Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 21

Episode Date: February 12, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.Join us on 2/17 for a live digital experience of Behind the Bastards (plus Q&A) featuring Robert Evans, Propaganda, & Sophie Lichterman. If you can't make it, the show will be available for replay until 2/24!Tickets: https://www.momenthouse.com/behindthebastards Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch.

If you want, if you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and occasionally even about how to put some other things back together. Today, we're going to be talking about something that is increasingly a part of what we like to call the crumbles around here, which is the healthcare system in this country and the hospital system in this country as it kind of gets crunched by COVID. And we're going to particularly talk about a really critical aspect of our entire medical infrastructure that a lot of people don't know about, traveling nurses. And with me today is our guest, Ann.

Ann, you are a traveling nurse from New York to California all around the country. Thanks for being on the show. Glad to be here. Yeah. So I live in Colorado and I was a regular staff nurse until COVID hit. And, you know, at that time, we expected it to crunch everywhere. But my home hospital, like many places that worked on the coast, ended up being really empty when everybody locked down and stopped getting into car accidents and going to parties and all of the other things that bring people into the ER and ICU. So at that time, I quit my full-time job and went to New York as a travel nurse. And then I've been dancing around hotspots since then. So New York, Texas, Ohio, rural New Mexico. I just finished my third contract in California. I've been up to Oregon.

So I've seen the healthcare system working and not working in a lot of different places and also like how much disparity there is in different communities related to COVID and the healthcare that we can provide. Yeah. And I am kind of, before we move on to some of the specific things going on with travel nurses, what is your sense of like, how often are you in a place and feel like, well, the hospital system here, this particular hospital, they're like right on the edge of a breaking point? Oh, most of the time. Okay. That's good to know. Where are your seatbelts, folks? Yeah. I mean, particularly since everyone was able to get vaccinated, right? Like, to me, I really feel like that that point of like the tipping point of like the quote unquote crumbles

kind of like after everybody was able to get their second vaccination. And we had so much hope last May and June and things were reopening. And it was kind of like, wow, things could go back to normal. And then like, I don't believe that's going to happen. And since then, I've seen so much more despair in my coworkers. And I've heard about so many more healthcare suicides, staff nurses, travel nurses, RTs, other ancillary people, and, you know, the kind of running joke in a lot of workplaces is like, well, I hope I test positive for COVID because that would be better than coming into work another day. Yeah. Or I hope I get hit by a car so I don't have to come in. Your job, I think, is what a lot of people would, the people who, you know, are reasonable human

beings and see what you're doing is incredibly necessary, would find the work to be something of a nightmare. I mean, it sounds like horrific to have to deal with this. I mean, it's not an easy job and the best of times being a nurse, but like with COVID and stuff, it's just, there's so much else on y'all's plates. And one of the things that has happened over the course of the last year, well, almost two years now, is that from January 2020, the advertised pay rates for travel nurses around the country have gone up by about 67%, which in staffing firms have, you know, increased their billing of hospitals by like 28 to 32%. So like this huge raise in what travel nurses are demanding and what is getting paid out. And I think a reasonable person would go, well, yeah,

of course. And yeah, I think anybody would go, any reasonable person would go, well, yeah, of course, you guys deserve much more money than that for what you're dealing with right now. I have no problem with this, but people who do have problems with this are the American hospital, association, among other folks, generally the folks who are seeing this primarily as a, well, now we're spending more money issue as opposed to a, hey, maybe we don't have enough nurses, which right. Yeah. So I guess I have maybe a couple of comments on that. So one of the things about travel nurses, though, if you're not in the travel field, and you say, I want to change hospitals, even if you're an experienced nurse, they will take between a month and six months

to go through their hiring process. And then they will give you a week, two weeks, maybe four weeks of orientation. So that's a long process to hire a nurse normally. For me as a travel nurse, I will talk to a recruiter. I will say yes. I will be on the road somewhere between four hours to 24 hours later. I will get to the hospital. I will do a bunch of paperwork that is for compliance and makes no difference at all. I will give between two and six hours of orientation, which is basically, here's the bathroom, here's the storeroom. This is what we're going to audit in the charts. And then I'm expected to take care of complex, actively dying patients. So people complain about how much we're getting paid. But if you only have two hours of

like, where's the bathroom? And like, this is how you get, and most of the time when you're spending with IT being like, Hey, I need computer access, buddy. And then there you are. And you're in the thick of it with no backup. So you already have to be an expert in your field. And you have to be able to walk into an unfamiliar chaotic situation and hit the ground running immediately. So yes, making 120 bucks an hour is a lot of money. But I don't know that that's so super unreasonable for two hours of like, exit, now take care of people who are actively dying and don't screw it up. It's the way we're told the system is supposed to work, right? Like this is how capitalism is supposed to function. The demand for something goes up and the demand for nursing

is way the hell up. So the price goes up. If you believe in capitalism, like one assumes these people who are responsible for, you know, paying you and are currently lobbying. So what's happening? I should go back because we didn't note this. But the American Hospital Association and a number of other folks are lobbying Congress right now to put a cap on the amount of money that traveling nurses can can can receive. And a number of Congress people have said that they're going to be looking into the issue. Several states, Oregon, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Kansas and Kentucky have introduced legislation that's attempting to cap nurse pay rates. So there's like this huge backlash attempting to lock down the amount of money y'all can continue to get paid.

Because of all of the things this country, I guess, has money for the people dealing with the, I don't know what, I don't know how many millions of additional sick and dying people are kind of beyond what these folks are willing to shell out for. Have I gotten the size of that? And I mean, to clarify, so in a FEMA contract, so what a lot of the contracts I take are, so the nurses making between $100 and $125 an hour. And maybe you also have the tax restyping or you don't kind of depending on how you are in that. But the bill rate to the hospital is usually like 220, 240. So the legislation is against the agencies because the agencies are making between 40 to 60%. Of course, the agency is then going to say, hey, well, we aren't going

to pay you as much because we still want the same cut. My understanding, so the trickle down effect is likely going to be travel nurse wages. But my understanding is it's asking the FTC to take enforcement against the travel nurse agencies. Because the agencies, they're the ones that say they have the person on the phone that says, hey, you have these credentials, we want to send you to this hospital, yes or no, we've got this hotel arranged or we don't or those types of, and we're going to do this type of onboarding. So they have their own kind of infrastructure and they take half 60% of the cut. And so some of those people are making a lot of money too. Yeah. And it seems like it's kind of the situation where the way this is being framed,

they're trying to crack down on these people who are kind of profiteering or could be argued to be profiteering off the situation, rather than trying to cap the amount that the nurses can make, so to speak, or at least not buy as much. But the overall effect will be that because of the way these companies work, y'all will still wind up making less money. Yeah. How, within the traveling nurse community, what is kind of, where are people right now with this? Like what is, what is kind of the mood? So I think there's a couple of things to note. So in the FEMA contracts, they're usually 60 to 72 hour contracts. So you're working back to back to back to back. So I'll do 80 hour weeks sometimes. And most people are not white women like me. This is mostly first and second

generation immigrants and generally people of color. So these are not people that are saving for Lamborghinis. These are people that are paying off their student loans because a lot of them went to private nursing schools because that was kind of what was accessible to them. Yeah. Because of all of the disparity in education and opportunities. These are people that are trying to pay off their mortgages. These are people who are paying off their parents' houses. So this kind of idea that like nurses are greedy is, I think, really unfair because most of us are just trying to like, you know, make a life that works. And also you can't do 80 hour contracts 52 weeks out of the year. No. I mean, doing it for any extended period of time, I've worked

those kind of hours in a generally less stressful working environment. And it like it breaks you down over time. Like you can't do that at any time in your life for one thing. Like, and you can't do that forever. And it sounds like this is kind of a lot of people are taking it as like this is an opportunity. I can get my parents out of debt. I can get a house. I can save for my kids. I can pay off my own college. Like it's a chance for a lot of these people by putting in an unbelievable amount of effort to get ahead. And I can't even imagine the frustration at seeing so many people be like, well, no, not so fast. And I mean, one of the things that people are bringing up is right, like in the same way that, you know, we struggle to want to pass minimum

wage laws for the undocumented immigrants that pick our food and, you know, support this infrastructure that is totally unseen. Now that we have, you know, what is mostly first and second generation immigrants that are working these FEMA contracts, right, like you're targeting a section of the population that are not the people that have double tripled their wealth in the pandemic, right? Like these are not all of the people that got the small business loans that didn't need them and, you know, and have just putting all of that money into stock, right? These are not, these are people that just want a middle class American dream. And we're working really, really hard for it. And I mean,

there, these are people who are asking, can I have the thing we're all promised? If I spend 80 hours a week watching people in a lot of cases choke out their last fucking breaths, is that okay? And a lot of people are saying, oh, of course not. Right. And, you know, so we're taking care of dying people while we're getting yelled at at the phone of like, is cursing a lot on this show or not? Abs a fucking Lutely. Yes, of course. Yeah. So I mean, I had a family member saying you're fucking imprisoning her on a ventilator. I'm going to come for you. Where do you fucking live? You know, we have to get security involved.

Um, you know, we get death threats. I've had people like threatened to find where I live and rape me. Jesus fucking Christ. And so I mean, yeah, 67% isn't enough of a race. If you're dying, loved one who also probably would say those same things to me because I would say, Hey, please be vaccinated. And they would say, fuck you. But I'm still going to do everything I can to take care of them. And I'm going to endure this abuse and like, yeah, if I'm going to leave my home and the safety of a hospital that works and go into these total cluster fucks of hospitals where the educator has left, the manager has left, the director has left. So there's no leadership. It's 80% travelers, some of which are great. Some of which are also hot messes and try and

take care of these people than like, yes, I want to be paid accordingly for it. Yeah. Now, would I trade that for a social, um, a social safety net of health insurance? Because I have to get private health insurance, which is shady. Um, I don't get any disability insurance. I have no sick leave. Right. Cause you're, you're, you're a pinch hitter. You're not like salaried anywhere. Yeah. But would I trade this high salary for a social safety net? Personally, I would. Yes. But I mean, nobody's going to say like, yes, you will be able to retire with dignity if you play by all of these rules. They don't believe that I want to make the money. Yeah. I mean, we're all always in this kind of like, yeah, sock away as much as you can

while it's coming situation. And she's especially if you're, especially if you're doing something you're going to need to recover from later, right? Like this is, I, I, you know, I've done overseas work. I understand kind of the nature of like trauma. And while you're doing the job at the rate you're doing it, you're also like pushing off a day of reckoning mentally. And by God, having a cushion of savings helps with that. Yeah. Like in the middle of it, you're in it. And then, you know, sometimes it's week, sometimes it's months. I hiked the Colorado Trail for mental health and half of those nights I had ICU nightmares. So I was in these beautiful a middle of nowhere places where everything was quiet. I would wake up with all of the

beeps and people dying in my head night after night after night, you know? Yeah. So I mean, yeah, I'm angry that they don't want to compensate me for that because I mean, they're definitely not paying for my therapist. They definitely like, aren't giving me access to disability if I need it, right? Like. Yeah. Because obviously, again, you're, you're a contractor effectively. There's not like a union for traveling nurses. Is there or am I wrong about that? No. So I mean, the only thing you have is your negotiating power. So I have eight years of experience between emergency and ICU and a lot of very big and highly regarded hospitals. So

I'm a hot commodity to them. So I can kind of pick and choose who I want to work with compared to someone that has less desirable specialties. Not that those specialties don't also work as hard, but they're just harder. They're easier to staff. So therefore they're not. Yeah. It's a market thing. Sure. Right. It's a market thing. I definitely don't believe that my specialties are more like inherently valuable just in terms of the market. So, you know, so I get, I can, I have the luxury of turning down contracts that aren't what I want, but I mean, I have no idea what I'm walking into. So on Monday, I'll walk into somewhere. They said, you'll do some paperwork, you'll get your orientation, you'll have,

it'll all be, it'll be a busy day and then you'll be on your own. And I have no idea, sometimes you're oriented in one unit and you never see that unit again. So, and I, you know, you have no idea what you're walking into. And how, how long are these contracts generally for? So before COVID, the standard nursing contract was 13 weeks. Okay. Since COVID, a lot of them are shorter and I've only done short contracts because if it's a decent place, then I can renew and stay longer usually. And if it's a bad place, then I'm pretty happy to get out early. So I do between four and eight week contracts. And I usually do 60 plus

hours a week. Is there any kind of like organization that you've seen come together a little more between people who are doing this, this gig since you don't have kind of representation? Is that something that started to take form in the last two years since COVID? I mean, there's definitely a lot of talk about it. I think like those of us that started traveling since the pandemic, you know, I would say that I've only done crisis contracts. Like I've never done a normal 13 week, 36 hour a week, not crisis assignment. Like I've only gone into the shit show hotspots. And so therefore like my needs and desires are different than somebody who likes that previous lifestyle. So in some ways, it's a little bit hard for us to kind of agree on common

goals because we have a lot of different, you know, we're a very diverse group of nurses. Definitely the Million Nurse March is kind of a step towards that. Yeah. Tell me about that. What is this? Because I just learned about this pretty recently. Yeah. So I dropped off the grid for the last five days, which was fantastic for me, but it means I'm also just starting to figure it out. So the kind of general idea is that, you know, we have, I think, hopefully I don't get it wrong, four million some nurses in the country, a huge number of nurses in the country, and a huge number are dropping out. Yeah. You know, hundreds of thousands quit last year. I think one estimate is 500,000 may quit

this year. And we were just so people know tens of thousands of nurses understaffed before COVID nation. Yes. Right. Right. And, you know, I think one of the things to understand, too, is that, like, if you work, I don't know, what's what's a normal type of job that people work? I don't know. If you work at the DMV. A bookman. Oh, right. Right. If you work at the DMV and the DMV is slow, you will still stay there eight hours and you'll still get paid for your eight hours. If you are a normal nurse and you work 36 hours and the ER is running slow, they could say, we're just canceling you for the rest of the day. Go home. We won't pay you for those last six hours. And so, like, we've always had pretty, like, flexible, like, we've never had, like, most of

the places I've worked have never had guaranteed hours. And so one of the reasons to go to travel contracts, too, is also so you can at least have guaranteed hours. So there's a lot of kind of protections that nurses have never really had, like guaranteed hours, like staff ratios. So some states, California and Oregon are two of them. If you go into the ICU, which is the highest level of care, so people are actively dying, actively unstable, things can go bad within seconds. Usually it's a one nurse will have two patients, which is pretty much all you can handle because they're on multiple drips, multiple types of life support, keeping them alive. So ventilators, being the one that we see the most. And it's really your responsibility to know every inch of

that person's body and everything going on with them. And you really direct a lot of their care. So two to one kind of makes a lot of sense. Since the pandemic and not having enough nurses, sometimes that's led to three to one, or even in bad situations, four to one. So one of the statistics that one of the kind of nurse influencers and comedians nurse Blake talks about is that for every additional patient that a nurse takes on, and I believe he's talking about MedCert, not ICU, that that patient's mortality increases by 7%. So asking a nurse to do more with less is not just like, hey, just suck it up, be busier. This is actively contributing to people's disability and early deaths. So one of the things that the Million Nurse March wants to

talk about is mandated staffing ratios. So ICU would be two to one. MedCert is usually four to one. I think ER, they're asking for three to one. So these have been studied by the American Nurses Association and other sort of nursing organizations. And not only do they make your job as a nurse so much better, because we go into nursing because we want to fix things and take care of people. We want good outcomes. You don't go into nursing to just run around with your head cut off and watch everyone die. That's terrible. You go into nursing because you want the people to get better under your care, and you want to be able to give them that. And so when you're asked to take care of more patients than you're able to, you're not able to do that. And

it just crushes you. So not only is it better for nurse satisfaction, it also saves patients' lives and also prevents things that cause lasting disability, like ventilator associated pneumonia or bed sores or delirium or things like that. So, you know, mandating patient ratios is one of the really big things that the Million Nurse March is for. There's a lot of talk about pay and living wages. You know, like every section, housing prices and inflation have gone through the roof. Sure, because you've got to like be renting a spot whenever you're like the hospital ain't putting you up. Right. Well, and for staff nurses too, right? Like if you're, you know, maybe they gave you a 2% raise, but hey, rent increased 30%. Sure. I used to be on the interview

board at my old hospital, and we would just tell people like, if you're moving to Denver as a single person, we lose most of our nurses because they haven't looked at housing. So like they'll accept a job and then they'll look for a place to live and be like, oh, I can't afford to live here. So, hey, like, I mean, we can't ask if you're single moving here, but like you probably can't afford to live here with what we're going to pay you. I mean, cool. It's just, it's so eternally frustrating that like the one thing that everybody when you sit them down agrees is incontrovertibly necessary, medical care. We can agree on a lot of things, but not how to make sure the people doing it have a good quality of life and good income. Like we can, we have all

these fun, fun rules that make it possible to charge X number of thousand dollars for a dose of insulin. But we don't just have a law that's like, hey, if, if you're working full time as a nurse, maybe you shouldn't have to be housing insecure. I don't know how do you make that into a law, but seems like there should be some option for a country that can make some of the things we make. Yeah. I mean, tying wages to housing prices seems like, I don't know, not being an economist and not being an administrator. Like that sounds super easy to me. Like I think those are 15%, everybody gets a 15% raise. Sure. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but it seems super simple to send a guy around with a stick to threaten landlords when they raise

rent. Like there's, we could debate the answers to this. Sure. What do you think? I mean, not, not that like you have any sort of comprehensive knowledge of all of the people doing this, but like, do you think there's a possibility of like a wildcat strike, which is again, for people who maybe are, is when there's a strike of workers who are not unionized? Um, I mean, to some extent, with everybody quitting to do travel nursing, it's not so different. I mean, some units have lost 80% of their staff to travel. Yeah. Right. Some, like when a unit says, oh, well, we lost 50% of my staff, I'm kind of like, well, you did better than most, you know. So in some ways it's already happening. And in that same

way, I am seeing hospitals give better incentives to their nurses that have stayed, either retention bonuses or increasing bonuses for, for core staff picking up extra shifts or kind of other perks, like increasing education benefits or things like that. So I think hospitals are responding to like, hey, we don't want to lose these people to traveling. Like can we tip the balance a little bit? And I think, you know, overall hospital leadership is moving slower than they need to. But I mean, at least they're moving a little bit. So I mean, in that way, I can see a wildcat strike just coming from the kind of laborer forces at play. And I could, and I mean, there were one of the hospitals in the South, I think it was Alabama, all of their staff, their staff

coordinated so that the shift that was on agreed to stay late because you can't, because abandoning patients can put your license at risk, right? So we all walked off in the middle of a shift and said, fuck you to the hospital administrators and patients died than like our licenses at risk. So we also have to kind of balance that a little bit. But there was a hospital, they organized for the day shift basically to stay as late as they needed. And night shift all stood outside the hospital and wouldn't refuse to clock it in. So sometimes these things are happening in small levels also. Interesting, really interesting. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that is like such a tough thing to balance just the idea that like, well, you are healthcare workers, like withholding

your labor is a thing that's going to be necessary from time to time. There's also consequences for it that are not present if you're making, I don't know, tires, you know, yeah. And as much as teachers and nurses are the same, like I don't think our country cares about educating children as much as it cares about their parents dying, you know, like for better or worse. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's another subject. Is there anything else you wanted to get into today before we close out for the, for the episode? I mean, if it's okay with you and you can cut it if it's not, you know, I try and tweet about kind of what's happening on the ground. Yeah, absolutely. And the things that I'm seeing. And I'm mostly finished with a book about the first year on the front line and

seven different hospitals and kind of the disparities between, you know, critical access in New Mexico versus trauma hospitals in, you know, the Bay Area and kind of what that first year looked like. So if you want, you can follow me on Twitter. It's Ann, A-N-N-E, like Ann of Green Gables and R-N 2020, which is when I started travel nursing, you know, and so that I kind of talk a little bit about like what I'm seeing and what's going on. I was recently in an ER where, you know, people often had to stay outside under the heat lamps for 30 hours waiting for a hospital bed just because everything was unpacked. So they couldn't even come inside the hospital and they were, you know, waiting to get their appendix out and things like that. Yeah. Again, where your seat

belts and the helmet, you know, be real, be real careful right now, guys. Right. And I mean, I think the other thing is the blood shortage. So most hospitals are revising their guidelines of who will get a blood transfusion. So you now have to be much more critical before they will give you a blood transfusion. So there's a lot of politics around blood donation. But if you feel like you can donate blood, it's really desperately needed. Yeah. And people are going to wear your seat belts because people are really going to legitimately die because we run out of blood. Yeah. Boy, howdy, please wear your seat belts, folks. Just hunker down for a little while. No, no new risky experiments in life for just a minute. Not the time to take up skydiving.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe avoid that. Maybe don't go skiing if you haven't gone skiing before. I just did that and broke my wrist because I'm exactly as dumb as the people I'm trying to warn. And then I guess just check in with your mental, with your the mental health of your health care workers, because I mean, so many people have, you know, I think a lot of us are dealing with at least passive sort of like, maybe I should just drive off the road instead of going to work today sort of thoughts, you know? And oh, for a lot of us, that's just that fleeting thought and then we get our shit together. But for some people, it's going to be more than that. And, you know, nursing is one of those things where people have to find themselves by their career

and they need people in their lives saying like, if you are never a nurse again, you are still valued, you are still loved. Just being alive is enough. And this is how, you know, we can help take care of you if you need to quit for three months, you know? And supporting people with their intrinsic value rather than like, you are only productive and valuable because you are their saving lives. Because I think a lot of us really get stuck in that. And a lot of us are drawn into nursing because we feel some lack of worthiness without it, you know? Well, that's the hard thing to get other people to do because in part, this is a society where we just have such generally crummy attitudes towards mental health. But like, we're great at saying things like,

oh, you know, there's a pandemic. Our healthcare workers are heroes. You're all heroes because of the work that you're doing. The work makes you a hero as opposed to saying, hey, thank you for doing that. I know things are still fucked up right now. But if you decide you got to like, take a break or whatever, you know, you're, you're, you're, that doesn't mean you like what you did was still wonderful and you're still great and valuable. And maybe the best thing is for you to take that break and not drive yourself off of a cliff. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's harder to get people to like, wave banners that say outside of their apartment complexes. Right. Maybe people were like, banging on pots to like, let healthcare workers know that no matter what they do,

they're valued members of the community that people love. But yeah. All right. Well, Ann, thank you so much for talking with us today. I hope you hold together and help the people in your life hold together, which is all any of us can really do other than wear a seatbelt. Yeah. And thank you for being a part of the conversation. And thank you for, you know, listening to hard things. And, you know, that's one thing that I think we really appreciate is people who will actually listen with open hearts and, and we'll witness this with us. So that we're not alone in it. It could happen here is the podcast that you're listening to right now. I'm Robert Evans.

All right. That's, that's my job done. What are we, what are we doing? What are we doing today? Hey, what's up? Hey, Andrew, back at it again with another podcast. Today we're doing something a little bit different from the previous episodes that I've done. We're having a bit more of an open discussion about a certain book that has been passed around for about a decade now and has polarized members of the anarchist community to put it that way. Today we'll be talking about the book, the infamous polemic desert by anonymous for those who are, you know, not aware of this extremely controversial text. Desert is a nihilist anarchist text was published in 2011 that is mainly directed at other anarchists

and seeks to address its use of climate collapse and revolution. It became somewhat of a meme to tell folks to read desert. I'm not sure when that was, but I just remember seeing it a lot. I think in like 2020. Yeah. Around 2019, 2020, red desert became a meme. Yeah. Yeah. All over Twitter and Instagram and Reddit. But of course, being a thing that exists on the Internet, people naturally became torn on the subject of it. And so there are a lot of perspectives and opinions and think pieces about desert, some more or less accurate than others. But we are here to discuss the book, our personal experiences, reading it, things we think it gets right and wrong, and what we could potentially learn going forward.

So I would say the floor is yours. Whoever wants to go first. I mean, I'm a huge fan of the quote that the book takes, or that it takes its name from, which comes from, you know, Tacitus, who was a dude writing in the Roman period. And the exact quote that it comes from is, and he's talking, Tacitus is talking about the Roman Empire. Robbers of the world, now that the earth is insufficient for their all devastating hands, they probe even the sea. If their enemy is rich, they are greedy. If he is poor, they thirst for dominion. Neither east nor west has satisfied them. Alone of mankind, they are equally covetous of poverty and wealth. Robbery, slaughter and plunder, they falsely name empire. They make a desert and they call it peace.

How? Good ass quote. It is a solid quote. And obviously, I think people living in the shadows of every empire that's ever existed can identify with that quote. It's a powerful kind of central idea to hang your extended essay. I don't really know what the best term to refer to it is on. Yeah, it's a long essay. Yeah, it's a very long essay. As we talked about kind of coming into this, it's extremely 2010s. So, pre-Arab Spring, pre-all the big uprisings and revolts we had in 2019 and 2020, there's definitely some stuff that it gets very right. And I think kind of one of the ways in which it's had an impact on me is kind of, I've thought about what happens to sort of culture as the result of this kind of Hollywood engine

that is heavily tied up with the United States military industrial complex as a process of desertification of ideas and the ability to like conceive of new futures. That said, I haven't re-read it in a very long time and haven't really felt called to in many ways because I do think, I don't know, I think there's an extent to which it's been kind of left behind with some of the things that have happened since. I think, I will say that as someone who really came into my own as an artist in like 2020, early 2020, although I had identified with it before, when I had read the book, I think it was in late 2020, late 2020, suddenly I read the book, first time I read it.

And honestly, there was some good, some bad, some very outdated stuff and also some stuff that I don't know, maybe the author felt it was like groundbreaking at the time, but you know, at this present stage just feels like common knowledge, common sense, you know. I mean, it was groundbreaking in a way for like climate realism, right? Like this was written before, you know, this is written before Climate Leviathan, this was written before the uninhabitable Earth, this was written before a lot of kind of the texts that view climate change as an absolute, like this was written one year before HyperObjects, which is really interesting actually, because you know, the whole premise of that book is that

climate change is done, like it happened where like there's no turning back the clock. And that sort of was written even before that, like it was one of the first things now, of course, it's much more niche, but like it was, if I look back and books that have like impacted me, it was one of the first books like that came out like timeline wise to take climate changes like, yeah, it's, there's no saving it, like there's no living in the 2000s, there's no living in the 90s again, it's like things are, like the world's not going to end, but things are going to get worse, right? Like, and that is kind of a big, a big part of the book, because right, it's, it's also, it's also not pro-collapse, like it doesn't take collapse as an absolute,

it doesn't take, it doesn't, it doesn't subscribe to global collapse. And that's one of the misconceptions I think people have about the book, that they just assume it's like this collapse, tumorous, like misanthropic kind of text, but really isn't. I did not read it as that. I first read it around the same time you did, and I read it as a part of a lot of books I was reading to prep for this show when we were writing our first five episodes on like, on climate change and, and like the crumbles. So I read it as a part of my kind of general research. And yeah, like at that point, it was already kind of meme-ified to be like, you know, like an anarcho-nihilist, like a tumor manifesto. And I read it and like,

that's not what it's saying at all. It's actually staying with the opposite of that. Once I had read it, I was like, I was really taking it back at how, how easily popular perceptions of a piece of media could, I mean, honestly, corrupt it beyond recognition. Yeah. You know, like if people, a bunch of people are telling you, you know, this or the other about a certain text or whatever, you know, it's kind of shake, it kind of shakes you up to like actually consume for yourself and then realize, how did you all get that?

Yeah. How did you read that out of it? It is really interesting because I'm not even sure if they did read out of it, or if that was the perception they had going into it. So they read it through that lens, and that lens basically, you know, changed the text in their head to fit that thing. Because yeah, it is really interesting how, how it is so associated with like, doomerism. Yet if you like engage in good faith with the text, it's very much not a doomer manifesto in any way.

Although there are aspects of it that I am, that I think attitude wise that I am critical of, but I think Chris was going to say something. Yeah. So I was going to say like, I really, I've always not liked this book. Like I read it back in, I think 2017, 2018 when it was first sort of like coming back. Yeah. And I didn't like it then, and I reread it this morning, and I like it even less now than I did then. And I think, I think I actually, I actually, okay, so like I think it's true that most of the text doesn't do the doomer thing, but I think I understand

where people got it from because you know, you have quotes in this like, here's one, yet I can already hear the accusations from my own camp. Accusations of deserting the cause of revolution, deserting the struggle for another world, such accusations are correct. I would rejoin that such millenarian and progressive myths are at the core of the expansion of power. And this is, this is what I really like, I think from an ecological perspective, it's sort of okay. I strongly dislike desert as an anarchist text because I think that's just wrong. I think, I think there's, there's, there's, there's an ingrained defeatism in it that is so strong

that it, it, it, it just, it, it like warps the author's perception of the past. Like you, you get these things where he's talking about these, these counter, he's talking about like the, you know, the, the, what we, you call the classical anarchist movement from roughly like 1870 to really sort of ends with the defeat of the anarchists in Spain in like 1937. And, and he, you know, they say things like, from Spain pre 1936 to the Jewish anarchists in North America, the illegalist of France and the Italian anarcho-syndicalist of Argentina, the inhabitants of anarchist counter societies were always by definition active minorities. The minorities may have gotten larger in an instructionary moments, but they remained

at minorities always. And that's just wrong. It's factually wrong. Like these, these movements were not minorities. Like the, like the entire, like the, the, like the largest union in France was the CG, like in the early 1900s, was the, the, the, you just see the CG that all of the, the the French, Spanish, Portuguese, country speaking countries have a hat. They have one union that's called the UGC and one union that's called the CGT and I can never remember which one's which, but like, like that was, that was the largest union in France and it was a syndicalist union, right? Like it was, and there's, you know, the same thing with Argentina, right? For a, like for a while was the largest union in Argentina. And I think, and this, this is sort

of my problem with this, which is that, you know, this is a person who's basically like, they talk about like they're born in the 70s and they've, they're writing this 2011 in just the midst of the collapse of sort of, like the complete total destruction of, of the old anarchist movement, right? The anarchist movement that had been born out of sort of like the Zapatistas and the anti globalization movement. And they'd been beaten so badly that, you know, I mean, they were crushed, they were completely destroyed and they'd been beaten so badly, they, they, they can't, and they, they, they literally can't imagine winning and think that like, like revolution in general, like is essentially a secular, it's a secular theology,

they repeat this over and over and over again. It's like, revolution is a theology, revolution is a myth. And it's like, and this is, this is something that's just a product of, of defeat. It's not a product of sort of taking seriously the conditions that are emerging around them. And, you know, I was talking about this before the recording, it's like, right after this is written, it's, you get the movement of the squares and then you get occupied. And it's like, basically, like every major city in the world goes into revolt. The revolts are anarchist inspired and, you know, and desert, like this is why desert vanishes for like six or seven years, because desert is, is a piece that's written, like it's, it's a piece that's, that's

only happens in a very specific part of a revolutionary cycle, which is when all, like every, everything has been crushed, all resistance has been crushed, everyone's losing hope, and then everyone starts reading desert again. And then the revolutions restart. And, and at that point, like once, once, once there's like, you know, 200,000 people in the streets again, like fighting the cops, it becomes less and less sort of like, like that, that part of its analysis becomes less and less relevant until, you know, inevitably everyone, like there's, there's a defeat and then everyone goes sort of, like, and I think, I think that's why it has the doomer wrap, because it's, it's, it's the text that people read when you've been beaten in the streets.

See, yeah, that's, that's an interesting look at it, because I mean, I definitely agree with the revolution is an ideal, like is a myth thing, like I specifically within the context of the United States, which I believe that's what the books trying to mostly focus on, they, they do bring up other parts of the world and stuff. But it's definitely written by an, by an American like citizen. That is, I mean, I mean, that, that could actually be wrong. It may not be written by an American, but I in terms of reading it, it is kind of through like a very like Western lens of like, revolution's not happening here. And I definitely sympathize and agree with that viewpoint. And I mean, if you're going to point at me, like it was 2011, then Occupy happened and like,

yeah, but Occupy didn't, but that also fit, like every, every attempt has not succeeded in this country to get any kind of big meaningful change that we can push towards something that's like post capitalist. So yeah, I mean, I do think, I think it's, it's, it's mostly targeting people, specifically like communists, or Marxist Londonists who like, are just waiting around for the revolution to happen and then don't do anything. Like that, right? That is, that is the thing it's trying to point at. But I, but I think this is, this is why it's a text that's like, that's not good for the moment, because our problem isn't that like, like the problem right now isn't that there's no, like there's no uprising on the horizon, like everyone's

been completely beaten down. No one's ever going to go into the streets again. Our problem is that like, there's just, there's, there's, there's periodic uprisings everywhere. And every single time everyone is caught off guard and every single time no one's able to actually sort of mobilize off of it. And, you know, like, like, like, no, no, no one's been able to, like, pivot it into something that's actually like transformative. But, but I think that that's a very different problem than the problem that desert is, because desert has already abandoned the possibility that an uprising can win. That's, I mean, it's, I mean, I think I have too. Yeah. And then specifically banning the idea of like global revolution, right? That is,

that is the thing that's specifically targeting. They're saying smaller specific, they're saying like smaller local things actually can succeed in a lot of ways. But they're trying to tie this idea of global revolution as like a pacifying idea, right? Just waiting around for this to happen and tying that to this, at the time, much more niche idea, now it's, now it's way more popular, but this idea of like global collapse and how people think, if they can, people think believing in global collapse is smarter than believing in global revolution, they think it's more realistic. But the book saying no, this idea of global collapse actually falls under all the same issues that global revolution has.

I think I'd want to sort of comment here. With regard to like the defeatist sort of reading in the text, I understand that reading. I mean, personally, I distinguish between like defeatism and doomerism. And I always think like my own personality and my own perspective kind of like inoculates me in a way from like adopting that kind of defeatist attitude towards, you know, change. But I don't think the book is entirely, you know, dismissive of like revolution. It just, I think the main thrust of it is that it's critical of the idea of like one global revolution, one global collapse. What it really emphasizes is that, you know, climate change brings new possibilities for new anarchies, plural to develop worldwide

in response to changing circumstances. But at the same time, you know, in some areas, things are going to get worse in some areas, things are going to get better. And it's not that really one broad brush could be applied to the entire earth, you know? But I think, I mean, I think like this is another thing that they're really guilty of, especially like there's an entire section in here where they just keep writing about Africa. And it's like, well, and then, you know, and they'll get pressed on it. And they'll be like, no, no, no, we mean Sub-Saharan Africa. And it's like, what are you talking about? Like they won't name countries, they won't name movements, they won't name people. It's just they'll just write something about the whole of Sub-Saharan

Africa. And it's just like, well, I think that's evidence of the kind of what Garrison was talking about. This is a person, right? And this is something you see all over the place with people writing about politics, with people trying to write about like, particularly revolutionary politics in a global sense. And I think it's usually a mistake to do that for the reasons we've kind of discussed. Anytime I see a left wing, even to somebody who I think is generally on point, who starts talking about, for example, like extending their theories about revolutionary politics to places I happen to know just a little bit about, it's always very clear like, oh, you don't know shit about Syria. Oh, you don't know shit about Libya. Oh, you don't know

shit about Angola. And that's not even a moral failing. It's just that it's impossible, really, to have in-depth knowledge of what's actually going on in those places and what's going on in those revolutions. It's why people default so much to the whole, well, whatever side the US is on must be the bad side and whatever side the Russians on must be the good side. It's the easiest way to look at that shit. I think that's a worthwhile critique to make. And it's a critique to make anytime that it happens. I agree with Garrison and with Andrew that I think the thing that is, that desert gets right. And the thing that I've seen in my own life is that like, the opportunities we should be looking for are not suddenly that some sort of global revolution

sweeps all of the things we don't like out of power and magically institutes something better comprehensively across the globe. It's room for little anarchies. It's what we saw in northeast Syria, right? Where the government pulls out and people have an opportunity to do something not perfect, but better. And I think that's kind of one of the things we talk about a lot on this show. That's why mutual aid is valuable. It's why building these connections are valuable. It's because as things crumble, there will be opportunities to in local areas, piecemeal, institute and push for more just and better ways of living. And I think that if you're looking at kind of the broad level, potentially optimistic point is that when you have enough of those and

when they spread well enough and if communication is good enough, maybe the things that work will get adopted on a wider scale. And there's always the opportunity that when ideas spread far enough, they have a tipping point and they go viral, so to speak. But I think that while there's a lot of specifics that desert gets wrong, I do think they were ahead of the curve in recognizing that. And I think it's a more productive way to look at the idea of revolutionary change than we're going to finally have 1917, but everywhere, you know? With regard to the African chapter, the impression that I got while reading that chapter, and I think the book itself references Samba. I got the impression that the author had read

African anarchism, the history of a movement by Sam Mba. And they were just kind of like inspired by that, I would say. Because as I do point out, they didn't like specify the specific cultures, which is an issue considering, you know, the tendency that Westerners have of, you know, being significant, this large brush as if it's, you know, all one way or the other. But I think what we do see now is, you know, from the Horn of Africa to South Africa to Nigeria to, I mean, recently Sudan, I believe, there are Africans, a smaller number organizing under the banner of anarchism, and there are anarchic elements that continue to persist on the continent. Yeah, I mean, I think that's like, you know, I mean, one of the things that they

sort of got, they got right was about how like this sort of renewal despite of urban anarchism, they're talking about like Chile in particular, they got right, Indonesia, Bangladesh sort of somewhat. But I think there's another, like my biggest issue with them in terms of the way they think about ecological stuff and this comes this is something I talk about with like they have this thing where they think that forager societies are like, okay, they're more careful than most people to frame it as like the foraging societies can be egalitarian. But I think they wind up talking about these sort of like, the way that sort of foraging nomadic societies sort of inherently defy the boundaries of the state and like that's true.

But you can also have like nomadic foraging societies that are, you know, hereditary slave societies. And this is, this is a problem because there's a there's a lot in here about that that's about sort of like, you know, they're taking this is sort of like soft anti-siv line, right? I was about to say that. It has a few lines where it does specifically say civilization is the cause of like, I think it's like civilization is genocide, which yeah, and that's silly. Yeah, that is heavily influenced by civilizations commit genocide. Sure. Yes. If you're saying that they do cause genocide, if you're if you're trying to make the case that it seems to be that civilizations, well, I don't know, every civilization does not commit genocide,

but no, but civilization is a constant. Yeah, civilization gives you the framework that makes genocide possible. Well, I like intentionally like intentional genocide possible. I don't know that I would agree with that because I think you see examples of genocide from hunter gatherer societies and from from so possibly society. Yeah, yeah. That obviously documentation on that isn't as extensive because we weren't documenting things for a lot of it. But you do have examples from from what we know of like the Americas of there were genocides committed by societies we would call stateless. So I think I might argue that like genocide is a thing that human beings do in civilization. Yeah, because it allows us to do everything on a larger scale allows us to do

way better genocides. That's definitely an argument. I think that's fair. I think I think my problem with it is that they're going back into this sort of like they're going back into the the the you know, there's this inherent binary between foragers and settle societies and that, you know, and specifically they think that that these sort that the foragers ideas are, you know, inevitably going to become egalitarian. It's like that's not true. And it's not true in ways that you can see right now in like there's like they're like there are lots of places right now where you can look at, you know, forging societies that have incredibly right like there's there's like, for example, you get sort of you get the Falani joining like right wing Islamist groups, right? And that like

that kind of thing, I think it has a problem with it's the same thing as looking at indigenous societies and and seeing them all on one side of the the fight with with colonizing nations as opposed I'm reading a book about the history of the Mapuche right now, which are historically like the indigenous group in Chile that resisted the law and the indigenous group really in you could argue in all of Latin America that resisted the longest and most effectively. But even then when you look at like the campaigns of the Chilean government in the 1860s and 1880s, large like significant chunks of the Mapuche sided with the government against other Mapuche. And like that's the like it's it's always a mistake. And I think this is a good one of the

things that you get out of the dawn of everything. It's always a mistake to like look at any of these groups hunter gatherers, stateless societies is like one thing or another. They're people and some of them sucked just like, yeah, they're yeah. Anyway, yeah, there's there is one thing that I wanted to sort of push back against. Robert, you had said that genocide is a thing that humans do. I don't think I agree with that assessment. In this sense, or at least I'd rather I would like to clarify or give you an opportunity to clarify what you mean by that. I, you know, I don't know that it's just humans. But I think that genocide is a thing that as long as we have evidence in recorded history, it seems like we have done not just against

our not just against other humans, but against other kind of hominid species, we have we have examples of things that it seems fair to call genocide going back further than we have any kinds of written records, you know, villages in the Balkans that were, you know, burnt in people who like groups of people, tribes and whatnot who seem to have been killed in mass. And, you know, there's there's other theories for some of that some of them may have been like people trying to stop a play we don't plague or whatever like there's not any kind of comprehensive solidity. But what we do know is that as long as we have documentations of humans doing things, we have documentations of things that we could call genocide. I see. I see.

Let's look into that a bit more. I appreciate the clarification. Yeah. Can I do a Balkans pivot? Go ahead. Because there's a there's a there's a thing like, like it genuinely disturbed me reading it in here about the Serbs dream dream that the Bosnian genocide were so that they're quoting disturbing about that. Oh, yeah. But this is this is a I uh, yeah. So they're doing a they're reading a quote from the book Gypsy's Wars and other instances of the wilds where he's talking this is about the Bosnian genocide. How is this possible in Europe at the end of the 20th century was the question that played obsessively through my mind. What the war in former Yugoslavia forces suggests the fact that people proved willing to make a

conscious and active choice to embrace regression, barbarity, a return to the wildness, take the Serb fighters who dreamed of a return to the Serbia of the epic poems where quote, there was no electricity, no computers, when the Serbs were happy and had no cities, the breeding ground of all evil. And then this is this is the next thing that's that's the text coming back and commenting on it. That some modern day militias reflect romantic desires while shelling towns, massacring villages and being in killed in turn should neither surprise us nor necessarily fully invalidate romance. It does, however, suggest along with the honest expression of joy and destruction mouthed by some soldiers in every war as well as many anarchists, that there was a coupling of some

sort between a generalized urge to destroy and a disgust at a complex human society. And there's there's there's another part um slightly later on we're talking about. Uh, ethnic diversity and autonomy will often emerge both from mutual aid and community and animosity between communities. I'd like to think and our history's backed this up that self-identifying anarchists will never inflict such pain as Serb nationalist militias, an example I chose purposely for the Republicans, but we should admit that our wish to fuck shit up is partly driven by the same urge to civilizational dismemberment that can be found in many inter-ethnic conflicts and in the minds of fighters more generally. And I I think that's

fucked. I think that's true. That's just why I don't ever remember that line. No, no, I I think there's commenting on a specific type of anarchist literature, which is like the make total destroy thing. And yeah, I've definitely I have observed that in people, the same the same urge that you're so broken down by everything that the only urge that is the only creative urge you have is to destroy the things around you. I've seen that. I don't think they're necessarily celebrating that, but they're pointing out that that urge can be there. What I think they get really wrong here is that I don't think that's the urge that that is like that. That's when you're dealing with inter-ethnic conflict and when you're dealing with genocide, I don't think

that's the urge that's going on, especially with the Serbs, because the Serbs like, you know, okay, like when an anarchist is doing make total destroy, right? There's a very specific set of things they're attacking or they're attacking building, they're attacking the physical infrastructure of the world. When the Serbs are doing the Bosnian genocide, like they have a very specific thing they're doing, which is killing Bosnian Muslims. And I think that's an extremely different urge than the sort of like, I don't think that's about sort of what it's civilizational dismemberment or whatever. That's about Islamophobia and genocide. And I think that's a different, I think the genocidal impulse is a, I think a very

different one than the sort of like the impulse to break the society that has harmed you. Yeah, I think it's important to draw a distinction between, you can kill a shitload of people without it being a genocide. And I think, and it's also one of those things I think sometimes where people, I think why there's hesitation to see certain acts in early history as genocide is that they're not as complete as modern genocide. But what a genocide really is, and I think it's important to lay this out, it's not necessarily killing every member of an ethnic group or religious group or whatever kind of community. It is stopping their ability to propagate and continue themselves. That's why things like destroying churches and

destroying it's like a cultural destruction markers are part of genocide. And it's also why a lot of genocides, they left the women and children alive, they would kill all the men and they would take the women in and they would breed with them, they might kill the kids sometimes, but it was this, the goal was not necessarily, we need to kill all of you, it's we want to kill this culture, this population. I think the parallel he's trying to make here, or they, or she, is that that like, that type of like genocidal cultural destruction is targeted against specific groups. The difference here is with this type, like, you know, he's writing this for other anarchists, he's pointing out like, our destructive urge, our cultural urge isn't

even for a specific group, it's just for everything. And that can be unhealthy sometimes. Sometimes there's ways to do, make total destroy, that's totally fine, but that can go to unhealthy places. Now, he's not equating like ethnic cleansing with that, he's like, they are, they are different. But when your total destroy urge is against all of culture, then yeah, that can, like, that's something you should probably ponder. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely, I would agree that that's a thing that's potentially problematic, right? Like with a number of different desires, there's a way in which that can lead to people doing really fucked up things. Yeah, it's like, it's like, it's pointing out the, that type of

accelerationism, not specific to ideology, but just like accelerationism in general. I mean, I think when I, when I talk about things like the, the fact that, because not every culture commits genocides, not every civil, civilization does. And throughout history, there have been more that found the idea repugnant than found the idea acceptable. But it is really a consistent thing in history. And I think the lesson with that isn't necessarily that everything could end in genocide. So I don't think the lesson is necessarily like, oh, you should look at make total destroy is if, you know, the, the, this kind of trend in anarchist thought could lead to genocide, it's that people in groups are nearly always capable of killing a shitload of

other people for a variety of reasons, if applied in the proper ways. And so those of us who seek mass movement should always be conscious of that because human beings in large groups can do wonderful things, but there's a long history of them doing really fucked up shit, sometimes in ways that surprised the people that got the large group of human beings together in the first place. The other thing I wanted to bring up is kind of more circling back to like the doomer kind of idea. Because yeah, a big part of the book is trying purposely is to dissolution people with this idea of global revolution and dissolution people with the idea that we can save the earth because we can't. So that's a big thing. And first, I think, I think for some people, if you

stop right there, and you that's how you end that thought, yes, that does lead to doomerism, obviously, like that is, that is. But the book, the book doesn't stop there. The book continues on from there. Now, they continue on from a nihilistic standpoint. I'm not a nihilist, I prefer absurdism, I prefer discordianism. But those two things are pretty caught like they're they are more similar than not, is that you can be dissolutioned with global revolution and the idea to save the earth. But that should not change what we do, or how we feel or operate as anarchists. It's not that we should be disillusioned, and then do nothing and step aside, that we should be disillusioned, and then find that disillusionment itself a form of liberation,

like the freeing nature of being free from this idea of revolution, is that like, no, we are living our lives now, don't live for a revolution, live your life now and do things now, because that's what you actually have. So it's like that type of nihilistic, absurdist, discordian thing. This is where I come back to having problems with it again, because this is literally just there is no alternative, except it's it's it's it's a bad plan. And I think if you look if you look at what happens with this, you know, this was the thing that was really big in the American anarchist movement, like, in, you know, from about 2017, like, to roughly now, and it's like, a lot of these people were in the 2020 uprising, too. Yeah, but also that didn't succeed, like that,

like, not really, like, like, this is like, I think I think this is like, like, one of the reasons it didn't work, like, okay, this is like, the thing that's important, one of the things that's important with revolutions, even when they don't succeed, is that for a very brief window, you actually can, like, it becomes it becomes possible to imagine another world. Yes. And what what what this entire thing is saying is don't do that. That's not that's not that's that's that's that is not what I'm saying. It is absolutely not. This is no, no, no, no, okay, can I can I finish this sentence? Yeah, like, yeah. Okay, so what what what I'm saying here is that what what they've abandoned, right, the thing that they're giving up with when they

would they give up revolution, when they're like, this is a progressive myth, this is like, like, theology, what what they've abandoned completely is our human capacity to actually shape a different world. What they're arguing is that, like, the, you know, essentially, that the combination of ecological and social forces are strong enough that humans humans no longer have the capacity to reshape the world into a way that is different than this, and that this is now the eternal present. And you know, and yeah, inside of the eternal present, they're saying you should be fighting for the same thing you should be fighting for. Like, you know, you should you should be in your own sort of local domain, you should be like, I mean, there are

some of the recommendations are wild. Like, I think I think their conservation stuff is sketchy given. I mean, it doesn't it doesn't apply to an eternal present, though, like they lay out like the world is is changing a lot and will for the next 50 years, like they will be massive changes in how things are set up in the next like, in the next century. And we need to take advantage of that, we need to turn those liabilities into assets, and start making those little anarchies like that, that is what it's trying to do. And I would add as well, that as a point, so the situations in passing stoke and Bangladesh are different in the present, and will be in the future. You know, I what I think is is trying to be sort of drilled in here

is that at least in the text and how I read it, is that yes, things will be different in different parts of the world. And probably maybe they won't be this, you know, or as the authors, there won't be, you know, this one global revolution. But at the end of the day, I think what it's trying to emphasize is that we don't have the structures. And I think what part of what it's trying to emphasize is that we don't have the structures in place right now to launch an interaction we can meaning meaningfully defend. And so that is the sort of thing we should be focusing on in the end. But they but they but this this this is going back to my problem with it going going back to the thing with the they go on the rant about how anarchists

are like a permanent cultural majority and will never become a majority is that even even in situations where people had that capacity and did it, they go back, they project back onto it, go no, no, no, no, they couldn't have done that. Like it's not about it's it's it's they have a belief. And this is something that they do explicitly say that that anarchist will always be a permanent minority, right, they will there will always be an active but permanent minority. And that is the like, like that specifically, I think is just a an actual rejection of the belief that we collectively can make a better future. Because if if you think that our idea is that, you know, if being free, right, if if society is mutually if you think that that

is permanently always going to be a minority, you are, you know, you are condemning your condemning the future to the people who don't believe that. And I understand why especially if you know, if if if the only thing you've ever known is 50 years of when the near-liberals actually did the thing, right, they took over the entire world, restructure the entire world economy seized every government. Like if that's what you lived through, I understand why you would think that. But I think the fact that it was possible to do it from the other direction is in some ways a sense that like, yeah, we could do it too. I don't know. Sorry, I will stop harping on this one specific point. It just extremely annoys me. I think it's not giving up the idea that the world can be better.

It's that like, we don't need to have the majority of people be anarchists to make the world better. We can still spread our own anarchies and people don't need to self subscribe as anarchists. But as long as we start building those systems in the places around us, people will start using them and people might start like living them out, even if they don't call themselves anarchists, right? Like the majority of people will probably prefer some type of state or government, right? You can even look at Rojava and be like, yeah, it still is state-ish in some ways, but some ways not, right? Like it's going, we're not going to get an anarchist world. That's not going to happen. But we can make it better through the lens of anarchy. And I think that's what it's kind of trying to say.

Yeah, I think it's worth acknowledging that like, yeah, the majority of people are never going to the majority of people are never going to be what anarchists are right now, which is people who comprehensively reject the systems they live in. Most people are always going to think more like, well, I want to be comfortable. I want to, I support changes kind of that, that, you know, fix this thing that I've noticed is a problem or that thing. Most people are never going to comprehensively reject the system. But I do have hope that in time and given, you know, space to build things and show people other ways and improve life for people, you can get to a point where most people believe a lot of the things that I think are important. Yeah. And I think that's

what's on time. I think that's what they call themselves. Sorry. I think that's what the specialists tend to advocate for in terms of through the process of social insertion in these larger movements, generalizing the ideas of anarchist ideas as a whole, making them more common throughout the population. It's not only trying to get each and every person in the world to self identify as an anarchist communist or whatever. It's more so that you're trying to spread these ideas to the point where they are, I suppose, the common sentiment, the popular will. Yeah. Like, I, it's, it's, um, that's like the point of culture jamming and, and, and shit like that. Like it's the, the idea that, like, it doesn't so much matter. Like, like, what matters is

inserting the things you think are important into the culture and getting people to identify with them and understand them. The terms that they specifically use aren't, aren't as important. Like, that's not really what matters. Well, okay. I don't think they're arguing that, though, because, I mean, like, they have lines like this, we cannot, however, remake the entire world. There are not enough of us there, there never will be. But then, you know, they, they, they, they specifically talk about the, oh, well, they don't have to all be anarchists. And, you know, I mean, here's their line. There is unfortunately little, little evidence from history that the working class, never mind anyone else, is intrinsically predisposed to libertarian or ecological revolution. Thousands

of years of authoritarian socialization favor the jackboot. Neither we nor anyone else could create a libertarian or global or ecological global future by expanding social movements. Further, there is no reason to think that in the absence of such a vast expanse of global transformation congruent to our desires will ever happen. I think, I think, I think the key word there is global. Like, yeah, that's, they're trying to break up with that. And it's important, like, they're writing this specifically for anarchists who are kind of already nihilistic, kind of already anti-sif, right? They are writing this for other anarchists. This isn't a book to radicalize a normie or a communist. This is for other anarchists to be like, hey,

you already kind of think the world's kind of going to shit. Here's a way that we can still do things despite the world being shitty. Because once you're, once you're disillusioned, it's hard to be illusioned again. Like, it's, it's, once you give up on the idea of global revolution, once you give up on the idea of global collapse, it's hard to reenter those. Even if you see things happening, like there can still be uprisings and revolts, absolutely. But there is a distinction between uprisings and revolts and like a global revolution, right? And specifically, like, the Marxist Leninist sense. And I'd also like to continue the paragraph you're reading from there. We had said that as anarchists, we get to the, or they had said that

as anarchists, we are not the seed of the future society in the shell of the old, but merely one of many elements from which the future is forming. That's okay. When faced with such scale and complexity, there is value in noncival humility, even for insurgent. Yeah, but this, this is just, this is just giving up. This, this is the old, it's too complicated. It's too like, and I think, I don't know, like, it's, it's, it's, it's giving up on, it's giving up on trying to do any kind of, on, on, like, humans as a whole, trying to do any kind of large scale, like, you know, like trying to do any large scale transformation of what the society is. I disagree. To continue that, that quote,

to give up hope for global anarchist revolution is not to resign oneself to anarchy, remaining an eternal protest, seaweed puts it well. Revolution is not everywhere or nowhere. Any bio region can be liberated through a succession of events and strategies based on the conditions unique to it, mostly as the grip of civilization that area weakens through its own volition, with the efforts of its inhabitants. Civilization didn't succeed ever at once. And so it's undoing my own yaku to varying degrees in different places at different times. Even if an area seemingly fully under the control of authority, there are always places to go to live in, to love in and to resist from, and we can extend those spaces. The global situation

may seem beyond us, but the local never is. And I think that's beautiful. I think that's like a, that is one of the things that keeps me alive is ideas like that, honestly. And at the same time, I also hold the opinion that none of us, including this author is a fortune teller, you know, the deserts picture of the future is not the only possibility, you know, and I think in a lot of ways, in a lot of ways, I believe that they can and have already been proven wrong, you know, like, and there's an issue that I really take a lot of contention with the book, part of the book that really pisses me off is the sort of persistence of the overpopulation myth. Yeah, that was, and I don't remember it being so consistent as I reread it a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah. And also this sort of nonchalance, the author seems to have about like mass die-offs and that kind of thing. You know, I think that's, that's very troubling to me. That's very specific to its type of anti civil literature. That's like, we view civilization is going to progress towards genocide anyway. And the way to actually avoid more deaths is to kind of help the collapse along because that'll end civilization quicker. So therefore, less people, less people will be born, so less people will have to die. So that's the type of thinking they have. I don't necessarily agree with that necessarily. But like, yeah, that is, that is very typical of this type of literature. So again,

because it is written mostly for other anti civil anarchists. But like, again, it's not like pro- genocide. It's saying genocide will happen. So the way to make less of it is to actually kind of slowly start kind of help helping the crumbles along essentially. And while still, you know, making people's lives better in your immediate community, like with that, with that very local focus, which so again, not not saying I necessarily agree with that. But that's the, that's the type of thought it's engaging with. I mean, I think that's true of some of it. But there is definitely a lot of like panic about there's going to be nine billion people and like population growth. Yes, all of all the overpopulation stuff is a little iffy. You know, there is a discussion to have

on caring capacity, but we are not there yet. We right now we way overproduced for the amount of people we have. Yeah. And that, I don't know. That also frustrated me immensely. So they're like, yeah, we have, because they're talking about caring capacity, right? But they're like, oh, we already can't, we have a billion people going hungry. And it's like, yeah, but that's not about the caring capacity. That's just a distribution. That's about distribution. Which was literally distribution. That and that idea gained more prevalence after desert was written. We kind of more understood like culturally that it is a distribution issue, not necessarily a production issue. Now we do overproduce, right? Because and the amount of production we have

contributes to stuff like climate change and that is bad. So we should tone down production, but we should make a ways that it's more sustainable and ecological. Yeah. I think that does point towards the dated nature of the text. I think also my last like thing with it is, I think, I think it could have benefited a lot from like in indigenous stewardship perspective, because the way it thinks about, it's particularly like the way things about wildness versus conservation is just very messy. And yeah, if it falls, it falls, it does a better job of it than some other anti-save things that I've seen. But it definitely falls into the like trap of like, here is the wild and then any attempt to manage it is, you know, is civilization

and you need to go back to the wild. And it's like, oh, this is already stewarded and managed. Yeah. Yeah. That is the one. Yeah. It does fall on that slope of like nature being an other that is sacred, which isn't necessarily a great idea, nor is it really true. Yeah. This is very 2010. Very 2010. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So I think the the book is critical of conservation. It's a sort of binary way. And I agree that an indigenous stewardship perspective was solely needed. But at the same time, I do think that the way that the book criticizes or rather just points out the issue of conservation may have been on may still be new for some people, you know, the idea that these sorts of government conservation projects, which sort of preside over this sort

of static vision of nature and ecology and stuff that is supposedly threatened by humanity. I think criticizing that approach to nature is good. I mean, the sort of romanticization of the wild that is very typical of anti civ text and thought is very much anti civ. But I do believe that people should look or should rather resist these sorts of conservation impulse. As I was rereading it a couple weeks ago, I wanted to know what you guys thought of the section of the book that speaks of the different modern different, the idea of fourth and fifth generation war. Oh boy, that's a

I feel that that has been sort of a controversial approach to analyzing conflict. So I figured as you have been in actual war zones, Robert, that you might have a thing or two to see. I mean, it's the kind of thing that we should probably cover in detail on because this is a lot of like William Lind stuff. I think he's the guy who came up with the idea of like fourth generation war at least. And it's basically the idea that warfare today is conducted through a lot of stuff that's not conventional weaponry. So stuff like putting bot networks together to push social division through social media or carrying out cyber attacks on infrastructure, disinformation, all of that kind of stuff, which is I think accurate. I've been reporting on what

you could call fifth generation warfare since some 2014. I think it's, I think to the extent that it's relevant here, I think one thing that people on the left need to acknowledge is that they have been blindsided by the effectiveness that the far right has adapted to the key components of this kind of warfare. And I think nothing is more key than social engineering and disinformation. And they've been much more successful at it over the last release since 2015 in particular than the left has by basically everywhere. And by I think every single measure of success. And I think this is something we should save in depth for another day. But I think that it is worth acknowledging this is, and I also think that, and this is again part of a bigger conversation,

we talk about the concept of like culture jamming when we talk about like operation mindfuck, you know, which is discordian idea, all of which you can see as kind of pre predecessors to the concepts of fifth generation warfare. I think there's a strong argument to be made that those efforts by leftists in the 80s and 90s in particular actually contributed to the substantial right wing victories that we're seeing right now in this space. And I think maybe it's, I think there's a number of reasons for that, including some to some extent the idea of arrogance that what that we were just too smart that they were never going to figure out how to utilize the same means we had or to kind of judo like take the momentum for that and spin it around on us.

But they were and they did. And yeah, that'll lead into another episode. We'll have to talk about this in more detail. That's something Grant Morrison actually talks a lot about in regards to discordianism and this type of how, how, you know, he used to work for a company called disinformation back when disinformation was a job. Yeah. Yeah. And now it's like one of the leading causes of mass death in the world, right? Yeah. So he that is something that Morrison talks about a lot in terms of how they did have that arrogance. And now the same forces that they used in hopes of making the world better and now being used to regress the world and make it worse. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had a big copy of disinformation on my coffee table when I was 19.

I just ordered one. Oh, good. There's some fun essays in there, Garrison. There sure is. All right. That'll probably, I mean, did you have more to say on that, Andrew? Yeah. Yeah. I just wanted to say that, you know, regardless of the uncertain future, regardless of your stance on deserts message, however flawed, here now, as the minor birds in Alice Huxley's island, so often repeat, we can and should pay attention to what we can do to support ourselves for whatever outcome through, you know, projects within the spaces we inhabit. I believe that anarchism can be the seed of the new world. I do believe that we have an impact, a huge impact on society and on politics. And I believe there are still many possibilities for liberty still.

Yeah. I do as well. I think that acknowledging, you know, failures, both of, you know, ideas and of methods doesn't mean giving up hope or ignoring the successes of those same things, which are also present. Yeah. So I don't know. Stay optimistic. Read something. Doesn't have to be desert, but just go read a thing. Go read. Read the back of your shampoo bottle. Yeah, back to your shampoo box, especially if it's Dr. Bronner's. A lot of good stuff in there. All right. That's going to do it for us this week. Take care. Yeah.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast we already recorded. And I messed up. Or something happened with the Zoom and we lost the audio. So now we're recording it again, as is the cycle of life. Thankfully, I'm now on my 10th shot of espresso of the day, and it is 8 p.m. So I'm ready. I'm ready this time. Today, we're going to be doing another one of our chronicles into open source and OSINT style research or open source verification. And this kind of side of generally, you know, this is kind of a field of like anti-fascist research and journalism. So we're looking at one of these case studies. But today, I have someone with me, Alistair from Opossum Press, is here to talk about OSINT and this type

of research. Hello. Hey. Thank you for being with me again on this call, on this very deja vu experience for us. I would actually first like to talk about how Opossum Press got started as like a collective of people dedicated towards this goal of, you know, surveying the fascist creep. I had an interest in journalism. I have no experience in it, but I have other friends that are into writing and stuff. And I just kind of reached out to friends like, hey, would anybody be interested in doing this? And there are several friends that were like, hell, yeah, let's do this. And that's pretty much it. After we got it all formed, we set up some open source Intel like workshops. Cool. And we'd about every other week, we'd get together for

two, three hours and learn stuff. That sounds lovely, actually. Most of my stuff is usually done alone in my computer dark. When I'm on my again, 10th cup of coffee of the day, doing OSINT in a group of people like that sounds like it could be actually kind of fun. So yeah, we're going to, in our last episode, we talked about how I tracked down and found out who written house was the night of that happening in Kenosha. And today we're going to be talking about someone related to January 6, the infamous zip tie guy as he became known for like two days on the internet before he got his actual name. First, I guess I probably, if in case you haven't listened to the previous episode I did on written house, should probably kind of explain what open

source stuff is and what OSINT is and verification. So it's about trying to track down information using open sources on the internet. So in terms of like nothing is, it's all, it's already sitting there. Nothing requires like special access, nothing requires, you know, you to hack into anyone's system. It's stuff is just the stuff that's already sitting there. The data, whether that be, you know, geographical data, personal data, data from social media accounts, data from every time you've entered your email into a random website that you maybe didn't know quite what's going on, but you did it. That gets stored somewhere as data and someone can probably find it. So it's all this stuff about you on the internet that is all open if you do the digging. Often cases,

this results in going through social media profiles. That is a good portion of OSINT work, is learning how to use Google really well, and how to how to go through social media, start using like Google search operators, start using social media tools that help you sort through information, because the information is there, you just have to learn how to sort through it, right, because there's just so much of it. So that's kind of the gist of what open source stuff is. I mean, eventually you can get into stuff like using like Python using code and scrapers, like all that stuff is there too. But for our purposes, we're going to stick to the more simplistic stuff, because this is an audio format. And I'm not going to start explaining Python code on a podcast.

So let's let's let's turn back the clocks a year, a little over a year. And it's January 6. What's kind of you or your collective's reaction just to kind of watching things unfold, you know, like as a researcher, every time I look at these types of, you know, protests, you know, whether they be big or small, always part of my brain's like trying to make connections and do stuff, right. So as January 6 is unfolding, what's what's kind of going through everyone at a possibly press this head? The first thing that seemed to be collective in everybody's mind was, oh, my God, none of these people are wearing face masks. Yeah. Yeah. Like the immediate thing is this is probably going to be really easy for a lot of people. There's nobody nobody is in any

type of like block or trying to hide their identity at all. Something you see the European fascists actually doing more often. There was a, I think a video from Germany of a whole bunch of far right dudes just in black block, because black box is a tactic. So yeah. But in the states there, specifically on January 6, it was, yeah, no one was really worried about keeping their identity a secret. They really did not think what they were doing was wrong. I think the other thing we were a lot of us were really angry. Yeah. Like we had been like yelling that this was going to happen, screaming it out, like trying to get people to pay attention. And we got blown off so much. I remember just like a few days before I got in an argument with a Facebook

friend, like people need to be paying attention, like they're planning something. They're like, Oh, it's fine. It's fine. And then, you know, just a few days later, I'm like, Oh, is it fine? That is kind of always the curse of surveilling all of these things, whether they be like a specific event or some movement in general, right? People who are really into QAnon before the Libs knew what QAnon was. And we're warning about it for years before, you know, it resulted in people dying. Right. That's kind of always the curse of these things. So you get the mix of the shock and horror of the thing finally happening and a weird relief. It's a very bizarre feeling to watch these things unfold because you're like, Oh, I'm vindicated, but it sucks that I vindicate

it. Right. I remember like the December watching all these groups, like I was just, it was just filled with dread. Yeah. I knew something was going to happen. I didn't know what was going to happen. And it was just so much anxiety. And then like it's funny, January 6 after it happened, like it all went away. I was able to get a decent night's sleep just because there was I didn't have that buildup of suspense of what what is it going to be? What's it going to look like? How bad is it going to be? They kind of had that release. Yeah. Unfortunately, they were all like amateur and didn't know what they were doing. And it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Yeah. Well, I think as for the open source stuff, I'm going to kind of walk us through chronologically

of in terms of the journey of the zip tie guy, because I was doing like archiving on January 6, but zip tie guy was really the only dude I was interested in identifying. There was there was a lot of other people doing really great identification work. I was also January 6. I was going through all the social media history of Ashley Babbitt archiving all of her Twitter and Facebook like years of stuff to chronicle how she went from like an Obama voter to a QAnon proponent. So that was what I was doing. And I was writing an article with Bellingcat about that. But the only other guy I wanted to like identify was zip tie guy because he was really interesting. He was one of the few guys that was masked up. He had what he had visible weapons on him. He was obviously

carrying zip ties, you know, it gives you images of like, Oh, yeah, it's like they're planning to capture and execute people. That was like the general kind of vibe of that. So he was the only person I was actually working to identify. And I put a decent amount of work in now. I failed where other people succeeded. And we can talk about like why in a sec. But for like a day at least, all we had to go on was the picture of the guy holding the zip ties in a mask. There's a few other pictures of him around from that day, but it's mostly mostly one picture. And the biggest clue that we had to start with. Why don't you explain what the first clue is and how that maybe piqued your interest? He had two patches on his vest. And one of them was a thin blue line

patch, but it was in the shape of the state of Tennessee. So yeah, in terms of having a decent lead that is like, okay, well, that that narrows it down to one of 50 states probably, right? Yeah, I should say I'm from Knoxville. So like it being Tennessee that I picked up on that because that's my state. Yeah, that it becomes a local problem. I as someone in Oregon, I definitely understand that feeling of yeah, when fascism becomes a local problem. Yeah, so that definitely piqued your interest specifically, but then also gives a really good lead for like, where to look because odds are he's not trying to do a meta thing by tricking us into giving us a false lead. Generally, people don't do that as often in real life as they do in television.

But there's still plenty other ways to detect. I mean, I love detecting and there's enough stuff to do otherwise that making it needlessly complicated is honestly, I'm fine with it not being that. So yeah, we had that to go off initially. So starting looking for like far right activity in Tennessee. Now I was an outsider, so I didn't really know where to start in terms of specific rallies. But I know you at what point did you start looking trying to like go through pictures of specific rallies to try to like match clothing or stuff? I think it was probably it may have been that day or the day after is when I started going through the notebooks that I had like names of just people we suspected may become problems. And I started looking at their profiles

again and, you know, didn't find anything in our research that we had already done. We didn't see anything on. Okay. Yeah, I mean, that was kind of the case for me as well with just the picture of the zip tie guy with the patch. I mean, it's a lead, but there wasn't tons to go on. But thankfully, thankfully, our good friends at January 6th were giving us more clues as because as the Simpsons meme goes, videotaping this crime scene was the best idea we ever had. So like January, I think 7th, there was a live stream video that was kind of circulating through like anti fascist group chats. It was it was posted like publicly to get everyone's attention on it on January 8th. But for like a day, it was kind of passing through back channels.

And throughout in this live stream, which is yeah, there was so many people were live streaming that night. And it is a kind of surreal thing to watch of them. This this this live stream in particular is a zip tie guy, if you was friends, I think his mom, and a few and just random people from January 6, all hanging out at a hotel room afterwards, like it's it is it is the night of the 6th. And they're all just hanging out again, totally like no masks. They're they're they're in a hotel lobby, no masks. And they're just like hanging out and chilling like sitting on the couch and chatting for like half an hour. It's one of the weirdest videos to watch all all the live streams from that night are so surreal, because it is like this transitionary

period of like after the Capitol attack, but before every before like, people like go down on them. So they don't really know how to behave. They still think what they did was kind of fine, even though at this point, I think like four or five people are dead. But it's so weird just watch them just interact like such normal people in this moment, like after they did this thing, then they go in this hotel room and they're acting completely normal. So it's it's just a weird video in general. But what it does have is someone in the same outfit as a zip tie guy with no mask on. You actually we actually can see his full face. Yep. But getting to see his full face was a big moment. Big help, big help. Everyone was looking for pictures of this guy

without his mask all like for the entirety of the day. So now having a whole video where we can see like all of the angles of him was great. It was perfect. The best the best thing that was really the beauty of all of of all of all the January 6 documentation is how many people were live streaming themselves doing crimes and their friends. It did it did make the archiving and well not the archiving part archiving is always painful and tedious. But it made the actual research afterwards a lot easier because there was so much documentation of it. So yeah, we got this video. I'm going to explain how I kind of took this video and failed to reach the conclusion and then we can talk about how you succeeded. But first, but first we're going to hear some ads from our lovely products and

services. Robert was here for our previous recording that we tried and I failed and he made some very good jokes and very good segues about how all of our sponsors support insurrection just like January 6. And if I try to repeat the jokes, it'll be stupid. So I'm just going to I'm just going to give you the sense there was a joke and now you're going to be left with that dissatisfaction. So goodbye. Here's some ads. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to give an extremely brief rundown on how I failed to do. Well, I didn't fail to do research. I did research. I just didn't reach a proper conclusion. And I knew that. So the other the other thing about ZipTai guy, he had he had the patch of like the thin blue line in Tennessee. And then that's then I soon

after got the video of his face and interacting with people. And the other thing is I think the hat he was wearing in the ZipTai guy photo was I think was tracked back to be be our favorite coffee company black rifle copy merchandise. It was it was like what was one of the hats they sell. So me being clever, I'm like, okay, here's this black rifle coffee hat is patched in Tennessee. I know black rifle coffee is based out of Tennessee. I'm going to go look through everyone who works for black rifle coffee, which I mean, isn't a bad instinct as an outsider. But it did not it did not succeed. But the funny thing is is that while looking through all the employees at black rifle coffee, all of them do look identical to ZipTai guy,

they all say characteristics, they all look exactly the same on their their beards, their nose, their forehead, their hair, all of them identical, every single one of them to the point where the only way I could tell that it wasn't ZipTai guy was being like, okay, no, he has a mole here. He has like a birthmark here. This way his like his eyes are his eye wrinkles are different. So it's like, it's going down to the very like fine tuned facial features, because all of their face shapes are like identical. I think there was a point that I had the same instinct. I think I I know there's a point that I went through the black coffee rifle, all of their people look at yours. I don't know if it was

for Eric Wanchel or if it was like baby around the written house stuff. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that's that's what I spent my time doing is going through everybody who works there. But by the time I kind of gave up on that, the identity was already discovered and posted by your team at Apostle Press. So how how did you get from you know, the ZipTai guy picture, then the like the archived live stream video of him without a mask to the point where you could say, hey, this is his name. Well, I was I wasn't even really in contact with like, we as a group weren't messaging each other trying to figure this out together. But we were like it turns out a few of us were working separately. So while I'm going through social media, a friend in Nashville was

going through pictures of the protests from there over the summer. And they ended up finding about five different pictures, I think. And we knew, we knew most of the people in the pictures that are maybe like one or two that we did not know. And one was always Eric Munchel, and he's wearing the exact same gear he wore January 6. I say Eric Munchel, we don't know his name yet then. So from there, we kind of we went ahead and posted what we had to Twitter. And then we went back to the social media and I started looking through the profiles that were the people we knew. And sure enough, one of them Kurt Dennis had a live stream that was telling the story. The same story that Eric Munchel told in that 30 minute video. And he actually while telling it, he's like, yeah,

my buddy Eric. So at that point, we go to his friends list. And sure enough, he only has one Eric there. And it's Eric Munchel. And there we go to that page and find some of the same gear in the background of the pictures that he has publicly posted. Yeah, he like posted pictures of him in his gear with like guns. And yeah, you can you can track all this like facial like, like, like birthmarks and stuff. They're all the same. So yeah, you and that that's you, you definitely got them of your own mistakes. Yes, that's that's my favorite part. Like they gave us his identity. They often if not having themselves to you on a silver platter, they at least have a platter. They often there's often enough bread, right, the reason why these things are solved, because

there are enough breadcrumbs to follow. And often they kind of leave pretty big chunks of bread. Just the fact that again, adding to the surreal aspect of that whole live stream video, the fact that he's like, you matched it by telling the same, you could hear them, someone tell the same story is just such a weird surreal thing. So I think in terms of like, oh, since stuff, what this case study in particular really highlights is the importance of archival stuff, right? The reason why you were able to solve this and not me is because I wasn't I mean, I did my own archival thing for archiving like the video. But the way that you were able to really crack this open and everyone else who worked on it is because you have like those lists of connections of people

who are already kind of active in this like, alt-right far right scene within your local community, like you already had documentation of the major players who they interact with, or you already had pictures of this guy in gear with other known people. So the fact that there was already previously work archived really made the success of this so much more possible. That's what they, people do, they do, they do it, they do it, they do it, they do it. People's Plaza in Nashville during their protests, they were really big on documenting. They documented everything with the police and any counter protesters, they would, they had professional photographers out there making sure we had good, clear quality pictures of

like everybody on the other side as well. And that definitely helped us a lot. Yeah, because off, especially before January 6th, they, there was, they did a decent job of archiving themselves, well, not, not archiving, but like filming themselves and documenting themselves. And then, you know, it takes, takes other researchers to then archive that. So not only is it important just to like look at the research and look at like the documentation of the, that people do of themselves, but then make sure that you have a source for that that's not their own uploading of it, right? So like a great example is like all of the live streams from January 6th, including like this one from this hotel room, pretty soon it was deleted by

the person who posted it because they realized, oh, maybe I shouldn't have this living record of my crimes. But at that point, people already saved the video. They already like, I already went through a video saving program that I had. So it's important not only to again, archiving, having, having, having previous documentation of people and known players, but then as new information is coming out, make sure you make separate copies of that for your own sake, so that you actually have it. And then you're not going to be stuck looking for something that's gone, right? The worst case scenario is to like, you know that there was an important thing, but you just don't have access to it anymore. It's like, you remember seeing it, you didn't

save it, and now it's gone. That's a horrible feeling to do when you're trying to get this kind of research done. And like, it happens. We all, we all make mistakes like this. I definitely have it happen to me actually this week. Yeah, it happens all the time. It happens to me. It happens to me all the time. I'll look at something and be like, I should probably save this. I get distracted, or I just don't want to because archiving is boring and tedious. And then I check again, that's gone. I'm like, well, that's, I should have archived it. So on top of all of the archiving stuff, which in general, anti-fascist research is really, that's the thing that really excels at even like above, above journalism is like, you know, getting like traditional journalism

is like getting a good documentation of like key fascist players in your area, key people who are kind of pushing far right stuff and far right violence, actually getting like a good, a good, a good idea of who they are. And having that knowledge always handy is something that this type of research is is really that that is really what it excels at or like what what the what those researchers excel at. This is the thing that they do very well. I think a lot of us probably started doing it just out of curiosity, looking into people. That is certainly how I started. Like, I've been doing it long before. I just didn't know that's what it was called because

like I'd see somebody make a messed up comment online. I'm like, who is this person? And then, you know, try to find as much as I can about them. Yeah, that's that is certainly how I got started with this type of thing. Because it can be fun to look for bad people. It is, it is, it is kind of pleasurable. And one of one of the, again, another big contributing factor in how you got zip tie guy, how how I got written how how a lot of the stuff works is the beauty of Facebook as a research tool. Because often in order in order to do the archiving, you need to have stuff to archive. And a lot of the stuff that gets posted from these things by the people doing them is is done on

Facebook or at least it used to write the past five years. Really, Facebook has been the main main source of this. Now it's maybe now people are kind of getting wise and maybe some stuff's moving to telegram Facebook's becoming a little bit less important of a platform for this type of research. And I know Facebook has changed the way that they that you can like use their service. So it does make research kind of harder in some ways. But but even still it is it is one of the better tools to to dig into certain types of people because there is certain types of people who are going to be more likely to use Facebook. And yeah, in terms of how getting Facebook was the method, it's not the place where you're able to make the link between the fascists you already

knew and and Eric, because of because you are you already you already knew who the players were, and that Facebook had the visualized network to actually make those connections. So Facebook itself and social media in general is really is really useful. And then in terms of how this operates like going through friends lists is really easy. But oftentimes, a lot of people will not maybe have those public. And what's what's then this again, it's not a dead road. You can still look through likes, you can still look through shares, you can still look through like if you like people are tagged in photos. It really it really is a is a great is a great system that is good at making you not have privacy. That is the thing it really it really excelsant.

Yeah. And even even if people don't have like an active social media presence per se, it can still be really useful in getting specific names of people or or just make or just having a connection be known like this. This was mostly how I was able to identify the all the anonymous riot cops in 2020 when when the Portland Police Bureau took took away their badge numbers and names is that I could get like a list of cops and we could start figuring out like, okay, this is problem. This is this is this is pre cops previously on the right team, right? You start doing facial matching. And then if I want to learn out if I want to if I want to learn more information about like their first name and more information about them in general,

even if they don't have a social media profile, often their wife might or their mom might, you know, there's a and in terms of fun sentences to say really learning how to exploit people's family as a weakness is wonderful for this type of stalking stalking violent bad people. Because yeah, because a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of the riot cops were smart enough to not to at least to either not have a presence at all on the internet or to have it very locked down in terms of, you know, no one can see their posts, no one can see their friends, no one can see anything. But still their wife will occasionally tag them in photos or maybe not even photos of them, but like they'll they'll just take them in a photo of like their kid or something. And then this just

creates more ways to make connections so that you can, you know, learn more about these specific people. Because sometimes that's fun and interesting. I've noticed some people with socks that I've found their identity. It's by going through the likes and seeing, you know, the same woman is always the first to put a heart react there. And you can go to their pages, sometimes it's as little if you go through their pictures, and you see a picture of the guy they're with, they'll have like somebody in the comments, oh, Mark looks really good there or something, you know, naming the husband. And from there, you can get the last thing, you know, you've known the wife's last name, you have a good chance of that being their last name.

Yeah. So family, family is really is really great for finding people because because like all all the stuff research is is learning how to make these open sourced connections, right? A lot of it is connections and networking. And people usually always have an innate connection and networking and that that that is their family. And often this like extends out in terms of, you know, political organizing, whether you're part of, you know, militias or just kind of smaller groups. Yeah, that is another network. Friends is another network. But you know, for people who are kind of are more locked down, it is possible to find information about people, you know, especially if they have like, if they

have like a not very common last name, you know, that can make finding information about them much easier if you're using tools like Facebook, then it's, you know, just a matter of doing all the other, you know, open source research of, you know, comparing clothing, you know, and comparing to what other kind of information you already know about the person. Email addresses, phone numbers, if you can, you know, get that get that kind of stuff as well. But I think that's all I had on zip tie guy, mostly. Yeah, he was a really easy one. There's not a whole lot to really dive into there. Yeah, no, for, for someone is for someone who was one of the few people masked up wasn't wasn't not was not that hard to find. Now, I mean, yeah, of course, the fact that he was

found by local people in his area, not surprising. That's another thing anti fascist researchers really good at is that type of local research, because they have, they have all those local connections, they have those local documentation of like a political events that have happened in their area. So again, it's the importance of having stuff archived and having stuff like sorted and having stuff organized well, so you can access your archive information is really important. It's it sucks that it's it's the part of OSINT. I hate the most is every all of us. Everyone, everyone hates it. Everyone hates I'm I'm sure there is some sicko out there who likes it. But everyone else, everyone else hates all of the we hate all this organizing and sorting.

And I find archiving to be tedious archiving videos and live streams. It's tedious. It's difficult. Time consuming. It's time consuming. It's repetitive. It's not generally not a good time. But it is so useful in the long run of trying to get these like a list of like established players in your area. You get this is how you start seeing patterns, right? You need to have this information already laid out. So you can actually watch the patterns unfold. Otherwise, it's just a whole bunch of chaotic information. That means nothing. So it's super important as as much of a bummer as it may be. Yeah, let's see. Is there anything you've been working on since then that you like that you would like to talk about or any upcoming research projects?

Right now, I'm really focused on our local school board. And, you know, like many towns across the country, we have fascists trying to take it over and going to the meetings. And so I've been watching that group very closely for the last several months. It's probably about October, our school year, we started out without a mask mandate. Okay. And a couple of parents whose children need like their immunocompromise, like their kids need everybody else to wear a mask. So their parents sued the school board and our governor to have a mask mandate. And the judge issued an injunction. And like the next Monday, all the schools had to wear a mask. And the anti-mask crowd is like losing their shit over it still, trying to figure out how to fire the judge.

It's like, yeah, we have a member of Patriot Church who's involved in it. And, you know, they're the ones with the Church of Planned Parenthood. It's Ken Peter, too. I think he's from Washington. Yes, Spokane, I believe. Yeah. And he's moved down here. I think he still goes up there to the Church stuff. But most of his time is spent down here in Tennessee. And causing just as much trouble as he does up there and his followers. So I'm curious to see how does a research project like this school board thing differ from like the research surrounding, you know, trying to identify someone at January 6th? For one, this is local. It's, you know, I'm going to the school board meetings. I know it's easier to know where to look for this because

like I'm watching it as it happening where like, you know, January 6th, most of those people, you have no clue where to even start from. So this, more now, it's monitoring and documenting as we, you know, figure out who these people are, like linking telegram names with Facebook names and all of that. So I guess now it's more record keeping and getting that documentation done early. So when one of them goes too far, we have, we have it ready. I mean, that's, that's, that's the sad part where it's like you're watching inevitable inevitability almost as you can mean that. Yeah, that's also how like January 6th works, right? We were able to identify these people because there was a lot of documentation of a lot of major players already, right? So a lot of the work in

between these big protests and events is the is the is the slow tedious documentation because we have to do it now so that it's useful later. That's, you know, a big part of research is like, yeah, trying to spot potential, you know, issues and archiving it. And then if the issue ever becomes a bigger issue, you already have information on it, right? Whether that be, you know, watching someone online who you might think is who like watching someone who's like a Nazi who you might be worried that like they're posting and plans about how to kill people, you're like, okay, to probably look into this dude because he's doing this in case he does something in the future. It is that is kind of a it sucks because yeah, you are watching this thing where you feel kind of

helpless, but you know that documenting it is worthwhile. Yeah, it's the same thing where like you don't want to be vindicated. But if it does happen, it's better to be prepared. Right, right. Because I don't think people realize like how much anti fascist research how much of this type of like oscent stuff like my journalism like most of the work that you put into it is never seen. Even if you do complete investigations, sometimes by the end, you're like, it's getting getting them getting them out enough time for them to be useful. Sometimes this isn't even worth it. So you know, a lot of it is, you know, writing stuff and doing research that never actually sees the light of day for a long, long time. Right. With Eric Manchel, we have like probably 20

people we had on our list, too. And he wasn't even one of them. Yeah. So you do all this of like, on one hand, it almost felt in a moment like all of that we did was really for nothing, but now it did lead. Yeah, it did lead. And even when you do find the correct answer sometimes, sometimes could be a circumstances, you know, it's not something you need to post about immediately. Sometimes it's worth just, you know, hanging on to and not being super, super public about every horrible thing you find, right? It's not like you, you don't need to post every time you find a horrible thing on Telegram. You don't, you don't need to tell Twitter that it's like it's, it's about collecting these things and keeping them there for future use. Well, thank you so much for

coming on to talk with me again after, after I already, already discussing mostly the same things. Where can people follow your stuff online? We're on Twitter at at opossumpress, really easy. Yeah. Yeah. We're on Facebook. We don't actually do much on Facebook though. Yeah, as we've discussed now, you probably, probably shouldn't. Facebook should not be like, in a lot of ways, a lot of like fascist organizing that used to be done in primarily like Facebook groups, or just even just like through like, like incidental organizing through just through like posting and cross posting. A lot of that has been, you know, moved over to Telegram at this point. Telegram is kind of the new main nexus. Whereas Facebook, in like the days of the early alt right, Facebook was a pretty

big nexus for like the more normies, right? You know, it's there, there is actually fascist forms that we're doing organizing. But as a place for, again, like a lot of people in January 6th, who didn't really know what they were doing was wrong. They, they, they were mostly, you know, make America great again, people are queuing on people. A good portion of it, like most of them were not, you know, swastika, waving Nazis. They may, they may agree with fascist ideas, but they don't, they don't self-describe as Nazis. So like, but we're even seeing after January 6th with, you know, Facebook like cracking down on these groups, other platforms like parlor going offline. A lot of these normies themselves are even migrating onto Telegram.

So, you know, Facebook used to be a really great research tool, and I'm using it less and less, less and less often now, unfortunately, because I mean, it really did have a lot of strong suits. Telegram does have its own strong suits, but, you know, it's, it's still, it's still different. I think the normies move into Telegram is troubling though, because they're having a way easier time over there. That is, that is the obvious thing is, yeah, now that those groups are in closer proximity, it's easier for one to seep into the other, whereas before there was more of that distinction. Yes, that is a worrying thing that I believe we've talked about before, and we'll talk about again in the future in terms of having this like

fascist milieu or cultic milieu of a place where the amount of, the amount of overlap between, you know, your uncle who's a regular conservative and, you know, a member of Adam Waffin or, you know, someone who wishes they were a member of Adam Waffin is very small. It's a very, right. They are, they are very close together. Well, thank you for talking about all of these things on our, on our second OSINT case study episode. I guess big, big takeaways is archiving is great, archive live streams, archive things, because it's better to have them and not use them than not have them and need them. And then, you know, archiving and documenting local fascists is really great, even for things beyond your locality, like in January 6th. So those are,

those are my main takeaways from this. And, you know, also everyone at Black Rifle Coffee, they all, they all look like everyone at day six, all of them do. They do. All right. All right. That does it for us. Thank you so much. I can follow them at a pause and press. Goodbye, everybody. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the only podcast you are legally allowed to listen to right now. I'm Robert Evans. We talk about things falling apart, putting them back together, all that good stuff with me as like 70% of the time is my cohost, Garrison Davis. Garrison, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. This is early for you. Yeah. They had to drink me out of bed, but I made it. And I'm excited to talk about a hair after three. Okay. I have my second coffee

already. So yeah. Our topic is gun culture. And to discuss gun culture with me and a number of aspects of it, including how to maybe make a better one is Carl Casarta from InRangeTV. Carl, welcome to the program. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really stoked to be here. And it's a topic, as you can imagine, with my work on InRangeTV is near and dear to my heart because it's a challenging one. We've got a lot of great things in this community and a lot of challenges too. Yeah. Gun YouTube has gone to some really interesting places in the last, really, it feels like most of the growths happened like the last five, six years. Like there's been a real significant increase in, yeah. I feel like there's been like a wave. I feel

like there's generations of gun too. There's like gen one, gen two, gen three in there. Yeah, you had FPS Russian back in the day and stuff. Totally. Yeah. And so there's a whole thing there. There's there's generations of what was addressed in the conversation and the cultural significance as well as the gear impact. I think we've got different kind of generations of it. Yeah. And I think the stuff, obviously, when aspects of gun YouTube go viral, it tends to be stuff that's like particularly problematic. But in my experience, most of it is just dudes shooting stuff to see what happens or trying out different guns and stuff. Like it is mostly, if you're someone who believes in the right to bear arms, it's mostly pretty much just like people trying

out guns and stuff with guns. Yeah. Yeah. When things go viral, it's like my experience with that. There's a number of reasons. One is that it's particularly gross. Someone does something or says something fucked up. Somebody's out there dressed as a rotation. Stuff like that. That tends to tends to push the buttons. But yeah, most of the time, the stuff that gets the largest volume of viewership are quite honestly more banal. It's things like a 50 caliber AK exploding or shooting a 55 gallon drum of gas. That kind of stuff appeals to people that aren't just gun people. So they're like, oh, I want to see shit explode. So let me click on it. Well, one of my favorite things is to look at videos of people destroying safe life vests. It's one of my favorite

ways to watch gun YouTube. But I guess this is probably what we're probably talking about this as the episode goes on. But once you watch enough of those from one channel, you'll get to a video when they fantasize about shooting a T-foot or something, and you're like, okay, well, yeah, that's just the way it goes sometimes. And it is, you know, the thing that my first, I guess, the first time I became aware of online gun culture was a site that's still really near and dear to my heart. I'm sure you're familiar with it, Carl. The Box of Truth. And it was like, and I think this is like 15 years ago or something like that is when I started reading their stuff. And it's just like some kind of bubba-y dudes in Texas who will take different,

who will try out like, hey, there's a myth that this specific round in Korea got stopped by people who were wearing multiple layers of like clothing in the cold. Can winter clothing stop this bullet? And they would, they would, you know, mock up the clothing on like a target, and they would shoot it. Or like, how many books does it take? Like, if you have a full backpack, how many books would it take to stop a round of nine millimeter? If I, like, it's all very much like practical, hey, people, you know, say this works this way or this works that way, well, let's go out and shoot some stuff and test how it works. And I think was like, as you said, the kind of thing, I think even if you don't own guns, you might find interesting just because

like a lot of it is dealing with here's things you've seen in Hollywood, what actually happens. So I do think like fundamentally, there's always going to be a place for that kind of content, because it's it's not just like stuff that people who like guns are interested in, it's just stuff that has kind of objective value, you know, you're trying to expand what people's understanding of things. Yeah, I call that G whiz content. It's like what happens if, right? Yeah. And so on in range, the closest equivalent to that, which are the videos that get the most views are somewhat now infamous mud tests. And it started off six years ago, and it was literally it was G whiz, let's go do this. And of course, there's this longstanding

lore it everywhere outside of the gun community and in it, about the AKM being this undestructible indestructible unicorn, you're right into combat that no matter what happens to what it fires, and they are 15 being this fragile piece of shit. And in our mud tests of which we've now done multiple of it, while initially it was just G whiz over time in aggregate, or turned out to actually have really interesting data points in that the AK doesn't do well in mud and they are excels in mud, which is completely against the lore about Vietnam, which is a different problem. But that kind of thing extends beyond the gun community because people are like, guns and mud, what happens is G whiz is mythbusters kind of stuff. Yeah.

And I think, but it's interesting how you can learn from it. Yeah. And I think one of the problems that is, we can say like has is an issue on on gun YouTube and one of the things that has become an issue in this isn't just within the gun culture, it's everywhere is that like if you're into that stuff. And if you're if you're coming into it, like I want to see people do this G whiz stuff, or I just want to see reviews of different guns, because I might be buying one. Google's algorithm is going to feed you a lot of stuff. And some of that stuff is going to be people who, yeah, are preparing to like shoot folks at protests and are filming videos about that and stuff. And that it has this it has this radicalizing effect on a lot of people. And it

also has this kind of can have this kind of radicalizing effect on content where, you know, most political stuff you see isn't kind of that overt. But it does if somebody has a video where they're being more explicitly political outside of, you know, you know, arguing in favor of gun rights. But if they're getting kind of political in a broader sense, and that does really well, the way that content works as other people might be like, Oh, well, folks want me to do a political video, folks want me to talk about, I don't know, Nancy Pelosi or whatever. And that that's, you know, not just a problem with gun culture or gun YouTube, but it has increasingly become a thing. And in the NRA kind of very famously, there's a good podcast on the how that

organization has kind of gone from where it started to where it is that talks about like NRA TV, but they their YouTube channel had some pretty outrageous shit for a while. And I think it left an impact even though it failed initially, eventually. Well, the NRA is a tool we can get into that later. The NRA has changed so much since its origins to what it is now. It's not even the people have found that it wouldn't recognize it, I don't think at all. But you're touching on a topic there that's also near and dear. And I'm not trying to promote in range here. That's just we're having a conversation. But years ago, I decided to proactively demonetize. I turned off my AdSense and I take no money from any views. So it's not like advertising doesn't drive what I do.

And I feel like the reason I did that was partially just fuck you YouTube. It was the hacker manifesto of you come watch my content, I cost you money versus make you money, which is kind of a statement on my part. But additionally, I do feel like whether it's firearms or any other content that is completely advertiser supported, there is a dangerous thing there in that you have to pursue the clicks like a heroin addict, and the clicks make you the money. And therefore, you're going to make the stuff that's going to make the clicks because that's how you make your income. And even if you don't want it to do it can affect you. Yeah. And I'm curious, like, how do you kind of, how do you approach sort of dealing in this space where it is so easy for things to

become politicized? Like, is that a kind of thing that you have to be consciously sort of picking your battles, I guess? I'm just kind of interested in how you, because you definitely have been more open about having kind of more on the left libertarian side of things politics than a lot of people talk about in that space. How do you decide kind of what is worth inserting and what is worth kind of just, you know, no one needs to hear that within this context? Well, yeah, I don't think that that's an easy thing to answer, right? It's hard. Like, there's a lot of landmines. But when, introspectively for me, the answer for me at least was, I'm just going to come to this content as my honest self. Like, if I'm just going to produce what I want to produce, and since I

don't have to worry about advertising dollars, I'm just going to make the shit I want to make. And as a result, I guess it's sometimes considered an alternative voice, but I don't think it really is. I think that the loud, loud mouths have made it sound like there's only one voice in this community, but there isn't. And so by just being legitimate and honest and being me, there's turned out to be a lot of groundswell, if you want to use grassroots type people out there that want to hear something that's not just evangelical American Taliban. But in terms of where to put your foot on what landmine, I guess for me, my decision has been to do topics that have been intentionally ignored that shouldn't have been. Like, I've done a bunch of videos about the confluence of

civil rights and firearms ownership, which there's a lot of it. And it's really amazing how much there is. And no one talks about it. Yeah. I mean, we, yeah, we've chatted about that a little bit in some of our episodes. It was like 1919, when there were all those like race riots around the country, or even if you're looking at like the post construction period, there's a history, both of like gun control being used for racist purposes, but also just of communities arming themselves, black communities arming themselves that is is woefully undertold. Although it is, people are starting to deal with it more thankfully. I'm kind of interested in talking to you about sort of the culture jamming aspect of we have this huge gun culture, aspects of it are very

toxic and becoming politicized in a way that is aggressive. How do we, how do we have a positive influence and kind of hopefully pull things back? Because I do think within kind of the issue of gun rights, there's more actually more possibility for people to sort of come together and reach an accord than there is on something like abortion. And I think a lot of that conversation is going to start in spaces like the one you inhabit. Yeah, no, I like what you said culture jamming, because another term I've heard is subversive, although that's not the intent, but like you mentioned the red summer of 1919. And I talked to, when I, I talked to a lot of people that, that are really historically interested in minded, and I was astonished how many people had not

even heard of it, never mind the only like the explicit realities of it. And so when it comes to the culture jamming thing, there's one video I did about two of the events of red summer of 1919, one of them here in Bisbee locally. And it's an interesting problem to someone who normally would be considered a, a very standard issue firearms content creator in that particular red summer 1919 episode, it turned into the local police attempting to disarm the 10th cavalry soldiers who are off, you know, military soldiers in Bisbee on recreation. And so you've got this interesting cognitive dissonance. Do I support the cops that a lot of firearms people are like, just blindly support? Or do I support the military, which a lot of firearms people

blindly support when both of them converge and the, and it's a racist agenda in it? That poses a question that I like to do with like this kind of content, because it means that the viewer has to really, if they get through the video, have to introspectively go, holy fuck, which do I support? Or do I support neither? Or is there a problem here I haven't been considering? I think asking questions like that really matters. When you try to like start these conversations with people who are kind of in the same space, but, but not, you know, I haven't considered talking about this stuff before or on what would traditionally be seen as kind of very opposed political wing. How do you kind of start these conversations in a way

that makes it most likely that you're going to be able to have a positive dialogue that actually moves forward as opposed to kind of getting bogged down in the, in the things that cause people to just kind of lock horns generally when you, we start getting into these areas? Yeah, you know, I don't know. It's totally possible. You're going to have that problem no matter what, right? I'm sure you see that with, you see that with your work for sure. Absolutely. Yeah. When you take an honest approach to history and just be like, here's the facts. There's going to be people that are just going to be completely resistant to that. They're not going to take it. But I think the best way to do that is to just be that honest approach to it. Like one of the things that I

think we do with firearms content, gear is cool. Tech is cool. Guns are neat. They're fun. I enjoy shooting with guns. I like the sport of it. I like going to competitions. But one of the things that gets left out of the conversation a lot is what are the implications of firearms and the sociological economic environments that we live in? And I think that's one of the things that isn't get talked about. And so if we talk about it fairly and also tend to, I think it's hard to do, but have people from all sides of this perspective, as long as they're not completely dangerous and toxic, being part of the conversation, we can have a better middle ground. That's the hard part. Like so being inclusive, ironically, even of views that you aren't necessarily your own,

as long as the person you're dealing with isn't. My line is if you're actively supporting bigotry or the harm of other people, there's a no go. We're done. But if we have different views, but we realize that that's not the intent, then then we should have a conversation. I think that that's a big difference. Now, I think one of the areas in which this can get murkiest is when you are talking to people, and I've had a few of these conversations who are convinced that they're kind of on the precipice of a violent conflict sparked by someone coming to take their guns. There's the version of this that is like, I'm worried that the ATF is going to do some fuckery and a bunch of my shit's going to be illegal, which is pretty reasonable. And then there's the

I'm worried ANTIFA is going to come to my small town and take my guns or do whatever, like, because there are often people in that who are just kind of tragically misinformed and radicalized in a way that they're not so much eager to harm people as they are just like broken and frightened because of the things that have been fed to them. Do you have any kind of best practices when it comes to sort of approaching those conversations and trying to improve the information those people are getting? I guess for me in that regard, when I see people like that, I think all of us have those people in our world, whether it's your aunt or your uncle or a friend, right? Like, we've seen that over the last couple of years for sure. I think the best thing you can do there,

for me, again, I'm just talking to my approach, is break the echo chamber if you can. And so, the echo chamber is the problem. When we suck from the fire hose of only one source, like, non-stop, yeah, that's going to be dangerous. That's the kind of stuff that pollutes your mind to the point where you can't think outside of that box. So, like, being more inclusive, and that word is kind of a trigger word, a catchphrase, but being legitimately more inclusive and presenting a lot of different diversity that really is part of the firearms community, can, in some circumstances, break the echo chamber. Like, I'm really happy with this one project on the channel where I'm working with Annette Evans about specifically a female or

woman's approach to self-defense with firearms. And you don't really see that. You'll see, like, channels that are only for women. And you'll see, like, all the majority of gun channels that are only for gun-fascinated dudes. But, like, throwing that into the mix, there's going to be some subset of people that will click in to watch it out of that G-Wiz level. And that kind of stuff can break a paradigm in terms of, well, I never thought of that or never looked at it from that perspective. And that's, at least that's what I think is the great answer is do your best to make sure you're approachable and try to break the echo chamber. Yeah. That makes complete... Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I think the other side of this is also worth talking about, because we've

kind of been focused on how do you break the echo chamber? How do you get people who are, you know, in the gun culture on the right to be more open-minded? The other side of this is you have a lot of people who are kind of liberals or on the left who have a really reflexively negative opinion to the reaction to the very idea of gun ownership or gun rights. And have these, you know, you will generally see there's a mix of people who can come do it from a very reasonable and argued point and a mix of people who are just going to like, in the same way that folks on the right do, throw out a handful of quotes that they've seen on memes that they can use to kind of, you know, shut down debate. How do you... Do you have a lot of those conversations where you're

kind of trying to make people at least more open to? Because this is something my work has done with a lot, is kind of trying to sit down to like, I get why you don't think these things should be legal. Obviously, I see the same mass shooting news that you do. There's a problem, a deep problem with guns in this country. I don't deny that. But like, let's also talk about the idea that the state should have an absolute monopoly on the ability to do violence. Let's talk about the ability of marginalized groups to defend themselves. Let's talk about the history of gun control and how it like, it is, it is, there's a lot of conversations that kind of get wrapped up in that. I'm wondering, do you have thoughts in terms of like, how to kind of broach

those and progressive avenues to go down to when you're having that side of the conversation? You know, it's totally interesting. I think, I feel like, and I'm curious what you think about this from your work as well. I feel like over the last, for good reasons, over the last couple years, more than a couple years, I think I've seen, maybe it's just my own echo chamber, I've seen a lot of people on that side of the political spectrum coming more and more around to being pro-gun. Yeah. I mean, the statistics back that up. Support of gun control in the United States is the lowest it's been in quite a while. It's that like, if there's that joke on that side of the political fence, but you go far enough left, you get your guns back, right? So,

but I think there's been a real wake up call for a lot of people that used to be very much vehemently against the idea with some of the stuff they saw and went, whoa, this isn't, these aren't going away. And if you're reasonable, if you're willing to have a rational thought about, at least in this country, the reality of firearms ownership, whether you like it or not, it's not debatable. This is real. It's what it is. They're not like, they could ban everything tomorrow and there's going to be AR-15s in this country for the next hundred years. So that ain't going to change. So with that realization, maybe the better idea, which I think is with all technology, is instead of being afraid of it, is to actually learn about

it and understand it. Whether you want it or not, it's up to you. But like, learning and understanding it is at least a step further forward than just complete abject fear. Yeah, that is often kind of where I start the conversation with just like, we have to deal with the reality as it is on the ground, which is that there's 400 million firearms in private hands here, which is not all that far from half of all of the guns in the world. So any sort of like plan you have, it's the kind of like one of the things that often comes up in those conversations is Australia and people say, we're like, well, they were able to do it after, no, Port Arthur was Scotland. I forget the name of the massacre. But there was a massacre in Australia that they

banned most kinds of firearms after and confiscated them. And it gets brought up a lot. We're like, well, they did this in the short frame of time, and there was this impact on gun violence deaths. Why couldn't we do it? And the reason is that they had to confiscate a total of 200,000 arms, and there's 400 million guns in private hands in the United States. It's a different scale of problem. And that's before we get into sort of the legal barriers, because Australia didn't have a second amendment, obviously, like whether or not you like it, firearms have a level of protection that is equivalent to the protection free speech enjoys in this country. And you can't just pretend that's not the case. There's a tremendous body of jurisprudence around it. Yeah, no, totally. And

like so that that's that's part of it is the reality. The Australian here is a completely different beast, as well as culturally like the people that were into guns there. And I don't mean to offend any Australians listening, but it wasn't like here, like in a place like Arizona, like at least like Arizona, guns are just if you're in Arizona, they're just intrinsically part of life, whether like they're just constant, they're everywhere, you go to like you see them open carry, you not always do she open carry either. Sometimes it's like reasonable open carry. Sometimes you see the other side of it, but they're just everywhere. It's just part of the deal. And it's like a lot of that in a lot of the country. And so I actually think that that fear based ignorance

of them is more dangerous because then we don't teach people what to do around them or how to be safe around them, kind of like abstinence, like education in school, teach people not to have sex. Yeah, that's fucking dumb. They ain't gonna work. And guns exist in this country, just just be afraid of them. That don't work either. So in that regard, I think that the reality is it's much better to to approach this. What I think I guess the way I try to deal with that is, if you don't fetishize them, people that are more afraid of them are less likely to just click away. If you talk about them like, this is a thing, here's what they are. They're not a totem against evil. They're just a tool. And here's a historical story or narrative or sociological impact of this

that's not fetishizing it as some religious item. I think that that helps break that barrier a little bit. And I think that that does bring me to something I think about a lot, which is the the how you're in and actually has, I think gotten a bit better than it was prior to Sandy Hook, but the very sorry state in a lot of cases of of advertising of gear and guns. I think the most famous example was a I believe it was a Bushmaster ad that got pulled after Sandy Hook that was like an AR 15 that came with a man card that you would get like with your gun. Get your man card back, I think. Yeah, get your man card back. Your man card has been reissued because you have this gun here and that I you know, I've seen a lot of different gun cultures because it's actually

like we've just talked about how unique US gun culture is. But a lot of people actually own firearms around the world. There's a lot of even like in Europe, like France has a very significant gun culture. And in Germany, you'd be surprised like people can own a lot of the same weapons you can hear. There's a lot more hoops to jump through to get access to them. But there's still like there's gun cultures all around and especially places like Iraq and Syria. It was really going to when I saw kind of the gun culture that I I most wanted to port some things over to hear from there. It was in northeast Syria in Rojava where like damn near every not every individual but every like family had an AK because in part, there was this understanding

that you have a duty from time to time to like patrol and watch your neighborhood and not in sort of this like I'm going to set up a checkpoint for Antifa. But in a like, hey, ISIS just carried out a big attack. Let's let's get some folks out into the streets to like watch our neighborhoods because that's just the reality of the world. And we don't we don't do we don't just have like a group of militarized police rolling around every neighborhood. Like we also are responsible for protecting our communities. And so we train with weapons. And there was a lot of conversations I had with women about like, well, the fact that I have this and know how to use it now means that things can't be done to me that were before. Because I have an AK 47 and that means something. I would

like to port the kind of like what you were talking about, not just seeing it as a tool but seeing it as a tool with societal responsibilities. You don't just have a gun. So you can hold up in your house in the zombie apocalypse, you have a gun, because you're part of a community. And because there's there's some value that we see in members of the community being armed and not just the state. Yeah, no, totally. So I mean, that goes that kind of goes way back to the old, like, now sort of silly sounding thing. But like, God made man called made them equal, right? So before that, like, if you were a frail human being for whatever reasons, you really were sort of defenseless, especially in places like the frontier, but skill at arms could change that. And yeah.

And that's it puts it can put a more balanced power infrastructure in place. Not that I want to live in a world where we're always like at this point of mutually assured destruction. But it is much better to have more power balance than power imbalance and firearms absolutely provide that in trained responsible educated hands. Yeah. And that's what I think the story should be, right? That's the emphasis like, when when the whole thing happened went down in Iraq, like you're describing, I think it was ironic, one of the things that that the US military did was allowed every home to have an AK, like because you get to keep one gun and it's one of these. And, and you talked about gun ownership worldwide, like once you jump through some of the hurdles

in some of these countries, it's actually easier to own certain things than you can. Like suppressors. Like a machine gun, for example. Yeah. Yeah. Like a machine gun in the US is highly regulated since 1934 and pretty difficult and highly expensive because of a specially closed market. But like, bloke on the range, one of the guys I work with on on YouTube, once he gets his permit, like he's like, I'm just going to go buy a fully automatic stand. And he just does. And it's not at an exorbitant price like it would be in the United States. So it's not apples to apples. Like these controls, whether we like them or not, some of them are actually more liberal than we have in the United States. Yeah. And I think a good example of that and an example

of where like a lot of folks who might kind of reflexively think this is insane, but like, it's silencers, you know, suppressors being the more accurate term, but silencer is what you call them. It's the thing you see James Bond screw on the end of his gun to make it quiet. And there's like this attitude that they should be heavily restricted because there's this misnomer that for the most part they make things sound like stuff in James Bond. Now, there are some ways to get a firearm that is incredibly quiet, particularly using like a smaller round and subsonic ammunition. There are some very, some weapons you can effectively make quiet enough that people won't notice it. But when you're putting a silencer on an AR 15, it is not quiet.

No one will miss it firing. But what it won't do if you have to defend yourself in your home is shatter your eardrums forever, right? Or, and this is honestly the bigger case for suppressors, if you are hunting with an animal, as a lot of people do with your dogs, you can have a suppressor on your shotgun as your bird hunting or whatever, and you will not destroy that dog's ears. You know, it's the same thing like hunting for deer, you know, it's easier. It's like less dangerous for you potentially. Like one thing you notice, if you've spent a lot of time around hunting dogs, they don't have good hearing by the time they get older, because they're hunting dogs. It's funny suppressors, like everything that's

that's more controlled is got a lure of magic around it, right? Like, oh, a suppressor, a silencer, or, or for that matter, a machine gun. And like, therefore, it is the forbidden fruit, and everyone wants it more than they ever would have. Once you own, I have one transferrable machine guns with tax stamps the whole nine yards. Yeah. And I shoot it like once a year, because you shoot it and then you're like, wow, that was expensive. And yeah, that was 150 bucks. And it's like, oh, we, that was fun. And then you put it away. And the truth is that some automatic stuff is far more interesting and actually generally more effective. Once you use full auto fire, it's got very limited use. Fully, there, there, I mean, there is, like, if we,

again, are being complete, there's one mass shooting I can think of where a fully automatic weapon made the shooter more dangerous. And it was the Las Vegas shooting because he was in a set fixed position. He was holed up. And he had, he was not like moving and standing, he was like, braced while firing into a crowd from a building as a general rule, if you're talking about like, what's someone going to be more dangerous with, if they're somebody who decides to shoot up something, it's a semi automatic weapon, because an automatic weapon number one, going to jam more often requires a bit more understanding and know how on behalf of the user and also is a lot harder to hit with and will run out of ammunition very quickly as opposed to

an a semi automatic AR 15. The reason they are so often used in mass shootings is it's kind of the best weapon to use for that. If that's also prolific, right? There's like, yeah, and it's so easy and available. AR 15s are cordwood in this country. You can like, they're literally everywhere. The Las Vegas shooter, though, I don't know that he had actually any truly select fire guns, weren't they mostly bump stocks? Yeah, he was using a bump stock. I think it's close enough to, yeah. Oh, well, no, it's a good analog. But it is interesting to note and that guy, what's interesting about that guy is, well, of course, his act was horrific and evil. Obviously, yeah. But like, he used a bunch of AR 15s with like shitty bump stocks,

and he had planned something like this for years, apparently. Yeah. And he had Tannerite in the setup too, which is, I think, yeah, no one knows. I mean, as we know, no one currently, I don't know anyone knows what his motivation was, at least it hasn't been released. But he had been planning something like this for a very long time. And what's ironic about that is that if he had bided his time, he could have actually had a real select fire, like belt-fed machine gun. Yeah, he was a millionaire. Yeah, he could have done that. And this could have, but he just went with this bump stock kind of garbage, which is weird. That's a whole another topic. But it is, and it is like that is one of those cases when you talk to people on the

right, where it's like, after that shooting, Donald Trump and his administration banned bump stocks, which is more gun control than we got out of eight years of Obama. You know, oh boy, you point that out at least on the federal level, you know. In fact, there's always this narrative that, you know, this political party will take your guns and this polarity party walled. But the truth is, statistically and historically speaking, both tend to err on the side of trying to add more restrictions over time. Like if you do it over time, like Obama didn't. In fact, Obama opened things up. I think he liberalized concealed carry of pistol or firearms in national parks. Yeah, he actually made guns a little easier to deal with. But then via essentially

as executive order edict, you got Trump banning bump stocks, which whether you like bump stocks or not, I think the way that went down is questionable legally speaking, but that's another topic. And obviously, bump stocks were also somewhat questionable. Yeah, right, right, totally, totally. But that sets an interesting precedent with what he did with just like fiat edict. But that said, like historically over time, there's always been more restrictions, not less from both sides. And when you point that out, the people that just kind of drink the Kool-Aid from one side or the other, want to just immediately knee jerk on you and you're like, no, this is weird. This is coming from all directions, really. Yeah. And I think it is,

it is a big part of it is just that like as a general rule, people who are rich and powerful do not want poor people to be armed doesn't tend to work out in their favor. The only time they want poor people armed is when they send them to a war they decided to have. Yeah. And obviously, the history of gun controls would heavily tie to racism and the Black Panthers and a whole bunch of stuff around California's gun laws being started to curb Black people from owning firearms. And so it would be, we would be remiss to mention that. I mean, you could argue in some ways that Reagan had a big role in inventing our modern concepts of like what gun control means and what kind of gun control laws like liberal states tend to go after. Bands on open carrying, bands on,

you know, concealed carrying of arms, that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's deeper than this. There's always nuanced, obviously, really hard, right? But like California, which is kind of one of the flagship states of gun control. And I think that their methods are bizarre to me and almost not understandable. But like you talk about Reagan, pretty much, they were like, guns are cool. And then the Panthers walked around with some guns are like, whoa, we better do something. And of course, the image of the Panthers with their guns out walking down the street, which was their legal right. Yeah, absolutely. And it was rad. And it motivated, of course, a lot of things in California, which now we see where that has led in California gun control laws,

has also changed the narrative for so many people that are unwilling to look at things from a truly broad historical perspective. That's only one tiny thing the Black Panthers did. And the rest of their actions are so lost to just the pictures of them standing around them with carbines. And that's another example of leaving out like the sin of omission. We'll talk about one thing, but not the rest. And therefore, the historical narrative is only one thing. And it is also, there's a lesson in that for people who are on the left and who are advocates of gun ownership about what happens in terms of media and in terms of how your movement is thought about and remembered when guns are a part of it. Because that's always going to for a variety of

reasons. And we can say a lot of those are very unreasonable reasons. But if you are a political group who is armed and makes that a visible part of your activism, that is going to really dominate a lot of conversations. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be, but it means you have to go into that understanding that like, that's just how it works in this country. Yeah, you will immediately from at least some part of the perspective, whatever side you're on, you will immediately get someone slinging the extremist militant at you. Yeah. But by the way, I mean, those are real things too. There are those. I'm not saying there aren't extremists. Well, sure. Yeah, we talk about them all the time. Yeah, this country's full of them as is the world. So that's not an

unreasonable thing that does exist. But the minute you go ahead and stand with that gun, you're going to get that label, whether it's truly something you earned or not. There's a very deep conversation that we've talked about. We've had it in pieces on this program and other shows that we've done in Coolzone about like, when makes sense to be openly armed? And when makes sense to be openly armed as part of a group? Because that is a very fraught question as like the what happened in the Chas in 2020, made abundantly clear. But in, you know, a bunch of cases, Kyle Rittenhouse and whatnot, there's a ton of different reasons why choosing to be openly armed. There's a debate to be had about like how that influences everyone

around you, how that influences the demonstration. And I've seen and heard it used in good ways in an irresponsible ways. I've seen people carrying guns at political events in order to intimidate others. I've also seen people carrying guns at political events to create essentially a buffer where it's like, okay, there's going to be people fighting at this event, there's going to be clashes. If we're standing here as a group with guns, there's a place people can run back to and the fighting won't continue because nobody wants to push that. And that's Yeah, without talking about specifics of intent for any of those situations you already talked about, because I can't. But I think I think it does like it always comes back to this thing of

intent, right? So to me, you're right for the firearm, absolutely true, regardless, like even if I disagree with you, this is a right, like we said, it's protected like the First Amendment, it's the second. But I think the problem starts to come when you've decided to bring the firearm solely for the intended purpose of intimidation. Like that's that's where I start getting like this is this is troubling, right? But if you're bringing it for personal defense or community defense, or there's a need because your community is really at risk, I mean, one of the examples of a civil rights one was, this is someday I'll do a video about this, a community knew that the Klan was coming to intimidate them. And they armed up with surplus M1 Garans and steel pot

helmets, literally dug fighting positions and fought them off the Klan ran for their lives, no one was killed. But they literally used M1 Garans to to stop the Klan from infiltrating their community. That was not used as a weapon of intimidation, it was used as a weapon of community defense. I think that's intent goes everywhere. Yeah, that's fucking dope too. And yeah, I think one thing that that that kind of I think there's a conversation that needs to be had when we start talking about when is reasonable and what situations are reasonable to carry a gun open or concealed about also what should be carried. I've certainly seen because I don't I think that the most harmful thing is certainly

people carrying a gun to intimidate. I've also seen people carry guns as a fashion statement, which is not the same thing, but is bad. For example, people on the left people at a protest bringing a loaded Mosin to because it was the gun the communists use, which is like, you don't you don't want to be in a firefight in a dense urban environment with a Mosin Nagat. Did you bring your rubber mallet to beat the bulldozer when it gets stuck in me? Yeah, like, yeah. It is a gun that doesn't function without a sizable hammer, you know? Not generally speaking, yeah. And of course, people on like, I remember outside of this anti-mask rally, these two guys who were up and carrying ARs, one of whom had an AR 10 with

100 round drum was talking about it. We had like 400 something rounds on him. And it was like, and in case stuff pops off. And it's like, what are you? Number one, like if you're talking like that, you've spent no time thinking about what actually happens in the situations in public areas in which gunfights occur. Because none of them that have happened in any time in the recent future have involved people needing to 400 rounds of ammunition or drum magazines or whatever. Like you are not in Fallujah, you are in Salem, Oregon. The extent to which a firearm can be useful for self defense and that does not like bragging about the number of bullets you have is just like weird and gross. You know, this is going to come off maybe a little strange or even

counterintuitive. But when I hear someone like that, what you just described in that particular person, first of all, that guns barrel would burst in 400 rounds. But that's a whole nother topic, probably. But that said, when I hear that, I almost have like, it's kind of sad, because the reason that sad is that person is doing that one, because they've been sold the idea that the firearms talisman, like that to me, that person's acting like that's a talisman. Secondarily, the reason they have 400 rounds is because they've been sold a pretty big bill of fear. And that's that's sad for anyone to live a life based on fear. Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that entirely. Do you have anything else you wanted to get into

in this this conversation? Well, I don't know. I mean, we're just here to talk about like community. I just I think one thing that's really important and it's something that is is a positive and I'm happy to see this is that it was kind of a happy accident with my work. I didn't even think about it just hard to happen. But this is a much the people people that love, first of all, just the sport. There's a lot of us. There's a lot of us of all spectrums across the board. Sure. Absolutely. People that believe in the right from the person, the purposes of personal defense and community defense, they're across the board. And I think that one of the things that we need to do is not let the narrative be only one, which is we see so much of very much just

like right wing. I'm going to usually say Christian white males need like completely dominating this conversation as though and they think they owe as a result own the space. Now, it would be in their interest to from the perspective of preserving firearms rights to be inclusive and have everyone that believes in that a particular thing work together to make sure we don't lose a right because a right on exercise is lost. So even if I disagree with you on economic policy, but we agree on firearms rights, we have an agreement there. And that makes us somehow interestingly in the same space. We have something in common versus something diversive. And I think that part of the conversation, at least within reason, I mean,

there are people that are legitimately dangerous. You don't negotiate with them. But within reason, agreeing on that topic means, well, we got something in common here. There's probably other things too. And maybe that could be a place where we kind of try to make that conversation better, not worse. And so by being more open, inclusive and saying, hey, there's people here and people there and here we are all together doing this together. Perhaps conversation can be had that's better than what we've been having. Maybe it can be actually a community builder versus a community destroyer. Yeah. Yeah, I would like to see that. Well, I think that's as good a note as any to close out on Carl, you want to you want to throw

your pluggables up before we write out of here? Yeah, sure. I mean, so I run in range TV. You can find me at inrange.tv. Completely viewer supported. Like I said, I don't want any sponsors or anything. I like I like the idea of the people liking watching it, support it. So if you like it, cool. Come check it out all over the place. YouTube, BitShoot, decentralized video content distributions. Another thing I believe in strong with the corporate oligarchy. But yeah, come out. If you want to have a little bit different take on firearm stuff or you're interested in the confidence of civil rights and guns and stuff, come check out in range TV. I'd appreciate it. I always appreciate new viewers and thanks for checking it out. Awesome. All right.

Yeah, check out in range TV and check us out somewhere. We won't tell you where, but you can find us if you keep us in your hearts. Cybernetics. All right, this is me, Christopher Wong, realizing that I have done like 16 consecutive actual real introductions and that if I keep doing them, everyone's going to expect that I do a real introduction every time instead of like randomly yelling something. So yeah, welcome to it could happen here. I am trying to make my job function as it should and not professionalize it. And this is a podcast about things that are bad, but it's also occasionally a podcast about things that are good and how in fact there can be a society beyond this one and talk about some of the shades of what that could

look like. I have with me the cohost of the general intellect unit, Kyle and June, which is a it's a podcast on the Emancipation Network that is, this is the tagline, the podcast of the cybernetic Marxists. I am very excited. Yeah, it's really exciting to be here. Absolutely. Thank you for coming on. Yeah, I guess, okay, we should start at the very, very beginning because I don't think most people know any of this. What is cybernetics? Right. So cybernetics is, I guess, a term that comes from, what is it, the cybernetics, right, steering the idea of steering a boat. So using your order to navigate the waters. And so essentially, it is a science of control. And that sounds really scary. But what it means

is that it's that kind of connection between the steersperson, the ore, the boat, their body, and the water around them. And getting all of those things in sync in such a way that the steersperson is going where they want to go. The ship or the boat doesn't capsize. And they don't lose the ore. And so that's what control means. It's a kind of balancing, a kind of connection between the organism and the environment in such a way that it can survive and thrive. Yeah. And that's what cybernetics is focused on. Yeah, the thing I love about them, the steersman metaphor is that like, it's all about, it's control in the sense of regulation, but also very importantly in cybernetics,

it's almost always self-regulation. Because one of the kind of core principles, again, because the term usually calls to mind this kind of terminator, cyber gothic kind of domination, it's actually not what the field is about at all. Because one of the core insights of cybernetics is actually that any given system, the only thing that can really control it is itself because of the sheer complexity of systems. The kind of top-down external domination of an organism that we all fear is kind of like, actually, if you look at the cybernetics literature, that's not actually really possible. Because the external controller would never have enough complexity to match what the organism is capable of. And you know, organisms are self-regulating

systems. The steersman with his boat is a self-regulating system that regulates its upright position in the water and regulates its course that's directed towards its goal. So that's why it's so important. I think that's why we think it's so important for the left and people who are concerned with these visions of politics of autonomy and liberation, they really need to look at this stuff because it turns out there kind of is a science of autonomous self-guiding organic systems. So yeah, no terminator here. Yes. And yeah, I mean, you know, when you see scary videos of militarized robots and they are learning to, you know, jump and fire weapons and all that kind of stuff, there certainly is

cybernetics involved there. But that is a kind of domain application of cybernetics rather than defining what cybernetics is. It's really kind of holistic systems thinking in general is what cybernetics is. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably worth emphasizing, right? That like, cybernetics in some ways is kind of like out of fashion these days, like it kind of evolved into systems thinking and I guess a lot of its lessons got kind of absorbed in general, but we find there's great value in going back to the kind of originators and like focusing on that field. On the show, we got into the cybernetics angle by reading Andrew Pickering in his book, The Cybernetic Brain, in which he kind of acknowledged that like there's he kind of split into two, like there's American cybernetics,

like which had that kind of like dour kind of military domination sort of flavor to us that like it's kind of an earned reputation there. But Pickering was more concerned with like British cybernetics. So like a lot of British thinkers that and it had a very different flavor there where it was more open ended, it was kind of had more of a focus on kind of liberation and like politics and stuff. In fact, some of those like Gray Walter was like explicitly an anarchist like wrote in anarchist like journals and stuff like that. And for him, like those two things went hand in glove right like that like liberatory politics as like a politics of like human flourishing like as human human beings as autonomous units flourishing in their own contexts, and of like

social systems that would enable that kind of flourishing. To him, that was just hand in glove with cybernetics. There was no real distinction there. It was just like, yeah, these these two things fit each other perfectly, which you lose later with like general systems theory sort of stuff. You know, it's like there's plenty. I don't know. Who am I thinking of here? Like the Talibe, that guy with the like Black Swan sort of stuff, like he's big system and stuff, but like isn't so much, isn't so much into the liberatory politics, I guess, you know, a lot of that angle is kind of lost. Yeah. And I think this is awesome. This is, you know, this is sort of a product of, I guess, the broader ideological course that's going on while cybernetics comes in and out of

fashion. And I think I think we should go back a bit to the beginning to sort of situate this, because I know like when I like before I like ever did any reading on cybernetics, like my immediate assumption was that it was it was you know, this is the thing that was entirely just based off of computers, right? That this is like this is and that's not really true from my understanding of it. So can we go back and sort of like talk about where this came from a bit and how it's sort of moves over this over sort of the 60s, 70s and yeah, go from there. Yeah. Yeah. I think you can kind of trace it back in its sort of European origins to you could probably say Hegel, you know, his his move towards like understanding being not just a substance, but a subject,

I think is a move towards a kind of cybernetic understanding where you understand the whole system as a holistic entity, as opposed to just an individual interacting with an external environment. And you can also see this come up in say, there was a ecologist who X skill in the German ecologist in the early 20th century, I believe, who was trying to understand, you know, the organism in its environment, the sort of precursors to ecology can be seen as precursors to cybernetics. Then when you get to the kind of development of cybernetics as a science or as a discipline in the mid 20th century, it's not exactly about computing. It's it's more about balancing a machine with its environment. So the sort of prototypical machine of this kind was the servo mechanism,

which was used to help guide a like an anti aircraft gun in shooting down enemy aircraft. So making sure it tracks properly with the target and doesn't lose the target and is assisting the operator in operating the gun instead of just being a inanimate object that has trouble tracking what a very fast moving target. I mean, you can even think back to like the, you know, in World War One, when they discovered, hey, we could actually like synchronize the timing of the propeller and the timing of our gun on the front of this plane, so that our guns aren't destroying our propellers and shoot and we're shooting our own planes down with our guns when we're dogfighting, right? Yeah, that's a systems understanding, right?

So that's, that's that's Norbert Wiener, right, and working on the automated gun turret stuff. And that's he coins the term cybernetics to like, given name to the thing he was starting to discover. And it's like he was kind of pulling together a bunch of threads there. And like, one of those kind of important insights is that like, like they couldn't get an improvement in like targeting an accuracy without like basically making the gun turret an agent of its own that like and the like the turret and the gunner would be cooperative agents that in combination would achieve their goal. But like, there was there was there's something strange and spooky about that, right? Like that this feedback mechanism inside the turret gives it a sort of weird agency that

combines with the agency of the gunner to like, guide the whole system towards a goal. Yes. And what it ends up becoming then is a kind of boundary space, where the distinction between human and machine starts to become ambiguous, because they both start to possess they're both understood to have a kind of agency, they're both understood to have kinds of like functions. And then you kind of get this sort of like a human machine interface idea. And you can start to bring in all of these different ideas from like anthropology, from physiology, from math, from ecology, and they all start to interact in this domain of cybernetics. And like the core the core idea of them, that kind of ties everything together is that a feedback.

So weiner realizes that what he needs to do to achieve this goal is a feedback mechanism that would is error correcting feedback, right? Like if the if the gun is slightly too far to the left, it corrects itself right words and so on. But that as you said that that connects across all sorts of things, right? Like you start to realize that's present everywhere in ecology, in neurology, in like, that learning is based on feedback, you know, so it's really funny to read Norbert Weiner, like in the 50s, basically describing what would become machine learning. And he's just like, he just off the cuff is like, yeah, like if you could, if a machine could like, or if any system could just like, analyze its own performance, and then feed back onto itself,

it would it would learn any old pattern you wanted it to. And he's like, yeah, he turns out he was completely correct. And that's, that's where it kind of like gets into like, you get later thinkers like Ross Ashby, who was, and like, other folks, like, in and around psychiatry, we were like, really interested in how the brain worked. And that's that's the other thing that feeds into like, cybernetics is like, it's why Pickering called his book The Cybernetic Brains, because like, the brain and like nervous systems show up so much in that field, right, that like, the brain being a kind of learning and adapt an adaption adaptation machine, attached to the body or whatever. And like, yeah, I don't know, there's there's something fascinating there. And like,

the, I mean, there's something kind of possibly troubling and kind of melting down the distinctions between living organisms and machines, whatever. But like, there's also something very compelling and just like recognizing the same patterns happening at all these different levels, right, that like, you get similar behaviors and similar kind of outcomes. And then, you know, it turns out like, you can kind of do a science on these things. And, and come up with even better explanatory frameworks based on your observations across many fields. Yes. And so it is in a sense about computers. But the computers are really just understood to act like a kind of brain. And that's connected to a nervous system, which is connected to, you know, like actuators of some

kinds, some kinds of like machines that actually do things in the world. So it's not about, like, say, computer science, specifically, it's more about like, well, computers are a useful way to do cybernetic design, because they can act as a control system, and they're flexible. It's not that this is about computers, really. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And like, you brought you brought up something very important there that like, in all cases of like cybernetics, like the systems that we're considering are not like isolated like brain in a box kind of things. They're all the things that are directly engaged with the world. Like so it's not that kind of like monadic kind of rationalism of like computation just happening in a box somewhere and like

perfect intelligence or anything like that kind of stuff. These are always like the cyberneticians are always working with systems that were engaged in real time emergent situations. And because of that, they rapidly kind of like acknowledge that for so many of these important like systems, the only way to figure out what it's going to do is to let it do it. Because you can't like pre-compute all the possible outcomes, you know, of these like very sticky and complex real world situations. The best way to figure out what it's going to do is to let it do it and watch. Yes. And I think I think that's an interesting sort of like, if you look at where a lot of the sort of like techno fetishist like social attempts to sort of like manipulate society

technology have gone, it's like, yeah, you get like like blockchain smart contracts. It's like the blockchain smart contract is like, okay, we are going to think of literally everything that could possibly happen and attempt to put it in like a very small amount of code. And if anything, like literally anything at all happens that I, you know, that we didn't expect, we're now, everyone is now screwed because we have just made this thing immutable and put it in such a way that we can't change it. Yeah. So I think that yeah, that's a, I think this is a useful sort of, I mean, corrective just in the way that we've now like, we've gone backwards, like we've gotten into this place where you instead of like, we need to let these systems

play out, we need to let them be controlled themselves, we've gotten to like, we think that we can actually just sort of like, you know, turn the entire system into code that we can predict ahead of time and have, you know, the basis of some sort of social system off of. Yeah, I mean, it's, I think it's something that like the serpentitions and like, like maybe Pickering would describe as like a kind of perversity of modern thought, like the modern mindset, like the kind of like rational, like kind of mindset, right? Like, and like to the serpentitions that that whole thing with like the blockchain stuff will be just truly laughable because it's immediate, it's immediately obvious to them that

the problem there is like, okay, proposing, oh, we're going to use a blockchain to regulate some sort of social process or whatever smart contracts, whatever. And it's like, that thing has nowhere near the fidelity required to regulate social processes because social processes are unimaginably complex and have just incredible variety. There's a there's a there's like a law that's at the heart of cybernetics called Ashby's law of requisite variety. And in short, it basically states that given a system, the only thing that's really capable of regulating is regulating it is itself, because a regulator needs as much variety as the thing it's regulating, if it's going to actually succeed at it. And so that's the kind of thing that nudges everyone towards like,

like when you get to someone like Stafford Beer, his whole model of like, organization pushes all a lot of the intelligence downwards to the bottom layers, because there is basically the people on the ground on the shop floor are the people who are best informed to actually deal with their own situation. And that sounds like a banal observation, but like it for beer that was actually quite a step forward to like, just admit that like, trying to like, trying to like, in his context, was like, often the organization of a firm like a company, like trying to manage a company from the boardroom is just fucking ludicrous. Like, yeah, nobody there has enough information to act on. They're all dumbasses anyway. So for beer, it was just

an app like, this is where it starts to get interesting. And it connects to the politics, right, that like, for one of these scientists just observing reality and like, you know, using, you know, pretty, pretty good sort of intuitions and like, scientific frameworks, just looking at it and going like, Oh, it is obviously the case that the best way for society to organize is bottom up self organization. And that like, it's not just a moral point, it's actually a technical point as well. Then like, these these top down bureaucratic kind of micro tyrannies are not only morally objectionable, they're also technically inferior to the kind of like, cyber communism we want to institute. Yeah, and I have like, one of one of my, one of my favorite stories about so I worked

as a maintenance worker for a while. And one day, my boss was like, there was some problem with the sink. And my boss was like, No, we don't need the plumbers, I can do this. And so he goes in there and it's one it's like, it's like a sink in like a building, right? So it has just one of those things that there's like a pipe that connects the top of the sink to like the wall. And he goes, Okay, here, look at this, I'm gonna, I'm gonna turn this valve and this is going to turn the water off. And what he instead does is he takes, he takes the pipe off of the wall. And just like a torrent of water is just now shooting out of this pipe because he has removed the thing. Yeah, he's removed the pipe from the wall. This is, this is, this is why I think like,

yeah, this, this, this, this, you know, this, this is like a particularly funny example of how these sort of top down management systems and this guy like, like used to be a maintenance guy, right? But he just like was a plumber. And so, you know, and he accepts into it and he's like, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, hold on, I know, I know how this system works, it's going to be fine. And it just, there is a geyser, the geyser of water has so much force to it, it's like, it's like pushing all our tool cart across the room. It's just, it's just, it's just gush, it's like a fire hydrant. Now I wanted to, I guess beers is an interesting way to go, to go into the sort of the politics of what this actually looks like. Do you want to talk about, and I know I briefly talked about this

in an episode on neoliberalism a while back, but do you want to go into sort of more detail into what beers was up to and the eventually failed attempt because of military coup to try to implement like a cybernetic system for organizing essentially an economy? Yeah, sure. Yeah, so Stafford Beer was a management consultant. He and a cybernetician. He got his start sort of doing operations research, which is kind of a precursor to cybernetics that is kind of like interested in logistics and organizing systems in the in the British military in World War II. And then he came out of that and became a corporate consultant for operations research and management. And so in working in the corporate world,

he saw all of the things that were really screwed up with the status quo way of doing business and of organizing things, you know, the way that autocratic power of management creates all kinds of ridiculous problems, the way that managing organizations, according to org charts, which are there to assign blame more than anything else, creates all kinds of perversities, the way that organizations fail to adapt to their environments because they get into these kinds of strange neuroses. And, you know, just sort of going through all of that and more often than not being unable to intervene in an effective way to address these problems and just sort of like seeing how these little instances of perverse

corporate culture are indicative of the broader problems of our society as a whole and of capitalism. And so, you know, he had a basis from his time in India during the Second World War in kind of like kind of like Tantra, kind of like, you know, Eastern or specifically Indian spirituality, yoga, all this kind of stuff. So he kind of had a counter-cultural side to his personality. And he was always doing tinkering, strange experiments with cybernetics. He wasn't just the straight-laced corporate guy, but it was a combination of that sort of counter-cultural background with his growing frustration with corporate systems that led him to start to develop ideas about how things could be different. And this kind of meshed up with the thoughts that

were happening in Chile during the Chilean Revolution in the early 70s. So they reached out to him to come and help out with organizing their economy as they were undergoing this revolutionary process of trying to sort of throw off the shackles of imperialist dependency and create a society that was focused on the flourishing of workers and of society as a whole, as opposed to one that was based on sort of, you know, resource extraction where everything flows to the top. Yeah, do you want to explain some more about how that went? Well, so, yeah, it went well and then it went badly, I guess. But from the reading we've done, and from our research, it seems like basically if the U.S. hadn't sent in the fascists to kill

them all, this would have worked. It was working, and the project was actually going pretty well. Yeah, can you explain briefly what, I think it becomes, it's called product cyber symbol. What exactly, what was it doing? So beer's big kind of innovation is what we call the viable system model, or VSM. And it's a model that's, it's a model for these like autonomous social systems that is kind of taking, I wouldn't say it's entirely based on like the structure of the human body, but it's like taking a lot of lessons from biology and neurology and neuroscience and cybernetics and just kind of meshing them all together. So basically, it's like, if your body is basically a bunch of autonomous organs that all take care of their own business,

plus a nervous system that synchronizes them and unifies them into a workable whole, then you can kind of see the whole system as having this kind of mixture of vertical and horizontal aspects. Like on the one hand, it has this horizontal aspect where the autonomous like system one units are well autonomous more or less, like the heart takes care of its own thing, the lungs take care of their own thing. But then the nervous system meshes them together in layers so that it can say, oh, hold on too much oxygen, dial it down a bit, and then the organs respond dynamically to those signals, right? So it's kind of like up down feedback loops, right? Where the lower levels of the system are the smart bits that are doing all the important work, but there's

this supporting infrastructure of the nervous system in the brain that unifies the whole thing and keeps it all on the rails. So, and importantly, it's a kind of recursive model. So like a human being is an autonomous unit. And then that unit is composed of more autonomous units like the organs and the muscles. And then each of those is composed of cells, which are autonomous units, and then, you know, so on. But like that ladder goes upwards as well. So that like a team is an autonomous unit composed of human beings. A firm or like a department is a autonomous unit composed of teams. A firm is composed of departments. Like a sector is composed of firms. And it's the same kind of structure in at each layer. So the kind of upside there is that like,

you don't like you kind of have a fairly unifying like set of principles and like a science for doing this kind of like coordination of autonomous units at every level at every layer of society. So like, in principle, the sort of like the cybernetic principles that get applied to co-hearing members of a team are the same sort of principles that get applied to like sectors in an economy. With the same kind of, you know, bottom up kind of feedback going on as well. So Stafford was invited to Chile to by the I&A government in, so that was like 1970, right? Right. That election happened. So he arrived in late 1970, I think. Yeah, I'm not 100% certain on the timeline, but we're looking at those first few years of the

70s as the time when this is happening. Yeah. I&A's elected in 1970. Yeah. So it's towards the end of that year that he's invited. And he's basically kind of giving the task of like, hey, do all this stuff, but with this entire economy. And he's like, yeah, sure. Cool. So it puts together Project Cybersyn. And there's kind of a long story there of like them building out this kind of infrastructure. And like it's all highly experimental and highly sensitive. Like one of the big problems they run into is that like they don't have very much in the way of like hardware, especially because they're under embargo. So they had like a pretty, what at the time was a pretty crafty old mainframe that they

ran the software on. But like step one was like, installing this like huge communications network amongst all the factories and like setting up like the workers committees and stuff would feed information into it. And it would kind of again, this like feedback thing where you kind of take signals from the economy, integrate them and then go, oh, you're producing too much steel, route some of your product over to this, this factory, and it'll be better use there. And then, you know, you guys over there turn up this dial, you turn down this dial. So and then if that plan doesn't quite work out, then you've got another layer of feedback tomorrow to say, okay, that plan didn't quite work. Here's an adjusted plan. So it's it's this like, both bottom up and top down

sort of loop of feedback. That's like, I think that the phrase pickering uses is reciprocal adaptation, where the economy and its firms and its workers are all kind of adapting to each other in real time in a kind of in a in a full system. Yeah, no, that I mean, that's, that's essentially what Cyberson was. It was a system designed to largely, I think at first, supplement the market. Although, beer later realizes that like, actually, if you have a good system of this kind, you probably don't need a market. But essentially, it was like, okay, our economy has been one that has been built around dependence to, you know, especially the United States, and it's been organized in that way. And we need to reorganize the economy, both to promote the well being of the workers, the autonomy

of the workers, realize the ideals of socialism in that way, and also to create a system that is less dependent on those existing structures of imperialism. And so having this reciprocal adaptation, having systems in place to connect things that were previously disconnected, would allow you to move in that way of increasing autonomy and increasing freedom. And that was generally the idea of Cyberson, yes. And there was something very interesting, like when we were reading the reissue of his book, Brain of the Firm, where he has a section at the end that documents this whole experience in Chile. There's a really interesting part where towards the end of it, and this is getting up towards the coup, where he and the other Cyberson operatives,

and the people who are putting this together, realize that the workers and people in towns are just on their own, just using this stuff and these kind of principles to just abolish the value form, basically. But notably, without the involvement from above, as beer and company stumble upon this just happening, where they're like, oh my god, they're just dismantling the market. And it's all just kind of happening. And there was something really wonderful to that, that it indicated there really was something to it that you could, as in people, working people, could use these tools and this new way of organizing themselves to just liquidate market relations and wage relations spontaneously. It feels very different from the kind of spontaneity

you often get in the way leftists or anarchists talk about it often. Spontaneity is a magical sort of thing where freedom just arrives from out of nowhere. But this was like installing infrastructure to enable freedom, and then it actually kind of happening until the fascists showed up. What I think is really interesting about it is that you have this sort of central control center from which a lot of this stuff is being run. But it's a weird system because it's trying to link together a lot of different kinds of firms. You have some say you have private firms, but you have a lot of state-run firms. You also have firms that throughout this whole process, like workers just taking over factories, they're setting up these sort of industrial

cordons, I think, if I'm remembering my Spanish rights. They start setting up their own institutions and this becomes this way of networking these groups together. The other thing that's interesting is you have them on the one hand just getting rid of markets and going like, okay, wait, we can just coordinate production through this and not have markets. And then the second thing they do is the freedom immediately becomes political in the sense that one of the things they do, that's just going on in this period, is that Chile has a very, very right wing. It's basically like, even today, it's really like one of the only huge unions left in Chile is the truckers unions. And those guys are extremely right wing. In this period, they're

being backed by the CIA, they're being trained by AFL-CIO as I say every episode. But yeah, and they're intentionally doing strikes right over the government by blocking production. And the workers are like, okay, hold on, we can just use this cybernetic system to figure out where these blocks are, figure out where materials need to be moved through, and we can just stop the kind of revolution. We can just fight our way through it. And it's interesting, it's like, this happens, and so the original plan of using these truckers is like this sort of right wing, like the first attempt fails, and once that fails, it's like they have to go to the military. Yes. And the coup eventually works. It's hard to resist a coup outright, isn't it?

Yeah. The thing with the trucker strike is that you can very well imagine the CIA and stuff going into it thinking, oh, this is what'll do it, right? This will sew it up. But not realizing that the workers actually had in their hands a vastly more sophisticated system for outmaneuvering them. Yeah. And that system worked like a charm, like clockwork. And you read the accounts from this thing, like both in Eden Medina's cybernetic revolutionaries and in Beer's own account. And there's this sense that it was actually kind of spooky and weird. Even the people involved didn't quite expect it to work out that way, and that they were surprised at how effective it is. But it gets back to the core of cybernetics, that feedback is weirdly effective at getting

things done. These highly tuned feedback systems, they give you a lot of power to outmaneuver this complex. Yeah. And I think in some sense, people talk a lot about Chile as the sort of foreclosed future of an electoral, democratic socialism. But I don't think that was the potential of the moment. The potential of the moment was this. And it's interesting to me that, well, because Beer's kind of traces out a political history that never quite happened, which is, so okay, one of the sort of big political trends over the course of the 20th century is you have all these people who were sort of like, they basically got turned into planning bureaucrats during World War II, because every government basically turns into a giant planning engine.

And then some of them go into, some of them essentially stay on in the government during planning stuff. Beer goes into the corporate world, and the corporations are also, they start doing, they also start doing this planning stuff. But Beer's is interesting, because he pivots in a direction that the world doesn't, which is he pivots towards, okay, the solution to sort of the kind of like decay of these authoritarian planning systems, whether they be like the corporate versions of it, or the sort of like state administered, like total economic planning from the top down versions is, oh, well, okay, we need to have planning from the bottom up. And distribute the planning. Yeah, yeah. And he, like everyone

involved with Cybersyn gets murdered. The only reason Beer survives, because he wasn't in the country. And it's just really interesting. Like, it's kind of not a story. Not everybody got murdered, but some of them did. And some of them were in exile. Some of them were imprisoned. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, you know, it was not a good time. Beer got out early, and he knew things that were getting, were getting bad. And everybody around him knew things were getting bad. Yeah. Yeah. Well, like he was on a, he was on like a kind of, I guess, like a almost diplomatic mission to like try and get some of the blockade stuff. Like he was trying to, I think he was trying to flog like a container ship full of iron or something, you know, he was shopping shopping it

around to try and try and help out the like, sell the land to the world. That's what it was. Yeah. But yeah, it's, oh, hold on, I had a thought there. Oh, and then like afterwards, like Beer spent a fair bit of his time like trying to cash his comrades out of out of Chile and get them out of prison and got them resettled in, in the UK and so on. And yeah, America as well. But yeah, I think that this is like, that's a very interesting point about the, you know, the sort of the real value of this moment being that movement towards autonomy, that, that reorganization of society, not towards neoliberal engineering of markets and sort of reinforcement of private dictatorships. But towards a kind of like holistic control system that is still informed by, you know,

the principles of autonomy and science. It's definitely like an answer to the crisis of the 70s, which was not taken up. And in that sense, it is a foreclosed future. But of course, one that we can take lessons from now. Yeah, I think there's something else that's very interesting to me about this because, you know, if you look at how, like, if you look at how the socialist bloc sort of responds to, to the crisis in the 70s and, you know, they sort of decay in the 80s, like they have this option available to them, right? They have, they have made a lot of ways, they have a lot, they have a lot better technology than what the Chileans are using, they have more resources. And every single one of them goes no. And instead, just sort of like transitions, you

know, instead of, I think it has to do with, there's a line, this, this is like slightly before this, there's a line in a debate Mao and Joe and Li are having in, I think it's 1967, this is like the peak of the sort of worker led part of the Cultural Revolution, like the works have taken Shanghai and Mao and Joe and Li are talking and they're, they're trying to figure out, like, what are they going to do? You know, they've set off this force, it's now become uncontrollable. And there's, there's this line where they're talking about, okay, well, if we give, if we give them a, if we give them a commune, they have to have free elections. And Joe and Li is like, well, that would be anarchism. And they're just like, oh God, we

can't do that. And they never do in the end, you know, the end result of this whole sort of, that whole sort of process is that China, like, instead of doing, instead of sort of like, devolving any level of control down to like, any of the workers who are doing things, they're like, okay, well, we'll just, we'll just, you know, we'll do capitalism instead. Well, you will, you know, we'll create markets will sort of like, maintain our firm structure, but, you know, subjugate the party cadres into it. Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's, it's, it's a very interesting thing to me too. Because like, there've been other like, you know, like, like lots of socialist parties have sort of various, like, degrees of radicalness have come to power, like, since 1973. And to my

knowledge, not a single one of them has ever picked any of this stuff back up. Like, even, even, you know, like, like the most radical sort of like, like, you know, like early, like early Chavez never like touches this, like even, like, I don't, like, I don't, I don't think, like, I don't think the easier lens ever done it, like, I mean, they, they have technological issues there. But like, it's interesting to me that like, basically, no one who's ever taken power since has ever attempted it again. Which again, is strange, because this is, you know, one of one of the sort of, like this, you would think this is like, this is at least a potential solution to sort of this, this, this, this problem of this stagnation and sort of collapse of the

old sort of old systems of planning economies. But no one takes it up. And I'm interested to think what you two think about that, like, why this doesn't happen. Yeah, there's a, I think there's an interesting dimension of beer's work in Chile that kind of, I think, might provide some answers to that, which is that, you know, he, he was in charge of setting up Cybersyn. And Cybersyn was is kind of a system for optimizing the economy. But he had other concerns and other briefs that he was working on at the same time. And what he came to realize was that there was a layer of management and experts in the organization of the economy that were happy enough to sort of work on a Cybersyn that was designed to improve production numbers. But they had real resistance to

the idea of worker autonomy because of the, because of wanting to maintain their, their job privileges. And because of the, the prejudices of their, their habitus, I guess you could say, the, what they learned when they were educated as engineers or managers or whatever, and, and, you know, where the people who know things, the workers don't know things, they shouldn't be in charge, that kind of thing. And so he starts to, he starts to realize that in order to really make Cybersyn effective as an engine for autonomy, what needs to happen is that sort of what you were describing with the Shanghai commune, the, the workers need to learn the cybernetic principles themselves and implement them through autonomous action. And so he starts to try to kind of like

write up like write pamphlets that can be distributed to the workers so that the information that he has as theory is not being filtered through a bureaucracy, but is instead like, you know, involved in an educational process of self-mobilization among the workers. And so, you know, this really doesn't mean that expert knowledge is irrelevant, but it does mean that it does imply threatening the social privileges of management and expert knowledge, because in Beers' conception of management, management is something that is done by anyone who has the power to affect an organization or change an organization. So if the workers are able to change their organizations, they are also managers. That's not something exclusive to experts.

It's like for, for, for beer management as a function, it's not a person, right? Right. So in, in, in Beers' ideal world, like management would just be these like decision nodes that emerge among, among workers, right? And like in the manager, a manager would never be a person. A manager would be like a kind of structural information processing like thing that happens among people. Yeah. And so like when you see in, for example, the USSR, the option of creating a planning network, a computerized telecommunications planning network throughout the whole Union, it's basically shot down for two reasons. One, it would be very, very expensive for them to develop. It would be on the order of, of doing,

you know, their nuclear weapons development, perhaps more expensive than that. And two, it is simply at odds with the system of like planning the, the command economy that had, that had grown up in the wake of the revolution, right? It's simply at odds with the power of all of the factory managers, the planners, all that kind of stuff. It just kind of makes, it threatens their identity and it threatens their position of power. And so I think that when you look at the socialist countries and why they didn't adopt this system, I think it's because they, it would require the people in power to really rethink their entire role and identity as members of society. Yeah.

And then there's, there's a kind of, there's a dreadful irony really in that like it's, it's Stafford beer, somebody who comes out of like bourgeois, like management stuff, and is deep in the pocket for that. He's the one who actually sincerely pursues the most radical project in like socialist history that we've ever seen, vastly more radical in its intent. And it's like, kind of, it's the beginnings of its impact than anything any Leninist has ever done. And it's basically because he actually did want real freedom and autonomy for working people. And your average Leninist just doesn't, you know, like, again, like to go back to the example from earlier, right, that like, when, when under pressure, they will, they'll do capitalism before they'll do

anything that even resembles autonomy for workers. They'll take that path rather than doing the right thing. You know, that does speak to the character of the thing. And it's, it's, it's, it's that class interest, basically, of those kind of functionaries, right? Like, and the thing that makes beer different is that he sincerely actually wanted to do it. You know, and the, the workers autonomy thing wasn't just a smoke screen for him. Yeah. And when, when he starts to come up with these ideas of like thinking like, oh, okay, like an economic planning system is not adequate, we need to go beyond that to thinking about the constitution of the social body. He, he quickly finds that he's being marginalized within those circles of planners in the Chilean government,

because this is not something that they are enthusiastic about. They're actually quite concerned about this idea. Even if Allende would be, you know, all for it, right? Because he, he was, he was very sincere about his interest in, in autonomy. There were still many people around beer who did not particularly like the idea. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think if we look at it, you know, in terms of a, why hasn't it happened since then in, in all of these intervening decades, I think you also have to look at the international system and the way that countries figure into it. Because we have all of these neoliberal structures of management and organization that were created in the 80s and 90s and early aughts that a socialist government has to contend with

if they are to embark on a program like this, which isn't to say it's impossible. But what it does mean is that there are all these sort of highly complex regulatory and organizational structures that have roots deep in our societies right now. And it is the path of least resistance to not attempt to engage in an effort to kind of, you know, let the market atrophy as you develop an alternative structure for social organization. Because all of these structures are there and you have to kind of like root them out and replace them with something new, as opposed to having all these ready-mades of what's already there, the market-centered solutions, the kind of autocratic solutions, you know, all of the management systems that have been developed

with an autocracy in mind instead of something that is truly democratic and kind of self-gestating. And I think as well, there's a kind of other thing that like the left has been kind of in a very weak position for quite a while now, like since the 70s, right? And we're just starting to come around to maybe being on possibly an upswing. But also, I think there was this kind of long end of the crossing in the centuries where a lot of the leftists kind of, and this actually gets into some of the reasons why we started a general intellect unit, that we felt like we needed to bring this kind of systems thinking and technical seriousness back to the table after the kind of weird depressive phases where like say the ultra-globalization stuff or the occupy stuff

where people kind of take an almost explicitly anti-strategic kind of turn and like a kind of anti-technical turn, you know, there's that kind of depressive hangover of like, oh my god, like capital and its technology is hegemonic, like how the fuck are we ever going to get out of this? Like it would have been hard to make an argument for a scientific and like technical kind of fusion with the humanist kind of impulses of socialism. But that's, I think we're getting to a point where we can start actually having that conversation again, like we're seeing a bit more of a turn towards that and it can turn towards like this kind of serious kind of like more serious kind of discussion of like, hey, okay, okay, we fucking hate the current order of things,

we want to see it gotten rid of, what would we actually replace it with? Like functionally, how would things actually work? Like I think those kind of conversations are coming back on the table in a way that those were just impossible in the 90s, like after the Berlin Wall came down or whatever. They were impossible a couple of years ago, you know? Yeah, the market as the fundament of society basically seemed to be invincible at that time. And there was a lot of just sort of wrongheaded assumptions about what was and wasn't true about it and about society as a whole. And, you know, we've had a lot of chaos in the year since then that affected not just the countries

that were being restructured by the IMF, but actually came and affected the core of the world economy as well. And I think that that's sort of like, you know, in the same way that World War One kind of disproved the idea of the white man's invincibility and superiority, like having those like market chaos dynamics come home to roost in the core of the world system has undermined that invincibility, that idea that, oh, the market is just naturally the best and there's nothing that could possibly be better. At the same time that we have all of this technological development that's happening, you know, in our economy that could be used for something different as opposed to, you know, I don't know, making NFTs or something.

Yeah, absolutely. That's all super important. I think that kind of refines like my previous thought is refining in my head now, like that like right now, that kind of market chaos and especially even like the chaos of like the systems response to COVID and stuff really puts like in general and for the left in particular, it puts like the question of governance back on the table in a way that it had kind of been off the table for a while. Like I think there was a period on the left where like left activity was kind of like railing against governance, like it was like we want freedom from governance, that sort of thing, right? And I'm not going to say those are necessarily bad impulses, right? But I think they're also kind of a bit wrong headed as well, right? But like

the kind of reality is that like, for human life to flourish and for our lives to flourish, we need governance and like because like governance actually like as a word has the same root as cybernetics does. So kibernities, the Greek word becomes kubernetes becomes cybernetics, right? But that's also the root of governor. So kuberner, kubernator, those are the roots of governance. So governance and cybernetics are one and the same kind of concept. And this question of like, if we intend to create a world of self governance that is effective, it's viable in beer's terminology, like viable self governance, that what we're proposing is opposed to the chaotic vortex of nonsense that we have to put up with right now. And that's back on the table in a big

way that like, because I think especially with COVID people look at like just the sheer idiocy and ineptitude and chaos of our governments and realizing like, oh, those are decrepit, completely screwed up systems. And in part because their goal is the maintenance of capital accumulation. So this gets us back to the goal directed behavior of cybernetics, right? Like the steersman steers the boat towards a goal, right? And it's always about or like, you know, a cybernetic device like a thermostat has a goal temperature that's trying to like regulate the temperature of the water towards. You know, we have these governance systems that are completely awful. They're just like not suitable for like the regulation of human life for flourishing.

They're only suitable for the regulation of this insane system that just keeps capital accumulation going. Like that's the control variable that it regulates. And we're now in a position where on the left, like more and more of us are saying like, what we're proposing is not like a sort of magical escape from governance. We're proposing really, you know, we should have sane governance. And it turns out that sane governance is bottom up self organized governance. And that's both a moral position and a technical position. And I think both of those, the moral and technical valences feed off each other. Like we're able to be the serious people in the room. This is a very big change of pace, right? For us, because like, for a while we were

railing against like the very serious people of like the centrists and like the fucking Blairites and the Clintonite sort of people. We're the serious people now saying what what this what this system actually does is absurd and ludicrous. And it needs to be dismantled and rebuilt with a totally different like feedback circus, a different kind of goal orientation. And it needs to be oriented towards human flourishing. And like, that's, turns out there's a science of doing that. And it's called cybernetics, you know, and we also have a runaway ecological crisis. The more we learn about the more we see, we see that, you know, like, the capitalist market system is absolutely leading us all to death

and to death. And so it is human flourishing, but we also are concerned with the flourishing of life in in general, right? So I think that that is something that wasn't as much on the horizon in the 70s. You know, certainly think, you know, people were thinking about it, but but breaking down this barrier between economics and and ecology, I think is a very cybernetic impulse. And I think one that, you know, we need to keep working at because, like, you know, whenever we think about these things as separate domains, we're already we're already engendering more destruction of the environment. Yeah. Yeah. And I think cybernetics can also help us in that kind of like,

on a kind of for left projects, like on an aggressive footing of like, if we recognize that like the capital and its kind of governance system is it is cybernetic and like it has its own feedback circuits and like say the the the explosive feedback circuit that we're on with ecology, right? Like, how do you intervene in a system to halt and disrupt those circuits so as to to so as to disintegrate the system is something like you can you can learn a lot from cybernetics to get lessons on how to intervene there. The last thing I want to talk about is just what is the society that is non capitalist and based off of sort of cybernetic governance principles? What does that look like for just a person? Because I think, you know, this has been

one of the big sort of like political challenges of the last, you know, 50 years is just the complete foreclosure of the ability to even just sort of imagine a system that's not this. Yeah, I think it it means in the first instance, it means a different orientation to your workplace and your community, right? Because when you grow up in a society where power is exercised automatically, it has an infantilizing effect on on you as an individual. Yeah. And, you know, maybe your relationship to work is your workplace is one of sort of emotional detachment or of tantrum throwing, right? Because these are these are reactions, these are natural reactions to being

in an abusive environment. But if you are in a system where the work of management is not only open to you, but expected of you, you have a different orientation to that workplace to the community you're in, because it's your responsibility. If you don't do it, you know, you're going to lose your autonomy. And also, you're going to have real problems that you have to grapple with as an individual. So there is a responsibility that comes there. But also, like, that means an opening up of horizons in terms of, well, things don't always have to be the same, things don't always have to be handed down to you for management on high, they can actually change. Like, you can see the possibilities in front of you, you can plan for the future in your context, and you can have

that meaningful freedom in your life and be, you know, a full human being in that sense, right? And so I think that that's a very core every day change that you could see. In terms of, you know, sort of your horizons of where you might work or what you might do, you know, you could expect that there would be more possibilities for each person to be like, quote unquote, entrepreneurial, right, to to have initiative in their life, and be able to envision and create things around them that, you know, they can't do right now, because they either are stuck in a job that doesn't give them that freedom, or it they are actually not even able to have a job right now, where they can have a reasonable expectation of survival, because their workplace is 100% oriented around just making sure

the work gets done, and, you know, the consequences be damned. So I think that, you know, that is another area that's important. And that sort of freedom of management extends all the way up to, you know, working in different kinds of capacities or jobs, like some people in kind of a middle, middle ranking area in a corporation these days might get shuffled around from department to department, to try to kind of get a well rounded understanding of what the corporation is, and how it functions. But, you know, we can kind of expect that these roles would be more open to everybody, because again, you know, a system in the VSM is not a person, a system is a function, and that function should be fulfilled in a way that is as flexible

as possible. So there's a lot less kind of, well, I'm stuck in accounting, and that's my life now, and that's all that I'll ever be. Of course, there are limits to education, there are limits to specialization, all of that kind of stuff, like, you know, it takes time to learn these things, but you could expect some more flexibility there, without having that terror of, oh, yeah, you know, in the neoliberal era, everybody's expected to have like 15 jobs in the course of their quote, unquote, career. But also, each of those jobs is going to be interspersed with a period of absolute terror as they live with unemployed in a society without a safety net, right? I think that that's, that's, you know, those are real consequences for everybody's life, I think, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think like at a very, very high level, the way beer puts it is that we are trapped in this kind of crazy system that like its control variable is profit, like, that's the little variable that it's like doing feedback on to maintain. Whereas, what we're proposing is like the sort of cybernetic future would be a society that's optimizing flourishing, like what beer, beer, the word he uses is eudemony, which is borrowing from Aristotle, just like flourishing. And I, yeah, a lot, a lot of stuff flows out from that, like to imagine a world where like, we all feel it right, that like everything around us is kind of like micro tuned as a like a little feedback loop to keep money and profit flowing and to keep capital accumulating.

Just imagine a world where that's just not true anymore. And the, the sort of social infrastructure that you grow up in is an infrastructure that instead optimizes for the flourishing of life. Yeah. And I think, you know, when we look at sort of the broader patterns of society today, we see all of these harebrained schemes that, you know, very rich men are embarking on and they're setting the agenda for society, you know, where that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is telling us that the metaverse is the future and you just have to get on board with this, even though anyone can see that this idea is patently ridiculous. And in a society where that kind of management, that kind of money power doesn't exist anymore, like you don't have to live under that kind of

future horizon anymore, where it's like eight men with absurd amounts of money cook up, you know, ridiculous schemes and everybody has to follow them just like they were following the orders of Pharaoh back in the day. Yeah. I think do not be ruled by Pharaohs is as good a place as any to leave off unless you have anything else you want to get to. Okay. There's there's one little line from beer's book. Well, it's actually a set of presentations called designing freedom that I absolutely love. It cracks me up every time I read it. So I'm just going to read it out for the listeners. It gives you a sense of his absolute like ridiculous radicalism, like these off the fucking charts with this stuff. At some point, he says, I'm quoting here, every time we hear that a

proposal will destroy society as we know it, we should have the courage to say thank God at last. Yeah. A real maniac. Yeah. And he had this this dictum of if it works, it's out of date. Yeah. So, you know, it's it's like, like, yeah, don't be complacent, you know, don't be a traditionalist. I think also that there's been there's been really horrific consequences of sort of the right being the ones to like take the urge for creative destruction or just like, you know, what was that line? There's some what I forget some some venture capitalist things like move fast and break things. And it's like, yeah, okay, so when they move fast, the things they break is us. But yes, you know, we can move faster and break things that are bad.

Yeah, it definitely gets to a creative and playful kind of mode of being right that like, you might be able to wake up in the morning and think, God, you know, it'd be really cool if we could have like, like a childcare nursery just like, like out in the out in the common area between these buildings and stuff. And like, go to your go to your like local, like your your workers council or whatever and have really plausible like, way of actually getting that and like collaborating with people to make that happen. And then being like, okay, we'll try it as an experiment for 12 months, we'll keep, we'll see how it goes. And then there's a feedback cycle where it's like, okay, some aspect of this design didn't really work out, we'll go talk about

it some more and then iterate on that. And that's that's like, it's an entrepreneurialism that doesn't bear much resemblance to what that word means right now. It just means that human beings living real things, real workers will be able to actually control their environments in this, the substance of their lives in a meaningful way. Yeah. And like this, I think, you know, back in the 90s, the early odds sort of before the, the 2008 crisis and the horrid days of your, it's, there was a lot of talk about flexibility and dynamicism and adaptation. But what that always meant was, we make decisions about what's going to change and you have to adapt, right? It was, it was, it was, you know, always this arbitrary power from outside that

would just be changing the social fabric and you had to be flexible enough to cope with what you were being subjected to. It's very different if, you know, the planning is being done by you, for you, and you're moving towards adaptation and flexibility out of a sense of, oh yeah, this would be better. And I'm going to adapt to be in a better state to, to work with my environment in a more healthy and more flourishing way, as opposed to just like, oh yeah, you've got to work three jobs now. So figure it out, right? That's a very different kind of flexibility, very different kind of adaptation. And, you know, those things have sort of become dirty words in some ways, but they are really core to the way that we all exist as organisms in the world. And

they don't have to be just synonyms for abuse. Exactly. Yeah, I think, okay, we can take this as a place to leave off. Yeah, do you two have stuff you want to log? I know you have stuff you want to plug, but plug the things that you want people to listen to, because they are good. Yeah. Yeah, we're General Intellectiness. You go to generalintellectiness.ness and it's got all the episodes on there. We're on Twitter as GiUnitPod. Yeah, you can find us on all the podcast things. We're also part of a podcast network called Emancipation. So that's emancipation.network on the web. And yeah, some really excellent shows on there. We were collaborating with Swampside Chats and Mortal Science from Alpha to Omega, Gemseat in Utopia. They're really

wonderful shows. It's a variety of different takes on things, but there's a spiritual common ground we all have. Yeah, we're all interested in thinking systematically. We're all interested in emancipation, as the network name says. And we're all interested in building something going forward, trying to construct an alternative as opposed to simply getting caught up in day-to-day politics or getting caught up in a doomer mentality. So yeah, it's systematic, it's critical, but it's also constructive. And I think that's what we're all trying to do there. Yeah. Well, thank you to both for coming on. Thank you. It's been wonderful. Yeah. Thanks for having us. Yeah, this has been Naked Happen Here. You can find us at

Happen Here Pod in the places. There's also stuff at Quilzon Media that you can also find in those same places, and possibly also different ones. We have a website. Everyone asks me for my sources every single week, and they get posted there once a month. So yeah, go to quilzonmedia.com and you will find all of the sources so you don't have to DM me every week. All right, goodbye. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.