It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 26

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, 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 Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,

there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Oh, it could welcome here, the podcast that happens. Shit. All right. that happens. Shit. Alright, well, St. Andrew, I'm gonna pivot to you to pull us out of this tailspin I've locked us into. Hello, hello. What's the scene, everyone? Today I wanted to go on a bit of a personal meandering, I guess, on some of the ideas and concepts that are just kind of

floating in my head um surrounding sustainable city planning and city living honestly a lot of these ideas and stuff um kind of just crimped them from like all over the place and in some cases they're a bit less, I would say, viable than others. But I do find the work of, for example, lowtechmagazine.com and so on to be very inspiring in terms of our capabilities, what potential there is in obsolete technologies, what low-tech solutions exist for issues, and what we can do as people to just kind of make living in urban sprawl or suburban hell a little bit less hellish. in hell a little bit less hellish.

Yeah, that is definitely a topic close to my heart as well, as someone who lives in a city. I would like cities to be less hellish. Yeah. That seems like a joke. And I would like suburbs to not exist. Eternal war on the suburbs. We have to ally with rural America in order to protect the suburbs. We have to fight the war on the suburbs we have to ally with rural America

in order to protect the suburbs yes yeah I mean my crank proposal has always been reintroducing Macedons and just like just having Macedons just like walking through and destroying buildings because that's what the suburbs deserves

yeah Macedons isn't the actual animals yes yes I thought you meant buildings because that's what the suburbs deserves. Yeah. Macedons isn't the actual animals. Yes, yes. I thought you meant like the social media platform. No, no. No, I think we need to clone leopards so that they breed as quickly as rabbits and just let them loose.

Wasn't Dr. Doofenshmirtz raised by leopards? Sure, why not? Robert, do you know who Dr. Doofenshmirtz is? No. Okay. Let's just move on. No explanation. Down.

Okay. Now I feel better. Sorry. I think we are roughly in the same age bracket for television we watched. You both have a lot of Tremors movies to catch up on. I'm very familiar with The Good Doctor. Perry the Platypus Pilled. Yes, I am very platypilled, as they say.

Platypilled. Let's continue. Right. let's continue right so um there are a lot of aspects of my evil plan to make the entire tri-state area more sustainable but um i think i would want to start with something that tends to consume a lot of the energy in cities and that is like heating and cooling i mean for me living in a tropical country heating has never been a consideration yeah um i mean the coldest it gets is in like the i would say like 80 19 20 degrees celsius area wow um so and to me that is like chilly that's like layering up kind of thing because i can't

handle that kind of cold um which is kind of wild to me that i ever considered moving to canada i don't think i'll be able to handle it it does it does get it does get much colder i mean we when i was in canada we would have not not uncommonly have minus 40 Celsius a week. So, yeah. Yeah, I've never experienced minus degrees before. I don't even know if that's like real. Oh no, it is.

Oh, it's fine. It's not a big deal. You just put on an extra pair of socks, you're good to go. Okay, so when it hits negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit, Wait, what? You've experienced negative 40 degrees? It's not like Arctic temperatures. No, like negative 40 Fahrenheit is the temperature of the surface of Mars on a sunny day.

Well, actually, negative 40 Fahrenheit is the same as negative 40 Celsius. Oh, is it? Yeah. They actually converge at that point. Yeah. It's like, you just. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah.

It's just pain. Like it's not even cold anymore. Like you just, like your, your face just hurts. It's great. It's a good time. I'm going to call out my, my, my favorite meme again and have negative 40 Fahrenheit, negative 40 Celsius, Celsius clapping hands in the middle. Yeah.

Classic. Classic. Anyway, yes. Very cold. Honestly, I can't even conceive of that kind of temperature. I am an island boy, so that's how I operate. Got it. And as an island boy, I had to say that like heat is very, very uncomfortable.

Humid heat is even more uncomfortable. Dry heat is also extremely uncomfortable. Dry heat is also extremely uncomfortable. And when you have a hot day combined with like Saharan dust in the air and no clouds in the sky, it is truly, truly miserable. can't imagine um what life in a city would be like if um you know these sort of temperatures continue to climb as they are climbing um as we see you know global average temperatures rising by you know a half degree or a degree or two degrees celsius that's just ridiculous let alone three or four degrees celsius increase especially compounded with the fact that in a city there's this thing called the urban heat island effect so cities are 10 degrees celsius hotter than the surrounding countryside and the

reasons for that are numerous you know you have like vehicles emitting heat constantly you have air conditioners pumping heat into the air you have concrete and asphalt covering every surface just like absorbing and radiating the sun's rays and you have these urban canyons between tall buildings that prevent heat from escaping from and keep it at the sort of street level it's miserable right and the typical solutions the individual solutions the short-term solutions they just make the situation worse because i mean when you're feeling hot i mean i was just feeling hot just now and i turn on the ac right When you're feeling hot, you know, you turn on the AC or you put on a fan. But not so much a fan, but the AC continues and fuels this vicious cycle of heating the outdoors to cool the indoors, making external spaces even more uncomfortable.

So you end up with air conditioning use accounting for like one fifth of global energy electricity usage of building related global electricity usage and you end up with the thing that's supposed to be cooling us heating things even more because you know as developing countries you know they have access to more and more air conditioning especially and you know developing countries tend to be in the hotter sides of the world um you know the use of air conditioning just continues to skyrocket and um the international energy agency actually estimated that it would take the amount of energy needed to cool buildings will triple by 2050 which is equivalent to the current electricity demand in the u.s and germany combined so on top of all that you also have an issue of like heat and heat deaths right the deaths and injuries caused by heat i mean heat stroke is becoming

more and more of an issue in cities especially when you know temperatures reach above 25 degrees celsius people you know manual laborers people who work outside people who just have to move around a lot you know experience the symptom the symptoms of heat stroke whenever there's like this spike in temperature right and then even you know if you don't experience like a heat stroke heat is exhausting it is energy draining is utterly sapping and it requires a lot out of your body to keep you cool and prevent you from like overheating and surprisingly this overheating issue is not just like you know a tropical issue or like a hot country issue like places like moscow had like an estimated 11,000 people die due to heat wave in 2010.

And so with all these heat waves and stuff, we need to like figure out what to do with all these giant concrete buildings. I mean, I know for some people like eco-brutalism is, you know, wow, so cool. To me personally, and this is just my subjective opinion, I find it ugly and disgusting and I hate it. But, you know, to each their own, right? Brutalism discourse. I mean, what do you all think of Brutalism?

I think Yugoslavian Brutalism was cool. Every other kind of Brut brutalism is just like... My opinions on brutalism boil down to thinking the game Control is fun. I have stayed in a Yugoslavian brutalist architecture hotel, which was one of the weirdest nights of my life because it was clearly made. It was like one of these gigantic people's hotels that was meant to provide everyone with vacations.

So there's like 20,000 rooms, and we were like the only three people there so there was one person at the desk and it's just cavern of empty rooms yeah such this everything felt like a liminal space it was it was very odd it can be it can be very very uncanny it wasn't like bad it was like reasonably well constructed it was just like deeply strange as a place to spend the night i think that's what makes the game control so cool is that yeah it plays with those uncanny feelings on brutalism while still being like very cool like it's still it's still control is the game that um jacob geller made a video about right yes he made a he did make a video i think i watched that recently this is like the sort of oldest house yeah kind of thing yes right right right right

yeah yeah yeah i want to check out that game because i mean that's all right that's kind of like my issue with brutalism it feels like a boss level in a video game yes like you have to go through each level clear out all the minions and make it to the top and beat the boss it's kind of unsettling yes and then like eco-brutalism it's just like oh what if trees trees or moss yeah yeah and it's like okay cool but i mean like one of my many um occupations and I still maintain it seasonally. I was a power washer and I hate moss. And so to see moss all over buildings just really bothers me.

Like I just want to get, you know, my spray gun and just clear it all off. And especially in like this climate, moss is like a very significant issue. That makes sense. You know. Yeah. Yeah. One of, yeah, yeah, yeah. One of my pet peeves among many. So, I mean, there are many different ways we could combat the urban heat island effects

that don't involve eco-brutalism. And they can also help to facilitate, you know, creating more attractive spaces to live and to play you know um obviously the solution isn't to just like build always every building that has ever been built and make it more sustainable you know with vernacular materials and stuff though of course new buildings should be built with those principles in mind um but you know it's unpractical to or even sustainable to destroy all the buildings we've already built and rebuild them

you know the best thing we can do is try to mitigate and adapt with what we already have greenery and I know I was just roasting eco-brutalism for just slapping trees and everything but you know greenery is an important

part in that right because it causes evapotranspiration which is like where water evaporates from plants leaves and cools the temperature you know it also improves people's

psychological well-being um and they just they're nice to look at um they're nice to look at they keep things cool in fact they can help cause temperatures to drop by like two to three degrees celsius in the like the surrounding area i think people certainly misinterpret it but like this is one of the big things you can see with with racism in the U S where like, you can literally like, you can literally track racial divides in a lot of American cities by the, by the temperature,

because like people, places where not a lot of people live just don't have trees. And, you know, and this, this has like a, a, just this sort of like cascading series of,

of environmental and social effects which are a disaster and yeah environmental racism yeah

yeah it's really stark honestly if you look at the heat maps or some of these cities and you could literally see you know where poor black folks

live you know you can see the places with less trees the places next to factories with like toxic runoff and waste and that kind of thing it's just you know right there and it sucks which is why of course part of any sort of efforts to improve cities and efforts to improve cities and make things more sustainable would involve you know social justice and would involve responding to and addressing the compounding effects of like environmental racism

over the past several decades so you know and part of the issue again tying things back to environmental racism is that a lot of the climate change policies that you know ostensibly are meant to favor like high density urban smart growth you know like sustainable blocks and that kind of thing you know like sustainable blocks and that kind of thing they are not conceived or implemented in a way that involves the people being affected by them you know in fact a lot of these like sort of green um projects raise the cost of food energy water, water, transport, housing for people in the area. You know, they create these sorts of like gentrified neighborhoods, essentially, where the original inhabitants can no longer afford to live there. So if we want to develop like a sustainable city, a resilient city,

a sustainable or resilient neighborhood, it requires social justice it requires you know equity and you know like the involvement of all future that you know they will be experiencing because they're the ones being affected by it there are a lot of other ways as well to heat proof as it um reflective roofs and roads um can also help reduce the absorptive powers of um solar radiation by concrete and asphalt so in fact in some cities like la and in new york there's this white reflective coating that has been implemented in some 500,000 meters squared of roof space that saves an estimated 2,282 tons of CO2 per year from cooling emissions. I mean, all it takes really is just like that sort of white reflective coat and it saves dividends in the long run um nasa had done some research on this and it demonstrated the results demonstrated that a white roof could be 23 degrees celsius or 42 degrees fahrenheit cooler than a typical black roof um on a hot new york summer day um and in places where like yeah yeah yeah

i'm sorry i just kind of like glossed over but that is crazy that is absolutely absolutely wild and in cities where like we're like 10 of the land area is like asphalt. You can imagine how that sort of reflective sealant can impact the cooling or the heating of the area. Water, of course, is another important aspect of cooling cities. of course is another like important aspect of cooling cities um in andalus um which was like the muslim kingdom in geberian peninsula in the 14th century um they used to have these sort of like courtyards with pools and fountains that would stimulate water evaporation and cool the air and so like cities today can you know take some hints from that you know you have ponds and pools and fountains and misting systems and stuff that can sort of chill things out i mean we see being um implemented in china um where you have like for example um water misters at like bus stops which can chill the air and you know cool passengers as they wait

um and they found actually that adding water features and like cool coatings that adding water features and like cool coatings reduces the cooling requirements of an area by 29 to 43 percent and also lowers the overall average air temperature by 1.5 degrees celsius so it's like honestly wild how like these little things can have such a major impact on temperature speaking of like old methods of cooling um ancient methods of cooling there's this middle eastern shading device called the mashrabia um or i think it's mashrabia and it's basically an architectural element that is usually built by wooden lattice work and sometimes stained glass. And it's used to like catch and coolting out of a building um with sort of decorated by latticework with jars and basins of water placed within them to let the wind pass through and as the wind is passing through it's causing evaporative cooling then it chills out

the um interior and so these mashrabiasias, they've been used since the Middle Ages by the Coptic churches of Egypt and the art deco movement in Iraq and by the architecture in Baghdad as well. And so these sort of construction methods while they tend to be developed for you know individual homes or individual buildings um they can in fact be implemented um with even the aesthetics of islamic geometry to help to cool a building and reduce its overall CO2 emissions. So I've been talking about heating and cooling and stuff for a while now.

And speaking of, I should probably turn on my AC, turn off my AC rather. I think I heard either it was you, Andrew, or maybe it was Robert talking about the ceramic kind of cooling idea ceramic yeah i mean that that's the thing in like the um apart to the american southwest like new mexico there's a lot of like swamp coolers that are basically working right yeah swamp cool swamp coolers it only works in certain climates right like you wouldn't really i don't yeah because if it's if it, because if it's too humid, it's not going to work.

You're just going to have to get even more humid. Yeah. I think there's kind of a broader thing there architecturally, which is that like we have a lot of sort of like, like we've lost a lot of,

in the way we do architecture, we've lost a lot of in the way we do architecture, we've lost a lot of this sort of like we've lost a lot of sort of building techniques adapted to specific locations for natural architecture yeah, and that's something that has to be

reversed immediately because our current model of building houses out of oil is going to get us all killed oh really? what's the problem there? what's wrong with that? I mean on top of that right

it's not just vernacular architecture but vernacular clothing I mean it's I mean as again someone living in a tropical country I see it for myself like working people going to work wearing full long-sleeve dress shirts and long dress pants and formal shoes. It's honestly absurd. Sometimes they have the whole tie pulled up and everything.

It's entirely based on like european standards of professionalism and um it needs to be abolished abolish dress codes all right abolish like this whole idea that you know we have to dress this particular way um despite you know the temperature because it's more professional or whatever fuck professionalism honestly we at podcasting are in the vanguard of this but we need your help

to destroy professionalism once and for all yeah show up to work in your bathing suit yeah but yeah vernacular buildings as well Show up to work in your bathing suit. But yeah, like vernacular buildings as well. You know, obviously you had in Africa, in different parts of Africa, you'd have different structures that were particularly tailored. So, you know, if you were in a tropical rainforest environment,

you would have a building that's tailored to, you know, if you were in a tropical rainforest environment, you would have a building that's tailored to, you know, keeping mosquitoes out and maintaining a certain temperature within and maintaining comfort as well within. Or, you know, in colder regions, you would have certain construction that would keep heat within the building and prevent excessive discomfort. And there were also, of course, when it comes to cooler areas, you were also expected to keep yourself warm as well as keep your building warm. In fact, it was more so keeping yourself personally warm, so keeping yourself layered up even when you're indoors. And of course, that's kind of lost today. People are expected to just turn on the heater

and vibe for the months of winter, but it isn't sustainable. A lot of things we enjoy today aren't sustainable. It keeps coming back to that, but yeah. Speaking of things that we enjoy that are not at all sustainable how about cars yes get rid of cars please get rid of cars i mean cars are very convenient in terms of like if you want to get somewhere very specific um you know if there's a place you want to go i'm the one you need to know i'm a car i'm a car i'm a car

you know kind of thing thank you yes my little musical interlude there thank you for appreciating it i appreciate it but ultimately like they honestly aren't sustainable they honestly aren't something that we can maintain in the near or even far well potentially in the in the near but it's much the far future i mean people are already know the problems with gas cars really know why gas cars are bad but you know things are just things are just sort of pivoted towards electric cars and who electric cars let's get a bunch of electric cars but electric cars aren't better i mean the materials they require the energy they require quite frankly not sustainable in the long run and it just lengthens the amount of time that we spend dependent on cars for short and long distance

travel and especially how in the states we've like built our cities around the idea of a car which has expanded the urban terrain unnecessarily and if you look at like all the space taken up by like highways and overpasses and how much of just like urban space has taken up but just been built around the idea of the car it really kind of makes the whole idea of a city so much less useful it's really frustrating and I think it's also worth noting that cars are

so unbelievably dangerous yes that is true we're very much used to like having these like death machines driving around at all times and that that makes for like a very um cool like series of metal band song names or whatever but the death statistics aren't funny when it comes to cars no and like the average transportation time having cars has not actually decreased. Like the amount of time it takes to get from place to place based on like where you live in your city has not actually decreased because now everything is just spread further apart.

So 100 years ago, it would take, you know, like a 15 minute trek to get to like, you know, the market or something it can take oftentimes longer especially if you're driving in like rush hour traffic to get just just just like a couple of miles or even in some cases a decent jog could get you there faster um yeah just because of how we've just designed cities all around these rolling metal death cages um yeah it's not it's not great it's one of the reasons i don't currently have a car yeah and that's kind of that's something that's shocking to a lot of people when I tell them that really, I have no intention of ever buying a car, of ever owning a car. It's not something that I want. And I mean, I live relatively close to some of the major transport um arteries of the country and you know trinidad has like this unique ish um transportation system public transportation system so we have these

privately owned maxi taxis that um they're like vans um with seats in the back um and you know you could you just kind of jump in um depending on where they're going which route they're taking um and they're they're convenient enough for me and for my purposes so i just you know i go where i need to go um with them but they're also gas guzzling inefficient machines i mean they're better than you know all those people driving cars i mean as an island you know like i don't know why we're so obsessed with having more and more cars on the road um but at the end of the day they still aren't the best in terms of sustainability and in terms of viable, reliable, sustainable transport. We also have personal taxis as well, but they have the same problems as regular taxis.

And what's frustrating is that we used to have a train line that went along the entire east-west corridor of the country. And that's where most of the people in Trinidad live, along the east-west corridor of the country. And that's where most of the people in Trinidad live, along the east-west corridor. But that was destroyed in the 1960s, I think, to make way for highways and a priority bus route. So instead of having a nice, convenient, cute little train that we could take to go from place to place,

we have to rely on buses and maxis and taxis and cars yeah that is quite that's not cool that is quite it's not good quite grim because we need to reconfigure seriously I would love for them to bring back

trains to be able to take a train to not have to rely on I mean We need to reconfigure. Seriously, I would love for them to bring back trains. To be able to take a train. To not have to rely on... I mean... Government bureaucracy makes all things unreliable, but I think a train would have been slightly more reliable

than a bus. Very much on the pro-train. On the pro-train train, I've had fewer moments more happy than riding the portland max line and streetcar in a uh no face costume it's very it's it's very fun i think also like another thing about about cars right this is just this is just just on a very pure political level like cars are the thing that allow suburbs to exist and the existence of suburbs has produced just generation upon generation of like frothing reactionaries who are the source of like enormous percentages of

the world's problems and so if you get rid of those places, you produce less of them. Yeah. Which is just a political benefit for anyone who wants to not die. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, we don't think about it because there are already so many things to think about. pondered the death toll of cars and really brought it to the forefront and really made it less of a necessity I think more and more people would be open to the idea of rejecting cars

to keeping them as at most benign novelty that maybe one or two exists in an entire community for use

if needs be but otherwise I don't see how each and every person in the world owning their own car

is at all the best way to go also cars are kind of ugly to me yeah we really didn't design them to look cool it's just it's I mean there's some cars that look kind of cool

like some of the more classic ones but and that's part of the issue right they're getting uglier to me and they're also getting larger you know like suvs and stuff people are like yeah they're raising their grills more and more so like you're basically a pedestrian killing machine we've effectively undone most of the benefits of making cars safer for passengers by making them much more dangerous for pedestrians which is entirely a marketing choice like if you like the fucking trucks they were making 25 years ago are just as useful um and in a lot of cases more useful for like practical farm work for hauling and whatnot than the trucks they're making today they haven't meaningfully

gotten better they've just gotten a lot larger for no real reason other than it makes people feel like big men well and you get these fun you get these fun you can you can look at their marketing people like explicitly talking about how like yeah like they like basically explicitly playing into the the fantasy of running over protesters. It's great. Get rid of cars and you won't have to deal with that. But Chris, how is that sustainable or

viable? Good question. Introducing Superblocks. Ooh. Yes. Superblocks are basically neighborhoods of nine blocks, so I don't think they have to be.

I think the philosophy and ideas behind Superblocks could be implemented to suit different cities with different histories and different layouts. Especially with localized streetcars within each superblock-like system. Exactly.

Just to clarify, the idea, superblocks are basically neighborhoods of nine blocks where traffic is restricted to the roads on the outside of the block which means that the interior of these super blocks are entirely walkable that combined with the idea of a super block being um mixed use means that people are mostly able to access their basic necessities within their city block are able to like spend

more time have more open space to spend more time to meet with people to talk to do activities to you know have some relief from noise pollution and air pollution from vehicles and to really like connect people with the space they're living in and make the space they're living in more livable i mean i don't live smack dab in the middle of like urban urban town but i could imagine for people living in like new york or whatever you can't exactly step out of your apartment and play in the road on a typical day if you have kids or whatever you know they can't exactly just go run outside um you will die exactly so fast exactly exactly i mean people complain about like oh kids these days don't go outside as much but

i mean look at outside yeah you know look at what look at what has been created um and reflect on that i mean part of the issue is um the way social media algorithms are designed to suck people into like cycles of addiction but that's a whole nother topic right um i think a lot of people more people would be willing to would be able to pull themselves out of that sort of harmful algorithmic hell. If there was an outside to pull themselves out to, you know, but honestly,

cities, especially a notorious for like not having places you can be where you don't have to spend money. And that sucks. So I think super blocks being places where, you know, libraries and places people can eat. Makerspaces, community kitchens. It does seem to be missing or ignoring what we're going to lose with super blocks, which is how am I going to roll down the street smoking endo, sipping on gin and juice if I'm not allowed to drive within my block? Wow.

I think we can. Where am I going to do that? I think you could just get a bike. Booze cruising on the bicycle. Have you tried smoking endo, sipping on gin and juice while riding a bicycle it's it's impossible get a cup holder anything is possible this is snoop dog erasure no but the the idea of having a like community gardens community like kitchens like makerspaces libraries all these within within this super black framework like green spaces

it does make actual urban city living seem attractive and not like you're just living in nested concrete boxes yeah I mean people like living in cities because that's where everything is happening right you want people to take part in the things

that are happening but the place is unlivable. Yeah. You have the table I will continue to complain about until the end of time, which is the table in Chicago Chinatown that threatens to arrest you for sitting at it. Like it's. Yeah. Yeah. Like the hostility of, I mean, this goes back to like racism because of course everyone does, everything does. But you know know a lot

of these loitering laws and stuff were literally designed to target black people and to target you know poor people um like vagrancy laws and that sort of thing just hostile people's existence that gets into like hostile architecture and that sort of thing but i think with these super blocks you know we open up our spaces to make them welcoming to human existence spaces that are not built around cars built around commutes built around work and this obviously is a transformation that requires more than just you know vote for so-and-so and make the city green kind of thing. You need something more substantial than that.

You know, within these super blocks as well, you're able to take stock of how your block or whatever, you have a better mental sense of um community and able to take a better sense of even things like how your block can communally sustain themselves and you know reduce waste and all these different things. This in conjunction with struggle against capitalism in the state. But, you know, that is implied. This is, you know, this is the show.

This is what could happen here. I don't know if you expect in like electoralism, but it's not really what we do around here. I don't mean the benefits to these sort of like super blocks, you know, these 15 minute zones where people can walk within 15 minutes to get the essentials. The benefits are innumerable, you know, better air quality, less noise, healthy lifestyle, mental health boost. But the issue is without a combination of, you know, these projects and these activities with anti-capitalism and anti-statism it tends to lend itself towards gentrification and we've seen that in

Spain which is where some of these superblocks have been implemented they've created these locations that are obviously more desirable because who doesn't want to live in a super block where you know you actually have a sense of community because we're all desperate for that and at least an increase in property demand higher prices higher rent it basically creates these pockets of unaffordable neighborhoods yeah displacing local residents so

you have to get into the fight against gentrification in order to make this idea viable the last thing that I want to get into really is as Gar mentioned community gardens I want to talk about urban farming because that is

crucial I mean part of what makes cities cities in a lot of cases is the fact that they import all their food right they have the urban rural divide that you know delineates the two areas um but considering the transportation costs the the energy costs, all those things that compound to sustain a city's food needs. We have to look to ways that we can sustain cities and sustain neighborhoods within cities within themselves. neighborhoods within cities um within themselves before i continue i just want to point out that the future of urban farming is not in vertical

farms um they look very cool you know like those tall kind of like pillars of like lettuce or whatever growing out of things but the land that they save is usually cancelled out by the land they need to produce the energy to power them like they're very energy intensive um spaces so until that issue is resolved and i don't know if it will be considering you know how the energy requirements are sort of built into the vertical the concentration of energy requirements built into the vertical farming design um we have to look to more practical methods land ownership tends to be a major hurdle hurdle when it comes to organizing community gardens and maintaining community gardens.

I mean, like folks like Black Futures Farm, Oakland Avenue Urban Farm and the Victory Garden Initiative, they've been working to like provide fresh produce to those in need, especially in urban food deserts. But in a lot of these projects, they're going good for some years and then the city suddenly spins around it's like we need this land for development so they just snatch it up and you know those years of efforts just basically go down the drain um community land trusts have been put forward as a potential solution to that issue. But like a lot of these things, I mean, it's a good band-aid, I would say, but it's not necessarily marking the end of capitalism. another issue that there is with the whole urban farming thing is that um the culture that develops around them while they you know provide education and community and connection for people within them and that is extremely valuable i think some organizers

fall into this habit of treating of creating this sort of like shared delusion around community gardens you know claiming to be sort of feeding the people quote-unquote and what really brought this to my attention was um inhabit territories newsletter they had an article on it last year, I think, on urban community gardens. And it was written by Gabriel Aysin, the co-founder of At Planta, which I find to be a very, very creative name. Basically asked the question, are we really feeding ourselves? the question are we really feeding ourselves i mean these local food initiatives they do produce food that people eat but it can be a bit harmful to be overly optimistic about our food autonomy at this stage especially considering how reliant we still are on big agriculture you know like yes we are producing you know organic nutritionally

dense crops and stuff and that's great that's helping people but you know oftentimes it usually just means that you know the people might be getting participants might be getting like a salad or you you know, a couple of tomatoes. It's not necessary that they're cutting down their grocery bill in a sustainable, long-term way. Because I mean, if you've tried gardening, you know that like when you're working with a limited space, you know,

you grow your first set of tomatoes. The tomatoes are cool, but they don't last forever, you know, and you have to wait until the next harvest to get more tomatoes or whatever the case may be. Same for like lettuce or whatever. It's kind of rough, you know? It doesn't, it helps for like a meal or maybe two, depending on like your living situation. But it doesn't meaningfully cut into our reliance on groceries and food imports. Yeah, it definitely takes a bit to get to that point.

You have to do it with a combination of food preservation and canning and jarring and a whole bunch of other stuff to actually make that a worthwhile endeavor. As opposed to just making like, great, I spent three months making these tomatoes. Now they're ready for one meal and then they're all gone. With like one salt. Yeah. Yeah. You do have to really kind of figure out how to grow enough to keep enough ready to be harvested for jarring and canning for future use. And make sure like you're, you know, harvesting them when they are ready so that you can, you know, you don't lose stuff and that you have like, you know, an ongoing, ongoing process of like preserving the food that you do grow for later as well. So you can definitely take a lot, a lot more like mental effort and planning than just, you know, planting it and then, you know, using it and cooking it when and cooking it when it's all ready.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of energy and self is put into growing things like greens and roots and fruiting vegetables. And they're healthy. They have the vitamins and micronutrients, but people still need meat, dairy, eggs. Protein, yeah. Heavy, high calorie dense stuff, you know, like potatoes and other starches, like a really holy balofa, wheats and that kind of thing.

And that just isn't being grown right now. You know, wheat and rice and soy and nuts and corn and sugar, these staples and stuff don't tend to be produced by these community gardens and by these, you by these garden plots. Not many

legume patches at your local community garden. Yeah. I'm in the process of growing some pigeon peas right now. They are taking a very long while and what i realize is that um i mean i just planted them so i'm being a bit impatient but what i realize is that i when they do grow out and i've seen you know some mature pigeon pea trees and stuff so i know

how big they tend to grow. By the time harvest rolls around, you get all those different pods, and you put in the work, you pick all the pods, and you pry open the pods, and you put in some more alliteration into the sentence, and you get those peas out. Once those peas are out of the pod pod and you put them in a pot, they are not potent enough to hold you over for more than one meal.

You know, like you pick like a tree's worth of peas in a pod and, you know, that's like sometimes like half of a meal and really honestly respect to the people who are producing all of our food right now because i can't imagine having to be shelling peas all the time it's kind of ridiculous i mean it can be fun but i can't imagine doing it all day i mean work is work right it's gonna's going to, yeah. Work is health. We know this. But yeah, so yeah, I mean, community gardens, they're good. You know, they have, you know, education.

They build community. They provide outdoor activity and stuff. But, you know, I think what community gardens, urban gardens and stuff need to do is find ways to, and this isn't to disparage the work that's being done you know like massive support i'm doing that myself kind of thing but we've got to like as the article argues we can't get caught up in the fluffing up of the reality for marketing purposes you know we need to look for ways that we can actually feed ourselves. That means getting into caloric foods.

That means, you know, like dried beans, potatoes, fruit trees, that kind of thing. Grains, nuts, all that jazz. And also connecting with farms outside of the city, you know, local farms outside of the immediate urban landscape seeing what cooperatives can be developed that can work aid each other mutually to build a more potent capacity for food autonomy. So, I mean, get in touch with the soil, you know, get the sun in your face.

But also think about what more we can do to sort of take this to the next level. take this to the next level. And yeah, that is what I believe could in fact happen here. This is happen here good. Yeah, it's nice to have a positive one of these.

Yeah. We should do that more often. If only we had the power. if only we had the power to control what well come back tomorrow when we'll be talking about another bad thing and then abandoning you to deal with your thoughts about it

wow we try we do try this is us trying well this is us having St. Andrew try you're welcome we try we try we do we do try this is us trying well this is us having saint andrew try you're welcome thank you thank you uh very much this is a topic i've wanted to discuss for a long time in terms of yeah because we get a lot of people talking about like yeah how you know and whatever like post-collapse fantasy that you can imagine where you're able to kind of reconfigure society.

How would you plan urban living? And you're like, well, yeah, there's a lot of actually really cool ideas for keeping people close together can be a very ecological idea if you do it certain ways. It's just a lot of the ways we've defaulted to over the past, like, really 300 years

has made it not that with the invention of the car really really screwing us over um so yeah thank you so much for uh talking about urban living and super super blocks and all this kind of stuff um where can uh where can people find more of your work in writing on the interwebs you can find me on YouTube at St. Andrewism and you can find me on Twitter which hopefully

when you hear this I am still not on at underscore St. Drew fantastic St. Andrew just put together a really great episode about anti-work stuff and the way that uh debacle has has has happened and uh what we can learn from it and that kind of thing um and why you should still actually care about anti-work um and yeah so would definitely recommend the anti-work video for recent

stuff let's see if you want to feed your brain into the addiction driven social media algorithm you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolZoneMedia and yeah let's

go think about makerspaces and community gardens that seems like a good a good way to dedicate your thought time and roll down the street smoking endo sipping that gin and juice while you still can on a bike on a bike before the bike because i'm as i am personally bestowing my moral judgment upon you Okay. Before the fascist anarchists take away your F-150s, yeah. Look, if we can democratize military-grade weaponry

the way the Ukrainians have, we can form neighborhoods that cannot be forced to live in the traffic, the auto-industrial complex. We could also really reduce frivolous air travel. What a fantasy. Otherwise, we'll end up in a Mad Max world.

I mean, who wants that, right? Well, everyone's in the wild. Aspects of it. Aspects of it. Yeah. All right. See you later, everybody. Bye.

Peace. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Podcast. Thank you.

That is, it is true it's true actually it could happen here a podcast you're listening to a podcast oh that's broadly accurate that is more or less the truth we have dragged Robert out of bed

before the crack of dawn at 11 42 a.m um and we're gonna talk about actually something very fun i'm i've been i've been wanting to talk about this for a long time because this is one of actually one of my favorite things okay um yeah yeah so i'm gonna i'm gonna tell a bit of a bit of a little story regarding one of my actual all-time favorite events and topics. So back in like 2013, there was this cheesy little online university science show made by the Rochester Institute of Technology called Can You Imagine? The idea was to highlight some of the cool and weird things at the university, in part to promote the Imagine RIT

Festival, which was like the school's annual like innovation and creativity festival thing that they put on. So yeah, today I want to talk specifically about episode three of the web series, because the contents of which overlap with some of my like artistic interests, and like just my love of illusions and paradox. And it'll kind of tie into some topics we other, we always discuss in the show. So yeah, episode three, one, probably the most interesting episode. Episode three opens with the hosts, Kevin and Steph as they like stand awkwardly in a gloriously dated you like

university film set. I like it. It's only 20 only 20 it's only 2013 but it was like obviously like made in the 90s like like like the sets like it's all it's all very dated what what specifically are you referring to oh like they're like they're just like weird like like weird like like dated science stuff on the walls all the hosts are wearing like dorky orange t-shirts like over top of their regular clothes. Really old computers? Do they have like those? Yeah, it's all that kind of stuff. I love it.

Dorky orange t-shirts with the letters RIT for Rorschach Sister Institute of Technology. Of course, because everything in this online video series is perfect. Kevin is wearing his shirt over top of like a button down. It's great. The first 50 seconds of the video are taken up with like plugging the upcoming RIT Imagine Festival with a co-host, Steph, beautifully stumbling over her lines when she says the event's catchphrase.

It's where the left brain and the right brain collide. And it's great. It's perfect. So after all the plugs and the vamping, the hosts get down to the fun engineering feat that they'll be showing us today, which is a neat little architectural experiment, a part of the RIT campus called the Assyrian stairwell. Of course, named after the impossible staircases depicted in Dutch artist MC Escher's artwork. So the video cuts from the little soundstage they're filming in to this boring, white, seemingly typical stairwell. Our host, Kevin, ascending a flight of the gray concrete stairs, explains that located in Building 7 of the campus, the stairwell was designed by Filipino architect Rafael Nelson Avogando and was one of the first structures put up when RIT moved their campus

from downtown Rochester to the more suburban Henrietta. When he's reaching the top of the stairs, he turns the corner and then suddenly seems to appear at the bottom of the lower flight of stairs leading up to the landing that he just left from, all while continuing to talk about the architect behind this like kind of weird, impossible feat. So as Kevin walks back up to camera, he says that the stairwell was built in 1968 and it's been wowing RIT students ever since. It's it is very cool. It's like it's like like, okay, you get the little, like, you get the little, like, architectural trick that they're doing.

But it is still pretty fun to see. Before episode three of Can You Imagine aired, you could already find a few articles on the school's website about the Asherian stairwell, along with some, like, forum posts debating how the architecture in the stairwell works to like achieve the effect. Also floating around on YouTube was like a random

segment of what looked like a PBS style late 90s documentary about the physics and architecture of the school and specifically the stairwell that interviewed some like professors and some like architects and like of the, and some physicists kind of discussing what, like how to like bring paradox into the physical world. Yeah. But, but, but around the time that can you imagine episode aired the now like infamous RT stairwell was mostly unknown. So it was like, even despite it being very interesting,

no one really knew about it until this episode of this little web series aired. very interesting. No one really knew about it until this episode of this little web series aired. The little web episode dedicates around half its time to interviewing students and random people at the university about if they even know about the Star Wars existence. And if they do, what experiences they have with messing around with the looping architecture. Because, yeah, you can play a lot of games with this type of design. So the rest of the short video

like tries to demonstrate the disorienting ascent down and descent back up via the camera in various ways. Like, you know, like human chains or holding hands around the weird, like moobius loop type staircase and like passing objects back and forth in a circle while inside and around the enclosed stairwell um there's one where kevin walks around with a cup to show that the stairs aren't like clearly like heavily slanted like the water stays pretty pretty level as he walks all

the way through and we like we follow with him the entire time um so yeah like the overall like nerdy and lo-fi style of the university video matched with like the insane feat of architectural illusion. It's a really fun mix. Like it's like, it's like, it's, it's, it is very like surreal, but not totally on purpose. Cause it's just all of these like regular college students showing this like really cool architecture by this really good architect. And you're like, oh yeah, they're just like so chill about it.

It is, it is, it is about it. It is pretty fun. It's pretty fun. After the third episode of the Imagine RIT video was posted, finally, the mind-boggling looping staircase of Building 7 of RIT started to gain a lot of confused appreciation. And the Dorky University Science Show went viral.

People started traveling from out of state, even other countries, to see the Assyrian stairwell themselves and film videos on social media as they walked through it. There's this one video of people traveling from a different country, and they're harassing the school staff to try to tell them where it is.

And they're like, oh my God, you're try to like tell them where it is and they're like oh my god you're still doing this it was like because like this film was this video was like like years old but it still happens people still travel there to to specifically see it um there is like tense online discussion and debate on how the filipino architect rafael avogando was able to achieve the effect and what kind of other bizarre architectural experiments he may have worked on because you can find his facebook page and you can find some stuff about him but he has not really because like this this stairwell was built in the late 60s but you have you so even though he has an online presence he's like he's like he's not like active so it's unclear like what else he's actually been doing um but i would i would i would love to learn more

about this architect and what else he's done because this it's it is it is really rad to have these very like small condensed but like high effort type like type builds and like the the existence of the whole thing poses some really interesting questions around how extremely clever paradoxical design can push the boundary of how we make assumptions about spatial physics and how we visually and physically demonstrate things that we usually can only depict in two dimensions, right? Like you can easily depict the Assyrian stairwell in two dimensions, but when you're scaling that up to three dimensions, it's obviously more work. Like

that is part of the paradox. Plus, you know, it also demonstrates the importance of art and how ideas once thought impossible or merely optical illusions can actually, with enough dedicated effort, break into our real reality. If a brilliant architect can manage to build this physically and logically impossible structure, what other types of things can we actually do as possible? The video now has like over a million views on its original upload, and videos about the RIT stairwell have raked up as many as 25 million views. Wow. Yeah.

It's pretty cool. Yeah. You know what else demonstrates the looping nature of time? Having to listen to all these ads that we do. Pew! Pew, pew. We are back. I've rounded the corner, and we are back where we came from because of the fun paradox of architecture.

The one other thing I should mention before we continue on this episode is that the entire thing is fake. It's false. No way. Not this time. We created it. Not this time. No, not this time. It's totally made up. Because of course, it's a staircase that breaks the basic rules of movement and physics. Kevin walks up the stairs and teleports to the lower stairwell. Believe them.

That's not an architectural illusion. It's called good video editing and Adobe After Effects. That's not an architectural illusion. It's called good video editing and Adobe After Effects. It's not like, no, you're really going to believe a video on the internet and some well-placed falsified internet posts over the very basic rules that govern our universe? But like, oh boy, did it fool millions of people. And if I played my cards right, I hope most of our listeners

until the last few seconds. So the whole thing was a student film and art project around building a modern myth. It sure is interesting how good storytelling can overrule obvious logical processes. The tale of the Asherian stairwell is one of my favorite case studies in how disinformation spreads and is believed while all in defiance of the basic rules of reality. Because it's not a matter of what facts are interesting than it being someone's weird and disinformation art project.

Fair. So, yeah, I want to say, like, what were you guys thinking as I was explaining the Assyrian stairwell? Like, where did you see this going? Okay, so I had in the back of my head. Okay, we should we should mention this uh garrison has been hyping up this episode for like i don't even a pretty significant amount of time has told us nothing so we just show up yeah and there's a staircase and i'm like what what and i was like my my brain my brain started going because he's in 1968 and i was like

my like my counterinsurgency brain flicked on and i was like wait a second hold on is this like some kind of like uh weird like we've redesigned the college campuses so they stop uh people stop taking the dean hostage a thing that used to happen constantly and would all my favorite part about this would happen constantly and you'd get new york times articles calling it non-violent great yeah so yeah it was a that was a i was yeah i spent more mental energy that i probably should have trying to figure out how it would work and i was like i don't know maybe they just made it like if they just made it occult razor it's obviously yeah i mean i was i was in the like i was in the like okay so they built the staircase they built another stack the viewers

cannot see no it's a regular staircase it doesn't tell us and it's not it was like it was like but you you can find videos of people traveling to the school to see if it's real. And they try it and they're so disappointed. They're like, oh, yeah, it's it's nope. It's just stairs. It doesn't. Yeah, it's disappointing in a lot of ways because it's not even like a thing where like there's like another back staircase that you walk down. Then you go back up it again.

No, it's just nothing. It's just stairs. I was hoping there was like some actual clever thing. No, no, it's, it's not real. It's just the brave would you hit me if I danced. It was that meme where all the math doesn't add up and the person is like, what is happening? I was like, all right, Garrison, you got us here. You made Robert get up before noon.

What is happening? get up before noon what is happening well the reason the real reason i got up before i got robert up before noon is because i actually um have uh scheduled an interview with the creator of the asherian stairwell the actual one via like the online art project and building a modern myth idea um which we are now going to segue into. So yeah, what follows is us talking with the creator of the Assyrian stairwell project. Hello, we are back from our probably very, very brief break. And with me, along with Robert and Chris and Sophie, is Michael, the creator of the Assyrian Stairwell Project and the Building the Modern Myth Project. Hello. Greetings.

Hi. Greetings. Thank you so much for joining us to talk about one of my favorite things, actually, which is your little 2013 project. Yeah, I've been a fan of this for a long time and found it to be really compelling and interesting. And so I just walked through, Robert and Chris and Sophie, what it was, but from the perspective of it being true. For like a good 15 minutes, was i was i was going was going through talking about it as if it were completely real um i'm curious to hear how you did that

it was it was slightly baffling because again we were told nothing and then what we got is garrison is talking about a youtube video about an architecture thing and i was like what yeah and then and then then talking about hey oh yeah and i guess one more thing is that it's actually fake um and it's part of this whole this whole thing so yeah i would i would love to talk to you about both like how how you like logistically like made the project but also like the underlying your underlying thoughts that like inspired you to do it in the first place and then like retrospected now almost like 10 years later like how do you view the project as like happening you know right before like the peak of online disinformation um around like 2016 right so but first of all i i just think we should probably start start at the beginning like what was your inspirations for this type of like um online like very because

it seems it seems built to go viral in a lot of ways yes exactly so this was around 2011 i guess was when i first got the idea it was for my master's thesis, my MFA for film at Rochester, RIT. And the idea actually began from this like deep anxiety about how to discern fact from fiction. At the time, like I came into film school school like really into like realism in films like romania new wave michael haneke dardan brothers like these are filmmakers who are like they're sort of like the modern day version of italian neo-realism and they're trying to like depict like these um reality as it is i wanted to like learn how to make those types of films um so over like with each year that's what i tried to get better at and the more i tried to do that um well like a

number of things were happening around that time right in class they showed us these mockumentaries called no lies which was made in 1973 by this guy called mitchell black it actually won a student oscar at the time and uh delusions in modern primitivism 2001 by this guy named daniel laughlin um and these like i was like floored because i thought they were real. Like real documentaries. And. And. It bothered me. Like our teacher told us afterwards. That these were actually scripted works of fiction. With like really really good actors.

And it. Like I went into kind of like existential crisis mode. Afterwards. Like how do I even discern. What's true from what's not. If I got fooled by these things. Especially like that's like my concentration. That's what I've been studying for years.

And even I was not even able to tell that they were fake. Right. Yeah, there was that going on. And then there was like smartphones were becoming a thing. Like I just looked it up. Smartphones didn't start out selling flip phones till 2013. smartphones didn't start out selling flip phones till 2013. So around this time, it was becoming a thing where everyone would have the internet in their pocket.

So I guess there was that anxiety going on. Yeah, absolutely. I'm trying to think about how we're starting to function. I remember when I proposed my thesis to the thesis committee, I remember when I proposed my thesis to the thesis committee, one of the things that I was telling them was, I have this worry about how reliant we are on the internet to determine what's true and what's not. And this is like, my professors found my concerns really abstract and theoretical. Like, why do you even care? Because this was 2011, right? theoretical like why do you even care because this was 2011 right like why do you care about fact and fiction it wasn't like fake news that wasn't even a term yeah it wasn't it didn't become part of the everyday lexicon like you said until 2016 when trump started throwing that term around yeah and and suddenly we hear about it every day

um so there was that going on trayvon martin was a thing and for the first time like nationally you could see like disinformation like on you know just like exaggerated versions of different different accounts from like polarizing sides yeah all that was going on and so i i i wanted to it was it was like this film project was about um trying to take something that was uh are you familiar with with the difference between like a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge yeah okay so, so like, you know, for, for anyone who might be listening that doesn't really know the exact difference, a priori knowledge is the type of knowledge that you can have without

needing to make observations or conduct experiments or look at surveys or do any research of any, any kind is a sort of knowledge you can know just by reasoning it out, but just by sitting in a room by yourself in the dark you could figure things out this is the sort this is a priori knowledge um so for an example of that is like knowing that all bachelors are unmarried right or all triangles have three sides that's a priori knowledge an example of a posteriori knowledge um is something that you find out through observation or using one or more of your five senses right like joe biden is the

president of the united states um the masses of mars is 6.4171 times 10 to the 23rd kilograms you actually have to go out into the world and conduct surveys or do research. So that's a posterior knowledge. So the idea was to take something that was a priori false, something that could be disproven by reason alone. You wouldn't need to do any research in order to to know that it was false you'd simply have to reflect on it and um think about it uh so we could have picked anything right we could have we could have said made up like a fake news report that leaves mathematicians at mit having invented like a square with five sides, something like that.

You know, I remember their weekend update and SNL had this sketch. I think it was like, forget who it was. It might have been Kevin Nealon or something like that. The report was like scientists and mathematicians have discovered a new number. The number exists between five and six and they're calling it the number spleen you know something like that which is like just impossible yeah so um so come up with something that could be disproven by reason alone and at the same time surround it with this wealth of online information yeah um supporting its veracity so like you know it was kind of a social experiment so i was like have we are we so far beyond rational thinking that even something that can be

disproven a priori people would believe and it was like we didn't really know the answer to that but we were going to commit to creating this thing as though it was real and but which was like logically impossible so in a way it anticipated the age of like this information absolutely um and it was just yeah the thing i kind of alluded to in my little scripted portion is like yeah it wasn't just the youtube video there was also this extra online content that was created um some of which fake articles right yeah yeah yeah it's like there was also this extra online content that was created um some of which articles right yeah yeah yeah so like there was you could find like articles forum posts all this kind of stuff like like like if yeah like so if you could look into it more and find these other things but it still contradicts the basic logical processes that we can use to discern what is real what is not um in terms of like yeah in terms of like believing in a five-sided square like no that's not what that that's not how like physics and like spatial like spatial dimensions work um right

so yeah and in terms of all the extra material you filmed for it there was like there was like i think i read around like nine hours of documentary footage was also well it was a lot like a lot of footage but it was only made into like probably a 30 minute thing um we got our friends like at the very very beginning we got our friends to play along with it like so whenever you see posts about this just comment like it's real like yeah i was there it was really great and um eventually people would actually start visiting the stairwell from all over. Like from Canada, they'd cross the border to get there because it's in upstate New York, right?

And I actually ran into a couple from India who happened to be visiting New York. And they were like, since we're here, we'd like to see the stairwell, that sort of thing. Oh, no. I know. I felt really bad for a lot of the visitors so we actually had to come up with souvenirs so that they wouldn't leave empty-handed right so we made fake we made postcards like saying i've been to the asheran stairwell stuff like that programs that is so good and um what happened and the way we explained it so a lot of people were really mad, actually, as you can imagine when they got there.

But after we would explain what we were doing to them with the project, a lot of them actually started playing along and thought it was really cool. And they went home with their souvenirs and told their friends that they just saw this amazing thing. So it kind of built that way for a little bit. It's like telling kids that santa isn't real um exactly and then some of them will be like play along with like okay cool this means i can play along with the myth to help keep other kids happy and some of them will be like what oh no my entire reality is broken how can this happen right and when you find out it's your turn to like pass it on. Exactly. See that. So a lot of that was going on.

Like Shaq, the basketball player, posted about it at some point. Joe Rogan talked about it on his podcast. Oh, my God. It got kind of crazy. Wait, did Joe Rogan know it wasn't real? It's funny. You should see the clip of him doing it because he was like it was him. And who's the other guy, Bert Kreischer or something? Anyway, him doing it because he was like it was him and who's the other guy burt kreischer or something anyway they were arguing about whether or not

it was real the other guy was like no it's real it's so real joe rogan was like all all you guys are fucking idiots you're all idiots let's google it right now they google it and they look up an article and joe joe rogan's like okay yeah all right it's still fucking stupid the guy who built it is fucking you know that is so good i you have you have no idea how happy you have made me because i in my in my research but like i i have like read your thesis i've read all the i've read lots of lots of articles about this i did not come across the joe rogan clip but i would have loved to see that right right um it's like way back right it's like 10 years ago and it's like a lot of stuff to dig through and i found

it though again um so i like to kind of go into like the logistics of like actually doing this in terms of like creating all the fake like web content but also like you know dreaming up this like family-friendly science show that's made by rit and like how like you know dreaming up this like family friendly science show that's made by rit and like how like you know the thing between like naturalism and realism and making it like playing not trying to like replicate reality but playing it as if it were reality and how those are two different things um yeah we what we wanted to make it as real as possible and like that's what i was i'd been studying anyway but in like a dramatic context like making narrative films um and the idea was to um there's this event at

rit every year which gets a lot of people like 30 000 people a year go to the campus and look at like um these uh whatever the students are working on it's kind of like a mini like festival type thing well not mini it's pretty big so we just we wanted to make a video for that event um as though we were promoting the event hey come see the asharians there well when you get here at rit um and you know you normally for these like for these for these events if you have a booth or something you'll see reservations and you know you normally for these like for these for these events if you have a booth or something you'll see reservations and you'll see like four people reserved 15 people like we were like started getting nervous and we found out we got a sense that this was gonna be big because like

when i looked at like the reservations for like our non-existent stairwell there were like 1 000 plus visitors waiting to visit it um yeah i still remember like going to campus that day of the festival saturday and like my friend ira like comes up to me he's like mike people want to kill you like come get over here i was like trying to not show my face but anyway yeah that's what so what the way like a lot of the legs of the project was just like word of mouth i guess and we actually ran out of money um we didn't get to do like the web stuff on the scale that we wanted to but it turned out that we didn't even have to in fact like within a few days or maybe a week or something after the original video came out i posted a video explaining that it's a myth like i posted it and i was like all right that was a

fun ride now it's gonna be over because here's a video of me explaining everything on the same email channel yeah right and people still didn't believe it people were saying that my my video explaining was fake that was a conspiracy like people were you know like they're so invested inside the inside the actual myth of it yeah because it is right it is so much for a lot of people they've thought that is more compelling than the idea that is this like you know project around what is real what's not they just got so invested in the reality of it that they'll explain away every other explanation right right um exactly like my i had a teacher at rutgers where i did my undergrad tim odlin he used to say that you know there's two types

of thinking there's reasoning and there's rationalizing. Reasoning is when when you start from a place of ignorance and you look at the best evidence and the best arguments you can find and follow that through to the, you know, the rational conclusion. Rationalizing is when you start from what you want to believe and working backwards and looking for, you know, right. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Looking for the arguments that are already support what you're saying. There,

there was a lot of, a lot of rationalizing going on. I guess people wanted to believe it. Yeah. For, for the, how much, how many people in this,

because I assume for all of like the filming, like, like everyone was all all in on it but there's a whole bunch of great stuff around all of the men on the street segments are perfectly done in terms of people just acting like regular university students talking about

the stairwell and how they've got lost and they're looping around in a circle and all the segments with you inside the stairwell was all like the very like the very clever editing i assume you're using stuff like adobe after effects um and yeah it is played it's played so well like it's it's i think part of the part of why it's so successful is that it's not filmed like you would film something too high like like like for a lot of films when they

like you want to do like like you know like like a the term is like a one-er where they have like one long shot and they like hide the transitions in between right you can obviously tell like they're filming it to make these transitions work versus the way you film this is just how people would film it if they were filming this for real um and you can definitely tell that, and it's, it is so carefully done because it's not trying to be something it is, it is just being the thing so earnestly in terms of like how, how the actors like stumble over their lines in the, in like the opening segment. Um, like the aesthetics of like all of like the title cards and everything is just so it has this, it has this like aura of earnestness, which I think helps sells the whole project so, so much. Yeah. Yeah, actually, speaking of the show and the cheesy title cards and stuff, my girlfriend at the time was a producer for this local show called Homework Hotline. And where kids call in with their homework and they answer questions about it.

and where kids call in with their homework and they answer questions about it i studied the shit out of that show just looking at how they built the sets and how cheesy and how awkward like the uh the hosts were because a lot of it was like a lot of the realism i think of it is just um yeah the awkwardness of the people how it's not um it's not really meant to be and and like like the best the most convincing untruths right is a combination of fact and fiction yeah and you know a lot of and blending in the actors with real people you know in in in the in the actual video stuff like that it's like yeah it comes out 2013 goes goes pretty viral um you like pretty quick create a very easy explanation for no it's not it's not real it's part of this project people still believe it for years and years um as kind of the decade progresses we go into like

the era of disinformation everyone starts getting phones in their pockets everyone has facebook with them wherever they go everyone has twitter with them wherever they go. Everyone has Twitter with them wherever they go. How is kind of your views on like the ethics of the project and what it demonstrates in terms of like a case study and like a social experiment? Like how has that changed over the years from like you like 10 years ago when you're dreaming this up to you now after, you know, we've had stuff like, you know,

like January 6th and QAnon, you know, all these types of things, which I feel like are almost like foreshadowed in this in this weird way by showing how successful your little project is. professors even is still facing right now like it's still the type of thing people bring up which is essentially that hey there's so much disinformation out there at the time we weren't even using those terms disinformation right but basically people were were bringing up the same complaints which is there's so much disinformation out there you're basically just adding to it. What are you even doing? So I guess the idea is that, and, you know, it's a very noble idea, which is what's our response to disinformation, right? We should, I guess the idea is we should call out every instance of it when we

can, flag posts, report posts that violate community community standards you know speak out um provide counter evidence when you see fake news that sort of thing and i think that's great that's a good thing um but disinformation the problem with disinformation is at the time this is kind of how i explained it like 10 years ago. I described it as an epidemic. Yeah, no, absolutely. Right? Or like a cockroach infestation. Like every time you kill one, 10 more spring up.

And this notion of like, we got to call out every instance of disinformation and stomp it away is like, it's great, but you're focused on killing cockroaches yeah it's like addressing the symptoms not the actual problem right i want to get to the cockroach's nest right and whenever whenever i give talks about this um this project people always approach me afterwards you know like wanting me to kind of because we we don't just talk about this project we talk about like deep fake stuff like we show speeches of obama like looking like the real obama but it's like completely fake right and people start to realize holy shit like i don't even know what's real or not anymore like what can i trust and they approach me expecting me to ease their anxiety somehow and kind of like guide them through how to discern what's true from what's not as though

my project was about finding some sort of solution and i tell them that like my project wasn't about solving the problem it was about seeing the problem right it's about it's about trying to get to the heart of the matter and it's like to me i think like the heart of the matter like the cockroach's nest is the i don't know you there are different ways to say but basically the um the lack of critical thinking in individuals and like in the society we shape together or um or lack of a willingness to think through things carefully maybe that's that's um that's like if we had a society of critical thinkers this wouldn't be much of a problem i think it's because so many people come at a lot of information from like what you would say the rational viewpoint of like

they're trying to use reason and stuff like they're trying to think critically they're trying to think like logically but they come at it in the terms of rationalizing stuff they already believe um and i think that's a very prevailing type of idea in terms of like yes i'm going to believe in this thing so i'm going to find evidence to to support it um which isn't critical thinking i don't think i'm not really no like it is that is itself a logical fallacy but that is so common especially on the internet because the internet it encourages the backfire effect you know whenever someone calls out on something you want to be right so you're gonna it's as soon as as soon as someone calls something you're going to backfire you're going to like become even more entrenched in what you believe um when you you know when

you explain to someone that no hillary clinton is bad but she doesn't eat the blood of children like no she does i saw it on this thing. I have to believe it because like all of the things are tied up in what makes you a person. And now all of these like ideas that have, that were used to be just be conspiracy theories that you could believe in for fun are now so a part of like what people's sense of being are and how they have their entire worldview that there's so much more because the internet's such a bigger part of their lives everything on the internet is a bigger part of the lives for each person

so it is more of an ontological threat because these things are so closer together now right there used to be much more of a distinction between the internet and you because you can only access the computer every once in a while we can now carry around a supercomputer wherever we go so it is like a part of you like you bring it with you almost everywhere it's always in your pocket so these things are so like stitched together that prying them apart and telling people no this thing you carry around actually probably most what you see on it isn't isn't actually true like there is people can like believe that in their heads but don't actually don't actually the belief doesn't actually impact them because like we all know that there's like we all know that there's like,

we all know that people can just go on the internet and lie. Right. It is like a part of the joke, but we still don't act like it. But like, oftentimes we get so, we get so like, encased into the stories that we tell ourselves. Right. Part of why the Asherian stairwell is so good is that it's such a, it's such a compelling story. Like that, like the idea of like a brilliant architect bringing like you know building this paradox in the real world is like is is so much more fun than being like yeah some dude just knows how to use adobe after effects like right so you get so entrenched in the storytelling because the the story of like politicians eating the eating

the blood of children is so much more interesting than no, politicians just don't care about you. And getting to the heart of that problem is so much more difficult than just debunking things, because you can debunk things all day, and does that actually matter?

Yeah, and I think there's a secondary problem that there's another level of it, which is that yeah, everyone knows that there's this information problem that, like, you know, there's another level of it, which is that, yeah, like, everyone knows that there's this information now. Like, everyone does. But that just makes it worse because now if you want to do this information, what you can claim is like, oh, hey, look at all these other times that all this stuff has been fake. And then, you know, this is how you get everyone, like, doing frame-by-frame analyses of, like, a bombing and going, oh, these are all crisis actors. Right, right. And it's like, you know, you talk to these people and they're like oh yeah no i i i i did i did the research look i like i

saw through the lies it's like no you've just completely made this thing up in your head but you can see the green screen compression they're like no it's just regular video compression and it's like yeah like everyone can be a detective now so everyone can be so convinced of their own conclusions even when the conclusions turn out to be not true. Right. It's a problem. If there was an easy solution, we wouldn't have the problem. Right.

It's one of those things where it's like your project's a very good example of like, it's, it's, it's a very demonstrative thing. You can like, you, you take someone along this journey and demonstrate, Hey, this can happen to you. So you should watch out for it. Right. Look, look at the story I crafted. Look how you become convinced of it for these six minutes.

And then you think, Oh wait, no, you can't teleport to a bottom stairwell. That's not, that's not how that works. But because you take them on that journey, it's a very, it's a, I love it so much as like a demonstrative process being like like, this can happen, so watch out for it in the future. Which I think is honestly more useful than just debunking somebody. Because you can debunk all day. You can have the backfire effect and stuff. Yeah, and you're right about the demonstrative stuff.

Because it's like, if a bunch of film students and volunteers with no connections and no resources pulled this off like we did like a tally of all the videos at the end of the year of um you know all the videos that ripped it off and posted on their own channels and all that um it was like 50 million right so if if a bunch of film students like had that much influence, what more can like people who are actually fun, like actual political power and resources, right. What could they do? And we were just doing ours was about like this innocuous,

silly stairwell. It wasn't about anything that would cause, you know, anyone's death or anything like that. Or, and like, you know, something like in Myanmar, where the Myanmar military basically systematically created fake articles and fake photos to create, like, to arouse disdain for Rohingya people.

And they incited a genocide through Facebook just through fake news right in the Philippines where I live right now which a lot of commentators call like the patient zero of disinformation because in 2016 this guy

called Duterte was elected president basically running his entire campaign on disinformation and after him was brexit like a month later and after that was trump got the nomination so like what's her name kate katie barth barth or something like that uh the one of the executives of facebook referred to the philippines as patient zero in the era of disinformation because like um and the thing that duterte the president here right now was running on was basically like the same sort of um othering and scapegoating of a certain group and he said basically he's

the guy who said like basically if you're a drug user or a drug dealer, it should be okay to murder you and kill you. And that's what happened. That's exactly what happened. Because they were posting all these stories about the same sorts of stories that we saw in the US in 2016 about undocumented immigrants or Muslims or something like that. This undocumented immigrant raped a five-year-old girl you know that sort of thing yeah and he would the the um the organized campaign um making up stories about drug addicts like murdering and raping people basically like got an entire nation to well not an entire nation but basically this guy won the

election and you know we have a country right now that basically lived through just atrocities the last five six years you know and like the double-edged sword of this like what chris mentioned is like yeah it could this type same type of thing because it exists people also like retroactively apply it to like you know like sandy hook was staged or like even stuff now with like you know the pandemic right people would be like right what if what if what if the pandemic isn't real what if all these people just you know conjured this thing into being and it it's all a giant misinformation campaign, right? So it has this dual, it has this double-edged sword nature,

which makes combat and disinformation so challenging. It's like disinformation to combat disinformation to combat the idea of disinformation. And there's so many layers of it now. It's just, it makes actually getting to the heart of it so much more

challenging because it's been abstracted so many times. like one of the things i was remembering what didn't didn't the new york times weren't the first people to come up with the term fake news and then trump started using it after like or maybe was watching post-it which newspaper was but my memory of it was like it was it was it was the media that came up with fake news and then like trump just took it and it became this like this just like demon they absolutely could not control and was just turned on them do you remember the context in which they used it for the first time like they were i think they were calling like stuff that trump said fake news i am i'm unsure of at the moment who specifically coined that term. But I mean, we definitely see terms like even terms like disinformation, which used to be more tied to like a discordian philosophy, breaking like in like even even back even as back as far as like the 80s, getting, you know, turned into an actual like political term that everybody uses.

So I'm reading that it was actually somebody from buzzfeed an editor at buzzfeed was one of the that makes sense craig silverman is one of the ones who first popularized it uh but was in 2016 yeah but there could be there could be you know several other people that say that they coined it i don't know i mean i even there's even a a a an illustration from 1894 by by frederick offer with reporters carrying newspapers labeled humble news uh cheap sensation and fake news so it's i mean in terms of in terms of just mashing words together i'm sure it has it's had a decent history but definitely trump is the one that like yeah launched it into the zeitgeist right right right yeah let's see uh robert you've been pretty quiet i know it's pretty early in the morning for

you do you have any do you have any kind of thoughts to help us kind of generally start closing us out not like super immediately but generally heading that direction i mean no not really kind of brought up everything I would say. All right. All right. It's, uh, yeah. Um, I guess, uh, uh, Mike, what have, how has this project kind of impacted how you approach film and just the, like how you, how you use the internet yourself in the past decade? Hmm. Well, I'm fully aware of what we did.

Every time I'm like looking at something, I'm like, could they have done that? Could they have done this and that, you know, that sort of thing. I don't know if it's, if, yeah, I'm not sure how it's, how this project specifically has impacted me other than. Just trying to think through things a bit more carefully, trying to go through things like. I mean, like so we we basically came up with this idea of what eventually became troll farms right like me and like my classmates would hey we even make fake accounts and like talk about the stairwell and um

so i don't know like a few years later people we we learned that people were actually doing this like to influence like elections around the world and a lot of the strategy of like the russian troll farms and stuff um was to basically create caricature versions right of arguments from whatever side like you know whether they they might present an argument from like the left or the right, but in like a caricaturized version of it. And so what people would see when they see that they'd see an argument coming from the other side and they'd ridicule it. Like, look at these people who just seem crazy espousing this whatever view, you know, or they might say things like, like yeah if you're a democrat you want to abort babies at like the ninth month or something like that yeah no reasonable person actually argued so what happens is like um people talk about how the goal of russia was to like polarize

you know um polarize the uh political spectrum i think like the bigger goal and the the goal that we're gonna be untangling for many many years and the the more um the more difficult problem to deal with was that they over simply they successfully oversimplified discourse you know what i'm saying like they found a way to like oversimplify the type of discourse we're having because everyone's like arguing with such simplistic i'm not sure if i'm making sense it's like it's like it's like the the term i use is like politics as fandom right right right and that's i think that like intersects it's not exactly what you're saying but like it intersects with that type of idea of like right condensing down actual

discussions on like what you believe in um and what politics you want and how you want to improve the world into this weird fandom lens of like this team versus this team which we we we we've had a degree of that for a long long time but But with the internet and how discussions on the internet are designed to work, right? How algorithms want to boost content, how there's always these short snippets. It just, it mirrors the way people discuss, like, what Star Wars character is their favorite.

It's just that, but for politics. So it's just this, like, what if politics is just this idea of fandom and you can debate what fandom is more valid than the other right i like the last jedi more you like rise of skywalker this means your version of reality is less good than mine so that is that is objectively true if you like the rise of skywalker which is wrong but let's be clear here it's that same idea but for how we like make social programs and how we address racism and how we like give food to poor people and how we do affordable housing and how we handle the police.

So it's that type of idea, which is just. this in part because when you flood the zone with so much conflicting information that people can't really get a handle on or easily sort of like when they're when when you've when you've put that much confusion into the air um it makes people more likely to just kind of grasp its sides because everything coming out is way too complicated and messy and it's, it takes too much work to figure out what's actually true. So holding to some rubric of, well, I believe this. So that means these are the good guys. These are the bad guys. And I don't have to, to analyze it any deeper than that. I can reject information that comes from this group, or I can reject information that says this, because I, I just category categorically reject, you know, anything that anything that fits in with that. That's the benefit of disinformation for authoritarians of all stripes.

You're seeing it in Ukraine right now where you've got all of these different authoritarian powers. You've got Turkey. You've got Russia. You've got the United States, at least to the extent that like we impact a lot of things internationally. And you've got them all coming down on different sides of this issue and of what's happening in Ukraine. And because there's so much disinformation and misinformation about what's going on, people just kind of grasp at, well, whatever side I have been more sympathetic to recently, I'm just going to believe whatever they say, because it's way too complicated to actually analyze what's going on. Yeah, and this was a thing that, I mean, this was explicit on the left. I remember this.

This was around 2017, 2018. There was a whole thing about how people talking about anti-imperialism would literally say, like, nuance is liberalism. Don't say like nuance nuance is liberalism i don't like nuances liberalism don't don't research this don't think about this because nuance is how liberals like you know spread sort of pro-regime change propaganda like i remember those people like amber frost just just straight up said this and this was a huge and you know like i i got a lot of shit for this because you know like i i remember when when the coup in bolivia happened like i i made a giant thread that was trying that was like okay we need to figure out like how specifically the cia was involved in this like okay so did they plan the

whole thing was it like were they working with local partners was it a thing where someone else planned it and they signed off on it and like to this day people think that i supported the coup because i was like we should figure out who was who the actors were on the ground because no one like this this this this became like an act like like a like a tenant like like an actual sort of like like political tenets of of how a lot of anti-imperialism like in the american left worked was you you were not supposed to do nuance you were not supposed to look at who was like you know if if you spent too long looking at what was going on on the ground people would be like you you work for the cia and that you know i think like we've finally seen that basically blow up in their faces because you know oh hey look how many of these people just like wound up supporting russia and then spent like three months saying that

russia would never invade ukraine then this happens but it's i don't know it's it's it's invade ukraine then this happens but it's i don't know it's it's it's it's extremely depressing how people who otherwise are you know like in in a lot of ways like i've spent a lot of their time like trying to you know filter out stuff from the media that's false just go into this because they just do not want to deal with the complexity of reality yeah it's just easier not to again if there was a simple problem we wouldn't i mean if there was a simple solution we wouldn't need to discuss the problem yeah yeah so i guess basically like just to like um answer that question about how it i guess at the time i'd say like we got an up-close look at how things were gonna be like you know with with all these things we it we it kind of anticipated the next few years um so yeah

that's basically what happened um sorry to interrupt your closing but no no no it's the it's the best note that that we can go um mike do you uh where can people find you online and if people want to look into some of your other projects i mean you found me like i guess if they want to find me they'll find me right i don't know i still don't know how you got my email garrison is extremely good about this not that many people are that good uh yeah well they could check out the YouTube channel like I'm gonna be posting some new

films this year probably so my name Michael or just search the Asherians there I guess that's a way yeah yeah I'll add your YouTube channel to to the description yeah and I just want to thank you so much for coming on

to talk about your project. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, well, that does it for us today. You can follow us on the internets for some reason, on Twitter and Instagram at HappenHerePod and CoolSumMedia. And yeah, go create a myth that people will believe and travel from out of country

to walk over some stairs, because that sounds like fun. Go do something like that for fun. Funsies. Alright, bye-bye. 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. An anthology of modern-day horror stories

inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here. It being a number of things. This is the podcast about things falling apart and also maybe putting them back together and assuming there is not a nuclear war in the immediate future.

You will probably be hearing this episode sometime in early March. I am Robert Evans, my co-hosts as always. Well, as often, Chris and Garrison. And that's that's my job for the day done. I'm going to I'm going to sit back and chill. You guys want to take it from here? Yeah, I'll take it from here. We are doing one of our perennial things fall apart, but also we sort of put them back together again episodes. And joining us today is JMC from Strange Matters, a new libertarian socialist cooperative magazine. JMC, great to have you here.

So I guess we should probably explain what the magazine is, not just in and of itself, but also because it's a good lead-in into what we're going to be talking about. So we basically – there's five of us as co-editors, and we're all equal worker-owners in it. The point of it is to explore radical new ideas, not just in terms of politics and economics, which is going to be kind of half the focus is trying to figure out like libertarian socialists talk a lot about dual power, which I know you all talk about on the show a lot. Talk about building independent institutions under the direct democratic control of the working class to control real resources that are not the state or capitalist firms. and are not the state or capitalist firms. But like we talk a big game, but do we actually know how to do that stuff? And do we know how to do stuff like run like a big company as a self-managed democracy? Or do we know how to like run a city as a radical democracy,

like rooted in neighborhood councils or anything like that? The answer kind of is not really. And there's a lot of like open questions that we don't know yet the answers to and that very few people are working on those answers. So Strange Matters is partly about discovering those answers, not because we, the editors, have the answers, but because we need like some kind of space within which we can bring

lots of different people with different life experiences together in order to talk about the stuff and figure it out. And then the other mission of it is to be a kind of general interest literary intellectual magazine doing the kind of journalism and philosophy and poetry and memoir and stuff like that, that perhaps gets shut out of capitalist society because it's not commercial or because it's too weird or because it's like, I don't know, a historiographical essay about Ibn Khaldun or something like that, you know, and we think that there should be a place for that just because it brings delight and meaning into people's lives. And it's what we're fighting for a more democratic society in order to do. So that's basically our vibe. And the essay in question is a collective editorial that we that we collectively drafted and uh talking about our political views in particular and the recent history of libertarian socialism um and then as for me i'm uh uh i'm a writer who's

written for a couple other places like uh the the point and the brooklyn rail uh and i also was involved in uh the dsa's libertarian socials caucus and also the uh the yeah yeah the DSA is libertarian socials caucus and also the, the, yeah, yeah. That's, that's, that's right.

Not so much in the LLC, but yeah, a lot of history there, trauma, you know, some, some yeah, but anywho and also the symbiosis federation,

which is a federation across Mexico, the U S and Canada that is trying to put together. It's a confederation of local organizations that are trying to do this kind of direct democracy stuff. Yeah, so I guess, well, okay, so the pandemic isn't, I guess, the perfect jumping in point for this, but I want to go back and I guess just getting into the meat of this piece, because I think it's very interesting. I wanted to sort of talk about the origins of what's called sort of neo-anarchism and how it sort of began to decay after sort of after the collapse of occupy and after well i guess the the sort of kind of

revolutionary arc of the 2010s so basically before you do the decline at least it's the way that we wrote it and i kind of think that it's the way that I would tell it, you have to kind of lingering in an afterlife afterwards where it kind of looked like anarchism was going to take over the world and that's a bit of a joke but it's also not a joke because in the context of like the radical left which is of course obviously a kind of like you know dissident scene in any country where it happens to exist um you know everything receded in terms of the traditional parties because the fall of these soviet style uh leninist states uh either through their collapse as in the case of the ussr uh or in the case of their transition to a much more like clearly and obviously like state capitalist uh semi neoliberalized uh model

like in china like the the you you basically had like this total recession not just in leninism interestingly which obvious enough right like you know it's basically a global collapse of leninist style governments but also in like social democracy um because it a lot of the – I mean it's actually kind of interesting why. It's unclear why it is. People have different theories, but people often describe it in Fisher's term, the writer Mark Fisher, capitalist realism. 90s was that, you know, there's only one world that's possible and it's the best of all possible worlds. And that's the capitalist world where everybody's going to have McDonald's in every country and two countries that have the same McDonald's are never going to go to war, which we kind

of found out the hard way this week that that's not really the case. Well, and if people had paid attention more to other parts of the world, they would know that like, well, there were civil wars in a bunch of countries that had mcdonald's it didn't stop people from shooting each other yeah as as the united states should tell you people will kill each other whether or not they have access to chicken mcnuggets yeah you know i mean i think like that that's a period that has it's full of the most wrong anyone has ever been like you got your friend fukuyama like the most wrong person ever you've got yeah you've got a lot of sort of ideologues who like have sort of deluded themselves into thinking this stuff is over and yeah i think you're right that that sort of plays into this

you know into sort of the collapse of of i guess the the party state left and then the way in which that you know the alternative to that i guess becomes neo-anarchism and anarchist practice even if it's not necessarily ideology with all the groups kind of seeps its way into the rest of the activist scene yeah so basically the story that we tell is that there's, you know, the Zapatista rebellion in 1994 triggers these. It's not just that the Zapatistas were able to create their autonomous territory in Chiapas, but it triggers this wave that we use a term that sometimes is used in academia called neo-anarchism for this. You know, there's an anarchist revival in the 90s um around the world and it's not just people calling themselves anarchists it's all these movements that were inspired by the uh libertarian socialist uh broadly speaking um zapatistas um adopting kind

of similar methods in their local contexts in different countries fighting against i mean a lot of things. Initially, it's against like, you know, neoliberal trade deals, but it also ends up being against like sweatshops because that's basically what a lot of outsourcing is, is, you know, if they have unions in this country from the social democratic period, they shut down the factory fire, everybody move it to someplace where some dictatorship is going to shoot anybody who tries to do a union. And then that that you know that that lowers uh logistics has gotten sophisticated enough by this point that

you know it ends up being cheaper for the company even though they have to transport goods all across the world and do just-in-time delivery and that kind of thing so um the a lot of the the anti-globalization movement that sprouted up around the 2000s was like against all these things and usually using the kinds of direct actions, which is when you act kind of independent of the state and not trying to like convince a politician to do something, but taking direct action to get your desired result and all this kind of stuff. your desired result, and all this kind of stuff that were using direct democratic consensus methods in the way that they organized stuff, that was all basically anarchistic. And so there was this way in which anarchist methods, anarchist tactics, anarchist attitudes towards what activism even is started filtering into all these other movements. And this has been happening a little bit in the eighties too. So there was like the anti-nuclear movement had a lot of this, the,

the feminist movement had a lot of this. There was a whole stream of single ecological movements were actually like pioneered in a lot of ways by anarchists in the nineties. So as well as indigenous movements in places like Mexico, Bolivia, et cetera. So the, the, this is the kind of like rise of this neo-anarchist milieu that we're talking about, which is not just about anarchists. It's about people who act and think like anarchists without necessarily identifying as it. that I hope we can kind of more encourage as well in the next few decades as those types of ideas can be. I want to make sure that we can take these ideas and make them very approachable for people, even if they don't use the terms that we might use, you can still kind of suggest these types of thoughts and suggest these types of kind of lenses and viewpoints.

these types of thoughts and this suggests these types of kind of lenses and viewpoints as much as we're about to get to how this sort of goes wrong or fails in some sense like i think that was the strength of this movement was that it was it it's tactics were really easy to spread and that led to a lot of people adopting it led to it sort of becoming this i guess activist consensus that you know like you use things like consensus process you that led to a lot of people adopting me. It led to it sort of becoming this, I guess, activist consensus that, you know, like you use things like consensus process. You,

you know, you, you have horizontal organizations, you have, you do direct actions, you mobilize people and you don't have these sort of like hierarchical like parties, but that, yeah.

And I think, I think the next part of the story that you want to tell us about, I guess how that fell apart and the consequences of that basically what ends up happening is that like there was this moment of our ascent because i would identify myself as being definitely like part of these uh the the this general movie i mean i came i hopped aboard a lot later with like occupy wall street but a lot of the kind of explosion of movements that happened around the world in 2011 again not always right it started with the arab spring which started with somebody setting

themselves on fire in tunisia and like you know and then that spreads to um other countries in the middle east and um you know protests against dictatorships and so on but it starts getting kind of like transported beyond its initial Middle Eastern context. And what a lot of people don't know is that the, the, the Occupy Wall Street movement in North America and like other movements that, you know, some of them were called Occupy. Some of them, and one of them was Maidan in Ukraine, as a matter of fact, and other like, you know, the, the Hong Kong, the

umbrella movements. Yeah. And all these kind of movements that proceeded from after 2011, a lot of them were basically in a single kind of wave, a protracted wave of copycat movements that were trying to adopt the same kind of tactics of like occupying public squares uh declaring them basically autonomous and doing like direct democracy in those squares modeling the kind of society that they that people wanted to create um you know in this moment where it seemed like you could uh have this uh direct democratic uh sorts of movements the the and in the u.s there's like a direct line of succession from like occupy wall

street through to like black lives matter through to like the uh anti-pipeline uh indigenous protests there's a lot of like shared movement experience a lot of the same people showing up to it or teaching the next generation um in those movements and i think this is something i mean uh it's difficult to find like sources on this but I mean y'all are involved in social movements I think that that's like a rough that's roughly a description of what's happened right unless we're crazy

yeah and I think you know I think I guess what you call the last wave that is Occupy Ice in 2018 yeah yeah you know like I remember like that was a sort of mix of I guess two crowds one yeah you know like i remember like that was a sort of mix of i guess two crowds one is you know i mean like i i remember it was a bunch of you know people

who'd been in occupy and then also it was a lot of people who radicalized essentially by trump yeah there was there was a pretty big new wave of people yeah around around 2016 and that you know and i guess i guess the other other thing that's going on through this period is the ascension of the right and the return also not just of the fascist right, but of Leninism and social democracy as well. This has also happened around like when bernie sanders was getting more popular yeah yeah and i think i think i think there's there's you know there's a couple of there's like two threats here there's the sort of bernie sanders thread and then there's you know the rise of the rise of the tankies which has to do with syria and has to do with sort of this backlash against the the 2011 revolutions that you know like some of that

backlash turns into like just you know like erdogan's like hard right well i mean there's never like not a right wing but like erdogan's turn into just like firebombing cities and um right and then asad as well like the you the barrel bombing, you know, that basically sent the signal. Nothing. I mean, nothing happened to Assad. Right. So that basically sent the signal that like, oh, he had a stressful couple of years. But yeah.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like like you can you can just shoot people and bomb them and like it and that basically defanged the kind of central tactic that a lot of these movements were trying to do which is to have like large numbers of people do non-violent civil disobedience and then through those like direct actions cultivate this culture of like

direct democracy in the hopes that um you know the assemblies that are created in that space could in some way become the the germ of the organs that could run society or at least that's like when it's taken to its logical conclusion, because usually people who are involved in this, they get involved in it. They think the assembly stuff is really cool. They start learning more about it. They get radicalized by being in the assembly because like when you're in a direct democratic assembly and you're actually making the decisions like

together, and then you come to an agreement and you execute the decision, you start asking yourself like, why can't we do everything like this um and then um you know that that's what directs a lot of people in this kind of anarchistic direction but yeah one of the reasons why these movements start to decline is because they get smashed um the uh but i think that there's always this other thing going on, which, and I wonder how y'all felt about this, like reading it, like, you know, there's, there was this kind of both like an external critique at first from people like, you know, Baskar Sinkerov, Jacobin and things like that but then also like this increasingly over the years in the last half of the 2010s internal critiques of anarchism coming from anarchists themselves are people in this general kind of milieu libertarian socialism talking about how like anarchists didn't have solutions to the most pressing crises in the 21st century like if you like if you guys had to say i know it's like kind of pretentious but like what is the most pressing crisis of the 21st century? Like if you, like if you guys had to say, I know it's like kind of pretentious,

but like, what is the most pressing crisis of the 21st century? What are like the top three, just off the top of your heads without thinking, what would you list? If you had to list three, two or three separate things, climate change,

creeping authoritarianism and rampant disinformation about basic facts of reality. Sweet. Okay. So let's tackle each one of those right like what's what's an anarchist got to say about climate change well okay disrupt the pipelines like you know do uh like you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet so you have to have like you know we have all the slogans right i mean we've all heard them like a million times yeah you have the diagnoses of the problem, but yeah.

Yeah, but then like, okay, so how are we going to, like, you know, I guess we're going to build some co-ops and then the co-ops are going to democratize production and then we can do degrowth somehow, but like also disrupting existing production. But there's like a missing step here, right? Because like, you know, the reason why we have all this production in a certain way is because the entire economy depends on it.

It's been set up that way. So implied in the idea that we're going to do degrowth somehow is that we need some way of constructing a different economy. And how do you construct a different economy, right? Through some kind of planning. So really the question is, how do you do economic planning? Second one, I'm going to skip creeping authoritarianism for now, because that's actually like feeding into the more the ending of the essay. But the but the other one, right, disinformation, another great question, right? Like, what do you do with social media? Like,

okay, again, anarchists talk in general a lot about like, okay, we're going to democratize all the companies because we're democratizing everything we're democratizing neighborhoods we're democratizing cities so it's kind of the same thing turning everything into like a radical direct democracy okay but if we're going to have social media first of all should we like was it a mistake to invent a centralized system instead of the more decentralized internet that created that existed before social media right that's kind of a interesting question but then assuming that we do how do we restructure it not just in terms of how it's managed but like okay we have the democracy of facebook or whatever and let's say that we're the workers at facebook what do we do

like how do we structure it so that it's not a giant misinformation engine, right? Like once, once you actually have like the responsibility and the power of being in the saddle, which is what we spend so much of our time kind of just trying to do, you have to actually make decisions about what to do. And honestly, there aren't that many. I mean, what do you, what do you do with, with a, with a, with a utility like that? Like, for example, who ought to be in control of a utility like that? Is it really just the workers ought to be in control of a utility like that? Is it really just the workers of Facebook? Aren't all the people who are users of it,

don't they have a right to be making decisions about it too? And is it just an American institution just because it's an American LLC? Or is it like a global institution because everybody on the planet's on it? Is there, you know, are there ways that it could be reconfigured like fundamentally in terms of how users use it that would change the experience in some way to actually

make it uh make you less liable to misinformation but on the other hand if you try to manipulate people in order to um you know not see something that's going to be misinformation isn't that well you know like censorship or or or some other thing that we generally would oppose right like the the tool of centralized social control so they like these are really deep questions and again this is generally a kind of silence and of course you know in that case there's silence from the social democrats too and there's silence from the leninists i mean well the leninists just kind of fantasize about turning facebook into the the tool the central party state uses in order to crush dissent forever or whatever but you know social democrats are like let's nationalize facebook and it's like

you know yeah sure we could we could do that and then you know the nsa owns owns facebook i'm sure that that's a that's a better scenario yeah i mean i tend to think somewhat differently about what it means to have an anarchist solution to those problems like for example i don't i don't see anarchists or social democrats or leninists having any kind of stopping climate change solution because I don't realistically see the organizing potential capable of actually stopping what's going on in any kind of reasonable time frame. And I certainly don't think that the existing, you know, neoliberal structures or the authoritarian structures that exist in, you know, other countries or in this country are going to stop it either. So when I think about solutions to climate change from an anarchist perspective, I think about how can anarchist

organizing help people deal with the consequences of climate change. And I tend to see the potential for actually mitigating climate change coming more from there's as the consequences of this become more dire to people. If anarchists are better, are good at providing relief and helping people and organizing through that, then eventually there's some potential to actually get people organized to stop the causes of the problem. But I just don't, I'm not an optimist about our ability to stop the worst of it at this point, especially not after the most recent IPCC report. And I guess I'm kind of in the same boat when it comes to disinformation. And this is not just like anarchists I feel like lack, as you've stated, a good idea about like what do we do with Facebook? What do we do with YouTube?

What do we do with the way all of these things are set up and the harms that they do at scale? Nobody, and I include the people currently in charge, has any real good ideas for that, because they haven't. Like, I've been working in this space for a very long time. I've spent a lot of time talking with and debating with a lot of the folks who are leading minds kind of in the fight against disinformation. And I just don't feel like there's any sort of solution that is an immediate term solution because the problem is so advanced as it is. So I guess that's kind of like where I land on a lot of this stuff is we certainly need to be thinking about solutions. But I kind of like, I think it's less likely that there's going to be, like you were saying, the kind of debate is between, is there some way of like reforming or fixing, making Facebook more

democratic? Or is it just we need to decide that maybe we don't have some of this stuff? And I tend to land towards that, that like, well, I think the solution is going to be maybe Facebook's a bad idea. Maybe we shouldn't have – there's aspects of it that are necessary, obviously. And I think aspects of things like Telegram and Twitter that are useful. But I think they're also fundamentally tied to the algorithms that drive them, which is also what drives so much of the toxic aspects that I think if you're divorcing the medium from the algorithm, you're talking about something that is very different. It's no longer the medium. It's no longer the medium. It's so radically different that it's not even useful to compare them. It's like comparing Discord to Facebook. It're not they don't operate the same way that's yeah that's

exactly kind of where i where i i tend to be on on that and i know that's not like i i to the extent that like uh that's pessimistic i guess i am kind of pessimistic about anarchism's ability to stop the worst of things that's happening, where I kind of look at myself as an optimistic anarchist is in the, I believe anarchism offers solutions when these things go as badly as they're going to do in a way that, you know, the present systems or, you know, more authoritarian systems that people propose can't solve the worst consequences of these problems as well. That's kind of where I feel. It is, can feel a lot simpler to default to like the dual power framework of a lot of these things,

because otherwise the problems are so complex that you cannot approach them from every angle. So you really do need to simplify and condense them and collapse them into something that is more simplified, which often results in like a dual power kind of framework for what you actually start doing. whether you're an anarchist or, you know, a Leninist or whatever, you have to be looking at what's actually happening in Ukraine right now and recognize that, all right, well, to what extent do you think you're going to be able to organize people in such a way that allows them to deal with thermobaric weapons, you know? In what way are you going to organize people that allows them to effectively resist cluster munitions? And I think that when you kind of look at it that way, which is what it would take to overthrow any of the large hegemonic powers in the world right now, on building power by building organizations and communities that are capable of taking care of

themselves in the holes that these powers are increasingly going to be experiencing because because they too are crumbling and that's much smarter than being like all right well i'm going to try to get a bunch of my friends with rifles and and arm up a couple of drones and and go up against you know people who have access to mlrs you know weapon systems and whatnot yeah no i think that that's a really great point um i the way that i would think about it is the starting with the big picture problems is a bit misleading because as you said like nobody it's quite likely that nobody has solutions to these problems certainly the social democrats don't they sure haven't solved them like yeah Because as you said, nobody – it's quite likely that nobody has solutions to these problems.

Certainly the social democrats don't. They sure haven't solved them. Yeah. And I say this as somebody who's like half a social democrat by temperament. It would be really nice if we elected a little social democratic government and they swooped in and did New Deal stuff. I like New Deal stuff. I like WPA stuff as much as the next uh you know um person who uh likes arts programs and infrastructure development well you know some infrastructure development not others right uh the war the war complex we can do a little without but you know the the thing about it is

those big problems you're right it looks like there's not going to be like a big solution uh and that we're going to kind of have to cope with the consequences of of it at least at first yeah but even coping this is this is kind of where i think the real kind of substance of of the problem that libertarian socialists are facing right now even coping would require a greater level of organization than we have proven able to muster up to now. Not because the methods that we choose don't work, because in fact, as you point out, and as I actually really want to forcefully argue, because we do in the end of the essay, like authoritarian methods don't work and can't work for a lot of the specific problems that we face uh and history shows that very definitively but um there is also a a serious way in which even kind of developing these like you know local highly like you know rooted in a community uh like direct democratic institutions

that control real resources scaling that up to the point where it actually could start replacing some of the gaps left behind by states and capitalist firms that are too dysfunctional or too focused on their own goals to meet those needs. require us to be able, for example, to know how to build up a cooperative sector in a city, or how to kind of like network the tenants unions that already exist, you know, across different, you know, regions, maybe even across like a continent, and then construct like the the way in which they self manage each other, or, or not each other uh self-managed together the you know the larger group or it would require and you know there's a lot of people working on these problems but sometimes there is a kind of like you know you'll see this like obstacle in the road because for example like what do you do when the uh it might not even be the the state properly speaking right it might be like a posse that's funded by some rich

billionaire uh asshole who's got like his uh you know his notion that some people are just better than others and that you should institute the dictatorship of the tech bros um you know and then that billionaire is funding a bunch of people who've got now like you know some industrial access to industrial infrastructure and they don't like the fact that you're doing your DIY, like, you know, commune or whatever stuff in there on their turf. So how do you fight back against that? I mean, some of it you can fight back against at kind of our current level of capacity, but some of it does kind of require us to start thinking like,

well, how do you, how do you build up financial independence? Like how do you build up the kind of independence where it's like, if we get kicked off of the capitalist social media, for example, which is a great deal of what we use for fundraising, what kind of institutions could we create that would be like alternatives that are not like the ones that the Nazis created

when there was a purge of some of them that gab like highly dysfunctional, like, you know, it didn't even work for them. Not that, I mean, I'm happy about that, but like, you know, my point is like the same thing could happen to us. So what would we do? The, like, there are all these kinds of things that are more little picture questions in a way, but they,

they scale up relatively quickly to at least like medium sized questions where we need this kind of like these, these because, because part of what it is is also that like, it's not that these questions are impossible. It's that they're kind of neglected. And there's there, there's these the thinkers like Christian Williams,

who's an anarchist from the Pacific Northwest, who wrote a pamphlet about this called wither anarchism. And there was another pamphlet or an essay in Counterpunch by a person named Gabriel Kuhn, who's an autonomous Marxist, basically like a libertarian Marxist anarchist type, called What Happened to the Anarchist Century. And both of those essays, which I highly recommend that people read, they make points basically like this, you know, like where the focus on how to construct those institutions and the nitty gritty of how to do that has kind of receded from anarchism as it's actually practiced. revolutionary transformation but not always the attention to the nitty-gritty of how you actually can like build uh resilient institutions that actually like carry that through which you know a hundred years ago people were talking about like the one big union and the general strike but that's kind of like um well a it didn't work in exactly the way that they were thinking it

would even in the most successful revolutions like in spain and b it was also like the the there's there's there's a certain way in which our tensions are focused on other things and it's not that those things are bad it's just that like there's been this kind of neglect of the question of large-scale organization and how you do uh coordination like you know in order to tackle problems that are kind of like at the scale that that I was talking about before. And so basically, the argument of the essay is that in the absence of that, like, for the the socialist movement that emerged after 2016, turned away from neo anarchism, thinking basically that it had no solutions, which I don't think is true either. But it's like, you know, or like, rather, it was true in the moment, but it doesn't have to be true. But it was true. But enough people thought that it was that you know or like rather it was true in the moment but it doesn't have to

be true but it was true but enough people thought that it was that they turned to like the social democratic route but with the failure of corbin and bernie that kind of burned a lot of people out too and a lot of what it seems like it's coming up now and i'm wondering i wonder what you guys think of this like a lot of the people that we see showing up in movement spaces who we see kind of like getting politically activated for the first time or whatever. A lot of those people are really interested in Leninism and on specifically because I don't I don't know how true that is. That's at least not that's not that part's not true. At least at least at least here in Portland. That's very much not the case.

Yeah, well, Portland is also got no other... No other part of the country is like Portland other than maybe Eugene. Okay, that's fair. Well, Seattle a little bit too, let's be fair. Portland is a big enough anarchist city that there are entire decade-long inter-anarchist wars that no one else in the U.S. has ever heard of

that are the most important thing that's ever happened in Portland. Oh, welcome to the green red let me tell you chris you have just pissed off 60 people who could not explain to you if you gave them a year could not explain to you why they're angry i mean to be to be fair like i i am an anarchist in chicago when the first time i introduced two of my twitter mutuals together they almost got in a fist fight so like that makes sense that makes sense yeah that's that completely scans even with like dsa stuff i feel like there's there was at least was a trend a little bit to stay away from some of the more russia communist kind of like types of aesthetics and,

and ideas because it is a turnoff for so many people. And it does, you know, it does like encourage and forefront a form of authoritarianism that maybe is not great. Yeah. I don't know. Like I,

I I've seen sort of both friends. Okay. So I think the last like year has been very different than I think the previous five. I've seen it on Twitter, but I don't know how much it expands into actual spaces. I think it does. I saw a lot. One of the things that happens in the DSA is that the Leninists essentially took over the international committee. And they had this kind of division of labor inside the DSA where you have a part of the DSA that's essentially a social democratic machine,

and then you have the International Committee, which is a foreign policy wing essentially run by the Leninists. And I think – I don't know. I think I saw it there. The other thing I think I saw a lot of that I've seen, even from people who are ordinarily not Stalinists, part of what I know, part of what I was talking about this is the sort of, like, climate Stalinism. Or, like, climate Mao stuff. That is a huge problem that, you know, I mean, I think part of it also just has

to do with the fact that people don't, like, okay, so, like, we have actually existing climate Leninism. Like, we have it. It's China. Like, the's it's it's china like the ccp changed it's like literally changed state ideology in in in the mid-2010s as you know as an attempt to to deal with with with with pollution climate change they did nothing like they they pressed every policy right yeah it doesn't it didn't work yeah yeah i mean they

did carbon markets they did they literally just banned coal in entire provinces and it didn't work. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they did carbon markets. They literally just banned coal in entire provinces, and it didn't work. They changed their country valuations. They probably shot people. Yeah, yeah. Like, lays this out specifically with China to an excruciating degree. Like, in detail, if you're really interested in this type of, like, climate left authoritarianism, they call it climate Mao in the book, but you can call it climate climate leninism you can call it whatever but they they lay out how it could work and how use cases of it have not worked um to a pretty pretty intense degree if you're interested in that i would recommend reading the book climate leviathan definitely influenced a large portion

of the writing for this show yeah and i mean to your point i don't think that this is the only trend i do i agree with you that out of like the conjuncture of 2020 there was this um i i think that a lot of the more like establishment reformist aspects of the movement were discredited and that pushed people in different radical directions like one of which very much is anarchism and libertarian socialism i am seeing a lot more faces that are interested in different radical directions, like one of which very much is anarchism and libertarian socialism. I am seeing a lot more faces that are interested in those questions for sure. And that's kind of counter to the trend that I was describing from the last like five years of like people becoming more disinterested because of the real or perceived lack of solutions. I do think that it's important, and this is kind of following on Chris's climate Leninism point, to understand that there's at least a countertrend where a lot of intelligentsia-type people like journalists, professors, blah, blah.

You see a very common set of arguments, and I think it's very clear that as the century proceeds and the crises get worse and start killing even larger numbers of people than they already are, we're going to see this argument a lot more. And the argument is something like this. argument a lot more um yeah and and the argument is something like this i mean i there's a quote from a tweet uh and and you know one could argue that the tweet doesn't matter old friends old enemies the you are naive if you think this is the tweet climate you are naive if you think climate change can ever be solved without an authoritarian government at this point that's and that's that's the whole thing so it's a it's a nasty little tweet because it's ambiguous right it has this like shocking and scandalous effects you know we need authoritarianism to to solve climate change it's scandalous you know whatever

but then it's like okay wait but what do you mean by authoritarian am i just being hysterical reacting it's like what do you mean but yeah it's the same as saying you're naive if you think that um climate change can be solved without uh nuclear power or climate change can be solved without really big hammers like we have authoritarian governments we have nuclear power we have really big hammers and climate change has not be solved been solved is it possible that any of those things might be a part of a theoretical solution that may happen someday? Yes, but it hasn't. And there's like – if you're trying to say that authoritarian governments are better at dealing with climate change than the governments that currently dominate. Number one, a hell of a lot of authoritarian governments are responsible for our current situation, Ari, climate change. Number two, the Soviet Union, which I suspect most of these people see as a guiding light,

horrible for the environment, turned the largest body of water in Eurasia into a poison lake. Yes, right. Not good at the environment, you know? And here's what's interesting about the thing to me. The other thing that it's doing is kind of signaling that it's like patently ridiculous to oppose this idea without specifying what the idea is. Like, and like, in other words, authoritarianism, like, but like, I mean, let's be blunt, right? What they're implying as a Leninist is the one party state, the secret police, press censorship and the command economy. Yeah. So does that help you fight climate change? That's actually an interesting and a kind of like,

you know, distant 5000 foot view, you know, from the God's eye view or whatever, like the that's an interesting technical question. Do these institutions actually help or hinder a response? But we're not even having that conversation because instead it's this kind of underhanded attempt to get you to think that. So, again, does a tweet matter? Well, I think a tweet matters if it comes from a member of the National Political Committee of the DSA, because at least ostensibly if DSA is, which is the person who did that tweet, because at least ostensibly if DSA is a mass movement as it purports to be the mass movement of socialists in the U.S. And the National Political Committee is ostensibly the leadership of the DSA, which I personally don't believe, but that's certainly how they think of themselves. Then this indicates that the largest, most important socialist mass movement in the U.S., at least self-brand uh, has people in its leadership who believe that the secret police might help in, uh, addressing climate change. That's an interesting thing. And it's also very disturbing. And the thing is this, this person is not actually like important. He's a symptom because this is something that's happening across the board and a more intellectually

serious, uh, version of this argument was put forward by the marxist intellectual and historian um a professor of human ecology called andreas malm and people who are really into like marx nerd stuff will probably have heard yeah mom's name yeah what a very good book called fossil capital everything he's written after fossil capital is a disaster i like some of the sabotage stuff it's it's i mean it's a little romantic and impractical he wrote an ethical discourse instead of a thing about like the risk of eco-sabotage which is the actual important part of getting well and also the degree to which it can matter because because eco-sabotage, there's this idea on the left that like, well, what we need to do is be targeting fossil fuel infrastructure. And again, it's like what that DSA dude said. Like, yeah, that could theoretically be part of a thing.

It can be a part of an overall process. But also if it's like nine dudes who do it and then they go to prison or get shot well that doesn't really fix climate change i think yeah the book the book um ministry for the future really lays out all of the all kind of like the best case scenario yes all these types of things and how they can work together to overall trend trend in this direction because yeah that type of like eco-sabotage in conjunction with other like political effects can be impactful on what things happen but it's not necessarily be you know it's not it's not as simple as we would like it to be because yeah it's it turns out a complex world has complex consequences and complex yeah and and i think i think this is you know the trend that mom is on the trend on the

you know there's there's a big environmental authoritarian like thing among among liberals this is a huge thing in in political science was a big thing in ecological studies that was essentially making a similar argument to to what mom was making that's like well okay you need some kind of air quotes vague authoritarianism to to deal to with climate change and you know it it's it's it's it's basically this this attempt there's like these people have have seen climate change but they have no actual solution to it so they wave their hands and pretend that like this like you know the state is going to descend from the sky and save them and and it's not and and i think that's you know i i i think i think we're we're sort of i don't know i think as we just i guess kind of wrap this up because we unfortunately are running out of time.

But this exact moment, these few weeks are this moment of incredible rupture on the left because we've had in some ways social democrats be discredited by the fact that Corbyn and Sanders both lost. Their political project has been discredited. the fact that like corbin and sanders both lost right their political project has been discredited um we've had a series of sort of anarchist failures but then you know and in the last couple of weeks right it was all of the sort of big state like authoritarian people like tied themselves to a bunch of imperialists and you know staked their whole entire politics off of them being the anti-imperialist class and then you know the state who's like a bunch of their press people like literally work for right and who they've been arguing like is is the counter imperialist power just does imperialism

and so like yeah i think we have this moment where everything is in chaos in which we have to be the ones that that that have solutions or have or have the tools to build them and i think that's think that's why this project is important because that's something that we need in this exact moment. Yeah. I think there's a tremendous value in being humble about seeking out solutions to these questions and not doing what so many do on the left and pretend that their tendency has an absolute answer because all we have is theories. And the reason I know that to a point of certainty is that no one has solved any of these problems yet. Right. Yeah, absolutely.

And so there is a tremendous degree of humility that people need to have in terms of like, all right, well, we are attempting to arrive at the conclusions that can lead us to a better world as opposed to we are trying to force through this thing that we know will work. Because you don't. If you're a Marxist-Leninist and you think that we need climate Mao, you don't know that that will work because it hasn't yet. And if you're an anarchist who thinks the solution is bombing as many oil refineries

as you possibly can, well, you don't know that you're ever going to get enough people on board for that to mean anything. And I think that there's the conversations that we need to be having. I think it's important to see them as conversations as opposed to polemics aimed at just getting people in line behind this shining vision of a clear set of steps. It's important to envision the end goal. I say that a lot. We need to be looking and accepting the possibility of a better future, but it's important not to be dogmatic about the road to get there because nobody really has a clear idea of what that looks like.

Yeah. So the piece ends up, and if you want to see the ending of it, it'll be up sometime in the next couple weeks. But the basic gist of where it goes is precisely to the practical question. Instead of making these polemical arguments that are rooted more in what tribe you've decided to identify with within the broad family of socialism than in like actually trying to like solve problems for the people around you right or help uh contribute to the solutions like it's actually we what we want to ask is like if we have like the giant ecological crisis uh how do you how do you actually do it is it by trying to force people from the top down to do it as um andrea's mom kind of from the top down to do it as Andrea's mom kind of draws on the failed policies of war communism as an inspiration for that? Or is it

potentially by having like democratized institutions that incentivize people with carrots instead of sticks, like Naomi Klein basically uncovered in a lot of her journalism and this changes everything. So this is kind of like the debate that we have to start having in order to be able to together formulate these kinds of solutions. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's going to do it for us today. You guys got a plug you want to throw up before we roll out? up throw up before we roll out yeah uh if you want to follow us at uh at strange underscore matters um on twitter um we also have a facebook and you can um read our articles uh at strange matters dot co-op uh which is our website uh and if anything that you read there that you've heard here inspires you at

all, please consider donating. We're going to be in the next month, raising money for, for the magazine. And we want to pay our writers above market rate because we think market rates too low. So,

but in order to actually do that, and none of the money's going to the editors from the fundraisers. So if, if, if we're going to be able to do that, we got to meet our fundraising target. All right. Well, support them and figure out how to save the world.

It's up to you. And I'm speaking to exactly one person right now and no one else, but I'm not going to be more specific. 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. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together again. And today we're doing one of our, I guess, increasingly less rare, but still sort of uncommon, Putting Things Back Together Again episodes. And with me today is Ted Minn from Amazonians United to talk about different kinds of union workers organizing and the work that y'all have been doing. So, Ted, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

So, all right, one of the things that I wanted to talk about right off the bat is that Amazonians United is running a very, very different kind of organization than a lot of the union efforts that we've talked about on the show and a lot of the sort of, like, I guess, classical or sort of business union model stuff that, you know, we've, you know, then what you see in the press and then also that we've been covering so i wanted to start off by asking you about solidarity unionism and how it sort of differs from other kinds of union organizations and campaigns sure i think it's pretty simple actually i think solidarity unionism is workers who believe in ourselves. And by that, I mean, it's workers recognizing that we don't need someone to save us. When, because we are the ones doing the work, we know how to run our workplaces. We know how to do it best. places. We know how to do it best. And we also deserve the wealth that we produce. And so solidarity unionism to me is building organization with each other where the fabric of our organization is our relationship and our solidarity as coworkers engaging in struggle against bosses, managers, owners, everyone that's telling us what to do while taking the lion's share of the wealth that we create. the lion's share of the wealth that we create. And it's by uniting, coming together around issues that we care about, taking direct action in the workplace, building our confidence and our strength and our consciousness and our organization that to me is is solidarity unionism. It is distinctly different from business unionism,

which is the dominant form, mainstream unionism, legalistic unionism, whatever you want to call it. That model that has been failing for several decades actually is predicated on a deep distrust of workers. The disbelief that workers can organize ourselves, run our own workplaces, represent ourselves, defend ourselves and each other. represent ourselves, defend ourselves and each other. Um, and in business union, I mean, you know, you, you, you see the ads when they're posting, uh, for union staff job, come lead these workers, come, come join this union and lead. You're not even a worker in the workplace. How are you going to lead someone in there? Like, you know, you're, you're a lawyer, you're a, you know, you have a different professional expertise.

You're not moving the packages with us from inside, from within the warehouse. And so, yeah, I think that's the main difference to me of the model. Do you, are you a worker? Do you believe in workers? Do you trust and have faith that workers, we ourselves can build our own organization lead ourselves um and um and win or do you think workers need to be led need to be represented need to be told what to do um need to pay you to go and save them um and uh yeah I uh I believe in workers so I'm a solidarity unionist yeah and I think we were talking a bit before

the show about this and I think there's a lot of aspects about this that are I think very powerful in you know in sectors of the economy that haven't been unionized or unions ever treated from or people who were never sort of organized to

begin with. And I think that's, you know, something that there's, there's, there's this problem that happens like with, with a lot of unions where, you know,

you, you, you get, you get this sort of bureaucratic structure that builds up and the bureaucratic structure that builds up, like doesn't have, doesn't necessarily have the same interests as the people in the union and that's a real problem and you get these entrenched like you know you can get these entrenched caucuses

you control unions and you get this sort of proliferation of of these people and i think this was part of why a lot of the sort of the the anti-union techniques that you saw in like the sort of anti-union purges in the 80s? I mean, you've been seeing them for a while, but like why they started working in the 80s was that like, you know, when someone like starts ranting about union bureaucrats, right? Like there actually was a divide there. like there was a sort of like a kind of fundamental class difference, which I think has a lot. I mean, it also has a lot to do with,

you know, when, when you get into your sort of like more, more revolutionary context that, that has to do with why a lot of unions, when, you know, France is infamous for this,

right? Like France has had these giant, like communist trade unions. And every time a revolution started, the trade union just like sits there and does nothing. And yeah. And you have to sort of ask yourself like, so why is this happening and i think yeah like solidarity unionism it has it has a lot of answers to this sort of i guess you call it like there's there's a there's a sort of like right-wing critique of unions that has to do with like well okay so we don't want workers to organize we don't want to deflect

power at all but then there's also you know but, but the reason that it works in a lot of cases, because it's able to tap into a sort of like, into these structural problems that a lot of unions have. And I think, so my understanding of how y'all's organizing has been going, and correct me if I'm wrong, that I've been interested in is that like, unlike a lot of other campaigns that you've seen i mean even specifically with amazon but like a lot of other the the sort of the campaigns that are getting a lot of press like you're not actually your goal isn't to just get like recognition as a collective bargaining unit right that's another key part of our key difference between solidarity unionism business unionism um In business unionism, what defines you as a union is whether you are legally recognized by the state, by the NLRB, by the appointed government body. Yeah. That is the point at which the folks in these organizations like are we a union or are we not okay let's let's do an election let's follow all these rules that by the way were

designed to demobilize us a century ago but uh let's follow these rules let's try to fight in the courts uh to be recognized as a union and then once we're a union then we can fight for a legal contract that has benefited a lot of people in different ways i'm not you know what i mean like but that approach is different than solidarity unism where it's like we know our power is in the workplace on the shop floor where our power is based on our unity and numbers as co-workers we see this when we walk out and within a month they give us a raise how long would it have taken to get a raise if we went for an election yeah it could be years how many years i mean what yeah what organization are we even building in that way? And so instead of seeking legal recognition and waging our struggle against bosses in the courts, we are choosing to engage in struggle in the shop floor where we are the experts, where we have the power, where we have the organization, where we are doing the work, where that is our home turf.

We have more power there. not in the institutions that were specifically designed to disempower us and give large employers the upper hand, all the different ways that they can manipulate how the votes happen, what is considered part of the voting unit, the contract negotiation process. I mean, all of these legal hurdles, I mean, for the vast majority of workers, you'll need lawyers to even understand how to engage in that world. That's not our world. It was not built for us to be in. It was built to control us. And so it just doesn't make logical sense to try to wage our struggle in that arena. We should be in waging it in the places that we work. And so that, yeah,

that's, I think another core principle, solidarity unism like build power where we have it. And that's the shop floor. Yeah. And I think, I mean, that's something that I've seen like in, like when I was in college there there was a big grad student union uh organization campaign and it kind of they they had this huge problem which was that okay well they were trying to do they were trying to get a national labor relations board like vote under trump but they couldn't do it because if you know because because the national labor relations board was controlled by just like the, even by National Labor Relations Board standards, like just unbelievably anti-union, like viscerally anti-worker forces.

It was like, well, if we try to get a vote, like there's a chance they could just, you know, like literally destroy the right, like destroy the organizing rights of all grad students in the country. And yeah, and you get it. They with the nissan election or something like that yeah yeah and definitely delayed it yeah and it's and it's you know and yeah i think this this is a trap that like a lot of people even even people who are really highly organized like get stuck in where you know and then like eventually uh the grad students just like essentially started doing walkouts because that was, you know, that, that was the thing they could do when they started doing their own strikes, even though they weren't like legally recognized, because that was the thing that you could do to, you know, actually fight in a terrain that wasn't just inherently

rigged against you. So, okay. So you've, you've, you've decided to, to take, to take a fight in the workplace, like on the shop floor where,'re at your strongest. What does that actually look like in terms of actions, in terms of organization? more rudimentary than one might think or that you might read about in an academic article or something, analyzing. I think it comes down to building community, comes down to building culture, and the principles of the community and culture that you build together with your coworkers is one where we value ourselves and each other. We respect ourselves and each other. And that means that we fight for what is fair in the workplace. That means that we maintain integrity. Anytime a boss disrespects one of us, we need to confront it. We need to address it, if not immediately, soon after in numbers. It means if we're getting overworked and underpaid, then we need to strategize and figure out how do we compel the employer to stop overworking and underpaying us?

How do we hit them in a place that they are forced to respect? And as it goes in the world we are today, it's always the numbers. It's always the money. It's always the numbers, it's always the money, it's always the profit. So what that means on a day-to-day, I mean, Amazon warehouses are a very isolating place. Amazon has basically gigified warehouse work. You know, it's like the Uber for warehouse where you can pick up shifts, you can, you know it's like the uber for warehouse where you can pick up shifts you can you know extra shifts you can take uh furlough days you know we call them vtos um many warehouses like you're you'll work a 10 12 hour shift and you're for that entire time you're near one or two people max because you're spaced out and it's loud and there's machinery and you're packing boxes. And, and so, um, on top of that, you know,

the everyday dehumanizing, it's also, um, you're pushed to work faster and faster. Um, it's difficult to have, you know, deep human interaction when you're busting your ass moving, you know, 30 to 45 pound packages as quickly as you can. Um, and so the, And so the day-to-day of building and fighting in the workplace, building community means, for example, every week we have a potluck during lunch, bring coworkers together, new coworkers that, you know, someone could start last week. That's something that we hear a lot. You of the challenge, the turnover is so high. How can you possibly organize? Turnover is so high.

That is a specific weapon that bosses use against us. High turnover means what? It means we frequently have new coworkers, harder to build relationship and organization. It means that the job feels more precarious. So people are always afraid that we'll lose our job. You know, we could get fired. We could they could change staffing numbers. They could close warehouses and create, you know, as a tool, higher turnover. They just they churn through workers. OK, who who's willing to do the most work for the lowest pay and sacrifice the most of their body

okay if if you can't handle it then you quit if you can then you stay in here okay let's find the workers in society that are most able to you know produce the most so on and so forth and so uh basic things you know having every day uh sometimes it's just like talking with your co-workers is something that is that they try to keep you from doing in the workplace. And by engaging conversation, you're already resisting that isolation, already resisting bosses trying to just control everything, keep everyone divided. So weekly pot lunches, having meetings inside or outside of the workplace, coming together, what are the issues that we care about? How do we bring, how do we build more unity around these issues that we know many people care about? Is it doing a petition? People sign on together?

Are we delivering the petition in a group? If the management doesn't respond, doesn't give us a reasonable response, how do we escalate do we need to walk out do we need to take other action um anytime we see a manager disrespect disrespecting a co-worker um how do we post up next to them pull out a notepad start taking notes ask questions um we're a witness you know how do we defend each other in all of these basic ways how are we addressing um and being honest with ourselves and each other of just the depth of disrespect when they're waiting for us outside of the bathrooms to write us up for time off tasks? When they're telling us to work faster when we're already on a 10-hour shift, we're on hour 10 of the 10-hour shift, they send a bunch of people home and are forcing us to finish all the work for a small number of people. Do we continue putting up with it or do we immediately walk out or do we talk with their coworkers about what we want to do? Just being mindful of being honest about what,

how we are being treated, what is fair, what is not, and taking the necessary action to uh uh demand the the fairness the respect that each of us deserve i think like that's what the workplace struggle looks like um i don't yeah and i think it comes down to building that community um with each other and then building the culture of not putting up with bullshit defending each other looking out with each other and then building the culture of not putting up with bullshit, defending each other, looking out for each other. There's a them, there's an us make sure, you know, what side you're on. And, you know, I think that's the, that's the foundation of it. Yeah. I think that the aspect especially of culture building is really interesting

to me because I think that's something that's not really talked about much with organizing efforts. when you have people writing about union organizing, even when other union organizers are writing about unions, is that you don't hear much about the cultural aspects, and you don't hear much about just resisting the actual psychological degradation that you get. And that strikes me, I think, also, as you've been saying, it strikes me as something that's very important to not discuss enough as, I mean, both as just something that is a goal in itself, like not having this sort of, you know, not having the just sort of horrible,

demeaning and abusive sort of tyranny of the bosses, just like existing as this kind of like normal force and but then also like yeah that it starts to be something that is really important for anyone who's who's thinking about organizing is you know getting people getting people to organize around just like how or getting people to organize around just the how or getting getting people to organize around just this the sort of like the psychological degradation like i i think is really important because otherwise you know you you get you can get you can just get these cultures where like i mean i remember i had a job where i was in like we had a union but like it didn't I mean so I was I was a temp

worker so I wasn't in the union but like they had a union and it just sort of didn't do anything and no one like yeah and this this was a real source of sort of right-wing resentment because the union just didn't do anything and then you know everyone's getting treated terribly like by by the bosses and by sort of upper management and no one but it never even like it never really like just on a cultural level never occurred to them to sort of like use the union for that because that's not really what the union was there for it was just a sort of like it was just a thing that existed and like occasionally when contracts came up it would appear and i guess on on that note one of the things i was also wondering is what sort of, so for people who are interested in their own workplaces and starting doing this kind of organizing and starting to sort of, I mean, just fight back against their bosses in ways that don't, you know, either because they don't want to or because they literally can't, which I think is true of a lot of people.

is true of a lot of people like who, who want to organize outside of the business union model. How, how do you, how did you all start organizing like this and what, what sort of immediate lessons do you think people should, should take away and should sort of bring in, bring into their own organizing in the workplace? Yeah. Um, I think at the base of it is that, I guess I mentioned something like this earlier, but that we can organize ourselves. If you have two coworkers that you're friends with and you

say like, hey, let's meet up and talk about what's going on at work you're starting to organize you know um and i think part of part of the damage part of the harm that business unionism has done and also just, I don't know, hierarchical organizing, um, Kalinsky and organizing. Um, I think they're all part of a, uh, sort of connected school of thought where it's like organizing and, you know, building a union is something that like you need to be like professionals to,

or, you know, they're experts at it. They're experts. And then if you're not an expert, then you need to consult an expert to figure out how to do it. And I think that's bullshit. I think it's, if you're a worker, then you can be a union organizer. If you're a worker and you talk with, you know, another worker about what's going on in your workplace, like you're already starting to organize. Um, like I said earlier, if you're calling a meeting, if you're, you know, and, and workers do this all the time, uh, confronting

management about disrespect, you know, I think think it's much more frequently on an individual basis, but it's a matter of connecting your issue with a couple other coworkers and then figure out, okay, well, what's our next step? if each of us can invite one more person that's six people if uh you know if the six of us can are starting a petition we could probably get you know signatures of 50 or 60 you know like it's it's step by step and saying if we want to build organization we can do it from the bottom up we can start it um and we can figure this out. I mean, every, even within the same company, even within the same company in the same city there, you know, I work at, um, a delivery station, uh, in Gage Park, other delivery stations in the city of Chicago have a completely different culture, you know, the neighborhood that it's in, the, uh, the workers that are the bosses, you know, the neighborhood that it's in, the workers that are the bosses, you know, and so even in the same company, the same type of workplace in the same city,

it's going to be a different story for how that workplace is going to, you know, get united, come together, um, figure things out, build organization. And it's just anyone there that is thinking about that, that, that kind of just begins the process of putting together the basics. All right. We need to start building up some numbers. We need to start having, you know, addressing some issues that people care about. And there's always, I mean, i mean there's always the you know overworked and underpaid and that's going to exist everywhere you can always go after those issues but frequently they're smaller ones like our first issue was a water petition uh or or or at was access to water um and this is how we started as an organization um basically they were taking away bottled water they said we were leaving around too much garbage they're saying bottled water is only there for the summer and now that's not the summer that

whatever they're trying to save a few dollars a day on bottled water to make us you know work without it um and we said that's fucked up we're doing warehouse work like this is hard manual labor and it's hot in here we need that bottle of water it's you know not just the uh broken unfiltered fountain across the warehouse that you can't even get to while you're working um and so uh just a few of us that were talking at break it's like okay well there's six of us here well we're kind of you know this is the this is the, this is the break room at work. They're like managers walking around, their cameras in here, like, let's meet outside and figure this out. So, you know, we, we met at a, at a Krispy Kreme down on like 93rd.

And we just basically said like, well, how are we going to get this water? We've been asking management, you know, they've given us the same reasons. We need to do something bigger that, that they can't ignore. How about a petition? And so we just drafted it. The six of us, we drafted it. We went around, we got 150 signatures, I think from our coworkers or just like basic demands. We need bottled water stocked every day. They need to be, you know, filters need to be clean.

We need to get them be able to take a break to get this water. And we delivered the 150 signatures to management. I think it was within 30 or 40 minutes, they drove to a grocery store, bought, you know, went to the nearest Pete's, bought every case of bottled water they have, brought it and passed it out to everyone. We're like, oh, okay. Like that like oh okay like that was you know people were like that's what's hey we got to do a petition for this thing we got to do yeah you know what this thing we should probably it was that I don't want to say easy because it's definitely not easy to like yeah but yeah the steps the step by step of like how do you begin how do you something started? How do you start building some unity? These are steps that we have taken. These are what we think can be applicable with everyone's own personal tweaks based on your own workplace to start getting something going for more coworkers to start realizing, oh yeah, like we should be in more control of what's happening around

here because we're the ones that are doing all the work. We're the ones that are suffering the most from it. I mean, our body's getting ground down from doing it. And so, yeah, I think that, I think I looped back to a previous question too, but like how we started, how you engage in the struggle and just like what that looks like or, or building, building something up from nothing to something like that. So that's what we, you know what I mean? That's what we did. Yeah. From what I've seen, y'all have been extremely effective,

like at, at, at, at getting management to recognize it, but essentially getting them to like accede to your demands because like this this this kind of organizing like solidarity union what i'm trying to say is solidarity unionism works like it's not like like and you know and yeah it's a thing i think one of one of the things you're talking about is like yeah it's like when like when you win even on something fairly small right and you you can show people that this works and that like you know if if you actually come together on something you can force management to do stuff like i think that also become becomes an important sort of like i don't know if catalyst is the right word, but it becomes, it becomes an engine that like feeds itself.

Definitely. I mean, especially for a big company like Amazon, like I think the most common perspective, at least at the start is like, this is such a big company. Like what could we possibly do? They have a thousand warehouses. Like what, you know, they could choose to close one and open another one. You know, they do this, they could suddenly, you know, and with two weeks notice, like change the schedule from an evening time to an overnight time,

which is what they did to us basically. What can we possibly do? And so, you know, but i think it's like the moment it's like there's a kind of cliff or a uh what do you call it like the watershed a point like the moment you kind of take that first collective action and then get what you want um it's like oh wait it's not as like within this space like we can actually make our lives a lot better pretty quickly if we just come together and do it ourselves and recognize the power that we have. And that's one of the reasons why it works so well is because it is different from the mainstream approach, which bosses and these companies understand very well and can easily maneuver around such as, oh, if we do, if one of our managers does something wrong, what will happen next is one of our lawyers will receive a grievance from one of their representative lawyers and this business union. We'll have this many months to respond and then we can do this. And then we'll do this paperwork and have this legal back and forth. And then maybe we'll address

this issue six to 12 months down the line. No disruption, nothing to worry about. Let the bosses run amok and we'll get a six to 12 month head start to maybe get a slap on the wrist and a fixed order if we need to or pay a small fine. where it's like they just disrespected us in a way that like we're not trying to put up with like we are hurting we can't even finish this shift without hurting ourselves more we're just going to group up and walk out right now um they're going to figure out they're going to have to figure out how to get the rest of these packages out without us um and when we come back tomorrow uh we'll see we'll see if they want to keep treating us the same way. Um, and so it's like, to me, you know, we, we've had basic, basic management confrontations where either immediately, uh, you know, they were under staffing and we grouped up, rolled into the office, just like with seven of us, not even like the whole shift. It's just like with seven of us, not even like the whole shift. Seven out of 50 people will roll in the office and you have too few people on the lines. You need an extra person. We've been asking. You have it. We folded our arms.

Within five minutes, they sent an extra person over there. They're working the rest of the shift. And in the business union approach, I don't even know how you follow, you know, understaffing grievance. Like what are the details? How does that happen? Does a union representative have to be contacted and then negotiate in some way? Fuck that. Like let's just address this right now and fix it. I don't want to wait for some outside activity. Let's just improve our working conditions right now by confronting and addressing it. now by confronting and addressing it um i think it just you know that's something that um the bosses are less it's less predictable for them it's less in their control it's less in their wheelhouse um

and i think that's a key reason why it works better yeah and i think one of the things the thing this reminds me of is it reminds me of the kind of stuff that unions used to do when they were strong. Like it reminds me of like, yeah, you're like CIO, like sit down strike, right? It's like, well, okay, if the manager does something we don't like, someone blows a whistle, everyone sits down. And like, it's like, it's that kind of not just sort of like waiting to go to legal channels, but just immediately taking action is like, it's something that is like, it's something that worked and it's, you know, like that, that's, that's the kind of stuff that like built the,

built the original like labor movement. And it's really interesting to me that like, cause I think there's a lot of like, I think a lot of people look back at that era sort of like nostalgically and go like, well, okay, if unions were stronger,

we could do this. But like, that's not really true. You can actually just like, like you can do the same things that like, well, okay, if unions were stronger, we could do this. But that's not really true. You can actually just – you can do the same things that your 1930s CIO was doing. And you don't need the kind of institutional backing that those people had if you're organized enough in your specific location. I think that's a really interesting i don't know i'm curious if you agree with us it seems like it's sort of interesting lesson about like what happened

to the labor movement where like the the the more you the more you get into this sort of like okay well the the union is now two lawyers sitting down with each other right the the what what you're doing basically is like this is the this is this is explicitly what the national labor relations act was right like it was an attempt to get labor labor and capital sit down at the table and stop fighting so that they could like you know it's basically so the production could go on and like sometimes sometimes that that you know sometimes i favor the union right sometimes you'd have the president be like like the actual like u.s president would be like okay you come you like steel company you have to like give workers what what they're asking for because our steel production shut down

right but like you know the the problem with that is that it's based on like it's based on at all costs trying to sort of preserve like it's based on all costs like trying to preserve the labor piece and you know i mean there's reasons for that too. Like, yeah, like I'm not going to like, like obviously there's, there's anytime we take a direct action, there's a risk. And yeah, like I'm not going to like,

you know, I'm not going to be like, like it's, it's hard to be really mad at people who don't want to go on strike because they don't like, because the, the, you know,

how, how am I going to feed my family? Well, et cetera, et cetera. But like, you know, how, how am I going to feed my family? Well, et cetera, et cetera. But like, you know, bring like have,

having that kind of militancy in, in the workplace, just, you know, without, without any kind of formal recognition, I think is an extremely powerful tactic and is, I mean,

literally how the original labor movement like got built. It's difficult though. And it can be scary. Yeah. You know, and it's difficult though and it can be scary yeah you know and it's like i think you you posed kind of the question or or kind of questioning the idea like where did how did the labor movement get to where it's at if the origins were more conscious um in the ways that you've been describing um i think that um i mean it's it's definitely you know the risk is always there you're always confronting the power i mean in the workplace when it comes down to it like obviously the power dynamics shift and it's more complex than you know bosses have more power than

workers unless workers organize and workers have more power than bosses that is true and also for example on the day-to-day you know the boss can fire anyone and then you're, you know, however you end up dealing with it, you know, you could be out anywhere between two or 20 paychecks until something is resolved legally or even through direct action you know there's obviously very directly uh oppressive power dynamic there um and i think that um to speak truth to power to directly confront it um of course it's frightening i mean i i would be lying if you know like i like I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, talking on this, on this podcast about doing this and yeah, we're doing this. You're like, you know, I'm not going to pretend that like when we were, even when we were in a 40 person mass, you know,

confronting management, addressing everyone together, it's still like, you know, there's, there's, there's still this power dynamic here and we're, we're, we're punching up. Like it's a punch, but like we're punching up to someone that's like a bigger, heavier adversary. And so it's like, they could swing back too. Like you kind of got to be ready to. And so I think that what I'm describing

on a kind of like face-to-face interpersonal that moment in the workplace I think on a broader scale also exists where it's like waging an extended you know organizing struggle to be fighting this fight millions of times in many different ways and then continually trying to bring people together you know people move on because everything that's happening in life they got evicted from their place so they had to move to a different place far away okay suddenly they had to leave the job and they were someone that was you know contributing a lot to the organizing something happened someone has a family member uh you know that they need to spend a little bit more time with um everything that's happening everything that's making you know, that they need to spend a little bit more time with, um, everything that's happening, everything that's making, you know, reducing our time as working people to take care of

ourselves and each other, like all of this, we're fighting against all of this. And, um, there are definitely ups and downs. There are definitely times where it was like, dang, like we're, you know and it seems like at times uh all of the struggles in life like it's like you take like two steps forward and then two steps backwards yeah how do we even get there and so you know there's definitely a difficult reality permitting everything you know all of the the the organizing wins the the events that we're talking about um we need to be fully honest about that and also recognize that there's still like nothing more there's like nothing more beautiful powerful there's no there's nothing that feels

better than the that moment when you when the power dynamic was like this and you pull something off and it's like yeah you know it's like oh like you you just did what we wanted you know and and more and then now like you're being real careful with us like we we change things here like our lives are better concretely. Um, and we made it happen. And, um, you know, I think those are like celebrating the wins and like taking joy, not always thinking so far, okay, we've got more to go. Yeah. There always, there's always more that, um, we can and have to be building and let's make sure that we're taking the time

to recognize, um, and celebrate each of the steps that we are advancing so that, you know, we don't get lost in, you know, assuming in the cycle of like seeking permanent, infinite growth and organizing and being constantly stressed out about it rather than like taking those breathers taking those moments okay like let's take this in stride let's do this sustainable let's not burn out um you know i think that's all part of figuring out how to how to how to make it happen yeah and i think that's that's important i think that's an important thing to understand with any kind of organizing, which is that if you... If there's never a moment in which you're reflecting on or just celebrating the goals that you've actually accomplished, you're just going to be endlessly bashing your head against a wall and this is sort of a burnout machine. This is a way that you know it's something that also just sort of feeds despair

which is that yeah like you know like yeah okay your your victory is a small victory but it it it is a real one and that's that's something that even in the face of sort of like the cyclopean horror of like just the world that we're living in like no your your small victories do lead up to bigger ones and yeah and you know and getting people to lose sight of that is a like it's a major way the system is held together by just sort of like manufacturing hopelessness even when there there are reasons for hope and there are reasons to sort of look at what you've done and go hey we won this thing

definitely yeah I think that's a I guess unexpectedly cheery for this show note to end on do you have anything else? yeah I mean I think we touched on a lot. I guess I have a usual pitch or some version of it.

But I think maybe something to bring together different elements that we touched on and bring in some of the cheery hopefulness and also put out some encouragement too I think now is a time where there's a whole lot of uncertainty and definitely in a

global week to week or year to year scale but also on an individual level. I think a lot of individuals right now, likely those that are listening that, that end up listening to this or those that are like seeing what's happening around the world. It's like,

what is my role in all of this? What am I trying to do? And different people are joining different organizations and trying to figure out how they should be living their lives, what the principles they should be living out, how they should be applying themselves to, for example, combat and dismantle, you know, capitalism and, and, and, you know, the prison industrial complex and reverse climate destruction and, and, uh, you know, the prison industrial complex and, uh, reverse climate destruction

and, and fight fascism and everything, all of the existential threats that we face. Like what, you know, what is my role? you at all have the capacity and curiosity to engage in some of this deep work yourself for building community, relationships, culture among, you know, just with workers, building your own organization, building your own acts of resistance, building your own forms of reclaiming your time and minds and bodies and build something beautiful that can be part of a broader movement that lifts up working people, that kind of gets back what we are building and what we what we deserve um you know think about think about the logistics industry think about warehouse work yeah um think about joining in um and uh you know it's uh it's hard work it's hard manual labor it's hard manual labor. It's hard mental and emotional work. But I think this is the future of what the winning, fighting, successful labor movement will need. Um, and I think many people engaging in building more genuine, more worker focused, more worker centered, worker run, uh, solidarity unions of our own, uh, democratic horizontal bottom up.

Um, I think building this way and connecting with each other, I think this is the way forward. I think this is the examples that we need. We need more people engaging in this work. We need more, more of that attention, energy, and focus. Like how do we build the real stuff? That's going to be the, the, the powerful organizational influence to transform society and, and avert these forms of extinction and continued,

uh, extraction, exploitation, oppression of all of us, uh, join us, join, join the struggle, uh, get, get some of these jobs, talk to your coworkers, build something. Uh, it's that it's and yeah that's my everyday pitch so if people want to find Amazonians United specifically where can they find y'all so in Chicago so Amazonians United Chicagoland

is our name we have a Facebook page. We have a Twitter. Those are probably where we're most active and where you can follow and get into contact with us, tweet at us, message us on Facebook. If you're really so inclined, you can email us at AUCh chicagoland at gmail.com um but otherwise yeah just look up you know follow our social media you'll see what we post occasionally about what's going on um and uh you know feel free to reach out get into contact ask any questions you might have um and you know let's connect let's build community. Yeah. That's at AUChicagoLand

on Twitter, by the way. Yeah. Yeah, sweet. Ted, thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, it was really great. Yeah, if you want to find us at,

you can find us at HaveIt it here pod on twitter instagram and close on media in the same places um yeah go go go organize with your co-workers go do cool things go make the world a better place yes yes yes for sure sure. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Arrgh, arrgh, me artees. This is me doing a pirate voice, which is kind of a bad Irish voice. That's enough of that. Hi, welcome to Could Happen Here, the show where we talk about things that could possibly happen and or are happening. And go yarr, fiddly dee. I'm Garrison. Welcome to this tech-centric episode. This is very exciting. With me is Chris to help us discuss libraries and piracy. Arrgh.

Permanently pirate-brained. And paywalls and all this fun stuff. So, yeah. We're talking about kind of free access to information. And, I don't know. I really like libraries. And I think a library-based economy would be pretty cool. Libraries for everything. Food libraries.

You take food, deposit compost. It's a decent system. You've got tool libraries, so you can get your angle grinders for taking apart federal fences. You can get your soldering irons for building your FGC9s. All of the basic stuff.

And I guess book libraries are cool too. But we already have those. And we're going to be talking about them a little bit. We're going to be having a discussion on paywalls, piracy, ARG, and how access to information is actually good. Contrary to what many people want to tell you yeah no so yeah as uh as the internet uh uh became easier to access and information flow accelerated there's been kind of questions and speculation on how physical book libraries will fit into our increasingly digital media

landscape. Now, it's important to mention that the library is also one of the main ways for lower income people to access the internet with their collection of free to use computers, as well as a decent Wi-Fi connection. And many, many libraries also are expanding their scope to include stuff like makerspaces, as well as their printers and standard kind of office supplies. So libraries are already kind of beyond just places to get printed media. But of course, that is kind of their main premise. But they've been including stuff regarding e-books, computer use, Wi-Fi access. All this stuff has been a part of libraries for the past 20, 30 years.

It's not a new thing. But I think when people think of libraries, we just think of books or newspapers and stuff. But it is definitely more than that. Because, yeah, obviously physical libraries are mostly known for printed materials. And because we'll be talking about paywalls and piracy, arg, and fears that access to free content will negatively impact creators' ability to make such content, I figured let's start by talking about book libraries, since they're one of the oldest examples of providing information for free. So based on kind of surveys and data collected from library users across the country, it would seem that libraries and loaned ebooks are actually a very powerful economic

engine for the book business. Now, yes, libraries do have special deals to buy the books that they have in stock. Sometimes they're donated. But even beyond that fact, like library users, like the fact that libraries exist for the users in and of themselves increase book sales. It's pretty fun. So even as far back as like 2011, there's been studies that show that libraries do increase book sales. Now, yes, this is a capitalist argument. Now, yes, this is a capitalist argument, but sometimes when arguing with, let's call them normies, you can convince them to agree with a lot of kind of like anarchy-leaning improvements to the world by carefully using their own rhetoric against them. This is like the same thing with giving out free drugs and having safe drug intake sites and giving houses to homeless people, all this type of stuff. All of those things are cheaper for the taxpayer than what we're currently doing with how we use emergency services spending. So yes, it's a capitalist argument, but you can still kind of

paint someone into a corner to agree to actual good improvements by using, hey, this is actually cheaper, you know, that type of argument. So, yeah. Libraries, they do increase book sales, so that is mostly cool. There was a study that shows around this is a study around 2011 showed that 50% of library users report purchasing books by an author

they were introduced to through the library system, which debunks the myth that when a library buys books, the publisher will lose future sales. Instead, it confirms that the public library does not only incubate and support literacy, as it's generally understood in our culture, but is also an active partner with the publishing industry for building up the book market. And also including in that is the ever-growing e-book market, which I don't really like e-books for reasons we'll kind of discuss in a bit

for how I kind of have an aversion to the idea of digital ownership. But e-books are undeniably a growing industry that also does support writers in a lot of ways. But I think physical books are a lot cooler and more reliable nice they are as you can tell by my very nice physical book collection behind me which you cannot listen to because this is a podcast and you can't listen with your ears unless you're on a lot of drugs which good luck hearing the books behind me people who listen to this podcast also have fun yeah you too but yeah i'm not i'm not talking about them

um this is an anti people who have on drug induced synesthesia podcast now lucky bastards gonna get canceled oh sure yeah that's that's that's what's gonna get me after all not the well bleep that i can't believe you said that. Wow. Whoa. Chris just said, one of the most horrible authors that I would never be caught dead reading any of their books. Anyway. So the idea that piracy and free information will tank creative industries, and the idea that just having access to free versions of media will hurt the ability to make more of the media,

is definitely proven wrong simply by the modern existence and popularity of anime in the United States. Because we would not have anime... Anime would not be what it is today without piracy because in the specifically like 2000s late 90s the piracy of anime became

a massive reason why it is the cultural juggernaut that it is today over half of anime related sales revenue comes from overseas not Japan it comes from places like the states yeah and you know and it's also i think worth mentioning here like it wasn't even just that they were like pirating the show right they were pirating they were getting a worse version of it

oh yeah because like you know you're talking about resolution yeah terrible resolutions like i mean literally like vcrs that people had figured out how to like write like get subtitles on like these versions of it are terrible the translations are awful and it's still just like absolutely like just catapulted anime from like an incredibly fringe thing for weirdos to a thing that is also still for weirdos but it's still mostly mainstream yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna take to take this opportunity to plug our future episode, just dissecting the politics of attack on Titan. Dun, dun,

dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. It's coming folks. It's strapping.

So yes, anime would not, would not be the thing it is today without, without, without privacy. And again, but the majority of, of sales revenue comes from not Japan. So yeah, the majority of sales revenue

comes from not Japan. So yeah, that's pretty clear. So the discovery of new books and authors through the library system is definitely surging right now, actually,

specifically due to e-books and audio books being available online anytime via library means so there's like you know there's there's ways you can access you can quote unquote borrow these types of things via via the library systems uh despite them being like digital media uh which again i prefer physical but that's that's something we'll talk about later so even even while live visits to libraries like physical bookstores plummeted during covet-19, digital library usage soared, which is, you know, that tracks.

More than 430 million titles were borrowed from the Overdrive library platform in 2020 alone. And it would, you know, you could assume that this would cause a drop in the purchasing of books during the same period, but the opposite's true. Actually, the overall purchasing of books also rose in 2020, including an 8% lift in the sales of print books, despite a lot of

people being out of jobs, out of work. You know, it turns out people are bored, so they're going to spend money on books, because books are cool. And even when they have access to library stuff they still buy books yep it's a it's a it's a simple truth that the the library patrons are usually also book buyers yeah it's it's me i am literally surrounded by books on all sides they they have me surrounded i have no escape and this is what happens when you grow up in a library i i mean i also grew up in a library i mean i was i was homeschooled i grew up a lot of time in library to my to my left i have books on urban exploration and lemony snicket to my right i have books on

alchemy behind me i have books which i shall not name um and behind me i have a massive stack of comic books um yeah i am usually surrounded by books. Books are great. And you have them. Unless they burn up, you're going to have them, no matter whether the internet goes out, whether an online provider shuts down. You're going to have physical books.

They are pretty cool. So libraries and the library system offers a really great way to discover new books, new series, new genres or new authors before deciding whether to permanently purchase those titles. So this isn't just like an assumption used to hype up the idea of a library. This has been proven by lots of studies like the one I mentioned a few minutes ago from 2011. minutes ago from 2011 um also there was the panorama projects immersive media and books 2020 consumer survey which is a way too long of a title it's a real mouthful which found that one third of responders bought a book that they discovered through the library in 2020 so turns out you you discover a book you return it and you're like hey that book's actually pretty good

i'll just buy a copy myself. I did that. I still do that all the time. It's, yeah, it's a thing. This is why I own all my Star Wars books, for better or for worse. This is why I have a beautiful copy of Splinter in the Mind's Eye. Oh, God. Which I am very curious to see who will get that joke. I was trying to think of the worst Star Wars book that I have,

and you said that. I'm like, I can't. I got nothing. I think I actually have that. Well, there you go. There's two. There's two for you. I gave you two.

Yeah. So in our technology-driven world of wanting things very quickly, instant gratification, library users are no different. They still have that instant gratification drive. And many times they will want a specific book and they'll be happy to pay for it instead of waiting for it at the library. You can put a book on hold and wait a month, or you can buy it for 10 bucks. And oftentimes people will buy the book because we want things quickly it's uh according to the same panorama project immersive media and books 2020 consumer survey uh about 30 30 percent of respondents uh said that they just bought books rather than waiting for them if they are unavailable from from the library at the time so and it's it's it's a great

system like libraries are also frequently used just as like a really good browsing tool. You know, if you're unsure of what you want to read next, you can go to the library, look at stuff and be like, okay, this is what I'm interested in and then purchase it online

or in person at a later date. And it's not just physical books. Library users are also driving the purchase of eBooks and physical books, um, and audio books. Audio books have been actually very big at library. I used to listen to a lot of audio books actually from the library because I would get,

uh, CDs back when those were a thing. Uh, great for road trips. Back in the old days when you had a CD, I say with my Gen Z outlook. Yes, CDs, classic, classic. According to the Audio Publishers Association, also known as the APA, which is an acronym,

daily audio consumption has grown 71% since 2017 2017 which is not surprising me like there's there's there's stuff like audible and you know big big platforms that are that are making high quality audiobook content uh but that's that's that's a lot yeah in in 2020 alone audiobook revenue grew by 17 percent even though even though the number of people who were commuting plummeted right because a lot of people listen to audiobooks while like driving to work so the number of people who were commuting plummeted, right? Because a lot of people listen to audiobooks while driving to work. So the number of commuting dropped in 2020 because there was this plague. I'm not sure if you've heard about that. But the government clearly hasn't. So, you know.

That's true. They're pretending it's not real. But if you look at most, if you look at the audiobook revenue, it grew despite there being much less work commuting. And that was the eighth straight year of double-digit growth in the audiobook revenue sector. And it aligns with other kind of digital library usage statistics. So yeah, like libraries and booksellers, well, they work in tandem. Libraries drive interest for content, both physical and digital.

You know, Rising Tide races all of those floaty things in the water, as the saying goes. Arrgh, it's a piracy joke, everybody. Arrgh, fiddley-dee. Yeah, Overdrive has found that when a reader uses one or more digital library apps, like Libby, which I've never heard of until I had to research this podcast, but if you use more than one or more digital library apps, you are 61% more likely to increase your book consumption year over year

versus people who do not. So yeah, it turns out when you read more books, you want to read more books. Because they're good. Because it's fun. It rules. It's fun. Instead of reading a book, I'm going to give our audio listeners an opportunity right now to listen to this carefully curated selection of ads.

Unless they're by, like, I don't know, the National Guard or whatever. So here you go here's here's some ads and we are back wow what a lovely lovely collection of audio treats to tickle your ears okay okay you're gone speaking speaking of tickling your ears uh sonic the hedgehog so a lot of a lot of the reasons why we're going to... This will make sense, I promise. We're about to talk about fly genetics.

Gene SSH, Sonic Hedgehog. No. This is a real thing, look it up. We're talking about how when people are allowed to do piracy and allowed to do their own things with media, it actually boosts the overall presence of the franchise. Sonic the Hedgehog would not be

a current cultural stake if it wasn't for fan culture and the use of fan games and fan media related to Sonic. Same thing with anime. Sonic fan games, which were allowed to be existed for years, which Sega encouraged, are the only reason why there's good Sonic games right now, like Sonic Man games, which were allowed to be existed for years, which Sega encouraged, are the only reason why there's good Sonic games right now

like Sonic Mania, which they just hired people who made fan games. The person who redesigned Sonic the Hedgehog for the movie used to make Sonic fan comics. And then got hired to make the actual official Sonic comics. They got hired to fix

the horrible movie design. So yeah, Sega's been very good about not being horrible about copyright stuff and trademark stuff. They've really encouraged it because it turns out when you yourself don't make good games, you need to rely on fans

to actually make the good games. So that's where you get beautiful creations like the Sonic Dreams Collection. Which is a heartwarming nostalgic look. At Sonic through the ages. And other great games. Like Sonic Mania. So we can compare this.

To like a Nintendo. Who unfortunately makes good games. But also hates when fans make games. Or do like emulation. Or any like ports. They will clamp down on that so fast if you ever emulate a nintendo game you ho watch watch your back there will be there will be men in black suits following you around just like to give an understanding of like how far this goes right so super smash bros and melee this game is like maybe older than garrison

it is i think i actually don't know if that's game is like maybe older than garrison it is i think i actually don't know if that's true but yeah literally old and garrison right this game has an absolute still still to this day like copies of this game are extremely expensive because there's an enormous professional scene around it uh nintendo like basically was working to actively smash them because they were they were playing a yeah yeah smash them yeah because they because they were playing on like an emulated uh like they're playing an emulated version of it for tournaments because it was easier emulated software yeah yeah and nintendo again who is literally getting like millions of views of completely free good publicity was like

no we hate you yeah nintendo will not like it do this when people use their their like their their content and stuff in ways that are not not not official and because they make decent games they can actually get get away with that um sega does not make decent games unfortunately so they have to rely on fans doing that but yeah that's the reason why sonic is still a thing just because fans have like have been able to, through piracy, through emulation, through using Sonic code to code their own games, all that stuff is the reason why that's still a cultural staple that is releasing a new movie next month,

which I'm very excited about. I'm very excited about Sonic the Hedgehog 2. It's going to be. I'm thinking we could finally clamp down on the video game oscar this time i feel it well that's that look this is this this is just because ace attorney got robbed okay well greatest movie of all time so that is that is my little side bit about about uh about about sega um oh yeah i should also briefly mention that uh nintendo just like put literally put a guy in prison for helping for helping jailbreak consoles like put put a man in prison for this for modifying

people's software on a game console i guess the other thing i'll talk about is like i mean part of the reason why i really don't like digital ownership of media is because you don't actually own the thing you own a license to use the content as long as the online service is active. So even if you buy a game on, you know, the Nintendo Switch store, you're not actually buying the game. You're buying a license to use the game. Same thing for whether you're buying media on like Amazon Prime, right? It's the same thing.

If you're buying a digital copy of it, it's a license to use it. So you can take, you know, what Nintendo has done a few years ago is they shut down the Wii Shop channel, which means if you bought a game and it wasn't currently downloaded, it's gone. You cannot play it anymore because they just completely took the service down. So you're not actually buying the thing. You're just buying a license to use the thing. Now, they did the same thing a few months ago for the wii u shop channel and the 3ds channel so yeah rip rip to that uh if you if you if you

have if you bought games on there that were not currently running then you cannot get them anymore they're just gone like you can they're just lost lost a time well and you know and again if if you modify the software on the game console that you like nominally own in order to play the games that you bought and paid for they will throw you in prison nintendo will send men in suits to come and get you and throw you in the prison yahoo that's a it's a mario joke everybody um yes so i mean i it's the same thing with like subscription services like obviously if you have a subscription service you don't own the content you're watching you are just getting

permission to use it from a certain amount of time so this is obviously this is this is more obvious right you don't own what's on Netflix you just are able to watch what Netflix has legal rights to show but you even see this thing extended to like cars like Toyota was was trying out a program. And this may even it may even still be active for some cars where you need a subscription service to use the key fob on your cars, like automatic, like door locking, like fob. Like you need a subscription to use that service of it, which is like, why? Like it's it's just turning everything. It's turning everything into a to us like a subscription service it's horrible like everything is becoming a new subscription service a new a new thing to get your monthly payments for it's it's it's awful like you don't actually buy things anymore it's just a subscription services

and digital copies it's not nothing is nothing is actually the thing anymore yeah it's just it's all just rent extraction the entire economy instead of you know having a thing they figured out wait what if we just extract rent and then you also don't own it same thing with like tesla cars you have to like buy buy you know upgrades via software that are already built in and like subscribe to keep your car running nicely like what it's not like no yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna go on a very small gamer rant here yeah because this is this is a thing a lot a lot of the worst practices for this originated in gaming and this this was this was a big fight back in like the early 2010s about okay if you buy a game right do you own everything on the game and there was a huge fight about you know they have these like uh delayed dlc like they have these new content packages that will be on the disc

right that you've bought but you can't access it unless you pay them money and this was like a fight and some gamers were like eh you know some gamers tried to fight it right but most gamers didn't care and then they became the weaponized shock troops of the far right instead of you know dealing with this shit and now literally everything has fucking day one DLC on it that you buy the thing, you don't even get all the stuff. You have to buy the season pass to get all the content in the future. Yeah, it's like you have to buy the season pass

for your car to work properly. Yeah. This is just how capitalism works. It started with a season pass for a $60 game to then buy season pass to get more of the game and now it's for your

$50,000 car so yay that's fun it's it's not it's it's kind of sucks so but yeah

a lot of these a lot of these like play to win practices these like free models which then like which lead into like a subscription service based model

um have definitely started in online gaming and it's yeah it's it's really frustrating because as we'll talk about here in a bit like the sega model is like better like turns out when you encourage your fans to play around with the stuff it only helps helps your property. That's the reason why there's still Sonic March available now and it's not like a dead franchise. It's because they allowed that to happen. So it's actually really cool when we're allowed to access free information and play with it how we want

to instead of having this weird strict copyright rules for not allowing certain usage of certain things. It's not great when you're restricting emulation, restricting like rules for not allowing certain usage of certain things. Like it's, it's, it's not, it's not great when you're restricting like emulation, restricting fan games,

restricting the access to information. It's not, it's not, it's, it's not, it's not fun, but yeah, this is kind of,

it's kind of plays into why I am very skeptical of digital media, which is why I start, started collecting Blu-rays of all the, of all the things I like, because I've bought things on amazon prime which are now no longer available on amazon prime and that sucks so like why do that instead just buy your physical copy yeah well the thing is like it didn't and it's still true to some extent like if you buy physical copies like it didn't used to be like this like blu-rays used to to some extent

they still do most yeah sometimes yeah but like like if you buy the physical copy of it they will give you a code that lets you use the online version a digital download code yeah yeah and you know that's a much better way of the thing working than uh instead of you know you don't buying it you don't have the physical product and also they can take it away from you yeah it's i'll circle back to this idea towards the end but I kind of want to segue to like the idea of the same type of like paywalling subscription service

issues and like the restriction of free information regarding like online news so you know there's a lot of people whether they be like reporters editors authors or just annoying people online but there's a decent collection of people that perpetuate the notion that readers or consumers whether they be reporters, editors, authors, or just annoying people online. But there's a decent collection of people that perpetuate the notion that readers or consumers are actually responsible for the dire straits of the media industry.

But the problem with journalism and many other media industries, but the problem isn't that people aren't paying for news. The problem is that newspapers and outlets are being decimated and dismantled by hedge funds, capital investment firms, venture capitalists, and tech companies in search of profit. You can look at how Facebook tricked a whole bunch of companies into switching over to video content, and then a whole bunch of companies had to fire tons of people because there was a lie. bunch of companies had to fire tons of people because there was a lie. You can look at how Sinclair Broadcasting dominates local news channels and websites and how well-established local papers are struggling while big companies buy up all the competition. So especially the venture capitalist thing is actually a really interesting idea that has been documented decently well. In a bit, I'll teach you how to bypass newspaper headlines via different methods.

But there's this actually good article in the Washington Post that is titled, As a Secretive Hedge Fund Guts Its Newspapers, Journalists Are Fighting Back. It kind of just details all of the different hedge funds and venture capitalist firms that have just totally destroyed so many local papers throughout the entire country. It's actually kind of surprising once you learn how many of these papers are just getting destroyed by just a few hedge funds are just doing all this damage. And it's like, yeah, I mean, this is why the current journalism industry kind of sucks right now is because of these types of practices. And I mean, like no one likes it.

Like no one's happy with it. Like everyone hates journalism. Journalists hate journalism. People who read journalism hates journalism. Like activists hate journalism. Like everyone's mad at it. And yeah, you could look at these hedge funds and venture capitalists who are just making it such an impossible industry. to chase some big tech companies or media giants, you know, proposed money, like in the Facebook switching over to video content kind of debacle that happened a few years ago.

And like, it's understandable why these writers, artists, the journalists are frustrated, because, yeah, the work is hard and the salaries are low. Well, the work should be hard. Some people kind of slack off. But, you know, for the good journalism is more is challenging and salaries typically aren't great. But even if audience monetary support were the solution to making creative and writing industries more profitable again, the kind of anti-piracy folks would still be missing a fundamental point is that kind of the pro-paywall people want you to get it through your head that journalism is just like other

types of things you buy, whether it be food, you know, alcohol, or entertainment. Saying, you know, all these things, you know, Netflix isn't free, you know, Coca-Cola isn't free, right? This isn't journalism's fault, it's just how the world works. You have to buy it to use it. You know, it costs money to make, so you have to buy it to use it it's you know it costs money to make so you have to buy it to use it it's just it's it's it's like it's

dumb to think otherwise this is kind of their framework but i beg to differ because enjoying art and worthwhile journalism i think should always have the option of being free because when information is in the public interest it should just always be available to everybody whether or not you've already used up your three free articles like this is really important especially now when there's you know the whole the whole war thing happening and

finding like paywall articles about it is incredibly frustrating and yeah I mean there was even when the there was a right right-wing extremist who opened fire and killed someone at a Portland Black Lives Matter protest a few weeks ago. That is still definitely impacting the city because it's still very recent. But a lot of the news coverage, first of all, wasn't great.

A whole bunch of news coverage was parodying the police lies and framing the framing the attacker as like an innocent homeowner who was defending himself. It was pretty gross. But even we even when the news articles started to like correct their previous grievous errors, almost all of it was paywalled. Like all like all of like a whole bunch of stuff was paywalled about it. And that's incredibly frustrating because this is like, you know, when information is in the public interest, it should be free to access. Like that's just like a good moral thing. Like and even and we've seen it. We've seen this before.

Back in 2020, when the plague was a new thing, news organizations across the country started to lift paywalls to share coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, which was great. And you can obviously see that once that changed over, a lot of people who were making this happen behind the scenes probably hoped that it would just convince people to become paying customers. But that's still the way things should be, is to have the option of it being free and then having the option to donate. And this actually seems to be kind of the trend. In

2018, the University of Texas at Austin surveyed about like a thousand Chicago residents about their local news consumption and they found that respondents were more willing to give a $10 donation to support a free news site than pay $10 for a subscription to access

premium news content so yeah like that's and that i definitely share that same like uh that same idea i will way sooner donate money to a newspaper that i enjoy that is also free then i will pay ten dollars a month to read subscription service based news it's uh it's because it turns out when you like this applies to all types of media but like when you enjoy media you want to support its creators whether that be anime whether that

be Sonic the fucking Hedgehog whether that be whether that be news or books right. If you like something you're going to buy it right. I got introduced to Lemony Snicket's books via the library and now I bought lots because I wanted to buy the books from the? If you like something, you're going to buy it, right? I got introduced to Lemony Snicket's books via the library, and now I bought lots because I wanted to buy the books from the person that I like. Yeah, and there

are entire industries that literally just work on this person. This is why free-to-play games work. Yeah, exactly. There's another conversation with free-to-play games here about addiction and gambling and manipulation about that, but that's you know, like,

setting that aside for a second, it's like, yeah, these things, if people didn't spend money on things they like, free-to-play games would not work, like, fundamentally as a model. Yeah, no, definitely the idea of, like, yeah, you get, someone starts enjoying the service

so then they start paying for it. Whether it be buying a useless skin for whatever third person shooter you have. Or that be buying books or copies of the film or anime body pillows. Whatever. You want to

financially support the things that you enjoy. This is what humans do. So yeah. Maybe more stuff should have the option of being free. That is definitely my take on it. Let's, let's have a quick, let's have a bit of an app. Speaking of free content, this podcast is brought to you by these lovely sponsors. So you can listen for free while just skipping the ads. So good for you. We're back. And now we're going to talk about different ways of bypassing paywalls specifically for online news because paywalls frustrate me. And as someone who likes messing around with kind of computery stuff, there's definitely a long list of ways to bypass paywalls

depending on what types of paywalls we are talking about. So types of paywalls. There are typically two general types of paywalls. There's hard paywalls and soft paywalls. Hard paywalls require payment upfront. So usually some form of subscription fee before accessing any content. Websites with hard paywalls maybe will actually leave a tiny snippet of the article, but you need to pay subscription to access the full content. Soft paywalls typically allow you to read a number of articles before you need to buy a subscription. So you have a set number of articles that you can read for a fixed period or session. A lot of websites operate like this. Most of New York Times operates like this. A lot of news sites have a soft paywall model, which is great because they're typically a little bit

easier to bypass. First method, this works some of the time. It depends on how the website's constructed, but you can try to stop the loading page before it fully loads. It's generally a quick technique. It's generally a quick technique. It's effective on several different types of web pages. You have to stop your browser from fully loading the web page as soon as your browser displays the text element of the paywalled content. So you enter a page URL into the search bar, press enter, and then press the X icon or the escape key as soon as you see some of the text on screen before a paywall window pops up.

A major limitation of this is that stopping the website may not load all content elements, so it may only render a portion of the text, or it may miss out on files, images, animations, or videos. And it also depends on the order of which the website loads the page elements. So, for example, if a website loads the paywall first, then this trick won't be successful. Also, you have to be kind of pretty fast in order to make this one work. Typically, this isn't the first way I do it because there's generally easier ways. But if you can do this, then cool. It's definitely a fast one if you can get it to succeed.

a fast one if you can't get it to succeed for soft paywall so like i i will say the the stopping the browser from loading is actually successful at some hard paywall sites uh because if they do like load a portion of the text to read as like a snippet sometimes it'll actually load the entire text but then just block it off with a separate window so sometimes with a hard paywall you can actually stop it via this method so that's's always fun. But second method, generally more for soft paywalls, is to delete your page's cookies. So websites store cookies to track your browser activities, including how much content you've accessed. So blog publishers, newspaper sites can track the number of free articles you've read using the cookies stored on your browser. If you've hit the limit for non-subscribers, if the limit of articles allotted, then you can delete the website cookies to refresh that counter, and it will possibly reset the limit of articles.

You can go to the privacy or security section of your web browser, select the option that allows you to check the cookies and cite for all data, and then search for the website that you're looking for in the cookie management page, and then click remove all. You can do this on Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge, if you want to use that for some reason, Safari. Yeah. But this trick may not work very well on hard paywalls because it that's that they don't really use cookies for the same purpose and also you'll have to you know do if you're doing if you're doing this for soft paywalls you have to do it every time you you reach the limit um and if this won't work if the website is using other kind of more advanced tools to track your activity, like IP logs. Right. So if it's tracking your IP data instead of your cookies, then this probably won't work.

So this one's this one. I mean, you should clear cookies every once in a while anyway, just like generally a good practice. But to do this all the time, it's kind of a kind of a bit of work, especially because the next method is typically easier and does the same thing, which is just reading articles inside a private or incognito mode or in the Tor browser. So as explained earlier, not all paywalls are about the same. If a website uses a soft paywall, you should be able to read a subscription-based content through incognito or private browsing because it'll check the uh it'll it'll trick the website into thinking you're a brand new visitor granting you access to the content before it had before it racks up enough views to uh to throw up at the paywall window

so this is this is a lot easier than just manually deleting the cookies every single time because yeah most web browsers do not transmit pre-existing cookies onto an incognito or private mode uh browser mode so it doesn't switch those back over and then although the website will deposit new cookies onto your browser during private browsing sessions they will be removed as soon as you close the window uh one bummer is that some news pages are getting wise and actually are programming their websites to be able to be able to detect if they're opened in a private or browsing mode or even on tour um and they just like won't open they'll say sorry you have to we we've detected

that you're using this in private browsing mode to view this content boot up a regular browser which which really sucks for the tour users because a lot of people who are using tour are like hey yeah like i'm in china i'm trying to get past the great firewall and uh fuck you eat shit you should have uh somehow paid a subscription service to us yeah to see information on this site that uh is literally illegal here like yeah it's great it's really bad for people who are like actually facing government censorship who need to use Tor to view content so yeah that is what we call a major bummer a major sucks

a major oh no capitalism did a whoopsie yeah but yeah this is definitely this is one of the modes I do most often I can typically get a lot of sites to be able to view through incognito or private browsing but again it does depend on what the site is built to do can typically get a lot of sites to be able to view through incognito or private browsing. But

again, it does depend on what the site is built to do. But by far, my favorite method, oh yes, I'll mention another one that I don't really use very often, is the paywall removal extensions for your browser, which is like third-party browser extensions, which

try to automatically bypass paywalls. These are really hit and miss. And they're also a really great way to get nice, fancy malware onto your computer. So I typically steer clear of this, but there is allegedly a browser extension called Bypass Paywalls for Chrome and Firefox

that allegedly has been found to be effective that allows you to read subscription-based articles on hundreds of publications like New York Times, Wired, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post. It is free, but you have to manually load it onto your browser. And just typically, I'm not

a big fan of browser extensions in the first place, so I kind of steer clear of these. But some people swear by them, so maybe they can work. They're not really my thing. But my favorite method is archive websites, specifically archive.is. So there are internet archiving tools

that preserve copies of webpages and social media posts for reference purposes. And you can use these tools to access paywalled content and read subscription-based news articles for free, including a lot of hard paywalled pages. Archive.is is my favorite one. Also, it functions under archive.today. It just depends on what surfers they're running at the moment.

Of course, there's also the classic and pretty reliable archive.org, which has a nice calendar feature. But it's definitely good to check both of these because sometimes an article will be archived on archive.is really easily and it won't be available on archive.org. Sometimes it'll be on archive.org and not archive.is. I think it's currently, the one that's currently live, I think it's.ph. It automatically switches usually.

I usually just type in archive. um and it switches me over automatically but yes there is there is there is there is a few of them yeah yeah you are right correct it does automatically revert to archive dot ph right at the moment so yeah but these these are the ones i use the most because people who have access to hard paywalled content will often archive the hard paywalled stuff so it's available to people without the paywall. This can include the screenshot mode for archive.is and the regular archival method for archive.org. But both these are great. And they're also really good for looking at past versions of the articles yeah you can look to see what how the articles have changed over time and so these are great

just research tools and archive.is is very easy to even upload stuff yourself even if you don't have um the paywall it's like even if you're blocked off from reading the full thing you can try to submit it to archive.is and there's a good chance I might actually grab an unpaywalled version of it because of how the site works. So just go to archive.ph or archive.is, enter the webpage URL that you're wanting to access in the designated dialog box at the bottom, select save, it'll go through a little process, and then you'll be able to select the screenshot mode or the webpage mode and be able to see what type of thing it archives.

It's pretty cool. I guess the last thing I'll mention is Outline.com and 12 Foot Ladder. These are web-based tools, but not specifically archival sites. They're generally used to just get to the text of an article via like web page

nonsense and bypassing paywall stuff. Unfortunately, websites have also gotten wise to this. So stuff like New York Times and Wall Street Journal have figured out a way to get these sites blocked. So you cannot use Outline.com or 12-foot ladder on them. But they still work on stuff like

the Washington Post. So it always depends. But I definitely generally will prefer the archive.is and archive.org method to viewing any kind of paywilled content yeah and that's kind of my I mean I'm not now I'm not gonna explain how to do like regular piracy

on the podcast because I don't have enough time but like it's easy yeah there are lots of people who will tell you I mean like kiss cartoon is like a very popular website like you don't even need to like you don't even have to like properly torrent stuff anymore there is like so much pirated media available yeah and it's like okay so like you got to be a little bit careful when you're pirating stuff because sometimes you can get copyright strike but if you stream it they don't copyright strike you for that so yeah yeah i guess the other thing i will

plug is a plex which is a kind of an online movie hosting service like netflix except you upload all of the content to it so let's say you buy blu-rays that comes with it comes with a digital download code so now you can upload the digital copy into Plex and watch that wherever you want as long as you're signed into the Plex account and you actually own the stuff on the service. So as long as the service is online you can use it because you actually own the stuff on it. That

includes if you have pirated versions of movies downloaded, you can upload those versions onto Plex, then delete the actual hard copies of it on your hard drive then just watch the ones on Plex and you're totally fine. So Plex, then delete the actual hard copies of it on your hard drive, then just watch the ones on Plex, and you're totally fine. So Plex is great for having ease of access. Sometimes I don't want to sort

through my Blu-ray discs and make sure that I have a Blu-ray player with me to watch my stuff. So using Plex is a great web method to keep your stuff that you actually own accessible online to watch it as long as you sign into a web browser.

And the last thing I'll plug is library submission forms. So if you really want media and you don't want to pay for it and you don't want to pirate it necessarily, you can get libraries to buy stuff. I did this all the time when I was younger. I found out that you could submit

items for purchase via the library on the online forum. And I submitted so many comic books. Most of the comic books, I would say, not most,

but a good majority of the comic books in the Multnomah County Library system are because of me. Every Wednesday when a new trade paperback would be released, I would upload it to the library submission form and they would buy it.

And not just one copy, they would buy like 12 copies. So there's so many Batman comics in the Multnomah County system because I would studiously upload all that stuff so that I didn't need to pay for comics. I could just get them from the library. So definitely look into library submissions to kind of grow what your library has in stock. And then also look into see what other things your library is doing.

Because I know more libraries are looking into building like makerspaces and like tool libraries to have access to things that are not just like books, you know, power tools. And then, you know, how to access to even cool are not just like books, you know, power tools, and then, you know, have access to even cool stuff like vacuum formers and 3D printers, laser cutters. All these things are kind of growing. So look into what your library

is doing, because oftentimes libraries have some pretty cool stuff. So yeah, this is my little bit on why I don't like paywalls, why I think content should be free, because it actually helps creators in the long run anyway, and how to get past news articles that don't want you to read them without paying

too much money. Yep. And remember, folks, if Japan invaded your country, pirating anime is reparations. If you're mad about this tweet, find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. Yeah, make sure you tweet at IWriteOK if you have complaints about that take so yeah that is

my little bit talking about piracy argh and yeah I mean Morse I think it's I've always held this opinion that I think we can all learn a lot of lessons from Sonic the Hedgehog and I think

one of the greatest ones is that it turns out when you make stuff available to use for free and allow emulation, people like the stuff more. People enjoy it, and they will actually support official uses of it as well. So more stuff for free, more library-based economies. And having an enormous number of gold rings makes you nearly invincible.

This is also true. I mean, multiple franchises exist with that exact premise. Yep. Yeah. So, turns out, when you have more libraries, more rings, people are happier. Yep, that's the episode. 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 riot. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeart

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