ACFM - #ACFM Microdose: Space Forces with Fred Scharmen

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

In this #ACFM Microdose to accompany the gang’s recent Trip into space, Keir is joined by Fred Scharmen, author of Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space. Drawing on his background in architecture and spatial design, Scharmen unpacks the human desire to go into space and create new worlds from scratch. How […]

This is Acid Man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. My name's Kear Milburn and today I'm doing a special micro dose with Fred Sharman, their author of Space Forces, A Critical History of Life in Outer Space. Hi, Fred. How's it going? Hi, Kier. So let me just explain why I'm talking to Fred.

I've only met Fred in the last week or so. And in fact, this is the first time we're talking. A couple of weeks ago, we did a full trip ACFM with Jeremy and Nadia. And we talked about space, space in its wider aspects, the concept of space and how the politics of space is, suddenly seems quite relevant. But as part of that, we talked about outer space and why there seems to be a renewed focus on outer space

over the last perhaps six months or so, or at least in my head, has been a renewed focus. Perhaps it's longer than six months in actual fact. And then somebody recommended that I read Fred's book. Now, Fred's book's not out. It's coming out in November. And I got sent an advanced copy. I'm very glad I did because it's a great book.

I really, really, really enjoyed it. And so we thought, look, this is a way. There's so much more to talk about in terms of outer space. We've only scratched the surface. That's not a very good metaphor. We were talking about outer space, but we've only just the surface of outer space. We've only peaked out the airlock. Yeah.

We've only sniffed the extremities of the airlock. We want to get straight through the airlocking right out into the dark mysteries of outer space. So Fred, I'm really glad I got sent to your book. I'm really glad you've agreed to talk to us. Perhaps the best way to start the conversation is for you to talk, to give your own version of how you see the focus of the book and what your motivations were for writing it. Yeah, sure.

I mean, my sort of native field is architecture and urban design. So that's where I'm coming from as a researcher and a writer and a teacher. So, you know, what I've been in. interested in doing the past couple of years is like connecting people from my world in the kind of mainstream of spatial practice, if you like, to some of these ideas about creating whole worlds from scratch that come into play when we're talking about living in outer space. So I think that in general, you know, I found that people who practice architecture and who practice making space on Earth have a lot to learn from people who are working in space science and kind of vice versa.

So it's been a kind of mission of mind to like help that conversation happen by like moving people and ideas and things and concepts back and forth between those two fields. So as part of that, you know, I became, I worked for a few years on a previous book, which was really about this 1970s moment that was in which like NASA convened these groups of interdisciplinary people to come and design these huge. huge cities spinning in free floating in space, you know, not on another planet, not on the moon, not on Mars, but in orbit. And this was going to be like the 25-year plan for, you know, the human space program back circa 1975, right? So we'd be doing it about now. So that, I got really sort of deeply interested in that moment in history and all the sort of things that, all the really specific things about what that would have been like, what people would have been worried about, what they would have been hopeful about, what was going on in culture, you know,

visual culture, aesthetic, science fiction. And so with this book, I had the chance to kind of zoom out and go, okay, what are some other moments that seem to like reveal similarly interesting stuff about how and why, you know, we, we as a sort of human species, how. and why humans think that they could and should go and do this as a big project, right? So the current book sort of takes 150-year scope and a broad approach, but sort of takes a few core examples in that 150-year period. So starting with the Russian Cosmists back in the late 19th century and onward to some of the sort of strange things that were going on in the UK around World War II with J.D. Bernal, who was a physicist and a material scientist,

also writing these really fascinating, like quasi-mystical texts about the future. And then into the kind of, you know, also in the World War II period, all the tangled fraught history surrounding Werner von Braun and his sort of transfer of not only German Nazi rocket science, but, you know, in many ways, you know, sort of the strange logic of the terror weapon, his transfer of some of those ideas from Nazi Germany to the United States and the foundation of the American space program. Then onward towards, you're bringing in science fiction again, Arthur C. Clark is a figure that I've always found fascinating in his particular approach to, you know, the strangeness of going to other worlds and making other worlds. And then the kind of normalcy of, you know, I sort of treat NASA as like one figure, like how can we diagnose NASA as a person?

like what would be the characteristics of that person if we treated the institution and sort of analyze the institution in that way? And I do that through the lens of the black astronaut. And then, you know, Gerard O'Neill, who was leading these 1970s studies, and then to a kind of contemporary moment where I think that, you know,

we're finding ourselves again in this kind of hinge point where ideas about going to space are changing. Certainly, as you say, in the past six months, we've seen, I've lost count of how many billionaires have been to space now at this point. just in 2021 alone, but I think we really are at a point where not only, you know, our new and weird things happening, but we have like new and weird ideas associated with the whole kind of, the whole bigger project, right? The project has kind of changed again,

I think. So it's a good time to start talking about this stuff. Yeah, thanks. I mean, perhaps we should go towards the end of that list of ideas about outer space, the most current one, and perhaps you can work back. Because the latest one seems the most depressing to me. Actually, you know, perhaps Verna von Braun's picture of impending war as the... Impending doom as the necessity to go into space and construct weapons, weapons that can have oversight of the whole earth. A little bit like we've gone a little bit in that direction via drone warfare, etc., etc.,

and perhaps that's occupied that part of it. of the imaginary. But yeah, so one of the reasons we want to talk about space was this, you know, Jeff Bezos has gone into space. Then Richard Branson going into space. Yes, Britain has got its own cranky oligarch with too much money. And, you know, we were having a bit of debate on when we did, when we talked about it on ACFM about, you know, what's going on with all of this?

What's motivating these people? When you talk about Elon Musk, can you compare, to sort of Jeff Bezos, and you think about their, in fact, their business practices in a wider sense and how they may map onto their imaginaries about space. But in a way, you're sort of, you're taking that their business practices, but you're almost taking them at their own world as well. You're taking them serious about what they say. I mean, should we do that? Is that what is going on with Bezos and these oligouts going into space? Should you, we take their own, their own word about why they're doing this

and their own imaginary should we look at their perhaps the sort of perhaps political economy reasons behind it what do you think about that I think it's sort of both and and I think that's one thing I find you know at all of these moments

there's often like a gap between expression and intent and between like the way an individual kind of construction of a world relates to a bigger world outside so I think in the case of Bezos for sure and Musk too it's not I don't think it's talked about enough that these

that these two figures are actually true believers they really they're they're kind of high on their own supply and I think that's what I was asking actually yeah yeah yeah they they're serious about for different reasons for very very different reasons and with very different sort of methodologies but they're serious about you know like working towards a bigger project of a human future in space and of course they see themselves as as pivotal to that future and probably taking, you know, not only key kind of planning roles, but probably key leadership roles, and however that might play out. But, you know, they're serious, and they should, you know, the ideas should be taken seriously for all the silliness that goes along with Bezos wearing a cowboy

hat, you know, in his rocket, and Elon getting into arguments on Twitter with, with Jeff and with different people in the Russian space program and elsewhere. Well, and him, you know, shooting a car into space. It's hard to say that's shooting his car into space, his own car, his own red sports car, right? I mean, this stuff analyzes itself, right?

So, but, but you know, at the same time, like they're engaged in the practice of making new time and new space, right? I appreciate it in the space episode the extended discussion about time and space. They're not only colonizing. We can talk about that word colonizing. They're not only colonizing outer space, but they're colonizing the future. So it's worth sort of looking at how they do that elsewhere and how, you know, for example,

like a few people have written about how Elon Musk's companies are, if you sort of analyze their practices, they're really just sort of normalizing a status quo. It's, you know, in Starlink, it's like more internet and faster internet. Okay, great. The Tesla is like, okay, it's still a car. It's still a normal car. It's not going to threaten you. It's not going to, well, unless you're a pedestrian and you're out of the range of the camera, I guess.

But it's not a scary sort of technological artifact. It's designed to look like a cool car. But, hey, it's also electric, right? So everything will be fine. we can keep driving to work, we can put solar panels on our suburban house, we can, you know, get faster internet from these orbital satellites that are, you know, obstructing earth-based astronomy nowadays. So there's just this like more, more, more of the same logic in this, if you sort of, again, analyze all of Musk's companies as, you know, pieces of a world, pieces of a potential

future world. Whereas Bezos wants to sort of dominate every level of sort of, you know, what a lot of people call the stack. He wants to own the servers that, you know, show you the book for sale. He wants to, um, to, uh, subcontract, you know, the trucks that deliver it to you. He wants to buy the robot company that sorts it out in the warehouse. Um, so the every sort of layer of that reality, of that process is under, you know, very close control, you know, and to the detriment of the humans in the system, right? Because they're the ones who have to pee in a bottle, and they're the ones who have to deal with, you know, stress and strain injuries from working in warehouses. So the human in the system is just another sort of component

that seeks to be optimized. But, of course, you know, optimization is a kind of trap. So So there are two very different world views, and there are two very different potential futures bound up in those worldviews. When you start to, I think that become apparent, when you start to take these two figures seriously and look at their actions and they're intense. Yeah, it might be good to take, to split them and think about the sort of, because the way I sort of read your book, Fred, is that like, you know, that this, the practice of thinking about living in outer space and also, of course, for short periods, or well, actually, for longer. periods on the space station actually living in outer space you know it act as a sort of as a sort of screen upon which we we project our imaginaries about living on on planet earth and it goes a bit further than that because it's you know there's their actual practices of worlding if you like and like this practice of worlding is abstracting the key sort of elements that make up a world's

basically what you need to survive etc and then of course you know that that projects back onto onto your practices on planet Earth. You know, that's the sort of my really glossed over reading of the book. We can get into that a bit later. But I just want to come to sort of Elon Musk's version of, yeah, of this world in which, you know, outer space will just be like planet Earth. We're going to export all of our, you know, the lifestyles that we have on Earth into outer space, etc.

And you can sort of figure that on the idea that, like, you solve climate change by having electric cars. there's a huge resource implications involved in that right that just doesn't make any sense it's a bit like it's hyper loop where you just right the hyper loop which ends up being a tunnel for teslas that's just crazy that's absolutely crazy we have these things called trains are much more efficient etc you know the obvious solution is massive expansion of public transport trains in particular and so there's this thing about when when Elon Musk gets lot colonized in the future you know um what comes into question straight away is the universality of that future, right? That future presumably isn't for everybody,

right? Do you know what I mean? Not everybody can have a Tesla. There's just not enough resources on the planet for that. So that implies the fact that the future that they've got in mind is a future in which all of the inequalities that exist now will be replicated, basically. That's the Musk sort of idea of the future perhaps. Perhaps Jeff Bezos is a universal one because basically he'll control everything and we'll have to rent absolutely everything off him. Well, it's interesting. You know, it makes me think of the way that Amazon sets itself up

as the place, the store for everything, right? The place where, you know, all kinds of people can find whatever they're looking for. And it's the almost disordered or inhuman logic of the fulfillment center of the warehouse itself where, you know, things are categorized by type. You might find a CD next to, you know, a dust. pan next to, you know, a book, right, all in the same warehouse shelf. They're organized by, like,

how often they sell or how often they need to be retrieved or moved through the system. So, so, yeah, there's something, you know, I hadn't thought about that kind of question of, like, universality and the kind of the sorting of everything into everything else that goes along with the kind of the Bezos worldview, whereas Musk is very much just from making the things that he things are cool, right? It's not, there's no audience other than, other than himself in many ways. And of course, he does perform, you know, in a way that's very different from Bezos. But the imagined subject is really important here. And that, I think, is, is universal to, you know, to any of these conversations about any of these moments that, you know, it's something that

we learn from architecture is that the design of a space, you know, becomes implicitly the design of the type of subject or person that's invited into it or that's produced by it even. You know, my house has stairs. Certain people wouldn't be able to use those stairs. They wouldn't be able to use my house in the same way that I do. So in a very real sense, you know, when worlds are made from scratch, that question of who the subject is becomes very, very fraught, but also very, very important and impossible to ignore.

If we're even designing the atmosphere, you know, which is something that architects do. Architects specify the air. We have standards that you can look up in books for how that air, how humid it should be, how fast it should be moving, what temperature it should be for a given environment. And so what's the gravity, right? So when every aspect of the environment is designed, then every aspect of that subject is designed. So it becomes very important to think carefully when doing that. It's not to say that we can't make spaces that are inclusive, but we have to do that.

intentionality. Yeah, I like that. So it's sort of like these, this colonization of the future, you know, it gets built into the architectural infrastructures of the present in a way. I mean, it's a bit like one of the things I'm quite interested in and part of my job is sort of like institutional design. And thinking about the sort of the institutional logics that get built into institutions and how they have a sort of colonization of the future.

So we can think about things such as Foucault's concept of government. mentality, for instance, you know, the sort of subjects that get produced by the logic of markets or imposition of like pseudo markets into institutions and these sorts of things, which automatically to me it says, well, we should think about how we can anticipate different sort of perhaps more open and democratic futures within the institutions that we build. Of course, that goes one stage further when we think about it in terms of worlding, right? And like, you know, the, you know, the, the, the anticipation of different kinds of worlds, et cetera, that we might want to build.

And for that, you have to, you have to abstract the key dimensions that you want to focus on. Air is probably a given. But like, you know, when, when you're talking about longer periods, in the book, you talk about, you know, trying to anticipate things such as culture, etc. And, you know, cultural production and these sorts of things and the sorts of cultures that would be, would be produced, which I find really, really interesting. Perhaps another way into that is, you know, are there sort of brute

facts about life in and outer space or the difficulties of life and outer space that would basically that would override the imaginaries of the oligarchs and what I'm thinking about there is if people were going to work in outer space the work which is dangerous tends to produce

bonds of strong solidarity and in fact the historically strongest unions have tended to be around very dangerous work such as mining and historically you know dock workers and these sorts of well and actually you know perhaps the closest analogy, which would be seafarers and sailors, etc., perhaps not in terms of unionization, but in terms of, you know, the sort of golden age of solidarity or, yeah. Yeah, those sorts of bonds of solidarity.

And so it makes you think perhaps there are, you know, and in fact, you hint at that about this ever, these ever, the constitution of outer space that you talked about, which I think it's from the 70s, which has things such as mutual aid and the idea that space or outer space is a global commons built into it. Sort of two different sorts of worlds. So perhaps one is more aligned with the brute realities than the other. I don't know what you think. I'm just endlessly fascinated by the outer space treaty,

which is, as you say, what some people refer to as the constitution of outer space. And yeah, it's 1967 even. It predates moon landing. And it really was the kind of first attempt to sort of set up kind of, on the one hand, you know, they're trying to set up ground rules for the space race, not knowing, you know, not knowing who would win, right? And so wanting to secure mutual advantage for all the players, but what you end up with is these really utopian propositions in the document. On the one hand, you know, and they're tied to, as you say, like, the recognition that being in space creates this sort of shared, it's inextricable from this condition of shared danger, right?

constant danger. And so it writes that solidarity into first principles, into international law, essentially, untested international law, of course. None of this has seen the inside of a court yet, but the tests could be opportunities to, you know, really solidify principles of things like mutual aid. So, for instance, if you're in space and I'm in space, the outer space treat says, well, okay, you know, anyone undertaking activities in outer space is an astronaut, according to one reading, and astronauts have certain rights and responsibilities to one another. So if you're in need of air, right, and I have the ability to provide aid to you, I am obligated to provide you with air, right? So what is that, but it doesn't specify air, it just says to render all help. And so what does that mean if you're, you know, low on food for the week? What does that mean if you have no place to stay, right, if you're homeless? So there's, you know, there's the potential for, you know, a radically different kind of society when you follow those principles through to the, to their, you know, hopefully logical conclusions. And then, you know, there's no sovereignty in outer space. So there's no, there's no national claim to territory that's possible under the outer space treaty.

And this was signed by, you know, over 100 nations, all the space fair nations are signatories to this. but we can claim resources we can we can use resources so um again you know it's going to it's going to come down to matters of interpretation but those matters of interpretation are already playing out you know in terms of lobbying for changes to law nationally and internationally and in terms of practices you know we'll see these things tested probably within the next five years and didn't trump pass an act or trump passed something which said that space is not a global Commons, isn't they? This is one of the contradictions that I think, you know, will be interesting to watch play out. Because there's another document, the Moon Agreement, and this is, without going

too far into the weeds of international law, the Moon Agreement was not signed by any space nation. It's not signed by the United States. But the Moon Agreement goes a little bit further than the Outer Space Treaty and says that space and planetary bodies are part of the common heritage of mankind, humankind. This may be, again, and I'm not, I'm not a space lawyer. I have some friends who are space lawyers, but I definitely don't want to pretend to be a space lawyer. I just like to read this stuff because I read this stuff as science fiction, right, as utopian world building itself. So the idea that space is a common, it's kind of a foundational principle. It's why, like, I can put a, it's why, you know, Russia can put a satellite up that

orbits over the United States and nobody's going to start a shooting war about that, right? Because space is recognized as extraterritorial. And it's built on, you know, principles that were, you know, as you hint, sort of first developed, principles and practices first developed in places like the sea in Antarctica in these dangerous sort of extraterritorial spaces. And so certain, you know, and again, I think you could you could analyze it and talk about Mike Pence, who loves rocket. He loved. Mike Pence, the former vice president, was really the driver, I think, of space policy in the Trump administration, among other people. But the fact that they're so insecure about this principle of the commons that they have to issue an executive order, you know, on White

House stationary that says space is not the common heritage of humankind. It tells you a lot. Like, it's actually, you know, reassuring in a way to see that, like, that this is still contested, This is still all in play. So 1967 is when the treaty is signed. And like this idea that the global commons is there. Okay, I'm going to try and make a link between that and like the original series Star Trek. And then perhaps Star Trek generally, you know, that whole sort of Star Trek is communism because scarcity has been solved because of the replicator sort of idea.

I mean, that's one sort of imaginary of outer space as like this, the solving of resource limitations on Earth, basically. Well, not just resource limitations, but also, you know, the limitations of the planetary atmospheric commons, right? Because that's Bezos says we can put polluting industries into space and so forth. Yeah. Is that part of what's going on? In some ways, right, it reminded me of the whole discourse around the whole dot-com era where the internet was seen as like, oh, this is where we now, we overcome the limitations of material goods, et cetera, and we'll have frictionless capitalism, but we'll, yeah, and of course, and then there's a sort of dot-communism part of that where, you know, basically the reproduction costs of digital.

of digital goods are so close to zero that everything's free, etc, etc. It seems like another way of trying to find a sort of like Northwest passage around the material limitations and then the antagonisms that arise from those material limitations either sort of in terms of imperialism or just straight class struggle. It seems to be a constant search for a way to escape them into another reality. Is that part of what's going on with the imaginaries about outer space at different times? Oh, for sure. You know, again, even going back to, going back to the weird Russians in the 19th century, it was, space is conceived as a place where, you know, there's these contradictions, right? Space is empty, but space is full. Space has no air. It's hard vacuum. It takes forever to get from point A to B because everything's so far apart. But it's also presented and imagined as this place where there's just endless access to resources and energy.

available that we have that we can mine the asteroids we can mine the moon we can we can get out from under you know what they called in the 70s quite explicitly the limits to growth and you know I think that that always is a really kind of fascinating lens to look at to look at this stuff through because there's a couple aspects to the to the replicator story right which which is tied which as you hand is tied into like like the dot com era and the the lost utopias of that of that period in history. We probably, you know, we, again, I always try to, like, qualify my wees, but we as as a technological society in Europe and North America probably already have the ability to satisfy the material needs of everyone who needs them satisfied, right? We could, we could practice

mutual aid right now. We don't need a replicator. But what you see in the dot com, the lessons that you hint at from the dot com era is that even in post-scarcity, even in a potentially sort of post-scarcity condition, life finds a way, right? Capitalism finds a way to impose those limits to growth, those limits to mutual aid, those limits to post-scarcity. And now we pay for our MP3s. We don't get them for free. We don't share them in a global commons of art and culture. It seems obvious to ask like how long, how many times are we going to fall for this? Like, how many times are we going to really, are we going to really get suckered in again and believe that we're on the cusp of a post-scarcity society because we can mine the

asteroids and because, you know, that we, that we have this legal framework that allows us to use the resources we find there? I hope not, but probably, like, you know, probably we will fall for it again. But it's worth, it's worth just being really explicit about like, hey, You know, they keep saying this. They keep saying the end of scarcity and want is just around the corner and that technology is the answer, whether it's, you know, whatever kind of technology, replicators or lime wire. You know, like the technology is going to solve these problems and just let us develop

the technology. Just give us the support, give us the public support, give us the kind of cultural support to go and do it and we'll take care of it on. We'll bring it back. But it hasn't happened yet, and I don't think it's going to happen this time around either. And plus, you know, like there aren't infinite asteroids out there. There aren't infinite, you know, resources, even in the solar system. There's, you know, papers I've seen, the one that I quote in my book, says, you know, yeah, probably about, you know, given a three percent, three and a half percent growth rate, maybe 500 years, maybe 600, that's not a lot of time.

So, and then we, again, we, whoever that we is, we'll just hit more limits. Yeah, no, absolutely. I love that, that 500 years. 3% compound growth means you've got 500 years before everything in the solar system's gone. Pretty modest, yeah. And then, you know, interplanetary travel is so, or inter-solar system travel is so, it's just a different ballgame that, you know, and under our current underscern. of physics, that's just not a non-starter, basically.

But it sort of brings to mind this idea that, you know, the search for, like the Star Trek replicator.com communism sort of moment, in a way, it's an attempt to solve the problems of Earth by bypassing politics or bypassing class struggle, even if you want to get more to it. So it's this idea that, yes, we do have the resources. We probably do have the resources to satisfy needs, right? But that takes you directly into a distributional struggle in which you have to take those resources off people who are very powerful, right?

And it's a bit like, you know, in the book, Jeff Bezos could sort, I can't remember what the website's called, which every day says, it's probably called, has Jeff Bezos solved world hunger, isn't it? That's the website. Yeah, it's a Twitter account that tweets daily. Yeah, spoiler, no. Yeah, yeah, everybody, no. So perhaps the situation that we're in now

where you're reaching limits to growth and there's quite stagnant growth in the world economy and, you know, the climate change, etc. seems to provide limits to this expansionary, imaginary. What it means is that antagonism about resources, you know, who has those resources, is a direct problem, whereas, you know, perhaps during that period they call the Great Acceleration, the post-war period when you had

growth was rising and so you could have rising living standards and capitalist profitability and they could maintain to some degree till the 1970s and then you have the big conflict about that. Oil crisis. Yeah, exactly. So basically perhaps that's the world that post-war world is the world that's gone. The world of social democracy might even be begun in that sort of form. And the world we're left with is a form, a world in which.

there needs to be a battle, an immediate battle over resources, and unfortunately we're not in a very good state to take the oligarchs on. Is that playing into the perhaps current left imaginaries about outer space? Well, I find, I really love the, like, the resurgent kind of biocosmism that you can see out there, even in meme culture, that there's, you know, the seemingly like, the recapture of the seemingly like kind of ludicrous ideas from the early 20th and late 19th centuries that you know we're the the father of rocket scientists um sokovsky constantine solkowski actually believed that you know the human future was about being eventually able to live forever

and go to space and go anywhere and i love the kind of the simplicity and clarity of of that aspiration, right? Like that, what does ultimate kind of freedom look like? Well, live forever and go anywhere. And Sokovsky, you know, had a lot of very strange ideas that followed on from that basic assumption or that basic goal. But the, you see a little bit, and maybe it's just people I follow on Twitter, you see a little bit of resurgence, of a resurgence in the, the embrace of the ludicrous of ludicrous of that idea. It's under the pavement, the beach. You know, So it's of a lineage with, I think, these revolutionary slogans and these revolutionary aspirations. I don't have a rocket company.

You know, you probably don't have a rocket company. But why shouldn't everybody have a rocket company, right? I mean, I have a car parked outside. You know, is there an upside to the potential for technological growth that actually is liberatory? if we can liberate the means of production and the means of distribution, as you say, to distribute access to space. And you see that even in the sort of PR machines

that surround these billionaire junkets, they congratulate each other. Even Bezos and Musk, you know, long-time rivals, congratulate one another for helping make space more accessible to everyone. So every one of these flights has this round of utopianism, that's self-congratulatory,

but that's also, you know, you could squint at it and read it as kind of revolutionary too. I don't know if you ever come across this group called the Association for Autonomous Astronauts. Yeah. Right. It's sort of like a 90s sort of group. As far as I can remember, they mainly organized

three-sided football matches, which I'm not really sure what the link. But they were out of that sort of post-situationist, sort of, that sort of milieu. I really love, basically. And then recently I came across this sort of squatted social center in Rome called Metropolis, who were really, really fascinated by space travel, and they built models of spacecraft. They didn't actually fly into the air, but models of spacecraft in there. And one of the things I really found interesting about Metropolis was it was linked to

to housing squads for migrants, basically. and there's something there about that about the sort of the need to well in part these housing squats were that they were in factories right in dilapidated factories so people would move in and you'd basically have to construct your world inside right and you know when you look at like the sort of like the the habitats people built they do remind you a little bit of like you know the outer worlds in the expanse series you know where things are like you know futuristic kind of brickillage and futuristic but like basically yeah built out of whatever's lying about sort of thing do you know what I mean

there's something there in my head about you know why that scene would go towards some sort of probably tongue in cheek but seemingly you know sincere enthusiasm

about space travel it's access to space access to resources and access to time you know that that's what I think you know that that Cosmist formula of live forever and go anywhere, you know, kind of captures. And yeah, yeah, that that impulse is like, is always there under the surface. And I think it's, that's why I especially, you know,

was fascinated by you all's whole episode about space, because you took that for granted that, like, well, if you talk about space, it's all, it's all space, right? And so, so space, the practice of producing space, you know, is something that we do every day, but it's also like something that happens in an imaginary utopian future. So one of the other things I want to talk about, I definitely want to talk about Afri Futurism because it's just so, so sort of like, well, because I love the whole scene.

The whole Afrofuturist sort of imaginary really is to think about alien visitors, visitations of aliens, etc. And say, look, you know, this is just, isn't this a colonialist sort of mindset? isn't like the real example of an advanced, technologically advanced alien

species coming and kidnapping you and putting you into forced work. Well, that's the middle passage. That's slavery. It's already happened. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then you get all of these sort of mythos about, you know, civilizations being born under the sea by slaves

who've been thrown overboard. You know, all these sorts of things. fly from that. So perhaps we could talk about that colonial imaginary that is resonant in space, in ideas around space, both from people who,

such as Werner von Braun, who basically, you know, that just fits with his picture about what must happen on Earth in some degree, but also from people who were trying to use that and flip it in some sort of way. Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of layers to that.

I mean, there are a ton of layers to that. You know, even back to like World worlds you know which is which is this inversion of this this kind of colonial logic that says okay some more technologically advanced civilization is just going to come here and take our stuff because we've done it to you know we European American culture historically have done it to other people so couldn't couldn't what we have already done to us somehow some way and so there there is like that there is that anxiety on the part of dominant culture, you know, that's tied up in imaginations about outer space. And that's sort of, it's always been there. It's inextricable from the history of these

ideas. So there is that, that recapture of like, well, that, yes, that has already happened. And what things that are bound up in black identity that are inherently, you know, science fictional, that are inherently constructed technologically. The other sort of strand that I see that that is relevant here is about, you know, there's the, there's the idea of separatism, too. I mean, like, Sunrah, you know, Sunrah's movie is really clear. We're going to go and take all the black people from Earth, and we're going to take, we're all going to go to another planet, and we're going to leave this colonized world behind. I think it's tied up also with the hope that a life in space would be a life free from politics,

too, in some ways. Because people, you know, other people working in this area have been pretty explicit about, well, access to more territory means that an end to the culture wars, say, that we could create. There's an interview with Isaac Asimov and Gerard O'Neill where they're talking about, well, we can just make a Northern Ireland in space. We can make an Israel in space and a Palestine in space and nobody will have to fight over the same piece of territory. So these kind of dystopian ideas about ethnic separatism, but sometimes utopian ideas, are bound up in hopeful futures in really complicated ways. Because then immediately you have to ask, well, who's the overarching, who controls the ability of a person in space Israel to travel to space Palestine and vice versa? right? Like who, what is the, there's a meta politics there that's just hinted at that's not made explicit. And, you know, I think that's, of course, probably a function of like people

being maybe a little bit too naive. But also, you know, it's, it's again, it's tied to this, to this question of like life in space is a life without politics, which is, I think, I think, you know, And again, I'd return back to the outer space treaty and go, well, the metapolitics is we're all astronauts. So the metapolitics is if we're all in space, we're all astronauts. And we have those rights and responsibilities that come with that status. And, you know, and again, you know, tied up in the idea that you have the right to go anywhere and live forever, that that's the sort of metapolitics too. And so, yeah, I'm pushing the limits of like where, what? I've kind of thought through and definitely passed the limits of what I wrote through in the current

book. But these are the places where I think it's interesting and really necessary to go. The other side of a hopeful relationship of outer space, perhaps, is the sense of perspective that you'll get. So, like, you know, it's the famous moonrise picture. You'll remember when that was taken, but, you know, from the moon. 68. 68. Yeah. And like, so, and people, astronauts reporting back saying you know basically it just gave you a bit of perspective because you couldn't see any borders etc you know and perhaps it's that

so perhaps one of the hopes that are placed and out of space is that you get that the Martians view of humanity basically and why you also caught up in these fetishisms that you've created yourself race will be one of those fetishisms and money would be

another one of those fetishisms I would imagine and then alongside that it's a certain trope in which perhaps we'll perhaps we'll have communists from Mars, right? Perhaps Bogdanovs' writings, but also Posades as well. Those are two very, very interesting stories. Could you tell us a little bit about those and that idea of that perhaps communism comes from space? Yeah, and back to Bogdanov in the early 20th century, you know, he was of course a revolutionary, a physician, a teacher, all these things. But one of the other things that he was is a science fiction author. And after the

Russian revolutions in 1917, he was trying to sort of connect to the masses, connect to the people in all kinds of different ways. And one of those ways was to write popular science fiction. And he also did what a lot of people do when they're thinking about space, is go, okay, Mars is the future, obviously, and Venus is the past, because it's closer in the solar system. It's hot. It's You know, there's storms and probably jungles and dinosaurs and stuff. Mars is really dry. It's really further out. So it's obviously been around for a long time.

You know, we can picture these old, wise desert civilizations there that tell us something about, you know, what a human future might be like. And so to Bogdanov, that human future was a communist future. Because, of course, you know, following dialectical materialism, this is the necessary, you know, this is the science of history playing out, has already played out on this older, wiser planet. And so Bogdanov uses Mars to kind of think through, like many people have done, to think through and critique civilization and political practices here on Earth. So actually, I think this was written before the Revolution. Was Red Star before the Revolution? Might have been before.

I can't remember. I don't have the date to hand. But in any case, you know, he's creating this utopian ideal society on Mars that comes and then has to think about, you know, has to debate. publicly, you know, when they discover the existence of political conflict and war on Earth and how primitive, you know, we are back here. Once they discover Earth and once they make contact with humans, they have to have that public discussion about, well, should we, should we eradicate them and take all their stuff, right? Should we just go there? And what Bogdanov arrives at is,

I think, you know, kind of an answer to this metapolitics, that he, he has. Has his Martians, you know, through this public debate, arrive at a point where, no, we value, we actually value difference. We value, you know, even though, you know, we are at this further, you know, point in this dialectical and materialist timeline, and you are primitive in suffering, you might not end up the same way we are, and that's important. And that's something that should be preserved and not eradicated. that when we find difference we don't we don't need to automatically impose this hierarchy on difference right which is a sort of which is again that sort of metapolitics coming into play and um i find that you know i kind of get chills you know thinking about that you know as as a kind of an answer to this to this colonial anxiety um and an answer to um to questions of of of teleology of the

point of the end point of history, you know, in the way, and, and, uh, and questions of development, you know, what is, what is development and what is, what is that, that ancient wisdom in the desert, you know, um, and so, and, and, I mean, the, the, the, the, the, the, this era, you know, and Russia generally is a fascinating place to look for, uh, ideas like this, because they come up again and again. And, besadaism is a, you know, I, I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm not an expert in Pasadism. It seems like there's a lot going on there that I don't know how far I want to get into the weeds with.

But Pasadism, I think, is a kind of resurgent, you know, kind of recognition of those revolutionary possibilities that kind of, that tie up, you know, anxieties about the apocalypse, fears and hopes about difference in the other. and, you know, just questions about the finality of history. Bessadas and broadly, you know, just to gloss it for the listeners, is the idea that future space aliens are communist and we should start a nuclear war to get their attention to, like, really oversimplify things.

And there's some open questions about, like, how serious was Jay Posadas about proposing these ideas. You actually didn't really talk about this that much, when you go and dig in. You talked about quite a lot of other things, you know. But this is what travels, and this is what makes it, you know, to 21st century meme culture, too,

is like, help us space brothers, come and rescue us space brothers from this dystopian world that we live in. And, you know, I just, I don't know what it is about, about the Soviet Union that has produced such weird and fascinating, you know, variations on this idea, but I love it.

That's great. It's almost a great place to leave it, but I just want to do a little bit of analysis on myself if you can help me out here. Because basically, I was always really, really into space when I was growing up. I was born in 1970. I had those sort of Usborn books of the future type books, etc. Yep, I'm sitting right here, yeah. Yeah, all the Arthur C. Clark stuff where he's mixing up, you know,

these weird paranormal ideas as well, you know, that was all part of my birth, my, not my birth, my childhood, etc. I even had a pet rat called Valentina Tereshkova after the first woman in space. I was really into all of that stuff. And of course, then when you look back and, you know, you think about the resources that were spent on the space race and, you know, the contemporaneous, you know, the song by Gil Scott Hare and Whitey's on the moon, etc., which you talk to on the main podcast, but it's basically, you know,

you're spending this money going to the moon, look at all these problems on Earth. I find it hard to pick, even now, to pick apart my childish, my childhood, not necessarily childish, my childhood enthusiasm for that space race, with that bare fact that, yes, those resources, if you were thinking about it, it should have been spent elsewhere.

Of course, that's a problem for now, right? And so this problem of, like, you know, could Jeff at Bezos end world hunger? Well, he could also go quite a long, way those resources. We probably need those resources that Jeff Bezos has. We need them under democratic control if we're going to deal with climate change. Do you know what I mean? Nationalize Amazon. Yeah, totally. I find it quite hard to pick apart my childhood enthusiasm and perhaps not lose it, but like how to process that, given these, you know, perhaps less childish realities

that we face. Well, you know, I can, I can only commiserate because that's a large, I mean, can see from the book itself that the book was partly my own attempt to kind of come to terms with what all this means and having, you know, having grown up in the same kind of milieu, like that we had all these books on our shelves. You don't even, you don't even question, you know, like, what, where they're coming from. It's just part of your reality. And the books say, quite frankly, you know, here is your future. You're flipping through these pages. One of them is called the Kids' Whole Future Catalog, you know, which is like, oh, you know, giant cities floating on the ocean, domes in Antarctica, high speed, you know, vacuum

trains everywhere. Great. Let's do it. So, yeah. And I think that, you know, we kind of, and you all touch on this elsewhere on your podcast. It's kind of another one of these like long 90s moments where there was this sort of long 70s where the world ended and sort of nobody knew it for a while. that line that goes up into the right forever stopped going up into the right and there was the wily coyote thing where you're hanging in midair before you realize that you're going to fall and I think that again not to what's been useful to me is to is to just embrace and go okay Fred yeah you are a child of the 70s and 80s lean into it and take it apart and as you say kind of analyze it and use it for

stuff to think out loud with. And that's been, you know, one of the things that this book has allowed me to do is to use the wreckage of that world that ended, you know, before we knew it, as a set of things to play with and things to work with in order to draw out these other, you know, more important things. So, you know, we're all from somewhere. You know, this is kind of the metapolitics too. So we can't pretend to be from anywhere other than where we're from.

So we might as well start from there to address and advance, you know, common tasks along with other people who are from other places. So that's really to a large extent. That's perfect. That's perfect. It's almost sums up that ACFM project where we look at popular music and all sorts of little cultural bits and weird things in order to get to the politics. of today so that's absolutely perfect hey fred thanks so much for talking to me i i'd really

recommend the book i really really enjoyed it it absolutely it was like laser pointed at my own my own um upbringing and my own uh interest it was fantastic really appreciate you coming on and talking well thanks a lot here it was great to talk with you Thank you.