TRASHFUTURE - A Functioning State? Never Seen One of Those feat. Sanjana Varghese

Episode Date: June 3, 2020

Look, lots of things have happened that have made the content of this week's episode a bit out of date. This week's episode features Riley, Milo, Hussein, and Alice catching up on the Cummings scandal, the abomination of a tech house DJ collective made up of bankers, and a bit more. However, we also have an extended interview with freelance journalist Sanjana Varghese (@sanjanamv) on the topic of the socialist Indian state of Kerala and its success with controlling covid-19. We hope you enjoy. Sanjana's work can all be found here: https://sanjanavarghese.com We also want to pass along a link from ActBlue that lets you donate to a bunch of bail funds, Black Lives Matter local organizations, LGBTQ+ care organisations, trans rights organisations, and many more. These are all based in the US and are helping to relieve the financial burden place by America's terrible legal system on protesters and vulnerable people. Get it here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd Also, please help us save Nour Cash and Carry from the band Housekeeping. Yes, literally the horrible pricks we mentioned in this episode are trying to gentrify Brixton Market. There's a petition here: https://www.change.org/p/lambeth-council-save-nour-cash-carry-brixton If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping. *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ 

Hi everyone, it's Riley here. So anytime we open the show by saying hi everyone and then saying our names, you know that we have something to say about the content that's coming. We recorded this before like well the protests over the murder of George Floyd were like just beginning and obviously now it's being released they have taken on a new character. So we don't talk about them very much in the episode which is to be honest I think okay because a lot of people have said all that we could possibly say about the protests. So what we can say now is just to remind you that it's important that you donate to

bail funds if you can and the Minneapolis bail fund has said that it's fine. Stop donating to them. So I've actually linked an article from Vogue in the show notes that is giving another list of bail funds that do need assistance. So hey do that and enjoy this episode where we talk to well we talk amongst ourselves for a while about some stuff that feels like basically a historical document at this point but that still is pretty funny because Dominic Cummings edited his own blog which I can't stop chuckling at. And then Hussein and I talked to journalist and tech writer Sanjana Varghese about the

coronavirus response in the socialist Indian state of Kerala. So that's also pretty good listening towards the end. Anyways look point is enjoy sit back relax try to take your mind off stuff but then once your mind's back on stuff make sure you hit those bail funds tip jars up. Anyway enjoy the episode everyone. Bye. Hello and welcome back again to this week's free episode of Trash Future. That's the podcast you are currently listening to. It's me Riley. I'm joined by Hussein. Hi. I'm also joined by Milo. It's me your boy joining you from the

cool zone. Yes Milo. Milo Dave Courtney Edwards. Some protesters giving the police something of a clump in Minnesota and diamond Jesus. And also we are joined by Alice Davidina Courtney. Yeah. That didn't sound crowbar in at all. No I'm out of this out of this Alice. How about Courtney Dave. No. You know what continues to work on this make it even more dense and impenetrable. This is a good way to start your podcast. This is why people like us. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well what's up. I'm extremely sleep deprived and like I have a sore throat which is not good for podcasting. So my body has turned the gender dial down. I just sound like this now. It's cool.

Yeah. It is time for another another round of of of the liberals were super wrong about something again. Oh no. Not again. I hate it when that happens. Oh. Oh. It turns out that my disapproval wasn't able to change government policy. So I basically don't want to spend too much time because it's boring and it sucks. And all of it is just libs being like sir. Sir. Sir. Yeah. Like who who cares. It was the same thing when they were saying this to Mads this morning. It was the same shit when they were all like oh how come Prince Charles got a coronavirus test in 24 hours like because he's Prince Charles. Yeah. I mean it was cool that like it was cool that like people were yelling at him in the street. That was nice.

I liked seeing that but like beyond that level of genuine like public anger where you like lose your neighbors in Eslington like that seems disconnected to me from like the kind of people who will be like the government. You're trying to do you're trying to like your your is again it is people whose minds haven't even been poisoned at this point by like the West Wing were beyond that their minds have been poisoned by children's movies. There's a belief but it is an inspirational sports movie where you are going to try your best you're going to almost when you're going to come really close and then when it looks like all is all is lost the referee finds some violation of the rules and it turns out you won the whole

time. So look what we're going to do is we're going to go through exactly what happened and then why it's fucking lame and then we're going to basically just forget it ever happened like the rest of the country is going to yeah. We always do this like every time we finish recording a podcast we all do the men in black like memory gun thing to ourselves. It's the only way to remain sane. I would recommend it. I don't remember anything we've ever talked about on the show. I know who are you people? What are you doing in my house? Here's what happened. Dominant Cummings appeared to have broken lockdown more than three times when the lockdown was much more intense throughout April and he went up to his family's country estate in Durham and shut up and then

jetted around like different like areas of natural beauty and historic beauty with his wife for a birthday. Also as a side note the fact that he broke lockdown and sent the Tories polling to the negative not this matters to take his wife to Castle Barnard for his birthday is lame. It's so fucking lame. It's sitcom dad shit. Okay, boomer. Yeah, but like the really funny shit to me was that like because as we know we did we did the whole episode on the Brexit movie. We know Dominant Cummings is the brains Ronan samurai of the mind. Of course. My favorite shit that he did was that after he drove back from Durham. The first thing that he did was to go into his blog and like hastily re-edit a bunch of shit to like claim that he had predicted the coronavirus

because he didn't know that the way back machine exists. I have like I have like an odd respect for that because it sort of like reminds me of two thousand two three four blogs. Yes, you would do that and like lots of like online atheists where I feel like lots of like the problems that we face right now come from online atheists forums. They used to do that shit and they used to kind of like you know stay up until like stupid hours fighting just to like make a point and then they would edit their blogs to say that oh we made this point but none no one could like disprove them and by the time they were able to disprove them it didn't matter anyway and he's just like and we've spoken about this before that he comes from that sort of like digital tradition but he's like taking it and made

it policy. Yeah, he's a forums guy. He's a forums guy. He's a blogs guy. He's the older generation of poster who we do not respect. He predates ICANN has cheeseburger and I personally have been rocked to my core from by his blog post from 2018. We must protect XXXTentacion. I mean he was right. So here's he edited his blog to make it look like he predicted coronavirus specifically and add the evidence that it came from a Chinese lab but what's interesting is he made that edit so we could then say to a press interview on May 25th quote for years I've warned of the dangers of pandemics. Last year I wrote about the possible threat of coronavirus is in the urgent need for planning. Yeah, awesome. So cool. He is genuinely the the meme of the guy sitting on his own enormous brain.

Here's the thing right. I think of this. I think of this as like someone who's like well I know I'm incredibly intelligent and I can't let something like this and I know I'm incredibly intelligent. Everyone else needs to know I'm incredibly intelligent and this is kind of the perfect way to kind of sell them on that. So it's just sort of a PR move and I don't think that he sees any disconnect between being a super forecaster and only super forecasting in retrospect. Yeah, this is what this is. That's that's all it is as you just go back and you hide the evidence quite. Yeah, he's he's he is like I've always said about Dominic Cummings. The man is trapped in a mind palace and the idea that he is some kind of Spangali or that he has some kind of

damning evidence on Boris Johnson that like oh this is why Boris won't sack him. It's like no he's just he's just a blogger who believes himself to be some kind of mega genius and like all bloggers he's like an abusive shithead which meshes perfectly because like none of these people who have ever been told to fuck off to their faces before. Yeah, Dominic Cummings has a vice like grip on power in this country because he is the sole possessor of a video of Boris Johnson just motorboating the shit out of the queen. Yeah, so basically what happened then was a bunch of Tories like disapproved of and criticized the government in public and liberal journalists gleefully announced that this was like the end of Boris's authority. Like the equivalent was how

Tony Blair was kind of elected on Black Wednesday in the early 1990s even though the major government staggered on for a little while longer. And so Cummings gives a doubting street rose garden speech which is like the affairs of state place to give a speech and again liberal journalists falling over themselves about it being like oh how dare he give a speech next to the roses and Cummings was just like I was right the whole time to do what I did I'm not sorry I don't care that I edited my blog fuck you and that it all folded back into a pointless culture war when Emily Maitlis in the BBC was like taken off news night now she later said she this wasn't the case but specific circumstances around this mean I just don't trust that for like just saying the

facts of the case and that every merely for saying that you're English you'll be arrested and removed from news night yeah and so like ultimately there was this great furor it was like oh how could I wonder how could Boris Johnson be doing this how could he get he can't possibly get away with it he's going to be disapproved of if party's gonna rebel against him because dominant Cummings broke the lockdown how could you keep an unelected special advisor on like this and it's like I don't know I'm just gonna do it I'm gonna do it and there's nothing you can do about it fuck you and no one will give a fuck because they want to keep their jobs and they're fucking Tories anyway they don't care yeah I like the one the one the one fbp thing that I have is like you

know when they see anything bad they're like oh this is just like Russia but like the one putin-esque thing that I see in this is the I don't respect you enough to give you a plausible excuse uh so I'm gonna give you like an implausible one and be like fuck you call me on it yeah I drove I drove I drove 60 miles to see if my eyes worked good um go ahead and print that you're fucking asshole yeah when Michael Gove just goes on tv and it's like yeah I'd do that fuck you you know we were we were testing that financiers hearing by like locking him in a suitcase and throwing him out with that story window you know what it sort of reminded me of like and this this kind of like is very much in the vein of Dominic Cummings as a poster rather than as a

policy advisor which is when you just kind of tweet something ridiculous online which is like there's kind of like a grain of truth to it but all of it is so absurd and stupid for example that I'm a doctor who whispers into baby's ears and then you have like your friends and your pals like back you up on it and was like yeah he's the doctor I saw him yesterday and like you kind of create this reality which is like completely false and completely stupid but you have enough people kind of like amplifying it that the authenticity the authenticity of it like doesn't even matter anymore sorry are you suggesting that Dominic Cummings is doing bits yes I'm I think that he's doing bits in real life and and like and the fbp people are kind of like taking the bait for it

just like they took the bait when I did the tweet about Dominic Cummings um being like the uh being the episteme of an alpha male and I had all these fbp people in my mentions being like you know huh that's what you think like you know uh just calling me a tori and all this stuff and like the original tweet that I did like had dudes rock in the actual tweet right because dudes rock and and I don't know just kind of just goes to show it shows first of all damn closing down the truth once again the lips I mean I think I think what there's one of the things I think this goes to show right is that um is that the the libs the the established respectable liberal commentators live only to react to the the conservatives at this point only to do that so they live in the

world the conservatives built literally that's that's transatlantic like the like the libs who exist to like troll trumps replies like and like jeff teedrick or Eugene hell that guy's the worst yeah so this is a this is a wendy's drive-thru he's just like replying to a tweet that's like yeah I would like to start the second american civil war um protesters will be shot also I don't know where I am right now and I don't really like whatever we've got a we've got a we've got a fucking stupid comes to fuck cheese string in the number 10 the fucking the fucking drums uh I think here's the thing who's saying right there's another thing I want to you said that I want to build on you said it's government by bits you're like yeah it kind of fucking is at

this point right because like if you think about it in this week boris johnson when told that migrants don't have recourse to public funds was like rightly horrified he was like what no of course they have recourse to public funds we've been saying that they've been coming in and taking all the benefits for ages you're telling us they don't actually have that right and it's like no man they don't you're just being goodbye lenin'd by his own government he has no idea he thinks he's the leader of the labor party absolutely no idea like he thinks he is Jeremy Corbyn that's why he was so confused by Jeremy Corbyn running against him but also Matt Hancock getting interviewed about the test and trace scheme and then just like being being suggesting that it's being

rushed out before it's ready and then just laughing at the possibility again in the middle of a pretty serious fucking crisis you just have to kind of respect the Tories for being like no we are not scripting this this is an improv government yeah this is ucb we all paid our fees to be here and ucb government test and trace program i think i heard test and trace program in the back is just like yeah cool the thing is is it's really effective as well because the audience that they're trying to bait are people who are so convinced that like the rules need to be uh the rules need to be followed and people will automatically be outraged that people don't follow the rules so the whole thing about like Dominic Cummings being like the huge story

even though it's not even though it is just like for the most part a twitter story albeit one with like maybe a little bit more traction than most um is like this inherent belief that well because he's so obtusely broke the rules and because he's so obtusely doesn't give a shit about it and any government that um cares about its like integrity would get rid of him which is exactly what kia starma would do in this kind of alternate universe um so it's kind of like taking all this you know it's it's still this kind of thinking that is ultimately fruitless there's no um there's no precedence to suggest that this government would punish rule breakers because it hasn't been over a decade and it yeah it just it just shows like how easy they are to take for a ride because

like any government that cared about its integrity would never have hired Dominic fucking Cummings did you see though that like the the labor response to this has literally been the 2016 hillary clinton playbook of let donald be donald like there's that that was in one of the sketch things there was like somebody asked um asked one of the starma people who was doing the like morning show rounds for the party and they said jokingly michael gove like they're just letting them like fall on their swords for this and it's like yeah great if we just let people see what shitheads the Tories are being then the people who have voted for the Tory shitheads overwhelmingly for uh now a decade at this point are just gonna like not vote for them anymore and they're going

to respond very positively to us having posted this like 60 square pixel image of like a letter that says maybe we should have a full judge-led inquiry into whether or not this guy actually did drive 60 miles because his eyes don't work yeah the crucial thing is right the crucial thing is to focus on the substance of any of this is to be completely snookered as many of these liberal journalists were the only thing that this tells you is that the there is an increasing realization on the part of this government that it doesn't really need to do anything or be like be competent like it could it's been double counting tests and double counting PPE and stuff and then nothing happens yeah i mean if you even trying to do accountability after having been

extremely servile to it for the past couple of years at a minimum they'll just kick you off of news night for the day just be like well fuck you yeah exactly it is it is it is pure season three shit it's pure middle finger middle finger to everybody Emily main list has been on thin ice ever since she was that rude to dapper laughs right and the other thing right i was thinking is just like it's part of this whole um just real feeling like we are just we have stepped through a door it entered back into 2016 where i just it gives me these memories of the discovery that the we never leave campaign like broke the financing rules and the belief that oh we're going to uncover this russia collusion and the leave campaigns like financing no collusion or

whatever whom and that's going to somehow snooker these people and it's like yeah it's like okay congratulations you you've won this game of the rules the thing is collect your prize somehow yeah the thing is right and i say i say this to neatly tie this up in a bow right um you don't like you're not going to be able to like appeal on a technicality on the basis that when you ask to the british people do you want to do a loss of racism yes or no and the majority of them voted yes that some of them might have been taken advantage of right and that's just that's fucked it's not going to work it's pathetic don't try uh you're embarrassing yourself um yeah just no no more lips yeah before we move on as well because i like i said i don't want to

spend too much time on this and we've successfully treated it with the contempt that it deserves in my opinion um i want to sort of say one last thing about the about this government by riffing which is something i've been thinking about so much having seen just the just the the way that like the it's that tori ministers and stuff going on tv no longer even have a sort of casual relationship with the truth they have a casual relationship with like plausibility because like they're just bumbling for one crisis to the next because i think since david cameron at least or maybe even blare governments have never actually been really for it well that's not true with blare blare had a mission was just bad but since david cameron governments have never really been

actually for anything themselves they're just sort of there as shibboleths who then vote through policies cooked up in think tanks and who are campaigned for by the press so they really just need to be there to be like a sort of altar or a statue and continue to be like a a pipe almost like a dumb pipe through which other things are realized and like before this they never really had to do much because 55 tufton street would write your policy and the telegraph would campaign for it you just sort of needed to be there to be a bum in a seat and so i'm reminded the reason i think about cameron is because i'm reminded of david cameron's chumocracy where he never really governed at all because he did what his job was and like when he would do policy retreats in it in

the prime minister's country residents like when blare did it like he was doing bad shit but he was like at least doing he was doing work like they were actually making policy it was just evil policy whereas cameron knew that his job was essentially just as at best marketing and pr and so just play tennis and drink pims with all of his spads all weekend he knew his job was to just be a mechanism that transferred all this stuff to people that was how they sold the coalition government right which was that you know you have a you know they i remember that i remember it being marketed as like you've got these two uniquely different parties of liberal democrats and the conservatives but they're coming together just like in the quote unquote national interest which

was to get the country's finances back on track which meant at least like the way that they sold it to kind of like get get out of debt or like to reduce the debt massively so for them it was like the policies and the ideology doesn't really like the aesthetics of it the aesthetics of it don't really matter and almost it's more appealing to say that you know we're coming together to solve this like existential problem that has been quote unquote created by the left in terms of national debt and it's amazing to think of that right now when you know the conversations around you know number one there's like a reluctance to even confront the consequences of austerity but even conversations about the national debt and whether it matters just doesn't really exist

anymore despite the fact that like the architects of those austerity related policies are still very much in the think tanks and in government and working as spads and they're saying austerity doesn't matter anymore because this is again it's all about the middle finger and the rule of power George Osborne has a new girlfriend and he's feeling younger than ever exactly and Grant Shaps is loving the improv class just relentlessly setting every scene during the widening works to the a66 that's right anyway i i i believe we have now now we have treated that subject with exactly the amount of attention and contempt that it deserves and i want to move on to something a little bit more fun before we before we cut to our our

discussion with senjana and this is that it appears that while we weren't looking an episode of the show entourage seems to have accidentally come true yeah i hate when that keeps happening yeah it wasn't entourage based on a true story yeah so it's just like we we've had like a simulacrum happen here yes where so this is an article that came out in the quietest magazine the other day by ed Gillett and my goodness is it quite something so it's about a dj collective called housekeeping all right i really hate this yeah i'm already angry yeah and we are going to get into why we're talking about this in a sec because my lord is it entertaining so the the article opens the importance of a piece of music can sometimes be disconnected entirely from the

sounds it contains so it goes with faces the latest ep from london based dj collective housekeeping an utterly unremarkable slab of tech house which nonetheless prompts some complex questions but underground music in 2020 the ep itself floats by is a blur of mediocrity notable only for its steadfast refusal to challenge even the tamest cliches of mainstream club music everything here is terribly well mannered flawlessly produced and almost incomprehensibly boring ouch yeah hey you know i've listened to this ep he is being nice uh it is i mean number one i i i fucking hate deep house and i hate tech house awful boring anodyne music for like you know investment bankers to do ketamine to and like a 400 like 400 pound entry abita clubs

so the article goes on the most notable aspect of faces is not its underwhelming sound but the social and economic environment in which it's been produced one in which ostensibly underground music is co-opted by people whose wider interests uh whose whose wider interests serve to destabilize the very cultures they claim to channel oh no we're not going to find out that dj's a posh are we yeah well it's going to be like four dominant comings is i'm seeing double here yeah drive 60 miles to check my eyes oh riley's just mad because we've just preempted him by guessing the thing haven't we yeah no so this this group is yes that's right uh this group it is is not it not this isn't funny yet this is the setup here's where it gets very delightful which is that and

also remember these guys aren't small time they sell out nights they promote in london they have a pretty prestigious residence in abita and they claim that their story is one of hard graph but the redeal real deal is much more odd so um i'd like everybody to please open the article and look at the picture of them oh well it was worse than four dominant comings is um do you remember when libs were on the like um hipster kendo thing whereas like uh these these goddamn brochure lists they all have the like designer stuff on the man buns that looks like that it looks like that uh that they all none of these people look real i'm thoroughly dissociating again um yeah oh yeah that they're really they're really astonishing so we're all mixed

like i was at university with like the guys the guys i was at university with who like got into djing at west minster because their dad bought them a set of decks for their 16th birthday to help him get over his parents divorce um and uh yeah i know i'm gonna be i'm gonna be running a night in uh in oxford it's going to be called subversion prime well it's just now all high renaissance man so here's the thing uh one nil nature uh so here's the thing telling li of the four three allied remove references to their surnames perhaps hoping to draw some distinction between their musical personas and other public appearances the mononymous jacobi is a regular on the society pages with his full name of jacobi ant struther a gao cal Thorpe

powerful name yeah yeah usually it usually in relation to his aristocratic connections well for another member of housekeeping sebastian mcdonald hall who was 168 on this year's rich list as a commercial real estate man he must be really good at djing hell yeah yeah he's so rich from dj so good at djing yeah he's absolutely getting tons and tons of money up from spinning at night said it's just like getting a bunch of money from my dj and collective and it's like propping up my like vanity project real estate empire i don't i make no money off of renting flats to anybody yeah but like i just i keep banging out those tunes there is like he's making so much money off djing people are putting pressure on him to open a break like

clinic or a mutual aid organization so and and then thirdly carol waxberg is almost positively relatable by comparison having merely been a director at city bank for 13 years before launching his own investment he's the only one with a normal name so far which is why it's so funny because it falls so flat like you have like fucksworthy mc hunts the most dangerous game of all and then you have uh like antonious pious tremulous vanderbilt the 14th and then you have carol waxberg and it's like cool surely i'm now expecting the fourth one to be like a dj havia eichmann yes sabina de regime change socialite party planner and property developer taylor mc williams from texas is perhaps the

most infamous member of housekeeping and i would now like to ring the um this has happened on a previous episode of the of the podcast thing we're getting the explanation for something we talked about before oh yeah we don't actually have a drop for that i actually could have a drop for that what kind of drop for that would you like the the suco blat one is the drop for that is what i just said okay i'll give you the suco blat one anyway thank you so taylor mc williams is property development company hondo enterprises were met with protests after installing the segregated poor doors and the council and the like social um value flats and their old gate apartment building in 2014 i remember that but yeah that was him huh we have we have talked about this phenomenon

before and there it is again he named he named he's using he's using tech notes for his redemption arc oh it's tech house tech house i don't understand the difference and i won't learn but like he named he named his development company after a not great john wane weston hondo enterprises yeah hey pilgrim this marble entrance hall isn't big enough for the two of us is that you john wane this guy would technically be like no but i was always like going round to the poor door anyway to hang out because it had a much more gritty vibe he is actually texan um but i'm sure he probably would have that voice anyway that's what i love about poor door girls i keep getting richer and they stay the same age like jokes being texan doesn't make you uh like a cowboy at this point it makes

you like a macmansion guy or like an oil fund guy like the kind of texan that gets you into like a dj collective in london anyway so what i find more like let's more interesting about this right it's not just that there are some rich guys who have a successful dj collective but again it's mostly successful i think this article heavily implies because they basically just like bought they just paid over the odds to get like other people to come to their nights and stuff like they basically just bought being listen if they are a collective that means that they're workers they're a workers run co-op um and what we're not gonna do is we're not gonna tear down like uh proletarian culture on this show uh but what's very funny in my opinion uh is that like

they just they are djs who can't stop gentrifying stuff uh they are they are the witches gentrifying stuff um and so what's happened is they've basically bought all like mcwilliams the guy who owns hondo has bought like all of brickston market including like all of the the clubs that actually are owned and managed by people who are from there as well as like all of the shops that they go to and he says it's part of his drive to rejuvenate and preserve what's great about the area by turning it into a pret i guess oh yeah yeah fuck yeah the world like the world is gonna be an armed camp but like the inside of it is going to be a theme park for guys like this yeah oh yeah that's that's the future is the like everybody's up to their knees and boiling

seawater outside like a very authentic club in brickston that is run by these shitheads like listen mate if you're going to live inside a walled compound with snipers and towers you know you're going to want to be able to grab a wiltshire ham and grab baguette on your way to the club so this is from another interview with him he says when we first started going to abita it was 20 years ago and there was very little vip experience available and it certainly wasn't the vip culture that we wanted to bring to central london you know by buying all of it and evicting everyone oh central london which never had a fucking vip culture oh yes famous residents of central london like the prime minister and the fucking queen they went they went to brickston

market they did their research and they realized that the people who run the market and run the stalls just don't have very kitsch fashion yeah yeah that's right you know what it is it's that these guys are a worker's collective and the people who own like the grocery store and stuff pretty bourgeois yeah so yeah so he goes on the music and the vibe of the island is what we cherish and wanted to bring home with us the anything goes hedonism free spirited hippie fun combined with cutting-edge house music i hate every word of that sentence so much yeah the anything goes hedonism you know of when you make everyone pay 2000 pounds per month to rent an art from you so only like you know bae systems presents presents dance class can afford

yeah i mean but that's hippie right let's free spirited hippie fun yeah well they they also said that they love the dance floor because people of all races genders and classes can come together in the spirit of harmony as opposed to well dancing to electronic music and it's like yeah that's definitely what like you know under the bellville three and underground resistance and stuff yeah that's that's the roots of dance music you fucking moron listen if they didn't have some working class people on the dance floor like where would i buy my pingers from you know you've got to think about this um so what and so now like they are like they bought uh the premises of club 414 for example and this was framed as an attempt this like a club i had mentioned earlier which is like

a big place for like south line and jazz and and and tech and acid techno and stuff and they said that what we're trying to do is save the venue which have been closed by high other high rents for the previous six months rents that they were pushing up um and then they fired all of the staff and have kept it completely closed presumably they're going to open it up again to do their own like very and anodyne car uh car commercial electronic music again and at some point it's going to be the first pizza express night club speaking of speaking of which uh i actually did see uh share with you all the music video from one of the videos you can't make other songs uh oh uh alice i think you want to oh i think you want to watch this and open your third eye

because it is a third eye opener of the music video yeah it gets it gets a vibe okay well i'm reassessing then i don't really know if it's actually like it's one of those things where i say yes like it is weird but it's weird in the sense that like they're trying a bit too hard oh yeah well hang on let's seriously dj's take themselves like i never ceases to amaze me like the level of shit going on in this video is like wow like no one has ever told you to fuck off in your entire life well it's it's basically what this what this is is it's um the four housekeeping guys wearing black fedoras and leather jackets on the roof of like a building um then um a bunch of lingerie models um he basically kidnap a girl in a white dress i mean

i'm pouring a candle circle to like sacrifice they have they have the like bread cheap lighting that's cool uh yeah so it's um but it is it is quite simply a a a dj group comprised of like a couple of billionaires and a couple of multi of working class multi millionaires have i've decided the iconography they want to go with this video right we're going to kidnap a relatively young girl and have her like groomed for women in black lingerie like also and then she's going to appear on that she's going to appear on the roof above housekeeping's cool mayfair flat and then she's going to be a cool party girl as well this video cost a lot of money to make like the camera work is expensive the lighting is expensive the like and for this

1856 views three likes 15 dislikes two comments which read us a crap and cringe yeah they are they are trying to be like uh let's say elite elite conspiracy material but they are a set because they're all their jobs are just like aristocrat and landlord like they don't have the wherewithal to like do the propaganda do a shit instead or just like hey wouldn't it be cool if we could if we could turn a woman's clothes black and then she'd be goth like us uh the housekeeping guys it kind of gives me the impression that like these guys and i keep bringing this up as an analogy but it's this is like the only thing this is the only time it sort of makes sense these guys watch the ritual scene of eyes wide shot and they were like damn this is

really cool these are just like guys who hang out like us yeah that's right so they're like what what if we did that but we got rid of like the piano the organ music and replaced it with deep house yeah that's exactly right um it's is this is like this is guys who watched eyes wide shut and we're like what kind of music did jeffrey at steen like does anyone know that we're organizing a big party in a mosque on an island it's gonna be you have a little st james residency just run run that quote back about like the thing about little st james is we wanted to capture that like free spirited hippy fun vibe little st james is the fourth guy so it's still so funny to me that like one of them is just called like i don't know carl it like he's

not he's not a poor guy he's a multimillionaire but like next to these other dickheads he's just the most normal guy there is like and carl yeah and so like ultimately if you want to know what um all of that conservative government all of these big middle fingers the populace all of what they're doing the entire conser the conservative government as a fantasy dj project no i was gonna say it exists in many ways so the four housekeeping guys can continue to make fun videos that's sure that's who this is all for yeah for them it's for it's for the vanity it's for the vanity dj projects of landlords that will allow them to continue just consuming the all like all of the friends right like this is this is the culture that they want this is the culture that they want to kill the

world for so terrible yep it's this it is it is it is the tech house collective housekeeping and their enthusiasm for like little black fedoras and sort of airy airy female vocals over an e p called faces why would you call your e p faces there are a million e p's called faces named after the world's best nightclub in gants hail Essex but they took but the um it is it's the idea right of uh i'm just hey well we need to make sure that these guys who worked really hard being landlords and aristocrats get to own as much of central London as they can so that they can rope off most of it and make it into like a a champagne lounge for them and their friends yeah and it'll be like tie-in champagne like yeah it'll be oh absolutely auto zone presents champagne speedy auto glass

presents you know root yeah i love going down to the vove clicko foreign office the other last thing right is like the actually no so i'm not going to say that that's incredibly libelous no it's fine i'm just gonna be saying that yeah um so the last thing is no the last thing is and the last thing about this right is that not saying anything about anything anyone might have done but in general this seems like a cocaine ass idea i'm just you like wait are you suggesting that deep house guys might have like done coke importantly alice no i'm not suggesting that i see this idea this idea is so embarrassing that if i was them i would sue us for suggesting that they haven't done coke like you know like i

would at least want the cover of saying i came up with it when i was on coke i know it's a terrible idea i'm sorry it's it's out no you're clearly right though right like they i don't think they have been i think they're all like straight edge guys because like this is this isn't a cocaine ass idea this is a powerfully sober non-high idea this is this is the actually i think that we should we could convey the like chill free spirited hippy fun vibe over beta um i might get from looking at their picture is the only drug that they're really into is the drug of a speculative property that's right that that's a weird speculative property deeper here in many ways more dangerous than cocaine oh yeah million times uh you cocaine is a little podcast

and so that's the thing right um all of it all the lying all of the all of this of this bullshit all the collapsing public trust the just decimating of our ability to do anything as a society by working together all of that it's in service to this it's for these fucking guys um and look the thing is right there is also a campaign uh to save i know we're asking you to do quite a bit this episode but this one's just asking you to sign something there is a really big petition to save nor cash and carry um which is actually gating enough speed like enough momentum that it might just be worth is worth your time to sign yeah it's it's like the one family owned grosser market in in brexton market the actual people yeah as opposed to property speculators use

yeah and they're going to turn it into one of those clothing stores where they have like one shirt on a white pedestal and it's 900 pounds oh fuck this was my favorite detail about the article and i can't believe you didn't include it in the podcast was that one of them owns a gentleman's club called yes but there's an amazing detail in it where they're like oh the the thing is like yeah what our vibe to be like really trendy and edgy so like we ask people you know not to wear baseball caps and hoodies and stuff to the club and then and then it says on their website they sell a range of club apparel which includes baseball caps and hoodies which will presumably break their own dual policy hypocrites hypocrites you know what honestly liberal journalists go after tapes

that's something you could plausibly change with all of your like to a hypocrite uh finger pointing you could maybe get them to sell different apparel in the store of their nightclub is ultimately like satan is that dominant comings would not be let into tape london but look right these guys just they live in them they live it a life and that's true for the um the conservative ministers who just get to make it up as they go along they live the life of a Montessori student forever because every now everything is there everything is their soft play area there's no wrong answers there's infinite encouragement infinite second tries and uh you know uh it's if they say my life a movie uh we're all extras so that's pretty cool um anyway uh awful housekeeping awful

i don't know download them on youtube if you can yeah because it is some of the most dreadful music i've ever heard in my entire life anyway look uh this has been a fun little romp through through current events so i'm going to now throw to myself hussain and our friend sanjana for a uh a discussion about something that's actually actually important yeah we're not ending the show which means that i can't do the joke that i had for this which is where you are about to tie it up i say our theme song is here we go by hot by um by housekeeping it's very good listen to it early listen to it often oh no let's let's do a housekeeping song for our outro this week i'll send you one yeah theme song is faces by it it's really bad i've listened to it it's so

awful um but hey look it's yeah it's like it's like eleve it is essentially like on a lobby music or at best car commercial music and it's what gets made now yeah yeah it's what gets made now so cool anyway uh so over to us in sanjana so see you in a moment uh thanks past riley what a what a charming episode full of witnesses and acerbic observations however uh it now gives me great pleasure to introduce a slimmed down cast of myself and hussain whose location is still undisclosed still undisclosed yeah he's never disclosing it uh and our friend uh sanjana varghese who is a tech and culture journalist who's been writing about the only one of the only sort of um like socialist state or the most socialist state in

fact in india carola and how its response to the coronavirus crisis has been considerably better than most most of the rest of the country and indeed most other countries so sanjana how you doing i'm good how are you i am just fine here on this saturday thing for a week behind the curtain so sanjana we're going to talk about carola um can you tell me a little bit about like what carola's response to the coronavirus has been and how that's related to the politics of that state yeah um so i think there's a lot of different elements of it and i think a lot of the time what we're seeing is like because it's a left-wing government and has been governed as such for a long time basically the infrastructure to deal with stuff like this is in place and that's

kind of common sense stuff right like that's like investment in like public health infrastructure that's investment in like local communities and that's also about kind of making sure that all the things that you need to deal with something like this well are actually in place um which is actually common sense to me um and i think that one of the reasons that it's been so successful is because they acted really early so in january i think it was the first confirmed case of coronavirus which is a medical student returning from wuhan to india um to carola and so ever since then basically the health minister kk sadaja and um her like team and the local kind of civil servants and public servants around carola have basically kind of moved into action and realized that that was something

they needed to be over prepared for rather than under prepared for and so rather than assuming like oh we'll see like we'll wait if it actually we'll wait and see if it like spreads here they went on the assumption that it would and so kind of brought all this stuff um to the front and so that meant basically putting in voluntary screenings at airports so anyone who flew into carola which actually around winter time is quite a popular tourist destination as well um so anyone who came into carola was like screened at the airports um from january way before like a lot of other places were doing it and they were doing this basically not voluntarily but they're doing it without a directive from um the federal government which is really interesting um and then

this is kind of working really well for like a month anyone with symptoms was asked to isolate they were tested um it's kind of working well i think they had like one other case or something and then there was a family that are malealis so they're from carola that went to italy and then came back to carola and then basically after they got back from their holiday they kind of went and did all the normal post holiday stuff so they like went to a bank they went to a post office i think they went to the police department at some point um and they actually hadn't been screened at the airport um and then a couple of i think a couple of days later they tested positive um and so that kind of obviously kind of kicked things into like overdrive because i think by that point they'd come

into contact with like 300 people or something because they'd gone to so many different places and so then basically what happened is uh in the next two days they uh state governments like kind of devolved response teams so a public servant in the area um basically put together this like 50 person team to track and trace where exactly this family had gone and they did that basically by asking them for information which this family wasn't like great about giving them but then also combining it with like gps data that they took from their phones surveillance footage from like loads of different um like establishments that they'd been to like a jewelry store in the bank um and then basically what they did was they got that infection route and they

posted it on social media and like basically made it widely available and they said here's a helpline like number call us if you've been in any of these places and you think you might have come into contact with these people and that was like a huge amount of people call them i think it's like something like 160 maybe even more than that and so then basically as i recall it was 300 from reading your article yeah sorry my my grasp of numbers isn't so good in the morning um and so it's like an insane amount of people right which i think is like really worrying considering it's it's one family and they'd kind of stuck to their local area they weren't like really traveling outside of their town or anything um and so then after they posted this this number and people called them then basically

this this like response team basically went kind of kicked things up a notch and said okay we're going to start um you everyone has to go into isolation um if you've got these symptoms or if you kind of are displaying this behavior or if you were in this area with them for longer than you know x amount of time we're going to call you every day so every person who is in isolation had like someone who is calling them every day being like do you need anything are you staying inside like basically kind of checking up on them kind of also kind of enforcing the quarantine um and that kind of then also ramped up in the next couple of weeks as um larger parts of the country and larger parts of the world started to go into lockdown um and so basically they had this um

like method which is testing tracing isolating and surveillance um which is very interesting because surveillance is like quite an obvious part of it um and that's basically I think what we're trying to do in the UK and it's what a lot of other countries are kind of doing to varying levels of success but I think they've done it really well in Kerala because um it's kind of the investment in public health infrastructure and also there's like a relief package for people so yeah carry on yeah I'm gonna take this opportunity to give you some of your own words back to you nice which is that Kerala was successful not only because it sprung into action immediately on learning of the virus but it but because of what it had done in the years

not just the months leading up to it decades of continued investment in healthcare universal healthcare the devolution of government which gave responsibility to local communities and early precautions one of the things that I think has been very um telling about the Kerala response is that it has not just been a top-down state government led but rather that there has been the space for civil society organizations to exist not just um asking them to spring up in response to a crisis but they at these this this amount of institutional strength has been there and it has not been hollowed out in like since 1967 yeah definitely um and I think that is really crucial particularly with somewhere like Kerala

which has a really high rate of migration and a lot of people coming in and out which is actually quite important when you're understanding the Keralite response I think because rather than saying like a lot of other places did that um they're kind of going to leave migrant laborers or people who had come into the country and maybe didn't really have the resources to isolate effectively rather than saying okay well you're gonna throw yourself out like we'll figure it out they actually kind of made responses like that kind of response a crucial part of what they're doing so they kind of announced the state government announced this like relief package so they said okay we're gonna like distribute meals and we're gonna make sure people check up on you but actually

it was down to local communities to kind of administer that um which are like local village councils basically and so that basically meant that it was like someone you knew or people you kind of vaguely knew who would be coming to your door saying are you all right you know do you have food do you need anything is anyone in your family ill which I think makes a massive difference and I think also kind of the fact that that's already in place means that outside of this situation you've dealt with these people before you know what the systems are and you know that they're there for you which I think isn't really necessarily the case here and in a lot of other places and I think that makes a huge difference in terms of like compliance with quarantine as well

yeah uh Hussain what's uh what's your thought on this matter yeah I mean one of the things I found very interesting was when you compare Kerala to like other states um and I'm thinking like namely like Ahmedabad and Gujarat Gujarat being the uh the like home state of Narendra Modi like but you can see like these stark differences in like percentages so in ups I think I feel like maybe yesterday or a couple of days ago um Ahmedabad like reported almost like a 50 or 60 percent increase in coronavirus cases so like the number is still kind of rising up Gujarat still like very high as well and those numbers are still rising I'm not sure whether Kerala is the only state where um in coronavirus infections have stabilized or have um or are starting to decline but I sort of

wanted to um I was thinking about what you were saying like you were saying about like the differences in the structure of the states and whether the sort of um higher level of autonomy in Kerala like contributes to it the ability to build an infrastructure which can kind of uh build out like a more effective track and trace system compared to like other places like Gujarat where you have various like political forces um who have like this the nationalistic but also like maybe libertarianism isn't necessarily the right word but um one that doesn't necessarily see a communal state as uh necessarily like something conducive to its sense of governance um yeah I mean I definitely agree with you there and I think that is a huge part

of it um particularly like when you look at the fact that historically like Kerala has kind of gone its own ways since the 1960s since the um communist party came into power was actually one of the world's first democratically elected communist governments which is very interesting and and since then basically like Kerala has really gone a different way from a lot of other places in India if not the rest of the country I'd say and you and you can really see that now as you're saying and I think part of that is also the fact that when these reforms were implemented in like the 1960s so the land reform act and kind of investment in public health care and Kerala's put a massive emphasis on um literacy particularly for women and so that kind of thing

you know at the time I'm sure like I again I'm not like a policy expert but at the time I'm sure it was difficult to bring in but over like the last decades you've really seen that pay off so for example we're in a lot of other countries like we're not wearing a lot of other um states like information and misinformation on whatsapp is quite widespread and it's a huge issue and I don't doubt that it is in Kerala as well like again I you know I'm never sure about how to measure stuff like that but I think what people are actually seeing in Kerala is that the misinformation level for example and on whatsapp is like very different in Kerala than it is elsewhere just because of the fact that like literacy is a huge part of what has actually made the state able to

kind of respond in this way and so people then are paying attention to what um politicians are saying and they're able to like read the news about it and they're not relying necessarily on like sound bites they're getting from people and so because those things kind of like add up to a community response um even if at the time they seemed like one part of like a very different thing if that makes sense I don't know if it does speaking speaking about news I was watching one of those like crazy Indian news channels um you know the ones where they have like 25 guests or something on like um and it's just sort of like watching like a big brawl and what's really interesting that the covid stuff is that it's kind of like for all the craziness of like fox news and everything

the Indian equivalents um of which there are many tend to be like a more accelerated and more insane version of that and I was watching one of these programs like yesterday and from like my kind of like vague understanding of hindi and everything um what I found very funny is that when the Kerala response came out the one of like the most popular pundits uh like pro-modi pundits like response to it is well keraland people are like just very boring they're very boring people but don't like having fun and the reason why the covid 19 response like why the coronavirus infections have been kept low isn't because they're a better state from gujarat i'm a bother whatever it's because of men don't go out drinking and they're on strike all the time so they're never at work and that's

why it's not spreading I just found that like incredibly funny because it was almost like it was almost like was the acceptance of like you know you do have these like failed microstates in india and like it is very hard to control and it is very hard to like manage a population that size when you know you have that deep that kind of so-called decentralization but you also have these various like political forces that have undermined any sort of like state cohesion even prior to this crisis anyway and um yeah I mean I know that like there's criticism around like whether you can actually call the keraland government like communist or even yeah they're more like in recent years they've been more um social democrat than anything else um but I saw

I wanted to ask is this just like a follow-up question um like what you think about like the impacts of say like hindu nationalism or indian nationalism um whether that's kind of like had a detrimental impact on the way in which these types of crises are responded to and that's a good question I will I will preface it by saying very much like I am not an expert on any of this by any means um so my understanding of it is very much filtered through like what I read and kind of see on tv and also what I talked to about like my grandparents and stuff um I do think that particularly like speaking specifically about this as well I think which kind of grounds it is that keraland for example like went into lockdown like much before a lot of other parts of india did right

like they went to kind of a state of lockdown like at the beginning of march um and I think very much at the time if you as you kind of mentioned if you read like the newspapers and the news coming from outside of kerala people were literally like what are these people doing like why is the government reacting like this like this is basically like crazy talk like they don't need to do this they're overreacting um and I do think that there is a sense that like within within kerala as well like there's there's like a very it's always gone its own way right like it's always kind of for the last couple of last couple of decades it's always gone its own way and I think that in terms of that it's proven very like it's proven to go very well right now

right like in terms of its response it's worked out very well um and I think that's also because of recent history but I do think that coming back to your question about like nationalism and stuff I think that there is like a tendency for these strong men such as you know modi and for a lot of the other people who are very prominent in his government to say okay well we don't need to do those things that's like overreacting we're just going to be able to get through it with like you know doing other things we're not locking down and you have to go out and clap for the healthcare workers or whatever and I think that has kind of contributed actually in the long run we're going to beat up the virus yeah basically and I think I think that's like a very prevalent tendency

in a lot of other countries not just in India it's very nationalistic um and it's very much like that element of like you kind of have to do your own part to stay at home and that's patriotic and stuff without really recognizing that actually for a lot of people in India and for a huge amount of the population in India that's not possible um and so I think there is that there is that kind of like that kind of dissonance between like okay we just have to like do our own parts and you have to stay at home and you have to like and I think that's common in other countries but I've really seen this in India as well is that you have to do your own part you have to stay at home you have to like you know be patriotic and fulfill your like civic duty or whatever um without really realizing

that actually that's not possible in a lot of parts of India um without like significant help from the government and actually like decades and decades of like government underfunding and political considerations as you say have actually really like changed the circumstances under which that's possible and so as a result of that like this nationalism obviously is on the rise and we're very aware of that like in the last particularly in the last like year we've seen like such devastation reached by that and I think that does kind of feed into what's happening now and I think that there is there is this as as as you become more hyper individualized you need to rely more on sort of like aggressive nationalism to keep people together but I think

also and you can see this not just in other Indian states but also in the UK in the US is that these hyper individualized um and residualized societies they're not able to act um they're they're they're they're they're they're they're horizon for action is so incredibly short term and they're not and they're able to only do the next best thing for the next what week maybe like this is why you know the UK is trying to break out of its own lockdown early why the US has gone into lockdown but largely failed to like um keep a lot of people actually like on uh on any kind of monetary support whereas you're in in Kerala like they were mocked in March for going into lockdown but that's because I think if you have these institutions

not just governmental but the ones that are supported by civil society if you understand that there is that in addition to being individuals we also are a unit and it's bizarre to me that the understanding that society exists as a concept is now an outlier in terms of um of of of how uh of of administrative units like it's so bizarre that the fact that everyone in Kerala realizes that they are not everyone in Kerala but that like that Kerala has been the institutions have been built on a sense of interdependence as well as individualism it's bizarre that that's an outlier I mean it's not bizarre when you look at the material conditions but I feel like responses in the UK and US right have basically left the responsibility for actually

meaningfully doing anything to an assumption that technology will just develop which we on trash future refer to as the a wizard will fix it hypothesis um so like we have we have for example we have a we've delayed lockdown we're trying to go out of it early and we assume that we'll have well we won't have to make any sacrifices by which I don't mean individuals making sacrifices I mean just acting together as opposed to everyone does whatever they want within the market all the time because that's freedom we've assumed that eventually a vaccine will have we'll just fix it all and we won't have to like consider any of our institutional failings for the last 40 years and that in the meantime we can just use an app uh to kind of

magic the problem away with software when you describe the keraland track and trace response it's about uh people and there is a software component there is a technology component they've recognized that technology is not magic which is why whenever I see this condescendingly described as a low tech response I'm like no fuck off it's tech appropriate they've used the technology in the appropriate way and the rest of what they've used is an institutionally strong response definitely um I think there's a couple of different elements to that as well and I really agree that um when it comes to the like magic bullet of tech thing I think that's like very prevalent particularly now and I think that the issue with that on a very like large scale is that

when you start talking about technology and I'm sure you guys like you guys talk about this all the time and I think you know exactly what I mean is that when you start talking about technology is this like magic bullet that will save us particularly when it comes to this app I think what you also do is you you start to legitimize its use in other circumstances as well so even if it's not necessary for us to use software for another dimension of this crisis for example if someone was to make like I don't know an app that like I don't know helped mutual aid groups distribute food or medicine or whatever and that's the kind of thing where you actually legitimize the use of technology when in circumstances where it's not necessarily needed I think that that also

becomes a big issue too and I think that is like I think going to be a consequence of what we see now with Matt Hancock kind of saying like here's our magic app it doesn't work and the people who are supposed to be using it like have no idea what's going on and I don't even know how to find it on the app store but it's there and it's actually on you to find it and it's a bit like well that's not how anything works let alone something like this. The lockdown is just an escape room and Matt Hancock I fucking love that Matt Hancock just went on TV and fully just did a Labrador head tilt when just like like a dog that's been shown a magic trick when it was explained to him that like okay you spent what 90 million pounds on an app from Circo one of the like participation

trophy outsourcers that's been running this country into the ground for the last 30 years um you've just you've just given them infinite money yeah and then what have they done they've built a crappy program for like I don't know 20 dollars that doesn't work that you can't find and then they've hired a bunch of people to whom they're paying like poverty wages yeah and uh then their training consists of nothing they're being paid to do nothing because Circo and Sytel can't make any of the technology work yeah I have something from um from some articles about this so it's basically what it is it's an app and what you do is you call people who've been identified on on this track and trace program which we don't know how it works and then you're

supposed to do several pre-written one of several pre-written phone scripts that you don't deviate from so Sytel this is from Wired Sytel's contact tracing program contact tracing training consists of signing up for one mandatory eight-hour shift and working through a series of documents and a few videos of software demos between five and ten minutes long one contract tracer we spoke to who had years of medical experience and is working remotely spent five to six hours reviewing the training manuals and did not have any form of one to one or group call with staff as part of the training the day before the track and trace program was supposed to go live the synergy script software which is like you make the call you say what you said you upload the call was still not

live at this point and there was no supervision or feedback mechanism quote i think those calls were for us to try it out but not necessarily to improve the system i'm not sure how many mock calls i've done and in the downtime between the mock calls which are all we do and the suggested activity of refamiliarizing ourselves with the limited training materials the k clinical case worker got on with normal lockdown life quote i've mastered a three ball juggle and i'm getting pretty good another contract tracer we spoke to reported taking up gaming welcome like welcome to if you if you just if the if like circo in there and their elk know that they are able to get away with time after time after time basically just delivering

uh delivering what like um a car with a drawing of an engine instead of an engine block and saying it's good and suing you if you complain about it right if they just do that time after time after time we keep going back to them of course they're gonna like i don't know make the matt handcock app for you know um catching up with your friends it's basically like omegle or chat roulette would be a better contact tracing system than this we spent 90 million pounds on it because that's all that that like residualized governments know how to do they only know how to go to the same companies that rip them off time and again because we just we have decided to spend the last 40 years ripping out all the infrastructure of of our own society ripping out the um the actually

destroying the like actual social bonds that put us together and replacing them with just infinite marketized contracts and again that's all in favor of what we spoke about earlier which is the earlier the previous segment of the show which is that the four billionaires who run the house deep keeping dj collective are all free to like turn brickston into a soft play area for themselves like that is what this is for and this is just looking at carola i can think this is what we could have had i mean i i find it sorry karen handing back you no it's it's interesting and like i definitely agree with you obviously on like a lot of this and i think one of the things that i found really interesting about um the kind of the bungled rollout of like

basically any app that's supposed to be like helping us in this um is that like kind of at every step they've basically fucked up so on a very basic level like this uk test and trace service which came out yesterday actually didn't complete any mandatory privacy checks um which i found this morning um which is like hilarious and also like terrifying so public health england basically confirmed to politico that they hadn't completed a data protection impact assessment which is like mandatory under uk law because they're basically like going to be having they're going to have so much information about people's like personal information their names their zip codes their email addresses and it's going to be held by the government bodies for like up to 20 years which is

like a huge amount of time and i think that what also ends up happening is that there's a real question of trust here which i think i i find has been kind of under reported in terms of like if someone calls you like an unknown number calls you and they say hi i'm blah and i'm from like circo or i'm from like the uk's contact tracing like scheme or whatever can you tell me where you've been and what your postcode is and what this is and stuff like there's no there's no trust that actually this person is who they say they're they are and because of the way that the government's actually fucked up their sponsor this so badly it's really like easy for people to exploit that you know and it has happened already like in terms of scammers and kind of people saying oh yeah i'm

from this government agency and people basically being exploited and that's awful and i think it is one of those things where like even when it does get up and going again let's say hypothetically speaking like the contact tracing people who've been hired do actually get to do some work in this area and they do actually get to start calling people and start doing something like even then i i'm really like uncertain that people will trust that this is the like this is something that's smart for them to do with their data and that's something they feel comfortable doing and i think that's like very much a failure of the government as well as the technology yeah that's right who's saying i'm going to throw back to you for a couple of final thoughts before we close out yeah i mean

i i was just thinking about i was going to ask a question about any bit sort of feels like irrelevant now um but in some ways i saw i sort of i guess i keep coming coming back to that point of like you can have like you can have like a functioning app um and it's not actually that difficult to make a functioning app for tracking like for tracking trace uh and i think you're right in kind of saying that both it seems that both in terms of like the indian government and indian bureaucrats and in the uk varies this idea that well if we make an app that's like good enough and slick enough and like the user interface is really good then that's kind of sufficient for the response um because it streamlines uh it doesn't put like pressure on the government to

actually have to do anything and it feels like in kerala even though various like tracking trace technology like the reason it works is because you have an infrastructure that sort of supports it and you have like and you know and this is stuff that requires decades of work and decades of investment and also crucially like decades of politicking to like you know fault that because there have been various occasions when your autonomy of kerala as well as that be your autonomy of like other indian states um has been kind of challenged and has been like tried to be scaled back um and what we're kind of seeing in the uk is like well you know okay we've you know in inshallah one day there will be like an autonomous region of newcastle um

but uh you know until then like you know we we come we're sort of like dependent on a national response but the crucial issue is that because of you know a gushing of unions and a gushing of um you know social services and community centers and basically like the notion of community it means that like no sort of technology can really like when it comes to a crisis like this and also other crises like remember bearing in mind that like yes the coronavirus crisis is like a really horrific moment but it also isn't going to be the worst thing that we're likely to face in the next like decade and if the lesson that we the lesson like that we come out of is like we just need better technology or we need to kind of give more authority to technology companies

to access our private data um not just for security reasons now but also for health reasons it just sort of feels like we're going to be accelerating this problem of like not really resolved you know of not really having a cohesive and effective uh public health responses to public health but what we will have is a lot of companies making money from more and more data that was more of like a statement than a question i don't know if you have any thoughts on like whether like the carolin response like might actually be a good way of resisting that or a good way for like people to advocate for better ways in which we can use technology and how we can use it more effectively

yeah um i definitely do and i think i think there's like a lot there as well in terms of what you said about legitimizing technology like for further use because i was reading about this the other day like in hangzhou in china they're like the kind of virtual health app thing they've been using is now going to become like a permanent fixture apparently um and it's going to become like a thing where your health like your health status is determined by like it you can see on someone's phone and it's determined by like a series of colors and stuff and that's something to consider and i think the thing that i find really interesting about how carilla has used surveillance technology is that you know i think there is like an idea that carilla is like this communist utopia

and it definitely isn't and i've seen that and a lot of like western coverage of what's happening and obviously like we all fall into it as certain like points and i'm definitely guilty of it as well and i think there is some like legitimacy to to some of the things people are saying but you know the carilla uh government has used like a huge amount of surveillance in terms of being able to actually track and trace people and isolate people and particularly for that first family that came back to india well but came back to carilla after like they went to italy they use their they use surveillance camera footage from like banks and stores they use like gps data they use phone location data and they're continuing to do that and they're kind of collating it into maps and

that's like available for public health officials um they've apparently been using drones to like make sure that people are staying inside that's unconfirmed i don't actually know if that's fully true the site that i saw it on is a little sketchy but they had maps so i don't know um and so there's kind of these these different elements to it and i think that is worth considering in terms of like carilla has obviously done a great job in many ways because of the public health infrastructure because of the trust that people have in the government um but also what they've fundamentally done is like there's a huge amount of like manual labor that's gone into contact tracing um so for every like you know for every person who's for every like bit of like cell phone data or whatever

that they're using there's also like two or three people who are actually physically calling places and calling people and like literally with a map saying okay well we know they were here and then they went here what road did they take you know and stuff like that and and that's really important and there is that element of like using technology appropriately um and there is that element of also like making sure that this kind of use of technology is like limited and it's bounded so hopefully in it you know when when things start to change or when we can kind of see the light of the end of the tunnel whenever that is who knows um there's a hope that this kind of stuff can actually be scaled back very quickly because it relied on like the manual labor of people if that

makes sense so rather than all just being held you know up to 20 years and like some government server somewhere because it's been done individually by people and it's been done kind of manually hopefully that kind of stuff that information actually isn't like held in perpetuity and that's like I think quite a good thing to take into the future and that's quite a good way of like conceptualizing this kind of like data usage and I'm hoping that I'm hoping that like this is this isn't going to happen like you know for years and years I'm hoping that this kind of surveillance isn't become like so widespread and so normal for whatever reason um but I think that the crucial element as you guys say and as everyone else has been saying is that you can you know

track people all you want you can surveil them you can look at where their phones have been but at the end of the day like if you're not supporting them like materially if you're not giving people like food and making sure that they've got what they need and that they've got a place to stay and that they know that they can like rely on the government for help you're not going to get anywhere and I think that's that's like just the fundamental element and that's honestly like common sense cool well hey uh you know what I um I think that might be about all we have time for and that feels like a really good place to leave it as well so I think the lesson we can learn here is the lesson one of the lessons we can learn from carola is the best time to

create a robust public health infrastructure was 40 years ago or 50 years ago the second best time is now and you know I mean to do be careful also not to like completely idolize what they're doing as some kind of wonderful utopia but hey fuck you know what it's it's fucking better than what we have here which appears to be a coterie of labor doors and scammers all um like double double counting apps and tests and gloves and just sort of kind of pretending to do what a what a response might be um and getting to have fun with it because like at least earlier I cannot shake this idea that they're all living in a society that's built on Montessori rules and uh they're having a great time just doing ucb government anyway hey senjana thank you so much again for talking to us where

can people find you online um probably on twitter I can't remember my handle which is probably a good sign I'll find it it's it's like senjana mv or something um and yeah so well thank you for having me on I really like talking about this yeah hey this was this was a proper delight and uh so that was that was senjana uh from a wired wow great on twitter wow I sure did learn a lot about that topic um huh very scintillating stuff I particularly like the part where she talks about why would you make you beep with your mouth when I have Alice I think you should probably go beep that um so uh yo um everyone knows it's time

if you if you want to get into tapes nightclub the exclusive club you definitely have to buy a tf t-shirt which is available in the show notes you know the email address to send to because we have not gotten an online store yet we probably will at some point it's difficult to get an online store that prints union merch that's exactly right um anyway so and also it's just me that has to package the t-shirts so yeah I'm just a union of you yeah uh no yeah yeah you're you're a one-man union uh look also um international brotherhood of Milo's yeah it's it's you it's me you're not the lost inventor big land it's uh it's five bucks a month you know what it is sign up on the patreon um let's see what else really you cut out when you said that beginning of that sentence and so

what happened was there was a long pause and then in the exact cadence of steamed hams you said the patreon just an isolation the patreon yeah so that's how we're plugging the patreon from now on is just the patreon the patreon the patreon uh you know all about it so okay yo I I definitely need to go eat dinner so uh we will see you on the bonus episode on thursday uh it should be a good time and you also know what it is streaming 9 to 11 yeah uh British standard time wednesday thursday sunday yep all right is that everything yes our theme song is whatever the fuck it's called by house keeping its faces by house keeping it's very mad listen to it never later bye