Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Utopia (part iii)

Episode Date: January 22, 2018

Artist and Filmmaker Ruth Dusseault tells us about how the internet has changed the American Commune. Plus ToE’s Andrew Callaway lets us in on an internet joke about  Socialist Dolphins. ***********Click on the image for details about this episode ********

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Utopia, Part 3. I like utopian fiction. Filmmaker and artist Ruth Dessau has been reading utopian fiction since she was a child. One of her favorite books is called Ecotopia. It is a work of utopian fiction by Ernest Kallenbach. It was written in 1975, and in it, the states of Oregon, Washington, and the District of Northern California secede from the United States

and become a separate country. The government is mostly female. It's sort of a decentralized social democracy. Suburbia is demolished because it's considered environmentally destructive, and so is the interstate. All waterfront property is converted into public land. All enterprises are employee-owned. Yeah, this sounds like utopia. The social climate is sexually open, healthy. I just sort of knew my destiny. I had to go up there somehow and find Ecotopia. In the summer of 2010, Ruth DeSoto got an opportunity to teach a summer photo class

at Stanford. She got a car, and on the weekends, she scouted the terrain, searching for her utopia. I found this area where there was once this famous 1960s commune called the Wheeler Ranch. It was featured in Life magazine in the 60s. It was about an hour north of San Francisco and in a town near Sebastopol, California. And when I got there, I found not a bunch of old hippies like I expected, but young people. So this is, I drank this water. It filters through sand and a biological layer that's over time has formed here. That's Gil. Ruth recorded him at the Green Valley community. He wanted to get closer to his water.

If my water comes out of the faucet and it's already clean, purified, chlorinated and pressurized, I didn't get to love it. I didn't get to know it. I didn't see all the process, the beautiful process that goes into making it so. It's like watching the last five minutes of a movie. You miss out on the reason that it's so good. Where did you learn the techniques? Well, I learned it, well, everything's available on the internet, right? That's an excerpt from a video that's part of Ruth's Ecotopia project,

a multimedia investigation of communal life after the internet. What's heartening is that young people are finding the space themselves for doing the experiments that they find necessary for meeting the challenges of the future that they feel the institutions are not even doing. Do you guys feel that the Internet has facilitated village life? It's getting in touch with people. And we can put a lot of information about ourselves

and people can put a lot of information about themselves. And we can also see on, we can put a lot of information about ourselves, and people can put a lot of information about themselves. And we can also see on Facebook who are they connected to, and what are these people into. And if it wasn't for the internet, I wouldn't be here. And so my research question asks, what are these places like after the internet? There's this thing that shows up time and time again in this project,

a crazy primitive spaceship structure, the Earthship. An Earthship is a passive solar house with a glazed wall facing south. It has an internal planter for growing food, it has a water-collecting roof with solar panels, and it's designed to support human life entirely off grid. Earthships are primarily composed of beer cans and tires. Michael Reynolds, the utopian visionary who came up with the Earthship, wanted to create something out of America's waste. I was responding to Walter Cronkite and the media. This was the 70s, so when Reynolds watched TV, he saw towering landfills of trash, cars lined up for blocks at gas stations, environmental collapse. And the same newscasts would also have, we're clear-cutting timber in

the Northwest. And so those kinds of things influenced me to not use trees and to try and use these things that we're throwing away as natural resources. He uses old tires, one of the most difficult pieces of garbage. They just don't degrade. And he uses them to create this really sensational berm. And in the process, it results in a house that heats itself. Michael Reynolds wasn't just influenced by the media, though. There were also space wizards. Four wizards with four different colors. They were entities, I called them. And they telepathically spoke to me and said all that stuff.

And I'm like, how could I dream all this stuff up? Together, the space wizards and Walter Cronkite propelled Michael Reynolds to build his own spacecraft. An Earthship is just a vessel. The concept of a vessel is that it is providing everything for the people independent of infrastructure. So I'm looking at a building that accommodates people in all of their needs independent of all of the horseshit that we have on this planet in terms of politics, corporations, infrastructure, Monsanto, pharmaceuticals, and so on. In other words, I'm trying to provide a vessel for people that they can sail on the seas of tomorrow.

Michael Reynolds wanted everyone to be able to live in an Earthship. My goal was to get Earthships to be in the same price range as conventional well-built housing. I achieved it, and I thought I had made it. But in 2008, when the housing market collapsed, Michael Reynolds woke up to the reality that people can no longer afford even conventional housing. Now it has to be made available to people

even easier than conventional housing. Now it has to be made available to people even easier than conventional housing, and people have to be able to make this happen for themselves. This is when the Earthship takes off on the Internet. Michael Reynolds puts open-source plans online, and he uses the web to create a funding model for the whole operation. He had to restructure his mode of operation from an architecture studio with a single channel of output into an educational business model that is more of an exchange of information, where students can come and learn how to build an earthship and then go home and make one for themselves. And it's that face-to-face contact that results in a kind of consciousness

that you don't see that much in a regular educational system. They have an experience, a life-changing experience, a retreat, so to speak, where they can step out of the default culture and experience the world the way it would be if something was different, just like in a utopian novel. Is this what you've been working on? Ruth DeSoto follows a group of students who had come to Taos to learn how to make Earthships back home to Prince Edward Island in Canada.

Here, they plan on making one for themselves. The tires were open source, basically, through Earthship. The plans for the front did cost us. She introduces us to Jaden, another utopian dreamer who, after discovering the Earthship online, becomes convinced it will solve all of his problems. Well, most of them. I wanted to break free of the chains that everyone seems to have of the debt. And I see these structures as genius because you have free heating.

Basically, you have everything you need just from an encounter, like Michael Reynolds says, with natural phenomena which is the sun going by, the rain falling on the roof, you have your water, you have your food, you have your heat, you have your basically all of Maslow's pyramids of needs except for love but then that'll come. For her project, Ruth Dessoe visits a number of communities who are using the internet not just to build stuff, but to live together. Like Dancing Rabbit, a community nestled in the northeast corner of Missouri. The first thing you notice when you walk into Dancing Rabbit

is all of the buildings are made from earth. As much as Dancing Rabbit sounds like just another hippie commune, Ruth DeSoe believes this place is different because it was started in the Internet age by an Internet person, Tony Cerna, a computer programmer from Silicon Valley. He told her that Dancing Rabbit was a model for a new way of living, cheaper, softer, and simpler. So we're talking about a model for stepping down into a smaller life. At Dancing Rabbit, like most of the communes Ruth DeSoto visits, the average annual income is around $10,000. That's about all they need. I make about one-fifth of what I was making while living in Los Angeles. That's Ilya. He used to be a full-time sound designer working in Hollywood.

Thanks to the internet, he was able to move to Dancing Rabbit and continue to do film work. Only now he doesn't have to work as much. Well, actually, he doesn't even have time to work as much as he used to. To meet all of my needs, I have, well, to meet all of my needs affordably, without hiring specialists to accomplish certain goals that I wish to achieve while living here, whether it's around food production or building my house or building a business, I'm having to do all those things myself. I like roadkill. Yeah. And how can you tell that it's not bad?

Is there a way to tell that there's no maggots? For the most part, when I eat roadkill, it is someone saw it get hit or hit it themselves. But the model isn't working for everyone we meet at Dancing Rabbit. Rachel can no longer afford the co-op dude. So how much do the co-op fees work out to? I don't know. I dropped them all. We don't get any amenities. Like it galls because when I moved here, the required minimum fees were like 20 bucks a month, and that was not even four years ago. And so it's gone up a lot. And I used to do all the co-ops.

Now I don't do any of them, you know, and I still pay more. The gentrification suggests Dancing Rabbit may have fallen short at their utopian goals. But according to Ruth DeSoto, this community never set out to remake the world. These people are not necessarily experimenting with a new kind of politics. I see these experiments as being technical ones. Yeah,

I see these as being design experiments. Dancing Rabbit is cooperative in spirit. We definitely try to focus on reducing hierarchies in our softer, more egalitarian version of capitalism. Ruth DeSoto filmed her Ecotopia project just as the majority of Americans were buying their first smartphone.

It's also the moment Facebook succeeded in getting grandparents to join their children and grandchildren on its platform. But it's also the same exact time period when the world was digging itself out from the financial collapse of 2008. In fact, most of the young people we meet in Ecotopia were personally affected. A lot of the people I met in Sebastopol, for example, and a lot of the people I've filmed over the next five years had partial college degrees. We read about them in the news. They were the first class that graduated into the economic abyss.

You know, so by 2012, they had fallen under the burden of student loans, some of their parents had lost their jobs, and they had found their way onto these homesteads. Talking with Ruth DeSoto about her project made me realize something obvious but still profoundly important about communes in the Internet age. It's actually impossible to filter out the economic story from any narrative about technology, especially anything post-2008.

She also helped me better understand how these technologically driven communities are in fact not that different from the communes of the 60s and 70s. Between 1966 and 1973 was the largest wave of commune building in all of American history. As many as a million Americans actually went back to the land or built communes in other ways. And when they did, I think many of them believed that small-scale technologies would allow them to escape the world of politics, to leave mainstream America and all its psychological and political and social problems behind and build communities of the like-minded.

That's Fred Turner. He's the guy who wrote the book on how the communes of the 60s lead to the birth of the Internet, from counterculture to cyberculture. Ruth showed Fred Turner some of her footage and recorded an interview with him for her project. He says, and he says this repeatedly, it reminds him of the Puritans. When the Puritans founded the country, they believed that God was watching their every move and that every action they took had to be sacred and that the world would go by their lead. And it's a beautiful vision, he says, but it's also a very narcissistic one.

I think one of my fears with the kind of new communalism that we see today, the technology-enabled new communalism, is that we believe that with small-scale technologies, some separation from mainstream society, deep attention to our individual lives, will change the world. The techno-utopians, Fred Turner believes, are doomed to make the same mistakes the utopians of the 60s and 70s made. I think you change the world in a much more mundane, less interesting, but collaborative way by doing the things that we saw in civil rights, by doing the things that we saw in civil rights, by doing the things that we saw in the

wake of World War II, by reaching out to people who are unlike yourself, forming institutions around that, and working for structural change. I'll say one other thing that really disturbs me. I sometimes get asked where I see the new counterculture today, and the answer is in the churches of the South. That's where I see real rebellion today. I see organized protests that draws people across racial lines, across class lines, and that leads folks to do things like form a Tea Party that transforms our Congress. I don't like the outcome. I loathe the outcome. But I think that that pattern of working from local community institutions to changing an existing government, changing the rules, very effective. My team, you know, we had Occupy. We had the 99%.

Okay, we reframed the debate. That's great. The Tea Party took Congress. After spending time with Ruth DeSoto and her project, I'm even more convinced that technology is not the key to making the world look more like a utopian novel. I mean, just look at the internet itself. Ten years of techno-utopian design, and what do we get? A dystopia beyond our wildest dreams. A black hole from which none of us will probably escape.

Actually, Benjamin, I'm part of this organization that's using the internet to do some really amazing things in the real world. You're going to go for it, aren't you, Andrew? You're going to turn our Internet Utopia episode into a pitch for the DSA. Can I? Hell yeah. After a year, I finally get to talk about the other thing I do for no money, the Democratic Socialists of America.

I hadn't really ever thought of myself as a socialist, but when we did the InstaSurf series and you had me learn firsthand the horrors of working in the new exploitation economy, I realized we really do need a mass working class movement. I was really excited by the Bernie Sanders campaign. It gave me hope that people actually could come together and deal with the fallout from years of neoliberalism. After the election, I saw a lot of Bernie people online saying DSA was the place to continue the fight. So I went to a meeting, and I wasn't the only one. The membership surge just went from 6,000 people to 32,000 people, for many whom this is their first time in any kind of socialist

organization. That's Larry Website. He's kind of a Twitter celebrity and a DSA recruiter. Larry Website. Well, his real name is Christian Bowe. He's one of the people who's responsible for funneling internet leftists into the DSA. There was something called distributed digital organizing that his campaign used because he didn't have staff in all 50 states. Distributed is kind of just trusting volunteers all across the country to make the backbone for a campaign anywhere. That's kind of the same way that we learned how to build a 50-state DSA was like trusting people all across the country and just asking them to be like, hey, we think you're the person.

Can you do this? And people will almost always step up to take the initiative to continue the political revolution that he was talking about, but for an explicitly anti-capitalist socialist organization. There's just so much about the DSA that seems impenetrable. Like, even the party you drag me to on New Year's at midnight. Everyone sings Solidarity Forever. Who knows the lyrics to that?

There's just so many in-jokes, memes, emojis, your crazy dolphin button. Okay, but I can explain that one. There was the socialist named Jay Posadas who believed that something completely ridiculous would have to happen in order for us to move past capitalism, like a nuclear war or a benevolent alien invasion, or if humans could just learn how to communicate with dolphins for some reason. Anyway, in the weeks before our national convention, a group of DSA members formed this fake Posadas caucus.

And they created a bunch of memes and Facebook groups and threw like alien and dolphin themed parties. As a joke? Kinda, yeah. I mean, people were campaigning for leadership at the national convention. So part of what these Posadas are doing is kind of trying to diffuse some of the internal tensions that elections naturally bring. And, you know, as a way of making fun of factionalism, which has always been this huge thing in the left. And for the DSA, you know, we're a big tent organization. We have anarchists, libertarians, full-blown communists,

and even liberals. But we're all comrades. So while it might look kind of like cliquish or confusing from the outside, all the parties and the group chats are actually bringing people together. The organizing power of an inside joke is to include more and more people on the inside. That is Ravi Ahmed, an elected member of DSA's National Political Committee. And she's really proud of how DSA organizers like the Posadas are using the internet to build a movement. Okay, that's actually pretty cool. But why is everyone always fighting?

I mean, the rose emoji people on Twitter just seem to be constantly yelling at each other nonstop. Well, I mean, some of those people are just trolls. But, you know, it is true that there is conflict. And according to Ravi, that is proof that the DSA is doing political organizing better. I would actually say that, like, avoidance of conflict or pressure to be unified about everything, unity at all costs, is actually part of how we got into this mess. Putting aside, for instance, issues about race and gender and saying, for the sake of unity, we can't talk about that. Right. Like, don't cause a ruckus.

The difference about DSA is that we're actually dealing with this stuff. We're going to fucking face up to it. We're going to talk about it. And it's necessarily messy. Because of social media, the mess is just out for more people to see. The DSA has transformed thousands of people who connected online into a real-world community that's all over America. I've met some insanely talented, amazing people who are volunteering countless hours of their free time

and pouring their hearts and souls into this thing. You know, it makes sense that we're all passionate about it, that we feel ownership over it. We should. That's kind of what democratic socialism is all about. It's impossible to say what's going to come out of all this organizing. But we're growing fast. 700 new members every month.

The DSA is building power. You should come to a meeting. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Utopia, part three. This episode was produced by me and Andrew Calloway. Special thanks to Ruth Desso for sharing her project with us, and also to Larry Website, Ravi Ahmed, Connor Arpoi, and Mordo and the Posadas Caucus of the DSA. You can find lots more information

and links at the TOE homepage. That's toe.prx.org. The Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.