It Could Happen Here - Infrastructure as Control feat. Andrew

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Andrew is joined by James to discuss how physical and digital infrastructure can be used as systems of control, and how communities have resisted and built their own infrastructure.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hey guys, it's AZ Fudd. You may know me as a gold medalist. You may know me as an NCAA national champion. You may even know me as the People's Princess. Every week on my new podcast, Fud Around and Find Out, I'll be talking to some special guests about pop culture, basketball, and what it's like to be a professional athlete on and off the court.

Listen to Fud Around and Find Out, a production of IHart Women's Sports and partnership with unanimous media. on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Have you ever looked at a piece of abstract art or music or poetry and thought, that's just a bunch of pretentious nonsense? That's exactly what two bored Australian soldiers set out to prove during World War II when they tricked the literary world with their intentionally bad poetry, setting off a major scandal.

We break down the truth, the lies, and the poetry in between on hoax, a new podcast hosted by me, Lizzie Logan, and me, Dana Schwartz. Every episode, Hoax explores an audacious fraud or ruse from history. Listen to Hoax on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Stuff You Should Know guys have made their own summer playlist of their must-listen podcasts on movies. It's me, Josh, and I'd like to welcome you to the Stuff You Should Know Summer movie playlist. What Screams Summer? More than a nice, darkened, air-conditioned theater, and a great movie playing right in front of you.

Episodes on James Bond, special effects, stunt men and women, disaster films, even movies that change filmmaking, and many more. Listen to the stuff you should know summer movie playlist on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, the saying it, this is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole. The unwanted sorority is where black women, fims, and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence, rewrite, the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leitra Tate. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone Media

Hello and welcome to It Could Happen here, and It Could. My name is Andrew Sage. I'm also Antericum on YouTube. I'm here once again with James. James Stout. People have said I'd never say my last name and they can't work out who I am. So I guess I'll do that more. Welcome, James Stout. Thank you.

So with Lee, and I mean, this is an unfortunately common pattern of thought for me, but I've been thinking about just how totalizing the system feels. And it's like everywhere you turn, you know, walking down the street, looking at the city, pollution, at every inch of land. that's been claimed by the system. Every bit of, you know, the way to live and operate just feels like it's been manipulated and controlled in some way. And so that's really what I want to highlight in today's episode, the infrastructure of

the system and how it's used to control, you know, both in terms of the physical infrastructure and the digital infrastructure of our lives. So I suppose to start off. I'd ask, when was the last time that you noticed infrastructure shaping your choices? That's interesting. I mean, a lot in a certain ways, right? Like, the infrastructure of labour shapes a lot of my choices. Like, I have to work a lot to make ends meet, right?

Like, which means I can't do sometimes things I want to do. Like, there are mutual aid efforts I'd like to participate in more that I'm not able to because I had this obligation to capital. I guess that's one of them. Or just like the physical infrastructure limiting the people I get to see, right? Like there are places I love to go out. There are some really nice vegan places in Tijuana that I don't go to as much I'd like because someone has built a giant wall and then another giant wall next to it

and then stationed a bunch of people with guns to check if I have the right piece of paper to go back and forth to somewhere that otherwise I could ride my bike to. Yeah. Borders are very unfortunate and big one. Yeah. Yeah, it's really frustrating. And I think that's one of the most obviously detrimental of aspects of physical infrastructure that sort of manipulates our lives today. I think on the digital level, there's things like just the way that social media is laid out. I think it really controls like how much time you spend on it, on much energy you invest into it. And of course, even just, just the way that social media is laid out. I think it really controls, like, how much time you spend on it. And, of course, even just, just our neighborhoods, our environments, our cities with their laid out, it tends to affect, you know, just how often we go out, where we go, what means the transportation we use. And I mean with physical infrastructure is concerned and how it's been used to control people, that that goes way back into history. You know, colonial powers often built transport infrastructure in like roads and railways and ports with the very explicit purpose of extracting raw materials

from the colonized territories to get to the imperial core you know the systems were not designed to save the mobility needs of the local populations they usually created direct lines from the mines and the plantations and the resource rich areas to the coastal ports where they could be exported yeah yeah and so for the british imperialists and lovers of empire they often brag that you know we've built ports and we built bridges and we built roads and we built railways well it's the same pattern everywhere. You know, in India, it was used to move cotton, tea and other resources from the interior to the shipping port. In Ghana, it was used to move gold and cocoa. In any case, it wasn't to interconnect within the city. You know, the actual economic self-determination

of the people in that area didn't matter. Yeah, very much too. I think about this, like, I cycled around Rwanda in 2020, which is an interesting time to be traveling. But I remember riding around and the Kenya Rwanda word for dirt road is Ikitaka, right? And so that's what mostly we so we cycled on these dirt roads. And it was lovely, you know, we'd go through the village and everyone would come out and wave at you. And like, the little kids would come out and be like, what the fuck is this bicycle? And it was kind of fun, you know, and then we'd find someone, it's not really set up for like restaurants. So you just find someone and pay them an amount upon which you agreed and they would give you some food. And that was a beautiful

experience. And then there were these roads that they call Chinese roads. just go directly from the mine to the place where the raw material can be extracted, because China is doing a lot of what you could generously call foreign direct investment or, like, neo-colonialism in lots of places in Africa, right? And it was just the contrast between those two traveling experiences was so profound. Like, obviously, you travel faster on the smooth roads, but, like, you don't immerse yourself in the human experience of meeting and sharing that travel with people, which is why I do these things in the first place with just like such a profound

contrast. I remember it really striking me at the time. Yeah. I mean, and this is what empires and rulers in general have been doing, right? They wield their control over labor to set things up in a way that fulfills their interests. Yeah. And then, you know, even when people came in some sort of nominal independence and they inherit these colonial infrastructure grids or you know they have investments coming in and they have set it up they have these companies it's the multinational companies setting up infrastructure it still continues you know this sort of extractivist and top-down nature of the way the infrastructure is set up you know it doesn't reimagine all of them don't reimagine the logic of what key

before. You know, in part for lack of funding and in part for lack of imagination. And so in a lot of places, the peripheral regions in these countries are still lacking in connectivity. They're still lagging behind the rest of the country. They still don't have access to some of the basic social services and resources that the urban core has because, you know, the urban rural divide in many ways mimics the core periphery divide on the international stage. And then you have these neo-colonial development aid programs coming in with the IMF of the World Bank, and you have even more infrastructure projects to just repeat this extractive pattern under the banner of development. Of course, real development would be connecting people,

encouraging people to participate in society and distribute opportunities, but the infrastructure that tends to be set up is more so for consolidating state power and channeling the movements of people in predictable, available ways and prioritizing access for certain populations while excluding or marginalizing others. Hey guys, it's AZ Fudd. You may know me as a gold medalist. You may know me as an NCAA national champion and recent most outstanding player. You may even know me as a People's Princess, but now you're also going to know me as your favorite host. Every week on my new podcast, around and find out, I'll give you an inside look at everything happening in my crazy life

as I try to balance it all. From my travels across the globe to preparing for another run at the Natty with my Yukon Huskies to just try to make it to my midterms on time. You'll get the inside scoop on everything. I'll be talking to some special guests about pop culture, basketball, and what it's like to be a professional athlete on and off the court. You'll even get to have some fun with the Fudd family. So if you follow me on social media or watch me on TV, you may think you know me. But this show is the only place where you can really fud around and find out. Listen to Fud Around and Find Out, a production of IHart Women's Sports and partnership with unanimous media on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

In 1920, a magazine article announced something incredible. Two young girls had photographed real fairies. But even more extraordinary than the magazine article's claim was, the identity of the man who wrote the article, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who wrote Sherlock Holmes. Yes, the man who invented literature's most brilliant detective was fooled by two girls into thinking fairies were real. How did they do it? And why does it seem like so many smart people keep falling for outlandish tricks? These are the questions we explore in Hoax, a new podcast for me, Dana Schwartz, the host of Noble Blood. And me, Lizzie Logan.

Every episode will explore one of the most audacious and ambitious tricks in history, from the fake Shakespeare's to Balloon Boys, and try to answer the question of why we believe, what we believe. Listen to Hoax on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The stuff you should know guys have made their own summer playlist of their must- list and podcasts on movies. It's me, Josh, and I'd like to welcome you to the Stuff You Should Know Summer movie playlist. What Screams Summer? More than a nice, darkened, air-conditioned theater, and a great movie playing right in front of you.

Episodes on James Bond, special effects, stunt men and women, disaster films, even movies that change filmmaking, and many more. Listen to the stuff you should know summer movie playlist on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney. podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all,

childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the stream to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on the street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast.

It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you. you listen to your favorite shows so of course infrastructure development has a capacity to help people you know it can increase accessibility can make people's lives easier and it can also just manage and contain them and their resources and we see a lot more examples of this sort of infrastructure control when you look at the class and racial dynamic within societies Those sorts of divisions and separations and stratifications, they of course manifest physically.

You know, in the U.S., you had literal segregation areas that were designated for black people, listening to for white people, water fountains and neighborhoods and all these different things. He also had redlining policies, and nowadays you have spaces that were redlined and thus lacked investment and thus were neglected infrastructurally due to that racial and economic inequality. those spaces are now ripe for development in the form of gentrification because the property is so cheap, so undervalued, and to the people who made something out of that lack and now being pushed out. And in South Africa, I mean, up until recently, these apartheid era policies created townships that were deliberately located far from white urban centers that were lacking in services and transit options that physically reinforced. the racial division of that society and even today around the world

you have human zoning laws and transit access limitations and public housing policies that recreate historical class divisions and racial divisions ethnic divisions and I'm sure you and you're with all the

I mean every time I talk to you have like a new travel story to tell I'm sure you've witnessed something like this yeah I was just thinking of how like I was thinking, like, if we think about the Syrian state as a contiguous colony, right, like it's called the Syrian Arab Republic, but not all the people who are contained within the territory in which it once claimed the monopoly on violence are Arab people. So we think of the parts of like north and east Syria, with majority Kurdish areas, as colonized. We can see that reflected in the infrastructure, right?

Part of that is, as you say, this sort of lack of investment, but then also part of it is every government-funded building, right? Schools, hospitals, the buildings you go in to do the paperwork you have to do to exist under the state, they're set up, like, strong points. Like, they're designed with a big kind of wall and then a big courtyard and then thick exteriors. Like, they're designed to be militarily defensible against the people they're supposed to serve, right? Like, the school is designed to be used as a fucking machine gun position. Wow.

And once you see it, you see it everywhere. And you think about the nature of the state that designs infrastructure with that explicitly in mind, right? It's fascinating. The other example I think of is like Chris Elam's done some fantastic writing on the development of Barcelona. And you have like the unregulated working class of Raval, like this area just next to the Rambler

where the streets are just fucking small and winding and crazy. and there's never not laundry kind of over, you know, over your head. And it's a very, I like to go there. It's a place that I enjoy. And then you have the Ejampler, which means extension, where the infrastructure is extremely, like, it's probably one of the earlier grid cities that you would see, right? And the idea was that, like, these overcrowded kind of what were in the 1920s and 30 slums would be, like, where the working class would be kept.

And the working class, to be clear, what, like, seen. as there was a colonial relationship between the bourgeois and the working class in Barcelona because most of the working class were not Catalan. They would actually put signs atop of these working class areas saying like Murcia begins here, right? These are the Mursiano, the people from Murcia, the people from outside of Catalonia.

Catalonia stops here where the working class exist. That later reflected in the working class self-identity. They came to refer to the Raval as Chinatown, not specifically because of a high concentration of people from the Chinese diaspora but because they'd seen Chicago gangster movies where Chinatown was like the area where the gangsters were and they were like, yeah, we're fucking gangster.

Like, we're going to call it Chinatown. Like, you want to come in here? We'll fucking shoot you. Like, I thought that was, it's really fascinating, like, response to the way that they had been alienated by infrastructure. Yeah, I mean, and that's why when you look at they sort of claims that

oh, you know, it's just roads, it's just zoning, it's just a city grid. Yeah. It's just an embassy. It's just a government office. It's like, no, these sorts of

spaces, these buildings, this infrastructure could never be neutral. Yeah. And when you see that, you can't unsee it. Because you look at the amounts of decisions it would have had to have gone into, you know, some of the examples you mentioned or the examples I mentioned.

Yeah. You know, the design decisions, it's like, okay, we're going to put this road here instead of here. Yeah. We're going to use this material instead of this material. Who you employ to build those structures, that infrastructure also has an impact in the surrounding area. Are you employing people within the community, employing people outside, what's happening there? Who's funding this infrastructure? Who's maintaining the infrastructure?

Yeah. What level of surveillance has been implemented? where are the public transportation routes and why are they here and up there, you know? Yeah, exactly. Like, there's people whose opinions and views matter in that process and there are people who are excluded from it. Exactly.

Yeah. One of the authors I tend to go back too often is Yvonne Lich, because he critiques a lot of this stuff, particularly infrastructure as control. In tools for conviviality, he spoke about how modern transport and urban design have been used to alienate people from their own bodies and communities.

So he called out the usual suspects, suburbanization, car-centric infrastructure, how do I-eslis people, and increases dependence on vehicles. And he called this dependence a radical monopoly because all the other choices have effectively been eliminated. Technically, you could walk along the highway, but you're not going to. You're going to get a car. Yeah. Right?

You can't choose to walk or cycle in that sort of scenario. Yeah. Well, someone's going to call the cops that you try that in America, right? Yeah. So as Elish thought, it's really a cultural imposition that shapes how we end up living, interacting, moving, and it's frustrating. And on the global stage, you also see how infrastructure has the capacity to control the whole geopolitical board. You know, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, all these places. have a lot of power militarily, trade-wise, diplomatically, because they control the flow of oil

or of goods or of data. Yeah. Particularly in the areas where the undersea internet cables run. Oh, yeah. And so speaking of data, actually, the realm of digital infrastructure is also very insidious when it comes to control. We tend to think of the internet as that sort of ephemeral cloud right but the cloud is hosted physically you know there are servers there are fiber optic cables their data centers all these things they're not as obvious as roads and railways and you know neighborhoods but they are just as if not in some ways even more powerful in terms of controlling what people access how fast they access it under what terms they access it or because it's so intangible it's so hard to pin down and it can often escape scrutiny,

but there are companies that own these things. There's a small group of very powerful corporations that pretty much dictate how things are in it. Most people, they know about China's great firewall and how it's used to cordon off China from the rest of the internet in some ways. You know, it censors websites and switch results. It monitors people's activity.

And it usually has the state monitored alternatives to some of the popular global platforms like Google and Facebook, right? But Google and Amazon and META and Microsoft, it's not like they're any better. You know, they're not running things through public good. So if we will call out what China is doing with the Great Firewall,

and I agree, I don't think that any government should have any control over what people access. But, you know, it's not like censorship, data harvested, and surveillance are unique to China. Yeah, right. You know, a lot of other governments, in collaboration with these companies deploy soft censorship. You know, they derank things in the algorithm.

They filter certain keywords. They selectively block certain things. Yeah. You have things that may be automatically flagged or moderated. And that often affects people from the LGBTQ community in countries where, you know, that's a big no-no. Or you have even the manipulation of language, the words people use, as people try to get around censors,

hence the proliferation of terms like grape and essay and self-delete and unalive and all these other euphemisms, which, I mean, honestly, I don't use any of them. I despise them. Yeah, me too. The thing is, a lot of people assume that these words are censored on all platforms.

Yeah. But they're not. You know, they may be censored on one platform, usually it's TikTok, or limited in one platform. And then people take that sort of TikTok sort of way of speaking and spread it across the rest of the internet or worse yet, bring it into real life and end up saying things like unalive in real life. Yeah, yeah, and then you have allowed fucking TikTok's algorithm to determine the way you can express yourself. Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, TikTok gets a lot of heat these days because, you know, rightfully so. It's very popular. It has a lot of influence and it's you know, very blatantly

interventionist with its content in some, you know, damaging ways. But again, the other big corporations are not immune either. I mean, Facebook was famously found culpable for genocide, right? Yeah. They played a major role in the sort of attitudes that were developing and the marginalization that was sort of targeting

Rohingya community and the subsequent genocide. Yeah. So I was on a panel with some Rehingya people the other day, and they are still a physical and technical infrastructure being marginalized. So something myself and my union friends are trying to do is help the Rehingya podcast initiative start podcasting, right, such that they can share their own voices with the world and their positions and their opinions. It's very important at a time when they're facing marginalization even from revolutionary forces within Myanmar. And we cannot sustain an internet connection to allow them to do that.

We tried to do a live panel, and it was very hard for, you know, these guys were running around Cox's Bazaar, where tens of thousands of Rohingya people live in refugee camps, trying to find connectivity. And like, just another example of how they continue to be marginalized by the systems that first allowed them to be genocided. Exactly. Yeah. Because the private corporations alone are not responsible for this,

it's the governments too. You know, when the corporations tell the government to do something, the government comply, and then when the government's tell the corporations to do stuff, a lot of the time it's also like they comply. It's collaboration, you know, especially since the government has the power in a lot of cases to shut down the internet when things are not going their way. Yeah. You know, they've, they used it.

I'm all over, I mean, recently, you know, the suppression of dissent during protests, you know, to influence elections or to restricting, information, substruct journalism and communication during crises. When you look at all over the world, Iran, India, Sudan, Myanmar, Uganda, even in Gaza, in all these cases, these governments step in and they limit or they shut down the internet entirely to prevent the news from getting out. You know, they could target either the entire internet or they target certain platforms.

They target WhatsApp, they target Twitter. They justify by saying, oh, they're going after, take news. or there's a security threat. Yeah, it's bullshit. But, you know, we could see through that. Yeah. And it's tough because, I mean, these are the places where people have gathered.

These are the online town squares, you know. And these, this infrastructure is very much centralized. Google controls most of the search on the internet. Amazon dominates e-commerce and cloud computer and logistics. and meta controls a lot of people's social interactions. And I could brag and say, oh, well, I'm not on Facebook, but, you know, I still use WhatsApp

because everybody else uses WhatsApp. Yeah. And it's so easy for them, because we're so concentrated on these platforms, it's so easy for them to copulate us, to flex their muscles and control the direction of public discourse. And, I mean, it's amplifying certain things, suppressing other things,

maximizing our engagements, exploiting our cognitive vulnerabilities, you know, polarizing discourse, distorting reality. It's like, what the hell do we do? Yeah. And so for the

Hopium segment of the podcast, I just want to point out that you know, infrastructure can be used to consolidate power and control people, but it can also be used to resist and to reclaim our collective agency.

You know, even infrastructure that was originally designed to control can be taken under our control. You know, around the world, communities have been able to challenge these extractive logics to build their own infrastructures on their own tubes. You know, in digital spaces, this might take the form of community-build mesh networks, or alternative internet's local servers.

You have projects like gwefi.net in Catalonia or you have the NYC mesh in New York. And these are efforts to engage in, you know, pair-to-pay and decentralized communications without the reliance on the telecom giants. And then you also, of course, physically have examples of infrastructure-resistant central control, participatory urban planning movements, you have guerrilla urbanism, you have, you know, of course, the long and storied history of squatting, otherwise known as informal settlement. And these informal settlements are hubs of innovation, in a lot of cases, in place like Nairobi or in Rio de Janeiro, you know, these slums and favelas, they're hooking up their own electricity, hooking up their own internet, hooking up their own water supply.

Yeah. Because they recognize that this is within their hands. This is within their capacity. You know, we don't have to have everything, you know, passed on to us from one high. You know, we can, you know, sort of reclaim our own voices and design our own spaces. Hey, guys, it's AZ Fudd. You may know me as a gold medalist. You may know me as an NCAA national champion and recent most outstanding player.

You may even know me as a people's princess, but now you're also going to know me as your favorite host. Every week on my new podcast, fud around and find out, I'll give you an inside look at everything happening in my crazy life as I try to balance it all. From my travels across the globe to preparing for another run at the Natty with my Yukon Huskies to just try to make it to my midterms on time. You'll get the inside scoop on everything. I'll be talking to some special guests about pop culture, basketball, and what it's like to be a professional athlete on and off the court. You'll even get to have some fun with the FUD family. So if you follow me on social media or watch me on TV, you may think you know me.

But this show is the only place where you can really fud around and find out. Listen to Fud Around and Find Out, a production of IHart Women's Sports and partnership with Unanimous Media on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Have you ever looked at a piece of abstract art or music or poetry and thought, that's just a bunch of pretentious nonsense? Well, that's exactly what two bored Australian soldiers set out to prove during World War II when they pulled off what was either a bold literary hoax or a grand poetic experiment,

publishing over a dozen intentionally bad but highly acclaimed works of expressionist poetry under the name Earn Malley in an incident that caused a media firestorm and even a criminal trial. The Earn Malley episode made fools of believers and critics alike and still fascinates poetry lovers to this day. We break down the truth, the lies, and the poetry in between on hoax, a new podcast hosted by me, Lizzie Logan, and me, Dana Schwartz. Every episode, hoax explores an audacious fraud or ruse from history, from forged artworks to the original fake news, to try and answer why we believe. Listen to hoax on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The stuff you should know guys have made their own summer playlist of their must listen podcasts,

on movies. It's me, Josh, and I'd like to welcome you to the stuff you should know summer movie playlist. What Screams Summer? More than a nice, darkened, air-conditioned theater and a great movie playing right in front of you. Episodes on James Bond, special effects, stunt men and women, disaster films, even movies that change filmmaking, and many more. Listen to the stuff you should know summer movie playlist on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney. The podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around

you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all, childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more, and found the stream to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house, unarmed.

Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows if you're really interested in how infrastructure has the capacity to control and truly just how states sort of see things i have to of course recommend the classic jamesy scott seen like a state yeah uh i mean it's just a foundational framework but understanding how infrastructure is used for social engineering it's really readable as well so definitely give that a read

and, you know, think about ways that you can contribute to shaping the infrastructure around you. And I don't know, James, if you have any stories along this vein, you could leave us off with. Yeah, I think of a ton, right? Like, even, I think about, like, when I was a lot younger, I lived in a, I guess what you could call a slum of Valela. Like, I did a pretty economically disadvantaged to part of Caracas for a little while. And like at the time, and I've seen this when I lived in Barcelona too, like, I guess the English word would be InfoShop. They normally call them social centres would be the Spanish word or social spaces. And like, it was cool to see this as a city which is established through colonialism, right?

And there was a brief time before things were terrible in Venezuela where people were trying to make. And largely it was people trying to make things better. And like the state for a time allowed a space for that to exist before it. stopped allowing a space for that to exist, which is where we're at right now, right? And very clearly, the state right now is very repressive in Venezuela, to be clear. Like, I don't want to put fuel on the tanky fire or whatever. But it was actually a really beautiful thing. And it facilitated, right?

I was like 19. My Spanish was dog shit. I was hungry all the time. It didn't have any food, you know. But it facilitated that community taking care of me because the spaces were public and people could see if people were falling through the cracks, right? And like, I think a lot about refugee camps, obviously that's somewhere spent a decent amount of time, right? Both within the US and outside of the US. Something I've been thinking about a lot recently is how so many of the people

I met on the way to the United States and the Dalian had horrific experiences in the Dalian and afterwards. But they also miss the community that they had. Like, They also miss the profound solidarity. I was just talking to people the other day who were telling me, like when they were hungry in the jungle, strangers who didn't speak their language would try and give them food. Yeah, you see that in a lot of disasters too. They're sort of explosion in mutual aid.

Yeah, and like a refugee camp is a place where you do not have privacy for the most part, and that's not always great. But it facilitates caring for one another. there. And like, I don't know, I'd have this recollection from seven or eight years ago now while I'm walking through a refugee camp in Mexico and just a very little girl, 50, 6, 7, something like that. And I have long hair. People can't see me. But she liked to, like, mess with my hair and braid it and shit. And I'm carrying this little girl. And, like, I've been coming for some time. And, like, the sense of community that you felt there

amongst, like, a really terrible situation. But, like, because everyone can see you, walking down this little walkway, everyone's like, oh, hi, how are you? Like, you know, they're kind of, I'm trying to work out what they need and how we can best help. Like, I just remember thinking, like, what the fuck is wrong with, and then going back to the United States, right, sitting in my little house and, like, you know, like, I'm fortunate to know my neighbors and to be close to them, but not many people are. And, like, for most people, you know, they get out of their house, they go to their car, they drive to their work, they don't say hi to anyone. Like, it's so.

strange that, like, in a sense, in those refugee camps, we were closer to the beautiful life that we want than we are in these million-dollar homes in America. My house does not cost a million dollars. I don't own a house. But this, the profound alienation that we feel in part because of the physical infrastructure. The ability of humanity to fall back into caring for one another, like, that's what we we do when we are not like physically and like, intellectually restrained from doing it by structures, both physical and digital and even emotional, that divide us from one another. And I've kind of thought about that ever since, like how do I build a place where people have more stability, people have privacy, people have

their material needs, man. Yeah. Does you want to strike a balance infrastructure? Yeah. I don't want there's some co-housing sort of plans that I've seen, for example, but don't even really factor in much privacy, which I'm not for at all. You know, people don't want to recreate their dorm room experience. So in my case, they are sharing a bedroom, the entire childhood experience. So yeah, this says we need to have space for people to have privacy and then, but at the same time space for people to have community and like cities can exist like that, communities can exist like that.

The theory of the Mediterranean public sphere that sometimes comes up where like, again, and working class Barcelona, right? People don't generally have air conditioning and it can get very hot. So you just spend a lot of time outside, balcony, whatever, you know, front port, if you've got one. That creates community, right? That creates a public sphere, like a place that is not quite a home, but it's not controlled by someone else either. It's like a community space. And that doesn't exist in, like, I don't live in the suburbs, but like suburban America, you know,

where everyone has these, like, literal fences around all the shit that they own. Yeah. That exists to very an extent in Trinidad. Yeah. You know, some areas are very much communal and other areas, like, I try and desperately to be America. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, it's kind of a mix of both wheels there. At the very least, from what I'm aware of, what I can tell, people at least say hi to their neighbors, though. Yeah. That's still, like, a horrifying. you know, nightmareish sort of. The specter of not knowing your neighbors.

Thing that I've heard of of American life that you don't even say hi. Yeah. You know, you don't even wave at people like that's. Yeah, no, I'm always in my neighbor's houses

and they're always at my house. And like, I'm a person who owns a lot of tools, you know, like different spanners and stuff. So like, I'm like, I will go out of my weight

to make sure that my neighbors know they can borrow my shit. And, uh, And, like, that does seem to be quite a new experience for people who are, like, new in the neighborhood or whatever. But, yeah, we should all do that. It's such an easy way to fight that alienation and that infrastructure that, you know, like, yeah, there's a wall between where I live and where the person next door lives. But, you know, I can knock on the door and say, hey, it looks like you're having some trouble with your truck.

Do you need a hand or what have you? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, what you're saying is, it could happen here. Yeah. Yeah, you've got to make the good things happen here, too, because enough of the fucking bad she is. Indeed. That's it for me, guys. All power to all the people. Peace. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, it's AZ Fud. You may know me as a gold medalist. You may know me as an NCAA national champion. You may even know me as the People's Princess.

Every week on my new podcast, Fud Around and Find Out, I'll be talking to some special guests about pop culture, basketball, and what it's like to be a professional athlete on and off the court. Listen to Fud Around and Fudder Round and Find out. find out, a production of IHeart women's sports and partnership with unanimous media on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you overlooked at a piece of abstract art or music or poetry and thought, that's just a bunch of pretentious nonsense? That's exactly what two bored Australian soldiers set out to prove

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