are
Speaker 3: the issues that we're kind of dealing with right now?
Speaker 3: And you know, and then I'm like, Okay, then there's
Speaker 3: this thing called the New Protocols that is going to
Speaker 3: you know, help jump start the revolution. And this is
Speaker 3: somebody coming in and just you know, implementing whole new
Speaker 3: software programs and hardware programs without any care for like
Speaker 3: what it does to people. Then there's mass layoffs that
Speaker 3: are a part of this. And then deportations are you know,
Speaker 3: like all a part of the story of how the
Speaker 3: Martian Revolution gets going. And you know, this stuff was
Speaker 3: plotted out in October. And I got to tell you,
Speaker 3: you know, maybe I was naive, maybe I had my
Speaker 3: head in the sand. I thought she was going to win. Yeah, man,
Speaker 3: like I thought Harris was going to win the election.
Speaker 3: That's where I That's where my head was at in
Speaker 3: September and October, going into November. I was like, it'll
Speaker 3: be close. Of course, well it's a toss up, but
Speaker 3: I think she'll pull it out in the end. It
Speaker 3: sure feels like it because they were running a terrible
Speaker 3: campaign and like they didn't have any field operations and
Speaker 3: like the whole thing just kind of seemed like she
Speaker 3: was going to win, so for Trump to win and
Speaker 3: then start doing all of these things that were just
Speaker 3: supposed to be fictional plot points. Oh they were references. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like now I'm just like Jesus Christ. This is terrible.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what's so so interesting is because yeah, so
Speaker 2: much of so much of the initial like as you
Speaker 2: imagine it, the opening stages of like the Martian Revolution
Speaker 2: in your series are based on like a guy who
Speaker 2: is a quote unquote like partly like an auto dite act, right,
Speaker 2: like a dude who is raised believing that his ideas
Speaker 2: are good because they're his ideas, and yet he can
Speaker 2: kind of jump into any field of human endeavor and
Speaker 2: make things work better than the people who have been
Speaker 2: studying and working in that field for their entire lives.
Speaker 2: And he just starts changed everything based on his whims. Now,
Speaker 2: you don't have him staying up until four in the
Speaker 2: morning on ketamine bendors and then tweeting out his ideas
Speaker 2: for how to change the government. But I guess I'd say,
Speaker 2: like that's the one the one thing that doesn't map
Speaker 2: onto right now. And I think this is this almost
Speaker 2: just goes inherently with the active crafting fiction. Even your
Speaker 2: bad guys are a lot more sympathetic than our current ones. Yeah,
Speaker 2: which I think is to your credit. But like I've
Speaker 2: enjoyed the degree to which the decisions that are being
Speaker 2: made that are kind of making this Martian revolution inevitable
Speaker 2: are the kind of decisions that you make when you've
Speaker 2: been raised in these sorts of bubbles where you are
Speaker 2: expected to just sort of be able to run things,
Speaker 2: because like that's the strata that you come from, and
Speaker 2: it maps directly to like what we're seeing right now
Speaker 2: with these Silicon Valley guys who have spent the last
Speaker 2: few decades getting impossible amounts of money and having that
Speaker 2: convinced them that they know how to do everything. But
Speaker 2: it also maps back to like Versailles. I find that compelling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, the Timothy Werner character, he's like
Speaker 3: sort of the figure against whom the revolution is going
Speaker 3: to start, Yeah, after he comes in and starts doing
Speaker 3: all this stuff, like the number one. Of course, as
Speaker 3: I'm releasing this, people are just like this is just
Speaker 3: a cardboard cutout of Elon Musk, right, and which I
Speaker 3: would point out the first thing is like, actually no,
Speaker 3: because I very specifically wrote it, so he was a
Speaker 3: good husband and father. Yes, Oh, it's it's obviously not.
Speaker 3: It's obviously not Elan Musk because he loves his kids.
Speaker 2: He's allowed to be in the same room as all
Speaker 2: of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they like they get along great and everything. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so obviously it's not. But honest to God, like it
Speaker 3: wasn't meant to be just Musk, but it was meant
Speaker 3: to be those tech guys, right, Like this is meant
Speaker 3: to be thinking about the guys who come in and
Speaker 3: they're like, we're gonna we're gonna move fast and break things, right,
Speaker 3: and then what they break is like one hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty years of like labor law, and that's the only
Speaker 3: thing that is actually being broken here, Like this is
Speaker 3: what you know, what what uber is and all of
Speaker 3: those kinds of like all that stuff that came out
Speaker 3: Adison the last like ten or fifteen years. And they
Speaker 3: think that yes, because they can code well, or because
Speaker 3: they have this one ability to like, you know, market
Speaker 3: something in an effective way, that that means that they
Speaker 3: are brilliant and can do everything and everywhere for everybody,
Speaker 3: and like we're going to reinvent this and we're going
Speaker 3: to reinvent that, but they have no idea what they're
Speaker 3: doing or what they're talking about. And you run into
Speaker 3: these people on Twitter all the time. This phenomenon of
Speaker 3: people being good in one area, yes, and then becoming
Speaker 3: sort of all purpose general knowledge experts when it's like,
Speaker 3: you don't have any idea what you're talking about. And
Speaker 3: so the line, there's a line that's in there where
Speaker 3: it's like Werner, the way that he thought is I'm smart.
Speaker 3: Therefore the ideas I have must be smart. Yes, And
Speaker 3: that is something that's not about Musk. That's about like
Speaker 3: just people I run into on Twitter all the time.
Speaker 3: That's a phenomena that's a generalizable phenomenon.
Speaker 2: No, I mean yeah, we talk about that constantly on
Speaker 2: the show, Like we just did that four parter are
Speaker 2: on the Zizians. That out of like the rationalist Bay
Speaker 2: Area tech industry cult, which is both influential that a
Speaker 2: lot of the people who wound up working at DOGE
Speaker 2: and just to the general tech mindset, and it is
Speaker 2: it's the human embodiment of that idea that like, well,
Speaker 2: I know it a code coding's difficult. That means I'm smart.
Speaker 2: This must mean I know how to run the schools. Right,
Speaker 2: this must mean I know how to replace medicare, right, yep.
Speaker 2: And it's this kind of like reasoning from first principles
Speaker 2: without ever actually like having to sit face to face
Speaker 2: with the consequences of your decisions. And I think you
Speaker 2: do a great job of showing how that cascades into
Speaker 2: a calamity and in a way that feels very realistic,
Speaker 2: even though we're talking about Mars. And there's also like
Speaker 2: gravity generators in the light.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's and what you know, what
Speaker 3: Werner does here is so much of what Doze basically
Speaker 3: started doing. When they start going into these systems, they
Speaker 3: start changing codes, they have no idea what are the
Speaker 3: key things that are actually underpinning our society. The most
Speaker 3: recent thing I saw that made me think of this
Speaker 3: is like they're shutting down all the regional offices of
Speaker 3: the Social Security Administration and like all communications are now
Speaker 3: going to be run through Twitter. Right. And one of
Speaker 3: Timothy Werner's things is the centralization of all decision making
Speaker 3: and the centralization of really everything. And in his mind,
Speaker 3: it would be more efficient if the company just had
Speaker 3: one brain and that was his brain, and every decision
Speaker 3: is made by the one brain, and so he's got
Speaker 3: all this stuff and he's got to make all these decisions.
Speaker 3: Except that is that's crazy. That is not actually how
Speaker 3: you can run anything, and it just creates all of
Speaker 3: this like basically everybody, I forget if I wrote this
Speaker 3: in no, I definitely did that. Like the dreaded like
Speaker 3: request pending screen that people started getting. They would submit,
Speaker 3: they would submit stuff like a fuel requisition order and
Speaker 3: it would just say request pending, and like request pending
Speaker 3: would never go away, it would just that's what it
Speaker 3: would say. And then you look at what they're doing
Speaker 3: now and that they are trying to centralize everything that
Speaker 3: it's it's a generalized authoritarian power grab, but you know
Speaker 3: they are, they are doing these things. Yeah.
Speaker 4: One of the things that it reminds me the most of,
Speaker 4: like from the other revolutions, is I immediately went, wait,
Speaker 4: this is ur Nicholas, where you know you have less
Speaker 4: of the reform package. Well, like, yeah, like the way
Speaker 4: that all of the power gets concentrated and centralized and
Speaker 4: there's one guy who's a micromanager and then can't do
Speaker 4: it because like no human could possibly have done it.
Speaker 4: But they're not they're you know, because of just there
Speaker 4: they're sort of affective power and the way that they
Speaker 4: think about micromagic anything they're incapable of, like letting their
Speaker 4: subordinates do things.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: It also scans with the loves his kids part.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean that's the thing is like everything
Speaker 3: that's in the show also is like basically something that
Speaker 3: comes from history, right, like, and I am trying to
Speaker 3: do that, and it is it is something that you know,
Speaker 3: like Charles the First, Louis, sixteenth Zar Nicholas, these guys
Speaker 3: are all great family men. Their kids love them and
Speaker 3: they love their ki right. Like one of the reasons
Speaker 3: the French Revolution happened is because Louis's son died, like
Speaker 3: on the eve of the Estates General, and he was
Speaker 3: just not there because his son had just died. That's
Speaker 3: a real thing that happened. And the other stuff is
Speaker 3: like that sort of centralization of power is a lot
Speaker 3: like what I was trying to get at. There was
Speaker 3: actually like the reforms that went in for the European
Speaker 3: colonial powers after the Seven Years War in the Anglo
Speaker 3: colonies and the Spanish colonies and the French colonies, all
Speaker 3: of those governments sort of undertook a reorganization of their
Speaker 3: colonial structures after the Seven Years War. It kind of
Speaker 3: like reshuffled who had what territory, and all of those
Speaker 3: moves were about sort of an increasing presence of the
Speaker 3: metropol in colonial life. And this is what triggers, you know,
Speaker 3: the American Revolution, because there was going to be like
Speaker 3: two more customs officials in Boston Harbor and so like
Speaker 3: we went into refolt about this. Yeah, but this is
Speaker 3: also true of like the Bourbon Reforms in Spanish America.
Speaker 3: Is that kind of like centralization of a community of
Speaker 3: colonies that had grown very used to managing their own affairs,
Speaker 3: and so they're coming in and saying, well, yeah, this
Speaker 3: is ours, and we here on Earth should be making
Speaker 3: these decisions for you Martians. And the Martians were like, well,
Speaker 3: we've been making these decisions for ourselves for like seventy
Speaker 3: years now. That's where that stuff is coming from. And
Speaker 3: then history is always the place that I can point
Speaker 3: to and then I have to watch it also on
Speaker 3: the TV.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I've had that same experience of like I'm
Speaker 2: writing out kind of like this possible, you know, this
Speaker 2: story about what a future conflict is civil conflict in
Speaker 2: the US might look like, and I'm I'm just taking
Speaker 2: from stuff that happened in the last like ten years
Speaker 2: in a lot of cases that I saw in different countries,
Speaker 2: And people are like, how you know, how did you
Speaker 2: like anticipate this, And my answer is like, I didn't.
Speaker 2: This is just stuff that happens all the time, right,
Speaker 2: because people don't learn the mastery as a rule, Like
Speaker 2: no one's ever learned a lesson from history. Is the
Speaker 2: thing I've kept repeating to people over the last few
Speaker 2: years as I continue to fail to learn lessons from history.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we all do and no. But like one of
Speaker 3: the things that's getting kicked around the other day was like,
Speaker 3: had I came to this point where Werner is going
Speaker 3: to start firing people? He's going to start firing people
Speaker 3: because he's changed the metrics for how your employment status
Speaker 3: is being rated, and he's firing just people essentially randomly,
Speaker 3: like you are firing the head of this department and
Speaker 3: now that department can't run anymore. But he's like, it'll
Speaker 3: be more efficient. And when I was writing it, it
Speaker 3: was originally supposed to be like a kind of a
Speaker 3: more dramatic ten percent across the board layoff, and as
Speaker 3: I got closer to actually trying to type that up
Speaker 3: and write it down, I was like, this doesn't actually
Speaker 3: feel believable to me, Like people are going to really
Speaker 3: push back, and I mean this sincerely, like people are
Speaker 3: going to push back that nobody would be so stupid
Speaker 3: as to just across the board to a ten percent
Speaker 3: layoff of something so critical, as you know, Mars is
Speaker 3: to Earth, because in the story, Mars is absolutely critical
Speaker 3: to how Earth is able to function with the resource
Speaker 3: that they're able to get from there. So I changed
Speaker 3: it around and actually look to like the sullen prescriptions
Speaker 3: from from Roman history to kind of give it a
Speaker 3: different take, where really it was like you woke up
Speaker 3: every day and there was like fifteen more names on
Speaker 3: the list, one hundred more names on the list, and
Speaker 3: there was something equally sort of dramatic and cool about
Speaker 3: that without this like unbelievable, you know, ten percent across
Speaker 3: the board cut. And I wrote a paragraph in there
Speaker 3: being like I know that people are going to think
Speaker 3: that this is like unrealistic, but you just have to
Speaker 3: understand that, like throughout history we have seen these things,
Speaker 3: like people do stupid stuff and they stubbornly cling to
Speaker 3: it all the time. Yea, because that is something that happens,
Speaker 3: and life as we know it is actually less. Like
Speaker 3: if I wrote up what was happening right now, Like
Speaker 3: if I was just got like a window into an
Speaker 3: alternate world and we're living in a different world where
Speaker 3: Trump lost and I brought all this stuff back, they'd
Speaker 3: be like this is implausible, Like this is crazy. They
Speaker 3: would never be allowed to get away with that. They
Speaker 3: would never be not allowed to do that. They would
Speaker 3: never be so stupid as to blow up the global
Speaker 3: economy with a bunch of tariffs that make no sense
Speaker 3: to anybody.
Speaker 2: Wouldn't want their reserve currency. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, none of nothing that is happening right now is
Speaker 3: plausible in the in a storytelling in a fictional storytelling setting, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know this.
Speaker 4: This this is also gets something that I've been saying
Speaker 4: on this show that I want I want to get
Speaker 4: your take on, which is, like, you know, one of
Speaker 4: the things that you you wrote about in your sort
Speaker 4: of like I guess like recap series of your experience
Speaker 4: going through the Revolutions was about like how how much
Speaker 4: of the stuff is driven by like the Great idiots
Speaker 4: of history and my god, Elon Muskins Trump look to
Speaker 4: me like two of the gretty dacy history and that
Speaker 4: doesn't like guarantee that it'll happen, but like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're there. The great idiot theory of revolutions is
Speaker 3: a very simple thing, which is just saying that it's
Speaker 3: revolutions don't happen because some tyrant is in power and
Speaker 3: they are intolerably oppressing their people, like people have been
Speaker 3: intolerably oppressed for a long time. And like Trotsky's got
Speaker 3: this quote is if peasant discontentment was the cause of revolution,
Speaker 3: then there would be a revolution happening every single day,
Speaker 3: because the peasants are always discontented, right, So what it
Speaker 3: takes to really have a revolution is for somebody in
Speaker 3: power to be kind of incompetent and to start doing
Speaker 3: stupid things that allow the situation to get out of hand,
Speaker 3: and on top of that, really piss off the other
Speaker 3: elites around them, because it's the mismanagement of the state
Speaker 3: that allows the elites that that are kind of necessary
Speaker 3: for a full blown revolution, Like you need their resources,
Speaker 3: and you need their money, and you need them being
Speaker 3: close to a position of power to be able to
Speaker 3: pop whoever's in there at the time, and you've got
Speaker 3: to be pretty incompetent to like wreck an elite consensus, right,
Speaker 3: Like that is in and of itself catastrophically stupid if
Speaker 3: you're trying to stay in power. Yeah, and so yes,
Speaker 3: the great idiot theory is getting quite a workout lately.
Speaker 4: That's actually something else that I wanted to ask you
Speaker 4: about in terms of, like you see this in terms
Speaker 4: of Mabel Door right where Mabel Door is this kind
Speaker 4: of example of like the sort of local I guess
Speaker 4: said local colonial elite to some extent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I almost saw her as like, yeah, a lot
Speaker 2: of these kind of American revolutionary figures right where you
Speaker 2: have this person who holds a fairly high position in
Speaker 2: the colonial state as a result of you know, their
Speaker 2: birth and the family they come into, but also is
Speaker 2: identifies more as a member of that state, of the
Speaker 2: colony than of the colonizing state.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think this is something this is a
Speaker 4: part of the revolutionary process that I think is really
Speaker 4: really badly understood on the left in terms of, in
Speaker 4: a lot of ways, the necessity of parts of this
Speaker 4: elite flipping and like the other The example I think
Speaker 4: most people kind of are more familiar with is fleepygality,
Speaker 4: like the Duke de orlone like funding a bunch of
Speaker 4: these sort of revolutionary groups that eventually kind of like
Speaker 4: get out of his control. But can you talk a
Speaker 4: bit more about sort of the role of these sort
Speaker 4: of like elite defections and how they end up sort
Speaker 4: of funding and enabling these revolutionary movements.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's a it's a mix of things,
Speaker 3: and I mean you got it. Like Mabel door is
Speaker 3: meant to be sort of the colonial elite, and she's
Speaker 3: also meant to be sort of the liberal nobility in
Speaker 3: lots of different revolutionary settings, and she is doing that
Speaker 3: like and when she is, like when I talk about
Speaker 3: her like funding the Society of Martians and like funding
Speaker 3: all these like philanthropic you know, enterprises to help Martians,
Speaker 3: Like that's a lot of philipicality, like straight up like
Speaker 3: that that's what the Duke Doorleon was doing in you know,
Speaker 3: seventeen eighty six, eighty seven, and eighty nine. And so
Speaker 3: that's the role that she's playing. But you know, if
Speaker 3: the elites are unified, it is very difficult for any
Speaker 3: kind of like peasant or worker uprising to actually get
Speaker 3: traction and succeed in overthrowing the state. Like peasant insurrections
Speaker 3: have happened throughout history without any sort of elite support,
Speaker 3: they have often accomplished great things. But when you think
Speaker 3: about the great revolutions in history, there really have always
Speaker 3: been people in the inner corridors of power who are
Speaker 3: ready to get rid of whoever the sovereign is in
Speaker 3: that moment. And you know, you can advance all the
Speaker 3: way to the Russian Revolution, and this is you know,
Speaker 3: this is the prototypical like the workers have risen up
Speaker 3: and the army is mutinying, and it is the people
Speaker 3: who overthrow this are And what that story misses is
Speaker 3: all of the people, even inside the Romanov family itself,
Speaker 3: who are like so fed up with what Nicholas and
Speaker 3: Alexander are doing that they're just like, we don't know
Speaker 3: what to do anymore. But like he's, yeah, I guess
Speaker 3: he's got to go, you know, Like we can't get
Speaker 3: him to see reason, we can't get him to change course,
Speaker 3: we can't get him to do anything. Like the situation
Speaker 3: is completely out of hand. And without those people leaning
Speaker 3: on Nicholas to force his abdication, and also to say, like,
Speaker 3: we're not going to back you up. If you try
Speaker 3: to bring the hammer down on all these people, then
Speaker 3: that's when sovereigns are actually overthrown.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I love that you bring that up because
Speaker 2: it gets to the failure to see that. And this
Speaker 2: is especially common with people who kind of idolized the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventeen revolution, but it's certainly not limited to that.
Speaker 2: I mean, in every revolution, you have people who are
Speaker 2: fans of that revolution or who see it as a
Speaker 2: model for what they want to do, and also ignore
Speaker 2: the realities on the ground that like made it possible.
Speaker 2: I think one of my favorite examples is the quote that, like,
Speaker 2: you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know.
Speaker 2: In those pictures of the nineteen seventeen revolution, I see
Speaker 2: a lot of mosins that used to be property of
Speaker 2: the czar, right, Like it happens all the time, and
Speaker 2: I think that we always need to be cautious of
Speaker 2: like seeing just what we want to see in revolutionary
Speaker 2: history as opposed to seeing what was there.
Speaker 3: And the thing is is Lenin understood this right, Like
Speaker 3: Lenin understood what the game was, and he understood what
Speaker 3: was going on. And you don't have to, like, if
Speaker 3: you're a revolutionary and you're sympathetic to the communists in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventeen, you don't have to say, oh, well, the
Speaker 3: elites were necessary for this first revolution and we need
Speaker 3: you know, we need a break inside the ruling class.
Speaker 3: We need divisions inside the ruling class. That doesn't mean
Speaker 3: you have to say, and what those people want out
Speaker 3: of overthrowing the czar is what we want and what
Speaker 3: we're going to accept, right, you know, obviously, like the
Speaker 3: cousins of the of Zar Nicholas and the people who
Speaker 3: are in those inner circles of power, they wanted him
Speaker 3: out of there just so they could run the empire
Speaker 3: a little bit better. They were frustrated with how poorly
Speaker 3: the empire was being run. They didn't want a social revolution.
Speaker 3: But if you're going to take down that whole system,
Speaker 3: creating a destabilization event at the very top is necessary.
Speaker 3: But you don't have to support the ultimate aims of
Speaker 3: those people. It's just it's an ingredient. And this is
Speaker 3: and you see this in the course of revolutions, and
Speaker 3: you see this in nineteen seventeen. You see this seventeen
Speaker 3: eighty nine and then seventeen ninety two where there is
Speaker 3: that first wave of sort of revolution that overthrows the sovereign,
Speaker 3: and then there is a second wave that overthrows the
Speaker 3: people who did it first. And so you know, you
Speaker 3: can hold out hope for you know, getting the job
Speaker 3: done without thinking that elites do play some role in
Speaker 3: all of that.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, I think that's a great point.
Speaker 4: One of the things that I wanted to ask you
Speaker 4: about sort of shifting gears a little bit, was about
Speaker 4: how you were thinking about the deportations when you were
Speaker 4: writing it, and how you were thinking about the way
Speaker 4: that kind of this like generalized anti deportation organizing like
Speaker 4: turns into that, and the sort of mutual aid networks
Speaker 4: that the society emortians are doing like directly turns into
Speaker 4: this thing. And that's something that I don't know, It
Speaker 4: feels very prescients in ways, even though it was written
Speaker 4: out before a lot of this stuff happens.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the deportation stuff is just because of my own
Speaker 3: personal political commitments all over the course of my adult life, right,
Speaker 3: which is that we have an insanely cruel immigration system
Speaker 3: in this country, you know, and and you know, we
Speaker 3: they say like, oh, we've got this like open borders,
Speaker 3: Like we do not have open borders. It is actually
Speaker 3: really really hard to like navigate your way properly through
Speaker 3: the American immigration system. That's true. The system itself is broken.
Speaker 3: And we did all of this, you know, we did
Speaker 3: the worst of the horrors with Trump, right, Like obviously
Speaker 3: that is on my mind with you know, with family
Speaker 3: separations and putting people in camps and abusing people and
Speaker 3: rounding people up, like all of this stuff which happened
Speaker 3: under Trump, Yes, but it also happened under Obama for
Speaker 3: eight years, and it happened for another four years under Biden.
Speaker 3: It's just that we kind of stopped talking about it
Speaker 3: because it wasn't Trump who was doing it. And there
Speaker 3: is there is a through line of cruelty inside of
Speaker 3: this system towards immigrants. So that issue of deportation and
Speaker 3: like rounding people up and evicting them, especially those who
Speaker 3: have lived in this place their entire life. Like that's
Speaker 3: one of the points that I make, Like the people
Speaker 3: who are being fired are like born and raised on Mars.
Speaker 3: Like one of the main characters, Alexandra Clare she is
Speaker 3: a fourth generation Martian, and she just gets caught up
Speaker 3: in these like stupid layoffs that Timothy Werner is pushing through.
Speaker 3: And now the only choice that she has is to
Speaker 3: either hide or get deported to Saturn, where and nobody's
Speaker 3: ever come back from Saturn. We have no idea what
Speaker 3: happens on Saturn, because all they know is that nobody
Speaker 3: ever comes back from Saturn. And this is a thing
Speaker 3: like taking people who are born and raised in America.
Speaker 3: This is the only place that they have ever known,
Speaker 3: right even if they came here when they were like one,
Speaker 3: Like okay, they weren't born here, but like they here
Speaker 3: since they were one, and then you're like, okay, we're
Speaker 3: gonna send you back to Mexico. They're not from Mexico.
Speaker 3: They don't know anybody in Mexico. They don't probably even
Speaker 3: speak Spanish half the time, you know, And doing this
Speaker 3: to people is cruel. It is unconscionable what we do
Speaker 3: to people. And so yeah, so when I was thinking
Speaker 3: to myself, Okay, I'm all right, this like fictional revolution,
Speaker 3: it's going to be on Mars. What are some of
Speaker 3: the things that I want to do that will make
Speaker 3: the revolution happen. Yeah, some of this does is like
Speaker 3: a little bit of like this is these are Mike's
Speaker 3: political interests and the deportation issue and trying to highlight
Speaker 3: the horror of the deportation issue and laud those who
Speaker 3: would hide those people and help those people and bring
Speaker 3: those people food. Like the bravest people going are the
Speaker 3: ones who like go out and leave you know, water
Speaker 3: jugs out in the middle of the desert so people
Speaker 3: don't die, right, And the cruelest thing is these guys
Speaker 3: who go out and then break those knowing that people
Speaker 3: are going to knowing that people are going to like
Speaker 3: die of dehydration and die of starvation, but just not
Speaker 3: care because they don't care about those people.
Speaker 2: That's one of the sickest things to me. Like it's
Speaker 2: just there's information coming out now that there's that horrible
Speaker 2: video of that ICE agent smashing the window of that
Speaker 2: woman's car to deport her, and then the informations come
Speaker 2: out that he is a deputized volunteer border guy. And
Speaker 2: you know what's really happened if you look at it,
Speaker 2: is we've kind of recreated in a decentralized form the Eindsetsgrupa, right,
Speaker 2: like instead of having a centralized state having to raise
Speaker 2: these organizations that are going to be carrying out this
Speaker 2: kind of violence. Like it's it's largely become something that
Speaker 2: vigilantes have gotten into on their own as part of
Speaker 2: like just their special interest in hurting people at scale.
Speaker 2: And it's it's such a uniquely it's so uniquely tied
Speaker 2: to like this American individualism. It's such a uniquely sick
Speaker 2: thing about the way things work here that that's happening,
Speaker 2: Like that wouldn't have happened, not that Germany is you
Speaker 2: know that German culture in the thirties was better, but
Speaker 2: it just wouldn't have happened because it was a different
Speaker 2: kind of culture.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. And then it's really important to remember
Speaker 3: that this is not just a Trump problem, Like what
Speaker 3: he's doing right now is like of course, like we
Speaker 3: are entering next levels beyond next levels of what he's doing.
Speaker 3: And even you know, just this morning, we've got an
Speaker 3: American citizen who has been held and they are not
Speaker 3: being released despite the passport and the Social Security card
Speaker 3: being shown to the judge, and the judge is like,
Speaker 3: I don't I can't actually release this person. Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: sort of where we're at now. But this has been
Speaker 3: an ongoing thing for twenty years across both parties and
Speaker 3: both administrations, and nothing really has like sort of churned
Speaker 3: my stomach more since Trump got elected than all of
Speaker 3: the Democrats and people doing like sort of post mortems
Speaker 3: on the election and being like, well, you know, we
Speaker 3: really should be tougher on the border, and we really
Speaker 3: should sort of like buy into this framing that there
Speaker 3: is this like invasion and we just need to do
Speaker 3: border enforcement better. Like then even moving positioning themselves to
Speaker 3: a place where it's like Trump's not even doing a
Speaker 3: good job protecting the border. And like there was somebody
Speaker 3: I forget even who it was, but somebody one of
Speaker 3: them senators like tweeted, you know, this time last year,
Speaker 3: Biden had deported this many people and Trump isn't even
Speaker 3: deporting that many people. And he was like trying to
Speaker 3: make this point that like Trump wasn't following through on
Speaker 3: his promises or something. But it was like do you
Speaker 3: even hear yourself? Like do you even hear yourself? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: it really is And I can't, you know, stomach the
Speaker 3: fact that the Democrats are are going to take away
Speaker 3: from all this that the American people love cruelty towards
Speaker 3: immigrants and that we need to lean into that. Yes,
Speaker 3: And then you see the polls before all the tariffs
Speaker 3: stuff and all this stuff is going on, and he
Speaker 3: Trump is still sitting in like fifty percent approval, and
Speaker 3: it's like, I don't know, maybe they're right, Maybe the
Speaker 3: American people really do just love this.
Speaker 4: So I mean, I think the other the other side
Speaker 4: of that though, and this is you know, part of
Speaker 4: the reason I brought up specifically like the resistance to
Speaker 4: it was it like the other aspect of the kind
Speaker 4: of individualism of American culture was that it also meant
Speaker 4: that there, you know, a bunch of people went out
Speaker 4: to the desert. Like our coworker James spent a lot
Speaker 4: of time during the Biden administration like at these just
Speaker 4: like the open air prisons they built in the middle
Speaker 4: of the fucking desert, like on the border, and you know,
Speaker 4: and like like one of the stories that he covered
Speaker 4: extensively was that like probably most of these people would
Speaker 4: have died if it wasn't for like border volunteers like
Speaker 4: passing food and water to the bars. And that's something
Speaker 4: that I was thinking about a lot looking at the
Speaker 4: mutual aid networks and looking at the kind of mutual
Speaker 4: aid networks that trans people are building up right now,
Speaker 4: and like, I mean, I okay, like there's I mean,
Speaker 4: there's always been a million mutual aid networks because it's
Speaker 4: just impossible to survive if you're trans without like getting
Speaker 4: stuff from other trans people.
Speaker 3: We're not supposed to do anything alone, man, We're not
Speaker 3: supposed to do anything I want. Yeah, well right, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's nothing. We're not supposed to be doing anything alone. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And that's honestly the most optimistic thing about your podcast
Speaker 2: is that, like Martian society develops this very communal because
Speaker 2: it's we're living in like an artificial habitat and if
Speaker 2: shit goes really wrong, everyone dies at once. You have
Speaker 2: to have this more collaborative, collective attitude towards safety and
Speaker 2: security that is just so completely absent from American culture.
Speaker 2: It's the thing that continually sends me into the darkest
Speaker 2: spirals is because there's there's no fixing the fundamental underlying
Speaker 2: problems without fixing that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like on Mars, you know that that sort
Speaker 3: of communal stuff is like they're also living in close
Speaker 3: quarters yeah, so you can't really be somebody who needs
Speaker 3: to be alone, right, That's that's the thing. And then
Speaker 3: also like in terms of like the early colonization of Mars, like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you have to do this stuff together, and like there's
Speaker 3: there's a like when I was doing like cultural like
Speaker 3: there's cultural background like like works and and you know,
Speaker 3: like music that was going on that the Martians were creating.
Speaker 3: And I didn't quite get into this, but there is
Speaker 3: a song that I've got like half written called the
Speaker 3: Ballad of Lonely Joe, which is like a it's like
Speaker 3: a Martian folk song about lonely Joe who went off
Speaker 3: and tried to like do it himself, but and then
Speaker 3: he never comes back, and now Lonely Joe like wanders
Speaker 3: the red sands of Mars because like he tried to
Speaker 3: go out and not do it like with the group
Speaker 3: and not do it with the community, because you can't
Speaker 3: survive alone on Mars. Yeah, But to your other point,
Speaker 3: like one of the things that I definitely wrote into
Speaker 3: the show is that everybody on Mars has a skin
Speaker 3: chip in their hand, and the skin chip in their
Speaker 3: hands and is what like opens door. It like literally
Speaker 3: opens doors and it gives them access to the commissary,
Speaker 3: and it gives them access to restaurants, it gives them
Speaker 3: access to food and employment. Like everything goes through that skinship.
Speaker 3: And when the people get fired by Werner, their skin
Speaker 3: chips just get turned off effectively, and it doesn't it
Speaker 3: doesn't open doors anymore. They can't get food anymore. They
Speaker 3: have they are living inside of a society that they
Speaker 3: literally cannot interact with anymore. And so it took other
Speaker 3: Martians around them. And so there's a thing in the
Speaker 3: show called the no Doors movement, which is Martians jamming
Speaker 3: open doors so that the people who have they were
Speaker 3: called the annulled because their their contracts were annulled. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but so so that the annulled could get from here
Speaker 3: to there without needing their skinship. Yeah. Those are the
Speaker 3: kinds of things that you know are are necessary, and
Speaker 3: those are the kinds of things that are going to
Speaker 3: protect people. And I hope that those things are going
Speaker 3: on out there, and I hope that none of us
Speaker 3: publicly state right now what we may or may not
Speaker 3: be doing that front. So let's just go ahead and
Speaker 3: keep that words at.
Speaker 2: I'm a big fan of the don't fed post on
Speaker 2: social media or in your podcast thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, something you touched on there. I think is interesting
Speaker 4: about the way that being forced to live together like
Speaker 4: creates this consciousness. It reminds me a lot of But
Speaker 4: I was a student. I was an anthropology student, and
Speaker 4: one of the things that we read was this this
Speaker 4: sort of classic of I guess, I guess you'd call
Speaker 4: it like structurals Marxists, like anthropology from the eighties. But
Speaker 4: it's this book called We the Mines and the Minds
Speaker 4: eat Us, which is about these indigenous Bolivion tin miners.
Speaker 4: And one of the things that I always struck me
Speaker 4: about that was, you know, like because they're all they're
Speaker 4: all literally like sleeping next to each other, like in
Speaker 4: these rooms, you can literally hear like the stomach of
Speaker 4: like the child next to you, like rumbling at night
Speaker 4: because I don't even have food, and that like turns
Speaker 4: them into like one of the most militant sort of
Speaker 4: like working class I mean, for like a hundred years
Speaker 4: they are like like they're syndicalists and then their communists
Speaker 4: and like they're they're one of those Milton things, and I,
Speaker 4: I don't know, it's it's interesting to me that that
Speaker 4: this is like this aspect of the society that that
Speaker 4: you've you know, you've sort of drawn out of of
Speaker 4: these historical revolutions where a key element of it again
Speaker 4: is this sort of cllactivity. And also there's this like
Speaker 4: if you look at like the trajectory of like the
Speaker 4: modern American state and like the modern just the modern
Speaker 4: development of capitalism, it's been specifically trying to make that
Speaker 4: stuff not happen by like kicking people into suburbs and
Speaker 4: like trying to physically alienate people. And I was, I
Speaker 4: don't know, I was wondering how much you were sort
Speaker 4: of thinking about that kind of stuff when you were
Speaker 4: like writing the cultural aspects of this.
Speaker 3: Sure, No, that's that stuff is all in my mind.
Speaker 3: And like I said, like we're not meant to do
Speaker 3: anything alone, like humans are communal creatures. Like you don't
Speaker 3: go anywhere in history, like all the way back to
Speaker 3: the dawn of this species, you do not find individual
Speaker 3: humans like living by themselves. We have always done this
Speaker 3: as a group. This has always been a group project.
Speaker 3: And like when you go back, because this is something
Speaker 3: that comes out of sort of like I study a
Speaker 3: lot of like political theory in school and those state
Speaker 3: of nature sort of works, you know, these thought experiments
Speaker 3: that like Thomas Pain would do or Rousseau would do,
Speaker 3: and you know it's like, how did we come together?
Speaker 3: Why did we come together? Well, let's first imagine like
Speaker 3: an individual human wandering through the forest and like they
Speaker 3: encounter another one, so they come together for defense and
Speaker 3: they come together, you know, to share food and do
Speaker 3: some division of labor. And it's like, no, there's no
Speaker 3: such thing as a human wandering alone. That's not a thing.
Speaker 3: Like any outgrowth that comes from our description of what
Speaker 3: human society is, like, whether it's defense or the division
Speaker 3: of labor, begins with the fact that we are already
Speaker 3: a group. There is a mother, there is a child,
Speaker 3: there is a father. There there are aunts and uncles
Speaker 3: and others. Like whatever the group is, there's we are
Speaker 3: always doing this as a group. And hyper individualization and
Speaker 3: hyper adamization of our society is something that is trying
Speaker 3: to undo one of the most fundamental parts of what
Speaker 3: it means to be human. This is something that I
Speaker 3: thought about a lot too, because when I started having kids,
Speaker 3: and you know, I have two kids, and the model
Speaker 3: for like having a family at this point is like
Speaker 3: you have a mother, a father or whatever, you have kids,
Speaker 3: but the point being that they are a unit that
Speaker 3: is unto itself, and they live in their own house,
Speaker 3: and they have to supply their own food, and they
Speaker 3: are in charge of getting their own money, and everything
Speaker 3: that happens is just up to that little nuclear family.
Speaker 3: And the nuclear family is not really how we've ever
Speaker 3: done it before. Now, there's always been a broad network,
Speaker 3: a broad family friend network that has been a part
Speaker 3: of you know, raising our kids and having our families.
Speaker 3: And you know, if something bad happens, we don't just say,
Speaker 3: oh wow, bad luck for them. You know, you support
Speaker 3: that person. And that is something that we've really gotten
Speaker 3: away from as a society obviously.
Speaker 2: And it's something that we've been pulled away from purposefully.
Speaker 2: Right like the atomization is isn't It isn't just a
Speaker 2: byproduct of incentives, right like is a It is a
Speaker 2: directed move. I mean, you just got to look back
Speaker 2: to some of the shit Thatcher was saying. Right, there's
Speaker 2: no such thing as a society. There are men and
Speaker 2: women and there are families. Right, this is a directed change.
Speaker 2: And I'm not saying this in like the conspiratorial since
Speaker 2: I'm saying this a a This is what a lot
Speaker 2: of people, a lot of the worst people in our
Speaker 2: society believe because it's convenient for them, and they have
Speaker 2: pushed to make that belief more common and done so
Speaker 2: by funding think tanks and funding media organizations.
Speaker 3: In part, right, I was.
Speaker 4: Actually about to quote literally that exact thing. But the
Speaker 4: interesting part to me about that Thatcher line is that everyone,
Speaker 4: almost everyone who quotes that line only quotes the part
Speaker 4: about their are only individuals and then leaves out the
Speaker 4: part about the family. Yes, which I think is a
Speaker 4: really important connection to to what you were saying, where
Speaker 4: it's like your vision of the family is also still
Speaker 4: fundamentally this isolated group, because yes, they still need some
Speaker 4: kind of collective because again, you can't just like leave it,
Speaker 4: leave a baby like out in the woods.
Speaker 3: It just dies.
Speaker 4: Right, But like they had, they had to like create
Speaker 4: this version to to be the like the political base
Speaker 4: of their thing. They had to create this this one
Speaker 4: collective that would be cut off from everything else that
Speaker 4: had normally made it a collective.
Speaker 3: Yep. You know people think these days that that atomized
Speaker 3: nuclear family is like the law of nature, right, that
Speaker 3: this is like, this is the way it's always been,
Speaker 3: and like that's not true. It's just not true. There's
Speaker 3: a great line. I don't have it right in front
Speaker 3: of me at the moment, but in Tokeville's austieon Regime
Speaker 3: in the French Revolution, which is really dynamite book everybody
Speaker 3: should read, at the end of it, he lays it
Speaker 3: out he's writing this in like the eighteen forties and
Speaker 3: eighteen fifties, and he's he straight up says that like
Speaker 3: what liberal capitalism is doing, which he was himself. I mean,
Speaker 3: he's a conservative liberal. Like it's not like he's on
Speaker 3: the left or anything, but he's he's watching as the
Speaker 3: atomization of families and individuals is happening, and he's like,
Speaker 3: and that's how that's what tyranny thrives on. Tyranny thrives
Speaker 3: when everybody is disconnected from everybody else and everybody is
Speaker 3: in competition with everybody else, because that's the other key
Speaker 3: part of it is your family is now pitted against
Speaker 3: every other family in terms of like getting money, getting jobs,
Speaker 3: like getting that, getting this other thing. Like we're all
Speaker 3: scrambling out there in a competition to get a little
Speaker 3: bit more, a little bit better, or just you know,
Speaker 3: have enough. Like I feel this every time I have
Speaker 3: to sign the kids up for like summer camp, you know,
Speaker 3: like I'm at war with every other family in the
Speaker 3: neighborhood because I'm just trying to get my kid into
Speaker 3: this camp and some people aren't going to make it
Speaker 3: and other people will, and you got to be there,
Speaker 3: and you gotta have strategies about ending to log onto
Speaker 3: the thing like because they because they they're pitting us
Speaker 3: against each other like all the time, in all those
Speaker 3: little subtle ways. Yep.
Speaker 4: That's what's optimistic kind of about the Martian Revolution is like,
Speaker 4: you know, on the one hand, there is this kind
Speaker 4: of like collective society, but on the other hand, you know,
Speaker 4: this is a this is a society entirely ruled by corporations,
Speaker 4: right and it is it is literally every single aspect
Speaker 4: of it is specifically designed to get to do this,
Speaker 4: pitting each other like people against each other. And yet anyways,
Speaker 4: somehow they you know, even even if it is by accident,
Speaker 4: which is to be fair, how a lot of revolutions start,
Speaker 4: they they do it.
Speaker 2: I think the key thing is here is that we
Speaker 2: see throughout time, like really extreme societies that try to
Speaker 2: mold people in certain ways with the idea of permanently
Speaker 2: changing them. And what happens in the past, at least
Speaker 2: to every one of those societies, is that the society
Speaker 2: dies and people go on being people, right.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm, yeah, Yeah, there's no there's no year zero
Speaker 3: they're create new There's there's no there's no new Man
Speaker 3: right now, that's not ever going to happen. That's actually
Speaker 3: I mean, just I wouldn't even have thought that. I'm
Speaker 3: going to tie this back again to Tofield, which the
Speaker 3: reason I would recommend Onnian Regime is because that is
Speaker 3: a book about how much of the revolution was a
Speaker 3: continuation of what was going on before it and not
Speaker 3: actually caused by the revolutionary break And even if you
Speaker 3: believe in the revolution and believe it was this way,
Speaker 3: I actually believe in the revolution because it accomplished these
Speaker 3: great things, but there was no year zero thing that happened.
Speaker 3: A lot of this stuff like is just on a continuum.
Speaker 3: And you know, like, I don't want to get in
Speaker 3: a fight with somebody about whether human nature is a
Speaker 3: thing that exists or doesn't exist like an as an
Speaker 3: abstract thing, because because I'm not sure that it's true,
Speaker 3: but there sure are a lot of things that keep
Speaker 3: popping up, right, Like we're interested in sex, and we
Speaker 3: have to eat food, and we live in shelters, and
Speaker 3: we make music, and there do there does seem to
Speaker 3: be some very like human qualities that exist across all
Speaker 3: time and across all space. And if you just say
Speaker 3: to yourself, like, well, like, I mean, this is one
Speaker 3: of the things. I'm very sympathetic to anarchists, but like
Speaker 3: there's a point with anarchism, like especially the early stuff,
Speaker 3: where their idea was that if you smash the state,
Speaker 3: and you destroy the state, then humans will be allowed
Speaker 3: to flourish in their natural goodness and communalism, which is,
Speaker 3: you know a little bit what we are moving towards
Speaker 3: right now. But I'm not sure even that exists, because
Speaker 3: if you if you crash the state out, it's not
Speaker 3: the state that's necessarily making us this way. There is
Speaker 3: there is stuff inside of human nature that's that we
Speaker 3: created the state to begin with. So the whole, the
Speaker 3: whole thing is like a very it's a balancing act
Speaker 3: that has gone way too far in a certain direction.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that's something I always I always
Speaker 2: try to keep in mind, like it's not that societies
Speaker 2: can't alter or improve aspects of like how things are
Speaker 2: right by changing the incentives, but by altering like the
Speaker 2: way things work, you can reduce the prevalence of certain problems.
Speaker 2: You can make things better in some ways. But there's
Speaker 2: so and stuff that you're just never going to Like
Speaker 2: when I look at when I look at what the
Speaker 2: white supremacists want to do, right well, you're never going
Speaker 2: to get people to stop mingling with other kinds of people.
Speaker 2: You simply can't. It's never worked and it never will
Speaker 2: right like that, that's an impossible dream. So I can
Speaker 2: just say, like, that's a thing. No matter how tightly
Speaker 2: you grab a hold of the reins of state and
Speaker 2: how many weapons you deploy, you simply won't succeed in
Speaker 2: the long term of doing this because it's just not
Speaker 2: something we can do. You can't stop people from mingling.
Speaker 3: This is actually one of my points about immigration and
Speaker 3: migration is that no matter how tightly you try to
Speaker 3: control it, no matter you could build every wall you want,
Speaker 3: you can make as hard as you want, people are
Speaker 3: still going to move here. People are still going to
Speaker 3: move away from here. People are still going to go
Speaker 3: from here to there and from there to here, and
Speaker 3: that is something that is going to happen no matter what,
Speaker 3: and especially if we're going into the twenty first century
Speaker 3: with all of its various climate disasters that are facing us. Route,
Speaker 3: yeah is going to make such Yeah, it's gonna. It's gonna.
Speaker 3: It's already making some places less habitable and other places
Speaker 3: will be more habitable. And what's going to happen is
Speaker 3: that people who are living in less habitable areas are
Speaker 3: going to want to go to where there are areas
Speaker 3: that are still habitable. And so there is there's going
Speaker 3: to be movements of people. And the question before us
Speaker 3: in the twenty first century is not, you know, can
Speaker 3: we keep people in the places that they are now
Speaker 3: and you know, like sort of lock in rigidly to
Speaker 3: like these xenophobic nation states and that will actually stop
Speaker 3: those migrations from happening. Or do we open ourselves up
Speaker 3: to the idea that this is going to happen and
Speaker 3: simply make it more humane and more more rational. That's
Speaker 3: the question. It's not whether the migrations will happen or not,
Speaker 3: it's simply how cruel they will be. When they happen,
Speaker 3: and right now we are choosing maximum cruelty.
Speaker 2: Yep, sucks, Yeah, it does. Like that's that's so much
Speaker 2: of our our present society is like, well, yeah, this
Speaker 2: is the cruelest way I can imagine this happening, you know,
Speaker 2: like and we are we are staring down the barrel
Speaker 2: of the worst case scenario, right, Like that's the thing
Speaker 2: everyone's had to make peace with. You know, even once
Speaker 2: Trump won, there was still a degree of like, well,
Speaker 2: I guess we'll see and we've seen, right, and we
Speaker 2: do just kind of have to guide off that without
Speaker 2: pretending it's otherwise. Like the That's one of the few
Speaker 2: things that does give me hope is that the people
Speaker 2: who are insistent upon pretending otherwise seem to be getting
Speaker 2: increasingly marginalized. I mean, we'll see Gavin Newsen still hasn't
Speaker 2: been sort of choked off of access to the public,
Speaker 2: but you know, the statements he's been making recently about
Speaker 2: Abrego Garcia, it's just like, yeah, I just can't I
Speaker 2: can't imagine this guy being the future of the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2: If this is just looking at where popular discourse is
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 3: Right, and there's a lot of them who would like
Speaker 3: it to be the future of the Democratic Party because
Speaker 3: they don't care as much as Republicans don't care about
Speaker 3: the lives of these people who are living on this earth,
Speaker 3: who are living, breathing human beings, who are just someplace
Speaker 3: else and living in a world where like, yeah, the
Speaker 3: United States and Europe we suck up the world's wealth
Speaker 3: and resources, like that's where the imperial center of the globe,
Speaker 3: and people are like, oh that. And even when people
Speaker 3: say like, well, why do people come here, and you know,
Speaker 3: there's a kind of a standard American exceptionalist notion which
Speaker 3: is like, well, they come here because they want their
Speaker 3: because they want freedom, and freedom is what America offers,
Speaker 3: and like the American dream and all that stuff, like
Speaker 3: the entrepreneurial spirit, et cetera, et cetera. But mostly it's
Speaker 3: because this is where you can come and get the
Speaker 3: world's money. Yeah, this is where it always. It's sitting
Speaker 3: in my pocket, it's sitting in your pocket. Right, we
Speaker 3: are the ones who have all of the world's money,
Speaker 3: and so that is why they are coming here. Yep.
Speaker 3: So you just have to like fit that in your brain.
Speaker 3: And what is happening is is this this constant division
Speaker 3: between like Americans being more important and anybody else, and
Speaker 3: I understand why that exists politically, and even these questions
Speaker 3: are like citizens versus non citizens. Like one of the
Speaker 3: things that got me when I was reading Bakunin was
Speaker 3: like he had it was a throwaway line. It wasn't
Speaker 3: even like a point he was making, but he referred
Speaker 3: to something as mere citizenship, which kind of struck me
Speaker 3: because I grew up very liberal, Like I come from
Speaker 3: like the liberal suburbs of Seattle, and I had very
Speaker 3: liberal notions, and citizenship, in sort of the liberal imagination,
Speaker 3: is the highest thing that you can be, be a
Speaker 3: citizen of a polity with rights, there's a constitution, you
Speaker 3: get to participate in the government. Like citizen and citizenship
Speaker 3: are these words that had great, profound meaning, and it
Speaker 3: really kind of like knock me sideways to have them
Speaker 3: be like mere citizenship. Right, You've been reduced to simply
Speaker 3: a part of a polity, and your humanity has been
Speaker 3: taken away from you. You're no longer being recognized as
Speaker 3: a human being. You're being recognized as a citizen. And
Speaker 3: if you're not a citizen, then you just don't count
Speaker 3: at all. And it totally went out their humanity. So
Speaker 3: not only do I not have humanity because I'm simply
Speaker 3: a part of some polity rather than being me, Mike Duncan,
Speaker 3: a human being, but it's erasing our human obligations to
Speaker 3: each other, to non citizens and the idea like and
Speaker 3: you just see this very casually, like right now, like
Speaker 3: all over the place. It's just like, they're not citizens,
Speaker 3: so they don't deserve due process. They're not citizens, so
Speaker 3: we can just send them to Al Salvadoran torture prisons
Speaker 3: and it's fine because they're not citizens and therefore they
Speaker 3: don't have rights. It's like, what about, you know, just
Speaker 3: being a person thinking about other people. And one of
Speaker 3: the greatest, one of my one of my very favorite.
Speaker 3: And I know i'm steamrolling here. I'll I'll let you
Speaker 3: get a word in edgewise here in a second. But
Speaker 3: there the I forget what the court case was, but
Speaker 3: there was a court case out of Texas, you know,
Speaker 3: like back in like the sixties, when they decided that
Speaker 3: the Texas school districts had to open the schools to
Speaker 3: undocumented children. And they they said that because it says
Speaker 3: in the Fourteenth Amendment persons. It doesn't say citizens. And
Speaker 3: they were resting a lot of this on the notion
Speaker 3: that like it's it says person has these rights, not
Speaker 3: citizen has these rights. And this is what conservatives and
Speaker 3: MAGA hate, hate hate, This is why they're going to
Speaker 3: try to undo the fourteenth Amendment. But to have the
Speaker 3: Supreme Court at one point in the past be like, no,
Speaker 3: you have to do this because you owe an obligation
Speaker 3: to them as a person, not just as a citizen.
Speaker 3: That's like mind blowing. I could not see the Supreme
Speaker 3: Court today making that same decision, But like, that's that's
Speaker 3: the kernel of something really good, I think for the
Speaker 3: future of humanity, rather than like clinging to this like
Speaker 3: citizen or non citizen thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess kind of. For me, the most important
Speaker 2: belief I ever came to was the understanding that, like,
Speaker 2: I don't care about citizenship and I don't care about
Speaker 2: who is supposed to be in a specific place, right.
Speaker 2: I think one of the most toxic ideas possible is that, like,
Speaker 2: your rights as a person are dependent on where you
Speaker 2: were born. Yeah, that's just the thing I'll never believe.
Speaker 2: And it's the fight we've lost. The worst as the
Speaker 2: left or you know, I should even say getting beyond
Speaker 2: left and right, because I really think those are not
Speaker 2: the most useful ways to look at things. It's like
Speaker 2: human beings. The fact that that that battle, the battle
Speaker 2: to just see people as humans with inherent value as humans,
Speaker 2: regardless on their place of birth, the fact that has
Speaker 2: been botched so badly is maybe the greatest calamity of
Speaker 2: the twenty first century. Although there's a few, there's a
Speaker 2: few contenders, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a lot well, And it's so.
Speaker 4: It's so deeply ingrained. Something I'm going to talk about
Speaker 4: more like in different places, but like, one of the
Speaker 4: things that's been driving me the most up the walls
Speaker 4: is like, so I've had to read like every single
Speaker 4: piece of terrorist tariff coverage has been written by like
Speaker 4: fucking all these analysts, all of these media people, like,
Speaker 4: and every single one of them only fucking talks about
Speaker 4: its impact on Americans, right, yep. And if you look
Speaker 4: at the like the Liberation Day like turf tariff package, right,
Speaker 4: the single country that is the most from this is
Speaker 4: Sri Lanka. And if those tariffs go back into effect
Speaker 4: in like in like fifty days whatever, like eighty days.
Speaker 4: Like the entire country of Shri Lanka is fucked. They're doomed,
Speaker 4: They're completely fucked. And all of these countries, you know,
Speaker 4: these countries need US dollars in order to like literally
Speaker 4: to buy fucking fuel. And then suddenly, oh wait, hold on,
Speaker 4: you can't do experts of the US, and like the
Speaker 4: entire is something that affects literally the entire world. Right,
Speaker 4: you can look at the terrif rates on every single
Speaker 4: country like in the world, and everyone writing about it
Speaker 4: only writes about its effect upon the US because there's
Speaker 4: this just like like there's this this this pure sort
Speaker 4: of Americ centrism thing where like people and this I
Speaker 4: see this on the left too, where's like they fundamentally
Speaker 4: don't see anyone who's not in the US as human,
Speaker 4: and the people in the US who are who are
Speaker 4: seen as like people who seems like humans who you know,
Speaker 4: like think and feel and like act and like hurt
Speaker 4: in the same way that we do. Like that's only
Speaker 4: a thing that happens if you're a very specific kind
Speaker 4: of American citizen and if you're not, or God help
Speaker 4: you, you were born in like most of the like the
Speaker 4: rest of the world, which is again it hitteous super
Speaker 4: majority of everyone on Earth. You just you don't matter, and.
Speaker 3: Yep, they don't. Yeah, not in all this, And like
Speaker 3: I mean to bring it back to the Martian Revolution,
Speaker 3: like one of the things that is happening right now,
Speaker 3: Like in the series, you know, it's going to be
Speaker 3: thirty episodes long, and I'm writing episode twenty three right now.
Speaker 3: But like we've gone through the revolution, there's been I
Speaker 3: don't want to give away too many spoilers, but obviously
Speaker 3: like they win, you know at certain points, otherwise it
Speaker 3: wouldn't be a very interesting story. And there is a
Speaker 3: debate right now among the victorious Martian revolutionaries about who
Speaker 3: should count inside of the Martian constitution and this thing
Speaker 3: called the Republic of Mars that they have just declared
Speaker 3: they're no longer a part of a corporation. They're going
Speaker 3: to be this thing called the Republic of Mars. And
Speaker 3: there is a guy who is passionately committed to Mars
Speaker 3: and to the Martian people, and he hates Earthlings, doesn't
Speaker 3: trust Earthlings, and there's no reason for him to trust Earthlings.
Speaker 3: They have tried to screw them over a bunch of
Speaker 3: times and it caused nothing but pain and so but
Speaker 3: there are a bunch of earth born Earthlings on Mars,
Speaker 3: and he wants to exclude them from the Republic of Mars.
Speaker 3: And if you're born on Mars, then you should get
Speaker 3: to participate, and if you're not, then you shouldn't have rights,
Speaker 3: you shouldn't be a part of this project. And I
Speaker 3: would love to just I would love to deport you.
Speaker 3: That's what he's going to be arguing. And then there
Speaker 3: is another side that has a more universalist take on this,
Speaker 3: And my character Alexandra Clair, who's like a d class.
Speaker 3: She comes out of the warrants she can just that's
Speaker 3: basically like the working class, you know. She's like when
Speaker 3: Earthlings come here, Yeah, I don't like it when they
Speaker 3: bungle things because they're new and they don't know what
Speaker 3: they're doing. Like I'm as annoyed by the new guy
Speaker 3: as anybody, But like they've suffered right alongside me, like
Speaker 3: suffering the same conditions, Like the fact that they were
Speaker 3: born on Earth doesn't mean that they're not suffering right now,
Speaker 3: that their contracts weren't annulled, that they are not suffering
Speaker 3: from the new protocol, Like and you know when during
Speaker 3: these revolutions, did they hold neutron guns in their hands
Speaker 3: and fight and die for Mars? Yeah they did, and
Speaker 3: so probably we should say that it's not Martian good,
Speaker 3: Earthling bad. But like, let's just open it up to
Speaker 3: everybody and we will sort out like you know, who's
Speaker 3: you know, who's in on this and who's who's actually
Speaker 3: trying to undermine us, because you know there is there
Speaker 3: are loyalist fifth columnists that they are going to have
Speaker 3: to deal with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, uh, I think we're encroaching on an hour here,
Speaker 2: so we're I think we need to probably uh call
Speaker 2: this for the day. But Mike, I really appreciate your time.
Speaker 2: You've been so generous and I can't wait to see
Speaker 2: where you end. I know that you're also can't wait
Speaker 2: to see where you land on all of.
Speaker 3: This, right right right, I've got all the plot points,
Speaker 3: you know, I know where it's going, but just getting
Speaker 3: there is is. Yeah, it's weird because sometimes when you
Speaker 3: write fiction, characters are like you weren't supposed to do that,
Speaker 3: and now I've got to deal with that, and like
Speaker 3: what do you well, she wouldn't do that in this moment,
Speaker 3: So I guess I was going to have her do it,
Speaker 3: but I just can't believe that she would ever do
Speaker 3: that in that situation. So I guess she can't do it,
Speaker 3: and I'll have to figure that out. And that's my
Speaker 3: weekly struggle these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's that's the struggle of releasing fiction before
Speaker 2: you're entirely done with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I write it. I mean I wake up,
Speaker 3: I wake up every Monday morning with a blank piece
Speaker 3: of paper and have to have that week's episode done
Speaker 3: by Sunday night, And so I'm writing these in real time. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I congratulate you on trapping yourself in such an
Speaker 2: exquisite Hell, I'm enjoying listening to it, and I know
Speaker 2: everyone else's is.
Speaker 3: Well, it's great.
Speaker 1: I love it.
Speaker 2: All right, that's the episode, everybody, Thank you by.
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