It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 11

Episode Date: November 27, 2021

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Hey, every, uh, buddy, America. Hey, Americans, America.

How was American? That is the podcast. And those beyond. That was, that. And those beyond. That was a horrible issue. That was maybe your top 10 worst. This is It Could Happen Here, a podcast where an incompetent rube fucks up starting the show,

and then we talk about how things are falling apart or how to make things not fall apart or some version of things in between those two facts yep yep that's uh kind of kind of not great time going on right now a lot of people are that was our second that was our b pitch for the name of the show it's kind of not a great time going on right now. It actually is not that far from what was discussed. Yeah. I mean, especially right now, there's a lot of trials going on and stuff.

I know the Ahmaud Arbery trial is happening. The one about Unite the Right is going on. And of course, the Rittenhouse trial. As of recording, the jury is still in deliberation. We have deliberations. So no idea what's going to be the result by the time this episode goes up.

I've actually been, like, not commenting on it or trying not to think about it. There's nothing we can do about it. There's nothing you can do. And, like, a lot of people, there's been discussion about how much civil unrest there's going to be depending on the result of the trial i know there's been a lot of like national guard sent to wisconsin it's been you know fbi door knocks at activists homes trying to scare people so they don't you

know go out and riot or whatever discussion online the people you know planning protests in response to in response to whatever the result is um i noticed today there was a post from i think the ohio proud boys claiming that they'd be sending like like uh was it hundreds or thousands of like people armed with like ars to wisconsin or yeah there's it there's a fucking post people are saying like you should take it seriously because it's from a Proud Boys internal chat. And it's like we've got 300 guys heavily armed heading to – and there's already X number of guys there. And we're going to kill a lot more communists than Kyle Rittenhouse did and yada, yada, yada.

Yada, yada, yada. If I could give you one piece of advice now in who knows where the world is at the point at which this episode drops. where the world is at the point at which this episode drops. It's when people talk about, say, if you are at a protest and someone starts talking about the Proud Boys, as in the Proud Boys are coming or the Proud Boys are here, if you don't immediately see incontrovertible visual proof that they have access to showing it, assume it's nonsense. Okay? Yeah. That is my advice as someone who has heard a thousand times people say versions of the proud boys are coming. Okay.

Insist on evidence or ignore it. But whenever these big civil unrests and types of stuff happens, there's always an increased chance that there'll be some kind of protest related shooting. Yes. Definitely. Absolutely. It may have happened by the time this episode drops. Yeah, especially if people are bringing guns, people are bringing firearms.

There's been a lot of, you know, for like the demonstrations outside the courthouse, there's been, you know, guns there. There's been, you know, an increasing in the rate of shootings at protests on the West Coast throughout the past few months. So I'm going to be kind of talking about, you know, some things that you can do if

you're at home and you feel competent enough in the aftermath of one of one of these shootings you know if if if you know if a proud boy does bring up bring a gun and shoot somebody what you can actually do if video if you're in a situation where you've been following something happening all day there's a shooting and like low quality footage starts coming out of somebody killing someone or someone's else here's what to do next if you want to maybe be a positive part of of that of that process well not of that process but of like the the aftermath of it yeah you know and and because because the universe is cruel i i originally wrote this road write up about the written house shooting um because the universe is cruel, I originally wrote this write-up about the Rittenhouse shooting.

Because the universe is a cruel place, and this particular incident is going to continue to be impactful. Even though it's not the first, it's not going to be the last one of these, it is still impactful because of how much of a symbol has been turned into so i i think a lot of people forget about how how chaotic the night on the internet was the day of the kenosha shooting uh like it was it was wild uh being online as that was going on uh no one had no idea what was going on people could not agree on who the shooter was beforehand there was a lot of pictures floating around it was it was it was a it was a nightmare uh we know we knew that people were shot we did not know how many or who like it was it was pretty bad and chaotic and it is always that way in the wake of a shooting um and it is the in any given shooting always keep in mind when you're when you're online or in person and there has been a shooting and people are saying things about said shooting other than we should take cover

from the shooting if they're saying anything else about it um you have to assume they're probably not either wrong or not entirely accurate um because it's hard to be it happens constantly i mean that's not it's something against any of. I can remember a moment when you and I were out last year, Garrison, and there was a shooting, I don't know, like 40 feet away. Nobody hurt, thankfully. But like the immediate report from it was some guy had gotten pulled an AR-15 out of his car. And I think the thing I said to you was, I'll bet you right now it's a nine millimeter handgun. And sure enough, within minutes, there was a photo. And it's a nine millimeter handgun and sure enough within minutes there was a photo yeah it's and it's not that those people were like dumb or bad it's that like

shootings are scary guns getting pulled is scary and people fuck up um in in their recollections um it's the same way in which like if a bear comes after you uh you may exaggerate the size of that bear in your head because you're scared of shit yeah because it's a bear comes after you uh you may exaggerate the size of that bear in your head because you're scared as shit yeah because it's a bear yeah so so i i was home on august 25th um just and i i i was i was actually about to go out to to uh a cover to protest in portland but then i saw this happened on my phone on twitter it was like i cannot go out i will be more useful at home um so with with so much uncertainty online or in the details of the actual shooting, it was clear that trying to provide

concrete information would be crucial in the hours to come. So I booted up my computer and started to try to begin to search for information and verifiable stuff. spent i spent all night looking looking for details about the shooter you know um uncovering his supposed identity um ultimately about an hour before the police announced their investigation even started um and and 12 hours before the police uh announced the shooter's arrest um and also to my surprise at the time i i discovered that the shooter was the same age as me um which is fun yeah quite a moment for you yeah that was that that was that was a night so um because i because i mainly use twitter and most of the video of the incident was on twitter i i started uh my my investigation by looking at twitter uh my first goal was to find as as many videos of of the

shooting uh that i could and collect pictures of all of the alleged suspects. All the people who were claiming, hey, this is the shooter. I think I got a picture of the shooter. Here's who he is. So I kept my eye on trending terms. So I searched under the hashtags like Kenosha, Kenosha shootings, Kenosha shooting, Kenosha protests. Boogaloo was trending a lot. A lot of people thought the shooter was a Boogaloo boy.

It was not. And also, hashtag militia. So the searches brought up a lot of photos of multiple young men, most of whom were carrying long guns. And a lot of unconfirmed reports that the shooter was a boogaloo boy was trending on twitter this was the main the main thing that night was boogaloo boy shot all the stuff that that was the the main trending topic a lot of a lot of conflicting details and i did not want to kind of add to the misinformation so i decided to not make any posts about whatsoever about the

identity of the shooter until i was 100 confident uh that I had the correct ID, which takes a while. Twitter wants you to post stuff quickly as soon as you find it out, and it's way better to hold off your information and wait until you are absolutely sure it's the right time to post it because it's that correct stuff. Because misidentifying a suspect can have serious consequences for any individual involved. One's one of the worst things you can do is misidentify any suspect. So I was looking through all the videos that I collected

for kind of unique or identifying clothing that the shooter may have been wearing. The first video I found useful was from a right-wing videographer named drew hernandez um who a few months later uh called for bloodshed at the capitol he also testified at the written house trial this video did not actually show any any actual shooting it had a wounded person on the ground being treated by a medic and a man standing over the scene with with a gun um and wearing a green shirt a tan baseball cap jeans and like purple latex gloves he had he had a he had a black and orange bag um the person in the green shirt then runs towards the camera while talking on the phone and he says into the phone um i just shot somebody or i just killed somebody it's hard to tell where he's actually saying if it's one of those things

where if you think about it you can hear both ones yeah yeah but but he he says something like i just killed somebody on the phone and he runs past the camera so this this this this was the first kind of really important piece of information yeah that was brought up in the trial too and he he was like i don't remember what i said oh interesting okay yeah and to be honest like even if if this was i i don't think any of us believe this was legitimate self-defense but like even if it was either of those things would be perfectly acceptable things to say it's a surprising moment right like and you probably wouldn't remember what you'd said i don't necessarily think he's lying about that it turns out out he was, he was on the phone with the person who bought him the gun of a friend of

his. So, but, but this was my first like important piece of information. I, you know, the night of, right.

This is before anyone's analyzed any of this stuff. So this is the first video that I can find. I was like, okay, here's a person admitting on camera that they shot somebody and wearing a few potential identifiers, namely the green shirt, baseball cap, and bag. So now I can search for all of those

items together and the rest of the footage collected throughout the night. Looking over the top viral videos of the night, showing multiple people getting shot. This is from later on, after the first person gets killed. We can see someone in a baseball cap, black and orange bag, and what could be a green shirt, running through a street.

Somebody runs over to the individual with the gun and kind of punches him in the head, knocking his hat off. So now the person running with the gun does not have a hat. Individual with the gun keeps running, but trips and falls on the ground before people try to disarm him uh four more shots are fired from the suspect and uh one more person dies as a result of this other person gets their arm nearly blown off uh there is one continuous video of all of this happening extremely useful having having one video of this whole shot yeah let you time it and everything yeah yeah um so the the shooter who appears to be the same person, is the other video because of the green shirt

and the hat at the beginning, continues to get onto his feet and runs off again. And the orange and black bag swings in front of him as he's running, and a purple glove is also visible. Multiple vehicles drive past police vehicles. The shooter then walks up pretty close to the police vehicle and he just

with the rifle and nothing happens. He waves to the cops and they just keep driving and he walks away. So, after finding and watching these videos, I had no reason to believe the shooter was in custody. And I had a good idea of his clothing and attire.

So now it's time to, you know, compare this information that I gathered to pictures of the supposed, you know, suspects circulating on Twitter. But but first, I think now it's the time to listen to people selling you stuff. You know who doesn't? Oh boy. Travel to another state to show up armed in a community to threaten people? They don't do it! I'm saying they don't! That's good!

Okay. Products and services who support this podcast. Unless it's HelloFresh. Black Rifle Coffee. Washington State Patrol! What do you have against Hello Fresh? Actually, a number of our sponsors will show up unwanted in your community armed. I forgot the Washington State Highway Patrol and the FBI have both dropped ads now. And California Highway Patrol.

Don't forget about those motherfuckers. Like Kyle Rittenhouse, a number of our sponsors may show up in your home neighborhood with a gun. I have another one. Also, Black Rifle Coffee, Kyle's favorite brand of coffee. Remember? Well, it was until they disavowed him. Anyway, that's a long story. Here's the ads. Here's the ones that paid us. We're back.

We're back. Yay. So, there was a lot of pictures of suspects on Twitter. Some of them who look nothing like the person we now know who shot those people. Funny how that happens. Well, it's not funny.

It's pretty bad. Dangerous misinformation. Yeah, yeah. It's not great to share stuff like that when these things happen. Which is why I said, I'm not going to share anything until I 100% know and know that it's actually worth posting about. So I'm going to go through some of the pictures and stuff.

I'm going to go through at least one of the pictures of one of the people people claimed to be the shooter. So in one picture circulating, you see someone in a green shirt, a baseball cap, and big black rifle. But this man's also wearing shorts, a black hat, not a tan one, has no bag.

Appears to be wearing like a tactical vest that is also green. So not the guy. Even though he's wearing a green shirt and hat, not the same dude. Would be pretty easy to check. You really don't need to show that kind of stuff. sure pretty sure a lot of people own green shirts yep so two other photos that were circulating they were claiming to be the guy we had a green shirt a tan baseball cap put on backwards jeans um one of the one of the pictures has a bag in front which is an orange and black one one One of them doesn't. One picture has purple gloves.

The other picture doesn't. But these dudes look pretty similar, despite the same differences. I'm pretty sure this is the same guy, but I made the decision at the night. This is probably the same dude, and he does appear to match the shooter a lot better. And there was a few clearer pictures of his face um here but honestly the face of if you look at all the pictures of the kenosha shooting that night the pictures of the suspect are really unclear because the way that the light hit his face he looks like an incredibly generic white boy um like extremely generic it is hard to tell

any any identifying features from his face i mean he is an archetype he looks like every every white every white boy it's really hard to say um everyone you went to high school with who i don't know sniffed a girl's chair when he like it yeah that's that's kyle rittenhouse that was such a gross visual now that i decided that i have like i have a decent collection of pictures of who i believe the actual actual suspect is it's time time time to figure out who the suspect's like name actually is and this is this is one of the this is one of the harder things but often you can have a lot of help in ways that you might not expect um often once you can get a good picture of someone

you know it'd be like yes this is actually the dude once that gets shared enough often somebody knows who this is already you know the internet's a pretty big place i believe the first i believe the first person to actually like like i i was i was the person to like prove online who who kyle written that kyle was the shooter the first first person to actually tie Kyle's name to the shooter was a neighbor of his on Facebook. They saw pictures of the shooter on Facebook and said, hey, I think I recognize this guy. I think this is my neighbor.

So often, once you have enough pictures and those can spread, people will be able to find names. It isn't as hard as you would think. The hard part is finding out what personal connections are making those links and finding out where those are. But stuff spreads in a weird way.

And for this, I was able to prove that it was Kyle pretty quickly for a few reasons. After I was able to prove that it was Kyle pretty quickly for a few reasons. So, I was doing my clothing comparisons to prove this is the actual person who did these things. The other thing I found that was not viral at all, but just because I was digging through so much stuff was this meme shared by some small Boogaloo account. It was a picture of the shooter right beside a collection of Blue Lives Matter pictures of someone who looks kind of similar linking to a Facebook page. Not linking. It was screenshotted from a Facebook page, and I can tell because of the font.

And it said, like, Rittenhouse's photos. So this was the first thing I saw buried deep inside Twitter's images, but by using all of these hashtag uh hashtag terms was this meme and and and then the meme said so y'all think he's still a boogaloo no no he wasn't because of all of like the pro police stuff uh because boogaloo's generally are not not that fond of police they sure aren't yeah so so yeah um given given so you know if someone was to look at this you know look at this meme itself he's like okay you know the job is done you know information this dude looks vaguely similar ish to the guy on this written house facebook um the gun looks kind of similar because

one of the pictures of the Facebook was a guy holding an AR. But just something looking similar or even holding a similar gun in one picture from a Facebook account, that's not enough to be sure about publishing a positive ID. There's no actual really definitive proof there because honestly, if I was to look at these two guys' faces, they don't look incredibly similar, because faces can distort with lighting and compression. It can be really difficult.

This is where trying to ID a shooter is hard and requires complex judgment calls and posting inaccurate information or incomplete information can have extremely harmful effects. There's a lot of examples of this happening in the past. The biggest example,

or the most notorious one of false identification is the Boston bombing incident. Oh, yeah. So, you know, right after the 2013 bombing, you know, thousands of users on sites like Reddit and 4chan began combing through footage to try to identify potential suspects. Screencaps of the people they deemed suspicious went viral

online on various social media sites. Unfortunately, the sleuthing work done on 4chan and Reddit was incredibly shoddy, and seemingly had way more to do with racial paranoia than actual detective work and evidence gathering. The New York Post subsequently

published a picture on its front page that originated on Reddit that users had declared that it was showing the two suspects without doing any further verification. So it's real bad how stuff can spread from Reddit like this that's completely unverified to a newspaper, even as one as unreputable as the Post. It's still a very popular paper. The Post also claimed that the law enforcement were looking for those two individuals in that picture. One of the people identified by the Post was harassed online. Police later told him just to delete his social media accounts entirely because there was no use at that point. When the FBI did officially release photos of the unnamed suspects reddit

users again falsely identified these people uh one of the people they falsely identified went went missing for weeks prior um his his family received media inquiries about the false unverified rumors of their son's involvement um and rumors of of involvement were spread by reporters from politico news week uh newsweek mbc news and buzzfeed um eight days after the bombing this guy was actually eight days after bombing this guy was actually found dead and his family said it was a suicide um it was not not one of the shooters not one of the bombers um so again why even more than the tactics you could use to try and you know verify things online the most useful

thing you can take out of this is if there is a mass shooting or other act of violence and people on social media are saying it is this person don't share it don't just don't share it just wait especially there's no value in sharing it if they have don't have anything to verify this at all so yeah like i'm not gonna i'm not gonna don't yeah like again that is the overwhelming thing we we want to get across you know that's why i know i'm not gonna share this kyle rittenhouse um boogaloo meme because there's no proof for it it's it's not there now eventually after digging i would realize that this meme cut is uh comes from his neighbor saying that she thinks the suspect is him so that's how this meme was created

but still there was no proof for it so I didn't share it so all the Boston bombing stuff was going through my mind as I found this and was trying to dig for more details so yeah I knew that I could not post a name on any social media

or any info until i until i could prove it like without a shadow of a doubt that this is the same person because a lot a lot of times it is possible it just requires work and time you know and a big part of doing this on twitter is like you want to get it out fast so you're the first person to do it so that you know you can go viral on your thread of identifying this killer and like no that's not the reason to do image verification it's not to go viral on a thread of identifying this killer and like no that's not the reason to do image verification it's not to go viral on a thread it's because whenever that's your goal you're gonna do you're gonna do shitty fast work that is gonna end up causing some kind of horrible

consequence like in the case the boston bombing and to be even extra clear the primary use for this that kind of what you're teaching people image verification which is something that like like bellingcat which is has been like kind of a part-time employer of mine um is a is an open source journalism collective that's broken some of the biggest stories in the last couple of years and in the classes we teach a class on image verification and the point is just whenever someone is sharing a piece of what is like supposedly breaking news based on video or images that have been taken at the site of a whatever image verification tactics can help you to know whether or not it's it whether or not either it's true or false but also just whether or not the image the information they're presenting gives you any reason to believe it

yeah like it yeah it's not even how the information is useful or how it's just knowing yeah you might be full of shit like that's super important yeah yeah like there's there's a thing that happens like and anytime there's something that looks like a war starting there's like this video of a bombing from 2014 in gaza that goes around yep yeah it's like every time yeah yeah um there's there's actually five or six different kinds of things that are like that chris that are like yeah oh this is there's actually footage from like a russian video game that people keep keeps getting like mistaken for actual combat footage yeah and it's like no it's fucking from a video game this has been on this has been three wars now there's this famous footage of like a fucking um an airsoft battle at night, uh,

with glowing, like airsoft pellets. With the glowing pellets. Yeah. And it, it kind of, it kind of looks because it's black and white, not a great camera.

It kind of looks like tracer fire. And it's, there's like three wars that people have said like, look, this is real combat footage from, it happens all the time. Like, and again,

great account to follow is, uh, hoax eye on Twitter. They, they, they do really good work pointing out kind of more like less high stakes kind of

image verification stuff. But before I get into the actual verification work of proving, hey, I can actually prove that by not just someone's face, I can prove that this shooter is the same guy from the Facebook page. I'll explain that next.

First, short ad break, and then we will finish up with this actual proving section. Yeah, you know who is not Kyle Rittenhouse? Oh, God. Wow.

You have really dropped the ball to all of the transitions today. Yeah, I am not proud of myself or my place in society at the moment. Here's the ads. We're back. I feel terrible. Garrison. So even though the Boogaloo meme was not hard evidence, it did provide a lead. So after seeing the meme, I did the first most obvious thing that I could see was compare the gun in the two frames. They do look similar. They're not identical.

The optics are different for each rifle. but the rest of it the stock, the grip and the barrel do seem to be if not identical at least extremely similar again, still not enough to make a positive ID on an individual basis, like this person is this person

so the next step is to scour the actual Facebook account itself that is alluded to in this meme and see what I can find there the the goal obviously being to find statements or pictures that will tie this person in the images of the shooter to the person on the account so that's you know clothing location intention you know all types of things that could tie the pictures of the shooter to the pictures of the person on this account.

So, Kyle Reddenhouse's old public Facebook profile was mainly made up of Blue Lives Matter and pro-police images going back as far as 2017. With a few then recent pictures of him holding his AR-15 style rifle. The rifle

pictures were from June. The shooting happened in late August it appears I think it came out in the trial that he got his rifle around like May so yeah a lot of pro-police stuff a lot of thin blue line

blue lives matter type things his public page is relatively sparse and there was no public friends list to look through. One noteworthy piece of information was that he did list another name for himself as Kyle Lewis, which I believe is his mother's maiden name. Sure. But even though I wasn't able to view a friends list and there wasn't many public posts, his page is by no means a dead end. and there wasn't many public posts,

his page is by no means a dead end. I can still see everyone that has commented on, shared, or liked his public posts. So he did not have many pictures himself on his page that I could use for verification. He didn't have nothing that I could tie to the shooting besides the actual gun. So not tons of useful stuff, but perhaps there's still other leads

to look through, like everyone who's liked, shared, or commented on his posts. So I opened up new tabs for every single person that interacted with Kyle's posts. While looking over their pages, I was searching to see if any of them had listed Kyle as a relative, with a focus

on anyone with the last name of rittenhouse or lewis um and and you know ideally was looking forward to see if anyone had pictures of kyle or someone who seemed to be kyle uh one post from may of 2018 uh eventually eventually proved uh useful uh one comment read kyle you sure do look like a Lewis. So there's the alternate last name. And two people had liked that comment, Kyle himself and someone who is his mom, which I would later find out is his mom. So she said that she lived in, is it Anatoke, Illinois?

Antioch, probably. Antioch, Illinois, which matches with Kyle's Illinois-based pro-police posts. He made a lot of Chicago Blue Lives Matter posts. So I assumed that Kyle was from Illinois. And also Antioch, is that what you said? Whatever. Yeah, Antioch. Antioch to Wisconsin Antioch to Kenosha

is only like a 30 minute drive. So that is also like, okay, that's pretty close. That is doable. So the next I went through a lot of the relatives pages, but I'm going to focus just on the person who I found out a lot of the relatives' pages, but I'm going to focus just on the person who I found out who was Kyle's mom because they're the one that had the most useful information, right?

A lot of other information I looked through just didn't turn out to be useful, right? So I'm not including all of that here. One post from Wendy's mom featured younger kyle wearing a police outfit um i'm sure people have seen this picture online before i think i was probably i was i was probably the first person to share this photo of kyle in this in this younger kyle wearing this this police this police costume an unbelievably cringy photo like yeah outside of the fact that he took two lives. Like just. Yeah.

I mean, look, we all have photos we took while in ROTC. So, yeah. Ideally, we would get a chance to grow out of that. There's actually a lot more of these photos. There's photos of him touring. This is stuff I also found that night. Photos of him like touring a target with police as he's in a police uniform. He was part of like a, uh,

police young cadets program. He would, he was like 12. Um, so that's where he got this outfit and he like tagged around with police for like a day or something. And there's photos of him like in a target with police. Even when I was like a shitty right wing kid,

that sounded like a nightmare. So, so yeah. So, uh, Kyle's the person who I figured out was Kyle's mom, uh, I was like a shitty right-wing kid. That sounded like a nightmare. So, yeah. So Kyle's – the person who I figured out was Kyle's mom posted this photo of family picture including Kyle wearing what I would say is like an army green shirt. Kind of similar, but it's a green shirt. I have shirts that are pretty similar to that.

That's not going to be anything super definitive. Until we got one picture that proved to be much more useful of Kyle on... Or someone who I assumed was Kyle. You don't actually see his face, but he is wearing horribly cringy American flag Crocs, which Kyle – Oh, God. Terrible.

I know. I know. Which – so – and on Kyle's page, there was also pictures of him wearing those same Crocs. So, like, even though I can't see the person's face, the Crocs are the same, probably the same guy. He's also wearing a tan baseball cap. And on this, I can actually see that it has an American flag

on the front of the cap, which I did not notice on anything else before. So, that's, you know, that's something different. But again, not that that's, that's not, that's not, that's not like a red flag. That's just, you know, a thing to a thing of note. Um, cause the baseball cap is tan, um, and it has like white mesh on the sides. Um, the one, the one thing I did, I, I, I, I did make one post before I actually did any kind of claiming to do identity stuff. I did ask my Twitter followers if there's any pictures of the back of the shooter's cap.

And I got them to send me those. And then I got one picture of the back that actually has, I couldn't see, like, okay, the back of the shooter's cap also has the flag on it. So I was able to actually show that, okay, so the baseball cap on the back of it, they're both tan baseball caps, they both have white mesh on the sides, they both have an American flag. And then I got another picture that was even closer that showed a tear on the brim of the hat. And if you zoom in on one of the beach pictures, you could also see a tear on the brim of the hat. And if you zoom in on one of the beach pictures, you could also see a tear on the same position on the hat.

So this is, this hat is, the hat is the same hat. The hat was definitely, it was definitely in both locations. So at this point, based on the gun, based on the hat, based on the location being very close to Kenosha, and being close on the gun, based on the hat, based on the location, being very close to Kenosha, and being close on the rough facial similarities, there was enough to put stuff together to be like, okay, I think this is probably fine in saying, I think this is this is probably this is you're probably fine in saying i think this is probably the dude um so at this point i i wasn't i wasn't and i'm not again i'm not going to post this

immediately and i'm not going to post something by saying this is who it is without providing the evidence so instead of like writing a thread tweet by tweet i read the whole thread out and then tweet the whole thread at the same time um so so i i put together the thread documenting my relevant stuff um i i wrote the first eight posts at the same time um so so i i put together the thread documenting my relevant stuff um i i wrote the first eight posts at the same time and posted them together with all the evidence uploaded um and then and then uh as i was writing the thread i came across another piece of evidence there was one i i was going through one of the live streams of of that night from a channel called the rundown live which i've not heard anything of before or since

then, but, you know, one of the many streamers that were out in 2020. And you can see Kyle inside the frame and then, like, pans away, but the people are still talking. So Kyle's actually off-camera now,

but I think someone, like, asks him his name, and the person who I think is Kyle replies Kyle. Now, of course, it's off camera, so you can't be totally sure. There's enough context clues and that, plus all the other evidence, I'm like, okay, this is enough to add to the thread because

again, it's not enough proof by itself, but it, combined with everything else, completes a much fuller picture. So, I posted my like nine or yeah like eight or nine thing thread on on being able to prove it's kyle via you know comparing stuff like the gun uh the hat the shirt and demonstrating my work tracking across facebook and how i was able to like link these two people together. 22 minutes after I posted the thread identifying Kyle, Kenosha Police announced

that they were starting an active investigation. I soon added a court document to my thread about a traffic violation by someone named Kyle Rittenhouse filed a few days before the shooting. The traffic violation thing also included stuff like address

which I blacked out the address for that just because for reasons I'll soon explain, because again, if it's a traffic violation, if people really want it, they can find it themselves, right? It's not making it possible to find it. And this was able to confirm it.

It was in the same location, Antioch. And also, this proved that Kyle was 17 at the time. This is how we knew that he was 17 years old at the time of the shooting was because of this traffic violation document found online. So the address on the violation document was the same one I had linked to Kyle's mom by doing other OSINT address work. I was able to find out what her address was. So yeah,

that was most of my work that night. It took about I don't know, like two ish maybe? It's hard to break up the timing. It took about half an hour to get from the Boogaloo meme to finding the matching baseball cap on Kyle's mom's Facebook page.

About another half hour to write out the thread. And, you know, about an hour of work previous to that about, you know, trying to find out the actual footage and categorize it. And, OK, this is the clothing he's wearing. Here's the clothes I need to look for on social media, right? See if I can find these shoes, these pants, this shirt, this hat, this bag, that kind of stuff. And I was able to find enough of those items to make it pretty clear that it was linked.

And that makes you, Garrison, one of the first people in the world to get to know way more about Kyle Rittenhouse than you ever wanted to know yeah a lot more this nightmare has been going on longer for you than anybody else

other than his family yeah so I want to note a few other ways to do image verification specifically on Kyle that I didn't do but other people did after I said hey this is probably the guy so afterwards people found

other kind of evidence on Kyle's TikTok and Snapchat so it turns out Kyle was Snapchatting his night in Wisconsin which we would find out later so he was Snapchatting from night in Wisconsin, which we would find out later. Dear God. So he was Snapchatting from Kenosha. And Garrison, first off,

I do feel as the representative of Zoomers in this call, why are you guys all using the Snapchats, huh? I don't use the Snapchats. Well, I'm making you answer for the crimes of your generation. Christopher, do you use the snap of the chat no well technically speaking I have one friend who I only talk to through snapchat

and we both only use it for that and we don't know why we use snapchat yeah there's a few people who are like snapchat people who only text through snapchat and I don't get it yeah except neither of us are like that we just download signal anyway so yeah snapchat is also Yeah, except neither of us are like that. Just download Signal. Just get Signal.

Anyway, so, yeah, Snapchat. There's also TikTok. There was footage of Kyle attending a Trump rally at TikTok. Also, him assembling and testing out his gun was on Snapchat. I believe clips of it were also shared on TikTok. So I could have gotten a lot more closer details of the gun if I looked on Snapchat or TikTok. And I think this is good advice that I've

taken since then, and for other people looking to do this stuff, if a suspect looks young, you know, Snapchat and Instagram might be apps that are worth checking out for information as opposed to like Facebook, right? Lucky enough, there was enough stuff on

Facebook on this instance. Typically, probably because Kyle's family was conservative and he was conservative, so higher chance of being on Facebook there. But in general, if someone's younger, maybe look on younger apps. But yeah. Good thing to think about, you know, whenever these like chaotic, panicked moments happen, you know, misinformation can spread very, very quickly.

Cannot stress enough how dangerous and irresponsible it is when a suspect is named without proper verification. You know, last last September, Ian Miles Chong falsely identified a suspect in the shooting of two L.A. police officers. This resulted in the falsely accused got a man and receiving many death threats online. I think Ian Miles Chong did this like again a few months later. He he was doing this a lot last year. He was doing he was really bad about trying to identify people. But, you know, doing solid solid verification work is possible. But extreme caution trying to identify people. But doing solid verification work is possible, but extreme caution needs to be taken.

I need to be very mindful of the consequences of your actions when you're doing this work. I also want to put out, Garrison is very good at this. That's why it took two and a half hours. It's going to take you longer. It takes a lot longer. Yeah, honestly, finding Kyle was just the right mix of things in one moment often it does often it doesn't go that fast and it doesn't need to be right like a big a big part of the problem is that if people think about it needing to be

like a fast-paced thing that's where that's where the mistakes happen i was just lucky to have enough like dominoes fall in the right place to i i'd identify kyle the night of having having his neighbor say, hey, this guy looks similar to my neighbor, extremely useful in the long run. That happened faster than that happens in a lot of cases. So that really accelerated things. Sometimes it will be easy. Sometimes, like a good example of when it's harder,

we have a decent amount of footage about the individual who placed bombs outside of the capital bomber before the sixth um that person has not been identified and the fucking fbi seems to have no goddamn clue but also what they were way more intentional in what they were very smart whoever they are they're very capable they were the only thing that we have on them is their shoes basically those are those are kind of the poles of this right on one like that with with written house you've got this situation where it's like all of the information you need to identify them is there openly online um and part of opsec if you're doing things that are

crimes um is to make sure that is to limit that that that whatever it is you are going to to this to the crimes in um there nothing exists on the internet that connects that to your name and face. And that doesn't always mean Black Block. That can mean other clothing. Especially if you've been photographed in Black Block a bunch. Yeah. I think if you look at the guy who dropped off bombs on January 6th, he's not wearing Black Block because Black Block draws attention. He's wearing like a graze.

I will bet you money that guy that well that individual person is either a former fed or former special forces they were very capable yeah leaning towards fed who showed up in clothing they had never worn worn before and paid for used in cash probably from a variety of places um that clothing was burned as soon as they got away they were out of the state uh as early as it was possible to do so plant them and then immediately get out like um and you know by the time the capital right by the time their bombs had been found they were they were if they were smart i mean gone you know yeah like that's how... Anyway, whatever. Those are the kind of the polls.

Oftentimes, if someone knows what they're doing, this process can be a lot harder, like in the case of the guy who left the bombs at the Capitol. Kyle wasn't wearing much identifying clothing, wasn't even wearing a mask because COVID was for cucks.

There's a lot of these things that, that made this process, um, you know, easier than a lot of, a lot of other verifications. But like I said, there still was a lot of false IDs going around that night.

Um, so it still happens. I'm kind of on the fence myself as to whether or not it would have been safer, like for our country or the society or whatever you want to call it. If, um, like how much more damage or less damage would have been safer like for our country or the society or whatever you want to call it if um like how much more damage or less damage would have been done if kyle rittenhouse had been someone who showed up in impeccable like clothing that he could not be identified from fucking ran off and was never caught and we just knew there was the shooting of protesters in kenosha um by somebody um like i don't know how much better or worse that

is for society if that happens. I don't know. I'm thinking about terrible things, but sorry. First off, I want to apologize. Sometimes talking about this stuff winds up seeming like advice for how to commit crimes. That's not the intent. It's just when you talk about what makes something difficult to identify, you're kind of by default talking about like, here's how to commit a crime and get away with it. And it's the kind of thing, like if you're doing verification work, one of the things that helps is to kind of put yourself in the mindset of somebody who, okay, if I'm in this situation and I do this, what are the decisions that I might make afterwards? And you can kind of try to think through this person. Like, it can be helpful, especially if you're trying to, like,

track someone through a day. So you know someone was at this point at a protest at X hour because they shot somebody. You know, think through, okay, what else happened that day? Were there other protests? Were there other gatherings? Like, or is this one in a series of events? Can I go look for videos from other things in the area that this person might have also been at and might have worn the same clothing? Anyway, image verification is fun. Catch the fever. if you're not able to attend in-person demos for like, like physical reasons or whatever, or like mental reasons, uh, doing this stuff from home is another way of getting involved.

Uh, especially for, you know, tracking down bad people after, after they do bad things. Yeah. Um, so,

uh, you can, you know, if you want to learn more about this with, you know, the benefit of also, uh, visual aids,

um, Bellingcat has, if you just type image verification, Bellingcat, there know, the benefit of also visual aids. Bellingcat has, if you just type image verification Bellingcat, there's beginners and advanced guides to verification. Yep. There's talk about like manual reverse image search tools and like how well they work. There's quizzes. So go there if you find this interesting. It can be quite a hoot.

But you know what else is quite a hoot? Ending a goddamn podcast, which I'm doing now. We're done. Goodbye. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

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that was really rude. Get the fuck off of our podcast. You just left people out like that, Robert. Are you going to do one for every other country? I think they're being rude for barging in. The internet is clearly American soil. I would pay good money for a wacko sings, but with Robert saying all the

all the countries of the world well you know what you need to do in order to be able to pay good money for something garrison wow you need to you need to you need to get money by by working well i was gonna say you need to be born rich but if you're not born rich you have to work and a lot of people are saying what if we did what if we didn't and now they have a subreddit and that's what we're talking about today anti-work uh not just the subreddit but that's why we're talking about it today because the anti-work subreddit has grown hugely um and like it's got like a million it's or it's it's like doubled it's been around for years. It's more than doubled.

Yeah, in a month. It's almost quadrupled. In the space of a month. Yeah. I have the numbers for later, yeah. Yeah, okay, great. So Garrison, why don't you kick us off now that I've let everyone know what to expect. I will stop working in solidarity with the anti-work movement. Thanks, Robert. You're welcome.

work movement. Thanks, Robert. You're welcome. So yeah, the past few months, if you're anything like us, and if you're online in the same ways that we are, you've probably seen like a flurry of posts and screenshots depicting text conversations between like an employee and their boss. Typically, the boss like asks them to come in when they said they're going to have to be having to have time off or something. The employee objects. The boss then gets mad and makes threats and demands the employee be a better team player or some bullshit like that. And then the

employee says something like, you know what, actually I quit. Good luck filling the shift now. Bye. And then the boss pleads that the now former employee comes back and offers concessions. End of screenshot. So soon this type of like screenshotted text conversation became like a meme format with with people joking and obviously like staging fake ones as well uh you know similar to the scene i just described but but but by all accounts this trend started incredibly like

sincerely with with genuine text conversations showcasing like worker abuse um and and uh you know bosses being unreasonable and cruel um and some people quitting their jobs just to stand up for themselves and um all this stuff is kind of tied up in the worker shortage kind of myths the great resignation as a as a lot of pundits are calling it yes yeah of people of people resigning and then you know a lot of pundits are calling it. Yes, of people resigning and then a lot of big companies complaining about worker shortages. And central to this text conversation, online kind of meme trend thing

and employee resignations is a subreddit called AntiWork. So the AntiWork subreddit has been a growing place, specifically the past year. Their motto is unemployment for all, not just for the rich. It's a good motto. It is a solid motto. Those who want to end work are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas, and want personal help with their own jobs slash work-related struggles. So back in February, the subreddit's been around since like 2013, but back in February it had like 235,000 subs, and now it has over 1.1 million.

It's grown. Most of that growth has been in the past two months. It has kind of exploded in popularity. And actually, it got so big and there's so many posts on it that now they have to restrict text message conversation screenshots to only being allowed to be posted on one day a week just because of the intense influx of these posts. Some of them genuine, others maybe not so much. And even though the subreddit may not be the biggest in terms of subscribers, it has more daily posts than something like the wall street bets subreddit has so even though

it doesn't have as many subscribers the amount of actual like posting on it is is is higher than a lot of other subreddits as well so it is it is growing in popularity abs like in in in multiple ways it it feels a little bit right now like the social media equivalent of a sort of Damocles. Like Wall Street bets made a not insignificant splash earlier this year. It was quite a thing for the national economy for a little while there. And anti-work hasn't had that moment, but I kind of feel like it might be getting close to critical mass. Like something might of this. Um, which I think would be rad, uh, for, for the record, I think would be rad. Absolutely. And you know, it may not be one big thing, but it could be a lot of smaller things, right? You know, sometimes it's harder to

see bigger change when you're like having more anarchist adjacent ideas and, and, and the, and the anti-war subreddit does, does try to keep itself anti-war subreddit does does try to keep itself being a radical subreddit and does try to fight off yeah neoliberal sentiments and stuff and there have been there have been some complaints i've seen of people being like ah the liberals have gotten in and and people are talking about like well i just really want a life that's like i'm not stressed all the time and i have enough money for for bills and stuff or like people have been talking about like oh this job like i i left my old job and I got into a better situation that's good. And there's complaints about that.

And I think it is important to push against de-radicalizing the subreddit. But I don't think it's bad that you're getting a lot of liberals in there who are not turned off by the name anti-work. who are not turned off by the name anti-work. And I think it's positive that they're, even if they're not coming at it from kind of a revolutionary perspective, but hey, it's okay to quit my job if the conditions are shit and try to find a place where I'm treated better.

If that's their inroad to this kind of thought, I still think that's pretty awesome. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean, that's pretty awesome. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's not realistic for every single person. Well, actually, it is realistic for every single person to quit their job, but it's not realistic for only a few people to, right? And sometimes if everyone's not going to do it, like literally everyone,

then some people can't afford to quit their job right now because they have kids to feed or whatever, or themselves. There's a lot of reasons, which I'll kind of talk a little bit more about later. So the term anti-work does not come from the subreddit. Anti-work has been a post-left term for a while now. And it kind of applies to a broad spectrum of anarchist-adjacent kind of thought around, hey, if we're going to question capitalism and the state, we should probably also question

just the idea of work itself and how it functions and how the state kind of works only possible with the state. And it's that specific line of thinking. A few examples of seminal anti-work books. One of them is Bob Black's The Abolition of Work. Crimethink has a really good book just called Work, which is another one that gets referenced a lot, even in the subreddit.

And also Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. And Bullshit Jobs was also kind of partially inspired by Bob Black's The Abolition of Work. All of those are great resources. And specifically, Bullshit Jobs is great for a modern outlook on this. Bob Black's book was written a while ago, and Bullshit Jobs is definitely very timely. And even, even, even crime thinks workbook also, also addresses stuff or even though it's, wasn't not written within the past, I, I, I think it is maybe slightly older than, than a decade, but I think they, they are updating it with more information about like the gig economy and stuff like that. Yeah it's it's not as it's characterized and as anti-work is often characterized by critics it's not saying like nobody should have to do anything

in a way no it's not actually we'll talk about diogenes later um but it it's not everyone should just like lay around and do nothing it's people shouldn't have to do the thing that we call work which is destroy your body or your mind or both uh most of your waking hours most of your life in the hope that you'll get 10 years as an old person uh to not do that like and and a little bit that's bad that's a bad way to be a person like a bad way to have to be it's not bad to do that it's it's bad that you have to do that yeah yeah and i mean and and there is a there is do that it's it's bad that you have to do that yeah yeah and i mean and and there is a there is a little bit of it that is about finding time to chill out well sure absolutely which is going to apply a lot of you know a lot of the ways if you have to keep

a job you know the different ways you can you can go about that job that dude does that makes it so doesn't like kill you one of my favorite ways to think about anti-work is just like anti-capitalism put into actual practice so it's sort of you know just debating online about anti-work is just like anti-capitalism put into actual practice. So instead of, you know, just debating online about anti-capitalism as some, you know, future thing. It's like, no, like what can you do to actually, you know, make capitalism a less important part of how you live your life every day? Which means, you know, not obsessing over careers and all these kind of other things. So I think first of all, it might be useful to kind of think about like what do we actually mean by work? Because work is kind of a – it has a lot of definitions depending on what you mean by it, right? Is it just like wage labor?

Is it just forced labor? Is cooking for yourself or your family considered work? Not always. But at times when I'm like relaxed i can i quite enjoy cooking for friends and family but but certainly but certainly it can feel like work sometimes especially if you especially if you just got home from like a work shift so in a way like work creates more work um and it's it's not it's it kind of it's it isn't just it isn't just about like wage labor or something it can kind of apply to a lot of ways about how you live your life.

Yeah. There's a lot of – Fucking laying down wood chips or sod, if that's your job every day, can be a miserable back-breaking process. If you actually have a huge yard or own a little bit of land and you're making your own garden, that can be an intensely – like the best part of your week. It can be a great form of play. Yeah. It's not, the problem is not the individual tasks necessarily. It's what work is as a platonic kind of concept in our society.

Yeah. And again, one of the things, and I think this is one of the things, speaking of, you talked about David Graeber earlier, who's an anarchist anthropologist and widely seen to be like one of the most brilliant anthropologists of his generation. He recently deceased. how, yeah, these ideas that kind of capitalism has a vested interest in you believing that the world was always hard in the way that it's hard, by which I mean, like, in order to get basic necessities, you have to make somebody else rich or find some grift of your own. And as opposed to like, yeah, life is always hard, but life didn't always involve labor the way we think about it.

Labor has not been a constant in human civilization. And in fact, most of human civilization, people have not done a thing that we would recognize as labor. And I think also, even if you go towards things that look more like labor to us, right? Like, I don't know, if you look at feudal levies, right? You're a peasant. You have to give some amount of grain to your lord but like okay we work way longer than medieval peasants did and not only do we work longer it's something graber and david wenger talk about in that book it's like yeah like not only do we work much longer like the amount that we work would

have been considered absolutely like even even a feudal lord would look at that much work and go no like this is this is this is like yeah and you know and i think there's there's another graver has another point um he wrote a piece called uh turning modes of production inside out where he has this argument that like okay so if if you take you know if you take like plato right you're like you take any of the greek philosophers even the conservative ones and you show them this, the thing that we do every day, right? You know, you're completely under the command

of another person for, like, at least a third, probably more of your day. Yeah, I monitor you and Garrison's bathroom breaks. Yep. I look at your texts with family and friends. It's really not a good situation yeah it's an incredibly strict surveillance state yeah robert evans yeah yeah this is like like you know if you show a greek person that this is like this is the apocalypse to them this is this is the

worst thing that could possibly happen is every single person in society has like essentially Society has essentially been reduced to a slave. And, you know, that's bad. And it doesn't have to be like that. It's not that they've been, because I want to push back on that terminology because it can go to some uncomfortable places. It's not that they are treated as a slave. It's that in the hours in which they are expected to labor, there's societal expectation that they they act as the property of whoever owns the business or manages them right the idea of like if it if it like that attitude from like like working in a kitchen or working at a fast food restaurant like if you lean if you're if you can lean you can clean like that attitude is saying you do not have any autonomy when you

are at work you are the property of the of the employer while you are at work. I think that's – Yeah, and I think the specific thing with Greece is that the only way you could do that to someone in Greece is if you owned them. Yeah. Like Greece has wage labor, right? But the only people who – it has wage labor, but it has wage labor for slaves. And that's like it has wage labor but it has wage labor for slaves and that's like it right like this you know and this is this is like obviously not to say that like you know we're like having a job

is the same thing as slavery but it's just to say that like the kinds of things that we think of as normal like are things that like the people who you know the people who run the system the people who you know get cited all the time justify stuff would have looked at as like the worst thing that could possibly have happened to a society yeah sure for sure like daily life for a very substantial chunk of of the american workforce is a would be a nightmare to large percentages of the the human population prior to the modern period like it's it's and and if you think about it that way like one of the things graber does a good job of going into um is like the way in which uh and this is also something that comes up in in tribe by younger the way in

which like during the early period of colonization of north america um it was very common for you know europeans to leave the the cities and towns being established behind um and and join up with and join with the tribes yeah the reverse never happened like yeah like not willingly not without kidnapping being a part of it um and it's because like their attitude was they were looking at the lives these people were living in these cities and like, well, why would you agree to do that? And this is turning anyway, Garrison, you should you should take us back on the rails. But first, it's time for products and services. time for products and services. You know what has nothing to do with the fact that human beings

are forced to labor for basic necessities in order to keep up a system that steals the freedom of the many in order to provide impossible liberty to the few? You know what isn't related to that? You sure? The advertising industrial

complex? It has nothing to do with it. Totally unrelated. Why would you say that, Garrison? By the way, did you know that McDonald's Egg Muffin is turning 50 years old and it's giving the breakfast sandwich a price to match? Stop it! Stop it! They're selling it for its original price of 63 cents during breakfast

hour, 6 a.m. to 10.30 a.m., exclusively on the McDonald's app. Isn't that cool? I can't. I can't. Do you guys want Egg McMuffins for 63 cents? That's the original price. I wonder what else the McDonald's app is looking at on my phone. Anyway, here's some ads. Oh, we're back, and we're talking about anti-work.

We're talking about how work's kind of bullshit for our jobs. Yeah. Yeah. We sure are. We sure are. sure are so you know like there is there there's a lot of people who who like enjoy stuff like gardening fishing carpentry cooking and even like you know fist fighting sure fighting computer programming just for their own sake like a lot of the stuff that we like quote-unquote needs uh need for uh society to function a lot of those things people like doing

as hobbies in their spare time for example if you're a police officer gunning down a man in cold blood might be kind of like your day job and like frustrating and there's a lot of shit you have to deal with if you're a mass shooter though you you just love it you know you're just doing it for the pure love and it's not work it's not work for a mass shooter that is that is exactly what the kyle rittenhouse thing is though like like like like actually like literally that that is this is we i mean we're not going to get the verdict today it doesn't look like not today which isn't a bad sign by the time this airs it may already be done um but anyway like a lot of people like doing those things without getting paid and sometimes often costing themselves money.

A lot of these hobbies are costly in their own right. And I think it's interesting to think of a society where you're free to do those things when you feel like it and you don't need to drag yourself out of bed early in the morning to work a 10-hour shift as a cash register. And it's not just even when you feel like it because there will be things that you have to do even i will discuss this later yeah yeah yeah in any but like yes but it's not it's it's not work if you're if you're going out and harvesting food that feeds you in your community that's no that's not like work in the sense that we talk about modern work the amount of extra energy we have by not having 10-hour horrible shifts that drain ourselves mentally and physically

and with the amount of most of the work that we people do, as shown in David Graeber's bullshit jobs, is not necessary. A lot of the work that we do as a whole is nonsense. Yeah, there's some quibbling about, because the book was based off of a study, like a survey that kind of showed a lot of very significant chunk of the

labor workforce thinks their job is like pointless and doesn't do anything. And there's been some criticisms of that, but it is undoubted that a very significant amount of total labor time spent is stuff that isn't necessary for any like reason of like making people's lives better and another part of like anti-work theory is is looking is looking at our society as it's built you know because it is it is tied to anarchism be like how much of this is actually necessary like how do we do we really need a mcrib like do we do we guys what do you what do you Garrison. We do not. Sophie, call HR. No, we don't need a McRib.

We do not need a McRib. Garrison is 100% right. Listen to them. I did the company training and they said you can't. We don't need a McRib. The company training says you can't attack someone for their religion and Garrison just attacked the McRib. That actually is, you know, it is a religion for a lot of people. Did you see that they're there

they or they they did sell a mcrib nft a few weeks ago um don't tell me that shit that is so upsetting god damn it yeah oh yeah just saying society with no money would not have nfts yeah so anyway gosh you know thinking of like anti-work as as the theory you know it's about cutting down those those unnecessary things that fill people's time um and you know and for a more you know forward forward looking sense it's it's a general kind of like app like abolition of the producer and consumer-based society um so you know life is not dedicated to the production and consumption of goods and commodities. So this applies not just to capitalism,

but also to state socialism, where work is still a big part of state socialism. And I think it posits a future that humans can be way more free when they can reclaim their time from jobs and employment instead of spending a lot of their time doing that. And spending a lot of – not just time but also just their energy, right? Because even if you work eight hours a day, you still have a majority of the day to yourself. But you're exhausted.

You can't do much, right? It drains you of everything. You can't do much, right? It drains you of everything. So, you know, the main point, one of the main points of like of the abolition of work essay by Bob Black is about like there's no one should work because work is as defined as like a forced labor practice is you can kind of track this to being the source of most of the misery in the world from you know in in individual people um who are forced to do this like this is where a lot of a lot of their pain comes from um is is this is this is this forced labor concept um i think i think a good a good way you know there is you know the point that robert brought up earlier is like you know what about the tasks that aren't fun you know what, what about, what about the stuff that isn't, isn't maybe as, as enjoyable? Um, you know, there's, there's, there's a list, a list of things that the standard response is who's going to clean up the poop, right? That's the thing.

So, you know, I, I kind of, I kind of, I kind of look at this as like the, I kind of look at this as like whenever I have to like turn the compost, which is not my favorite thing to do. I don't look forward to having to turn over our massive, shitty, rotting compost pile. Not my favorite thing. Yeah, that's why we have the whip. Oh, no. oh no but no like if there's if there's like friends around and we're playing music and we're all we have like some

like I have like an iced tea or a Dr. Pepper and we're like talking as we're turning the compost it's a lot more doable you know it's one task that's going to help all of us in the future and I'm not getting watched over by a boss

to fill a certain quota so I can pay my rent, right? It's this thing that helps everybody. And I do it because I want the goal of it to succeed. So there's always going to be tasks that are less pleasant than others. Now, what we can do is, you know, imagine a world where the amount of work actually needed to be done is greatly reduced so that the tasks that are necessary, and some of them unpleasant, can be spread out among more people because less people will be wasting upwards of eight hours a day, five days a week,

doing mostly pointless, time-filling work. Because yeah, there's going to be things that suck and we'll be able to do those a lot better if there's more people and we don't have to waste our times doing stuff that is honestly a lot more bullshit than actually scooping bullshit.

Wow, what a good joke. Speaking of scooping bullshit, it's time for it's time to scoop up some more ads. Wait, really? Haven't we done two? No, we only did one. Oh, all right.

We went a while without doing one. Guys, listen to the products because everyone loves a service. It's not like the thing we're talking about is bad. It's different than that, so it's fine. Yep, we're back about is bad it's different than that so it's fine yep we're back and we're still still talking about anti-work um i i do this is something that the crime think workbook uh points out and you know it's a pretty it's pretty obvious thing i've certainly thought of this before is that you know we've been told that the like technological progress will soon liberate humanity from the need to do work or from you know having

to do work as much um and today we have the capabilities that you know our ancestors couldn't have even imagined for for the amount of work that we could get done um but these predictions still like aren't true we're still working more than ever even though we have developed so much um technologically we're still working more than ever and i think it's silly to think that we'll we'll reach like a magic threshold. And I think it's silly to think that we'll reach a magic threshold where somehow now we have less work to do because we'll have robots being a server at a McDonald's or whatever, right?

There still is forcing people into this thing because this is the only way that we can live, right? We've built our whole society around getting work for money. So this is the only built our whole society around getting work for money so this is the only the only thing that we can do yeah david creeper one of the things he's argues in bullshit jobs is that basically you know okay so so if if you have like you have the soviet economy right okay so the soviet economy has has a policy of full employment and for a little bit they were like okay what if we make everyone work less and then they stopped and then like everything went to shit so you know okay but if

you can't make people work less hours and everyone has to work what do you do it's like okay well you pay a bunch of people to like stand at a doorway right now we also do this and then one of what graber's like funniest points that he brings up is that the the total number of bureaucrats in the ex-ussr like increased dramatically after uh the ussr fell which is incredible yeah and you know what it points to is that like yeah you know graber called this total bureaucratization which is that you know what what we did instead of like giving ourselves more free time is created this just like endless enormous incredibly violent bureaucracy that all of us have to spend all of our time like dealing with bullshit from our insurance companies and like fighting with like the comcast service person and all of this just

like you know incredibly violent dehumanizing stuff that you know it's it's a make work program right but it's a make work program that just the work that it makes is everyone is making everyone's lives miserable and we could just not do this yeah i mean we could it's always more complicated than that right because the the thing that is when we talk about anti-work the thing that's on the other side of this is like okay well what if you get a kid how are you going to feed that kid like what if like yeah how are you going to keep them in a house like how this is not just if you have a kid but like yeah you people die in our society when they do not have access to adequate resources and the only way to have access to adequate resources is to be born rich or to work.

Those are your options. Yeah, that's why I think – Without robust mutual aid and the commitment by a lot of people to try to make sure that a lifestyle is sustainable outside of this system. It's not impossible, but somewhere along the line, there has to be input. I mean, you can be – Yeah, we've been talking about anti – Live in a squat and be a freegan, but yeah. We've been talking about anti-work as kind of like a broad, hopeful future goal in some other post-scarcity, well, not post-scarcity, but like a post-crumbling, post-collapse future. But I think, you know, for us now, as you know, the anti-work sub-brand is about people now, right? The anti-work sub-brand is not about a future world.

is about people now, right? The anti-work system is not about a future world. I think the anti-work now is like an alternative to the obsession with living your life with the goal of a career. It's about, you know, it's like a project to radically reframe how we think of work and leisure. It's like a cognitive antidote

to this culture of hustle and hard work, which is like taking over our minds and, and, and our time. So if like, yes, for those who can't just resign from their job for whatever reason, whatever moment the,

the anti work is about like thinking of this movement as like the antithesis to the mainstream capitalist hustle culture, you know, that, that includes like slacking off more, finding ways to waste time, possibly even finding ways to steal or scam your boss i i've read certain certain alleged uh ways of doing this inside the anti-work yeah garrison's had my car for days i don't even know where where they got it from but yeah no but like you know like there is you

know like ways to like scam scam whatever corporation you work for right that either there's been examples shared in the anti-reddit in in the anti-work subreddit. So, you know, it's about actually like finding or like they're special to have it right it's like oh you're like i'm lucky to have such a good job because like when you're stuck in that mindset you can often put in like a lot of extra unpaid labor because you think it's important because you're like oh no this is worth doing because it's going to have some like benefits to the world so you end up like putting in actually more work that you don't actually get paid for and like it's about trying to like kill that instinct as well so that's a whole a whole way to think about like working because like we're going to be stuck a lot of people are going to be stuck doing it for a for for a while so how can we kind of reframe what we do on the job and how

kind of jobs live in our minds when we are at home and and i I think the best thing about what you've said, in my opinion, is the idea that like, this is not, the importance is not on whether or not this, this causes everyone to stop having to work immediately, like whether or not it leads to, you know, directly to like the measure of success of this movement, isn't that nobody ever has to work again. That's a, that's a long term goal. The measure of the success of this movement isn't that nobody ever has to work again. That's a long-term goal. The measure of the success of this movement is that people accept en masse that, no, the American dream as it's sold to people is not a good thing. It's not a thing to aspire to. Work is bullshit, and we should aspire to a society that doesn't do it.

It's getting back. Honestly, it's getting back to some of the shit that people were talking about in like when the jetsons was on tv the idea that like well with labor-saving devices the like a hard work week will be four hours and like that's the way life will be for everybody and like um and the it's the acceptance that like no a better future involves me not having involves no one having to spend 40 hours a week of their limited human life working at a fucking Sonic or like listening to some middle manager berate them for not answering phones fast enough. That doesn't exist for any human being in a world that is achievable and better than the one that we live in. Like convincing people of that and getting that to be widely accepted is I think what I would consider the terms of victory in this particular struggle. Yeah, kind of moving on from this side of things into like the great resignation and the other kind of things that people are doing.

jobs, and the rate of people quitting increased to a decent record high of like 2.9% according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. So, and this has been a growing trend. You can look at like, I think June was like a little under 4 million. August was 4.3. So like, it was, you know, it's ramping. I don't know what, I don't know if we have data for September or October yet this was the most recent one I could find

so yeah like it's stuff stuff is going up people are because people are like a big part of the anti-work side is like yeah if your job sucks you can quit it and probably find another one that pays better in decent time especially right now like right now. Like, right now,

if your job is really terrible, you have a decent chance of finding a better one. This wasn't the case, like, two years ago. It is the case at this moment. So a lot of the anti-broke subreddits are like, yeah, quit your job, like, say fuck you to your boss, and leave. Because if they're being shitty, then they

don't deserve to have you. So resigning has been a big part of this. And there has been attempts at other kind of organized stuff. And this kind of falls into, in my opinion, this kind of falls into the same kind of traps as sole internet organizing kind of always does.

So the big thing that they're organizing for is called Black Friday Blackout, which is about kind of trying to get everyone to, as many people as possible, to not work Black Friday and not buy anything on Black Friday. So like a post from the subreddit here is like, spread the word. Call in sick if you're forced to work on Black Friday. Spend time with your family instead. Remain at home and participate in your favorite activity on Friday, November 26th. Talk to your family and friends about your work-life struggles.

Pass out flyers. Join r slash anti-work. So this is, you know, I think this kind of falls into the same, like, you know, general strike organized online stuff that we talked about before. How kind of like a lack of like real like in-person solidarity and like non-internet, you know, networking and organizing results and stuff like this. Just, you know, like proposed like one-day strikes or actions that are ultimately kind of non-effectternet networking and organizing results and stuff like this. Just proposed one-day strikes or actions that are ultimately non-effectual. They can be a good symbol sometimes,

but it's not really going to matter that much, even if it works. Would I think it'd be cool if literally no store was open on Black Friday because everyone quit? Yeah, that would be rad. But that's not going to really happen. It would be rad. But that's not going to really happen.

It would be fun if it did, but realistically, it's not going to happen. And there is people on the subreddit who also point this out. There was a reply to this post that was like, oh look, another online call for a general strike with no union support whatsoever. Don't worry y'all, this one's definitely

going to work. So it's like, yeah, a lot of people in the sub also recognize that without actual organizing support and in-person stuff and networks to support people on lengthy strikes, these types of things are mostly symbolic actions that will have, in the end, little impact. They may make you feel powerful as you're doing them

which is you know which is good that is a lot of activism is actually just just about you feeling powerful in that moment um but you know as an end goal it's important to be remember to think like it's not it's this isn't you know this isn't gonna reach whatever anti-work utopia which i i i know people people organizing it aren utopia, which I know people organizing it aren't thinking that, but it's important to keep this within context of the limits of online organizing.

So a lot of people recommend focusing on organizing your own workplace and community, having discussions with unions in your area, you know, discussing, having discussions with unions kind of in your area. And yeah, part of kind of the reply to this original Black Friday blackout post that someone wrote was, seriously though, I would love for an actual general strike to kick off,

but these online calls for general strikes, it's no union involvement, no demands, no supports for strikers of any kind, no nothing whatsoever beyond social media hashtags don't do anything. Focus on organizing your workplace and your community. Discuss with unions which might be sympathetic to what criteria they might need from such a drastic action. There's a lot of unions on strike right now, so if there ever was a time to kick one off, it's now. Most general strikes in the past started off with specific strikes

that started pulling in other unions and solidarity than anything else. Focus on that. And we might get somewhere. I think is, is a decent, is a decent advice for the people who are really dedicated onto this kind of like general strike thing is, yeah,

that is, that is, that is pretty, pretty good advice in, in my opinion. I want to say something kind of briefly, just in general, about general strikes, because I think we've talked about it a lot on here. But they're really, really hard. I mean, there's an example, just to get a picture of how actually hard it is to pull off.

There was one in Sudan in summer of 2019. And, you know i mean this is this is in the middle of a revolution right the the like sudan is incredibly highly organized it's incredibly militant people have been like you know i mean like the the like the chant in the street is like uh you cannot kill us we already dead like you know they and you know and and it's the whole revolution is being led by the sydney professional association which is an association of like 17 trade unions right so this this is a population that is enormously better organized than like anything really that exists in the u.s and you know in in the middle of the summer the army opens fire and starts killing protesters and so they they call a general strike.

And the turnout is massive, right? They have millions upon millions of people show up to the strike. And on day one, it's successful. And then on day two of the strike, people start having to pull out, especially people in the informal sector, because even with the level of organization they have, they can't support everyone. and by about day three most of this reich has collapsed because even even with levels of organization they had even with you know the coordination even with the fact that they're in the middle of a revolution they just they couldn't support particularly the people in the informal sector so this stuff is really really really hard and yeah it is it is definitely hard yeah like even even highly organized highly motivated people who are you know

like literally willing to fight to the death will lose and that's that's something that you have to sort of keep in mind when you're talking about this because a lot of people are more focused on kind of their individual resignations finding other ways of making money and just slacking off at work in general because those are a lot easier than trying to organize a mass general strike right now. And I think one of the really optimistic things about this whole anti-work thing, including the subreddit, is that it has

made some bank executives kind of nervous. There was a fantastic article by Yahoo Finance. Now by fantastic, I mean funny for me. You know, they did not think it was as funny. They talked with the Golden Sacks CEO, and they pointed to the anti-work subreddit of being – what was the phrase? A long-run risk to labor force participation. Good. This is, see that, when I first read that in the article,

I just like flashed in my head to that scene from Starship Troopers where Neil Patrick Harris puts his hand on the brain bug and goes, it's afraid, it's afraid. Yeah. Yeah. He said, we see some risk that workers were elected will elect to maintain out of the workforce for longer provided they can afford to do so um pretty pretty good stuff and and i think good stuff and everything that's worth mentioning that hasn't been talked about very much is that so this is actually kind of working in some sense like the the the last few

months or 2020 in general last few months in particular, have seen basically the highest levels of wage increases that we've seen in decades. So, you know, we haven't overthrown capitalism yet, but if you can keep quitting your job, keep quitting your job. At your regular job, work less, keep doing it, it's working. job work less keep doing it it's working yeah this is stuff i wish we need to in the future i would like us to be focusing more on stuff like that like this that is a legitimately as you point out chris there's a lot of reasons to be very optimistic about about some of the numbers that we're getting from what is happening to labor right now um and it is important as we all like right now we're all miserable because we're sweating through the rittenhouse case it is important as we all like right now we're all miserable because we're sweating through the rittenhouse case it is important to talk about stuff like that that like yeah some shit people's

doing is is is hitting home some motherfuckers have found the glowy vulnerable spot on the the boss monster and it's it's doing the weird not working yeah it's just not working yeah like again as we started the series with like yeah, General Strike is kind of the best available solution. Yeah. Or path to a solution that I can find. But anyway, what else we got, Garrison? I think that does it for us today. Is that a soad?

Have we casted? Chris has some special some special like sequel stuff happening so tune in tomorrow for our listeners. For anti-work in China. And like all of the best sequels this one will be directed by James Cameron.

So we're all very excited. To bring our pal James onto the pod. To bring our pal James and the reanimated corpse of Stan Winston. It's going to be amazing. So check it out. Bye. Bye, everybody.

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New episodes every Thursday. Fuck work! Hey, hey, hey, hey. Good introduction. I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here. That was Chris. Garrison's also here.

So is Sophie, who is changing her name. Sophie, what is your new name? Sophie.com Arena. Sophie.com Arena. She's doing this to deal with the trauma of the fact that Los Angeles just agreed to change the name of the Chase Bank Arena to Crypto.com. Chase Bank, motherfucker! It's Staples Center! Oh, Staples Center. Sorry, I'm getting my arenas named after venal brands mixed up

yeah why couldn't you buy more binder clips speaking of the pointlessness of work there are people laboring right now who worked at staples so that staples would have enough money to name a place where people go do sports after a place where people get fucking pencils um and now staples has declined enough that it's just crypto.com fucking crypto.com fucking crypto.com look upon look upon the works of cryptocurrency ye formerly mighty staples in despair fucking the osman deus of the office supply world i don't know whatever chris what are we talking about we're we're going to a place yet no the agentes comes in the middle but right now we're gonna go to a place where they they banned crypto mining for the most part so and

that that place is china and i wanted to talk about specifically a lot of stuff that's been going on the chinese internet what's been going on the Chinese internet what's been going on in Chinese labor because so Garrison Garrison told me we're doing an IT work episode and I went oh yeah there's a there's you know there's a version of this in China and then I realized that like a almost no one has heard of lying flat and b it rules and c that nobody really know in the U.s knows what's going on in the chinese internet because it's effectively siloed and i mean you know there's there's there's lots of different ways to silo i mean there's there's literally the great firewall there's fact has different

languages people use different apps and you know the internet's become this sort of like you know it's it's a bunch of bubbles that don't interact with each other yeah the walled garden thing and it's you know the the sort of national level walled garden stuff is, I think, in a lot of ways, way more dangerous than the stuff, you know, the, like, people complaining about it was stuck in an ideological bubble. And, like, that's bad, but the fact that we have bubbles like this, where it's, like, you know, the… With, like, actual, like, basically borders, but online. Yeah, yeah. Because they're enforced by governments with force yeah the place it was always going to go

once we decided not to be rad with the internet which everyone collectively decided in I'm going to say 2004 yeah do you think that was 9-11's fault

9-11 played a role 9-11's fault? 9-11 played a role. 9-11 did play a role. The dot-com boom played another role. There were a number of factors, but we can all blame it on, let's blame it on low tax and continue. So anti-work in China.

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

the hit? Sub nemesis. I have many nemeses that I have dealt with. Oh god, we're going to do a Jody Dean episode at some point. Those are our enemies too now. Thank you. I appreciate allies in my

one-person intellectual intellectual wars although this does seem to be a pretty boring intellectual war yeah well he's dead so i've won by default yeah yeah that's fair yeah so what what gears was describing basically so he does his field work in java and what he's describing what involution means is a system where people keep working harder and harder but there's no increase in output and so that there's no there's no reward for working harder and so you know in java you'd have these plantations right the plantations would get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger but because each new person was only like harvesting just enough to feed themselves uh you never actually got any productivity increases and so interesting you know

yeah there's no there's no output increases and which is not really the case in america in a lot of ways yeah and what's interesting well okay so the reason i want to talk about this also is because basically everyone who's been writing about this from ancient news outlets has missed about half of the story of how how this like incredibly obscure anthropological term that like i don't like again i was an anthropology major i don't think i ever ran into involution while like while i was studying anthropology i've never heard that term yeah and no one has ever heard of this like fucking everyone in china has like a like a treatise they can spout at you about this now um interesting yeah and and you know i want to talk a bit about how it emerged. And part of this is because, you know, in the last about two years, people have been getting increasingly pissed off at, you know, just the sort of incredibly competitive nature of Chinese society and particularly work. And, you know, a lot of this is because everyone's working what's called 996, which is 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.

And I should make this good. When I say everyone, that's like an average average schedule the schedules get a lot worse than that but 996 is the one that sort of gets the attention because a lot of people work in especially the tech industry this is you know this is what you do but you know everyone focuses on the tech industry everyone ignores a bunch of migrant workers who also do this and worse and you know there's this enormous societal pressure to sort of keep moving and keep competing and keep working. And simultaneously, people in China today are working basically as hard as anyone's worked in China since people would literally collapse in the fields in the Great Leap Forward. That's the last of people working this hard. But instead of getting rewards for this, Chinese growth rates have been collapsing for a decade. And yeah, this is a thing you get in the US too.

It's like, well, okay, people were like, well, if you work hard, you get into the middle class. But then everyone's working 996. No one's getting into the middle class. China has incredibly low rates of social mobility. And into this comes involution. But the weird part about what's happening here is that involution doesn't enter the Chinese discourse through, like, people complaining about work. It's actually a product of a bunch of middle-class people

complaining about Chinese industrial policy. And this is the part of the story that nobody really talks about, even though I think it's really interesting because, again, like this, you know, anti-work in the US starts on the left, right? Involution, which is the thing that's going to bring about sort of the Chinese version

of anti-work, is originally a right-wing discourse. And essentially, it's a right-wing very nationalist discourse that gets, you know, the right-wing part of it gets essentially expunged and it gets pulled left. So originally, you know, China is, I don't have a more elegant way of saying this than China's leaders are more online than ours. Like significantly more like they actually. God, that's frightening.

That's hard to imagine. No, that is. It's horribly problematic yeah people people like like local government offices right have like they they have these like internal sites that like show them what people are posting and this this goes from the from the bottom levels it goes all the way up to the top like people actually listen to bloggers like like they're they're you know so some of the people who are about to talk about are incredibly influential and there's a bunch of arguments in the early 2000s about how china's going to

industrialize and these are basically online arguments um and the guys who win that argument uh xi jinping basically takes their industrial policy and implements it which is you know which is which the scale is like how online these people are that like yeah people are taking economic policy from like literally i mean you, it's not solely that bad. They're taking economic policy from people arguing on the internet. Oh no. This is, this is an incredibly online society. And it, you know, but the worst part is that for a while it works.

You know, the economic policy basically is they're going to increase the size of the Chinese economy by investing in sort of high tech industry and moving up the value chain. This is, this has been very standard Chinese economic policy for a while. The problem is in the last about decade,'s it's stopped working and you know the ccp's response was to do more financialization and this pissed off the like the the online they were they were called like the industrial party this pisses off those guys because you know their whole thing it was don't financialize just keep investing in like building airplanes and stuff and the chinese economies will work itself out and but eventually even they can't keep making this argument because you know i mean like like 2010 right like the chinese gdp growth rate was 10 and now it's like maybe five and last year i mean last year is 2020 so you know it was really low but i mean the

chinese growth rate has been imploding and so what you get out of this is this group of people called the cowists based on this guy named cow okay so so cow is the guy who who essentially introduces the concept of involution and he's arguing that this is happening because and i'm going to quote him here, people can't get, quote, a peaceful life, get a pretty girl, live in a big house because of the US. And so the solution to this basically is to deal with, like to destroy America as a hegemon. And then once you do that, you know, you can get all of these things. And as you can tell, like, you know, okay, peaceful life, get a pretty girl, live in a big house. This is like a very conservative framing of this.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the Chinese equivalent of 2.5 kids in a white picket fence and it has all of this sort of associated gender politics and class politics that go along with that and you know and when when cow and the cows are talking about evolution what they're talking about is they're literally literally mean china stagnated economy right so they're talking about okay you have more inputs you have labor technology inputs but the output per emperor is declining and the only way to restore economic growth achieve prosperity is by solving a decline in output by defeating the americans but you know and this this is kind of a big deal and for a while in sort of like 2019 2020 this this is this is going places but very quickly people are like my life fucking sucks like i don't care about this econ shit or this like grand national struggle against the world hegemon like i care about the fact that

like my life is this incredibly pointless ever-escalating rat race with like literally no rewards yeah that would that would concern me too if that were a thing that we were capable of feeling in our country yeah it's why there's been some really funny stuff with involution where like you read accounts of it and you'll get like anthropologists going like oh yeah this is this is the thing that this is the thing that's unique to china and it's like have have you worked a job in in the u.s like but you know involution you know what happens to it over the course of sort of 2020 is it goes from being the general, you know, it goes from being this thing that's about like very specific, like technical industrial arguments about industrial policy to, as one anthropologist put it, quote, the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless. And so people start talking yeah we could we couldn't

imagine that this is no yeah and it's you know and people people start talking about finding individual solutions to this and so you know then this is things like working less moving to lower tier cities getting less prestigious jobs um but you know and i want to think about this again because this this is a really interesting thing where you have a very incredibly right-wing nationalistic and sort of like like middle class like nostalgia kind of like you know like aggressive foreign policy thing and then it just flips and and part of how it flips and this is a part of the story that is almost completely ignored but i think is really important did you guys know about there's a youtuber named lizi qi she's the biggest chinese youtuber she has 16 million followers and most of her followers are not on youtube because you know youtube's like blocked by the firewall but she has

she has 55 million followers on um the sort of chinese version of tiktok and yeah she has across the world she has 100 million followers right like she's she's one of the biggest media stars in the world and her origins are kind of unclear the like official biography basically says that like when she was 12 instead of going to high school, she became a waitress. And then she had to like, you know, but she'd gone to the city and then she had to return to Aurora Village to take care of her grandma. And she makes these videos that are these like very soft and calming videos with like calming music of her going into the woods and like harvesting materials and making fires out of logs and like cooking things. Okay. And it's just like, you know, it's just very much this this real utopianism there's there's basically no industrial technology yeah like cottagecore

return to nature yeah yeah i know a lot of people who watch shit like that just to like soothe them after a day of work like see somebody like dig a cave and turn it into like a bath or something using just hand tools or whatever yeah and there's it's interesting this kind of it's almost like turned into a sub-genre but uh she's by far the biggest like version of this and you know so she gets picked up by a media company and from 2015 2016 goes viral and you know it's interesting because so she's doing this because so she has to go back to like take care of her grandma and so she like opens a store and it's interesting because so she's doing this because so she has to go back to like take care of her grandma and so she like opens a store and she's trying to support herself but

and like her grandma by opening this store and so the videos were like a way to promote the store and then you know now she has 100 million followers and she gets adopted as this kind of like like national culture ambassador i guess by the state sure and and essentially you know so there's nothing overtly political about these videos at all right which is essentially offering and like trying to sell is this you know this like fantasy of retreat from industrial modernity into world life and I think it's really easy to look at that aesthetic and go like this is basically fascist like this is reject modernity embrace tradition some people online when they see that immediately sees up was like oh no it's eco-fascism yes some people do think that

yeah and I think you know and I think like that interpretation I think is actually a lot of why it got picked up by the Chinese media companies and then like sort of by the Chinese state because you know like having an actual positive utopian image of rural life is politically useful to them and something that's like not hasn't been true

since like we've had this for a long time yeah well no and I think I would say this I think this is the thing that's like not absolutely hasn't been true since like this is we've had this for a long time yeah well no and i think i would say this i think this is the thing that's different in china is there hasn't been like a positive conception of rural life really since i i i guess the great leap forward and then are like there were some people in the cultural revolution but then they actually went there and were like oh god this sucks and so you know so they need a new one they came up with this but you know the thing that's different about china than the u.s is that china's migrant worker population like is almost the entire size of the population of the u.s i mean it's it's like 270

million people right i mean it's enormous and and a huge number of these people you know i'm some of these people are going from like city to city or like town to town but a lot of these people are coming from from rural villages into cities and you know i mean these are this is the backbone of the chinese workforce like these people like they see their family once a year because you know like they they can't afford to go home so they go home once a year for new years because they get some time off and they come back and and this is where you know like these videos are an obvious fantasy but you, they suggest an alternative to work in the capitalist city that's sort of plausible, you know, especially if you come from a rural village. And this is where this whole thing completely backfires on the Chinese ruling class.

And, you know, because this this this this cowist involution discourse is about to fuse with this style of rural rural utopianism into a movement that is going to shake the foundation of work itself but first but first ads again also not connecting to anything we're talking about no connection whatsoever why garrison don't even bring that up there's no needs there's no reason for people to think about about the fact that about that don't think anyway here's the washington state patrol about ads yeah think about the was that about that don't think anyway here's the washington state patrol think about ads yeah think about the washington state highway patrol primary sponsors if it could happen here if it happens to you you'll want the washington state highway patrol fleeing over the border it's so funny anyway we get it pulled, but I think it's hilarious. We're working on it, people.

I think it's hilarious. Yeah. So please don't join the Washington State Highway Patrol. Ah, we're back. And I don't know about y'all, but I thought I knew what I was talking about. And after those ads, I am fully Washington State Highway Patrol pilled.

I'm on board. Let's do it. Yeah. In April of 2020, a guy on Washington State Highway Patrol pilled. I'm on board. Let's do it. Yeah. In April of 2020, a guy on Chinese social media makes a post. And I'm just going to read it. 2020 or 2021? Sorry, 2021. Yeah, April 2021.

So yeah, I'm just going to read this post because it's kind of short and it rules. I haven't been working for two years. I have just been hanging around and I don't see anything wrong with this. Pressure mainly comes from the generation with your peers and the values of the older generation. These pressures keep popping up. But we don't have to abide by these norms. I can live like Diogenes and sleep in a wooden bucket enjoying sunshine. I can live like Heraclitus in a cave thinking about Logos.

Since this land has never had a school of thought that upholds human subjectivity, I can develop one of my own. Lying down is my philosophical movement. only through lying flat can humans become the measure of all things incredibly based oh my god that's the best i love that can i talk about diogenes yeah all right we're talking about diogenes let's go my my man diogenes is he's from this trend in greek philosophical thought during kind of the high period of Greek civilization where a bunch of things come out of it. You kind of get anarchism, Western anarchism out of it. You kind of get – you get elements of like Puritan culture from it because a lot of them are very much anti like the pleasures of sex and like anything pleasing.

And like you don't do anything that feels good because then you become dependent on it like there's a whole bunch of shit going on um and diogenes was like one of one of the first motherfuckers who were kind of playing around in this in this philosophical space and when he gets into so his early life is his dad is uh kind of a grifter it sounds like we know that he got in trouble. He and his dad got exiled for debasing currency, which could be as simple as they were watering down, for lack of a better term, like the gold or silver in currency

with less precious metals and hiding it in order to make a profit, right? And like keep the extra gold. That could be what they were doing. It also could have been like, it could have been political because some people who were doing this in Sinop, I think is the city, which is now in Turkey, were doing it for political reasons. We don't really know why, but there's actual

documented archaeological evidence of this, including right around the time he would have been a child. We found from that period, a cache of debased gold and silver coins that had been destroyed. So someone had like realized they'd been debased and destroyed them so they couldn't be used. So there's evidence anyway, he and his dad get exiled, which means from an early stage, he goes from being somewhat of means.

If your dad's making the currency, you're not probably not like a poor family. And then they get kicked out of their city state and they're like kind of stateless. And so Diogenes evolves over time and like gets into philosophy he tries to there's this i always forget the name of the guy that he he loved at first but there's this philosopher who's like you know this cynical like that's the the school of thought he comes from he's like a cynic um that diogenes really

wants to study from and the guy like assaults him as diogenes is like hey man i want to learn from you like he like hits him or something. This keeps happening. And eventually he's like, this guy is like, why do you keep doing this? And Diogenes is like, you have something I can learn from. And so I don't really care what you do to me. I'm going to I'm going to keep persisting. And so he becomes this guy's student, yada, yada.

And the guy who he becomes the student of is like kind of a poser because he's talking about like we need to give up, you know know these kind of like pleasures of like civilized life and and return to a more simple time and like not enjoy all of these you know the benefits of wealth but he like he's also a rich guy and he doesn't give up his money and diogenes is like poor as hell um and stays that way um and so he becomes famous for he goes to athens and he becomes famous for a bunch of like troll shit we don't actually have he wrote like 10 books we don't have any of them so we don't actually like know what he actually wrote in his philosophy we just have stories from other philosophers and it's all diogenes being a fucking troll so like um on one occasion he one of his big things was he believed that people – that if something was an acceptable behavior, it was an acceptable behavior everywhere, right?

And so the start of this was in Athens, you were supposed to go buy your food in the market, but you weren't supposed to eat it there. That was like considered rude, like kind of obscene almost. And Diogenes would like get food and then – usually by begging because that was the way he got everything. He had no money. He would like get food and he would eat it right in the middle of the market. And everybody was like, that's disgusting. And Diogenes would be like, well, if it's okay for me to eat, it must be okay for me to eat here. That's great.

Diogenes took it a little bit further than that. I can see a few ways you can take this. He extended that to, if it's fine for me to urinate or shit, it's fine for me to do it anywhere and eventually i have no problem he defended himself masturbating while looking at people in public as there you go if this is okay for me to do in my bedroom why can't i do this here right um it's very like he's he's he's a troll um diogenes and he's also like again the stories we have of him is he is, like, uber anesthetic.

So, like, at one point for a long time, the only thing he owns is a wooden bowl that's his cup and for his food. And then according to, you know, legend, he sees this poor peasant child drinking from, like, cupped hands. And he throws away his bowl. And he's really angry. And he's like, God damn it. I spent all this effort carrying around something useless like i could have just been putting shit in my hands he's he's a very entertaining character and a very like the original oogle yeah yeah he's absolutely an oogle um and he's yeah he's just kind of like an endearing piece

of shit is like his the the idea you get but also like smarter than i mean because because fundamentally what diogenes is doing is he's he's saying like hey all this stuff that we think is important and good about our culture and and like valuable what if it wasn't what if none of it matters yeah he's like he's provoking the third and he's he's big into like one of his his like the things he comes back to a lot is that dogs are clearly happier than us and better creatures than us, so we should just seek to be like dogs.

And one of the ways he might have died is getting bitten by a dog and his bike getting infected. We don't really know how he died. The other thing about the Arginine is this guy fucking hates rich people. Oh, yeah. He abuses them. And he's very funny about it so alexander the great apocryphally maybe this probably never happened but the story is that alexander the great comes to athens you know while he's on his his blitz through conquering the known

world and finds diogenes and alexander the was raised by Aristotle, right? So he knows his philosophy, guys. He's seeking Diogenes out because he's a fan of this dude, probably through stories that were told to him in the same way that I'm telling them to you now. So he comes up to Diogenes and he's like, oh my god, I'm Alexander the Great. I'm a big fan. If I couldn't be Alexander the Great, I would want to be Diogenes. And Diogenes responds, well, if I couldn't be Diogenes, great i would want to be diogenes um and diogenes response well if i couldn't be diogenes i would just want to be diogenes which is a fucking flex again probably

never happened but like i want i want to i want to read this meme that garrison sent me because it it it happens it's absolutely the perfect description of what's of what this whole thing is sort of about so okay, okay, this is me. The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher, I don't know how to pronounce this guest's name, Aristippus, who was living comfortably... It doesn't matter, some dead-ass Greek motherfucker. Yeah, some guy who's about to get absolutely destroyed.

Right. He's living comfortably, like, flattering the king. Aristippus says, If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils the agnes replied learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king oh oh there's all sorts of based shit like that my favorite but i know like i so our guy our guy works up plato is like is like trying to determine trying to define like a human in the simplest way possible.

Oh, yes. Yeah, like the platonic ideal. And so he comes to the conclusion that like, well, it's an unwinged biped. And Diogenes supposedly goes, grabs a plucked chicken and says, behold a man. I found a dude. Rules. He would famously walk around town in broad daylight with like a um what do you call it like a lantern like looking around and people like what are you looking for

he's like i'm looking for a man he would like look at a dude and he's like i'm looking for a man and as it is to say like none of you motherfuckers are people like you all think that you're human beings but you're really just pieces of shit he's just an amazing asshole sorry that that we should move back to anti-work but that's no what's who diogenes is it ties in yeah yeah yeah but and this is this is the funny thing both both both american and chinese like anti-work people both fucking love diogenes absolutely yeah you know very popular on r slash anti-work yeah and and you know and the the thing i was reading about the like you know learn to live on lentils and you'll never like have to be subjugated by a king that's a lot of what lying down becomes so very rapidly this whole thing

spreads into this like really it's like a sort of astounding you know it starts out of a meme and it spreads incredibly quickly and the ccp gets like really really mad about this um so so it like so this starts in april right and in may there's they have this like enormous media blitz where like like the the the party is like outlet basically and guandong publishes like a four page long attack on the concept of lying down like the ccp the newspapers everywhere publish this stuff like the ccp like bands how you know you've done it right we chat yeah yeah it's funny it's like they do this but it's too late like it's it's already always too late yeah and you know so and you know so part part of a lying down is is about you know you have this incredibly fast-paced intense intense work culture.

You have involution. You're working more and more, and you're getting nothing out of it. Lying Flat is just going no. You just lie down. You refuse to work. But it's also – it's more than that, and I think this goes back to the sort of broader conception of anti-work. So one of the slogans of this movement is don't buy property don't buy a car don't get married don't have children and don't consume and you know the last part of this which is implied is don't work

and you know there's a lot sort of going on here i mean you have you know it's not just sort of a critique of like we work too hard it's about you know it's about the sort of whole system it's about the sort of patriarchy involved in this it's about this whole system. It's about the patriarchy involved in this. It's about the forced capitalist consumption. It's about the fact that literally a quarter of China's economy, China's GDP, is all this real estate bullshit that everyone knows is going to collapse, and even when it gets built, sucks. Thank God we don't have anything like that here.

Yeah, I know. It's great. One of the fun things about learning history is you get to just watch every country do exactly the same thing with their housing market like yeah japan do it it's like it's great it's just like you also get to watch think this will work what one one extra fun thing is you get to watch every country do the same thing with farms and it always ends the same way you will have a fundia anyway bad yeah so there's there's a lot of you know in order to sort of like facilitate this you know you get back to the diogenes so a lot of it what's happening is people sharing tips about how to like make the cheapest food you can possibly survive on so you don't have to work and so you know and people the the guy who wrote the the diogenes post like he spends 30 a month

and he does this by only eating dried ramen and eggs and like rice there you go yeah yeah yeah one way to do it that's a way to do it yeah this is like the most extreme example actually i don't even think it's the most extreme example a lot of people no one of the things that happens a lot as much people just like have left their jobs to become monks this is like a whole thing sure yeah i gotta go be a buddhist like honestly why not like yeah absolutely great like and i used to live in a place in the middle of fucking nowhere one of the most like isolated places I've ever lived that like had power. And one of the people who was like by neighbor,

they were within several miles of us, was a monastery. This is in the United States. And like I went there once because I heard they made good wine to try and get some of their wine and like none of them would answer the door. I could see them inside all staring at me.

They didn't do shit. And my overwhelming thought was like, yeah, that seems like a pretty good way to do it. would answer the door i could see them inside all staring at me they didn't do shit and my my overwhelming thought was like yeah that seems like a pretty good way to do it yeah yeah i i see why you guys have picked this life it was also during the 2016 election oh yeah that's back from the the rnc and the dnc and was like yeah that seems smarter than what i'm doing yeah so there's a lot of you know yeah that'd be the extreme example like if people going to become monks but like one of the things that's happening a lot is again you know china has an almost migrant worker population and people are just like

fuck this i'm going back to my village and so you know and this is you know this this this is where they really screwed up with the youtube stuff because you know people were people you know they they were gambling that that you know you, you know, people were people, you know, they, they, they were gambling that, that, you know, you could just sell this as an aesthetic and you, you know, you can sell it as an aesthetic.

Like Chinese tick tock has this integrated thing in it where like, if, if, if, if you plug like something to buy, I, it, you,

you, you can like click it and it'll, it'll take you like to a link, like to, to, to, to the thing it's selling. So,

you know, it's like, yeah, they make an enormous amount of money out of this, but amount of money out of this but you know the the the other side of that sword is a bunch of people were like i don't have to work this like i don't have to work 996 in a city i can just go home yeah and you know and you know and you know so you know as you're talking about the anti-work stuff it's not actually possible for a lot of people to leave their jobs. Not everybody. So, the solution to this was...

There's a culture that developed called Petting Fish. Before you talk about Petting Fish, you said something about plugging things on TikTok. You know, like advertisements. And you know who also plugs advertisements, you know, like plugging, like advertisements. And you know who also plugs advertisements,

Chris? Oh no, is it us? It's Joe Rogan. It's Joe Rogan. But our new sponsor is the Joe Rogan Experience. Oh no.

Brought to you by Honda. Honda, drive a car. Do fascism. Honda, really? Yeah, Honda,

Garrison. Look, we don't, we're not nearly a big enough podcast to get a Toyota ad. Are you crazy? Yeah, that's... We can dream big. Yeah.

I mean, that is the dream, to sell Toyotas. I mean, we could become used car salesmen in the Valley. Alright, here's that. Ah! in the valley all right here's that ah all right cut that head and fish come on chris handle it cut that keep it all in baby yeah so there's there's all this thing called the petting fish which is like chinese slack off culture and it's you know it's a bunch of people sharing tips about how to slack off at

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

But if you want to like make it sound cool, they're waging an insurgency from within capitalism. It's true. By trying to take resources away from their employers um without being spotted yeah there's a there's a thing in volume one of capital about this that i i was like oh i could pull this up and then i was like that is too much work i'm not going to do it so i don't have the thing in volume one where he talks about we don't struggling between about labor time but instead you get a bunch of people like this like smuggling whiskey into work, taking three-hour lunch breaks. My favorite one. My absolute favorite one. Drink at work,

especially if you're a nurse. Oh, boy. We've probably killed about 50 people. This is going to be great. Fingers crossed. So you know how companies all have these really annoying mindfulness fitness things? Yes.

So one of the things people started doing was, okay, so you know the thing, but like you have to drink eight hour, eight times a day. So they, they would set these alarms. That's like,

oh, I have to go drink my water. And so like every, like every like 50 minutes or something, they just go up and like spend 20 minutes getting water. And they sit back down. It's like, you've just eviscerated an enormous part of your work day.

And, and the product of this, you know, the CCP is really pissed off about this. And, you know, you get these giant billboards that say no lying flat, no petting fish on them, which would have been literally incomprehensible like a year ago. It's amazing. Yeah. And, you know, I think this is something, you know, in the U.S. anti-work, like the actual political class kind of has been ignoring it.

I mean, you see a couple of financial analysts in China. Xi Jinping like made a speech. It was like, you know, he had a private speech to a bunch of high level people in the party. And so a part of it got printed like a month ago or something. I've lost track of all time. But like specifically in this speech that Xi Jinping is making that is published in the ccb's official like theoretical journal he's like explicitly saying like don't lie flat and saying quote happy life is earned through heart hard work and yeah and he's also has this he has his rant about like denouncing welfarism which is great the uh the communist vanguard there yeah

yeah preaching the immortal science. Yeah. Socialism with Chinese characteristics, motherfuckers. Don't be a welfare queen. That's very funny. Follow Xi Jinping thought. It's great.

You know, but it's interesting because people, this is the one people are really freaked out about. Like I saw, I saw like an American writer about this who, no, they wrote like an article

about this whole thing and then they were like, this is gonna, this is gonna cause inflation. It's like like this is gonna be the driver of 20 percent inflation like what yeah people just use the word inflation to mean whatever scary thing they want yeah well they're like oh this will this will increase wages and that will lead to inflation we'll get the 70s again and i'm like oh god maybe we'll get a tallow disco again did you ever think of that guy good god that we that we're our reserves of a tallow disco are critically low so garrison do you know what a tallow disco is

no idea that's a shame all right let's continue what what type of like is there is there like any like you said this kind of stuff started to like move leftwards is there any like actual like leftist organizing in these types of places? So this is the thing I was getting to, which is that people are starting to do reading groups. But the problem with leftist organizing in China is that state policy in the past three years has been like, if you poke your head above ground, you get arrested. In 2018, for example, there was a strike at jacek and you know a bunch of student groups who'd been organizing for a long time like tried to do solidarity with it and they all got arrested the people who were struck people who let the strike got arrested all the students who were

doing solidarity got arrested people like people got arrested for like like dancing with like like university students got arrested for like like dancing with the people who were like cleaning the floors yeah and so god yeah that's a little bleak yeah like the emotional science depression yeah like it's incredible and like you know and the other thing that you can see about this was so so for example there was there was a guy doing like delivery driver organizing it was kind of weird he was like kind of an entrepreneur kind of doing delivery driver organizing like he got arrested and then you know like a couple weeks later the ccp was like oh we're gonna like do things to improve the conditions of uh of delivery drivers and you know who knows if that's gonna happen but like you know basically like any anyone out for some reason the the people in the tech sector

have been able to get away with more for reasons that are probably class-based and i think this doesn't take them seriously in the way they do with students and factory workers yeah but you know and actually i mean the fact that the the tech workers like kind of recently like there's a tech worker thing calling for like like democratic control of production which is wild but other than those guys like you can't you know you can't stick your head up you get flattened so this has sort of been the result of this, which is this – lying flat is this mass decentralized movement that there's no one to hit with a hammer. And I think – okay, so one of the other quotes that's been going around about lying flat is – it's a poem. It doesn't – poem as well in English, but this is the best we've got.

Lying flat is to not bow down. Lying flat is to not kneel. Lying flat is to stand up horizontally. Lying flat is a straight spine. And so what's basically happening here is it's a combination of the tendencies you see in the US where a bunch of people, terrible terrible jobs realizing that everything's pointless and then also this is a way you can like this is a way you can like fight your boss without like the police showing up yeah and so there's there's some interesting like political stuff so there's there's there's there's

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

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

with the same exact points in totally different languages. If you're someone who's interested in massive global revolutionary change, this should probably be a thing that you are looking at and studying and thinking a lot about. Because perhaps while we're arguing about shit that people started talking about in the 1870s, this might be a better thing to do than that. Because it seems like there's some potential here. Yeah, and I think, yeah, I mean, you know, if, you know, any actual revolutionary project that makes the world better is going to have to be international.

And that's been, you know, that's been the bane of all revolutionary movements forever. But, you know, okay, so we have, you know, we have something the Chinese American working class agrees on, which is Diogenes' base in work sucks. Yeah. Yeah. So as you go forward into your life this week, take a page from Diogenes' book and go shit on the floor of a free people. Shit on the floor of a free people.

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

It's like Mao said, all political power comes from being able to shit really fast and then run away from the doors of a free people. Just get the hell out of there. The immortal science. Look, I think we should leave with the real immortal science, the immortal words of a skeleton from the share zone.

Just walk out. You can leave. Work, social things, movie, home, class, dentist, clothes shops, two fancy weed store, cops if you're quick, friendships. If it sucks, hit the bricks. Yeah, yeah. As some comedian who I can't remember now said,

always have an exit plan. Like, that should be your thought for everything. Everything in the world hit the fucking bricks get out anyway get out of this podcast episode now welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes

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I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend, and I found his piss jar in our apartment.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me

in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to

life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to It Could Happen Here,

a podcast about things falling apart and what you can do about it. My name is Christopher Wong, and today I'm going to be talking about sabotage. But this is not the episode on sabotage that you expect. I will not be discussing, for example, the destruction of machinery, throwing monkey wrenches, slowdown strikes, or the myriad of other tactics that workers have used since time immemorial to strike back at their bosses. No, instead, I'm going to be talking about a far more common and infinitely more dangerous form of sabotage. Corporate sabotage. Now, the most convicuous form of corporate sabotage is the mass destruction of a corporation's own products. The fashion company Burberry, for example, destroyed $370 million of its own product in one year alone. Louis Vuitton and Chanel also systematically destroy their unsold

stock every year, joining H&M in literally lighting their unsold products on fire in order to prevent anyone from using them. Quote Business Insider, Richemont, the owner of Cadelier Montblanc, destroyed more than 400 million pounds of watches over a two-year period after an excess in goods in the Asian markets. goods in the Asian markets. Nike has also admitted that a New York store slashed unsold trainers before throwing them away, and last year an Urban Outfitters employee said he was instructed to pour green paint on the unsold stock. These, of course, are only the stories that have made it into the press. And this behavior is by no means limited to high fashion. Grocery stores routinely throw away enormous quantities of unsold goods, and when communities realized they could feed people in need by taking the still-good products from grocery store dumpsters, the stores began to destroy their food intentionally.

But these acts of destruction, as callous and horrifically greedy as they are, are by no means the extent of corporate sabotage. To explain, I turn to the work of the economist Thorsten Veblen. Veblen is perhaps best known today for the theory of conspicuous consumption, but he wrote extensively on corporate sabotage. In the first part of The Engineers and the Price System, a work that has been broadly ignored even by his followers, Veblen wrote a section called On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage. From that work, writers and speakers who dilate on the militarious exploits of the nation's businessmen will not commonly allude to this voluminous running administration of sabotage,

this conscientious withdrawal of efficiency that goes into their ordinary day's work. We are not used to thinking of the ordinary work of a corporation being sabotage. But for Veblen, there was no other explanation for what he was seeing. In the wake of World War I, there was an enormous explosion in unemployment, an enormous need on behalf of the population. But even as the unemployed begged to be let in to create the products that could fill the needs of their fellow humans, business owners steadfastly refused to open their factories. As Feblen explained, but for reasons of business expediency, it is impossible to let these idle plants and idle workmen go to work. That is to say, for reasons of insufficient profit to the businessmen interested,

or, in other words, for reasons of insufficient income to the vested interests which control the staple industries and so regulate the output of product. Veblen was not alone in observing these or similar conditions. John Maynard Keynes, writing Dream the Depression, observed nearly precisely the same thing. For Keynes, the solution simply was to have the government step in to increase demand. But for Veblen, this missed the core of the problem. The real problem was that a core of absentee owners had the ability to shut down the factories in the first place by simple virtue of their ownership. This, Veblen argued, was simply sabotage, no different from the hated strikes of the IWW that so racked and perturbed the capitalist ruling class of his time. At least the workers could argue that they were simply fighting for a better share of what they'd created. The absentee owners,

on the other hand, who had no actual involvement in the production process whatsoever, simply carried out sabotage on an enormous scale in order to secure their own returns. And this was true even in times that weren't marked by massive depressions. In order to make payments to capitalists, Veblen argued, who expect a certain rate of return on their investment,profitable prices, at the same time that the increasing need of all sorts of necessities of life must be met in some passable fashion on pain of popular disturbances, as will always come of popular distress when they pass the limit of tolerance. This sabotage, Veblen argued, was simply a product of the price system. A production that was too efficient would simply and inevitably be sabotaged for private gain, because in order to maintain prices that would maintain the returns of investors, it was necessary to ensure that production never became too efficient and produced too many goods.

Veblen used as his example the 20th century post office, but we could just as easily point to Trump sabotaging the post office in 2020 in a dual bid to privatize the service by causing it to collapse and prevent mail-in votes from being counted as part of his attempt to win the 2020 election. In their book Capital as Power, Connors, Shimshon Bickler, and Jonathan Neidtson take Veblen's argument and expand on it, noting that capitalism, far from encouraging productivity writ large, makes things inefficient on purpose. They use the example of public transportation, which is, by essentially any measure, a significantly more efficient way of moving people around the U.S. As an example, in the U.S. in the 1940s, 100 electric rail lines were bought up and destroyed by car companies.

lines were bought up and destroyed by car companies. Those same companies, likewise twice, destroyed incredibly efficient and popular electric cars once in the 1930s and again in the 1980s, because the profit rate was lower than that of gas cars. They then set out to cause everyone to forget that they'd actually done this until Elon Musk figured out a way to sell electric cars that was profitable, namely by selling himself as a brand and not the cars themselves. Now, if capitalism was simply destroying its own products in order to create Elon Musk's, you could argue that the system at least produced advancements before it stopped them. But the most violent forms of sabotage are reserved for productive systems that are simultaneously efficient and outside of capitalist control altogether. Perhaps the best known example of this this is the British East India Company's deindustrialization of the Indian textile industry.

Not to be outmatched by their British forebearers, American settlers and their allies in the American military exterminated the buffalo herds of the Great Plains in an attempt to starve out the indigenous tribes that lived there. In doing so, they destroyed an enormously productive and sustainable agricultural system. They did so precisely because the system was efficient. So efficient, in fact, that it allowed indigenous tribes to repeatedly defeat the American army in defense of their lands. We are used to thinking of capitalism as the system of production, but here, amidst the fields of buffalo corpses, is something else entirely. Capitalism appearing in its true form, a system of organized sabotage. To fully untangle what this means, let us return to Veblen. Veblen divided capitalism into two separate processes. The first he called industry.

Industry, Veblen argued, has existed long before capitalism and will continue to exist long after it. As Bickler and Nietzsche put it, When considered in isolation from contemporary business institutions, the principal goal of industry, its raison d'etre according to Veblen, is the efficient production of quality goods and services for the betterment of human life. Industry is an inherently collective undertaking. Its basis is cooperation and integration, the creation of communal knowledge that allows

production and scientific advance to occur, and coordination and cooperation between people to create things for each other. Left to its own devices, industry would simply produce goods for people. It has no concern for profitability, rates of returns, or capitalization. Unfortunately, capitalism is defined by private ownership. This is what Veblen calls business. Business is a system of power that extracts wealth from industry by means of sabotage. Production to serve human need, the basis of industry,

is useless to business unless it can be turned into a revenue stream. It does this by taking control of industry and its products and then restricting access to it. Pickler and Nietzsche put it, the most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not. Technically, anyone can get in someone else's car and drive away,

or give an order to sell all of Warren Buffett's shares in Berkshire Hathaway. The purpose of private ownership is wholly and only an institution of exclusion, and institutional exclusion is a matter of organized power. As we can see from the genocide on the plains, this power is no abstract force. Veblen tends to focus on the power of absentee owners to stop production, and for good reason. But business stands in the way of industry, in more immediate ways too. After all, the purpose of cooperative industry is to make goods, to improve our lives. And yet in between us and the proceeds

that industry creates to serve our needs, there is a cash register and a cop. Even the creators of a Louis Vuitton bag, or for that matter, a tomato, have no claim on it once business takes over, and business would rather destroy it than see it fall into their hands. The famous Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin was writing along similar lines to Veblen just a few years before. Veblen, it seems, had been exposed to anarchist ideas through its association with the industrial workers of the world. In the early 1900s, it was not altogether unusual for economists to move in radical circles. The great Italian economist Piero Serafa smuggled pens and papers to Antonio Gramsci while

Gramsci, the head of the Italian Communist Party, was a prisoner of the Italian fascist regime. Serafa would later extract the writings that Gramsci had written in prison, unleashing Gramsci's prison notebooks onto the world. But Veblen was unique even among these economists for the extent that he incorporated radical theories directly into his work, as you've seen with his adoption of sabotage as a way of thinking about capitalism. This led Veblen to call the end of the system of what he described as vested interests and absentee owners. Veblen's solution, however, which he described as a quote, Soviet of technicians that would manage production for all society, leaves a lot to be desired for.

So let us return to the source. Here's Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread. The mines, though they represent the labor of several generations and derive their sole value from the requirements of the industry of a nation and the density of the population. The mines also belong to the few, and these few restrict the output of coal or prevent it entirely, if they find more profitable investments for their capital. Machinery, too, has become the exclusive property of the few, and even when a machine incontestably represents an improvement added to the original rough

invention by three or four generations of workers it nonetheless belongs to a few owners and if the descendants of the very inventor who constructed the first machine for lace building a century ago were to present themselves today at a lace factory in Bale or Nottingham and demand their rights, they would be told, hands off, this machine is not yours, and they would be shot down if they attempted to take possession of it. Here we see the competition between two different kinds of rights. On the one hand, the right of industry, the right of creativity, the right of those who produce and care for each other to be able to determine where the proceeds of their labor go. From industry's point of view, this is to each

other, to those in need, and to society as a whole. On the other hand, there is the right of property, the right of men with guns to throw oysters into the ocean because it's not profitable for anyone to eat them. Capitalism has developed a myriad of iterations of precisely the same principle, and the world is now infested by them. Patent trolls haunt the already fraught waters of intellectual property, buying up patents for cheap, or on rare occasions creating something themselves for the sole purpose of preventing anyone else from using it making money by suing anyone who dares try large corporations of course do precisely the same thing see for example disney's war and the concept of anything anything at all falling into the public

domain this sabotage and on this all four of our interlocutors, Veblen, Kropotkin, Klierenitz, and Agri, as long as private ownership exists. Because sabotage is all private ownership really is. But it is not simply enough to answer corporate sabotage with our own sabotage. As Veblen pointed out, this is simply the ordinary state of affairs under capitalism. For Kropotkin, the answer was simple. This rich endowment, painfully won, builded, fashioned, or invented by our ancestors, must become common property, so that the collective interest of men may gain from it the greatest good for all. There must be expropriation, the well-being of all, the end, expropriation, the means. How precisely to go about doing such a thing has been the subject

of endless debate for nearly 200 years, and I am not arrogant enough to propose to solve the problem here. But a system where a company can prevent even the US government from attempting to produce ventilators by simply buying up the company that won the contract and refusing to fill the order to maintain the value of the ventilators it was already producing is a system based on nothing less than ensuring that people will die for a five percent rate of return if we are to have any hope of stopping the ravages that climate change promises for our future we cannot afford to be sabotaged at every step. 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, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. Danny Trails, and Step Into the Flames of Fright, an anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality,

cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.

The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking music, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my culture. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world

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