TRASHFUTURE - All Sex Work and No Sex Play feat. Molly Smith

Episode Date: August 22, 2018

For this week’s episode, Riley (@raaleh), Hussein (@HKesvani), and Milo (@Milo_Edwards) discuss the absurdly high valuation of tech companies, the idea that tech impacts our lives as capital-subsidised precarity, and the fact that 40 percent of the US economy is effectively a shell game. Later, Riley and Milo speak with Molly Smith (@pastachips), co-author of Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights, about how the UK’s approach to criminalising sex work and persecuting sex workers -- and why we should demand full decriminalisation now. Riley also makes a strong case for work in general being eliminated. If you want to donate to SWARM (Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement), you can do so here: https://www.swarmcollective.org/get-involved/ You can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. You can also purchase useful kitchen implements from our socialist cookware sponsor, Vremi (https://vremi.com/). Nate (@inthesedeserts) produced this on the last day that he has furniture in his home before it all gets shipped from one rainy fascist island (Long Island) to another (Britain).

So you're going to spend you're going to spend nine hours on a plane on Tuesday. Yeah, so how hell yeah, what's what's your plan? Well, the last time I was on a plane. I was going to this wonderful facility in Cuba So so this is this is this is going to be a very different experience I've been trying to figure out what I'm going to do So then there's various complications because obviously I'm going to the land of our boy Justin Trudeau So I've got to be very careful right our person our person. Oh, yeah. Yeah, sorry See, I'm already making mistakes as it is I imagine that like I'm going to be pulled out by border security in in Vancouver and

They're just going to question me on all the kind of like problematic stuff I have said about like various Disney films on my Twitter feed No, of course. He isn't all super saying it's a person So in terms of like in terms of how I'm going to spend the next night and with the nine hours on the flight Um, I feel there's like several options. So the first one is about I just listened to down of the sickness for nine hours straight Um, but then you come off it. You are Brendan O'Neill Where did this wallet chain come from? Where did this an ancient ceremony that transforms you into Brendan? I mean you get you get off the plane and they're like

Yeah, what country you're coming from and you're like, I'm escaping the caliphate in London, of course The fate of the family escapes the caliphate the famous no-go zone. The second option is the bane of the caliphate So the second option is To listen just a spectator podcast and nothing else Also very rational that way. Yeah, that way can come out very rational and I too can have lots of like hot and interesting takes about Starship troopers Oh, yeah, which it's ready to take on Jordan Peterson with logic before we do before we drop into the theme song I do kind of want to mention that Starship troopers thing because I didn't know this but the internet sometimes does just give you a taste a little treat wrapped up a little bow and

We all shed a tear when activate which is like just a free way to get like likes on Twitter by dunking on them the sort of Tory youth outreach account just embarrassed itself into non-existence and We were and and it was it was taken down obviously because you know I think the something like the leader was shockingly like involved in like an Islamophobic WhatsApp group or whatever like every single Tory is Group what amazing concept that is that that or they die in like a fatal wanking incident and

You know, that's that that got shut down Of course, they were like, ah, we looked at momentum. We saw that they were doing they were They were doing so they were doing memes. So we're going to do memes about Teresa May the most memeable world leader and So that got shut down and now here's the great thing. UKIP has won UKIP has UKIP has an activate called warplan purple My veins you want to be slammed into you Brownist of the brown liquors you're saying to drink you but here in a courtroom

Yeah, so it's called warplan purple and their slogan is service guarantee citizenship now Can anyone tell me where that interesting slogan comes from and what it means? Does it come from the famous communist movie Paddington 2? It comes from Paddington 2 and Paddington was trying to sign up as a as a as a as a colonial shock troop, of course Classic. Yeah, the Paddington 2 sepoy rebellion Well, that was it's exactly wait. I got it Paddington is Peruvian. So he was busy expropriating lands from Daniel Haydn's parents And rules and then coming then coming to the UK and and of course going on benefits and changing West London into a cocaine narco state, but no, he's a cocaine mule. What do you think he's got under that hat?

No I'm from Starship Troopers, which they say is a film about representative democracy again Can either either of you guys tell me why that's absurd? I honestly like haven't seen Starship Troopers for a long time All I remember is like various scenes involving guys like staring at themes. That's the only thing I can remember about it No, it's never seen it. Well Starship Troopers is a Movie about well, it's a movie made out of a book And the book is this sort of a satire of fascism about this kind about this sort of United Earth

That is like a militant nationalist species that's fighting a war against sort of dehumanized alien bugs And the idea is that you're not a citizen of the country until you're in the army and you kill some enemies Dracula and the whole point of the movies Robert Heinlein was like Paul Verhoeven read Robert Heinlein's book and was like, ah, yes, I'd like to do something different I'd like to make a satire of fascism Where that's about a country that's so stupid. They don't even know that they're being fascist they just think they're a fair representative democracy and What's incredible is that is is that?

UKIP youth outreach activate that's literally run by ultimate Mesopotamian genius statue and Modern architecture of Phobes Sargon of Akkad That's their like youth outreach guy now like a guy with a gray beard Isn't he like isn't he like isn't he like 40 40 years old? Yeah, he's he's like a senior set a guy with it with a still that's young for UKIP Like most people are members of UKIP are technically dead So like someone someone said but like the reason why him and Paul Joseph Watson are heading UKIP's media strategy is

Because everyone their membership like don't know how to use computers Oh, that's my grandfather died in 2014 and he still gets post from UKIP But but they said that actually they saw Starship Troopers as a model for a representative democracy where Where everyone has to serve in order to buy into the state. So they are literally Saying is their model of an ideal society a Satire of fascism about people too dumb to realize their fascists Isn't this like I don't know. I don't know if this is like the correct way of saying it But isn't isn't this like movies like Fight Club or there's both the ones are like supposed to be satirical about something

And then they end up like they end up just getting amassing these like huge amounts of like male fandom Who just like take it very very seriously until the fill like all the kind of actual satire that was intended just becomes irrelevant Like the same with American Psycho as well, right? Yeah, it's like American Psycho is a film about a cool business guy That does cool business stuff and lives in a sweet apartment and gets laid all the time. It's like this podcast Yeah, if I one gets that this is an irony pro Tory podcast Fight Fight Club is just a is just like a film about a cool guy with sweet abs who wears a sweet leather jacket Like really like so possibly be No, what no one no one no one understands that trash feature is actually the activate podcast

Activate didn't go away. It's just adaptive Yeah All right, let's let's theme song it Oh Hello, what's up? What's up? We're back. We're back in the saddle. We're back for a remote episode this time coming to you Over the freakin airwaves. We're coming to one another over the airwaves coming to you also over the same airwaves But later. Hello, it's trash future TF the pee about how the F is T. I'm Riley. How are you doing? It's me motto Edwards. You can find me on Twitter at motto on the score Edwards

I'm in Edinburgh where it is cold and my name is Hussein. I am not actually too far from London I'm in Kent right but yeah because of our very good transportation system in which is a six pound one-way ticket to a six-pound one way a six-pound one-way tickets of a nearest train station, but more importantly I try to drive in this afternoon and There when I got to the train station They southeast and rail like shut down all the trains and they're basically offering rail replacement buses to like places even further back in Kent So you basically have to go back to go forward I am I brexit. Yeah, we live in society. This is this is a side that definitely definitely a society

But I just I didn't I didn't really fancy like having a scenic tour of Kent when there were more important Things to do such as listen to starship trooper fancasts Yeah, well, I think clearly what happened is warplanned purple has decided to disrupt the left's podcast supply line But also just like what a terrible like it genuinely sounds like a strategy in Age of Empires Like who came up with that name? Do you remember do you remember that like Twitter Fred from ages ago about Just a bunch of these dudes who were like imagining what a new civil war would look like in the US And they were like, oh, yeah, the sub the southerners will win because we have all the guns and Someone like made the point that like well in like all the kind of like liberal democratic states like that's where all the like

actual functional public transportation systems operate So in terms of like legit like in logistical terms like both states like we'll have an advantage And like your guns really don't mean it like won't be as effective as you think they will be Oh, no, they're gonna use them to kill one another before they kill a single one of anybody else Like I don't say they're a bunch of slobs Oh, no, totally. I mean, it's there's gonna be an enormous amount of score settling I suppose like if in the case I don't you guys have seen this right like a lot of the public agencies have been told by like various government bodies to

Prepare for like an insane Mad Max catastrophe in the event of Brexit Like there's gonna be a lot of score settling here as well. Yeah, fantastic warplanned purple is prepared for this What special online shock troops ready to tweet about how every film is actually about liberal democracy Have we considered that warplanned purple is actually just like an extreme Barney the dinosaur Fandon It's Barney militant I kind of a Barney the debt of the dinosaur genocide where he just murders everyone who's not Barney the dinosaur. I Cannot wait purple in some way. It's like him Milo from the tweenies Tinky-winky. Yeah, tinky-winky

Somebody else You guys know the story about purple a key. No. Oh my god. Okay, so purple a key is like this right real Like this is like a giant law behind purple a key Basically, he was this guy who had a face that like looked kind of like he was like He I don't know how to describe him other than that his skin like looked purple in like photos So he got the name purple a key and he gained notoriety because he used to go so always like big muscle muscle gyms And he would just like what he would ask people whether he could feel their muscles Not not in a gateway just like, you know, but like in an interested way. Let's be very clear not in a gateway

Yeah, I think he purpled up as a disguise So no one would know his secret shame. Yeah, that's that's that's that's that's so everyone would know He was a classical liberal who has hard opinions about the corn laws He didn't he doesn't he doesn't see race. No, I thought of one more person for the for the purple genocide team I grimace from the Ronald McDonnells universe Absolutely, I mean, that's that's what's excellent race It's like we this is just is genuinely like the Tory cabinet right now is like purple ackee grimace fucking

Barney the form of Boris I guess and Matt Hancock MP and Matt Hancock who is currently a stockpiling blood and semen in the case of like In the case of a hard Brexit slathering himself with beetroot juice and hoping not to get noticed Yo, shall we shall we I think that's that's pre-show chat formally ended Can we can we get a great as that ascent to formally end pre-show chat? Yeah, get into get into the the the main content of this meeting says this is my verbal signature The first letter of my mother's maiden name is Hang on actually also what I want to do before we go on friend of the show Hagelbond Trevor Strong been on the show we've been on his a great guy and what he's doing is

He is a go fund me for four colors red, which is a leftist critique a leftist comics and so on That are I think they're telling the history conjoined history of Judge Dredd and thatcherism Which looks really really cool. And so I urge everybody to go over to Indiegogo and Support Trev get in on the on the ground floor of these of this comic zine And and get into it. I will put the link in the in the description But yeah, I could encourage everyone to do that. I am the poll tax so I This is kind of a different a different sort of

Of show today because I there's something I've been thinking about for a while It's not really sort of connected to the news I guess because we saw that like Apple was valued at a trillion dollars recently the first company ever to be valued at a trillion dollars, right? Yeah, but I mean and we know it's because their main whole strategy is just sitting on like the world's largest pile of cash in Ireland Just with no way to profitably invest it just proving John Hobson's theory about fucking Oversaving and imperialism more or less correct. Like there's literally nothing they can do with it Which is pretty funny. I love the idea that Apple just has a huge warehouse full of cash And they're like what it there's no more room in the warehouse for all the cash. What do we do with it?

We don't know. Yeah, we can get rid of some of the cash to buy another warehouse, but then that'll only fill up with more cash It's like that scene in the Wolf of Wall Street where he has literally too much money So he straps it on to various blonde women. Mm-hmm Trapping on to nerds. So that's what my theory is like every blonde woman that you see is actually just paid by Apple to like hold their money So all all blonde women actually are so that that's that's what that's what's happened Is blonde women have been copyrighted by Apple because they saw Wolf of Wall Street Which is another movie that those guys like unironically about a cool guy who hangs out Tim Tim Cook keeping all that cash in his prison wallet. Yo, it's just it's just it's just a movie

It's just a cool guy movie about a guy doing business. Yeah It's a cool guy movie about a guy who's really good at business who makes best friends with Matthew McConaughey And then like just hangs out with his friends all the time until some fucking narks come and ruin his good time Doing seriously good Lamborghini drives and yachting trips Yeah, it's an unironically good movie about a cool dude. Like these are that's what I love about these guys before we go back into it These are really cool guy who likes to do funny voices on the phone These are all people like all the people who think this about these movies and you think that you know Starship Troopers is actually a Portrait of a good society all of these people if Jordan Belfort had a Kickstarter would don't would borrow money to do it

Borrow it from the Apple cash warehouse Like these are all people who would like who would borrow money to pay Jordan Belfort's go fund me But then also would like spend 3,000 pounds buying indulgences from the fake Pope that lives in the United States That is your soundcloud rapper Young fake I may have defrauded people, but I've never molested no kids Grills pop and raiment's dropping Shit the thing is like I was sort of I was looking at this

I've been thinking of this for a while because as of April I would notice that like the S&P 500 which one of the main stock indices of the United States By market capitalization It's got like 23 or so Trillium and three stocks Apple Amazon and alphabet Google's parent company make up a full 10% of that Like they make up a full 10% of the mainstream of the US economy those three companies Which is sounds regular Astonishing but then one of them is called alphabet, which is incredibly normal name for a company when you add Microsoft and Facebook to that That that gives us 15% of the S&P 500

that's Astonishing those five companies are 15% of the entire mainstream US economy Then taken in total the tech industry is 25% of the S&P that's like this is Certainly a bubble, right seems that wasn't there something that like Apple makes more money than like the combined GDP of all of Africa or something Yeah, that that I did see that recently as well, right? Like, you know, and I'm I'm a hypocrite I'm recording this on my MacBook. It's an old MacBook. Fuck you. I mean, I mean, they're good products I mean, I can't I can't sure but the fact is and the thing is my my thinking other tech companies

Which make bullshit. Well, that's still have loads of money. That's the thing I was I wasn't really I was actually kind of thinking about Apple and Microsoft less I mean Apple's mostly this valuable partly just because it sits on litter on the world's largest cash horde tax-free It does series of Irish warehouses and apparently strapped to a bunch of blonde women But oh for sure. It's been a long day garden. Did I pull cash warehouse? At some point they're just gonna have to hire someone to mine in their cash Well, I was doing some research for this episode. I stumbled on this quotation, right from this article I thought was really illuminating

It's from a CNBC piece from a few months ago entitled tech dominates the S&P 500 But that's not always a bad omen by Karen 500 is such a fucking sub Yeah, by Karen Firestone who is a former fund manager whose Harvard educational pedigree should warn anybody sensible off of that Institution, that's it. You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college That's the Harvard jingle now So She says last night I swiped myself out of the parking garage used ways to avoid the Fenway Park pregame crowd Remove the puppies electronic fence collar before we went for a walk and streamed a crazy violent Netflix show after dinner

Bonus points for whatever. We think that crazy violent Netflix show was and what it says about Karen It was cutting porn. Yeah, she just like she's just shocking her dog and watching and watching like snuff films on YouTube Wanking and shocking the dog to get herself on That's that's that's what these people are. They're like they're absolute just like Smiling sadists like these like she would definitely purge if the purge was real she would purge so hard I'm watching Netflix and pegging my dog while I electrocuted So she says well, I watched the episode. I guess the and Masturbated furiously while shocking my dog is silent or implied

I used both my Amazon Prime and PayPal accounts to make a couple of online purchases to which of these activities To buy some more dogs torture from the dark web To which of these activities does the word technology not apply now? I'm no digital geek, but I live my life the way everyone does surrounded by technology That's why I'm surprised and frustrated that so many smart people have been warning that technology sectors weight in the S&P is dangerously high Also Digital geek is just a geek because an analogue geek is a hipster That's true. Yeah, who in 2018 is like talking about being a digital geek because they like are watching Netflix number one

Good God call the geek squad. My dog torture equipment is malfunctioning I for one love to stream Netflix and Spotify via my tablet computer Absolutely, I'm fucking nerd Which makes me which makes me a tech geek and also like the hackers from the famous movie hackers. Yeah, I'm in This is this is definitely bored in a long leather trench coat The ultimate digital geek Karen Firestone definitely says I'm in every time she logs on to her Amazon Prime account I Correctly guessed my own password

You know what like, yeah, you know, so like I've got this weird setting on my computer Which means that every time I basically like shut down my browser I have to put in my passwords again and like be being an idiot like myself I always forget them so like it usually takes me 10 minutes to kind of go through these various channels to find my passwords And that makes me feel like a computer genius. So yeah, you know, you're I guess this is the same thing You're hacking the main frame of your own mind To get one password man. No, okay, so This is this is Karen Firestone's take which is basically because I a very wealthy Boston located fund manager

And base I'm using technology to like shock my dog get off and then you know buy some Charmin ultra quilted toilet tissue The SNP 500's insane over waiting to the technology sector is actually not a bubble Right like that's that's more or less what she is saying. Let's think about this, right? Like what are these companies actually do just the top five, you know, Apple Amazon alphabet Microsoft and Facebook? Like what like Facebook and Google are the ones that I particularly am interested in because how do they actually make their money? Well, they have advertising, right? Yeah, they're advertising They are I have I have a story about this whenever you want to Hop in okay, so

Welcome to my lows when I went to business school corner Because you know, I'm the only person on the left who went to business school I Was radicalized by business school because it was so bad Yeah, so one day In fact, it was our first lecture of one of these courses and like evidently the dude just on the first lecture term Could never be fucked to give the lecture so he got every year He would get like instead of doing his lecture. He would just get an external person from like a company to come in and give a talk about what they do and

And he did he wasn't even there like he wasn't even there like introducing the guy He just did not show up. He sent this guy from Google analytics in his space So Google if a people who don't know Google analytics is like the bit of Google that does all of the really fucking complicated marketing shit So like if you have a if you have like a website of any kind of whatever You can use Google analytics to basically like analyze all of the traffic that you get who it is what they're looking for and how to like target those People as customers for example, if you're selling a snuff film of your dog, right? Yeah, exactly You would target Karen firestone

Who is admittedly mostly turned on by snuff films of her own dog, but other people's dogs will do in a tight spot So anyway, they got this guy in from Google analytics, right? And it would be safe to say that this man fucking loved Google, right? Like he was like he was like a fucking it was like he was in a cult. He was basically going like Yeah, you know because like Google analytics you can use it to market anyone anything. It's incredible And he's like I've gotten so interested in marketing that I have found myself online Changing my own behaviors to make it easier for market marketers to target marketing to me Holy shit, right? So the amazing thing is that this guy is himself a

Microcosm of how fucked up this whole segment of the economy is because he is like deliberately being like he's like presenting his anus being like Fuck me marketing But the thing is that there's no point marketing to this man because the only thing he's interested in is marketing So all you could advertise to him would be the opportunity to buy advertising But that's really so much of it is what it is, right? Because like in the productive sense Marketing doesn't if you need something, you know, you need it and so you go and you get it, right? Like that's

ostensibly the way this shit works, but marketing is this podcast unless it's this podcast in which case you definitely don't need it But marketing all it does is create and fulfill needs, right? It doesn't make anything It's just these two giants of it cuz Facebook does the same thing. It's it's same business model Twitter is the same thing But we're Nazi themed Where all they do is they find ways to more and more finely tuned Marketing to a population, right? But hey people who bought 50 black shirts also bought 50 pairs of black trousers That's me. That's literally me, but if but in the sense that like if no one has anything and

If no one's making anything then really it's marketing is pointless busy work and But it's like more and more of our economy or the US economy and I guess that's the world economy is just focusing on pointless busy work It doesn't do anything for anybody. It doesn't fulfill a single need It fulfills the needs of some people to get really fucking rich Yes, I suppose so it fulfills the needs of Mark Zuckerberg to be able to like I don't know Go on a Robo tour of midwestern America to say he is an enthusiast for cat for a bovine cattle Has none of your human needs. No Mark Zuckerberg has not a single human need He is he's transcended them because of the power of marketing

His only need is to lie on a rock under a hot lamp every morning for several hours, right? But okay, but you say you do sort of see this as well, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm being quiet mainly because I'm I'm looking at Starship trooper Fat fat fan stuff on tumblr. Yeah, no, no, this so this yeah, like In many ways in many ways, this is like stating the obvious, right? When you when you go down to it The ultimate question being like what do all these kind of like social media companies actually do? Like what kind of wealth are they generating and it's and it's a weird thing to ask because I think so much of our like society over the past five years or so is pretty much been dominated by online, right? So if you look at like

You know, if you look if you look at like the fat one of the fastest growing job sectors is in like social media marketing and management and stuff PR agencies are all kind of like social media first, you know, and when you talk to them so I my job involves like talking to a lot of PR people and The way that like they usually think about things is always in terms of like what the teens these days called clout You know, it's not the idea of like, you know My client or like the celebrity that I represent can kind of increase your business and like very kind of real terms through this method It's like well, he's got miss my clients What's actually like a big reputation that number one? He shouldn't be paying for like staying your hotel room

And number two if he posted like one picture of this hotel on Instagram, you're gonna get loads of business as a result, right? There's no evidence to back this up There's nothing to kind of show that this is true But this is like something that has sort of been accepted in a lot of like PR circles And I think what it goes to show is just how much of this kind of like bullshit like, you know social media It call like social media driven economy has like taken over So now even though we kind of all know that like Twitter and Facebook and like Instagram and stuff Don't really offer anything and they're not definitely not creating wealth as you said like Netflix loses money every year

They're now thinking about like running kind of ads in the same way that TV does so basically they kind of say we're gonna enough people are buying the dog born Yeah, you know, they're basically going to like replicate what people do on TV, but put it on the internet And it just like I don't know you know so much and this is reminds me of like the HBO show Silicon Valley Right where a guy does made like a shit ton of money like he made billions of dollars Because he put he put music on the internet. That's like the big gag, right? Like yeah, it's really dumb thing But now he's kind of like a billionaire venture capitalist who spends like waste all his money on really stupid things

So that's like so that's my take on it by imagine I like it is it I you know the weird thing I think is just that everyone knows that this is happening, but yeah, we can't really figure out Whether like how it can be stopped or whether it'd be good that it should be stopped Well, it's the thing is how I think one of the main ways it could be stopped is just if people have more money because one of the reasons sort of advertising has gotten so pernicious Yeah tight and so micro targeted is that people have less money to spend and so the way to stop it It's just like if you give people more money It thought this level of advertising won't be necessary, right because people have less

But companies need them to keep spending and so this is just basically capitalism and yet another one of its death throws because Because that this is this is the core contradiction that sort of even Marx pointed out that the sort of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as Sort of wealth inequality increases, which it naturally does people have less and less and less money in order to maintain that sort of their wealth The capitalists need people to spend that money still and they dispense they need them to spend it on stuff that they don't even need And so then you get sort of social media micro targeting and sort of the whole business of data mining so that You can you can be induced to like go into debt to buy, you know a t-shirt that says oh homie on it with a picture of your favorite SoundCloud rapper, you know, it's that it's literally that's what is happening I guess they're doing something that's creating no value in order to just mine the last little droplets of blood from the actual working class

And I just say that it's very funny that the ice cream truck just like drove past while you Yeah, I gave it a kind of it gave it a certain pathos didn't it Talk about talk about fucking breaking the marketing paradigm the ice cream truck We're gonna destroying people with the ice cream song But then that's and but then that's just that's Facebook and Google on the other hand what What companies like Amazon and the gig economy providers, you know like like uber and delivery or whatever and all these other companies That are supposedly the rising stars. They're just squeezing blood out of workers the other way like they they haven't really invented much other than a way To circumvent workers rights and so where the where the social media giants are

Squeezing sort of the last of people's savings or getting them to go into debt Through just through targeted marketing The Amazon and the gig economy providers are just figured out ways to sort of transfer wealth In the form of just you know lost benefits lost hours zero hours contracts, etc From sort of the most precarious workers to people like Karen Firestone, you know, she's thinking like oh, yeah Well, um, I'm I'm using my Amazon. I'm everything I buy an Amazon is really cheap I they must be because of technology, but actually Karen Firestone is enjoying her, you know new dog shock collar with you know added shock butt plug

Because there is because there is someone in an Amazon warehouse whose rights have been eroded to the point that they're being paid like $10 a Day and like you're shitting themselves in fear because if they stop they'll be dropped into it from a trapdoor into like a fire pit Do you think like the dog has now gotten to a point where it has such Stockholm syndrome that it deliberately strays to the boundaries of the Property just to feel something Also what we fail to acknowledge is there's actually a third way of squeezing the blood out of the workers Which is being developed by friend of the show Peter Teal Very literal. Yeah, but it's all the same thing It's all completely the same thing where it's just it's not these people who have invented anything

But all they've done is taken advantage of a very lax regulatory environment to sort of assist and mask an incredible upward transfer of wealth That's literally all they've done so much of this is like service driven stuff too, right? So like we mentioned things like Uber and delivery and all that stuff We're like the kind of whether the differentiator or like the means of attaining competitive advantage is through like being quicker Right, so if you're like, you know, I I was listening to a genuine business podcast a couple days ago For research reasons because I want to set up. I want to set up a social media company No, um, so on this on this like on this very genuine business podcast. They were talking about Like, you know means of you know means of attaining competitive advantage and the idea that if you had a service where

Where like same-day delivery was guaranteed like it would blow Amazon out of the water, right? Because like ultimately like the kind of thing that gives value is Speed You know and the idea that we have an economy that's like being driven faster and faster because of that demand for speed You know We're kind of having the right conversations at the moment in terms of like what's the human cost of like that No, you know such so, you know such fast kind of delivery of services, especially when we're talking about like, you know Why CEOs are so?

You know so keen on like union busting and stuff like that But the fact that like it's basically just like the monetization of time I guess is like the point that I'm trying to make like like in an economy where everything can be monetized It's no longer the idea of like creating physical material things It's about like putting values on things that like are available It should be readily available to all of us and there's also like one reason why I'm very worried about like natural resources like water And like the number of like big businesses like startups and stuff I just like so fascinated with you know making businesses around water like that's gonna be you know

That's that's the natural trend. That's where we're gonna go to next But it ultimately kind of shows that these are CEOs that kind of want to put value on absolutely everything despite how Ghoulish and it that would be well guys if the cost of raw water goes up. I'm gonna go under I'm not gonna be able to afford anymore. I need to get my I need to get my exclusive and valuable dysentery That's the thing right is this is just more primitive accumulation, you know All the it's a which is when sort of someone with power or a capital or whatever Encloses something and says this is mine now, you know, so when so they enclose water. This is mine now I've accumulated it. I have property rights over it and I'm gonna restrict it from you

and and they they've done this with with people's time and people's sanity they've done this with people's data and But the king to remember is that not this is just they haven't produced anything They've just sat on stuff. They've just hoarded things to themselves and 25% of the US economy It's basically based on people just hoarding shit and engaging in sort of a transfer of wealth whether that's in like disc and whether that's in discounts on taxi rides and you know your electric dog torture device or Whether that is you know something or whether that's even like tax dodging and being the valuable company because you're sitting on fucking trillions of dollars It is just

Unproductive rent seeking activity, right? Like if you read Peter Fraser's for futures life after capitalism, which I strongly recommend Where you see we're actually kind of transitioning into the rentier economy where there is nothing being produced anymore We're like, you know, we actually most jobs have been automated away And now we're just kind of trying to figure out what to do with all this surplus And we're just using it to sort of protect the interests of a few wealthy people and then everyone else, you know It gets to fucking shit themselves to death in a warehouse to to make sure the rest of it goes smoothly But then there's that cash try don't shit yourself near my cash warehouse There's another there's another category of tough tech of tech company though

And this is where Netflix Tesla and the Juicero sit for the subsidy hogs Like like you said Hussain like Netflix makes a loss every fucking year But they keep getting invested in just because of basically marketing just because people are enthusiastic about this idea Even though it's not a viable business was also it's also rooted in fear as well Right, like, you know, Netflix has kind of got a huge market share when it comes to Television and media but like media is an industry that you know notoriously like it's very difficult to make money in it, right? You know Netflix was kind of seen as like, okay, this is the alternative to television. This is going to be

You know, this is going to be the future the future is going to be streaming and stuff like that And you know in Netflix caught on to that very very early on but the point the problem is is about the way that's like Like television is structured is one where like you're still dependent on lots of different parties when it comes to like creation direction Licensing copyright. So like, you know, it's inevitable that regardless of what platform Netflix moves on to and despite like regardless of how much it Like, you know, like how many people that it can reach with it some with it's still like quite low kind of subscription rate Like that's not going to cover all the costs if they want to like do their own original shows or they do their own original news programming and stuff like that You know, if they're always it's always always going to make a loss And that's one reason why they're kind of considering doing advertisements like in between the shows

As I think I mentioned as I think I mentioned before Yeah, you know, that's going to be the same as Spotify too Like I don't think Spotify has ever like has made like a lot of money since its inception Despite the fact that it is basically decimated like the entire music industry and like screwed up like everything if you're a If you're like if you're a band starting out and you can't get a record label because it's just not Financially feasible to give bands record labels anymore around record deals anymore It's what's what's happened is we are just we it's basically monetized precarity More or less. Yeah, right. It's that you you are a musician

And but we're going to take we have found a way using technology to take no risk on you To sort of not employ you in any way and only to pay you the fraction of how useful you are to us at any given second You know and and so that and but these guys the guys they get in vet They they they profit off of precarity, but they're not profitable anyway So they sort of suck up investment or someone like tesla All they like so much of their of their money just comes from the fact that governments around the world subsidize the purchase of electric cars Now whether or not you think that's a good thing and i'm sort of conflicted about it It means that sort of tesla spacex and the boring company are actually just very fancy ways to sort of

To sort of suck taxpayer money out of out of government in a way from say potentially useful programs Where you know, it could feed someone instead we have in cities like all you know I'm going to get my space program subsidized because they decided because bill clinton decided it wasn't useful funding it in the 1990s Or you know, i'm i'm going to build like a special underground train that goes directly from my private bathroom at chicago O'Hare to the fucking trump tower, you know, because you know must just misunderstood what the underground railroad was He thinks he's being really woke this is this is how we're going to end the races and please do not ask how my family made money Fuck that was scottish Scottish Elon Musk

It's going to be a deep frayed underground railroads while while we're on while we're on this subject Can we talk about azalea banks and the Definitely and the revels and the Elon Musk revelation It's totally it's yeah Yeah, just remember that this is like 25 of our economy is controlled by people like this Um, so I guess that must getting eaten So azalea banks apparently put out some text where she's been having with grimes I don't know what the relationship with them is

I assume that like after the whole like freeway incident that it was done But apparently not apparently like azalea banks are spilling the tea on her instagram page like regularly and one of the one of the One of the things that she posted out which has gone viral on twitter was the fact that elon musk might be faking his own accent So he's so he's so actually because like apparently he doesn't actually have like he doesn't have like a strong south african accent He's never had He's he's doing he's doing a partide face So the thing is that Elon musk doesn't have a south african accent And he has like a weird well, this is the thing apparently according to grimes anyway

He's put he's basically like he puts on a voice In public because he wants because he wants to sound mysterious Holy shit, that's the thing I sort of sound like I'm not really from anywhere Elon musk never actually stopped being the guy who visits the uk for like Two days over the course of a summer and then comes back with like a flat cap in a cane and says oh I just picked up a bit of an accent across the pond He is literally that guy

And the and the dominance of the technology sector and the fact that it was all inspired by this weird california individualism of the 1960s Means that like our futures are now in the hands of these guys Who've just basically invented ways to sort of monetize the precarity of the vast amount of workers to you know, um subsidize the sort of Boring life choices of of white suburban psychopaths exactly But I mean who else was going to sell mics and over to the fucking flamethrower So I think we can be we can be thankful to him for that. Well, it's like and that that's right like it's This is they're just they're basically they've figured out how to take money from investors or money from governments

Or deprive people of stuff and just transfer that value elsewhere. It's just it's they're no longer producing anything It's just a big game of three-card Monty and at the end of it. We all die in a fire of climate change Well, hang on a big game of three-card Monty was what he was trying to get his alia banks That's what Elon Musk would call it for sure We uh, we should probably we should probably uh transition to our our next segment where we um, we had we Milo and I spoke with uh Molly Smith uh in edinburgh About her book revolting prostitutes, which is going to be out and on verse so soon

don't um But before we go what I think uh, if you want a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel Do you know what the next biggest sector of the u.s economy is of the s and p 500 podcast? No, it's it's leftist irony podcasting It's um financial institutions like banks basically what like azalea banks or like actual banks Yeah, it's it's azalea banks's twitter beef with the on musk and grimes is the next 15 of the s and p 500 Wait, she changes her name to just banks to be like grimes like banks and grind think about this, right? 40 of the sort of modern mainstream economy is made up more or less of

of advertising Advertising or sort of shuffling wealth around and then just lending people money so that he can continue to keep this cycle going How if anyone can explain to me why this isn't a bubble? I will fucking blow you on command because we are fucked Roddy just wants to blow someone Yeah, if you don't just want to play someone just like just just be honest about it. Put it on your curious count I'm sure there's someone who'll say yes Don't know no more horny curious cat questions, please. Um, all right, so uh

guys, let's um Let's wish which hussein safe travels. Let's everyone wish hussein safe travels safe travels hussein Everyone are you saying that to your phones right now? I hope I hope that you find yourself the newest and best kind of masculinity on your Self-discovery trip in the land of the free and of the persons Yeah, of course the land of the free persons. Um, all right, uh, let's uh, Let's let's tattoo molly about sex work Hell yeah, all right later everybody

ciao Oh And so welcome back to the second half of this The show which I think I didn't introduce I'm done introducing it I didn't I'm not gonna do the intro anymore. That's as part of second second year It's a show about how Riley Like sort of does this as a job, but not enough to remember a whole phrase and say it right every time Yeah, exactly. I'm really really good at this Milo. Yeah

um, so uh, without any any further, um, uh delay adieu or other um Uh, well, this is just this is just adieu right now when I'm doing I'm doing delays. Yeah, um without any further ado With much further delay um, so Uh, we are also joined by the co-author of revolting prostitutes out on verse of books If you haven't pre-ordered it earlier, you should probably pre-order it now

There's no time to pause the recording now. You're just gonna have to multitask, okay For fuck's sake. This is a deal. This is a lot of adieu. Hi. Oh, yeah, I'm past the chips on twitter At past the chips on twitter. We forgot to do all of that. We're still really bad at this You can follow her on twitter, but don't pause the recording to do so What have you only got one ear and one arm? Fuck's sake people who have one ear and one arm are also welcome, but what do you say put it together? What are you a letterbox? What are you a round potato person?

Anyway, so You guys have gone ahead and written written a book. It's called revolting prostitutes Can you tell us a little bit about kind of what it's about and then we'll get into some of the content? Okay, so I guess it's um a kind of leftist take on sex worker rights Which posits that sex work is in fact bad But that criminalization makes that worse not better

I was thinking earlier when I was writing up the notes for the show I was thinking about like the split in the sex worker rights movement at least in the uk between like liberal and leftist strands and Me and Juno definitely I would say on in the in the leftist strands and Yeah, I don't know why I was thinking about that really But so could you go into what that split is? um So I guess there's people

Well, one of the things we try and do in the book is try to be sort of empathetic to why Various like various kinds of reasons why people have bad sex work politics So lots of non-sex working feminists um have kind of bad sex work politics Because right because they are correctly identifying the reality that the sex trade is like a site of like misogynist and capitalist and racist exploitation and harm and trauma And they think that that can be fixed with more policing like they're right about the first half They're just not right about the second half. They're gonna fix it like they fix drugs Right, right. Absolutely. And then conversely

some liberal feminists and also I would say some liberal sex workers and this is like I feel really empathetic to why this happens because it's like a defensive response to stigma If you're say a sex worker And you're used to being told that you're disgusting that you're abject that your you know Your body is constantly like lichens to a to a meat or to all like, you know Loads of horrible like misogynist language that I'm kind of hesitating to even use because it's too gross to speak Then it sort of makes sense to me that you would try and push back on that by being like actually no I love my job. I love sex. I love having sex for work work is good sex is good

I pay my taxes, um, you know, I'm a legitimate worker because I do that and because I love it Um, and that's totally understandable But Work is bad. Let's be real. Yeah. I mean everyone hates that job Yeah, that's long. I mean that's that's that's long been I mean it as much as sort of I have a sex work politics My politics has been sex great work All work is bad bad work. Yeah. Yeah I hate this job. I hate riley. I've never made enough money to pay taxes like

But it's and so that's the that's what I think is really interesting is it sort of the Is that there is there is sort of this kind of like Because there is there is sort of those three strands right there And this is something we've seen before when we've talked about this like phenomenon before this phenomenon this with this Topic before is there the three strands of like, um All sex work is bad the julie bindles and then there is the Actually, actually I'm like I have a great time Being being a sex worker and I love and I love all that and so on when it's like

You're still just glorifying a form of exploitation in the form of work rather than sex work uniquely And then there's this one which I really like just mostly because I'm very lazy, which is the the like Fuck work to uh position right right and like You know One of the reasons well one of the reasons why this kind of liberal sex worker rights position is bad Is it it's sort of nonsensical? It's like if we're saying that sex work is currently amazing then like what is the point of the sex worker rights movement? Like what are we asking for? What's the problem? And like clearly we can go home

Right and clearly the problem is that like, you know sex work is really explosive Like and that is driven in large part by criminalization although not exclusively um And you know and traumatic and like fucked up in a million different ways and like the point that sex worker rights movement should be to like Mitigate that in both like big and small ways um, and I guess what kinds of what kinds of things are the is the sex worker rights movement aimed at right now So in the uk especially the key demand is decriminalization. So like in the uk um working on the streets both selling sex and indicating

That you want to pay for sex are criminalized. So obviously that drives um people who sell sex on the street into the shadows it um signifies that they are you know outside the bounds of the rest of society and so perpetrators feel free to attack them um and indoors The only legal way to work is alone um and with you know like legal right to work in the country. So like being documented rather than undocumented So obviously it's much safer to work with a friend

um, but if you do that you are both potentially liable for brothel keeping And the police like actively Search out that kind of situation prosecute one or both of you for that And if you work for a manager, then you are safe from criminalization But your workplace is criminalized your manager is criminalized. So you have no labor rights. No recourse if the workplace is abusive or exploitative um You know no recourse if you're harmed by a client at work because to tell

Like for example to tell the police about that would involve making the workplace visible to the police and the police would then raid it And shut the whole place down So yeah, yes Not all the climbing walls and free snacks in the world could make that a particular like, you know, woke 90s silicon valley office Oh, shit, but what if you got free beanie hats with that? That'd be better Okay, so there's this so that's it says a very sort of Very sort of sort of straightforwardly articulated demand, but there is presumably

I'd say quite a quite a few obstacles in the way of that right in some ways the terrain of the debate feels weirdly mismatched because sex workers are Mostly trying to talk about stuff that gets read as very kind of Boring and and when we talk about like stuff that is about I don't know workplace safety That is kind of Heard as capitulating to sexual violence Um, you know, so on the one hand you have like the julie bendels of the world who are who are kind of posturing as very radical Because they're saying, you know, this is a disgusting terrible industry and we should just we should tear it all down

You know, like, you know, this idea that like radicalism means starting from the roots and like we just need to uproot the sex industry And just throw it away. It seems like it's the again It's one of these things where it's like julie bendel seems like She's a little bit right and she's like, yeah tear down the industry as part of tearing down all industries Right. Yeah. Well, because also like there's nothing radical about criminalizing sex That's pretty much what every country has done since the dawn of like countries existed Right. And there's nothing radical about giving the police and the border police more power Which is what you're talking about when you talk about uprooting a sex industry. I don't know. I can't see that going wrong

Radical thing to volunteer border flaws to solve my prostitution The only way we're going to solve the problems for the sex industry is we give the police rocket power grenades I had heard that. I had heard that. Right, but you can't you can't fix worker rights issues with carceral Non-solutions because that is what it's producing harm like in the same way that Undocumented migrants are subject to abusive or dangerous Workplaces precisely because of border policing precisely because that means that if they make themselves visible to state authorities in attempting to get redress For, you know workplace harm, they will be deported if they're lucky or criminalized for illegal working if they're less lucky

like that's That like that carceral framework is producing the very harm that it's I love supposedly supposed to be tackling The mark of chains inside these people's brains like let's keep women safe from sexual violence by putting them in prison You're blowing my mind Right. I mean in fairness in the uk in europe Most anti-prostitution feminists will say that they don't want women who sell sex to go to prison the Nordic model, right? They always the nor it's like these people have like a button that they can Which is

Complicated because under the Nordic model women who sell sex or people of all genders who sell sex But obviously primarily women can still be criminalized In lots of different ways most obviously for working together. What is the Nordic model? So, um, it's a supposedly feminist sex work law introduced in sweden in 1999 and it criminalizes the client and the manager if there was a manager And it ostensibly decriminalizes the worker. So if there's for example

A Soliciting law that criminalizes workers on the street like it is supposed to or that doesn't always in reality Remove that So the idea is that by targeting the client in particular you're reducing demands And that means that the amount of sex that is sold will go down and therefore your society will be better um criminalize all because we're just staff which is better and then no criminalize all managers, right all managers of everything But I mean you joke, but that would actually be bad I mean, I think we if we criminalize all managers as part of tearing down underestimated how wrong rada is prepared to be

I think criminalize all managers in every industry Like it also For example criminalizes the landlords of sex workers and like, you know, sometimes on left-wit, you're like, haha You know criminalize we should criminalize landlords Like the way that that works out in practice Is that when the police in sweden or norway suspect that someone is a sex worker They call up the landlords and they say, oh, um, we think your tenant so-and-so is a prostitute Would you like to evict her today or tomorrow?

Or would you like to be prosecuted for pimping because you're her landlords? And the tenant goes, oh, thanks for letting the heads up uh, because thanks to the heads up I will kick the tenant out right now Like that's what the effect of criminalizing landlords of sex workers is Ah, so good landlords are just the best delicious. So good. I love I love That's not even the landlord really at fault in that situation Yeah, is that that's who we need to make sure we're we that's where the solution is the cops The police in the police in norway even they had a specific, um

Uh operations, uh, that was aiming to disrupt the sex industry by evicting sex workers in this way And they called it operation homeless, which is like an incredibly. Yeah Yeah I know It's it's that it's that it's like that someone in in norway just was like looking at a chart and was like We have too many sex workers not enough homeless people right right We need to change the diet. We've solved the homeless problem too well in norway Also, like let's stop people selling sex by making the people who sell sex homeless a group of people who never sell sex

Right never in the past has any that ever happened Yeah, it's it is not a smart guy, but I'm starting to feel smart in comparison to these people like It's this the level of myopia is truly staggering Right, right and yet the Nordic model is presented as this like amazing like feminist utopia Um, precisely because of what we were talking about earlier like people Like, you know, people women come to feminism with like a bunch of hurt and trauma and that's like totally Legit and understandable and you know, I think me and Juno would say the same about our own experience of coming to feminism, but like people want to

like Put that onto a specific like relatively small group of people so that they can kind of Otherize it and push it away and and they are and again people are correct that like the figure of the client does represent you know, like loads of patriarchal and capitalist harm and So it sort of does make sense to put a lot of that hurt and trauma onto that person You know, he is the kind of physical embodiment of like huge inequalities of loads of different kinds But the policy of criminalizing him doesn't make stuff better for people who sell sex

It makes it way worse and people are just so caught up in this like Desire to punish the figure of the client who's come to stand for this kind of archetypal perpetrator of male violence it's it's almost seems like a weird kind of like Sort of Turning inward a kind of weird sort of self-flagellation To the way we must we must punish the client, but we sort of know we all are also the client Yeah, I think the like a lot of people in that kind of like what we might quote unquote call sort of white feminist circle

They kind of they get into they get into feminism for the ur men and they do not want to stay for the intersectionality And so therefore like it's much more appealing to me to be like, ah, it's men again Like clues. Oh, we found the culprit rather than being like, oh, no, it's actually like societal structures. Wait. I'm in those. No, not those Right, right. I think there's something really similar as well in terms of like How people often are angry at homeless people like there's an amazing quote that we've used in the book pretty annoying to be fair A city counsellor in oxford where he says something like, oh, um, you know, I see these homeless people in oxford I just want to go up to them and shake them and say pull yourself together. I have some more respects And it's like that doesn't make sense. And you like they're not they're not choosing to be homeless

You're fucking idiot. Like and you know, you see that again with like classic troll being homeless to own the lives You know with like finding homeless people and like anti homelessness spikes, etc Like I think that's like people are made really uncomfortable by like the kind of visible manifestation of like the inequalities that are produced by capitalism and instead of Like seeing that as like about a wider like social thing They become angry with the symptom And I think you have the like do you have a really similar dynamic with street based sex workers in particular who are like often Hassled by like random passers-by like people going past in cars will throw things at people they see working on the street

And and even like Nordic model campaigners will like cite like the supposed success of the law in terms of like the reduction in like Visible street based sex workers and they're not asking are those people happier? Are those people safer? Are those people no longer doing street based sex work because they're wealthier and more secure and less precarious They're just saying they're less visible and that's good Like and and like the sex industry in general and clients in particular definitely kind of Symbolize like like exactly what you're saying like come to symbolize this um

These like really profound scary inequalities that people don't want to deal with and so Like get other eyes and like pushed away so then if we sort of know the the Nordic model to be bad even though that's kind of What everyone seems what most of the sort of mainstream seems to be campaigning for is the woke position And we also sort of know that from the sort of worker side the provider side What we need is like decriminalization labor rights the ability to unionize You know the ability to sort of work in the open How do you get there? How do how do you where are we going legislatively in the uk?

And how do we get to where we need to be? I'm sort of less worried about Nordic model stuff although I'm quite worried about it But I think I am much more worried about cester foster style copycat laws because I think it taps in like what do you know Saying it feels sort of cleaner like more like everyone loves tech Stuff, I don't know. Yeah Like and it taps into this kind of Tory authoritarianism Like the suggestion that whatsapp should be forced to unencrypt itself

All of these powerful people including sarah champion the person with one of the more ironic names She she's utterly unencumbered by any kind of censorship ever because she's already powerful She can already basically say anything she wants This even goes back to like the people talking about you know how the banning of alex jones means that donald trump is censored He's the fucking president. He's not censored all of these people who say oh, I'm voicing controversial opinions I'm julie bindel. I have a guardian column. Nobody wants to hear what I have to say except this Subscribers to this giant syndicated platform Right like history is written by the champions

Right so all so the of course they want to censor because they know it will Or get the ability to censor because they know it will never affect them because they're always wielding the censorship hammer You know and so and so when they And so the it's it's even just like the the the people who put down anti homelessness spikes are people who own homes You know it's it is it is the it is the most sort of vile kind of punching down I've got the idea that they're like anti homelessness spikes rather than anti homeless spikes Don't they somehow stop the problem of homelessness? Like we put down these amazing spikes and it's just everyone's got houses now. Yeah, it's amazing

We've solved it. We put down these giant hollow spikes with doors and kitchens in that Like Wakewams Yeah, we made tepees look anyway So we might so we're saying we might we might see some kind of copycat cester fosta situation um as sort of You know more because more and and we're see even we're seeing this with porn, right? Like chorizo may wants to have some kind of age verification or or whatever because like all of the i'm convinced that

There are two kinds of tories There's the there's like the there's the the boris johnson and lord pickle's type who are just like lord Is he a lord now? He's a lord. Holy shit. That's good sort of you know constantly just like getting high and you know getting sucked off and like you know turning britain fascist but like Sort of set a self-dealing cynical way turning britain fascist by shagging your mom and convincing her to vote for it Then there are the ones like liam fox and chorizo may who are completely ideologically and hedonic To whom the idea of like just jacking off or having an orgasm or whatever is just gives them a little shudder Let's forget chorizo may goes on holidays in wales. She goes on walking holidays in wales

Talk about being an hedonic And they want to make everyone as an hedonic as they are Yeah, she wants to she wants to ban sex work But then she wants to make it so that everyone has to run through wheat fields to get to work Yeah, we can all share her joy They just like they just kind of like hate sex and anything that might be considered like a liberal attitude to sex And they kind of throw sex work in with their opinions about that as well Yeah, I mean little do they know that they have you know a number of great allies in the sex worker rights movement

All sex workers also hate sex Oh this again I don't want to bring my work home with me fucking terry from accounts Except in your case fucking terry from accounts Yeah That's what I call accounts receivable That's the nerdiest fucking joke Business jokes somehow nerdy and disgusting at the same time. That's me, baby

Like will keys Let's not be mean to the poor lad. He's just a sword enthusiast online He's my favorite sword enthusiast online No, no, this is just a guy who posts youtube videos of him testing out blades. This might be the guy I think you know, it's a different guy. Okay, this guy will Keith is because will Keith is not hateful Will he just love swords? Yeah, the guy who studied the blade. He is hateful. He's dark will key And then will Keith is light side because he's just a real sword enthusiast Happens to just be broader than most of his swords are long. He's just a very lovely treat boy. Some of them are broadswords. So, you know

Anyway, we're getting deeply off topic into into will Keith territory, which happens frequently. Yeah, um, But regardless, so I was we were asking before we got distracted by talking about will Keith We're just I was sort of trying to figure out like Sort of what's where's it going in the uk and we're saying it might be a copycat cester fosters situation Um, but what would be like the good outcome if we could snap our fingers other other of course then abolishing capitalism making work unnecessary Yes, other than that So in a shorter term before we do that, which is obviously just over the horizon. Yes. Yeah, october, uh, maybe late october Yeah

um Like full full decriminalization. So removing the laws that criminalize both workers and clients on the streets Removing the laws that criminalize workers when we work together indoors Subjecting our managers when we work for them to labor law Um, so in in new zealand where they have this uh, a sex worker rose recently took her manager brothel to an employment tribunal for sexual harassment and one and one a pretty large financial payout, but also obviously like one Amazing symbolic victory of being able to say like sex workers aren't

We're not supposed to be subject to sexual harassment at work just because we're selling sex like and the employment tribunal was like absolutely right Like fuck anyone who's sexually harassing at work. Like this is bullshit Plus, I mean, so there are some problems with the new zealand model like it doesn't cover undocumented migrants Or migrants in new zealand on I think a temporary work visa Um, so that obviously means that those people are still working in the shadows They're still unable to seek redress for abusive workplace conditions because they'll face deportation um, so I think if we got if we could snap our fingers and get decriminalization in the uk tomorrow, we would um

Abolish the border police as well. Yeah, I mean, I would love that. Yeah So I'm gonna say if if if anyone listening to this wants to sort of help with that finger snap Would you suggest they go to swarm? Yeah, so um, check out swarm uh follow us on twitter. We're at sex work hive. I think Also something I should really mention because I'm quite excited about it Even though I'm only kind of peripherally involved is this new effort to unionize sex workers starting with strippers Because their workplaces are legal so they can make their workplaces visible with picket lines, etc. That's made that bounce is legal. Right, right

So united voices of the world union who are like a small radical union in london who have a bunch of experience of organizing Kind of precarious hard to unionize workplaces So particularly like cleaners are like primarily like migrant workers and who are like complicatedly outsourced So it's like not even clear like who is responsible for their shit conditions So they've been unionizing amongst those workers and they've been Winning so that's amazing. Okay. Um

There was a previous attempt to unionize sex workers in the uk led by the gmb about 10 years ago now Which wasn't successful Basically because it wasn't a tool like the united voices of the world union. Obviously the gmb is a huge clunky bureaucracy That doesn't really do anything We need a small lean startup union That's willing to Do stuff And that's willing to support sex workers in like quite specific ways that's like the gmb

I remember being briefly a member of it and it was like you just got this card that said well done You're a union member and you can call our like legal helpline If you need help, but it was like really aimed at like someone who does not do sex work So like I don't think their legal helpline would have been useful at all um Yeah, and I mean it also fell apart for a bunch of other Dramatic reasons that I maybe won't go into because it's a bit too much like inside baseball Wait is baseball unionite?

But yeah, like so united voices of the world union looks really exciting and If any sex workers listening then you should go and join in solidarity with strippers and all the other workers in it And also like anyone listening should potentially go and donate to their strike funds Um, because hell yeah, yeah, well, we'll put that link in the episode description. Awesome Uh, and smash that link button smash that link button smash that The the the follow buttons for all of the people you've heard today Um, smash the follow buttons on swarms smash the follow Buttons on vremy cookware the finest the finest cookware money can buy in new york city

They don't ship here, but i'm just really enthusiastic about them Smash that follow button on alex jones's new bebo page Yeah, follow alex jones on follow alex jones on frenster He's on myspace pixel, you know, and hey commodify your descent with a shirt Uh from little comrade Uh, please do and uh, let's see people keep asking us when we're gonna get a patreon. We are gonna get a patreon soon Yes, believe me. We need money Um, there are bureaucratic problems that we're currently dealing with and as you know, we're all really dumb and bad at paperwork

So as a criminal as a criminalized worker, i'm not actually allowed to take any money from it Ah, yes, so you're gonna support the other three guys and not me Anyway, i just need your spiritual love support. I just i just need your attention. Um, like not for anything just in general It sustains me anyways Uh, so molly juno, thank you very much for coming on today and talking with us. It's been great About uh sex work and the abolition of work in general Oh