QAA Podcast - Episode 173: The Disinformation Society w/ Marcus Gilroy-Ware

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

A bird's eye view of how the market-driven society has evolved into a potent catalyst for "disinformation" and conspiracy theories. This week’s guest is Marcus Gilroy-Ware, senior lecturer in digital journalism at the University of West England and the author of 2017’s 'Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism & Social Media' and 2020’s ‘After The Fact: The Truth About Fake News’. ↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓ https://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Follow Marcus Gilroy-Ware & find his book 'After the Fact': http://www.mjgw.net Follow Liv Agar and find her podcast: http://www.livagar.com Our first QAA records release: 'Hikikomori Lake' by Nick Sena is available to listen for free at http://qaarecords.bandcamp.com (12 original tracks) QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: https://qanonanonymous.com Episode music by Pontus Berghe, editing by Corey Klotz.

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listeners to Chapter 173 of the Q&ONANANANANANAS podcast, The Disinformation Society episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky, Liv Egar, Julian Field, and Travis Vue.

Hello everybody. It is the first episode of the new year, and that makes me very excited to be doing this together with all of you. And so, you know, as such, my beautiful friends, before we jump into things with the episode, any resolutions this year? Stop posting. I just, it's too, it's, you just stopped yourself from posting there, right there. You're all, see, you're already doing it. Right. Perfect. I'm going to resolve to be less of a dumer and get more politically involved. And by that, I mean, I'm going to petition my congressman to make stealing blockchain-based assets legal. Because I think that obtaining, you know, NFTs by means of fraud or deception ought to be legal and encouraged, especially, I mean, the seeing people's, you know, NFTs, you know, be stolen on Twitter. I wasn't on Twitter very much this past couple weeks while I was trying to like, you know, spend time with my family and do other things I enjoy. But the occasions I did hop on, I did see the drama of people's, you know, apes being stolen. And that was the delight. I thought, we need to see more of this. We need. This is very fun. So we need the purge, but for bored apes. Exactly. Exactly. We need all those apes gone. Yeah, you go out in the middle of the night one day a year and you can, you know, wear scary masks and, and yeah, you destroy or steal as many bored apes as possible. Yeah, I think that, yeah, it's like, I think that that, that should be part of the game.

Is that if you're too slow and you click on the wrong link or you're, you know, you trust the wrong person, like a fake, you're like you're a Facebook grandpa, you don't deserve your apes. They should just be gone there. Yeah. Does anyone really deserve their apes? I have deeply read John Locke, the British and Periscist, and there is no case be made that crypto bros have property rights. Yeah, I don't see any laborer being mixed in those apes. Yeah, so he started with a kind of a positive statement,

and by the end, of course, it's put all apes to death. Okay, so that's great. You know, Jake, you got anything going on? Yeah, for my New Year's resolution, I'm just going to read this quote from Exhibit. Dibbit, the rapper, because I think it's appropriate. Right. He says, yeah, check this out.

Let me tell y'all something about shit. Because motherfuckers try to do it to you every day. Try and shit on you, right? Check this out. Don't shake the shit off. Because when you shake the shit off, you never know where the shit is going to land. Could land on your girl. It could land in your food.

It could land in your car. Man, let the shit slide off you, homie, and hit the ground. because when you shake the shit off, you have no idea where it lands. Wow. Wise words. Yeah, that's very good. No, I mean, and also, you know,

I'm going to try to, you know, eat healthier. I've got a wedding coming up. I think I let it slide in an episode last year, but I have a wedding coming up very soon. Yes. And I'm trying to look handsome, you know, so there's no regrets on her side up at the altar. And, yeah, I'm just going to try to eat healthier, maybe order McDonald's a little bit less.

You know, I'm going to try to not take Twitter so seriously. I think a lot of times we're so in the phones, we're so in the scrolling that we forget that Twitter is not real and it's not real life. And it doesn't represent the majority of what people believe or what they think or their values. So I'm going to start looking, you know, more outward for my information about where we are as people, you know, at least within my small community, and not look so much down into the flat screen to try and gauge where our society is sort of at. I think that that'll be good. That's good. That'll be good for me. Instead of doing that, you can just press play on the podcast app and put it in your pocket.

You're not looking at the screen. In fact, you're detoxing, technically, if you listen to us. You're doing a digital detox. Oh, well, I listen to every episode, of course, you know, to hear my own voice. I skip everybody else. I skip around. But I do like to hear my sections. Wow.

Also, would anyone like to split the cost on a shed in Montana? Yes, I would actually. It's a good location. But a shed, anything. where I would be totally a farm. Also, when I said I would stop posting, I'm going to continue posting but through a different medium.

Okay. In fact, I see where this is going. In fact, on medium. I'm going to pass on this. Travis seemed to be interested, though, so. Yeah, yeah. You're just going to send, you know, threatening letters to the Washington Post or something. But, yeah.

Hey, stop, stop, stop saying. what you want to do and putting it in her. Maybe I'm projecting a little bit. Those are the best resolutions are the ones that you influence somebody else to have. Exactly. That's so true. And I do have a resolution of my own, which is to just be nice to everybody, all the people who listen, you know, be nice to Jake.

Nicer to me is a good one. And just be nice to everybody. Be nice to Travis. Be nice to live. You know, be nice to Annie. And be nice to anyone I can be nice to. if it's within my power. This is the year of nice Julian.

And so I want that on record. Wow. All right. We're on it on record, Julian will be being nice to Gilean Maxwell. She's a misunderstood woman. But yeah, so that's our year. It sounds like it's going to be quite a banger. We do have lots of cool stuff in store for all of you.

But to kick off the year, we have maybe the brainiest episode in a while. So I apologize for after a two-hour episode on Babes in Toyland and a bored ape meltdown from hell in this time of renewal and resurrection. I thought it might be interesting to pull back a little and try to catch a bird's eye view of how we got to this particular moment in history and why conspiracy theories continue to be generated and popularized at such a dizzying rate. That's why this week's guest is Marcus Gilroy Ware, senior lecturer in digital journalism at the University of West England and the author of two. 2017's, Filling the Void, Emotion, Capitalism, and Social Media, and 2020s, after the fact, the truth about fake news. We'll be focusing more on the latter book in this episode, which explores not just conspiracy theories and quote-unquote disinformation, but also the powerful structures that give rise to

these phenomena. So welcome to the show, Marcus. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to kick off the year with a big brain, a new brain, and we're all going to get smarter together because, you know, we're all going to read your book after the fact. I thought that it was, I don't know, it really builds this convincing portrait of how conspiracy theories and disinformation arise in what you call a market-driven society. And you're very good at providing historical context for your arguments, which is why you kind of decide and you admit, hey, we could go back a lot further. But it's a good place to start the post-World War II period, this kind of crucial juncture.

So could you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, the book is very much, I mean, it's very much about the relationship between, kind of that market-driven, kind of, I use the word neoliberal, but I don't use it so much in the book for certain reasons. But anyway, the relationship between that world and the kind of phenomenon of, you know, heavily scare-quoted fake news that arose, particularly after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. And, you know, not only the kind of copious misinformation and disinformation that we were seeing at that time, but also the kind of political turn

that that moment, like Britain's exit from the European Union, represented. And, you know, I'm also a teacher. I don't just write. So one of the things that I, you know, really enjoy about that is, is having kind of conversations with the students. And whether it's learning from them or just the conversations that I'm having in public or, you know, recalling my own education here as a teenager in Britain in secondary education, just feeling that actually the way that the kind of recent history of the society we now have is told, is remembered. It's constructed. It's just really woeful. But not only that, actually, that the erasure of many details and aspects and contours of that story is a part of how we then arrived at this juncture. That the machine, if you like, erases the traces the traces of its own operation, not to speak too mechanistically, but, you know, there's something about that kind of erasure, which is part of the story that I wanted to tell. It's a little bit like, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind where the erasure is the story. So I felt that in order for us,

to reverse that the first chapter in a way it's kind of an introduction it's sort of separate from the other chapters but i think it had to be the sort of you know a moose bouch or something before you get into the kind of the why well let's let's talk about what happened and so that was that was where i wanted to start and so you know in this period and then moving into the 60s you're kind of wary of this idea that there's this great change that occurs uh you know in the 60s and then everything is different um so can you tell us a bit more about like how the postwork period evolved into the 60s and then into, you know, the 70s and this kind of consolidation of global capitalism into the 80s and beyond. Yeah, well, maybe we can, you know, we can break that down

because, I mean, I was recording a podcast about a year ago and someone basically asked me, so you tell a lot of history in your book and you summarize that for us. And I was like, no, it's so long. But, you know, as far as the 60s is concerned, I mean, I just wanted it to be accurate whilst also brief. So I had to do a lot. I mean, that was the hardest chapter to right. I think that in the conspiracy chapter were the two hardest. And part of that was because, you know, I mean, at one stage it was 20,000 words as a chapter. There's just, when you start trying to tell a history in one chapter that you realize how much there is, how many details there are, it's always going to be an imperfect and an incomplete story. But, you know, where

possible, even in passing, you try to be as kind of accurate and theoretically grounded as you can. Although, of course, I'm sure we all always feel like there's more we could be reading. There's never, never, never, never read enough. But, you know, it's a one. of the places I went for the 60s was Frederick Jameson periodizing the 60s, a really important essay on that topic. And, you know, he's very kind of skeptical about the idea that the 60s is a sort of decade that changed everything. The reason why that matters, though, as far as looking at, well, I guess all of the different, you know, elements of this story in terms of tracing how we got to where we are now is that I suppose I feel that something about that political

turn that, you know, Trumpism or Brexit or many other so-called populist movement, movements in the world also represent, is a backlash. And it's a backlash against a certain kind of Nietzschean value-free approach to life, you know, and that really that market-driven kind of neoliberal world is sort of hostile to all other systems of value and valuation. And that, you know, that was when the neoliberal and the kind of conservative right were working together in the kind of Soviet era, you know, the enemies were kind of left-wing bogey men, ostensibly left-wing bogey men called communists. There was a certain kind of alliance there

where certain questions about how these things fit together, the kind of aspirations of neoliberalism to build a market-driven society and the aspirations of conservatives always to try to make the world as kind of structures as possible around their values. That didn't have to be kind of picked apart too much, that kind of alliance.

But more recently, you see that there's been a kind of, really a breakdown in that. And so exploring this backlash idea, I was thinking, well, where did a lot of the kind of more permissive elements of our, you know, of the society that we now inhabit as far as things that really piss conservatives off? Well, there's a sort of story that is often told, and like many stories, it turns out to be kind of, you know, incomplete and inaccurate and oversimplified. But there's a story about how our society suddenly became very kind of permissive as a result of the 60s, the swinging 60s. And so I felt that that was an important thing to include in the overall story being told.

So, you know, the kind of safety net, you know, in the West and this idea of taking care of one's society emerges after World War II. And then in the 60s, there's these supposed kind of social changes that actually, you know, in your book you make a good argument that the changes that were allowed to occur went towards this consolidation of power outside of the hands of what, you know, these people and these thinkers thought were totalitarian rulers. So instead of ever having the rise of a new totalitarianism, they said, well, what if, you know, what if the market, this kind of supposedly neutral force was, you know, dictating structure? And obviously the 80s are kind of the explosion of that.

And so, and then by the 90s, people are discussing the end of history. So that seems pretty quick. We did the revolution in the 60s. The 90s are the end. So like, you know, Can you describe a bit this concept of the end of history and how you connect that to the resurgence of the right and Brexit and Trump? Wow. Well, you mentioned so many things there. Sorry. I mean, the end of history, I think we can come back to one of the things that we need to kind

of say before we get to that is that this kind of proliferation of neoliberalism isn't a straight line. You know, when I was researching the book, I discovered some really interesting kind of ruptures there, you know, as far as like what the neoliberal relationship to internationalism or globalization or, you know, different, those kinds of forces were, for example, the original architects of neoliberalism imagined a world in which certain kinds of valuation outside of the market would continue. The structure of the family, for example, was very, very important. So what seems to happen around about that moment in the 80s or the early 80s, late 70s after

the kind of rubble of the kind of European Social Democratic project is a kind of change in direction for what counts as neoliberal thinking towards a much harsher and much more kind of ruthless world in which those other kind of vestigial structures of valuation are gone. And actually, it's a sort of really kind of abject Nietzschean version of where the market really drives everything about a society and those other values aren't present anymore. So that has to be said because I think otherwise we sort of assume that the thing we call neoliberalism, you know, in 1940 standards and the thing we call neoliberalism instead of 1989 are the same projects. And I just don't think that they are. I think there's things you can trace about them

that are the same, but also some important differences. We can maybe come back to that if you want to. But as far as your question about the end of history, I think, I mean, I sort of alluded to that already, but I think there's this kind of sense of when the world is structured by something as kind of scary as, you know, the Cold War undoubtedly was. I mean, I wasn't born when it was happening. But, you know, there's a sense of, like, you kind of know who your enemies are, and the world is structured around a particular kind of order of friends and foes and all the rest of it. And, you know, in this, I mean, one of the points that I'm trying to make in the book is that in this kind of story about what happened after the Second World War and the kind

of, you know, world, particularly on the European side, being kind of rebuilt after that, you know, enormously violent conflict and all the atrocities that occurred during it, is that, you know, we talk about kind of conservatives versus radicals and the 60s and all this kind of stuff. But while all of that's going on, capitalism is slowly mainstreaming itself in the West. Capitalism is certainly mainstreaming itself in the West and making itself fun and enjoyable. And it's got a sort of optimistic utopian feel as a way of trying to get buy in, right? Hearts and minds. And so that's kind of happening all the way through the 50s and 60s and lots of the things that we associate with kind of classic Western culture as far as, you know, rock and roll.

and, you know, types of architecture really are part of that process, and much of which, of course, is actually borrowed from the ways that fascism tried to make itself appealing kind of earlier in the kind of World War II and before that. Nazis are absolutely pioneers of that kind of cultural, you know, cultural stuff. But anyway, so you have this kind of capitalism is building its eight-lane highway through the development of, you know, of Western culture, as we know it. And that's occurring within a context in which, you know, market capitalism and the kind of conservative American and British establishment

is trying to keep the communists at bay all around the world. And then suddenly along comes the end of the Soviet Union. And that whole sense of like who's friends with whom and what does the world have to look like now in order to kind of encourage people's participation suddenly looks very different. Because suddenly the capitalist world doesn't have to try very hard anymore to kind of incorporate people into participating with it. Certainly doesn't have to give any more concessions to what we might call left-wing causes, you know, vis-a-vis kind of welfare state or those kinds of things. And so that produces quite a dramatically different order. And for me, that's a moment, I mean, not just me, but for lots of people, you know, I mean, Tarak Ali's book on the hard

centre and kind of tracing that moment of the 90s and the early 2000s is, you know, I think for a lot of people that that's a very important moment as far as saying, well, suddenly, that kind of alliance between the conservative right and the market neoliberal doesn't really, it's not really necessary anymore because the thing for which they were united has been achieved. And now actually, capitalism has a sort of different job to do as far as what kind of politics it's going to represent. And yeah, so I guess that's kind of where a lot of scholars have identified a kind of death of the future, the loss of this kind of optimistic thinking around what governments and politics will be, and also the kind of loss of cultural innovations

as well, that were kind of always part of that project as well. And if you kind of see that kind of change happen, the loss of the future and all those kinds of things, and a kind of rampant neoliberalism that's cutting back welfare states, that's privatizing everything, you're kind of setting in motion a collision course for, you know, what will undoubtedly be at some point, a realization that the idea of a capitalist democracy can't really work anymore. something that doesn't actually work on behalf of most people. And it's only a matter of time before that becomes evident. You know, on the left, we've known for a long time

the capitalism doesn't work for us. But I think for the right, that's been a nasty shock a lot more recently. And so the kind of backlash and the anger around that, even if it's totally misguided and sort of ill-informed, there's a sort of confused, blind, belligerent anger around that same betrayal. Near liberals don't work for anyone except near liberals. Right. And so the idea here is that slowly the values that conservatives thought would be ushered in through this coalition are being cannibalized by this thing that is kind of out of the control of even the people who would thought it up, you know, in the think tanks and all of this.

And so you get this kind of automatic development that starts to set in in the 90s and the concept of the end of history arises to, you know, explain that we've basically found the final logical state, this market-driven society. and that, you know, at least in the pamphlets that were selling it to us, like this was going to lead to essentially, you know, everyone having a fair shot and more kind of equality of wealth and opportunity. But what instead of that, we had a reduced amount of opportunity and the conservatives started to lose things like, you know, the primacy of the nuclear family and all of this. And so you see the rise of even in the 70s kind of far right parties that are essentially, you know, rising to meet the destruction of. of some of these values as they start to realize, uh-oh, it actually looks like, you know, even though we liked some of the cruel aspects of neoliberal capitalism, it actually won't spare the things that we value, the things that we call a kind of coherent society and a set of values. Absolutely. Not only will it not spare those things, but it also, it has,

we can get into the reasons why, but around that time, that sort of prevailing politics starts to use the language, a much more progressive sounding language. Right. And that's kind of through the 90s. I mean, you can really sort of see that, especially, I mean, I don't know about the states so much, but certainly in Britain, that's kind of become more and more and more the case. And that this kind of harshly neoliberal government, for example, are using pretty progressive sounding language to realize harshly neoliberal policies and to sort of justify them and so forth. And, you know, having our language borrowed has turned a lot of people who might have been kind of open to, to, to, progressive ideas completely against them because that sort of anger can be focused towards those values because that that rhetoric has been used in aid of all of the things that are leaving, you know, leaving people in this situation. I mean, I caveat all of this because I actually think that racism is not a thing that has necessarily any economic origins. And I think it's really important to be clear that racism is an old phenomenon that has been around for a long time

and doesn't come from these kinds of, you know, political machinations. It's a separate phenomenon. And I think it's in the mix and it's there. as well and other kinds of forms of social prejudice as well. I think the dangerous thing is we try to say, well, you know, all of this is neoliberalism's fault and all of this is explicable according to a kind of economic logic. And I think that what has happened is that, you know, the things we've been talking about have poured a lot of gasoline on the fire. But I wouldn't say that I think you can just explain all of the nastiest elements of this kind of so-called populist turn just by telling these particular stories because I think there's more to it than that.

So you use the term fake democracy and kind of zombie democracy. Could you kind of explain how you use those terms? Sure. So zombie democracy, I suppose, zombie anything really is the idea of something that kind of is dead but refuses to die, right? And so, I mean, a zombie democracy is kind of the sense that there's this idea about a particular kind of. of democracy, which has been kind of extolled and talked about for a long time, the idea that, you know, I mean, even going back to the Cold War, the idea, communists are kind of repressive and violent, and often they work. Therefore, ergo, capitalism is free and you can make your life under capitalism, et cetera. And of course, anyone who's even looked with one eye at the history

of neoliberalism knows that, in fact, capitalism doesn't produce freedom in a very systematic way. You have this idea that capitalism is democratic and the idea can kind of outlive its own veracity, right? In comparison to kind of certain forms of violent Soviet governmentality, maybe that's true. But actually, as we've been talking about, sets up a world in which there's this sort of really inaccessible and harsh thing called the free market, which most people are less free, not more. But yet even though the kind of harms that that system produces continue, the idea of capitalism being something that makes us free, also continues. And the two things, although they're completely opposed, exists side by side. And the persistence of the idea is the thing that enables that structure, that system to continue. And so that was

the sense in which I felt it was it was zombie, because it was the sort of idea that refuses to die and kind of keeps itself, keeps itself alive. As far as fake democracy, I think, I mean, that was really more that I was hearing the phrase fake news, which as you know, I take issue with in the book quite a lot. And I wanted to kind of find a quick and easy way for people to understand that the problem is not anything really to do with news. That's really just the symptom. But actually, it's important for people to understand this has a political and an economic kind of engine underneath it, which is much more complicated. And the role of journalism, which is something I explore in chapter five of the book, you know, is relevant enough for us to talk about? It's there's something

there. But actually, this is this is a much broader problem that's to do with the kind of functioning of democracies themselves rather than simply the ways that the news media work. So you have these kind of growing contradictions and breaking a part of this, you know, a conservative center, even though the Overton window has shifted quite a bit. And like you said, neoliberalism in the late 40s was not the same idea that we're seeing put into effect in the 80s is not the same idea that we're seeing put into effect now. So the contradictions are rising. And there's this passage from your book that I wanted to read and have you develop a little bit for us. Against the backdrop of fake news, we tend to talk about misinformation and disinformation

as a very specific type of problem that certain people are responsible for. Online extremists, big tech, the Russians, or unreliable social media users who are apparently stuck in echo chambers. At the very least, any threats posed by these villains turn out to be more nuanced, but there is also the case to be made that this is an incredibly selective, exaggerated, and at times disingenuous understanding of misinformation and disinformation that has arisen in response to the highly specific historical conditions. If we're going to talk about misinformation and disinformation, there needs to be an honest

engagement with the ways that power and the shiny, appealing, market-driven forms it has assumed in the 20th and early 21st centuries, wormed its way into our lives, invited us to participate and guided what we know, believe, and accept about the world we inhabit. So, yeah, could you develop that a little bit? Because I, you know, it rang true because we've been exploring on this podcast, just the variety of things that feed into the birth and the adoption of these conspiracy theories. It is dizzying how many kind of cultural vectors are involved. So, yeah, yeah, could you just kind of develop that a bit?

Sure thing. I mean, that's the point of the book, right, is that this is a very multi-threaded and complicated picture to try to pull apart. And there are many things that you could say about kind of where this has come from. I don't really want to try to kind of rephrase the thing that is already, the whole point of the book is it's already the best phrasing that I could find, really. so I think what I would say is just that I in some ways this book is a sequel to the last one I wrote and the last one I wrote was about social media and I was given three extra weeks to to add to it

because of the election of Donald Trump they thought that Donald Trump wouldn't win I thought that he would and then when he did they gave me some extra time to kind of incorporate that into the book and one of the things that's just starting at the end of filling the void is this sense of of the structures by which we come to know about the world having been eroded. And so it's no wonder that so-called fake news is a thing. And one of the questions at that moment that nobody was asking was, okay, let's say I really published something that is by the most literal definition of the phrase, fake news, like these stories that were circulating about how the Pope has endorsed Donald Trump or

whatever, that if I'm pushing that kind of thing and people are actually believing it, The question becomes, well, why were public so vulnerable that they would believe that kind of thing? What is it in us that makes us so ready to believe that kind of nonsense? When everything we could know about the world, you know, and in some ways, we've never been more exposed to opportunities to learn about the world. I mean, Wikipedia is not exactly the kind of beacon of, you know, of knowledge, but it's certainly a reliable source for most things most of the time, right? We could easily learn about the world much more than most people actually do know about it. Why will we so vulnerable in the face of all that information? And that's the point at which there's all these stories about, you know,

Mark Zuckerberg is kind of single-handedly responsible or this was the Russians fault or whatever. All of these kinds of liberal kind of explanations just fall to one side. Like they just can't really answer that. And to answer that, you have to kind of look much more deeply at the ways in which we are kind of conditioned not to really want to know much about the world because it's, you know. for all sorts of reasons, much more kind of fun and enjoyable and easy not to know. And I mean, you know, this is the kind of thing that my students are being sort of tormented with all the time on a weekly basis by me. But there's obviously a social side to that.

The fact that, you know, the cost of being wrong is so little. But the cost of losing your community, your friends and so forth over a very polarizing issue is much higher. So if your community and your friends are all convinced of something that isn't true, it's much easy just to carry on convincing yourself of that same thing as well. There's a cultural side to it. If you look at the history of propaganda and advertising and those types of things, we're well aware of that history, people like Bernays. Then there's the kind of ways in which think tanks and those kinds of institutions also decided that they had to enclose and take control of certain forms of knowledge production in order to serve quite specific and usually highly neoliberal market-driven

interest. There's, I mean, there's advertising. The list goes on, right? There are all these things that are there that should show us that there's this kind of multi-decade history of making misinformation, commonplace, enjoyable and completely inevitable. I mean, the last book, filling the void, was about this idea of depressive hedonia, that when people feel low, when they're looking at the world and they, you know, they're disappointed with their lives or whatever, they need an escape. They're going onto these same networks of, uh, on media that we think, and the journalists that I've talked with for years, think are the means by which people are learning about the world. Well, if it ever was an information super highway,

now it's just the information lane. Meanwhile, all the other lanes on the highway are disinformation, misinformation, you know, cat videos, whatever, lots of other things that have no real kind of informational merit at all. And why is that like that? Because, well, consumer capitalism finds that easier, right? This is an attention economy. It's not an information economy, at least as far as consumers are concerned. So, you know, there's lots of threads here that I think are kind of, I'm trying in the book to weave them together. Right. One of the interesting things around conspiracy theories that I felt I had to deal with was the kind of hyperabundance of suspicion.

And I talk about this as the kind of politics of suspicion because I think there's a hyperabundance of suspicion amongst people we would call conspiracy theorists. And there's also a real lack of suspicion in amongst certain, sometimes a lot more sort of educated audiences as well, which also lead to equally damaging forms of misinformation. But in the case of conspiracy theorists, that abundance of suspicion has political origins as well. It has a structural origin, right? We are convinced that we're being lied to and fucked over all the time because basically we are,

just by different people and the people conspiracies think we're being, you know, lie to by. So I think there's lots of different things here that are kind of all relevant in terms of tracing that relationship to misinformation that we've developed. Marcus, do you think that there's also, element of people sort of realizing whether actually or sort of unconsciously that these systems are kind of eroding and they might know that the thing that they choose to believe in

is most likely bullshit but at this point they don't care because it's a more fun or like you were saying it it gives them a community and they actually make the conscious decision to kind of just decide to believe in the thing that they like the most or makes them feel the best, even if they know, you know, on some level that it's, that it's unlikely to be true or real. That's a really interesting question. I think that, I mean, I'm not a psychologist, I should say, but one of the things that has been bothering me about this is the sense that the binary between unconscious and conscious fails to deal with an aspect of, of this, a really important aspect of this kind of informational paradigm that we're in, where people kind

of half know, but it's never a fully conscious decision that, you know. You know, you know, You can't be in denial about something unless on some level you know that thing. But at the same time, that denial can be so pervasive and so reinforced by the structures that surround you, that you can never perhaps consciously be aware of the very thing that you're denying. And so you end up in a kind of really interesting halfway point where you sort of know and don't know at the same time that you're wrong, you know? And I think that's, it's a sort of fascinating paradox.

And I don't have the answers around that, but it's definitely something I would like to explore further. And one thing that I really liked in your book was the way you kind of conceptualize literacy, because I think it allows for an understanding of, say, someone believing in Q&N while having attended fancy schools and being financially well off. You know, these people's supposed, like, basic material conditions are met. They have the education, but they're still totally deep on Q&N. So how do you use a word literacy in, I guess, a different way than a lot of people, which is like, oh, if you didn't get a good education, you are illiterate and, you know, that kind of simplistic

thinking. Well, I mean, actually, it's interesting because real literal literacy is also declining in much of the kind of overdeveloped world. And so that's, you know, that's the kind of interesting thing to have on the table, I suppose. But yes, I mean, I suppose I've been, because I'm a teacher, I've been following education policy for a long time. And, you know, at least in the UK, there's a kind of steady push by the conservatives who have been running things since 2010 to basically to send the education system back to a sort of like very traditional boarding school education where you do your maths, you do your English language, you do your science, you do the hard subjects and kind of away from, you know, humanities, arts, forms of thinking about culture that, you know, had a moment where they were slightly more present in the educational curriculum. And that's a sort of like more specific and identifiable version of a much more general pattern in which, you know, neoliberalism has an interest in producing certain kinds of graduates, certain kinds of thinking, certain kinds of competence. And, you know, that's what markets want. It also has an interest in, if you like, not producing people who are able to read what's going on and challenge those patterns as they unfold. And so, you know, that creates a kind of prevailing wind that pushes people in it. certain ways. So yeah, you can be the most over-educated person in a traditional sense as far as getting all A's and a 1600 on your SATs or, you know, whatever it is. And yet still be lacking a

kind of really fundamental understanding of the way that the capitalism runs the world. And again, that's a sort of interesting, I mean, maybe it's an irony. Maybe it isn't. It depends what you think education is. But I felt that that was something that, you know, had to be a very important part of the book, this kind of sense that, you know, because there's this, even people, on the left slip into this idea that somehow more privileged people are smarter, you know, or that formal education equates to kind of having better politics or whatever. And it's just so not true. And it's really kind of insulting to a lot of working class comrades who would very easily disprove those kinds of prejudices. So I suppose that is another reason why the distinction

between literacy and education for me was really important. I was also kind of thinking about Bell Hooks and her idea of education as a practice of freedom. And I wanted to kind of distinguish that a little bit as well. Right, right. And so, you know, we've kind of explored now some of the forces that are, you know, pushing and pulling in a macro sense. But how do you fit that in with the rise of something like QAnon? You know, this kind of, you know, ur-conspiracy theory,

this umbrella for other conspiracy theories in the context of what we've been discussing? Well, I mean, you know, everything is a product of it. historical circumstances. Obviously, QAnon was building for a while. I think that you can say certain things about pre-COVID Q&N, you know, and Peter Gate and that kind of stuff that relate to really the ways that that kind of hyperabundance of suspicion that I mentioned earlier addresses that sort of hard centrist kind of end of history arrogance and tries to make sense of it. You know, the sort of obsession with the Clintons is a really interesting one, or built. gates, these people who don't really represent the left or the right, they just represent money.

And, you know, I guess with conspiracies generally, but I guess particularly of late, you know, the line I've been walking, which I know is a kind of perilous one, given how much I disagree with, you know, basically all of those theories, is to say that on some level that, at least the hyperabundance of suspicion that they represent, has a kernel of truth to it, right? I mean, I kind of think that that very starchy kind of rich centre is morally bankrupt and, you know, hypocritical and arrogant. I really do believe that, the Macron's of this world, the Tony Blair's of this world, the Kirstama's of this world, you know, they really is very little good to say about them. And even if they're not ideologically near liberal, they're certainly enablers, really kind of foolish, arrogant enablers of the very worst things about the world we've built, including of the far right, actually, in kind of interesting symbiotic way. But anyway, so there is a kernel of truth in the sense that we should be looking at that centre.

And in fact, I spend a whole chapter kind of basically trying to take them down as best I can. So, you know, as far as pre-COVID Q-in on, I think there's a sort of sense of like you're faced with something that's bad or doesn't feel right or it's extremely arrogant about its own forms of an expression of exercise of power. But you don't really, you haven't been endowed by the kind of market-driven world and its education systems and lack of literacy to really. make sense of that properly. So the most appealing narrative, the most exciting narrative or the one that your family and friends already believe ends up being the one that you adopt rather than the one that's based on, you know, on books or on historical precedent or on learning in a different kind of way. I mean, back in November, well, last November 2020, when my book came out, I was asked by James Butler like, well, if this is what you believe, Marcus, why aren't you a conspiracy

theorist and I was I mean I was kind of he's a brilliant interviewer and he asked me a lot of really great questions and I wasn't anticipating that one but I guess the words that I blurted out were because I have marks um but certainly I think that you know because on the left we've been kind of dealing with that exercise of power um that sort of bourgeois arrogant um you know those forms that power takes for a much longer time we have a kind of abundance and wealth of of theory and thinking about how they operate with, I mean, to some extent, a little bit kind of more inoculated against some of those kinds of more fanciful ways of trying to make sense of our circumstances. Meanwhile, I don't think you can say the same about conservative communities

at all for reasons we were talking about earlier, that kind of betrayal and so forth and that sense of being on the same side as them. So that's the kind of general picture. And then obviously the pandemic has just been a kind of incredible. opportunity for this conspiracist, I don't know, what you want to call it, disinformation economy to sort of amalgamate and for all the different nodes to find each other and to kind of strengthen one another and obviously any time there's a crisis in the work of Kate Starboard is brilliant on this. There's always an abundance of conspiracies about what's really happened and, you know, filling in the kind of the gaps, you know, the sort of loud silences. And so obviously

this has been a huge crisis, been a huge collective drama. it's been a moment where we've been asked rightly. It's the one in a hundred times when we've been asked rightly to put our faith in the system a little bit in order to get through it. And of course, conspiracists have a field day with that. So that's, you know, really proliferated everything. And I think, you know, one thing that's interesting is that you kind of, you mentioned that, you know, disinformation and even this resurgent kind of far-right belief system is kind

of the lifeblood of social media engagement and that a lot of it kind of, you know, is almost like necessary to the larger management of the system. Like they arose together instead of an opposition. Maybe am I misinterpreting that? No, that's right. I mean, there's a couple of things there. I mean, I do think that, you know, foolish conspiracy theories are helpful to the system in the sense that if you have a really exciting and appealing story about, I don't know,

the basement of a pizza parlor or something, you're much less likely to be paying attention to what the real story is, which is probably more boring. There's more bureaucracy. There's more paperwork. It's not fun to discover, you know, what's actually happening, as many investigative journalists will tell us. It's kind of dreary and depressing. And in the end, we need to know it. And there may be some kind of surprising exposés. So, you know, in a way, social media, first and foremost, it's not about misinformation or disinformation. For me, I felt that it's about non-information, right? It's

an attention economy product. That's what it sells. And they want to command our attention with whatever they can get and with whatever is going to is going to kind of distract us and pull us towards them. And so that might be cat videos or people on TikTok dancing or whatever, all of which is relatively harmless. I happen to quite like cats. But then there's also all of the misinformation and other aspects of that which are much more kind of concerning. The social media companies, I don't think really care one way or the other. I don't even think that they necessarily even have the literacy to be able to kind of make a decent theory about all of this. They are of, very much of that system that says that market valuation, including their own share

price and shareholders' interests, are paramount. And the rest is kind of collateral damage. Yeah. On the, on the notion of Marx, I think, his concept of ideology seems like really important here. And like to inoculate one against conspiracy theories, because like for Marx, ideology is autonomous, right? So it's not as if like all of this is the product of some scheming backdoor, you know, CEOs and billionaire saying, this is the narrative we're going to drive. And to certain extent, maybe it's somewhat it's a part of that. But it's like they're being bamboozled as well. Yes. We're all being sort of misled here. And I think that like, especially in relation to social media, like one of the reasons why it's so conducive to producing these fantastical

stories about, you know, how these backdoor, you know, deals are being made that decide the world, you know, these absurd conspiracies about children in basements is because they get, you know, clicks, basically. And the algorithm is just censored around like, how many clicks can we get because that makes money? We get more ads and then the revenue continues. And so it's almost in a certain sense like these social media companies are pushing this just because it makes money. It's not even a, to certain respect, it's not even an elaborate plan. Right. I want to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. I think the kind of Marxian approach to seeing this as a self-reproducing system that doesn't have some kind of evil genius

stroking a white cat in a high back chair was really important. It's the only way really that we can kind of make sense of the crisis that I'm talking about is very much through looking at that. And that was why kind of looking at liberalism and looking at conspiracy theorists and looking at, you know, I mean, one really good instance of the pattern you describe is in journalism, something I know well from having taught alongside a lot of quite seasoned journalists who are, I'm sure, great journalists, but very wrong about, or some, I should have some amazing colleagues. But over the years, I've also had some colleagues that were very wrong and very positivist about what they believe journalism was.

They really thought that they're the ones who go and find the information through news gathering and then share it with the public and that's a public service that's kind of sacred. And I just felt like, no, sorry, you have idiots in the newsroom and the idiots reading the paper and there's a sort of closed cycle there. And, you know, in a sense, what social media companies do is they've taken that same cycle and they've just kind of really accelerated and intensified it. You know, I don't even think that they consciously push.

certain stories. I mean, the jury's kind of out on that. I just think that they are producing, what they have created is the algorithm that does, you know, we call pre-selected exposure, right, where it reads your preferences and then tries to feed you things that fit those preferences. It's not very sophisticated. It's just kind of mostly a quantitative machine. So the idea, for instance, that it's selecting for you based on sort of your ideological commitments or the people only see left-wing content if they're left-ring and that kind of stuff is mostly not well-founded. But, you know, the algorithm is a means of production. It's a way of making. money, it's a way of harvesting our attention, and they are constantly trying to improve it

to make it better, you know, commanding our attention. And that's their focus. And, you know, with these kinds of like networks of people and these kinds of structures in which it's never one person, there's no, there's no singular bad guy, I think one of the interesting things about this, as far as like accountability, which again is something that I would like to work more on, of thinking about how these patterns we've been talking about, you know, apply to the idea of accountability. But here we have kind of a network of the naives and the cynics. We don't really know who is who, which is which. We just know that like some people probably know the harms that they're doing and others don't. I mean, Nick Clegg, the former leader of the Liberal

Democrats is a really good example. He seems to be utterly convinced of the benevolence of Facebook. But on the other hand, he's paid a large sum of money to be convinced of that and to go and communicate that. Are there people that Facebook who really know how harmful their products are? Well, actually, recent exposés have shown that yes, there are. But whether or not they're really in charge or, you know, exactly what the balance of power is and what the ways are that they think about these things. We don't know and we may never know. But I think it's a kind of interesting kind of shudding as, you know, who are the evil ones and who are the good ones? And actually everyone is kind of in between because money conditions, you know, the ways that people think about

these things. Yeah, which I think is a better attitude because it relates to structures, not to speak too mechanistically, but it's not as if like, oh, we just need to replace Mark Zuckerberg with a nice guy. It's right on Facebook. Yeah, exactly. That wouldn't just wouldn't work. Well, and specifically, I mean, talking about social media in relation to Q&on and Travis can tell us more about this than I can. But there's also this element that you have politicians, you know, people who are in power who, who, you know, one would think, you know, has some sort of, um, um, you know, ability to influence, you know, the current system. They are reading the same shit that their followers are on Twitter. They're getting pilled on something that they, that, you know, bubbled up from QAnon onto a message board or onto Twitter. And then they are adopting those beliefs and then, you know, influencing the system on something that was essentially made up online that they believe. You know, we saw this, the episode a couple weeks ago where we were talking about this, this PowerPoint presentation that went around, you know, in the lead up to January 6th, you know, about how the, you know, Donald Trump could reclaim the presidency or, or stay, you know, stay president or root out the, you know, the quote unquote fraud. And this stuff is just bubbling up from online, you know, it's just bubbling up from the same. I guess we're all feeding at the same trough, and that includes the people that are supposed to be

sort of protecting us. Yes, there's a kind of cyclical nature to it. I mean, I think I'm a little kind of cautious around, you know, I mean, not for a second am I criticizing your rhetoric? But I think when we talk about politicians, we have to be very careful because there's so many different kind of approaches to that. And, you know, one of the things about Trump or Marjorie Telegreen or one of these other crazies is that they represent politicians who are simultaneously very much inside the system, but also completely don't believe in the system and are not trying to kind of undermine it. And that kind of turn against democratic systems is something that, you know, has its own, his own origins in this, in this populist turn. Whereas like a classic kind of

establishment politician, for example, is someone who probably thinks that they still do believe in the system, maybe sitting on a few committees and be getting kind of intelligence briefings or whatever and maybe taking, like a John Bolton type, you know, I mean, the breakdown in relations between John Bolton and Donald Trump was kind of predictable in a way, precisely. because there's a rupture there between two very different kinds of doing politics. And John Bolton, you know, not for a second do we want to make him into the good guy. But, you know, there was a kind of, he believes very much in a certain version of their political machine in a way that, like, Trump's whole platform is that he was against the machine

and was going to kind of completely change it from outside. So I don't know. I think I would like to, I think that distinction is a helpful one. I'm there's still it's terrible on both on kind of both sides but um then you have the sort of one or two or possibly three politicians who actually may be trying to do something good but of course they're always a tiny minority Travis, you wanted to ask something? Yeah, you know, I'm curious, and you mentioned say you're not a psychologist, but I'm curious, like, how much of the destructive outcomes of these systems are not, you know, rooted in immutable human desires.

And, I mean, I'll draw a parallel to, like, you know, the food industry. Like, you know, the reason that there's a burger king and a pizza hut and not a quinoa king and a romaine latest hut is because the people desire sugar, the people desire Greece. The people desire salt. The people desire the things that hurt them, ultimately, if you take too much of it. And this is just the way our human braids were evolved in the savannas of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. And it's just hardwired in how we are. And of course, there are systems that provide, you know, excess amounts. And of course, Americans suffer obesity and, you know, disproportionate rates, whatever. But at the same time, I feel like, you know, the reason that people seek out these. destructive ludicrous stories or misinformation or, you know, destructive or, you know, foods, which can be harmful in excess is because of like how they are, just like in a root software programming. And there will always be people who, you know, who crave sugar. And there will always be people who are willing to provide those people with excess amounts of sugar. And, you know,

I'm curious. And so I don't know how much is this attributable to is not, it's not really a fixable problem by fixing the system. That's a fantastic question. I mean, I actually deal with this pretty head-on in my previous book, Filling the Void, partly because, you know, those people who have a problematic relationship to refine sugar, I'm one of them. I have been my whole life, really, certainly my whole adult life. And, you know, in my classrooms, we often talk about, from an informational perspective,

the idea of, like, making the people eat their veggies. And, like, what do you have to do if you run a restaurant and you want people to eat vegetables in a way that it's like plant-based and healthy and all the rest of it, you have to do quite a lot of work on those vegetables to make them palatable. And this idea of palatibility in a kind of consumer economy, I think, is just really, really important. And obviously, you know, there's lots of industries that have for quite a while tried to, like, they make their money on selling us things

that link into various kind of structures of the brain as far as our reward system. There's a lot to talk about dopamine, mostly quite oversimplified. But I did a sort of deep dive. into this stuff when I was writing that book, looking at, for instance, why if you look at pictures of food on social media, so-called food porn, well, firstly, why is it called that? But secondly, you know, the fact that like the Facebook page, at the time, Facebook was the kind of still the main social media, but the Facebook page for like chocolate ice cream

had like hundreds of thousands, if not millions of likes, right? But the one for celery had, you know, 900. And, like, I mean, that's pretty like crude kind of quantitative. quantitative data, you know, but I felt that I put that against some research that I had found into the kind of the impact of internet porn on the brain and the ways that that is actually very similar to what I saw happening with, with social media, with the social media timeline. I think there's definitely things, I mean, I'm always a bit wary of like the appeal to nature thing, but I think there's definitely strong parallels that you could draw as far as thinking about, you know, on some level, like every cell in your body needs glucose to stay alive.

I mean, is it so strange that you would crave sugar? I mean, lots of my kind of more sensible friends claim that they hate candy. But on some level, maybe deep down, there is a desire for sugar and fat and salt, primarily those things. But also, if you're iron deficient, for example, you start to develop a lot of other strange cravings. So there is a kind of psychology of food. Comfort food is a real thing. I also looked at research on that. So, yeah, I mean, I think as far as information, to me, isn't strange at all, but there would be similar patterns here.

because certain forms of media do feel better, and other forms of media are more difficult, certainly a lot less palatable. And, you know, the affective and psychological side of this stuff is very real. And the people at Facebook and Instagram know that. That's one of the areas where they have done a lot of research. I also want to clarify, I'm not judging anyone's eating habits. I literally ate an entire large pizza by myself last night. So, yeah. No, of course. I mean, I'm sure we all have confessions we could make there. But, you know, that's, that's, that's, the nature of the system we're in, isn't it? I think also just to briefly add on to that, like, psychologically speaking, people

always have sort of stupid thoughts, so to speak, but it's just like about creating a system where those stupid thoughts don't attach someone to like a far-right, you know, fascistic movement. Right, right. Quite, quite. Because that's very historically contingent. It is, absolutely, and geographically contingent as well, even in a globalized world. I mean, in 2019, I had an interesting experience briefly being.

a guest of the Norwegian government and sort of got talking to some government functionaries, their speech writers, that kind of thing, low-level civil servants. And I was talking to them about their populism and the kinds of issues they have to deal with and so forth. And they were saying, I mean, maybe they were a little bit kind of rose-tinted about this because they were in the government. But, you know, they were saying, well, we can correct misinformation like really easily, much more easily than we see you guys having to deal with this.

but more to the point, you know, I remember at that time the mayor of Bergen was about to start seeking re-election. And the main issue that the sort of UKIP equivalent, Republican equivalent, people had fastened onto, was tolls, road tolls. And I was like, I wish I lived in York country where, okay, there's lots of other problems. But like, if that's as bad as it gets, you know, then definitely it's a very different term. You could see the same contours, but the issues were different. I think that's the point that I'm making. So yeah, it's definitely very historical and geographically contingent. And that's, of course, one of the hard things about writing about this is, like, I didn't

want to write a book about Britain only, because that, that bores me. I didn't grow up in Britain entirely. And, you know, I think a global outlook is important. But then at the same time, Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump might seem like they're similar in some ways. But the things that have been happening in the Philippines, things that have been happening in, you know, the United States, and let's say, you know, the things that have been pushing Fides to the top of the polling in Hungary and keeping Viktor Orban in power are all kind

of actually there's points at which they, you know, they, um, they're very, they're very different. So, so, so, I mean, I guess the question to, to kind of finish off that, that sugar conversation, the question is, are we doomed to create systems that ever accelerate and kind of pornography, uh, pornography, whatever word you would use there, but pornography our, are, our, our, our natural desires. So, for example, you might wake up craving sugar and fat and salt, but there's a difference between that and open. opening your social media feed and seeing a bunch of photos of hamburgers and then having those rise to the top because of engagement. And then your kind of addictive, you know,

tendencies will start to feed back into that system and create a kind of ever-worsening and tightening cycle. You know, it's hard to talk about human nature when we get up in the morning and the first thing we do is check a feed, again, curated by a company that is only interested in your attention. And then our desires, our natural desires, have to play out through that existing system. So the question is, are we just going to make worse and worse fast-foodified versions of social media that will make us want fast food even more? And I mean, is this intractable, you know? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think I wouldn't separate them because I think there's one or two companies or five companies whose interest is our

attention, but there's probably, you know, 500,000 companies who are their clients whose interest is in selling those other things. And let's not forget that they're paying the bills of the first group of companies. And that when you have these kind of structures of economic relations that are about pushing one thing, and then that's the whole basis in which your society is constructed, you have something that, again, I feel like the metaphor of the prevailing wind, the fact that winds will slowly blow from west to east is kind of a good one because it's like, well, if you want to sail in one direction, you've got to push harder than if you're going to sail in the other direction. In other words, there's always going to be a tendency within these

societies for certain things to be, you know, easier. And this kind of, I mean, as you call it, pornification of our information, I think, is definitely one of those effects. You can't sort of see it in isolation and just say, well, you know, we wake up, we see the thing on the time, and then we kind of, we want, the fact that McDonald's exists or the hamburger exists or the hamburger has been commercialized in this way over the last, you know, again, 70 years or something is also part of that story. And I think this is one of the points that I wanted to make generally about social media and culture and information is that we tend to, I mean, I'm not saying that we're doing this now, but I think in general, these conversations tend to look at social

media in isolation. And they often do that as a way of not having to talk about capitalism more generally, which is flawed and will produce lots of harmful outcomes with or without social media. The tobacco industry is another fantastic example of that, where you have, you know, Not only do you have organized disinformation, which is always fun, but you also have, you know, something which is not even part of our kind of so-called natural urges, right? It's just a sort of like chemical that's in this plant that once you start smoking it, it's seductive, you know, and also really carcinogenic and harmful to your body, to everyone's bodies.

And yet look at the kind of fortunes of the tobacco industry over its history, you know, and of course then its relationships to other parts of the machine. It brings us back to those think tanks again. So it's, you know, this is the challenge, right? I mean, one of the reasons why, you know, when we're talking about literacy or these kinds of big pictures that we've been making here today is that, like, it's a very difficult thing to make sense of all of these things at once, you know, it's like really takes a lot of work, even if you're used to researching and writing about these things, it's still a lot

of effort. And so it's kind of no wonder that like these kind of ways of looking at the problem are either erased or misunderstood and simplified or, you know, lots of other things happen to prevent that kind of analysis from being made and being understood. It's like a sort of not exactly grand unifying theory, but there's a way in which, you know, it is a sort of extremely big picture that's kind of irreducible. I like to go back to your example. It's like, you know, I think it was celery, right? It's like if you're presented with a photo of celery and a hamburger, most people will click on the hamburger, but that doesn't mean that they wish their entire society

was structured around the warship of the hamburger. And that's what they're already born into. So, you know, it's not like, they might be, I mean, it's questionable if they're even aware of what the original natural, natural relationship you would have to any of this because there's so many layers of like previous creation that are, yeah, it obfuscates, you know, I think, like any clarity. Yeah, I mean, I think obfuscation is the key word here, you know. This is not only a self-reproducing system, it's also a self-obfuscating system. And the two things have to be understood, you know, two sides of the same coin. And so I wanted to explore a little bit, you know, the one big part of QAnon and a lot of the kind of far-right reaction to media involves just this, like you said, just insane levels of suspicion, especially at the mainstream media, the MSM, just absolutely central to almost all conspiracy movements, at least since.

you know, 2015. And you kind of took a look at some particular British outlets that I thought were pretty interesting. For example, you know, when you're looking at suspicion, could you describe kind of what happened to the Guardian from about 2015 onwards and what the DSMA notice system is? Well, I can do. I mean, I have to say I'm very much indebted to an investigative journalism outlet called Declassified There. That's their story, really. So, well, I can, I mean, It was a good illustrative instance, but in a way it's not, you know, I would recommend your listeners to go and kind of look that up and read it. But just very briefly, what Mark Curtis did in that article was to look at the change in editorial stance at The Guardian sort of through the second decade of, you know, basically from like 2010 onwards, I think. And to kind of consider the Guardian's relationship to power as kind of formerly having been.

the sort of progressive or even left-leaning newspaper in Britain, the primary one. And, I mean, without wanting to be sort of ad hominem, I think there's one of the theories there is around the kind of change in editorship, but also perhaps also the changing conditions. As Liv said, it's rarely one person, it's much more, you know, the kind of structure overall and the historical conditions overall that are interesting. But what this article did, Mark Curtis's article, was to think about Alan Russ Bridges, kind of editorship of the Guardian as culminating in the sort of Edward Snowden expose there around, you know, what GCHQ and their friends at the NSA had been doing.

And to see the kind of the Guardians' expose of that as a sort of culmination of a certain kind of like hostility to power, challenge to power that they felt was their role. And, you know, one of the bits of that article that really stood out to me was the sense that, like, journalists who had brought that story to print, right, who, had then watched as British spies had required the destruction of computer equipment containing that story as a way of trying to stamp it out, like literally going there and drilling through hard drives and that kind of thing. That journalists, you would think would be horrified at that kind of suppression very quickly then end up sitting on the DSMA notice committee. So for the non-British

readers of, sorry, listeners of your podcast, I should just explain quickly what that committee is. The committee is made up of government officials, military officials, and journalists working together to decide if and when there is a story where publishing that story and publicizing it heavily would be harmful to the national interest. Their committee decides to put out a voluntary notice called a DSMA notice. SMA is a strategic media advisory, right? So they basically say we would prefer if you didn't publish anything about this, either either ever or until we're ready. outlets don't have to follow it and the Guardian didn't used to but what happened was that one of these journalists who was involved in this kind of Snowden thing ended up sitting on that committee

which is quite a sort of inversion and you know the Guardian also then transferred to the editorship of Catherine Viner who had had a kind of rather different background in journalism a lot less kind of hard hard journalism investigative newsy stuff and this is not an ad hominem criticism of Catherine Viner but just to say that the paper kind of did change its focus, as would be, you know, common with any change of editor-in-chief. So then you have, like, Guardian journalists sat on the DSMA notice and a lot more proximity

to the kind of, like, security and military establishment and a lot less rocking of the boat in the kind of years from around sort of 2015 onwards, really. So that's the kind of instance that I gave, just the proximity between, you know, journalism in a kind of mainstream sense and power in a mainstream sense. And, you know, most of the best journalism that I'm seeing is coming from startups and kind of insurgent, small organizations like declassified, like open democracy, like the intercept, democracy now have been going for years, you know, many others, but definitely not the guardians and the New York Times of this world.

I don't think that's their role any longer. If you look at the New York Times' support for the war in Iraq, for example, I think that's another rather galling example. And so do you think that over time, you know, this shift, You know, for example, you also studied a bit how the BBC progressively shifted the references to think tanks towards more conservative think tanks over the last, like, a couple of decades. Do you think that there's that shifting of the Overton window and at the same time stuff like the DSMA notice system, which, you know, is then creating excess suspicion? And then people are saying, well, it's the mockingbird media. They get their talking points every morning from the CIA and MI6 and, you know, and take it too far and create the.

that backlash? Well, I mean, there is a simplification. I mean, you know, one of the things that I think we can wrestle with is the fact that, like, are people knowledgeable enough to even have read the journalism that we could say has produced their suspicion? Because a lot of the time, you know, if they had, they wouldn't be coming up with these kind of alternative narratives. Because there's lots of, like, independent investigative journalists that are giving us the kind of the real story already. But yet, that's not the kind of narrative that the conspiracy theorists are adopting. They're taking something which is neither the official line, which they know to be suspicious of, or the kind of so-called truth, you know, that these kind of journalists who don't have an agenda

or have a lot less of an agenda besides, you know, paying their rent, have. They're taking something else. And so, like, there's a bit of a kind of oxymor on there. Well, how can they be suspicious because of the real abuses of power that are happening if they're not actually reading about those kind of real abuses of power? And so I think you kind of, it's more that there's a kind of generalized malaise, It's a generalized kind of suspicion that kind of slowly accumulates like a sort of sludge within the system where, you know, when do people get to see a politician really do something for them, put their, you know, put their necks on the line for them. When do we ever see anything other, you know, if there's a hundred stories showing politicians being lying and cheating and, you know, and none showing them doing good things, that would already be bad enough.

But, of course, it isn't even like that. There's just like the thousands that have the establishment line, 100 that have the kind of more kind of ethically motivated kind of journalistic thing going on. And then the kind of sobering truth that the actual, there's nothing saying that the system that is working in your favor. These things really are, you know, there's like that. So what I'm saying is that suspicion can like slowly accumulate. And I see that more as being the thing, the suspicion and the anger that this kind of system produces are the things that have slowly accumulated. accumulated and that eventually it's like a kind of well it's a bit like a damn collapsing um so yeah i mean i i feel like i sort of slightly straight away from your question so um if you would like

me to no it's okay it you know you kind of uh we've kind of talked about how the system after after you know the fall of like actual global left wing powers the system basically moved into management mode uh because it didn't have as much opposition and so it's trying to kind of vent these suspicious tendencies, right, through a variety of mechanisms. And, you know, there's been all these different attempts at doing that, both ill-intentioned and well-intentioned, but you're saying basically that the system over time has basically not been able to catch up to the rise in suspicion, and it's now becoming overwhelming. Well, I mean, it goes back to what we were saying earlier about the kind of illiteracy within the newsroom, within the system as well, right? So I don't know

that they necessarily even have enough of the right kinds of analysis to show them that that's what's happening. I mean, the levels of arrogance about the kind of, you know, how good, how great the system is, you know, are pretty staggering. So I think it's a sense of like, if you're arrogant about the kind of harms that you might be doing, then those harms can sort of multiply and, you know, accumulate over time. And I think it's more that rather than, I mean, sometimes there may be an intentional kind of venting. of, you know, but I'm always kind of a bit reluctant to go down the kind of intentional route because you just never really know with intentions, right? Exactly who's intentions or what.

Right, right. Yeah, no, the system itself doesn't exactly have intent. It just, you know, it's like when conspiracy theories rose, you saw the rise of like fact checkers and stuff like that that attempted to kind of help people process some of the suspicion. And that's, again, the system just kind of self-managing, right? I mean, it's like the algorithm trying to compensate for excess of something? Yeah, I mean, fact checkers is always a bit, kind of a bit of a bemusing development in a way because they're sort of, you know, at best decades too late. But also it's the sense of like, I mean, you know, I've had all my vaccines and I'm not

an anti-vaxxer, but like the idea that you can sort of like get rid of the problem of vaccine hesitancy by just kind of forcing everyone to participate in the system is a sort of like, that's a great example of the kind of positivist arrogance that I think I see as being so central to these processes of misinformation. It just isn't going to work and it's probably going to make the system worse. And so, yeah, you know, continuing on that kind of dam metaphor, I think Liv had a question for you. Yeah. On the subject of the dam-breaking metaphor, it seems that the only movements that are, or at least most of the movements that are exploiting the proverbial cracks in the system, are either explicitly on the right or some sort of confused amalgamation of local

problems without, you know, a central left-wing critique. So like the yellow v. movement, for instance. Why do you think it is that the right has been seemingly so much better at exploiting these cracks in the system? I think that's a really good question. I mean, I don't necessarily know that I'm qualified to give you the entire answer, but I think one of the things we can say is about temporality. I've sort of alluded to this earlier, but I sort of feel like, you know, I mean, again, these labels are not, don't fill me with joy, but the left has sort of got about a 150 year history of kind of arguing about what's going on

and about the exercise of power. But in almost none of that time have we really, you know, in the sense that most kind of contemporary left-wing people would think of, you'd never really been in power. Like the kind of thing, you know, so there's always this kind of external, rather academic, arguing about what's happening,

often in the face of things that we can see our crises, but which, you know, perhaps the other participants don't necessarily recognize the harms that are being created. But as we were saying earlier, there's been this kind of desistency. sort of works if you're right wing and it works if you're a free marketer or at least it did until relatively recently right basically 2008 is kind of the um the drop-off point there um and so it's a much more kind of sudden shock and i think that sudden shocks are always going to kind of

hit the cracks a little different than a sort of 150 year conversation about um based in superstructure or historical materialism or you know um what the bourgeoisie is up to um and the other thing is of course, I mean, I really want to talk about this a lot, but there's a lot of infighting on the left about exactly which is the right analysis, which is always kind of a bit heartbreaking. But at the same time, we've all been there, we've all been involved in some of those kinds of heated discussions, and a lot of them do matter. So, you know, I think there's probably a lot more that one could say about perhaps if the world has been constructed in a kind of image that's an amalgamation of right-wing and free market thinking, then

then in a sense that's going to be the best placed ideological system to kind of to take advantage of whatever vestigial pieces are lying around and left over by those formerly empowered systems that did work before this kind of moment of rupture. It's the sort of, I mean, it makes me think of that rather creepy Milton Friedman quote about like our job is to generate ideas and have them be lying around and then when the crisis comes, you know, these are the ideas people will pick up. We have not really been in a position on the left where we're kind of churning out ideas that people could use when a crisis comes along. I mean, a little bit, yes, but not nearly as much.

Yeah, no, the ideas that are picked up are definitely not that. It's a combination of, you know, on the left, like a think tank that, you know, would be already pretty horrifying. And then on the right, it's the Cato Institute and, you know, the whole Coke machine. There is, you know, that dark money and I guess the structure of manipulating human feelings and of being those ideas laying around when the crisis comes. That's a long time work. It's not just like a natural process.

You know, they invested a lot of time into making the system, you know, have those things be the available buttons when you need to press something on the machine. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's not kind of underestimate money as well itself. I mean, like anyone who's ever tried to set up like a left wing Montpelarang or a left wing Cato Institute or a left wing any version of these things knows that immediately that's the problem you run into. That they have all of the kind of oil wealth and, you know, these kinds of things that just aren't available if you're if you're kind of coming at this from from a kind of. kind of, you know, perspective. I mean, that's why figures like Bernie Sanders and, you know, Jeremy Corbyn and others are interesting because what successes they have had, you know, even if bitterly defeated at the last or whatever, are kind of remarkable in the face of that kind of incredible difference in, in resources. Yeah. And it seems like we have to deal with the

problem of like ensuring that the discourses and ideas that are picked up in crisis that were initially left don't just turn into like basically like Blairite sort of new labor, where it's the ideas are sort of shifted to be used for the sake of profit, while maybe appearing still somewhat on the left, we have to make sure that those ideas are being picked up against the system to sort of make the cracks show even more and for the benefit of the worst off. Yeah, so you don't have one enemy, you have two, because you have the people appropriating those ideas to the wrong ends,

and then you have the people who are just completely against those ideas to begin with, and you're kind of fighting both simultaneously. Maybe that's why we can never have any kind of power. And so, you know, since you wrote this book, Marcus, the world has changed and we no longer need to worry about anything you laid out. But still, I'd love to get your observations on like the last couple of years since you finished it. Wow. Okay. That's, that's quite open-ended. I mean, I think we could, I mean, well, let's just say this. I mean, one of the things that I was asked about a lot when the book came out is about solutions. And I think that, you know, I didn't

quite realized how big the pandemic was going to be, right? I mean, I finished writing the book. I sent the book off the very last, you know, corrections in sort of August 2020. And, you know, then we were sort of like, we'd done the first wave and we sort of hoped, you know, maybe there might be a second wave and after that we kind of go away. So I didn't realize it was going to go on like this. And I think maybe, I now think it may never go away. But sorry if that's particularly kind of pessimistic. Jake just coughed in reaction to that. dying right here on the call. But so I think, you know, the conversation around solutions is one that people wanted to have a lot with me.

And it's a very difficult one, but I think it's a very important one. And I think that, again, it sort of relates to what we were just talking about, actually, as far as like, you know, when I, in my sort of limited attempts at organizing, I have found it very difficult to get people who have a sort of like basic politics of wanting to look after people who they do not know personally. you know wanting to come yeah I don't know it's very difficult to get those people to like line up it's very difficult to get them to kind of cooperate with one another it's very difficult to get them to have a kind of policy around when are they going to be transparent and when are they going to be strategic about their you know declaring what they're up to

it's very difficult to get people to like start an institution and have a sort of constitution within it and stick to the rules that they make and it's very, you know, it's very difficult to get people of conscience to talk about taking back power, actually, as well. All of these things have been enormous obstacles to my limited attempts at trying to organise anything. And so, you know, I know that there are some people already kind of writing about this, but I think I've certainly been reflecting on this a lot more since the book came out because, I mean, I got a bit of shit from the publisher for not having more solutions in the book, which I think is entirely justified, actually. But certainly I would like to kind of focus on that more. And I've been thinking about that a lot in the last two years. I think I was going to say something else, but I can't remember what it is now.

No, it's fine. I mean, you know, what do you make of the way, you know, more specifically conspiracy theories are propagating? I mean, do you see this dam basically continuing to break down? Or is there a point where some of these factors might change, you know? I mean, I'm really not trying to make an episode that's fatalistic about this either, you know. It's just that if you, you know, it's more of an observation of history rather than a proposal to change it. It's just kind of seeing the factors and what is now, you know, I guess the dominant structures. So yeah, sorry, go ahead.

No, no, no apologies needed. I mean, I think there's lots of solutions that have been proposed, you know, whether it's, I mean, okay, I guess me, I mean, solutions that have been proposed to the kind of general. general problems we've been talking about and to the problem specifically of conspiracy theories. In both cases, I think we're looking at a very slow solution if there is one. Even the things that we've been talking about didn't come about overnight. That's why the history of it is so important. The big question for me is, do we have time to put in place a solution like that before it's too late?

We have lots of time in theory, if we're talking about fighting fascism or fighting big tech, But as far as the environment and the kind of denialism and conspiracism around that issue, and also just the ways that, not even conspiracy theorists, but just the structure generally doesn't really want to change its direction in relation to that crisis. I worry that we'll run out of time in relation to that crisis before we can really put in place the things we need. So don't worry about the conspiracy theory. The tsunami will be hitting first.

Well, I mean, I am worried about all of these things. And much to the frustration of some of my comrades, I am kind of eternally optimistic about this because I think basically you have a choice to kind of stand up and try and make the world better or crawl into bed with a bunch of harry bow and give up you know I don't I don't really see that I mean I think most people are doing neither but I actually think that the choice between us really is one or the other not to be too sort of like binary in our thinking but I think that's kind of you know it's sort of somewhere there really and you know I suppose it's I mean one of the conversations that's really interesting I think is about what the imagination can do in in these contexts and

how if you can get people to imagine different outcomes and to think about the world and imagine it differently, then you can probably produce different outcomes. And one of the things is in relation to people's own agency, getting them to kind of imagine that they actually can do something. And I don't mean like stopping using plastic drinking straws. You know, I mean something a little bit more material than that, even if it's just like, join a group, join a group. You know, even if it is arguing about whatever, left wing, you know, philosophy, I don't care. I'd rather people we're doing that than doing nothing, you know? And I mean, I think if you want to do music, join a band.

If you want to save the world, then join a group that's about doing that. But the idea that any of us can do much by ourselves, I think, is one of the things that prevents action from being taken. And there's lots of world building we can do in groups. Some of those groups are going to be really frustrating and annoying, and some of them are going to be really powerful eventually. But it's just you don't know unless you start. Travis is holding up a very obscure Leninist pamphlet that he wants us to read.

No, he's holding up the Unabomber's Manifesto for some reason. Oh, that's what it is. One of the more recent Michael Moore films, whatever you think of Michael Moore, I think there's a quite powerful section where he talks about, like, well, when did America become such a kind of right-wing country? Well, the truth is, it never was, actually, if you take the party names off the policies and talk to people about just general ideas for how to kind of, you know, how to make things better. They actually support quite a lot of progressive ideas. And I mean, it's, it's always a bit

tricky to say, well, people's kind of grievances are well-founded because, you know, it shades into a lot of other things that perhaps aren't. But actually, their basic, affective frustration at the system, even if they're not entirely sure why, often is. And it often is about, if you, if you were to drill down enough, it often is about the kind of things that we've been saying for however long. But it's just like the polarization is kind of cutting across that. It's like they'll support something until they figure out that it's a democratic, you know, policy and then they'll suddenly drop it. But what's really interesting, actually, is the people who say they'll either support Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, they just won't support like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or, you know, whatever. And like that kind of thinking is just getting so common now.

Like I'm seeing so much of it kind of out there in the environment where these people who have sort of like got a weird fascination with like left wing critical theory, but then also are kind of clearly. held right in a way as well. And I mean, I've had my book talked about and recommended to each other by some people whose politics I find absolutely abhorrent. The first book, you know, filling the void book, I was really kind of stunned by that. And there's nothing in that book that could possibly be construed. I don't think in a way that's like anti-Semitic or anything. But there was something about its approach to dealing about with, with power and centrist hypocrisy that they like. So there's a lot of confusion and sort of weird, you know, it's like a sort of belligerent confused anger like people have like blindfolds around their their eyes and then

they're kind of provoked into anger and they don't really kind of know which which way to to stab you know that's sort of i mean it's probably a bit of a patronizing metaphor but in some ways i think it's not far off yeah it's like it's almost like we need to redefine the terms you know as uh mortimer adler adler says is that you know so many people's like you were just saying you know they think this this idea is good and then they find out that oh that's a social that's a progressive that's a progressive thing, well, wait a minute, no, I don't like that. If we didn't have any of these terms to label these things, people would just know an idea that feels right and feels like, it feels like it's something that is for the good of the people. Absolutely. I mean, I'm not one for

policing language, but, you know, I mean, I think as far as how we talk about political ideas, that's definitely a case to be made. I mean, I tried to write a whole chapter around what I would call liberals without using the word liberals. Because I was talking to one person who's kind of advising me a little bit. And I was like, but how can I talk about this thing of I don't like, I don't like the words? And he was like, well, just don't use the words. And I was like, how can you even do that? But I think, you know, liberal, to me, that's a problem because it means so many different

things in different places. The idea that, like, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters have, you know, on the same team is ridiculous to me. But to many people, they're all liberals. That's clearly crazy. Progressive isn't that much better, particularly as it, you know, encodes the idea of progress, which, you know, I think is really problematic. I mean, then you have moderates.

you know, which are basically set up to kind of make use, making them sound like they, how, I mean, how could that possibly be a bad thing to be sort of moderate? Right. It sounds like a warm bar, it's nice. Vanilla ice cream, you know. And then centrist, which is the same, you know, like, I mean, it's like not too spicy, please, right? Not left wing, not right wing.

It's just in the center, therefore it has no ideology. I mean, the number of times I've seen, you know, like schemers that talk about, like, the media or how left wing or right wing is this particular media outlet? And then the sort of ones in the middle are considered to be objective and balanced. And it's like, no, they have, they're just as ideological. It's just that their ideology is just money, you know. No, because the right will read the paper and be like, well, look, there's a fucking ad for McDonald's that's pro-LGBQ. And then the left is like, that's a fucking ad for McDonald's.

And so everyone's fucking pissed. Well, like, it's crazy. I've had friends. I've had, you know, long political discussions with friends where we're like playing video games late at night. We're chatting on a headset and they're talking about all of the, you know, their policies. and what they believe in, and it's totally, you know, what I would consider somebody who is left or progressive. And then I would say, well, you know, how do you define yourself? And they say, oh, well, I'm a centrist. And and I think that it just people, like you said, the definition of the term can even just come down to

somebody's just individual idea of what they think it means, you know, it's wild. And often it doesn't match anything to do with like policy or even an understanding of ideology on the right or the left, right? It's just the idea of like, hey, man, like, I'm chill. I'm not going to, like, argue with my racist uncle too much, you know. Like, I'm not looking to. The racist uncles have also learned a thing or two about this, right? And I mean, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, often known as Tommy Robinson, the sort of, you know, kind of right-wing, I guess you'd say,

a Jean Provocator of a certain kind, who's, you know, known for Islamophobia and all this kind of stuff. And it's funded by American Australian dark money. He's very good at saying, no, but I support gay rights. I'm a liberal and I'm this and I'm that and has a certain way of talking about himself that is aimed at borrowing that technique that real liberals have. It's like the borrowing of the borrowing. Like these kind of centrist take left wing language and use it about themselves so they can push free market policies.

And he's learned from that and is doing the same so he can push Islamophobia and all sorts of other kind of unsavory things and harmful things. And it's like, I mean, this is, no wonder people are suspicious because nobody's really being honest or truthful about what they actually believe. I mean, you know, even if you are kind of quite clear. about your left-wing politics and you have read quite a lot about left-wing politics, there are still situations in which you can't really say exactly what you stand for. I mean, certainly in my institutional life, I have to kind of tone it down.

I have a wager with one of my colleagues about which one of us is going to get written up in the Daily Mail first. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, yeah, that's the confusion. That's the illiteracy. That's the kind of suspicion that these are the conditions that produce that kind of like extreme obfuscation that we've been talking about.

There's one general idea I was thinking about briefly that I could ask you about. It seems like, especially in sort of my impulse to analyze where these movements came from, there are two general like poles where I'm being pulled to.

One is to make like an overly structural analysis and to say like, well this is a product of capitalism. This is almost like, you know, not inevitable, but like of course this is going to come about in relation to this system that's existed. this is, you know, profit MCM Prime, you know, making money.

This is a product of structuring our society around the market. And the other sort of poll is essentially to say, no, this is a very particular phenomena. We can't, we can't universalize this. We can't say that, like, this was inevitable in some sense. I almost see this in, like, fissures writing about neoliberalism and the Thatcher government. Like, we take this to be an inevitability. But then it turns out that it was actually quite contingent. There were many moments where it could have broken.

up. We weren't necessarily going to land on this position. I wonder what you're sort of, because I see sort of both our polls to some respect and where you've been talking, how you've been analyzing this, where you position yourself there. Well, I think, I mean, that's a really perceptive thing to say. I always ever asked me about that as far as my work. I think I try to have my cake and eat it, to be honest with you on that. I sort of think it doesn't have to be one or the other. I think you can say that there are aspects of the ways that capitalism works that go back to its very origins in the 16th century that kind of, you know, in hindsight, make this situation kind of a likely culmination in a way. But then obviously there are so many contingencies and so

many things that happened. And there's so much historical and geographical specificity. And, you know, the important thing, I suppose, is how we then take account of that in any solutions we try to implement. Because, you know, obviously, if we're too deterministic about it, then we sort of end up being kind of either resigned to our fates or, you know, we end up saying, well, the best thing we can do is just kind of hasten our, you know, the sort of accelerationist thing, right? But I mean, the danger of the, of the kind of other extreme is that we fail to see that, I mean, to a large extent, each version of capitalism is the product of the previous version of capitalism. And so even if there isn't one thing that you can blame that's the kind of in a grand unifying theory way,

there is a way in which a kind of more abstracted, structural, joined-up analysis of capitalism's tendencies is essential to how we do build that solution, because there are some of those fundamentals that have to be gotten rid of, right? I mean, I believe the free market, as we know it, has to go. Do you have to be other systems of valuation that have to come back? And that's basically, you know, I mean, that's what we were saying. That's what the right have been trying to do is reassert their kind of all of their moralistic anchors because they don't know it, but they're fed up with the kind of extreme valueless approach to everything. And so it doesn't have to be those values.

It could be either much more kind of useful ones that I think we could be much better about articulating. To go back to what we were saying earlier, if we can kind of make the people eat their veggies, then maybe we can do some of that work. And that's one area where Mark Fisher's work, I think, has been inspiring to lots of people, this kind of quote that his students, quote from, I think it's chapter three of capitalist realism that his students went and wrote on the wall after he died. The idea that, you know, imagining things to be impossible is part of how you make them impossible. And likewise, imagining it to be attainable is part of that.

I mean, you know, you don't have to love all of Fisher's work to actually really take something from that. And, you know, imagination and values and togetherness, I think, are a part of how you can do that. Bunchal Hand's work has actually been really helpful to me as far as thinking through some of these problems as well. But yeah, I mean, it doesn't have to be either or it can be both. It can be locally and historically specific and also structural and abstract. And I think it's really kind of a yin-yang sort of situation.

And there's probably other approaches that are neither that could be helpful as well. It's like, you know, there was always going to be a teenage mutant ninja turtle sequel. You know, the first one would. incredibly it did incredibly well it was based on this this you know this IP that had swept you know children children of the 80s and 90s by storm there was always going to be a sequel now whether that sequel you know nobody knew that they were going to send the turtles through time to like you know feudal Japan and and make an absolute fucking mess of it it's like the sequel was inevitable but how shitty the sequel is that that is is down to the

specificities and the details of the creators. I'm sure Fisher would agree. Fisher would agree with that. He was definitely against like the, yeah, it's like, come on, like the whole idea of the Ninja Turtles that's cool is that they're in New York, you know? They're kind of like living in the sewers. You said it's a Shogun Japan. Do they even have a sewer system?

I mean, I believe that was a critique he page of the sequel on his blog, K-Punk, at some point. Oh, there you go. Yeah, I mean, I was thinking of another slightly more, well, another example that came to mind. Please, save my analogy, please. Of it. Yes, perhaps that, I mean, for those people who, I mean, I was really entertained with Ninja Turtles when I was little. So that analogy worked fine for me. Okay, excellent.

I think another one could be, I was just thinking of a story that my mom tells in her book, which is coming out next month, called Return of a Native, where Anthony Fisher, who's the founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs, obviously one of the really important institutions in the history of development of, you know, free market capitalism made his money from industrialized chicken farming. And the way he was able to do that was by going to the United States and bringing illegally, bringing eggs back into the United Kingdom from the states in his luggage in a very kind of carefully concealed way that then enabled him to build this kind of business empire that would then fund the Institute of Economic Affairs. But if either of those

eggs had broken, then, you know, perhaps the whole world would be different. The effect of the Institute of Economic Affairs would not have been felt in the years since 1955. So, I mean, I'm sure we could, for hours, we could really find lots of other examples like this, but, you know. Yeah. But that's a great one, too, because eggs by nature are so fragile. And, and, I mean, hell, like, if you're traveling, I mean, everybody, you always get to break something in your suitcase if you're traveling. So especially, like, but, you know, back in those days, you know, and you didn't have the smooth airplane rides and the careful baggage handlers.

This is a call to all baggage handlers to really beat the shit out of every suitcase you can get your hands on. Especially if it has an upper class luggage kind of tag on it. Oh, Louis Vuitton, he thinks you are smuggling eggs to create capitalism. Smash. Well, thank you so much, Marcus.

And really, I do recommend people read your book. It is so much more coherent than anything we're going to be able to explore. And like you said, you know, carefully crafted each word to be the kind of simplest and most straightforward kind of way of saying these things. And yeah, I really appreciated it because it doesn't, you know, even though the conversation today has been quite heady, I don't think your work is inscrutable in any way. It was a great read and an easy read. So I do recommend people go check out after the fact by Marcus

Gilroy Warren. Where else can people find and support your work or follow you? Oh, wow. I mean, I have a website, mjgw.net. I don't have any, I don't have a more recent book that I can plug here, but I can definitely say thank you to you all for your attention to my work and for your enjoyment of it and your attention in this attention economy. And please support your local independent, well, it doesn't have to be local, but an independent journalism outlet, especially if it's a startup, like people really trying to make a difference and do kind of good investigative work because the idea that all journalists are bad is, you know, is a part of the problem. And I'm by no means a defender of journalism, but I think

some of the kind of younger, independent, insurgent voices that I see are really, you know, they give me hope. So I think if $5 a month, $10 a month, we can all support something like that. I think we would definitely be going some way towards kind of making that long-term solution that we've been talking about. And people could also follow you on Twitter. Your handle is MJGW. That's right. Thanks so much for joining us, Marcus. Thank you so much to you all. having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Q&on Anonymous podcast. Please go to patreon.com slash QAnonanonymous and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. When you subscribe,

you help us stay advertising free and editorially independent. Live, where can people find your other content? Yeah, I have a sort of philosophy-related podcast that's just called Live Agar podcast. Just search Live Agar, whichever podcast hosting. that you use. The Patreon is also Live Agar. I also stream on Twitch, also under Live Agar. And my YouTube is Live Agar YouTube. It's a one-stop shop.

You put Live Agar into any box that has a blinking cursor where you can write text, and you will open up a wealth of incredible content, you know, similar avenues to some of the stuff we talk about on the show. There are some platforms that they don't need to type Liv's name into it. What? I'm just saying.

Well, there are, You never know. Okay, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. You know, not any platform, okay? You know, use your brains on this one. It's a new year. Everybody's thinking better. Use your brains.

Use your brains and as such, your judgment. Yeah, no, go check out all of Liv's stuff. You can also go check us out on Twitch at QAnon Anonymous, and I'm Julian Field on Twitch as well. And for everything else, we have a website, QAnonanonymous.com. Listener, in this new year, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. It's not a conspiracy, it's fact. And now, today's auto Q. Government just isn't working for the hardworking families of America. We need fundamental

change, not more of the same. That's why I've offered a comprehensive plan, a real plan to rebuild America, create 8 million new jobs, invest in education and job training, ensure quality, affordable health care for all. We're going to ask the rich to pay their fair share so the rest of America can finally get a break. A plan to put government back on your side. Read it yourself. Together we can make America work again.