The Blindboy Podcast - The Styrofoam Shepherd

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

Barefoot accountant update. The story of a Chilean Book which was a Marxist critique of Donald Duck, an attempt to create a socialist internet in 1971 and the CIA backed fascist coup that ended it all Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cuddle under the Dutchman's jugular, you wonderful dumplings. Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast. If you're a brand new listener, maybe go back to some earlier episodes. Maybe even begin from the start, a lot of people do that. To familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. Because we don't really know what this podcast is. I don't really know what this podcast is. You can't just listen to this podcast without wearing a condom.

Or without doing your stretches first. It requires aural and spiritual prophylaxis and flexibility. But if you're a regular listener to this podcast, if you're a vinegar fintan, then you know the crack. Welcome back. It's fucking February, lads. February's a tough month. I have trouble loving February.

I have great difficulty finding meaning in February. And I think half the problem with February is if I just stop telling myself that it's spring. If I just stop... I don't know who put that into my head. It's not spring. February is the end stage relationship with winter. February is when our relationship with winter breaks down.

February is sleeping on the couch. February has a secret Tinder account. The one thing you can guarantee yourself with February is it will disappoint you. February is a disappointing month. The fucking rain in February the sideways wind, cold sideways wind

like I don't mind November, December there's an honesty to November and December, it's cold it's winter, there's a bit of Christmas about, you deal with it then February comes along and you get it into your head that it's spring and it just disappoints you day after day and this morning there was a rain this morning and

it got me really i got really annoyed that we don't have enough words for rain so there was a rain this morning and it's it happens in February and sometimes it happens in July but when it happens in July it's warm so it's okay so it's this type of rain that's like a very a very thin mist a perpetual thin mist that's deceptive and you look out the window and you say, I'm going to go for a run in this thin mist, because it's just thin mist. But then you go outside, and it soaks you to the bone within three minutes. You go back home because you're too wet,

and then you have to experience a sense of shame or foolishness because you trusted that February rain. It's like the quicksand of rain. And you know exactly the type of rain that I'm talking about. And it happens every year. And yet we don't have a specific name for it. We don't have a specific name for that freezing cold, sideways aggressive rain that you get in February, which I think is my least favourite rain because

there's nothing you can do to warm yourself up in it. If you're on your bicycle, if you're out for a run and you get aggressive freezing cold sideways rain accompanied by a wind, there's no way to heat yourself up. Then there's that other rain that you get in the summer, that very incredibly vertical, that very incredibly vertical, sudden, aggressive, fat droplets of hot rain that fall on ground that's dry, and when it's finished, you get that oily smell, you know that oily summer post-rain smell. Well, that smell has a name. That smell is called petrichor. But the rain itself, we don't have a fucking name for it.

And you'd think in Ireland where we have multiple different types of rain. Like Ireland is a rainforest. Ireland is a temperate rainforest. We've just gotten rid of all the forest. But it's kind of never not raining in Ireland, all different types of rain. And we don't have individual names for these types of rain. It turns out of course we do. But we can blame the brits so we don't in ireland we don't have individual names for rain in english but we do have names for these different types of rain in irish i don't know why i don't

know why the brits wanted us to not have different words for rain in the English language. Like, I suppose if everyone in Ireland is trying to figure out the names for all the different types of rain, then it's easier to steal our potatoes. There are two words in the Irish language for that. The rain I described this morning, that misty, deceptive rain that gets you suddenly wet. Some people call it wet rain. A lot wet. Some people call it wet rain. A lot of people in Ireland call it wet rain in English. And that makes sense, but it doesn't make sense. That's the closest I've come to a Hiberno-English word for that.

I've heard it called bastard rain. But in Irish there's two different words for that type of deceptively wet, misty rain. And one of them is caobhrán. And the other one is bradán. And these words describe a specific type of drizzly rain. And then that other rain I described, the one that I fucking hate, the one that has that freezing cold wind that's aggressive, that's called brachfástach.

An occasional shower, like if there's a couple of showers throughout the day but it's nothing to worry about, that's called, you can't pronounce Irish words without sounding like an elderly man, but that rain is called shedfástach.

And then that summer rain with those big fat vertical drops, that's agarféir agus teineach, And then that summer rain with those big fat vertical drops. That's. Which means raining cats and dogs. So we do have loads of different words for rain. They're just in Irish. And I can't for the life of me figure out. Why we didn't take this over into Hiberno English.

Why don't we have all these corresponding English words for Irish rain? And I just have to assume that as soon as English was being enforced upon us and everything that went along with that, the violence of colonisation, the famine, we probably had more things to worry about than to be sitting around naming the rain in English. Of course, I'm not great at the Irish language, but if I have any questions about the Irish language,

I ask Mán Cháin Magan, who I've had on this podcast twice. And Mán Cháin sent me in the direction of a glossary of Irish terms for rain. So a lot of people this week were asking me on Instagram to give an update about the Barefoot Accountant.

So on last week's podcast I mentioned that I've made a major lifestyle change. I now have an office and I go to this office four or five days a week and I go there like a nine to five job and in this office I write, I research this podcast and it's the best thing I've done in two years lads, getting this office is the best thing I've done in two years because lockdown was not good for my mental health. I'm somebody with a history of social anxiety and the experience of lockdown brought back quite a lot of mental health issues and social anxiety was returning. So I said to myself, right, I'm not having this. I'm going to get myself an office. I'm going to go there nine to five. I'm going to try and live a life as structured and normal as possible. And hopefully interact with strangers throughout my day.

So that I can conquer any potential social anxiety rapidly. Because when it comes to anxiety or fear. The best approach is action. You change your actual behaviours. So the office has been fucking fantastic. Going in there. Doing research. Not going online.

Leaving at 5 o'clock. Every day having this miniature sense of achievement. It's been wonderful for my self esteem. And now that my self esteem has improved. My sense of motivation has improved. I'm not scared to answer emails. I'm not procrastinating. It has been wonderful.

But the only piece missing from this office that I'm in is I can't record my podcast there. The reason for this is, is that this is a shared office space. the reason for this is, is that this is a shared office space. I have an office, and it's on a corridor, and there's multiple other offices around. Usually accounting and finance and shit like that.

But on my floor, there's an accountant, I think he's an accountant, and basically what he does is that he doesn't stay in his office, he walks up and down the corridor barefoot doing zoom calls and shouting so because of this I can't actually press record and record this podcast because if you did you'd just hear a 50 year old man shouting in the background all the time now this isn't really acceptable it's a shared office space so you're kind of supposed to stay in your own office and the corridors are a communal space. So if you're using the communal space to take loud

phone calls barefoot all day long that's not fair on the other people in the shared office space. So I was trying to think of ways to solve this problem and I was using the metaphor of dungeons and dragons because it does remind me a bit of a role-playing game because this man is in his 50s I don't particularly speak the language that he speaks I don't speak finance he's a level 50 barefoot accountant and I need to figure out the appropriate spell that's powerful enough to cast so that he stops walking around the corridors barefoot. I had come, I'd come up with a strategy. The strategy that I had planned was I was going to approach this man and kindly say to him, I'm recording something inside my office.

And when you are in the corridors talking, I'm actually recording your conversations. And this would actually breach the GDPR rights of the other person that you're on the phone to, who I'm assuming is your client. Because if I'm inadvertently recording his phone call, then I'm recording the data of that phone call and I'm not entitled to that data. So this would be quite a powerful spell to cast on a level 50 barefoot accountant. And I was going to do this. I was going to say it to him. I would have presented it as if I was solving a problem for him.

I wasn't going to say anything about his not wearing shoes. Literally, I just want him to do the calls in his office. I don't give a fuck about his bare feet. So that was the plan. I was going to do that earlier this week. I'd even considered putting on a fake accent in order to address him, to speak to him the way that like another accountant would speak to him. There's this weird thing in Ireland amongst the professional classes, like barristers, lawyers and accountants who are in like big farms, fancy Dublin farm accountants

who would see themselves at the level of barristers and lawyers. They all speak to each other as if an unseen hand is choking them. Like listen to two barristers speaking to each other. Everything is delivered as a type of insincere laughter. Niall, how are you would it be possible for you to have the report on my desk by five o'clock because i want to be out playing golf by six o'clock i have the golf clubs in the boot of the car jekyll and o'halloran will be there with all the partners and if you listen to two two barristers or two solicitors speaking to each other that's how they do it

what they're speaking about is really serious but it's punctuated with a laughter like an unseen hand is choking them and I think that hand is the legacy of the British Empire because in Ireland we don't really have proper posh people not like they have in England now of course you're going to have your exceptions like Anglo-Irish families that are still around and stuff like that like I was watching an English YouTube channel recently it was a coffee YouTube channel and the guy on it was like trying to open up a 200 year old can of coffee and he says this is my great-grandfather's can

of coffee he was a coffee merchant in the east india company and i'm like okay wow my great grandfather was trying to fuck a turnip in the rain what you have in ireland are maybe someone's granddad was a barrister or maybe they can they have generational wealth that they can trace back to the foundation of the free state in the 1920s. But in general, we don't have that generational poshness that the English have. And this has manifested itself amongst the professional classes as a type of anxious laughter. Like I reckon Daniel O'Connell spoke like that. Daniel O'Connell was a, he was a Catholic, but he was also a solicitor. But he once shot a man in a duel and as a result he wore this black glove on the hand that killed the man and he was awful shameful about this hand so I think Daniel O'Connell like choked himself with his shameful hand and then established this way of talking like this and it stuck with the

Irish professional classes. Like every Irish barrister deep down feels like they should be in a stone hut tit-feeding a bonnif. We'll be eating oysters in Galway by the end of the night. And you'll know, if you're doing Zoom calls, if you're working in a company and you're doing Zoom calls and one of the higher-ups comes on the Zoom call,

they could be telling you to shove a toothbrush down your dickhole. And if they're doing it in that anxious laughter you probably will it just, it works it sounds like authority it's like I don't know what the fuck this cunt is saying but this laughter thing sounds like I'm going to lose my job if I don't do it

so I was going to chance that with the barefoot accountant I was just going to walk out of my office walk past him and go Niall I don't even know his name I'll just call him Niall Niall you are going to get a veruca I will send it up the chain to my office, walk past him and go, Nile. I don't even know his name. I just call him Nile. Nile, you are going to get a Veruca. I will send it up the chain and Vincent Merriman will recommend a chiropotist. And by tomorrow we'll be having lunch in Killarney. And it might've worked.

It might've worked. I probably wasn't going to do that. That wasn't, that wasn't the serious approach I was thinking of taking. So, like, yesterday I was going to actually approach him and just say, look, can you keep it down? Can you keep it down? I'm recording your phone calls. But a spanner got thrown in the works and now I don't know if I can approach him at all. So here's what happened. I ordered a beanbag from my office.

Alright. Now I posted footage of this on my Instagram stories yesterday. If you saw it and you're wondering what the fuck is he doing with a beanbag. I ordered a beanbag. And do you know what? I was being a horrible hipster cunt about it. I was being an insufferable hipster about it. I was being a horrible hipster cunt about it. I was being an insufferable hipster about it.

So, do you know the way beanbags in offices are like a cliche? Like Google and Facebook will have these beanbags in the offices. And now I have theories about the beanbag. I've covered this before. Large corporations put beanbags and table tennis tables in offices as a way to perpetually infantilize the workers. So if you work in a large company and they've provided you with beanbags because they want to create a fun space environment where you can relax, really what they're doing is they're creating a power dynamic where you're a teenager and they're your really sound parent. And by creating this office environment that's like a really cool bedroom that you wish you could have had when you were 13. That by creating this environment, it means that you won't join a union or ask for a full-time contract. Because it's not a worker employer relationship it's a

parent and teenager relationship so that I have my my doubts about beanbags so I was being a horrendous hipster bollocks by ordering a beanbag from my own office and going no no no it's not like those beanbags not like the ones they have in Facebook and Google this is my bean bag in my office and I'm putting this in my office so that I can chill out and relax I'm reinventing the office bean bag

so I ordered the fucking bean bag and when I came to the office on Monday I didn't know that like they don't just send you a fucking beanbag. What they do is they send you the beanbag casing, which is made out of fabric. And then the beanbag filler, right? A giant bag of fucking tiny styrofoam pebbles that I have to put into the beanbag.

styrofoam pebbles that I have to put into the beanbag so we're talking about a hundred thousand tiny white styrofoam balls so as you can imagine fucking chaos

ensues so I get into the office on Monday morning and the first thing I do is I say alright the beanbag has arrived fuck I have to build it myself what's the worst that can happen well the worst thing I do is I say, all right, the beanbag has arrived. Fuck, I have to build it myself. What's the worst that can happen?

Well, the worst thing did happen. Getting like 100,000 styrofoam balls into a cotton bag in an office space is difficult. So about 8,000 small styrofoam balls didn't go into the cotton bag. They went all over the floor. Now the thing is with these styrofoam beanbag balls, they kind of defy the laws of physics. First off, they become incredibly statically charged. So they stick to the carpet.

So I'd assembled the beanbag. Closed it up. But then like I look around at the carpet. And it's like fuck. There's 7000 tiny white styrofoam balls in this carpet. What am I going to do? So I tried to. I've no hoover.

I don't want to go down to reception and say can I have a hoover. Because I'm going fuck I'll get into trouble so then I'm I got bits of cardboard and I was trying to scrape all these styrofoam beanbag balls around the carpet but it doesn't work because they're

stuck to the carpet via static electricity and sometimes they float they float up the cardboard so I figured out the only way that I could move these thousands of beanbag balls into a corner so I could scoop them up and put them in the bin

scraping wasn't working the only thing that would work is that I had to get a piece of cardboard and flap it so that I generated a small localised wind and only by doing this could I, it was a bit like shepherding sheep, it was like being 10,000 feet tall and my head being up in the clouds and I just have this huge flock of tiny styrofoam sheep on the carpet and I'm blowing wind and only when I generate a small

amount of localized wind could I then use that air to push the styrofoam balls into the corner and it worked unfortunately I didn't know that quite a lot of the styrofoam balls went underneath my door and then went into the corridor but the barefoot accountant was walking up and down the corridor not wearing shoes so I didn't check I didn't look out but he definitely stepped in styrofoam balls definitely and they definitely stuck to the bottom of his feet it's impossible that it didn't happen because i would say 250 tiny styrofoam balls ended ended up on the fucking communal corridor space where he was walking up and down barefoot so now i actually can't

approach him about walking up and down the corridor because it looks like I set a booby trap. If I was him, I'd be thinking, this cunt deliberately put a load of styrofoam balls out in the corridor so I'd step on them and they'd stick on my feet. And that was his plan A to get me to stop. And that didn't work and now his plan B is to come and confront me. So now I'm in a mad situation where he thinks I'm the type of person who'd set a booby trap in the corridor.

And I didn't. I just... The fucking beanbag got out of hand. So I don't know what I can do now. But you know what? So, I don't know what I can do now. But you know what? I would rather the quagmire and the adventure of that situation over not getting an office and just staying at home in my fucking studio,

staring at the four walls with nothing happening to me. That bizarre situation is why I got an office. That's why I got an office. That's what I wanted. I wanted the spontaneity of society. I'm so glad that that's what's worrying me now. Styrofoam balls sticking to a stranger's feet. I'm glad that that's what's of concern to me.

Because when I didn't have an office, it's just me at home with four fucking walls and the things that are of concern to me are imaginary anxieties and self-esteem issues and all that. So, fuck it, it's not that bad. Who gives a shit? And it gives me an interesting story to tell you on the podcast

so this week's podcast is not about styrofoam shepherding or about my office so i got two deliveries on monday one of them was the bean bag and the other one was a book and i want to talk about this book that I ordered, and the very interesting rabbit hole that it took me down. So the book that I'm referring to is called How to Read Donald Duck, and it was written in 1971 by a writer from Chile called Ariel Dorfman, and a Belgian sociologist called Armand Matelart and how to read Donald Duck is

it's a piece of cultural critique that analyses Donald Duck Disney and the Donald Duck universe in the context of capitalism it views Donald Duck as a violent tool of capitalist ideology. And I first found this book, How to Read Donald Duck, back in art college. Again, the first time I was in art college, I would have been in the art college library. Was a fantastic resource to me.

This giant library full of books about art and cultural critique. And one day I was in the library, I was about 19 or 20. And I just saw this book, How to Read Donald Duck. I picked it up and I opened it. And it was an eye-opening moment for me, because up until that point I would have viewed cartoons like Donald Duck. I would have viewed them as just things for kids, utterly harmless cartoons for children.

I wouldn't have possibly fathomed that something like Donald Duck could have serious political messages behind it or ideologies behind it. But here I had this book in my hand, which was kind of serious academic literature that was tearing apart Donald Duck and demonstrating how the cartoons of Donald Duck actually promote quite a lot of ideas of American imperialism and capitalism and individualism

and it's like Roland Barthes and semiotics that I mentioned last week it showed me that you could apply cultural critique to anything. You don't just have to apply cultural critique to serious literature or to works of fine art. That any piece

of pop culture can be taken apart and analysed and that any piece of pop culture, no matter how silly, can reflect or even promote the dominant political ideology of the culture it was created in. And I owe a lot of the hot takes that I do today

to a book like How to Read Donald Duck. And it stuck with me. I'll tell you how much it stuck with me. I have a short story in my book Boulevard Ren. And this short story is called Mara. And basically it's about a girl from Ireland who is suffering greatly under the stress of simply living in Dublin. Living, renting and working in Dublin. living, renting and working in Dublin and the impossibility of being able to live a happy life

or being able to see a happy future for herself because of the economic pressures of Dublin and the price of rent. And the stress of this slowly unravels her psychologically to the point that in a manic episode she spends all her savings on a sudden trip to Barcelona. And she goes to Barcelona

and when she arrives at her Airbnb she slowly becomes fully convinced that her Airbnb landlord is actually Donald Duck. Because she can't see him but she can hear him. And in her mind she starts to fabricate

my landlord is Donald Duck go and read the story I think I actually read it out on one of these podcasts but go and read that short story Mara it's in my collection Boulevard Ren

but the reason I chose Donald Duck as the character in that story because it could have been anything. You know, why didn't she imagine that her fucking landlord was Homer Simpson or Sonic the Hedgehog? They're all equally as ridiculous. I chose Donald Duck because of that book,

How to Read Donald Duck, that I'd come across in college. I chose Donald Duck to represent Airbnb. Airbnb, of course, being a company that is it's the ultimate realization of neoliberal economics it's complete unfettered capitalism airbnb allows anybody to become a hotel you don't even have to own a home. You could be renting and then not tell the landlord and decide to Airbnb the fucking bedroom next door to you.

I know of people who've done that. And it uses the kind of deregulated landscape of the internet and apps to do this. Airbnb also is contributing hugely to the rent crisis all around the world

because a lot of people aren't renting their properties out long term anymore. They're just doing short term Airbnbs. And this is creating a lack of rental properties for people to actually live in, which decreases supply and in turn then makes rents gigantic in quite a lot of cities all around the world. So it's because of this book basically that I chose Donald Duck makes rents gigantic in quite a lot of cities all around the world. So it's because of this book, basically, that I chose Donald Duck to be the fantasy imaginary character in that story and for it to represent Airbnb. Now, I tried to get this book, How to Read Donald Duck, over the years,

and it was very, very difficult to get, and the few copies I found on the internet were quite expensive. But then in 2018, and when I found out recently, they had reprinted How to Read Donald Duck. So I ordered it, and it arrived in my fucking office. And I was thrilled to get it. And if you're interested in that type of thing, I recommend you get it too. It's a Marxist analysis of Donald Duck.

That's about it. And it's very interesting, and it's very entertaining. But I didn't realize how important the book it was and I didn't realize the context in which the book was created and that's what I want to speak about I want to speak about Chile which is a South American country I want to speak about Chile in the early 1970s I want to speak about Chile in the early 1970s. I want to speak about who wrote the book and the sociological, economical and cultural conditions under which it arose

because it's fucking mad and quite interesting. I went down an intriguing rabbit hole of research while being surrounded by tiny styrofoam beads. So I don't want to get into the full history of Chile because I need to do way more research. And also, and this is something I will explore on another podcast down the line because it's fascinating. There's a mad Irish connection with Chile.

Like, the person who is considered to be Chile's George Washington is a man called Bernardo O'Higgins. The founding fathers of Chile, quite a few are of Irish descent. Chile was a colony of Spain and a lot of the leaders of the Chilean War of Independence were Irish and Irish descent. So who was Ariel Dorfman who wrote the book How to Read Donald Duck? And why is he writing a book about how dangerous Donald Duck is in Chile? Well, Dorfman, he was from Chile, he was an academic, he's still alive, academic and a novelist, and he was also a cultural advisor to the socialist president of Chile in

the early 1970s Salvador Allende. So here's a very incredibly basic synopsis of the history of Chile from its war of independence up to about 1970. So the continent of America is huge. It includes Canada, the United States, Central America and South America. And for a lot of the 19th century and the 20th century, the United States of America was like global superpower, incredibly wealthy country. Incredibly wealthy, incredibly prosperous. but a huge amount of the wealth of the united states existed because of the brutal exploitation of countries in central america and south america i covered this before in a podcast about bananas the problematic relationship between the United States and Honduras regarding bananas and how Honduras was exploited for the resources of bananas. So with Chile this natural resource

was copper. Chile has a lot of copper but by the 1920s all of the copper in Chile was controlled by two companies and these were American companies and this is a pattern you see throughout South America. The United States of America would use its secret services like the CIA to heavily control and influence the politics

of Central American and South American countries and they do this so that a small amount of US companies can completely control the natural resources of south american and central american countries in chile it was copper so chile had a lot of copper mines all of these copper mines were controlled by two u.s companies the people the chilean people working on these mines they're not getting paid properly they're being exploited completely

the people of Chile are not seeing any economic benefit from their own natural resources and the US has just essentially been a big giant parasite getting cheap copper from Chile and inflating its own economy and that's something that doesn't get spoken about enough I don't think

the 20th century wealth of the United States is as a result of extracting resources from countries in South America at the expense of the people in those countries and the environment of those countries. So what happens in 1970? In 1970, a socialist president called Salvador Allende is democratically elected as the president of Chile. And the first thing he does is he nationalizes the copper industry. Which means he tells America to fuck off. The copper in Chile now belongs to the people of Chile. The people of Chile will economically benefit from this. What happens to America?

Oh fuck, now copper is expensive. The Chileans are keeping their own fucking copper. So Chile becomes a socialist country. This means that all the large scale industries are nationalized. They're run by the government. The healthcare system becomes socialized. It's run by the government, not as a for profit industry, but to provide healthcare for everybody, regardless of whether you can afford it or not. Same thing with the education system. The education system becomes socialised. Education is for everybody, it's not for profit.

Allende also introduced a free milk programme for kids, especially incredibly poor children in Chile, which was massively beneficial to the nutrition of very poor people in Chile. Now here's where it gets fucking interesting. When Allende is elected Chile becomes like a central point in the history of the modern world where things could go either way. Allende introduces this mad idea. Now it's 1971 mind. Allende employs an English professor of cybernetics to basically invent

a type of internet that's socialist way before the internet became like a mainstream thing. And this was called Project Cybersyn. And that's what I want to talk about. But first let's have the pause.

I'm going to have the grinder of Perfectly Legal Herbs pause this week. So I'm going to crack the grinder of Perfectly Legal Herbs, and during this period, you might hear an advert for something. Here we go. on april 5th you must be very careful margaret it's a girl witness the birth bad things will start to happen evil things of evil it's all you know don't the first omen i believe girl is to be

the mother of what is the most terrifying 666 is the mark of the devil. Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The first Omen, only in theaters April 5th. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none.

Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game. And you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. that was the grinder of perfectly legal herbs this podcast is supported by you the listener via the patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast this podcast is my full-time job this podcast is how I earn a living if this podcast wasn't my full-time job I don't think there'd be a podcast being put out every week because I don't like just interview people I do monologue essays that require quite a bit of research I adore this work

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Because of government restrictions, I have to promote these gigs in a very short amount of time, unfortunately. And that's quite difficult. So please consider coming along to my Vicar Street gigs. They're going to be unbelievable crack. And they're midweek gigs. So you can come along to a live podcast, maybe have one pint and be up for work the next day.

Also I have some gigs in Cork I think the Opera House is sold out but there's two gigs in St Luke's Church in March. If you're in Cork come along to those please as well. Dog bless. So back to Chile.

So before I start speaking about this utopian Chilean socialist internet I want to go back to the book How to Read Donald Duck. So when the socialist president Allende was democratically elected in Chile in 1970 and he nationalised copper and education and all these things

and tried to create a socialist economy, at the same time, Ariel Dorfman, who was one of the president's cultural advisors, released this book, How to Read Donald Duck. And he released it in Chile for the people of Chile. Why? Why? Why Donald Duck? What's going on with Donald Duck in Chile? Well, Donald Duck was present outside of America mainly in the form of comic books.

So we tend to think of Disney as movies and films, but in countries like Chile would have been considered a third world country in the 1960s, 1950s. So not a lot of people would have had access to cinemas. But in Chile, the media was controlled by wealthy industrialists. And in the newspapers newspapers there would frequently be Donald Duck cartoons and Donald Duck comic books

were very very popular and when Allende got elected and he's essentially beginning a process of decolonisation when you kick the Americans out and say to America we're not going to have our entire copper industry

controlled by two American companies who are exploiting people. That's an infrastructural act of decolonization. But also for true revolution to occur, you need to decolonize people's minds. And that's what Ariel Dorfman was intending. And in in 1971 the book became a bestseller in Chile. Dorfman says He denounced Walt Disney as an agent of American cultural imperialism incarnated in the life adventures and misdeeds of Donald Duck just as copper and other resources usurped by foreign hands needed to be recovered for the nation

so too did our dreams and desires. We had to take back control, forge a new identity, devise new forms of entertainment. And the thing with this book is like it contained examples of Donald Duck cartoons. It was written in a way that was really accessible and humorous and funny. written in a way that was really accessible and humorous and funny and Dorfman kind of outlined that Donald Duck is basically like this loser who can't hold down a job because he's so incompetent and that the reason Donald Duck can't hold down a job is because of some type of moral failing it's not that Donald Duck is being exploited by his employers, but that he himself is a bad worker. He points out that any time Donald Duck collects a bit of money from his jobs and goes on holidays in the comic books,

he visits these countries and the natives of these countries are depicted as savages and idiots. The book pointed out that in the Donald Duck comic books that riches are never produced by the workers they're always produced by the investors like Uncle Scrooge McDuck and anytime there's a villain or a baddie in a Donald Duck comic book they're always portrayed as some type of racial bias they're always racist all the villains are always people of a different race. And essentially this book made this really clear, compelling argument to the people of Chile that you've been hoovering up these Donald Duck comic books for years and they've been appearing in your newspapers. And if you scratch beneath the surface, these comic books are just telling you

all you are is a worker and if you're bad at your job it's your fault and you deserve to be exploited and you deserve to work long hard hours in a mine or in a factory and your employer is a really good person who just wants to give you a job they're really good people and when you don't do your job well you're morally wrong and your employer is morally right, even points out comic books where Donald Duck

works at his job where he's incompetent, saves a bit of money, goes on holidays to a savage land and then Donald Duck ends up quashing revolutions in foreign lands and it shows the people of Chile this is how your minds have been

colonised this is how consent has been manufactured quite sneakily through these fucking cartoon comic books about a duck and of course Disney immediately tried to sue him for releasing the book because he used the donald duck comics within it without permission the book was banned from

publishing in the united states up until 20 fucking 18 but most importantly what the book how to read donald duck did it kind of globally laid a blueprint for the cultural critique of pop culture. Now let's talk about Project Cybersyn. So President Allende, the socialist president, had nationalized a lot of the industries. And nationalizing industries wasn't something new, like the Soviet Union had did it. This is something that would happen in socialist or communist countries where the government controls all industry. And if you work in industry, you're a government employee. But one of the issues that the Soviet Union had with nationalizing industry is decisions moved quite slowly. And Chile were thinking, how can we nationalize all the industries and run it really efficiently? Maybe we could use modern technology.

So they looked towards the emerging field of cybernetics. And they employed a fellow called Stafford Beer, a British professor of cybernetics. And they designed a system called Project Cybersyn. So here's how it kind of worked. So every single factory in Chile was equipped with a Telex machine. A Telex machine, think of it like an early computer. It's like a fax machine that communicates via phone lines.

And the goal of Project Cybersyn was to harvest data. So every piece of information possible about each individual factory, how much stuff is being made, how many supplies do you have, what's the situation with the workers, every single piece of detail was communicated via telex to a central government command and basically the goal is to communicate data and information in almost real time so that there's no waiting period so if a factory runs out of timber then the government knows immediately this factory needs timber uh communicate to the trucking company to the

logging company and get the timber to that factory as soon as possible and do it all really quickly using this internet that we've invented same thing if there was a shortage of workers so like an early form of internet but with socialism as the goal. The efficient running of the economy centrally using cybernetics. Now the maddest thing about Project Cybersyn, you can look up photographs of this, was the operational room that was designed. So this looked like something out of Star Trek. This bizarre room that contains like eight chairs all in a circle and all of these chairs are real futuristic plastic looking and all around the walls of this room are just screens and screens

and screens and the idea would be is that all these government ministers would sit in this central control room with their buttons on their chairs and they would be receiving all this real-time information about this factory needs supplies that factory needs this all this information and they would make these decisions centrally from here utterly revolutionary something which is now just standard and normal via the internet this was utterly revolutionary at the time nothing else had been done like this before now the other revolutionary thing that would have been in this control room is they had a piece of software that was intended to be a simulation of the economy so let's just

say all the government ministers are there in this room and they're receiving all this data about the copper industry or the forestry industry and they're not all this data about the copper industry, or the forestry industry, and they're not sure what decision to make. Should we export all this copper? Or do we really need to bring all this wood and put it into that factory? Do we really need to do this? What would happen? So they designed a piece of software

that allowed them to make simulated decisions to see what would happen if they did do it. A piece of software that simulated the economy and hopefully allowed them to play out many different scenarios to see what would happen. Now here's the maddest goal of this project. So part of Project Cybersyn was another project called Project Cyberfolk. Now remember this is 1971. So the purpose of this or the goal of this is that every single house

in Chile was to have a little a telex machine dial in their house and what this dial was is it was a measure of happiness. So every single home in Chile had this button in their house and what this dial was is it was a measure of happiness so every single home in Chile had this button in their house and it would have like a sad face and a smiley face and depending on how you feel every day you had to let the government know are you unhappy or are you

happy and then all that data would be fed to the government. Like the most primitive form of social media long before social media could even be considered an idea because that's what that is there, that's social media. I mean, what do we do today on Facebook, on Twitter? You tweet. You tweet whether you're annoyed about something, you tweet whether you're happy about something and this was a very limited version.

Everyone has a dial. Are you happy? happy are you unhappy every single house has it now that any of this ever work we'll never really know and i'll get to that in a minute but the reason i find it interesting is that just the sheer imagination creativity and optimism of it. I mean it has that flaw that all modernist ideas have. That idea is pure modernism. Modernism being the zeitgeist whereby humans put absolute faith in technology. Now we live in a world of social media today and one thing we do know about social media is human beings are powerfully irrational. We are very irrational and very chaotic. The past two years of the pandemic showed us that. There was a lot of people who were simply saying coronavirus isn't real. We're driven by the irrational pangs of our emotions and not the logical rationality of a computer.

So if Project Cybersyn had had an opportunity to go ahead, they would have learned quite quickly that it's not going to run as simply as that. Humans are very complex and we can't hook up perfectly with machines to give pure unadulterated data and also now as we can see with algorithms the machines can control us and can control our thoughts and our emotions and our desires and that's what we have that's the world we live in we live in a world where a few small billionaire companies

control all of our social media and these companies are deliberately and consciously changing how we think and behave via the algorithm in a way that suits how they consume and monetize our data. So what happened in Chile that we never got to see whether Project Cybersyn was successful or not?

This wonderfully creative, optimistic, massive early version of the internet on socialistic principles. What happened? Well, the socialist presidency of Allende only lasted three years because by 1973, the book How to Read Donald Duck was being burnt in the streets of Chile by soldiers. It was being burnt on television. You see America really

really didn't like that Chile had nationalized its copper industry. America really really didn't. This was 1971. This is the Cold War. America could not allow Chile to elect a democratically elected socialist president who was trying to do things for the people of Chile. America could not allow this. America launched an economic war on Chile. They enforced an embargo on the sale of Chilean copper. This was all ordered by President Richard Nixon. Nixon was very annoyed at Chile and at Allende.

The CIA got involved and they funded a massive fascist military coup. They supported and backed a fascist general called Augusto Pinochet. And Pinochet and his soldiers had a military coup in fucking Chile in 1973 on September 11th. That CIA-backed coup happening on September 11th actually led to a lot of September 11th conspiracy theories about CIA involvement in it. The democratically elected president, the socialist president Allende died in the military coup

when Pinochet and the generals stormed the government buildings. People don't know whether Allende was shot or whether he shot himself. In 2011 they exhumed his body to see

what the crack was and they ruled that he had shot himself but a lot of people are unsure whether he was murdered or whether he shot himself. Pinochet became a dictator in Chile. He was a dictator from 1973 up until 1990. Pinochet was an intensely evil man. Very very evil fascist. He was placed in power by the CIA. He was protected by America. As soon as he got into power, he forcefully imprisoned, they reckon, about between 80,000 and 100,000 people. He went after leftists, socialists, intellectuals, journalists, political critics. He executed thousands of innocent people, thousands of innocent people

using death squads. One of the most evil fucking bollocks of the late 20th century. And he ordered the banning and the burning of the book How to Read Donald Duck. He saw this, this is a fucking dangerous book and this book is actually right. Yes, Donald Duck is a comic of American imperialism and this book that says that it is, this needs to be burnt and banned publicly. And Ariel Dorfman escaped Chile. He lived in exile for years. Obviously, Project Cybersyn never got off the ground and so we never got to see whether it worked or not. But remember at the start of this podcast I said that the moment in Chile between 1970 and 1973 represented this point where it could have gone in one of two directions and this had global implications.

But what I meant by that was Chile could have had a go at Project Cybersyn, this socialistic model of the internet, and it might have worked, we'll never know. But instead what happened, Pinochet's legacy, right, he installed these economists that advised him and that kind of ran the economy. him and that kind of ran the economy so under Allende the plan was let's nationalize everything let's be socialistic let's try and have this cybernetic future where we organize things for the benefit of the people Pinochet said fuck that I'm kidding everybody I'm bringing in these economists called the Chicago boys now the Chicago boys were a group of Chilean economists. Who'd studied at the University of Chicago.

Under an economist called Milton Friedman. And the Chicago Boys were. Economists that were early proponents of neoliberalism. Which is a very capitalistic free market. View of economics. And under the Chicago Boys, Pinochet and his military government they got rid of unions completely banned unions

put everything towards the private market, all like no more nationalised copper industry, nationalised education everything is private, everything is for the market. Massive deregulation. Deregulation is when sometimes laws are in place

that protect people's rights or protect people's health. But deregulation is when you take those laws away and allow capitalism to go unfettered. All of this massively benefited the United States, of course. But the CIA puppet presidency of Pinochet and the Chicago by economists in Chile it acted as the test tube for what would become Ronald Reagan's economic policies in America 10 years later, and Margaret Thatcher's economic policies. So both Thatcher and Reagan were proponents of an economist called Milton Friedman, and he's the fellow who trained these Chicago boys. So Chile was the testing ground. And a

huge amount of the issues that we face in the world today are as a result of this type of neoliberal economics. Like let's just take Ireland for example. In Ireland at the moment the biggest landlord in Ireland is a fucking vulture fund. So this huge faceless pile of cash owns tons of apartments and properties all over Ireland. And it's a private company. of apartments and properties all over Ireland and it's a private company but our government is paying them money to rent out affordable housing but also because a giant investment fund owns so much property that's why nobody can afford to buy property and also why rents are so absolutely high and so exploitative of people

you see the housing and rental market in ireland isn't isn't very heavily regulated so people are open to being completely exploited this is why a fucking one bedroom flat in dublin is two grand moves towards privatizing education privatizing healthcare, putting everything towards the free market. In Ireland, unfortunately, homelessness is a privatised industry because we have a system in Ireland called emergency accommodation. So hotels, which are private businesses, are given money by the government, not to solve the homelessness problem but to profit from it and to keep people perpetually living in these hotels as opposed to the government building and providing people with houses direct provision which is a system in place

to process people who'd like to immigrate into Ireland is run for profit. Businesses like hotels make money from the government off human misery, off people who are simply trying to, refugees who are trying to escape. So, Chile and Pinochet, the fascist dictator, and his economic policies, and his economists called the Chicago Boys,

that was a test tube. And people like Reagan and Thatcher had a look and said, I like what they're doing in Chile. I like this unfettered neoliberal capitalism. Let's have a go at that. And that's where we are right now. And that book about Donald Duck led me down that rabbit hole so that was an incredibly broad and sweeping um synopsis of the history of Chile in a small amount of time

apologies if I got some shit wrong I'm sure I did get some shit wrong so maybe take take some of the details with a pinch of salt um I tried my absolute best to make sure that every single source I used was rigorous and that nothing is factually incorrect. But economics and the history of Chile, it's not an area where I'm like a fucking expert in. When I'm talking about this shit, I'm just somebody with an internet connection and an interest. So that was this week's podcast.

I hope you enjoyed it. I enjoyed making it but that was it was quite challenging to try and fit so much in such a small amount of time and to do it justice. I bid you farewell. I'm going to have a little pause

and then after the pause I'm going to come back with a song. If you're not interested in hearing any music or hearing any songs, you can say goodbye now. If you are interested, stick around for a couple of seconds. God bless. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th

when the Toronto Rock host the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Okay, here's the bit where I play a little song at the end of the podcast.

Usually what I do is I play a song from my Twitch stream, right? Twitch.tv forward slash The Blind Boy Podcast. If you've been listening for the past five or six weeks i live stream every week on twitch and on this live stream i make songs up on the spot to the events of a video game something i really really enjoy doing and then sometimes i take songs from this from this live stream that i songs that i make and i play them at the end of this podcast i don't actually have a song from this from this live stream that i songs that i make and i play them at the end of this podcast i don't actually have a song from the stream this week because i didn't have time to edit one but i do have a song um i found this on my computer i think i would have made it about

a year ago so this is a song it's not an improvised song that I made up on the spot on Twitch this is one that I would have I would have sat down in my studio for about an hour and wrote a little song wrote a little demo for the fun of it and that's what this is so the audio fidelity and production quality and songwriting standard is slightly higher on this than my twitch songs because the twitch songs i literally just make them up on the spot and i don't know where they're going to go whereas this i had a bit more time to think about it and change things and be critical so this song is called what sort of dog is that and it's an exactly one minute long song about what sort of dog is that?

Enjoy. What sort of dog is that? Is it a sheepdog? Is it a spaniel? Is it a Labrador? Is it a Seagull? It's a big dog! It's a dog! What sort of dog is that? Can I pull its tail?

Can I rub its head? Can I rub its head? Can I give it some food? What sort of dog is that? Is it a German Shepherd? Is it a big shepherd? What sort of dog is that? Can I give it some food?