Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 55

Episode Date: October 15, 2022

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, your favorite sportscast. I'm not the host of this episode, but I'm talking for some reason. James and Chris, why are we talking about sports? To distract us from the crumbling of society around us. But more specifically to talk about how sports are used to launder the reputations of dictatorial regimes. And I know Chris has got some interesting stuff on Bolsonaro's Brazil and sports. This is before that, sorry. This is some wonderful PT era vintage crimes.

Oh, good stuff. I love Brazilian crime no matter what the vintage, so I'm excited to learn about crimes. How the NFL legitimizes the military police state anyway. Yep, and it's not even football, is it? So, multiple things they're doing wrong. I want to talk first about the original instance of what we're going to call sports washing, because everyone else calls it sports washing, too. So, that's like using these big global mega events to launder the reputation of a pretty questionable regime.

So, the OG instance of this is the 1936 Olympics which were held in Berlin. You'll probably be familiar with who was in charge in Berlin in 1936. It was the Nazis. That's a spoiler. The Nazis weren't actually given the Olympics. The Olympics were given to Bayern by Germany, which was considerably less shit than the Nazis, but the Nazis took them on and they're really round with them. And lots of the symbology that we associate with the Olympics today, that they're raising flags during the medal ceremony, the playing of national anthems,

the parade of flags, the opening ceremony, the torch relay. The torch relay goes from OG, Olympia, in Greece, to wherever the Olympics are being held. It's this big ceremonial thing. All of these things were created by this guy called Karl Diem, who was a Nazi, to draw stronger links between the Nazi party and the ancient Greeks and position the Nazis like the inheritors of this classical legacy and the civilized people in the barbaric world like the Greeks saw themselves.

Obviously, the Olympics, if you aren't familiar, draws its legacy from a largely mythical construct of a games that did actually happen in ancient Greece, so they claimed to be like a reconstruction of this Greek tradition. Except in the Greek tradition, everyone was naked, which I think would make the Olympics much more watchable. We could, yeah. That is one of the things that is true. I would watch the male gymnastics way more. Not just naked, but oiled.

Honestly, men's swimming would be a lot more interesting. Yes, it would. Yep, naked Olympics we can get behind, but they didn't bring that back. The Nazis didn't bring that back. They'd have some naked statues, but they weren't big into nudity. But they fused a whole lot of fascie eugenics shit. The reason that they started having these metal tables was very much to reinforce their idea of the superiority of one race over other races.

It didn't really work out for them in 1936 because Jesse Owens turned up and owned them at lots of different events. Jesse Owens being, of course, a black American sprinter and long jumper. The 1936 Olympics did exist. It did help significantly in laundering the Nazi image. They hid away a lot of their bullshit. For instance, all the Nazi party newspapers weren't distributed for the time that foreigners were in the country.

They hid away anti-Semitic slogans. They even had a Jewish woman on the German Olympic team because there was lots of fuss and neoliberal complaining. Oh, no, you're being anti-Semitic. Oh, look, there's a Jewish person on your team. It's fine. You guys are great. You guys aren't anti-Semitic at all. It's good. We're sorted. The US did nearly boycott the Olympics, but they decided not to.

This guy got every brandage. He went on to be a piece of shit of some renown. This 1936 Olympics, I guess, set the tone for the use of these massive events to put on a show to the world and bring the world's press and show them what you want them to see and hide the stuff that you don't want them to see, which I think is a nice transition to talking about Brazil. Yeah, so we've talked sort of about that effect of it. Sports has a second sort of incredibly important internal political effect, which is that when you have a sports thing that's large enough,

like when you have a World Cup, you have the Olympics show up, you have... Even to some extent, the Super Bowl, like... What it basically creates is this like... It basically creates a temporary sort of state of exception where just the sort of normal function of society stops, right? And this can go in a number of different ways. And anyone who's ever lived in Philadelphia, okay, there's a version of this in Philly where after the Eagles win, for like 15 hours, there are no laws.

Or like in Indonesia, when they just killed like 30 people. Oh, not 30, like 130. Yeah. Oh, was it 130 people dead at the end? Yes. Oh my God. 135, I think. Yeah, terrific shit. Yeah, well, you gotta head to sports for killing tons of people. I think that largely to blame were the cops rather than sports themselves. Yeah, but this is the thing about sports, right? Is that in order to sort of like do security, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, etc.

Like make sure the game is worth. You can do fucking anything. Yes, right. It justifies nasty ass shit. Yeah, and you know, one of the things, one of the sort of like examples that I want to talk about about this happening is one that is really not talked about that much, which is the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, which wound up, I think, actually having a pretty big impact on the way Brazilian politics went and also just destroying the lives of unfathomable numbers of people. So, okay, so this whole thing, like I've been in, like it's happening in 2014.

It's been in the works since like Lula was in office in like the late 20, like late 2000s, right? This is like, this is like one of the workers' parties like big things, is that they're going to have this World Cup. They've taken a shit ton of corporate money to do it. They've taken, you know, they've spent enormous amount of political capital and making sure this is going to happen. And the consequences of it are just like astronomical, something like 250,000 people like lost their homes in order to like make way for like the fucking stadiums and the fields

and like all of the sort of like bullshit around like all the sort of security theater stuff, all of like just like debate. And this is something that happens with Olympics is to more famously, but like whenever you have a sports event like this, just this giant cleansing that happens of like anyone who's like on the street who's homeless, right? Anyone who's just sort of like doesn't look right, particularly anyone who's black, just sort of like suddenly is like disappeared by the police from this area. But this particular one in Brazil was interesting because this is happening 2014.

So in 2013, there were like enormous protests in Brazil. And actually there had been another like set of soccer events there in 2013 and like something like 800,000 people were in the streets across Brazil like protesting it. But yeah, there are these like there's enormous street movements, just like like 6% of the entire Brazilian population was in the streets. They were like basically started as sort of like anti-austerity protests because cities were sort of like we're increasing the price of like fairs for stuff. It gets, the protests get kind of weird very quickly because on the one hand,

so like you have the Workers' Party in power, right? And like the Workers' Party has been sort of sliding right by this point, but you have a sort of like you have like a really militant left that's in the street. You have a bunch of anarchists, you have a bunch of autonomists or sort of like doing stuff. But then also right-wingers start showing up because it's a protest against the government and the government's like nominally left government. And yeah, this leads to just a really confusing state of affairs. But you know, the next year this,

and the protests like keep going for like a long time and they're still like, even after like the largest ones are kind of peteuing out, they're still protests happening. But when the World Cup hits, like the World Cup is one of the sort of like the errs, like the law suddenly doesn't work anymore. Like in order to do this, you have to sign like there's something called the general law of the World Cup, which is like a bunch of like laws that you have to sign that like physically change what your laws are, like in order to fucking have this event. Magnificent, great.

I mean, that's actually great. You should do more of that. The great thing about FIFA is that they've shown a commitment to human rights, to quality and democracy. And so I'm sure those rules are good rules. Oh yeah, no, so there are fun things like literally like parts of the Brazilian constitution are suspended. What parts? Well, so typically a bunch of stuff about the right to strike. Like there's a special court that's set up that like within 48 hours will like decide on whether a strike is legal or not

and what the thing is going to be during the Cup. So that's not very good. Yeah, it's real. They're all really bad. The Brazilian government spends like $70 million buying basically police equipment from the U.S. from Germany and from Israel, which is like the holy trinity of good, normal countries where if you're buying shit from them, you're doing a good thing. See, I thought we were going to talk about how, you know, there's moments in our society where the regular rules of engagement are suspended and in such we can use this moment of extra opportunity to find new ways of experiencing liberatory freedom.

People tried that and instead a bunch of fucking literally like they were driving tanks through the street like into like like blockading off like roads leading out of the favelas with tanks. Like it was fucking nuts. There are some incredible videos of this time. Yeah, there are like laws in Brazil about child labor, right? Guess what doesn't apply to FIFA so you can so they can have fucking ball boys. They suspended this fucking child labor. They also have, there are 20,000 people who are working for this event who are classified as volunteers.

And so you can just like use them as basically they started doing slave labor. Yeah, what's the deal with Brazil? Shocking. Yeah, I know. Are they forced into this or do they actually volunteer? Kind of. Okay, so some of them seem to have volunteered. They don't even know it's like actual slavery.

It's like slavery. It's not actual slavery. Okay, so the Brazilian government will do actual slavery, but like this is yeah, this is not quite that, but it's a bunch of people who are kind of volunteering. Yeah, but yeah, who have no labor rights like and the everything happens is there are enormous crackdowns. Like they just start they start doing the thing that like the US does it too. But I think like Canada is more than the US where it's like when when they know a protest is about to happen, they like go find the like six people who they think are protest leaders and just arrest them beforehand.

They started doing that. They there's a bunch of people who get tortured. There's a bunch of like the police are basically just going ape shit. They like yeah, they there are some like there's a point in this where like the the the garbage workers go on strike. And they actually win because it turns out that if in the middle of the World Cup, there's fucking garbage piling up on the street, like it's really bad. But like yeah, like this has like this has a just like absolutely disastrous effect on like just just sort of what's like everything that's going on Brazilian politics.

Like one of the things that Lula does I'm going to talk about this more in another Brazil episode, but Lula it like sent a bunch of Brazilian troops to invade Haiti, which fucking sucks. And then those troops came home and they were used to occupy the favelas in real while this was going on. And this kind of crushed like what was left of the sort of left that had been in the streets in 20 in 2014, like they just got like in 2013, like they just got they just got stomped because the Brazilian police are un-terrifying and like literally they're deploying colonial troops like in the streets. And yeah, so this is the sort of second kind of thing that you can get with sports, which is like on the one hand they're used to sort of whitewash regimes.

And on the other hand, they're used as basically a way to like do fascism inside of a state where you can, you know, like you could you could do a state of exception, right? Like the law cease to exist. The state becomes like this entity that can just sort of like do whatever it wants in order to preserve itself. And it's a way that you can just, you know, you can socially cleanse 250,000 people in which something that would be like, you know, would genuinely be pretty difficult if you try to do this in any other circumstance, but you know, it's sports. So you can just basically do ethnic cleansings.

And yeah, it sucks ass. And sometimes you can do it with the support of the other. So like the World Cup is going to your Qatar, right? And one of the things that's happening is that it's quote unquote security consultants from the participating nations are coming. So you have this like incredible situation where like A, the Qatari police chief, I believe, has been like, hey, for your own safety fans, if you do happen to be gay and it's illegal to be gay, right, in Qatar, like just guys, just don't hold hands with your partner because it's not us who's going to come and beat you up. It's it's the regular Qataris, right?

Like you, you won't be safe and we can't protect you from their violent homophobia. And then we've got like Britain sending soldiers to be like, yeah, let us help you with your security consultations, guys. We need to keep this country safe. God, okay. So do you know what else those violent security consultations? Is it Britain? Yes. Yeah, we're now sponsored by the nation of Britain is better. Better help.

Better help online counseling. If you don't sign up for therapy, a military, a military team will break through your windows and force you to go to therapy. With a cop. That's that is that is the better help guarantee. And we're back and I am not thinking about the people who I know who were physically dragged by cops in the therapy. Oh, it's great. It's a great country that never happened. Never happened.

No one's ever been forced to go to therapy. Yeah. Non-consensually. Never happened. It doesn't happen. Yeah. Other things that don't happen include. Include sports.

Yeah, sports aren't real. They're a figment of our imagination. If we simply thought the ontology of sports is fatally flawed. They might say that sports are a way of teaching people to be compliant with rules and to be administrators in the colonial empire. Or people can argue that sports offer a gamified version of the world that allow you to recognize problem solving in fun and creative ways and encourage team building. So I don't actually join online school. I don't actually like sports very much. Yeah.

On the other hand, I do quite like sports, but I'm aware of the role they play. Okay. So this is like a big thing that the Gulf States do is particularly do the sports bullshit. And Carter, I think usually is smarter about it than like Carter just has better PR people than the Saudis do. And I mean, they're slightly helped by the fact that they are marginally less bad than Saudi Arabia like margin. This is a lie. This is a fucking a bar that is so low you can trip over it. Yes.

I think we can just say both bad. Yeah. So should we talk about the kafala system? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So the Gulf States have this thing called the kafala system. There have been some alterations to it and some things that made it less bad in the last few years. But basically, this is a system that lets...

Okay. So there's a lot of market workers, particularly from Southeast Asia, that like take jobs in the Gulf because they have... The Gulf States have a like a obscene fanatical like world-rending amount of oil money. And so people come seeking these jobs because they need to feed their families and there's a huge amount of oil money here. Like they have just every petrodollar. But the way this labor system basically works is that like in order to like be in the country, you have to have a job. Right? You like to be very specifically have to have a job and your employer has to be there.

So very, very bad things start to happen when you have a group of people who you can just like instantly destroy the life of. And so these will happen where, for example, like... Okay, so you show up, you show up to Qatar, right? And your boss will just take your fucking passport. Yeah. And it's just gone, right? And you know, it's like, okay, if you don't do literally everything they tell you, like you're not going to get your passport back, you're just fucked. And this creates a like a genuinely like very close to slavery has a lot of the fucking horrors.

Like there have been a bunch of stories of people like fucking jumping out of buildings, trying to escape and then like being dragged back. Like it's fucking horrifying labor conditions. It's not not indentured servitude. No, it absolutely is. It is one of the worst. It's one of the worst labor regimes on earth that is not literally slavery. It is in the category of technically not slavery, but like very, very close. Yeah, it is one of the worst things that exists.

A serious and genuine solution to if you want to solve like a bunch of the problems of all of the bullshit that's happening in the Gulf region. If you gave every single one of these migrant workers like several artillery batteries and a bunch of assault rifles, like it instantly like so many of the problems of this region be solved. Yeah, so it's just looking up statistics 6500 of these workers have died in Qatar since it was awarded the World Cup. Like that's a pretty alarming number of like, so it's from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, places like that, right? Yeah, these people have absolutely no rights and they have incredibly dangerous working conditions. And also we got a bit like people are super fucking racist. Yes, the kind of racism that you get when you have literally like basically pure absolute power over someone, it is a fucking trip. Yeah, people will literally have to pay off the debts that they incur.

You'll pay a recruitment fee or a travel fee to get these jobs. Like we're not messing around when we say it's an indentured servitude. Yeah, and it's very hard to do that. Your employees could just, you know, like they can fucking just withhold your pay for whatever the fuck reason because. Yeah, there's this absolute power. There's like a few, should I read this one, there's an example of one of these deaths that I could read if we want. Yeah, yeah. So this guy, Madhu Balapali, I think is his name, he's from India.

He was 43. He left his wife and his 13 year old son Rajesh in India to take a job in Qatar in 2013. And they never saw him again. One late night in 2019, when his roommate returned to his dorm, he found Balapali's body on the floor. Like thousands of other sudden unexplained deaths, his passing was recorded as heart failure due to natural causes. Despite working for his employer for six years, his wife and son received 114,000 rupees, about a thousand pounds, about a thousand dollars now as well. In compensation and unpaid salary. Rajesh had no idea why his father died.

He had no health problems, he said. There was nothing wrong with him. Yeah, I will link the Guardian story, but there are dozens of these stories of people who die working in extreme heat for long hours with no brakes and terrible conditions. It's pretty terrible shit. Yeah, and also, and this is the other thing we should point out, a lot of people have died directly building. Yes, the stadium. Yeah, which is, like, the absolute human horror of why are we using, like, why are we building a giant fucking soccer stadium in the middle of, like, in the fucking desert? Like, Jesus Christ.

In a place with no endemic soccer culture, it's not like the stadium is, like, you know, going to be packed week in and week out with the Qatari Ultras doing TIFOs and shit. Like, it just exists for people to come once, to watch this spectacle and then leave again. I mean, it's the same thing with all the Olympics stuff, right? Like, they, like, tank a city's economy to build a whole, like, basically miniature, like, village in town that then becomes useless after, like, a month. Yeah. Some of it will just get turned into, like, I don't know. That's what the Olympics are for. The Olympics are, like, a gathering place for a transnational bourgeois elite, and they have always been that, right? Like, they, when they started for a very long time, the Olympics had an amateurism clause, which meant that, like, quote unquote, professional athletes couldn't take part, which was designed such that, like, bourgeois people who had enough leisure time to train could compete,

but working class people who needed to take time off to train couldn't be compensated for that time off, right? They couldn't even be compensated for their time off taken to travel and compete at the games. So, like, the Olympics are doing what they're supposed to do, which is bringing these elite people together. But, like, yeah, Coca-Cola benefits more from every Olympics than the city that hosts it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and obviously, it's, the Olympics are heavily tied to nationalism. That has a whole bunch of, you know, not great elements. Which of the national symbology comes from the Nazis directly, like, that whole?

Yeah, exactly. But also, on the flip side of that, there is other stuff, like, like, Taiwan having to compete as Chinese Taipei and not use their actual flag, which is other, like, yes, the alternative would be more, you know, embracing the country as, like, as a nationalist thing, like, as its own nation. But still, it's still not great that they can't compete under their actual, you know, flag and name. Yeah, and, you know, like, and this is, like, Cotter's, kind of weirdly, this is slightly backfired on Cotter a little bit, because, like, Cotter works the best as a sort of diplomatic power when nobody pays attention to it. And then the, like, absolute fucking brain geniuses, like, Atari Rural Elite were, like, what if we fucking drew attention to ourselves? And everyone was, like, wait, hold on, this place is fucked. But this has not stopped it. FIFA is, like, maybe the only ruling sports body more corrupt than the Olympic Committee.

Like, it is incredibly staggering, like, group of people who have figured out a way to just, like, help a city ethnically cleanse a bunch of its population and then extract a normal amount of wealth and then look good while doing it. Yeah, it is, it's an exercise and, like, pointing, pointing over there while you steal someone's wallet, you know? Yeah, so I think that the last thing I think we want to talk about was talking about what the Saudis have been doing this too, because... Yes. Well, the sport I'm most familiar with, obviously, is, like, cycling, that's the sport I competed in. And it's recently seen this influx of money from petrochemical states, right? So we have, like, UAE team, we had a Dubai team for a while, and there is, like, a tour of Cotter and a tour of Dubai now that, like, these are not places anyone wants to go right about, right? They're hot, they're flat, they're terrible, but, like, bike races have always served as a way to consolidate nations, right?

That's why the Tour de France exists, it's, like... Yeah. It's literally a loop and being, like, hey, you're included in this, and, like, in Europe, they're often used to consolidate nations that exist outside of states, right? Like Flanders, Catalonia, the Basque country, Wallonia, all of these places have bike races that delineate who belongs in and who belongs out. It's slightly different in these petrochemical economies, because it more delineates, like, look at us, we're a great country and totally normal, and you can come here and do sports, and please don't look at the way that we treat our workers from Southeast Asia, like, it's, it's... Please ignore our 17 wars, and, like, all the school buses full of children we've blown up, like, all the circulation... Do not look at Yemen. Yeah, which also, by the way, I do want to just put this for a moment, Carter also fucking involved in Yemen, same with the UAE, they, nobody ever talks about it, they also are fucking doing this, do not left them off the hook for this bullshit, yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting to see, like, it's interesting to see some fan groups organizing, like, against this shit, right? And, chiefly, I think it's gonna, it's about stuff that you're about to talk about, I think, which is the purchasing of clubs by these very wealthy interests. I find it fascinating to see that there has always been an anti-fascist element in football alters, right? There have always been clubs that have been anti-fascist. Those clubs have always tended to oppose, like, ownership of the clubs that they are fans of by finance capital. But it's interesting to see that now articulated against these petrochemical regimes in the Middle East, right? Like, it's Keith from fucking Bolton and his mates who go to the football match every Saturday. Now, I'm fucking pissed, ain't it? Because I allow in LGBTQ rights in Qatar. But yeah, it's very funny to see. And also, it's nice to see, right? Like, it's good to see people showing solidarity. Like, you can't display, in theory, you can't display pride flags in stadia or anywhere else in Qatar, right? And I know people were talking about taking them anyway.

So, maybe some will do an epic, like, pride flag or TIFO at the Olympics, which would be, I don't know, I've never seen none of the Olympics at the World Cup. They might only get disappeared, but, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Approach with caution. Yeah, then the stadium collapses and here we go. So, the other thing that's sort of been happening is the Saudis have been buying up a bunch of clubs. They brought Britain's premier league, Newcastle United team, they bought it. The Saudis have this thing called the Public Investment Fund, which is kind of like a sovereign wealth fund kind of.

They just use it to buy shit. And they've been doing a bunch of sports stuff. They've also been pushing it to eSports, which has been a disaster. Yeah, so they bought the ESL, which is the, does it still stand for electronic sports league? I think so. I think it still does. So, they're basically- Are we talking about eSports now? Yeah, we're talking about fucking eSports. This is it. Okay, okay.

Oh, are we, are you about to be a bigot and say eSports aren't sports? No, they're video games. Yeah, maybe not. No, it's better than acting. It's better than regular sports. Yeah, but they're different. The chess was in the Olympics. The same shit is happening here.

So, the ESL is like one of the, it basically ate a bunch of the other, so there used to be a bunch of sort of circuits for a bunch of different like eSports games, right? Things like Counter-Strike seems like Starcraft, those are the sort of, I think there's another, what's the other big one that ESL does? ESL seems to me mostly Counter-Strike. Yeah, it's mostly Counter-Strike and they basically consumed all of the like Starcraft stuff. There used to be IEM and Dreamhack that did stuff and they've like eaten them all. And the ESL just got like bought out by like the Saudi's fucking investment company by a new sort of like media group thing at the Saudis forum that's headed by fucking former Activision CEO Brian Ward. Unbelievable. Yeah, who's the guy who engineered the fucking Activision Blizzard merger and is now going on to do this bullshit?

The Savvy Games group. Yeah, I mean like, eSports as always, there's funerals are always sucked. Like a bunch of the stuff is funded by like fucking cryptocurrency right now, but they somehow found something that's called eSports. No, it's great. You can't take it seriously. It's the best, but yeah, the Saudis have taken my beloved Starcraft League, I will be waging an unending holy war against them until they fucking cease to exist. Yeah, you become a Starcraft 2 again. It sucks.

All I know about eSports is Sonic Fox and Smash Brothers. That's all I know because everything else just seems like people who are having a fun time playing video games. That's great. It was very, so my postdoc was funded by the IOC and like at the time I was there, there was this massive like, first of all, there was like a lot of boomers discussing eSports for sports and then whether they should be incorporated in the Olympics. And it was just extremely funny to watch like these people completely fail to understand the fundamental like, you know, sports or physical contests with the metal element, right? It doesn't matter if you're moving your thumbs or your whole body, but it was very funny towards these people having discussions about things. I want to say this because this is okay. So it's just really funny, but also people get like really seriously injured doing eSports shit.

Like, there's a lot of Starcraft players who like fucking paralyzed who have like serious damage to their spines. Yeah, because they have like Starcraft players, like especially older days, you know, people like practicing 16 hours a day, right? And they're sitting in a chair and they're fucking, you know, they have like 400 APM, right? So you're doing like, like 600 actions in a minute and people's people's wrist just explodes. Like people get fucking like damage at their spines, they get nerve damage, like all this shit happens. It sucks. I have a friend who's a human physiologist who used to work for the Department of Defense here in San Diego, helping like, you know, like high speed Army people be better at killing people and Navy people, I guess, in San Diego,

and then left to work for Red Bull in their eSports division. Yeah, yeah. To be the human physiologist who like, yeah, optimizes people's set up so that they're risked at the right angle and like gets them actually training. I guess we won't be happy until Taiwan is playing Fortnite in a democratized, decentralized eSports league that has union workers. And I guess that's what we're advocating for now. Yep, that's the one goal of this podcast. There is a Myanmar national unity government eSports team. Actually, there was actually a whole thing in competitive Starcraft where someone held up a Hong Kong flag and they fucking like, they cut the stream and fucking fired the two, like they not only fired the guy who held the thing up,

they fired the two fucking casters who like, who were just there while it happens. Critical respect, that person is the John Carlos, that's the raised fist moment of eSports. Yeah, so yeah, fuck, sports do bad things, make them do good things, overthrow your local government. I mean, the revolutionary, I mean, this has been written about by like actual academics, but the revolutionary potential of like soccer hooligans and football hooligans are like, is massive. Yeah, one day we'll do an episode about the fucking, the Turkish soccer altars who fucking stole a backhoe and we're driving it around Turkey, doesn't 13 destroying fucking police barricades with it? Sick of shit.

Every, lots of, like in Taria Square, there were Egyptian altars who were leading the, in the Maidan, it was Ukrainian altars. There's a really good book called 1312, which people should read if they're interested in like the political potential of football altars. We should do something about like hooligans in general. But yes, this was supposed to kind of be about the various ways that there's sports things that are kind of messed up. Yeah. One more thing. You can stop these fucking giant mega events from happening in your city.

Like people, people successfully do this, they've done this with the Olympics, they've done this. Last, for example, World Cup, but yeah, and if you can do that, like please do, like, don't, you don't have to let these fucking sports company bullshit like execs, ethnically cleans your city. You just don't, you can stop them. Look up. No Olympics LA is something that people in the US should look up. Yeah. That is your action item for today is look up.

No Olympics. I think we've talked about no Olympics before, but look at that. We've spoken to no Olympics on the podcast, I think. And the last thing I will, I will give an Easter egg. There's, there's one sport I actually, like, unironically enjoy. Curling. No, not cur, fuck you. You racist, Canadian racism.

Unbelievable. That's the episode. Hello, and welcome to it could happen here to podcast about the world falling apart and people who are putting it back together. Today we're joined by Jimmy and Rain from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. They are helping to put back together some of the parts of the world that are acutely falling apart right now. My colleague, Gare is here as well. Hi, Gare. Hello.

Hi. And yeah, we're going to, we're going to get into it. We're going to talk about the response that Mutual Aid Disaster Relief have made to Hurricane Ian. We're going to talk about how we can solve these things without necessarily giving a bunch of money to the wrong people and people can help people. In a way that is natural, organic and good for everyone. So, Jimmy and Rain, say hi. Hey, everybody. Hello.

Hey, and can you explain to us a little bit, first of all, about what Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is and how it operates in these natural disasters? Sure. Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is a people-powered disaster relief network based on the principles of solidarity, mutual aid and autonomous direct action. And we act as a Swiss army knife for the larger autonomous disaster response and mutual aid movements and work with affinity groups, local mutual aid groups and other disaster survivors to help form and foster a communal recovery. That sounds great. That's very inspiring. Jimmy, can you explain maybe for listeners who aren't familiar exactly what Mutual Aid means in this context? Sure.

Mutual Aid is a voluntary reciprocal participatory exchange among equals. It's about sharing resources, but it's also about sharing power. I've spent a lot of my life in poverty and I know that many people in the same experiences would rather not receive something than receive something with a downward gaze. If something costs us our dignity, it's not worth it. Mutual Aid is a way to share with each other where we're sharing as equals instead of a powerful giver of aid and a powerless receiver of aid. It also has a dynamic of addressing the root causes of the need in the first place. That's a good description. Thank you very much.

What you've done recently is responded to Hurricane Ian, which most people I think will know hit Florida and I think the Carolinas after that. Can you take us through some of the work that you've been doing down there? Sure. A lot of what I've been involved in is supplies distribution. We're every day loading up vehicles and doing mobile distribution to trailer parks, to public housing apartments and other communities that are hit and historically left out of top down relief models and providing tarps, water, food, other essentials that people need. Yeah, sure. That's very important. What's the situation like we're now like we're 10 days out, something like that from when the hurricane first made landfall? Is that right? I'm not sure exactly.

Do you know? Yeah, no time. Time is not a thing when this is happening. It's just kind of like all the days go together or nights or both. Yeah, that's totally fine. In some places power is starting to get turned back on. Gas is easier to find than it was several days ago. But there's still a lot of need for solidarity based relief.

There's just like every disaster, there's many communities that are left behind and it's the same communities that are left behind by the disaster of capitalism and colonialism and white supremacy. And so, you know, even though power is starting to get turned back on in some places, it's going to be months or years before people recover from this. Yeah, there's a lot of folks that are not like to me is talking about those folks that are renters who, you know, don't don't know what they're supposed to do with their with the apartment during the roof is caving in. And if the landlord's not responding, then what are they supposed to do so if there's folks on the ground they go in and they'll try to like help get the tarp up, you know, on the roof and things like that. So that's usually the kind of stuff I'm involved with when I'm when it's happening more in my area but there's a lot of us that are working like remote as well to help support on the ground like doing comms and organizing supply lines through the autonomous supply line chain that we have. And just kind of trying to mobilize more affinity groups in the local areas like food not bombs. Savannah food not bombs came down and helped out and did a food share. And so just trying to get everybody who's close by to be able to address the immediate needs and start planning for the long term because Jimmy's right it's going to take years. Yeah, that's really fascinating. I think you're right that often like, I think we should contrast actually that like that they sort of done the large global nonprofit model or the service provider model that they contrast with this right which often kind of floods an area with resources

whether or not it needs them, and then withdraws kind of wants attention has gone away and people are left to rebuild their lives kind of on their own right. Yeah. Yeah, I'm in time again from Hurricane Katrina to Hurricane Maria, you know, rain, you know, in Louisiana has experienced a number of hurricanes, you know, in recent years. Um, you know, time and time again. We had we learn over and over again that the state is not coming to save us. The market is not going to save us the nonprofit industrial complex is not going to save us. We have to save each other. We have to take care of each other from below. Yeah, I think that's very true. I remember in 2018 when the last set of midterms came there was a large migrant caravan that came to Tijuana, which is just south of where I live. And there were a number of these big international nonprofits, but they weren't actually allowed to enter the area where these people were so you had these people in a football stadium, and you had large nonprofits outside and they cut off the water to the place where these people were because they wanted them to go somewhere else. And it was just bizarre scene where you had tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars of resources sitting outside and then you had little children who hadn't had a drink of water that day sitting inside. And it was really illustrative to me of how these massive nonprofits can raise a shit ton of money and still completely fail people when they need help the most.

So it's great that you guys are out there doing that. Can you take us through some of the you mentioned Hurricane Katrina you mentioned being in New Orleans like can you take us through some of the other natural disasters and how you've helped? Well, in 2016, when we first kind of got our paperwork official or whatever. We had the flood in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and it was one of the most historic floods since like the early 1900s and it barely made the news and there were several other major floods that happened and climate caused floods in the Midwest that summer that barely made the news and now people are starting to talk about it right starting to talk about climate change because it's inevitable every single disaster is, you know, just more and more frequency or higher intensity storm more rainfall in a shorter amount of time. And so we had that flood and we hit the ground pretty much running just doing lots of mucking and gutting and organizing a lot of folks coming up from Texas and South and like New Orleans area and, you know, East from Florida all the way over Mississippi. And then, like Jimmy said, we just kept getting hit and hit I can remember everything after that I know there was Irma, and we responded to Irma, we had national comms running, which was really cool people were signing up for workshops and helping out on the ground, while people were running around and getting transportation and getting people out of places, delivering supplies, helping, you know, again with tarping or like things that might have happened to homes. And then we've had Maria, I went down to Puerto Rico for that helped out with some of the solar and water issues there. And then we have Laura and Harvey, and I cannot even remember all of them at this point Fiona. They're all, they're all going to keep coming either into the Gulf, or they're going to head along the East Coast because of the way that the climate has affected the currents and the surface water temperatures in the Gulf and the Atlantic.

Yeah. And like you say, they're going to have a disproportionate impact on people who are already marginalized. What is it, you were talking about people signing up for work, that's interesting. It seems like you're mostly a volunteer organization. Do people who have special skills just go up to a website and say, Hey, I'd like to help or how does that work? It happens in a lot of ways. Sometimes folks will reach out via the email on the website, or they'll reach out on one of the social media, or they'll know somebody and be like, Hey, I want to get involved. That's really grassroots. Some people are in the ground. There's a lot of folks that have gotten involved more long term because there was a response on the ground in their area. They kind of got into it just because that's what ends up happening when there's no one else around you rely on each other and you build that community. It's kind of just what happens. Yeah, that makes sense. So what's your sort of national, do you have a sense of how many people, how many volunteers you have on a national, I'm guessing your national or international scale now? It varies, you know, like in times of, you know, when, you know, between disasters, you know, there's, you know, dozens of people involved, or, you know, like 100 or 200. But then we're very, you know, participatory. And so when a disaster happens, you know, there's a lot more people involved, hundreds and thousands of people that participate in one way or another.

Yeah, like in Louisiana, we've had a lot of different like DSA groups or SRA groups come out and help out like mobilize on the ground and kind of come out as affinity groups and do different jobs or help out with different homes. And so really, it's just like, it's a network of facilitating anyone who's interested in ensuring that all of us have what we need when we know the response is going to be slow from those that are supposed to be handling that quote unquote. Right. And then you guys can connect people with skills or people with time to people who need help. Yeah. So really anybody who has an awesome skill of any kind or not is welcome. That's great. Yeah, where can they find that? Do people do want to sign up? I guess the easiest way would be via, I don't know, Jimmy, you want to answer that? I'm on the ground a lot. Check out our website Mutual Aid Disaster Relief dot org. And our email is Mutual Aid Disaster Relief at gmail.com. We're on all the social medias as well. And yeah, we love it when folks reach out to us and tell us how they want to be involved.

I wanted to ask you, there are obviously some other organizations who like maybe I would name and you can if you want to who have received a lot of national press for doing helping people in times of disaster. And maybe you can explain why like some folks wouldn't necessarily be comfortable asking them for help or going to them if they needed help. Yeah. So oftentimes, you know, like organizations, you know, top down at organizations, you know, they partner with, you know, police or Homeland Security or carceral institutions like that. There's a shelter after when Hurricane Michael hit the panhandle, you know, people who had warrants, you know, were signed into the shelter and then police came and scooped them up and brought them to jails into prisons. And, you know, so, you know, and also, you know, even with, you know, with those, you know, extreme situations aside, you know, the top down approach is patronizing, it's stigmatizing. It can at sometimes provide the water, the food that people need, but oftentimes comes at a too high of a cost. And people long for a communal recovery. That's how we heal from disasters like this from crises events is being part of, you know, a communal recovery where we're all able to pitch in and receive what we need and and give what we can. Yeah. Can you tell us, can you give us an example of a communal recovery like that something that's happened somewhere where you guys have been able to assist a community or a community to assist a family or an individual in recovering?

Yeah, one, one example that I think is really representative of our approach is there, there's a family who who was evicted, you know, the illegally, you know, after after a disaster, and that, you know, single mom was looking after the other single moms making sure they had, you know, fuel for, you know, their generators to, you know, to power their, their phone in different different devices and that they had diapers and that they had, you know, what they needed to get by even though, you know, they no longer had a roof over their head. And so when mutual aid disaster relief comes across people like this, our resources are their resources, you know, so, so when we both local mutual aid groups, just the matriarch on the block who's taking care of, of the other folks on the block. Mutual aid disaster relief exists to, to share, you know, on this, this network of supplies and labor and, you know, backup and support with, with efforts like that that are spontaneous that arise after every crisis. Okay, that makes sense. The last thing I really wanted to get to here was like, as you mentioned, right, climate change is causing these natural disasters and the worst that things get than the worst that things get. And like, you guys have started this organization that helps people to help people. And I'm wondering, like, what a like, how can people organize to help and be, how can people in communities organize to be more resilient in the time when natural disasters are becoming more and more common place. So, one of the things that I think what Jimmy spoke to regarding like a matriarch on the block, building that community in advance and after, if it happens to just be after which is kind of what happens a lot of times is when it's that forced. I don't want to say forced, but out of necessity, right, like, necessity is the mother of invention, right. And so there's these iterations of what community can become. Every time there's a disaster. There's like a clean slate and there's a vacuum in which something can be created because there may be nothing.

And so if you can see an opportunity, and if you have any kind of network on the ground, or you, it spontaneously erupts, then that can be the new growth or the light or however you want to phrase it. But I think for the resiliency to happen, that solidarity in the long term is built from those networks on the ground, those people recognizing each other and seeing each other. And I think COVID is so interesting, because people had become so nuclear and like isolated with technology and then forced into these pods of technology. And that was the only way people existed. And then all of a sudden there was this need to be around people like people like no, no, no, I really want like human contact. And so I think that kind of speaks to the reality of what we need to survive. And that's going to be through disasters through pandemics. So building them, building a community garden, like saying hey to your neighbor, finding out who on your street is like an elder and maybe doesn't have anybody checking up on them. Like knowing what is in your, what are the resources, whether it's people, whether it's a food bank, whether it's like a water fountain, like what are the resources in your area, and where can you spontaneously take over areas when something happens. There's so many empty lots, different places that are, you know, really on the verge of being gentrified. And when something happens, if you can help in the areas where you can maybe take over a building that would help maintain that building for the persons who would otherwise be getting pushed out soon. Right, like we've worked with people that allow us to set up school libraries, for example, in their areas while we're, while we're doing disaster response.

And we help build that like house or that community center, or that school up while we're there, and creating a community space for people to then run with that concept of what they wanted to build like what they wanted to put there. The best way, you know, to prepare for disasters is ongoing mutual aid projects and groups and efforts. You know, the more that we can connect with each other, those relationships and those connections. They're the groundwork for a vibrant people powered disaster response. You got to know who's who you got to know what people are able to do wanting to do know what are people's strengths. It really is about that resiliency, knowing who you can count on for something like who knows about, you know, wiring, who knows about plumbing, who knows about, you know, the, the streets, who knows the area the best, you know, certain members in the community that are founders in the community that others will respond to or navigate or gravitate to. I got you. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense that like, I think it's really interesting to contrast this with the model of like surviving natural disasters that we've seen portrayed so often, especially on like TV shows like preppers, right, which is like, I will sit on my own with a shit ton of ammunition and shoot anyone who comes after my ramen noodle castle. But what are you going to do with that when your supplies run out, then what are you who are you going to rely on all we have is each other.

We're not, we're not, I mean, more power to the, you know, outlier individual out there that can literally do everything to themselves. But I just don't think that's humanity's function. We have, we have much more when we share with each other than we have individually. When we pull our resources together, we have enough for everybody. We, you know, we take what is in our cabinets, you know, as far as food or supplies, we take what's in our medicine cabinets, we make it liberated communal space and supplies and, and very quickly things snowball and small first aid station becomes a wellness center or a clinic. And, and, and that's, you know, the power of sharing with each other and building building alternative infrastructure infrastructure together. The alternative infrastructure for me is really important too.

I think for us to be resilient, we, we have to teach each other the skills. We have to start learning the ways in which we will be able to actually build back the way we want. The way we foresee our communities to be whatever that looks like. But we need those skills if we are going to divest, if we are going to have autonomy. Yeah, I really like that model of thinking of your natural disasters, like an opportunity to rebuild in a more, a more equal way, rather than thinking of it as the thing which just has knocked down the, you know, the amount of stuff you've accumulated or whatever instead seeing it as an opportunity is really positive. It is an opportunity to reevaluate. It's an opportunity to see each other, to see your neighbor.

It's an opportunity to be more sustainable in the rebuild, which is a thing that I really struggled with in a lot of responses. It's just the dependency on the existing supply chains and the existing methods of transportation like that, that also needs to be addressed for resiliency in the future. It's going to be an entire rebuild of how we respond in some ways in general, if we're going to divest the way we want. No, I think that the sustainability thing has just reminded me of something, which like for whatever reason, I bought one back last time, I was somewhere, but people can't see this being an audio podcast. But one of the things you'll often see in natural disasters is these things that are called humanitarian daily rations, and it's like an MRE. It comes in a pink packet and everything else comes in a packet, and it's within two days, and obviously this is a time when systems for disposing of rubbish have been overwhelmed. Within two days, these things on the foil packets and little brown spoons are fucking everywhere. It always strikes me as so sad that we've taken this time when people are in crisis and we've made it a time when also their environment is in crisis now as well.

And so that's one of the things I struggle with with water as well. Water is kind of like my thing. I know the irony, but whenever there's a response, there's a heavy dependency on bottled water. And there's other alternatives, but it would require a little bit of advanced skill training, a little bit of advanced infrastructure development, but that response could be prepared in advance. And I think in some cases, there's communities, especially in the Gulf South, where that advanced thinking about, it's going to happen, right? It's going to happen here, right? It's going to happen everywhere in the Gulf Coast, and it's going to keep going up and up. And whether it's a fire, whether it's a hurricane, whether it's a massive tornado, whether it's a drought and a food shortage or a pandemic. If we're not thinking in advance and be just, and I don't want to sound like, you know, necessarily proper individualistic, but as a community thinking in advance, like, for example, small plug, but cooperation. Jackson is thinking about building their own water infrastructure so that they're not going to be dependent on just municipal water, which is, yeah.

And why not, even if it's small scale, why not start developing community owned micro grids, water treatment facilities? Why is it just capital, large capital? Like Jimmy said, we're stronger together. So if we pool together in these communities, just like old school CSAs, we can do that. Then we can essentially, it's another opportunity to build it ourselves. We can do it before we could do it after. But I think for resiliency, for me, finding ways around those existing models and supply lines is critical to avoid the gap in the disaster and the response. Yeah.

Talk us through a community owned water, a sustainable water project like that. Like, what does that look like? What are the components of it? So that's a fabulous question. But it's also one that I personally can't answer because I'm not the entire community. So there's so many questions that are involved with that, like, who's committing to maintain it financially, operationally, maintenance-wise. How many people is it going to be used by? How frequently is it intended for all the time used for just as a response and a backup?

There's a lot of things that are involved there and also financial structures. There's so many different ways that that can get set up. And like Jimmy knows, I do not like to involve myself with money aspects. I'm just straight hammers and like, you know, solar. But there's a lot of good examples of community owned microgrids for solar. And that's really, I don't know that there's that many, especially in the U.S. community owned water systems. But if you look internationally, that is likely different. Yeah.

But as far as solar, that's a pretty common thing. Yeah, talk us through that. There's a lot of diversity. Well, there's a lot of different ways microgrids can get set up and who could own it. So again, it depends on the scale, right? Like who's going to fund the operation at the beginning, if you have a few angel donors that want to do it, or if you have a community that's willing to pitch in an equal amount per person, you know, and how much they want to use for it. So you'd calculate how much you need for each person's use, you know, what's the distribution area, how many candles do you need,

and how are you going to get it to everybody? Are they going to have battery banks for autonomous use or are they going to be like tied in? So it's a lot of models that you could do for some of these years. Just before Hurricane Ian, Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico, and it wiped out, you know, for a time, the whole island's power grid. But the autonomous off-grid solar infrastructure that was built up at the central state of Pueblo Mutual, the mutual aid centers across the island, the light stayed on. And they were able to continue powering their communities through autonomous infrastructure. Oh yeah, that's really cool.

I know some Indigenous nations on the West Coast certainly have their own microgrids as well. Nice. Yeah, it's a cool model. And smaller scale, like how many people are in the communities, right? Yeah, the smallish scale, I think, like maybe a few hundred to maybe a couple thousand, something like that. That's good. Yeah, it's an area of interest and no further Indigenous people for very obvious reasons. Right.

But yeah, that's really cool. If someone was interested in that, like let's say I'm at home with my community and I hear this and I'm like, hell yeah, that's what I want to do. Can they reach out to you and be like, hey, help me join together these 15 Prius car batteries? Or would you be able to help them with the like planning stages of that? Or is that beyond the scope of your work? So my main area of knowledge is around water and I dabble with solar a lot. But there are a lot of folks in the network who have insane skills. Like we have people working on all kinds of projects.

So many cool things. So I would say, yeah, reach out because that's kind of what the network is. A lot of really cool people trying to just make positive change with super awesome skills. A lot of folks have pretty cool skills. Yeah, in the beginning of this interview, you mentioned how you felt like times just kind of slowed down or like it's all kind of blurred into one. Is that like a common feeling whenever these things happen and people are on the ground, the type of other worldliness or how everything feels so stretched out? How does that kind of like, what's your experiences with that feeling? Yeah, I think that feeling is partly trauma, right?

There's a lot of trauma associated with the work and you know, those conversations happen a lot. And it's really, I mean, personally, I won't speak for everybody, obviously, but personally, I find a lot of support just in our collective network. Everybody's, I feel really focused on the same thing. So I personally gain strength from that. I think there is a lot of, I feel like you can get a lot of hopelessness sometimes, right? Like when you start to see the long term need and the fading of the spotlight because the next disaster happens. And I mean, there's literally still people in Baton Rouge who still have houses that haven't been fully rebuilt. And that was from the 2016 flood. And there's still places that don't have electricity in Puerto Rico right now and it's been like, you know, I don't know what over a month. So, you know, Flint, Michigan, just like name a thing, right? So I think my, my, I don't think I could do this work without the support of other people who do this work who have that same feeling who experienced that and the time, the time warp, I think is partly for me, again, partly exhaustion, partly trauma,

partly excitement. There is so much excitement, right? Seeing the love, like I don't want to make it sound all bad, like there's like beautiful moments every day with the love that you have on the ground with everybody. And so, yeah, go for it. And then, um, you know, Dorothy Day after the San Francisco earthquake over a century ago said, while the crisis lasted, people loved one another. And what oftentimes we experience after a major crisis or disaster is, is that our lives before were disastrous, you know, that capitalism and colonialism and the isolation and alienation and the meaninglessness drudgery of the work and selling ourselves to the highest bidder so that we can survive, you know, um, all that is an ongoing invisible disaster. And in, in the moment where the, the ruins are around us and we see them, you know, we, we come together in a way that, that draws on, on, on that feeling of solidarity and love and, and those, those ideas of a better world that we, that we protest for, that we march on the streets for, that we, you know, envision coming, you know, sometime in the future in a microcosm they exist here and now in, in these local pockets of people taking care of each other against all odds. Yeah, I think that's really, that's really well put, like, it's sort of, it made me reflect on like I've reported from and worked in lots of natural disasters and like that time when the like alienation boredom and despair that you associate with

everyday drudgery and the capitalism goes away and you have a purpose and everyone's working together. And you're not also on like Twitter.com all the time. It's very time stretches and at the same time compresses. It's, it's very addictive in a sense like it feels wonderful and hopeful. And then it's the feeling that an uprising tries to replicate. It's, it's this moment of peak experience that makes you, it forces you to fall out of the kind of the drudgery of collapsing capitalist infrastructure and you're forced to actually live around people. And it's the weirdest feeling and it happens when horrible things happen, like disasters, like wildfires, hurricanes, or it happens. People getting shot. People getting shot. Yeah, it happens in the moment of like national uprising as well. Like it's the same, it's the same function. And for a brief moment, you're able to actually live the things that you like preach and able to see them get applied in the world. And I think a lot of us getting away from that just being a peak, right, and having to come back down because I really hate that, is to build that resiliency, right, to, to create it so that with the lights don't go out, and we just keep rolling. And if they do go out, you know, we've got a backup plan, like, you know, there's a wood burning stove and we make some pizza. I don't know. But, you know, I think, yeah, the the peak shouldn't be a peak. There should be just a shift. Right. So how do, yeah, so how do we, how do we keep that right? How do we rebuild and keep that momentum, that, that, that net for each other?

Yeah, it's, I think you got the question. Yeah, I think Lenin had an answer to that and it did not work out the best. Well, it's so decropokin. Yeah, and, and we're still here. Yeah, yeah, here we are listening to podcast bit. Yeah, I think that was wonderful. I really enjoyed that. I think your point just to close out that discussion about like how you guys have a network to support people, some of the most profound depression I've experienced has been not like directly around disasters or conflict but coming home and feeling useless. So I think that like checking in on people and continuing to feel like you're pushing in a positive direction, like more people will experience a natural disaster after listening to this and have done before listening to this. And next year will be bigger than this year and it will get worse until fuck knows, but like you will feel elated and that's okay and you will feel devastated and that's okay and checking in on people is super duper important.

And speaking of that network and making connections, where can people find and support the work that y'all do? All right, Jimmy this year, we can go to mutual aid disaster relief.org or on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, mutual aid disaster relief on Twitter is mutual aid relief. And our email is mutual aid disaster leaf at gmail.com. We'd love for more people to join this movement, you know, both mutual aid disaster relief, their local mutual aid project and other similar efforts. Or start one. Yeah, that's a question we get a lot is like, oh, you guys talk about mutual aid and stuff but there's really nothing in my area. I don't know what there's to do like, okay, well, maybe there's someone that could fix that problem. Do you have any resources to help people kind of figure out how they would?

Absolutely. On our website mutualaiddisasterleaf.org there's our resources tab. And one of the sections is mutual aid about, you know, diving into the subject of what is mutual aid and how to form a group or a project and other resources along those lines. We also have a newly formed mutual aid tool kit relief tool kit that's on our website so if there are local mutual aid groups. This is a public forum so there's a big bold like warning about it not being as public for intention we have our own obviously like internal threads. But this is more like for folks who maybe haven't ever plugged into mutual aid before like being able to see where's all the different mutual aid projects and what they're doing so. Again, we talked about the resiliency so this is kind of our attempt to be able to map for each other a way where we can see where everyone is that's interested in responding and doing what they're doing. So if it's a group or whatever your mutual aid thing is that you're doing, if you want to join onto that, that's a fun way to see who might be in your area if everybody starts filling it out.

Thank you so much for taking time out of the stretched out, a more fist concept of linear progression of time to talk with us about the fantastic work that you are all a part of. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. Hey everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew of the YouTube channel Andrewism. I'd like to borrow some of your time today or tonight whenever you're listening to talk about movement. The fact that humans move around and the most Indian restrictions on it in our modern world. Today I'm joined by my co-hosts. Hello Garrison here. Hi, it's James as well. Right. Glad to be here and to be here with you guys.

So even before I was an anarchist, I would say there were three things I really despised, things I despised from like a fairly early age. That being the education system, advertising and borders. I believe freedom of movement is fundamental. I don't know if that's controversial or anything. But these days it feels like it has reached a point of like really great restriction. More so I think than at most points of human history. So I want to talk about the history of borders, the role of borders and the fight against borders. Now to give you some context, in case you get into my accent, I'm from the Caribbean, particularly from Trinidad and Tobago. And being from an island nation, a twin island nation actually, I have been made aware of the constant through history that has been into island migration.

Whether you're talking about the Polynesian migrations across the Pacific, whether you're talking about even within the Malay Archipelago or the Philippine Archipelago. Or even when you're talking about of course the Caribbean. There's always been, you know, this movement of people going from island to island, you know. Like Trinidad is very close to northeastern Venezuela, only 11 kilometers off the coast of northeastern Venezuela. Our northern range, literally called northern range, is an extension of Venezuela's maritime and these mountains. But the connections do end there. Human settlements in Trinidad dates back at least 7,000 years. In fact, one of the oldest human settlements discovered in the eastern Caribbean, the Banuari Trace site, is found in southeastern Trinidad.

One of the leading theories of human dispersal across the world places the migration of the Caribbean as beginning in Trinidad and going up the Antillian chain. A lot of the indigenous groups that settled in Trinidad and in the other islands north of Trinidad have for the most part migrated up the Orinoco River in what is now Venezuela. So exchange of migration between the continent and the island has continued undisturbed freely for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish. And today in our free quote-unquote, post-colonial quote-unquote world, what was once the norm is now criminalized. Now you have to go through this proper process in order to migrate. You have to ask permission from governments who draw these invisible lines or in some cases violently physical lines in the sand and demand a deference. And yet still migration continues because migration is a constant of human existence, legal and illegal. The recent Venezuela crisis and subsequent migration is just another uptake of the same.

Refugees desperate to escape the present thumb of American imperialism and Venezuelan government mismanagement and all the component issues that have caused the Venezuelan crisis have been fleeing to Colombia, to Brazil, to the Dutch Caribbean islands, to the other Latin American countries and of course to Trinidad. Now this migration is extorted by opportunists, facilitated by the organized crime of human traffickers because when you try to restrict that kind of demand, when you illegalize that kind of movement, the people on the margins will try to take advantage of those who need to move around because that need is still there. And so lines also of course are not necessarily creating, but they serve to exacerbate issues like xenophobia, which is only amplified by the existence of borders. And they also deal with, due to their paperless status, a lot of gross exploitation because they struggle to find work and secure the basic necessities of life. The Venezuelan refugee crisis is a disaster I've seen unfold before my own eyes, one I've witnessed firsthand and one that is facilitated and exacerbated by the existence of borders. And I've seen similar issues occur in other parts of the world too, borders are enforced between the US and Mexico, between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, between Spain and Morocco,

between Europe and the Swana region, between India and Pakistan, between Australia and Indonesia, between Palestine and Israel. And being journalists, I'm sure you guys have experienced, perhaps firsthand, other examples of the violent enforcement of borders. James, you have any experiences? Yeah, for sure. I actually live just about the same distance you live from Venezuela, I live about the same distance from the US border with Mexico. So I've spent quite a lot of my journalistic career crossing the border and reporting on the border and like, as you said, it's become increasingly violently enforced and it's just ugly scar on the landscape now. And I often like to say the border doesn't protect people, it controls people. Yeah, it's a very cruel and vicious and entirely arbitrary distinction between what is Kumi Island to the north of the border and Kumi Island to the south of the border in my case. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The way that borders have cut through the homelands of any different indigenous groups has been absolutely disastrous for them.

This has taken place in, of course, the US and most, I suppose, recognizably in Africa, where these colonial borders have been causing tremendous harm to this day. Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point. I remember just talking of like weird border things. I remember in 2020, just before the pandemic, I was on the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. And when you did, it just seemed so absurd to think that, you know, literally some old dude in England do a line on a map or whatever in Germany. But one of the things that it creates is this weird situation where plastic bags are illegal in Rwanda, because they're trying to protect the environment and they're not in Congo. So there's like this illegal arbitrage, like trade of plastic bags across this border. And it's just such an odd and constructed and entirely unnecessary and strange sort of legacy of the colonial plunder of Africa. Yeah, I didn't even hear of that before and that sounds quite interesting. It says between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yeah, I think it's the border town there. But yeah, people will come across with their plastic bags.

It would be interesting to see how that develops. I know they're attempting to unify Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan. I think Djibouti and Somalia and a few other places, I think, into like an East African Federation. So it'd be interesting to see how those discrepancies and laws develop. Yeah, the Rwandan border with Congo is that there's a soldier every 50 meters with a big machine gun, even going right through the middle of the Nyongwe rainforest, which is very remote by Rwandan standards. Rwanda is a busy country with lots of people. But yeah, that's a very militarized border right now. Right, yeah. That reminds me, it's a less militarized example. I mean, people point out the disparity between the US-Canada border and the US-Mexico border. But I remember reading a story somewhere about how a person on the Canadian side had like, they could very easily cross over onto the US side.

There was like a state trooper or something just standing there. And it's like, if you cross over, I have to arrest you. And it just, it's like, you're right there. We are literally having a conversation face to face. And yet if I walk over this arbitrary designation, I have to be jailed. Yeah, it's bizarre. There's a very arbitrary, the border between Myanmar and Thailand is a funny example like that, where like, it's a river. And this is unfortunately resulted in people trying to cross it here, unable to swim, dying, which is terrible.

But one thing that happens is like, if you're in the river, you're in neither country. And so people will make stilts, like little stands on stilts, which come up to the level of the river bank, such that they can stand in like, no man's land or every man's land, maybe every one's land, and sell alcohol without paying the Thai taxes and fees to people who are standing on the bank in Thailand. And again, it just really illustrates how stupid and arbitrary this whole thing is. Yeah. So as we're talking about the absurdity of borders, I suppose it's only fair to get into their history. Because for most of the world, and for most of human existence really, free movement has been the status quo.

Traders, migrants, hunter-gatherers, nomads, they freely traversed this little blue marble, as they call it. Of course, many ethnic groups maintained certain relationships with particular lands, but even when city-states on such rules, it was rare for rulers to delineate precisely where their realm ended and others began. The first large-scale restrictions really arose under the Roman emperor Constantine in the 4th century, when he forbade serfs from leaving their lord's land. Documents, of course, had to be created to request safe passage to ask, O king, will you please allow me to move from point A to point B, my lord, your majesty, soon, whatever. What I want to call the first passports is what quickly arose.

The medieval era essentially bound large parts of Europe's population in place by serfdom, and movement was viewed by rulers as ruinous to their law and order. They needed static populations to stay in place so that taxation and the raising of troops and whatever they wanted to extract could easily be extracted. Because, you know, if these peasants were able to just move as they pleased, they would probably try to evade taxation that got a little bit too excessive. They would probably try to evade the oppression of their rulers, and that they did. I mean, throughout feudalism, peasant revolts and uprisings were very commonplace. And it's due to those revolts of the masses that serfdom would come into a decline as wage labor arose in the 15th and 16th centuries.

But that didn't mean that free movement came back, because now people were a commodity that a country's government wanted to keep within its borders. So rulers offered citizenship and tax incentives in order to encourage migration, and yet while they were encouraging migration, they were also kicking people out. So countries like Spain and France were either executing or expelling ethnic and religious minorities en masse. So this period also bring about the rise of nationalism, which would tap into an earlier sense of, I suppose, connection and sort of subvert that from connection to community to connection to this abstract notion of nation state, the imaginary community of the nation. Nationalism in Europe would attempt to unify a vast and diverse range of cultural groups and classes under one state while defining themselves against outsiders. And of course, this ruling class metanarrative exists as a mechanism of manufactured meaningless loyalty in order to control you. But that's a topic for another time. This era has also been described as one of the largest periods of involuntary migration in human history, that being the transatlantic slave trade, which trafficked an estimated 12.5 million enslaved African people between the 16th and 19th century.

But there was this one key movement in the history of borders that would have lasting effects to today. At the end of the 30 years war, the peace of Westphalia was signed by 109 principalities and touchies in imperial kingdoms, which basically agreed in 1648 that a state's borders were inviolable, and an absolute sovereign state could not interfere the domestic affairs of another. Now, of course, this is all just talk, right? At the end of the day, states have continued to interfere the domestic affairs of others, will continue to violate the borders of other states. There are plenty of border disputes that are alive and well some decades or even centuries old on this planet. And then, of course, this whole idea of Westphalian sovereignty would not really be applied to people outside of Europe. The actual inhabitants of the interesting looking maps that the Westphalian era produced were not actually made privy to any of those decisions about the drawing of borders. They would also be moving, of course, people continuously. So, you know, Spain was kicking out Jewish people and Moas and people who related to heretics as you need inquisition. The British was moving their dissenters, criminals and general pains in Debombsy to settle colonize in places like Australia, which is why Australia is like that.

And things progress a bit further. You have the notion of free trade and free market gaining some ground, thanks to Adam Smith's new School of Economics. And at the same time, concerns of all the population, Alamalthus, underemployment and social unrest in Europe led governments to start facilitating emigration, moving out their colonies to more general free for all settler colonialism, which would lead to domestic depopulation in Europe. And there was another shift, as tends to be the case in human history, as in the 19th century, migrants from now underdeveloped regions began to stream towards the more developed areas in droves. So you had North Africans go into France, Italians and Irish headed to New York, and all the while, of course, racism and xenophobia are festering and proliferating as nationalists whipped up fear against the so-called threats to their nation. Of course, Italians and Irish were eventually assimilated into the hegemonic notion of whiteness, but North Africans in France have not been so lucky. Oh, I suppose lucky, quote unquote, because there's a whole conversation about how whiteness destroys cultures and erases the unique identities that these youth would have come up with in an effort to unite them against minorities such as African Americans in the US. So you see this period of lockdown of this increased nationalism and these restrictions, these border restrictions would also try to manipulate access to certain technologies. The telegraph, the railroad, yes, they enabled central governments to assert their presence across their whole territory, but they would also try to compete with other nations and keep certain secrets regarding technology.

You see that particularly during the Cold War, but we'll get to that a bit later. During the first World War, we have the death of some 16 million people, the Great War, as you should probably call it if you ever happen to time travel to that period. I don't think people would want to hear that this is just the first two world wars. But after the World War, the Great War, the segregationist Woodrow Wilson, who was US president at the time, proposed 14 points to the international community in order to prevent such horrors. And one of those core principles of the 14 points was that the globe's borders be withdrawn along clearly recognizable lines of nationality. And like I said before, this is, of course, just in Europe. It's not like any of these world leaders actually cared about the territories they carved up in Africa. And I think there was a point that I wanted to make about technology and how technology has been restricted. Because when you look at, again, the railroad and telegraph, while they enabled central governments to assert their presence and assert their control unlike ever before,

the potential these technologies was kind of lost. Yes, the railroad and the telegraph can help a government to assert its control over its territory, but it can just as easily empower people to travel further and faster than they ever had before to communicate across greater distances than they ever had before. And instead, in the hands of the states, these technologies are, of course, used for oppressive ends. Back to the end of the First World War. In the post-war period, which saw the collapse of four European empires, Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German, millions of refugees were left in a world where immigration controls had continued to tighten and passports gained greater prominence. Last once the nation-state was cemented in place, fascism and Nazism would quickly arise to guard its supposed purity.

The world would once again be plunged into war, the second one this time, which would again leave millions of uprooted and displaced people that states like Switzerland, quote-unquote, neutral, and the US would largely refuse to assist. After the Second World War, nation-building would continue to displace and slaughter millions of ethnic and religious minorities. Millions of refugees have been dismissed from lands that have been colonized and imperialized and intervened with wars and wrecked with just the destruction of climate change and poverty. And yet immigration controls only tighten further and they will likely continue to tighten due to the effects of climate migration and climate collapse. Especially in our post-911 reality, US Border Patrol in particular has escalated to employ 20,000 agents and Israel runs the largest open air prison in the world. These days militarized borders with heavily guarded barbed wire and electrified fences, which were once common in times of war, have now been a staple of times of peace. These imaginary lines on the map have become in some places violent fixtures on the landscape where thousands of people lose their lives every year for simply trying to cross.

We've entered an era of essentially bordering without precedent. And thanks to today's technology, governments know more now about the people they govern, the people within their territory, than at any point prior in human history. Cross-border surveillance keeps neighbors in the know, managing and monitoring their populace like lab rats. Data has become more valuable than black gold itself. These governments have chosen to wall and survey. This is our world now. It's not some future cyberpunk dystopia, the surveillance capitalist hellscape is here now. And borders have an important role to play. Borders are a power structure, they're a system of control. As the writers at Crime Think have said, there is only one world and the border is tearing it apart. And I think the idea of borders extends much further than just the nation's borders. When you look at the internet firewalls, the checkpoints, the hidden databases, the for-profit prisons and the gated communities, all these different boundaries enforced by ceaseless violence, enforced by deportation, enforced by vigilante attacks, by street harassment, by torture, all of these boundaries are holding us back and tearing us apart. Migrants, due to their vulnerable status, are often the first targets when it comes to economic downturn, repression, surveillance and scapegoating.

Nations wield a fear of this other. And they use that to prevent their people from fighting for better. They turn their ire towards another victim. And that's not even getting into all the different categories that have been constructed. Migrant, expat, refugee, asylum seeker, illegal alien, and that one in particular really grinds my cares. Because it is, I believe, the pinnacle of dehumanization to look at a person whose dice just managed to, like, just by happen sounds, fell on the other side of the border to look at them and to deem them alien, to deem them illegal, to brand them that, to not even acknowledge their humanity when referring to them. And it's become a normalized part of political discourse to speak of illegal aliens. But I don't think we should forget just how violent that kind of language is. It's particularly violent when you count for the fact that while these borders are used to restrict people on the lowest rung of society, capital has very few restrictions. In fact, it has much less restrictions than people. The rich and their capital can cross borders with ease, go from place to place without much processing. In fact, we look at Jeff Bezos and we say that, oh, well, he's the richest man in the world, for besides soon, but when you account for the wealth that has not been accounted for. I think it must be put into perspective that Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, etc.

They are the richest people that we know of, not necessarily the richest. Our global economy has also been, of course, moving resources for a while now. Resources have more freedom than people. The unequal and uneven development has extracted minerals and materials from some parts of the world, process them in other parts of the world, manufacture them in other parts of the world, and then sold worldwide for the profits to be hoarded by select few countries and select few people. These wealthy countries plunder the poor and then brutalize those who follow where the opportunities have been taken. But I don't think that one's opportunities, one's freedom should be restricted by where they were born or by the wealth that they do or do not control. Passport inequality is an issue that should not exist. Passports should not exist. Palestinians can travel visa-free to only 38 countries and territories, yet those in the West Bank are restricted by violent checkpoints, and those who live in Gaza call you the stripper tool. Meanwhile, other regions enjoy vast visa-free travel, such as Germans who have access to 191 countries and territories or the Japanese who enjoy the most freedom visa-free of all, with 193 countries available to them.

A billionaire like Elon Musk could fly wherever he wants in his private jet. A political prisoner like Hojory Lutalu can be kept in solitary for years on end. Traditional seafaring channels and land has been militarized and guarded by these vast navies, by these vast troops, by these machines, these structures that disconnect and unravel the deep ties between communities. Border students all into prisoners, and I think it's about time we resisted them. As the underground railroads of anti-Nazi and anti-slavery resistance has shown, everyday people can help everyday people, no matter the obstacles. If you live in a border, a sanctuary city, or a migrant community, there are probably already groups that are putting in this work, and you could join that infrastructure resistance. If not, you can help to create that infrastructure to connect with people who are affected by borders in ways that you aren't. I mean, perhaps you have a neighbor or a coworker who's undocumented and could use a helping hand. Try to connect cross-border, formal and informal, public and clandestine, because these connections, these networks, are how people move, live, and evade state violence. Obviously, I can't speak for every situation, because different people's legal status, language, ability, education level, gender-raised class commitments, and ability would affect their contribution to this anti-borders movement. However, you decide to contribute. I hope that you remember who it is we are trying to help. We're not trying to act as these saints for the media, and I recognize the irony of saying saints in particular, considering my old YouTube name.

But media is not our focus. The audience for actions is not public opinion. It is those we want fighting with us, people who need our help, people who know the violence of borders firsthand. So they get into direct action to directly affect the material outcomes of people influenced by borders, whether you're helping a migration prisoner to escape, or helping one person get a roof over their head, helping an asylum case, helping a person who is trapped in this system to find the strength to get through a day. These actions reverberate in our communities, and they help others do the same. We also need, of course, more infrastructure, networks, alliances, skills and resources to be cultivated to strengthen our autonomy from these structures and to develop our ability to defend against them. And of course, these actions should be rooted in some strategy, long term and short term, for overcoming this regime once and for all. Just for a final word, I would say that there is nothing necessary or inevitable about borders. Only the violence of their most ardent believers keep them in place, and without them, borders would cease to exist. Borders can only exist if they are enforced, and together we can make borders unenforceable. Together we can create a world in which everyone is free to travel, free to create, and free to exist on their own terms.

And that's it. If you like what I spoke about in this episode, or if you just like to hear my voice, feel free to check out my YouTube channel, Antrism, and you can support me on Patreon.com slash St. Drew, or follow me on Twitter, at underscore St. Drew. Hey everyone, and welcome to Take It Up In Here. I'm Andrew, of the YouTube channel, Antrism. And today I want to talk about the squatting movement. Actually, before I do that, I'm joined today by my co-hosts. Your co-hosts, Andrew, are Garrison Davis and James Stout, and I am your producer, Sophie, and I am here. Andrew, please continue. Thank you, Sophie. I want to talk about the squatting movement, and particularly how people have overcome the inanities of privatizing land and restricting people's access to it. So they could carve a life for themselves in this troubling world. Now, I think a lot of people are at least passively familiar with the squatting movement, the political squatting movements, be it anarchist, autonomous, or socialist in nature, that have taken place in Italy, the US, and most famously Denmark, where they had, you know, free town, Christiania set up.

But outside of the global north, in much of the rest of the world, squatting is just a fact of life. It doesn't typically, though sometimes it does, have radical political ambitions. So today I'm not going to be spending time discussing the squatting movement in Europe or North America, but instead discussing the millions of people in the world who lack access to land, where they can find secure shelter, and have turned to what has been deemed informal occupation or squatting to find residents. More specifically, I'll be discussing the Caribbean, but first I need to get into some statistics. It's always that kind of word, right? In 1950, only 86 cities around the world had populations of one million people or more. And in 2016, there were just over 600 cities that met this threshold. Half of the world's population now lives in urban areas, and nearly a billion, if not a billion, are estimated to be living in informal settlements, mostly in the urban and peri-urban areas of less developed countries. I don't know if any of you have read Planet of the Slums by Mike Davis. I think I have. But he discusses this phenomenon, this explosion in urbanization, and the fact that, unfortunately, you know, these cities aren't exactly urban edens.

They are deeply impoverished, filled with makeshift and often unsafe, whether it be, you know, poisonous or just poorly constructed or disease-written dwellings. Areas such as Beirut's Quarantina, Mexico City's Santa Cruz, Meahualco, Rio de Janeiro's Favelas, and Cairo's City of the Dead, where up to one million people live in homes made out of actual tools. Now, Davis addresses the issues root cause, that being post-colonial neoliberal policies driven by free market capitalist principles. You see, as cities modernized in the wake of the colonial era, a lot of the same zoning boundaries enforced by imperial powers across racial and socioeconomic lines were continued. So-called decolonization did not really take place, and the imperial rule didn't lead to a magical increase in equality with egalitarianism. It's just that post-colonial rulers took up the mantle where colonial rulers left. So, and of course, this switch, this changing of hands of power, was kept up by the International Monetary Fund, which stepped in on behalf of these elites and pushed the poorest citizens, basically, into thickly concentrated slums by making it easier for the ruling class to ignore these issues and prioritize the affluent. The debt restructuring policies in the 1980s also led to a lot of governments cutting down on their public health and education investment expenditure, so that they could repay the loans that they had been forced to take out.

Davis spends a lot of time talking about Asia and sometimes talking about the increase in hardship in African cities, but the situation of squatting is often overlooked in the Caribbean. And so I'd like to draw some attention to that. I think that anyone who has lived in the Caribbean or has family in the Caribbean would be somewhat familiar with the idea of family land, which is this idea that, you know, you have these plots that the family essentially owns collectively. There may be somebody living there, or it may just be land that has been passed along for anyone who needs it. A lot of this land was acquired by purchase, and a lot of it was acquired by squatting. In Trinidad, in Jamaica, in Puerto Rico, in Martinique, in Barbados, squatting was how a lot of recently emancipated people gained some foothold to live. Now they could not stay on the plantation system. Now the early squatting movement was largely wiped out by the growing plantation system.

But eventually, a new squatting movement would arise due to escaped slaves and maroons and post-intentioned individuals who would resettle on those regions that were previously wiped out by the plantation system. I'm going to spend most of the focus of this episode discussing what took place in Jamaica because I discovered this really excellent research paper done by Professor Jean Versand. But Jamaica is really quite an interesting example because Jamaica is one of the few Caribbean countries that had a successful, sustained maroon movement that lasted into the 21st century. And so what happened, as is the case with a lot of these colonies, is you have this sitting model of land ownership called crown land. Basically all the land of the crown deemed themselves to own by virtue of colonizing these places. Crown land would often be, you know, parceled out when they wanted to attract new colonists to their different colonies. And so enslaved people in Jamaica created these squatter settlements on crown land, basically recaptured that land, and created villages and communities in as maroons in that context of colonial violence. And of course, these governments would demolish the squatter settlements and try to effect land capture.

But in Jamaica, the maroons succeeded, particularly the Leeward maroons, as they were two different groups, the Winwood maroons and the Leeward maroons, and that's a whole different history. Today, Akampong village is the only surviving village for the Jamaican Leeward maroons, and is also the oldest persistent maroon society in African America. After the enslaved Africans and Creoles escaped the plantations and squatted crown land, they waged successful guerrilla warfare against the British colonists in the first maroon war under the leadership of Colonel Kujo. And that land would be the basis of two Leeward maroon villages, that being Kujo's town in St. James and Akampong's town in St. Elizabeth. Akampong being named after Kujo's brother-in-arms, Captain Akampong. Eventually, Kujo's town would be renamed Trelawney town after the treaty between the British governor would grant the maroons their freedom and 1500 acres of legal free-gold land. Akampong town, on the other hand, did not really get any legal recognition until a land grant was given to them to some 2559 acres around 1758. A couple decades later, between 1795 and 1796, the second maroon war would be fought between the Trelawney town maroons and the British colonists, because, of course, the British did what they would do and whipped two of the maroons for the theft of pigs in Montego Bay.

Of course, this is just the inciting incident, as these things tend to be, for the deeper discontent regarding access to the land. And after this second maroon war, the Trelawney maroons ended up being deported to Nova Scotia. So for those a bit familiar with, you know, Canadian history, the maroons moved to and resettled in Canada. As a result of this, and the Trelawney town maroons land being confiscated, Akampong town became the sole surviving village. And today it remains common treaty town. It is owned in common by the some, I believe it's like just over 3,000 adults, all of which, by the way, claim descent from, you know, Kujo. And they sort of have a mixed settlement producing for household use, rear and livestock utilizing the forest for medicines and timber, cultivating food forests and provisioned grounds. And even after members of the community migrate, they would still have that connection to their commons and often returned to either live or visit.

Trelawney town, on the other hand, after being recaptured by the crown, it was eventually purchased and transformed into family lands by the descendants of slaves, planters and maroons. And of course, squatting played a part in that development. Most recently, in Latin America and the Caribbean, there's been a move by governments switching from a policy of trying to eradicate squatters and instead trying to give them title to their lands, either granting them or usually selling it to them in an effort to alleviate poverty, so they could use their houses, you know, collateral for business loans and that kind of thing. And that's basically what happened for Akampong town and for Trelawney town, where the captured land was surveyed and subdivided and put for sale until the squatters were able to purchase the land and the government was able to impose taxation on the people who live on that land. Now, I spoke of squatting in the Caribbean Latin America, typically being not radically political, but there are political slash religious movements that have used squatting to gain a foothold. For example, the Revival Zion movement, an offshoot of Drastafarian movements, if I honestly couldn't find much information about them, but they're an Afro-Jamaican religion slash cult. And so they managed to capture a lot of the land near Trelawney town and would often settle their homes right behind the city councils, no squatting signs.

Eventually, you know, you have about 30 households who have basically recaptured their land from Babylon, as Drastafarians would describe the state. By 1995, their community, which they called Zion, became a very vibrant squatter settlement of some 70 house yards on about 30 acres of captured land. Eventually, the land was surveyed and subdivided, of course, trying to tax and control the people that were there. But the situation led to a lot of people still, you know, not being able to afford land and still, of course, having to squat on the land that they lived on for so long. The difficulty with squatted land is that it's a very tenuous, very fragile state of being. The future is often uncertain and clear. It's more secure, I would say, than being homeless, but you're still very much subject to state violence. And even when so-called legal avenues opened up for you to get the land through purchase, the fact that you had to squat on the land in the first place should be some indication that you probably can't afford to buy land. But squatting enables people, at least in the interim, to potentially develop some funds and stuff until they are able to secure a future for their families.

I think a lot of the liberal solutions to the issue of squatting and poverty is to replace these sorts of systems and put in instead proper, private property rights and giving these people private property so that they could achieve sustainable development goals and all the other buzzwords that these programs tend to use. I think the future of these kinds of projects, however, should be more along the lines of commons. I think that the fact that they were able to secure that land without the government's approval should be an indication that the government should not need to approve for people to live on the earth you are called home. I spoke in a previous episode about Barbuda and their commons, and I really don't see why. I do see why, but I really believe the solutions to these issues lies in reclaiming the commons, lies in rejecting these colonial and post-colonial governments, which face themselves on exclusion and illegality and bring about participatory local management of the land by the people, for the people. And that's about it.

Thanks, Andrew. It was really fascinating. Any final thoughts, Gare, James? My final thought is that we have a live show. Oh, wonderful. Yeah, just a thing I was thinking about as we talked about squatting. This one, you will be excluded unless you can pray the cost of entry or work out how to not be excluded, I guess. But it's on the 26th of October. I nearly forgot what month it was.

And you can buy tickets on the internet? Yeah, so we're doing this live stream October 26, 6 p.m., it is a live virtual event, and you can get tickets at moment.co.ichh. We'll link that in the episode description. It'll be a fun, spooky-themed live show. Woohoo! Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. You know, when we started this show, when I did the first season of it, you know, the one about all the Civil War stuff back in 2019, this was basically a place for me to write long essays explaining my vision of the future and the present.

And people seemed to like that a lot. We did a little bit of that at the start of this new, eternal, daily season of the show. But obviously, over the last year or so, it's morphed into something very different and something wonderful and successful, and it's brought a lot of new voices, or at least voices people maybe hadn't heard from as much out in front of the audience. And I've been really happy about that. But what I also haven't been doing is writing any more essays about the world and how fucked up shit is, because, you know, I've been managing a bunch of stuff, and there's been a lot of work to do. But I like doing that stuff, and I think you people like it, so I'm going to try to do more of that.

And I wanted to kind of start by talking a little bit about Silicon Valley. And I'm going to say something at the start of this essay that a lot of people are probably instinctively going to want to disagree with, which is that Silicon Valley and the tech industry have been gigantic failures by every metric that matters. They have made life comprehensively worse for humanity, and there is no real fact-based counterargument to that statement. This is a hard pill for people to swallow. I'm sure a lot of folks are frustrated at me for saying it right now and are thinking of counterarguments. Most people today are critical of the tech industry, obviously, particularly major social media companies. But they still tend to acknowledge the tremendous wealth created by Silicon Valley as if there's some sort of inherent value to that behind a number on a spreadsheet.

Collectively, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, the so-called Big Five, had a $7.5 trillion market cap in 2020. Every person listening to this keeps a device in their pocket made by or using the software of one or more of these companies. And so when people want to make the counterargument to what I just said, they'll tend to point out some version of this. Yeah, companies like Facebook have done bad things, but the internet is still a tool for good. It connects people, yada, yada, yada. Smartphones empower us. You know, there's all these positive things about the internet to which I will say, present me with your fucking evidence that that has mattered for people.

Really, in terms that actually, in aggregate, improve their lives. I will show you my arguments to the contrary. In the period of time from Harry Truman's election to the end of the Nixon administration, American productivity on a per capita basis increased at a faster rate than it did at any other point in history. But then something happened. From 1973 to 2013, income growth was 80% slower than it had been in the previous three decades. If productivity had continued to grow at the same rate from 1973 to 2013, as it did from 1946 to 1973, the economy in 2013 would have been 60% larger than it actually was.

Now I'm going to guess a decent number of the people listening to this grew up watching the Jetsons. I know I did. And for the most part, it was a silly, pretty harmless animated show. But at the center of it was a dream about the future that seems unfathomable in light of current events. George Jetson, who is in the show, a pretty normal working class guy, worked three hours a day for three days a week. One of the running jokes in the show is that he considered himself overworked despite this pretty idyllic schedule. Now this was never particularly a focus of the show.

It was just kind of something that was mentioned from time to time. And that's because the idea that a work week might just be nine hours in the future wasn't a joke. This was the direction futurists in the 1960s looking at that surge in productivity I just mentioned and all of the middle class wealth that had been created from the 40s through the early 60s. This is the direction they saw us heading in. Around a decade ago, in a period that was still significantly more optimistic than our current age, the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal went on a reading spree of some early 20th century futurist novels. His conclusion was this,

quote, technological optimists sold the world on automation by telling people it would create unimaginable amounts of leisure for them. The big question for the workers of the 21st century would be how to spend their copious amounts of free time. Now, the future we've actually gotten has given us the opposite of this dream. To try and cover up the rank and rampant ways modern technology has failed humanity, think tanks funded by venture capitalists and tech gurus produce an endless stream of identical futurist thinker types who write columns about how the world is actually better today than it's ever been. A good example of this would be this June 2024's column by Rob Asgar titled, The world's getting better, here's why your brain can't believe it.

It opens with this paragraph. Life has improved for most people around the world over the past generation, temporary pandemics aside. The rub is that you can't get anyone to believe the good news and the result is a toxic political environment and the potential collapse of democratic norms if too few people feel that a stressed system is worth saving. Now, I might point out, for example, that if people don't actually feel like the system's good, perhaps it's not really working well. There's a number of counterarguments you can make to this. Now, two years later, this again was written in June of 2020, we've got a massive war in Europe. People are worried about nuclear warfare as a result of that again.

We get a degradation of democracy worldwide that's continued to pace from where it was in 2020. We've got soaring inequality. We've got inflation, the likes of which a lot of people alive have never seen myself included prior to this point. And we still have a pandemic. So it's clear that Rob is at least not as smart as he thinks he is, which is what I would say about everyone who makes versions of the same claim that he was making. Now, this doesn't mean I'm saying that life is worse now than it was at some imagined prelapsarian version of the past. I actually think that's kind of a useless way to think about the past and the future.

There's different things people would have preferred. There's things that are objectively better. There's things that are objectively and debatably worse. It's hard to make those kinds of claims about history, especially when they often rely on saying, well, X amount of more people have been pulled out of poverty. And the question to that is, well, I don't know, before colonization of Africa, would you say all of those people in what became the colonized parts of Africa were in poverty? Or were they simply not part of a system that measures poverty?

And anyway, whatever, we can go on and on about that. My point is that the metrics these people use to claim the success of our current system, to talk about how wonderful things are today, are constantly shifting and they're widely arbitrary. The same year Rob wrote his stupid column, an NORC study showed that Americans self-reported being happy at the lowest levels in 50 years. And quote, juked statistics about wealth or access to luxury goods all you want. But the modern world and the post-2008 financial crash economy, all of which was built in the shade of the tech industry, is making people miserable.

Now, happiness is obviously not a perfect measure of progress either. Self-reporting is always dicey. But things like the consumer price index and per capita income, which are often used by folks on the optimistic side, are also juked and jiggered to hell and back. So to provide a bit more of an international scale, I'm going to quote from the Berkeley University's Greater Good magazine. Released annually on the International Day of Happiness, the World Happiness Report ranks countries based on their life satisfaction in the Gallup world poll.

Residents rate how satisfied they are with their lives in a scale of 0 to 10, from the worst possible life to the best possible life. This year's report also analyzes how global happiness has changed over time, based on data stretching back to 2005. One trend is very clear. People's feelings, worries, sadness, and anger have been rising around the world, up by 27% from 2010 to 2018. The others also found troubling trends in happiness inequality,

which is the psychological parallel to income inequality. How much individuals in society differ in how satisfied they are with life? Since 2007, happiness inequality has been rising within countries, meaning that the gap between the unhappy and the happy has been getting wider. This trend is particularly strong in Latin America, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. And this is kind of getting at, I think, what is an incredibly important point. For one thing, if you want to look at how people have self-reported their unhappiness rising, this massive recent surge in unhappiness occurs almost at exactly the period of time

that the smartphone takes off and becomes ubiquitous. And the smartphone is such a bafflingly useful device, I would never want to give mine up as a thing that I had access to. And the internet is an incredibly powerful tool. I wouldn't want to give the internet up either. But the usefulness and the undoubtable brilliance behind these products makes it seem inconceivable to argue that they haven't made us better at accomplishing the things that matter to us.

But the evidence on this is pretty clear. I want to quote now from a write-up in The Atlantic. No matter how aggressively you torture the numbers, the computer age has coincided with a decline in the rate of economic growth. When Chad Cyverson, an economist at the University of Chicago's business school, looked at the question of missing growth, he found that the productivity slowdown has reduced GDP by $2.7 trillion since 2004. Americans may love their smartphones,

but all those free apps aren't worth trillions of dollars. The physical world of the city, the glow of electric-powered lights, the rumble of automobiles, the roar of airplanes overhead and subways below, is a product of late 19th century and early 20th century invention. The physical environment feels depressingly finished. The bulk of innovation has been shunted into the invisible realm of bytes and code. All of that code, technology advocates argue, has increased human ingenuity by allowing individuals to tinker, talk,

and trade with unprecedented ease. This certainly feels true, who could dispute the fact that it's easier than ever to record music, market a video game, or publish an essay. But by most measures, individual innovation is in decline. In 2015, Americans were far less likely to start a company than they were in the 1980s. According to the economist Tyler Cohen, the spread of broadband technology has corresponded with a drop-off

in entrepreneurial activity in almost every city and in almost every industry. Now, you might think from all this that I'm about to head into some sort of techno-doomer, anti-sif, primitivist rant here. I'm not. Perhaps I should, but I'm not. I am a person who loves technology. I got my start as a journalist, as a tech journalist. I've joyously traveled the world for years visiting conventions, looking at new gadgets, and a lot of this was in that pretty wondrous period, if you're a gadget nerd,

from 2008 to 2011, where there were these amazing new weird sci-fi gadgets dropping every single week, stuff that you'd grown up watching and like Star Trek the next generation, suddenly getting mailed to your door for you to test out. I tested hundreds of tablets and smart gadgets in that time frame, and there's some really great products that came out from that period. Bluetooth speakers are wonderful. A lot of people, including me, use them happily on a daily basis.

But when it comes to legitimately life-changing applications of technology that's come to us in the last 15 years or so, I can really only think of three things. Number one is the ability to navigate by GPS basically everywhere. Number two is the ability to be in constant contact with people around the world. And number three is the ability to store a shitload of media on a portable device. So, I'm not anti-technology, nor am I saying that big tech doesn't make things that are cool or useful, nor am I saying we should get rid of this stuff.

The point I'm making is that, viewed at 30,000 feet, the tech industry has produced very little of quantifiable value to the human race, and it has caused unfathomable harm at the same time. Now, in my opinion, this has nothing or at least fairly little to do with how the technology inherently works, and instead has everything to do with the ideology behind the people who developed and who continue to marshal that technology. In 1995, two of the smartest guys in the 20th century, by my estimation,

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, wrote an essay about the ideology that animated the men who would come to dominate the 21st century tech industry. They titled their essay, The Californian Ideology, and I think it still counts as one of the three or four most incisive, accurate essays of that century. The gist of the idea was that, as the first wave of the digital boom started to hit in the mid-1990s, the thinkers behind it were fueled by a mix of left-wing, egalitarian,

often anti-status beliefs that got wedded to right-wing, free-market, fundamentalist libertarian ideology, and created this deeply toxic way of thinking about the future. You can see this in the story of guys like Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the personal computer, who was also a former phone-freaker. He committed federal crimes as a kid hacking the phone system, primarily because fuck the man. But then, when he's a young man,

the was hooks up with a guy named Steve Jobs, and Jobs is a brilliant but heartless con man who cares about nothing but market dominance. Jobs recognizes the naive brilliance of Steve Wozniak, and he turns it into an engine for wealth creation. At one point, he steals money that Wozniak was owed for a project that they took on together. Money Wozniak probably would have just given him if he'd asked, and he used it secretly to fund their business, which became Apple.

In their essay, Cameron and Barbara, who are much better writers than I, described the Californian ideology this way. The Californian ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free-market economics, and counterculture libertarianism, and is promulgated by magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000, and preached in the books of Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics,

futurist bureaucrats, and even by the president of the USA himself. Now, the tech industry, as we know it, got its start courtesy of government money. Everyone knows that the first version of the internet was developed as part of a defense department project. But the entire computer industry, all of the coders and engineers who would form the first generation of Silicon Con Valley profit engines, all these guys got their start working for or as defense contractors. When the US pulled out of Vietnam, thousands of these people were left out of jobs,

and they were forced to move into the private sector. Everything worthwhile that's come out of big tech has involved a titanic amount of public funding one way or the other, and I'm going to quote from that essay again. Almost every major technological advance of the last 200 years has taken place with the aid of large amounts of public money and under a good deal of government influence. The technologies of the computer in the net were invented

with the aid of massive state subsidies. For example, the first Difference Engine project received a British government grant of 517,470 pounds, a small fortune in 1834. From Colossus to EDVAC, from Flight Simulators to Virtual Reality, the development of computing has depended at key moments on public research handouts or fat contracts with public agencies. The IBM Corporation built the first programmable digital computer

only after it was requested to do so by the US Defense Department during the Korean War. The result of a lack of state intervention meant that Nazi Germany lost the opportunity to build the first electronic computer in the late 30s when the Wehrmacht refused to fund Konrad Zuz, who had pioneered the use of binary code, stored programs, and electronic logic gates. One of the weirdest things about the Californian ideology

is that the West Coast itself was a product of massive state intervention. Government dollars were used to build the irrigation systems, highways, schools, universities, and other infrastructural projects which make the good life possible. On top of these public subsidies, the West Coast high-tech industrial complex has been feasting off the fattest pork barrel in history for decades. The US government has poured billions of tax dollars into buying planes,

missiles, electronics, and nuclear bombs from Californian companies. Americans have always had state planning, but they prefer to call it the defense budget. Now, this state of affairs is more or less unchanged today. Elon Musk is probably the most celebrated modern tech visionary. Ms. Sundry companies have taken nearly $5 billion in public funding, subsidies, and government support since 2015. All of these libertarian visionaries who push in their political lives

for a world of laissez-faire economics and corporate sovereignty only produce value with the help of taxpayer dollars, period. The irrational exuberance of public financing and the narcissism to ignore its role in innovation has given us a generation of tech industry overlords who seem bound and determined to destroy their own creations. Steve Jobs represented the most successful and probably the most intelligent manifestation of the Californian ideology.

Every tech industry ghoul currently boiling away fortunes for the sake of their ego, I'm thinking of Zuckerberg and Musk most prominently right now, is trying to be him. Steve's skill was being able to perfectly inhabit the form of a visionary, and he was so good at doing this that he convinced this generation they could follow in his footsteps. But Steve Jobs was only ever playing at being a creator, at being an inventor.

His skill was not in making things. He had other people to do the making. Steve was an exceptional confidence man, and like all good confidence men, he was able to make money because he understood on a deep level what other human beings wanted. This skill allowed him to lock Apple into spending hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D for what would become the first proper smartphone.

And for a while, he was just having them toss that money into an apparent chasm repeatedly turning back iterations of the product that weren't quite right on the strength of his belief that when they got it right, it would be worth it. In the years since, we've seen many wannabe Steve's try to follow in his footsteps, igniting tens of billions of dollars of venture capital for absolutely nothing. One of the best examples would be Uber.

They lost $8.5 billion in 2019, $6.8 billion in 2020. Once upon a time, the understanding, the jobsy and vision of what Uber could be, was that all of this ignited VC cash would be worthwhile because eventually the company would succeed in replacing human drivers with autonomous cars, cutting out the primary cost in the entire professional driving industry and making the potential for a shitload of profit.

But after investing more than a billion dollars in self-driving cars, Uber sold their entire autonomous vehicle division off at a loss. All of that expense had resulted in self-driving cars that averaged one half mile traveled per accident. Despite this, after a $2.6 billion loss in August of 2022, Uber stock soared. Now, the realities of what generates profit and loss in the tech industry have been completely divorced from productive reality

or value created for quite some time. The delamination of real value in big tech happens subtly. Not hard to see why Apple, who created a device every human being wanted to have in their pocket, became worth a shitload more money, right? Pretty obvious. The value case for Google's core business, Search, is also pretty obvious. And as much as I hate Facebook, it became initially successful because it provided people with something of real value,

a way to stay in touch with human beings they had met over the course of their lives. Younger folks may find this odd because they've grown up with the internet, but as a kid, I can remember very vividly my parents talking about the friends they'd had in high school and in college and how a lifetime of moving regularly had severed many of the connections they'd valued with these people. When I joined Facebook and my freshman year of college, I found real value in the ability to maintain

and sometimes even build stronger connections with people I would otherwise have lost touch with entirely. There is the core of something good or something at least valued inherently by people in Facebook. And that's true with most, if not all, of the big five companies. When people reflexively leap to defend the tech industry as an engine of innovation, they can point to these successes. But the point that I'm making isn't that no good ideas come out of Silicon Valley

or that there isn't anything valuable that is involved in what these companies do. It's that the endless quest for profit and the narcissism of this Californian ideology lead inevitably to the destruction of whatever value the industry creates. This is why none of these innovations have actually led to surges in productivity. Why none of them have made us any happier, which I think might be more important. Any potential these creations had was smothered by the ideology that drives Silicon Valley money. Facebook took the connections that they'd made with people and used them to feed those same people rage bait.

They destroyed the open internet, shuttered countless local news sites, put tons of people out of business while algorithmically pushing millions of folks around the world towards whatever kept them angriest and most online. Google spent billions on an endless stream of spinoff products like Google Plus and Google Glass which were nearly all catastrophic failures, at least on a financial sense. And all the while, they gradually turned the search results they'd prided themselves on into a sponsored ad feed. Google is less useful now than it was a couple of years ago.

You'll notice this immediately if you just get on there and start asking it questions. Elon Musk has taken the visionary technology that underpins the Tesla all created by other people and used the clout from that to shatter any chance of California developing a high-speed rail system. By the way, in June of 2022, Tesla's stock value plunged $75 billion, which is substantially more money than the company has ever actually made. Elucidating the full scale of the failure of Silicon Valley and American techno-optimism would take more time than I'm able to spend right now. So instead, I want to talk about the idea that's behind so much of the recent big failures

that we've seen from Big Tech, stuff like Meta pissing away $10 billion, half the budget of NASA in a year to create a worse version of VRChat. The idea is called Blitzscaling, and it basically means that attempting to achieve massive scale at breakneck speed. You take big risks and you spend huge amounts of money very quickly to try and force apps or other products onto the market that are then adopted rapidly by huge numbers of people. This brings in a shitload of VC money and is a way that you can make a fortune. In the years since Jobs brought the first iPhone out on stage, this has become the dominant model of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.

Everyone is looking for the next iPhone, right? Something that can take over an industry, something that can take over the world, that rapidly, that can change human life almost overnight. In funding calls, Mark Zuckerberg says this very directly, comparing his company's metaverse dreams to the new smartphone. The thing that Mark misses, because his ideology renders it invisible, is that Steve Jobs didn't make people want the iPhone. He was able to figure out what they wanted already,

what they had talked about wanting for decades, starting with tricorders and communicators on Star Trek, and he lashed his dev team until they built the damn thing. Now, the metaverse has some analogs in fiction, including the thing that it gets its name from, but number one, most depictions of the metaverse in fiction are not aspirational things people want, they're dystopian. There's no evidence that people actually want this thing, that he's igniting a fortune to build, or that they'd spend meaningful periods of time in it if it existed. There's not a lot of polling on this data, but one 17,000-person survey I found showed less than 20% of respondents expressing an interest in a metaverse,

like the one Zuck is trying to build. The last time Facebook provided any kind of information about how many people are on Horizon Worlds, which is kind of the core of their metaverse efforts, it was somewhere around 300,000 people. In the most recent quarter, they declined to provide an update to those numbers, which suggests the number has not increased. And if you just want to look at what happens when people create a digital product that actually has a strong base of interest, look at how quickly World of Warcraft went from,

you know, a thing that very few people outside of nerds would have known much about, to a thing that was entirely mainstream, millions of users, regular references to it on television. You're just not seeing that with any of this metaverse shit, because there's nothing in it that people actually want. The sheer hollowness of big tech is starting to become financially obvious, too. Facebook's stock has lost 57% of its value in the last year. Amazon is down 26%, Google by 29%, and even Apple has fallen by 14%. More to the point, I think any honest person has to look at the last 15 years or so,

in which these companies have ruled our economic and social lives and ask, are we better off? Now over the course of the 19th century, productivity and income rose at unprecedented rates. There was a lot of brutality in this process, right? We talk, you know, on behind the bastards regularly about all of the horrible labor things that happened in the 19th century. It also marked the beginning of the fossil fuel age, which may well kill us all. But while all this was going on, another thing that happened is wages for the working class doubled in the first half of the 19th century.

In the second half, life expectancy rose faster than it ever had before as well, and that continued through the first part of the 20th century. Now, near the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, we're not seeing that kind of movement. The United States is now ending its second consecutive year of declining life expectancy for the first time in any of our lifetimes, and real average wage adjusted for inflation has remained flat for almost half a century. Progress has flatlined, and nothing about how brilliant the modern tech industry is or how cool some of these gadgets and products are can change those fundamental facts.

It's a failure.