It Could Happen Here - Antiwork Part 2: Lying Flat and Petting Fish

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

We discuss lying flat, China's version of the antiwork movement, discourse beyond the Great Firewall, and how overworked youths in China and America alike fell in love with Diogenes Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here. That was Chris. Garrison's also here. So is Sophie, who is changing her name to Sophie. This is It Could Happen Here. That was Chris. Garrison's also here. So is Sophie, who is changing her name. Sophie, what is your new name? Sophie.com Arena. Sophie.com Arena.

She's doing this to deal with the trauma of the fact that Los Angeles just agreed to change the name of the Chase Bank Arena to Crypto.com. Chase Bank, motherfucker! It's Staple Center! Oh, Staple Center. Sorry, I'm getting my arenas named after venal brands mixed up yeah why couldn't you buy more binder clips speaking of the pointlessness of work there are people laboring right now who worked at staples so that staples would have enough money to name a place where people go do sports after a place where people get fucking pencils.

And now Staples has declined enough that it's just crypto.com. Fucking crypto.com. Fucking crypto.com. Look upon the works of cryptocurrency, ye formerly mighty Staples, in despair. Fucking the Osman Dias of the office supply world i don't know whatever chris what are we talking about we're we're going to a place yet no the agentes comes in the middle but right now we're gonna go to a place where they they banned crypto mining for the most part

so and that that place is china and i wanted to talk about specifically a lot of stuff that's been going on in the Chinese internet and what's been going on in Chinese labor because... So Garrison told me we're doing an IT Work episode. And I went, oh, yeah, there's a version of this in China. And then I realized that A, almost no one has heard of lying flat. And B, it rules. And C, that nobody really in.s knows what's going on the chinese internet because it's effectively siloed and i mean you know there's there's there's

there's lots of different ways to silo i mean there's there's literally the great firewall there's the fact that in different languages people use different apps and you know the internet's become this sort of like you know it's it's a bunch of bubbles that don't interact with each other yeah the walled garden thing and it's you know the the sort of national level walled garden stuff is i think in a lot of ways way more dangerous than the stuff you know the like people complaining about it was stuck in ideological bubble and like that's bad but the fact that we have bubbles like this where it's like you know the with like actual like basically borders but online yeah yeah because they're enforced by governments and with force. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the place it was always going to go once we decided not to be rad with the internet, which everyone collectively decided in, I'm going to say 2004. Okay. Yeah. Do you think that was 9-11's fault 9-11 played a role 9-11 did play a role um the dot-com boom played another role um there were there there were a number of factors um but uh we can all blame it on let's blame it on low tax and continue so anti-work in china um before we get into lying flat which is china's

version of anti-work isn't the right word because this actually started a few months before sort of anti-work blew up in the u.s but before we fully get into that to understand what's going on here we need to talk about something called involution what did you say that again like what in in involution in the vote in the involution what did you say that again like what in info involution in info involution okay yeah so this this is this is originally this is a very obscure anthropological term developed by my old nemesis clifford geertz who's one of the most famous and most important anthropologists in history who also sucks ass and i hate him i thought your nemesis was Noam Chomsky. Yes, also, but for different reasons.

Should I cancel the hit? Sub-nemesis. I have many nemeses that I have to tell. Oh god, we're going to do a Jody Dean episode at some point. Those are our enemies too now. Thank you. I appreciate allies in my one person intellectual wars

although this does seem to be a pretty boring intellectual war yeah well he's dead so i've won by default yeah yeah that's fair yeah so what what gears was describing basically so he does his field work in java and what he's describing what what involution means is a system where people keep working harder and harder, but there's no increase in output. And so there's no reward for working harder. And so, you know, in Java, you'd have these plantations, right? And the plantations would get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

But because each new person was only, like, harvesting just enough to feed themselves, you never actually got any productivity increases. And so, you know, yeah, there's no output increases. Which is not really the case in america in a lot of ways yeah and what's interesting well okay so the reason i want to talk about this also is because basically everyone who's been writing about this from ancient news outlets has missed about half of the story of how how this like incredibly obscure anthropological term that like i don't like again i was an anthropology major i don't think i ever ran into involution while like while

i was studying anthropology i've never heard that term yeah and no one has ever heard of this like fucking everyone in china has like a like a treatise they can spout at you about this now um interesting yeah and and you know i want to talk a bit about how it emerged and part of this is because you know in the last about two years people will be getting increasingly pissed off at you know just the sort of incredibly competitive nature of chinese society and particularly work and you know a lot of this is because everyone's working what's what's called 996 which is 9 a.m to 9 p.m six days a week and actually i should make this good when i say everyone that's like an average schedule the schedules get a lot worse than that but 996, which is 9am to 9pm six days a week. When I say everyone, that's like

an average schedule. The schedules get a lot worse than that, but 996 is the one that sort of gets the attention because a lot of people work it, especially in the tech industry. This is what we do. Everyone focuses on the tech industry. Everyone ignores a bunch of migrant workers who also do this and worse.

There's this enormous societal pressure to keep moving and keep competing and keep working and simultaneously you know people in china today are working like basically as hard as anyone's worked in china since like people would literally collapse and exhaustion in the field during the great leap forward like you know that's lots of people working this hard and but but instead of you know getting rewards for this uh chinese growth rates have been collapsing for a decade and yeah this is you know this is this is a thing you get in the u.s too it's like well okay people were like well if you work how to get into the middle class but then

you know everyone's working 996 no one's getting into the middle class the like china has incredibly low rates of social mobility and you know into this comes involution but the weird part about what's happening here is that involution doesn't enter the the chinese discourse through like people complaining about work it's it's actually a product of a bunch of middle-class people complaining about chinese industrial policy and this is the part of story that nobody really talks about, even though I think it's really interesting because again, like this, you know,

anti-work in the US starts on the left, right? Involution, which is the thing that's going to bring about sort of the Chinese version of anti-work, is originally a right-wing discourse. And it's interesting because it's a right-wing, very nationalist discourse that gets, you know, the right-wing very nationalist discourse that gets you know

the right-wing part of it gets essentially expunged and it gets pulled left so originally you know china is i don't have a more elegant way of saying this than china's leaders are more online than ours like significantly more like they actually god that's frightening that's hard to imagine no that is it's horribly problematic yeah people people like like local government offices right have like they they have these like internal sites that like show them what people are posting and this this goes from the from the bottom levels it goes all the way up to the top like people actually listen to bloggers like like they're they're you know so some of the people we're about to talk about are incredibly

influential and there's a bunch of arguments in the early 2000s about how china is going to industrialize and these are basically online arguments um and the guys who win that argument uh xi jinping basically takes their industrial policy and implements it which is you know which is which is scales like how online these people are that like yeah people are taking economic policy from like literally i mean you know it's not solely that bad they're taking economic policy people arguing on the internet oh no this is this is an incredibly online society and it you know but the the worst part is that for a while it works you know the economic policy basically is they're going to increase the size of the chinese economy by

investing in sort of high-tech industry and moving up the value chain this is this has been very standard search Chinese economic policy for a while um the problem is in the last about decade it's it's it stopped working and you know the CCP's response was to do more financialization and this pissed off the like the the online they were they were called like the industrial party this pisses off those guys because you know their whole thing it was don't financialize just keep investing in like building airplanes and stuff and the Chinese economy will work itself out. But eventually, even they can't keep making this argument because – like 2010, the Chinese GDP growth rate was 10%. And now it's like maybe 5%.

I mean, last year was 2020, so it was really low. But I mean, the Chinese growth rate has been imploding. is 2020 so you know it was really low but i mean the chinese growth rate has been imploding and so what you get out of this is this group of people called the cowists based on this guy named cow okay so so cow is the guy who who essentially introduces the concept of involution and he's arguing that this is happening because and i'm going to quote him here uh people can't get quote a peaceful life get a pretty girl live in a big house because of the u.s and so there's the solution to this basically is is to deal with like to destroy america as a hegemon and then once you do that you know you can get all of these things and as you can tell like you know okay peaceful life get

a pretty girl live in a big house this is like a very conservative framing of this yeah yeah yeah i mean this is this is the chinese equivalent of 2.5 kids in a white picket fence and it has all of this sort of associated gender politics and class politics that go along with that and you know and when when cow and the cows are talking about evolution what they're talking about is they're literally literally mean china stagnated economy right so they're talking about okay you have more inputs have labor technology inputs, but the output per input is declining. And the only way to restore economic growth, achieve prosperity, is by solving a decline in output by defeating the Americans. But, you know, and this is kind of a big deal. And for a while, in sort of like 2019, 2020, this is going places.

But very quickly, people are like like my life fucking sucks like i don't care about this econ shit or this like grand national struggle against the world hegemon like i care about the fact that like my life is this incredibly pointless ever-escalating rat race with like literally no rewards yeah that would that would concern me too if that were a thing that we were capable of feeling in our country yeah it's why there's been some really funny stuff with involution where like you read accounts of it and you'll get like anthropologists going like oh yeah this is this is the thing that this is the thing that's unique to china and it's like have have you worked a job in in the u.s like but you know involution you

know what happens to it over the course of sort of 2020 is it goes from being the general, you know, it goes from being this thing that's about like very specific, like technical industrial arguments about industrial policy to, as one anthropologist put it, quote, the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless. And so people start talking yeah we could we couldn't imagine that this is no yeah and it's you know and people people start talking about finding individual solutions to this and so you know then this is things like working less moving to lower tier cities getting less prestigious jobs um but you know and i want to think about this again because this this is a really interesting thing where you have a very incredibly right-wing nationalistic and sort of like like middle-class like nostalgia kind of like you know like milt aggressive foreign policy thing and then it just flips and and part of how it flips and this is a

part of the story that is almost completely ignored but i think is really important did you guys know about there's a youtuber named liziqi she's the biggest chinese youtuber she has 16 million followers and most of her followers are not on youtube because you know youtube's like blocked by the firewall but she has she has 55 million followers on um the sort of chinese version of tiktok and yeah she has across the world she has 100 million followers right like she's she's one of the biggest media stars in the world and her origins are kind of unclear the like official biography basically says that like when she was 12 instead of going to high school she became a waitress and then she had to like you know but she'd gone to the city and then she had to return to rural village to take care of her grandma and she makes these videos that are these like very soft and calming videos with like calming music of her going into the woods and like

harvesting materials and making fires out of logs and like cooking things okay and it's it's just like it's you know it's just very much this this real utopianism there's there's basically no industrial technology yeah like cottagecore return to nature yeah yeah i know a lot of people who watch shit like that just to like soothe them after a day of work like see somebody like dig a cave and turn it into like a bath or something using just hand tools or whatever yeah and there's interesting this kind of it's almost like turned into a subgenre but uh she's by far the the biggest like version of this and you know so she gets picked up by a media company and from 2015 2016 goes viral and you know and it's interesting because so she's doing this because so she has to go back to take care of her grandma.

And so she like opens a store and she's trying to support herself and like her grandma by opening a store. And so the videos were like a way to promote the store. And then, you know, now she has 100 million followers and she gets adopted as this kind of like like national culture ambassador, I guess, by the state. Sure. And essentially, you know, so there's nothing overtly political about these videos at all right which is essentially offering and like trying to sell is this you know this like fantasy of retreat from industrial modernity into world life and i think it's really easy to look at that aesthetic and go like this is basically fascist like this is reject modernity embrace tradition some people online when they see that immediately sees up was

like oh no it's eco-fascism yes yeah yeah and i think you know and i think like that interpretation i think is actually a lot of why i got picked up by the chinese by chinese media companies and then like sort of by the chinese state because you know like having an actual positive utopian image of rural life is politically useful to them and something that's like not absolutely hasn't been true since like this is we've had this for a long time yeah well no and i think i would say this i think this is the thing that's different in china is that there hasn't been like a positive conception of rural life really since i i i guess the great leap forward and then are like there there were some people in the cultural revolution but then they actually went there and were like oh god this

sucks and so you know so they needed a new one they came up with this but you know the thing that's different about china than the u.s is that china's migrant worker population like is almost the entire size of the population of the u.s i mean it's it's like 270 million people right i mean it's enormous and and a huge number of these people you know i'm some of these people are going from like city to city or like town to town but a lot of these people are coming from from rural villages these people, you know, I'm saying these people are going from like city to city or like town to town. But a lot of these people are coming from rural villages into cities. And, you know, I mean, these are, this is the backbone of the Chinese workforce. And like these people, like they see their family once a year because, you know, like they can't afford to go home. So they go home once a year for New Year's because they get some time off and they come back.

And this is where, you know, like these videos are an obvious fantasy but you know they suggest an alternative to work in the capitalist city that's sort of plausible you know especially if you come from rural village and this is where this whole thing completely backfires on on the chinese ruling class and you know because this this this this cowist involution discourse is about to fuse with this style of rural rural utopianism into a movement that is going to shake the foundation of work itself but first but first ads again also not connected to anything we're talking about no connection whatsoever why garrison don't even bring that up there's no needs there's no reason for people to think about about the fact that

about that don't think anyway here's the washington state patrol think about ads yeah think about about the fact that about that don't think anyway here's the washington state patrol think about ads yeah think about the washington state highway patrol primary sponsors if it could happen here if it happens to you you'll want the washington state highway patrol fleeing over the border it's so funny anyway we're trying to pull, but I think it's hilarious. We're working on it, people. I think it's hilarious. Yeah. So please don't join the Washington State Highway Patrol.

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Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. And I don't know about y'all, i i thought i knew what i was talking about and i after those ads i am fully washington state highway patrol pilled i'm on board let's do it yeah in april of 2020 a guy on chinese social media makes a post and i'm just gonna read it or 2021 sorry 2021 yeah april 2021 so yeah i just going to read this post because it's kind of short and it rules. I haven't been working for two years.

I have just been hanging around and I don't see anything wrong with this. Pressure mainly comes from the generation with your peers and the values of the older generation. These pressures keep popping up. But we don't have to abide by these norms. I can live like Diogenes and sleep in a wooden bucket enjoying sunshine. I can live like Heraclitus in a cave thinking about logos since this land has never had a school thought that upholds human subjectivity i can develop one of my own lying down is my philosophical

movement only through lying flat can humans become the measure of all things incredibly based oh my god that's the best i love that can i talk about diogenes now all right let's go my my man diogenes is he's from this trend in greek philosophical thought during kind of the high period of greek civilization where a bunch of things come out of it you kind of get anarchism western anarchism out of it you kind of get, you get elements of like Puritan culture from it, because they're a lot of them are very much anti like the pleasures of sex and like anything pleasing. And like, you don't, you don't do anything that feels good, because then you become dependent on it. Like there's a whole bunch of shit going on. And Diogenes was like one

of one of the first motherfuckers who were kind of playing around in this philosophical space. And when he gets into, so his early life is his dad is kind of a grifter, it sounds like. We know that he got in trouble. He and his dad got exiled for debasing currency, which could be as simple as they were watering down, for lack of a better term, like the gold or silver in currency with less precious metals and hiding it in order to make a profit, right? And like keep the extra gold. That could be what they were doing. It also could have been like, it could have been political because some people who were doing this in Sinop, I think is the city, which is now in Turkey, were doing it for political reasons. We don't really know why, but there's actual documented

archaeological evidence of this, including right around the time he would have been a child, we found from that period a cache of debased gold and silver coins that had been destroyed. So someone had realized they'd been debased and destroyed them so they couldn't be used. So there's evidence. Anyway, he and his dad get exiled, which means from an early stage, he goes from being somewhat of means, if your dad's making the currency, you're not – probably not like a poor family. And then they get kicked out of their city-state and they're like kind of stateless. And so Diogenes evolves over time and like gets into philosophy. He tries to – there's this – I always forget the name of the guy that he loved at first.

But there's this philosopher who's like this cynical – like that's the school of thought he comes from. He's like a cynic that Diogenes really wants to study from. And the guy like assaults him as Diogenes is like, hey, man, I want to learn from you. Like he like hits him or something. This keeps happening. And eventually he's like, this guy is like, why do you keep doing this? And Diogenes is like, you have something I can learn from. And so I don't really care what you do to me. I'm gonna I'm gonna keep persisting. And so he becomes this guy's student, yada, yada. And the guy who he becomes the student of is like kind of a poser because he's talking about like, we need to give up, you know, these kind of like, pleasures of like civilized life and return to a

more simple time and like, not enjoy all of these, you know, the benefits of wealth, but he like he's also a rich guy, and he doesn't give up his money. And Diogenes is like poor as hell and stays that way. And so he becomes famous for he goes to Athens and he becomes famous for a bunch of like troll shit. We don't actually have he wrote like 10 books. We don't have any of them. So we don't actually like know what he actually wrote in his philosophy.

We just have stories from other philosophers and it's all diogenes being a fucking troll so like um on one occasion he one of his big things was he believed that people that if if something was an acceptable behavior it was an acceptable behavior everywhere right and so the start of this was in in athens you were supposed to go buy your food in the market but you weren't supposed to eat it there. That was like considered rude, like kind of obscene almost. And Diogenes would like get food and then – usually by begging because he was – that was the way he got everything. He had no money.

He would like get food and he would eat it right in the middle of the market. And everybody was like, that's disgusting. And Diogenes would be like, well, if it's okay for me to eat, it must be okay for me to eat here. That's great. Diogenes took it a little bit further than that because yeah i can see a few ways you can take this he extended that to if it's fine for me to urinate or shit it's fine for me to do it anywhere and eventually i have no problem he defended himself masturbating and while looking at people in public as there you go if this is okay for me to do in my bedroom, why can't I do this here, right?

It's very like, he's a troll, Diogenes. And he's also like, again, the stories we have of him is he is like uber anesthetic. So like at one point for a long time, the only thing he owns is a wooden bowl that's his cup and for his food and then according to you know legend he sees this poor peasant child drinking from like cupped hands and he throws away his bowl and he's really angry and he's like god damn it i spent all this effort carrying around something useless like i could have just put shit in my hands he's he's a very entertaining character and a very like the. The original oogle.

Yeah. The first one. Yeah. He's absolutely an oogle. And he's, yeah, he's just kind of like an endearing piece of shit is like his, the idea you get, but also like smarter than, I mean, because fundamentally what Diogenes is doing is he's saying like, hey, all this stuff that we think is important and good about our culture and like valuable. What if it wasn't't what if none of it matters yeah he's like he's provoking the third and he's he's big into like one of his his like the things he comes back

to a lot is that like dogs are clearly happier than us and like better creatures than us so we should just seek to be like dogs um and one of the ways he might have died is getting bitten by a dog and his bite getting infected we don't really know how he died um the other thing about the this guy fucking hates rich people oh yeah yeah he's and he's very funny about it so alexander the great apocryphally maybe this probably never happened but the story is that alexander the great comes to athens you know while he's's on his blitz through conquering the known world and finds Diogenes. And Alexander the Great was like raised by Aristotle, right? So he knows his philosophy guys. Like he's seeking Diogenes out because he's a fan of this dude, probably through stories that

were told to him in the same way that like I'm telling them to you now so he like comes up to diogenes and he was like oh my god i'm alexander the great i'm a big fan if i couldn't be alexander the great i would want to be diogenes um and diogenes responds well if i couldn't be diogenes i would just want to be diogenes which is a fucking flex again probably never happened but like i want i want to i want to read this meme that garrison sent me because it it it happens it's absolutely the perfect description of what's of what this whole thing is sort of about so okay this is me the philosopher diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper he was seen by the philosopher i don't know process guest name erastippus who is it doesn't matter some dead ass greek yeah some guy who's

about to get absolutely destroyed right he's living comfortably like flattering the king uh aristippus says if you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils the eugenics replied learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king oh oh there's all sorts of based shit like that my favorite but i know like i so our guy our guy works up plato is like is like trying to determine trying to define like a human in the simplest way possible oh yes yeah like the platonic ideal and he was so he comes to the conclusion that like well it's a it's a it's a it's an unwinged biped. And Diogenes supposedly goes, grabs a plucked chicken and says, behold a man. Like, I found a dude.

Yes. He rules. He would famously walk around town in broad daylight with like a, what do you call it? Like a lantern? Like looking around and people are like, what are you looking for? He's like, oh, I'm looking for a man. He would like look at a dude and he's like, I'm looking for a man and as it is to say like none of you motherfuckers are people like you all think that you're human beings but you're really just

pieces of shit he's just an amazing asshole sorry that that we should move back to anti-work but that's that's who diogenes is it ties in yeah yeah yeah but and this is this is the funny thing both both both american and chinese like anti-work people both fucking love diogenes absolutely yeah you know very popular on r slash anti-work yeah and and you know and the the thing i was reading about the like you know learn to live on lentils and you'll never like have to be subjugated by a king that that's a lot of what lying down becomes so very rapidly this whole thing spreads into this like really it's like a sort of astounding you know it starts out of a meme and it spreads incredibly quickly and the ccp gets like really really mad about this um so so it like so this starts in april right and in may there's

they have this like enormous media blitz where like like the the the the party is like outlet basically and guandong publishes like a four page long attack on the concept of lying down like the ccp newspapers everywhere publish this stuff like the ccp like bands how you know you've done it right we chat yeah yeah it's funny it's like they do this but it's too late like it's it's always too late yeah and you know so and you know so part part of what lying down is is about you know you have this incredibly fast-paced intense work culture you have involution you're working more and more and you're getting nothing out of it and lying flat is just going no like you just lie down you refuse to work but it's it's also it's more than that and i think this this goes back to the sort of broader conception of anti-work so one one of the

the slogans um of this movement is don't buy property don't buy a car don't get married don't have children and don't consume and you know the last part of this which is implied is don't work and you know there's a lot sort of going on here i mean you have you know it's not just sort of a critique of like we work too hard it's about you know it's about the sort of whole system it's about the sort of patriarchy involved in this it's about the sort of like forced capitalist consumption it's about like you know the fact that like a literally a quarter of chinese of china's economy china's gdp is like all this real estate bullshit that everyone knows is going to collapse and even when it gets built like sucks thank god we don't

have anything like that here yeah i know it's great it's one of the fun things about learning history is you get to just watch every country do exactly the same thing with their housing market like yeah japan it's like it's great it's just like you also get to watch think this will work what what what extra fun thing is you get to watch every country do the same thing with farms and it do it, US do it. It's great. It's just like, why do you think this will work? One extra fun thing is you get to watch every country do the same thing with farms, and it always ends the same way. You will not have fundia. Anyway.

Yeah, so there's a lot of, you know, in order to sort of facilitate this, you get back to the Diogenes. A lot of it, what's happening is people sharing tips about how to like make the cheapest food you could possibly survive on so you don't have to work and so you know and people the the guy who wrote the the diogenes post like he spends 30 a month

and he does this by only eating dried ramen and eggs and like rice there you go yeah yeah yeah that's one way to do it that's a way to do it this is like the most extreme example actually i don't even think it's the most extreme example a lot of people it's probably not no one of the things that happens a lot as much people just like have left their jobs to become monks this is like a whole thing sure yeah i gotta go be a buddhist like honestly why not like yeah absolutely great like and i used to live in a place in the middle of fucking nowhere one of the most like isolated places i've ever lived that like had power um and one of the people who was like by neighbor they were within several miles of us was a monastery this is in the united states and like i went there once because I heard they made good wine

to try and get some of their wine, and none of them would answer the door. I could see them inside all staring at me. They didn't do shit. And my overwhelming thought was like, yeah, that seems like a pretty good way to do it. Yeah, I see why you guys have picked this life. It was also during the 2016 election.

Oh, yeah, that's fair. I was also during the 2016 election. Oh yeah. That's back from the, the RNC and the DNC and was like, yeah, that seems smarter than what I'm doing. Yeah. So there's a lot of, you know,

yeah, that'd be the extreme example. Like if people are going to become monks, but like one of the things that's happening a lot is again, you know, China has an almost migrant worker population and people are just like, fuck this. I'm going back to my village. And this is where they really screwed up

with the YouTube stuff. Because people were gambling that you could just sell this as an aesthetic. And you can sell it as an aesthetic. Chinese TikTok has this integrated thing in it where if you plug like something to buy uh it like you you can like click it and it'll it'll take you like to a link like to to to the thing it's selling so you know and so yeah they make a nice amount of money out of this but

you know the the the the other side of that sword is a bunch of people were like i don't have to work this like i don't have to work 996 in a city. I can just go home. Yeah. As you were talking about the anti-work stuff, it's not actually possible for a lot of people to leave their jobs. Not everybody. So the solution to this was there's a culture that developed

called petting fish, which... But before you talk about petting fish, you said something about plugging things on TikTok. You know, like, advertisements. And you know who also plugs advertisements, Chris? Oh, no. Is it us?

It's Joe Rogan. But our new sponsor is the Joe Rogan Experience. Brought to you by Honda. Honda, drive a car. Do fascism. Honda, really? Yeah, Honda, Garrison.

Look, we're not nearly a big enough podcast to get a Toyota ad. Are you crazy? Yeah, we can dream big. Yeah. I mean, that is the dream, to sell Toyotas. I mean, we could become used car salesmen in the Valley. All right, here's that. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

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cut that keep it all in baby yeah so they developed this thing called petting fish which is like Chinese slack off culture and it's a bunch of people sharing tips about how to slack off at work and it's kind of the equivalent like, I love that it's called petting fish and then also like

it is good yeah it's kind of the chinese equivalent of like boss makes a dollar i make a dime that's why i shit on company time and so people do just a lot of like they have a lot of like genuinely fun things they do like people people started putting like fake uh beatings on their calendars people wouldn't bother them they They just like people to leave. That's also what I do, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you want to make, I love the term petting fish as well, but if you want to make it sound cool, they're waging an insurgency from within capitalism.

It's true. By trying to take resources away from their employers without being spotted. Yeah, there's a thing in volume one of capital about this that i i was like oh i could pull this up and then i was like that is too much work i'm not gonna do it so i don't have the thing in volume one where he talks about we don't struggling between about labor time but instead you get a bunch of people like this like smuggling whiskey into work taking three-hour lunch breaks my favorite one my absolute favorite work drink at work especially if you're a nurse uh oh boy we've probably killed about 50 people this is gonna be great

fingers crossed so you know how like companies all have these like these really annoying like mindfulness fitness things yes so one of the things people started doing was okay so you know the thing but like you have to drink eight hour eight times a day so they would set these alarms that's like oh i have to go drink my water and so like every like every like 50 minutes or something they just go up and like spend 20 minutes getting water and they sit back down it's like you've just eviscerated a normal part of your work day and and the product of this you know the ccp is really pissed off about this and you know you get these giant billboards that say no lying flat no petting fish on them which

something that would have been literally incomprehensible like a year ago yeah no it's amazing yeah and you know and i think this is something you know in the u.s anti-work like the actual political class kind of has been ignoring it i mean you see a couple financial analysts uh in china xi jinping like made a speech it was like you know he had a private speech a bunch of high-level people in the party and so a part of it got printed uh like a month ago or something i've lost track of all time but like like specifically in this speech that xi jinping is making that is published in the CCP's official like theoretical journal he's like explicitly saying like don't lie flat and saying quote happy life is earned through heart hard work and yeah and he's also has this he has his rant but like denouncing welfarism which is great the uh the communist vanguard there yeah yeah preaching the immortal

science yeah socialism with chinese characteristics motherfuckers don't be a welfare queen that's follow xi jinping thought it's great you know but it's interesting because people this is the one people are really freaked out about like i saw i saw like an american writer about this who you know they wrote like an article about this whole thing and then they were like this is gonna this is gonna cause inflation it's like this is gonna be the driver of 20 inflation like what yeah people just use the word inflation to mean whatever scary thing they want yeah well they're like oh this will increase wages and that will lead to inflation and we'll get the 70s again and i'm like oh god maybe we'll get a tallow disco again. Did you ever think of that, Guy?

Good God. That our reserves of a tallow disco are critically low? Garrison, do you know what a tallow disco is? No idea. That's a shame. All right, let's continue. What type of, like, is there, like, any, like, you said this kind of stuff started to, like, move leftwards. Is there any, like, actual, like, leftist organizing in these types of places? So this is the thing I was getting to, is that like you know people are starting to do

reading groups but the problem the problem with leftist organizing in china is that you know so state policy in the past three years has been like if you poke your head above ground you get arrested so you know i mean in 2018 for example there was there was a strike at jacek and you know a bunch of student groups who've been organizing for a long time, like, tried to do solidarity with it. And they all got arrested. The people who were – the people who led the strike got arrested. All the students who were doing solidarity got arrested. People, like – people got arrested for, like, dancing with – like, university students got arrested for, like, dancing with the people who were, like, cleaning the floors.

Oh, God. Yeah. That's a little bleak yeah like the emotional science depression yeah like it's incredible and like you know and the other thing that you can see about this was so so for example there was there was a guy doing like delivery driver organizing it was kind of weird he was like kind of an entrepreneur kind of doing delivery driver organizing like he got arrested and then you know like a couple weeks later the ccp was like oh we're gonna like do things to improve the conditions of uh of delivery drivers and you know who knows if that's gonna happen but like you know basically like any anyone

out for some reason the the people in the tech sector have been able to get away with more for reasons that are probably class-based and i think this is take them seriously in the way they do with students and factory workers yeah but you know and actually i mean the fact that the the tech workers like kind of recently like there was a tech worker thing calling for like like democratic control of production which is wild but other than those guys like you can't you know you can't stick your head up you get flattened so this has sort of been the result of this which is this like you know the the sort of the like lying flat is this is you know it's this mass decentralized movement that you know there's there's no one to hit with a hammer

and you know and i think like okay so one of the other quotes that's that's been going around about lying flat is it's it's a poem it doesn't poem as well in english but you know this is the best we've got lying flat is to not bow down lying flat is to not kneel lying flat is to stand up horizontally lying flat is a straight spine and so you know what's basically happening here is is it's a combination of the tendencies you see in the u.s where you know a bunch of people terrible jobs realizing that everything's pointless. And then also, this is a way you can, like, this is a way you can, like, fight your boss without, like, the police showing up. Yeah.

And so there's some interesting, like, political stuff. So there's, if you look at the document, there's a bunch of memes here because they're great uh so there's there's been a thing with these people talking about how people are leaks which are like they're leaks they're harvested over and over again and they're being exploited and like the plants yeah yes like yeah like yeah you eat and so they have this thing it's a leaks that lie flat cannot be so easily harvested it's just like a knife go like like a machete like trying to swing at a bunch of leaks but leaks are flat so they can't hit them and i like that too i see what you do i like i like all of this yeah yeah it's it's it's it's you know and so and so what the the product of this is that yeah like this this this has this stuff has actually been effective

enough that the ccp like you know i mean the ccp is taking it seriously but you know there's not much they can do about it because like if someone's just like oh i'm going to go from a job that's really high stress to one that's less high stress like what are you gonna are you just gonna arrest them like what are you gonna do and so this yeah this this has been building for a while now, and I don't know. Who knows exactly where it's going to go, but it's already – it's something that people can do as an individual in a place where organized political action is impossible in a way such that their individual actions have a collective effect but one that can't be just, you know, pounded down. Yeah. I mean, it is certainly interesting to see two completely separate, like anti-work style movements arise basically around the same,

same exact time with the same exact points. If you're in totally different languages, right? If you're someone who's interested in massive global revolutionary change, this should probably be a thing that you are looking at and studying and thinking a lot about because perhaps while we're arguing about shit that people started talking about in the 1870s,

this might be a better thing to do than that because it seems like there's some potential here. Yeah, and I think, yeah, I mean, you know, if, you know if any actual revolutionary project that makes the world better is going to have to be international. And that's been the bane of all revolutionary movements forever.

But, okay, so we have something the Chinese American working class agrees on, which is Diogenes' base in work sucks. Yeah. Yeah. So as you go forward into your life this week, take a page from Diogenes' book and go shit on the floor of a free people. Shit on the floor of a free people. Or, yeah, free people are an h&m go walk into one and just just just go

absolutely ruin that tile i mean fuck it up this is why my my my biggest political advice to friends who has always been learn to run fast because if you learn to run fast you can do so many more fun things all politics in a store and then run fast and it can do so many more fun things. All politics. You can take a shit in a store and then run fast and it's done, right? The problem is that a lot of people who want to do this can't run fast enough. So learn to run fast, do this, there we go.

It's like Mao said, all political power comes from being able to shit really fast and then bolt from the doors of a free people. Just get the hell out of there. The immortal science look i i think i think i think we should leave with with the the the the the real immortal science the the immortal words of a skeleton from the share zone just walk out you can leave work social things movie home class dentist clothes shops two fancy weed store cops if you're quick friendships Leave. Work. Social things. Movie. Home. Class. Dentist. Clothes shops.

Too fancy. Weed store. Cops if you're quick. Friendships. If it sucks. Hit the bricks. Yeah. Yeah.

As some comedian who I can't remember now said, always have an exit plan. Like, that should be your thought for everything. Everything in the world. Hit the bricks. Hit the fucking bricks. Get out. Anyway, get out of this podcast episode now. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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