Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Institutionalized

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

Critic Anand Giridharadas demystifies the rise of the thought leader, artist Chris Vargas rememorializes the Stonewall riots and your host clears up where he stands on the YouTube platform. Chapter three in the new ToE Failure miniseries.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Institutionalized. See, today we're all so afraid of that word failure, but the truth is we need to fail. Failure is a natural stepping stone towards perfection. You should be treated better than the people who succeed. It's called smart failure. Why? Because you can't put it on your CV. There's now a circuit of ideas festivals. Instead of looking to charity to solve this problem, what if we looked to business?

TED. It's called the blockchain. Block chain. Pop tech. What we did is a very simple thing. Replaced paper checklists with cell phones. It's basically an app. Aspen.

I've been thinking about YouTube and podcasts quite intensely for about two years. This is where thought leaders take the stage and the rich and powerful fill up the seats. Sometimes the billionaires even go on stage. I am one of those 0.01 percenters that you hear about, read about, and I am by any reasonable definition a plutocrat. I still remember how strange it was, sitting in the audience at one of these things, even though it was almost 10 years ago.

People holding up plastic straws that supposedly could solve Africa's water pollution problems, and apps that could end inequality. These talks were all like late-night TV ads for sharper image crap. Bro, this is how it works. I invented Lifesaver Bottle because I got angry. And today, on the Ethereum blockchain, there are projects underway to create a new model of democracy.

But I ask you to think about technology as a way of expanding our humanness. That has revolutionary significance. What if your wearable device could be transformed? By the way, since I've been speaking, another 13,000 people around the world are suffering now with diarrhea. Blockchain can encode these values. Everybody can win. The absurdity of these talks also impressed writer Anand Girharadas.

I think one of the things that struck me from the beginning was the juxtaposition of two different kinds of stories about our time. You could tell a plausible story about the fact that things were kind of dire, and seemingly a plausible story about how fact that things were kind of dire and seemingly a plausible story about how things were so amazing. And the link I found as I kind of spent more time in that world was that there was this feeling that we lived in this age of extraordinary intractable problems, but that there was nothing wrong with the world that couldn't be fixed by the people who ruled the world.

And so my first impression was kind of the smugness of a group of people who it seemed to me were these do-gooding elites and thought leaders and billionaire saviors and corporate swashbucklers who were getting together in these fancy settings and talking about how to make the world a better place, but who in many cases seem to be the only ones really benefiting. In his new book, Winners Take All, Anand sets out to divert our attention

away from all the straws and blockchain apps to the winners, the folks who are actually benefiting from what he calls the win-win ideology. The most powerful people in our society have a huge interest in us thinking about the problems of our world in as depoliticized a way as possible. You take any problem, the empowerment of women, the fact that we have flat wage growth for working people, the discontents of trade wage growth for working people, the discontents of trade and globalization and tech disruption, any of those kinds of big shared social issues. There's no way to solve any of those kind of issues

without dealing with power structures and perhaps changing who has power and really making changes in our deep systems of taxation and spending, etc. So the winners of our age have a really big interest in us not thinking about those problems in political ways. And so they have a very big interest in us talking about those problems in other ways. The win-win ideology boils down to a very simple idea. When you put the rich in charge, we all do well. Everybody wins. For example, when Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to fix or disrupt the public school system in Newark, New Jersey, that's the win-win ideology.

Because a billionaire gets credit for doing his part to better society and, well, in this instance, nothing changed for the kids in Newark because all the money went to consultants in charter schools. The kids in Newark were most definitely not the winners. But yet, open any book or magazine article written by a thought leader and you'll find more arguments for more technocratic philanthropy, like what went down in Newark. So when I look at that marketplace of kind of thought leader ideas, what I see is a bunch of thinkers who have willingly embraced the role of being kind of fluffers for power. I mean, it's almost like yay is the official slogan of the kind of neoliberal ruling class. Now, win-winism might sound like trickle-down economics,

but Anand wants us to understand that it is much, much worse. The present win-win ideology is way more radical than trickle-down economics. At the heart of that idea is simply the idea that rich people should be left alone. It's not a, this is actually not a view that kind of says rich people are specially geniuses or incredibly wise about everything. It's just a view that says you leave rich people alone, you let them do their thing, and you will get good societal outcomes, the stores will be full, better than planned economics or whatever. Now, the new win-winism or philanthropic capitalist ideology actually turns this on its head. Rich people are no longer incidental boosters of the common good through just doing their thing. Rich people are specially qualified geniuses.

And people who've made money in some thing are the people who are now, they're just general purpose whizzes. They're smart about everything. And therefore we should deploy them to fix our schools. It actually is a view that rich people should make public decisions about the kinds of things democracies generally have made them about because of their wits as business people. I realized that one of the things you're really not supposed to say in our age, when you're thinking about the role of the rich and the powerful, is it's totally fine to ask the rich and powerful to do more good, but you're kind of not supposed to tell them to do less harm.

It's okay to ask them to give back, but you historic levels of inequality, staggering anger and a kind of failure of the future to translate into people's lives getting better for years and decades. Because of that disparity, those folks in the market world community really need to evangelize and re-evangelize their gospel to each other. And that's why you kind of have all these conferences and you have this circuit and you have all these kind of inane thought leader books because it takes a lot of re-evangelizing to maintain an ideology that is so out of step with the facts of the age. Unlike me, Anand didn't just go to one or two of these events.

He actually took the stage at a number of ideas festivals. He was even a fellow at the Aspen Institute. And it's this immersion in this world that enables him to articulate the difference between a thought leader and a critic. Critics ask the rich to do less harm. Critics ask the elite to take less. I think a critic is willing to speak truth to power. I think critics are people who talk about how the world should be changed

structurally, systemically, at the root and through systems of power rather than how it can be kind of redecorated within the existing framework. I've always made it a point to put critics on this show, but I will admit over the past few years, this has only gotten more difficult, more complicated. All of a sudden, it's like thought leaders are everywhere. Anand's book really moved me because he makes it clear that the rise of the thought leader is a phenomenon that emerges in parallel with the destruction of the ecosystem that fosters and sustains critical voices. What are the institutions that nurture thinkers who can afford to tell the truth and speak truth to power? Well, academia has a system for that through tenure. And that's one

way we historically maintained a cadre of people who could kind of speak truth to power. Well, tenure is way down. And we all know the phenomenon of the rise of adjuncting. For many younger academics, that kind of protected life is simply never going to happen for them. And instead, they're teaching at five different places to cobble together $20,000 a year. Another is newsrooms. You know, newsrooms used to be another place where you were supposed to speak truth to power and you were protected that way. Well, newsrooms are about half the size they were, you know, a decade or two ago. And then you have book publishing, where thanks to consolidation and the rise of Amazon and just people's reading preferences and the internet, you have book advances down and a very small number of people being able to afford to be full time writers and having that insulation. And so the kinds of thinkers who stood athwart the consensus of the age or who kind of were able to poke holes in things are losing many of the traditional

sources of support that would have allowed them to do that. On the other hand, with the rise of the plutocratic class, these rich people love to go to conferences and have kind of continuing billionaire education. And so they love to have thinkers around. They'll pay them or they'll fly them around or even just by going to one of these, you know, Aspen kind of things for free, you might get opportunities that help you pay the bills. And so you have fewer and fewer thinkers receiving these kind of traditional sources of support that insulate them from the whims and needs of the rich and powerful. And you have more and more thinkers tempted to enter this kind of parallel circuit where they

are speaking to the rich and powerful, and therefore it's maybe struggling to speak truth to them or watching what they say. And so at the moment where we really need deep explanations of what's going on, the people who can explain it to us find themselves, in many cases, needing to keep the rich on board as they may not be able to afford to speak truth to money. A couple of months ago, I went searching on YouTube for an answer for how to deal with the loose handle on my toilet. YouTube recommended a video for me. The title was something like, How to Deal with the World's Sewage. It was an actual video on how to do ethnic cleansing.

It's kind of incredible, isn't it? Almost poetic. While the mainstream media failed to even pivot to video, this video platform succeeded in creating an entire new media ecosystem. All of its own. YouTube has its own language, its own rhetoric, its own way of doing business, and its own secret magic rules. The algorithms that power YouTube defy comprehension, mostly because they're trade secrets belonging to Google. But it's not just that. There's something truly magical, esoteric about them. I see why they inspire such devotion, or at least in my case, a burning desire to figure out how they work. I've wanted to do something on YouTube for years now,

but there's always been something holding me back. To tell you the truth, I've been scared. This platform is just dangerous. And it turns out my fears were not unfounded, because here we are, only a few episodes into this new Theory of Everything miniseries, and my YouTube segments have only gotten me into a mess of trouble. I've been deluged with emails from listeners, furious that I'm giving airtime to people like Megan Dahm.

That's the woman who spoke about her relationship with the intellectual dark web, the cadre of thinkers that's made a name for itself using YouTube, people like Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson. Some of you have even gone as far as to complain to the Radiotopia bosses, emailing Roman Mars, demanding I be detoped. And then there's the situation with Andrew. TOE's Andrew Calloway's done the lion's share of the work when it comes to cutting the YouTube clips we've used in this series.

So he's watched over a hundred hours of Jordan Peterson, and he's watched thousands of YouTube conspiracy theory videos on how the Jews, immigrants, women, and trans people are destroying Western society. He's lost his boyish smile and his happy bounce. I fear I'm going to have to pay for his therapy. I've also gotten a number of emails from Theory of Everything listeners who've written in to thank me for turning them on to these new YouTube thinkers, people like Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson.

So yeah, it's a disaster. I can't believe I have to do this. Dear listener, I cannot believe that I've failed so badly that I actually have to spell it out. I've never had to do this before. But here goes. I am not platforming, fascist, and misogynist. Listen carefully to the episode with Megan Dom, for example.

Every time I ask her about her favorite YouTube videos about Gamergate or the biological differences between women and men, political correctness, she only responds with statements like, I don't know, or I don't understand what they're talking about, but it sounds like we should pay attention. To be honest, I thought she was the one who was going to be angry with me. But a couple of days after that episode went out, I received an email from her. She loved it. So yeah, a total disaster. All right, so I'm here live in Christopher Park in the village in New York City, across the street from the Stonewall Inn.

This is the site of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, one of the most significant events in New York City's history and the event that kind of kicked off the gay liberation movement. But it actually wasn't until 1992 that this event got this monument. Two pairs of white figures, sculptures by the artist George Siegel called Gate Liberation Monument. Two men and two women. The women are sitting on a bench and they're awful. I don't know. I always thought they were awful. This is artist Chris Vargas and he is not a fan of George Siegal's Stonewall Memorial. Yes, I can be critical of them as like a trans queer person of color, feeling totally not

seen or represented in that. But then knowing that the neighborhood people in the 90s were protesting their placement in the park. Yeah, critique is coming from all sides. But as monuments pointing to these events that were riots, they're ridiculous. They're ridiculous, yeah. Last year, Chris got an invitation from New York City's New Museum. They offered to help him re-memorialize the Stonewall riots. I was wondering what would new monuments to Stonewall look like? So I do as I do and I invited other artists to propose new memorials. Chris Vargas's Stonewall re-memorialization project is massive. 12 monuments from 12 different artists.

I love G.O. Wyeth's kind of graveyard of trash. There's kind of headstones, but in the headstones, the headstones are sort of angled downwards and there's mirrors so then you can see actually on the headstones that it says, Pay It No Mind, which references Marsha P. Johnson in a so much better way than a Ron statue could. The P in Marsha P. Johnson stands for Pay It No Mind, which references Marsha P. Johnson in a so much better way than a Ron statue could. The P in Marsha P. Johnson stands for Pay It No Mind, which was how Marsha would respond

when asked about her gender. She was celebrating her birthday at the Stonewall Inn when the cops showed up. And she, along with some other trans women of color, are credited by many with starting the riot. But if you haven't heard of her, you are not alone. The dominant narrative that has existed for a long time, up until recently, was white, gay, cis male experiences in Stonewall and centered them as the insiders of this riot. In fact, in the big Hollywood Stonewall movie from 2015, it's the fictional main character, a cis white boy from Indiana, who throws the first brick. No, Trevor! It's the only way! Gay power!

Come on! Gay power! Yeah, I'm working against a very whitewashed history. The 12 artists that Chris chose all contribute to the de-whitewashing and opening up of the story of Stonewall. Most of the artists I work with are trans or non-binary or gender non-conforming in some way. But for this specific project,

the intergenerational group of artists felt important too because of the ways that we understand this history. Every generation rewrites the history of Stonewall because it's so complicated. There's so many awesome layers to it. The Stonewall Rememoralization Project is multi-layered with meaning. But Chris doesn't have to worry about the neighbors objecting to any of it. He doesn't have to worry about any community standards or municipal laws either.

He doesn't even have to worry about the laws of physics. For example, Devin Morris' contribution looks like lounge furniture for a tropical resort. They're meant to kind of replace the benches in the park, but they're a lot more luxurious and loungy. They're beautiful, actually. And totally not feasible. No. There's the weather.

Yeah. And I loved, yeah, these impossible materials in public. And just this project, because we didn't have to adhere to the parameters of like public art sculpture. And reality. And reality. Which brings us to what might be my favorite component of the project. A pile of bricks made by the artist Nikki Green. She created these tiny little bricks with stone walls stamped onto them. And if you can imagine entering a park with a pile of bricks, you would,

I would inevitably take one. So it's this pile of bricks that are just sort of meant to disappear as people use them, take them to maybe incite other riots or throw through another window or a cop car. Chris Vargas' Stonewall Monument not only memorializes the riot that took place, it also re-memorializes the diversity of the rioters and their politics. In the height of the marriage rights movement, so many activists were creating this narrative

that made a direct line between Stonewall the marriage rights movement, so many activists were creating this narrative that made a direct line between Stonewall and marriage rights, which like erased all the radical politics around Stonewall, which wasn't necessarily assimilationist. Yes, those people with those kinds of politics, I could see you being there at Stonewall, but that's not all of the politics represented by the people at Stonewall. A lot of people didn't care. That was like the last political issue on their mind. It was like housing and employment and healthcare and, you know, all like important survival issues. So my intention is not to close down stories. It's about opening them up.

And to point to the reasons why these stories are marginal. You know, which is an oppressive history. And then mixing fact and fiction is a coping strategy because of an oppressive past. And then what's real, you know? What's realness, especially in terms of, like, trans people. You know, that's like a big conversation. There's a history of real, terrible attempts to define realness. How are you a real woman?

How are you a real man? At what point in your transition do you become real? And who's setting these rules? As an artist, Chris Vargas values his freedom to set his own rules. In 2013, he created his own institution, MUTHA, the Museum of Transgender History and Art. But it's not a place you can visit. Like his Stonewall Memorial, it's not real.

He's resisted making it concrete. Some people understand their identity or their trans experience is very fluid and not necessarily moving from one gender to another. Fluidity is a lot of people's experiences of their gender. I mean that's why I modeled this institution sort of after that experience, but also making a museum, you all of a sudden have to police what's inside and what's outside. You have to police how to define transgender and transgender as a term has changed a lot, even in a few years, let alone like the last couple of decades. It's actually pretty closed down from what its original use was. But as the terms evolved, as the understanding of trans evolves, it doesn't make sense to like create an actual physical brick and mortar concrete place

that makes decisions about what's in and what's out. But being a fictional space, like, I mean, it feels like you get to be more inclusive than a non, a physical place. By default. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the freedom of not actually being a place. Or being real. Or being real.

The Museum of Transgender History and Art exists because Chris says it exists. And because he says it exists, it seems to be existing more and more. That's Johanna Burton. Until her recent move to run the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, she was a curator at the New Museum. In 2017, she hung one of Chris's collages of transgender artists and heroes in one of the elevators for her show Triggered, Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. She then invited him to come out of the elevator and into the museum.

His stonewall rememorialization project actually took up a good part of the whole fifth floor. The model out there is a 1 to 7 scale, which is actually a really weird scale for a model. It's really big. It became 1 to 7 because we wanted to fill up as much of the space as we could. There's projects that are just so tasty to museums, and this is one of them. The one thing about museums is they love to absorb institutional critique. For Chris Vargas, working with a new museum was a really big deal. He's been extremely cautious about his relationship with institutions.

In fact, a core mission of Motha is to critically interrogate contemporary arts institutionalization. I mean, my position is that institutions are totally awful and they should just be burned down. But as an artist, I know what I'm gaining. I'm gaining cultural capital, but I know what I'm losing too, which is there's a way I have to dumb down even the history of transgender culture and politics. Not specifically me, but just the process does that by its own nature. But according to Johanna Burton, it is totally possible for museums to make room for artists like Chris Vargas to do institutional critique. It can be a win-win for everyone. I think this is the way that we

at our best work with artists, which is that they're teaching us how institutions need to react. And, you know, we're also offering something in terms of visibility and resources that might not otherwise be available. So I'd like to think about it as productive conflict or, you know, counter narratives that are welcomed in with all of the scenes showing. Which brings us to the big question. How the hell are we supposed to gauge the success of institutional critique? Or failure?

And what would, you know, failure mean then? Failure would be to be boring, I think. And to stop trusting that artists are asking the right questions. I think they're crucial to the cultural conversations happening today. I don't believe Chris Vargas' project failed. It was certainly risky, but I think he pulled off some

real critique. He opened up both the Stonewall narrative and the new museum to radical ideas. Plus, he got everybody paying. And I'm going to ride that all the way to the bank. Thank you very much. you have been listening to benjamin walker theory of everything this installment is called Institutionalized. This episode was produced by me,

Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. It featured Anand Girharadas and Chris Vargas. Special thanks to Paul Jackson of the New Museum and Johanna Burton who's now running The Wexner. This show has a website. It's theoryofeverythingpodcast.com.

This is where you can find links to all the books we talk about and images to the art we feature. That's theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.