Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Book Club, book Club, book Club, book but no one
Speaker 2: else can say it. That's a joke. There's no one
Speaker 2: else on the call. It's just me. I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Margaret Kildoy, and this is Cool Zone Media book Club.
Speaker 2: And this week, dear listener, you're the guest, so I
Speaker 2: hope you're going to okay, So let's chat it together. Okay,
Speaker 2: you already book club, the Club, the club. What do
Speaker 2: you mean you don't want to do it in public
Speaker 2: with while you're listening to headphones on the bus. You
Speaker 2: should be chanting with me. Well, either way, this is
Speaker 2: the Cool Zone Media Book Club. I'm your host, Margaret Kildrey,
Speaker 2: and every week I bring you a new story that's fictional.
Speaker 2: The opposite of the truth is fiction. This week we're
Speaker 2: going to talk about well, I guess you're going to
Speaker 2: hear what the episode, what the story is about when
Speaker 2: I read it to you. This story is called Tongue Mining.
Speaker 2: It was written by Jack Morton, and here's a bio.
Speaker 2: Jack Morton was born in New Brunswick, Canada. He studied
Speaker 2: theater and writing at the University of Toronto and carries
Speaker 2: a knit and black belt in karate. He currently lives
Speaker 2: in to Lose, France, where he writes and narrates audiobooks.
Speaker 2: You can read more of his stories in rat On Journal,
Speaker 2: The Woodward Review, Expanded Field Journal, or let Him read
Speaker 2: one to you at Vast Literary Press. And this story
Speaker 2: in particular first appeared in rat On Journal number four.
Speaker 2: And if you like Coolsone Media Book Club, you'll probably
Speaker 2: like rat On Journal r A Don which is a
Speaker 2: anarchist fiction magazine, so might interest you. It might not.
Speaker 2: I hope this story does though. It's called tongue Mining.
Speaker 2: Oh and the best part is there's a bunch of
Speaker 2: like French and stuff in it, and other languages, and
Speaker 2: I don't know how to speak them, so you can
Speaker 2: hear my. I'm not even going to try into an accent.
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna stumble through it. That's the way it goes.
Speaker 2: Tongue mining, my ears sting, threatening to water, sweat beads
Speaker 2: on my upper lip. I don't think anyone said not
Speaker 2: to blink or touch. My face just remains still so
Speaker 2: the camera can focus on my eyes. The word bird
Speaker 2: appears plain white font on a black background projected onto
Speaker 2: a fabric screen. My gaze flicks to the upper right corner,
Speaker 2: and then back to center. Mountain comes up next upper left.
Speaker 2: The man beside me coughs, I don't look. That could
Speaker 2: throw off my results, but I'm distracted. It takes me
Speaker 2: longer to place mole in the lower right. The words
Speaker 2: disappear quicker, less time to read. I hear sharpened hails.
Speaker 2: Tension fills the room. Relax, says the woman monitoring the test.
Speaker 2: She paces slowly between the rows of desks, making me
Speaker 2: feel like a school child, even though I'm probably older
Speaker 2: than her. I break down and wipe the sweat, and
Speaker 2: I'm able to breathe steadier. The words begin to fly naturally.
Speaker 2: Tree upper right, stump, lower left, cloud, upper left, bat
Speaker 2: upper right. Just as the monitor said, I relax. I
Speaker 2: tell myself not to think about whether the object is
Speaker 2: high or low, animate or inanimate. The meaning is contained
Speaker 2: in my English speaking mind. I just have to let
Speaker 2: it come out. Then something flashes on the screen. Poutik.
Speaker 2: I think I didn't have time to reread it before
Speaker 2: it disappeared. I'm lost for a moment, but suddenly a
Speaker 2: voice in the back row said, booisit. I try to
Speaker 2: keep focused forward. More words are coming, but I hear
Speaker 2: a scuffle in raised voices. The man who shouted insists
Speaker 2: he misread and doesn't speak to Gallic. The monitor points
Speaker 2: out that nobody mentioned to Galic until him. When a
Speaker 2: chair scrapes loudly against the floor, I turn around. Two
Speaker 2: men with a symbol matching the one on the monitor's
Speaker 2: lapel across their broad chests are physically removing a panicked
Speaker 2: elderly man from the room. He's cursing now in English,
Speaker 2: and what I assume is to Glic, resisting like if
Speaker 2: he could regain his seat, it would undo all of
Speaker 2: this and he could still take the test. Then I
Speaker 2: realize he's reaching for his earbuds and glasses, lying to
Speaker 2: the side of his desk. Like all of us, he
Speaker 2: had to remove them to start the test. Please just
Speaker 2: let me take my The monitor cuts them off. These
Speaker 2: devices are not yours, they are the property of all talk.
Speaker 2: She strides across the room and collects them. By refusing
Speaker 2: to abide by the rules of the test and by
Speaker 2: concealing language fluencies, you have violated our terms and conditions.
Speaker 2: Your subscription to our translation service is terminated. He tries
Speaker 2: to object again, but soon he's out of the room.
Speaker 2: The monitor closes the door and all noise from outside
Speaker 2: is silenced. Sorry for the dis option, everyone, please turn
Speaker 2: to face the screen and we'll resume. I look at
Speaker 2: the others. They mostly look as scared as me, but
Speaker 2: one tall, blonde man's face shows indignance. We make eye contact,
Speaker 2: and my meek cowed expression seems to motivate him further.
Speaker 2: He stands, no, I'm not taking this. You can't treat
Speaker 2: people that way, dragging him out like he's some criminal.
Speaker 2: All Talk reserves the right to expel testers who disrupt
Speaker 2: the process. You all saw him grab me when I
Speaker 2: asked him to leave on his own. I'd seen nothing.
Speaker 2: I don't know if anyone else had. The blonde guy
Speaker 2: goes on, I'm a paying customer. I don't need to
Speaker 2: put up with this treatment. Of course not, she replies calmly.
Speaker 2: This test is completely voluntary, as you were informed when
Speaker 2: your attendance was requested. You're welcome to leave at any time.
Speaker 2: Simply leave any all Talk devices with the front desk
Speaker 2: on the way out, and your subscription will be terminated.
Speaker 2: And there it is. She has us or they do.
Speaker 2: The corporation behind that symbol on her lapel because no
Speaker 2: one would voluntarily give up their all talk. They'd venture
Speaker 2: into the world with no translation tech, without the ubiquitous
Speaker 2: glasses and earbuds. Maybe at work the next day they
Speaker 2: discover their company was Russian and their boss gave instructions
Speaker 2: in Arabic. Maybe at home they'd find out their partner
Speaker 2: spoke mohawk. Half the signage in the city is probably
Speaker 2: in scripts they couldn't name, much less read. The blonde
Speaker 2: man's face still looks defiant, but he swallows whatever he
Speaker 2: wants to say and sits down facing the screen. And
Speaker 2: if you want to look defiant, dear listener, you can
Speaker 2: buy our one hundred percent defiant ADS revenue. This is
Speaker 2: an AD pivot. Here you go, and we're back. We
Speaker 2: all turn and resenter our eyes on the cameras as
Speaker 2: the monitor scrubs. The test playback and we start at
Speaker 2: bird again. My eye actions become jerky, trying not to
Speaker 2: think about the Filipino man. At least I can vindicate
Speaker 2: his loss by succeeding. Now that I know the real
Speaker 2: point of the test. They don't care whether we correctly
Speaker 2: identify objects as high or low, animate or inanimate. The
Speaker 2: start of the test was mental training, getting us to
Speaker 2: react instinctively to these concepts, so that when non English
Speaker 2: words appear, we'll respond without thinking. They aren't testing fluency
Speaker 2: in English, they're hunting for it in other languages. And
Speaker 2: maybe my participation wasn't random selection, like they'd claimed. A
Speaker 2: flash of Grandma's old place, the box she made us
Speaker 2: put all our electronics in when we arrived, songs and
Speaker 2: games in French as a child, stories about Champlin or
Speaker 2: the Corie de Bois when I was older. But I
Speaker 2: haven't used my French in years, not since Grandma died.
Speaker 2: The test won't pick up on that, certainly, not if
Speaker 2: I can help it. I banish Grandma's living room and concentrate.
Speaker 2: Sure enough, after putik every few words, something appears that
Speaker 2: I don't know. Often can't even read. Even if I
Speaker 2: think I recognize something, I stare defiantly straight unless I'm
Speaker 2: sure it's English. Anyone else try to fool them in
Speaker 2: the room has an edge now, but it still won't
Speaker 2: be easy. The words are getting trickier. Snow falls from
Speaker 2: high to low. Brain could be animate or an inanimate
Speaker 2: part of an animate whole. I have to think before
Speaker 2: I can place mine as something low and inanimate. I
Speaker 2: first think of the other meaning ownership, to which neither
Speaker 2: of those ideas applies. Loon. My eyes flick up and
Speaker 2: left slightly before I study them. But I hadn't been
Speaker 2: expecting traps. I would have looked. A fluent French speaker,
Speaker 2: already programmed by the start of the test to go
Speaker 2: up and left for something high and inanimate, would have
Speaker 2: had no chance. I hope I didn't react too much.
Speaker 2: Surely English speakers know lune, they have lunar and lunacy.
Speaker 2: I try not to think about it. More words are coming.
Speaker 2: Apparently I succeed at the word recognition portion. At least
Speaker 2: the monitor doesn't say anything to me before moving on
Speaker 2: to the written composition. I stare at blank paper on
Speaker 2: which I'm supposed to write a response of a few
Speaker 2: hundred words to their prompt describe a wedding you attended
Speaker 2: in the form of an email to a friend. Pens
Speaker 2: move all around me, but I feel stuck. Images of
Speaker 2: various weddings flashed through my mind. My cousin on the beach,
Speaker 2: my sister at the old farmhouse, or I could invent
Speaker 2: a wedding. It shouldn't matter. They're not judging my memory,
Speaker 2: just my writing, Except now I know that's not really
Speaker 2: the point, or at least not the only one. They
Speaker 2: don't just want to evaluate my English. They also want
Speaker 2: to know if I secretly understand anything else. I glance around.
Speaker 2: The projection screen is rolled up, exposing writing on the
Speaker 2: blackboard behind it. Some of it looks like a lesson,
Speaker 2: a list with bullet points. Some of it could be
Speaker 2: student graffiti. I turned quickly back to the paper before
Speaker 2: I have time to take anything in. It wasn't in English.
Speaker 2: It may be part of the test. I should write
Speaker 2: in an anglophone way, use a variety of sentence structures
Speaker 2: to showcase English's versatility. Maybe drop in some impressive vocabulary.
Speaker 2: But trying too hard might seem suspicious. Everyone around me
Speaker 2: is already writing. It's not that hard to write a
Speaker 2: few hundred words in your native language. Simple off the
Speaker 2: cuff writing is probably best. I squeeze out some details
Speaker 2: from my cousin's wedding, mixed with a movie I saw
Speaker 2: last week. Reading back, it feels clunky. Maybe that's okay.
Speaker 2: Just because you're fluent in a language doesn't mean you
Speaker 2: can spontaneously shit out beautiful prose especially in as synthetic
Speaker 2: a situation as this. I write a few more trite
Speaker 2: sentences and start counting words. The monitor cos all the
Speaker 2: papers and directs us to the next haulover for the
Speaker 2: oral communication portion. Everyone instinctively puts their glasses on and
Speaker 2: earbuds back in. We move with the slow shuffle of
Speaker 2: a group no one wants to lead. I have time
Speaker 2: to check the blackboard. The writing and other scripts and
Speaker 2: tongues has resolved into English. I read some of the
Speaker 2: crassest and most abusive insults I've ever seen. The original
Speaker 2: phrases could have been tough to ignore for someone who
Speaker 2: understood them. I chuckle and glance around. No one else notices.
Speaker 2: We sit in low plastic chairs waiting to be called
Speaker 2: into one of the small rooms. When my name comes up,
Speaker 2: I'm surprised by the man waiting for me. I'd prepare
Speaker 2: myself to see the monitor from earlier, but of course
Speaker 2: she couldn't run each individual test. My expectations of the
Speaker 2: tight haired school teachery woman run up against a smiling,
Speaker 2: balding man in his fifties, a red face and a
Speaker 2: well fed build, plus a twinkle in his eye, suggests
Speaker 2: as sort of bombon. I mentally chied myself for using
Speaker 2: that phrase, but there can't be any harm in loanwords.
Speaker 2: I don't know French speakers even say bon vivant. He
Speaker 2: gestures for me to sit. I reach for my earbuds,
Speaker 2: but he says to leave them in. He verifies my
Speaker 2: name and all talk user information, then asks how the
Speaker 2: written component of the test went. I explained my struggle
Speaker 2: with what to write, how long I hesitated worrying about
Speaker 2: the content of the response. Apparently it's a common problem.
Speaker 2: The setting is so much like a school classroom that
Speaker 2: people feel they're going to be graded on clever ideas,
Speaker 2: when really we're just looking for comfortable use of the language.
Speaker 2: The same goes for this test. No need to stress
Speaker 2: about what you say. We're just establishing whether you speak naturally.
Speaker 2: So let's chat. He takes out his earbuds and I
Speaker 2: do the same. He's explaining why it was important that
Speaker 2: we talked briefly before taking them out, something about hearing
Speaker 2: changes in vocal quality or vocabulary. But I don't follow
Speaker 2: because halfway through, both of our earbuds are out and
Speaker 2: I suddenly hear a regional accent. I'm not sure where
Speaker 2: from maybe northern England. I wonder what he'll make of
Speaker 2: my accent now that all talk isn't filtering it for him,
Speaker 2: He looks expectantly at me. We can talk about anything
Speaker 2: at all. An awful pause follows, which he breaks by
Speaker 2: bursting into laughter. Sorry that was mean, he admits. I
Speaker 2: love how universal it is. Take the most talkative people
Speaker 2: in the world. Ask them to speak, and they have
Speaker 2: no idea what to say. Why don't you tell me
Speaker 2: where you're from? As I described the small town I
Speaker 2: grew up in, I get more comfortable. He must often
Speaker 2: ask people about their home to put them at ease.
Speaker 2: I wonder if that gets boring. I meet people from
Speaker 2: all over the world in the city. All talks have
Speaker 2: eliminated one of the biggest barriers to integration. But for him,
Speaker 2: always testing in English speakers, they must have a more
Speaker 2: limited range of backgrounds. It might surprise you how many
Speaker 2: places people have learned English as a first language. The
Speaker 2: British Isles and North America, but also in Australia and
Speaker 2: Pacific Islands, Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean. There are pockets
Speaker 2: of it everywhere. That's without all the people trying to
Speaker 2: pass it. Off as their mother tongue. We sell someone
Speaker 2: ejected for that during the word recognition test. Why would
Speaker 2: they do that? Silly, isn't it? The whole point of
Speaker 2: all talk technology is everyone can use their own language.
Speaker 2: A major selling point when we first pitched to governments
Speaker 2: was preserving minority languages while giving their speakers the same
Speaker 2: opportunities as people with one of the big colonial international languages.
Speaker 2: I noticed you didn't answer my question, So why do
Speaker 2: they object? All talk only translates into the wearer's first language.
Speaker 2: People raised multi lingual get a choice. But you can't
Speaker 2: get translation to English if you didn't grow up speaking it.
Speaker 2: But why would someone choose English over their first language? Oh?
Speaker 2: There are some complaints that the AI interface, designed by
Speaker 2: Anglos and first adopted in the US, has been trained
Speaker 2: to perceive the world with an anglocentric lens. Whatever that's
Speaker 2: supposed to mean. He's frowning at the table as he speaks.
Speaker 2: It's all nonsense. There's more data coming in from Mandarin
Speaker 2: than English these days. Honestly, I think English has become
Speaker 2: sort of fashionable. But not knowing all our customer's fluencies
Speaker 2: messes with our data collection. It lowers the quality of
Speaker 2: the translation. He hastily adds, as if clarifying was important,
Speaker 2: we wouldn't want the AI to start thinking that the
Speaker 2: way that non native speakers use English as normal, he chuckles.
Speaker 2: I decided to push a little further. Outside. I saw
Speaker 2: a few people picketing the building. A few is understating it.
Speaker 2: They outnumbered those of us coming in for the test,
Speaker 2: people of all ages, holding signs, shouting. None had warn't
Speaker 2: all talks, so most of what they said as I
Speaker 2: walked in with gibberish, but my glasses decoded the signs.
Speaker 2: My words are not all talks property. You are a
Speaker 2: police camera now mining your tongue to sell to my ears.
Speaker 2: Monopoly on translation equals monopoly on the truth. The bearer
Speaker 2: of the last one stepped in front of me, shouting.
Speaker 2: I realized I could understand him. His shouts were English
Speaker 2: is a multinational corporation. States have to work together to
Speaker 2: regulate it. But all talk translates to international law. They're
Speaker 2: writing their own rules while they harvest your voice as
Speaker 2: data and decide how you interpret everything you hear or read.
Speaker 2: They are your oppressors. Your mind is being colonized. I'd
Speaker 2: push past him without really taking in what he said.
Speaker 2: Voices that aren't filtered through the all talk speakers sound
Speaker 2: a little fainter, less real when the earbuds are in,
Speaker 2: but his wrinkled, angry face stuck with me. Something about
Speaker 2: oppressors colonizing the mind. I say to the monitor. We
Speaker 2: don't tell anyone what to do, he starts off angrily.
Speaker 2: We offer a service, they're free to use it or not.
Speaker 2: How could we possibly be oppressors? Then he laughs again,
Speaker 2: but it doesn't have the same full throated ease of
Speaker 2: the first time. We're a private company. We're not the state.
Speaker 2: We exist to liberate people. There was a time when
Speaker 2: national governments could make language competency a requirement for so citizenship, employment,
Speaker 2: or access to services. Not anymore, just a bunch of
Speaker 2: nut jobs, I guess. He concurs, reassured and happy to
Speaker 2: finish with the subject. He asks me some more about
Speaker 2: where I grew up, before saying he's heard enough, so
Speaker 2: did I pass? Then he chuckles, there's no passing or failing.
Speaker 2: We just want to evaluate our customer's facility with the
Speaker 2: language to better meet their needs. I stand up and
Speaker 2: shake his hand before heading to the door. I fiddle
Speaker 2: with my earbuds and thank him thoughtlessly. He answers mercier who.
Speaker 2: I turned back to him, frowning and ask him to
Speaker 2: repeat himself. He shakes his head. Never mind, thank you.
Speaker 2: I exhaled deeply as I make my way out. They
Speaker 2: were specifically checking me for competence in French, and I
Speaker 2: don't think it was to better meet my needs. The
Speaker 2: crowd of protesters has gone when I leave the All
Speaker 2: Talk office. A few police cars park nearby suggest it
Speaker 2: might not have been their idea. As I turned the corner,
Speaker 2: the same wrinkled face from before confronts me. He has
Speaker 2: a stack of papers in one hand and holds one
Speaker 2: out to me with the other. I turn my head
Speaker 2: and my All Talk glasses with their built in cameras
Speaker 2: away from him. Without looking. I take the paper and
Speaker 2: stuff it into my bag. At home, Louise asks how
Speaker 2: it went. I tell him it seemed fine, and mention
Speaker 2: about the Filipino man getting thrown out. He doesn't know
Speaker 2: what to make of it either. I say nothing about
Speaker 2: the French. When we head for the kitchen, I continue
Speaker 2: to look after him, but I reach blindly into my
Speaker 2: bag and move the crumpled up paper into my pants pocket,
Speaker 2: still not looking at it. In the kitchen, when Louise
Speaker 2: is facing the other way, I feel around inside the
Speaker 2: drunk drawer until I find a small flashlight and pocket
Speaker 2: that too. In bed, later, we say good night before
Speaker 2: taking off our ear pieces and glasses, mounting them on
Speaker 2: their chargers. When I hear Louis's breath coming deep and regular,
Speaker 2: I reach down to my pants on the floor and
Speaker 2: retrieve the paper and flashlight. I turn my back to
Speaker 2: my glasses, ostensibly deactive while charging. Then I duck under
Speaker 2: the covers and unfold the paper. It's covered in writing
Speaker 2: dozens of scripts. I don't know. Even the stuff in
Speaker 2: Roman letters is mostly meaningless to me. At the bottom,
Speaker 2: there's one phrase written over and over in different languages.
Speaker 2: I spot the French vou valais resiste a prem un languis,
Speaker 2: and then the English want to resist learn a language.
Speaker 2: How could learning a language be resistance? I think back
Speaker 2: to practicing French. There were fun games than boring memorization
Speaker 2: of conjugations and genders. It got better when I could
Speaker 2: read books or I have conversations and started noticing the
Speaker 2: differences embodied by the languages. It felt fun naughty, maybe
Speaker 2: to learn the swear words calise, tabernac, but never felt
Speaker 2: like an act of rebellion. I was just hanging out
Speaker 2: with Mammy. Mammy. I hadn't thought of her by that
Speaker 2: name earlier. When I had my all talk head set
Speaker 2: on Grandma what my parents called her in English, not
Speaker 2: what I'd addressed in French. The screen from the word
Speaker 2: recognition test flashed into my mind. In ten minutes, they
Speaker 2: could train my brain to react in a specific way
Speaker 2: to certain concepts. How many hours of wearing glasses and
Speaker 2: headsets had taken to implant Grandma and erase Mamie, or
Speaker 2: to erase harvest to use later with native French speakers
Speaker 2: mining your tongue to sell to my ears a sign
Speaker 2: had read no wonder. They couldn't stand even a passing
Speaker 2: competence in a language to go unreported. The service they
Speaker 2: sold and all the power and influence that went with it,
Speaker 2: was built from the voices of linguistic minorities. I suddenly
Speaker 2: noticed an absence. Louis has stopped snoring. I look up.
Speaker 2: He's ducked under the covers as well. His dark eyes
Speaker 2: are wide staring at me. In the paper and the torchlight.
Speaker 2: I position it between us. Can you read any of this?
Speaker 2: I whisper quissoldu? He whispers back. It almost sounds like French.
Speaker 2: I don't quite understand, but I want to the end
Speaker 2: and I'm going to talk about it. But first I'm
Speaker 2: going to talk about how lucky you are to have
Speaker 2: this podcast interrupted by capitalism right now and we're back
Speaker 2: that we in this case, it is either royal or
Speaker 2: I'm including you. Everyone's back. We're all back. So I
Speaker 2: clearly like this story, oh as I want to read
Speaker 2: it to you. And at first I wasn't sure how
Speaker 2: I was gonna feel about the story, because the idea
Speaker 2: of a universal translator is one of the positive things
Speaker 2: that we can imagine to come out of AI and
Speaker 2: that we can imagine to come out of technology, right,
Speaker 2: And that's what interests me so much about this story
Speaker 2: is it talks about the way that that would be
Speaker 2: developed within our current capitalistic ecosystem economy, economy. And to
Speaker 2: toot my own horn, yeah, that's the expression. I once
Speaker 2: wrote a story called one Star that ran on Vice motherboard,
Speaker 2: and it was a story about a self driving car
Speaker 2: that drives you to jail and when it came out,
Speaker 2: a lot of people were like, yeah, Margaret Kiljoy Hill
Speaker 2: hate self driving cars just like us. And I'm like,
Speaker 2: I lived in a van at the time. It's like,
Speaker 2: I would have loved if my van drove me places
Speaker 2: while I hung out in the back and read books. However,
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean that I'm not capable of putting two
Speaker 2: and two together to say that within our current society,
Speaker 2: if you had a self driving car and you had
Speaker 2: a warrant, your self driving car would drive you to jail.
Speaker 2: Because technology. While some of the concepts embedded within technology
Speaker 2: could be applied in lots of different ways, the ecosystems
Speaker 2: in which technologies develop do not lend themselves to creating
Speaker 2: neutral technologies. So I don't want to specifically say it's
Speaker 2: like bad to have translation I think it's good to
Speaker 2: have translation services. Not everyone's going to learn every single language, right,
Speaker 2: But talking about the way that these things that seem
Speaker 2: like they would be really good would get twisted is
Speaker 2: really interesting to me and to I actually asked the
Speaker 2: author what he had to say about this particular story,
Speaker 2: and he mentions radon the journal that it was published in.
Speaker 2: He says, it's cool how Raydon brings transhumanism into conversation
Speaker 2: with anarchism. In my imagination, transhumanism has always been the
Speaker 2: threat to freedoms cybermen or the borg, not mally from neuromancer.
Speaker 2: I had trouble squaring that well. Working on tongue mining,
Speaker 2: it clicked for me. Not only can transhumanism work with
Speaker 2: the centralized freedoms, it has to. Transhumanism is scary when
Speaker 2: it represents a loss of humanity, but if there's no
Speaker 2: authoritative state enforcing it and no corporate interest standing to
Speaker 2: benefit from it, it becomes a question of personal choice.
Speaker 2: Then physical or mental modifications are an embodiment of the
Speaker 2: individual's aspirations. What could be more human than that? And
Speaker 2: I like this thought about it because I like realizing that,
Speaker 2: you know, the author of the story is coming sort
Speaker 2: of from the opposite position where I'm like, oh, a
Speaker 2: self driving car would be cool, but oh wait, it
Speaker 2: is actually gonna be terrible, you know. And it seems
Speaker 2: like he's coming more from a point of view of like, oh,
Speaker 2: all this transhumanist stuff is going to be terrible. Well,
Speaker 2: I could see actually how it could be freeing, but
Speaker 2: within our current context it's not Okay, my one other
Speaker 2: story that relates to this story. You know, there's this
Speaker 2: part in this story. I thought it was a really
Speaker 2: good detail about how there was a bunch of very
Speaker 2: explicit things written on the chalkboard in a bunch of
Speaker 2: different languages because people can't help but respond to that.
Speaker 2: The state does that. Now, they did it to me once.
Speaker 2: I was once arrested in the Netherlands and for an
Speaker 2: anti fascist action where some Nazis had burned down a
Speaker 2: mosque and a bunch of anti fascists went to Rotterdam
Speaker 2: to go try and stop the Nazis from physically interfering
Speaker 2: with the rebuilding of that mosque. We went to go
Speaker 2: fight Nazis and we all ended up in jail. And
Speaker 2: it was a very internationalist movement, and they knew that
Speaker 2: I didn't speak Dutch, and I didn't have a Dutch passport,
Speaker 2: and I wasn't from the I wasn't an EU citizen.
Speaker 2: So everyone refused to speak anything but English. And we
Speaker 2: all went to jail together and none of us gave
Speaker 2: our names, and we all said we only speak English,
Speaker 2: and so they separated us and they started going through
Speaker 2: and trying to get all of us they tried to
Speaker 2: prove who was Dutch. One of the ways that they
Speaker 2: would do that. Some of it would be like they'd
Speaker 2: catch someone and they'd have a Dutch book, you know,
Speaker 2: something like that. But one of the things that they
Speaker 2: would do is we're all on individual cells, and so
Speaker 2: an angry man would come in and basically like scream
Speaker 2: in Dutch, like, yeah, I fucked your mother last night,
Speaker 2: how do you feel about that? And like look to
Speaker 2: see our facial expressions. And when an angry man screams
Speaker 2: at me in Dutch on my second day in the Netherlands,
Speaker 2: I have no idea what he's saying. I just sort
Speaker 2: of stare blankly ahead, feeling a little bit defeated, a
Speaker 2: little bit like it's my second I haven't even been
Speaker 2: in the country for twenty four hours, and I am
Speaker 2: in jail, you know. And so they picked me out
Speaker 2: and sent me to foreign attention. However, they picked several
Speaker 2: Dutch and or EU citizens and send them to foreign
Speaker 2: attention as well, because those people had successfully masked their Dutch.
Speaker 2: And here's where systemic racism comes in. Those people who
Speaker 2: were picked and sent to foreign attention with me by
Speaker 2: American standards, those were white people, but by Dutch standards.
Speaker 2: You know. Someone said to someone said afterwards, like, notice
Speaker 2: how they picked the darker skinned and darker complexioned people
Speaker 2: and sent them to foreign attention, you know. And again,
Speaker 2: racial conceptions are very different in different places. But realizing
Speaker 2: that it was like the people who didn't look Dutch
Speaker 2: based on ethnic characteristics, and even though it was ostensibly
Speaker 2: this language filtration, it was also had a racial component.
Speaker 2: And I think that that kind of thing would absolutely
Speaker 2: become true in something like what this story discusses. And
Speaker 2: that's it. That's it for this episode of Cool Zone
Speaker 2: Media Book Club. You can find me on Cool People
Speaker 2: Who Did Cool Stuff if you listen to this on
Speaker 2: these it could Happen Here feed, and you can find
Speaker 2: it could Happen Here on the could Happen Here feed
Speaker 2: if you found this on the Cool People Who Did
Speaker 2: Cool Stuff feed, Because it's one podcast on two feeds,
Speaker 2: neither of which are the feed for the pod. It's
Speaker 2: wild crazy, We're doing something new, no one's ever done
Speaker 2: it before. I'm gonna press stop now on the recording.
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