It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 10
Episode Date: November 20, 2021All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy info...rmation.
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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron,
host of the Better Offline podcast,
and we're kicking off our second
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billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better
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Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1999,
five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez
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And the question was,
should the boy go back to his father in Cuba?
Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.
Or stay with his relatives in Miami?
Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.
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Hey, everybody.
Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you,
but you can make your own decisions.
What's
facing
my
books?
Your grandmother.
All of your
grandmothers. Wow, garrison my grandmother's dead so well that was
they're still facebooking in the grave i mean thank god no uh i think my grandparents briefly
got introduced to myspace before being too sick to use the internet anymore they were on aol for
a while though oh that's that's quaint yeah they were on aol for a while, though. Aw, that's quaint.
Yeah, they were on AOL for a while.
You know, it's... I don't often say
thank goodness for Lewy body dementia,
but at least it stopped them
from knowing
the horrors that were to come in the digital age.
They got right off the bus
before things got terrible.
Yeah, that is so friends romans countrymen how do you feel about meta which is totally what we're all going to be calling facebook
for now on for forever the my main thought honestly is that like the word meta the past
like two years the word meta has been ruined ruined by both pop culture thinking it's smart and then shit like this.
Now that a once useful concept has now been obliterated and we can't use it for anything anymore.
You can't be meta.
And the fact that Facebook is attempting to use this as the name of their company shows that Mark Zuckerberg hasn't had a conversation on an even footing in his entire adult life.
Like everyone is trying to get someone out of him every time he talks to anybody.
So nobody would say like, you know, Mark, Meta is a terrible name for a company.
But anyway, they did that.
And they had a big event about two weeks ago where they got up and talked for an hour and
20 minutes about the future of the internet and what Facebook's vision of the metaverse
was going to be.
All this very fun stuff. Okay, so here's the thing. It's a
bad idea. And normally, like, bad tech ideas are a dime a dozen, and we don't cover them on our show,
because this is a show, it could happen here, about collapse, things falling apart, and the
future, and what's going to come next. But in this case, talking about meta is actually really
worthwhile, because meta is one example of how the people who are kind of in control
or at least in control of a significant amount of the world that we live in,
particularly the digital spaces that we've all agreed to be locked into, see the future.
I think the thing that like makes it clear why this is in our wheelhouse is an article from Wired by Matthew Galt,
who's a buddy of mine.
He's a great journalist.
And it's titled Billionaires
See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change. And that title does kind of get to the nut of it,
but the quotes in this thing are fucking wild. So before we get into Mark Zuckerberg and his
vision of the future of the internet and of humanity, I want to read some quotes from John
Carmack. So John Carmack is the guy he made doom
right like you can't overstate the the impact john karmack had on gaming like he invented the first
like first effectively the first popular first person shooter he was the cto of oculus for a
while um and yeah he's very familiar with like 3d digital spaces. Yes, and he's very bullish on VR.
And he gave a quote – well, not gave a quote.
He talked to Joe Rogan during an interview in 2020, and he said this.
Some people read this the wrong way and react incorrectly to it.
The promise of VR is to make the world you want it.
It is not possible on Earth to give everyone all that they would want.
Not everyone can have Richard Branson's private island.
People react negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation.
You have to make decisions about where things go.
Economically, you can deliver a lot more value to a lot of people in the virtual sense.
And that's one of those things that you can see how a guy like John Carmack, who is, again,
a smart guy who's been ahead of the curve on a number of important things, could convince himself this is true. This is absurd. And I think what we see in
Facebook's video is going to make clear that it's absurd. One of the reasons that it's absurd is
that, like everything else, the people who are building the metaverse have done, like what
they've done to the internet. The internet before Facebook and Twitter and these like these behemoths used to be weird and decentralized and primarily not for profit.
There was a period of time in which like the idea that you would actually make money off the internet like really out of like content or whatever was just silly because it was this – it was impossible to monetize.
It was this weird, wild, like creative nonsense pile.
It was impossible to monetize.
It was this weird, wild, like creative nonsense pile.
And you could only kind of make money around the edges of it.
But the core of it was just far too strange and uncontrollable, too wild and free.
And that's not the internet anymore because of the people – because in large part of the people who are trying to build these metaverses. And the idea that they would allow poor people to have the same kind of resources as rich people in the metaverse, they can't let that happen.
They're not the kind of people who would let that happen.
They're going to monetize every aspect of this thing.
If it becomes real, if we ever have like an all-encompassing metaverse, every moment of it and everything you do in it, everything you have in it is going to cost you money.
you have in it is going to cost you money probably with some kind of bullshit subscription yeah plus adding on you know like randomized caches and other like you know loot box type mechanics
selling gambling to children is the business model of the future by the future i mean it's
been happening for like 10 years yeah it's the business model they want for now i will state i
think some sort of persistent virtual reality thing will probably happen in some way someday. I don't think
any of these people, part of why my thesis of this is none of these people are capable of making it.
It's because they look at this the same way like shitty app developer, shitty like game developers
for Facebook look at gaming where it's like everything should cost money. You should be
able to pay to win. And it's like, well, nobody likes that. Nobody likes those games. Those are not the things that are successful. And it is one of the games that comes up a lot
when people talk about the metaverse is Minecraft and what made Minecraft hugely successful and why
you can kind of plausibly see like, oh, this has elements of a metaverse where everybody's building
these gigantic persistent things that you can interact with and that you can make these
incredible. And people have made like works of art in minecraft they did it for free
and they did it because like nothing costs money really in minecraft if i'm not mistaken like you
can make anything with nothing you just buy the game and then you have the game and you can build
whatever you want yeah your equity is effort right like yeah yeah yeah and if like you know like one
of my friends like learned computer science so he could like okay he can create circuits right he like he built a
like functioning computer in this game just like you can you can build computers yeah like it's
it's like it's pretty it's pretty cool yeah if you're gonna tell me sometime in the future
virtual reality in the internet is going to get like so good and so pervasive that eventually
people will
bootstrap together some kind of metaverse yeah maybe like that that could happen if it comes
from like a cyber like punk aspect where like emphasis on the punk then sure i can see this
being a thing but the way tech companies are talking about this that's not how people use
the internet currently specifically like the mainstream people there's no way yeah and there's
there's a few more like one of the things that Matt brings up in this article is like
VR is a way to avoid radical social change, is like kind of the, one of the reasons why
he's number one, and I think where we should all be kind of critical about how realistic
it is, is kind of the present state of virtual reality which is about 1.7 percent of steam users have a vr headset steam being kind of the largest app to try to monitor like how many people are
using vr right like it's kind of your best yeah it's figuring out the rough size of that it's the
biggest pc gaming yeah um headsets sales of vr headsets did go up about 30 during the pandemic
um but that was kind of alongside a surge in video game sales yeah vr headsets did go up about 30% during the pandemic. But that was kind of alongside a surge in video game sales.
Yeah.
VR headsets were already boosting, and the pandemic definitely emphasized that.
Because it's like, hey, I'm stuck in my house.
What can I do?
Well, I'll buy like a $200 Oculus so I can walk around and fight ninjas in my living room.
And VR is like real.
Like VR is cool.
I have a VR headset.
I've had it for years.
It can do one of the things that – I talk about like what it takes for technology, new technology to like go viral, to become like endemic.
It has some of that, which is that as soon as you put one of these on most people, unless you're one of the people that it makes sick, most people, if you put them on and you show them the right thing, they're like, oh oh this is actually way cooler than i thought it was going to be yeah absolutely um so that is like i'm not
i'm not like has i i'm not poo-pooing the entire idea of vr um and there's there's there's been
some successes on it like half-life alex sold about two million copies yeah which is huge for
vr but like also nothing for a video game like Like that's like for a big, for a fucking Half-Life game, that's shit.
Which just, it just shows that it's still like fractional, which I don't think any of these people are kind of missing.
But it does kind of point to, again, the degree to which this technology would have to leap up for anything like what Facebook, what we're about to talk about Facebook, like, for that to actually be popular. Yeah, there's a difference between developing VR gaming and developing this metaverse concept,
which goes way beyond VR gaming.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I, so what I find, what I find so, like, doomed about this isn't the technology, even
though I think it's important to acknowledge there's a long way to go, just in terms of,
like, how heavy it is, how much space you need how graphics not fully immersive it is you know yeah yeah trying to
remove lighthouses making it more mobile yeah there's a lot there's a lot of stuff the control
schemes are still kind of jank like yeah there's a lot to be done but all of that's i mean think
about the first iphone right it was like a fucking brick compared to the shit today all of that gets
better yeah and all of the first vr headset compared to the o right? It was like a fucking brick compared to the shit today. All of that gets better.
Yeah, and all of that.
The first VR headset compared to the Oculus 2, it's like a massive improvement in basically
every way.
I don't think when people criticize this stuff by pointing out like how primitive VR is today,
I don't think that means anything.
It is like worth noting, you know, its current level of adoption, but it's not people compare
this to like 3D TVs and stuff.
It's not that.
3D TVs were immediately, obviously, from the beginning, nothing but a grift.
Because nobody wanted what, really wanted what 3D TVs had.
Like VR, people do want what VR does, and eventually the tech will get there.
What's bullshit is the idea, and this is why I think this article by Galt is so good,
the idea that VR is going to allow the poor and downtrodden of the world to have a slice of the good life.
And this is something Carmack is particularly bullish about.
Quote, not everyone can have a mansion.
Not everyone can have a home theater.
These are things we can simulate to some degree in virtual reality.
Now, the simulation is not as good as the real thing.
If you are rich and you have your own home theater or mansion or in private island, good for you.
You're probably not the people who are going to benefit the most.
Most of the people in the world lived in cramped quarters that are not what they would choose to be if they had unlimited resources.
Incredibly deranged.
Yeah, it's out of its mind.
That's not how VR works.
I can put on my headset and load up a nice forest And it's not the feeling of being in a forest.
No.
That's not how our senses work.
So until we can hack our own brains into feeling things we don't actually feel, then it's not a thing.
And we're nowhere close to that level of technology.
Even just to the degree that he's talking about like, yeah, if you don't have a big home theater, you could just like put it on and have a huge TV, which is a thing that vr can do now like i've tried it it's not it's not good and it's like garrison you come
over two three times a week and we watch movies with all of our friends in my living room like
the good thing about it like it's nice to have a large screen i have a big tv but like a big part
of the experience is thank you with your friends yeah you're watching them react like you're eating
food together you're doing all this stuff that will watching them react like you're eating food together.
You're doing all this stuff that will never really be possible in VR.
I have a lot of respect for John Carman.
He made Doom, right?
Like that's a third of my childhood.
He's out of his mind now.
If he thinks that that's like what people want, what poor people want, like you've been rich for too long, sir.
You don't understand human beings anymore.
The particular type of escape like using vr as that
type of escapism is totally wrong because like vr can be escapism but it's not going to trick you
into thinking you're living in a mansion that's not that's not how vr works because you're walking
around a tiny room in your house and you can't feel anything you can like walk through cupboards
which is a great way to play vr games as you can just like hack it by walking into stuff and
they're working
on so the article notes that elon musk is working on a brain machine interface called neural link
yeah neural link yeah and who knows what it'll be i will say that's a little bit like the how
how realistic all of those dreams are um is is is questionable that said something like what they're
claiming it is will eventually be figured out.
It will, and it probably should be destroyed.
It probably should be destroyed.
Like, not put the chip in your brain.
Don't do it.
Val's Gabe Newell is really bullish on that technology.
Gabe Newell is the guy we have half-life for.
Like, he and John Carmack,
if there's a Mount Rushmore of, like, gamer dudes,
they're on it.
Valhalla, Steam, they make one of the better headsets.
Yeah.
Again, like we're about to talk about Mark Zuckerberg, who I do not think is a visionary.
Both Carmack and Newell are visionaries.
Doesn't mean they're right because visionaries are wrong all of the fucking time.
It's part of their job.
But they're both really, really fucking bullish on this.
Newell is a big believer in like the promise of kind of what
the Neuralink the brain interface technology and VR uh he told IGN in 2020 we're way closer to the
matrix than people realize which I don't think is the case um and Newell is the person who I've just
talked about like how smart he is he is even more out of his mind than John Carmack on this shit. In an interview with New Zealand's One News, he talked about his vision of the near future, which is a world in which brains and computers interface and computers can make changes to the human brain.
Uh-huh.
That sounds like a good idea.
He called the human body a meat peripheral.
Jesus Christ.
I know.
He has lost his mind this is this is the thing
about like vr and like the metaverse in general is over like emphasizing that we basically just
live in the meat space and the meat space exists just to make content for the online space which
is so and the online space is the actual real space and we just have to operate inside our
meat space to make content for that this is like the way technology has been progressing the way tech companies have been
wanting things to go and it's the most dystopian thing that's going to give so many people like
disassociative mental disorders yeah it's horrible for you i'm going to be super interested to see
people of my generation including myself like how we develop mentally the next you know 20 years
based on how kind of fake our lives have been because of
how much we exist and socialize within this like false network it's gonna be interesting to watch
i i used to be really optimistic about aspects of vr i actually when i was in mosul i filmed
not that like other people did this before i did but i was kind of one of the early people filming like a VR documentary
of some combat of like the Battle of Mosul, aspects of which were aired as a 360 and a
bunch of different like TV networks. And I had this belief that like, yeah, VR, because the
visual aspect of VR is so good, you know, even at that point, 2017 was already so good. I had
this belief that like, well, if you could – because the first time I ever went
into a war zone, it was such an affecting experience.
And I thought, like, oh, my God, if you could somehow carve out this moment of experience
and, like, transmit it to other people, maybe that would mean something.
Maybe it would, like, have an impact on people.
I do think that is possible in the long term.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think maybe. well like we'll see
the question is like can you ever make people give a shit yeah if you feel like horror games
the level of like anxiety and some degrees trauma of playing like a really well-made horror vr game
is incredibly intense um and that's something that can be done very well so i feel like that
type of like surreal experience like a war zone could actually be carried over to some degree in VR to change people's minds on like, hey, maybe war is not good.
Yeah, I mean, that's the dream.
I don't know how much I still believe that.
But reading people like Gabe Newell and how they talk about this technology makes me lose some hope.
Yeah, it makes me want to throw all the headsets in a river.
Here's another thing Gabe Newell said in that interview, Garrison, after calling the
human body a meat peripheral.
You're used to experiencing the world through
eyes, but eyes were created by this
low-cost bidder that didn't care about failure
rates and RMAs, and if it got
broken, there was no way to repair anything effectively,
which totally makes sense from an evolutionary
perspective, but is not at all reflective
of consumer preferences.
The miracle of the
human eye what the fuck no fuck it fuck eyes like dave there is some aspects of transhumanism that
i like i like being able to like change like body parts at will with like my mind but this type of
stuff yeah so you want to throw all technology of course i i
support the idea of like it would be great if when people lose their eyes completely from like
shrapnel or whatever some sort of like degenerative disease we could just pop new eyes in there
absolutely yeah 100 we start cloning eyes i think that's a great thing but eyes are amazing like the
eye is incredible like the most their most impressive camera ever
yeah we're nowhere close to replicating the abilities of the human eye it is not a low
cost bidder it is like they're imperfect like everything that that is part of the human body
like they didn't break down that he can't monetize it the same way right that's that's his problem
he's also talking about like well they break down it's like motherfucker have you used a computer
you're gabe newell i know you've used a computer like you want to talk about
breaking every computer i've ever owned yeah i've used steam before yeah yeah i use steam
motherfucker i'd like i would rather have my eyes and i'm wearing glasses right now go suck an egg
and it goes on because he he can't stop shit talking like reality uh he
talks about like in the in the virtual world he wants to build uh the real world will seem flat
colorless blurry compared to the experiences you'll be able to create in people's brains
um and i want you to keep that in mind my my dear friends and colleagues as we leap now
into the facebook live stream.
First of all, I think,
would it be worth explaining?
I know we've danced around what the metaverse is,
but for people who are totally unfamiliar,
do you think it would be worth giving a general explanation?
Will that be covered in the Facebook thing?
That's kind of covered in the,
because this is Facebook building it.
But I think we should,
you're probably right that we should give a little bit of context about where they got this idea.
Because again, Mark Zuckerberg has never had an original thought in his life.
He's not the first one to do this.
And Gabe Newell and John Carmack have had original thoughts in their life, but this is not an original thought for many of them.
All of them, everyone anywhere who talks about the metaverse is whether or not they know it a fan of Neal Stephenson.
Yes, this is all based on Neil Stevenson's books. Who wrote a book called Snow Crash,
where the point was that in the future,
the world is a dystopian corporatized nightmare.
And because things are, in part, because things are so bad
and incredibly highly like advertised and monetized,
persistent internet called the metaverse
that exists all around us and is totally immersive
has come to dominate everyday life.
And it's a bad thing.
Like Snow Crash is a story of like,
wouldn't this future be horrible?
Yeah, it's not like, hey, this is a cool thing,
but these tech guys read this and are like,
oh, that seems like fun, we could do that.
Neil Stevenson, who is yet another person I respect,
made one crucial flaw,
which is he gave the hero in his book a katana.
And because the hero in his book has a katana,
everyone was like, wouldn't this be rad if this were the future?
Let's make this be the entire future.
It's a real tragedy.
We do need to abolish katanas.
We would save so many lives.
Honestly, you could probably make a strong case
that the katana has a huge chunk of the cultural weight that it has
because of Neil Stevenson. He's a big part of that right you know you've got a lot of movies and stuff too
but yeah but like the katana cyberpunk kind of melding yeah and it's it's a it's a it's a very
i mean it's it's a bit dated now but it's still like a good book to read like there's a bunch of
silly stuff like that you've seen this replicated in a lot of other cyberpunk art some better some
worse yes some worse cough cough ready player one yeah and every in a lot of other cyberpunk art, some better, some worse. Yes. Some worse cough-cough Ready Player One.
Yeah, and every – like every – not every cyberpunk sense because there's people like Cory Doctorow who do some really cool shit.
But most cyberpunk sense is to some extent borrowed from Neil Stevenson's work, and Facebook's entire idea is based on this.
And so the idea is that it is a persistent, fully immersive digital world that interacts with the real world.
So you can be in VR hanging out with friends from around the world in like a fake living room and then like call someone and see like a video of them in the real world as they're like walking to a concert or whatever and like talk to them and like make – like that's the idea, right?
Yeah.
So this video, it opens with – you've got your little introduction and music and stuff.
And then we see Mark Zuckerberg looking like a fucking golem.
An android.
Yeah.
And the first thing that I really noticed about this is that he talks about how we're all going to do this together, meaning invent the technologies and use cases that are going to make the metaverse worthwhile.
And when he says all of us, this is not an internal Facebook video. This is a video. meaning invent the technologies and use cases that are going to make the metaverse worthwhile.
And when he says all of us, this is not an internal Facebook video.
This is a video – the meta video is heavily angled towards developers and investors.
And it's been viewed by a lot of people, like 12 million to date.
But he's talking about like a big part of what he's saying is that like the technology for all of the stuff that we've rendered,
because most of what's rendered in this isn't game footage so to speak like it's not a game but whatever it's here's how it might look if the technology is ever invented like nothing nothing is like in engine
or anything close to it it's all it's all speculative what's interesting about this to me
is that he's he is saying we're going to build this together and and sort of acknowledging that
like facebook does not have the capacity to make this thing they've dreamed about.
But Facebook's going to own it.
So he's – a lot of like this is him tacitly admitting I want to take your surplus value to make a metaverse that I then control and monetize entirely at my own discretion, which is cool.
It's great.
It's also – like I think if you want a sign of where this is actually going and like the actual
creativity behind this,
like,
okay,
again,
everything in that video is a mock-up,
right?
It looks like dog shit.
It's so ugly.
It's hideous.
It looks like a fucking connect game or like a fucking Wii game,
which is fine for a Wii game,
but I don't want to live there.
Like it's all weird and cartoony.
Yeah, so he talks about – in kind of laying out why he thinks this is the future,
Zuckerberg talks about how text used to be the basis of everything online,
but now like photos and videos dominate.
It's a visual thing, yeah.
Yeah, as that change happened from like text to photos to videos, the next change,
happened from like text to video to photos to videos the next change he kind of frames it like the the the the obvious next evolution is to what he calls an embodied internet where you're part of
the experience and that's the metaverse which again that if you don't i think that part has
some true elements i agree i don't think he's entirely wrong there obviously that's not his idea
um oh running out of time okay thank you for telling
me about the host and now includes unlimited minutes great uh thanks zoom um speaking of
metaverses um yeah like like yeah i mean i'm gonna i'm gonna flop on to uh uh uh share screen and
i'm gonna show you guys a section from this from. Think about computers or phones today. Now, since we're doing
this remotely today, I figured let's make this special. So we've put together something that I
think is really going to give you a feeling for what this future could be like. We believe the
metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet. We'll be able to feel present, like we're right there with people, no matter how far apart we actually are.
Okay, so I'm pausing it here because I want you to watch this.
The room that Mark Zuckerberg is in, he's not in the metaverse yet.
He's in like a house.
I think it's supposed to be his house.
It is clearly not a place human beings live.
It's not an actual house.
It has been set dressed.
to be his house. It is clearly not a place human beings live. It's not an actual house.
It has been set dressed. One of the ways you can tell is that all of the books in picture frames on the bookcase are like the same flat tones because they're not meant to stand out. They're
meant to blend in. And very tellingly, this is what's interesting to me, as soon as he steps
into the frame where he's going to announce this, the thing that is directly next to his head is the
only thing that's not like the same kind of beige as everything it's a bottle of barbecue sauce that's being used as the bookend to a bunch of books
now meta immediately after this like people joked about it online and meta started tweeting about it
and like trying to make like jokes about oh mark just loves his you know his his barbecue so much
like they tried to turn it into a meme because they think it's humanizing and and and kind of
one aspect of the meme they were
putting together is that like oh he just forgot to you know he just he's he's so into barbecue
that he leaves his sauce around that was put there on someone's orders like that was it was
to create me we're seeing we're seeing marvel does as well yeah they're releasing promotional
images specifically designed to be turned into memes and it doesn't work because it's so obvious
like because people like you know yeah we're not going to use this because it's it's a it's a dog shit
horrible like horrible cinematography bad colors it's not a fun meme but people did fall for the
mark zuckerberg thing uh like oh look at the barbecue sauce but yeah no that was intentional
to create like a viral thing to try yep yeah anyway i'm gonna let mark uh continue here after
i made my little point.
When I send my parents a video of my kids, they're going to feel like they're right in the moment
with us, not peering through a little window. When you play a game with your friends, you'll
feel like you're right there together in a different world, not just on your computer by
yourself. And when you're in a meeting in the metaverse, it'll feel like you're right in the
room together, making eye contact, having a shared sense of space, and not just looking at a grid of
faces. So that's important because a big aspect of what he's trying to sell here, why he's trying to
convince people that this is a real thing, is that it's a balm for loneliness, right?
And he's one of the people who's
responsible for pushing our society to such an atomized and isolated direction. Facebook
propaganda has isolated huge numbers of people from their families. It's – and of course,
then there's just the aspect of it that is the lockdown, which has isolated people,
a number of – a lot of which ties back to disinformation spread on Facebook. But like –
Yeah.
He's selling this, you know,
as a this will make you less lonely. It'll make you feel like you're all together. Yeah. And it's
it's he specifically says at one point, this isn't about spending more time on screens. It's about
making the time we spend on screens already better, which is horseshit, because as the Facebook
papers make clear, Facebook has repeatedly refused to do things that would have reduced the harm of their platform because it would have reduced the traffic that they've got.
And I think those are the kind of decisions you can – yeah.
And still, like, technologically, we're still not there.
Like, when you're in VR, even if you're interacting with other, like, 3D, like, personas of people, specifically, like, VRChat was very popular among, like, furries.
And I think they are honestly the best example of what the metaverse could actually
be, is how furries use
VRChat. But even still,
that is very different
than standing in a room
with someone in a fursuit, right?
It's totally different.
And metaverses and this
type of thing, I don't think will actually solve
alienation. I don't think...
Because you're not actually touching anyone like it's not it's you're not there's still that that that
digital fog between you and everything else do i think there's some elements of it that could be
developed specifically using ar that would make things a little bit cool yeah uh but it's not
going to solve alienation as a concept in fact it could actually make it worse it could make it worse
like again there's some use cases for i don don't know, people who have, like, ALS.
Maybe you could develop some sort of rig that would allow them to interact, like, more with
people around them.
And, like, that could be useful for those people.
But, like, it is not a societal answer to loneliness.
And I think one thing that makes that clear is you look at their vision of home spaces.
So this is kind of the center of the metaverse they want to build is everybody has their little digital home that you can set up
and you can design to your liking
and you can buy things like NFTs to decorate it.
This becomes a big part of the pitch that like NFTs are going to be in it.
And like that way you know that they have at one point
like somebody buys like an autographed poster for a metaverse concert
that's an NFT and they get to put it in their
room and know that it's the only one of those posters or something which is the dumbest thing
i can imagine um maybe it'll work i don't know i i don't really see how that's any different
from an nft being revolutionary case than like you know being able to buy something in a fucking
video game no it's it's the way people already hate to do.
Yeah, it's just skins or whatever bullshit cosmetic stuff.
I remember one of the things that's entertaining about this is how bad a lot of the acting is for all of the money and time they have.
Like Mark Zuckerberg is a shit presenter.
And this bit where he tries to explain why the home space is so cool.
And it shows you like their home
space it starts at about 4 30 on the video if people at home want to watch is just a perfect
perfect encapsulation of like how inhuman this this world they want to build really feels what
even when they try to present it in its best face oh hey mark hey what's going on what's up mark
whoa we're floating in space who made-huh. Who made this place?
It's awesome.
Right?
It's from a creator I met in L.A.
This place is amazing.
Boz, is that you?
Of course it's me.
You know I had to be the robot, man.
I thought I was supposed to be the robot.
Whoa.
I knew you were bluffing.
Hey, wait.
Where is Naomi?
Let's call her.
Naomi!
Hey, should we deal you in?
Sorry, I'm running late,
but you've got to see what we're checking out.
There's an artist going around Soho
hiding AR pieces for people to find.
3D street art?
That's cool.
Send that link to our social media.
So I wanted to stop here because this is also part of like what's – it's this perfect – it's like NFT culture and all this shit.
Like the street art they show, this is clearly them trying to be like here's one of these cool use cases for how the metaverse is going to interact with and influence the real world.
Like this artist pastes this art on a wall that when you look at it in the metaverse or when you you film
it and you send a video to people in the metaverse it becomes this big 3d thing and it it just looks
like shit it's just a bunch of like squiggly lines and stuff like it's not like there's good graffiti
especially in san francisco there's incredible fucking graffiti um this is just like nonsense
it looks like it looks like a fucking nft like it's just this this kind of shitty it was obviously designed by a computer not an actual person yeah and there's nothing like it doesn't
say anything there's nothing cool about it um and they haven't again because mark zuckerberg can't
conceive of art there's nothing about this that like makes me think oh what a neat futuristic
thing it's just like oh cool i can see squiggly lines yeah and it has in person and on my phone
i mean the big part of metaverse and like ar and vr is like you know making depth within actually
making 2d space appear to be 3d space this still just looks 2d like it doesn't it is not
it's not tricking my brain in any way whatsoever especially with the concept of like filming it on
your phone we have the technology now like that's not that's not the metaverse that's just filming
it already on your little box as mark zuckerberg said and we have the technology now. That's not the metaverse. That's just filming it already on your little box, as Mark Zuckerberg said.
And we have the technology to do that AR thing with fucking –
Yeah, like fucking Pokemon Go did that like five years ago.
And it's not what people want.
Well, Pokemon Go was successful for a long time.
Yeah, Pokemon Go was the closest we ever got to world peace, and it was a CIA.
I mean, Pokemon Go is probably the closest we ever got to world peace and it was a cia yeah so pokemon go is probably the closest we ever got to like the metaverse like realistically but people
don't want people don't want to like take photos of crappy street art that then becomes 3d but
still isn't like i don't know there's it is it is incredibly grim that most of like the case uses
for metaverse stuff the only thing they can imagine it being is fucking meetings.
This is the biggest thing that they show.
It's like, oh, we can make virtual meetings.
The video that we just played, they're all in this spaceship, and everybody's 3D.
One person, it looks like kind of a hologram of their real body.
Some people are just 3D rendered cartoons of themselves.
One person's a big robot and they're all like
floating in zero G
and playing cards.
They're all sitting at a table
and playing virtual cards
and there's like a bed
in the background
but like you can't go in the bed
because it's a fake area.
No, and you're not
floating in zero G
because VR will never
be able to trick you
into thinking
you're sitting in your chair
in a room
with some shit on your face.
You're fucking Carl Havoc
and trying to pretend that you're like having a good time
playing cards with your friends.
It's like, yeah, if I could have a space station house
where my friends and I could float around and play cards,
that would be sick, but you're not promising me that,
are you, Mark?
You're not actually doing that.
No.
I mean, like, there is games that simulate zero G.
They don't trick you.
They make you nauseous.
Sometimes it can be fun but
like it's i'm not gonna be yeah in the same way that eating hawaiian baby wood rose seeds can be
fun um yeah so he he goes on to talk about the avatars that you'll have which are basically he
describes them as profile pictures but much richer because they're live which i find unsettling in
part by thinking about what will happen when people die to their digital avatars.
But whatever.
At this point, he goes on to talk about how he thinks people are going to actually use these avatars, and it's very unhinged.
One for hanging out and maybe even a fantasy one for gaming.
You're going to have a wardrobe of virtual clothes for different occasions designed by different creators and from different apps and experiences.
So one of the things he's talking about that is exciting is that like you'll be able to have a different avatar for like work if you're in a work meeting or like hanging out with your friends.
And to me that says like, oh, so now I'm going to be expected to like maintain and keep up an avatar for like my job and like dress that fucking thing.
And then I'll have to like switch to hang out with people.
And like, why?
Why does that?
What does that provide me being able to like sit in a room as an avatar that I don't currently have like through Zoom?
Like why?
Why is in what world is that something people want?
The only only good use case for
this is furries this is the only way it's worked because they that has almost like a true
representation of their own body what what's this is going to do for regular for like people who are
not furries is it'll probably give people a lot of weird like dysmorphia yeah um or if you're or
if you're trans and you make a female avatar assuming like
like you know for me if i was to make like an avatar that's more feminine that can be fun for
me um but for a lot of people these weird like digital versions of themselves will probably just
they're just like uncanny valley and it'll probably make you feel weird yeah um and he's he's so
focused on like this as a way for people to work together while being remote, which says a lot.
Like about a half a minute after this point or a minute or so after this point, he brags that your home space can even have your own personal office where you work, which is –
Within the metaverse.
Within the metaverse, which is really bleak to me.
Just like, yeah, you can go to work digitally. Yeah, why? yeah it's gonna ruin your eyes why you cannot wear vr goggles that long your eyes get
ruined because it's blasting light into your retinas and it's also just like i like sitting
with a laptop and i have a laptop and i have a second screen for my laptop and i sit at my
comfortable living room table and i I write and browse the internet
and research and stuff. And yeah, every now and then like I hunch over too much and my back gets
a little bit sore, but like it's not, it's pretty comfortable and I can get up and move and do stuff
in the house, putting a bunch of shit on me and sitting still and like being unable to perceive
the world around me and locked into this uncomfortable digital desk. Because it's
later on, whenever they do, there's this mix of you can see the videos of the
technology as it actually exists and they're aspirational.
And the aspirational version, it's like you're in this gorgeous three-dimensional office
that looks like something like that.
Yeah, you're playing basketball both in real life and in the hologram, which is first of
all, just impossible.
Like never going to happen.
You're never going to do.
Never, ever going to happen.
It's just physically impossible. But when you see the clips of like what, because they. Like never going to do. Never, ever going to happen. It's just physically impossible.
But when you see the clips of like what because they do have aspects of this built.
When you see the clips of like the workspaces they have built, it's like, oh, 80 percent of my screen is the Microsoft Word app or Excel as it or Outlook as it currently exists.
And 20 percent of it is like the edges of this little VR office.
exists and 20% of it is like the edges of this little VR
office. So all I'm looking
at is I'm seeing a full eye
version of like whatever apps I'm
using. You can get a VR headset,
you can download virtual desktop, you can
bring your desktop into your VR
space. It's not useful.
It's novel for
the first 20 minutes and then you get bored
of it because you realize that you can't actually see your keyboard
so you can't type as fast. There's a great joke about this in the last
season of community yeah the best example of the metaverse where he's like yeah i have because like
the big part of like epic games version of the metaverse is like interacting with like brands
and all your apps within a 3d digital space which is what uh the dean does in community he has to
like yeah run to his email which is yeah like this does in community. He has to run to his email. This is a great
example of why this technology is never going to actually catch on for regular people, because
that's not how they use the internet. You don't want to traverse a 3D digital space to get to
your email. That's asinine. Yeah, and there's aspects of it that are asinine, and there's
aspects of it that are just impossible. So a big thing that he's hitting on with this is interoperability, which is like, you want to be able to travel
between different apps, between different programs that different people have made,
and you want to be able to take like whatever items you buy, whatever NFTs you have with you.
And he's talking about like, this will work in games. This is a thing that like you've seen
people talk about with like the promise of NFTs for gaming. Like you could get an item that like is yours so they can't nerf it or whatever.
And like it'll travel for you from game to game. There's a developer I follow on Twitter. He made
the game Adios, which is about like a guy who disposes of bodies for the mob and tries to quit.
It's a cool game. He's a good developer good developer doc something or other he wrote a huge article about like why none of this nfts can't work for gaming um that also hits on like
why what zuckerberg's saying is impossible which is that like so you're saying that everyone who
makes a game has to has to build in like a way to handle every single item that you could possibly
get in the metaverse and everything that you're having like it's an unthinkable challenge um it's and and like why and what if a game shuts down right like are you
saying they have to continue operating the game forever and updating it forever even once it's
no longer profitable so that you can keep using your eye like no it's just it's it's functionally
impossible um but it's it's what's interesting to me is he's talking about all this he has to know
this is impossible when he does there's all these scenes like you said where people like playing
basketball and like one of them's in the real world and one of them's in vr but they're both
playing on a real world court and they're interacting with the ball yeah with a with a
virtual ball and it's like number one how is the person the real world how do they feel that ball
he says some vague shit about like haptic feedback which doesn't work that way um maybe there's a way if you're wearing like a glove that it could trick
you into believing you were hitting a ball or something um and yeah like and not everyone's
wearing headsets like now it's just we'll get to that in part two the headset question um but it
what what's interesting is that like a huge amount of the the coolest stuff the stuff that you can be like, well, that would be neat.
Yeah, if I could fucking play pool with my friend in Germany
and it would feel like we were both in the same room,
even though only one of us is standing around a real pool table,
yeah, that would be an amazing feat of technology.
It's never going to happen.
Certainly not in any kind of reasonable time frame.
Mark knows that.
All that is going to happen at most
is like a digital conference suite
that damages people's eyes and brains.
And he knows that,
but he's angry that Zoom beat him to the punch
when the pandemic hit.
And this is his,
like that's kind of one of the sinister things about it.
There's other sinister shit,
which we'll talk about in part two.
But you know what, guys?
It's time to end part one. This is enough for part one. We'll talk more about, we'll talk about
what's really frightening about a lot of what Mark's trying to build in part two. But for right
now, I want to talk about ending the episode, which I guess I just did. Goodbye.
Welcome. I'm Danny Threl.
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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here,
the show where we're talking right now about the metaverse that a bunch of rich people think that you're going to want to live in once they ruin the regular world and why it's dog shit.
And it is dog shit. So. It's just it's just it's just total dog shit.
Just total dog shit.
Everything about this, I don't know, seems like a waking nightmare to me.
So far, if we're actually talking about what they are immediately trying to, because a bunch of this is aspirational nonsense that, as we've stated, is like, you are never going to play a perfect game of basketball in a mix of real and AR courts with your friend in Hong Kong.
That's never going to happen.
Never.
That's not how physics works.
That's not how physics works.
That's not going to happen. Never. That's not how physics works. That's not how physics works. That's not how electronics works.
Maybe when we find out how to literally hack the human brain, we can like put you into a quasi seizure state that mimics that.
But like the closest thing we have to this right now is actually VR board games is the best.
It's the best example of this where you can play with you can play Settlers of Catan with your friend across the globe.
Yeah, and there's some cool shit you can do with haptics.
And haptic feedback is like,
the basic example of it is when you touch your phone
and your phone vibrates under your hand
to let you know that you've touched a command.
Yeah.
And there's people who think at some point
we may be able to make, using haptic feedback,
a virtual keyboard that feels like a real keyboard.
That might be possible.
I'm very skeptical of that.
That's still like kind of – like the idea of a keyboard that isn't there but feels like a real keyboard might be possible.
We're nowhere close to that.
That's still on the fringes of possibility.
Like the fucking shit they're showing in this video is like nonsense.
We will have laser cannons before we have any of this bullshit.
Like, we will be shooting each other in space before we have this nonsense.
And thank God for that because at least that sounds fun.
So the actual center of what they've built in terms of the products that Facebook is launching now for the metaverse, the core of it is Horizon Home and Horizon Worlds.
And I think Horizon is kind of the brand they're going with for all of their different, like, metaverse. The core of it is Horizon Home and Horizon Worlds. And I think Horizon is
kind of the brand they're going with for all of their different like meta programs.
Horizon Home is the home spaces thing that they discussed earlier where people can like
make their own like houses. And one of the things they don't talk about in this, they keep saying
like you can build whatever you want. You can make it look like anything. They don't say a word about
how like decorating your digital home is going to be monetized versus how much of it will be sweat equity.
And again, the smart thing would be make it all sweat equity.
Make it like Minecraft.
Make people be able to build anything they can conceive of
if they're actually creative enough and spend the time.
They won't do that.
As they talk about in that, like in the video they played,
we're like, oh, this is a cool world.
It was made by a developer.
Like, yeah, you're going to buy the cool shit um i don't i don't know yeah you're gonna buy it and it's gonna suck because all you can do is sit at a table yeah and it's like you
can't go into bed like you can't like all of this stuff is just cosmetic like it's and you're not
gonna be tricked into thinking it's real i've been in some cool vr like 3d rooms and like they're cool to look at for like
10 minutes yeah you can't do anything boring yeah like it's easier like oh yeah it's like the real
world but i can't touch anything and when they show you the stuff that's closer to real like
the different like people chatting in the metaverse and whatever it doesn't look fun there's a there's
a scene where they like show people like watching a YouTube video together in the metaverse,
and they're all like these disembodied upper torsos because, of course, VR sets can't read
your legs.
So it's like a bunch of torsos floating around a maximized YouTube video window, and it's
like, I would rather just show a friend my phone.
I would even rather text them a video.
You know what's actually realer than that is being in person with somebody and watching it on a phone.
But even without, like, it's the kind – I think that they're expecting that, like, everyone's kind of bummed when they send a friend a video over signal or text and, like, wait for them.
No, I would rather do that than this shit.
I don't want to hang out as a bunch of torsos around a YouTube window.
I don't want to have to schedule a VR session every time I want to share a YouTube video.
No, that sounds horrible.
And it sounds like I would constantly have to be in VR.
He talks about how we're not trying to expand screen time.
But am I just waiting around in VR to show friends YouTube videos?
They are real unclear about how often you need to be in a headset.
And it's kind of suspicious.
It's almost like they don't actually plan on doing headset. And it's kind of suspicious. It's almost like they don't actually
plan on doing anything. And it's all bullshit.
I'm going to play another video that they
claim to be a use case. And the way this video starts
is like, this actual person
is in an actual real world concert
for some guy I've never heard of at Facebook.
I think he's clearly some
sort of musician with a following that Facebook hired
to do a concert for this video.
And she calls her friend on the the metaverse and her friend digitally hops
into the concert and they like the digital girl and the real girl are like
dancing together at the show,
which I don't know,
whatever,
like that is more possible than the basketball shit.
I mean,
yeah.
Watching of having a,
like a VR version of standing in a room where a musician plays.
Sure.
I mean,
it's not,
yeah,
it's doable,
but it's doable. Yeah. I would debate like whether or where a musician plays. Sure. I mean, it's not going to be tons of fun.
But it's doable.
Yeah, I would debate whether or not it's doable.
But then after that, they see during the concert, this digital thing pops up that's like, do you want to go to a free after party?
And first off, all of these after parties will cost money and they'll all be dog shit.
But that's the same with most real after parties. So I guess that's, that's at least Facebook, uh, accurately delivering on, on the promise
of the real world.
Um, but I, I want to play like what happens in this metaverse after party that these two
both hop into digitally after one of them.
So like, as this starts, the lady who was actually at the concert, like sits down at
home and gets into the metaverse.
lady who was actually at the concert like sits down at home and gets into the metaverse imagine your best friend is at a concert somewhere across the world
what if you could be there with her
yeah real yeah real and clear how that works yeah real clear how that works I'm packing all my sneakers. I never had a clue. Yeah.
Real, yeah, real and clear how that works.
Yeah, real clear how that works. Like, how does the person at the concert see the holographic version?
How does the holographic person see that?
Yeah, is she wearing all that shit while she's dancing?
Or is everyone wearing VR and seeing the world through VR?
Because I'll tell you what, like, right now, in our break, I put on an Oculus as a joke.
And right now, I have it
on the pass-through mode, which means I can see the
real world through my cameras in the
Oculus, and you know what? It looks
like shit. It's black and white,
it's super grainy,
it has no exposure range,
everything is like...
You look like you're wearing a sunglasses
case in your on
your in front of your face like i can see the world but like i can't do anything because it
all is like a horrible digital like copy like i can't like it's not real like i can't do anything
aspects of this like at some point pass-through mode will be in color and the latency will be
low enough that you won't really notice it yeah right like and there won't be latency and like, yeah, but it'll-
But it's not going to be as good as looking at it with your human eyeball.
And it'll still be a thing.
So that girl's going to have to be at a concert dancing, getting super sweaty.
And like, she's wearing something, even if it's as small as like regular glasses.
She's not like, I guess that would be better, but like whatever.
I'll talk about this more at the end, but like if people are actually going to develop
this technology, the real way to do it is with AR, not VR.
Because with AR, yeah, you could have put on like actual glasses and have like a person show up on the thing and make it look like they're there while actually still seeing the real world.
That's going to be the way to do it.
Yeah, and I think that is what they're –
Companies are trying to do it.
Yeah, I think that's what they're like claiming here.
But it's really unclear how it's all going to interface, how the AR is going to interface with like the full VR stuff.
Like, are we going to have two separate sets of gear, one for when we're in the real world and we can't be fully immersive?
Yeah.
And one for when we want to dive into the metaverse?
Do we always carry that around?
Do we always carry that around wherever we go?
Yeah.
But I want to play the section.
I'm sorry.
I played the video where they were at the concert just because it looks very silly.
I want to play the section where they're at the after party because it's dystopian as fuck.
So here's the all metaverse after party that looks like a bunch of fucking Kinect avatars standing around a room made out of glowing neon.
A digital room, yeah.
Nobody's drinking, which is the only good thing to do at an after party that's not cocaine.
Yeah.
Nobody's drinking, which is the only good thing to do at an after party that's not cocaine. So from the jump, I'm like, well, what is the only good thing about an after party is if you want more drugs and all of the drugs places are closed.
So you go to an after party.
Maybe at the end you can hook up with a digital avatar.
Yeah.
It's anyway.
I'm just going to play it.
I'm just going to play this dog shit.
Where they were.
This is wild.
Is it?
Is it? They're just slowly slowly dancing he's a giraffe man
hey check this out charity auction nfts yeah charity auction for nft merchandise
that looks like shit your new versions of your favorite song yeah it looks dog shit well now you've got to get it yeah so it's like it's
a it's a horrible 3d chat room we already have these these already exist and they're not tons
of fun the only time they're fun is when you're in fursuits and you're walking around a fake city
destroying it that's the only fun way to do this and the thing they're showing in this is that like an autographed poster for the concert is is an NFT that you can buy for a charity auction.
And like as they're looking at it, the actual musician walks by and tells them it looks cool.
And so they buy it and they have the musician come in for that.
Number one to like try to make this kind of like, yeah, you'll be able to do these digital events where you can meet actual celebrities, which like, no, I'm sure celebrities will agree to do Q Q and A's in the multiverse like
they do anywhere else,
but they're not going to just walk around in some dog shit virtual party
because they have money and they can do actual fun things in the actual
real world.
They're going to be fucking supermodels while skiing down a mountain in Lake
Tahoe because they're rich.
Um,
they're going to be like flying in their private jets or driving in a fucking yacht and eating
lobster that's been tortured so it tastes better because they're rich.
Like they're not going to be hanging out in a digital lobby telling you that a fucking
dog shit poster NFT is cool and that you should buy it.
Unless you're a millionaire and they want your money because they're Nicolas Cage and
they have an addiction to buying Tyrannosaurus parts.
I don't know.
It's silly.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah.
So one of the things that I thought about when I was watching this is like the concept
of metaverse culture.
So like at some point, if this is a thing, there's going to be like, like if there ever
is a metaverse, people will develop a culture for it, just like they've developed a culture for Twitter, a culture for Reddit, a culture for Facebook, just as there were, like, internet culture or was internet culture before.
Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, yeah.
Yeah, it happens with every community you make online.
And that's the thing.
Like, there's no I see no space in this thing that Mark Zuckerberg has envisioned as he is presenting it for organic evolution of a culture. None of the things that here are going to make people want to form a culture around it because it's all it looks like it looks like boring, yuppie shit.
All of it.
None of it is actually looks cool or fun.
And none of it.
None of it is.
He's not talking about any of it with like the there's no there's
no openness in it like there's i don't see where a culture could evolve and if one does it's going
to be directly like in opposition to facebook moderation um like yeah um well yeah and i mean
and there's there's an extent to which like they can't right because like if you actually let people
just like do things like imagine the
griefing that's going to happen in one of these spaces right like every person's avatar is going
to be like 16 000 dongs yeah that's just that's literally that's all it's going to be like this
is this is what twitch looks like right like every twitch chat is just a guy posting a hydra made of
dongs like it like none of none of this can actually work if you let people do literally
anything if you don't let people do anything like like why would you ever want to do it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like how, how are you going to sell them this crap?
Like once upon a time there was a game called second life.
I guess it still exists, but people talked about it the way they're talking about the
metaverse now.
And that became just like, it was never that, but there was like this beautiful moment where
this, I think Anshi Chung was never that. But there was like this beautiful moment where this I think Anshi Chung was her name. This like culture writer kind of expert lady was like doing a Q&A and Second Life that was like billed as being this like big event for the platform that was going to like make people take it seriously.
Like users showed up and made a bunch of floating dicks like float through the room during the interview so that like while this person was trying to talk seriously about Second Life, just like floating cocks were zooming past her head the entire time.
And it was extremely funny. And it's exactly the kind of thing that like, yeah, Mark, that's what all of this is going to look like.
Any mass event is going – people will find a way to grief it.
And that will in fact be the thing they most want to do.
That will be the actual culture part
is fucking with facebook yeah yeah but you know but that's the part about that that sucks it's
like yeah you know like you're in a virtual reality thing right so like okay what are people
going to do in a virtual reality it's well okay you're gonna get you're gonna get a bunch of neo
nazis like figuring out a way to like show you just like the worst shit you've ever seen in your
life like it's gonna it's gonna be all the stuff from the 2000s where like half of the internet was just like a video
why this is 2010s too like half of twitter is just beheading videos except now it's in vr
it's like yeah yeah imagine isis in the metaverse it's gonna be amazing that's some of that's even
already happening in like vr social media apps i know of a few specific nazis involved in january 6th who networked and met with
people via specifically vr chat so like this this is already a thing um and making it even more
broad than like this small you know because the vr right now is mostly just a small subsect of
like gaming culture right and people are into it because there is vr games that are cool like like
like beat saber is fun right yeah there's there's fun vr games yeah absolutely i um in order for them to break this
through into the mainstream they need to make it appealing some way and the only way they're
making it appealing right now is by doing meetings and like concerts so the next part i want to play
doesn't say a lot about the future mark's trying to build but it's very funny because it's him
sitting down with a woman who works in his gaming department and she's walking
him through like what games are going to be integrated into the metaverse.
And it fucking reads like, and I think you should leave sketch.
Like it feels like a sketch where the joke is that everyone is awkward and not talking
the way human beings talk.
And in case you can't watch this chunk of the video and it starts at about like 1934
um in the actual facebook video all of the video games they're talking about like look dog shit
they look like the kirkland brand of like popular like fighting games and fps's and stuff none of
them look very good um so i'm gonna play a clip from this because it's very funny this can build out active communities beat saver has a
passionate community i love beat saver so do i and beat saver just passed a hundred million dollars
in lifetime revenue on press alone it's a great example of a game that keeps releasing fresh
content they've actually been working on evolving the way that you interact with the tracks and feel
the music the way he's nodding in this,
like his digital avatar looks more like a person.
Here's some Beat Saber.
Yeah.
Yeah, it looks like regular Beat Saber.
Yeah, but it's VR.
It already is VR.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's already a VR game.
I can't wait to play this.
You can already play it.
And they continue with incredible artists
to release new music packs all the time. You can already play it! They have incredible artists who release new music
packs all the time. You can do this right now!
A little more than I should have.
I probably should have been working more on this
metaverse presentation.
Oh, God. Every scene where she's
talking to him, and he's just like bobblehead
nodding just a little bit, but not in...
He looks so fake.
Mark actually will benefit from
the metaverse, like outside of a financial thing, a a sculpted 3D representation of him will be a thousand times better.
It looks more human than he looks like more of a person.
Yeah.
It's I mean, it's just like he's scripted it badly and he's a narcissist.
So he has to be the one to present it again.
Oh, I love Beat Saber.
Number one, if Steve Jobs were doing this number one he wouldn't
because he understood what people wanted from technology but if he were doing something like
this he would introduce like little chunks of it and then he would have a famous person who's
charismatic introduce the rest of it like yeah that's yeah like it wouldn't be it wouldn't be
sitting like a bobblehead listening and like he would introduce vr and ar into a way that
actually integrates how people use the internet already because there is ways that there is ways of doing
it there's but it's not this like super monetized nft like bullshit holographic fake stuff yeah and
there's there's aspects of this like he goes through after this like there's a bunch of gaming
stuff which is impossible for the reasons we've talked about then there's aspects of it that seem
cool like there's a scene where like an architect
gets onto his digital office
and like somebody sends him schematics
to a building they're making
and he's able to generate it in 3D
and walk around the building.
Like, okay, that actually seems possible.
That's actually useful.
Yeah, that seems like useful.
Like you've developed a use case
for all of the architects out there.
I'm still not convinced that
cad would actually be better in 3d than it would be like sure it's debatable i i think like it
maybe someday i think it could be like if you are one of the increasingly small number of people who
can afford to like build a house of your own i can see why it would be neat to be like okay well
let's do a 3d render of the house and i can walk through it and I could maybe make changes at the last
moment as I'm kind of experiencing the flow of the room where a window is.
Like, yeah, I can, that seems like something, number one, technologically, you could do
that more or less now.
I don't think it's not going to be as instantaneous as this, but if you give it time to render,
it could be done.
And it's something that a number of people might find useful but again that's a niche product because like 18 people in our generation are buying homes
i mean yeah and also it's it's it's expensive to develop because you would have just modeling an
actual real life location is a lot of work um now there is there is a lot of technology that's
getting way better at it by yeah machine cameras basically filming a space and the computer can reconstruct it pretty accurately.
That is a growing field, but still, it's a very niche area, at least at this point.
Yeah.
So anyway, there's aspects of this that are ridiculous, aspects of this that seem neat.
But the longer you watch it the thing that
come becomes really clear is that all he's really advertising is mass surveillance that's the problem
with yeah yeah there's a point in this video where they're showing you how they can like map
a real world location so you can be in your actual house put on your vr glasses um and it can map the
your actual home digitally in real time.
And as you pick up real things in your house, you see them being picked up in VR and presumably other people in VR could see it.
Which we are not quite there yet.
I stay pretty up to date in VR technology.
We're getting close to this, but we're not quite there.
I mean, we actually are aware what they show in the video.
And I'm going to play you a second from it because I want to show you something here.
At least for consumer products, we're not at this point yet.
Yeah, and I want to show you where we are because this video, they're showing actual footage.
So they have built this thing, but there's a catch, and so I'm just going to play it right now.
All right.
So what's critical here is that this is all
happening in real time so if you i've just paused it well you've got here on one side there's a
woman in a real like house sitting and picking up like a a toy home on her couch and then on the
left you see the vr version of her house which looks close to photorealistic and like the house
that she's holding in the real world is floating in the same way that she's holding it like her body isn't there like the stuff she's interacting with
is but if you look at the house she's holding the reason that they're able to do this and it really
does work is it's covered in sensors it's covered in and actually every single thing in the real
house is covered in sensors um because that's the only way for this to work right now moving
is covered in sensors yeah yeah and it is impressive like as a proof of concept like this
this is here,
we can do this,
but like it's still light years away from practical and more to the point.
When you look at this,
you realize that like,
well,
if this is ever going to work,
the only way to make it work is for Facebook through this service to map
your entire home in real time,
every hour of the day.
And they also go on to talk about like how you're going to have gesture commands and
like you'll be able to like make an expression or like a hand gesture and that will do things,
which means that like this service isn't just learning what's in your home and what you
do with the things in your home.
It's learning your facial expressions and your gestures and like what they mean and
interpreting those at all times.
I can kind of explain where Oculusculus which is over facebook i think they're technically renaming oculus
uh yeah spring to just calling it the meta quest um but wait wait wait the meta quest that that
that's what they're calling it instead of instead of oculus it's to be Meta Quest. Okay. So where they're at right now is basically
the only kind of real-world interactivity that they have
for their VR headsets, again, for the consumer models,
I don't know what's in development, is hand tracking.
This is the thing they've been working on for a long time,
is that you put on the headset,
and the cameras and depth sensors built into the headset
can see your hands.
And like you said, you have gesture controls
where you can do certain things with your hand
and it'll make certain things happen.
This is the only interactivity that we have.
It's okay.
It's not perfect.
It is better than a lot of the other hand tracking systems from other companies.
But it is very much a work in progress.
And the way to make this work is very good depth-sensing cameras,
which I think Apple makes some of the best ones right now that they put into the iPhone.
The other way of doing this is with lighthouses.
So this is, like, separate cameras that you set up around the corners of your house
that project different, like the corners of your house that project uh different like wavelengths of light and they get it received back so they can map your house um with not just
cameras but also like like in like infrared sensors and that kind of thing so these are like
the two methods of doing it uh facebook is really trying to go full out full on to the everything is
built into the headset thing so yeah no so no like lighthouses everything is
just depth depth sensing cameras so that's why they're working on hand tracking so much because
that's something you can actually do but like i can't pick up anything um like the only thing i
can pick up is my controllers which because they have sensors built in they can be rendered in the
actual game uh the same way like my hand can be so that that's where they're at for that for the
consumer products again it's getting developed again where they're at you think about what
facebook has already done with the information you provided and how so much of their money comes
from selling your data yes um the only way for this to work that they've they've is that the
cameras are always watching everything every moment of your existence, including like your micro expressions,
is being tracked.
Which is why I keep my Oculus
in a tiny little box.
Yeah.
And here's the thing.
If they were to actually develop the technology,
which I don't think is impossible,
although it's not particularly close,
it's not going to be cheap to store all that.
So in order to make it worthwhile,
outside, well, it's going to be cloud-based,
but in order to make it,
like cloud isn't free.
No, you're going to have to pay a subscription probably.
I think you'll pay some,
but I think in order to make it affordable
so that more people are on it,
they're just going to sell your data
in a way that has never been,
and the government will have access to it.
It's actually, the thing that he is actually proposing here is i want to build a machine god
that knows your sins like that knows when your heart rate is elevated that knows what it looks
like before you smile that can predict like when you're about to make a gesture or laugh because
it it is so accurately mapped your body and motions um it's
actually a nightmare like when you really think about what he is trying to build here it's like
well what's what's the actual use case for this and it's like well okay so you have a you have a
bunch of special forces guys you put them in a vr thing and then you know you can you can you can
have them drill on knowing exactly where all the rooms in the house is where everyone is in where everyone is in a house at any given time and it's like oh hey
this is this is gonna be great this is yeah it's it's great yeah it's it's really cool um they have
a so there is a little bit here briefly about where like mark talks about uh how the last year or so has been um fucking uh the term he uses is humbling for them
um oh god yeah and you you kind of think that like he's about to say that like oh because we
we made life dramatically worse and our service was integral in several ethnic cleansings and a
couple of civil wars and like hate crimes on a scale that was
unimaginable before it really came into being or that we thought had been at least we thought had
been consigned to a century or so ago before Facebook came into being. But no, that's not
why it's humbling. Why he says it's been humbling is that Facebook has been developing services for
other platforms like the App Store where they don't have total control. And that sucks. And
that's like the thing that that's the that's him admitting a little bit that like a big part of this is
they're trying to build a service the entire internet gets filtered through that they completely
control so that they are never in anyone else's wheelhouse like everything is done through facebook
and with facebook's approval as opposed to them having to get apple to say yes to something yeah
yeah facebook facebook is going to become the state.
Yeah.
And that's the thing that's trying to do.
It says so much about Mark that he's like,
what's humbling.
Isn't all of the mistakes I've made. It's that periodically I have not had total control.
Um,
it's great.
Um,
he then from immediately from this says that if we all work at it,
uh,
all of us,
the metaverse can reach a billion people by the next decade.
Um, which is
very funny yeah um yeah that he thinks that that's like an enticing fucking thing so
one of the use cases they try to present is they have a beauty influencer who like made like a
fucking candle line or something uh that she sold on instagram and she's she's very successful on
instagram they bring this lady in.
And number one, as soon as they started interviewing her, it's what I was saying about, yeah, hire
a celebrity to do this, Mark.
You're not charismatic.
She's immediately the most engaging person in the entire presentation because she's a
successful – like she's someone who understands how she appears on camera, how to make herself
seem likable on camera, how to like interact with the world on a camera.
And nobody else in this video understands that, which is just funny.
It's not particularly like say anything other than that.
Like, yeah, have professionals do difficult things.
Mark, don't don't hire your weird, gawky engineering staff to like be the faces of this thing.
They're not good at this and neither are you.
I just want to point out.
So he says that like he can get one
billion people the next decade so far there's only been 16 million vr headsets sold ever yeah
so getting that to the point of a billion seems like uh quite quite the challenge i mean it is
a challenge but you could look at like how quickly smartphones went from yeah except smartphones were
useful in improving the world in very obvious ways whereas the metaverse and even vr in general doesn't improve the world for most
people in obvious ways yeah but that's kind of what i'm saying is that like the thing that is
stupid and doomed about this isn't like oh you would have to sell so many headsets if it was
legitimately something every single person wanted on their head they would sell a billion they would
sell a billion in a couple of years you know, but they haven't made that look
like like.
So this this beauty influencer thing is an example of them trying to, like, explain here's
something that people will find cool about the metaverse.
And the way they do it is like talking about how you can have a digital storefront where
like people can't just buy products, but they can interact with you.
She talks about how it'll be good for letting her interact with her fans but like bringing them into my home oh god sounds
like a fucking that sounds like a nightmare we love our fans but like no i do not want anyone
from my god damn home no um i barely want my friends in my home half the time like absolutely
not um they didn't present us with a use case of how a brand in this case
this like candle company this lady made that's big on instagram could release like a new candle
flavor and launch a digital experience with it so you can buy both real and digital products
it's kind of unclear in the video whether or not you're paying for the digital experience or is it
like free when you buy the candle um yeah this is like i don't games is like developing it's like
you know dropping products at the same time in the real like i don't games is like developing it's like you know dropping
products at the same time in the real world in the digital world but like the digital version
is free because it's like because it's like an ad right you could try something out virtually
before you buy it physically and that's what like epic games is doing and honestly i think epic's
version of the metaverse is slightly more hinged they understand more what people actually want
yeah because like all the stuff they're trying with fortnite again it doesn't seem fun for me but at least it's like
an extension of how people use the internet already whereas facebook's is not that yeah and
mark never really understood what people wanted he he accidentally did when trying to make something
else like he wanted a place to share pictures of ladies he
thought was hot um and he accidentally built a thing that like gave people something they did
want which was a way to stay in contact with their friends from high school and college as they grew
older right like that was the thing about facebook that made it get huge originally um and he hasn't
learned anything since he's just been smart he's he's hired people who are smart enough to be like
hey instagram's probably going to be a big deal. Buy that. You should buy it.
Yeah.
You know, like that.
But I haven't seen anything that's made me think like Mark gets what people want.
And this has just made it clear that like he absolutely doesn't.
So I want to play this video of like this is the digital experience to go with this fucking candle that they're they're framing is like a piece of art that everybody is going to want to interact with.
Who likes candles?
I'm so thrilled to watch it. It's incredible because it again feels like a piece of art that everybody's going to want to interact with who likes candles. I'm so thrilled. I'm so thrilled to watch it.
It's incredible,
because it, again, feels like a nightmare.
I am a big candle fan, so.
Same here.
The butterfly effect transports us
to something magical.
It's like a shitty arboretum.
I don't see what this has to do with candles
it's jackie as we walk through this amazing world what does the universe mean to you
i just feel like this is like endless possibilities with my imagination i can't even begin to imagine
but i i don't understand what does that have to do with candles i yeah like they have again
like there's nothing i can walk around like why can't I begin to imagine
all the things people are going to do I can walk
around digital spaces and my quest
it's again it's fun for like 30 seconds
and then you see everything you're like oh well I can't touch it or
smell it or actually feel it or do anything
so I'm gonna go back and have a soda
and I don't know yeah play and like
read a book or something like
they've brought in this influencer who like
used one of their other services
in a way they hadn't initially intended
and was successful in that,
which is not a bad idea on its surface.
Like, yeah, bring in creative people
and let them play around
and make something new
to show people how exciting this is, right?
That's the smart thing to do.
But all they've presented is like,
look, it's a tiny little weird arboretum
you can walk around in after buying a candle.
And it's like, well, I like candles, but that doesn't sound like a fun addiction.
It's a candle buying process.
The whole part of the metaverse is like making like interactivity more, like being able to interact with digital things.
And like that's not interacting.
That's just walking around.
Like unless I can like take of like a bazooka and blow up the armor like our arboretum
the candle you know you have to do something like all of the vr games that are fun like like like
like like a super hot or something like something it's about you know picking up objects in vr and
throwing them at people that's fun yeah and you like unless i can pick up this candle and assault
people with it in the game i don't see what really the dry, like, what's
exciting about this.
You were saying something, Chris?
Oh, I guess, you know, the thing I keep coming back
to with this is that the only way this
literally any of this makes any sense, it's just
like a chip in your brain.
Yeah. Because all of it is built
around that, but it's not. Like, it can't be.
The technology for that won't exist for, like,
ages, and so they're, it's like they're selling some of it definitely
is headset based like that arboretum thing but for a lot of even yeah but like i mean i think
even that right like okay so why would you want like yeah you're saying like why would you it's
like okay it's interesting for like 10 minutes right yeah the only way that would be like the
only way that would be an actually interesting experience is if you could get all the full sensory experience you could
smell and feel yeah right and that that's that's that's like that's that's the thing where like
this thing only makes sense if it's like a brain chip well i mean there's two versions there's one
it's a brain chip or two it's a video game yeah and epic games is doing the thing where it's a
video game and that makes slightly smarter to me yes yeah yeah but like they don't you know but
they're they're trying to sell like and i i think
part of what's going on here is also just like this is this is designed to like like this is
designed to like trick silicon valley investors yes that is what's going on yeah and those people
i think are just gonna be like oh we'll have brain chips eventually and so we'll just we'll
talk about we'll probably talk about that part more at the end. Because yeah, this is just a scam.
This is just a scam.
And it is like, again, to talk about like the dystopian aspects of this, Chris, as you brought up, one of the aspects is that like, it's a complete panopticon of perfect surveillance if they actually make this thing.
And number two is the only way to do most of what they're talking about that's cool is to give mark zuckerberg physical control over human beings
brain chemistry on a global scale which i think is a bad idea i'm not gonna sign up for that i'm
not gonna sign up for that i don't i don't want to walk around in a weird candle room that badly
like to your point chris about like how it's you know there's no sensory stuff is like like the
most popular vr games the reason why they work so well the reason why they don't like break the uncanny
valley is because you're in like a barren land
like you know like Beat Saber you're not in a place
you know you're in the game interface
for like for Superhot
you're in like whitewashed
abstract like concrete
spaces right so like there's nothing
there is nothing to smell or feel so like you don't feel like you're
missing anything because you're in a very like
stripped down version of reality there is a really good a vr game i forget what it's
called but it's based on like an office and you're like fighting robots to break out of like this
capitalist office room and it's cool because like yeah it's miserable because it's like it's like an
office space you feel like you're in an office because it nothing about it's exciting right
vr games that are in like lush worlds they feel so much more like disconnected because
you have like a weird like you have like you have like an uncanny valley thing but instead of like
a face or a person it's like an environment we're running low on time i want to move to something
that i think is important here which is there is one moment in this video where they try to address
the fact that they've done a tremendous amount of damage to the world and have repeatedly failed to
like uh anticipate dangers that their services have.
So they need to like deal with that at some point.
And this is like, well, what about if like what about bad things that could happen?
What if like what about like unintended things?
What about like ways in which this could be harmful to society that you haven't foreseen?
So because they're not completely stupid in order to address that, they bring on a well-dressed, not well-dressed, but they bring
on like a friendly British man who kind of reads as like a scientific kind of expert guy. They
bring on a charming British person to like talk about how they're going to not destroy the world.
And this is very telling. So far, it's such visionary stuff. But as you mentioned early on,
with all big technological
advances, there are inevitably going to be all sorts of challenges and uncertainties. And
I know you've talked about this a bit already, but people want to know how we're going to do
all this in a responsible way, and especially that we play our part in helping to keep people
safe and protect their privacy online. Yeah, that's right. This is incredibly important.
people safe and protect their privacy online. Yeah, that's right. This is incredibly important.
The way I look at it is that in the past, the speed that new technologies emerged sometimes left policymakers and regulators playing catch up. So on the one hand, companies get accused of
charging ahead too quickly. And on the other, tech people feel that progress can't afford to wait for
the slower pace of regulation. And I really think
that it doesn't have to be the case this time round, because we have years until the metaverse
we envision is fully realized. So this is the start of the journey, not the end.
So that's telling that he's like, we don't need to worry about like, we don't need to like,
it'll be fine. It'll get regulated properly.
It'll be safe enough because it's going to take so long to figure all this out that surely we will anticipate and deal with all of the potentially toxic side effects of this technology ahead of time.
And if you believe that, I would say take a look at Facebook's track record with that kind of thing.
Yeah.
But they are smart in having a charming British man do it.
That's the right guy to have in,
in,
in the only aspect of good casting in this,
that is the right guy to have come on and try to allay people's fears that
this will destroy society.
You bring a,
you bring a charming British man in,
you know,
that's how you do that kind of thing.
That's when I get canceled for the things I've been doing overseas.
I'm going to hire a British person to defend myself.
Do they make any more comments about like AR glasses or VR?
Yes, quite a few.
I wanted to move on to that, even though, yeah, we're so they talk about they have a whole section where they're they're talking about the actual glasses they have.
So they announced, number one, they have a project.
actual glasses they have. So they announced, number one, they have a project. The goal,
as he repeatedly says, is to make a, quote, normal, good looking pair of glasses that do all this stuff, which obviously, yes, that is the end goal. Yeah. And he does in order as like a
proof of concept, he shows us these AR Ray Bans that actually look legitimately rad. They look
like normal, at least the private touched a pair of these in my hands. But the the the videos that
are supposed to be these real products show a pair of what look like normal Ray-Bans that you can take pictures and videos with.
You can answer phone calls on.
You can do video phone calls on them and stuff.
They seem neat, and they look like normal glasses.
And that is pretty cool.
They kind of pivot from that to announcing that they have this new thing, Project Nazar, which – oh, I looked up what Nazar means a little bit ago.
It's probably dystopian.
No, I think it was just – yeah.
It's a town – oh, it's a surf spot.
Right.
It's a place in, I think, Portugal where there's, like, great waves.
And Mark Zuckerberg is really into surfing.
He plays a surfing game at one point in this that is one of the most –
Embarrassing things like that. Embarrassing things I've seen in my entire fucking life.
But yeah, so Project Nazar is supposed to be like the first true like VR glasses.
So they do the good thing, which is like here's the real technology, these Ray-Bans.
And look, these are pretty neat.
Obviously, that doesn't come close to what they're promising.
And this whole thing where they talk about what the
the glasses which they say they're making good
progress on are going to do we don't ever
see any fucking glasses
yeah
and that's because they're not really
close to
to working yet
I definitely think
the AR glasses are going to be the way to act
like if the goal is to integrate digital spaces into the physical space, I think it's a good goal because what that's going to do, that's going to make the digital space less fake, right?
It's injecting that into the actual real world.
So I think that will actually really help with like disassociative stuff because it's actually in the real world as well.
I think that's going to be wonderful when that gets developed.
And I think the glasses are definitely going to be a thing
within the next 10 to 20 years.
There are ways of illuminating glass on the side
to make what looks like an image.
This is definitely going to be a thing that's going to be possible.
Don't figure aspects of it out.
Surveillance and privacy are big fears for that
because we're nowhere close to hacking the brain enough to feel sensations.
And like the only thing,
like I've played a lot of VR.
The only thing that you can feel in VR is fear.
That's the only thing that VR is capable of replicating
as a feeling.
It's like you can feel terrified in VR.
That's it.
You can't ever feel like-
There's one other thing.
You can feel exhausted.
I played a
bow and arrow game and i was doing like bow draws for like four hours and i was like we've we've
developed a way to make you frightened and tired that is what vr is best which is all by the way
what twitter does normally it's true all of like all of like the resident evil vr games yeah they're
gonna making you tired and terrified and that's kind of it so we we have
to close out but i want to do that by playing mark zuckerberg lamenting the internet that he played a
major role in in building as a way to talk about why we need a metaverse because it's kind of funny
this we're allowed to build and use are more tightly controlled than ever and high taxes on
creative new ideas are stifling this is not the way that we are meant to use technology.
The metaverse gives us an opportunity to change that and build it well.
But it's going to take all of us, creators, developers, companies of all sizes.
Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology and deliver an experience where we are present with each other.
Yeah.
What a ghoul.
What a ghoul.
Like all of that's nonsense.
Number one, you're not you're one of the people who has turned the Internet into an expensive walled garden.
It didn't used to be this way. whooped in, made themselves for free, like integral to all content and then started charging those content creators
and like fucking them around and lying to them,
which led to the destruction of a huge number of websites
and a tremendous amount of digital culture.
Like you're why it feels like a dead walled garden
and everything you've presented in this video
makes the metaverse feel like a dead walled garden.
But I wanna play his last lines in this video
because this is him kind of summing up his vision for the future via the metaverse.
And now it is time to take everything that we have learned and help build the next chapter.
I am dedicating our energy to this more than any other company in the world.
And if this is the future that you want to see, then I hope that you will join us because the future is going to be beyond
anything we can imagine. I agree with that part, Mark. The future is going to be beyond what you
can imagine. What a ghoul. Yeah. You have no imagination. It's just it's just using trendy
tech terms to trick investors into giving them billions of dollars. Yeah, that's like right.
That's that's all it is, because all of this like this like haptic feedback replicating like human feelings and stuff that we're nowhere close to that. And when we do, it's going to be dystopian, but we're not close to it. And it's going to be dystopian or it's going to be better in ways that like we can't yet conceive of. And then eventually it will be destroyed for profit if it actually gets cool like the old internet was
yeah
but I think both this and even
a lot of the epic stuff
it's just
the new way that
tech companies
that's where they think the money vault is
is by using these terms
and they think using these terms is going to get them lots of
extra investor money
because the actual technology is nowhere really close to this It's by using these terms. And they think using these terms is going to get them lots of extra investor money.
So because the actual technology is nowhere really close to this and it's not what people want out of the Internet anyway.
It absolutely is not. But I don't know.
I think this was important.
I think Facebook is important and has a major impact on the way the Internet is continuing to evolve, usually in negative ways.
But this is how these people who are doing a lot of damage view the future.
So you should know what they're looking at and what they anticipate.
I think there's a kind of optimistic note to this, though, right?
Which is like, okay, so we've reached the point where even Boris Johnson is going like, oh, God, climate change is coming.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
And this is the best they've got
yeah right this is their vision of the future they have no they have nothing they have nothing
and you know i think like what the what are the only ways we can win is if we're facing a uniquely
incompetent ruling class yeah and if it if the rule if the if the guy were if a guy we have to
deal with in order to like not drown every single whale and like have half of the world's cities consumed by the ocean is Mark Zuckerberg.
Like.
We got a shot.
We got a shot.
I think there are some smarter people that aren't.
Yeah.
That operate behind the scenes.
Right.
Like.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I don't think I think that's a nice note to end on because it is
it is worth the nice thing about this is how clearly they don't understand what the future
is going to look like online yeah um they have ways in which they're trying to direct the future
and aspects of that will come true like their vr will succeed in some form at some point and it
will be potentially an unprecedented surveillance breakthrough
that has some unsettling implications,
as well as some positive ones.
Metaverse stuff's getting developed by a lot of other stuff.
I think the move by Twitter to create this,
it's called Twitter Spaces,
where it's basically like voice chat room.
A lot of people are moving towards this concept
where we try to inject more in-person interactivity into this virtual framework right we have this with
like uh with like a clubhouse last year during during the pandemic where people like watching
like netflix in the quote same room right yeah like we're seeing people try to do this with
varying mixed success but this is the way tech is is is inching so it is a good idea to keep your
eye on it because yeah that's a lot of of implications for privacy and advertising and all that kind of stuff. We'll continue to cover aspects of this,
talk about the technology, talk about the surveillance implications, talk about the
visions these people have. But I think this has been these episodes have been useful. And like,
here's what Mark thinks is coming. Here's what Facebook is pouring like $10 billion into.
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All right, well, I've done my job for the day.
Wow.
Even by our standards, that's an intro.
That's actually one of your better ones.
Thank you.
This is, of course, It Could Happen Here,
a show about how things aren't going so great,
kind of falling apart, crumbling a bit,
but also maybe things could
be better. That would be nice. Let's try and do that. Today is one of the maybe things could be
better episodes, and we are talking about the ongoing wave of strikes. We had striketober
last month with John Deere strikes and strikes, like, whatchamacallit, a couple of different
food companies, bunch of strikes.
And today we would like to get an update on all the motherfuckers who are out there striking for better conditions and better treatment.
And today, for that purpose, we've brought on the great Kim Kelly.
Kim, you are a journalist who focuses a hell of a lot on labor.
You've been up and down to some of the coal strikes that have been going on.
You were there for the Amazon attempt to form the union in, oh, geez, was that Arizona?
Alabama.
Alabama.
Alabama.
And you're writing a book on the history of labor in the United States.
So I'd like to just kind of turn the floor over to you.
There's a floor.
Okay. There's a floor. There's to you. There's a floor. Okay.
There's a floor.
There's no ceiling.
There's a floor.
It is filthy, just as a heads up.
You know, we're doing our best, aren't we?
Some of us are.
Yeah.
You are.
We are not.
I am.
I'm trying to keep up with all this labor action, this exciting action, hot labor action.
Yeah, tell us some hot labor action stories.
action, hot labor action. Yeah, tell us some hot labor action stories.
So as you mentioned, we're just kind of coasting off of the peak of Striketober,
which was such a fun thing to kind of see explode in the mainstream consciousness. Like usually labor stories, they're a big deal to the people that are involved in them and people in the labor
world who are watching and like rooting for them. But they don't necessarily end up on like,
you know, the mainstream, like they don't end up on the tv they don't end up with like
fancy old guys talking about it on dateline or whatever but that's something that happened and
i think there's been a real shift in consciousness that has accompanied that and of course you know
it's like striketober is fun there's all these these big strikes happening at the same time but
we of course need to remember that that didn't happen in a vacuum.
There's people on strike now who have been on strike since before it was cool, right?
Since much earlier.
Like, shout out to the St. Vincent nurses up in Massachusetts and to the coal miners in Brookwood, Alabama at Warrior Met who have both been on strike for over eight months.
Jiminy Christmas.
Right?
met who have both been on strike for over eight months and they kind of christmas right so literally like they're like they're in the middle of their tour drives for their children because
they've been on strike for so long and they kind of got a little bit left out of the conversation
around striketober and i think that just kind of shows that we need to be paying attention even
when it's not as flashy or new or exciting i mean strikes are exciting but you know there's a lot
going on and one of the things I think
is interesting and important,
especially as we head into
Strikesgiving, which I guess we're doing.
Yeah, Strikesgiving,
Strikesmas, Strikentimes
Day,
Strikestay,
the 4th of
Strikuli,
Strikes, yeah's it gets worse really until we get
to Labor Day and by then yeah yeah Stryker's Day that one works pretty well I'm also a fan of
strike and tines day that's cute yeah baby keep this going. Strike a ween.
Strike a ween.
There's a missed opportunity there.
Although that frightens me, Garrison,
that the band ween might go on strike,
and I don't know that society could handle that. What would we do?
We wouldn't have our...
We would be completely out of ween.
Our reserves of ween aren't going to last long if they stop.
Yeah, that's unacceptable.
Yeah, there's been a tragic shortage of ween for years now i don't know that we can handle a strike please continue
kim i mean i didn't realize you were a nerd robert this is kind of throw some things into question
yeah uh-huh yeah i mean as a heavy metal dirt bag i'm like contractually obligated to say things like that but um as i was pontificating
uh a minute ago oh right so as we go into strikes giving there are still more big strikes on the
horizon and potential big strikes on the horizon but part of the story that i think is also very
energizing important is the organizing that's happening in the new unions that are hopefully
going to end up being formed,
not necessarily as a result of this wave of attention, but they're kind of caught up in the
tide. I mean, we look at the Starbucks workers in Buffalo, who have scared the shit out of their
employers to the point where they're flying executives in to follow them around the store
and be like, please don't vote for a union. We need all of our billions of dollars we can't share.
Or, you know, even
workers at Wirecutter who are threatening to strike on Black Friday and their whole thing
is telling people what stuff to buy. Yeah. You know, and McDonald's workers in I think 10
different, either 10 different cities or 10 different states, 10 different locations
just went out on like a one day strike over sexual harassment in their workplace.
Kroger workers are taking a strike authorization vote in Texas.
We have multiple Amazon organizing attempts happening in Staten Island
and a rerun of the election coming up in Bessemer, Alabama.
And there's just so much happening that, you know,
I hope that the novelty idea of the strikes till we're strikesgiving,
I hope like that was fun, but I hope now that people people are paying attention that they stay interested and realize that you know labor
stories maybe it's not necessarily always like a big strike or like a cool picket line to look at
but there's a lot going on like every story is a work story every story is a labor story
and people seem like they're finally catching on to the fact that, yeah, we're all workers and, wow, cool things happen when we come together.
Yeah, I hope that too.
And I hope that, you know, the word on everybody's lips who's, I don't know, coming at this from kind of a little bit of a more either radical or desperate point of view, depending on how you want to frame it, is like general strike, general strike.
depending on how you want to frame it is like general strike general strike and you know there's there's been some there's been people online who keep saying like okay well we're all just going to
go on on black friday everybody general strike and it's like yeah well you don't you don't set
that up on twitter like the the unions that are striking now have strike funds and and put a lot
of thought into it and have like had to take there's things you have to do in order to not irresponsibly like just screw over a bunch of working people.
But it is like I'm a believer in the potential of something like a general strike to force significant concessions.
I mean if we did it right.
Yeah.
It's a big if.
I mean it's a huge if because it's never really effectively been – like there's been pieces of it done.
Like we saw – I think the closest we've gotten in like my lifetime has been when the airline workers threatened to go on strike over the budget thing.
And you just saw the federal government go, oh, fuck.
Nope.
You know what?
We can actually pass this thing.
I mean that's the thing, like that threat,
I think that when Sarah Nelson said that,
even like hinted towards that in 2019
when the government shut down,
that sort of, that was a tipping point.
I think that's the first time people would,
well, really it was probably the first time
in many people's lifetimes
that an actual labor leader with a platform
had even mentioned those words.
Because general strikes historically kind of are more situated in that late 19th century early 20th century like labor
swinging its dick around era and we've been kneecapped so much yeah that doesn't feel as
as possible but i mean the fact that she said and she was part of the airline industry
if we're ever going to actually you know bring capital to its knees we're going to need the
transportation workers we're going to need the dock workers we're going to need to like
actually analyze who is moving things around the country who's making sure things work
and how can we get them to put down to down their tools and be like okay we're going to do something
about this you know the whole general strike idea i mean i mean and arguably like one of the first ones was
uh you know in black reconstruction they uh the book there's a this argument that the first general
strike was enslaved enslaved people leaving the plantations and and withdrawing their labor
from that situation like that was a form of striking and i think the general strike is kind
of a amorphous
idea especially online as more people learn about labor and learn about it but it's also like kind
of a specific thing like yeah you can't just declare like okay we're all not going to go to
work tomorrow like cool but there's so much planning that goes into it to make sure that
people are able to do that and sustain that. And the people that are traditionally, you know, already left out or the most vulnerable and marginalized,
like that their needs are prioritized
because the people that can afford to declare general strike
and not show up for a week,
like that's all well and good for them.
But what about everyone else who can barely afford
to go to work at all?
Yeah, I've had these arguments with people online
and it's often like well you're
saying we shouldn't do like if we just do it people will figure it out like the infrastructure
will be built after the fact i'm like that's i'm i'm glad that you're in a situation where you feel
like you could you could handle that kind of uncertainty but like a single mother of four
who relies on her her job to like keep them and alive, isn't going to be like, someone will figure out how to feed my kids.
That's not how people work, you know?
Yeah, this is where having, like, a robust commitment to mutual aid
and strike funds and, like, an actual fabric,
like, having the fabric of a community
where you can depend on your neighbors
instead of never talking to them.
Like, a general strike would have a huge impact but on who like
who would it hurt more if you didn't plan it properly if you didn't have a if you didn't
have an actual grassroots network of people ready to help if you didn't have the understanding that
not everyone can just go run off in the streets some people like have mobility issues some people
have children some people are older or sicker, there's so much that goes into it.
Yeah.
It's like your car is fucked up and you know you need to take it in to get some stuff fixed or it's eventually going to break down entirely.
But that doesn't mean the right solution is just get in there and start hitting shit with a hammer.
Like, there needs to be, like, some systemic way you approach it, right?
Like, there's a proper way to fix an engine.
Right. And we can do that. that like we can start building those networks we can start you can organize your workplace and plug into the into like the organized labor framework which obviously
has many flaws not as radical as i would and many other people would like it to be but they know how
to do this shit like there there's a lot of different pieces that can be pulled together
different organizations and populations that need to work together if we're actually going to
accomplish something like this yep and i don't know if people are ready to put in all that work
because it's more fun to tweet yeah but i am wondering yeah as they say in alabama bless
their hearts you're you're spending a tremendous amount i mean bless their hearts. You're spending a tremendous amount of time on the ground with a lot of these people, talking with them.
Are you seeing kind of – how are you hearing them talk about the other strike efforts in other industries that are going on right now?
Because it has been more in the news than it's been at any point I can recall in the recent past. And I'm wondering how, in places like Bessemer, you know, in places like, you know, that coal miners strike you've
been at, like, how are they being, are, to what extent are they talking about other strike efforts?
Like, is that, does that seem to be something that there's a lot of kind of consciousness
and discussion about? Or is it just kind of in the background? I mean, it really depends. I,
like you said, I spent, I spent most of my time with the coal miners over the past year,
because I've been writing a book and that's been my one fun thing.
But I mean, I talk to them every single day and I've been to Alabama lots of times.
And I'm in a group chat with the wives.
Like I know I have a decent grasp on what's going on.
And honestly, the thing about it is that there are some folks who are very engaged and who
have made Twitters and they have their Facebook groups and they do pay attention to what's
happening.
And I do think they feel that kind of excitement and that widespread sense of solidarity.
But one thing that's important to remember, especially for workers who are already disadvantaged
or they're dealing with low wage labor is like, it's really hard to go on strike.
Like there's a lot of shit they have to figure out.
Like there's kids, there's health issues. there's how am I going to pay my rent?
Like, funds are great, but they don't cover everything.
Like, I think that's one of the realities that maybe gets sort of glossed over because we're all so online.
And we, like, to you and me, it feels like, oh, everyone's fucking stoked about these strikes.
But for someone in rural Alabama who is just hoping this strike is over soon so they can go back to work and have some financial stability, they're not necessarily reading your tweets or signing up for webinars or even paying attention to cool other strike efforts.
I'm sure some folks are aware and they have that time to plug in, but most people are just trying to get by.
And these are folks who spend eight hours a day on the picket lines lines and there's no cell phone service out where their picket lines are like yeah there's
only so much that a normal regular worker on the picket line can do to keep up yeah and um you came
into this i think unlike a lot of the people who are who are actually striking you you came into
this with a lot a lifelong history a lifelong history of interest in kind of
labor justice movements and whatnot, which I don't think most people who are in unions
necessarily spend a ton of time studying the last hundred years of labor relations.
What has surprised you? What has been a new realization that you've gotten since you started
covering this stuff on the ground in this most recent period so the thing that's really sticks with me and i'm going back
to my minors again because that's you know my where that where the most familiarity but something
that i think has so much potential and i'm not entirely sure how to articulate what that potential
is but so something i have seen is when this strike began, most, not all, but the majority
of the folks involved in this particular strike were conservative Christian people who were a lot
of them voted for Trump. A lot of them were like just in that world, maybe not like, you know,
wild MAGA people, but that's just what was the norm where they are in their community.
And they don't really think about it that much. But there are some people that I i've seen especially those who are involved in the mutual aid efforts or have been who have seen
birmingham dsa come out who have kind of taken this kind of like wider view of what's happening
how they fit in i've seen their politics and their perspective shift like there are some people who
are like straight up socialists now that seven months ago would have probably spit in your face or at least given you a hell of a look if you had even suggested such a thing.
And this is a small sample size and this is a unique situation.
But I think it really speaks to the potential there to like reach people who are very ideologically, politically different from what we maybe think of as labor people, as progressive,
radical, whatever people on like our team, right? But the power of the strike and the power of labor
is that there is so much there, there's kind of an inherent common ground, because so many people,
most people, a lot of people, most people have a job, a lot of people hate their boss,
you can kind of build from that very, very low baseline
and find more common ground and kind of, you can work towards a better understanding. Like maybe
you're not going to be best friends, but you can potentially shift someone's harmful worldview by
exposing them to new ideas once they trust that you're not just there to tell them they're wrong
and stupid and bad. You're like, look, we're coming at this like i'm gonna talk to you like a person i understand we see the world
differently but like you know i'm here to support you i'm here listening to you maybe you could
listen to what i have to say too maybe it might change how you see things and sometimes it works
yeah yeah um you know what else works, Kim?
Blowing shit up.
Well, okay, allegedly.
In Minecraft.
Yeah, I was going to say cap ads.
Cap adlisms.
Ads and services.
But I like your answer better, so let's just roll out with that.
Material support, right?
Another concrete example there,
the Birmingham DSA has been very active in fundraising and showing up and just providing support for the minors
and the people on strike.
And this is not necessarily a population of people
that like the idea of socialism,
whatever idea of socialism whatever idea
of it is that they hold because fox news or rush limbaugh are big cultural yeah and buys there
like whatever they think socialism is and then have a bunch of socialists show up and just practice
solidarity and mutual aid and practice socialism and they're like oh these guys are great thank
you for coming out it's things like that where it's like, I feel like so much
of radical politics
and various,
you know,
various tendencies,
there's just like
a branding problem
and there's a propaganda problem
on the right wing
and the mainstream media
doesn't tell anybody
what anything means.
yeah,
and it's a broader conversation,
right?
But yeah,
I felt for a while,
like one of the things
that leftist organizers
need to get better at doing is is being willing to like drop names when they're not productive
like okay maybe these people because of the media environment they've grown up in are never going to
want to consider themselves socialists but if they are willing to organize together and support the
efforts of other working people to organize together against the capital holding class, like then, okay, like what is it?
Why do you need them to like start quoting Karl Marx?
Or is it just cool that you've got them doing what they like?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me that like, yeah, you can get a lot of these people
on board with, again, pretty radical things if you're kind of approaching it from within their world, from within like, I'm not trying to talk to you about burning down the system.
I'm trying to talk to you about how you get what you need.
And it just so happens that how you get what you need is taking the system on in a very direct way.
I mean, so many ideas that are painted as radical just like aren't.
way. I mean, so many ideas that are painted as radical just
aren't. It's
normal people caring
for them. It is like
community care and common sense.
It's just been politicized to this insane
extent.
And the place is like, oh, sorry.
Even a lot of the tenants of mutual aid
you can even see pop up in a lot of church
communities as well.
At least smaller, closer-knit communities that are actually based around helping each other
at least i've i've i've observed that in a lot of my time traveling across the states
yeah absolutely that's a huge part of like the the church is the only mutual aid option in so
many like smaller and more isolated rural communities or just communities where the
church is a big deal like there's always ways to chip away at these institutions and eventually
hopefully burn them down. Right.
Without alienating people and making them feel like you're coming in and
telling them everything you believe is wrong. And I'm sure, and yeah,
making a mistake. Some of these folks,
I'm sure they believe things that are absolute garbage and I would never.
Yeah. Everybody does. But yeah, you know, like there's, you know, but there's,
there's just that covering the strike in particular has really just taught me a lot about
the gray areas in between not in a like wishy-washy liberal way but just in a way of like
how do you relate to normal fucking people who see the world differently but are in
yeah ultimately the same struggle as you like maybe i could i mean going down there
the only time i've been around
that many trump supporters was like at protests where i was yelling at them or like at my family
dinners so i wasn't you know i wasn't expecting to make friends but then i did and i think hopefully
we've we've shifted each other's perspectives a little bit in a way that's beneficial. I don't know.
It's been interesting.
Yeah.
Talking to people really is a lot different than tweeting at them.
Yeah.
As a rule, don't tweet would be my recommendation to people.
Never.
Never.
Talk to your neighbors and be nice to people when you buy coffee or food from them.
You'd be amazed what happens
and tell your neighbors
hey I'm taking my phone down to the river to throw it in
can I take your phone with me?
can we just all throw our phones in the river?
yeah
it's worth a shot
if you're going to start out being the weird neighbor
it's a strong start
we've already killed the water system so it's fine
like just right in the river with the car batteries you know it's good strong start look we've already killed the water system so it's fine like just
right in the river with the car batteries you know it's good for the eels the thing i love about our
show is just the hope is is the incredibly uh hope injected optimism that we start and end every
episode with um but no but i mean like me like yeah the more people you know in your community
especially people who are like working class you know when bad stuff starts happening the more people you know in your community, especially people who are like working class, you know, when bad stuff starts happening,
the more people you know,
the better,
because that's a lot,
I'm guessing a lot of the,
a lot of these people who are like,
you know,
like,
like,
like,
like old,
like old union workers,
they have a lot of like physical skills.
Like,
like they,
they,
they know how to do a whole bunch of stuff and it might be worth getting to
know some of those people,
even if,
you know,
depending where you live, like, yeah, they'll probably say something not great, at least for, you know,
the first bit. But once, you know, I have a lot of family in like a rural area of Alberta. And
like, yeah, my family is like pretty gay. So, you know, once you're in close to those people,
yeah, they're going to say something that's maybe not great, but once they get to like,
know you and really be like,
Oh,
like you're another person.
They like people actually,
you know,
people want to be around other people and they'll even change the way they
talk to be like,
Oh yeah,
maybe this isn't the best way to hang out around people because it's going
to drive people away.
So yeah,
I'll,
I'll change the way I say some things.
Cause like,
it turns out people actually like a lot of,
a lot of folks just kind of want to make their lives a bit better and that's really their main focus
yeah um it's hard enough to do that and it's it's it's just this matter of like
so much of what um so much of what kind of the the way that discourse happens online has poisoned aspects of
activism is in like making it difficult for people to relate in that way
without feeling like,
well,
okay,
but if I can't get them on board with all of these other things,
like I can't talk with them or whatever,
like because they're,
because they don't agree with this and this and this,
like we can't organize.
No,
like the purity of ideology.
Yeah. Like, I feel like most No. The purity of ideology. Yeah.
I feel like most people who aren't terminally online don't even necessarily have like a
specific ideology.
Absolutely not.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like there's just stuff that they have learned or they've decided that is true about the
world.
They just kind of go with it and they'll like interrogate it all the time.
And you can like, those are people you can talk to and maybe shit.
Like I've done it with my dad.
I've seen it happen with some of these conservative coal miner folks.
Even something as small as being able to humanize.
Okay, if you're talking about something,
oh, well, the thing you said, that really upset Joey.
And you like Joey, so maybe think about that.
And they'll probably be chiller because, oh, well, that's Joey.
I can't.
I don't want to be a dick to him.
If we can just find a way to enact that on a very broad scale, life would be a lot better for a lot of people.
Yeah, it's this dichotomy between a lot of people want to own the folks they see as like being against them or being on the other side.
But also people don't want to be a dick to people that like they like you don't want to feel like you're a dick so if you if you lean
more into the we're in opposition then you're going to trigger the well i want to i want to
make the person who disagrees with me angry side of the brain but if you can lean into the like
hey like we can get along,
and maybe you don't want to feel like an asshole
if we get along,
then, I don't know,
that's a productive place
to continue conversations from
and a good way to shift people, I think.
And then when your area floods
because of severe rain and storms,
then we have people that can help.
Yeah.
It's the importance of interacting with people in person
like offline which is like obviously more difficult to do because we're still trapped
in it yeah there's not ever gonna be like caveat caveat caveat but like it's so much easier to talk
to someone and kind of and like see the world you shift or even just humanize yourself to someone
who is inclined to not thinking of you as someone worth talking to like yeah as
long as it's not you're not putting yourself in danger like there's yeah obviously it's easy for
me to say stuff like this i'm a blonde lady you know but yeah still we're not talking about like
oh you have to go be friendly to people who like want to murder you because you're trans no it's
about no we're not saying that but most of these people don't think that maybe they have some
regressive attitude.
No, or they'll use the word gay to mean something, you know, not cool.
And you'll be like, hey, I have to do that.
They'll be like, hey, you know, I'm actually gay.
Or maybe you don't open with that.
Maybe you do, depending on the situation, to be like, hey, maybe there's other words that we can use for this because, yeah, whatever. Yeah, and you can shift people into a a closer alliance um just by becoming a human
in their eyes and also letting them become a human in your eyes um which is necessary the other
option is not a pleasant one so i would prefer the option where more people grow to see each
other as human and worth supporting right that seems like a better tactic to me yeah i know there's this argument where like no one is oh like i shouldn't have
to educate you i shouldn't have to put the time into to shift you and like that is valid that's
fair like you shouldn't have to but ideally no yeah no but yeah but if you want to that change
to happen it's probably not going to happen unless you put some effort in because they're
probably not going to actually think they're fine yeah and, because they're probably not going to. I actually think they're fine.
Yeah, and
I don't know. There's a bunch of shit that you shouldn't
have to do that we're also all
going to have to do. I shouldn't
have to say, hey guys, maybe
we don't kill the ocean. Maybe
killing the ocean is a bad idea.
No one should have to say that,
but we do. Could we not?
Because we're otherwise going to kill the ocean. Can just not please the fact that you shouldn't have to do something
also doesn't mean that like the thing doesn't need to be done and obviously i don't think that
the primary onus on speaking to let's say the kind of increasingly radicalized uh white lower
middle and middle class.
I don't think that falls primarily on people of color, on the LGBT community.
It falls on people like you and me, Kim, you know?
Literally, yeah.
Yeah.
But it still has to be done.
Like it's a thing that needs to be done.
And I'm not saying, hey, you out there who, you know, left where you grew up in rural Alabama
because someone was going to fucking murder you
and you had to get to a place where you could not deal with that i'm not saying you need to go
rolling back to to alabama um but it's good that people are talking and and working with and trying
to build connections with folks out there and change the nature of kind of aspects of the
culture and make things better because that needs to be done
we can't just be like well fuck some of those people yeah and that is definitely easier if you
are like one of the bros if you are you know a a bigger cis adjacent dude yeah that is that is of
course going to make things easier yeah i, the way you think about it,
that's kind of the tax...
That's not the right word,
but the fact that you do feel comfortable
and you're safe and you're not under a threat
in those spaces because of who you are
as a white cis or even a white cis lady,
the price you pay for that
is making it easier for everyone else
to feel that too.
That's your job.
Other people's job is to survive and be safe.
You can be the one that pushes the boundaries on these things
so when someone says something not great,
you can kind of call them out in like a bro-ish way
and they can respond to that a lot better
than a lot of other people who they don't know
screaming at them in a no-context scenario.
Yeah, be like, oh, I'm a pretty lady.
You don't want to make me upset by being rude.
That's exactly.
Yeah.
Like you shouldn't,
you should see this thing as rude and not okay.
Like the amount of men who have apologized to me down there for swearing.
It's so funny.
Yeah,
man,
my dude,
I live in Philadelphia,
but that's cute.
But if I could just harness any of that,
like chivalrous,
whatever chivalrous patriarchal viewpoint, like, Hey, apply this to being cool to my trans friends or not being rude to anyone else, like, sure, I'm down.
Yeah.
We don't take kindly to misgendering around these parts.
Yeah.
for a lot of people at least like you know when i worked at like smaller workplaces you know where it's like a small business where i know the owner the even if me and some other employees want to
unionize the prospect is always kind of more weird or challenging because you know it's a smaller
business maybe it's like connected to like a larger you know larger overall industry you know
like when i was like uh when i when i was like a parkour instructor right i i had discussions with
other like employees about doing you know like a parkour instructor's union type thing.
But it's hard when there's not many of you or you know the owner.
What would you say is good ways to at least get that conversation going among other employees?
And then similar examples from other stuff for people who deal with smaller workplaces that aren't a co-worker.
They're not working for Amazon or anything.
It's more like small local stuff.
The most important
basic building block of
all this is one-on-one
conversations. It's organizing.
Even if you just work with three or four other people
and maybe unionizing
in a formal structure doesn't necessarily make sense
or it seems like it might be too much of a headache,
you're still... A group of workers coming together is still a union doesn't matter
what the nlrb has to say about it and you you have shared interests and shared challenges and
there's things at work you probably want to change so even coming together and discussing that with
your co-workers like there's no law that says you have to be in a union if you want to get some shit
done you can march on your boss iww style and make them and demand a meeting you can make a petition you can do public pressure campaigns like all of the
things well not all of them but a lot of the tools that we see organized labor engaging in and unions
engaging in those are those are um available to everyone else too it's easier if you're within
that framework because you have that firepower behind you and you have maybe some legal protections, but just as workers,
you know, I guess that's more in like the IWW solidarity.
You need to use a model where like, we didn't like,
we don't need to do no stinking badges. Like we're a union.
Cause we say we're a union.
We're going to take control of things in our own way.
Like you see this in, I'm trying to, I think I, what's it called?
Diversity threads. There's a, there's a thrift shop in i think richmond virginia where workers just like they weren't being treated
properly i think it was like a like a queer community space that wasn't living up to its
values due to actions by management and so they just put a letter on the door said we're not coming
to work until you fix this here are clear demands here's what we need. Here you go. Figure it out.
Like, I don't think they're in a formal union, but they're acting collectively.
And that's something that is totally available to everyone as long as you're in a workplace.
If you're an independent contractor like me and probably some of you, that sucks and it's harder.
But you can always find your people and you can always there's always options, right?
Like you don't have to just join a union. You don't have to be a teamster to get shit done.
Yeah, I think, you know, when you were saying that,
I was going through my past experiences at places like that.
I'm like, yeah, we kind of did do some of that stuff
to varying degrees of success.
Sometimes it works out well,
sometimes it doesn't work out so well.
But yeah, I mean, there was definitely a while
where we did definitely make some decent changes kind of based on that model.
Yeah, it's kind of a shift of perception where like you were just doing this because this is because you're a worker and like we need to do this.
But if you just take a step back and think of it as like this is a labor action, we're a union of workers.
Like even just that little shift where it's like it's, you know, it's always us against them.
But look, it's us as a little as
a group as a collective against this manager against this exploitative practice i think that
adds a little bit of power and a little bit of energy because you realize you know i'm still
i think maybe it makes you feel a little less alone and also yeah absolutely and like you know
concerted activity is a legally protective right too too. So, like, there are some bits and pieces of labor law that are useful in these situations, too,
if you have a nerdy friend who would like to read about them for you.
All right.
Well, I think that's going to do it for us here at It Could Happen Here.
Until next time, remember remember fuck it
organize
and where can people find
Kim Kelly online if we want to send angry
tweets
oh well just try me buddy
I'm at
grim Kim because my college radio
DJ name will never die
and you can if you
are thus inclined you can pre pre-order my book,
White Like Hell,
The Untold History of American Labor,
on the internet.
Hopefully not Amazon.
Hopefully not.
Yeah.
I mean, if you do, like, thank you,
but there's other places that are better.
Do you want people to send you
a bunch of random knives, Kim?
Knives?
I mean, I wouldn't.
We've had a lot of luck with that in the past
I like knives, I like skincare
I like loose leaf tea
I contain multitudes, really
Send Kim a loose leaf tea
skincare knife
One of those exfoliating
knives with a tea infuser
in the hilt
Wow, that sounds great
That sounds like the next behind the bastards merch.
Yeah.
The T knife.
Yeah.
We'll,
we'll put that out after we get finished where we've got a very exciting
black Friday product this year,
which is a,
a,
a male to male,
a adapter.
People say you shouldn't do it.
They say it causes electrocution and fires and death.
And I think those people are cucks. Buy our mail-to-mail
adapter. Show the
woke establishment that you won't be
chained.
Welcome. I'm Danny
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Hey, everybody.
Robert Evans here.
This is It Could Happen Here, the show about how things are falling apart and how maybe they could be made a bit better.
Right now, today, we're doing an episode that is based on a, I don't know, essay Garrison wrote and I edited that we think you'll find interesting. So here it goes. Green capitalism promises to deliver us all the same
luxuries and commodities that we enjoy today, but without doing net harm to the biosphere.
It's the message liberal elites try to hold on when they make their case for being better stewards
of the environment than Republicans. This is not untrue, but it's also not true enough to stop your house from flooding or
your town from being incinerated in a hellstorm.
When it comes to the methods green capitalism posits by which we might reverse course without
changing the direction of the ship, one term you'll hear often is energy efficiency.
I want to read a statement I found on WhiteHouse.gov,
a fact sheet on the new U.S. government commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 50-52% by 2030.
I should note that's 50% of the 2005 levels, which were like 15% higher, something like that.
Anyway, here's the quote.
The United States can create good-paying jobs and cut emissions and energy costs for families
by supporting efficiency upgrades and electrification in buildings
through support for job-creating retrofit programs in sustainable affordable housing,
wider use of heat pumps and induction stoves, adoption of modern energy codes for new buildings.
The United States will also invest in new technologies to reduce emissions associated with construction,
including for high-performance electrified buildings.
Now, energy efficiency is in fact a fine goal, and trying to reduce emissions is broadly good.
But the sad and kind of weird fact is that increasing efficiency can sometimes mean increasing pollution
through what's known as the efficiency paradox, which is, of course, the title of the episode,
because you want us to think of a second title, of a separate title from that? Come on.
So first off, what does energy efficiency mean? In general terms, energy efficiency refers to
the amount of output that can be produced with a given input of energy, output being stuff that
energy is used to do, like light your house or wash your clothing
or power your wall-mounted 20-volt vibrator that requires as much electricity as an arc welder in
order to use. Energy savings are the reduction of energy use without the loss of output produced.
Improved energy efficiency is expected to bring a number of benefits. First of all, reducing energy
usage should result in lower energy bills. Ideally, reduced energy demand also means that energy imports can be decreased.
The International Energy Agency has estimated that strict efficiency policies could allow the world
to achieve more than 40% of the greenhouse gas emissions cuts needed to reach its climate goals,
even without new technology. So there is considerable wiggle
room within the existing structures of global society to reduce emissions a lot without fancy
space technology. But despite substantial energy efficiency gains in the past few decades and
increases in output from places like the United States, we as a species are using more energy than
we have pretty much forever, and emissions wildly surpass
our or the Earth's ability to handle them.
Quoting from the Global Carbon Project, quote,
Global energy growth is outpacing decarbonization.
Despite positive progress in 20 countries whose economies have grown over the last decade
and their emissions have declined, growth in energy use from fossil fuel sources is
still outpacing the rise of low-carbon sources and activities.
A robust global economy, insufficient emission reductions in developed countries, and a need
for increased energy use in developing countries, where per capita emissions remain far below those
of wealthier nations, will continue to put upward pressure on CO2 emissions. They use the term
developing and developed. We don't prefer those. But obviously, population growth contributes to
all that, the growth and the use of energy and the emissions of carbon. You know, more people,
more cars in the road, whatever. But it's not really the primary factor that's adding on to
the increase in energy use for the human race. We'll talk about that later, though. For now,
it's important to note that the full potential energy savings, like in these kind of hypotheticals about how much could be saved by improving efficiency, are usually estimated by assuming that demand for energy services will remain unchanged after energy efficiency gains.
So when they say that we can get 40% of the greenhouse emissions gas reductions we need by increasing efficiency, they're doing that assuming that nothing will change about our
overall energy use when we make things more efficient. But time and time again, we see that
once products are made more energy efficient, people often end up consuming, producing, or even
using more of the thing, which makes the potential savings less meaningful in a net result. Doesn't
mean that it's not a net good, but it's not as much as is often calculated in these climate proposals. You can see this demonstrated on the job if you're in, say, food services.
If you happen to figure out how to do a task faster, your boss probably isn't going to let
you use that extra time to just chill out and do stuff on your phone. What is the phrase? If you
can lean, you can clean. So if you do something faster, now you're just expected to do it faster all the time
and output more total work for your boss. This is the paradox of efficiency, and it applies to
energy as well on a societal level. Increased energy efficiency is a double-edged sword,
having the potential to help cut emissions by a significant factor and having the potential to
increase our total energy use depending on what is made more efficient and how people react to it.
The idea that energy efficiency improvements can actually lead to more overall energy use
goes all the way back to the start of the Industrial Revolution.
In 1865, economist William Stanley Jeevans published a book called The Coal Question,
in which he argued that innovation and efficiency, particularly in the case of the coal-powered steam engine,
would actually increase the overall consumption of coal
rather than reducing it as it had been intended to do.
His prediction that efficiency improvements on steam engines
would lead to massive economic expansion,
accelerating coal consumption, was very much correct.
This idea then, dubbed the Jevons Paradox,
is still very much worth considering
when we discuss efficiency gains and policies that are meant to reduce energy consumption This idea, then, dubbed the Jevons paradox, is still very much worth considering when
we discuss efficiency gains and policies that are meant to reduce energy consumption and
thereby fight climate change.
In modern terms, we describe the process by which potential energy savings can be cut
by greater use of the energy-efficient product as the rebound effect.
There are two different kinds of rebound effects observed, the most obvious of which is dubbed the direct rebound effect. There are two different kinds of rebound effects observed, the most obvious of
which is dubbed the direct rebound effect. Direct rebounds are observed when improvements in energy
efficiency for a particular energy service reduces the effective price of that service and thus
provides incentives to increase its demand. This leads to the overall increased efficiency not
equaling to a reduction in energy use, as good as you might think.
Direct rebounds are observed when improvements in energy efficiency for a particular energy service reduces the effective price of that enough that it provides incentives to increase
its demand.
You may upgrade to a more energy-efficient appliance, but because of the lower energy
costs, you'll use the appliance more often and thus use more total energy.
Or in some cases, energy efficiency gains are cut by the
fact that more efficient products allow people to use more of that product. For example, someone may
get a more efficient fridge that's also much larger, and so even though it cools more efficiently,
it's also consuming overall more energy. Transportation has a lot of direct rebounds.
Despite massive fuel efficiency gains in recent years,
transportation is still responsible for 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Transportation's contribution to global warming is quickly increasing,
with travel producing greater and greater percentages of the planet's carbon footprint.
Private automobile tailpipes will drive this phenomenon for the foreseeable future,
as the number of active vehicles on the road is projected to grow from 700 million in the year 2000 to 2 billion by 2040.
So even though cars are a lot more efficient, vastly more cars are being used. And of course,
that's not entirely, it doesn't mean that like more efficient cars cause people to buy more cars,
but it does make it more affordable for more people to own cars and to drive them further,
It does make it more affordable for more people to own cars and to drive them further, which drives up, you know, fuel use and drives up emissions.
And you see how the whole problem works.
And it's not just cars.
When planes became more fuel efficient, ticket prices decreased and more people started to travel by plane.
As cost per mile dropped, more miles were flown.
The fact that airplanes got more fuel efficient didn't reduce general pollution by the air travel industry. Quite to
the contrary, in fact. The decreased emissions led to an increase in air travel, which shot a
hell of a lot more poison out into the sky and also gave us eat, pray, love. So the other kinds
of rebounds are indirect rebound effects. This refers to when energy efficiency leads to monetary
savings for a producer or consumer, who then can spend those extra savings
on other carbon-emitting goods and services that otherwise they couldn't afford. For example,
you buy a more fuel-efficient car, you save money on fuel, and you end up with extra funds in your
bank account that you can use on a vacation, and maybe you take a flight on that vacation.
So in the end, you emit more CO2, despite the fact that you're emitting less CO2 through your car.
You've got 500 bucks extra in the bank, and you fly to Mexico on it, right?
That's an indirect rebound effect.
So even if a product is replaced by a more efficient one with similar specs,
lower energy bills can mean that more consumers will have more money to spend on goods and services.
This is generally seen as desirable from a social and economic standpoint
and probably from an individual standpoint, having more money is always useful.
But it involves additional energy consumption.
It means that you're consuming more, you're emitting more,
and so the savings and whatnot haven't actually led to a savings
in terms of, you know, from an environmental perspective.
An analysis of EU data shows that out of 29 EU countries,
11 experienced rebound effects of over 50%,
which means more
than half of the gains in energy efficiency were consumed by increases in energy use. Six of those
countries, including Denmark and Finland, reached over 100% rebound effects. This is called a
backfire, and it means that in those six countries, extra energy spending overtook all of the efficiency
gains achieved. Air conditioning and heating are large contributors to both direct and indirect rebounds.
A rebound effect as large as 60% has been shown in increased improvements in efficiency in the residential heating sector,
which is something that the White House specifically crowed about in their paper.
In China, long-term rebound effects ranging from 46% to 56% for residential electricity consumption in
Beijing have been estimated. All of this data casts doubt on the wisdom of relying on energy
efficiency policies to reduce energy demand. I'm going to quote here from a report by the
Copenhagen School of Energy Infrastructure. In recent decades, large increases in demand
for energy services have globally driven energy consumption. As a counterbalance,
energy efficiency has become a key energy policy mechanism to tackle higher energy consumption and
emissions, and countries and regions have adopted different targets and policies to achieve energy
and environmental objectives. The main goals of these policies are to minimize the dependence
on fossil fuels and mitigate local air pollution and GHG emissions. This has been particularly
relevant for the energy-intensive
sectors. The development and deployment of more efficient technologies are, along with more
technology management, the main channel to achieve these environmental and energy objectives.
However, energy efficiency improvements can lead to changes in the demand for energy services,
changes that offset some of the expected energy savings. Consequently, forecasts of energy
consumption reductions may be overstated. As evidenced by the empirical literature, rebound effects can be a non-negligible
issue. Therefore, ignoring them can imply an overestimation of the benefits coming from
energy efficiency improvements. This can in turn lead to decisions such as the over-allocation of
public funds to ineffective environmental and energy policies. Policymakers need to take rebound
effects into
account for air quality, energy security, and climate change policy reasons. A rebound effect
different from zero implies that the expected proportional reductions in emissions from fuel
efficiency improvements might not be achieved. Therefore, the policy goals to reach specific
levels of emissions through fuel efficiency enhancements may need to be adjusted accordingly.
Again, we have nothing against the idea of making more efficient devices. The point is that energy efficiency can't be
pursued in a vacuum. It has to coincide with changes to a less extractive, cancerous mindset
regarding the Earth's resources and carrying capacity. Just telling someone you can drive
more for less money now, or you can afford to keep your TV on all the time, doesn't really help
anything. My fear is that
governments and corporations, the neoliberal leviathan as we've come to call it on this show,
will focus almost overwhelmingly on energy efficiency to maintain economic growth and
obscure the overall lack of action on stopping carbon emissions. Think Joe Biden doing donuts
in an electric Jeep. Through such a lens as the Biden administration, energy efficiency
as a foil to climate change is a charade, being used to keep relentless economic growth viewed
as a net good. It plays into the myth that we'll be able to mitigate, adapt, and survive the effects
of climate change with little to no change to our current lifestyles. What we need to do is decouple
human well-being from energy consumption, and consumption in general, to effectively combat climate change. This needs to happen at such a scale that advocating for
individual changes in lifestyle will never be enough, but that is still a significant part of
the puzzle. The trick comes in getting people to accept the fact that their life will need to
change, without them telling them, and buying this product instead of that product is how you do it.
That said, populations of people can and do change their behaviors in pretty profound ways.
In 1950, abortion was not at all an issue for the religious right.
Resistance to abortion might make some Protestants distrust you
because that was seen as a Catholic concern.
Now abortion is the defining political issue of the ascendant right.
Their promise to destroy it is the rock upon which their titanic power is based. In a less calamitous sense, since 2007, we've gone from a time in which smartphones
were expensive trash for rich people to buy to today, when they're expensive trash that every
human being who can afford to has to carry at all times because they're so utterly integrated to our
daily life. So yes, people can change. A bigger challenge, though, will be to change the mindset of industry, which is not entirely or even often driven by consumer demand. As we've seen with the release of papers proving Chevron and other oil and gas companies knew about and deliberately hid research on climate change for decades, big capital will put its thumb on the scale every step of the way.
the scale every step of the way. In other words, if you come at the behemoth that is the integrated industrial economy, you'd best come correct. How do we do that? Well, if anybody really knew,
they would have, you know, done it by now. The human infrastructure of extractive capitalism
is deep and vast and tightly woven into the structure of every government with any real power.
So with the full understanding and admission that we aren't claiming to have
solutions to that problem, let's talk about something that will at least be part of any
real solution to the problem, degrowth. This is a term we'll explain in more detail later,
but we mean it simply as a holistic approach to encouraging reduction in energy consumption and
global environmental justice. A paper on the Jevons paradox and the link between innovation, efficiency,
and sustainability for the frontiers
in energy research concluded,
quote,
the Jevons paradox entails
that sustainability problems cannot be solved
by technological innovations alone.
They must be solved through institutional
and behavioral changes.
While there are still differences of opinion
about the scale of rebound effects
and ongoing arguments about the macro and micro and longer and shorter term consequences of efficiency,
our interest in this topic today is driven by the goal of improving how we use energy rather than totally overhauling or abandoning efficiency.
One example would be the current fight in Europe over smartphone chargers.
Most of the rest of the smartphone industry worldwide has jumped onto USB-C as the
right kind of port for charging, etc. with your device. Before this point, those of you who've
been using smartphones for a decade or more remember there were tons of different chargers
and thus a ton of different ways. Every phone had to come with a new charger. A lot of them wound
up in the trash. That has been reduced by everyone jumping onto USB-C. But Apple continues to use
their own special charger. And now the EU is promising to make a law to onto USB-C, but Apple continues to use their own special charger,
and now the EU is promising to make a law to mandate USB-C for charging new phones in an
attempt to reduce waste. This isn't, again, a bad thing, but if someone's really concerned with
waste among the smartphone industry, planned obsolescence is the thing to go after. Now,
targeting planned obsolescence, stopping it, includes a number of things. And for one thing, you have to fight for the right to repair devices, which is something
that a number of corporations, not just in the smartphone industry, have lobbied to, in some
cases, make illegal. More than that, it's stopping somehow these companies from making the conscious
decision to brick old technology to increase profits. And that aspect of it is the bigger
enemy than even the right to repair. As electronic devices become common in more sectors of daily life via the
internet of things, the overall share of global energy use that goes to making new versions of
old products that could still be working but are designed to break is really quite depressing.
For one example of how large it must be, I haven't found any solid information on the total size of this industry, things that you have to repeatedly rebuy because they're meant to break.
But the mobile phone industry in 2019 alone was 4.6% of global GDP.
So that's close to 5% of global GDP just from making phones that are designed to break so you have to buy a new phone.
This is an example of an area in which people's perspectives have to be changed. And I think actually that digital fatigue, the
fact that we're all so fucking exhausted with these devices these days, may provide somewhat
of an inroad for convincing people that they need to buy new gadgets less often. But because these
gadgets are so crucial to daily life, the industry actually also has to be forced to change. And
again, right repair is one
part of this, but that doesn't stop Apple from just deciding to throttle their old devices whenever
they need to add a new layer to the money pile. Our overall point with all this is that solutions
to climate change have to be cultural and not just based in some version of, we'll invent a better
version and that will solve the problem. Hybrid gas burning cars and standardized charging cords
are nibbling around the edges of the problem. Rely-burning cars and standardized charging cords are nibbling around
the edges of the problem. Relying on technological advances pacifies us in the present, and it
reinforces the need for certain types of human-material codependence, and that kind of
codependence leads to increased dependency and more extraction. By no means am I trying to say
that innovation is bad. I love gadgets as much as the next person. Innovation also has the capacity to
heavily decrease resource extraction. It just has to be tailored with something more than just,
we'll make this device more efficient so we can use it more or sell more of them.
The capitalist mode of mass resource extraction and grind for efficiency are intertwined,
and if we are to limit the most catastrophic effects of climate change,
we as a culture need to rethink how we view efficiency and energy use.
For the past few hundred years, economic growth has been the road that has led to our current ecological dilemma.
The fantasy of switching over to nuclear and renewable energy with a perfectly efficient electric grid to just sidestep climate collapse is a fantasy.
We missed our chance to do that.
collapse is, it's a fantasy. We missed our chance to do that. Even if we stop all carbon emissions right now, all of them, the carbon already in the atmosphere would push us past two degrees Celsius
of warming in about 50 years. So what, besides carbon capture, can we do about this? We as in
both you the regular listener and the ghouls with power and real influence. Well, the 2018
International Panel on Climate Change Special Report
indicated that in the absence of speculative negative emissions technologies,
the only feasible way to remain within safe carbon budgets
was for high-income nations to actively slow down the pace of material production and consumption.
Degrowth is the planned reduction of energy use, corporate profits, overproduction,
and excess consumption designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality while focusing on human and ecological well-being.
This isn't just some sort of utopian Marxist thinking, and in fact, a lot of Marxists have critiques of degrowth.
And degrowth could be applied to a number of different economic and governmental systems.
There are even some weirdo capitalist advocates of degrowth. Discussion about solving climate change can get into
uncomfortable eugenics-y territory if you aren't careful, so I should emphasize here that degrowth
is primarily about already wealthy countries limiting their economic growth. When aggregated
in terms of income, the richest half of the world, high and upper middle income countries, emit 86% of global CO2 emissions. The bottom half, lower and middle income countries,
emit only 14%. With very few exceptions, the richer the nation is, the more it emits. It's
all part of the resource extraction infinite growth lie we tell ourselves to keep growing.
Wealth is so much more of a factor in emissions than population.
North America is home to only 5% of the world population, but emits nearly 18% of CO2. Asia is
home to 60% of the world's population, but emits just 49% of CO2. Africa has 16% of the population,
but emits just 4% of its CO2. This is reflected in per capita emissions.
The average North American emits 17 times more than the average African.
This inequality in global emissions
lies at the heart of why international agreement
on climate change has and continues to be so contentious.
The richest countries in the world
are home to half the world population
and emit 86% of CO2.
We want global incomes and living standards, especially for those
of the poorest half of the world, to rise. The only way to do that while limiting climate change
is to shrink the emissions of high-income countries. Even several billion additional
people in low-income nations would leave global emissions almost unchanged. Three or four billion
poor individuals would only account for a few percent of global CO2.
At the other end of the distribution, however, adding only one billion high-income individuals to the wealthiest parts of the world would increase global emissions by almost a third.
A programmer in the United States has a higher CO2 footprint than 50 farmers in Uganda.
A decent chunk of this is just due to meat consumption.
Meat consumption per capita in the richest 15 countries is 750% higher than in the poorest 24 countries. Lowering the population of, say, Uruguay won't do much for emissions. This is not the case when you talk about wealthy nations. In fact, if you live
in, say, the United States, possibly the biggest thing you as an individual could do to reduce
emissions is to have fewer or no no, children. It's estimated
that dedicated recycling curbs about 0.3 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, while having one
fewer child is equivalent to preventing over 58 tons of CO2 emissions a year. Better sex ed and
free access to contraceptives could also go a shockingly long way to curbing individual emission
in wealthy countries. These numbers are averaged across a
whole nation, and just like the case in less wealthy countries, the impact on emissions by
having one fewer kid will be far lesser if your middle class are poor than it would be if your
upper middle class are rich. But of course, none of that is going to be enough if industrial
production keeps chugging along, and advising people not to have children, one of the singular
driving motivations for human beings across history, isn't exactly a vote-getter of a proposition. Degrowth is critical, but the
question of how to get there is thorny as hell. There are a few easy answers. Abolishing planned
obsolescence could be pretty easily pitched to the average person. Cutting down on the number
of people who have to commute could have a significant impact on toxic car culture, and again,
you can sell that to people. The obvious solutions are good places to start, but they should be seen as opening incisions,
meant to clear the way to make deeper, more expansive cuts, and eventually hew away at
the cancer we've planted in the heart of our civilization.
Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.
Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows
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Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,
and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better
offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry
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Don't get me wrong, though.
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Check out betteroffline.com.
Hola, mi gente.
It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again,
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It's Happened, Could Hear.
Robert Evans, the podcast that is now begun.
This is a show about how things are falling apart and occasionally how to maybe deal with that,
maybe try to steer things in a better direction.
We talk about a bunch of stuff.
Today, we're going to be talking about more supply line stuff.
And in order to kind of introduce this episode, we wanted to bring in Alexis,
who posted a thread on Twitter about some
of their experiences in the industry in which they work that we all found very interesting.
And so we just wanted to bring Alexis on and first off, have you kind of go over what you
went over in that thread and then kind of zero in and talk about that.
So Alexis, welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Yeah, I'm going to let you take it from here and then we'll drill in once you get through your piece.
All right. So I'm just going to go ahead and read the thread that I posted and then, yeah,
we'll go from there. So labor shortage discourse time. I work for a food manufacturing company,
specifically bottling and canning various beverages, and we are desperately understaffed. The wages are competitive, but they can't keep anyone on after they hire them.
Why? Because we're short on people. As soon as someone is trained, they start throwing massive
amounts of mandatory overtime on them to try and cover the missing pieces while they look for more
people to hire in. Folks get burned out and quit. And this is where my hate of just-in-time
manufacturing comes in. Now, obviously, in food. And this is where my hate of just-in-time manufacturing comes
in. Now, obviously, in food manufacturing, you can't just stock a warehouse with stuff and let
it sit for a year, but you can keep a couple of weeks of stock rotating at all times if you devote
the warehouse space, employees, et cetera, to doing so. This would give you some flex time to train
your new people without having to run everyone into the dirt. So even with a place that is offering decent money and benefits, because this is a union
shop, we can't keep people because we're making a conscious decision to only ever have
one to two days of stock on hand to increase profits.
Meanwhile, thanks to lean manufacturing, we don't keep a ton of spare parts for our
equipment on hand.
Thanks to the supply chain disruption, we've got packaging equipment that's been waiting
on replacement parts for six months, which further fucks our productivity due to downtime,
which makes the company schedule even more overtime to try and make up for the lost cases
from equipment downtime, which burns out more employees, which puts us in an even deeper labor
hole. I've been warning about just-in-time being a time bomb in the making for over a decade now.
When it works perfectly, you're fine. A single interruption causes cascade effects, and since everyone has been doing the
Just-in-Time thing, there's zero slack anywhere in the system. Grocery stores don't have any extra
soda in the back. They get behind. Demand builds up. Distribution doesn't have any pallets in the
warehouse. Ha, what warehouse? So they can't answer the surge in demand from grocery stores.
Manufacturing doesn't have spare parts for aging equipment, so we can't boost production.
Spare parts makers don't have stock buildup.
So on and on it goes.
The actual proximate cause of this is deregulation of capitalism that has incentivized quarterly profits and made long-term thinking anathema to CEOs.
But sure, conservatives blame California for not letting old trucks offload at the ports.
That's it.
That's the essence of my thread. i then plug my podcast at the end right yeah so i wanted to i'm curious as to kind of like uh to what it like i'm trying to understand
like what the solution is like we've talked a bit about okay just-in-time manufacturing is is problematic for a lot of reasons um keeping more like on the shelves is
going to allow you to avoid these crunches and it's going to like make supply line issues like
the ones we've been experiencing since the start of the covid pandemic less severe and less common
um but how do you actually how do you actually make that happen because i guess the traditional
free market thing is that like, well, because this has
been such a problem for companies, um, you know, they'll naturally change the system
in order to avoid this in the future.
I don't feel like that's likely to happen.
Um, and I, I'm wondering like, what do we, uh, what, what, what do you think is the,
the way forward here?
Well, cause some of the problem is, is right now, like most companies, you will pay taxes on stuff that you have stored in a warehouse, things like that.
So no company is going to voluntarily lower their profit margins if the other companies don't do it themselves as well.
So really, there's going to have to be some sort of forcing of companies to have that on hand.
And I don't see just being able to write a law that says, oh, well, you're required to have this much backstock on hand as being a functional way to work.
And really, as I'm sure, you know, Robert, I know you're well aware that capitalism itself is kind of the problem.
I know you're well aware that capitalism itself is kind of the problem. But as far as I guess a solution to this sort of thing, you would have to disincentivize the quarterly profits above all in order to force companies back into long term thinking.
Now, from a purely like mechanical standpoint, I guess if you did something to incentivize companies having backstock or flex stock on hand, that might help.
But I mean, I'm just a cog in the machine getting ground up.
So as far as like big solutions, that's I mean, I've been looking at it ever since I worked in a freaking
casket factory and we started doing just in time there. And just every time that I've been in a
place, a manufacturing place and seen it happen, I'm just like, oh, this is going to go wrong
because you can't, you can do just in time if all of your suppliers are local,
but having it stretched across the global supply chain, it's inevitably going
to collapse in on itself.
I'm sorry that I'm not more helpful.
No, no.
But I mean, this is the problem because there's a lot of reasons why the supply chain is global.
Some of them are labor-related reasons.
Some of them are cost-cutting.
Some of them are just pure pragmatism.
But it's trying to...
them are just like pure pragmatism um but it's trying to like i i don't i feel like it's it's one thing to say like well part of the problem is that like all of these different pieces come
from different countries um and there's a number of shady reasons for aspects of that um but it
makes for greater problems when there's a supply line shortage and then like okay well what are we
what are we gonna are you suggesting that we make everything domestically? Because I don't feel like that's a realistic solution.
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
And it's just – I'm trying to get a handle on – there's a couple of angles on this.
There's what we think is going to happen.
And then there's the question of like is there a way that the system as it exists could make this whole thing less vulnerable?
And in a lot of ways, that's going to be separate from the question of what would be better
for everyone to happen, because a lot of what would be better for everyone to happen is
a significant chunk of these things that we have constantly stocked on the shelves are
no longer parts of our life, right?
There's a lot of things that are made that we do not need and that there's an environmental
cost and a social cost and yada, yada, yada.
need and that are there's an environmental cost and a social cost and yada yada yada um but i i guess first i'm kind of curious to drilling in like how realistic do you think it is that the
system as it exists is going to like mitigate this and come up with better ways to to do this that
render us less vulnerable to these supply crunches like is there i i don't see a great financial
incentive in it for them yet um because they they don't seem to be hurting.
Right. Like, that's that's the thing.
Well, actually, and again, please keep in mind, this is limited anecdotal evidence.
Yeah, because it's going to be like John Deere, I know, was making record profits before all this union stuff happened.
But like, that's not everyone.
Right. So again, I work for a soda manufacturer. So
every time you're in, you know, enjoying your, your Schmepsi Schmola or your, or your Schmago,
whatever, whatever, I'm, I'm not going to explain which company I work for. Cause I don't want to
get in trouble. Um, and we're, we're actually a captive bottler, which means that it's a separate
company, but we work for the big
soda corporation. I think that in certain instances, those things will change because,
for example, just last week, we had one of our four lines go down. So 25% of our production
capacity went down because we had a motor burnout on the rollers that would move a full pallet out to be picked up by a forklift. And there was no replacement motor in stock.
And so we had, I think, 48 hours of downtime on this.
Now, all the way up at the top, the company executives, you know, we're one of 30 some
plants.
They don't care about why it was down, just that it was down. So in our position here, the people a little higher up the food chain than me are insisting like, hey, we've been after you guys for months that we need spares like this.
And I think that as that sort of stuff happens, as it cuts into potential future profits, you know, it's not dropping their profits, but it's keeping them from being even higher. Maybe certain companies are going to be like, okay, maybe we do need a couple more spares on
the shelves. As far as on the production side of it, I don't see that happening. I think we're
still going to be shipping out pallets of corn syrup infected carbonated water as fast as we
can make them. And you were talking about the
environmental costs like you do not want to know how much water it takes to make a single liter
of soda. You really don't. Yeah. But. On this on the production like input side, I think that
companies are going to start stocking spare parts because it has been, and I still have friends who work for other companies that I used to work for.
It has been all throughout the system.
And I live in the Midwest.
Every company is going through this where they're having huge amounts of downtime because things as small as a gasket or an O-ring are not on the shelf.
a gasket or an O-ring are not on the shelf.
And they're finally,
companies are finally going to listen to what their maintenance people
have been screaming at them
that we can't just stagger along
and then, oh, well, it's next day delivery.
Yeah, and then you freak out
that this line was down for 24 hours.
Now that it's not even next day delivery,
it's next week delivery.
I think that side of it,
they're going to probably try and fix.
But the other side shipping to the consumer, I really don't see that they're going to probably try and fix but the other side shipping to the consumer i really don't see that
they're going to change that yeah i mean that makes that makes sense and we i we are you are
kind of led thinking about this inevitably to like two conclusions one of them is that
i have my i'm sure parts of this the the system will adapt as it already has been in fact which
is why like you haven't seen toilet paper run out as bad as it did at the start of the pandemic again, right?
There is a degree to which the feeling that because of the way the system was set up and the fact that it was disrupted so severely, it's kind of impossible to get 100 percent back on track, especially considering the disruptions are going to continue, not just waves of covid, but, you know, natural disasters and whatnot, shortages of things like truck drivers like these different little hits are going to keep coming. And I just don't know that we're ever going to catch up everywhere enough that shortages of some sort aren't an aspect of our lives forever.
And this is one of those things that if you've spent a lot of time outside of the United States,
that's something a lot of people have been dealing with for years. It's just not something
Americans are used to dealing with. And I think I kind of feel like that's just where it is now.
I don't feel like every aspect of our production and consumption system is going to get backward to where it was February of 2020.
I think maybe that's never happening again.
No, absolutely.
It will not ever happen again.
You were saying earlier that, you know, there's some practical reasons for the global supply chain.
Like one of the things that we've had such hard time getting in is any of our concentrates
that contain real vanilla.
Obviously, we can't grow vanilla in the United States.
Yeah, that's the thing you have to.
I mean, that's part of why colonialism exists, right?
You need to go get vanilla.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So like there are certain things that are going to be stay, have to stay global. If we're going to
continue to make the things that we make and just from my side of it, being able to see,
oh, well, why can't we get this concentrate in? Oh, cause it has vanilla as an ingredient and
there's been a bunch of droughts and shit. And so vanilla is in a crunch, you know, that sort of
thing. So I just, um, you're right in that. Yeah. We're going to have shortages. There's it's,
you know, and it's not just the mechanical side on ours. It's like, we can't get cans in,
we can't get concentrated. We can't, you know, whatever it is that we can't get in is going to
slow us down and demand will build up. And I did have somebody in that thread respond and say,
I don't see how demand for soda will build up. And I'm like, no, I have a friend who's like a Diet Dr. Pepper fiend.
And as soon as Diet Dr. Pepper shows up now, she buys like 824 packs.
Demand will absolutely build up for stuff.
When people feel like they're being deprived of something, when it becomes available, they're going to hoard it as best they can.
Yeah.
Yeah. And that's, again, with soda, just kind of an annoyance, although that can because individual people can react in extreme ways can snowball.
I'm not going to be surprised if one of these days we have somebody shoot up a fucking grocery store because their whatever was out.
But that's also not a necessity. And I think that like the concern is that especially when you look at stuff like, you know, there's a couple of states that have like their wheat harvest and corn harvest that were like half or less than half of normal in big chunks of Iraq.
It was like down by I think like 70 or 80 percent, like these massive shortages of growing basic foodstuffs.
And that's all that's all tied into this. Like it's not the same business that you're in,
but it's all tied into aspects of this. And it's all tied into like a lot of our ability to get
that food out of the field is reliant upon different kinds of mechanical harvesting equipment,
the materials to which to like fix and replace it are often like caught up in this whole just
in time problem because they don't make enough of them. And sometimes they don't have them in
stores. And then there's like a strike at john deere and so more
aren't getting made and so there's not what you need to repair the equipment in time to get stuff
out of the field everywhere and in a year when you already have a reduction of harvests like that
cuts down on it further um like i i think i don't know it's it's this there's always a couple of
things to look at which is like number one as we've talked about, like how is the system going to try to handle this?
What ways are they going to be successful?
What ways are they going to fail?
What things are you going to have to endure?
as communities be more resilient to this stuff, which, you know, has less to do with soda, which again is not a necessity,
but more to do with figuring out how to anticipate and endure supply line
disruptions.
Right. Absolutely. And, and while I'm currently in soda,
I have been in everything from automotive to, I think,
as I mentioned before, casket manufacturers. So, you know,
I can go through a casket a week you know
especially when you're driving your uh your well yeah when i'm drunk driving in a oh boy right
right through a trailer park i mean you're you're i mean your casket order's got to be through the
roof uh it is it is a lot a lot of people yeah i mean i i do actually wonder how fuck um i mean
like i i do actually wonder how much like the casket industry
and stuff like that has been affected by the by like by the pandemic with the you know an influx
of dead people and how that's how that's affected things that's something i've been wondering about
but i've not actually spent time looking into i can't speak to the pandemic specifically i quit i
quit the casket industry in 2008 but i do recall my
boss uh the owner at the time being very very upset that hurricane katrina had a lower death
toll than he anticipated because oh that's really yeah he had overordered the sheet metal to make
the caskets and he was very pissed off about having all that extra stock because they were
trying to transfer to just in time society yeah so that's that's good
to hear yeah great yeah he he was in a bad mood for like a month after katrina because god it
hadn't reached his expectation well sure that's a real problem for for absolutely no he's got
that's all the sympathy critical support i mean the ghoul that job was grim. I'm just going to say that. It sounds like it.
I have, through a loved one, a connection to somebody who works for a company that makes body bags.
And 2020 was amazing for them.
They did incredible in 2020.
I didn't hear any ghoulish stories.
It's just like, yeah, of course you guys made a bunch of extra money like yeah sounds like that was great for you putting in putting in a mental note to uh
go through a bunch of the campaign contributions of people who make body bags to check if they're
supporting anti-mask yeah see if big corpse got into this at all yeah i mean honestly the thing
to the thing to do is you know i'm not a big fan of the stock market in general but next time the next time there's a pandemic find out which companies
make body bags on the stock market and invest in those as soon as as soon as the pandemic starts
i mean i can tell you what i'm i'm putting money into big corpse as soon as uh soon as the next
pandemic hits that's absolutely gonna happen oh boy all right yeah that's grim yeah i think it's fine there's a reason why after
after i started working there i immediately uh told my husband hey uh make sure if i die before
you i'm cremated so yes yes i don't want to give these monsters any of my money what i'm looking
into is just full full body stuffing that people can pose me around.
But that's a separate topic.
Yeah, you talk about that a lot, Garrison.
What I did want to mention is actually when you were talking about how they hire in a lot of employees and they make them work horrible hours and then they quit.
This is kind of a constant kind of process.
And this isn't exclusive to that industry at all.
One of the worst offenders of this is
actually the Postal Service.
The Postal Service has the
lowest employee satisfaction out of any
shipping company.
My father worked for the Postal Service
for a bit, and when you first join up,
you join as
on a
non-career employee path, and then you can get promoted to a career employee path after a few years.
But the turnaround for the non-career employee paths is massive.
Local branches can say up to 90% of people who start working at the Postal Service will end up quitting within the year.
Now, that number can be different based on nationally and based on what state you're in.
It could be different based on nationally and based on what state you're in.
But across the board, it's always around at least 50% for employee turnaround or people who join up the postal service on these city carrier assistant positions.
That's fascinating.
Yeah, because when you're a non-career employee path, you have to work seven days a week, and you can be called to work basically any time, usually working around 10 to 12-hour days.
All of the career employees, all of the – Wow, that sounds like what I put you guys through.
But all of the regular carriers get to work their specific route, and that's it.
That's their whole day.
For the people who are new to the job, they're forced to work tons of routes, fill in whenever someone else can't, and we constantly be doing overtime
and working basically nonstop
with only two holidays off a year or something.
It's pretty intense,
which is why when the Postal Service have problems
and because there's generally not tons of employees,
I mean, there is lots,
like comparatively,
the Postal Service is one of the bigger employers in the whole country.
But when employees drop off, filling those positions can be really hard in times of crisis.
So last year, when there was all these problems with the Postal Service, all of these kind of issues around the supply chain and around how people treat their workers,
all of them compound to create one like much bigger problem which we
saw last year with the postal service and like late in like the late summer um so i just find
it interesting how it's like you know these same issues around like how we treat workers
is adding on to this problem of like supply chains and getting stuff delivered and all this kind of
stuff and so what what i find interesting there is so you're you know we're talking about the the uh employee issue and yeah it churned
so i've been uh the plant i was working in which is 20 minutes from my house closed down and now
i'm working uh 90 miles away literally an hour and 45 jesus christ jesus h christ i am i am working
four twelves a week and i'm crashing at my parents' house, which they live about 60 miles away. So it's a little bit better. But also my parents are hard right evangelicals who do not agree with this. So that's fun. But the plant that I was in was a non-union plant. And the one I'm in now is a union plant. And one of the things that I've noticed that's actually kind of different is for once in the non-union plant, things were actually better
because what we could do, what could be done is, all right, we're all working seven days a week.
We have enough staffing that if nobody calls in, we have one spare person who normally goes around
and gives breaks and stuff like that. Well, we could, you know, basically all take turns taking a day off during that seven day
week at the union plant that I'm at now, though, it's all seniority based.
So any time that they force overtime, they go from the bottom of the seniority list on
up.
Yeah.
So, yeah, the people who are being forced into those, which I described in the thread,
Oh, yeah. The people who are being forced into those, which I described in the thread, I think it was split off in the thread.
But the people who were being forced to stay over four hours and then come in four hours early where you, oh, you were working six to two.
six and then you're coming in at two in the morning instead of six in the morning the next day are always the people who are the lowest on the seniority list which is same thing with the
postal service yeah yeah i mean it's not there's a number of different i mean i've heard that
complaint from a couple of different union gigs um and it's yeah it's a problem yeah
and it's that's why we get these new people and they get trained up and now they're trained
and they're signed off and then they immediately go from, cause when you're training, you're
not, you can't train on overtime or whatever, but now it's, oh, okay, well now you're working
every weekend.
You're being forced over, you're being forced in early, just nonstop.
And so, yeah, they get trained for a month and then a month after that they quit because
they went from working a relatively sane yeah amount to an absurd amount yeah hours a week
we went 58 days at one point without a day off yeah oh my god my dad went like almost i think
like 300 days without without a day off when he started the postal service a kind of funny thing is like when you hear the postal service talking about this like from the
in their own reports and on their own website what they find a problem with is not not the
turnaround in and of itself but how they're basically wasting money on trainings for people
that don't end up working it's like that is their main concern is that they're spending all this
money on like training for people that don't stick around often um and like yeah well maybe you should address why they don't stick around often that's
that seems to be kind of the actual issue here yeah and what I've been pushing for and I know
this is more on the labor side than on the on the supply chain side that we were focusing on
I've been pushing for instead of three shifts where we keep just getting just hammered with this stuff.
I want us to do four shifts, 12 hour days and do like a two on two off, three on three off type swing shift where you have like one shift that works.
You know, you work three days, one week, four days the next week and you work 12 hour days.
But really, you wind up getting a bunch of days off, you know, like that you're gonna work seven days a week that's the best way to do it in my opinion
yeah i mean like you know it's there's a lot of resistance to well what will then we have to hire
these extra people well you're hiring those people anyway and then they're quitting i mean like you're
not even getting your value out of them slave drivers i mean like you said this is more this
is more the labor side than the supply chain side but honestly these are these are like the same side right because if you don't have
employee like this is you know this is a fundamental you know thing and like how capitalism
works right you need to have you know workers to make there have be any value at all right
so if there's if there isn't any people to working then there is no supply chain it's gone because
we need people to do it both on like the production side and both in like the transportation side that's like you know ups usps you know fedex
you know so like the mail carriers and stuff is very important to all of this because
you you need in order for there to be a supply chain there needs to be the the chain part right
where you carry it from one place to to another so it's but it's both on the production side and
on like the transportation side for how all these problems you know get and one and one of the things that i
in the replies to my thread which i got into was that um part of the the only slack in just in time
uh manufacturing is the employees they've pulled all of the slack out of the system on the mechanical
side and on the production side of it, on all the physical side. The only slack left is people.
And they have stretched us all to the absolute breaking point. Now I'm lucky relatively speaking
in that I'm salary. So like I'm more on the inventory side of things. So I'm not
doing the hourly production seven day a week thing.
Like I said,
I work for 12.
But I can still,
you know,
and that that's this job,
every other previous job,
not the same thing,
but I can still see where they've taken out.
Like once again,
we used to have spares on the shelf so that when something broke down, we could fix the machine and keep running.
Now, instead of the spare, the spare is people working weekends.
That's the spare part.
And that makes total sense, right?
You're the capitalist.
A better spare that is a part on the shelf costs you money in terms of, like, you need to have that space.
That's extra rent you're paying.
You need to have bought that part part having your people just kill themselves is
much cheaper you can sort of misuse a marx here right we're like one of marx's things is like
okay well you know you you have you have this increased machinery you have this increased
machinery but that means you're producing less value because you know you've put more people
out of work well it's like okay well what if what what if we just re-extend the workday again
and sort of reverse all of the gains that have been happening?
Well, okay, I say have been happening.
Reverse all the gains that happened between about 1930 and 1970
and just, oh, well, what if we just make everyone work 12-hour days again?
And that was the thing that struck me,
both listening to this and reading the thread,
was that it's not even just weight, it's just the fundamental power imbalance.
And then it's a fundamental power imbalance that's gotten so bad that even like, you know, sometimes the remains of the union system, it's like it's not even, you know, the unions, like in this particular case like this, they're not even, it's not even really helping.
It's just creating like you have a small labor aristocracy that you have everyone else getting just like ground down.
In this case, it's that we've got a small core of people who've been there 20 or 30 years.
And whereas before, maybe even 10 years ago, they might have viewed the union as a vehicle to help everybody.
ago they might have viewed the union as a vehicle to help everybody things have gotten so bad that now it's just okay i'm going to use this system as much as i can to cover my own ass because things
have gotten so damn bad and obviously you know reagan destroying the unions and stuff like that
help with that but yeah it's that i and i feel feel like the union in my job could be very helpful, but it would require certain people in it to, instead of looking out for just their own interest, because, Hey, I've been here 25 years. go okay maybe i should you know sacrifice a little bit of of that power or that privilege to help the
people who are just hiring in so that we can keep them so that that this doesn't have to keep
happening yeah and it's you know this is one of the things that has made the john deere strike
uh that made it so powerful was these those older workers who i mean they had a tiered system right
so you had workers hired i think before like 97, got a full pension, and then like after 97 it was like a third of that.
And then workers hired in the last couple of years weren't getting any pension at all.
And a big part of the strike is like all of the workers saying that's not acceptable, including the ones who had a full pension, who had some of a pension, like saying that like the fact that the newer people are getting screwed over isn't acceptable.
had some of a pension like saying that like the fact that the newer people are getting screwed over isn't acceptable and i've heard different reasons for why that happened because this is
this tactic what you're talking about and kind of like what happened to john deere it was a common
tactic you know it's the thing we talk about in colonialism all the time you want to divide
the population against you know each uh each other one way or the other give them like make
make them feel as if their interests are not necessarily aligned you know so the people who um and there's reasons i've heard different reasons for why
john deere was different including the idea that like a lot of these are family jobs so it was not
people it was people being like well my kid's not gonna get a pension and that's bullshit um
anyway yeah i just it's it's it's important to talk about like that as a problem and also to highlight different strikes where that seems to have been overcome by the workers, like this fact that they were attempted to be played against each other didn't really work out.
And where in my case, it very much is like another another example being.
So we'll have people who are lower on the seniority list.
And like, let's say, say for example one weekend we're
running lines three and five and not the other two well the the newer people might only know
stuff on line four but if the new people don't get scheduled to do something even if they're
just being forced in to sweep the floor the people who have the higher seniority will throw a fit saying, well, they're lower seniority.
Why aren't they in here?
As opposed to, well, because they can't run that machine.
And then they don't want to train them to run that machine.
It's very, they've managed to succeed where the John Deere capitalists might have failed in making this all about like, all right, working.
making this all about like, all right, working. And I don't blame the people who have the higher seniority on this because if my, you know, if, if your working conditions are hell and you have
the option of, okay, well on a short-term scale, I can screw over this other person and actually
see my family once in a while, most are gonna do it and especially if that person is
somebody who just hired in that you don't know well screw that guy and that's where once again
if unions were stronger if it was more than what is it right now like two three percent
of jobs are a union job but unions have been so like just weakened that this sort of situation is allowed to happen i guess you
could say yeah and i think yeah that comes back to us like the the salute the solution to the
supply chain problem isn't really a like it's it's it's not it's not a logistical solution it's not
even really like a capital gain solution like a tax solution the solution is that you know you
have to fundamentally change the balance of power between
capital and labor and you know i mean that and that that can be like you know think things will
get better if it's if it's more unions but like things are going to continue to suck until like
the capitalists cease to exist as a class yeah and i think that's like that oh yes that's kick us yeah that's always the and it's one of
those like we get we get critiqued on the internets sometimes because i think people will say like
well you know is your only solution to this you keep talking about like mutual aid and anarchism
and like i just don't feel like that's a big scale solutions like yeah but the current system isn't
going to work very well on a big scale part of what we're always talking about is like how to get yourself and your people through the situation because that's also important. And it's the same thing with like a union, right?
effective and more able to like advocate for everyone that's not going to fix the bigger problem that's not going to deal with the the issues that like that's not going to stop climate
change that's not going to stop supply line crunches in a grand scale it's not going to stop
creeping authoritarianism but it can make life more bearable for you and the people around you
and that's that's also part of like getting by in a crumbling world absolutely yeah and yep it's it requires a bit of uh more foresight which i think goes one
of the other purposes behind working us as many hours as they do is when you're so fucking tired
all the time from working what you're working you don't have time to stop and think about the
larger implications of things.
Yeah.
And that's part of what they're going for.
Yep.
Yeah.
So, I don't know.
Anyone else got anything?
Well, I guess just the clear solution to this is that I need to just stock up on Bang.
Right?
I just need to buy all that I can. Because I love Bang.
I can't stop drinking Bang.
I will say the one... Are you scared of how much you love Bang. I can't stop drinking Bang. I will say...
Are you scared of how much you love Bang?
I'm scared of how much Bang I drink.
I will say one of the wonderful mutual aid solutions
is if you're very, very nice to the syrup mixing people,
they will be kind to you if you are working a double
and they will give you a shot of the energy drink syrup
before it's been mixed. my god oh wow oh boy you should you should not have told garrison that i have
a problem garrison's gonna quit his job podcasting just to be able to get i am shots of just gonna be
shooting up energy drink here on out that's's all I'm doing with my time.
I'm leaving the call right now, finding the nearest factory.
I hope you're happy.
My second day on the job in the soda manufacturing thing,
I had a 24-pack of energy drink explode all over me.
I didn't have a change of clothes.
And that's when I learned that caffeine and taurine can soak through your skin.
Oh, yes. Oh, mean basically i was seeing sound okay so i i've just been looking up
inflatable hot tubs and i feel like if i could order enough pure energy drink syrup in an
inflatable hot tub i could build basically the equivalent of baron harkonnen's rejuvenation bath
yeah yeah exactly but with like pure Bang syrup.
Yeah, that is my plan.
Just B12 caffeine and taurine.
It's just going to be,
we're all going to quit our jobs.
We're just going to have the same amount of money.
They get slower over time
because we're, again,
spending it all on Bang syrup.
Obviously, you need the inside person
to supply you with the syrup.
So we'll just have sort of an Ocean's Eleven situation
where you guys pull up to the loading dock
with a tanker,
and I'm just hooking the truck up, you know?
It's going to be like Scarface,
but we're selling pure syrup,
and then Garrison loses his mind
and winds up in a machine gun fight in a mansion.
Instead of burying his face into a mountain of cocaine,
he's instead got just a large Pyrex bowl full of syrup.
He's just sticking his hand into a bowl of syrup to absorb the caffeinated nutrients.
When I pee, it's just going to be straight syrup now.
Anyway, well, that's the episode.
If people want to find you online lot where can they find you so i host along with my husband and our
friend justin we host a trans comedy and pop culture podcast where we also interview interesting
people um it's called the violet wanderers so you can find us on twitter at violet wanderers
or thevioletwanderers.com or email thevioletwanderers
at gmail.com. And that's basically that's my Twitter handle. And I just slowly got sucked
into the Twitter hellscape where I originally went on just like, oh, I'm going to just promote
my show. And then I started responding to people. And before you know it, I'm writing
20 tweet rants about Justin Time on my stupid stupid gay podcast account i got into twitter to converse
with a young justice podcast and that's why i created my twitter account and here i am now so
because i was trying to get a planet side 2 beta key and i i got it but the consequences were i am
now here yeah twitter twitter twitter and its consequences have been a disaster for you're you're this you're such a child i remember the first planet side beta oh no
it was an age undreamed of oh chris and uh you all are welcome to come on the show anytime
i will i will bother you to come on my show sometime and excellent yeah
plugs plugs probably um yeah like I said
the Violet Wanderers, we're on Apple
we're on Spotify
we're on Podcast Addict, whatever
all your major podcast platforms
the tagline
of the show is
made for no one
expect a lot of queer humor
a lot of me calling
my husband a slut and us talking about video games, comic books, movies, and then occasionally just randomly interviewing really interesting people who I harass into coming on the show.
Like which, Robert, I know you know Daniel Harper from I Don't Speak German.
I sure do.
He's been on a few times.
German. I sure do. He's been on a few times. We've had him on and had some fun talking about Nazis,
which seems kind of counterintuitive, but there's a lot of humor that can be found in Nazis if you know the right places to look. And yeah, I you know what? I just watched a German language movie
about Hitler that was made in 2007 by a Jewish German comedian that includes, I've watched a lot of Hitler movies,
you know,
periodically I just get on Netflix and Hulu type and Hitler just kind of
watch whatever's there.
This is the first time I have seen Hitler fucking in a movie.
I've never seen anybody who had the courage to do that.
And he is just,
yeah,
he's,
it's,
it's uncomfortable.
One ball just swinging in the wind.
It is,
it is an uncomfortable scene,
but not the most uncomfortable scene
in that particular movie.
It's quite a film.
I was going to say, that's pretty amazing.
But yeah, come on sometime.
We'll play a round of Inselmageddon,
which is a game that I've created.
And if you guys don't want to kill yourselves afterwards,
then hey, you survived the game.
As long as I can get some syrup out of the deal,
that's all I want.
I will smuggle you some syrup out and mail it to you, okay?
Perfect.
That's going to do it for all of us here today,
if it could happen here.
Until next time, I don't know.
Go read The Dawn of Everything.
It's good.
It's worth reading.
Check it out.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,
visit our website, coolzonemedia.com
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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