Speaker 1: You know what I love prop is live shows. Live
Speaker 1: podcast shows are incredible, especially when you can watch them
Speaker 1: whenever you want. M that's what we're doing right now.
Speaker 1: Are you saying we should do one? Yeah, a virtual
Speaker 1: live podcast show at moment house dot com slash Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards on February sevent at six pm PST. You
Speaker 1: don't have to watch the show live, but you can
Speaker 1: and participate in a fun Q and A, or you
Speaker 1: can watch the link for up to a week later
Speaker 1: after it airs. So check out our virtual show and
Speaker 1: buy tickets at moment house dot com. Slash Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards will also be linking the ticket link in our
Speaker 1: episode descriptions for Behind the Bastards. You can check that
Speaker 1: out and see y'all there. Well, you'll see us there,
Speaker 1: you will see there. Hey, it's de Lieva. I'm here
Speaker 1: to tell you about my brand new podcast, De Liva
Speaker 1: at your service. I'll be sitting down with the world's
Speaker 1: most inspiring minds to uncover what makes them take and
Speaker 1: what they've learned from the obstacles life has thrown at them,
Speaker 1: including Sir Elton John. After a lot of upsets, a
Speaker 1: lot of disappointments, a lot of betrayals. It's turned out
Speaker 1: to be the most wonderful life right now that I've
Speaker 1: could ever imagined. Listen to do a Leap at your
Speaker 1: service on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Calbern, host of
Speaker 1: deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who
Speaker 1: helped the mob run Chicago. He bribed judges and even
Speaker 1: helped a hit man walk free until one day when
Speaker 1: he started talking with the FBI and promised that he
Speaker 1: could take the mob down. I've spent the past year
Speaker 1: trying to figure out why he flipped and what he
Speaker 1: was really after. Listen to deep Cover on the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know.
Speaker 1: This is a compilation episode. So every episode of the
Speaker 1: week that just happened is here in one convenient and
Speaker 1: with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to
Speaker 1: in a long wretch if you want. If you've been
Speaker 1: listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna
Speaker 1: be nothing new here for you, but you can make
Speaker 1: your own decisions. Welcome back, to it could happen here
Speaker 1: a podcast about things falling apart, and occasionally even about
Speaker 1: how to put some other things back together. Um. Today
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about something that is increasingly a
Speaker 1: part of what we like to call the crumbles around here,
Speaker 1: which is the health care system in this country, in
Speaker 1: the hospital system in this country as it uh kind
Speaker 1: of gets crunched by COVID. UM. And we're gonna particularly
Speaker 1: talk about a really critical aspect of our entire medical
Speaker 1: infrastructure that a lot of people don't know about traveling nurses. Uh.
Speaker 1: And with me today is our guest, and and you
Speaker 1: are a traveling nurse from New York to California all
Speaker 1: around the country. UM, thanks for being on the show.
Speaker 1: Glad to be here. Yeah. So, I live in Colorado
Speaker 1: and I was at a right ular staff nurse UM
Speaker 1: until COVID hit. And you know, at that time, we
Speaker 1: expected it to crunch everywhere. UM, but my home hospital,
Speaker 1: like many places that worked on the coast, UM ended
Speaker 1: up being really empty when everybody locked down and stopped
Speaker 1: getting into car accidents and going to parties and all
Speaker 1: of the other things that bring people into the e
Speaker 1: R and I see us um. So At that time,
Speaker 1: I quit my full time job and went to New
Speaker 1: York as a travel nurse. UM. And then I've been
Speaker 1: dancing around hotspots since then. So New York, Texas, Ohio,
Speaker 1: rural New Mexico. UM. I just finished my third contract
Speaker 1: in California. I've been up to Oregon. So UM. I've
Speaker 1: seen the health care system working and not working in
Speaker 1: a lot of different places, and also like how much
Speaker 1: disparity there is different communities related to covid as in
Speaker 1: the health care that we can provide. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: am kind of before we move on to some of
Speaker 1: the specific things going on with travel nurses, what is
Speaker 1: your sense of like how often are you in a
Speaker 1: place and feel like, well, this the hospital system here,
Speaker 1: this particular hospital, they're they're like right on the edge
Speaker 1: of a breaking point most of the time. Okay, that's
Speaker 1: good to know where your seatbelts, folks. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: particularly since everyone was able to get vaccinated right Like
Speaker 1: to me, I really feel like that that that point
Speaker 1: of like the tipping point of like the quote unquote
Speaker 1: crumbles kind of like after everybody was was able to
Speaker 1: get their second vaccination, UM, and we had so much
Speaker 1: hope last May and June and things were reopening and
Speaker 1: it was kind of like, wow, things could go back
Speaker 1: to normal. Um, and then like, I don't believe that's
Speaker 1: going to happen. And since then, I've seen so much
Speaker 1: more despair in my coworkers, and I've heard about so
Speaker 1: many more healthcare suicides, UM staff, nurses, travel nurses, arties,
Speaker 1: other ancillary people, and you know, the kind of running
Speaker 1: joke and all out of workplaces is like, well, I
Speaker 1: hope I test positive for COVID because that would be
Speaker 1: better than coming into work another day. Yeah, alright, I
Speaker 1: hope I get hit by a car so I don't
Speaker 1: have to come in your job, I think, is what
Speaker 1: a lot of people would the people who you know
Speaker 1: are reasonable human beings and see what you're doing is
Speaker 1: incredibly necessary, find that would find the work to be
Speaker 1: something of a nightmare. I mean, it sounds like horrific
Speaker 1: um to have to to deal with this. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's not an easy job in the best
Speaker 1: of times, being a nurse, but like with COVID and stuff,
Speaker 1: it's it's just there's so much else on y'all's plates. Um.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that has happened over the
Speaker 1: course of the last year or well almost two years now, UM,
Speaker 1: is that from January twenty the advertised pay rates for
Speaker 1: travel nurses around the country have gone up by about
Speaker 1: sixty UM, which in staffing firms of you know, increase
Speaker 1: their building of hospitals by like so like this huge
Speaker 1: rays in what um travel nurses are demand ending and
Speaker 1: what is getting paid out. And I think a reasonable
Speaker 1: person would go, well, yeah, of course, um And yeah,
Speaker 1: I think anybody would go any reasonable person would go, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, you guys deserve much more money than that
Speaker 1: for what you're dealing with right now. UM. I have
Speaker 1: no problem with this, But people who do have problems
Speaker 1: with this are the American Hospital Association UM, among other
Speaker 1: folks generally the folks who are seeing this primarily as well,
Speaker 1: now we're spending more money issue as opposed to a,
Speaker 1: hey maybe we don't have enough nurses, which right, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I guess I have maybe a couple of comments
Speaker 1: on that. So one of the things about trafical nurses,
Speaker 1: so if if you're not in the travel field and
Speaker 1: you say I want to change hospitals, even if you're
Speaker 1: an experienced nurse, they will take between a month and
Speaker 1: six months to go through their hiring process, and then
Speaker 1: they will give you a week, two weeks, maybe four
Speaker 1: weeks of orientation. So that's a long process to hire
Speaker 1: an Normally, for me as a travel nurse, I will
Speaker 1: talk to a recruiter, I will say yes, I will
Speaker 1: be on the road somewhere between four hours to twenty
Speaker 1: four hours later, I will get to the hospital. I
Speaker 1: will do a bunch of paperwork that is for compliance
Speaker 1: and makes no difference at all. I will get between
Speaker 1: two and six hours of orientation, which is basically, here's
Speaker 1: the bathroom, here's the storeroom, this is what we're going
Speaker 1: to audit in the charts. And then I'm expected to
Speaker 1: take care of complex actively dying patients. So so you know,
Speaker 1: people complain about how much we're getting paid, But if
Speaker 1: you only have two hours of like where's the bathroom,
Speaker 1: and like this is how most of the time when
Speaker 1: you're spending with I t being like hey, I need
Speaker 1: computer access, buddy, and then there you are and you're
Speaker 1: in the thick of it with no backup. You know,
Speaker 1: so you already have to be an expert in your field,
Speaker 1: and you have to be able to walk into an
Speaker 1: unfamiliar chaotic situation and hit the ground running immediately. So, yes,
Speaker 1: making a lenning bucks an hour is a lot of money,
Speaker 1: But I don't know that that's so super unreasonable for
Speaker 1: two hours of Like yeah, it's now take care of
Speaker 1: people who are actively dying and don't screw it up.
Speaker 1: It's the way we're told the system is supposed to work, right, Like,
Speaker 1: this is how capitalism is supposed to function. The demand
Speaker 1: for something goes up, and the demand for nursing his
Speaker 1: way the hell up, so the price goes up. Um,
Speaker 1: if you believe in capitalism, like one assumes these people
Speaker 1: who are responsible for you know, paying you and are
Speaker 1: currently lobbying. So what's happening. I should go back because
Speaker 1: we didn't note this. But the American Hospital Association and
Speaker 1: a number of other folks are lobbying Congress right now
Speaker 1: to put a cap on the amount of money that
Speaker 1: traveling nurses UM can uh CAN can receive, and a
Speaker 1: number of UM congress people have said that they're going
Speaker 1: to be looking into the issue. Several states, Oregon, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Kansas,
Speaker 1: and Kentucky have introduced legislation that's attempting to cap nurse
Speaker 1: pay rates. So there's like this huge backlash attempting to
Speaker 1: lock down the amount of money y'all can continue to
Speaker 1: get paid UM because of all of the things. This
Speaker 1: country I guess has money for the people dealing with
Speaker 1: the I don't know what. I don't know how many
Speaker 1: millions of additional sick and dying people UM are are
Speaker 1: are kind of beyond what these folks are willing to
Speaker 1: shell out for UM. And I got the size of that,
Speaker 1: and I mean to clarify, so in a FEMA contract,
Speaker 1: so what a lot of the contracts I take are.
Speaker 1: So the nurse is making between a hundred and and
Speaker 1: maybe you also have a tax free stipend or you
Speaker 1: don't kind of depending on how you are in that.
Speaker 1: And then but the bill rate to the hospital is
Speaker 1: usually like so the legislation is against the agencies. The
Speaker 1: agencies are making between forty. Of course, the agency is
Speaker 1: then going to say, hey, well we aren't going to
Speaker 1: pay you as much because we still want the same cut. Yeah.
Speaker 1: My understanding, so the trickle down effect is likely going
Speaker 1: to be travel nurse wages. But my understanding is it's
Speaker 1: asking the FTC to take enforcement against the travel nurse agencies,
Speaker 1: because the agencies, they're the ones that say they have
Speaker 1: the person on the phone that says, hey, you have
Speaker 1: these credentials, we want to send you to this hospital yes,
Speaker 1: or now we've got this hotel arranged or we don't
Speaker 1: or you know those types of and we're going to
Speaker 1: do this type of on boarding. So they have their
Speaker 1: own kind of infrastructure and they take, you know, half
Speaker 1: of the cut. Some of those people are making a
Speaker 1: lot of money too, Yeah, And it seems like it's
Speaker 1: kind of the situation where the way this is being framed,
Speaker 1: they're trying to crack down on these people who are
Speaker 1: kind of profiteering or could be argued to be profiteering
Speaker 1: off the situation um, rather than trying to cap the
Speaker 1: amount that the nurses can make, so to speak, or
Speaker 1: at least not by as much. But the overall effect
Speaker 1: will be that because of the way these companies work,
Speaker 1: y'all will still wind up making less money. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how um Within the traveling nurse community, what is kind
Speaker 1: of where are people right now with this? Like what
Speaker 1: is what is kind of the mood? Um? So I
Speaker 1: think there's a couple of things to note. So in
Speaker 1: the FEMA contracts. They're usually sixty to seventy two contracts,
Speaker 1: so you're working back to back to back to back.
Speaker 1: So I'll do eight weeks sometimes. And most people are
Speaker 1: not white women like me. This is mostly first and
Speaker 1: second generation immigrants and generally people of color. Um. So,
Speaker 1: these are not people that are saving for Lamborghinis. These
Speaker 1: are people that are paying off their student loans because
Speaker 1: a lot of them went to private nursing schools because
Speaker 1: that was kind of what was accessible to them because
Speaker 1: all of the disparity and education and opportunities. These are
Speaker 1: people that are trying to pay off their mortgages. These
Speaker 1: are people who are paying off their parents houses. Um.
Speaker 1: So this kind of idea that like nurses are greedy
Speaker 1: is I think really unfair because most of us are
Speaker 1: just trying to like, you know, a life that works.
Speaker 1: And also, you can't do eight hour contracts fifty two
Speaker 1: weeks out of the year, no, I mean doing it
Speaker 1: for any extended period of time. I've I've worked those
Speaker 1: kind of hours in a generally less stressful working environment.
Speaker 1: Um and it like it breaks you down, um over time,
Speaker 1: Like you you can't do that and at any time
Speaker 1: in your life, for one thing, like, um, and you
Speaker 1: can't do that forever. And it sounds like this is
Speaker 1: kind of a lot of people are taking it as
Speaker 1: like this is an opportunity. I can get my parents
Speaker 1: out of debt, I can I can get a house, Um,
Speaker 1: I can say for my kids to I can pay
Speaker 1: off my own college. Like it's a chance for a
Speaker 1: lot of these people by putting in an unbelievable amount
Speaker 1: of effort to get ahead. Uh. And I can't can't
Speaker 1: even imagine the frustration at seeing so many people be like, well, no,
Speaker 1: not so fast. And I mean one of the things
Speaker 1: that people are bringing up is right like it in
Speaker 1: the same way that you know, we struggle to want
Speaker 1: to pass minimum wage laws for the undocumented immigrants that
Speaker 1: pick our food and you know, support this infrastructure that
Speaker 1: is totally unseen now that we have, you know what
Speaker 1: is mostly for stance second generation immigrants that are working
Speaker 1: these FEMA contracts. Like you're targeting a section of the
Speaker 1: population that are not the people that have doubled tripled
Speaker 1: their wealth in the pandemic, right like, these are not
Speaker 1: all of the people that got the small business loans
Speaker 1: that didn't need them, and you know and have are
Speaker 1: just putting all of that money into stock, right, is
Speaker 1: there not? These are people who just want a middle
Speaker 1: class American dream and we're working, will work really really
Speaker 1: hard for it. And I mean there these are people
Speaker 1: who are asking, can I have the thing we're all promised?
Speaker 1: If I spend eighty hours a week watching people in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases choke out their last fucking breaths,
Speaker 1: is that okay? And a lot of are saying, oh,
Speaker 1: of course, not right. And you know, so we're taking
Speaker 1: care of dying people while we're getting yelled at at
Speaker 1: the phone of like is cursing a lot on the
Speaker 1: show or yes, of course? Yeah. I mean I had
Speaker 1: a family member saying, you're fucking imprisoning her on a
Speaker 1: ventil lator. I'm going to come for you. Where do
Speaker 1: you fucking live? You know we have to get security involved. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, we get death threats. I've had people like
Speaker 1: threatened to find where I live and raped me. And
Speaker 1: so I mean, yeah, taking care of your dying loved
Speaker 1: one who also probably would say those same things to
Speaker 1: me because I would say, hey, please be vaccinated and
Speaker 1: they would say fuck you. But I'm still going to
Speaker 1: do everything I can to take care of them, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to do this abuse and like, yeah, if
Speaker 1: I'm going to leave my home and the safety of
Speaker 1: a hospital that works and go into these total cluster
Speaker 1: fucks of hospitals where the educator has left, the manager
Speaker 1: has left, the director has left, so there's no leadership.
Speaker 1: It's travelers, some of which are great, some of which
Speaker 1: are also hot messes, and trying to take care of
Speaker 1: these people. Then like, yes, I want to be paid
Speaker 1: accordingly for it. Now, would I trade that for a
Speaker 1: social um, a social safety net of health insurance because
Speaker 1: I have to get private health insurance which is shady. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't get any disability insurance. I have no stick
Speaker 1: leave right because you're you're you're a pinch hitter. You're
Speaker 1: not like salary anywhere. Yeah, but would I trade this
Speaker 1: high salary for a social safety net? Personally I would yes,
Speaker 1: But I mean nobody's going to say, like, yes, you
Speaker 1: will be able to retire with dignity if you play
Speaker 1: by all of these rules. They don't believe that I
Speaker 1: want to make the money. Yeah, it's I mean we're
Speaker 1: all always in this kind of like yes, soccer way
Speaker 1: as much as you can while it's coming situation, and
Speaker 1: she's especially if you're especially if you're doing something you're
Speaker 1: gonna need to recover from later, right Like, this is
Speaker 1: I I you know, I've I've done overseas work. I
Speaker 1: understand kind of the nature of like trauma. And while
Speaker 1: you're doing the job at the rate you're doing it,
Speaker 1: you're also like pushing off a day of reckoning mentally
Speaker 1: and not having a cushion of savings helps with that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like in the middle of it, you're in it, and
Speaker 1: then you know, sometimes it's weeks, sometimes it's months. Um,
Speaker 1: I hiked the Colorado Trail for mental health, and half
Speaker 1: of those nights I had I See you nightmares. So
Speaker 1: I was in these beautiful the middle of over places
Speaker 1: where everything was quiet. I would wake up with all
Speaker 1: of the beeps and people dying in my head night
Speaker 1: after night after night. You know. Yeah, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm angry that they don't want to compensate me for that,
Speaker 1: because I mean, they're definitely not paying for my therapist.
Speaker 1: They definitely like aren't giving me access to disability if
Speaker 1: I need it, right Like, yeah, because obviously again you're
Speaker 1: you're a contractor effectively, Um, there's not like a union
Speaker 1: for traveling nurses? Is there or Am I wrong about that? No? So,
Speaker 1: I mean the only thing you have each you're negotiating power. Um.
Speaker 1: So I have eight years of experience between emergency and
Speaker 1: I see you um and a lot of very um,
Speaker 1: big and highly regarded hospitals. So I'm a hot commodity
Speaker 1: to them, so I can kind of pick and choose, um,
Speaker 1: who I want to work with compared to someone that
Speaker 1: has less desirable specialties. Not that those specialties don't also
Speaker 1: work as hard, but they're just harder. They're easier to staff,
Speaker 1: so therefore they're not It's a it's a market things.
Speaker 1: I definitely don't believe that my specialties are more like
Speaker 1: inherently valuable, just in terms of the market. Um. So
Speaker 1: you know, so I get I can I have the
Speaker 1: luxury of turning down contracts that aren't what I want.
Speaker 1: But I mean, I have no idea what I'm walking into.
Speaker 1: So on Monday, I'll walk into somewhere. Um, they said,
Speaker 1: you'll do some paperwork, you'll get your orientation, you'll have
Speaker 1: it'll all be it'll be a busy day and then
Speaker 1: you'll be on your own. And I have no idea.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you're oriented in one unit and you never see
Speaker 1: that united get so um and I you know, you
Speaker 1: have no idea what you're walking into. And how how
Speaker 1: long are these contracts? Generally? For so, before COVID, the
Speaker 1: standard nursing contract was thirteen weeks UM. Since COVID, a
Speaker 1: lot of them are shorter. And I've only done short
Speaker 1: contracts because if it's a decent place, then I can
Speaker 1: renew and stay longer usually, and if it's a bad place,
Speaker 1: then I'm pretty happy to get out early. UM. So
Speaker 1: I do between four and eight week contracts, and I
Speaker 1: usually do sixty plus hours a week. Is there any
Speaker 1: kind of like organization that you've seen come together a
Speaker 1: little more between people who are doing this this gig
Speaker 1: since you don't have kind of representation. Is that something
Speaker 1: that started to take form in the last two years
Speaker 1: since COVID. I mean there's definitely a lot of talk
Speaker 1: about it. Um. I think like those of us that
Speaker 1: started traveling since the pandemic, you know, I would say
Speaker 1: that I've only done crisis contracts, like I've never done
Speaker 1: a normal thirteen week, thirty six hour a week, not
Speaker 1: crisis assignment, like I've only gone into the ship show hotspots. Um.
Speaker 1: And so therefore, like my needs and desires are different
Speaker 1: than somebody who likes that previous lifestyle. So in some
Speaker 1: ways it's a little bit hard for us to kind
Speaker 1: of agree on common goals because we have a lot
Speaker 1: of different you know, we're very diverse group of nurses. Um. Definitely,
Speaker 1: the million Nurse March is kind of a step towards that.
Speaker 1: Tell me about that what what is this because I
Speaker 1: just learned about this pretty recently. Yeah, so I dropped
Speaker 1: off the grid for the last five days, which was
Speaker 1: fantastic for me, but it means I'm also just starting
Speaker 1: to figure it out. Um. So the kind of general
Speaker 1: idea is that you know, we have I think, uh,
Speaker 1: I'm hopefully I don't get it wrong. Four millions some
Speaker 1: nurses in the country, a huge number of nurses in
Speaker 1: the country, and a huge number of dropping out. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, hundreds of thousands quit last year. They I
Speaker 1: think one estimate is five thousand make quit this year
Speaker 1: and we were just so people know, tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of nurses understaffed before COVID nation. Yes, right right, Um,
Speaker 1: And you know, I think one of the things to
Speaker 1: understand too is that like if you work I don't know,
Speaker 1: what's what's the normal type of job that people work.
Speaker 1: I don't know. If you work at the d m V,
Speaker 1: a bookman, Oh right. If you work at the d
Speaker 1: m V and the d m V is slow, you
Speaker 1: will still stay there eight hours and you just get
Speaker 1: paid for your eight hours. If you are a normal
Speaker 1: nurse and you work thirty six hours and the e
Speaker 1: er is running slow, they could say, we're just canceling
Speaker 1: you for the rest of the day, go home. We
Speaker 1: won't pay you for those classics hours. And so, like
Speaker 1: we've always had pretty like flexible, like we've never had
Speaker 1: like most of the places I've worked, I've never had
Speaker 1: guaranteed hours. And so one of the reasons to go
Speaker 1: to travel contracts too is also so you can at
Speaker 1: least have guaranteed hours. So there's a lot of kind
Speaker 1: of protections that nurses have never really had, like guaranteed hours, UM,
Speaker 1: like staff ratios, so some states California and organ or
Speaker 1: um two of them. If you go into the I
Speaker 1: c U, which is the highest level of care, so
Speaker 1: people are actively dying, actively unstable, things can go bad
Speaker 1: within seconds. Usually it's a one nurse will have two
Speaker 1: patients UM, which is pretty much all you can handle
Speaker 1: because they're on multiple trips, multiple types of life's the
Speaker 1: part keeping them alive. So ventilators UM being the one
Speaker 1: that we see the most UM, and it's really your
Speaker 1: responsibility to know every inch of that person's body UM
Speaker 1: and everything going on with them, and you really direct
Speaker 1: a lot of their care UM. So two to one
Speaker 1: kind of makes a lot of sense since the pandemic
Speaker 1: and not having enough nurses, sometimes that's slid to three
Speaker 1: to one or even in bad situations four to one.
Speaker 1: So one of the statistics that UM. One of the
Speaker 1: kind of nurse influencers and comedians Nurse Blake talks about
Speaker 1: UM is that for every additional patient that a nurse
Speaker 1: takes on and I believe he's talking about medstart not
Speaker 1: I su that patients UM mortality increases by seven percent.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so asking a nurse to do more with
Speaker 1: less is not just like hey, just suck it up,
Speaker 1: be busier. This is actively contributing to people's disability and
Speaker 1: early deaths. So one of the things that the millionaiurse
Speaker 1: march Um wants to talk about is man man dated
Speaker 1: staffing ratios. So I see you would be two to one.
Speaker 1: MED starch is usually four to one. I think you
Speaker 1: are they're asking for three to one UM. So these
Speaker 1: have been studied by the American Nurses Association UM and
Speaker 1: other sort of UM nursing organizations UM. And not only
Speaker 1: do they make your job as a nurse so much
Speaker 1: better because we go into nursing because we want to
Speaker 1: fix things and take care of people. We want good outcomes,
Speaker 1: right Like, you don't go into nursing to just run
Speaker 1: around with your head cut off and watch everyone die,
Speaker 1: right Like, that's terrible. You go into nursing because you
Speaker 1: want the people to get better under your care, and
Speaker 1: you want to be able to give them that. And
Speaker 1: so when you're asked to take care of more patients
Speaker 1: than you're able to, you're not able to do that
Speaker 1: and it's just crushes you. UM. So not only is
Speaker 1: it better for nurse satisfaction, it also saves patients lives
Speaker 1: and also prevents things that will give cause lasting disability
Speaker 1: like ventilator associated pneumonia or bed sores or delirium, things
Speaker 1: like that. So you know, mandating UM patient ratios is
Speaker 1: one of the really big things that the Million Nurse
Speaker 1: Marks is for Um, there's a lot of talk about
Speaker 1: pay and living wages. You know, like every section. Housing
Speaker 1: prices and inflation have gone through the roof because you've
Speaker 1: got to like be renting a spot whenever you're like
Speaker 1: the hospital only putting you up right well, and for
Speaker 1: staff nurses to write like if you're you know, maybe
Speaker 1: you're maybe they gave you a two percent raise, but hey,
Speaker 1: rent increase. UM. I used to be on the interview
Speaker 1: board at my old hospital and we would just tell
Speaker 1: people like, if you're moving to at Denver as a
Speaker 1: single person, we lose most of our nurses because they
Speaker 1: haven't looked at housing. So like they'll accept a job
Speaker 1: and then they'll look for a place to live and
Speaker 1: be like, oh, I can't afford to live here. So hey, like,
Speaker 1: I mean, we can't ask if you're single moving here,
Speaker 1: but like you probably can't afford to live here with
Speaker 1: what we're going to pay you. I mean, cool, I I.
Speaker 1: It's just it's so eternally frustrating that like the one
Speaker 1: thing that everybody, when you sit them down, agrees is
Speaker 1: incontrovertibly necessary medical care. Um. We can agree on a
Speaker 1: lot of things, but not how to make sure that
Speaker 1: people doing it have a good quality of life and
Speaker 1: good income, Like we can. We have all these fun,
Speaker 1: fun rules that make it possible to charge X number
Speaker 1: of thousand dollars for a dose of insulin um, But
Speaker 1: we don't just have a law that's like, hey, if
Speaker 1: if you're working full time as a nurse, uh, maybe
Speaker 1: you shouldn't have to be housing insecure. I don't know
Speaker 1: how do you make that into a law, but it
Speaker 1: seems like there should be some option for a country
Speaker 1: that can make some of the things we make. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean tying wages to housing prices. It seems like
Speaker 1: I don't know, not being an economist and not being
Speaker 1: an administrator, like that sounds super easy to me, Like
Speaker 1: goes everybody gets a fifteen percent race, Like I'm sure
Speaker 1: it's more complicated than that, but it seems super simple
Speaker 1: to send you guy around with a stick to threaten
Speaker 1: landlords when they raise rent. Like there's we can debate
Speaker 1: the answers to this. What do you think I mean,
Speaker 1: not not that like you have any sort of comprehensive
Speaker 1: knowledge of all of the people doing this, but like,
Speaker 1: do you think there's a possibility of like a wildcat strike,
Speaker 1: which is again for people who maybe aren't is when
Speaker 1: there's a strike of workers who are not unionized. UM.
Speaker 1: I mean to some extent, with everybody quitting to do
Speaker 1: travel nursing, it's not so different. I mean some students
Speaker 1: have lost of their staff. Yeah, some like when a
Speaker 1: unit says, oh, well, the last of my staff, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of like, well, you did better than most, you know. UM.
Speaker 1: So in some ways it's already happening. And in that
Speaker 1: same way, I am seeing hospitals give better extent incentives
Speaker 1: to their nurses that have stayed um, either retention bonuses
Speaker 1: or UM increasing bonuses for pick for core staff, picking
Speaker 1: up extra shifts, UM, or kind of other perks like
Speaker 1: increasing education benefits or things like that. So I think
Speaker 1: hospitals are responding to like, hey, we don't want to
Speaker 1: lose these people to traveling, Like can we tip the
Speaker 1: balance a little bit? And I think, you know, overall
Speaker 1: hospital leadership is moving slower than they need to UM.
Speaker 1: But I mean at least they're moving a little bit.
Speaker 1: So I mean it's in that way I can see
Speaker 1: a wildcat strike UM, just coming from the kind of
Speaker 1: labor forces at play UM. And I could and I
Speaker 1: mean there were one the hospitals in the South, I
Speaker 1: think it was Alabama. All of their staff, their staff coordinated, um,
Speaker 1: so that the ship that was on agreed to stay
Speaker 1: late because you can't because abandoning patients, Um, you can
Speaker 1: put your license at risk. Right, So we all walked
Speaker 1: off in the middle of a shift and said fuck
Speaker 1: you to the hospital. Patients died then, like our licenses
Speaker 1: at risk. So we also have to kind of balance
Speaker 1: that a little bit. But there was a hospital they
Speaker 1: organized for the day shift basically to stay as late
Speaker 1: as they needed, and night shift all stood outside of
Speaker 1: the hospital and I wouldn't refuse to clock it in.
Speaker 1: So sometimes these things are happening in small levels. Um.
Speaker 1: Also um really interesting, yeah, because it is like yeah, um,
Speaker 1: I mean, and that is like such a tough thing
Speaker 1: to balance. Just the idea that like, well, you are
Speaker 1: health care workers, like withholding your labor is a thing
Speaker 1: that's going to be necessary from time to time. There's
Speaker 1: also consequences for it that are not present if you're
Speaker 1: making I don't know, tires, you know. Yeah, And as
Speaker 1: much as teachers and nurses are the same, like I
Speaker 1: don't think our country cares about educating children as much
Speaker 1: as it cares about their parents dying, you know, like
Speaker 1: for better or worse. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's another subject. UM.
Speaker 1: Is there anything else you wanted to get into today? Um?
Speaker 1: Before we we close out for the for the episode? UM,
Speaker 1: I mean, if it's okay with you and you can
Speaker 1: cut it if it's not. UM. You know, I try
Speaker 1: and tweet about kind of what's happening on the ground
Speaker 1: and the things that I'm seeing. UM. And I'm mostly
Speaker 1: finished with a book about the first year on the
Speaker 1: front line and seven different hospitals and kind of the
Speaker 1: disparities between you know, critical access in New Mexico versus
Speaker 1: trauma hospitals in you know, the Bay Area, and kind
Speaker 1: of what that first year looked like. UM. So if
Speaker 1: you want, you can follow me on Twitter. UM. It's
Speaker 1: an A N N E like and of green gables
Speaker 1: and urn, which is when I started traveling nursing, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and so that I kind of talked a
Speaker 1: little bit about like what I'm seeing and what's going on. UM.
Speaker 1: I was recently in an ear where you know, people
Speaker 1: often had to stay outside under the heat lamps for
Speaker 1: thirty hours waiting for hospital bed just because everything was impacked,
Speaker 1: so they couldn't even come inside the hospital and they
Speaker 1: were you know, waiting, um to get their appendix out
Speaker 1: and things like that. Again, where your seatbelts and a helmet,
Speaker 1: be real, be real careful right now, guys, right um?
Speaker 1: And I mean I think the other thing is the
Speaker 1: blood shortage. Um, So most hospitals are revising their guidelines
Speaker 1: of who won't get a blood transfusion, so you now
Speaker 1: have to be much more critical before they will give
Speaker 1: you a blood transfusion. So, um, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: politics around blood donation, but if you feel like you
Speaker 1: can donate blood, um, it's really desperately needed. And people
Speaker 1: are gonna where your seats because people are really going
Speaker 1: to legitimately die because we run out of blood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um boy, how do you please wear your seatbelts folks, Um,
Speaker 1: just just hunker down for a little while. No, no
Speaker 1: new risky experiments in life for just a minute. Not
Speaker 1: the time to take up skydiving. Yeah yeah, maybe avoid that.
Speaker 1: Maybe don't go skiing, uh if you haven't gone skiing before. Um,
Speaker 1: I just did that and broke my wrist because I'm
Speaker 1: I'm exactly as dumb as the people. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: warn and then I guess just check in with your
Speaker 1: mental with your the mental health of your health care workers,
Speaker 1: because I mean, so many people have you know, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of us are dealing with at least
Speaker 1: passive sort of like fuck, maybe I should just drive
Speaker 1: off the road instead of going into work today sort
Speaker 1: of thoughts, you know. And oh, for a lot of us,
Speaker 1: that's just defleeting thought and then we get our ship together.
Speaker 1: But for some people it's going to be more than that.
Speaker 1: And you know, nursing is one of those things where
Speaker 1: people have to find themselves by their career and they
Speaker 1: need to pull in their lives saying like if you
Speaker 1: are never a nurse again, you are still valued, you
Speaker 1: are still loved. Just being alive, it's enough, and this
Speaker 1: is how you know we can help take care of
Speaker 1: you if you need to quit for three months, you know,
Speaker 1: um and supporting people with their intrinsic value rather than
Speaker 1: like you are only productive and valuable because you were
Speaker 1: there saving lives. Because I think a lot of us
Speaker 1: really get stuck in that, and a lot of us
Speaker 1: are drawn into nursing because we feel some lack of
Speaker 1: worthiness without it, you know, well, that's the hard thing
Speaker 1: to get other people to do, because in part this
Speaker 1: is a society where we just have such generally crummy
Speaker 1: attitudes towards mental health. But like we're great at at
Speaker 1: saying things like, oh, you know, there's a pandemic. Our
Speaker 1: healthcare workers are heroes. You're all heroes because of the
Speaker 1: work that you're doing. The work makes you a hero,
Speaker 1: as opposed to saying, hey, thank you for doing that.
Speaker 1: I know things are still fucked up right now, but
Speaker 1: if you decide you got to like take a break
Speaker 1: or whatever, you know, you're you're you're, that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: you like what you did was still wonderful and you're
Speaker 1: still great and valuable, and maybe the best thing is
Speaker 1: for you to take that break and not drive yourself
Speaker 1: off of a cliff. Yeah, yeah, that's that's harder to
Speaker 1: get people to like way of banners that say outside
Speaker 1: of their apartment complexes, right banging on pots, to like
Speaker 1: let healthcare workers know that no matter what they do,
Speaker 1: their valued members of the community that people love. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, all right, well, and thank you so much
Speaker 1: for talking with us today. UM. I hope, uh you
Speaker 1: you hold together and help the people in your life
Speaker 1: hold together, which is all any of us can really
Speaker 1: do other than we're a seatbelt. Yeah, and thank you
Speaker 1: for being a part of the conversation, and thank you
Speaker 1: for you know, listening to hard things. And you know
Speaker 1: that's one thing that I think we really appreciate. It
Speaker 1: is to people who will actually listen with open hearts
Speaker 1: and will witness this with us so that we're in
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Speaker 1: that's that's my job done. Who what are we? What
Speaker 1: are we doing? What are we doing today? Hey? What's up? Hey? Andrew?
Speaker 1: Back at it again with another podcast. UM. Today, we're
Speaker 1: doing something a little bit different from the previous episodes
Speaker 1: that I've done. We're having a bit more of an
Speaker 1: open discussion about sitting book that has been passed around
Speaker 1: for about a decade now and has polarized UM members
Speaker 1: of the anarchist community. UM can put it that way. UM.
Speaker 1: Today we'll be talking about the book the infamous uh
Speaker 1: pollemic Dessert by anonymal Us. For those who, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: not aware of this extremely controversial text, Desert is a
Speaker 1: nihilist anarchist text for this published in two thousand eleven
Speaker 1: that is mainly directed at other anarchists and seeks to
Speaker 1: address issues of climate collapse and revolution. It became somewhat
Speaker 1: of a meme to tell folks to read Dessert. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure when that was, but I just remember seeing
Speaker 1: it a lot um I think in yeah around read
Speaker 1: Desert became a name, yeah yeah, all over Twitter and
Speaker 1: Instagram and credit. But of course, being a thing that
Speaker 1: exists on the Internet, people who naturally became torn on
Speaker 1: the subject of it. And so there are a lot
Speaker 1: of perspectives and innions and think pieces about Desert, some
Speaker 1: more or less accurate than others. But we are here
Speaker 1: to discuss the book, all personal experiences reading it, things
Speaker 1: we think it gets right and wrong, and what we
Speaker 1: could potentially looen going forward. So I would say the
Speaker 1: floor is yours, whoever wants to go first. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm a huge fan of the quote that the book
Speaker 1: takes it, or that the that it takes its name from,
Speaker 1: which comes from you know, Tacitus, who was a dude
Speaker 1: writing in the Roman period um and the exact quote
Speaker 1: that it comes from is and he's talking Tacitus is
Speaker 1: talking about the Roman Empire, robbers of the world. Now
Speaker 1: that the earth is insufficient for their all devastating hands,
Speaker 1: they probe even the sea. If their enemy is rich,
Speaker 1: they are greedy. If he is poor, they thirst for dominion.
Speaker 1: Neither East nor West has satisfied them a loan of mankind.
Speaker 1: They are equally covetous of poverty and wealth, robbery, slaughter,
Speaker 1: and plunder. They falsely name empire. They make a desert
Speaker 1: and they call it peace. Huh, good ass quote. It
Speaker 1: is a it is a solid Yeah, And obviously I
Speaker 1: think people living in the shadows of every empire that's
Speaker 1: ever existed can identify with that quote. Um, it's it's
Speaker 1: a powerful kind of central idea to hang your extended essay.
Speaker 1: I don't really know what the best term to refer
Speaker 1: to it as all. It's it's it's a long essay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a very long essay. As we talked about kind
Speaker 1: of coming into this, it's extremely two thousand tens um
Speaker 1: three Arabs spring pre all the big uprisings and revolts
Speaker 1: we had in twenty nineteen, and Um, there's definitely some
Speaker 1: stuff that it gets very right, and I think kind
Speaker 1: of One of the ways in which it's had an
Speaker 1: impact on me is kind of I've I've thought about
Speaker 1: what happens to sort of culture as the result of
Speaker 1: this kind of Hollywood engine that is heavily tied up
Speaker 1: with the United States military Industrial complex, UM, as a
Speaker 1: process of desertification of ideas and the ability to like
Speaker 1: conceive of of of new futures. UM. That said, I
Speaker 1: I don't really I haven't reread it in a very
Speaker 1: long time and haven't really felt um called to in
Speaker 1: in many ways because I do think I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think there's an extent to which it's been kind
Speaker 1: of left behind. UM. Yeah, some of the things that
Speaker 1: have happened since I think Yeah. UM, I will say
Speaker 1: that as someone who really came into my owners an
Speaker 1: archist in like, although I had identified with it before, UM,
Speaker 1: when I had read the book, UM, I think it
Speaker 1: was in late late so I read the book first
Speaker 1: time I read it, and honestly, UM, it was some good,
Speaker 1: some bad, some some very outdated stuff, and also some
Speaker 1: stuff that I don't know, maybe the author felt it
Speaker 1: was like groundbreak and at the time, but you know,
Speaker 1: at this present stage just feels like common knowledge sense,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean it was. It was groundbreaking in
Speaker 1: a way for like climate realism, right, like this was
Speaker 1: this was written before you know, this is written before
Speaker 1: climate Leavy. This was written before um the Uninhabitable Earth.
Speaker 1: This was written before a lot of kind of the
Speaker 1: texts that view climate change is an absolute like this
Speaker 1: was written one year before hyper Objects. Just really interesting actually,
Speaker 1: because you know, the whole preface of that book is
Speaker 1: that climate changes is done, like it happened, where we're
Speaker 1: like there's no turning back the clock. And the Desert
Speaker 1: was written even before that, Like it was. It was
Speaker 1: one of the first things. Now and of course it's
Speaker 1: it's it's much more niche, but like it was if
Speaker 1: I if I look back in books that have like
Speaker 1: impacted me, it was it's one of the first books
Speaker 1: like that came out, like timeline wise to take climate changes, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's there's no saving it, like there's no living in
Speaker 1: the two thousands, there's no living in the nineties. Again,
Speaker 1: it's like things are like the world's not going to end,
Speaker 1: but things are going to get worse, right like and
Speaker 1: that and that is kind of a big, big part
Speaker 1: of the book because it's it's also it's also not
Speaker 1: pro collapse like it it doesn't take collapse is an absolute.
Speaker 1: It doesn't take. It doesn't it doesn't subscribe to global collapse.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the misconceptions I think people have
Speaker 1: about them. Yeah, that they's assume it is like this
Speaker 1: collapse dumorous, like miss rupic kind of text, but which
Speaker 1: I did not read it as that. I first read
Speaker 1: it around the same time you did, um And I
Speaker 1: read it as a part of a lot of books
Speaker 1: I was reading to prep for the show when we
Speaker 1: when we were writing our first five episodes on like
Speaker 1: on climate change and like the crumbles. So I read it,
Speaker 1: read it as a part of my kind of general
Speaker 1: research and yeah, like at that point it was already
Speaker 1: kind of mimified to be like, you know, like an
Speaker 1: anarcho nihilist like Dumer manifesto, and I read it, I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's not what it's saying at all. It's actually once
Speaker 1: I read it, I was like, I was really taking
Speaker 1: it back at how how easily um popular perceptions of
Speaker 1: a piece of media good um, I mean honestly corrupted
Speaker 1: beyond recognition. Yeah, you know, like if people are a
Speaker 1: bunch people are telling you know that it's that about
Speaker 1: is in texts or whatever. You know, it's kind of
Speaker 1: shake It kind of shakes you up to like actually
Speaker 1: consumed for yourself off and then read eyes. How did
Speaker 1: you all get that? Yeah? How did you read that?
Speaker 1: It is really interesting because I'm not even sure if
Speaker 1: they did read out of it or if that was
Speaker 1: the perception they had going into it. So they read
Speaker 1: it through that lens, and that lens basically you know,
Speaker 1: changed the text in their heads to fit that thing.
Speaker 1: Because it is really interesting how how it is so
Speaker 1: associated with like dumerism um yet if you like, engage
Speaker 1: in good faith with the text. It's very much not
Speaker 1: a Doumer manifesto anyway, although there are aspects of it
Speaker 1: that I am um that I think attitude wise, that
Speaker 1: I am critical of. But I think Chris was going
Speaker 1: to say something, yeah, so I was just like, I,
Speaker 1: I really I've always not liked this book, Like I
Speaker 1: read it back, and I think she doesn't een when
Speaker 1: it was first sort of like coming back, yeah, And
Speaker 1: I didn't like it then, and I read it this
Speaker 1: morning and I like it even less now than I
Speaker 1: did then, And I think I think I actually, I
Speaker 1: actually okay, so like, I think it's true that most
Speaker 1: of the text doesn't do the duomer thing. But I
Speaker 1: think I nderstand where people got it from, because you know,
Speaker 1: you have quotes in this like uh here, here's one.
Speaker 1: Yet I can already hear the accusations from my own camp,
Speaker 1: accusations of deserting the cause of revolution, deserting the struggle
Speaker 1: for another world. Such accusations are correct, I would rejoin
Speaker 1: that such millinarian and progressive myths are at the core
Speaker 1: of the expansion of power. And this is this is
Speaker 1: what I really like, I think from an ecological perspective,
Speaker 1: it's sort of okay. I strongly dislike Desert as an
Speaker 1: anarchist text because I think that's just wrong. I think,
Speaker 1: I think, I think there's there there's there's there's an
Speaker 1: ingrained defeatism in it that is so strong that it
Speaker 1: it it just it like warps the author's perception of
Speaker 1: the past, like you get these things where he's talking
Speaker 1: about these these kind of he's talking about like the
Speaker 1: you know what you call the classical anarchist movement from
Speaker 1: roughly like eighteen seventy two really sort of ends with
Speaker 1: the defeat of the anarchists in Spain and like seven
Speaker 1: and and he you know, they say things like from
Speaker 1: Spain pre nineteen thirty six to the Jewish anarchists in
Speaker 1: North America, the legalist of France, and the Italian and
Speaker 1: Anarcho synicst of Argentina. The inhabitants of anarchist counter societies
Speaker 1: were always, by definition active minorities. The minorities may have
Speaker 1: gotten larger in an instructionary moments, but they remained at
Speaker 1: minorities always, and that's just wrong. It's it's factually wrong.
Speaker 1: Like these these movements were not minorities, like the like
Speaker 1: the entire like the like the the largest union in
Speaker 1: France was the CG like in the early Action hundred
Speaker 1: was the the you do see it this deep that
Speaker 1: all all of the French, Spanish and Portuguese country speaking
Speaker 1: countries have a they have one union that's called the
Speaker 1: U G C and one union it's called the CGT.
Speaker 1: And I can't remember which ones which, but like like
Speaker 1: that was that was the largest union in France, and
Speaker 1: it was a syndicalist union right like it was like
Speaker 1: and there's you know the same thing with Argentina, right
Speaker 1: for a like for a while was the largest union
Speaker 1: in Argentina. And I think, and this, this is sort
Speaker 1: of my problem with this, which is that you know,
Speaker 1: this is a person who's basically like they talked, but
Speaker 1: like they are born in the seventies and they've they've
Speaker 1: they're writing this Steals in eleven in just the midst
Speaker 1: of the collapse of sort of like the complete and
Speaker 1: total destruction of the old anarchist movement, right, the anarchist
Speaker 1: movement that had been born out of sort of like
Speaker 1: the Zapatistas and the anti globalization movements. And they've been
Speaker 1: beaten so badly that you know, I mean, they were crushed,
Speaker 1: they were completely destroyed, and they've been beaten so badly
Speaker 1: that they they can't they literally can't imagine winning and
Speaker 1: think that like like revolution in general, like is essentially
Speaker 1: a secular theology. They repeat this over and over and
Speaker 1: over again. It's like revolution is theology, Revolution is a myth.
Speaker 1: And it's like and this is this is something that's
Speaker 1: just a product of defeat. It's not a product of
Speaker 1: sort of taking seriously the conditions that are emerging around them.
Speaker 1: And you know, I was talking about this before the
Speaker 1: recording it's like right after this is written, it's you
Speaker 1: get the movement of the squares, and then you get occupied,
Speaker 1: and it's like basically like major city in the world
Speaker 1: goes into revolt. The revolts are anarchists inspired, and you know,
Speaker 1: and and Desert like this is why Dessert vanishes for
Speaker 1: like six or seven years, because Desert is a piece
Speaker 1: that's written like it's it's it's a piece that's that's
Speaker 1: only happens in a in a very specific part of
Speaker 1: a revolutionary cycle, which is when like every everything has
Speaker 1: been crushed, all resistance has been crushed, everyone's losing hope,
Speaker 1: and then everyone starts reading Desert again, and then the
Speaker 1: revolutions restart, and and at that point, like once once
Speaker 1: once there's like you know, two thousand people in the
Speaker 1: streets again like fighting the cops, it becomes less and
Speaker 1: less sort of like like that that part of its
Speaker 1: analysis becomes less and less relevant, until you know, inevitably
Speaker 1: everyone like there's there's a defeat, and then everyone goes
Speaker 1: sort of like and I think I think that's why
Speaker 1: it has the duomer rep because it's it's it's the
Speaker 1: text that people read when you've been beaten in the streets. See, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's an interesting look at it, because I mean
Speaker 1: I definitely agree with the revolution is an idea, like
Speaker 1: is a myth thing, like I I specifically within the
Speaker 1: context of the United States, which I believe that's what
Speaker 1: the books trying to mostly focus on. They do bring
Speaker 1: up other parts of the world and stuff. Um, but
Speaker 1: it's definitely written by in a by an American like citizen,
Speaker 1: and that that that is I mean, I mean that
Speaker 1: that could actually be wrong. Um. It may not be
Speaker 1: written by an American, but I in terms of reading it,
Speaker 1: it is kind of through like a very like Western
Speaker 1: lens of like revolutions not happening here. Um. And I
Speaker 1: definitely sympathize and agree with that viewpoint. And I mean
Speaker 1: if if you're in a point of being like it
Speaker 1: was two US and eleven then occupied happened and like yeah,
Speaker 1: but occupied in't. But that that also fits like every
Speaker 1: every attempt has not succeeded in this country to to
Speaker 1: get any kind of big, meaningful change that we can
Speaker 1: push towards something that's like post capitalist. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I do think I think it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's mostly targeting people specifically like commun nests um or
Speaker 1: marks Lendonests who like are just waiting around for the
Speaker 1: revolution to happen and then don't do anything like that, right,
Speaker 1: that is that but but but but but I think
Speaker 1: this is this is why it's a text that's like
Speaker 1: that's not good for the moment, because our problem isn't that, like,
Speaker 1: like the problem right now isn't that there's no one
Speaker 1: like there's no uprising on the horizon, Like everyone's completely
Speaker 1: beaten down. No one's ever gonna go into his treats again.
Speaker 1: Our problem is that like there's just there's there's there's
Speaker 1: there's periodic uprisings everywhere, and every single time everyone is
Speaker 1: caught off guard, and every single time, no one is
Speaker 1: able to actually sort of mobilize off of it, and
Speaker 1: you know, like like like no, no on, no one's
Speaker 1: been able to like pivot it into something that's actually
Speaker 1: like transformative. But but but but I think that that's a
Speaker 1: very different problem then the problem that desert is because
Speaker 1: desert has already abandoned the possibility that an uprising can win.
Speaker 1: That's I mean, it's yeah, and then let's specifically been
Speaker 1: the idea of like global revolution shan right, that is,
Speaker 1: that is the thing that specifically targeting. They're saying smaller
Speaker 1: specific they're saying like smaller local things actually can't succeed
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. But they're trying to tie
Speaker 1: this idea of global revolution is like a pacifying idea, right,
Speaker 1: just waiting around for this to happen, and tying that
Speaker 1: to this at the time, which more niche idea Now
Speaker 1: it's now it's way more popular. But this idea of
Speaker 1: like global collapse and how people think if they can
Speaker 1: people think believing in global collapse is smarter than believing
Speaker 1: in global revolution. They think it's more realistic. But the
Speaker 1: book saying no, this is this idea of global collapse
Speaker 1: actually falls under all the same issues that global revolution has.
Speaker 1: I think i'd want to um sort of comments here
Speaker 1: um with regard to like the defeatist sort of reading
Speaker 1: um in the text. I understand that reading um I
Speaker 1: mean perasonally I distinguished like defeatism and dumerism. And I
Speaker 1: always think, like my own personality and my own perspective
Speaker 1: kind of like inoculates me in a way from like
Speaker 1: adopting that kind of defeatist attitude towards um. You know, change.
Speaker 1: But I don't think the book is entirely um, you know,
Speaker 1: dismissive of like revolution um. It just I think the
Speaker 1: main thrust of it is that it's critically the idea
Speaker 1: of like one global revolution, one global collapse. What it
Speaker 1: really emphasizes is that, you know, climate change brings new
Speaker 1: possibilities for new anarchies plural to develop worldwide and response
Speaker 1: changing circumstances. But at the same time, you know, in
Speaker 1: some areas things are going to get worse than some
Speaker 1: areas things are going to get better. And it's not
Speaker 1: that really one broadbrush could be applied to the entire earth. Well,
Speaker 1: but I think, I mean, I think like this this
Speaker 1: is another thing that they're really guilty of, especially like
Speaker 1: there's an entire section in here where they just keep
Speaker 1: writing about Africa and it's like well, and then you know,
Speaker 1: and they'll get pressed on it and they'll be like, no, no,
Speaker 1: we mean sub Saharan Africa, and it's like, what are
Speaker 1: you talking like. They they won't name countries, they won't
Speaker 1: name movements, they won't name people. It's just they'll just
Speaker 1: write something about the whole of Sub Saharan Africa, and
Speaker 1: it's just like, well, I think that's evidence of the
Speaker 1: kind of of what Garrison was talking about. This, right,
Speaker 1: and this is something you see all over the place
Speaker 1: with people writing about politics, with people trying to write
Speaker 1: about like particularly revolutionary politics, UM in a global sense.
Speaker 1: And I think it's usually a mistake to do that,
Speaker 1: UM for the reasons we've kind of discussed. Any time
Speaker 1: I see a left wing even as somebody who I
Speaker 1: think is generally on point, who starts talking about, for example,
Speaker 1: like extending their theories about revolutionary politics to places I
Speaker 1: happen to know just a little bit about, it's always
Speaker 1: very clear like, oh, you don't know shit about Syria.
Speaker 1: Oh you don't know shit about Libya. Oh you don't
Speaker 1: know shit about Angle like um. And that's and that's
Speaker 1: like not even a moral failing, it's just that it's
Speaker 1: impost It's it's impossible really to have in depth knowledge
Speaker 1: of like what's actually going on in those places and
Speaker 1: what's going on in those revolutions. It's why people default
Speaker 1: so much to the whole Well, whatever side the US
Speaker 1: is on must be the bad side, and whatever side
Speaker 1: the Russians on must be the good side. It's the
Speaker 1: easiest way to look at that ship. UM, I don't.
Speaker 1: I think that's I think that's a worthwhile critique to make,
Speaker 1: and it's a critique to make any time that it happens.
Speaker 1: Um I I agree with Garrison and with Andrew that
Speaker 1: I think the thing that is that desert gets right.
Speaker 1: Um And the thing that I've seen in my own
Speaker 1: life is that like the opportunities we should be looking
Speaker 1: for are not suddenly that some sort of global revolution
Speaker 1: sweeps all of the things we don't like out of
Speaker 1: power and magically institutes something better comprehensively across the globe.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's room for little anarchies. It's what we
Speaker 1: saw in northeast Syria, right where the government pulls out
Speaker 1: and people have an opportunity to do something not perfect,
Speaker 1: but better. And I think that is That's kind of
Speaker 1: one of the things we talked about a lot on
Speaker 1: this show. That's why mutual aid is valuable, It's why
Speaker 1: building these connections are valuable. It's because, um, as things crumble,
Speaker 1: there will be opportunities two in local areas, piecemeal institute
Speaker 1: and and push through for more just and and better
Speaker 1: ways of living. Um And I think that if you're
Speaker 1: looking at kind of the broad level, potentially optimistic point
Speaker 1: is that when you have enough of those and when
Speaker 1: they spread well enough, and if communication is good enough,
Speaker 1: maybe the things that work will get adopted on a
Speaker 1: wider scale. And there's always the opportunity that when enough,
Speaker 1: when ideas spread far enough, they have a tipping point
Speaker 1: and and they go viral, you know, so to speak.
Speaker 1: But I I I don't. I think that while there's
Speaker 1: a lot of specifics that Desert gets wrong, I do
Speaker 1: think they were ahead of the curve and recognizing that,
Speaker 1: and I think it's it's a more productive way to
Speaker 1: look at the idea of revolutionary change. Then we're going
Speaker 1: to finally have nineteen seventeen. But everywhere, you know, with
Speaker 1: regards of the African chapter, the impression that I got
Speaker 1: while reading that chapter, and I think the book itself
Speaker 1: references Um Samba Um, I got the impression that the
Speaker 1: author had read Um Afrighan anarchism History of a movement
Speaker 1: by sam Member and they were just kind of like
Speaker 1: inspired by that, I would say, because as I do
Speaker 1: point out, they didn't like specify the specific cultures, which
Speaker 1: is an issue considering, you know, the tendency that Westerners
Speaker 1: have of you know, being to Africa this large brush
Speaker 1: as if it's you know, all one way or the other. Um.
Speaker 1: But I think what we do see now, um is
Speaker 1: you know, from the Horn of Africa to South Africa
Speaker 1: to Nigeria too, I mean recently Sudan. I believe, Um,
Speaker 1: there are Africans, smaller number organizing under the mount of anarchism,
Speaker 1: and they are anarchic elements that continue to persist on
Speaker 1: the continent. Yeah, I mean I think that's like, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean one of the things that they sort of
Speaker 1: got they got right, was about how like this the
Speaker 1: sort of the the sort of renewal the spread of
Speaker 1: urban anarchism they're talking about like Chile in particular, they
Speaker 1: got right, Um, Indonesia Bangladeshtra somewhat. But but but I
Speaker 1: think I think there's there's another like my, my, my, my,
Speaker 1: my biggest issue with them in terms of the way
Speaker 1: they think about ecological stuff that this comes this is
Speaker 1: something they talk about with like they have this thing
Speaker 1: where they think that forger societies are like, Okay, they're they're, they're, they're,
Speaker 1: they're they're more careful than most people. To frame it
Speaker 1: as like the forging societies can be a galitarian but
Speaker 1: I think they they they wind talking about these sort
Speaker 1: of like the way that sort of forging nomadic society
Speaker 1: sort of inherently defy the boundaries of the state, and
Speaker 1: like that's true. But you can also have like nomadic
Speaker 1: forging societies that have are hereditary slave societies. And this
Speaker 1: is this is a problem because there's a there's a
Speaker 1: lot in here about that that that's about sort of
Speaker 1: like they're you know, they're they're taking this is sort
Speaker 1: of like soft an anti su right. Yeah. It has
Speaker 1: a few lines where it does specifically say civilization is
Speaker 1: the cause of like I think it's like the civilization
Speaker 1: is genocide, um, which yeah, and that can't silly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: by civilizations commit genocide. Sure, if they're saying that they
Speaker 1: do cause genocide, if you're if you're trying to make
Speaker 1: the case that it seems to be that civilizations, Uh, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know every civilization does not commit genocide, but no,
Speaker 1: but civilization gives you a constant Yeah, civilization gives you
Speaker 1: the framework that makes genocide possible, well, like potentially contentional
Speaker 1: genocide possible. I don't know that I would agree with
Speaker 1: that because I think you see examples of genocide from
Speaker 1: hunter gatherers societies and from from so societies, and that
Speaker 1: the obviously documentation on that isn't as extensive because we
Speaker 1: weren't documenting things for a lot of it. But you
Speaker 1: do have examples from from what we know of, like um,
Speaker 1: the Americas of their word genocides committed by societies we
Speaker 1: would call stateless. So I think I might argue that like,
Speaker 1: genocide is a thing that human beings do in civilization
Speaker 1: because it allows us to do everything on a larger scale,
Speaker 1: allows us to do way better genocides. That's definitely in
Speaker 1: our think. I think. I think my problem with it
Speaker 1: is that they're going back into this sort of like
Speaker 1: that they're going back into the you know, there's this
Speaker 1: inherent binarya between foragers and sales societies and that you know,
Speaker 1: and and specifically they think that that that these sorts
Speaker 1: that the forager scietas are you know, inviably gonna become
Speaker 1: a galle Ryan. It's like that's not true, and it's
Speaker 1: not true in ways that you can see right now,
Speaker 1: in like like they're like they're like there are lots
Speaker 1: of places right now where you can look at you know,
Speaker 1: forging societies that have incredibly right, but like there's there's like,
Speaker 1: for example, you get sort of you get the Filani
Speaker 1: joining like right wing Islamist groups, right, and that like
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. I think it has a problem
Speaker 1: with It's the same thing as looking at indigenous societies
Speaker 1: and and seeing them all on one side of the
Speaker 1: fight with with colonizing nations as supposed I'm reading a
Speaker 1: book about the history of the Mapucha right now, which
Speaker 1: are historically like the indigenous group in Chile that resisted
Speaker 1: the law and the indigenous group realion, and you could
Speaker 1: argue in all of Latin America that resisted the longest
Speaker 1: and most effectively. But even then, when you look at
Speaker 1: like the campaigns of the Chilean government in the eighteen
Speaker 1: sixties and eighteen eighties, large like significant chunks of the
Speaker 1: Mapocha sided with the government against other Mapucha, and like
Speaker 1: that's the like it's it's always a mistake. I think
Speaker 1: this is a good one of the things that you
Speaker 1: get out of the dawn of everything. It's always a
Speaker 1: mistake to like look at any of these groups hunter gatherers,
Speaker 1: stateless societies. Is like one thing or another they're people
Speaker 1: and some of them sucked, just like yeah there, yeah, anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's one thing that I wanted to sort of
Speaker 1: pushback against. Uh, Robert, you had said that genocide is
Speaker 1: a thing that humans do. Um. I don't think I
Speaker 1: agree with that assessment, um in this sense, or at
Speaker 1: least i'd rather I would like to clarify. Um, Well,
Speaker 1: if you an opportunity to clarify what you mean by that,
Speaker 1: I you know, I don't know that it's just humans,
Speaker 1: but I think that genocide is a thing that as
Speaker 1: long as we have evidence in recorded history, it seems
Speaker 1: like we have done not just against are not just
Speaker 1: against other humans, but against other kind of hominid species.
Speaker 1: We have we have examples of things that it seems
Speaker 1: fair to call genocide going back further than we have
Speaker 1: any kinds of written records. Um. You know, villages and
Speaker 1: the Balkans that were you know, burnt in people who
Speaker 1: like groups of people, tribes and whatnot, who seem to
Speaker 1: have been killed in mass and you know, there's there's
Speaker 1: other theories for some of that. Some of them may
Speaker 1: have been like people trying to stop a place we
Speaker 1: don't plague or whatever. Like, there's not any kind of
Speaker 1: comprehensive solidity. But what we do know is that as
Speaker 1: long as we have documentations of humans doing things, we
Speaker 1: have documentations of things that we could call genocide. I see,
Speaker 1: I see, look into that a bit more. I appreciate
Speaker 1: the glarification. Yeah, can I can I do a Balkans
Speaker 1: pivot because there's a there's a there's a thing like
Speaker 1: like it genuinely disturbed me reading it in here about
Speaker 1: the Serbs during the Bosnian genocide. Were so that they're
Speaker 1: they're they're quoting. That's disturbing about that. Oh yeah, but
Speaker 1: this is this is a I uh okay, So they're
Speaker 1: they're they're doing they're they're reading a quote from the
Speaker 1: book Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild where
Speaker 1: he's talking this is about the bonding genocide. How is
Speaker 1: this possible in Europe at the end of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century was the question that played obsessively through my mind.
Speaker 1: What the war in former Yugoslavia forced us to suggest
Speaker 1: the fact that people proved willing to make a conscious
Speaker 1: and active choice to embrace regression, barbarity, a return to
Speaker 1: the wildness. Take the serve fighters who dreamed of a
Speaker 1: return to the Serbia of the epic poems were quote
Speaker 1: there was no electricity, no computers, when the serves were
Speaker 1: happy and had no cities, the breeding ground of all evil.
Speaker 1: And then this is this is the next thing. That's
Speaker 1: that's the text coming back and commenting on it that
Speaker 1: some modern day militias reflect romantic desires, while shelling towns,
Speaker 1: massacring villages, and being killed in turn should neither surprise
Speaker 1: us nor necessarily fully invalidate romance. It does, however, suggest,
Speaker 1: along with the honest expression of joy destruction mouth by
Speaker 1: some soldiers in every war, as well as many anarchists,
Speaker 1: that there was a coupling of some store between a
Speaker 1: generalized urge to destroy and disgusted at a complex human society.
Speaker 1: And there's there's there's another part um only later on
Speaker 1: they're talking about ethnic diversity and autonomy will often emerge
Speaker 1: both from mutual aid and community and animosity between communities.
Speaker 1: I like to think, and our history back this up,
Speaker 1: that self adantified anarchists will never inflict such pain as
Speaker 1: Serb nationalist militias. An example I shows purposely for the Repuglicans.
Speaker 1: But we should admit that our wish to function up
Speaker 1: is partly driven by the same urge to civilizational dismemberment
Speaker 1: that can be found in many interethnic conflicts and in
Speaker 1: the minds of fighters more generally. And I think that's fucked.
Speaker 1: I think that's true. That's I think there's commenting a
Speaker 1: specific type of anarchist literature, which is like the make
Speaker 1: total destroy thing. And yeah, I definitely I have observed
Speaker 1: that in people the same the same urge that you're
Speaker 1: you're are so broken down by everything that the only
Speaker 1: urge that is the only creative verge you have, is
Speaker 1: to destroy the things around you. I've seen that. I
Speaker 1: don't think they're necessarily celebrating that, but they're pointing out
Speaker 1: that that urge can be there. When I think they
Speaker 1: get really wrong here is that I don't think that's
Speaker 1: the urge that that is is like that, that's when
Speaker 1: when when you're dealing with inter ethnic conflict, when you're
Speaker 1: dealing with genocide, I don't think that's urge that's going on.
Speaker 1: It's specifically with the Serbs, because the Serbs, like you know, okay,
Speaker 1: like when when when an anarchist is doing made total
Speaker 1: destroy right there, you know, they're like there, there's there's
Speaker 1: a very specific that of things they're attacking or they're
Speaker 1: you know, they're attacking, builing, the attacking the physical infrastructure
Speaker 1: of the world. When the Serbs are doing the Bosnian
Speaker 1: genocide like that, they have a very specific thing they're doing,
Speaker 1: which is killing Bosnian Muslims. And I think that's extremely
Speaker 1: different urge than the sort of like I don't I
Speaker 1: don't think that's about sort of what it's civilizational dismemberment
Speaker 1: or whatever that's about is homophobia and genocide. And I
Speaker 1: think that's a different I think the genocidal impulse is
Speaker 1: a I think a very different one than this sort
Speaker 1: of the like the impulse to break the society that
Speaker 1: has harmed you. Yeah, I think it's important to draw
Speaker 1: a distinction between you can kill a shipload of people
Speaker 1: without it being a genocide, um, And I think and
Speaker 1: it's also one of those things I think sometimes why
Speaker 1: people I think why there's hesitation to see certain acts
Speaker 1: and early history of genocide is that they're not as
Speaker 1: complete as modern genocide. But but what a genocide really is,
Speaker 1: and I think it's important to lay this out. It's
Speaker 1: not necessarily killing every member of an ethnic group or
Speaker 1: a religious group or whatever kind of community. Um, it
Speaker 1: is stopping their ability to propagate and continue themselves. That's
Speaker 1: why things like destroying churches and destroying the cultural distroyal
Speaker 1: markers are part of genocide. And it's also why a
Speaker 1: lot of genocides they left the women and children alive.
Speaker 1: They would kill all the men, and they would take
Speaker 1: the women in and they would breed with them. They
Speaker 1: might kill the kids sometimes, but it was this The
Speaker 1: goal was not necessarily were we need to kill all
Speaker 1: of you, it's we want to kill this, this culture,
Speaker 1: this population. Um, I think the I think the I
Speaker 1: think the parallel he's trying to make here or they
Speaker 1: or she? Uh? Is that? Uh? That like that type
Speaker 1: of like genocidal cultural destruction is targeted against specific groups.
Speaker 1: The difference here is with this type of like you know,
Speaker 1: he's he's writing this for other anarchists. He's pointing out,
Speaker 1: like our destructive urge, our cultural urge, isn't even for
Speaker 1: a specific group, it's just for everything, and that can
Speaker 1: be unhealthy. Sometimes sometimes there's ways to do make total
Speaker 1: destroy that's totally fine, but that can go to unhealthy places. Now,
Speaker 1: he's not equating like ethnic cleansing with that. He's like
Speaker 1: they are like they are different. But when when your
Speaker 1: total destroy urges against all of culture, then yeah, that
Speaker 1: that can like that's something you should probably ponder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's definitely I would agree that that's the
Speaker 1: thing that's potentially problematic, right, like with a number of
Speaker 1: different desires. Uh, there's a way in which that can
Speaker 1: lead to people doing really fucked up things. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like it's like it's pointing out that that type of
Speaker 1: accelerationism not specific to ideology, but just like accelerationism in general.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think when I when I talk about
Speaker 1: things like the fact that because not every culture commits
Speaker 1: genocides and every civil civilization does, um, and throughout history
Speaker 1: there have been more that found the idea repugnant than
Speaker 1: found the idea acceptable. Um. But it is really a
Speaker 1: consistent thing in history. And I think the lesson with
Speaker 1: that isn't necessarily that everything could end in genocide. So
Speaker 1: I don't think the lesson is necessarily like, oh you
Speaker 1: should look at make total destroy as if you know,
Speaker 1: the this kind of trend in anarchist thought could lead
Speaker 1: to genocide it's that people in groups are nearly always
Speaker 1: capable of killing a shipload of other people for a
Speaker 1: variety of reasons if applied in the proper ways, And
Speaker 1: so those of us who seek mass movement should always
Speaker 1: be conscious of that, because human beings in large groups
Speaker 1: can do wonderful things, but there's a long history of
Speaker 1: them doing really fucked up shit, sometimes in ways that
Speaker 1: surprised the people that got the large group of human
Speaker 1: beings together in the first place. The other thing I
Speaker 1: wanted to bring up is kind of more circling back
Speaker 1: to the dumer kind of idea UM, because Yeah, a
Speaker 1: big part of the book is trying purposely is to
Speaker 1: dissolution people with this idea of global revolution and dissolution
Speaker 1: people with the idea that we can save the earth
Speaker 1: because we can't. UM. So that's a big thing and
Speaker 1: for I think, I think for some people, if you
Speaker 1: stop right there and you that's how you end that thought, Yes,
Speaker 1: that does lead to dumorism, obviously, like that that is
Speaker 1: that is, But the books, the book doesn't stop there.
Speaker 1: The book continues on from there. Now they continue on
Speaker 1: from a nihilistic standpoint. I'm not a nihilist. I prefer certinism.
Speaker 1: I prefer to escordionism. But those two things are pretty common.
Speaker 1: Like there they are more are similar than not um
Speaker 1: is that you can be disillusioned with global revolution and
Speaker 1: the idea to save the earth, but that should not
Speaker 1: change what we do or how we feel or operate
Speaker 1: as anarchists. It's not that we should be disillusioned and
Speaker 1: then do nothing and step aside. That we should be
Speaker 1: disillusioned and then find that disillusionment itself a form of liberation,
Speaker 1: like the freeing nature of being free from this idea
Speaker 1: of revolution. Is that like, no, we are living our
Speaker 1: lives now. Don't live for a revolution. Live your life
Speaker 1: now and do things now, because that's what you actually have.
Speaker 1: So it's like that type of nihilistic, absurdist and Discordian things.
Speaker 1: This is, this is this is This is where I
Speaker 1: come back to having problems with it again because this
Speaker 1: this is literally just there is no alternative except it's
Speaker 1: it's yeah, and that's it's do anarchy. I mean, but
Speaker 1: that's how I live like that that I think I
Speaker 1: think this is a bad I think that's a bad plan.
Speaker 1: And I think if if you look if you look
Speaker 1: at what happens with because you know this, this was
Speaker 1: the thing that was really big in the American anarchist movement,
Speaker 1: like in you know, from about seventeen like roughly now,
Speaker 1: and it's like a lot of people were rising too.
Speaker 1: Yeah didn't succeed like that, like not like but I
Speaker 1: think like like this is like I think I think
Speaker 1: this is like like one of the reasons it didn't.
Speaker 1: We were like, okay, this is like the thing that's important.
Speaker 1: One of the things is important of revolutions, even when
Speaker 1: they don't succeed, is that for a very brief window
Speaker 1: you actually can like it becomes it becomes possible to
Speaker 1: imagine another world. And what what what this entire thing
Speaker 1: is saying is don't do that. That's not that's not
Speaker 1: that's that's that's that is not what it absolutely not.
Speaker 1: This is no no no, okayn I kind of finish
Speaker 1: this sentence, yeah, like yeah, okay, so what what what?
Speaker 1: What What I'm saying here is that what what they've abandoned, right,
Speaker 1: the thing that they're giving up when they when they
Speaker 1: give up revolution, when they're like this is a progressive myth.
Speaker 1: This is like I see oology. What what they've abandoned
Speaker 1: completely is our human capacity to actually shape a different world.
Speaker 1: What they're arguing is that, like the the you know,
Speaker 1: it's essentially that the combination of ecological and social forces
Speaker 1: are strong enough that humans humans no longer have the
Speaker 1: capacity to reshape the world into a way that is
Speaker 1: different than this, and that this is now the eternal present,
Speaker 1: and you know, and yeah, inside of the eternal present,
Speaker 1: they're saying, you should be fighting for the same things.
Speaker 1: You should be fighting for, like you know, you should
Speaker 1: you should be in your own sort of local domain.
Speaker 1: You should be Like, I mean, there are some of
Speaker 1: the recommendations are wild, Like I think, I think their
Speaker 1: conservation stuff is sketchy, given, I mean, it doesn't but
Speaker 1: it doesn't apply to an eternal present though, Like they
Speaker 1: lay out, like the world is changing a lot and
Speaker 1: will for the next fifty years, Like they will be
Speaker 1: massive changes and how things are set up in the
Speaker 1: next like in the next century, and we need to
Speaker 1: take advantage of that. We need to turn those liabilities
Speaker 1: into assets and start making those little anarchies like that. That
Speaker 1: That that is what it's trying to do. And I
Speaker 1: would add as well that as it points out the
Speaker 1: situations and plastic Stooke and Bangladesh are difference in the
Speaker 1: present and will be in the future. You Know, what
Speaker 1: I think is is trying to be sort of drilled
Speaker 1: in here, is that, at least in the text and
Speaker 1: how I read it, um, is that yes, things will
Speaker 1: be different in different parts of the world, and probably
Speaker 1: maybe they won't be this you know or as the
Speaker 1: what the is, They won't be you know, this one
Speaker 1: global revolution. But at the end of the day, Um,
Speaker 1: I think what it's trying to emphasize is that we
Speaker 1: don't have the structures. And I think what part of
Speaker 1: what is trying to emphasize is that we don't have
Speaker 1: the structures in place right now to launch an introduction
Speaker 1: we can meaningfully defend. And so that is the sort
Speaker 1: of thing we should be focusing on. Yeah, but but
Speaker 1: but they, but they but this and this, this, this
Speaker 1: is going back to my problem with it, going going
Speaker 1: back to the thing where they go on the rant
Speaker 1: about how anarchists are like a permanent cultural majority and
Speaker 1: will never become a majority. Is that even even in
Speaker 1: situations where people had that capacity and did it, they
Speaker 1: go back they project back onto it. Go no, no, no no, no,
Speaker 1: they couldn't have done that. Like it's it's not about
Speaker 1: it's it's it's they they have a belief and this
Speaker 1: is something that they do explicitly say that that anarchist
Speaker 1: will always be a permanent minority. Right there, There will
Speaker 1: always be an active but permanent minority. And that is
Speaker 1: the like like that specifically, I think is just an
Speaker 1: actual rejection of the belief that we collectively can make
Speaker 1: a better future. Because if if, if you think that
Speaker 1: our ideas that you know, if being free, right, if
Speaker 1: if society is mutually if you think that that is
Speaker 1: permanently always going to be a minority, you are you know,
Speaker 1: you are condemning. You're condemning the future to the people
Speaker 1: who don't believe that. And and I understand why, especially
Speaker 1: if you know, if if, if, if the only thing
Speaker 1: you've ever known is fifty years of when the new
Speaker 1: Liberals actually did the thing right. They took over the
Speaker 1: entire world, restructure of the entire world economy, seized every government.
Speaker 1: Like if if that's what you lived through, I understand
Speaker 1: why you would think that. But I think the fact
Speaker 1: that it was possible to do it from the other
Speaker 1: direction is in some ways a sense that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we could do it too. I don't know. Sorry, I
Speaker 1: will stop harping on this one specific point. It just
Speaker 1: extremely annoys me. I think it's not giving up the
Speaker 1: idea that the world can be better. It's that like,
Speaker 1: we don't need to have the majority of people be
Speaker 1: anarchists to make the world better. We can still spread
Speaker 1: our own anarchies and people don't need to self subscribe
Speaker 1: as anarchists. But as long as we start building those
Speaker 1: systems in the places around us, people start using them,
Speaker 1: and people might start like living them out, even if
Speaker 1: they don't call themselves anarchists, right, like the majority and
Speaker 1: if people will probably prefer some type of state or government, right,
Speaker 1: you can even look at Rosa and be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's still is state issue in some ways, but some
Speaker 1: ways not right, Like it's it's it's going we're not
Speaker 1: going to get an anarchist world. That's not going to happen,
Speaker 1: but we can make it better through the lens of anarchy.
Speaker 1: And I think that's what it's kind of trying to say. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's it's worth acknowledging that, like, yeah, the
Speaker 1: majority of people are never going to be what anarchists
Speaker 1: are right now, which is people who comprehensively reject the
Speaker 1: systems they live in. Most people are always going to
Speaker 1: think more like, well, I want to be comfortable. I
Speaker 1: want to I support changes kind of that that, you know,
Speaker 1: fix this thing that I've noticed as a problem or
Speaker 1: that thing. Most people are never going to comprehensively reject
Speaker 1: the system. But I do have hope that in time
Speaker 1: and given you know, space to build things and show
Speaker 1: people other ways and improve life for people, you can
Speaker 1: get to a point where most people believe a lot
Speaker 1: of the things that I think are important. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think that's what's time. I think that. I then
Speaker 1: that's what the as specificitis um tend to advocate for
Speaker 1: in terms of through the process of social institution in
Speaker 1: these larger movements, generalizing the ideas of anarchist ideas as
Speaker 1: a whole, making them more common throughout the population. It's
Speaker 1: only trying to get each and every post in the
Speaker 1: world to self identify as an anarchist, communist, or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's more so that you're trying to spread these ideas
Speaker 1: to the point where they are I suppose the common
Speaker 1: sentiments the popular will yeah, like I it's it's um
Speaker 1: that's like the point of culture jamming and and and
Speaker 1: ship like that, Like it's the the idea that like
Speaker 1: it doesn't so much matter, like like like what matters
Speaker 1: is inserting the things you think are important into the
Speaker 1: culture and getting people to identify with them and understand them.
Speaker 1: The terms that they specifically use aren't aren't as important,
Speaker 1: like that that's not really what matters. Well, okay, I
Speaker 1: don't think they're arguing that though, because I mean, like
Speaker 1: do they have lines like this. We cannot, however, remake
Speaker 1: the entire world. There are not enough of us. There
Speaker 1: never will be. But then you know, they like they
Speaker 1: they they specifically talk about the oh well they don't
Speaker 1: have to all be anarchists, and you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: here's their line. There is unfortunately little little evidence from
Speaker 1: history that the working class, never mind anyone else, is
Speaker 1: intrinsically predisposed to libertarian and ecological revolution. Thousands of years
Speaker 1: of authoritarian socialization in favor of the jack boot. Neither
Speaker 1: we nor anyone else could create a libertarian or global
Speaker 1: or ecological global future by expanding social movements further. There
Speaker 1: is no reason to think that in the absence of
Speaker 1: such a vast expanse a global transformation concurrent to our
Speaker 1: desires will ever happen. I think, I think, I think
Speaker 1: the keyword there is global, Like, yeah, that's they're trying
Speaker 1: to write about that, and it's important, Like they're writing
Speaker 1: this specifically for anarchists who are kind of already nihilistic,
Speaker 1: kind of already anti sif, right, they are writing this
Speaker 1: for other anarchists, that this isn't a book to radicalize
Speaker 1: a normy or a communist by anarchists for other anarchists
Speaker 1: to be like, hey, you already kind of think the
Speaker 1: world's kind of going to ship. Here's a way that
Speaker 1: we can still do things despite the world being shitty.
Speaker 1: Because once you're once you're disillusioned, it's hard to be
Speaker 1: illusioned again. Like it's it's hard once you give up
Speaker 1: on the idea of global revolution, once you give up
Speaker 1: the idea of global collapse, it's hard to re enter
Speaker 1: those even if you see things happening the world, like
Speaker 1: there can still be uprisings and revolts, absolutely, but there
Speaker 1: is a distinction of between uprising and the revolts and
Speaker 1: like a global revolution, right, and specifically like the Marxist
Speaker 1: Leninist sense, and I'd also like to um continue the
Speaker 1: paragraph you're reading from there. We had said that as anarchists,
Speaker 1: sweet he had. They had said that, as anarchists, we
Speaker 1: are not the seed of the future society. In the
Speaker 1: show of the old, it may are you one of
Speaker 1: many elements from which the future is. For me, that's okay,
Speaker 1: when faced with such scale and complexity. There is value
Speaker 1: in non cervile humility, even for in surgery. But this
Speaker 1: is this is just this is just giving up. This
Speaker 1: is this is the old. It's too complicated, it's too
Speaker 1: like and like I think, I don't know, like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's giving up on it's giving up on
Speaker 1: trying to do any kind of on on like humans
Speaker 1: as a whole, trying to do any kind of large
Speaker 1: scale like you know, like's trying to do transformation of
Speaker 1: what the society. I disagree to continue that that code
Speaker 1: to give up hope for global anarchist revolution is not
Speaker 1: to resign oneself to anarchy, remaining any to protest. Seaweed
Speaker 1: puts it well. Revolution is not everywhere or nowhere. Any
Speaker 1: bioregion can be liberated through a succession of events and
Speaker 1: strategies based in the conditions unique to it, mostly as
Speaker 1: the grip of facilitation that area weakens through its own
Speaker 1: volition for the efforts of its inhabitants. So aisation didn't
Speaker 1: succeed every at once, and so it's undoing might only
Speaker 1: occur to varying degrees in different places at different times.
Speaker 1: In if an area seemingly fully under the control of authority,
Speaker 1: they always places to go, to live in, to love in,
Speaker 1: and to resist from, and we can extend those spaces.
Speaker 1: The global situation may seem beyond us, but the local
Speaker 1: never is. And I think that's beautiful. I think that's
Speaker 1: like a That's one of the things that keeps me
Speaker 1: alive is ideas like that, honestly. And at the same time,
Speaker 1: I also hold the opinion that none of us, including
Speaker 1: this author, is a fortune teller, you know. The desert's
Speaker 1: picture of the future is not the only possibility, you know,
Speaker 1: And I think in a lot of ways and a
Speaker 1: lot always I believe that they can and have already
Speaker 1: been proven wrong, you know. Like, and there's an issue
Speaker 1: that I really take a lot of contention with the book.
Speaker 1: Part of the book that really pisces me off is
Speaker 1: the sort of persistence of the overpopulation myth. I don't
Speaker 1: remember it being sun as done since I reread it
Speaker 1: UM a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, So this sort
Speaker 1: of nonchalance the author seems to have about like mass
Speaker 1: die offs and that kind of thing, you know, I
Speaker 1: think that's very troubling to me. That's very specific to
Speaker 1: It's a type of anti civil literature that's like, we
Speaker 1: view civilization is going to progress towards genocide anyway, and
Speaker 1: the way to actually avoid more deaths is to kind
Speaker 1: of help the collapse along because that will end civilization quicker.
Speaker 1: So therefore less people, less people will be born, and
Speaker 1: less people will have to die. So that's the type
Speaker 1: of thinking they have. I don't necessarily agree with that,
Speaker 1: um necessarily, but like, yeah, that is that is very
Speaker 1: typical of this type of literature. So again because it
Speaker 1: is written mostly for other anti civ anarchists, but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not like pro genocide. It's saying genocide will happen.
Speaker 1: So the way to make less of it is to
Speaker 1: actually kind of slowly start kind of help help putting
Speaker 1: the crumbles along essentially and while still you know, making
Speaker 1: people's lives better in your immediate community like with that,
Speaker 1: with that very local focus. So again not not saying
Speaker 1: I necessarily agree with that, but that's the that's the
Speaker 1: type of thought it's engaging with. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: that's true of some of it. But there is definitely
Speaker 1: a lot of like panic about there's going to be
Speaker 1: nine billion people and like population grows all the over
Speaker 1: population stuffs a little iffy, you know, there is there's
Speaker 1: a discussion to have on carring capacity, but we are
Speaker 1: not there yet. We right now we way overproduced for
Speaker 1: them for the amount of people we have. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: and that I don't know. That also frustrated me immensely.
Speaker 1: They're like, yeah, we we have becauseiner they're talking about
Speaker 1: carrying capacity, right and they're like, we already can't. We
Speaker 1: have a billion people going hungry. And it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's not about the carrying capacity. That's just that's
Speaker 1: that which was just liter that and that idea gained
Speaker 1: more prevalence after Dessert was written. We kind of more understood,
Speaker 1: like like culturally that it is a distribution issue, not
Speaker 1: necessarily a production issue. Now we do overproduce, right because
Speaker 1: and the amount of production we have contributes this tough
Speaker 1: like climate change and that is bad, so we should
Speaker 1: tone down production, but we should make the ways that
Speaker 1: it's more sustainable and ecological. Um. Yeah, that I think
Speaker 1: that does point towards the data and nature of the text.
Speaker 1: I think also my my last like thing with it
Speaker 1: is I think I think it could have benefited a
Speaker 1: lot from like in an indigenous stewardship perspective, because the
Speaker 1: way it thinks about its, particularly the way things about
Speaker 1: wildness versus conservation, is just very messy. And yeah, if
Speaker 1: it falls, it falls. It does a better job of
Speaker 1: it than some other antis of things that I've seen,
Speaker 1: but it definitely falls into the like trap of like
Speaker 1: here is the wild and then any attempt to manage
Speaker 1: it is uh, you know, is is civilization and you
Speaker 1: need to go back to the wild and it's like
Speaker 1: this is already stewarded and managed. Yeah, that is the one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it does fall on that slope of like nature being
Speaker 1: another that is sacred, which isn't necessarily a great idea
Speaker 1: nor is it really true. Yeah, this is very two
Speaker 1: two ten. Yeah, right, So I think the book is
Speaker 1: critical conservation and that sort of binary way, And I
Speaker 1: agree that indigenous stewardship perspective was sorely needed. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, I do think that the way that
Speaker 1: the book predicises um or ever just points out Um,
Speaker 1: the su conservation may have been one may still be
Speaker 1: new for some people. You know, the idea that these
Speaker 1: sorts of government conservation projects which sort of preside over
Speaker 1: the sort of static vision of nature and ecology and
Speaker 1: stuff that is supposedly threatened by humanity. UM. I think
Speaker 1: criticizing that approach to nature's good. I mean the sort
Speaker 1: of romanticization of the wild that is very typical of
Speaker 1: anti set of text and thought. UM is very much
Speaker 1: anti Seve. But I do believe that people should look
Speaker 1: ah or should rather resist these sorts of conservation impulse.
Speaker 1: As I was rereading it a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 1: I wanted to know, um, what you guys thought of
Speaker 1: the section of the book that speaks of the different
Speaker 1: modern different the the idea of fourth and fifth generation war.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, that's ah um um sort of a contributional
Speaker 1: approach to analyzing conflict. So I figured out, as you
Speaker 1: have been in you know, actual war Zoon's rout, that
Speaker 1: you might have a thing to see. Um. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's the kind of thing that we should probably cover
Speaker 1: in in detail on because this is a lot of
Speaker 1: like William Lynde stuff. I think he's the guy who
Speaker 1: came up with the idea of like fourth generation war
Speaker 1: less at least and it's UM. It's basically the idea.
Speaker 1: It's the idea that warfare UM today is conducted through
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff that's not conventional weaponry, right, so
Speaker 1: stuff like UM, like like like putting bought networks together
Speaker 1: to like push social division, you know through UM social
Speaker 1: media UM, or carrying out cyber attacks on infrastructure, disinformation UM,
Speaker 1: all of that kind of stuff, which is I think accurate.
Speaker 1: I've been reporting on what you could call fifth generation
Speaker 1: warfare since some UM. I think it's I think to
Speaker 1: the extent that it's relevant here. I think one thing
Speaker 1: that people on the left need to acknowledge is that
Speaker 1: they have UM been blindsided by the effectiveness that the
Speaker 1: far right has adapted to UM the key components of
Speaker 1: this kind of warfare. And I think nothing is more
Speaker 1: key than social engineering and disinformation UM, and they've been
Speaker 1: much more successful at it over the last release ince
Speaker 1: two that in fifteen in particular, UM than the left
Speaker 1: hast by basically everywhere, every and by I think, every
Speaker 1: single measure of of success. And I think this is
Speaker 1: something we should save in depth for another day. UM,
Speaker 1: but I think that it is worth acknowledging that this is.
Speaker 1: And I also think that and this is again part
Speaker 1: of a bigger conversation we talked about the concept of
Speaker 1: like culture jamming, when we talked about like operating should
Speaker 1: mind fuck you know, which is Discordian idea. Um, all
Speaker 1: of which you can see is kind of pre predecessors
Speaker 1: to the concepts of fifth generation warfare. I think there's
Speaker 1: a strong argument to be made that those efforts by
Speaker 1: leftists in the eighties and nineties in particular, actually contributed
Speaker 1: to the substantial right wing victories that we're seeing right
Speaker 1: now in this space. UM. And I think maybe it's
Speaker 1: I think there's a number of reasons for that, um,
Speaker 1: including some to some extent, the idea of arrogance, that
Speaker 1: that what that we were just too smart, that they
Speaker 1: were never going to figure out how to utilize the
Speaker 1: same means we had, or to kind of judo like
Speaker 1: take the momentum for that and spin it around on us.
Speaker 1: But they were and they did, And UM, yeah, that'll
Speaker 1: that'll lead into another episode. We'll have to talk about
Speaker 1: this in more detail. That's something like Grant Morrison actually
Speaker 1: talks a lot about in regards to discordionism and this
Speaker 1: type of how how you know he used to work
Speaker 1: for a company called Disinformation back when disinformation was yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and now it's like one of the leading causes of
Speaker 1: mass death in the world, right, so he That is
Speaker 1: something that Morrison talks about a lot in terms of
Speaker 1: how they did have that arrogance and now the same
Speaker 1: forces that they used in hopes of making the world
Speaker 1: better and now being used to regress the world and
Speaker 1: make it worse. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I had a big
Speaker 1: copy of Disinformation on my coffee table when I was nineteen.
Speaker 1: I just ordered good. There's some fun essays in their Garrett. Um,
Speaker 1: all right, that'll probably I mean, did you have more
Speaker 1: to say on that? And yeah, I just wanted to
Speaker 1: say that, you know, regardless of the uncertain future, um,
Speaker 1: regardless of your stance on that's its message, however flawed.
Speaker 1: Um here now, as the minor goods in Alis Souxley's
Speaker 1: Island so often repeat, um, we kind of should be
Speaker 1: attention to what we can do to support ourselves for
Speaker 1: whatever outcome you go through, you know, projects within the
Speaker 1: spaces we inhabit. I believe that I guess it could
Speaker 1: be the seed then you will. I do believe that
Speaker 1: we have an impact, a huge impact on society and
Speaker 1: on politics, and I believe there are still many possibilities
Speaker 1: for liberty still. Yeah, I I do as well. I
Speaker 1: think that acknowledging, you know, failures, both of of of
Speaker 1: you know ideas and of of methods doesn't mean m
Speaker 1: giving up hope or or ignoring the successes of those
Speaker 1: same things which which we're are also present. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: So I don't know, stay optimistic. Read something doesn't have
Speaker 1: to be a desert. But just go go read a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: back of your shampoo, but especially if it's Dr Browner's
Speaker 1: a lot of good stuff in there. Um right, that's
Speaker 1: gonna do it for us this week. Take care look
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Speaker 1: of the podcast History Unplugged. And if you're dreaming of
Speaker 1: being a full time podcaster someday, you and I have
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Speaker 1: Get paid and talk about the things you love with Spreaker.
Speaker 1: From my heart, welcome to it could happen here the
Speaker 1: podcast we already recorded and I messed up um or
Speaker 1: something happened with the zoom and we lost the audio.
Speaker 1: So now we're recording it again, as is, as is
Speaker 1: the cycle of life. UM, thankfully I can. I'm now
Speaker 1: on my tenth shot of Espresso of the day and
Speaker 1: it is eight pm, so I'm I'm ready. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: ready this time today we're gonna be doing another one
Speaker 1: of our chronicles into open source and OSENT style research
Speaker 1: or open source verification and this kind of side of
Speaker 1: of generally, you know, this is kind of a field
Speaker 1: of like anti fascist research UM and journalism. So we're
Speaker 1: looking at one of these case studies UM. But today
Speaker 1: I have someone with me, Alistair from Opossum Press is
Speaker 1: here to talk about and UH and this type of research. Hello, Hi,
Speaker 1: thank you for being with me again on this on
Speaker 1: this call, on this very deaf experience for us. I
Speaker 1: would actually first like to talk about how Opossum Press
Speaker 1: got started as like a collective of of people dedicated
Speaker 1: towards this goal of you know, surveying the fascist creep. UM.
Speaker 1: I had an interest in UM and journalism. I have
Speaker 1: no experience in it, but I have other friends that
Speaker 1: are into writing and stuff, and I just kind of
Speaker 1: reached out to friends and like, hey, would anybody be
Speaker 1: interested in doing this? And UM there are several friends
Speaker 1: that were like, hell, yeah, let's do this, and pretty
Speaker 1: much it after we got it all formed, UM, we
Speaker 1: set up some open source intel like workshops and we'd
Speaker 1: about every other week we get together for two or
Speaker 1: three hours and learned stuff that sounds that sounds lovely actually, UM.
Speaker 1: Most of my stuff is usually done alone in my
Speaker 1: computer dark when I'm on my again tenth cup of
Speaker 1: coffee of the day, do we go sent in a
Speaker 1: group of people like that? Sounds like it could be
Speaker 1: actually kind of fun. So yeah, we're gonna In our
Speaker 1: last episode we talked about how I tracked down and
Speaker 1: found out who Written House was the night of of
Speaker 1: that happening in Kenosha um, and today we're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about someone related to January six, um, the infamous
Speaker 1: zip tie guy as he became known for like two
Speaker 1: days on the internet before he got his actual day. UM. First,
Speaker 1: I guess I probably I probably in case you haven't
Speaker 1: listened to the previous episode I did on Written House,
Speaker 1: so probably kind of explain what open source stuff is
Speaker 1: and what like OSAN is and verification. So it's about
Speaker 1: trying to track down information using open sources um on
Speaker 1: the Internet. So in terms of like nothing is uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's all. It's it's it's it's it's already sitting there.
Speaker 1: Nothing requires like special access, nothing requires you know, you
Speaker 1: to hack into anyone's system. Um, it's it's stuff is
Speaker 1: just the stuff that's already sitting there. The data, whether
Speaker 1: that be you know, geographical data, personal data, data from
Speaker 1: social media accounts, data from every time you've entered your
Speaker 1: email into a random website that you maybe didn't know
Speaker 1: quite what's going on, but you did it. Something that's
Speaker 1: that gets stored somewhere as data and someone can probably
Speaker 1: find it. Um. So it's all the stuff about you
Speaker 1: on the Internet that is all open if you do
Speaker 1: the digging. UM. Often cases this results in going through
Speaker 1: social media profiles. UM. That is a good portion of
Speaker 1: Osan's work is learning how to use Google really well
Speaker 1: and how to how to how to go through social
Speaker 1: media UM. Start using like Google search operators, start using
Speaker 1: social media tools that help you sort through information. Because
Speaker 1: the information is there, you just have to learn how
Speaker 1: to sort through it, right, because there's just so much
Speaker 1: of it. Um. So that's kind of the just to
Speaker 1: what open source stuff is. You mean, eventually you can
Speaker 1: get into the stuff like using like Python, using code
Speaker 1: and scrapers, like. All that stuff is there too, But
Speaker 1: for our purposes, we're gonna stick to the more simplistic
Speaker 1: stuff because this is an audio format and I'm I'm
Speaker 1: not going to start explaining Python code on a podcast. UM.
Speaker 1: So let's let's let's turn back the clocks a year. UM.
Speaker 1: A little over a year and it's January six. What's
Speaker 1: kind of you or your collective's reaction just to kind
Speaker 1: of watching things unfold, you know, Like as a researcher,
Speaker 1: every every time I look at these types of you know, protests,
Speaker 1: you know, whether they be big or small, always part
Speaker 1: of my brains like trying to make connections and do
Speaker 1: stuff right. So, as January six is unfolding, what's what's
Speaker 1: kind of going through? Everyone a post and pressed his head.
Speaker 1: The first thing that seemed to be collective in everybody's
Speaker 1: mind was, oh my god, none of these people are
Speaker 1: wearing face masks. Yea, Like the immediate thing is this
Speaker 1: is probably going to be really easy for a lot
Speaker 1: of people. There's nobody. Nobody is in any type of
Speaker 1: like block or trying to hide their identity in at all,
Speaker 1: something you see the European fascists actually doing more often.
Speaker 1: There was a I think of a video from Germany
Speaker 1: of a whole bunch of far right dude was just
Speaker 1: to iatan black block, because black blocks a tactic. Um
Speaker 1: So yeah, but in the States they're specifically January six,
Speaker 1: it was, Yeah, no one was really worried about keeping
Speaker 1: their identity secret. They really did not think what they
Speaker 1: were doing was wrong. I think the other thing we
Speaker 1: were a lot of us were really angry. Um, just
Speaker 1: like we had been like yelling that this was gonna happen,
Speaker 1: screaming it out, like trying to get people to pay attention,
Speaker 1: and we got blown off so much. I remember, just
Speaker 1: like a few days before, I got in an argument
Speaker 1: with the Facebook friend and like people need to be
Speaker 1: paying attention, like they're planning something. They're like, oh, it's fine,
Speaker 1: it's fine, and then you know, just a few days later,
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, is it fine? Like that is kind
Speaker 1: of always the curse of surveilling all of these things,
Speaker 1: whether they be like a specific event or some movement
Speaker 1: in general. Right, people who are really into q and
Speaker 1: on before the Libs knew what qunan was and we're
Speaker 1: warning about it for years before you know it resulted
Speaker 1: in people dying. Um, Right, That's that's kind of always
Speaker 1: the curse of these things is that it's it's you get,
Speaker 1: you get the mix of the shock and horder of
Speaker 1: the thing finally happening, and a weird relief. It's it's, it's,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a very bizarre feeling to watch these
Speaker 1: things unfold because you're like, oh, I'm vindicated, but it
Speaker 1: sucks that I'm vindicated, right. I remember, like the December
Speaker 1: watching all these groups like I would just it was
Speaker 1: just filled with dread. I knew something was gonna happen.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what was gonna happen, and it was
Speaker 1: just so much anxiety. And then like it's funny, January six,
Speaker 1: after it happened, like it all went away. I was
Speaker 1: able to get a decent night sleep just because there
Speaker 1: was I didn't have that build up of suspense of
Speaker 1: what what is it gonna be? What's it gonna look like?
Speaker 1: How bad is it going to be? Um kind of
Speaker 1: had that release. Yeah. Unfortunately they were all like amateur,
Speaker 1: didn't know what they were doing, and it wasn't as
Speaker 1: bad as it could have been. Yeah. Well, I think
Speaker 1: as for the open source stuff, I'm going to kind
Speaker 1: of walk us through chronologically and of in terms of
Speaker 1: the journey of zip tie Guy, because I was doing
Speaker 1: like archiving on January six, but zip Tyke I was
Speaker 1: really the only dude I was interested in identifying. There
Speaker 1: was there was a lot of other people doing really
Speaker 1: great identification work. I was also generous six. I was
Speaker 1: going through all the social media history of Ashley Babbitt,
Speaker 1: archiving all of her Twitter and Facebook, like years of stuff.
Speaker 1: I was to chronicle how she went from like an
Speaker 1: Obama voter to a q and on from a proponent.
Speaker 1: So that was what I was doing, and I was
Speaker 1: writing an article with Belling Cat about that. Um. But
Speaker 1: the only only other guy I wanted to identify was
Speaker 1: zip tie guy because he was really interesting. He was
Speaker 1: one of the few guys that was masked up. UM,
Speaker 1: he had what he had visible weapons on him. He
Speaker 1: was obviously carrying zip ties. You know, it gives you
Speaker 1: images of like, oh yeah, it's like they're planning to
Speaker 1: capture and execute people. That was like the general kind
Speaker 1: of vibe um of that. So he was the only
Speaker 1: person that I I was actually put work into identifying, and
Speaker 1: I put a decent amount of work in. Now, I
Speaker 1: I failed where other people succeeded, and we can talk
Speaker 1: about like why in a sec But for like a
Speaker 1: day at least, all we had to go on was
Speaker 1: the picture of the guy holding the zip ties in
Speaker 1: a mask. UM. There's a few other pictures of him
Speaker 1: around from that day, but it's mostly mostly one picture
Speaker 1: and the biggest clue that we had to start with, Um,
Speaker 1: what what what what? Why don't you explain what the
Speaker 1: what the first clue is and how that may be
Speaker 1: piqued your interest. He had two patches on his vest,
Speaker 1: and one of them was a thin blue line patch,
Speaker 1: but it was in this uh shape of the state
Speaker 1: of Tennessee. So so yeah, in terms of having a
Speaker 1: decent lead, that is like, okay, well that that narrows
Speaker 1: it down to one of fifties states, probably right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I should say I'm from Knoxville, so like it be
Speaker 1: in Tennessee that I picked up on that because that's
Speaker 1: my state. Yeah, that it becomes a local problem. I
Speaker 1: and as someone in Oregon, I definitely understand that feeling
Speaker 1: of of yeah, when fascism becomes a local problem of Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that definitely piqued your interest specifically, but then also
Speaker 1: gives a really good lead for like where to look
Speaker 1: because ozar he's not trying to do a meta thing
Speaker 1: by tricking us into giving us a false lead. Generally
Speaker 1: people don't do that as often in real life as
Speaker 1: they do in television. Um, but there's still has plenty
Speaker 1: of other ways to detect I mean, I I love
Speaker 1: I love detecting, and there's there's enough, there's enough stuff
Speaker 1: to do otherwise that making it needlessly complicated as honestly,
Speaker 1: I'm fine with it not being that. Um. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: we had we had that to go off initially, so
Speaker 1: starting looking for like far right activity in Tennessee. Now
Speaker 1: I was an outsiders. I didn't really know where to
Speaker 1: start in terms of specific rallies. But I know, used, Uh,
Speaker 1: at what point did you start looking trying to like
Speaker 1: go through pictures of specific rallies to try to like
Speaker 1: match clothing or stuff. I think it was probably it
Speaker 1: may have been that day or the day after when
Speaker 1: I started going through the notebooks that I had, like
Speaker 1: names of just people we suspected may become problems. Um,
Speaker 1: and I started looking at their profiles again and you know,
Speaker 1: didn't find anything. And in our research that we had
Speaker 1: already done, we didn't see anything on OK. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that was kind of the case for me as well.
Speaker 1: With just the picture of the zip tie a guy
Speaker 1: with the patch, I mean, it's it's a lead, but
Speaker 1: there wasn't tons to go on. But thankfully, thankfully are
Speaker 1: are good friends. At January six, we're giving us more
Speaker 1: clues as because as the Simpsons meme goes videotaping this
Speaker 1: crime scene was the best idea we ever had. Um. So,
Speaker 1: like January I think seventh, there was a live stream
Speaker 1: video that was kind of circulating through like anti facist
Speaker 1: group chats um. It was. It was posted like publicly
Speaker 1: to get everyone's attention on it on January eight, um,
Speaker 1: but for like a day it was kind of passing
Speaker 1: through back channels and throughout in this live stream, which
Speaker 1: is Yeah, there was so many people were live streaming
Speaker 1: that night and it is a kind of surreal thing
Speaker 1: to watch of them. This this this live stream in particular,
Speaker 1: it is the zip Ti guy if you his friends, um,
Speaker 1: I think his mom and a few and just ran
Speaker 1: the people from January six all hanging out at a
Speaker 1: hotel room afterwards, like it's it is it is the
Speaker 1: night of the six and they're all just hanging out
Speaker 1: again totally like no masks, they're they're they're in a
Speaker 1: hotel lobby, no masks, um, and they're just like hanging
Speaker 1: out on chilly like sitting on the couch and chatting
Speaker 1: for like half an hour. It's one of the weirdest
Speaker 1: videos to watch. All all of the live streams from
Speaker 1: that night are so surreal because it is like this
Speaker 1: transitionary period of like after the capital attack but before
Speaker 1: every before, like people like go down on them, so
Speaker 1: they don't really know how to behave They still think
Speaker 1: what they did was kind of fine, even though at
Speaker 1: this point, like I think like four or five people
Speaker 1: are dead. Um, but it's so weird just watch them
Speaker 1: just interact like such normal people in this moment, like
Speaker 1: after they did this thing. Then they go in this
Speaker 1: hotel room and they're acting completely normal. So it's it's
Speaker 1: just a weird video in general. But what it does
Speaker 1: have is someone in the same outfit as zip Ti
Speaker 1: guy with no mask on you actually we actually can
Speaker 1: see his full face yea. Getting to see his full
Speaker 1: face was a big, big, health, big help because we ever,
Speaker 1: everyone was looking for pictures of this guy without his
Speaker 1: mask all like for the entirety of the day. So
Speaker 1: now having a whole video where we can see like
Speaker 1: all of the angles of him was great. It was perfect.
Speaker 1: The best. The best thing that was really the beauty
Speaker 1: of of all of of all of all the January
Speaker 1: six documentation is how many people were live streaming themselves
Speaker 1: doing crimes and their friends. Um it did. It did
Speaker 1: make the archiving and uh well not the archiving part.
Speaker 1: Archiving is always painful and tedious, but it made the
Speaker 1: actual research afterwards a lot easier because there was so
Speaker 1: much the documentation of it. So, yeah, we we got
Speaker 1: we got this video. I'm gonna explain how I kind
Speaker 1: of took this video and failed to reach the conclusion,
Speaker 1: and then we can talk about how you succeeded. But first,
Speaker 1: but first we're gonna hear some ads from our lovely
Speaker 1: products and services. Robert was here for our previous recording
Speaker 1: uh that we tried to end I failed, and he
Speaker 1: made some very good jokes uh and very good segways
Speaker 1: about how all of our sponsors support insurrection just like
Speaker 1: January six, And if I tried to repeat the jokes,
Speaker 1: it will be stupid. So I'm just gonna I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna give you the sense there was a joke, and
Speaker 1: now you're gonna be left with that dissatisfaction. So bye, goodbye.
Speaker 1: Here's some ads. Okay, we're back, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: give an extremely brief rundown on how I failed to
Speaker 1: do uh well, I didn't fail to do research. I
Speaker 1: did research. I just didn't reach a proper conclusion. Um
Speaker 1: and I knew that. So the the the other the
Speaker 1: other thing about Zip Tie Guy he had he had
Speaker 1: the patch of like the thin blue line in Tennessee.
Speaker 1: And then that's at then I soon after got the
Speaker 1: video of his face and uh interacting with people. And
Speaker 1: the the other thing is I think, um we the
Speaker 1: hat he was wearing in the Siptie Guy photo was
Speaker 1: I think was tracked back to be um our favorite
Speaker 1: coffee company, Black Rifle Coffee merchandise. It was it was
Speaker 1: like what was what was one of the hats they sell?
Speaker 1: So me, being clever, I'm like, okay, here's this Black
Speaker 1: Raffer Coffee hat, this patch in Tennessee. I know Black
Speaker 1: Ripe Coffee is based out of Tennessee. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: look through everyone who works for Black Raffle Coffee, which
Speaker 1: you mean isn't a bad instinct as an outsider. But
Speaker 1: it did not. It did not succeed. But the funny
Speaker 1: thing is is that while looking through all the employees
Speaker 1: at Black Apple Coffee, all of them do look identical
Speaker 1: to Zip Tie Guy. They all same characteristics. They all
Speaker 1: look exactly the same on their their beards, their nose,
Speaker 1: their forehead, their hair, all of them identical, every single
Speaker 1: one of them, to the point where the only way
Speaker 1: I could tell that it wasn't the zip tie guy
Speaker 1: was being like, Okay, no, he has a mole here,
Speaker 1: he has like a birthmark here. This way, his like
Speaker 1: his eyes or his eye wrinkles are different. So it's
Speaker 1: like it's going down to the very like fine tuned
Speaker 1: facial features, because all of their face shapes are like identical.
Speaker 1: I think there's a point that I had the same instinct.
Speaker 1: I think I know there's a point that I went through,
Speaker 1: um the black coffee rifle. All of their people look um.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was for Eric until or
Speaker 1: if it was like maybe around the written house stuff.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Uh. Yeah, So that that's that's what
Speaker 1: I spent my time doing, is going through everybody who
Speaker 1: works there of Uh. But but by the time I
Speaker 1: kind of gave up on that, the identity was already discovered,
Speaker 1: um and posted by your team at a Possum Press.
Speaker 1: So how how did you get from you know, this
Speaker 1: zip Tygi picture than the light the archived livestream video
Speaker 1: of him without without a mask, to to the point
Speaker 1: where you could say, hey, this is his name. But
Speaker 1: well I was I wasn't even really in contact with
Speaker 1: Like we as a group weren't messaging each other trying
Speaker 1: to figure this out together, but we were, like it
Speaker 1: turns out a few of us were working separately. So
Speaker 1: while I'm going through social media. UM, a friend in
Speaker 1: Nashville was um going through pictures of the protests from
Speaker 1: there over the summer, and they ended up finding about
Speaker 1: five different pictures, I think, and we knew we knew
Speaker 1: most of the people in the pictures. That are maybe
Speaker 1: like one or two that we did not know, And
Speaker 1: one was always Eric Munchell and he's wearing the exact
Speaker 1: same gear he wore January six. Um, I say, Eric Munchell,
Speaker 1: we didn't know his name yet then, so UM, from there,
Speaker 1: we kind of we went ahead and posted what we
Speaker 1: had to Twitter, and then we went back to the
Speaker 1: social media and I started looking through the UM profiles
Speaker 1: that were the people we knew, and sure enough, one
Speaker 1: of them, Kurt Dennis, had a live stream that was
Speaker 1: telling the story, um, the same story that Eric Mutchell
Speaker 1: told him that thirty minute video, and he actually while
Speaker 1: telling it, he's like, yeah, my buddy Eric. So at
Speaker 1: that point we go to his friends list and sure enough,
Speaker 1: he only has one Eric there and it's Eric Mutchell.
Speaker 1: And there we go to that page and find some
Speaker 1: of the same gear in the background of the pictures
Speaker 1: that he has publicly posted. Yeah, he like puts the
Speaker 1: pictures of him and his gear with like guns, and yeah,
Speaker 1: you can. You can track all of his like facial
Speaker 1: like like like like birth marks and stuff. They're all
Speaker 1: the same. So yeah, you and that that's you. Uh,
Speaker 1: you definitely got him of Yeah, their own mistakes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's my favorite part. Like they they gave us
Speaker 1: his idea, and they often, if not handing themselves to
Speaker 1: you on a silver pill adder, they at least have
Speaker 1: a platter um. They they often there's often enough bread, right.
Speaker 1: The reason why these things are solved because there are
Speaker 1: enough bread comes to follow and often they kind of
Speaker 1: leave pretty big chunks of bread. Um. Just the fact
Speaker 1: that again added to the surreal aspect of that whole
Speaker 1: live stream video, the fact that he's like, you matched
Speaker 1: it by telling the same you can hear them someone
Speaker 1: tell the same story, is just such a weird weird
Speaker 1: surreal thing. Yeah, so I think in terms of like
Speaker 1: oas and stuff, what this case study in particular really
Speaker 1: highlights is the importance of archival stuff. Right. The reason
Speaker 1: why you were able to solve this and not me
Speaker 1: is because I wasn't. I mean, I did my own
Speaker 1: archival thing for archiving, like the video. But um, the
Speaker 1: way that you were able to really crack this open
Speaker 1: and everyone else who worked on it is because you
Speaker 1: had like those lists of connections of people who are
Speaker 1: already kind of active in this like al right far
Speaker 1: right scene within your local community. Like you already had
Speaker 1: documentation of the major players who they interact with, or
Speaker 1: you you already had pictures of this guy in gear
Speaker 1: with other known people. So the fact that there was
Speaker 1: already previously work archived really made the success of this
Speaker 1: so much more possible. That's what they but People's Plaza
Speaker 1: and Nashville during their protests, they were really big on documenting.
Speaker 1: Um they documented everything with the police and um any
Speaker 1: counter protesters they would. They had professional photographers out there
Speaker 1: making sure we had good, clear quality pictures of like
Speaker 1: everybody on the other side as well, and that definitely
Speaker 1: helped us a lot. Yeah, because especially before January six,
Speaker 1: they there was they did a decent job of archiving themselves,
Speaker 1: well not not archiving, but like filming them selves and
Speaker 1: documenting themselves, and then you know, it takes takes other
Speaker 1: research to then archives that. So not only is important
Speaker 1: just to like look at the research and look at
Speaker 1: like the documentation of the that people do of themselves,
Speaker 1: but then make sure that you have a source for
Speaker 1: that that's not their own uploading of it. Right. So,
Speaker 1: like a great example is like all of the live
Speaker 1: streams from January six, including like this one from this
Speaker 1: hotel room. Pretty soon it was deleted by the person
Speaker 1: who posted it because they realized, oh maybe I shouldn't
Speaker 1: have this living record of my crimes. Um. But at
Speaker 1: that point, people already saved the video. They already like
Speaker 1: I already ran it through a video of saving program
Speaker 1: that I had. UM. So it's it's important not only
Speaker 1: to get archiving having having having previous documentation of people
Speaker 1: and known players, but then as new information is coming out,
Speaker 1: make sure you make separate copies of that for your
Speaker 1: own sake so that you actually have it and then
Speaker 1: you're not gonna be stuck looking for something that's gone right,
Speaker 1: the worst case scenarios to like you know that there
Speaker 1: is an important thing, but you just don't have access
Speaker 1: to it anymore. It's like you you remember seeing it,
Speaker 1: you didn't save it, and now it's gone. That's a
Speaker 1: horrible feeling to do when you're trying to get this
Speaker 1: kind of research done. Um. And like it happens. We all,
Speaker 1: we all make mistakes like this. Um, I definitely have
Speaker 1: it happened to me actually this week. Yeah, it happens
Speaker 1: all the time. And it happens to me. It happens
Speaker 1: to be all the time. I'll look at something and
Speaker 1: be like I should probably save this. I get distracted
Speaker 1: or I just don't want to because our chindague is
Speaker 1: boring and tedious, and then I check again that's gone.
Speaker 1: I'm like, well that's I should have archived it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So on on top of all of the archiving stuff,
Speaker 1: which in general, anti fascist research is really that that's
Speaker 1: the thing that really excels at even like um above
Speaker 1: above journalism is like you know, getting like traditional journalism
Speaker 1: is like getting a good documentation of like key fascist
Speaker 1: players in your area, key people who are kind of
Speaker 1: pushing far right stuff and far right violence. Actually getting
Speaker 1: like a good a good, a good idea of who
Speaker 1: they are and having that knowledge always handy. Um is
Speaker 1: something that this type of research is is really that
Speaker 1: that is really what it excels at, or like what
Speaker 1: what the what those researchers excel at. This is the
Speaker 1: thing that they do very well. I think a lot
Speaker 1: of us probably started doing it just out of curiosity
Speaker 1: looking into people. That that is certainly how I started,
Speaker 1: Like I've been doing it long before, I just didn't
Speaker 1: know that's what it was called. Because like I'd see
Speaker 1: somebody make a messed up common online, I'm like, who
Speaker 1: is this person? And then you know, trying to find
Speaker 1: as much as I can about them. Yeah, that's that
Speaker 1: is certainly how I got started with this type of thing,
Speaker 1: because it can be fun to look for bad people.
Speaker 1: It is, it is. It is kind of pleasurable. Um
Speaker 1: and one of one of the again another big contributing factor.
Speaker 1: And how you got zip tie guy, How how I
Speaker 1: got written? How how a lot of this stuff works.
Speaker 1: Um is the beauty of Facebook as a research tool
Speaker 1: because often in order in order in order to do
Speaker 1: the archiving, you need to have stuff to archive, and
Speaker 1: a lot of the stuff that gets posted from these
Speaker 1: things by the people doing them UM is done on Facebook,
Speaker 1: or at least it used to write the past five years, really,
Speaker 1: Facebook has been the main main source of this UM.
Speaker 1: Now it's maybe now people are kind of getting wise
Speaker 1: and maybe some stuff is moving to telegram. Facebook is
Speaker 1: becoming a little a little bit less important of a
Speaker 1: platform for this type of research. And I know Facebook
Speaker 1: has changed the way that they um that you can
Speaker 1: use their service, so it does make research kind of
Speaker 1: harder in some ways, but but even still it is
Speaker 1: it is one of the better tools to UM to
Speaker 1: dig into certain types of people, because there is certain
Speaker 1: types of people who are going to be more likely
Speaker 1: to use Facebook. UM. And yeah, in terms of how
Speaker 1: getting Facebook was the method, it's not where the place
Speaker 1: where you're able to make the link between the fascists
Speaker 1: you already knew and and Eric um because of because
Speaker 1: you are you already you you already knew who the
Speaker 1: players were, and then Facebook had the visualized network to
Speaker 1: actually make those connections. So Facebook itself and social media
Speaker 1: in general is really is really useful. And then in
Speaker 1: terms of how this operate, it's like going through friends
Speaker 1: lists is really easy. UM but oftentimes a lot of
Speaker 1: people will not maybe have those public um and what
Speaker 1: what then there's again it's not a dead road. You
Speaker 1: can still look through likes, you can still look through shares,
Speaker 1: you can still look through like um if you like
Speaker 1: people are tagged in photos. Um it it really it
Speaker 1: really is a is a great is a great system
Speaker 1: that is good at making you not have privacy. That
Speaker 1: is the thing. It really it really excels it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and even even if people don't have like an active
Speaker 1: social media presence per se um, it can still be
Speaker 1: really useful in getting specific names of people or or
Speaker 1: just make or just having a connection be known like this.
Speaker 1: This was mostly how I was able to identify the
Speaker 1: all the anonymous um riot cops in when when the
Speaker 1: Portland Police Bureau took took away their badge numbers and names.
Speaker 1: Um is that I could get like a list of
Speaker 1: cops and we could start figuring out like, okay, this
Speaker 1: is probably this is this is this is pre cops
Speaker 1: previously on the right team, right, and start doing facial
Speaker 1: matching um and then if I want to learn out
Speaker 1: if if I wanna if I want to learn more
Speaker 1: information about like their first name and more information about
Speaker 1: them in general, even if they don't have a social
Speaker 1: media profile, often their wife might or their mom might.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a UM And in terms of fun
Speaker 1: sentences to say, really learning how to exploit people's family
Speaker 1: as a weakness is is is wonderful um for this
Speaker 1: type of stalking stalking violent bad people. UM Because yeah,
Speaker 1: because a lot of a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: the riot cops were smart enough to not to at
Speaker 1: least to either not have their presence at all on
Speaker 1: the internet UM or to have it very locked down
Speaker 1: in terms of you know, no one can see their posts,
Speaker 1: no one can see their friends, no one can see anything.
Speaker 1: But still their wife will occasionally tag them in photos
Speaker 1: or uh maybe not even photos of them, but like
Speaker 1: they'll they'll just take them in a photo of like
Speaker 1: their kid or something. And then this just creates more
Speaker 1: ways to make connections that you can you know, learn
Speaker 1: more about these specific people. UM because sometimes that's fun
Speaker 1: and interesting. I've noticed some people with socks that I've
Speaker 1: found their identity. It's by going through the likes and seeing, um,
Speaker 1: you know, the same woman is always the first to
Speaker 1: put a heart react there, and you can go to
Speaker 1: their pages sometimes it's a little if you go through
Speaker 1: their pictures and you see a picture of the guy
Speaker 1: there with they'll have like somebody in the comments, Oh,
Speaker 1: Mark looks really good. There something you know. Naming the
Speaker 1: it's been in frim Mary, you can get the last name.
Speaker 1: You know, you've ne the wife's last name, you have
Speaker 1: a good chance of that being their last name. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Family Families really is really great for finding people
Speaker 1: because because like all the research is is learning how
Speaker 1: to make these open sourced connections, right, A lot a
Speaker 1: lot of it is connections and networking, and people usually
Speaker 1: always have an innate connection and networking and that that
Speaker 1: that is their family UM. And often this like extends
Speaker 1: out in terms of you know, political organizing, whether you're
Speaker 1: part of you know, militias or just kind of smaller groups. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is another network. Um Friends is another network. But
Speaker 1: you know, for people who are kind of are are
Speaker 1: more locked down, it is possible to find the information
Speaker 1: about people, um, you know, especially if they have like
Speaker 1: if they have like a not very common last name,
Speaker 1: you know, that can make finding information about them much
Speaker 1: easier if you're using tools like Facebook, um, and then
Speaker 1: it's you know, just a matter of doing all the
Speaker 1: other you know, open source research of you know, comparing clothing, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and comparing to what other kind of information
Speaker 1: you already know about the person, email addresses, phone numbers,
Speaker 1: if you can, you know, get that, get that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff as well. But I think that's all I
Speaker 1: had on Zip tie guy out mostly. M Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: a really easy one. There's not a whole lot to
Speaker 1: really dive into their Yeah, no, for for someone for
Speaker 1: someone who was one of the few people massed up,
Speaker 1: wasn't was not was not that hard to find. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, the fact that he was found by local
Speaker 1: people in his area not surprising. Um. That's another thing
Speaker 1: anti fascist research is really good at, is that type
Speaker 1: of local research, because you know, they they have they
Speaker 1: have all those local connections, they have those local um
Speaker 1: documentation of like a political events that have happened in
Speaker 1: their area. So again, it's the the importance of of
Speaker 1: having stuff archives and having stuff like sorted and having
Speaker 1: stuff organized well so you can access your archives. Information
Speaker 1: is really important. It's it's it sucks that it's it's
Speaker 1: the part of OS and I hate the most. Everyone
Speaker 1: Everyone hates, Everyone hates I'm I'm sure there's some sick
Speaker 1: of out there who likes it, but everyone else, everyone
Speaker 1: else hates all of the You hate all this organizing
Speaker 1: and sorting. And I find archiving to be tedious. Archiving videos,
Speaker 1: live streams, it's tedious, it's difficult. Um, it's time, it's
Speaker 1: time consuming, it's repetitive, it's not generally not a good time,
Speaker 1: but it is so useful and in the long run
Speaker 1: of trying to get these like a list of of
Speaker 1: like established players in your area. This is how you
Speaker 1: start seeing patterns, right. You need to have this information
Speaker 1: already laid out so you can actually watch the patterns unfold.
Speaker 1: Otherwise it's just a whole bunch of chaotic information that
Speaker 1: means nothing. So it's it's super important, as as much
Speaker 1: of a bummer as it may be. Yeah, let's see, Um,
Speaker 1: is there anything you've been working on since then that
Speaker 1: you like that you would like to talk about, or
Speaker 1: any upcoming research projects. Right now, I'm really focused on
Speaker 1: our local UM school board, and you know, like many
Speaker 1: towns across the country, we have fascists trying to take
Speaker 1: it over and going to the meetings, and so I've
Speaker 1: been watching that group very closely for the last several months.
Speaker 1: It's probably about October our school year. We started out
Speaker 1: without a mask mandate. UM and a couple of parrots. UM,
Speaker 1: who's children need like they're there, I mean a compromise
Speaker 1: like their their kids need the everybody else to wear
Speaker 1: a mask. So their parents sued the school board and
Speaker 1: our governor UM to have a mass band aid, and
Speaker 1: the judge issued an injunction and like the next Monday,
Speaker 1: all the schools had to wear a mask. And the
Speaker 1: anti mask crowd is like losing their ship over it.
Speaker 1: Still UM trying to figure out how to fire the judge. UM.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, we have a member of Patriot Church
Speaker 1: who's involved in it, and you know they're the ones
Speaker 1: with the Church of plan Parenthood. It's Ken Peter too.
Speaker 1: I think he's from Washington, yes, spoken, I believe, yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's he's moved down here. UM. I think he
Speaker 1: still goes up there to the to the church stuff,
Speaker 1: but most of his time is spent down here in
Speaker 1: Tennessee and m causing just as much trouble as he
Speaker 1: does up there and his followers. So I'm curious to
Speaker 1: see how how does a research project like this school
Speaker 1: board thing differ from like the research surrounding you know,
Speaker 1: trying to identify someone at January six. Um, for one,
Speaker 1: this is local. It's you know, I'm going to the
Speaker 1: school board meetings. Um, I know it's easier to know
Speaker 1: where to look for this because like I'm watching it
Speaker 1: as it happening, where, like you know, January six, most
Speaker 1: of those people you have no clue where to even
Speaker 1: start from. Um, So this more now, it's it's monitoring
Speaker 1: and documenting as we've you know, figure out who these
Speaker 1: people are, like linking telegram names with Facebook names and
Speaker 1: all of that. So I guess now it's more record
Speaker 1: keeping and getting that documentation done early so when one
Speaker 1: of them goes too far, we have and we haven't ready.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's that's the sad part where it's
Speaker 1: like you're watching inevitive inevitability almost as it can mean.
Speaker 1: But that's yeah, that's also how like January six works. Right,
Speaker 1: we were able to identify these people because there was
Speaker 1: a lot of documentation of a lot of major players already. Right,
Speaker 1: So a lot of the work in between these big
Speaker 1: pro tests and events is is the is this is
Speaker 1: the slow, tedious documentation because we have to do it
Speaker 1: now so that it's a useful later. Let's you know,
Speaker 1: A big part of research is like yeah, trying to
Speaker 1: spot potential you know, issues and archiving it and then
Speaker 1: if the issue ever becomes a bigger issue, you already
Speaker 1: have information on it, right, whether that be you know,
Speaker 1: watching someone online who you might think is who like,
Speaker 1: watching someone who's like a Nazi who you might be
Speaker 1: worried that, like they're posting and plans about how to
Speaker 1: kill people. You're like, okay, so probably look into this
Speaker 1: dude because he's doing this in case he does something
Speaker 1: in the future. Um, it is that is kind of
Speaker 1: it sucks because yeah, you are watching this thing where
Speaker 1: you feel kind of helpless, but you know that documenting
Speaker 1: it is worthwhile. Um they get oah. It's the same
Speaker 1: thing where like you don't want to be vindicated, but
Speaker 1: if it does happen, it's better to be prepared. I
Speaker 1: don't think people realize like how much anti fascist research,
Speaker 1: how much of this type of like ohs and stuff
Speaker 1: like my journalism, Like most of the work that you
Speaker 1: put into it is never seen. Even if you do
Speaker 1: complete investigations. Sometimes by the end you're like it's getting
Speaker 1: getting them, getting them out in enough time for them
Speaker 1: to be useful. Sometimes it isn't even worth it. Um.
Speaker 1: So you know a lot of it is, you know,
Speaker 1: writing stuff and doing research that never actually sees the
Speaker 1: light of day for a long long time. Right with
Speaker 1: Eric Mountchell. We had like probably twenty people we had
Speaker 1: on our list too, and he wasn't even one of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you do all this and like, on one hand,
Speaker 1: it almost felt in a moment like all of that
Speaker 1: we did was really for nothing. But now it did
Speaker 1: lead to Yeah, it did lead. And even when you
Speaker 1: do find the correct answer, sometimes sometimes could via circumstances.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not something you need to post about immediately.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's worth just you know, hanging onto um and
Speaker 1: not being super super public about every horrible thing you fight.
Speaker 1: It's not like you don't need to post every time
Speaker 1: you fight a horrible thing on telegram. You don't. You
Speaker 1: don't need to tell Twitter that. It's like, it's it's
Speaker 1: about collecting these things and keeping them there for future use. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on to talk with
Speaker 1: me again, um after after already already discussing uh, mostly
Speaker 1: the same things. Where can people follow your stuff online?
Speaker 1: We're on Twitter at um at a possum press really easy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're on Facebook. We don't actually do much on Facebook though.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, as we've discussed now, you probably probably shouldn't.
Speaker 1: I mean, like in in a lot of ways, a
Speaker 1: lot of like fashions organizing that you used to be
Speaker 1: done in primarily like Facebook groups or just even just
Speaker 1: like through like like incidental organizing through just through like
Speaker 1: posting and cross posting. A lot of that has been
Speaker 1: moved over to Telegram at this point. Telegram is kind
Speaker 1: of the new main nexus, whereas Facebook and like the
Speaker 1: days of the early alt right, Facebook was a pretty
Speaker 1: big nexus for like the more normalis right. You know
Speaker 1: it's there. There is actually fascist forms that we're doing organizing,
Speaker 1: but as a place for Again, like a lot of
Speaker 1: people in January six who didn't really know what they
Speaker 1: were doing was wrong. They were mostly you know, make
Speaker 1: American Great again people or quing on people. A good
Speaker 1: portion of like most of them were not you know,
Speaker 1: swastika waving Nazis. Um. They may they may agree with
Speaker 1: fascist ideas, but they don't they don't self describe as Nazis.
Speaker 1: So like, um, but we're even seeing after after January
Speaker 1: six with you know, um Facebook like cracking down on
Speaker 1: these groups, other platforms like Partla going offline a lot
Speaker 1: of these normies themselves, or even migrating onto Telegram. UM.
Speaker 1: So you know, Facebook used to be a really great
Speaker 1: research tool and I'm using it less and left off
Speaker 1: less and less often now on fourtunately because I mean,
Speaker 1: it really didn't have a lot of strong suits. Telegram
Speaker 1: doesn't have his own strong suits. But you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's still it's still different. I think the norm is
Speaker 1: moved into Telegram is troubling though, because a way easier
Speaker 1: time that is there. That is the obvious thing is, Yeah,
Speaker 1: now that those groups are in closer proximity, it's easier
Speaker 1: for one to seep into the other, whereas before there
Speaker 1: was more of that distinction. Um. Yes, that is a
Speaker 1: worrying thing that I believe we've talked about before and
Speaker 1: we'll talk about again um in the future, in terms
Speaker 1: of having this like fascist milieu or cultic milieu, UM
Speaker 1: of a place where the the amount of the amount
Speaker 1: of overlap between you know, your uncle who's a regular
Speaker 1: Conservative and you know a member of Adam often, or
Speaker 1: you know someone who wishes they remember ab Adam often.
Speaker 1: Um is very small. It's an these they are they
Speaker 1: are very close together. Yeah, well, thank you for talking
Speaker 1: about all of these things on our on our second
Speaker 1: o Sand Case study episode. Like guess big big big
Speaker 1: takeaways is uh, archiving is great, archive live streams, archived
Speaker 1: things because it's better to have them um and not
Speaker 1: use them than not have them and need them. Um.
Speaker 1: And then you know, archiving and documenting local fascists is
Speaker 1: really great even for things beyond your locality, like in
Speaker 1: January six. Um, so those are those are my main
Speaker 1: takeaways from this and uh, you know, also everyone a
Speaker 1: black life coffee. They all they all look like everyone
Speaker 1: at day six, all of them do they do all right?
Speaker 1: That doesn't for us, Thank you so much. I can
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Speaker 1: could happen here the only podcast you are legally allowed
Speaker 1: to listen to right now. Um, I'm Robert Evans. We
Speaker 1: talk about things falling apart, putting them back together, all
Speaker 1: that good stuff. With me as it's like seventy of
Speaker 1: the time. Is my co host Garrison Davis Garrison, how
Speaker 1: are you doing today? I'm doing great. This is early
Speaker 1: for you. Yeah. I get they have to they have
Speaker 1: to drag me out of bed, but I I made
Speaker 1: it just I'm excited to talk about a hair after three. Okay,
Speaker 1: I have my second coffee already, So our topic is
Speaker 1: gun culture. Uh, and to discuss gun culture with me
Speaker 1: and a number of aspects of it, including how to
Speaker 1: maybe make a better one. Uh. Is Carl cassarda from
Speaker 1: ranged TV. Carl, Welcome to the program. Hey, thanks for
Speaker 1: having me. I'm really stoked to be here. And it's
Speaker 1: a topic, as you can imagine with my work on
Speaker 1: range TV, is a near and dear to my heart
Speaker 1: because it's a challenging one. We've got a lot of
Speaker 1: are things in this community and a lot of challenges
Speaker 1: to Yeah, gun YouTube has gone some really interesting places
Speaker 1: in the last um. Really, it feels like most of
Speaker 1: the growth happened the last five six years, Like there's
Speaker 1: been a real significant increase in Yeah. I feel like
Speaker 1: there's been like a wave. I feel like there's generations
Speaker 1: of gun two. There's like gen one, Gen two, Gen
Speaker 1: three in theres Russian back in the day and stuff
Speaker 1: totally Yeah, and so there's a whole thing there. There's
Speaker 1: there's generations of what was addressed in the conversation and
Speaker 1: the cultural significance as well as the gear impact. I
Speaker 1: think we've got different kind of generations of the yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think this stuff obviously when when aspects of
Speaker 1: gun YouTube go viral, it tends to be stuff that's
Speaker 1: like particularly problematic, But in my experience, most of it
Speaker 1: is just dudes shooting stuff to see what happens, or
Speaker 1: you know, trying out different guns and stuff like. It
Speaker 1: is mostly if you're someone who you know believes in
Speaker 1: the right to bear arms, it's mostly pretty much just
Speaker 1: like people drying out guns and stuff with guns. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when things go viral, it's like my my experience with that,
Speaker 1: there's a number of reasons. A right, one is that
Speaker 1: it's particularly gross that someone does something or says something
Speaker 1: fucked up, somebody's out there dressed as a rotation a right,
Speaker 1: stuff like that. That kind that tends to push the buttons.
Speaker 1: But yeah, most of the time, the stuff that gets
Speaker 1: the largest volume of viewership are quite honestly more banal.
Speaker 1: It's things like a fifty caliber exploding or shooting a gallon,
Speaker 1: you know, fifty five gallon drum of gas. That kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. Is that that stuff appeals to people that
Speaker 1: aren't just gunned people, so they're like, oh, I want
Speaker 1: to see shoots fload, so let me click on it. Well,
Speaker 1: one of my favorite things is to look at videos
Speaker 1: of people destroying safe life fests one of my favorite
Speaker 1: ways to watch gun YouTube. But I guess this is
Speaker 1: probably what we'll probably talking about this as the episode
Speaker 1: goes on. But once you watch enough of those from
Speaker 1: like one channel, you'll you'll get to a video when
Speaker 1: they fantasize about like shooting Antifa or something. They're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well yeah, that yeah, that's that's just the way it
Speaker 1: goes sometimes. And it is, you know, the thing that
Speaker 1: my first I guess the first time I became aware
Speaker 1: of like online gun culture UM was a site that's
Speaker 1: still really near and dear to my heart. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you're familiar with it, Carl the Box of Truth, And
Speaker 1: it was like, and I think it is like fifteen
Speaker 1: years ago or something like that is when I started
Speaker 1: reading their stuff, and it's it's just like some kind
Speaker 1: of bubbay dudes in Texas who will take different who
Speaker 1: will try out like, hey, there's a myth that UM
Speaker 1: this specific round in Korea got stopped by people who's
Speaker 1: were wearing multiple layers of like clothing in the cold.
Speaker 1: Can winter clothing stop this bullet? And they would they
Speaker 1: would you know, mock up the clothing on like a
Speaker 1: target and they would shoot it, or like, how many
Speaker 1: books does it take? Like if you have a full backpack,
Speaker 1: how many books would it take to stop a round
Speaker 1: of nine millimeter? If? I like, it's it's all very
Speaker 1: much like practical Hey, people you know say this works
Speaker 1: this way or this works that way. Well let's go
Speaker 1: out and shoot some stuff and test how it works.
Speaker 1: And um, I think was like it is, as you said,
Speaker 1: the kind of thing I think, even if you don't
Speaker 1: own guns you might find interesting just because like a
Speaker 1: lot of it is dealing with here's things you've seen
Speaker 1: in Hollywood, what ACTU really happens? Um? So I do
Speaker 1: think like fundamentally there's always going to be a place
Speaker 1: for that kind of content because it's it's not just
Speaker 1: like stuff that people who like guns are interested in.
Speaker 1: It's just stuff that has kind of objective value. You know,
Speaker 1: you're trying to expand what people's understanding of things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I call that g whiz content. It's like g whiz
Speaker 1: what happens if right? And so on? In range. The
Speaker 1: closest equivalent to that, which are the videos that the
Speaker 1: most views are are somewhat now infamous mud tests. Um.
Speaker 1: And it started up six years ago and it was
Speaker 1: literally it was G whiz, let's go do this. And
Speaker 1: of course there's this long standing lore everywhere outside of
Speaker 1: the gun community and in it about the A K
Speaker 1: M being this undestruct indestructible unicorn you're right into combat
Speaker 1: that no matter what happens to it, it fires, and
Speaker 1: they are A fifteen being this fragile piece of ship.
Speaker 1: And in our mud test, which we've now done multiple
Speaker 1: of it will initially it was just G whiz. Over
Speaker 1: time and aggregate, it turned out to actually have really
Speaker 1: interesting data points and that the A k doesn't do
Speaker 1: well in mud and they are excels in mud, which
Speaker 1: is completely against the lore about Vietnam, which is a
Speaker 1: different problem. But that kind of thing extends beyond the
Speaker 1: gun community because people are like guns and mud. What
Speaker 1: happened is it's MythBusters kind of stuff. Yeah, and I think,
Speaker 1: but it's interesting how you can learn from it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think one of the problems that is, uh
Speaker 1: we we could say like has is an issue on
Speaker 1: on gun YouTube. One of the things that has become
Speaker 1: an issue, and this isn't just within the gun culture,
Speaker 1: it's everywhere, is that like, if you're into that stuff
Speaker 1: and if you're if you're coming into it like I
Speaker 1: want to see people do this g with stuff, or
Speaker 1: I just want to see reviews of different guns because
Speaker 1: I might be buying one. Um, Google's algorithm is going
Speaker 1: to feed you a lot of stuff, and some of
Speaker 1: that stuff is going to be people who, yeah, are
Speaker 1: preparing to like shoot folks at protests, and our filming
Speaker 1: videos about that and stuff, and that it has this
Speaker 1: um it has this radicalizing effect on a lot of people.
Speaker 1: And it also has this kind of can have this
Speaker 1: kind of radicalizing effect on content where you know, most
Speaker 1: political stuff you see isn't kind of that over it,
Speaker 1: but it does if somebody has a video where they're
Speaker 1: being more explicitly political outside of you know, you know,
Speaker 1: arguing in favor of gun rights, but if they're getting
Speaker 1: kind of political and a broader since, and that does
Speaker 1: really well the way that content works. As other people
Speaker 1: might be like, oh, well, folks want me to do
Speaker 1: a political video, Folks want me to talk about I
Speaker 1: don't know, Nancy Pelosi or whatever. Um, And that that's
Speaker 1: you know, not just a problem with gun culture or
Speaker 1: gun YouTube, but it has increasingly become a thing and
Speaker 1: in the n r A kind of very famously. There's
Speaker 1: a good podcast on the how that organization has kind
Speaker 1: of gone from where it started to where it is
Speaker 1: that talks about like n r A TV. But they
Speaker 1: their YouTube channel had some pretty outrageous ship for a while,
Speaker 1: and I think it left an impact even though it
Speaker 1: failed in this eventually, well, the n r A is
Speaker 1: until we can get into that later. The NA has
Speaker 1: changed so much since its organs to what it is now.
Speaker 1: It's not even the people have found it. It It wouldn't
Speaker 1: recognize it, I don't think at all. But you're touching
Speaker 1: on a topic there that's also near and dear, and
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to promote Ranger. That's just work having
Speaker 1: a conversation. But years ago I decided to proactively demonetize.
Speaker 1: I turned off my AdSense and I take no money
Speaker 1: from any views, so it's not like advertising doesn't drive
Speaker 1: what I do. And I feel like the reason I
Speaker 1: did that was partially just fuck you YouTube. It was
Speaker 1: the hacker manifesto of you come watch my content, I
Speaker 1: cost you money versus make you money, which is kind
Speaker 1: of a statement on my part. But additionally, I do
Speaker 1: feel like whether it's firearms or any other content that
Speaker 1: is completely advertiser supported. There is a dangerous thing there
Speaker 1: in that you have to pursue the clicks like a
Speaker 1: heroin addict, and the clicks make you the money, and
Speaker 1: therefore you're gonna make the stuff that's gonna make the
Speaker 1: clicks because that's how you make your income. And even
Speaker 1: if you don't want it to do, it can affect you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm curious, like, how do you kind of how
Speaker 1: do you, um, how do you how do you approach
Speaker 1: sort of dealing in this space where it is so
Speaker 1: easy for things to become politicized? Like do you is
Speaker 1: that is that a kind of thing that you have
Speaker 1: to be conscious sort of picking your battles. I guess
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of interested in how you because you
Speaker 1: definitely have been more open about having kind of more
Speaker 1: on the left libertarian side of things politics than a
Speaker 1: lot of people talk about in that space. How do
Speaker 1: you decide kind of what is worth inserting and what
Speaker 1: is worth kind of just you know, no one needs
Speaker 1: to hear that within this context. Oh yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: think that that's an easy thing to answer, right, It's hard,
Speaker 1: Like there's a lot of landlines. But when um introspectively
Speaker 1: for me, the answer for me at least was, I'm
Speaker 1: just going to come to this content as my honest self, Like,
Speaker 1: if I'm just going to produce what I want to produce,
Speaker 1: it's and since I don't have to worry about advertising dollars,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna make this ship I want to make.
Speaker 1: And as a result, I guess it's sometimes considered an
Speaker 1: alternative voice, but I don't think it really is. I
Speaker 1: think that the loud loud mouths have made it sound
Speaker 1: like there's only one voice in this community, but there isn't.
Speaker 1: And so by just being legitimate and honest and being me,
Speaker 1: there's turned out to be a lot of ground swell
Speaker 1: if you want to use grassroots type people out there
Speaker 1: that want to hear something that's not just evangelical American
Speaker 1: Taliban so. But but in terms of what where to where,
Speaker 1: what where to put your foot on? What landline, I
Speaker 1: guess I did. For me, my decision has been to
Speaker 1: do topics that have been intentionally ignored that shouldn't have been.
Speaker 1: Like I've done a bunch of videos about the confluence
Speaker 1: of civil rights and firearms ownership, which there's a lot
Speaker 1: of it, and it's it's really amazing how much there
Speaker 1: is and no one talks about it. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: we yeah, we We've chatted about that a little bit
Speaker 1: in some of our episodes. It was like nineteen nineteen
Speaker 1: when there were all those like race riots around the country,
Speaker 1: or even if you're looking at like the post construction period,
Speaker 1: there's a history both of like gun control being used
Speaker 1: for racist purposes, but also just of communities arming themselves,
Speaker 1: Black communities arming themselves. That is is woefully undertold, although
Speaker 1: it is people are starting to deal with it more thankfully. UM.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of interested in talking to you about sort
Speaker 1: of the culture jamming aspect of we have this huge
Speaker 1: gun culture. Aspects of it are very toxic and becoming
Speaker 1: politicized in a way that is um aggressive, Um, how
Speaker 1: do we how do we have a positive influence and
Speaker 1: kind of hopefully pull things back, because I do think
Speaker 1: within kind of the issue of gun rights, there's more
Speaker 1: actually more possibility for people to sort of come together
Speaker 1: and reaching a chord than there is on something like abortion. UM.
Speaker 1: And I think a lot of that conversation is going
Speaker 1: to start in spaces like the one you inhabit. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I yeah, I like what you say culture jamming, because
Speaker 1: another term I've heard is subversive. Well that's not the intent,
Speaker 1: but like you mentioned the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I talked to when I talked to a
Speaker 1: lot of people that that are really hged historically interested
Speaker 1: in minded, and I was astonished how many people have
Speaker 1: not even heard of it. Never mind you only like
Speaker 1: the explicit realities of it. And so when it comes
Speaker 1: to the culture jamming thing, there's one video I did
Speaker 1: about or two of the events of Red Summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen, one of them here in Bisbee locally, and
Speaker 1: it's an interesting problem to someone who normally would be
Speaker 1: considered as a very standard issue firearms content creator. In
Speaker 1: that particular Red Summer nineteen nineteen episode, it turned into
Speaker 1: the local police attempting to disarm the tenth Cavalry soldiers
Speaker 1: who are off you know, military soldiers in bis beyond recreation.
Speaker 1: And so you've got this interesting cognitive dissonance. Do I
Speaker 1: support the cops that a lot of firearms people are
Speaker 1: like just blindly support, or do I support the military
Speaker 1: which a lot of farms people blindly support. When both
Speaker 1: of them converge and the and it's a racist agenda
Speaker 1: in it. That poses a question that I like to
Speaker 1: do with like this kind of content because it means
Speaker 1: that the viewer has to really, if they get through
Speaker 1: the video, have to introspectively go, Holy funk, which do
Speaker 1: I support or do I support either? Or is there
Speaker 1: a problem here I haven't been considering. I think asking
Speaker 1: questions like that really matters when you try to like
Speaker 1: start these conversations with people who are kind of in
Speaker 1: the same space but but not you know, I haven't
Speaker 1: considered talking about this stuff before or on what would
Speaker 1: traditionally be seen as kind of very opposed political um wing.
Speaker 1: How do you kind of start these conversations in a
Speaker 1: way that makes it most likely that you're gonna be
Speaker 1: able to have a positive dialogue that actually moves forward
Speaker 1: as opposed to kind of getting bogged down in the
Speaker 1: and the things that caused people to just kind of
Speaker 1: lock horns generally when you we start getting into these areas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know, it's totally possible you're gonna
Speaker 1: have that problem no matter what you see that with
Speaker 1: your work. For surely when you take an honest approach
Speaker 1: to history and just be like, here's the facts. Um,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be people that are just gonna be completely
Speaker 1: resistant to that. They're not going to take it. But UM,
Speaker 1: I think the best way to do that is to
Speaker 1: just be that honest approach to it. Like one of
Speaker 1: the things that I think we do with firearms content
Speaker 1: gears cool tech is cool. Guns are neat, They're fun.
Speaker 1: I enjoy shooting with guns. I like the foard of it.
Speaker 1: I like going to competitions. But one of the things
Speaker 1: that gets left out of the conversation a lot is
Speaker 1: what are the implications of arms and the sociological economic
Speaker 1: environments that we live in. And I think that's one
Speaker 1: of the things that didn't get talked about. And so
Speaker 1: if we talk about it fairly and also tend to
Speaker 1: I think it's hard to do, but have people from
Speaker 1: all sides of this perspective, as long as they're not
Speaker 1: completely dangerous and toxic, being part of the conversation. We
Speaker 1: can have a better middle ground. That's the hard part.
Speaker 1: Like so being inclusive, ironically, even of views that you
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily your own, as long as the person you're
Speaker 1: dealing with isn't my line is if you're actively supporting
Speaker 1: bigotry or the harm of other people, there's a no go,
Speaker 1: We're done. But if we have different views but we
Speaker 1: realize that that's not the intent, then then we should
Speaker 1: have a conversation. I think that that's a big difference now.
Speaker 1: I think one of the areas in which this can
Speaker 1: get murkiest is when you are talking to people and
Speaker 1: I've had a few of these conversations who are convinced
Speaker 1: that there is uh that they're kind of on the
Speaker 1: precipice of of a violent conflict sparked by someone coming
Speaker 1: to take their guns right that, and it in you know,
Speaker 1: there's the version of this that is like, I'm worried
Speaker 1: that the a t F is going to do some
Speaker 1: fuckory in a bunch of my ship is going to
Speaker 1: be illegal, which is pretty reasonable. And then there's the
Speaker 1: I'm worried Antifa's going to come to my small town
Speaker 1: and and and take my you know, guns or do
Speaker 1: whatever like Because that there are often people in that
Speaker 1: who are just kind of um tragically misinformed and radicalized
Speaker 1: in a way that they're not so much eager to
Speaker 1: harm people as they are just like broken and frightened
Speaker 1: because of the things that have been fed to them. Um,
Speaker 1: do you have any kind of best practices when it
Speaker 1: comes to sort of approaching those conversations and trying to
Speaker 1: improve the information those people are getting. I guess for
Speaker 1: me in that regardless of what I when I see
Speaker 1: people like that, and I think all of us have
Speaker 1: those people in our world, whether it's your your aunt
Speaker 1: or your uncle or a friend, right, Like we've seen
Speaker 1: that over the last couple of years for sure. Um,
Speaker 1: I think the best thing you can do there for
Speaker 1: me again, I'm just talking to my approach and is
Speaker 1: a break the echo chamber if you can? And so
Speaker 1: the echo chamber of the problem when we suck from
Speaker 1: the fire hose of only one source like NonStop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be dangerous. That's the kind of stuff that
Speaker 1: pollutes your mind to the point where you can't think
Speaker 1: outside of that box. So like being more inclusive and
Speaker 1: that word is kind of a trigger word, a catchphrase,
Speaker 1: but being legitimately more inclusive and presenting a lot of
Speaker 1: different diversity that really is part of the firearms community.
Speaker 1: Can I can in some circumstances break the echo chamber?
Speaker 1: Like I'm really happy with this one. Project on the
Speaker 1: channel where I'm working with the net Evans about specifically
Speaker 1: a female or woman's approach to self defense with firearms,
Speaker 1: and you don't really see that. You'll see like channels
Speaker 1: that are only for women, and you'll see like all
Speaker 1: the majority of gun channels that are only for gun
Speaker 1: fascinated dudes. But like throwing that into the mix, there's
Speaker 1: gonna be some subset of people that will clicking and
Speaker 1: watch it out of that g whiz lewel and that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff can break a paradigm in terms of well,
Speaker 1: I never thought of that. I never looked at it
Speaker 1: from that perspective, And that's at least that's what I
Speaker 1: think is the great answer is do your best to
Speaker 1: make sure you're approachable and try to break the echo chamber. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes complete Yeah, I mean that makes a lot
Speaker 1: of sense. Um. I think on the other side of
Speaker 1: this is also worth talking about because we've kind of
Speaker 1: been focused on how do you break the echo chamber,
Speaker 1: how do you get people who are you know, in
Speaker 1: the gun culture on the right to be more open minded.
Speaker 1: The other side of this is you have a lot
Speaker 1: of people who are kind of liberals um or on
Speaker 1: the left who have a really reflexively negative opinion to
Speaker 1: the reaction to the very idea of gun ownership or
Speaker 1: gun rights and have these you know, you will generally
Speaker 1: see there's there's a mix of people who can come
Speaker 1: to it from a very reasonable and argued point in
Speaker 1: a mix of people who are just going to, like
Speaker 1: in the same way that folks on the right to
Speaker 1: throw out a handful of quotes that they've seen on memes, um,
Speaker 1: that they can use to kind of, you know, shut
Speaker 1: down debate. How do you do you have a lot
Speaker 1: of those conversations where you're kind of trying to make
Speaker 1: people at least more open to because this is something
Speaker 1: my work is dealt with a lot. Is kind of
Speaker 1: trying to sit down to Like, I get why you
Speaker 1: don't think these things should be legal. Um, obviously I
Speaker 1: I see the same mass shooting news that you do.
Speaker 1: There's a problem, a deep problem with guns in this country.
Speaker 1: I don't deny that, But like, let's also talk about
Speaker 1: the idea that the state should have an absolute monopoly
Speaker 1: on on the ability to do violence. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: the ability of marginalized groups to defend themselves. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about the history of gun control and how it's like
Speaker 1: it is it is. There's a lot of conversations that
Speaker 1: kind of get wrapped up in that. Um, I'm wondering,
Speaker 1: do you have thoughts in terms of like how to
Speaker 1: kind of broach those and progressive avenues to go down
Speaker 1: to when you're having that side of the conversation. You know,
Speaker 1: it's totally interesting. I think I feel like I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm curious what you think about this from your work
Speaker 1: as well. I feel like over the last for good reasons,
Speaker 1: over the last couple of years, more than a couple
Speaker 1: of years, I think I've seen, maybe it's just my
Speaker 1: own echo chamber, I've seen a lot of people on
Speaker 1: that side of the political spectrum coming more and more
Speaker 1: around too being pro gun. Yeah. I mean then the
Speaker 1: statistics back that up. Supportive in central in the United
Speaker 1: States is the lowest it's been in quite a while.
Speaker 1: Into that like if there's that joke on that side
Speaker 1: of the political fence, but you go far enough left
Speaker 1: to get your guns back right, um so Um, But
Speaker 1: I think there's been a real wake up call for
Speaker 1: a lot of people that used to be very much
Speaker 1: vehemently against the idea, with some of the stuff they
Speaker 1: saw and went, whoa, Um, this isn't These aren't going away.
Speaker 1: And if you're reasonable, if you're willing to have a
Speaker 1: rational thought about, at least in this country, the reality
Speaker 1: of firearms ownership, whether you like it or not, it's
Speaker 1: not debatable. This is real. It's what it is. They're
Speaker 1: not like they could ban everything tomorrow and there's gonna
Speaker 1: be air fifteens in this country for the next hundred years. Um,
Speaker 1: so that ain't gonna change. So with that realization, maybe
Speaker 1: the maybe the better idea, which I think is with
Speaker 1: all technology, is instead of being afraid of it, is
Speaker 1: to actually learn about it and understand it. Whether you
Speaker 1: want it or not. You but like learning and understanding
Speaker 1: it is at least a step further forward than just
Speaker 1: complete abject fear. Yeah. That that is often kind of
Speaker 1: where I start the conversation with just like we have
Speaker 1: to deal with the reality as it is on the ground,
Speaker 1: which is that there's million firearms and I have at
Speaker 1: hands here, which is not all that far from half
Speaker 1: of all of the guns in the world. Um So
Speaker 1: any any sort of like plan you have, it's the
Speaker 1: kind of like one of the things that often comes
Speaker 1: up in those conversations is Australia and people they were like,
Speaker 1: well they were able to do it after Now Port
Speaker 1: Arthur was Scotland. Um, I forget the name of the massacre,
Speaker 1: but there was a massacre in in in in Australia
Speaker 1: that they banned most kinds of firearms after and confiscated them,
Speaker 1: and it gets brought up a lot were like, well,
Speaker 1: they did this in the short frame of time, and
Speaker 1: there was this this impact on gun violence deaths. Why
Speaker 1: couldn't we do it? And the reason is that they
Speaker 1: had to confiscate a total of two hundred thousand arms
Speaker 1: and there's four hundred million guns in private hands in
Speaker 1: the United States. Um, it's it's a different scale of problem.
Speaker 1: And that that's before we get into sort of illegal
Speaker 1: barriers because Australia didn't have a Second Amendment. Obviously, like
Speaker 1: whether or not you like it, firearms have a level
Speaker 1: of protection that is equivalent to the protection free speech
Speaker 1: enjoys in this country. And you can't just pretend that's
Speaker 1: not the case. There's a tremendous body of jurisprudence around it. Yeah, no, totally,
Speaker 1: and like so that that's that's part of it is
Speaker 1: the reality there Australia and here is a completely different
Speaker 1: beast as well as culturally, like the people that were
Speaker 1: into guns there, and I don't mean to offend any
Speaker 1: Australians listening, but it wasn't like here, like in a
Speaker 1: place of Arizona. At places like Arizona, guns are just
Speaker 1: if you're in Arizona, and they're just intrinsically part of life,
Speaker 1: whether like they're just constant, they're everywhere you go to,
Speaker 1: like you see them open care, not always do she
Speaker 1: open care either. Sometimes it's like reasonable open care. Sometimes
Speaker 1: you see the other side of it. But they're just everywhere.
Speaker 1: It's just part of the deal. And it's like a
Speaker 1: lot of that in a lot of the country. And
Speaker 1: so um I actually think that that fear based ignorance
Speaker 1: of them is more dangerous because then we don't teach
Speaker 1: people what to do around them or how to be
Speaker 1: safe around them, kind of like abstinence, Like education and
Speaker 1: school teach people not to have sen that's fucking dumb,
Speaker 1: that ain't gonna work, and guns exist in this country.
Speaker 1: Does just be afraid of them that don't work either,
Speaker 1: So in the regard, I think that the reality is
Speaker 1: it's much better to to approach this. What I think.
Speaker 1: I guess the way I try to deal with that
Speaker 1: is if you don't fetishize them, people that are more
Speaker 1: afraid of them are less likely to just click away.
Speaker 1: If you talk about them like this is a thing,
Speaker 1: here's what they are. They're not a totem against evil.
Speaker 1: They're just a tool. And here's a historical story or
Speaker 1: narrative or sociological impact of this that's not fetishizing it
Speaker 1: as some religious item. I think that that helps break
Speaker 1: that barrier a little bit. And I think that that
Speaker 1: does bring me to something I think about a lot,
Speaker 1: which is the how you're in and actually has I
Speaker 1: think gotten a bit better than it was prior to
Speaker 1: Sandy Hook, but the very sorry state in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases of advertising of gear and guns. Um. I
Speaker 1: think the most famous example was a I believe it
Speaker 1: was a Bushmaster ad that got pulled after Sandy Hook
Speaker 1: that was like an a R fifteen that came with
Speaker 1: a man card that you would get like with your gun,
Speaker 1: Get your card back. I think it's get your Man
Speaker 1: card back. Your man card has been reissued because you
Speaker 1: have this gun here and that I I you know,
Speaker 1: I've seen a lot of different gun cultures because it's actually,
Speaker 1: like we've just talked about how unique u s gun
Speaker 1: culture is, but a lot of people actually own firearms
Speaker 1: around the world. There's a lot of even like in Europe,
Speaker 1: like France has a very significant gun culture, UM, and
Speaker 1: in Germany you'd be surprised, like people can own a
Speaker 1: lot of the same weapons you can here. There's a
Speaker 1: lot more hoops to jump through to to get access
Speaker 1: to them. Um, But there's still like there's gun cultures
Speaker 1: all around, and especially places like Iraq and Syria. It
Speaker 1: was really going to um when I saw kind of
Speaker 1: the gun culture that I most wanted to put some
Speaker 1: things over to hear from there. It was in northeast
Speaker 1: Syria in Rojava, where like damn near every not every individual,
Speaker 1: but every like family had an a k because in
Speaker 1: part there was this understanding that you have a duty
Speaker 1: from time to time to like patrol and watch your
Speaker 1: neighborhood and not in sort of this like I'm gonna
Speaker 1: set up a checkpoint for Antifa, but in I like, hey,
Speaker 1: isis just carried out a big attack. Let's let's get
Speaker 1: some folks out into the streets to like watch our neighborhoods,
Speaker 1: because that's just the reality of the world, and we
Speaker 1: don't we don't do we don't just have like a
Speaker 1: group of militarized police rolling around every neighborhood. Like, we
Speaker 1: also are responsible for protecting our communities, and so we
Speaker 1: train with weapons. And there was a lot of conversations
Speaker 1: I had with women about like, well, the fact that
Speaker 1: I have this and know how to use it now
Speaker 1: means that things can't be done to me that were
Speaker 1: before because I have an a K forty seven, and
Speaker 1: that means something I would like to port the kind
Speaker 1: of like what you were talking about, not just seeing
Speaker 1: it as a tool, but seeing it as a tool
Speaker 1: with societal responsibilities. You don't just have a gun so
Speaker 1: you can hold up in your house in the zombie apocalypse.
Speaker 1: You have a gun because you're part of a community
Speaker 1: and because there's there's some value that we see in
Speaker 1: members of the community being armed and not just the state. Yeah, no, totally.
Speaker 1: So I mean that goes that kind of goes way
Speaker 1: back to the old like now sort of silly sounding thing,
Speaker 1: but like God made man called me them equal, right,
Speaker 1: so before that, like if you were a frail human being,
Speaker 1: for whatever reasons. Um, you really a sort of defenseless,
Speaker 1: especially in the places like the frontier, but skill at
Speaker 1: arms could change that. And um, and that it puts
Speaker 1: it can put a more balanced power infrastructure in place. UM.
Speaker 1: Not that I want to live in a world, but
Speaker 1: we're always like at this point of mutually assured destruction.
Speaker 1: But it is much better to have more power balanced
Speaker 1: than power imbalance. And firearms absolutely provide that in trained, responsible,
Speaker 1: educated hands. UM. And that's what I think the story
Speaker 1: should be, right, that's the emphasis. Like when when the
Speaker 1: whole thing happened went down in Iraq like you're describing,
Speaker 1: I think it was ironic. One of the things that
Speaker 1: the US military did was allowed every home to have
Speaker 1: an AK, like because you get to keep one gun
Speaker 1: and it's one of these and uh. And you talked
Speaker 1: about gun ownership worldwide like, Um, once you've jumped through
Speaker 1: some of the hurdles in some of these countries, it's
Speaker 1: actually easier to own certain things than you can like
Speaker 1: like for example, Yeah, like a machine gun in the
Speaker 1: US is highly regulated. It's four and pretty difficult and
Speaker 1: highly expensive because of a specially closed market. But like
Speaker 1: bloke on the range, one of the guys I work
Speaker 1: with on on on YouTube, once he gets his permit,
Speaker 1: like he's like, I'm just gonna go buy a fully
Speaker 1: automatic stent, and he just does. And it's not at
Speaker 1: an exorbitant price like it would be in the United States,
Speaker 1: So it's not apples to apples. Like these controls, whether
Speaker 1: we like them or not, some of them are actually
Speaker 1: more liberal than we have in the United States. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think a good example of that, and an
Speaker 1: example of where like a lot of folks who might
Speaker 1: kind of reflexively think this is insane, but like it's silencers,
Speaker 1: you know, suppressors being the more accurate term, but silencer
Speaker 1: is what you call and it's the thing you see
Speaker 1: James Bond screw on the end of his gun to
Speaker 1: make it quiet um. And there's the like this attitude
Speaker 1: that they should be heavily restricted because there's this misnomer
Speaker 1: that for the most part, they make things sound like
Speaker 1: stuff in James Bond. Now, there are some ways to
Speaker 1: get a firearm that is incredibly quiet um, particularly using
Speaker 1: like a smaller round and sub sonic ammunition. There are
Speaker 1: some very some weapons you can effectively make quiet enough
Speaker 1: that people won't notice it. But when you're putting a
Speaker 1: silencer on an a R fifteen, it is not quiet.
Speaker 1: No one will miss it firing. But what it won't
Speaker 1: do if you have to defend yourself in your home
Speaker 1: is shatter your ear drums forever, right, Or this is
Speaker 1: honestly the bigger case for suppressors. If you are hunting
Speaker 1: with an animal, as a lot of people do with
Speaker 1: your dogs, you can have a suppressor on your shotgun
Speaker 1: as your bird hunting or whatever, and you will not
Speaker 1: destroy that dog's ears. Um, you know, it's the same
Speaker 1: thing like I'm hunting for deer. You know, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's easier. Um, it's like less dangerous for you potentially,
Speaker 1: Like I. One thing you know is if you've spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time around hunting dogs, they don't have
Speaker 1: good hearing by the time they get older because they're hunting.
Speaker 1: You know. It's funny suppressors, like everything that's that's more
Speaker 1: controlled has got a allure of magic around it, right, Like, oh,
Speaker 1: a suppressor, a silencer or or for that matter, of
Speaker 1: machine gun, and like therefore it is the forbidden fruit,
Speaker 1: and everyone wants it more than they ever would have.
Speaker 1: Once you own I have one transferable machine guns with
Speaker 1: tax stamped the whole nine yards, and I shoot it
Speaker 1: like once a year, because you shoot it and then
Speaker 1: you're like, wow, that was expensive and fifty bucks and
Speaker 1: it's like, oh we that was fun, and then you
Speaker 1: put it away. And the truth is the sum automatic
Speaker 1: stuff is far more interesting and actually generally more effective.
Speaker 1: What's you use full auto fire? It's got very limited
Speaker 1: use um fully there there, I mean there is like,
Speaker 1: if we again are being complete, there's one mass shooting
Speaker 1: I can think of where a fully automatic weapon made
Speaker 1: the shooter more dangerous and it was the Las Vegas
Speaker 1: shooting because he was in a set fixed position UM.
Speaker 1: He was hold up UM and he had he was
Speaker 1: not like moving and standing. He was like braced while
Speaker 1: firing into a crowd from a building. As a general rule,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about like what's someone going to be
Speaker 1: more dangerous with, if they're somebody who decides to shoot
Speaker 1: up something, it's a semi automatic weapon. Because an automatic
Speaker 1: weapon number one going to jam more often requires a
Speaker 1: bit more understanding and know how on behalf of the user,
Speaker 1: and also is a lot harder to hit with. And
Speaker 1: we'll run out of ammunition very quickly as opposed to
Speaker 1: it and a semi automatic a R fifteen. The reason
Speaker 1: they are so often used in mass shootings is it's
Speaker 1: kind of the best weapon to use for that. If
Speaker 1: that's it's all so prolistic, right, there's like or cordwood
Speaker 1: in this country. You can like, they're literally everywhere. Um,
Speaker 1: the Las Vega shooter, though I don't know that he
Speaker 1: had actually any truly select fire guns, weren't they. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was using a bump stock. I think it's close
Speaker 1: enough to Yeah. Well, no, it's a good analog. But
Speaker 1: it is interesting to note and that guy. What's interesting
Speaker 1: about that guy's um Well, of course his act was
Speaker 1: horrific and evil obvious, but he used a bunch of
Speaker 1: air fifteens with like shitty bump stocks, and he had
Speaker 1: planned something like this for years apparently, Yeah, Tanner right
Speaker 1: in the set up too, which is yeah, no one knows,
Speaker 1: I mean as we know, no one currently. I don't
Speaker 1: know anyone knows what his motivation was, at least it
Speaker 1: hasn't been released. But he had been planning something like
Speaker 1: this for a very long time. And what's ironic about
Speaker 1: that is that if he had bided his time he
Speaker 1: could have actually had a real select fire like belt
Speaker 1: fed machine gun. He just did a millionaire. Yeah he
Speaker 1: could have done that, and uh, um, this could but
Speaker 1: he just went with this bump stocks kind of garbage,
Speaker 1: which is weird. Um. That's a whole other topic, but
Speaker 1: it is and it it is like that is one
Speaker 1: of those cases when you talk to people in the
Speaker 1: right where it's like, after that shooting, Um, Donald Trump
Speaker 1: and his administration banned bump stocks. Um, which is more
Speaker 1: gun control than we got out of eight years of
Speaker 1: Obama's Like you know, oh boy, you point that out,
Speaker 1: at least on the center. In fact, um, Uh, there's
Speaker 1: always this narrative that you know, this political party will
Speaker 1: take your guns and this polaritically party waved. But the
Speaker 1: truth is, statistically and historically speaking, both tend to err
Speaker 1: on the side of trying to add more restrictions over time,
Speaker 1: Like if you do it over time, like Obama didn't.
Speaker 1: In fact of balla open things up. I think he
Speaker 1: liberalized h concealed carry of pistol or firearms in national parks.
Speaker 1: Actually he actually made guns a little easier to deal with. Um.
Speaker 1: But then via essentially executive order edict you've got Trump
Speaker 1: banning bump stocks, which, whether you like bump stocks or not,
Speaker 1: I think the way that went down is questionable legally speaking,
Speaker 1: but that's another topic. And and obviously bump stocks we're
Speaker 1: also somewhat questionable. They were speaking right right, totally totally,
Speaker 1: But but that's that's an interesting precedent with what he
Speaker 1: did was just like fiat edict um. But that that said,
Speaker 1: like historically, over time, there's always been more restrictions, not less,
Speaker 1: from both sides. And when you point that out, the
Speaker 1: people that just kind of drink the kool aid from
Speaker 1: one side or the other, I want to just re
Speaker 1: immediately knee jerk on you. And you're like, no, this
Speaker 1: is weird. This is coming from all directions really, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think it is. It is a big part
Speaker 1: of it is just that, like as a general rule,
Speaker 1: people who are rich and powerful do not want poor
Speaker 1: people to be armed. It doesn't tend to work out
Speaker 1: in their favor. The only time they want poor people
Speaker 1: armed is when they send them to a war they
Speaker 1: decided to have. Yeah, obviously the history of gun controls
Speaker 1: would have lay tied to racism and the Black Panthers
Speaker 1: and a little stuff around California's gun laws being started
Speaker 1: to curb black people from from owning fire arms, and
Speaker 1: so it would be we would be could argue in
Speaker 1: some ways that Reagan had a big role in inventing
Speaker 1: our modern concepts of like what gun control means and
Speaker 1: what kind of gun control laws like liberal states tend
Speaker 1: to go after on open carrying bands, on you know,
Speaker 1: concealed carrying of arms, that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: deeper than this, and there's always nuance to really hard right,
Speaker 1: but like, um, like California, which is kind of one
Speaker 1: of the flagship states of gun control. UM, and I
Speaker 1: think that their methods are bizarre to me and almost
Speaker 1: on not understandable. But like you talk about Reagan, pretty
Speaker 1: much they were like, guns are cool, and then the
Speaker 1: panthers walked around with some guns. Are like, whoa fucking
Speaker 1: we better do something. And uh. Of course, the the
Speaker 1: image of the panthers with their guns out walking down
Speaker 1: the street, which was their legal right, um, and it
Speaker 1: was brad and it motivated um of course a lot
Speaker 1: of things in California, which now we see where where
Speaker 1: that has led in California gun control laws UM has
Speaker 1: also changed the narrative for so many people that are
Speaker 1: unwilling to look at things from a truly broad historical
Speaker 1: perspect That's only one tiny thing the Black Panthers did,
Speaker 1: and the rest of their actions are so lost to
Speaker 1: just the pictures of them standing around them on car beings.
Speaker 1: And that's another example of leaving out, like the sin
Speaker 1: of a mission. We'll talk about one thing, but not
Speaker 1: the rest, and therefore the historical narrative is only one thing,
Speaker 1: and it is also there's a lesson in that for
Speaker 1: people who are on the left and who are advocates
Speaker 1: of gun ownership about what happens in terms of media
Speaker 1: and in terms of how your movement is thought about
Speaker 1: and remembered when guns are a part of it, Because
Speaker 1: that's always going to for a variety of reasons, and
Speaker 1: we can say a lot of those are very unreasonable reasons.
Speaker 1: But if you are a political group who is armed
Speaker 1: and makes that a visible part of your activism, that
Speaker 1: is going to really dominate a lot of conversations. It
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you shouldn't be, but it means you have
Speaker 1: to go into that understanding that like that's just how
Speaker 1: it works in this country. Yeah, you will immediately get
Speaker 1: you will immediately from at least some part of the perspective,
Speaker 1: whatever whatever side you're on, you will immediately get someone
Speaker 1: slinging like streamist militant at you. Yeah. But by the way,
Speaker 1: I mean, those are real things too. There are those.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying there aren't extremists. Yea, we talk about
Speaker 1: them all the time. Yeah, this country is full of them,
Speaker 1: as is the world. So that's not that's not an
Speaker 1: unreasonable thing that does exist. But the minute you go
Speaker 1: ahead and stand with that gun, you're gonna get that label,
Speaker 1: whether it's truly something you earned or not. There's a
Speaker 1: very deep conversation that we've talked about. We've had it
Speaker 1: in in pieces on this program and other shows that
Speaker 1: we've done on Cool Zone about like win makes sense
Speaker 1: to be openly armed and win makes sense to be
Speaker 1: openly armed as part of a group, because that is
Speaker 1: a very fraught question as like the what happened in
Speaker 1: the chas and made abundantly clear, but in you know,
Speaker 1: a bunch of cases Kyle Rittenhouse and whatnot. There's a
Speaker 1: ton of different reasons why choosing to be openly armed. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a debate to be had about like how that
Speaker 1: influences everyone around you had, that influences influences the demonstration.
Speaker 1: And I've seen and heard it used in in good
Speaker 1: ways in an irresponsible ways. I've seen people carrying guns
Speaker 1: at political events in order to intimidate others. I've also
Speaker 1: seen people carrying guns at political events to create essentially
Speaker 1: a buffer where it's like, Okay, there's going to be
Speaker 1: people fighting at this event. There's going to be clashes.
Speaker 1: If we're standing here as a group with guns, there's
Speaker 1: a place people can run back to and the fighting
Speaker 1: won't continue because nobody wants to push that. And that's yeah,
Speaker 1: without talking about specifics of intent in any of those
Speaker 1: situations you already talked about because I can't, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think it does, Like it always comes
Speaker 1: back to this thing of intent. Right. So to me, um,
Speaker 1: you're right for the firearm, absolutely true, regardless, like even
Speaker 1: if I disagree with you, this is a right, like
Speaker 1: we said, it's protected like the First Amendment, it's the
Speaker 1: second um. But I think the problem starts to come
Speaker 1: when you've decided to bring the firearm solely for the
Speaker 1: intended purpose of intimidation, Like that's that's where I start
Speaker 1: getting like this is this is a troubling right. But
Speaker 1: if you're bringing it for personal defense or community defense,
Speaker 1: or there's a need because your community is really at risk.
Speaker 1: I mean one of the examples of a civil rights
Speaker 1: one was this is some someday I'll do a video
Speaker 1: about this. A community knew that the clan was coming
Speaker 1: to intimidate them, and they armed up with surplus m
Speaker 1: one garren's and steel pot helmets, literally dug fighting positions
Speaker 1: and fought them off. The clan ran for their lives.
Speaker 1: No one was killed, but they literally used m one
Speaker 1: grands to uh to stop the clan from manfiltrating their community. Um,
Speaker 1: that was not used as a weapon of intimidation. It
Speaker 1: was used as a weapon of community defense. I think
Speaker 1: that's intent goes everywhere. Yeah, that's fucking dope too. Um
Speaker 1: and yeah, I uh, I think um one thing that
Speaker 1: that that kind of I think there's a conversation that
Speaker 1: needs to be had when we start talking about when
Speaker 1: is reasonable and what situations are reasonable to carry a
Speaker 1: gun opener concealed about also what should be carried. Um,
Speaker 1: I've certainly seen because I don't I think that the
Speaker 1: most harmful thing is certainly people carrying gun to intimidate.
Speaker 1: I've also seen people carry guns as a fashion statement,
Speaker 1: which is not the same thing but as bad. For example,
Speaker 1: people on the left people at a protests bringing a
Speaker 1: loaded mosen um too, because it was the gun the
Speaker 1: communists used, which is like, you don't you don't want
Speaker 1: to be in a firefight in a dense urban environment
Speaker 1: with a mos in negat did you bring? It is
Speaker 1: a gun that doesn't function without a sizeable hammer, you know.
Speaker 1: And of course people on like I remember outside of
Speaker 1: this anti mask rally, these two guys who are up
Speaker 1: and carrying a RS, one of whom had an a
Speaker 1: r tin with with a hundred round drum was talking
Speaker 1: about it. We had like four hundreds something rounds on
Speaker 1: him and it was like and in case stuff pops off,
Speaker 1: and it's like, what are you? Number one? Like, if
Speaker 1: you're talking like that, you've spent no time thinking about
Speaker 1: what actually happens in the situations in public areas in
Speaker 1: which gunfights occur, But because none of them that have
Speaker 1: happened in any time in the recent future have involved
Speaker 1: people needing to four hundred rounds of ammunition or or
Speaker 1: drum magazines or whatever like you are. You are not
Speaker 1: in Fallujah, you are in Salem, Oregon. Um. The extent
Speaker 1: to which a firearm can be useful for uh self defense,
Speaker 1: and that does not like bragging about the number of
Speaker 1: bullets you have is just like weird and gross. You
Speaker 1: know this is gonna come off maybe a little strange
Speaker 1: or even counterintuitive. But when I hear someone like that
Speaker 1: at what you just described in that particular person. First
Speaker 1: of all, that guns barrel would burst in four and
Speaker 1: a rounds, but that's a whole another topic probably, But
Speaker 1: that said, UM, when I hear that, I almost have like, um,
Speaker 1: it's kind of sad because the reason that's sad is
Speaker 1: that person is doing that one because they've been sold
Speaker 1: the idea, but the firearms and talisman like that. To me,
Speaker 1: that person is acting like that's a talisman. Secondarily, the
Speaker 1: reason they have four in a rounds is because they've
Speaker 1: been sold a pretty big bill of fear. And that's
Speaker 1: that's sad for anyone to live a life based on fear. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would agree with that, And I really, um, do
Speaker 1: you have anything else you wanted to get into and this, uh,
Speaker 1: this conversation, well, I don't know. I mean we're just
Speaker 1: here to talk about like community. I just I think
Speaker 1: one thing that's really important and it's something that UM
Speaker 1: is a positive and I'm happy to see this is
Speaker 1: that it was kind of a happy accident with my work.
Speaker 1: I didn't even think about it. It It is hard to happen,
Speaker 1: but this is a much the people people that love,
Speaker 1: first of all, just the sport. There's a lot of us.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of us of all spectrums across the
Speaker 1: board UM. People that believe in the right from the
Speaker 1: person purposes of personal defense and community defense there across
Speaker 1: the board. And I think that one of the things
Speaker 1: that we need to do is not let the narrative
Speaker 1: be only one, which is we see so much of
Speaker 1: UM very much just like right wing I'm gonna usually
Speaker 1: say Christian white males need like completely dominating this conversation
Speaker 1: as though, and they think they owe as a result
Speaker 1: own the space. Now it would be in their interest too,
Speaker 1: from the perspective of preserving fire and rights, to be
Speaker 1: inclusive and have everyone that believes in that a particular
Speaker 1: thing work together to make sure we don't lose a right,
Speaker 1: because the right unexercised is lost right. So even if
Speaker 1: I disagree with you on economic policy, but we agree
Speaker 1: on firearms rights. We have an agreement there, and that
Speaker 1: makes us somehow interestingly in the same space. We have
Speaker 1: something in common versus something diversive, and I think that
Speaker 1: part of the conversation, at least within reason. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are people that are legitimately dangerous, you don't negotiate
Speaker 1: with them, but within reason, like agreeing on that topic
Speaker 1: means well, we've got something in common here. There's probably
Speaker 1: other things too, and maybe that could be a place
Speaker 1: where we kind of try to make that conversation better,
Speaker 1: not worse. And so by being more open inclusive and saying, hey,
Speaker 1: there's people here and people there and here we are
Speaker 1: all together doing this together. Um, perhaps conversation can be
Speaker 1: had that's better than what we've been having. Maybe it
Speaker 1: can be actually a community builder versus a community destroyer. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would like to see that. Um well, I think
Speaker 1: that's as good a note as any to uh to
Speaker 1: close out on car You wanna you want to throw
Speaker 1: your plug ables up before we were right out of here? Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: I mean so I run in range TV. You can
Speaker 1: find me an in range dot TV, um completely viewer
Speaker 1: supported like I said, I don't wanty sponsors or anything
Speaker 1: I like. I like the idea of the people liking
Speaker 1: watching it support it. So if you like it cool,
Speaker 1: come check it out all over the place. YouTube bit
Speaker 1: shoot decentralized video contrat distributions another thing I believe in
Speaker 1: strong would the corporate oligarchy. But yeah, come out. If
Speaker 1: you want to have a little bit different take on
Speaker 1: fire and stuff, or you're just in in the confluence
Speaker 1: of civil rights and guns and stuff, come check out
Speaker 1: in Range TV. I'd appreciate I always appreciate new viewers,
Speaker 1: and thanks for checking it out. Awesome, all right, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: check out in Range TV, and uh check us out somewhere.
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Speaker 1: Plus each week you'll hear hilarious stories like this at
Speaker 1: the end when he says you got some schmid on
Speaker 1: your face. I feel like I pitched that job. I
Speaker 1: believe that I feel like I did. I'm not on
Speaker 1: a thousand percent. I want to say that was I
Speaker 1: tossed that one out. Listen to the Welcome to Our
Speaker 1: Show podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts. So I Burnett X.
Speaker 1: All right, this is this is me Christopher Wong, realizing
Speaker 1: that I have done like sixteen consecutive actual real introductions
Speaker 1: and that if I keep doing them, everyone's gonna expect
Speaker 1: that I do a real introduction every time instead of
Speaker 1: like randomly yelling something. So yeah, well, welcome to it
Speaker 1: could happen here. I am trying to make my job
Speaker 1: function as it should and not professionalize it. Um and
Speaker 1: this is this is a podcast about beings that are bad,
Speaker 1: but it's also occasionally a podcast about things that are
Speaker 1: good and how, in fact, there can be a society
Speaker 1: beyond this one, and to talk about some of the
Speaker 1: shades of what that could look like. I have with
Speaker 1: me the co host of the General Intellect Unit Kyle
Speaker 1: and June, which is a podcast on the Emancipation Network.
Speaker 1: That is I to this is the tagline the podcast
Speaker 1: of the Cybernetic Marxists. I am. I am very excited. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's really exciting to be here. Absolutely, thank you
Speaker 1: for coming on. Um yeah, I guess okay, we should
Speaker 1: start at the the very very beginning, because I don't
Speaker 1: think most people know any of this. What is cybernetics, right? Um, so,
Speaker 1: cybernetics is I guess a term that comes from what
Speaker 1: is it the Kaibernetes right, steering, uh, the idea of
Speaker 1: steering a boat um, so using your ore to navigate
Speaker 1: the waters. Um. And so essentially it is a science
Speaker 1: of control. And that sounds really scary, but what it
Speaker 1: means is that it's that kind of connection between the
Speaker 1: steers person, the oar, the boat, their body and the
Speaker 1: water around them and getting all of those things in
Speaker 1: sync in such a way that the steers person is
Speaker 1: going where they want to go, the ship or the
Speaker 1: boat doesn't capsize and they don't lose the ore um.
Speaker 1: And so that's what control means. It's a kind of balancing,
Speaker 1: a kind of connection between the organism and the ironment
Speaker 1: in such a way that it can survive and thrive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's what cybernexs is focused on. Yeah. The thing
Speaker 1: I love about them, the steersman metaphor is that like
Speaker 1: it's all about it's control in the sense of regulation,
Speaker 1: but also like very importantly in cybernetics, it's almost always
Speaker 1: self regulation um because like the one of the kind
Speaker 1: of core principles. Again, like the because the term usually
Speaker 1: calls to mind this like kind of terminator like UM
Speaker 1: like cybergothic kind of domination. It's actually not what the
Speaker 1: field is about at all. It's UM because one of
Speaker 1: the core insights of cybernetics is actually that any given
Speaker 1: system UM, the only thing that can really control it
Speaker 1: is itself because of the sheer complexity of systems. So
Speaker 1: that like UM, like the kind of like top down
Speaker 1: external domination of an organism that we all fear is
Speaker 1: kind of like actually, if you look at the cyber
Speaker 1: cyberanetics literature, that's not not actually really possible because the
Speaker 1: the the the external controller would never have enough complexity
Speaker 1: to match what the organism is capable of. UM. And
Speaker 1: you know, organisms are self regulating systems. The steersman with
Speaker 1: his boat is a self regulating system that like regulates
Speaker 1: its upright position in the water and regulates its course
Speaker 1: that's directed towards its goal. UM. So it's it's that's
Speaker 1: why it's so important. I think that's why we think
Speaker 1: it's so important for the left and like people who
Speaker 1: are concerned with these like you know, visions of a
Speaker 1: politics of autonomy and liberation that really need to look
Speaker 1: at this stuff, because it turns out there kind of
Speaker 1: is a science of like autonomous self guiding organic systems.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, no terminator here, yes, and yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you know when you see uh, scary videos of
Speaker 1: militarized robots and they're learning to you know, jump and
Speaker 1: fire weapons ends and all that kind of stuff. There
Speaker 1: certainly is cybernetics involved there, but that is a kind
Speaker 1: of domain application of cybernetics. Rather than defining what cybernetics is,
Speaker 1: it's really kind of holistic systems thinking in general is
Speaker 1: what cybernetics is. Yeah, yeah, that that's that. That's that's
Speaker 1: probably worth emphasizing, right that, Like um, um, cybernetics in
Speaker 1: some ways is kind of like out of fashion these days,
Speaker 1: like it kind of evolved into systems thinking and like, um,
Speaker 1: I guess a lot of its lessons got kind of
Speaker 1: absorbed in general. But we find there's great value in
Speaker 1: going back to them, the kind of originators and like
Speaker 1: focusing on that field. It's like we on the show,
Speaker 1: we got into the cybernetics angle by reading Andrew Pickering
Speaker 1: in his book The Cybernetic Brain, in which um, he
Speaker 1: kind of acknowledged that like there's he kind of split
Speaker 1: it intoo, like there's American cybernetics like which had that
Speaker 1: kind of like um dour kind of military domination sort
Speaker 1: of flavor to it. That like it's kind of an
Speaker 1: earned reputation there. But Pickering was more concerned with like
Speaker 1: British cybernetics, Um, it's like a lot of British thinkers
Speaker 1: that and it had a very different flavor there where
Speaker 1: it was more open ended. It was kind of had
Speaker 1: more of a focus on kind of liberation than like
Speaker 1: politics and stuff. And in fact, some of those like
Speaker 1: Gray Walter was like explicitly an anarchist, like wrote in
Speaker 1: Anarchist UM like journals and stuff like that, um. And
Speaker 1: for him, like those two things went hand in glove
Speaker 1: right like that, like um liberatory politics as like um,
Speaker 1: the politics of like human flourishing, like as human human
Speaker 1: beings as autonomous units flourishing in their own contexts, and
Speaker 1: of like social systems that would enable that kind of flourishing.
Speaker 1: To him, that was just hand in glove with cybernetics.
Speaker 1: There was no real distinction there. It was just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: these these two things fit each other perfectly, which you
Speaker 1: lose later with like general systems theory sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like there's there's plenty. I don't know
Speaker 1: whom I think here like them like the Tally, that
Speaker 1: guy with the like black swansor to stuff like he's
Speaker 1: biggest system and stuff. But like isn't so much um
Speaker 1: isn't so much into the libratory politics. I guess you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of that angle is kind of lost. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think this is awesome. This is you know,
Speaker 1: this is sort of a product of, I guess, the
Speaker 1: broader ideological course that's going on while such a cyberie
Speaker 1: comes in and out of fashion. I think I think
Speaker 1: we should go back a bit to the begetting to
Speaker 1: sort of situate this because I know, like when I
Speaker 1: like before I ever did any reading, What's ever next,
Speaker 1: Like my immediate assumption was that it was it was
Speaker 1: you know, this, this is the thing that was entirely
Speaker 1: just based off of computers, right that this is like
Speaker 1: this is and that's not really true from might understandtanding
Speaker 1: of us. Can we go back and sort of like
Speaker 1: talk about where this came from a bit and how
Speaker 1: it's sort of moves over this over sert of the
Speaker 1: sexes and yeah, go from there. Yeah, I think you
Speaker 1: can kind of trace it back in it's sort of
Speaker 1: European origins to UM. You could probably say Hagel, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know his his move towards like UM understanding being
Speaker 1: not just as substance but as subject I think is
Speaker 1: a move towards a kind of cybernetic understanding where you
Speaker 1: understand the whole system as a holistic entity as opposed
Speaker 1: to just an individual interacting with an external environment. UM.
Speaker 1: And you can also see this come up in say
Speaker 1: there was a ecologist X skill in the German ecologists
Speaker 1: in the early twentieth century, I believe, who was trying
Speaker 1: to understand, you know, the organism in its environment. Uh.
Speaker 1: The sort of precursors to ecology can be seen as
Speaker 1: precursors to cybernetics UM. And then when you get to
Speaker 1: the kind of development of cybernetics as a science or
Speaker 1: as a discipline UM in the mid twentieth century, it's
Speaker 1: not exactly about computing it's UM. It's more about balancing
Speaker 1: a machine with its environment. So UM. The sort of
Speaker 1: prototypical UM machine of this kind was the servo mechanism,
Speaker 1: which was used to help guide a like an anti
Speaker 1: aircraft gun in shooting down enemy aircraft. So making sure
Speaker 1: it tracks properly with the target, it doesn't lose the target,
Speaker 1: and is assisting the operator in operating the gun instead
Speaker 1: of just being a inanimate object that has trouble tracking
Speaker 1: what it's a very fast moving target. I mean, you
Speaker 1: can even think back to like the you know, in
Speaker 1: World War One when they discovered, hey, we could actually
Speaker 1: like synchronize the timing of the propeller and the timing
Speaker 1: of our gun on the front of this plane so
Speaker 1: that our guns aren't destroying our propellers and shooting and
Speaker 1: we're we're we're shooting our own planes down with our
Speaker 1: guns when we're dog fighting, right, Like It's yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the system's understanding, right. So that's um, that's that's Norbert
Speaker 1: Leonard Rice and working on the m automated gun turret stuff.
Speaker 1: And that's he coins the term cybernetics to like um
Speaker 1: given name to the thing he was starting to discover.
Speaker 1: And it's like he was kind of pulling to other
Speaker 1: a bunch of rights there, and like one of those
Speaker 1: kind of important insights is that like, um, like they
Speaker 1: couldn't get an improvement in like targeting and accuracy without
Speaker 1: like basically making the gun turret and agent of its
Speaker 1: own that link and the like the turret and the
Speaker 1: gunner would be cooperative agents that in combination would m
Speaker 1: achieve their goal. But like there was there was there's
Speaker 1: something strange and spooky about that. And I think that
Speaker 1: then this feedback mechanism inside the turret gives it a
Speaker 1: sort of weird agency that combines with the agency of
Speaker 1: the gunner to like guide to the whole system towards
Speaker 1: the goal um. Yes. And what it ends up becoming
Speaker 1: then is a kind of boundary space where the distinction
Speaker 1: between human and machine UH starts to become ambiguous because
Speaker 1: they both start to possess they're both understood to have
Speaker 1: a kind of agency, they're both understood to have kinds
Speaker 1: of like functions, And then you kind of get this
Speaker 1: sort of like human machine interface idea, and you can
Speaker 1: start to bring in all of these different ideas from
Speaker 1: like anthropology, from physiology, from math, from ecology, UH, and
Speaker 1: they all start to interact in this domain of cybernetics.
Speaker 1: And like the core, the core idea of them that
Speaker 1: kind of ties everything together is that of feedback. UM. So,
Speaker 1: like weener realizes that what he needs to do achieve
Speaker 1: this goal is is a feedback mechanism, and that would
Speaker 1: is error correcting feedback, right like if the if the
Speaker 1: gun is slightly too far to the left, it corrects
Speaker 1: itself right words and so on. UM. But that, as
Speaker 1: you said, that that connects across all sorts of things, right,
Speaker 1: Like you start to realize that's present everywhere in ecology,
Speaker 1: in neurology, in UM, like that learning is based on feedback,
Speaker 1: you know. So it's really funny to read to read
Speaker 1: Norbet Leaner like in the fifties basically describing what would
Speaker 1: become machine learning, and he's just like he just off
Speaker 1: the coff is like, yeah, like if you could, if
Speaker 1: a machine could like UM, or if if any system
Speaker 1: could just like UM analyze its own performance and then
Speaker 1: feedback onto itself, it would it would learn any old
Speaker 1: pattern you wanted it to. And he's like yeah, he
Speaker 1: turns out he was completely correct. And that's that's where
Speaker 1: kind of like gets into like you get later thinkers
Speaker 1: like Ross Ashby who was UM and like other folks
Speaker 1: like we in in and around psychiatry, we were like
Speaker 1: really interested in how the brain worked. And that's that's
Speaker 1: the other thing that feeds into like cybernetics is like, um,
Speaker 1: it's It's why Pickering called his book the Cybernetic Brains,
Speaker 1: because like the brain and like nervous systems show up
Speaker 1: so much in that field, right that, Like the brain
Speaker 1: being a kind of learning and adapt an adapt adaptation
Speaker 1: machine attached to the body or whatever, and like, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, there's there's something fascinating there, and like, um,
Speaker 1: the I mean there's something kind of possibly troubling and
Speaker 1: kind of melting down the distinctions between living organisms and
Speaker 1: machines or whatever, but like there's also something very compelling
Speaker 1: and just like recognizing the same patterns happening at all
Speaker 1: these different levels, right that, Like um, like you get
Speaker 1: similar behaviors and similar kind of outcomes, and then you know,
Speaker 1: it turns out like you can kind of do with
Speaker 1: science on these things and and come up with even
Speaker 1: better explanatory frameworks based on your observations across many fields. Yes,
Speaker 1: and so it is in a sense about computers. But
Speaker 1: the computers are really just understood to act like a
Speaker 1: kind of brain and that's connected to a nervous system
Speaker 1: which is connected to you know, like actuators of some
Speaker 1: kinds some kinds of like machines that actually do things
Speaker 1: in the world. So it's not about like say computer
Speaker 1: science specifically, it's more about, like, well, computers are a
Speaker 1: useful way to do cybernetic design because they can act
Speaker 1: as a control system and they're flexible. It's not that
Speaker 1: this is about computers really, yeah, yeah, absolutely, And like
Speaker 1: that you brought you brought up something very important there
Speaker 1: that like, um, in all cases of like cybernetics, like
Speaker 1: the the systems that we're considering are not like isolated
Speaker 1: like braining a box kind of things. They're all the
Speaker 1: things that are directly engaged with a world, um Like.
Speaker 1: So it's it's not that kind of like monatic kind
Speaker 1: of rationalism of like computation just happening in a box
Speaker 1: somewhere and like perfect intelligence and that kind of the
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. These are always, like the separantations, are
Speaker 1: always working with systems that were engaged in real time
Speaker 1: emergence situations UM. And because of that, they rapidly kind
Speaker 1: of like acknowledge that for so many of these system
Speaker 1: is the only way to figure out what it's going
Speaker 1: to do is to let it do it UM because
Speaker 1: you can't like pre compute all the possible outcomes. You know,
Speaker 1: of these like very sticky and complex real world situations,
Speaker 1: the best way to figure out what it's going to
Speaker 1: do is to let it do it and watch. Yes.
Speaker 1: And I think I think that's an interesting sort of
Speaker 1: like if if you look at where a lot of
Speaker 1: the sort of like techno fetishists like social attempts to
Speaker 1: sort of like manipulate a side e technology of God,
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, you get like like blockchain smart contracts,
Speaker 1: and it's like the blockchain smart contract is like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're going to think of literally everything that could possibly
Speaker 1: happen an attempt to put it in like a very
Speaker 1: small amount of code, and if anything like literally anything
Speaker 1: at all happens that you know that we didn't expect.
Speaker 1: Where now everyone is now screwed because we have just
Speaker 1: made this thing imautable and put it in such a
Speaker 1: way that we can't change it. Yeah, I think that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a I think this is a useful sort of
Speaker 1: I mean corrective just it just in the way that
Speaker 1: we've we've we've now like like we've gone backwards, like
Speaker 1: we've we've gotten into this place where you instead of
Speaker 1: like we need to let these systems play out, we
Speaker 1: need to let them control themselves. We've gotten to like
Speaker 1: we think that we can actually just sort of like
Speaker 1: you know, turn turn the entire system into code that
Speaker 1: we can break ahead of time and have you know,
Speaker 1: the basis of some sort of social system off of Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's I think it's something that like the
Speaker 1: Sarpetitions and like maybe Pickering what described as like a
Speaker 1: kind of perversity of modern cost like the modern mindsets
Speaker 1: like that, that kind of like rational like um kind
Speaker 1: of mindset right like um, and like to the sarpetitions,
Speaker 1: that that whole thing with like the bloock chain stuff
Speaker 1: will be just truly laughable because it's immediate, It's immediately
Speaker 1: obvious to them that the problem. There's like, okay, proposing
Speaker 1: we're going to use a blockchain to regulate some sort
Speaker 1: of social process or whatever, smart contracts, whatever, and it's
Speaker 1: like that thing has nowhere near the fidelity required to
Speaker 1: regulate social processes. Because social processes are unimaginably complex and
Speaker 1: have just incredible variety. There's a there's a there's like
Speaker 1: a law that's at the House of Cybernattics called Ashby's
Speaker 1: Law of requisite variety, And in short, it basically states
Speaker 1: that given a system um, the only thing that's really
Speaker 1: capable of regulating is regulating it is itself, because a
Speaker 1: regulator needs as much variety as the thing it's regulating
Speaker 1: if it's gonna like actually succeeded it um. And so
Speaker 1: that's that's the kind of thing that nudges everyone towards,
Speaker 1: like like when you get to someone like Stafford Beer
Speaker 1: is his whole model of like organization pushes all a
Speaker 1: lot of the intelligence downwards to the to the bottom layers,
Speaker 1: because there is basically the people on the ground on
Speaker 1: the shop floor are the people who are best informed
Speaker 1: to actually deal with their own situation. And that's that
Speaker 1: sounds like a banal observation, but like it for Beer
Speaker 1: that was actually quite a step forward to like just
Speaker 1: admit that like trying to trying to like in his context,
Speaker 1: it was like often the organization of a firm, like
Speaker 1: at our company, like trying to manage a company from
Speaker 1: the boardroom is just fucking ludicrous, Like no nobody there
Speaker 1: has enough information to act on They're all dumbasses anyway.
Speaker 1: So for Beer, it was just like this is where
Speaker 1: it starts to get interesting and it connects to the politics,
Speaker 1: right that like for one of these scientists just observing
Speaker 1: reality and like you know, using you know, pretty pretty
Speaker 1: good stray intuitions and like scientific frameworks, just looking at
Speaker 1: it and going like, oh, it is obviously the case
Speaker 1: that the best way for society to organize is bottom
Speaker 1: up self organization. Um. And that that like it's not
Speaker 1: just a moral point, it's actually a technical point as well,
Speaker 1: that like, um, these these top down, bureaucratic kind of
Speaker 1: micro tyrannies are not only morally objectionable, they're also technically
Speaker 1: inferior to the kind of like cyber communism we want
Speaker 1: to institute. Yeah, and I have like what if one
Speaker 1: of my what if? What of my favorite stories about
Speaker 1: So I worked as a maintenance worker for a while
Speaker 1: and one day my boss was like, there's some problem
Speaker 1: with a sink. And my boss was like, no, we
Speaker 1: don't need the plumbers. I can do this. And so
Speaker 1: he goes in there and it's it's what it's like,
Speaker 1: it's it's like a sink in like a building, right,
Speaker 1: So it's it has just one of those things that
Speaker 1: there's like a pipe that connects to the top of
Speaker 1: the sink to like the wall, and he goes, okay, here,
Speaker 1: look at this, I'm gonna I'm gonna turn this valve
Speaker 1: and this is gonna turn the water off. And what
Speaker 1: he instead does is he take he takes the pipe
Speaker 1: off of the wall and just like a torrent of
Speaker 1: water is just now shooting out of this pipe because
Speaker 1: he has removed the thing. Yeah, he's removed the pipe
Speaker 1: from the wall. This is you know, this is this
Speaker 1: is why I think like, yeah, go this this, this,
Speaker 1: this this, you know this this is like a particularly
Speaker 1: funny example of how these sort of top down management systems.
Speaker 1: And this guy like like used to be a maintenance guy, right,
Speaker 1: but he just like most a plumber and so you know,
Speaker 1: and he accepts into it and he's like, oh no, no no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: hold on, I know I know how this system works.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be fine. And it just there is a
Speaker 1: guys like the guys are of water has so much
Speaker 1: force to it's like it's like pushing our tool cart
Speaker 1: across the room. It's like a fighter hydrants come out
Speaker 1: with walk now I wanted to I guess beers is
Speaker 1: an interesting way to go to go into the sort
Speaker 1: of the politics of what this actually looks like. Do
Speaker 1: you want to talk about and I know I briefly
Speaker 1: talked about this in an episode in The Liberalism a
Speaker 1: while back, but do you want to go into sort
Speaker 1: of more detail into what Beers was up to and
Speaker 1: the eventually failed attempt, because of military coup to try
Speaker 1: to implement like a cybernetic system for organizing essentially an economy. Yeah, sure, um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Stafford Beer was a UM management consultant UM he
Speaker 1: and a cyberneticition. He got his star sort of doing
Speaker 1: operations research UM, which is kind of a precursor to
Speaker 1: cybernetics UM that is kind of like interested in logistics
Speaker 1: and organizing systems UM in the British military UM in
Speaker 1: World War Two. And then he came out of that
Speaker 1: and became a corporate UH consultant for operations Research and
Speaker 1: Management UM. And so in working in the corporate world UM,
Speaker 1: he saw all of the things that were really screwed
Speaker 1: up with the status quo UM way of doing business
Speaker 1: and of organizing things, you know, the way that autocratic
Speaker 1: power of management creates all kinds of ridiculous problems, the
Speaker 1: way that managing organizations. According to org charts, which are
Speaker 1: there to assign blame more than anything else, creates all
Speaker 1: kinds of perversities, the way that organizations fail to adapt
Speaker 1: to their environments because they get into these kinds of
Speaker 1: strange neuroses. Um. And you know, just sort of going
Speaker 1: through all of that and more often than not being
Speaker 1: unable to intervene in an effective way uh to um
Speaker 1: address these problems and just sort of like seeing how
Speaker 1: these little instances of perverse corporate culture are indicative of
Speaker 1: the broader problems of our society as a whole and
Speaker 1: of capitalism, right. Um. And so you know, he had
Speaker 1: a basis from his time in India during the Second
Speaker 1: World War in uh kind of like tontra uh kind
Speaker 1: of like you know, Eastern or specifically Indian um, spirituality, yoga,
Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff. So he kind of had
Speaker 1: a cult countercultural side to his personality. UM. And he
Speaker 1: was always doing tinkering strange experiments with cybernetics. He wasn't
Speaker 1: just the straight lace corporate guy. Uh. But it was
Speaker 1: a combination of that sort of countercultural background with his
Speaker 1: growing frustration with corporate systems that led him to start
Speaker 1: to develop ideas about how things could be different and
Speaker 1: this kind of meshed up with the thoughts that were
Speaker 1: happening in Chile during the Chilean Revolution in the early seventies.
Speaker 1: Um So they reached out to him to come and
Speaker 1: help out with organizing their economy as they were undergoing
Speaker 1: this revolutionary process of trying to sort of throw off
Speaker 1: the shackles of imperialist dependency and create a society that
Speaker 1: was focused on the flourishing of workers, h end of
Speaker 1: society as a whole, as opposed to one that was
Speaker 1: based on sort of you know, resource extraction where everything
Speaker 1: flows to the top. Yeah, you want to explain some
Speaker 1: more about how that went well? So, um yeah, it
Speaker 1: it went well and then it went badly, I guess.
Speaker 1: Um But from from from the reading we've done and
Speaker 1: from our research, it seems like if basically, if the
Speaker 1: if the US hadn't sent in the fascists to kill
Speaker 1: them all, um this this would have worked. Like it
Speaker 1: was working, and it was that the project was actually
Speaker 1: going pretty well. We explained briefly what like I think
Speaker 1: it becomes it's called product cybersyme, But what exactly is
Speaker 1: like what was it doing? So? Um so, like Beer's
Speaker 1: big kind of innovation is what we call the viable
Speaker 1: system model or VSM, and it's a model that's, um
Speaker 1: it's a model for these like autonomous social systems that
Speaker 1: is kind of taking It's not I wouldn't say it's
Speaker 1: entirely based on like the structure of the human body,
Speaker 1: but it's like taking a lot of lessons from biology
Speaker 1: and neurology and neuroscience and and cybernetics and just kind
Speaker 1: of meshing them all together. Um. So, basically, like it's
Speaker 1: like if your body is basically a bunch of autonomous
Speaker 1: organs that all take care of their own business, plus
Speaker 1: a nervous system that synchronizes them and unifies them into
Speaker 1: a workable hole, then you can kind of see the
Speaker 1: whole system as having this kind of mixture of vertical
Speaker 1: and horror suntal aspects. Like on the one hand, it
Speaker 1: has this horizontal aspect where the autonomous like system one
Speaker 1: units are are well autonomous, more or less like the
Speaker 1: harsh takes harsh takes care of its own thing. The
Speaker 1: lungs take care of their own thing. But then the
Speaker 1: nervous system meshes them together in layers so that it
Speaker 1: can say, oh, hold on too much oxygen dial it
Speaker 1: down a bit, and then the organs responds dynamically to
Speaker 1: those those signals, right, So it's kind of like up
Speaker 1: down feedback loops, right where then the lower levels of
Speaker 1: the system are the smart bits that are doing all
Speaker 1: the important work. But there's this supporting infrastructure of the
Speaker 1: nervous system in the brain that unifies the whole thing
Speaker 1: and keeps it all on the rails. Um So, and
Speaker 1: importantly it's a kind of recursive model. So like a
Speaker 1: human being is an autonomous unit, and then that it's
Speaker 1: that unit is composed of more autonomous units, like the
Speaker 1: organs and the muscles, and then each of those is
Speaker 1: composed of cells which are autonomous units, and then you know,
Speaker 1: so on. But like that latter goes upwards as well,
Speaker 1: so that like a team is an autonomous unit composed
Speaker 1: of human beings, a firm, or like a department, is
Speaker 1: a autonomous unit composed of teams. A firm is composed
Speaker 1: of departments, like a secretor is composed of firms. And
Speaker 1: it's the same kind of structure at each layer. Um.
Speaker 1: So that the kind of upside there is that like, um,
Speaker 1: you don't like you kind of have a unit fairly
Speaker 1: unifying like set of principles and like a science for
Speaker 1: doing this kind of like coordination of autonomous units at
Speaker 1: every level, at every every layer of society. So like
Speaker 1: in principle, the sort of like the serbonetic principles that
Speaker 1: get applied to cohering members of a team are the
Speaker 1: same storty of principles that get applied to like sectors
Speaker 1: in an economy. Um, with the same kind of you know,
Speaker 1: bottom up kind of feedback online as well. Um. So
Speaker 1: Stafford was invited to Chile to by the in a
Speaker 1: government in so that that was like nineteen seventy, right, Um,
Speaker 1: that that that election happened. So he arrived in late
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy I think, Um, I mean certain on the timeline,
Speaker 1: but we're looking at those those first few years of
Speaker 1: the seventies as as the time when this is happening. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I d elected in set in nicktey seventy. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's towards the end of that year that he's he's
Speaker 1: invited and he's basically kind of given the task of like, hey,
Speaker 1: do all this stuff but with this entire economy, and
Speaker 1: he's like, yeah, sure, cool, Um, so puts together projects
Speaker 1: cybersen UM and there's kind of long story there of
Speaker 1: like and then building out this kind of infrastructure and
Speaker 1: like it's it's all highly experimental UM and highly tensive.
Speaker 1: Like they one of the big problems they run into
Speaker 1: is that like they don't have very much in the
Speaker 1: way of like hardcare, especially because they're under embargo. So
Speaker 1: they had like, um a pretty what at the time
Speaker 1: was a pretty crafty old mainframe that they ran the
Speaker 1: around the software on UM. But like step step one
Speaker 1: was like UM installing this like huge communications network amongst
Speaker 1: all the factories and UM like setting up like the
Speaker 1: workers committees and stuff. Would feed information into it and
Speaker 1: it would kind of again this like feedback thing where
Speaker 1: you kind of take signals from the economy, integrate them,
Speaker 1: and then go, oh, you're producing too much steel, Route
Speaker 1: some of your product over to this this factory and
Speaker 1: it will be better used there. And then you know,
Speaker 1: you guys over there turn up this dial, you turn
Speaker 1: them down this dial. So and then if that plan
Speaker 1: doesn't quite work out, then you've got another layer of
Speaker 1: feedback tomorrow to say, Okay, that plan didn't quite work,
Speaker 1: here's an adjusted plan. So it's it's just like both
Speaker 1: bottom up and top down sort of loop of feedback.
Speaker 1: That's like, I think that the phrase pickering is is
Speaker 1: reciprocal adaptation where the economy and its firms and its
Speaker 1: workers are all kind of adapting to each other in
Speaker 1: real time in a kind of in a in a
Speaker 1: full system. UM. Uh, yes, no, that I mean, that's
Speaker 1: that's essentially what Cyberson was. It was a system designed
Speaker 1: too largely, I think, at first supplement the market, although
Speaker 1: Beer later realizes that like, actually, if you have a
Speaker 1: good system of this kind, you probably don't need a market. Um.
Speaker 1: But essentially it was like, Okay, our economy has been
Speaker 1: one that has been built around dependence too, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: especially the United States, and it's been organized in that way,
Speaker 1: and we need to reorganize the economy both to promote
Speaker 1: the well being of the workers, the autonomy of the workers,
Speaker 1: realized the ideals of socialism in that way, and also
Speaker 1: to create a system that is less dependent on those
Speaker 1: existing structures of imperialism. And so having this reciprocal adaptation UM,
Speaker 1: having systems in place to connect things that were previously
Speaker 1: disconnected would allow you to move in that way of
Speaker 1: increasing autonomy and increasing freedom. UM. And that was generally
Speaker 1: the idea of cyber sin Um. Yes, and there was
Speaker 1: something very interesting like when we were reading the reissue
Speaker 1: of his book Brain of the Firm, where he has
Speaker 1: a section the end that that documents this whole experience
Speaker 1: in chile Um, there's a really interesting parents where towards
Speaker 1: the end of it he's like, and this is like
Speaker 1: getting up towards the coupe where he's like, um, he
Speaker 1: and the other cyber Sinem operatives, like the people are
Speaker 1: putting this together, realize that like the workers and link
Speaker 1: people in towns are are like just on their own,
Speaker 1: just like using this stuff and these kind of principles
Speaker 1: to just like abolish the value form basically like but
Speaker 1: notably without the involvement from above, like as in Beer
Speaker 1: and Company, stumble upon this just happening where they're like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, they're just they're just dismantling the market,
Speaker 1: and it's like it's all just kind of happening, and
Speaker 1: that's there was something really wonderful to that then, Like
Speaker 1: it it indicated like there was there really wants something
Speaker 1: to it that like you could like as in people working,
Speaker 1: people could use these tools and this like new way
Speaker 1: of organizing themselves. Two just like liquidate market relations and
Speaker 1: wage relations like spun spontaneously. But it's it's a spontaneity
Speaker 1: that's that's not really it. It's it feels very different
Speaker 1: from the kind of spontaneity you often get in it,
Speaker 1: like the way leftist sort of anarchists talk about it often,
Speaker 1: like the kind of spontaneity is like a magical sort
Speaker 1: of thing, which is like where freedom just arrives from
Speaker 1: out of nowhere. But this this was like installing infrastructure
Speaker 1: to enable freedom and then it actually kind of happening
Speaker 1: until the fascists showed up. You know. Yeah, what I
Speaker 1: think is really interesting about it is that so you know,
Speaker 1: you have you have like you have the sort of
Speaker 1: central control center from which a lot of stuff is
Speaker 1: being run. But you know, yeah, it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a weird system because it's trying to link together
Speaker 1: like a lot of different kinds of firms. Like you
Speaker 1: have something saying in private firms, but you have a
Speaker 1: lot of you have a lot of state run firms.
Speaker 1: You also have firms that throughout this whole process, people
Speaker 1: like workers just taking over factories, they're setting up these
Speaker 1: sort of like call them industrial cordons. I think I'm
Speaker 1: remembering way Spanish rights, Like yeah, they they you know,
Speaker 1: they start setting up their own institutions, and it's it's
Speaker 1: this becomes this way is sort of like networking these
Speaker 1: groups together. And the thing that's the other thing is
Speaker 1: it's interesting is you know, so you have you have
Speaker 1: them on the one hand, like just getting rid of
Speaker 1: markets and going like okay, well we can just coordinate
Speaker 1: production through this and like not have markets. And then
Speaker 1: the second thing they do is it's the freedom immediately
Speaker 1: becomes political in in the sense that like, yeah, like
Speaker 1: one of one of the things they do they there
Speaker 1: that that's what's going on in this period is that
Speaker 1: and there's Chile has a very very right wing like
Speaker 1: it's basically like the even today, it's like it's like
Speaker 1: really like one of the only like union like huge
Speaker 1: unions left in Chile is is truckers unions. And those
Speaker 1: guys are extremely right wing. There in this period of
Speaker 1: being backed by the CIA, they're being trained by f
Speaker 1: l c I O as I say, like every episode,
Speaker 1: but like yeah, and and they're you know, they're intentionally
Speaker 1: doing strikes trying to oversaw the government by blocking production,
Speaker 1: and you know, like the workers are like, Okay, hold on,
Speaker 1: we can just use this symenetic system to figure out
Speaker 1: where these blocks are, figure out where materials need to
Speaker 1: move through, and we can just you know, we can
Speaker 1: just stop the kind of revolution. We can just sort
Speaker 1: of like we can we can just we can just
Speaker 1: fight our way through it. And and it's interesting, is
Speaker 1: like this happens, and so then that that like the
Speaker 1: the original plan of using sort of of using these
Speaker 1: truckers is like the sort of right wing like the
Speaker 1: first attempt fails, and once that fails, it's like they
Speaker 1: have to go to the military m and the coup
Speaker 1: eventually works. It's it's hard to it's hard to resist
Speaker 1: a coup outright, isn't it. Um? Yeah, Yeah. The thing
Speaker 1: with the trucker strike is not like yeah, it's you
Speaker 1: can very well imagine like the CIA and stuff going
Speaker 1: into it thinking about that this is what we'll do.
Speaker 1: That's right, this will sell it up, but not realizing
Speaker 1: that the workers actually had in their hands a like
Speaker 1: vastly more sophisticated system for out maneuvering them. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that system works like a charm, like like clockwork, just
Speaker 1: like and even like you read the accounts from this thing,
Speaker 1: like both in eating Medina's cybernetic revelation areas and in
Speaker 1: Beer's on account, and there's like the sense that was
Speaker 1: actually kind of spooky and weird. But I like even
Speaker 1: the people involved didn't quite expected to work out that way,
Speaker 1: and that like they were surprised at how effective it is,
Speaker 1: but that it gets back to the core of cyberneticsent like,
Speaker 1: feedback is weirdly effective at getting things done. You know,
Speaker 1: these like highly tuned feedback systems, they give you a
Speaker 1: lot of to maneuver this complex you know. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think in some sense, like this is like people
Speaker 1: talk a lot about Chile is sort of like the
Speaker 1: sort of foreclosed future of like an electoral demarcratic socialism,
Speaker 1: But like, I don't think that was the potential of
Speaker 1: the moment. The potential of the moment was this. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting to me that well because Beers kind of
Speaker 1: traces out a political history that never quite happened, which
Speaker 1: is so okay. One of the one of the sort
Speaker 1: of big political trends over the course of the twenty
Speaker 1: century is you have all these people who were sort
Speaker 1: of like they they basically got turned into planning bureaucrats
Speaker 1: Dree in June World War two, because every government basically
Speaker 1: turns into a giant planning engine, and then you know,
Speaker 1: some of them go into some of them, you know,
Speaker 1: essentially stay on in the government doing planning stuff. Beers
Speaker 1: like goes into the corporate world, and the corporations are
Speaker 1: also you know, they start doing they also start doing
Speaker 1: this planning stuff, and you know, but Beers is interesting
Speaker 1: because he he pivots, like he pivots in a direction
Speaker 1: that the world doesn't, which is he pivots towards Okay,
Speaker 1: the solution to sort of you know, the kind of
Speaker 1: like decay of these like authoritarian planning systems, whether whether
Speaker 1: they be like the corporate versions of it or the
Speaker 1: sort of like state administered like total economic planning from
Speaker 1: the top down versions is oh well, okay, we need
Speaker 1: to have planning from the bottom up and distributed. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And he, like everyone involved with Iverson gets murdered. The
Speaker 1: only reason Beer survives because he wasn't in the country.
Speaker 1: And it's it's just really interesting, like like it's kind
Speaker 1: of not a story. Everybody got murdered, but some of
Speaker 1: them did, and some of them were in exile. Uh,
Speaker 1: some of them were imprisoned. Yeah, it was, it was,
Speaker 1: it was, you know, it was not a good time.
Speaker 1: Beer got out early and he knew things that we're
Speaker 1: getting we're getting bad, and everybody around him knew things
Speaker 1: were getting bad. Um. Yeah, like he was on him.
Speaker 1: He was on a kind of I guess, like it's
Speaker 1: almost adic mission to like try and get some of
Speaker 1: the blockade stuff. Like he was trying to. I think
Speaker 1: he was trying to flog like a container ship full
Speaker 1: of iron or something. You know, he was shopping shopping
Speaker 1: it around to try and trying to help out the
Speaker 1: likely appine to the world. That's what it was. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But um, yeah, it's um hold on, I had a
Speaker 1: thought there. Um. And then like after afterwards, um, like
Speaker 1: Beer spent a fair bit as time like trying to
Speaker 1: get his his comrades out of out of Chile and
Speaker 1: get them out of prison and got the got them
Speaker 1: resettled in um in the UK and so on America
Speaker 1: as well. Um. But yeah, I think that Um, this
Speaker 1: is like that's a very interesting point about the the
Speaker 1: you know, the sort of the real value of this
Speaker 1: moment being that movement towards autonomy, that that reorganization of society,
Speaker 1: not towards UH neoliberal engineering of markets and uh sort
Speaker 1: of reinforcement of private dictatorships, um, but towards a kind
Speaker 1: of like holistic control system that is still informed by
Speaker 1: you know, the principles of autonomy and UH and and
Speaker 1: and science. UM. It's it's definitely like an answer to
Speaker 1: the crisis of the seventies which was not taken up.
Speaker 1: And in that sense it is a foreclosed future, but
Speaker 1: of course one that we can take lessons from now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's something else that's very interesting me about this,
Speaker 1: because you know, if if you look at how like
Speaker 1: if you look at how the socialist block sort of
Speaker 1: responds to the crisis and seventies, and you know, they're
Speaker 1: sort of decaying the eighties, like they have this option
Speaker 1: available to them, right they had they had They have
Speaker 1: made a lot of plays, they have a lot they
Speaker 1: have a lot better technology than with the lands are
Speaker 1: using that have more resources, and every single one of
Speaker 1: them goes no and instead just sort of like transitions,
Speaker 1: you know, instead of I think it has to do
Speaker 1: with there there there's a line this this is this
Speaker 1: is like slightly before this, there's a line in UM
Speaker 1: a debate Maw and Joe and Li are having in
Speaker 1: I think it's seven. This is like the peak of
Speaker 1: the sort of workers led part of the culture revolution,
Speaker 1: like the works have taken Shanghai, and Maw and Joe
Speaker 1: and I are talking and they're they're trying to figure out,
Speaker 1: like what are they gonna do? You know, they they've
Speaker 1: set off this force. It's now become uncontrollable. And there's
Speaker 1: there's this line where they're talking about, Okay, well, if
Speaker 1: if we give if you give them, if you give
Speaker 1: them a commune, they have to have free elections, and
Speaker 1: Joe and La is like, well that would be anarchism.
Speaker 1: And then they're just like, oh god, we can't do that,
Speaker 1: and they never do in the end, you know that
Speaker 1: the end result of this whole sort of that whole
Speaker 1: sort of processes that trying to like instead of doing,
Speaker 1: instead of sort of like devolving any level of control
Speaker 1: down to like any of the workers who are doing things,
Speaker 1: they're like, Okay, well we'll just we'll just you know,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll we'll do capitalism instead. Well, well you will,
Speaker 1: you know, we'll create markets will sort of like maintain
Speaker 1: our firm structure, but you know, the party into it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's it's this, it's it's a very interesting thing
Speaker 1: to me too, because like there have been other like
Speaker 1: you know, like they're like lots of socialist parties of
Speaker 1: sort of various like degrees of radical nous have come
Speaker 1: to power like since nineteen seventy three, and to my knowledge,
Speaker 1: not a single one of them has ever picked any
Speaker 1: of this stuff back up, like even even you know,
Speaker 1: like like the most radical sort of like like you know,
Speaker 1: like like like early Chavas never like touches this, like
Speaker 1: even like I don't like I I don't I don't
Speaker 1: think like I don't think the easy Lends ever done it,
Speaker 1: Like I mean, they have petological issues there, but like
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's interesting to me that like basically
Speaker 1: no one who's ever taken power since has ever attempted
Speaker 1: it again. H which again is changed because this is
Speaker 1: you know, one of one of the sort of like
Speaker 1: this you would think this is like this is at
Speaker 1: least a potential solution to sort of this this this
Speaker 1: this problem of the stagnation and sort of collapse of
Speaker 1: the old sort of adults. There's a plenty of economies,
Speaker 1: but no one takes it up. And I'm interested to
Speaker 1: think what you too think about that, like why this
Speaker 1: doesn't happen? Yeah, there's a I think there's an interesting
Speaker 1: dimension of Beer's work in Chile that kind of I
Speaker 1: think um might provide some answers to that, which is that. Know,
Speaker 1: he he was in charge of setting up Cyberson, and
Speaker 1: Cyberson was kind of a system for optimizing the economy,
Speaker 1: but he had other concerns and other briefs that he
Speaker 1: was working on at the same time. And what he
Speaker 1: came to realize was that there was a layer of
Speaker 1: management and experts in the organization of the economy that
Speaker 1: were happy enough to sort of work on a Cyberson
Speaker 1: that was designed to improve production numbers, but they had
Speaker 1: real resistance to the idea of worker autonomy because of
Speaker 1: the because of of of wanting to maintain their their
Speaker 1: job privileges, and because of the prejudices of their their habitats.
Speaker 1: I guess you could say that what they learned when
Speaker 1: they were educated as engineers or managers or whatever, and
Speaker 1: you know, where the people who know things the workers
Speaker 1: don't know things, they shouldn't be in charge that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. And so he starts to he starts to
Speaker 1: realize that in order to really make cybersen effective as
Speaker 1: an engine for autonomy, what needs to happen is that um,
Speaker 1: sort of what you are describing with the Shanghai commune Uh,
Speaker 1: the the workers need to learn the cybernetic principles themselves
Speaker 1: and implement them through autonomous action. UM. And so he
Speaker 1: starts to try to kind of like right up, like
Speaker 1: right pamphlets that can be distributed to the workers so
Speaker 1: that the information that he has as theory is not
Speaker 1: being filtered through a bureaucracy, but is instead, like you know,
Speaker 1: involved in an educational process of self mode mobilization among
Speaker 1: the workers. UM. And so you know this really uh
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that expert knowledge is irrelevant, but it does
Speaker 1: mean that it does imply threatening the social privileges of
Speaker 1: management and expert knowledge, because in Beer's conception of management,
Speaker 1: management is something that is done by anyone who has
Speaker 1: the power to affect an organization or change and organization.
Speaker 1: So if the workers are able to change their organizations,
Speaker 1: they are also managers. That's not something exclusive to experts.
Speaker 1: For for Beer, management is a function. It's not a person.
Speaker 1: Right in Beer's ideal world, like management would just be
Speaker 1: these like decision nodes that emerge among among workers. I
Speaker 1: can like the management manager would never be a person.
Speaker 1: A manager would be like a kind of structural information
Speaker 1: processing like, um, thing that happens among people. Um. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And so like when you see in for example, the
Speaker 1: USS are the option of creating a planning network, a
Speaker 1: computerized telecommunications planning network throughout the whole union. Um, it's
Speaker 1: basically shot down for two reasons. One, it would be
Speaker 1: very very expensive for them to develop. It would be
Speaker 1: on the order of of doing you know, their nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons development, perhaps more expensive than that. Uh. And two
Speaker 1: it is simply at odds with the system of like planning,
Speaker 1: the command economy that had that had grown up in
Speaker 1: the wake of the revolution. Right, it's simply at odds
Speaker 1: with the power of all of the factory managers, the planners,
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. It just kind of makes
Speaker 1: it threatens their identity and it threatens their position of power.
Speaker 1: And so I think that when you look at the
Speaker 1: socialist countries and why they didn't adopt this system, I
Speaker 1: think it's because they it would require the people in
Speaker 1: power to really rethink their entire role and identity as
Speaker 1: members of society. Um. Yeah, And then it's kind of
Speaker 1: there's a treadful irony really in that link. It's it's
Speaker 1: Stafford me or somebody who comes out of like bourgeois
Speaker 1: like management stuff, um and is deep in the pocket
Speaker 1: for that. He's the one who actually sincerely pursues the
Speaker 1: most radical project in like socialist history that we've ever seen,
Speaker 1: vastly more radical in its intent, and it's like kind
Speaker 1: of it's the beginnings of its impact than anything any
Speaker 1: Leninist has ever done. And it's basically because he actually
Speaker 1: did want real freedom and autonomy for working people, and
Speaker 1: your average leniness just doesn't, you know, like again, like
Speaker 1: to go back to the example from earlier, right that
Speaker 1: like when when under pressure, they will they'll do capitalism
Speaker 1: before they'll do anything that even resembles um, autonomy for workers,
Speaker 1: they will take that path rather than doing the right thing.
Speaker 1: You know. That does speak to the character of the thing,
Speaker 1: and it's it's it's it's it's it's that class interest
Speaker 1: basically of those kind of functionaries, right, Like, And the
Speaker 1: thing that makes Beery different is that he sincerely actually
Speaker 1: wanted to do it, you know, and the worker's autonomy
Speaker 1: thing wasn't just a smoke screen for him, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And when when he starts to come up with these
Speaker 1: ideas of like thinking like, okay, like an economic planning
Speaker 1: system is not adequate, we need to go beyond that
Speaker 1: to thinking about the constitution of the social body, he
Speaker 1: he quickly finds that he's being marginalized within those circles
Speaker 1: of planners in the Chilean government because this is not
Speaker 1: something that they are enthusiastic about. They're actually quite concerned
Speaker 1: about this idea. Even if I end would be, you know,
Speaker 1: all for it, right, because he was he was very
Speaker 1: sincere about his interest in an autonomy, UM, there were
Speaker 1: still many people around beer who did not particularly like
Speaker 1: the idea. UM. Yeah, absolutely. And I think if we
Speaker 1: look at it, you know, in terms of why hasn't
Speaker 1: it happened since then, in in all of these intervening decades,
Speaker 1: I think you also have to look at, um the
Speaker 1: international system and the way that countries figure into it,
Speaker 1: because we have all of these um neoliberal structures of
Speaker 1: management and organization that were created in the eighties and
Speaker 1: nineties and early odds uh that socialist government has to
Speaker 1: contend with if they are to embark on a program
Speaker 1: like this, which isn't to say it's impossible, but what
Speaker 1: it does mean is that there are all these sort
Speaker 1: of um, highly complex regulatory and organizational structures that have
Speaker 1: roots deep in our societies right now, and it is
Speaker 1: the path of least resistance to not attempt to engage
Speaker 1: in a in in uh an effort to kind of
Speaker 1: you know, let the market atrophy as you develop an
Speaker 1: alternative structure for social organization, um, because all of these
Speaker 1: structures are there and you have to kind of like
Speaker 1: root them out and replace them with something new, as
Speaker 1: opposed to having all these ready mades of what's already there,
Speaker 1: the market centered solutions, the the the kind of autocratic solutions, um,
Speaker 1: you know, all of the management systems that have been
Speaker 1: developed with an autocracy in mind instead of something that
Speaker 1: is truly democratic and uh kind of self just dating
Speaker 1: mm hmm. And I think as well, um, there's there's
Speaker 1: a kind of other thing that like, um, like the
Speaker 1: left has been kind of in a very weak position
Speaker 1: for quite a while now, like since then, since the seventies,
Speaker 1: right and like um, yes, like we're we're just we're
Speaker 1: just starting to come around to maybe being on possibly
Speaker 1: an upswing. But also like I think there was this
Speaker 1: kind of long depressive phase at the end of the
Speaker 1: at the crossing in the centuries right where a lot
Speaker 1: of like left is kind of and this this this
Speaker 1: actually gets into like why some of the reasons why
Speaker 1: we started general into that unit that like we felt
Speaker 1: like we needed to bring this kind of like systems
Speaker 1: thinking and like technical seriousness back to the table after
Speaker 1: the kind of weird depressive phases where like you know,
Speaker 1: like say the ultra globalization stuff for the occupy stuff,
Speaker 1: where people kind of take an almost explicitly anti strategic
Speaker 1: kind of turn and like a kind of anti technical turn.
Speaker 1: You know, there's that kind of depressive hangover of like
Speaker 1: oh my god, like capital and it's it's it's technology
Speaker 1: is is hegemonic? Like how the funk are we ever
Speaker 1: going to get out of this? Like it would have
Speaker 1: been heard to make an argument for a scientific and
Speaker 1: like technical kind of fusion with with the humanist kind
Speaker 1: of impulses of socialism, But that's I think we're getting
Speaker 1: to a point where we can startish actually having that
Speaker 1: conversation again, like we're we're seeing a bit more of
Speaker 1: a turn towards that, and it can turn towards like
Speaker 1: this kind of serious kind of like more and more
Speaker 1: serious kind of discussion of like hey, like okay, like okay,
Speaker 1: like we we we we fucking hate the current order
Speaker 1: of things. We want to we want to see it
Speaker 1: gotten rid of what would we actually replace it with?
Speaker 1: Like functionally, how would things actually work? Like I think
Speaker 1: those kind of conversations are coming back on the table
Speaker 1: in a way that those were just impossible in the nineties,
Speaker 1: like after the Berlin Wall came down or whatever. They
Speaker 1: were impossible a couple of years ago. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the market as the fundament of society basically seemed
Speaker 1: to be invincible at that time. Um, And there was
Speaker 1: a lot of just sort of wrongheaded assumptions about what
Speaker 1: was and wasn't true about it and about society as
Speaker 1: a whole. And you know, we've had a lot of
Speaker 1: chaos in the years since then. That was um that
Speaker 1: affected not just the countries that we were you know,
Speaker 1: being restructured by the I m F, but actually came
Speaker 1: and affected the core of the world economy as well. Uh.
Speaker 1: And I think that that that's sort of like, you know,
Speaker 1: in the same way that World War One kind of
Speaker 1: disproved the idea of the white man's invincibility and superiority,
Speaker 1: like having those like market chaos dynamics come home to
Speaker 1: roost in the core of the world system has has
Speaker 1: undermined that invincibility, That that that idea that oh, the
Speaker 1: market is just naturally the best and there's nothing that
Speaker 1: could possibly be better. At the same time that we
Speaker 1: have all of this technological development that's happening, um, you
Speaker 1: know in our economy that could be used for something
Speaker 1: different as opposed to you know, I don't know, making
Speaker 1: n f T s or something. Yeah, absolutely right, that
Speaker 1: that's all super important. I think that that kind of refines,
Speaker 1: like my previous thought is refining in my head now
Speaker 1: like that like right now, Um that that kind of
Speaker 1: market chaos and especially even like the chaos of like
Speaker 1: the system's response to COVID and stuff really puts um
Speaker 1: like in general, and for the left in particular, it
Speaker 1: puts like the question of governance back on the table
Speaker 1: in a way that it had kind of been off
Speaker 1: the table for a while. Like I think there was
Speaker 1: there was a period on the left where like left
Speaker 1: activity was kind of like railing against governance. Like it
Speaker 1: was like we we want freedom from governance and that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Right, And I'm not going to say
Speaker 1: those are necessarily bad impulses, right, but I think they're
Speaker 1: also kind of a bit wrong headed as well. Right,
Speaker 1: But like the kind of reality is that, like, for
Speaker 1: for human life to flourish and for our lives to flourish,
Speaker 1: we need governance. And like because like governance actually like
Speaker 1: as a word has the same route as cybernetics does.
Speaker 1: So kaiberneties, the Greek word becomes kubernettes, becomes cybernetics, right,
Speaker 1: but that's also the root of governor, so kuberner, kubernator,
Speaker 1: those are the roots of governance. So governance and cybernetics
Speaker 1: are one and the same kind of concept. Um And
Speaker 1: this question of like if we intend to create a
Speaker 1: world of self governance, um that is effective, it's viable
Speaker 1: in Beer's terminology, like viable self governance, that what we're
Speaker 1: proposing is opposed to the chaotic vortex of nonsense that
Speaker 1: we have to put up with right now. And that's
Speaker 1: back on the table in a big way. That like
Speaker 1: because I think especially with with COVID, people look at
Speaker 1: like just the sheer idiocy and ineptitude and chaos of
Speaker 1: our governments and realizing like, oh, those are decrepit, completely
Speaker 1: screwed up systems and in parat because their goal is
Speaker 1: the maintenance of capital accumulation. So this gets us back
Speaker 1: to the goal directed behavior cybernetics, right, Like the steersman
Speaker 1: steers the boat towards a goal, right, and it's it's
Speaker 1: always about or like a you know, a serponetic device
Speaker 1: like a thermostat has a goal temperature that is trying
Speaker 1: to regulate the temperature to water towards um You know,
Speaker 1: we have these governance systems that are completely awful. They're
Speaker 1: just like not suitable for like the regulation of human life,
Speaker 1: for flourishing. They're only suitable for the regulation of this
Speaker 1: insane system that just keeps capital accumulation going, like that's
Speaker 1: the control variable that it regulates. And we're now in
Speaker 1: a position, we're on the left, like more and more
Speaker 1: of us are saying like what we're proposing is not
Speaker 1: like a sort of magical escape from governance. We're proposing really,
Speaker 1: you know, we should have samee governance and it turns
Speaker 1: out that same governance is bottom up self organized governance. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's that's both the moral position and a technical position,
Speaker 1: and I think they're both of those. The moral and
Speaker 1: technical valances feed off each other. Like we're we're we're
Speaker 1: able to be the serious people in the room. This
Speaker 1: this is a very big change of pace right for us,
Speaker 1: because like for a while we were railing against like
Speaker 1: the very serious people of like the Centrists and like
Speaker 1: the fucking Blairites and the Clintonite sort of people. We
Speaker 1: are the serious people now saying what what this what
Speaker 1: this system actually does is absurd and ludicrous, and it
Speaker 1: needs to be dismantled and rebuilt with a totally different
Speaker 1: like feedback circuits, a different kind of goal orientation, um.
Speaker 1: And it needs to be oriented towards human flourishing. And
Speaker 1: that's it turns out there's a science of doing that,
Speaker 1: and it's called cybernetics, you know. And we also have
Speaker 1: a runaway ecological crisis where we learn about we see
Speaker 1: that you know, like the capitalist market system is absolutely
Speaker 1: leading us all to death and the earth to death.
Speaker 1: And so it is human flourishing. But we also are
Speaker 1: concerned with the flourishing of life in general. Um. So
Speaker 1: I think that that that is something that wasn't as
Speaker 1: much on the horizon in the seventies. You know, I
Speaker 1: certainly think you know, people were thinking about it. But
Speaker 1: breaking down this barrier between economics uh and UH and ecology,
Speaker 1: I think is a very cybernetic impulse and I think
Speaker 1: one that you know, we need to keep working at
Speaker 1: because like you know, whenever we think about these things
Speaker 1: is separate domains were already uh, we're already engendering more
Speaker 1: destruction of the environment. Yeah, yeah, I think cyberenetics and
Speaker 1: miltill help us in that kind of link um on
Speaker 1: a kind of for left projects, like on an aggressive
Speaker 1: footing of like if we recognize that like the capital
Speaker 1: and its kind of governance system is it is cybernetic,
Speaker 1: like it has its own feedback circuits and like saying
Speaker 1: that the explosive feedback circuit that we're on with with ecology, right, Like,
Speaker 1: how do you intervene in a system to halt and
Speaker 1: disrupt those circuits celested so as to disintegrate the system?
Speaker 1: Is um is something like you can you can learn
Speaker 1: a lot from cyran NICs to to get lessons on
Speaker 1: how to to intervene there. The last thing I want
Speaker 1: to talk about is just what is the society that
Speaker 1: is non capitalist and based off of sort of cyberbetic
Speaker 1: governance principles. What does that look like for just a person?
Speaker 1: Because I think you know this, this has been one
Speaker 1: of the big sort of like political challenges of the
Speaker 1: last you know, fifty years. It's just the complete foreclosure
Speaker 1: of the ability to even just sort of imagine a
Speaker 1: system that's not this mm hmm, yeah, I think it.
Speaker 1: It means UM In the first instance, it means a
Speaker 1: different orientation to your workplace and your community, right, because
Speaker 1: when you grow up in a society where um power
Speaker 1: is exercise autocratically, it has an infantilizing effect on on
Speaker 1: you as an individual. UM. And uh, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: your relationship to work, is your workplace is one of
Speaker 1: sort of emotional detachment or of tantrum throwing, right, because
Speaker 1: these are these are reactions, These are natural reactions to
Speaker 1: being in an abusive environment. UM. But if you are
Speaker 1: in a system where the work of management is not
Speaker 1: only open to you but expected of you, you have
Speaker 1: a different orientation to that workplace, to the community you're
Speaker 1: in because it's your responsibility. If you don't do it,
Speaker 1: you know, you're going to lose your autonomy and also
Speaker 1: you're going to have real problems that you have to
Speaker 1: grapple with as an individual. So there is a responsibility
Speaker 1: that comes there. But also like that means an opening
Speaker 1: up of horizons in terms of well, things don't always
Speaker 1: have to be the same, Things don't always have to
Speaker 1: be handed down to you for management on high. They
Speaker 1: can actually change, Like you can see the possibilities in
Speaker 1: front of you, You can plan for the future in
Speaker 1: your context, and you can have that meaningful freedom in
Speaker 1: your life and be you know, a a full human
Speaker 1: being in that sense, right, um, And so I think
Speaker 1: that that's a very core every day change that you
Speaker 1: could see, um in terms of you know, sort of
Speaker 1: your horizon of where you might work or what you
Speaker 1: might do. You know, you could expect that there would
Speaker 1: be more possibilities for each person to be like quote
Speaker 1: unquote entrepreneurial right to to have initiative in their life
Speaker 1: and be able to envision and create things around them
Speaker 1: that uh, you know they can't do right now because
Speaker 1: they either are stuck in a job that doesn't give
Speaker 1: them that freedom or they are actually not even able
Speaker 1: to have a job right now where they can have
Speaker 1: a reasonable expectation of survival because their workplace is oriented
Speaker 1: around just making sure the work gets done and you know,
Speaker 1: the consequences be damned. UM. So I think that you know,
Speaker 1: that is another area that's important. UM. And that sort
Speaker 1: of freedom of management um extends all the way up
Speaker 1: to uh, you know, working in different kinds of capacities
Speaker 1: or jobs. Like some people in kind of a middle
Speaker 1: middle ranking area in a corporation these days might get
Speaker 1: shuffled around from department to department to try to kind
Speaker 1: of get a well rounded understanding of what the corporation
Speaker 1: is uh and how it functions. But you know, we
Speaker 1: can kind of expect that these roles would be more
Speaker 1: open to everybody because again, you know, a system in
Speaker 1: the v s M is not a person. A system
Speaker 1: is a function and that function should be fulfilled in
Speaker 1: a way that is as flexible as possible. UM. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot less kind of well, I'm stuck in
Speaker 1: accounting and that's my life now, and that's all that
Speaker 1: that all ever be. Of course, there are limits to education,
Speaker 1: their limits to specialization, all of that kind of stuff like,
Speaker 1: you know, it takes time to learn these things, but
Speaker 1: you could expect some more flexibility there without having that
Speaker 1: terror of oh yeah, you know, in the neroliberal era,
Speaker 1: everybody's expected to have like fifteen jobs in the course
Speaker 1: of their quote unquote career. But also each of those
Speaker 1: jobs is going to be interspersed with a period of
Speaker 1: absolute terror as they live with unemployed in a society
Speaker 1: without a safety net. Right, Um. I think that that's
Speaker 1: that's you know, those are real consequences for everybody's life.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, yeah, absolutely, And I think like at
Speaker 1: a very very high level, the way Beer puts it
Speaker 1: as that we are trapped in this kind of crazy
Speaker 1: system that's like it's control variable as profits, like that's
Speaker 1: the little variable that it's it's like doing feedback onto
Speaker 1: to maintain um. Where is what we're proposing is like
Speaker 1: the sort of cyberanetic future. We a society that's optimizing
Speaker 1: flourishing Like what what beer Beer? The word he uses
Speaker 1: a u demony, which is borrowing from Aristotle, just like
Speaker 1: flourishing um. And yeah, a lot a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: flows out from that, like to imagine a world where
Speaker 1: because we we all feel it, right, that like everything
Speaker 1: around us is kind of like micro tuned as like
Speaker 1: a little feedback loop to keep money and profit flowing
Speaker 1: and to keep capital accumulating. Just imagine a world where
Speaker 1: that's just not true anymore, and the the sort of
Speaker 1: social infrastructure that you grow up in is an infrastructure
Speaker 1: that instead optimizes for the flourishing of life. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: And I think you know, when we we we look
Speaker 1: at sort of the broader patterns of society today, we
Speaker 1: see all of these hair brained schemes that you know,
Speaker 1: very rich men are embarking on and they're they're setting
Speaker 1: the agenda for society. You know, we're that you know,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg is telling us that the metaverse is the
Speaker 1: future and you just have to get on board with this,
Speaker 1: even though anyone can see that this idea is patently ridiculous. Um.
Speaker 1: And in a society where that kind of management, that
Speaker 1: kind of money power doesn't exist anymore, Like you don't
Speaker 1: have to live under that kind of future horizon anymore,
Speaker 1: where it's like eight men with absurd amounts of money
Speaker 1: cook up, you know, ridiculous schemes and everybody has to
Speaker 1: follow them, just like they were following the orders of
Speaker 1: pharaoh back in the day. I think, do not be
Speaker 1: ruled by pharaohs is as kind of places and he too,
Speaker 1: leave off unless you tell if anything else do you
Speaker 1: want to get to? Okay, there's there's one little line
Speaker 1: from Beer's book what it's actually a set of presentation.
Speaker 1: It is called designing Freedom that I absolutely love. Cracks
Speaker 1: me up every time I read it, so I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna need to for the listeners. It gives you a
Speaker 1: sense of his absolute like ridiculous radicalism, like these off
Speaker 1: the fucking chats with this stuff. Um. At some point
Speaker 1: he says, and I'm quoting here, every time we hear
Speaker 1: that a proposal will destroy society as we know it,
Speaker 1: we should have the courage to say, thank God at last. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Really a real maniac, ye yeah. And and and he
Speaker 1: had this this dictum of if it works, it's out
Speaker 1: of date. So you know, it's it's like like, yeah,
Speaker 1: don't be complacent, you know, don't be a traditionalist. And
Speaker 1: I think also that there's been there's been really horrific
Speaker 1: consequences of sort of the right being the ones to
Speaker 1: like take the urge for creative destruction. Just like you know,
Speaker 1: what was that line there's some I forget some some
Speaker 1: venture capitalist things like move fast and break things, and
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, so when they move fast the thing
Speaker 1: they breaks us. But you know we can move faster
Speaker 1: and break things that are bad. Yeah, definite to a
Speaker 1: creative and playful kind of motive, being right that like
Speaker 1: you you might be able to work, wake up in
Speaker 1: the morning and think, God, you know, it would be
Speaker 1: really cool if we could have like a like a
Speaker 1: child care nurse ory just like like out in the
Speaker 1: out in the common area between these buildings and stuff,
Speaker 1: and like go to your go to your local like
Speaker 1: your your workers council or whatever, and have really plausible
Speaker 1: like way of actually getting that and like collaborating with
Speaker 1: people to make that happen, and then being like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll try it as an experiment for twelve months.
Speaker 1: We'll keep we'll see how it goes. And then there's
Speaker 1: a feedback cycle where it's like, Okay, some aspect of
Speaker 1: this design didn't really work out. We'll we'll go talk
Speaker 1: about it some more, and then it aerate on that
Speaker 1: and that's that's like as it's it's an entrepreneurialism that
Speaker 1: doesn't bear much resemblance to what that word means right now.
Speaker 1: It just means that human beings, living real things, real workers,
Speaker 1: will be able to actually control their environments in this
Speaker 1: substance of their lives in a meaningful length. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: like this, I think you know, back in the nineties
Speaker 1: early odds, sort of before the two thous crisis, in
Speaker 1: the hoary days of your um it's there was a
Speaker 1: lot of talk about flexibility and dynamicism and adaptation. But
Speaker 1: what that always meant was we make decisions about what's
Speaker 1: going to change, and you have to adapt, right. It
Speaker 1: was it was it was, you know, always this arbitrary
Speaker 1: power from outside that would just be changing the social fabric,
Speaker 1: and you had to be flexible enough to cope with
Speaker 1: what you were being subjected to. It's very different if
Speaker 1: you know the planning is being done by you for you,
Speaker 1: and you're moving towards adaptation and flexibility out of a
Speaker 1: sense of oh, yeah, this would be better and I'm
Speaker 1: going to adapt to be in a better state to
Speaker 1: to work with my environment, uh, in a more healthy
Speaker 1: and a more flourishing way, as opposed to just like
Speaker 1: oh yeah, you've got to work three jobs now, so
Speaker 1: figure it out right, that's a very different kind of flexibility,
Speaker 1: very different kind of adaptation. And you know, those things
Speaker 1: have sort of become dirty words in some ways, but
Speaker 1: they are really core to the way that we all
Speaker 1: exist as organisms in the world, and they don't have
Speaker 1: to be just synonyms for abuse. Mm hmm exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think okay, we can take this as a place
Speaker 1: to leave off. Yeah, do you two have stuff you
Speaker 1: want to look and I know you you want to plug,
Speaker 1: but plug the things that you want people to listen
Speaker 1: to because they are UM. Yeah, we're General intellecting It. Um.
Speaker 1: You go to General intellecting It dot nets and it's
Speaker 1: got all the episodes on there. We're on Twitter as
Speaker 1: g I unite pod um. Yeah, you can find us
Speaker 1: on all the podcast things. UM. We're also part of
Speaker 1: a podcast network called emancipation and so that's emancipation dot
Speaker 1: Network on the web. UM. And yeah, some really excellent
Speaker 1: shows on there. We were collaborating with Swampside Chats and
Speaker 1: um Mortal Science, from Alpha to Omega Jumps Utopia. They're
Speaker 1: they're really wonderful shows that are all UM. It's it's
Speaker 1: a variety of different sort of takes on things. But
Speaker 1: like UM, there's a sort of common there's a sort
Speaker 1: of spiritual common grounds they all have. Um, yeah, we
Speaker 1: we all were all interested in thinking systematically. We're all
Speaker 1: interested in emancipation, as the network name says. We're all
Speaker 1: interested in sort of building something going forward, trying to
Speaker 1: construct an alternative as opposed to simply getting caught up
Speaker 1: in day to day politics or getting caught up in
Speaker 1: uh dumer mentality. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's systematic, it's critical,
Speaker 1: but it's also constructive, and I think that's what we're
Speaker 1: all trying to do there. Yeah. Yeah, Well, thank you
Speaker 1: too both for coming on. Thank you. It's thanks for
Speaker 1: having us. Yeah, this this has been make it happen
Speaker 1: here you can find us that happened here pod in places.
Speaker 1: There's also stuff atquals on Media that you can also
Speaker 1: find in those same places and possibly also different ones. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have a we have a website. Everyone asked me
Speaker 1: for my sources every single week and they get posted
Speaker 1: there once a month. So yeah, go go to quoson
Speaker 1: media dot com and you will find all of the
Speaker 1: sources so you don't have to DM me every week.
Speaker 1: All right, Bye, Hey, we'll be back Monday with more
Speaker 1: episodes every week from now until the heat death of
Speaker 1: the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. Or more podcasts from cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: Visit our website cool zone media dot com or check
Speaker 1: us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources
Speaker 1: for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone
Speaker 1: Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Kick Off
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