Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 66

Episode Date: January 14, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. It could happen here. It being the future and here being to you. This, well last week when you hear this, but this week when we're recording this because we're recording this in the past for you. Garrison Davis,

intrepid correspondent and myself Garrison Davis's boss went to CES, the consumer electronic show in 2023, in order to explore the future. And in keeping with our guide both to the future, which we cover here and collapse because the tech industry is falling apart. I think this was a pretty interesting time to be at CES. I did an episode last week where I kind of talked to preliminary about some preliminaries. I went to an event called CES Unveiled where some of the more prominent products were there. But we've since spent three days walking around the convention floor, probably around 30 miles on foot, something like that. My legs and back are falling apart. Yeah, we've turned you into an old man.

But we have we have learned what the future is going to be. And I am, boy, howdy, I'm excited to tell the folks what they can expect. Garrison, where do you think we should start? Let's start with some of the more collapsing type things revolving around crypto because crypto was kind of, crypto was kind of like the white elephant in the CES because this is happening right after the FTX fiasco. So it's kind of a weird. It was we saw it printed the word crypto and Web 3.0 printed on more stuff than I heard people talk about. Yeah, people weren't people were not talking about it the way I think they would have been definitely, definitely last CES.

But even even like a few months ago. And that was really interesting. We did sit in at one crypto industry event where it was a group of like French regulators and French crypto business people talking about what they felt like regulations were basically in the wake of the FTX collapse. What kind of regulations did they think would make crypto work? And you might have caught more than I did, Garrison, because they couldn't get their microphones to work. No, their microphones stop working, then their backup microphones stopped working, and then they got a third backup mic, which is a little tiny lav mic that they had to finish the talk with.

Speaking into a tiny little lavalier mic, we're amplifying it. And sending painful feedback into everyone's ears and look, they're going to be defending the traditional financial system. But I will bet you, when a bunch of Goldman Sachs bankers get up on stage to talk, their microphones work. Yeah, I mean, that was just one thing in a long line of crypto and metaverse kind of fiascos that we ran into at CES. The first night we got here, we were going to be going to a crypto happy hour. That was... Supposed to be held at a bar called The Nerd on Fremont Street. If you've never been to Fremont Street, Fremont Street is old Las Vegas, so it's the worst part of town.

There's a gigantic fucking football field long LCD screen above you that plays animated versions of God bless America. How'd you feel about Fremont Street, Garrison? It's a nightmare. It's horrible. There's cigar kiosks. The smell walking back to the car was something... I don't think I'll ever forget that smell. By the way, folks, one of the things you're going to get from this is a travelogue of young Garrison's first trip to Las Vegas. Yeah.

It's been a real one. So we get to Fremont Street, nobody is in The Nerd. No, The Nerd is completely empty. It's a bowling alley bar, which sounds like a great idea, but it was completely deserted. There was not a single soul in. I poked my head in. It was all under harsh purple light and completely empty. And this is off of Fremont Street.

There were plenty of people around it. There were plenty of people on Fremont Street, and the music was blaring both inside and outside, completely dead. So we saw this being empty, so we checked the email for the crypto party again, and they said there was another location listed. Just to clarify, there was the party invitation thing that you would click in the list of CES parties, and it had one location. And then there was also what you got emailed, which was a separate location. A separate location. And there was zero indication as to which was accurate. So we decided to go to the other location listed because no one was at this one, which was called the Go To Bar.

Yes. Which immediately upon pulling up, we got great impressions. Yeah. It was the hole in the wall, little box. Windowless box. Yeah, windowless box. All of the letters were coming off of the sign, so it was impossible to tell what they had once said. And they were descending in an almost artful manner.

There's a photo on my Twitter. We'll probably use it to headline this episode. It's beautiful. It's like, I don't know if someone could have intentionally placed those as well as they were. No. It was a perfect microcosm of this entire thing. We went inside. Very nice people.

The person there said that the party wasn't happening here anymore, but that this bar is the crypto guy's usual hangout spot, which was a glorious sentence to hear. Not a big money location. And look, I've drank at a lot of dive bars. I have both been poor and in need of alcohol for much of my life. This is a classic dive bar. And by that, I mean, not the kind of like trying to play it being a dive bar so that people feel like they're getting the dive bar. I mean, you will get tetanus from the bathroom dive bar. It was great.

It's just the fact that the person like running the bar referred to this as their regular hangouts. Referred to this as the crypto guy's regular hangout spot is just warm to my heart. My biggest regret from this trip is that we didn't stay for karaoke, but we had other plans. So that probably leads us into metaverse. There's not a lot else to say about crypto. Crypto, NFTs and metaverse were all kind of trying to piggyback off each other. And I think metaverse has survived the best out of those three. It's doing better than crypto and NFTs, which isn't saying much.

But even still, I think there was a slight... It was weird. Some people were trying to emphasize the metaverse aspect. Some people were trying to emphasize just the VR aspect. Yeah, I saw metaverse and meta around, but when I would go to the company's advertising various VR products, they would usually were focused more often on other applications for VR technology. I kind of get the feeling, again, a lot of them ordered stuff with meta on it before it became clear what a disaster it was. And there's some backing for this.

So for one, we went and we saw Magic Leap, which is a company that makes VR headsets and VR programs. They have had pretty disastrous sales to the consumer market, even though they have a very good product because it's really high-end and people aren't willing to spend $2,300 on a headset. And kind of prior to CES sort of reoriented themselves trying to sell to enterprise and trying to move units in an industrial capacity for people doing training. And it's one of those things, one of the things you can do with VR is you can sit a guy down and have someone remotely explain to them how to fix or repair something if he is less experienced.

Anyway, they were showcasing a lot of that as opposed to games. And certainly, no one tried to make me hop into a fucking horizon worlds or even VR chat. There wasn't much in terms of trying to advertise their software or hardware for building virtual concerts. A lot of it was way more enterprise and workplace training and a lot more very practical applications. Or gaming. Or gaming, but in terms of the high-end expensive big VR producers were there for, they were definitely pivoting or at least showcasing the applications that were more for enterprise. Yeah, and that's what I found really interesting because I probably had a dozen different VR headsets on my head at some point.

And not once was I dropped into like the kind of metaverse type thing that Facebook is. And again, none of their products were on display. Meta Facebook was not here at all. There was another company called Meta that I think did some kind of machining. Which was funny because the Meta booth was just some completely different company. Yeah, yeah. But in terms of circling back to the collapse aspect of the metaverse. So night one was this failed crypto party where we went to two locations and they were at neither one of them.

They sure weren't. Night two, we signed up for an invite to a metaverse party. And I can't tell you how excited we were for this metaverse party. We were actually very thrilled. Well, for one thing, legs are now in the metaverse. And Garrison's never experienced legs. So I was really excited for them to see that. Yeah.

I only had the quest one, which did, which did not include legs. I was also psyched to maybe make a big red robot friend like in that horrible video that Mark Zuckerberg made, where his friends are playing poker on a spaceship. So the party on the invite that we request, like you couldn't just show up. You need to like request an invite and like get a ticket. Yeah, we got four tickets. We got four tickets to this metaverse party. It was first for, it first said it was at the Palazzo.

About Palazzo being part of the Venetian. And about two hours before the party, they said it was no longer at the Palazzo. And instead we were supposed to meet them at that fountain. At the fountains outside of the Bellagio. Which is like one of the big famous Vegas landmarks. And quite far away from the Venetian. Yeah, because the Venetian is where half of CES was taking place. The other half was in the Las Vegas Convention Center.

So we make our jaunty walk over to to Bellagio. We get there and we realize that we have to use this application on our phones for the metaverse party thing to work. It's like this AR application. They did tell you if you have a VR headset, you should bring it. I think one person did at least. And bring a charged phone. Yeah, bring a charged phone, bring your headphones.

So we all, you know, open up this QR code or whatever. Or link to try to get this software working. And around 20 people there are all met with perpetual loading screens. Now a few people did have... I saw one or two people that this was working for. Mine loaded just the VR avatars of people, but it was on like a gray background. But it didn't load any of the background or any of the AR capabilities. The way it was supposed to look, because one guy had it more or less working, I think.

It was basically, it was a video, like a live feed of the Bellagio fountain in front of us, as his like camera would stand over it. It's using the phone camera. All of the different, like a bunch of different awkwardly jerking avatars, kind of crudely dancing in front of it. They did have legs. Ringing endorsement. Yeah, so it was supposed to be this AR animated experience thing

synced to the Bellagio fountain and to Viva Las Vegas. And that was what it was supposed to be. The thing is only one or two people it was working for. Everyone else had these loading screens or had just the avatars popped in with none of the other features working. As before the Bellagio fountain, like just like a show finished. The guy who was running this party. Before the final Viva, the guy running this party left.

He was gone. Quite rapidly. He exited the premises. He took advantage of the fact that people were confused and trying to figure out what was happening and he escaped. So we have all like 20 people, not sure what to do. And then we get an email like 10 minutes later saying that thank you for coming to the show.

I hope you enjoy your time at Beer Park, which is across the street. Beer Park is a place, by the way. I know it seems like a joke name, but it's a quite large business. So we were told that the party had a reservation at Beer Park and that we were all going to go over to Beer Park and you know. By the way, the people heading up there, it's not just like pieces of shit like us. There's like some serious industry people. Including the CEO of arguably the most prominent virtual reality game company.

Or the COO, whatever it is. There was people who have been involved in very popular VR games who are industry professionals. Entrepreneurs, engineers. Other VR enthusiasts and then also people like us, I assume, who just wanted to watch it crash and burn, which it did. Who were just there to be the sickos in the window laughing. So we're told that they had the reservation for Beer Park.

We're like, okay, well, the AR technology didn't work. That's a bummer. It's not the first failed demo I've seen at CES. Stuff happens. Maybe they didn't test it for how many people was there. Maybe 20 was too many. Actually, yeah, who knows. But at least we can hang out with people.

But the guy running the party left, so he's just gone. But everyone else makes, you know, like a dozen or so people make our way over to Beer Park. And we're told that there is in fact no reservation for this party. Nobody has called them. They don't know what we're talking about. Could we please get out of the way of being on the staircase? So we start our way down the staircase.

And then we stop halfway down because someone at Beer Park says there's a bar in the very back of Beer Park. And they're not selling alcohol there, but you guys can stand around and buy from other places. But we can stand there as they figure out what's going on. We later learned that the guy who was running the party, who did not show up, did have a reservation for six people at one table.

Garrison, that man hung himself at circus within 30 minutes of the show. I do know he actually made his way over to Beer Park at some point, but he did not go to where everyone else was going. He was at the other side of the bar. Oh, good. But he was not talking to anyone else from the party. So that was the second party we went to, which was of a similar level of competency.

So that is the crypto. People did show up for the second party. So I'm going to have to give it to the metaverse. They changed locations three times. From the Plaza to the Bellagio Fountain to Beer Park with a variety of issues along the way. In terms of the VR stuff, we actually got to try. So Robert tried, I think, three or four different haptic feedback suits.

I tried every haptic product I could find. And haptic, again, for the folks who don't know this, whenever you touch your phone and it buzzes to let you know that you're typing or whatever, that's haptic feedback. And that's kind of the crudest form of it. But the idea and the hope of the people kind of playing with the technologies that you can find ways to basically simulate a keyboard so that you would be able to touch type in a keyboard that's not really there

because you would be wearing a glove or something that would simulate the feeling so well. And so this is a key part of when you think about what would it take to go from where VR is now, which is a pretty visually immersive and can be a pretty auditorily immersive experience. But that leaves the rest of your body completely out of it. The tactile feedback isn't there, yeah. To something that is kind of, yeah, more like a holodeck

where you feel and like can, you know, even people have talked about like smell-o-vision and stuff, which is a little further behind. But like something that's actually engaging the entirety of your physical person. At the very least, not being able to like walk through walls. Yeah, or at least more of your physical person than just your head and eyes and ears. So that's the goal.

So the first one I tried was the tact suit, which basically feels like, and I wrote this was in the last episode, it feels like having a bunch of N64 rumble packs on your body. It does not mimic the feeling of hugging or touching a human being. Another one that we tried, I tried one that was just gloves that did a pretty good job of, and the tact suit gloves did a pretty good job of mimicking keyboards, which is kind of interesting.

I don't think it would allow me to touch type, but it was neat to see that kind of developing a little bit. Then we tried one by OWO. It's like Big Capital O's Little W. We're just going to call it O-O. O-O. And that was like a full body suit where it's basically it's like a skin tight, like a workout shirt.

Yeah, with a bunch of EEG pads underneath it. So the EEG pads make direct connection to your skin. And then if you have ever engaged in the kind of kinky sex play that involves like a violet wand, which is a device that erotically electrocutes you or your partner, you can also like draw on each other with it. Or if you've ever used like any of those fake sex cattle prods, they used to sell them at the kink.com arena

in that old castle in San Francisco. If you've ever used any of those, it's like that. So you're just like getting zapped a bunch all over your body. And on the low settings, it's kind of like a nicer massage gun thing. And on the higher settings, it's actually really, really uncomfortable. I tried this one today. I put on the little skin tight jumper thing. And even just during the calibration settings, it was really fascinating

because even though the electrodes are only on like a few of your muscle sections, the current runs through and it doesn't really, it doesn't necessarily have like, you know, like a taser, shocky feeling. It just, it just is like muscle pain. It's involuntarily contracting your muscles. Yeah. So it's not just like staticky, shocky stuff.

There was, you know, get, you know, the cool thing about this is that it can simulate, you know, an entry wound and an exit wound. So Robert was playing the popular VR game pistol whip where you get shot by dudes and you do like a John Wick thing, basically. And you can feel, you know, like bullet goes in, bullet goes out. Yeah. So it's not just like a rumble pack type thing. It's actually depth to the feeling.

And one of the things they simulated that was really cool is getting stabbed and then having the knife twisted in here. Which was the worst feeling for me is like, honestly, like getting shot in like the chest or shoulders, it was painful, but it wasn't necessary. It wasn't like painful in like a bad way. It's like, oh, I'm playing a game and this is a punishment. It hurts, but it's kind of fun.

The stabbing was awful. I would seek to avoid it. It was very painful because all the stuff like below my chest was way more uncomfortable and painful versus like chest and arms was kind of fun. Yeah. And I don't know, again, whether or not you find this appealing will have to do

with the way that you like to do your video games. Yeah. But what I will say is that from a perspective of just like enjoying an FPS type game, it is the first time I've been playing a game that's had some sort of feedback when you're hit that actually is negative reinforcement. Yeah.

Like you do not want to get hit. No. And you actually kind of dread it getting hit. It actually, it makes the game a lot more immersive. Yeah. And like, that's like a bullshit phrase people use for like, this is immersive, but like, no, this actually, like this actually starts introducing consequences.

It was really cool the thought, I think, that they put into something like how do we simulate a knife wound? How do we actually do like a through and through gunshot wound? And it also makes your VR body feel more connected to your actual body. Yeah. Which is something that usually doesn't happen. Yeah.

You feel a sense of like defensiveness towards your person. Yeah. And it, like when I was trying to like dodge the bullets and shit, like I actually felt, it didn't just kind of feel like I was playing a game, like my body felt more on the line, which was interesting because this is purely, we're talking about this kind of in the context of stuff

that matters and the stuff that matters here, not that gaming doesn't matter, but the stuff that actually matters here is the ability of people to simulate accurately life in a digital form. Because if that can be done, then a lot of other weird things are possible, many of which are good, some of which are bad, many of which are bad.

I mean, I think the next, the next thing we'll talk about has a bit more practical application and a bit more real world stuff. Because that's what I wanted to say. The only application I saw for this was in gaming. This does not, I didn't see like a metaverse application of this. Like this is not going to help in Mark Zuckerberg.

Like you don't want to... Unless you can get mugged in the metaverse. Yeah. And some asshole ten year old will lock up to you with a knife and stab you. That's a good point. When we're talking about, is it possible that people will be living

increasing portions of their life in persistent digital environments? One thing I would not want to have is a suit like this, because people will find ways to access it. Because you can get bullied. Well, and we've talked to, we've talked to some people who program for these things who are like other versions of them.

At the metaverse party, actually. At the metaverse party, they fuck up and it's like getting electrocuted. You can't take it off yourself. It's a serious problem. There is a competing model to the OO suit called the Tesla suit, not made by Elon Musk's Tesla,

different company. But similar degrees of care towards safety. Maybe. I mean, this is the most high end haptic suit that does this electro shock thing. And he said that he has watched demos where people have been in the suit and the suit like glitches

and all of the things turn on at full capacity, which means you're not only in excruciating pain, you also just can't move your body. You're stuck, frozen in horrible pain until someone turns the suit off. So there is this type of like logistical problems with these sort of things as well.

Well, and it's one of those, the first thought I had when using that thing was like, oh, this is kind of neat. This actually would make certain video games better. And the second thought I had was I would only ever want to have this on if I was playing a video game that was not connected to the internet.

Because the instant, I would never want to engage in a multiplayer game where I could get stabbed like that. It would be horrible. It would constantly be troll. I mean, obviously like, you can have lower settings on these things to make it not painful at all.

Yeah, you do get to pick that. But I tried to go as far as I could. But in terms of practical applications beyond just gaming, the next haptic suit that we tried, this company is working with governments. That's a B haptics. Haptics is the company.

They do the thing where they remove vowels. And they have military contracts. We saw army people testing out. Yeah, two employees of the United States Army. But they already are working with law enforcement in an industrial capacity. Government training. There's a fucking video of Jeff Bezos

using one of their products to wirelessly control a robot that is based off of human hands in order to do technical tasks. They work with governments. They work with businesses, corporations. They work with corporations. This isn't really a consumer thing at this point.

No. Because the full suit, I think they said the next full suit is going to be like $80,000. No, no, no. The gloves are $4,000. The gloves and battery pack. The next full suit that they're doing

is going to be $80,000 or $400 a month subscription. But that's for their suit that's not even released yet. That is their next model. Yeah, not a consumer. Theoretically, if you're willing to pay the monthly fee, you could have this thing. But that's not the intent. But I think what's interesting about it is

this is kind of where all of the technology is going. And the main difference is that the haptics that we had used on us and the lower-end gaming products were, again, they're basically just kind of like shocking you a bunch in specific ways. Or just like vibrating. Yeah.

Or just like vibrating. Whereas this suit used... Air pressure. Just like pneumatic. So it was basically, you have these gloves on. And the gloves are much more cumbersome than the other gloves. You have these gloves on and they're like blowing air onto parts of your hand.

It's compressed air that feeds into these little sensor things that actually make contact with your skin. And so the feeling is real in a way that the other haptic stuff isn't. And it doesn't... First off, it does not actually... It does not feel like you're getting puffs of air blown on your hands. No, it does not.

One of the things that they did in there is they simulated holding your hand under a leak with drops of... I think it was oil in that, but drops of a liquid coming down on your hand. And it felt like having water cup pour onto your hands without wetness, which is an odd feeling. Yeah, that is bizarre. They had like a bonsai tree,

which kind of felt like... It felt like a prickly... Yeah, it felt like a prickly plant. Running your hands through both plants. If you'd closed your eyes and you'd run your hands through both plants, they would feel like different plants. And one thing you could do is you could grab the vine with leaves on it and pull your hand down.

The leaves would come off the way they would in a real vine. And you felt it. And then your hand is full of leaves at the end and you feel them too as they slide off of your hand, which is a kind of fidelity I didn't really realize was possible at the moment. There was other stuff that really... There was some stuff that worked better than... The turning wheels and stuff was kind of like whatever.

The knobs and buttons weren't great. I actually thought the weak point was turning knobs because it just felt kind of shocky. But the straw... The rope. Yeah, there was a rope hanging from the ceiling, so you could pull it to... You were on basically a fake airship in the sky,

so it was kind of attached to a horn. So you could pull the rope and then the way you could grab a rope and pull it down hand over hand, you could pull it and it felt like... It felt just like pulling a rope through your hand. If I had no... Near perfect fidelity. If I had no visual sensory perception,

I would think I am pulling a rope through my hand. It felt perfect. There was a moment where I was at a desk and I had to open it. So I pull... And normally in VR, if you're opening a desk or something, you just kind of grab and pull in the right area and it opens the drawer. This I felt like there was a big metal hook thing that you get your hand up into pull. I pull it out and I feel my hand inside that thing as I pull it.

And then at a certain point, I stuck my hand into the drawer to push it open the rest of the way, which I do on real drawers when they get stuck. And it worked the same way that it does in a real drawer, and it felt like one. The other thing that was impressive about that is that... I instinctually picked up a mug by putting half my hand inside the mug and holding onto the other side,

and you can't do that if you're using VR controllers, and you can't even do that if you're doing hand tracking. It just doesn't work. But you put your hand in, pinched both sides of the mug and picked it up, and just that by itself, as you're feeling the mug in your hand, it's extremely impressive right now, which kind of sounds silly because you're talking about the mechanics of grabbing a mug, but it's actually a lot of advancement.

The capacity for mimicking reality with close to perfect fidelity, which I would not have guessed walking into the show you could do the things that we're doing. Yeah, and we talked to one of the products managers there, where they were speaking about how they're using this for workplace training, but also even talking about how you don't want to just use this tech for workplace training because then people will get too used to doing it in VR, and then when they actually go into the real world, they'll actually be completely lost because it's not close enough to the VR.

So they actually talked about how VR, it can only do so much. You want to use VR training as a supplemental thing for also in-person training, and kind of go back and forth so that you actually stay grounded in what you're going to be actually doing, but then you can also use the VR as an assistant so you can train it on your own, but also you get to apply it to the real world so you don't get stuck just doing the stuff in the digital world. I thought it was an interesting comment from the person who was trying to sell the technology.

Yeah, and that was kind of the thing. One of the neat things about CES, so most of the people you encounter, and CES, for those of you who have never been to a trade show, it's rooms that are bigger than you ever thought rooms could be, filled with thousands of booths, and some of the booths contain earth movers by the company Cat that are the size of a mansion in terms of their actual mass, and some of the booths are a crazy person sitting with his homemade air conditioner

and his cut open gloves explaining to you the new way he's figured out how to make air conditioner coils. And so you get this mix of at the big corporate booths a lot of the time, like PR people who are hired to sell a line and they don't know what they're talking about and are just trying to hype a product, and then inventors and people who have actually made the thing in front of you and are very excited about it and are kind of incapable of bullshitting you, sometimes they believe irrationally in their products,

but they're not PR people. And yeah, I got that feeling from the haptic people. We should move on from metaverse. So I want to talk about some of the other, since we're doing the good, the other products we saw or things that we saw and mentions we saw that made me kind of hopeful about aspects of the future. So we saw some AR glasses and again, VR is immersive. AR is just kind of putting an overlay from the digital world on the regular shit.

You're wearing glasses and you're seeing something that a computer is showing you. One of the things that we saw that I was most impressed by was by a company called Vuzix, and it was their Zander glasses. Zander with an X, like the guy from Buffy. And these are glasses that are designed to provide real-time captioning to those with hearing loss. So you are wearing them and you are conversing with people all around you and you see every word that's being said around you, including the words you say on screen in front of you, live captioning.

And it worked. It worked extremely well. I didn't see it miss or fuck up any words. It's not like punctuated or anything, but it was perfectly easy to follow. And it works for all of the voices around you. To the extent that I could tell, and I'm not hard of hearing in a way that I need captioning glasses, but I think that if you are, this is kind of a miracle product. It worked incredibly well as far as I could tell.

And I think a good amount of thought, from what they said at least, I think a good amount of thought went into the fact that if you are acting as someone's ears, you have a responsibility to take care of their privacy because all of it was local. None of it was going into the cloud. There is no app. There is no internet. There's no app. It doesn't touch your fucking phone. It's just the glasses. That's all it is. There's no internet. There's no app. It's just the glasses. So that was one of the coolest things that I think we saw there

and was just also a fairly rare, legitimate example of a need being met through fascinating technology that I think could really improve people's lives. Yeah. One of their pair of AR glasses I tried was by Ant Reality Optics. They had a few different models. They're the ones that make the actual lenses. They had models that you could switch between AR and VR. It was actually pretty impressive how they look pretty much like regular glasses. The specific AR and VR ones look a little bit funky, but they're not completely ridiculous. But you could, with a button, you could switch between having the AR pass-through mode.

You see the AR screen and then you also see the world around you. Then you can hit to the VR mode and it blacks out the real world. You just see the VR stuff. That was pretty impressive. They also had a full-frame AR glasses that looked relatively normal in terms of, you know, this is the regular pair of glasses. But this was the only pair of AR glasses I saw at the show that had the AR going over the course of the entire lens. All the other ones had a little box that they operated there.

Yeah, that also in some cases fucked up your vision when you didn't have a thing playing through. Yeah, and it's hard for your eye to know what to focus on. But this, the AR was across the entirety of the lens. And that one was very nice to test out. Now, I think one of the things that we're kind of talking around here is the fact that if you've paid attention to this, you'll note that none of the really cool stuff we're talking about is made by a giant tech company. Facebook meta, yeah.

Yeah, Facebook meta. Or like Samsung, Panasonic, LG, we went to those booths. Those are the largest booths at the show. They're fucking massive. Multi-million dollar booths. God knows how much money. Panasonic had one of the largest booths at the show, which probably was tens of millions of dollars.

It is not cheap to get real estate in the LBCC, the Las Vegas Convention Center. They had like the third largest booth in the entire show. It's massive. They didn't really have any of their new products. They didn't have any products. Panasonic makes things. No, they had like two cameras and maybe like ten lenses. And like not multiple ones of those, just those.

The only two cameras and like ten lenses, that's all they had for this massive, massive booth. And then some fucking TVs and shit, but like nothing new. And they had like displays and like not displays for sale. Just like projected displays of people using their stuff. They didn't have anything to show at all. But they did have a break dancing stage. And they brought up DJ Funky and his break dancing crew, which I swear were pulled right out of Times Square in 2003.

And just thrust into our reality. It was deeply awk because it's these very like, clearly people who spend most of their time doing break dancing shows out in public in streets and crowded cities. And a bunch of confused Japanese businessmen. Just like staring back at them. And they're being like, come on, come on, make some noise. And the Japanese businessmen are continuing to stare at them.

Do not want to make any noise. Don't understand why this is being asked of them. It was extremely funny. But yeah, and that was one of kind of the takeaways for me was the lack of ideas from big tech. Most of what the big companies were showing was like either a million different cars and, you know, our technologies, this car technology and I'm sure they're all great cars.

Very popular. That was one of the bigger trends we saw was how much people were pushing their EV cars, which is, I think, if you want to read something about that, it's bad news for Tesla. I also don't think it's good news for the rest of us because just replacing all of the cars on the road with EV cars does not solve many of the fundamental problems that we have, including even emissions.

Because even yeah, it's not easy to make a lot of that electricity generated views. Some of them look neat. There were a lot of e-bikes. A lot of e-bikes which all look neat. And of course, that's going to be a huge thing. A big impetus for the e-bikes right now is that Ukrainians have been using them very effectively in combination with drones to murder Russian soldiers.

And the U.S. military has actually put in large orders for e-bikes as a result of that. So I suspect you're going to see a lot more e-bikes geared towards military applications too in the near future. And what most of the big companies had were TVs. Yeah, fucking Samsung. Samsung and LG. Mostly big TVs.

And LG had one that it was stored in a little box where it was all rolled up and it would unroll when you press a button. If you ever had a hotel that has automatic blackout curtains, it kind of works that way. Which is conceptually like, oh neat, you've developed a TV that can fold and put itself away. But also, is this really better than my current TV? In a way that's going to alter my life, is this like...

Yeah, there's not much in terms of actual new innovation. They were trying to make their transparent TVs seem really cool and new, but that's not new tech either. It's just that people don't really like using them outside of the corporate space. Yeah, transparent TVs are neat for if you're decorating a space. If you're doing a lobby. You wouldn't want that in your living room because it's a worse experience. Yeah.

I think out of all the big companies, LG had the best booth experience. I walked through Samsung after waiting in a massive line, and it looked half like a hospital and half like an IKEA, where you're walking through and they're kind of showing you all their different smart appliance products, but nothing is actually new or innovative. It's all the same shit you can find at a Best Buy. It's not cool or interesting.

You're just waiting in line to walk through these little IKEA homes and they show you how you can now use Microsoft Teams from your television. And you're like, oh, cool. A lot of people bragging about their Microsoft Teams integration. Look, you and I both have to use Teams for work sometimes. Always the worst part of my day. But now, Robert, with your new rollable TV, you too can use Microsoft Teams. Finally, a rollable TV that automatically takes me into my team's room.

So would you boot up Microsoft Teams and you don't want to be there anymore? Well, when I first clicked the link on Firefox and it says this browser is not supported, you're going to have to use another browser to start Microsoft Teams. You probably wouldn't run into that issue if you had your rollable TV that was a smart TV that could connect directly to Microsoft Teams. Yeah. I hate it. The Samsung booth was horrible.

Sony mostly had PlayStations, which is fine. People love them PlayStations. Panasonic was a complete bust. LG at least had some interesting stuff. They had this one projection-powered TV extension room where you have an image or a 3D video file of the thing on the television that then projects out into the entirety of the room. That was cool and new.

There was no stated release date for this, no stated price point. Or application, because honestly, what movies are going to work in that? Now, the answer is that what you want to do is you want to combine that kind of drawing AI and use it so you can run a movie through it and it will finish the rest of the scene. So for example, you could put on boogie nights, that opening scene where it's that one long shot as they go through. They just call around you, but everyone looks a little wrong and their hands are tweaked and fucked up. You constantly have mid-journey continuing up to movie to fill the frame. Lord of the Rings, when you look to your right, one of the elves has hands that just curl up in on themselves.

And then you just take a shitload of acid and permanently damage your brain. I think the funniest thing at the LG booth though, despite being corny, was still miles better than anything else in Panasonic or inside Samsung. So was the home of the future? They had three different home of the futures, which is mostly talking about how to use smart appliances and how to integrate them with your phone or whatever. That was most of what they were talking about. But they had three actors in each of the homes.

Actual ass human beings. Who are kind of doing a presentation, kind of doing a fourth wall breaking performance. It was a weird mix of performance art. The mom kept emphasizing that she was almost criminally incompetent at cooking and thus had to be taught by a robot how to make pasta. But they're talking about their kids and my husband and it's a weird performance art thing. But honestly, that way of presenting their products was much more enjoyable to watch than walking through the Samsung booth.

Who didn't have any of that, you were just walking through. Despite being silly, it was still much, much more enjoyable. Yeah. So I have been attending CES since 2010, not every year, but often I try to hit it every couple of years just to kind of keep abreast of not just like what's possible because you always see some exciting new stuff that you wouldn't have guessed was a thing but also to just kind of get an eye for how the tech industry is talking about itself to itself. And the thing that struck me most was how completely out of the driver's seat the big tech companies were. Yeah.

And not even really even trying. Google's big box was not in the main convention center, their main booth. They had it outside the convention center and it does not seem to be a focus of much coverage right now. I've seen no one talking about it. People do not care. It's just more phones and it's like razors there, right? The company makes gaming laptops and they make perfectly fine gaming laptops, but it's also just like, well, now I can see what the new 16 inch razor looks like.

It looks like a razor laptop. Yeah. You know, I can go to Lenovo and see what they had actually a couple of cool laptops. Actually, Lenovo, I was bummed because they took away the laptop clit. They did take the clitoris off of the laptop, which is a shame. Although they have a semi clitoris button on the side of the phone. Okay, that's good. It's red, like the old anyway, whatever.

Look up Lenovo clitoris or just type clitoris into red tube. Don't, well, I don't know, whatever. It's your life. So the Lenovo has like, I mean, there's some like, oh, here's a laptop with two screens that doesn't completely suck. You know, here's a laptop that is in a slightly better form factor, but there's kind of, they've given up the idea that like, there's anything kind of, but iterative. Like here's TVs that are slightly better than your current TV, but not in a way that you can notice. And that's most of like the products there, which is like, well, on paper, this is slightly better than the thing I have,

but I don't think I would actually notice a difference in that. And when you're seeing that from the companies that are spending 30 million, 20 million, you have a many fucking millions of dollars to be at CES and have God knows how many billions that they put into R&D, when that's what they're bringing to the table and there's just like three nerds in a tiny booth in a corner of a room that have a device that like is capable of reading all of the speech around you and translating and like captioning it live. Or there's those, I mean, that little, not a massive company, although not, you know, clearly a decent amount of backing, doing that kind of shit with haptics, like that's all of the, that's the, I think the main takeaway to me is like, there's big tech seems to have entirely given up driving the conversation about what the future is going to look like,

which I don't take as a bad thing actually. I mean, we went to the John Deere booth and they had this, they had this AI assisted way to scan your crops and locate where weeds are and another kind of. And it was on like one of those gigantic irrigation plow machines where you like drive it around. It's like a hundred yards long and it waters and sprays pesticide. Yeah, but it's the AI power thing that recognizes things that are not crops and tries to remove them. The case in point being like trying to spray pesticides just on the weeds and not on the rest of the crops. It can go, it can do this while operating at 12 miles an hour.

This, this, the person we talked to, they just started working for John Deere because this technology was developed at a different company that John Deere just bought. Yeah, like John Deere didn't make this other companies did and then they just bought it. I think that's just another interesting case of like, that was just another small random company who was doing, you know, innovative farming technology that then, you know, another big company with money just decided to buy and be like, Hey, this is our thing now. And I think I want to, we'll do another part where we talk about the dark side. We'll talk about Palantir, who was there and who we got to chat with.

We'll talk about surveillance. We'll talk more about John Deere because there's some, some bleak shit in the John Deere stuff too. But I think this is the stuff that I found broadly optimistic, even the shit that didn't work because what didn't work is like big tech. And I kind of like the fact that big tech, it seems is stumbling and crypto. Those are the two things that didn't work. What I like is the fact, I like to see big tech stumbling out the gate and a bunch of weirdos putting some cool shit out there. And that actually makes me more hopeful of like a future where technology makes things more accessible. And I get to wear motorized exoskeletons.

Oh, let's end on the exoskeletons. Let's end on the exoskeleton. So we got to finally try the motorized exoskeleton, which is supposed to basically increase your lifting capacity by 60 or 70 pounds. It's like a backpack you wear on your back with a chest piece and hooks around your hips and stuff. And it works when you're like carrying loads and moving and squatting, you don't have to move the way you normally do to protect your lower back, which is kind of harder on your knees if you've ever like done kettlebell spots or deadlifts. When you first put it on and they had you bend over and then stand back up, the first time you did that, you kind of felt like you're getting launched in the air. Yeah, yeah.

Because it's pushing up with you. It's assisting you. But you can move. It like springs in your step as you're running. It worked really well. It was very cool. I want to... And I was kind of shocked at how...

This is from a German Biotics company. Yeah, German Biotics, which is the name of the company. And it was a really awesome, first off, shout out, the folks were fans. So that was nice. But it was a really cool product for... The price point was surprisingly... We're not talking Toyota factories can afford them. We're talking if you work in a small automotive company or whatever, you could afford one of these suits.

They're sub 10K, so they're not cheap, but they're not the kind of thing that only a multi-billion-dollar corporation could have access to. And it will actually improve the lives of workers. And you can rent them for 250 bucks a month, which is, again, very... Because it would allow you to work lifting and hauling shit all day or do stuff like on a farm, like bail hay and hook hay up without straining your knees and back. We talk a lot about the kind of devices... Oftentimes, the kind of devices that make work more... That are marketed to companies in this may make work more efficient, but they don't... They try to increase productivity by just doing more numbers, but not actually improving the experience for the worker.

The human side of this is that, well, maybe a bunch of people who ruin their backs and knees working in factories every day won't. And that would be nice, too. And it seems like it works really well. So if you are currently working a job or run a company and your employees are destroying their backs and knees, maybe reach out to the German Bionics guys. Also, it does seem like I could rent or purchase one and then combine my plate carrier with the chest rig, purchased extra thigh and shoulder armor, and have what is effectively powered armor without straining my body. I can't see any reason why that wouldn't work, Garrison. So come back next week where I will have recreated space marine power armor, and soon after that, gone mad with power.

And take over Circus Circus. Yeah, finally. Finally, take over. Garrison, why don't we end this by... So Circus Circus, the most beautiful place in the Las Vegas Strip. If you've never been, if you've ever read the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or watched the movie, it's where Hunter Thompson starts hallucinating. Now, the thing about Circus Circus is that it's a clown themed casino. Well, it's supposed to be a circus themed casino.

There's a lot of clowns. But there is a lot of clowns in their branding. And it's like one of the oldest casinos on the Strip. So everything is faded. They have not repainted it in a very long time. It is the outside as a shade of like, mauve that you only get when the sun has deeply damaged your building. Yeah, you cannot purposely produce that color. No, man cannot create it, even with all of our talents. And it's just, I purposely put Garrison up there because it's where I used to stay on the Strip.

And it's one of the worst places in the world. I love it very much. Tell the people how you found Circus Circus, Garr. I mean, initially, I wanted more theming on the inside. I think it's a bummer that clowns have gotten such a bad rap in the past 20 years. That I feel like they've kind of taken a backpedal off the clown theming. Yeah, it's cowardice. Because without the clown theming, it's just kind of dingy and depressing. Where instead could be surreal and uncomfortable.

And I would prefer it to be surreal and uncomfortable than just dingy and depressing. See, this is why I wanted to support you in your dream of sitting in dark corners of Circus Circus. I brought my clown costume. Wearing your clown costume. You could give, I mean, you might get stabbed. I still have one more night. That's right. Yesterday after I entered my hotel, there was a Las Vegas police officer. What time of day?

At least 7am. A Las Vegas police officer was walking the hallway in the very top floor where I'm staying. And then I go downstairs and there's a whole team of police sweeping the ground at 7am in Circus Circus. Probably just a murder. So this has been, it could happen here, reporting from CES. We'll be back probably tomorrow to talk about the dark horrifying things that we saw that made us deeply uncomfortable. And then we'll probably have like an audio documentary on the way as well using audio that we recorded at CES. So that will be integrated at some point in the future.

We'll continue to inform you of the future that is mercilessly rushing towards you and cannot be stopped and will inevitably crush you and everything and everyone you love. But in this episode in a good way. So true. So be happy. Welcome back to It Could Happen Meow. That's horrible. You didn't like that Garrison? No.

Well, they can all be winners. This is part, I guess, three of our coverage of the consumer electronic show and what the tech industry has in store for all of us in the future. Last episode we talked about the stuff we saw at CES that was both cool and optimistic and spoke to some potentially positive trends in tech. And today we're going to get back to what we do best, which is making you feel bad. But first, I want to open this up a little bit with Garrison. You're a Canadian. You're a very young Canadian, 20 years old, grew up in a cult. And now you have just seen Las Vegas, Nevada for the first time.

Did it change your life? I mean, I guess so. I guess it did change my life in my perception of what Las Vegas is and my desire to never return. But yes, we've been able to spend probably around half our time at CES, other half just soaking in the impeccable vibes of Las Vegas, Nevada. Yeah, I've been tour guiding you around soberly and safely. We went to the Venetian and the Palazzo. We took a very expensive gondola ride. That was an expensive gondola ride. Got to see the beautiful blue skies of Venice and all their four corners. Yeah, your reaction to seeing inside the Venetian.

If you've never been the Venetian, the interior of it, it's this massive casino as they all are. They're all like small towns inside buildings. And the Venetian is like a replica of the city of Venice with a fake sky and that is one giant mall. I believe it's the second largest hotel in the world. Yeah, it is unbelievably large, incredibly expensive. And the fidelity of the fakeness of all of these things that are based on real stuff is quite high too. It's a whole thing. Yeah, it's really interesting because some of the most impactful stuff is all of the fake storefronts inside.

Because in many ways, they're kind of just all glorified malls and glorified arcades, slot machines. And it's funny because they make all of these facades on the inside. They have the ceiling painted to look like the sky, but it's so dark in there. You see blue skies above you, but there's no light anywhere. There's no light anywhere. There's no clocks in the rooms. No, you never know what time it is. You never see the outdoors. You're all isolated in these little corridors leading from one shop to another with slot machines all along the way. You're flying back soon. Are you looking forward to not being in a maze of lights designed to be willed and slowly damage you enough that you sit down at a craps table?

I'm very excited to see a real tree that's not a palm tree. We're excited to touch grass because there's no grass in Las Vegas. No, it's actually, I think, illegal in a lot of parts of the city to have grass lawn. So one of the things, obviously Vegas is in an objective sense incredibly wasteful. A huge amount of resources get poured into what is effectively just for gaming. Another thing that you have to hold in your mind when you recognize that is that of all of the states in the Southwest utilizing the very limited water resources there, if I'm not mistaken, because I was just reading an article about this, Nevada is the one state that has reduced its water usage while it's grown by like three quarters of a million people. So it contains multitudes.

And also Nevada like Vegas is where the I'm spacing on the name right now, but basically you have all of these different states in the Southwest that are all kind of coming together to try to figure out how to deal with the fact that Lake Mead is water levels are getting lower and the Colorado River is disappearing in some areas and it is the only thing that makes life out here possible on the scale that it currently exists on. And a couple of months before CES they had their big meeting in Las Vegas in order to talk about how to try and deal with the calamitous water situation. So it is very much this city that is like filled with simulacra of the past, which it uses to try to hack your brain to get you to stay up for four days in a row gambling and spending tens of thousands of dollars. And it also because it's the best place to hold a convention in a very technical sense like it is the most prepared for a large convention. This city can handle 150, 200,000 people coming in overnight and needing places to stay and needing infrastructure in order to. So it's also where a lot of things about the future get decided, which is when you spend enough time walking in the hotels, it's kind of horrifying. It's like the fact that important decisions get made in this realm of.

In this place that's designed to be mind-altering. Yeah, exactly. It is crafted. We're not like joking about this. There are no clocks in the hotel rooms. Like the casinos are crafted to damage your perception of time. So I don't know that somebody should maybe look into that. I do like when you're talking about Lake Mead, just a great example of the overall vibes of Las Vegas is as Lake Mead is drying up, we keep finding bodies inside the lake. Yeah, bodies that have been there a long time.

Bodies of people who had alternate ideas about how Vegas should look. Yeah, a lot of them were probably in. Yeah. But wait, walk, walk through the Venetian walk through Caesars Palace. They had they had some nice vapor wave LEDs displays outside briefly went into the Paris one, which was honestly, I think they Paris handled this. Handled the fake sky the worst because not only was this the sky painted ceiling so low, the the bottom part of the Eiffel Tower just stops where the ceiling stops. They didn't even try. They don't even try to continue the illusion.

It's just it just is a hard stop. Yeah. We wrote a roller coaster. We went to New York. We went to the New York. That's all a little blurry for me because you're so drunk. But I just bought a I dumped the the attempt at like buying drinks from places and just got a handle of Woodford Reserve, which allegedly you can mix into one of the THC pina coladas that they have and allegedly is pretty good time. We we went to Rainforest Cafe.

I unfortunately bought you got sicker than I did eating that Rainforest Cafe dessert. I bought this volcano cake and it was quite regrettable. And then we walked over to the New York themed casino inside Las Vegas. So if you want a city themed casino inside the city that you're in, you can go there. But a different city creating microcosms within microcosms. You're just like the nesting nesting all the way down and I in an effort to make both me and Robert vomit. We went on a roller coaster, which we barely survived. That did feel like a very dangerous roller coaster.

We were so close to vomiting everywhere. It was a good time. It was pretty fun. I felt great. So that I just felt people would enjoy your your your first Vegas experience. And of course, you stayed at Circus Circus, which we just walked through earlier today. One last time one final one final goodbye to see a family of four with $38,000. I'm not just losing $40,000 at Circus Circus.

Unbelievable. The worst casino in the world. Well, I think in order to segue into our next topic. It's about Seag. I think Las Vegas is probably one of the most heavily surveilled cities in in the United States. It would be hard to find one with more, especially when you're on the strip. Obviously, there's a lot of Las Vegas. I have family who live here and they can go years without visiting the fucking strip because it's terrible.

But another another and so kind of in a similar sense at CES, there was a lot of stuff about surveillance. A lot of stuff about, you know, collect different new innovative ways to collect data on you and your and your appliances and what's in your home. Do we want to start start by talking about the the omnipure of surveillance tech? Yeah, there was actually just an article in the Washington Post about this about how unsafe quite a bit of it is. And one of the things that you may have caught in some of your news because this was probably one of the more viral stories is that there was a lot of piss based technology. A lot of P. Analyzation. Vivo had a thing.

There was there was at least three different P test kits that were on the show floor. I think some of them won some some of the CES innovation awards were based that you can analyze what's in your urine. Yeah. And they these are always framed as like it can let you give you confirmation if you have a UTI. It can help people who have all these different illnesses. It can help diabetics. And I'm sure there's a degree to which that's true. But I asked the Vivo lady and I didn't speak with the there was another called you scan by withings.

And you you scans urine sensor analyzes hormone levels in urine. That's interesting. Yeah. Which is why it won some awards. And also why a bunch of folks including consumer reports put out like a warning about it saying like we shouldn't be celebrating this. This is an incredibly dangerous product because it all is going to your phone. The data is being collected digitally. And if for example you are in a state that heavily restricts women's access to reproductive health care.

There is literally nothing stopping the law enforcement or the government of those states from demanding all of that data be handed over potentially even in real time. There's absolutely nothing stopping that. And the companies already said they'll comply with law enforcement with government requests. And there's they don't have any kind of plan for the fact that they are creating a way to surveil people's bodies for the government. And when I talk to the one of the representatives of Vivo, which is another one of these urine companies that I don't believe detect your hormone levels but does is generating a lot of data about your body a lot of biometric data. And the most she would give me is that the data is encrypted, which great. That's a fancy word for saying, yeah, we have it. We are we are sitting here right after one of the most damaging data hacks of all time, which has it was last pass.

It was one of the massive password collecting apps where you basically like centralized all your passwords behind one and remember and like it. A lot of people are exposed as a result of that. And I just think that like the this show such a massive part of it was we have we are debuting devices that will allow you to monitor different parts of your body at all times and get real time biometric data. Your body in your house and centralizing all this data about you and one ring in a second in one place because that's the same thing with like smart homes and smart appliances were very popular. Smart cars were a very big thing. We're talking about like smart cities were another big thing for just other ways to centralize all of the data about what you own where it is and how to effectively provide advertising to get you to buy more. Yeah, there's an attempt being made by Republicans in Oklahoma right now to make it criminal to do gender transition if you are under 26 years of age. There's no reason why a product like this couldn't be used to determine whether or not somebody is illegally taking hormones in a state where they are attempting to restrict trans people like it's this is all.

We're not just being like. Fuddy duddies these are all very serious implications and there's zero thought zero evidence of thought being given to with any of the biometric companies know one of the reasons we talked about that the smart glasses that are for people who are hearing impaired that caption conversations live around them. One of the reasons I was impressed by that is that it's all a closed loop none of it goes to your smartphone none of its broadcast wirely it wirelessly. It is all on device and none of it is stored anywhere and when they said that that was part of what convinced me these people understand the responsibility they have delivering a health care product. We should move on to the other part of the panopticon that we saw and talk about ring. Yeah the ring booth was one of the more terrifyingly dystopian boots and it's you know describe it for our listeners well I mean it's they basically made like a white picket house. And you know again CES these are massive massive buildings and so they do people can construct a full house in there yeah so like you know there's fake fake green grass a nice little fence. This perfect little idea like home and the massive massive sign above was like you know ring keep it like keeping our keeping your neighborhood safe you know like all of all of all of that that type of messaging.

The in the model home they had there was like a dozen cameras on you know every all all around the sides every approach outside multiple cameras on the doors there's a doorbell camera people camera camera on the fence. They had one door with three cameras on the door itself. Yep. And I mean rings owned by Amazon there was you know Alexa Alexa assisted ring cameras. All of this data gets gets used by law enforcement a ring partners like directly with law enforcement to make data like immediately available and make feeds immediately available. And the probably the silliest thing we saw at the ring booth was this home security tiny little drone. Yeah, so basically they've built and it's weird because the so the box that comes in looks like a fucking dehumidifier that I used to have or humidifier that I used to have in my house it's almost identical. It's like this little plastic box and a drone can take off and fly out of it and the drone trains itself on your house so it knows how to get around. And if somebody thinks somebody's breaking in a person who is effectively like works for ring like an actual human

being sitting in a call center somewhere takes control of the drone and can confront someone in your house which I guess there's a potential security benefit there but also you are signing up to allow Amazon to have a random person travel around your home at any hour of the night in a in a thing they control in a little flying machine that they control and that I cannot put myself in that I get obviously I get wanting to have cameras I don't think it's unreasonable to have security cameras on your home I even understand how some people who are not as privacy conscious as I am could be like yeah I don't care if it's connected to the internet. Even though that's not a thing I like I can't put myself in the head of somebody who would want that thing in their house. Yeah it's bizarre because obviously there's niche like again like health related maybe if you've got like an illness or something you might want something like that like I can understand how very specific purpose driven needs but like as a normal person wanting an Amazon employee to be able to wander around your home seems weird to me. I mean it's obviously also all that data getting used to Amazon scan your entire house figure out what what products you buy you know what what non Amazon things are inside your home what types of trends that you're using and all that can get used to help get you to buy more things that the the one of the more insidious parts of like all of the marketing and some of like the some of like the video commercials for ring that we saw you know playing

these giant giant screens inside is they're they're really trying to also push that they're trying to push and normalize using ring as a part of your everyday life but for non security means like you know when you're leaving your grandma's house you say goodbye to her in her little ring camera you know when you when you're getting to your friend's house you do little funny pranks in front of their ring camera and it's like it's always different ways to make rings like this fun and normal thing to like play with your friends and your family yeah when in reality look again it security cameras are inherently antisocial it doesn't mean that there aren't good reasons to have one and I as someone who's been burglarized I do understand that it's not bad but it's antisocial because you are surveilling people because you're worried about what they might do that is that is a fundamentally antisocial thing and so the attempt to like turn that the attempt to kind of like merge that into normal family life and to make it like friendly is is really bad yeah I think that we briefly stopped by the ADT booth and this is kind of this is kind of similar to the little groan that we just talked about but a little bit more ridiculous yes they have at the ADT booth this home security robot it like six six foot tall robot with with like an like like an like a LCD face with this big smile on it and they always smile and it's powered or not powered it is controlled by you the owner by wearing an Oculus headset and it has it has rolling feet so it can move around by rolling but it's like six feet tall it has two arms massive smiling face and if if you have you know your headset with you and you think someone's breaking into your home you can put this on and control this robot to like chase them out yeah and I was over hearing the ADT guys talk about it and they're like yeah this is even this is

just like a great deterrence like imagine your if someone's breaking into your home and then they see a massive smiling robot rolling towards you I I was I would run away very quickly and like and like like what this this thing has to cost like tens of tens of thousands of dollars yeah this is what you're doing to feel like this you're willing to spend that much money to to create this sense of safety really really this is this is what you're doing you're you're you're getting a robot that gets powered by a Facebook headset and so you can walk around your house in a rolling robot to make sure no one's gonna come you know take random shit from your house yeah when like what number one anyone who would do that is is the kind of person that needs to be have things taken from them but number two like if you're actually concerned for your actual safety and again I think that's perfectly valid none of these drones this robot is security theater it's not it's theater it's easy to to like damage it's easy you can knock it it's on three wheels you knock it over it can't get up put on block so that you're completely covered knock it over and then proceed to rob the house it's not useful it's just a security alarm at that point it's it's it's wild and like people will find ways to hack them and stuff you know you can't hack a well-trained guard dog which also will cost you tens of thousands of dollars less and will love you like a doberman pincher will kill your enemies if they break into your home and loves you like the same way you know there was people getting into Alexa machines a few years ago there was Alexa Alexa machines listening and sending info when they weren't supposed to there was a mass there was a pretty big incident actually in Portland a few years ago of Alexa listening in to when it was wasn't supposed to do and like listening to different conversations and trying to finish conversational cues you know it's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to control how to remotely control one of these ad t robots and you have something like rolling around in your house that you don't control anymore like it's

yeah there are there are always vulnerabilities in these things and they always get hacked and more to the point like well if you have some sort of security drone like your ring drone there's no way like again Amazon would comply with law enforcement requests there's nothing that says law enforcement if it was part of an investigation could not use this technology to surveil you in real time yeah so I don't like that not my favorite and while we're when we're talking about surveillance we can't ignore our good friends at Palantir now if you haven't been paying attention to the surveillance industry Palantir is a company that exists to collect data and build machine solutions and machine learning solutions to surveil people and to help equipment like drones targeting and whatnot work better they're an intelligence company there's like lots of systems they do systems it's not like they make a single product they help build systems to collect data and enable governments and militaries to make decisions off of that data that is like the thing that they do primarily systems analysts yeah tracking I mean like what one of the yeah one of the things we saw was them you know analyzing home to data around like water conservation right there they're trying to put a variety of their usage not just to kill brown people but they do a lot of the primary the center of their booth was this massive military truck with a huge armored box on the back that was filled with computers specifically to collect data and to

like do command and control for drone fleets in theater and one of the things you know when you see a vehicle of that size and it was very massive is that well this is not this is intended either to be very far back from the front which which mitigates some of the uses of it or it is intended to be used in an area in which the enemy does not have air power but so again the kind of places where you're just bombing them right like theaters like Yemen where the rebels have minimal ability to do something like bomb a gigantic truck that's a target but you have kind of unrestricted ability to do stuff like drone strike school buses which has happened repeatedly there we had a couple of conversations with the good people at Palantir they were I don't I think we kind of figured out they were primarily they're looking for talent because they were looking for people to recruit looking for different things to integrate into their systems yeah they would not show much of what they had no everything inside the van itself was classified here would you hand me my phone yeah find that person's name but everything in there was was classified whenever we started talking especially the first time we were there because I started asking some pretty specific questions about what was actually in that and how it worked and how it was different from current drone

command and control solutions and there was a very specific woman with Palantir who no matter who I was talking to would come up behind me and kind of direct conversation and I think also was there to listen to the answers that were being provided to me and stop people from saying things on her team yeah if they weren't supposed to say them there were a couple of occasions in which I asked hey can we check this thing out on the inside and we were told no it was classified no one else could get in you have to you have to gain permission from the army I definitely saw some individuals exit it but they were Palantir people but then the next day we came back and I watched a woman exit the vehicle and a man from Palantir with her but the woman was not from Palantir now people were badges at CES so their names are on display and what they do is on display although it's easy to look this person up and I saw she had a badge as a speaker her name was Mary or sorry her name was Melody Hildebrandt so I googled Melody Hildebrandt because I wanted to know she does not work for Palantir what is she doing inside Palantir's giant class classified robot murder box Melody is the president of blockchain creative labs and the chief information security officer for the Fox company for the you know that Fox corporation

so it looked like by the way her Twitter says CISO Fox Web 3 engineering cyber security former wargamer lover of farm animals so that's cool and yeah over here we've got her retweeting a post about Andarill which is one of the Peter Teal companies like Palantir is raising 1.48 billion in their series E funding this new funding will enable us to accelerate R&D and bring new cutting edge autonomous defense capabilities to market now I don't know why I wonder what they mean by the word defense yeah yeah yeah she's also pro NFT so that's good I'm gonna tweet to her in a little bit but you know it was it was very clear that there was you know there was PR people on the ground to make sure that the line of questioning if they were to if people were asking questions about their surveillance tech about this big Titan truck which is what it's called Titan

that there's only very very specific answers and like they were not there to talk to journalists they were not there to talk to media they were there to recruit people to you know become more capable at their surveillance tech that was very clear they were also right across the street right across the hall from the fantastic Robosen transformers robots so on the one side you have a fun Optimus Prime robot that transforms the other side you have the rolling metal death cage so that was that was that was most of Palantir they had this skybox which was this box that had like encrypted communications technology drones and drone piloting drone piloting technology and like you know military computer that all in this little tiny box that they can drop into people who are you know in basically drop into people who are in trouble yeah they were they were they were building it is basically number one it would be for it could be for special forces teams it has like a laptop in there it has potentially several drones in there and it has like a bunch of specially modified field cameras so you could set up surveillance on an area and those cameras kind of work with a machine learning algorithm to do stuff like try and identify where landmines are and again like these are the stuff that's problematic primarily about Palantir is it's data collecting its surveillance and the fact that we know that drone warfare is generally pretty fucked up and has an extremely high civilian casualty rate and is used in a lot of theaters obviously not in a lot of theaters where they are primarily just massacring people either fighting for their freedom or trying to survive this is the problem with it obviously all of this tech will also be used in generally positive things like for example dropping a box like this into the hands of some Ukrainian special forces guys to get to integrate them into a more advanced command and control network so they have better access to tactical data

like is not a thing I don't specifically have a problem with that application the problem is more broadly Palantir do you want to briefly explain in case people are not Lord of the Rings fans so again these are all companies owned by Peter Thiel who is a self described fascist believes in ending democracy believes that democracy and freedom are not compatible because freedom he defined specifically as the ability of people with lots of money to not have any kind of restrictions on their behavior or what they can compel other people to do Peter Thiel owns Palantir and Andriel the Palantir Palantir both of those are names from Lord of the Rings and in Lord of the Rings the Palantir was an orb given by the big bad guy Sauron to one of his lackeys a wizard named Saruman so that he could surveil any part of Middle Earth he wanted in order to send his armies to crush the free peoples of the world that is that is literally what this company is named after it is the bad guy surveillance tech to use the Orochi against the free people of Middle Earth it is it is specifically something that only evil people use it's it's pretty cool that the whole company is named after and there were all these very nice polite people in Patagonia style vests with Palantir logos stitched on them standing around

happy to answer any of your questions anyway I'm curious as to why Melody Hildebrandt was inside there what the chief information security officer of Fox would want to do with one of those vans that is curious that is curious she's on Twitter I did reach out to her we also saw a few of the robot dogs we saw the Boston Dynamics one which was very impressive in how it moves then we saw one much more cheaper model of a robot dog that had not as great mobility but it seemed to be more more suited towards the types of the types of style of dogs that we've seen law enforcement start to buy the cheaper ones with less flexibility more mounts to attach you know things to the top of the robot which you don't really see with the Boston Dynamics ones they do not like mounting extra things on but the the other robot dog we saw had this little arm that it was that it was that that had attached to the top that was in the robotics section pretty close to Palantir that one was much less impressive than that because we saw both robot dogs and these are if you've seen video of a robot dog that people are freaking about out about online these are those robot dogs the one we saw with the arm on it did not move it was number one controlled directly by a guy with a controller it was not on autonomous and it didn't move very smoothly

no the sitting in front of the Boston Dynamics bot spot and watching it move was really it was number one we both talked about the scarce and it's like watching CGI in real life because it's it's so fine tuned yeah it moves like a living thing but clearly is not yeah and it moves like a living thing enough that it is not it's not an uncanny valley that's not the right way to describe it because it the movements are kind of perfect yeah it's just not a lie it's almost it's it's it's not uncanny valley it's almost like instead it's like too perfect yeah it's it's just so fine tuned it's it was pretty it was pretty impressive to watch it was very impressive and it it's become obvious to me that like one of the things that absolutely is going on at Boston Dynamics is that they feel there is it there is and it is important to them as a business some of this may just be that they this is a personal challenge for a lot of these engineering guys but I suspect they also see this is valuable to their business to replicate physical emotionality and when I talk about that when you like watch a dog right you can tell a dog's emotions from the way that the dog moves because that's how dogs work the robot dog expresses physical emotion and obviously doesn't feel emotion but it physically expresses emotion in a similar way to a dog the curiosity they're very good at mimicking a curious dog in the way its body language works which is really wild yeah that would be one of the things I did not like I mean it's impressive a lot of this stuff is objectively impressive

most of the other robotics we saw there was not that impressive like I saw this this robot bartender that was making Boba but it but it didn't know it didn't know how or it wasn't able to actually deliver the Boba onto the secondary robot that delivers the Boba so this this this one robot with arms made made the drink a human picked it up inspected it then put it on a secondary robot which then delivered the trick and I and this technology I mean I I was eating at a at a at a Burmese place in Portland a few months ago where they were using this same food delivery robot system it's not it's not brand new it's just becoming cheaper and more people are trying to like make it a thing and there was so there was a lot of those types of things a lot of like R2D2 on Jabba's sale barge like delivering drinks style style robots that are autonomous like they do move themselves around they they don't need a remote controller but they're not that impressive but that that that was like the majority of stuff in the in the robotics section was that there was a few other kind of smaller rolling robots that were like elderly people like if someone falls down this robot kind of goes around and will help you and I yeah I don't feel well that specific stuff I don't feel like well suited to describe like to guess as to how well it would work but I think more broadly talking about autonomous tech because that was one of the biggest product categories at CES was all over the place there were a lot of cars and a lot of companies doing autonomous software and light our solutions for cars I consider that all to be there there's a great deal of evidence here but fully autonomous vehicles in the way that some of these companies are advertising is simply not they simply do not exist and will not exist and we did talk to a couple of people so again for the stuff that's very real about autonomous

there's things like driver assistance so for like truck drivers to allow them to strain and stress themselves less while driving and to help make certain things like backing up in parking that can be very difficult in certain environments safer by having more cameras and machine assistance and one of the people who worked with one of those companies said to us yeah there's no such thing as autonomous trucks or cars like they don't exist outside of very tightly controlled conditions all we are trying to do is make truck driving safer and less stressful on the driver which sounds great I mean obviously there's problems with the way the trucking industry exists outside of that but that sounds again like one of those products meant to actually mitigate worker fatigue and discomfort and potentially make shit safer so I'm on board with that kind of stuff other like an autonomous and smart tech that we like smart cars EV like electronic vehicles and autonomous stuff there was some stuff at the John Deere booth which it was pushing towards automation like we talked about in the last episode and then also their their EV tractor just launched which so John Deere if you're not aware has had a series of long running legal battles particularly with farmers in Ukraine over the fact that they do not want it to be possible or legal for you to repair your tractor if you're a farmer farmers have previously in history often repaired and fixed and modified their vehicles but this is both necessary if a thing breaks you can't always get it back to a manufacturing facility in time and a lot of farms are in the middle of nowhere which is where food comes from and you also like you can't wait you can't just be like well let's just put harvesting off for a week or two that that is a problem John Deere sees that as a severe threat to their profits and they have fought viciously in courts to make it to try to make it illegal to repair your own devices they have lost a lot of those fights in the United States and to its credit the Biden administration has taken a strong stance in favor of the right to repair and what we saw from John Deere at this CES was a bunch of very impressive

autonomous products that just coincidentally will also make it completely impossible to repair your tractors like specifically with the new EV tractor that launched so much of it is a computer that it is impossible to repair unless you work for John Deere like when we asked them like hey you know if this thing breaks down how would a farmer go about trying to fix this since it is a lot of it is like not it's not like motors and stuff from like a classic car it is like it is computer driven they are like they just can't it's just it's just so complicated that an average person cannot repair this like at all it just isn't possible so that's the way they are going to try to get around this right to repair issue yeah we will just and it's being done under the guise of you know by having this much more advanced we can use a lot less pesticides which is better for the soil better for everything using less carbon emissions using less carbon the farmer will have more time because the vehicle can handle this autonomously so that's eight hours the farmer you know gets to spend doing something else and all of this stuff that's kind of meant to distract from like well I guess yeah maybe he'll have more time but also substantially less autonomy and be completely dependent upon the John Deere corporation in order to produce the food that human beings need to survive I'm also gonna point it out there and say I started this by saying that like one of the major lawsuits was between John Deere and a lot of a group of Ukrainian farmers the same farmers presumably who were towing a lot of Russian ordinance away with the John Deere tractors yeah um I don't know that it's that kind of stuff and one of the things that I think looking at a lot of this autonomous tech some of it's great some of it will save lives

some of it rather than like reducing the need for humans to do work that it would be good if they didn't have to do we'll do just what you recognize create an even less human job for a human like taking drinks from a robot that makes drinks to a robot that carries them to people because we just couldn't figure out that interstitial step so your job as a human being as a member of a species that spent millions of years evolving to be capable of creating nearly anything your job will be to take a drink from one robot and set it down at another I mean we the thing is like that we already had that same idea in factories like as as factories have gone towards being more made by machines there still is factory workers who need to do all those little in between steps so we're taking this factory model and now just applying it to customer service doing the same thing trying to optimize as much as possible and then only rely on humans for all of these little in between steps that for some reason the robots and all of the autonomous tech just isn't very good at yet or you know isn't really focused on completing and that's that's the main thing that that humans are going to be are going to be doing in the in the autonomous Boba store that's going to come to your neighborhood in like 10 years. Speaking of bad things about the future or at least the present. Let's talk about Elon Musk's celebrity death tunnel. So if you're not aware Elon one of the companies actually the company he started that is based on his own legitimate ideas is the boring company which makes big tubes underground so that people can drive their individual cars through them and avoid traffic. Now Elon Musk is a man who takes his private jet between airports in the same city in order to avoid traffic. There is nothing he hates more than the idea of being a normal person or being at all connected to the lives of regular people which is why you get a private jet when you could just like fly first class or something because even if you're flying first class you're still going to an airport

because it's important through security around like the pores the pores. Elon has been vociferous about his hatred of traffic and public transit but also he hates public transit because you might sit next to a serial killer. His solution is dig holes underground and let people drive there. And most of the cities that have attempted to have boarding tunnels completed have been ghosted by the company. It is kind of a con. But they did build one in Las Vegas and Garrison and I used it. And it took us from one side of the convention center to the other. Potentially if we had made the most use of this service we might have gotten five to seven minutes that we didn't have to walk. Just you and me alone inside the Tesla not having to be around other people in the RGB tunnel. If you're in one of the things Elon Musk literally said is like well if you take public transit you might sit next to some serial killer. The way this tunnel thing works is you tell them whether you're going east or west and they put you in a Tesla that some dude is driving that you don't know. And then they fill the Tesla with other people that you also don't know. You're still sitting next to strangers. And you're in this this tube that is lit up the same way a pair of like razor gaming headphones are lit up. And you just slowly are stuck in this tunnel with two random people who you don't know very possible escape. I horrible like one thing I feel like obviously if you're in like New York or something or Berlin I've been in a lot of cities where I've traveled on the underground and I don't feel scared traveling in the underground because those have existed for a very long time. And so we know what happens when there's floods and when there's fires and there's a lot of systems built which is why you don't generally hear about a shitload of people dying in subway.

It's an extremely safe way to travel. This tunnel is filled with vehicles that take we know about 55,000 gallons of water to put out a fire when the battery catches fire and the batteries on Teslas. We also know catch fire with some regularity and you are trapped in a tunnel. There is sometimes traffic near the end of our ride we wound up in a line of like 20 Teslas and that did not feel good. No, because you just you can see nothing but Teslas ahead of you and behind you and you're surrounded entirely by this tight claustrophobic wall with absolutely no emergency exits visible. So fire suppression systems visible. I don't know what they have installed but you can't see anything. You cannot see a thing. All you see is the razor RGB gaming mouse. And then as soon as we got off this thing that was supposed to take us to like the central area it just took us to the other side of the convention center in order to actually get to where we needed to go. We just use the monorail. The thing that's been there for a long time and works fine. And monorails are also not great ideas for a lot of reasons but it got us right to the other end of the strip very quickly conveniently cleanly it took cost $5. So good work Elon. Love the tunnel. Hope you're proud.

Ringing endorsement. Can't wait for there to be tunnels like that in every city don't worry they want the boring company is not a real company. Yeah, anything else care. I mean we already talked about the digital health stuff, which was a very big part of CES. Yeah, that's I think that's most of what we want to touch on for now. OK, well, that's gonna just about do it for all of us here at whatever show this is. We will at some point have some stuff based on oh yeah actually let's let's in by I went in by talking about I guess another good thing but it's a good thing that relates to the bad things. I ran across a booth on our way out that on the first day I had seen, and I had thought was just like a I had assumed it was like a GPS solution or something because the company was called off grid.

And it's the off grid phone. And the founder of the company, Ben Wilson, who is just a guy who, as he put it, does not like that we consistently seated more and more control over our data and over our communications to large companies and governments and whoever the fuck else gets access to these massive anonymous or massive not anonymous data sets, and wanted to build a thing for himself that could eventually replace his smartphone. So he and the company he started have produced these. They're dumb phones at this moment that can text and can call and do encrypted into end communication. They also if you are off grid like in the middle of nowhere, and you and your friends have these you can communicate through text or through phone to each other, even if there is no network right the phones themselves do like make a network. They communicate just just to each other just to each other. And that's a wider internet. Yeah, which is really cool and potentially extremely useful. This is this is there's a number of applications that this could have, Garrison.

You mentioned that the Atlanta Forest Defense people could benefit from something like this because it will it effectively. There are about 200 bucks a piece anyone who can afford a few of these you can set up your own secure comms network for wherever you are and whatever you're doing. And the other the other feature of this is that you can set it on to something called sheep mode. Basically, if if if you suspect that that someone who you don't want to look at your phone, whether that's law enforcement, whether that's right other random random other people, you can set it to this mode that when they when they either sees or gain gain possession of this device, all of the data is immediately wiped before they can actually open up the phone. And they will open it up. They will see this fake profile that called the called not fake profile, but like this, this alternate profile called you set up called the sheep profile, which shows not not the stuff that not the stuff that you were using the phone for it can just be blank or you could like stick numbers in there you could have like a series of fake texts. But and then and but if you ever regain possession of the phone, you're able to put in a special a special password that will it will send the data.

It'll send the data through encryption back on to this device. So you still have the thing that you would have lost. And obviously there's a degree of like you would have to have some trust for the company. Yes, which has been says like Ben and Ben says like we are attempting to do this. He was very open about the fact that they have the phones. We saw them like some of this stuff is still getting built out, but it is it is still in development. They're still figuring out different ways to keep the servers secure to protect the servers from subpoenas from the American government and from other from other governments. Like there's this is still something that is being worked on. It was just one of the, you know, we see a lot of like a lot of lofty promises and a very, very little thing to show for this. This is one of the things that had actually, you know, just this one guy that had, you know, some pretty some pretty relatable promises. And it was very open about what they have done and what they haven't done and what they're trying to do.

He was he was he was not bullshitting. He wasn't trying to over emphasize what it can do or what it can do at the moment. Like it's still being worked on, but this is one of one of one of the one of the future things that we will be that we will want to follow up on. Yeah, I think we're going to try to have been on the show in the near future because they're going to be doing a Kickstarter to fund one of the next phases of production of this. But you can you can look them up yourself. You can buy the version one of their product, which is on sale and functional now at off grid phone.com spelled the way you would expect. So yeah, check out off grid phone.com. We found it interesting. We'll be following up on that. Ben gave me very strong, the good kind of libertarian vibes reminded me of a couple of people I've I used to hang out with in my youth. And it's very much is that kind of like product of just a cranky guy who knows tech and is angry at all of the data being sucked up and all of the data that we just kind of agree together. We're going to give away to unsavory characters because life in the modern world is kind of impossible if you don't do that.

No, and like one of one of the things on his signs was something along the lines of don't let the popo look at your phone. So like it's it's it is somebody who gets it. Yeah, yeah, we liked we liked Ben. So yeah, that is that is the dark side of the future of tech as this year's CES has unveiled it to us. You know, this is the also the conclusion of our reporting directly on the convention itself. We will have some reporting in the future that will be influenced by things we found here that we're going to continue to look up. But and we should have we should have some of the audio that we pulled from inside the convention center. Yeah, that should be edited together sometime in the near future. Talk to Palantir. That'll be fun. Yes, as as a little kind of documentary little daily diary of what we were actually doing on the ground. So that's being worked on. But this is this is as we're recording right now. This is the final day of CES. We are almost done. We have both very sore. It is surprisingly hard on your body.

We have to enter Eureka Park one more time, but then we will be finished. And then we'll have to upload this and edit edit the rest of the stuff we've made into into a little piece for you. So that is that that is still coming. You say we, which was very generous, you're going to be doing that me and Daniel. Yeah, I will not be editing anything. I don't know how to. Anyway, go to hell. I love you. I love you. Hegel remarked somewhere that all great world historical facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. You forgot to add the first time is tragedy. The second time is farce.

Welcome to Nick It Happened Here, the podcast where we last left Jair Bolsonaro. He had locked himself in the presidential mansion, turned off the lights and refused to leave or talk to anyone. Now, Bolsonaro has returned to his ancestral home, a hospital in Orlando where he's been admitted for abdominal pain. Joining me to discuss maybe the first man in history to be his own Napoleon the third is James. Hi, I'm here. This is I'm very much looking forward to this. Oh, God, I. OK, so for those of you who, I don't know, somehow have missed this. I woke up on Sunday and 10 minutes later, this was happening. And I was like, well, OK, I guess I'm canceling my dinner plans.

We're doing this instead. Yeah, I think Marx could have added to that quote and then as fast again and then for a third time as fast. Yeah, we really, we really, we really have sort of left the tragedy cycle and are now just in the forest over and over and over again. Yeah, we kind of need a new word for what keeps happening because it's not it's not really a coup and it's certainly not a revolution. It's just like an extreme reactionary tantrum. Yeah, I mean, I kind of like storming the capital because it is what they do. But then I don't know. I'm upset that everyone calls it insurrectionism or insurrectionists because it's like they're not.

Insurrectionary reactionary is like a power. Yeah, it's like I think like auto coup is closer. But the problem with coup is that coup implies that the military is actually cooperating, which it isn't. Yeah, that's why they always fail. Yeah, we're going to get into that more in a bit. But yeah, okay, so the thing that has actually happened is on Sunday supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who fled the country to Orlando, sacked the plaza of the three powers in Brazil, which is the home of the basically the buildings of the three branches of governments. And unlike in the US, they sacked all of them. They stormed the presidential mansion, they stormed Congress, they stormed the Supreme Court.

And then having seized control of the buildings as cops either sat around joking with them or just actively walked them into the building. Like there is a video of a procession of Bolsonaro supporters with just like they're all walking in a line towards the plaza. And there's just like two cop cars like in the middle of a thing driving with them. Like it's wild. There are cops taking selfies of them taking selfies. Yeah, yeah. That was the one in particular that was like, I feel like that goes slightly above and beyond even what was happening with the American cops. Like that was some, whew.

Yeah, it's been interesting. Yeah, it's okay. So they get there, they do the thing where they grab metal stuff and they break the windows and then they break in and they do classic January 6 stuff. They take pictures. There's one picture that I found that I think it's in the Supreme Court that's a picture of someone like you can't see their face. It's just them squatting on a, like facing backwards, squatting on a filing cabinet, like fully butt out about to take a dump. It's wild. Yeah, this is what democracy looks like when shitting on a filing cabinet in government office. Yeah, okay, so like they don't have a great plan here. The thing that they do is that, so they all do this, they break in, they like break stuff, they like take random stuff.

And then they, a whole bunch of people sit down on the ground and sing the national anthem, waiting for the army to show up because they think that when the army shows up, the armies go to join them. And it said the army shows up and arrest them all. There's some people who try to fight the police. They beat up a horse cop, which I think is funny because apparently this is just every single one of these now, someone beats up a horse cop. But, you know, by the end of Sunday, like, it's all over, the government forces retake the plaza, people try to fight the police, but they lose really badly. And, you know, okay, so obviously there's a reason why I read that first strategy, second time, it's farce line to start this, like, okay. The January 5th comparisons start fast and get harder, which is, this happened literally on January 8th? Like, they did it two days after the American one. You couldn't make this shit up.

They stormed the Capitol buildings, but this is something I think is kind of important to understand. This is an even worse plan than the January 6th plan. So the January 6th plan, if people remember this, so crucially, January 6th happens while Trump is technically still in office. And what's going on when they're storming the Capitol on January 6th is that Congress is trying to basically pass power to Joe Biden. Right, like, they're doing the vote to prove the ballot totals from the electoral college, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, okay, so this means that, you know, on January 6th, right, Congress was actually in session. So the people who were there actually had a thing they were trying to do to overturn the results. And there was like, there were people they could have harmed, there was like, they had like a goal, kind of.

It was like Seth Abramsom, but on the other side, like it was like constitutional fantasy. Yeah, but at least they had no idea. Yeah, but like, I can't believe, you know, like this is the thing about what's happening in Brazil. I genuinely cannot believe that I am being made to defend the planning capacity of the January 6th crowd. Like, genuinely, at least, Sonic, but the plan for January 8th in Brazil was even worse. Because, okay, the day they do this on, right, Congress is not in session. The Supreme Court is on holiday and Lula, the actual president of Brazil, has A already taken power and B is in Sao Paulo. So nobody is there.

Literally, they stormed three abandoned buildings. There is nothing there. They could have tried it. His inauguration was like three days before, right? Yeah, you know, it's funny. Lula talked about it in his speech. Part of it, like in the speech after this happens, is he has this line about how, like, all of these people were already in Brasilia, but they were too cowardly to face the people who were there for the inauguration.

So instead, they waited for everyone to leave, which is true. It's really funny. And this is kind of what they always do, right? They always kind of take the easy thing and then grandstand, like it's a big, brave thing that they've done. We see this constantly on the right. Yeah, and, you know, I think it's reasonable to ask, what were they actually trying to do? And I'm going to read from the Washington Post. The Washington Post was talking about some of the previous attempts to do the same thing.

Well, one radicalized Bolsonaroista named George Washington de Olivaria. Was it what? Yeah, all of the people involved with this are named like George Washington Olivaria. It's incredible. Wow. Did they change their names or is their whole thing just being a lame parroting of American conservatives? That is like... there is a lot of truth to the analysis that like Brazilian fascist culture is just like the fourth time a Facebook meme has been passed around, but this time on WhatsApp,

it's somehow more cringe than the American stuff. Yeah, this guy named George Washington de Olivaria was arrested and accused of planting a bomb beneath a bus at the Brasilia Airport. In a statement to police, he said he wanted to, quote, begin chaos that would lead to military intervention. So he's trying to do the strategy of tension, right? Which is this thing from Italy where, okay, so you have the government running a bunch of sort of like... I don't know if calling them fake fascist groups is technically correct, but you have them running a bunch of terrorist groups and, you know, okay, so this is happening in the 60s, 70s,

and sort of, yeah, it gets a little bit into the 80s, is that they're doing all these bombings and stuff, they're doing all these terrorist attacks, and the goal is to get people to like sort of trust the government and like allow like sort of further state of military intervention. But the thing about that was that crucially, the strategy of tension was a strategy that was done by the government. It doesn't really work if you're not the government and you are, in fact, people causing the chaos in order to get to military to sort of join you. So this is a crucial problem for Brazilian fascism because as much as the sort of the modern fascist movement is a cult of Bolsonaro, it's really a cult of the military.

Bolsonaro was sort of just the person who embodies the sort of desire of the fascist masses for military rule. But this means that if the military just refuses to do a coup, they have no idea what to do. Yeah, well, they could deploy Bolsonaro himself. Have you seen that video of him trying to do press-ups to prove that he's like... Oh god! He's still a super soldier, don't worry. You know, but this is sort of, this is a real issue for them. And, you know, okay, so if, I am pretty confident that if the military had actually decided to do a coup,

this would have worked. Like, and I think they would have pretty trivially just like smashed sort of the rest of the forces of the state and Lulu would be in prison. But, and this is the thing that's been the key to everything that's been going on in Brazil from the beginning. The army does not have the green light from Washington to do a coup. Because once again, Biden just absolutely hates Bolsonaro. Which is why... Not a personal, like...

Yeah, you know, this is a coup that was planned from Orlando and not Langley. Now, we're on like coup number four in the last few years that was planned from Florida. And notably three of the four of them have failed. And this isn't the best failure. The Venezuela one was a real high watermark. That was much funnier. Yeah. Well, I mean, like, to be fair, this is a better planned coup attempt than the Venezuela one.

That's not hard. That's an extremely low bar. Low bar, yeah. The kind of bar that you can get over by tripping. But, you know, we're still in the very early process of figuring out how exactly who was involved in this and like, to what extent everyone was coordinating with each other and like, you know, to what extent like literally governors were involved, seen to have been involved in this, but we don't exactly know yet.

What we do know in terms of this being planned from Orlando is that Bolsonaro for literally years has been saying shit like, quote, the patience of the people has run out. I want to tell those who will make me unelectable in Brazil. Only God removes me from power. There are three options for me, jail, death or victory. And I'm telling the scandals, I will never be imprisoned. He's been saying this literally years and years and years.

He's been saying he said like that, like over and over and over again. Yeah. And, you know, OK, so the other thing that we know right now, and this is being recorded on, what day is it? Is it the ninth? Yeah. It's being recorded on Monday the night. So this is the next day.

If by the time this goes out, there's more information, there'll be more information. But this is going on what we have right now. One of the things that we know is that the guy who was in charge of security for the federal district, which is like the federal district is basically like what if Washington DC was a state? But like a tiny one. Yeah. So the guy who was in charge of security for that was a Bolsonaro supporter who just so happened to be on vacation in Orlando, where Bolsonaro was staying with an MMA fighter whose mansion has a Minion's themed room.

He's just coincidentally on vacation in Orlando with Bolsonaro while this is happening. So, you know, OK, the Brazilian state seems to be being a lot faster to sort of crack down on everything that's happening than the American state was. The guy who was in charge of security who was in Orlando, the Brazilian federal defender has already asked the Supreme Court to arrest him. A Supreme Court justice like deposed the governor of the federal district for allowing this to happen. Yeah, it's wild. The Brazilian Minister of Justice says they've already identified people in 10 states who helped plan or fund the operation. They've arrested like, well, the total sum yesterday said that they'd arrested 400 people.

I saw somewhere they'd arrested 1200, but I don't know about that. Jesus. That could be wrong. They've arrested at least 400 people. There's a huge, like there's a huge crackdown on people involved in this. Lula. It's much better than the January 6th response in that sense. Oh, definitely.

Yeah. Like part of what's happening right is like, Lula literally like basically declared a state of emergency in the federal zone and like got basically like, I guess you recall, like he basically sent in the feds and like his people now have direct control over security in the capital because the police there are so unreliable. And you know, like he's been, yeah, the Brazilian states have been moving very, very fast. Yeah. Just sort of do stuff like this. Much much better than the US.

Yeah. But of course Trump was still in charge in that probably. Yeah. And also like Lula, unlike Biden, Lula has like literally like three hours, like as this was happening, he's making a speech about like that's him vowing to go after everyone who's involved in this, including Bolsonaro. And a Brazilian member of Congress has formally asked the foreign ministry to extradite Bolsonaro to the US. Who knows what's going to happen there. There have been, there has actually, there's been like a surprising amount of sort of support for that in the US.

And you know, I mean, that's everything that's been kind of interesting for this. Like before we take the ad break, is that like, he's gotten Lula's getting support from like everyone. Like this is, this is one of the rare, we have the great capitalist triumvirate of Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and, and Macron have all said that they're backing him, which is wild. Yeah. Real international Lincoln project vibes. Yeah. I mean, that, that, that, that is, I guess, like who Lula is, to a broad extent, right? Like, you know, if you go back to Lula episodes, like he was close with the Bush administration, but also like close with the world social forum people.

So he's always kind of like been the guy who straddles the divide between. Yeah. Like he's not. Yeah, he's not. And he's the guy who straddles the divide between the sort of like international imperialists and what was the left. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right, we're, we're, we're going to go to ads.

And then when we come back, we're going to talk more about how everything is actually sort of gone. All right, we're back. So one of the things I think is very interesting about this whole thing is that for all of the sort of planning and organizational capacity that's gone into building the sort of like transnational fascist movement. The American right like that, that the American right has been setting up. The American right has just actively been making their allies worse here. It's incredible. I mean, this is something I think that's genuinely very scary about the Brazilian right is that their regular combination of tactics are really effective. They've been able to successfully will this combination of sort of electoralism of lawfare of sort of like using the legal system against their political enemies of sort of road blockades, mass marches and these kinds of things.

And, you know, just straight up paramilitary desk wads of various kinds, you know, you have your sort of urban desk wads, you have these like genocidal logger desk wads and that's been very effective. And, you know, okay, so like they lost this one election, but you know, their position inside Brazilian politics is still really strong. They control a bunch of like governorships. They like Bolsonaro's party and his coalition like control control the Brazilian parliament. Okay. So, you know, like they're in a very strong position. But then they talked to the Americans and they imported January 6th and stormed the capital. And at least right now it looks like it's going really badly for them.

Like even even the sort of like right wing oligarch press has turned on them. Globo, which is like it's Brazil's biggest newspaper. Well, I'm 99% sure it's the biggest newspaper. It could be the second biggest. I'm pretty sure it's the biggest. It's funded by like right wing shit at billionaires. But, you know, their entire front page right now is just them yelling about the coup and like gleefully reporting on like like they had a front page thing for an individual sociology professor who stepped off a bus coming back from Brazil and immediately got arrested. Like this is this is the kind of sort of jubilation that is really it's kind of it's kind of amazing too.

Because like what kind of curse sociologist is also a Bolsonaro's interaction rate. Okay, I feel like if you're a sociologist, there are exactly two you have. Okay, you have three paths. One is you become a cop. Two is you do the Italian thing and you become the red brigades. Yeah. That was Italy's first sociology department, by the way. I turned into the red brigades.

Or three, you become a Nazi. Those are your three options. Yeah, they're awesome. I've never been unfortunate enough to run into any of the the church sociologists feel very right. They are there. Yeah, we we stayed away from them in the answer department. We're like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Yeah, I've taught in sociology before and you definitely do get a lot of students who are there to be a cop.

I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, it sucks. I will say Brazil has had well at least one. I feel like they've had at least a couple of sociologist presidents. Fernando Henrique Cardoso was what yeah, what was a sociologist who was president for a while. And then he got replaced by Lula. This is this has been a tangent about what happens when you put sociology professors and let them out of their cages. So OK, and you know, I would say this going back to global for a second, like some of the stuff that they're saying is not exactly true.

Like they're they're they're trying to sort of make a separation between the like extremist Bolsonaro. East is and then like the people in parliament. And it's like. OK. Yeah, they have this whole thing about these are extremists. These are extremists with no support in parliament. And it's like, OK, buddy, like there are literally people like in Congress who are in Congress because they they were elected because they filmed themselves doing right wing trucker blow blocks. Like, you know, OK, like one of these other things one of their other stories was them was them talking about I personally in politicians frantically deleting their social media posts in support of the protests.

So OK, you know, like it is absolutely it is actually true that like a lot of like even both people in Bolsonaro's own party like denounced it. But, you know. Yeah, I mean, we saw the same shit, right? And then they'll gradually reimagine it over the next two or three years to where like they're not denouncing it. Yeah. Well, we'll see what happens because there is also a chance here that like everyone who was even intentionally like involved with this just goes to prison. Everyone's like back out of this. I'm not a big pro prison guy, but the video of them arriving in a coach at the jail was pretty.

Oh, yeah, that was pretty funny. Yeah. Yeah. So OK. So right now it looks like this has gone pretty badly for them. Again, this is this is this is being recorded one day after it happened. So I don't know if the army has actually done the coup tomorrow. It's not my fault.

It's not out yet. But, you know, I think we should we should ask we should take a step back and ask why is this happening. And I think we should we should ask why did this happen in the same way in both the US and Brazil and why did it not work. And the answer to this is that the capital is a trap. What the American and Brazilian right has ran into sort of ironically is the crisis of the 21st century revolutionary movement. So to explain what I mean here, I'm going to I'm going to read a bit of to our friends, which is a work produced in late 2014 by the invisible committee, which is the pen name of some French anarchists who are most famous for writing the coming insurrection. I'm not normally a huge fan of their work, but they got they got one thing very, very right.

And that's this occupation of the Casbah and Tunis and of the Stagma Square in Athens, siege of Westminster in London during the student movement of 2011 encirclement of the Parliament in Madrid on September 25, 2012, or in Barcelona on June 5, 2011, riots all around the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, December 14, 2010, attempt on October 15, 2011 in Lisbon to invade the Assembly of the Republic, burning of the Bosnian presidential residence in February of 2014. The places of institutional power exerted a magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents managed to penetrate Parliament's presidential palaces and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya, or in Wisconsin, it's only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power and furnished without any taste.

It's not to prevent the people from taking power that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets, real traps for revolutionaries. The popular impulse to rush on to the stage to find out what is happening in the wings is bound to be disappointed. If they got inside, even the most fervent conspiracy freaks would find nothing arcane there. The truth is that power is simply no longer that theatrical reality to which modernity accustomed us. Yeah, I think that's very prescient. And like, we're raised on these myths, right?

Both on left and right, like on the right, like there are all these myths of these American institutions, which are great and unique and shining cities on a hill and on the left. Like, we're raised with the storming of the Bastille and stuff like that as the winter palace, right? These moments of kind of revolutionary change. But yeah, power doesn't. Yeah, and I want to specifically, I want to take a second to talk about the winter palace, because this is actually something that I think sort of worryingly, this is, Nick Fudd has actually talked about this in one of his podcasts, which is that like,

and he's right about this, which is that like, there are like, you can't actually just storm a winter palace and take power, right? It doesn't work anymore. And but I think it's actually worth like taking like two minutes to lay out why that's true. And it's because the winter palace was like a once in like a like a once in a century historical moment. And it only worked because and this is something that I think people forget. The storming of the winter palace was not the thing that overthrew the czar. That was later. That was that was the February revolution.

That is a completely different revolution. The storming of the winter palace. And the reason why that worked was that the government that the Bolsheviks were overthrowing was Kerensky's government, which is just like really dipshit, like interim, interim governments that was only supposed to be there until an election happened and had like the most fig leaf legitimacy of any government ever. Everyone hated them. They had no supporters. And this is why it worked, right?

Because when they had no power at all. And so when the Bolsheviks rolled in on them, everyone else just stayed home. And that is not going to work in any modern context unless like, I don't know, you're like, you two were also like two years in a revolution. There's like three years into a war. Yeah, there's like an incredibly fig leaf government. Maybe you can pull this off. But like that is not that is a absolutely terrible God awful model for attempting to seize like any kind of power or bring down any governments. But, you know, it's because that because that because that became the sort of like mythology of of the Soviet Union,

that, you know, that was sort of burned. The sort of false image of that was burned into the sort of memory of of collective memory of the left to the point where like, most people don't even remember that Karensky was also technically a socialist. And that they're like, and that the October Revolution was a socialist, like a group of socialists overthrowing another group of socialists. And both of them have a very tenuous sort of like it's ten years of whether they're either of them are socialists at all. Yeah, I think going on to take power and kill a bunch of other socialists. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that aside, you know, this this crisis I was talking about, like this is the reason why we're here in the first place, right?

It's in large part because of the failure to overcome the movement of power out of the sort of palace or people expected to be that in the 2011 revolutions failed like that. That that that that's why we're here in hell world, because people people were sort of unable to figure out a way to actually bring down a government instead of sort of being like drawn magnetically into these traps. But those problems are sort of like magnetic draw the Capitol building to will be revolutionary. This is just as much of a problem to the right as it is to the left. And for right now, this has saved us. It's caused the Brazilian right to abandon things they were doing that actually like are genuinely terrifying and, you know, could could have been and have been effective.

Like, for example, one of the cleanup operations that was happening today was the Brazilian army cleared a bunch of these people who were trying to do blockage of state oil facilities. And that actually could have worked, right? Like, yeah, that'll shut things down. Yeah. And you know, and we talked about this before in the other in the other sort of Bolsonaro episodes, but like that those kind of like trucker blockade things like getting highways blockings like those are tactics that the Brazilian right sort of natively uses. And there's a world where the Brazilian fascists stick to their instincts. And instead of doing this doomed attempt to storm the Capitol, they put the same numbers of people into trucks with roadblocks and burning tires and they try to shut down their Brazilian economy.

You know, in essence, there's a world where instead of doing an impossible like January 6th Revolution, where they do an invisible committee one where they realize the power is in logistics and attempting to shut shut down its flow is how you do a revolution. And that is a world that is a lot scarier than the one that we're in. Yeah. But and, you know, I think we'll see how this ultimately plays out. I actually think the fact that this was planned for Orlando is like, you know, with the help of sort of the usual American January 6th crowd. I think this actually really, really fucked them. Like it really deeply hurt.

Sort of the Brazilian fascist movement, which is good. Yeah. It always like when I see that I was thinking about this recently with like me and Marin, everything else, like I always come back to like Markoosa where he talks about the false choice of masters by slaves and like how the solution is not this like one big sort of like big, I don't want to call it like symbolic kind of active violence, but like the great refusal to participate in these things, which is something that lots of people have power to do as opposed to you're doing this stupid shit which centralizes a mid one place against them all arrested. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is also like there's another sort of part of this, which is that like both in the US and in Brazil, the right is not very good at fighting the cops. They got that one horse cop pretty good.

Yeah, there's a couple, like they'll get a couple people, but like they only do well when they're really like when they outnumber the cops like a hundred to one. Yeah. That is different in Europe. That is the thing that like, like if you look at where Zov comes from, right? Zov comes from right wing football hooligans who took the front line and the Maidan and beat the shit into the cops. Yeah. But in the US, it's like, I don't know, everyone's just like. We just don't do this, like the right doesn't fight the cops.

They're just shooting people. Yeah. But there isn't that history of like that's not, I don't just want to pick on like where I come from, but like crowd violence like football hooligans, like that doesn't exist in a meaningful sense in the US. It's not as commonplace and there isn't that like institutional memory of fighting riot police that exists all over Europe. Yeah. I think the thing is that like, okay, American sports fans do fight the cops. We only do it once a year. If that like, I may win the Super Bowl.

Yeah. Well, you know, so they deal with the NHL. But the thing is like, it's only, it's only like maybe like three cities a year that do it. Right. Yeah. And it's not every week. And the World Series too. It's harder because the World Series has this whole sort of like, like they have the parade thing.

They have this whole stage managing to get people to get people to stop from rioting. But really, there's only like two or three events per year where you can get riots, whereas like in Europe, anytime. Yeah. Any given Saturday, you could be throwing down with a cop on a horse. Yeah. But like it's outside of, it's gone long beyond that. Like I remember in like just before this 2011 moment, like the 2000, the earlier 2000s, the anti-G8 movement, like the institutional knowledge on how to deal with large volumes of police and still get your point across. As we saw in 2020, did not exist here and had to be imported from Hong Kong and other places.

Yeah. Badly imported. Yeah. But you know. Infographic from Hong Kong. Yeah. So, okay. Having said all of this, this is not to say that everything is fine.

This is not. You know, I think something that's very important that I have not seen anyone talk about in either sort of January 6th or January 8th is that the immediate reaction to the coup on the left. And this is as true of the Brazilian left as it was of the American left. In fact, I think the American left did American left had way worse. New January 6th was paralysis. Right. Even in Brazil, which has these sort of once mighty social movements, counter mobilizations took almost a full day to materialize by type by, you know, by which point the threat had already dissipated.

So, you know, for a full day, the only thing standing between the fascists and power was their own stupidity. And, you know, as boundless as their stupidity seems, like watching these people like taking a dump on a cabinet, like with a camera in front of them, like it's not actually a shield against fascism. Like every fascism after Mussolini, and even Napoleon III, who's like the sort of modern prototype of fascism, has at least one and usually two or three comically stupid like uprisings and coups that just fail. And they fail and everyone laughs at them. And then on coup number four, they're suddenly in power. And it's like, well, you can't actually write these things off because they're funny. Because again, they're always funny for the first like two. And then on number three, like all your friends are being barged into a camp and shot.

And it's like, well. Yeah. And like, we don't want to be in a place where like one grown up in the room is all that's between us and fascism, right? Yeah. Like an adult making a plan. And I think there's a specific, like, I think social media actually plays a really big role in this. Because, you know, I remember this in January 6th, like there was this kind of like the way that just turns everyone into a spectator. Everyone was just like, you know, I think it was Vicki Osterweil, I think was the first person who said this was like Twitter is a machine that turns action into discourse.

Yeah. And so, you know, while it was going on, right, like everyone turned the action of the thing into discourse. Everyone was just sort of like sitting there paralyzed watching it. Yeah. And that is fatal. Like, if you look at the actual stress test of the sort of machinery of power, right, like, it's actually, I think it's actually much less of a big deal that the cops were on their side. The cops didn't respond or because the cops eventually did clear them out. Right.

It took a long time. The cops eventually did it. But I think I think the thing that's actually more dangerous is that, like, there was no, like, there wasn't a response to the left at all. There's nothing. Right. There were rallies in Sao Paulo like the next day was actually funny because both both both the rallies, both like the people sacking the Capitol and the people in Sao Paulo were both were both seeing National Anthem, which is some real fun politics moments. That's another thing to talk about. Yeah.

But yeah, you compare that to Spain, which is obviously where I'm most familiar with where like people immediately got guns, got in the street and started killing soldiers when they had a much more effective and organized coup, right. And that coup would have failed where it not for fascist intervention from abroad. But yeah, Brazil has powerful unions who did shit. Yeah. And partially I think that's that's like that has to do with the hollowing out of the unions. There's there's sort of long story here. But like, you know, even if you look at like, I think this is this is a sign really of sort of how actually dynamic the left is. Because, you know, if you want to look at like like a dynamic Latin American left, like they, you know, there was there was there was a very, very well organized US backed coup against Hugo Chavez in 2001.

Oh, is it just one doesn't. It was. It was just before I moved there. So I think it would. There were other coup attempts in Venezuela to that were less well organized. Yeah. 2002. Yeah.

2002. And that one got far enough that like the New York Times was like had an article out about how democracy had been restored to Cuba and to Venezuela. And then, you know, the thing that happened after that and that there's a very famous movie of this from a filmmaker who was just there is that over over the next 47 hours, like the left mobilized. And they put so many people in the street that like the coup plotters had to back down and Hugo Chavez got to be president. And, you know, that's the thing that that's the thing that a strong left can do, right? They can actually defeat the military. And yeah, but, you know, but this didn't the US just we fell down on the job. Like, there wasn't much of that in Brazil.

Like I like it like it is true, as Lulu was saying, they picked a day when everyone was gone. But it's still, I think, really alarming that just by just by sort of acting first, they have so much of a. So much of a sort of time advantage and sort of an advantage and reaction over us. Yeah, that film, by the way, people want to watch is called The Revolution will not be televised, which is kind of a great title to expect on that spectator thing that you were talking about. And yeah, I watched that bad boy on VHS back in the day. Oh my God. In Caracas. Wow.

Yeah. Good times. So, okay, finally, in a broad sense, I want to ask, like, what are we doing here? Right? Um, the sort of dominant mode of quote unquote, anti fascism. And this is the model that's being adopted by Lula and the rest of the sort of liberal and even sort of moderate conservative ruling class in Brazil. It's what's been adopted by the Democrats is their anti fascism is posing their opposition to fascism as a defensive democracy, the rule of law. But yeah, okay, let's look at what's actually happening.

These coups aren't working. This is the sort of extra power military attempts to take power. They're losing every time. But do you know how the fascists are taking power by democracy? Their greatest success has been in taking power by just winning elections. Like, look at what happened in India, right? That is a country that has been like very nearly totally consumed by fascism and it was done by just elections over and over and over again. Hungry.

Yeah, even here on a fundamental level, like what we're seeing right now out of the sort of broad swaths of social liberalism, conservatism, social democracy is an unsustainable strategy. Anti fascism, anti fascism as a peer defensive democracy is just preserving the machine that will hand the power of the state over to the fascist on a silver platter. And, you know, that like this, this defensive democracy, the abstract is a death march, right? You know, if you can, you can, you can look at the sort of course of the late 19th, the late 20th, early 21st century, right? Why did the bombs fall over Baghdad? Well, protect democracy. When the when the Mexican government was shooting these appetizas, they're protecting democracy. When the cops raided the, when the cops raided the forest defenders in Atlanta.

Oh, it's because they were a domestic terrorist who are threatening democracy. But what's happened here is that the threat of fascism has sort of pressed ganged armies of people who otherwise would be enemies of sort of capitalist quote unquote democracy into protecting the very institutions that are inevitably going to bring these people back into power. And that's really grim, because it means that something has to change or we're just going to come back here again and again and again until eventually enough of the ruling class flips to back into fascist that they seize power once and for all. So, you know, something, we have to do something else. That's not just this, that's sort of desperate treading water. Yeah, like, like, yeah, fighting to stand still in this terrible place where people can't pay their heating bills and feed their families. Yeah. It's pretty dire fucking outlook for us, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, you know, I would say this, like, there was a vision in 2020 of what that something else could be, right? Like, it's not like we're in the depths of like the 2000s when no one has ever seen anything else being possible, right? Yeah, look, there are a lot of people probably listening because they saw that vision in 2020 and it had changed who they want to be and how they want the world to be. And I think that's really good. And for me, at least, I think once people are out in the streets, which people weren't able to do in time in Brazil, like, they will tend to find that solution outside of institutions. Yeah. The response has been almost entirely institutional, at least in here in this country to a fascist coup.

Yeah. Because people didn't and people were tired from your industry and they'd all been fucking arrested and half of them have been shot. Yeah. And part of the problem also is just that like, like the US just has this sort of geographical problem and then in Brazil has this too, to some extent, which is just like, yeah, this is not like Belgium. You can very quickly get people to the capital. Like, you can't actually, like it is actually genuinely very hard to get a bunch of people to a place quickly here, right? Which, you know, is a thing where we're lucky that, yeah, like the capital kind of, like holding the capital doesn't, you know, it's not a thing that actually allows you to sort of take power. But it's also a real sort of concern about politics in the US because it can't work the same way it works in a lot of places that are smaller.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like Bolivia, for example. Yep. Yeah, even Venezuela, right? Like so much of the institution, almost everything is in Caracas, even though it's a big country. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty much all I got. We'll see if Bolsonaro, when he gets out of the hospital, if he gets out of the hospital.

He's returned to his own social home. Yeah, it's always good to see people with takes on the situation in Brazil who also think the capital is Rio. That's always a fun thing that I can see on Twitter.com. Yeah, it's okay not to post. You know, this is my, okay, I have, one of my rules of thumb about talking about a place is if you can't name five cities in a country, don't talk about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a thing that like so many people who get paid to write articles about places like just fail all the time. That is a low bar, people who get paid. This is the rule.

Like frankly, you should be able to, like if I was doing due diligence, I would be learning Portuguese right now instead of like relying on my Spanish to sort of like power me through it. But you know, like the lowest bar is you should know the capital and you should be able to name five cities in it. And if you can't do that, like maybe don't post. Yeah, it's fine not to post. In fact, when dealing with coups, maybe consider options that are not posting. Yeah. Yeah, go out and stop them. Make friends.

Yeah, so this is what could happen here. You can find us in the places of social media. We live in a period of increasing class conflict during the Trump years strike action reached a 17 year high. And in 2022 strikes surged, increasing almost 40% over 2021 as workers fought back against rising inflation and the cost of living fights over unionization hit sectors previously thought to be unorganizable as workers declared victory across fast food chains, Starbucks and Amazon. And this increased strike activity is taking place against a rising course of revolt. Tenants are farming unions and launching rent strikes, riots kick off in the face of police murdering on average over three people per day. And kids walk out of school demanding everything from access to PPE to an end to attacks on queer and trans youth. It's not just that strikes are increasing, but the logic of the strike to strike a blow against one's class enemies to enact a cost and generalized collective refusal is spreading.

As 2022 comes to a close, the largest strike by education workers across the University of California system has seen barricades, occupied buildings and strikers even liberating dining halls to feed themselves. Members of the United Mine Workers have been on the picket lines for almost two years and this holiday season over 100,000 rail workers stunned the brink of crippling the US economy in an effort to win sick leave as the government rushed to enforce a contract and break the strike. With so many people on the verge of striking, it's easy to wonder what would happen if a strike across industries could be organized, a general strike. It's this very subject that we tackle in today's show. And speaking of strikes, the producers of It Could Happen Here have walked off the job and it's going down as taken over. Yay! We're so excited to be here to talk shit. That's right, IGD will be occupying the means of this production for five shows throughout the month of January as we address some of the major issues of today while looking back at recent examples in history about how the exploited and excluded have attempted to meet the conditions which amiserate our lives head on. Each episode, of course, is going to have special guests and a deep dive from us.

Launched in the summer of 2015, it's going down as a media platform, Radio Show and Podcast. It covers autonomous social movements from an anarchist perspective. As a group, we represent folks from across the US. Tom and myself have been involved in covering and participating in social struggles for over 20 years. Sophie is a longtime educator and community organizer across multiple continents. Marcella is a writer and comedian. This is Mike Andrews. Happy to be here. I'm Sophie. Marcella. And I'm Tom. Yeah, this is really cool. Thanks to all the It Could Happen Here people. This is awesome.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here and talk about strikes. It's going to be a fun time. Yeah, I'm excited about today's topic very much so. So just to start off, it's interesting. It seems like every few weeks on social media every couple months, whenever there's like a big issue that comes up or something that's going on in the news cycle. The idea of a general strike will trend or sort of kind of get out in the ether as this is zeitgeist that becomes really popular. And, you know, we live in this time of increasing protests and strikes and riots, but it also seems like the possibility of a general strike seems like very far off. Or the idea of it even being this like trending thing on social media is sort of like passe or silly. And also it happens so often and we don't see it materialized. It can be easy to sort of write it off. Or on the other hand, a lot of people will say, well, if you want that to happen instead of just like wishing it to be on social media, you should just join a union and get involved that way.

It seems that this drive to constantly declare general strikes, though ambitious sometimes to the point of, you know, people being able to sort of make fun of it. The reality is, is that the repeated sort of call for that has normalized that idea. And what we're seeing a lot in specifically in the US, what we're seeing a lot of people at their workplaces recognize that the business unions have failed, right? It's how we got here. Now, I live in the Rust Belt, I live in the midst of the failure of business unions every single day in my life, and that they also come to understand something that the autonomous in Italy were talking about the 70s, which is that workers already control the means of production. They're already there. They already run the coffee shop, run the restaurant, run the warehouse, run the tech company, whatever. And if they just stop, nobody makes any money. And you don't need a union in a formal sense to do that.

And so I think a lot of workers that traditionally fell outside of unions are starting to understand their power as workers outside of that structure. And that is incredibly important for us going forward. Yeah, I mean, I think you're totally right. I mean, I don't think quiet quitting came out of nowhere. And I know it's just like an idea I like loud quitting more, like I prefer that. But I do think this culture we're creating a culture where it is okay to be anti-work. It is okay for you to say I hate my job and I actually don't do anything and I steal from my boss and we should normalize that, right? Like, I don't think striking is just this whole thing.

And I do want to say this before I move into that. Every single time I post a TikTok video, somebody's always like, general strike July 30th. So it's like, yeah, it's definitely on the internet a lot. But I do think even people saying that and not doing it has an impact because it's like, what is that Martin Sostri said? You have to fight the culture. And the culture that we live in now is a culture that's like obsessed with work for work's sake. And so like maybe part of it is like, yeah, workers already owns the means of production. Yeah, just don't work as hard on your job.

You know, and if you're a work, steal from your boss. It doesn't have to be like this organizational thing because one thing is that like you have to realize is that sometimes unions work with management. So it's like, even if you're like, yeah, like I want to wait for my union. It's like, what if your union is like the Fridolet Union that will go behind your back and like make decisions? I guess all this to say is that I think changing the culture is important. And I think that's happening now. I think, yeah, like you said at the end of that, just like how something that I think we'll get into a lot more in this episode is looking at how this like claim to like join a union being the practical thing to do towards a general strike just isn't accurate at all. And that when you look back in history at kind of any of the exciting moments of general strikes or uprising and stuff, it doesn't come from those official channels.

And so I'm excited to sort of get into that more. And I think, yeah, like we're saying like this thing where it's just become this thing that people will like say and talk about, even if there's not that cultural memory of like exactly what a general strike means or what what's going to happen. There's this idea of like refusal and of solidarity that is captured just in the word and just in saying it. But I think it's really like stirring that energy up. And speaking of cultural memory, pack your dynamite in your pitchforks because it's time for a trip down memory lane. In the early 1900s, the United States groups like the industrial workers of the world of the IWW, which advocated for the abolishing of the weight system and capitalism, rejected racist exclusions of non-white workers in the labor movement and even engaged in shootouts with the KKK, popularized the idea of the general strike in the United States on a large scale. But the idea itself and its application in US history is much older.

Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, anarchists, socialists, and everyday members of the working class all promoted and carried out multiple general strikes as a means to win political and economic concessions. For some, the general strike was also a launchpad for revolution in which workers couldn't theory, seize the means of existence out of the hands of the capitalist class, and run society on its own terms. And it's this battle that thrust millions of everyday working class people directly into conflict with the American state and its military. In US history, the first large-scale example of a general strike occurred in the midst of the American Civil War. In W.E.B. Du Bois' famous book, Black Reconstruction, he explains how it was a general strike of the enslaved black proletariat that brought down the plantation system, not President Lincoln or Union Bullets. Du Bois argues that just like the black lead insurrections of today in Ferguson and Minneapolis, this strike took bourgeois white society by total surprise. He writes that in the South, newspapers denied the very idea that slaves could ever free themselves and even claim that they, quote, did not want to be free. He writes of white society in the North.

The North shrank at the very thought of encouraging servile insurrection against the whites. Above all, it did not propose to interfere with property. Black people on the whole were considered cowards and inferior beings whose very presence in America was unfortunate. Only John Brown knew that revolt would come and he was dead. So Du Bois really paints this picture of this mass-caron society in which slavery is seen as very sad. The more terrifying is the idea of mass black insurrection, which of course mirrors today's situation. I mean, that's what the suburbs are. I mean, right? Like, that's what the suburbs are.

It's like for you to like pretend like all the things that you have are not built on blood. It's for you to like segment yourself away from the people in society that give you everything you have yet you deny them everything. So you can go in your little home and like drink a little tea and like watch your little movies and just like ignore the fact that you're an asshole. You know what I mean? Like just like and even not even more than an asshole. I will go as far as saying I used to say that they're not good or bad people, but like you're acting like a bad person. Like you don't care about other people because you've been tricked to think that like you're getting a good deal. And it's interesting point the Du Bois makes about just like it was only kind of the radical wing of the abolitionist movement that was talking about open revolt.

There's this early anarchist. A lot of people don't reference a lot, but Liza under Spooner, he conspired with John Brown in various plots and he later became a member of the First International and it contributed to early anarchist publications like Liberty. He produced this really early text, which is just fantastic. It's called a plan for the abolition of slavery published in 1858. So this is a couple years before the Civil War. He writes, our plan then is to make our war openly or secretly circumstances may dictate upon the property of the slaveholders, burn the master's buildings, kill their cattle and horses, conceal or destroy farming utensils, abandon labor and seed time and harvest and let the crops perish.

Make slavery unprofitable. I love the line conceal or destroy. It's like you can destroy them. You can also hide them. This is like a parallel that we can draw now to like if you want to like have solidarity with like like other wage slaves is that like do accommodate them and help them steal from their jobs. I mean, it's like these things happened in the past, but these are tactics that we can still use in the present. There's echoes of this quote later with Lucy Parsons, right? You see this during the structure in eight hour workday in Chicago where she gives a speech where she's talking about grabbing knives and going to the doors of the rich as a way to make it very, very, very clear that they weren't going to be able to live off the backs of the working class anymore, right?

And it's this sort of idea of direct action, which now, I mean, if we think about now, what are politicians doing? They're trying to pass laws to make it a felony to have home demonstrations, right? To like do exactly these kinds of things, but in much more passive ways. So if we can really think back, I mean, this is a tried and true technique that people used in the United States for a very, very long time and we can see still how much that terrifies people. There's another awesome quote from Spooner I just want to read as well. And this I find this one really interesting because he's speaking actually to white people in the south, especially people that were in the slave patrols. He says, white rascals of the south, willing tools of the slaveholders, you who drive slaves to do their labor, hunt them with dogs and flog them for pay without asking any questions. You are the main pillars of the slave system. That is the most eloquent way to say ACAB.

Exactly. That's exactly what I was thinking. I think it's interesting to point out as Du Bois writes and as Frederick Douglass said of the Civil War, it was started, quote, in the interest of slavery on both sides. The south was fighting to take slavery out of the Union and the north was fighting to keep it in. And the mass black exodus did not kick off at the start of the war. He makes the really important point that Union leaders made it clear that they did not want to disrupt the plantation system. At times generals even offered to put down slave rebellions and he says that they even forbade, at least in some instances, Union soldiers from singing the song, John Brown's body. But as the north pushed into the south, the flood of former slaves escaping into Union hands grew and grew. By 1862 as Du Bois writes, this was the beginning of the swarming of increasing numbers no longer to work on Confederate plantations, a movement that became a general strike against the slave system. This was not merely the desire to stop work, it was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work.

It was a general strike that involved directly in the in perhaps half a million people. They wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system and to do that they left the plantations. It's interesting too and Du Bois makes this point. The general strike also encouraged and took place alongside many poor whites deserting the Confederate army. One thing that's interesting about the Confederate side of the Civil War, you could get out of fighting if you owned slaves and a lot of poor whites deserted the Confederate army which further crippled it. As Du Bois noted, the poor white not only began to desert and run away, but thousands followed black people into the northern camps. And just some key takeaways to launch into the discussion side of this, it's interesting that the wider society as Du Bois notes, before the Civil War, disparaged the possibility of mass collective action. And I think this really mirrors contemporary conspiracy theories and narratives around black rebellion today that happen often either in the midst of the George Floyd uprising or afterwards. And also the mass strike and refusal that happened during the Civil War, which disrupted the economy and made things like the slave patrols, the policing of the plantation system impossible. That helped bring down the Confederacy, obviously. And I think it's important to ask, as our contemporary society remains structured around racial capitalism, what might be done in the current system in terms of mass refusal and desertion that would cause a similar effect?

The idea of the wider society in disparaging mass collective action is because that the fear is letting us know that we do have mass power. You know what I mean? It's not a surprise that people always say that Lincoln freed the slaves. Lincoln literally said, if I had to end slavery to save the Union, I would have ended slavery and if I had to keep slavery to save the Union, I would have kept slavery. You know what I mean? So just like this whole idea of letting black people know you can't do shit, don't even bother, is because they know that we can do shit. And we are doing shit because black people are always rebelling. If you come to Flappouche, you see it in full color. They realize the government doesn't give a fuck about them and they've created their own institutions to support themselves. So it's like this whole idea to let us tell us don't even bother and criminalizing the informal sector because it's like that's a way for us to gain power outside of the formal sector. You know what I mean? And things like that. So I just think it's like when they tell us, don't bother trying to fight back.

Everybody has to suffer. That's what they always say. Everybody suffered and we all just suffer. And it's like, no, we don't want to suffer and we're actually doing things to ease our suffering. And I think this is just like all this is to say that people who are out there doing stuff, keep doing stuff. And like, if you want to do stuff, do it. You don't have to be part of a union. You don't have to quit your job and be an activist. By the way, Tate, activists are not really activists. You can do regular shit in your whole day. You can do a free store on the corner of your street so people can have clothes. It's like you could, striking from the economy means like divesting your time and resources. And you could do it. We could all do it in some shape or form. Well, and I think it becomes a lot more possible today to think about that than it did, say, before 2008, right? So we had this kind of collapse of the legitimacy of the American political project sort of with the Iraq war, right?

We all kind of saw how badly that can turn out. But what was left in America to uphold that entire edifice was the idea that even though things politically were kind of screwed up, at least there's economic success and then that failed too, right? And so this sort of idea that built up after World War II, this kind of concept of, you know, the labor court for compromise, the loyal worker that's going to get provided for the rest of their life, not only did our parents' generation find out that that was a lie, but younger generations don't really buy it at all. And so what you're really seeing is I think this kind of breakdown socially of the legitimacy of the idea of the American dream because of all of its problematic elements and its impossibility and its absurdity and kind of this revival of an idea which existed prior to World War II, which was an idea of social revolt, right? It was something we saw manifest during the Great Depression, and it's part of the reason why the New Deal exists, was a way to put that down,

was a way to prevent workers from feeling like the only thing that they had in front of them was to take over their factories and show up at the doors of the rich and so on, so on, so on, right? But that whole idea of the New Deal, that concept that the government was going to take care of you and the company was going to take care of you, collapsed in the 1970s. But the idea that it existed still holds on in some sectors of America today. I mean, you see this with the MAGA crowd really heavily. The idea that like nothing systematically needs to change really, we just need better outcomes. And we just need, in their case, Donald Trump to pay attention to us and give us the things that we want. But really outside of that almost comical patriotism, you don't really see a lot of adherence to that vision any further. And that makes the idea of mass refusal not only a lot more possible, but something that's actively happening currently.

Yeah, and the other part too I want to bring in is that when the New Deal was cast, it excluded like black people, right? And so that's one way, it's like this constant like how white people are like tricked into like submitting to the system. And it happens so many times and they still keep saying, trick us again, trick us again. It's like, yeah, they're going to give you shit so you're not upset. And then they're going to exclude black people because at the end of the day, black people do all the work that we need to survive as a society. Do we not remember who the essential workers were? Like who does the jobs that we need to like live? Like, you know what I mean?

So yeah, you can like be out of work and get your little thing, but as long as we keep enslaving and treating the people who make the society run, it's fine. And now that's happening to white people too. And they're like, oh no, this is not cute. Like it's not fun. I'm quiet quitting. You know what I mean? Because like they're real, like the way black people have been treated is certain to happen to white people. And it's just like, I hope this is what I was going to ask you.

How do we prevent another New Deal situation from happening where white workers are tricked again? Like because I feel it's coming, I feel like they're going to find a way out of this. And like, how do we know what if it's like bullshit? And like, how do we call it out and how do we call it out? That's what student loan forgiveness was, right? I mean, like if we really think about it, the Democratic Party has been built recently since the Obama era on this idea of re-instituting elements of the New Deal without threatening the existence of capitalism. Very intentionally, right? We saw that the Affordable Care Act is a version of that, right?

So I mean, they are doing this. And I think what's fascinating about this, and this is something that radicals in the late 60s pointed out often about Lyndon Johnson, is they said, you know, liberals voted for Lyndon Johnson and they put all their hopes in him. So when he failed them, it didn't have anything left to do except hit the streets, right? Like there was no other option. And I think what we've really seen since the Obama era is the collapse of the idea that the way that the Democrats do social assistance isn't any way going to solve anything. That's just going to continue to perpetuate the situation in which we need social assistance, right? As opposed to fundamentally ending that, which is, you know, the language that they put forward when they talk about things like justice, which we all know that they don't really have much adherence to, right? But I think until the Democratic Party gains legitimacy again, if they ever do, which hopefully they don't, but if they ever do, yeah, we might be able to see this kind of use of reformism as counterinsurgency again, right?

Which is really what the New Deal was. But really until that, I mean, we saw in 2020, you know, when the legitimacy of the group of people who often relies on that technique falls apart, you get uprisings in the streets, right? And so we're at kind of a different point, I think, than maybe just before the New Deal kind of came into effect. Something I want to go back to, too, that I think is relevant to this is the piece where the quote from Spooner is talking about concealing, or like, in secret, or in public, or whatever, how there's like a lot of power in terms of like things like general strikes, in that sort of like invisibility or whatever, in the unpredictability, in like not going for like building movements based on like visibility or public perception, or like the media or whatever, but actually building them in these ways that can't be seen as much and might be concealed. And also this thing where people are underestimated, like it makes me think about the revolution in Haiti in the late 1700s, which is, you know, a long time ago, but still very relevant, and just thinking about how the kind of like colonizers in Paris like couldn't believe the reports that were coming out of uprising in Haiti at the time, because they were so racist, basically,

that they didn't believe that black people there who were in state could rise up and could have that like, I don't know, awareness, gumption, whatever. And that gave them a lot of room, you know, that was like a position of power for them that like they were being underestimated like that much. And I think that's something we see with like, even though like the idea that's gone on from that time really of like outside agitator and stuff like in any uprising that we see, yeah, that involves black people is that there's something in that that is also powerful and gives possibility. Well, speaking of outside agitators, we're going to take a break and hear from some of our sponsors right now. In 1865, on paper, the Civil War ended and the Union was saved. A decade later, the North began pulling out of the South, marking the end to reconstruction efforts in the beginning of both Jim Crow and a reign of terror and white vigilantism in the form of the Ku Klux Klan. The 1870s was also a period of increasing poverty, declining wages, rising homelessness, economic depression and exploding class conflict.

As the stage was set for the great upheaval of 1877, a general strike that rocked multiple states as workers across lines of color, gender, profession and age threatened the very core of the capitalist state. As the decades were on, multiple general strikes followed, as did a heavy handed government response that evolved to police and repress the broader population. Wanting to know more about this history of these general strikes and their importance, we caught up with labor historian and author Robert Ovets, author of when workers shot back and we the elites. Ovets argues that the often violent general strikes of the late 1800s and early 1900s showcase the ability of working people to not only confront the state and capitalism, but also organize society on their own terms. Well, general strikes have been a rare occurrence, but a very powerful example of the way that organized workers and communities can transform society and hopefully transcend capitalism. I think we have in the examples of general strikes in US history, an example of the potential for getting beyond capitalism, and so that's what makes them really exciting to study and to write about. That general strike doesn't just happen, and we don't actually know exactly why general strikes happen, but we know that they don't just happen. They're not spontaneous.

There has to be a groundwork of organizing and engaged activists and organizers who are working quietly, sometimes for months or years to work and organizing their fellow workers and to build community connections to support their strike actions. And there also has to be a good communication of what the strike is about, what their demands are, and the ability to communicate and spread information about that strike. Probably the two most important general strikes in US history were the one in 1877 and the one in 1919 in Seattle, and the one in 1877 was a general strike throughout the railroad industry, but it also had this extraordinary microcosmic, if you will, general strike that was happening in St. Louis and East St. Louis. But what was fascinating about that was that the groundwork had been laid in 1877, not by a union actually, because the workers had tried to form a union, but it was sabotaged. It was infiltrated, and the organizers tried to call off the set date to start the general strike in the railroad industry, but the workers went on strike anyways, and they built their own organization across dozens of different railroad companies on their own. In St. Louis, however, there was a new left-wing party called the Working Men's Party that was formed by various socialists and communists and anarchists who had taken over the city and for a few days tried to run it. And that was probably closer to what happened in Seattle in 1919, where over 100 local unions actually pressured the labor council to call a general strike. And so that was kind of built up from below through formal unions, but then it went far beyond anything that those AFL-affiliated unions were willing to really do.

The St. Louis General Strike in 1877 that I was just mentioning, there was a multi-racial coalition of worker organizers who literally took charge of the strike. There had been a strike committee formed, and that strike committee was dominated by the Working Men's Party activists. But the workers themselves started to organize outside the confines of the strike coordinating committee, and it was very multi-racial. They started marching on one workplace and another. There was some evidence that there were some women that were involved in it, so there were strong ties to the community and various households and neighborhoods. But they marched on one workplace to another and spread the strike, and within a couple of days, much of the city had been shut down. And the irony of this was that the strike coordinating council actually freaked out about how multi-racial the crowds were that were shutting down these workplaces and leaving work. And internally, they became very divided based on their racism, and there were some members of the coordinating committee that were extreme racial supremacists

and didn't want the strike to continue, and they debated how to stop the strike, how to call it off. But the reality was that they had lost control of it to the workers outside of the committee. And when it became clear that the militias were being called into St. Louis to attack the city, the workers marched on the meeting hall where the strike coordinating council was and demanded that they appropriate money to acquire arms to defend the city. But they refused to do that, and they eventually tried to call off the strike. And so that lasted a few days, and race was a huge factor in why the strike spread and how the workers took over the city. But it was also a factor in how it was actually killed by those who were supposedly, quote unquote, running the actual general strike. In the case of Seattle, we don't know as much about the racial composition of the workers, but we do know that it was very generalized throughout the entire city. And the reason we know this is because the general strike committee, which was formed by the labor council, had representatives of every union.

And they took care of many of the reproductive needs of the population. For example, they kept the hospital running. They set up free kitchens where people could eat, as well as setting up and publishing a newspaper that came out every day during the five days of the strike. So they took care of also of public safety. So what was extraordinary about the Seattle general strike is how it incorporated many of these issues that we would say is about gender and reproductive needs of the population. They didn't just shut down the workplace. They actually took over the city and reorganized society to meet the needs of humanity. The 1877 strike actually resulted in what I show in a lot of detail in my first book, When Workers Shot Back, how the state and capital reorganized themselves in order to be able to respond a lot quicker to self-organized workers and strikes and especially general strikes.

For example, the modern police came into being in many cities as a result of the 1877 strike because up until that point the police were, if you will, they were kind of like gig workers. They worked on quote unquote tips or bribes. There were very few cities that had any municipal police and if they did, they had very small forces and so that was one reason why the strike spread so quickly around the country over that 10 day or so period in July of 1877. So modern policing really came into being also, as you mentioned, the militias were transformed into what became the National Guard. The militias also proved to be undependable because they were mostly composed of working men and if they were called out locally, they knew the strikers and in fact some of them were strikers and didn't even show up for their militia duty. So militias were essentially de-emphasized and they were replaced by a state-controlled National Guard as a result of the passage of a new federal law. The military was also funded on a permanent basis. One reason why the military was so slow to be deployed to put down the strike in 1877 was most of the soldiers were out in the west fighting essentially a genocidal war against the plains native peoples. And so there weren't enough military around and also Congress hadn't funded the military that year, believe it or not, and so the military was unfunded and undersized.

Another consequence of this was that many corporations started to work together to create their own, you could say, mutual aid to protect one another. They started forming employer groups in order to be able to respond in a more coordinated method. So you started to see corporations cooperate as a result of this. In fact, many of the technologies that we take for granted today were a result of the 1877 railroad strike. For example, the telegraph was installed in many rich peoples' homes as a way to be able to contact the police directly. Those lines went directly to the police. The so-called patty wagon was also invented as a result of the 1877 strike as a weapon against large crowds. So there were a number of new technologies that were implemented and became more widespread as a result of that strike. In Seattle also, the workers were prepared. They had known their history and they formed a self-defense group composed primarily of World War I veterans who had just come back from World War I. They patrolled the city and they did things like shut down bars because they didn't want people to get drunk and start fighting and that would be a justification for the National Guard to be called in.

But the police started to essentially line up outside the boundaries of the city and they waited for reinforcements, threatening essentially to invade Seattle before the general strike was called off. But the workers were prepared. They did carry out an organized self-defense against that eventuality. The 1946 Oakland general strike was part of an extraordinary wave of post-World War II strikes that were happening just like after World War I. And actually during World War I there was a wave of strikes. The same thing happened when a lot of soldiers started coming back from World War II. Unemployment shot up. Women were sent packing. Prices exploded. There was a shortage of housing and workers started to organize. And during that few year period there was a general strike in the steel sector and Truman threatened to take over some of the larger companies and he was repelled by the Supreme Court. But as a consequence of this upsurge of class struggle, the Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act which still governs us today. For workers who try to organize in the private sector where they're under the National Labor Relations Act, the Taft-Hartley Act was an amendment to that law.

One of the most important things it did was it banned so-called secondary strikes which means that if workers go on strikes somewhere, workers can't strike in solidarity and particularly if they have a union contract with their employer via legal. Now there are some workers that are exempted from that. For example, transport workers because they're under a different federal law. They're under the Railway Labor Act which is part of the reason why we almost just saw a railroad general strike before the Democrats killed it a few weeks ago. But the Taft-Hartley Act continues to serve as a means of suppressing and repressing the ability not only of workers to organize unions in their local workplaces but to actually engage in a general strike. So again, we've been listening to Robert Ovett's author of When Workers Shot Back and We the Elites. Just a few key takeaways from that discussion. We see various examples in these general strikes of tensions developing between more radical elements and reformist ones that want to contain revolutionary expressions and also stop workers from really taking over society. We also see positive examples of these strikes spilling out across lines of race, gender, and age and profession. One thing we see of course again and again is the state responding to these strikes with the combination of militias, police, and of course the National Guard. And finally, many of these strikes lead to the passing of legislation which is interesting because far from this sort of progressive arc towards justice, instead we see constantly again and again the state either reforming itself to become more oppressive, engage in surveillance, reconstitute the police in a certain way, reconstitute the military, or sometimes bring the workers into the superstructure of the state in order to better manage them. Yeah, I totally agree. It's not getting better. They're just being smart about it. They're like little slimy balls. They're just reshaping as they need to shape and form to get workers.

When you were reading that, it felt like a writer's room. It felt like a movie of how do we control these people? You know what I mean? It felt like it was this checker where they were like, oh, they make their move, we make their move. And it's like the state is a tool and you see that because it's a tool of the elite and you see that through the laws that are passed and when they're passed. Because when black and white people form, then there's violence, a lot of state violence, extreme state violence, because they want to remind us that's bad, you don't do that. And then they'll do stuff to placate workers, white workers too, with a Wagner hack, with unionization, a lot of black people were excluded from that. Maybe just maybe things aren't getting better like they telling you they are. Things are just reshaping. Something else I'm thinking about as you're talking and just like from from that history that it is like we hear that, like the creativity of the state with their oppression or whatever just going on. But also how people keep coming back with like new and different things, you know, how like it actually takes a lot of repression to stop these things. Like if you look at what happened in 1877 or whatever, it's like they kill quite a lot of people to stop that strike wave and stuff, you know, like it's really heavy handed and then but still a lot of strikes happen after that and it leads up to a

hay market in 86 or whatever. And I just think again, again, we see like repression, but then we see a flowering again. And I think that what we're seeing like right now, maybe is like a sort of creative non-union. What we're seeing is we're seeing over this time, the mechanism of counterinsurgency get a lot more complex. Right. So in the 1870s, it's let's get some guns and force everyone to go back to work. But now it's why don't we get nonprofits to fund these, you know, public programs? Why don't we have community policing and coffee with cops? And so what you saw during like the George Floyd uprising is you saw a lot of this like, well, I know you all want to cut funding from police departments, but really what you should do is you should come to our budget meeting and we can put it in the city budget. We should talk about it that way. And that was a way to force the resistance in the streets back into a mechanism that's able to be more easily controlled. But we see in like Rust Belt cities, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, places like this, the way that the wealthy at this period of time, the late 19th and early 20th century were already talking about trying to change entire environments. Right. So like surveillance, nonprofit activity, like that changes the whole environment. It's not just about a single individual objective, but it shapes an entire reality. In these Rust Belt cities during that period of time, I mean, you have a lot of like free art museums and stuff like this that are world-class institutions.

But if you look at their charters and actually look at them closely, the reason those institutions exist was to quote, encultrate the working class. And it was all about like Rockefeller, very specifically Cleveland, money to these institutions so the working class wouldn't kill them, like wouldn't murder them. And it was in the middle of really intense anti-capitalist activity in those cities. Right. And so we can watch the development of those techniques. Right. Now it takes the form of defunding the police campaigns and things like that as opposed to abolitionism. It takes the form of trying to find softer means of policing, like surveillance, as opposed to just having clubs and guns and stuff. Or in the case of the Democratic Party, the smart border, when they talk about the smart border, which is essentially putting a bunch of sensors and cameras in the desert to try and catch people crossing the border, that somehow less repressive by shaping the entire space around surveillance that somehow less repressive than just having police. And they use that idea that if they're not in a uniform and they don't have a weapon right in front of them or aren't human, that somehow there's some benefit that emerges.

And somehow the state is retreating a little bit. When in actuality, things like body cameras, stuff like that, just increase the ability of the state to have visibility. Just increases the number of cameras on the street. It increases the ability of the state to control information and decide what information gets out. These are all things which have reinforced the power of the state, but they get portrayed as reforms that are supposed to solve these huge social problems that people keep raising up. Well, speaking of things rich people give us so we won't kill them, we're going to now hear from some of our sponsors. So far, we've talked about general strikes that are largely over 100 years old. But now we're going to turn and look at two examples of general strikes that took place within the last 20 years. In December of 2005, Republicans passed in the House of Representatives HR4437, also known as the Border Protection Anti-Terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005,

a proposed piece of legislation that's as draconian as it sounds. The bill, as the ACLU wrote, pushed to, quote, militarize the border, give extraordinary powers to low-level immigration officials, allowing law enforcement to expel without hearing anyone believe to be undocumented, and detain non-citizens indefinitely without meaningful review. The bill also sought to levy criminal penalties against anyone that engaged in assisting someone that was undocumented, threatening both employers of undocumented workers as well as union organizers, teachers, clergy, and beyond. Foreshadowing the Trump presidency, it also called for hundreds of miles of border fence and authorized state and local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law. As George Kempfuss wrote, in the C-shapeway to insurrection, the bill would transform almost every person in the United States into either undocumented violators, police enforcers, or classify them as criminally complicit. The authoritarian nature of the legislation and the existential threat it represented pushed many undocumented workers to take action and organize on a mass scale.

As Kempfuss wrote, starting in March of 2006, marches and more than half a million people overwhelmed the centers of major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Dallas, halting business while there were literally hundreds of smaller gatherings in many other smaller cities. There were dozens of student walkouts in high schools around the country, as well as a nationwide immigrant general strike called for on May Day that was heeded by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of workers, including truck drivers who shut down the port of Los Angeles. Despite a series of large-scale immigration raids aimed at derailing the movement, millions took the streets and carried out strikes all outside of the direction of union and Democratic Party leadership. The mass protests and strikes helped revive May Day as a day of labor and worker action in the United States, installed for over a decade right-wing attacks on immigrants. HR4437 failed to pass in large part due to the mass opposition it faced on the streets in the spring of 2006. Direct action, as they say, gets the goods.

And what's fascinating about the 2006 strike is that it was organized outside of established unions and political parties, especially the Democratic Party, had a key youth wing to it. We saw lots of student walkouts. It was able to seriously push back against this draconian wave of anti-immigrant legislation, and that worked for around 10 years. And it seems like we don't reference this strike enough and talk about how important it was. I was a junior in high school when kids were walking out, but this is how I sleep I was. I didn't walk out, and I just remembered thinking, oh my god, those kids are so courageous and they're such fat asses. And it's so cool that they're doing that, and I wish that I could. That law was like, he did a slave law act, like, straight up.

They were just trying to, like, re-install slavery among people who were not here documented. Like, you know what I mean? They were trying to create a situation where people were so fucking desperate that they were going to work for slave wages. And I'll say this about New York City. There's a huge, like, immigrant population, a huge undocumented worker population that we didn't even, I mean, I didn't know about until COVID hit. Like, there's a lot of people who are keeping the economy alive that are not even counted, and they pay for our existence. As we're talking about those two things that always come up for me when talking about these strikes. First is, you know, the entire concept of, quote, immigration reform, as it was being talked about by Republicans at the time,

and then later accelerated under Trump, this idea of border walls started with the American Nazi Party, right? Like, this was an American Nazi Party policy proposal in the 1950s and 60s that got picked up through white supremacist movements, through people like George Wallace, and sort of imported into the Republican Party. That's why it feels racist. Yeah, because it's Nazis. But I think the other thing that was really inspiring about that movement, I was, you know, out of college at that point, watching this happen, it was one of the first times I saw mass decentralized action happen across the entire country at that scale. That sort of hit an apex like during these days, right?

The sort of period of time in which people kind of took it upon themselves to shut the whole country down. And it just shows what can happen when communities are organized as communities of people, and not as spectators in some sort of removed symbolic political action, but actually become immediate protagonists in what's going on in front of them. Another thing I think is really interesting about this is that it was such a massive response, and that part of what the Act was saying was that you could be like prosecuted for assisting someone who's undocumented, that I think it goes back to what we've been talking about with the other strike stuff, is like the government is very aware that solidarity between people is dangerous, basically, and tries to legislate it.

You know, after that strike in the strike wave in 1877, you start to get all those anti-conspiracy laws and stuff because that's a threat. And I loved it in this sense, it's like they put that out and it gets like such a massive response against it that people really like win, basically, and that lasts for like a decade. Yeah, I think that goes back to the idea of white supremacy historically in the United States being this system of how people describe it as threats and sticks of offering incentives to be included in this bracket of whiteness, but then also saying, oh, and if you help that kid at school, we're going to throw you in jail along with them. Which, again, is a good reason to celebrate these strikes because they were effective in beating back this legislation, but also pointing out that everyone should have been taking part in these actions.

Well, hey, thanks for tuning in. That's going to wrap up the first episode. We encourage you to follow us going down on masses on at IGD underscore news. And we hope you enjoyed us taking over. It could happen here. We're going to be back tomorrow. We're going to continue to look at general strikes. We're going to do a deep dive into Occupy Oakland that kicked off in 2011.

And we're going to look at how a citywide general strike grew out of the Oakland commune after the police nearly murdered an Iraq war veteran. And thanks for tuning in. Welcome back. Once again, you're listening to It Could Happen Here with the crew from It's Going Down taking over. This is our second show and we'll be doing a total of five episodes throughout the month of January. So if you like what you hear, please let the amazing folks at Cool Zone Media know. Yesterday, we began by looking at general strikes in U.S. history. Starting with the mass plantation strike during the American Civil War.

We spoke with labor historian Robert O Vets about the revolutionary and bloody history of general strikes in the United States. And we also looked at the immigrant general strike in 2006 that successfully beat back draconian legislation that sought to further militarize the border and attack undocumented people. On today's show, we're going to be looking at a general strike that was called for by Occupy Oakland, which took place on November 2nd, 2011. Occupy Oakland was part of the much larger Occupy movement that began in New York with the occupation of Zuccotti Park, but was seen as the radical focal point for the growing struggle. Starting as an occupation on October 10th in front of Oakland City Hall named Oscar Grant Plaza on October 25th. Iraq war veteran Scott Olson was nearly killed after being shot with a police projectile during clashes between police and demonstrators as law enforcement attempted to evict the growing Oakland commune. Following the Olson shooting, thousands reoccupied Oscar Grant Plaza and the general strike was called for a week later. Upwards of 100,000 people took part in the strikes associated actions, which included mass marches, a large anti-capitalist black block which broke bank windows, and the shutting down of the port of Oakland with upwards of 100,000 people participating.

But before we hear from our guests on the subject, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Occupy movement and Occupy Oakland and why it was so important. The Occupy movement itself grew amidst this growing anger over the economic crisis, but also this fading belief in the hope and change promised by Obama. While nationally it seemed to sort of come out of nowhere, there were certainly things that really helped influence it. Naturally, there was the Occupation by Chicago workers at the Republic Windows and Doors factory, which signaled a real turning point, as well as the Occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol in 2011 against anti-union legislation, and all this was happening against the backdrop of the Arab Spring. And then in the Bay Area, the Oscar Grant rebellion in riots in 2009 and 2010 kicked off and had a massive impact, centering discussions around police, race, and white supremacy, as well as the role of rioting and social movements. At the same time, students and graduate workers occupied college campus buildings in New York and across California, which really spread the concept of occupying across the social terrain as well as slogans like strike, occupy, takeover, and occupy everything. Now the explosion of the Occupy movement in the fall of 2011 cannot be overstated. Occupying cabinets became a focal point for people angry at the general state of the world to gather, discuss, and act, and they became a real focal point for encounter.

While some cities saw these encampments come and go pretty quickly, many saw concrete projects and organizing come out of them. People were fighting to resist foreclosures, for instance, in a lot of cities. And for many people, this was where they were introduced to anarchist concepts such as direct action, horizontal organizing, and consensus decision making, which really brought these ideas front and center to hundreds of thousands of people in a real intangible way. And while a lot of people on the left from a variety of backgrounds took part, the real backbone of those involved in Occupy were just everyday people who were new to social movements and became activated by material conditions and just the zeitgeist of what was happening at the time. Occupy was fascinating for me. I was in the Rust Belt at the time, still am. At the Occupy, I was part of the first march of 5,000 people there. There were maybe like 200 or 300 people at the General Assembly the night before. So most of the people that showed up were not people currently connected at that point to any kind of political organizing. They were just people that showed up because they heard about it on the internet and they showed up to do the thing. And that camp lasted nine months. But we can start to see the impacts of that kind of breakdown of that division between people who declared themselves political and quote everybody else.

We start to move forward past Occupy. We start to see that manifest during Mike Brown uprising in Ferguson. We start to see that manifest during the George Floyd Rebellion where this kind of division between those that declare themselves to be political agents and those that have not declared themselves to be so just ceases to really exist. And it's in those moments where we really actually see uprisings occur. Occupy pointed out an important thing which is a fallacy in the way that we think in that we think that radicals make revolts happen. When in reality people make revolts happen and our job is to antagonize circumstances and it's only at the point in which that division breaks down between quote us and everybody else that revolts actually occur. And Occupy was a really important point in a trajectory of I think a sector of the American anarchist movement and a sector of the American political scene, starting to really internalize that understanding, starting to really grasp how different that is from the way that we've been taught to organize. And we're still seeing the ramifications of a lot of that work today, many, many, many years later. Looking at Occupy or looking at any of these big moments, when we look back, we can see all these things that contribute to it. And I think that this thing that you're talking to, Tom, of the kind of losing that thing of professional actors or political actor in a situation is so important. And I think that that is something that can really inspire us in terms of what's happening in this moment too or how general strikes happen or how something like Occupy happens is that things happen. Like there are sort of moments that are kind of outside of our control. It's not something that can be planned for. And if you do all the right things, then you get a general strike.

But you can kind of be relating to circumstances and to each other and then different things happen. Thinking about the George Floyd uprising in 2020, none of us predicted COVID and how that might have contributed to what happened in that. Or just all these different circumstances that come together to make these moments. And I think that something like what's going on now, we could look back and look at all these different things that are happening that then make something big happen. And we never really know or can control it. A lot of the striking and Occupy, it serves the purpose of not us just coming together collectively, but it also serves as purpose of propaganda. And it just reminds me of this idea, important idea of us occupying public spaces and the reason why we're not allowed to occupy public spaces, because it's like sort of taking the power. And when there's lots of us occupied in public spaces, the media covers it. And then it's like, well, what are these people talking about? What are they doing? And that within itself also serves as a propaganda mechanism to spread. So just listening to that, and I remember one, again, Occupy was one of the moments that I was one of the people who viewed myself as not political, but I cared about what was happening in the movement because that was the first time I heard we are the 99%. I think about moments of radicalization, and I think of this one as being one of them as a person who just like recently, and as a five years ago, recently awoke, like these are moments that I remember like had an impact on me seeing people on the street taking public spaces.

And I think that perhaps that's something that we should continue to do. And maybe it's not one of those things where it's like, maybe not as large as Occupy, maybe it's not consistently large. But like, maybe we as civilians should just take over public spaces all the time, just as a reminder to ourselves that we do have the power to do that. Like, we can't have a free store here because we want to. We don't have to ask the government for permission to do anything. Like, I think it's a huge first step of becoming ungovernable. And speaking of things that belong in a free store, we're now going to hear from our sponsors. For us to understand how the Oakland General Strike of 2011 took place, we first have to go back to what made Occupy Oakland so important to so many people in just a few short weeks in October. In the following interview, we speak with its going down contributor, author and translator based in Mexico, Scott Campbell, about his memories of Occupy and what set the stage for a massive strike on November 2. We then speak with Tova, who was involved in the Occupy Oakland Labor Solidarity Committee, about Bay Area labor unions becoming involved in the strike. So to kick things off, Scott, tell us about Occupy Oakland, what it looked like, how life in Oscar Grand Plaza was organized, and about this living, breathing thing many came to call the Oakland commune.

If you were to walk into Occupy Oakland, I think you'd be overwhelmed. It was an amazing, vibrant, self-managed, auto-gestive community where you had folks living there in Oscar Grand Plaza. You had food, childcare, medical care, libraries, all sorts of projects in a self-run, sort of directly democratic, assembly-based, communally organized space. And it was open to anyone except for police and politicians who wanted to come and participate in this sort of radical experiment, this radical form of being with one another outside the constraints of how society normally constructs us to perform and interact with one another. And I think what really stuck out to me the most during this time period was just the welcoming atmosphere, the sense of potential that the camp and the activities based around the camp held, the openness of people, and really the wide range of individuals who were participating and collectives who were participating, which certainly, of course, led to differences of opinions at times that created some dynamics that were a struggle to work through and navigate, but at the same time really added to a sense of a space that went beyond a single project, that went beyond a single vision, but that was horizontal, communal, and open in a way that I'd never experienced before and that I have yet to experience again. It definitely had an organic feel to it of sort of people coming together lending what skills they had, lending what resources they had across a variety of positions that may be broadly categorized on the left or post-left spectrum, a spectrum of folks with a spectrum of capacities, of needs, I mean a large number of unhoused neighbors who were there, who brought their own life experiences and their own knowledge and their own skills to bear on the project,

which I think was a really, I guess, a powerful learning opportunity for a lot of people who hadn't really been in direct contact with unhoused folks and who were unfamiliar with really perhaps the impetus beyond Occupy Oakland and beyond Occupy, or the impetus behind Occupy Oakland and the impetus behind Occupy Wall Street in general, which was of course the 2008 financial crash and the Great Depression and the bailout of the banks while people got foreclosed on their homes, especially people of color and black folks, which hit particularly hard in Oakland. And so we see all these dynamics coming together and trying to work themselves out organically without being mediated by any one organization or any particular ideology. And it was a powerful, confusing, messy, lively, beautiful experience. How to categorize a general assembly is a great question. I think for me, how I interpreted it is it added a structural framework for how to navigate issues that would arise within the camp, within the sort of occupation, for lack of a better word, of Oscar Grand Plaza, facilitating the day-to-day functionings of things. In a lot of ways, it was a decision-making body. I wouldn't call it a government as such because it tried to run on consensus or modified consensus, and anyone was free to bring proposals to the general assembly. They were free to bring their ideas and promote their events and promote their actions and activities.

A lot of decisions were also being made by people who just showed up to do the work without necessarily consulting the general assembly. So you almost had different tiers of activity and different tiers of organization occurring in the same space that seemed, again, I go back to this word, that seemed to organically work itself out most of the time. And within the general assembly, that was the more formal structure where people came together at times nightly to discuss issues facing the camp, to discuss issues in terms of dealing with the police and the city government, and eventually the state and federal government, as they showed up, to determine how to respond to various acts of aggression and attacks on the camp and attacks on the space, to figure out how to better run the space, even to figure out how to better run the general assembly itself was a big question within the general assembly. And these were general assemblies that anyone could participate in. You didn't have to show qualifications or necessarily be living in the space. Anyone was free except for the police and politicians to come and speak to the general assembly. I remember one time Jean Kwan, then mayor of Oakland wanted to come and speak to the general assembly and she was told she could, but she'd had to wait her term. And so she decided to leave because she didn't want to wait. She didn't feel like she had to wait.

It was really a space of encounter for people to bring up different aspects that there were concerning them, that they were working on, that they wanted to see flourish in the space. The biggest general assembly was happened around when to move forward with the general strike, but there were also general assemblies on things like issues around smoking and people's health and well-being in the space, issues around cleanliness, issues around safety, how to interact with the police, how to interact with the government. Do we put forward demands? What should the name of it be? Is Occupy Oakland a problematic name? Should we change it to Occupy Decolonize Oakland? These were all sorts of issues that were brought forward to the general assembly along with like how do we meet the material needs of the space and how do we handle the supplies that are being brought in and make sure that they're equitably distributed. Who can do what for whom within the space? How do people's skills get the most use out of them? It was a very much a lively atmosphere. It felt like, I don't know, I know the word democracy is contentious. It felt like a directly democratic process, but it's important to recognize that there were some people who were more skilled and more familiar with how consensus works, who were more familiar with the process that was behind the running of the general assembly, which has its roots in anarchist practice and anarchist forms of decision making.

And so those folks definitely had a hand up when it came to making decisions, when it came to presenting proposals, when it came to even administering and running the general assembly itself. Those tasks often fell into the laps of anarchists who I think did a good job of making sure that these general assemblies ran smoothly and that they were inclusive and open to all who wanted to participate. And people could bring their ideas and sometimes they got approved, sometimes they got rejected. Even if they got rejected, some folks decided they would implement them anyways, and that also worked out as well as sometimes creating conflict. The city grew increasingly frustrated with the encampment as they found themselves unable to make any progress in trying to recuperate and trying to gain favor, sort of make the encampment their own, an extension of the electoral body or the electoral body politic. Ultimately, that's what moved Kwan, the supposedly progressive mayor, more to the side of the police way of seeing things as force was the only option to deal with these people who were being unrealistic, who were being naive, who were being entrenched in and intransigent, and at the same time the police along with the city eventually started building up this narrative of the camp as a violent and unsafe space where people were being harmed in a variety of ways and it was necessary for public safety's sake to move against the encampment. I was there the night the encampment was evicted. I think it was October 24th or early morning, October 25th, around 3am in the morning, 3.30am, 4am, and I was actually arrested. I was one of, I believe, 80 plus people were arrested during the process of the Camps of Eviction. The police came in force. They massed up outside of Oracle Arena in the AIDS stadium. It was a massive operation. They came in from all sides. People, upon hearing word that the camp was going to be evicted, set up barricades, they laced the entire area with string trying to impede the possibility of the police getting

entered quickly. There were battles with the police as they tried to make their way into the encampment and eventually they came in from all sides until they took over the encampment and encircled the people who remained in the camp. I was in jail when Scott Olson was shot, but I do recall the prison guards or the Alameda County sheriffs who were making these comments as we were being released finally after about 24 plus hours of being held saying things like, oh, go have fun riding and that sort of thing. And we get out there and then hear about all the events that had happened over the course of the day that we had been locked up of these people, of folks in the thousands, just like you said, coming out to try and retake the space of running battles in the streets. I have so many friends and comrades who were telling stories about getting tear gassed, of getting shot out with pepper balls, of Scott Olson's devastating injury, of getting shot in the head. And it was violence that occurred outside the normal narrative of violence deployed by the police in Oakland, right? And so it made it exceptional, even though much more brutal violence occurs daily by the police in Oakland against primary the black population in Oakland and other people of color. But we see a huge up swelling of outrage at the rate of the camp, outrage at the injury against Scott Olson, and this ultimately the attempt to use force to quash a movement tremendously backfired against both the police and the city government in terms of it building up even more support for Occupy Oakland and its efforts. I recall going to the General Assembly when the general strike was decided to be moved forward, when the proposal was made to have a general strike in a week, which was just seemed like a completely impossible notion and completely impractical. But also within the realm of the possible at the same time, because what had been going on, especially the response to people in terms of fighting against the police in terms of taking back the encampment of basically winning against the government, winning against the police forces, reclaiming the space,

taking injuries, supporting one another through that process, it seems possible that we could pull up a general strike within a week. When it came around, it was clear that the word had been spread that that energy that brought on that impulse to move forward with the general strike was still there a week later. And I would say that that day itself was a tremendous success. We had 100,000 people marching on the Port of Oakland, shutting it down. We had a day's worth of activities. Everything that encapsulated Occupy Oakland, I feel like, found a home in particular on that day on November 2nd. Again, we've been listening to Scott Campbell. Next, we'll hear from Tova, who was involved in the Labor Solidarity Committee of Occupy Oakland, which worked to bring in labor unions into the organizing of the general strike. There were just masses of people down there at Oscar Grand Plaza. Some of them were working on maintaining or re-establishing the different services that they had set up. I had been involved in labor struggles in the past back in Detroit when I was in the UAW, so volunteered to work on the Labor Solidarity Committee to do the outreach to get support and participation of various unions. Teamsters played a very big role in support for that general strike as well. And I think it's the OVA, the Oakland Education Association, as a teachers union. And they were very much involved, and so was the SEIU, particularly the SEIU, the city workers. So the city workers were down there every day and saw what was going on and were very much involved and affected by it. The teachers union had, like you said, been involved in support work before all the attacks by the police happened.

There was a lot of involvement beforehand as well. One or two Teamsters locals that were supporting officially, it wasn't just their rank and file members, which would have been great also, but we had support from one or two Teamsters locals. And the ILWU is primarily Local 10. The Longshoreman whole proposal was to march down to the port and shut down the Port of Oakland. We had people involved from ILWU, although I'm pretty sure that the ILWU Local 10 officially was not involved in calling for that strike. But there were members who were involved in the ILWU organization who were definitely involved in helping to plan it and organize it as well. The Teamsters added some logistical support in terms of trucking and supplies and things like that. I think that the OEA, the teachers also, in addition to participation, donated supplies and things like that. So there was a lot of donations from the locals as well. We've been listening to Tova from the Occupy Oakland Labor Solidarity Committee. We're now going to take a short break and be right back. As the Oakland Commune and the Occupy movement faded into history, it helped inspire and inform a new generation of activists.

As under Obama, we saw continued explosions in Ferguson, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and later at Standing Rock. By the time that Trump took office, autonomous resistance movements were bubbling beneath every surface. Airports were shut down against the Muslim ban, riots broke out against the alt-right, and thousands of teachers started striking across Appalachia, donning red bandanas, an homage to the so-called Redneck War of 1921, when striking coal miners engaged in guerrilla warfare with government troops, and the Air Force dropped actual bombs on strikers. With the current uptick in strikes under Biden continuing into 2023, and the economic conditions of poor and working people continuing to worsen, we asked Labor reporter and author of Fight Like Hell, Kim Kelly, just what are the possibilities of mass strike action in the coming year? I think we're in this really interesting moment where Labor and workers and unions in general are getting a lot more attention than we're used to, and a lot of that attention is positive. We have a lot of these big wins that we get to celebrate.

We get to celebrate the workers at Stan Island, Amazon, going toe-to-toe with Jeff Bezos and the union election winning. We get to celebrate this ongoing wave of unification efforts at Starbucks across the country, hundreds of Starbucks have unionized. We get to celebrate a lot of big wins, and there are also a lot of struggles that have been kind of set to the side, or not gotten as much attention as they deserve, or kind of written off. I think that's always the dichotomy of the labor movement in general, because it's so big, almost everyone is a part of it, whether or not they like to think of themselves that way. You know, I've been covering this coal miner strike in Alabama since April 1st, 2021. They're still out there. They have not gotten very much attention. They're kind of stuck in a stalemate at the bargaining table because the bosses want to starve them out. And this is Alabama, where workers in or outside the prison walls do not have very many rights, do not have any politicians on their side. They're struggling, and they're still out there. And that's kind of the flip side of these big, energetic, inspiring moments in labor, right?

Where we have these wins, and we also have folks that are being left to slog, or being ignored entirely. Like the folks that we're going to see very soon in Pennsylvania, who are going to be launching a strike inside the Department of Corrections. I hope that gets a lot of attention. I mean, we saw a similar effort by incarcerated workers in Alabama a couple months ago, and that got a lot of attention. And I'm really hoping that this kind of renewed interest in labor and in workers' rights, and in discussing, you know, even topics like prison slavery, in topics like forced labor and incarcerated work, and different types of work. I really hope that benefits these workers as they embark on their action. But we'll see, you know, like I am very interested to see perhaps the limits of this public support for labor actions. Is it easier to support a barista than it is to support a coal miner and incarcerated worker?

There's all these different pieces that go into this moment. And I love being posse. I love seeing workers win and workers organize and strike and protest. And I also like keeping an eye out for the folks who aren't getting as much attention, aren't getting as much support and thinking about why that is. So it's kind of a long rambly answer to say, I am cautiously optimistic. And I really hope that all of the people who have, thankfully, and, you know, I'm glad they're here, who have showed up in the past year, in the media, the political class, whoever, regular, regular people who have been paying attention to these worker actions, I hope they keep that energy for this year because we're going to need it, you know. We've had a pretty good, really decent spot, and I really don't want to see us squander that.

See, I think this moment with the railroad workers, I think that is something that's going to continue to resonate and reverberate out. And I think that's going to have an impact the next time the Democratic Party says, hey, where are the workers' party? Like, you need to come vote for us and keep us in power because we're the only ones who will protect you. Well, will you? Did you? Were you there for us when we needed you or when we needed your help? No. You know, it just makes one wonder how much of the pro-union sloganeering that this administration loves to do, how much of it is pure public relations, how much of it is actually attached to whatever personal beliefs that Biden has, or if they just think it's politically expedient to, you know, act as though we're a pro-union, we're a pro-worker, we're not going to pass any laws, we're not going to investigate any work or death at Amazon facilities or elsewhere,

we're not going to use our power to help you, but we're not Republicans. So, you know, I think it's going to be interesting to see how much the railroad strike impacts people. Because I think that the political calculus that the Biden administration did in choosing to crush the strike inside with the railroad bosses, I guess they figured, oh, well, it's not that big of a deal, maybe not that many people are paying attention, we got to make sure people get their Christmas presents on time. But a lot of folks were watching that, a lot of regular workers were watching that and thinking, oh, so if we were in that position at my job, the government wouldn't help us either. I think, you know, a lot of the chatter I saw from railroad workers from other workers, just from people in general,

was like, oh, so okay, this was the big moment where Biden could have proved he cared about us, and instead he threw us under the bus, straight onto the railroad tracks. And I don't think that's a surprise to people that are sort of paying more close attention to the way the state operates, but I think it was maybe a revelatory moment for folks who just sort of assumed, okay, like there's at least a little bit of benevolence, at least, you know, Democrats are in power, this guy says he holds unions, that should help us out a little bit. But seeing what happened there, I think it's going to be a profoundly disillusioning moment for a lot of people that maybe had a little bit more faith in the state, or at least assumed it was sort of looking out for us. And I think that's kind of had an impact when, you know, the Democratic Party comes back knocking on our doors endlessly asking for a voicemail support,

because I mean, we had a classic which side are you on moment, and we saw which way they chose to go. We're going to see more prolonged strikes, we're going to see more unfair labor practices, we're going to see more organizing. I think that it is impossible to put this lightning back into a bottle, right, like activity and interest in unions and organizing has, if not skyrocketed. It's had a really nice little bump over the past few years, a noticeable improvement and a noticeable amount of new workplaces being organized and going on strike and fighting for their rights. Like, I don't think that's going away. And two of the aspects of this entire scenario that really interests me. First, the fact that we're seeing so many workers who, some of my categories as quote unquote white collar, whatever, folks who work in nonprofits or at book publishers or in journalism, other types of media, kind of all of these other types of jobs that don't fit into that traditional manufacturing or extractive focused, more manual labor oriented jobs that I think a lot of people associate with the labor movement.

They've been going on strike and they've been making big waves, whether it's the 48,000 grad student workers at the University of California or Harper Collins publishing workers currently still on strike in New York City. I think there's been kind of this shift in understanding of, oh, okay, you don't need to be a certain type of worker or certain type of person or come from a specific background in order to organize to join a union. Unions aren't just for the classic white guy in a hard hat trope like my dad, right? Like they're accessible to so many more of us than perhaps we thought. And I think that's going to be big because work has shifted. Work looks different than it did 30 years ago. There's a lot of different ways to be exploited. And we know the employers have definitely looked into each and everyone and taken notes. So we have that happening. I think that's going to continue propelling the energy behind this movement. And secondly, I'm really intrigued by the rise. And it's a smaller phenomenon, but it is very much happening. And it is kind of increasing slowly the existence of independent unions because we saw, of course, the Amazon Labor Union.

They're the big ones. They've gotten tons of attention. But there are also efforts. Trader Joe's United is an independent union. Chipotle workers formed an independent union. There was an effort here in Philadelphia to form a Home Depot workers' independent union. And that one wasn't successful, but I'm certain that that organizer has not given up. And they're still going to keep working on that. And I think seeing these independent unions, which are not affiliated with other internationals, they're not part of the AFL-CIO, they're literally just DIY, in a sense. The fact that we're seeing this happen, I think it just shows the cracks in the current labor movement as it stands. And especially in the way that power is concentrated and the way that resources are organized and the way that the movement's priorities,

in terms of public statements and political power, are kind of dictated by folks who tend to be more conservative. And I mean that in a Democrat way, not like Republican chaos, but just more conservative compared to a lot of the rank and file. Like we see with the railroad workers that rejected that deal that so many of their leaders agreed on. I think there's more radicalism brewing in the rank and file and more militancy, and it's manifesting in different ways. It's manifesting in wildcat strikes or in independent unions or in organizing outside of the traditional organized labor structure in general, like what sex workers and incarcerated workers are doing and have been doing. I think ultimately the bottom line is that a lot of workers, a lot of people have realized that they have options. And they're exercising their rights to organize and to work collectively and to stand with their fellow workers against the bosses and against capital

in ways that perhaps wouldn't have felt as available or seemed as possible a few years ago. But now there's so many examples of other workers doing it. Of course they've been there throughout history too, like I read about in my book. But I think we're at this moment where people realize, okay, there are a lot of different ways to do this. I have people with me. We have problems we need to address. Let's see what works. It's not just picking up the phone and calling a union organizer, though that works for some folks too. It's recognizing the problems we face in our workplace, in our experience, and deciding together what we want to do, how we want to go forward, and how we're going to win.

Once again, that was Kim Kelly, author of Fight Like Hell. Over the past two episodes, we've taken a deep dive into the history of general strikes in the United States, looking at everything from the mass strike of enslaved plantation workers during the Civil War, all the way up to current examples during Occupy Oakland. I think one of the things history has to offer us as a guide for the present is that these upheavals are made possible not only by people responding to material conditions, but also learning from struggle. In the instance of the Great Upheaval, that general strike came after a series of other smaller strikes. This fall, thousands of prisoners across Alabama organized a general strike of incarcerated workers,

downing their tools and refusing to work their jobs, bringing the prisons to a grinding halt. This historic strike comes on the heels of many other prisoner-led strike actions in 2010, 2016, and 2018. Not to mention the fact that many Alabama prisoners saw themselves as acting in the spirit of the Great Plantation Strike during the Civil War, as epitomized by the strike slogan, let the crops rot in the field. In my final thoughts, instead of putting our hopes in a call for a general strike going viral, as the saying goes, we have to walk before we can run, so strengthening our ability to engage in collective direct action and action refusal, as well as building our capacity for community self-defense and mobilizing against state violence and oppression in whatever form will ultimately allow us to expand and grow

our ability to do these things in the future. A lot of times we're told that we're powerless and we're these passive beings and creatures and we have to wait for somebody to organize us, but every single day we wake up in the morning and we make capitalism happen. We do it, all of us, every single one of us does it. This is not like, oh, this is something that's happening to us, we're doing it to ourselves, we're doing it to each other. These are little things that we can do, like little acts of resistance, and I'm all about petty resistance because I do realize that a lot of people don't have time for the large resistances, so this is for anybody who's like, yeah, I hate capitalism, but I just don't have the breath and the space and the time

to necessarily go out and do things if you can't, please do it. If you can walk the fuck out, do, but if you can't, there's still stuff you can do. That's it for me, bye. What strikes me often about general strikes are two things. First is that general strikes actually function very differently than they do in leftist discourse. Like in leftist discourse, it's workers do general strikes, but in reality, if we really look at general strikes, there are these moments of convergence, right? There's these sort of points in which distinctions break down, right?

The distinction between organizers and everyone else, or the distinction between workers and non-workers, completely break down, right? It's not just railroad workers on strike in 1877, it's also their families, their neighbors, their whole communities on strike. And the second thing that that raises often for me is, again, this kind of long-term cultural implications of that sort of form of action. So growing up in a place where strike culture is a thing, still, where there's still actual union density, and people do walk off the job, you grow up with that as an idea, right? That you don't just walk off the job, but like the restaurant around the corner also gives out free food, and people bring coffee down to the picket line, and workers from other unions show up to block entrances, because the judge said you can't, you know, so on and so on.

And it becomes this huge community initiative of autonomy and self-defense. And what that creates is a sense in which class struggle is perpetual. Like, you understand always when you grow up in a place like that that when you go to work, you're making somebody else money, because you've been told that your whole life, right? And that if you get angry about that, the way you're supposed to do is organize and go on strike. And that's a very normal sort of narrative. That was because we all grew up in families where we were taught to do that, that if the wealthy were taking advantage of you, you just leave, right?

That is not a normal thing outside of the Rust Belt of America, right? Like, people don't get brought up with that. But I think as we're starting to see this kind of rise of the idea of the general strike, and we're starting to understand that as something that's not just connected to employment, but we can start to think of general strikes as social strikes and not just economic strikes. We can start to understand, like, even if those may immediately not succeed, the long-term impacts of those over time really create the conditions for them to succeed later. And if it hadn't been for that flame staying alive, I think, in parts of America,

this wave of worker action wouldn't be happening. There wouldn't be a foundation for it. There wouldn't be a way to understand it, right? And that's what's so critical about this moment is I think in some ways we're almost reviving a thing that my grandparents lived in the midst of, just as a very normal part of their lives. I think that's, like, a really important piece about this revival. And I think that something that feels really important about general strikes is the idea of, like, solidarity and that our liberation is collective. You know that it involves each other.

And I think that I feel like what happened between, like, what you're saying, some about your, like, your grandparents' generation and now is, like, neoliberalism in a lot of ways and just, like, this really strong promotion of the idea of, like, individualism and that if you want to make your life better, you have to, like, do it yourself. And, like, it's down to you as an individual, but I think it was pretty effective. It wasn't just about decimating a lot of ideas of, like, solidarity or the idea that our, like, freedom is with each other. And I think that that is starting to fall apart.

Like, people are realizing how much they hustle or, like, have side hustles or whatever. They're still fucked. And just, like, I think that we're seeing, like, a resurgence of this idea of, like, solidarity and that we have to do it together. That is going to do it for us this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. Check us out on Mastodon at IGD Underscore News and be sure to tune in as the workers that it could happen here into their two-day strike and return to the job.

But stay tuned. We'll be back next week for even more episodes. Until then. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. Check out our podcast from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.

Thanks for listening.