TRASHFUTURE - Attack of the 100-Foot Metaverse

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

We look at the shape of the (contracting) frontiers of politics and (expanding) frontiers cooked up in the minds of our most addled billionaires. Let Mark Zuckerberg make a skinwalker out of you, let Elon Musk put your brain into a tunnel, but try to work a little less and - as the British state always does - then "we got problems." If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *MILO ALERT* Milo has a bunch of live shows this month in both London and Prague. Check them out here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Midden's Mosaic. It is, yes, the four of us are palace guards in Constantinople. It's Milo, Alice, Hussain, and Riley, and we are standing around the portrayal of Mosaic where we're speculating what will the palace eunuchs do when confronted with Empress Theodosia's treachery. It is yon freewalk. I'm stealing Varangian guard, Valar. I'm like carving my name into the Isaphir. That's right.

It is here. It's real Byzantine hours over here at the podcast. We love Byzantine operations and disputes in the British government. No, it's great. It's where we, of course, make mosaics that are then distributed to capitolian farmers and minor Southern Italian city-state functionaries, where they can wonder, you know, is Empress Theodosia going to have to answer to the bureaucracy for her many crimes against the decency of the state?

Yeah, and was there a cake? Surely, surely they're going to get it this time after at long last. Quo hus quay tandem boris, abutere patientia nostra. No, no, it's it's just just kidding. It's not a mosaic and we're not in the Byzantine Empire. It's it's TF and it's a podcast. No, I look, what would it be the Byzantine version of a podcast? We would be like, yeah, traveling bars, traveling bars.

Yeah, OK, I mean, look, again, this is not my air expects expertise. I'm leaving it to you guys to decide what that is. I think we're we are creating mosaics and then having them sent round from Southern Italy to like Sir Cassie. So I would have thought the mosaics were kind of like the equivalent to T-shirts and like hoodies and stuff, but we put the design on the back of the mosaic tiles because we think it looks cooler than nobody can see in a thing. They just think it's a regular flaw.

Yeah, that's right. One day, all of the oral tradition of trash will be written down by one guy who will be falsely assumed to be. It's all remember you when the scuterios was a rough and tumble. Yeah, that's right. I'd like to see Andronica's come nanos wriggle his way out of this one. No, it's look I I'm I'm going to be honest with all of you. I would be very happy to never talk about Partygate again.

So we're basically not going to remember when the vigiles had a gladiator. I think I think we're perfectly survived the like fall of Constantinople and then also just become Ottoman bards. We're all just like gliding on Divans, wearing progressively larger turvans, like throwing heated combs at our various servants to make them like eating delights. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yelling at Greece. We change the name of the like the the the weekly bardic repartee

that we all do from like middens mosaic to like the most excellent and sublime you know, recitation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, illuminated recitation. That's what we're doing. You know, the reason I talk about this right is that I'm not going to keep following these revelations day by day. They're dumb and boring.

I've said boring and they're a symptom of something that's gone very badly wrong. I sort of got into this on Twitter a while back, but like Sue Gray being this sort of like a political punchline is deeply, deeply weird. She's not supposed you're not supposed to know who that lady is. No, but also she's the new Jackie Weaver. That's all so great. No, no, that's different. That's just someone who like no, that's just that's the thing.

That's what the jokes turned out to be. But it's like it's like Jackie Weaver, but it's Alan Dulles. It's like my yeah, my impression is that Sue Gray to like some lips is supposed to be like a Robert Muller figure, right? Or at least a hundred percent. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's like this moment and it's happened with Dominic Cummings thing. It kind of happened when Boris got covid.

A little bit of covid was our Robert Muller where like there was was investigating like, you know, even if you didn't really want to talk about it. And even though you sort of knew that like it wasn't going to lead into a material change, you're like, OK, it could be funny to see this man like cry and could like to see, you know, see him at the resign or whatever. Right. Like, but then it kind of gets ruined and it gets ruined by two things. First of all, it gets ruined by like YouTubers and like led by donkeys and stuff. Like they immediately make a cringe and therefore unappealing and just proof

that, OK, this isn't going to work, right? So wherever like led by donkeys go, you should just go the other way because it's not going to mark her down right now. We're saying led by donkeys. If this like goes one way, again, I'm not going to speculate how it goes. But if it does go the way that she like ends up, you know, writing some report or whatever led by donkeys is going to like take like millions of pounds from people to like make a big billboard outside outside of parliament

to say that she should be like made a day. I think it's the same instinct. You're right, as Robert Mueller, I think it's also the same instinct as to do a bit of continuity here. The right wing thing of, oh, what if we just got the army in? What if we what if we rode some cataphracts into the into the emperor's palace and they sorted it out? It's like it's it's so constrained.

It's like, OK, well, the thing is clearly broken. We need someone to fix it. How about anybody off this list of people who have spent their entire lives in this system making it work this way? Well, and also saying what was going to be your second thing? I cut you off. I mean, I don't I don't actually remember what the second one was. But off this off of my head, don't make me have a second thing.

Off of that emotional labor off the top of my head. It's also just like the kind of, you know, this just the time that it takes. And I think after a while, like it just sort of gets boring. I don't know. I could be wrong, right? Like I like this could this could like lead to like him kind of like the toppling and based on like other Tory revelations, including stuff that isn't related to Partygate, but like but has come out like quite recently. You know, you can definitely like see that as a possibility.

I think I think there's also just like the broad my kind of worry is that if the with the collapse of the Conservative Party happens over like these kind of scandals, the discourse that's going to be surrounded is not like they kind of got toppled by their own incompetence. But we were right that what we needed was sensible adults in the room. It was a victory for civility and following the rules. And you know, but Boris really is in trouble now because the Janissaries are investigating him.

Yeah, what do we go from Byzantine to Ottoman while recording this like flawlessly, flawlessly as they did in history? I mean, like, yeah, the thing I find about it is that like what exactly are we investigating here? Because the thing is, I almost want to say that doesn't matter. Yeah, what I think matters, right, is that the entire the like breaches of the rules and the crimes and stuff. Those are all like flagrant and obvious.

The like investigating them is in itself a farce. This is what I mean is in like no one actually disputes any of the facts. More or less, there's nothing to be investigated. All that's disputed is whether or not that constitutes a party or not, which is basically a philosophical inquiry. Yeah, it was always always yourself and the gentleman having a symposium. Would you agree? Crito, the presence of a cake does not necessitate the presence of a party.

I don't rightly know. Socrates. Yeah, we got we got Plato in to try and use this theory of the forms. But no, the reason I think like the content of this is something that is no longer even interesting or worth paying attention to is that the overall form of where the political life of a society is reduced to wild speculation as to how the how an individual functionary of that society is going to do its job, right,

where you have civil servants who become celebrities, whether they're Robert Mueller or whether it's this Sue Gray person, right, that something has gone badly wrong in your democracy. Like we're looking now at this point, you're looking at your democratic machine, right, and you're saying, I wonder, will will this will this civil servant sort of write everything by doing her job? Well, this is not her job, her job for the past fucking, you know, 50 years almost has been to be a fixer and a bag woman

and to like cover up this kind of shit. Now she's in this position where not only is she like sort of like has the power to possibly topple the government, but but now she's a household name off of it. Well, it's it's I think when when your politics, when your politicians and more importantly, your functionaries become celebrities, it's because there is a broad based and almost immovable sense that things are badly, badly going wrong and there's a desperation

for someone to come and save you. But what's happening is that actually what you're looking at is not a functionary doing their job. You're not looking at the investigation of a party. What you're looking at is the slow disintegration of a political system as a going concern turned into a spectacle. Well, if that is what is happening, well, if there was a cake, then it would certainly have been a party.

It cannot be otherwise. Sue Grey Ocracies and she's like, I have him now. Yeah. Sue Grey gesturing to a young boy playing the nose flute in the corner. But you boy, what say you to a cake? But it is it's what that's what I honestly think that is what we're looking at. It is the the the collapse of the state is sort of, I think, I don't know. We're looking at a Byzantine, Ottoman,

Sue Grey talking to a slave boy playing a nose flute. Absolutely. Pretty obvious. Straight forward. Even if it does topple the government, like to go back. Yeah, who cares? Because to go back to the classical analogy, then we're just in a kind of like year of the four emperors scenario.

But there are like a bunch of libs who believe that will be a victory for them at Hancock. He's been strangled in the bath. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm sick of Galbra. I want off like it's just like what nothing is going to change. They're just going to change. It's more annoying than that. It's going to be the same.

More annoying than that because we get the retrospective angle, which is as soon as author has been deposed. People start going, oh, you remember Arthur, he was kind of a girl boss. I was the most good transition. Have saved her from being a Gal boss. Oh, perfect. Thank you, Milo. Yeah, but it's it is because the problem with yeah, with the

year of the four emperors, right? This is not like a symptom of there being bad emperors. It's assist is what you're looking at is like a weakened and hollowed out society that's basically just ruled by whoever can grab the most military power. What you're looking at is it's it's a symptom of institutional rot. It's and I think, you know, it's what sort of Tory. Yeah, the Tory years setting you up for a beautiful circuit here.

But what if we monetize the rods? But what are you saying? There's some kind of Vitellius waiting in the way. Matt Hancock's back in front line politics. Well, like Mac back, because he's back. That's absolutely what I would call him in this scenario. Thank you. Yeah, he he's back.

He's making high profile speeches and you'll never guess what his most recent high profile speech was about. Hey, this is about how jacked is now. It's about how the UK needs to be the world's centre for fintech and crypto price. I was right. I was right. Apes. That's right. We need what this country needs is a special jubilee ape.

To it's true, we need to make Her Majesty the Queen an NFT. And also a smoking weed. If you want, we have we have aped in along with Gwyneth Paltrow. If you want an ape, you should be able to have an ape as a treat in moderation. Absolutely. Yes. Matt Hancock returned to frontline politics, making a speech today about how one of the reasons that we need to be the centre of cryptocurrency is because these things, I'm not kidding, increase transparency and decrease fraud.

Didn't we just didn't the government experience right off literal billions in covid loan fraud and didn't didn't didn't a sort of like relatively obscure minister resign in protest over this. Look, look, maybe. But what if there was like you could get an ape in there? What if you aped this particular thing? And then on the con got covid as as like a covid recovery thing. You get a government rebate for an ape.

You get it. No, you get a government ape. Yeah. Everyone get no. Everyone gets to like have like it. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone gets to have like the point of view profile picture. Yeah. Whenever you want to use it for looking at showing others going on late night talk shows, you need someone to tear something to shreds. Use that. No, no, no, no, no, no.

They are talking about a real ape. This is in this is a picture of an ape that you know, I see. I see. You actually own the right to either. It's technically what you own is like a distributed receipt for that ape. It's it's the Brit Apia Club. Right. Yeah. And it's going to be it's going to be just absolute. It's going to be on the Royal Yacht.

Probably. I keep saying it's going to be. It's going to be absolute dog shit, indistinguishable from the normal ones. We should replace the queen with an NFT. Yeah, let's get. No, with an ape. Yeah, with an ape. Yeah, we can replace the queen ape. You can get like a Dunstan checks in situation, but like it's the queen and she's an ape. Her Majesty, the ape.

Absolutely. Perfect. But what I think is very funny right about I mean, look, crypto is it's much more than apes. It's also different Ponzi schemes. It's also a lazy. Yeah, there's also a lazy lion. Yeah, you thought this was one scam. Oh, no, it's hundreds.

Because I'm just playing very funny, right? Is that on the very same day that that Hancock makes this speech, like two different gigantic rug pulls happen worth like millions and millions and millions. And Gertis is rubbing his hands. Meanwhile, in Beirut. Yeah. Well, this is a cat. It was an illusion. Meanwhile, in Beirut, Saskatchewan.

Yeah, that's right. So like there was a there was a blockchain called Time Slash Wonderland. The blockchain was Wonderland. The token was Time that was run by a guy called Sifu, whose real name was Michael Patron, whose real name was something else. Oh, it's Lionel Hutz. Yeah, AKA Miguel. That's kind of he was this is like cryptocurrency Lionel Hutz, right?

And this crypto Lionel Hutz ran an exchange in Canada called Quadriga, which again, like was a fake exchange that just took like huge amounts of money from people. We should be getting into fraud, man. We're in the wrong business. It's a growth industry, apparently. And you could just get away with it. You just do it and then you took a load of money off idiots. So no one cares.

And then they're like, OK, you're rich now. You beat the game. It's a knifey spoonie. Again, like, are you worked out how to be rich? OK, you're one of us now. So you're a huge from the law. And then Matt Hancock stands up in the House of Commons and goes, listen, there is no scam too dumb that I will not fall for. I want Britain to be a repository of like

of greatness in the wallet inspection industry. So I'll give you an example, right? Of the kind of thing that Matt Hancock wants to come into the country. This is the Time Slash Wonderland use case. Don't worry if you don't get it, because remember, it all turned out to be a scam. Dollar peg stable coins have become an essential part of the crypt of crypto due to their lack of volatility as compared to other tokens. So far, that's something we've talked about a lot.

Users are comfortable with transacting with stable coins, knowing they will hold the same amount of purchasing power today versus tomorrow. Do you know where they're going with this? Fuck, no, they're being inflation bugs. They say it's false. The dollar is controlled by the US government and the Federal Reserve, meaning a depreciation of the dollar is a depreciation of those stable coins, i.e. your cryptocurrency is not going to be like your fantasy retreat.

Talking really fast. Well, asking if I felt like lend him my watch. I that's right. I love the way they state things that are obvious. Like, oh, so one stable coin is one US dollar. And you know what that means? That means if the US dollar goes down in value, the stable coin goes, yeah, I'm not an idiot.

Also, like all of these people who are like, there's been a million percent, billion trillion percent inflation since like we invented money. It's like all that means is that you think that a time traveler from the 1910s ought to be able to like buy a meal with the change they have in their pocket. That's all that that means. Yeah, it doesn't, right? It doesn't, because all of these things, they, they, like the a lot of these things tend to rise roughly speaking in tandem with one another,

which means like the problem isn't that like is that wages are low because of inflation. They're low because of all of the factors that we talk about. But people like this, like I like it when the number is small. Yeah, number number small number go down. And so basically they were like, so we're going to have this non pegged algorithmic stable coin called time and what's going to be algorithmic. And it's not pegged to anything, but it's also stable.

So when the stable coin is non pegged. Yeah, it can't be inflation in anything else other than like fiat currents. So the guy behind this, right, ends up taking again, like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people are like, yeah, this is why there's 169 million. This is why there's no inflation in a stable coin is because they it immediately is revealed to be a scam before any of the structural things would kick in. Yeah. And the funny thing, of course, is that like, again, this thing is now completely worthless, you know, was revealed to be a scam.

And they were like, and the people who are like, look, we knew we were getting involved with this guy, but we believe everyone, you shouldn't judge people on their past. Everyone deserves second chances. That's right. That's right. That is very true. Which is a Matt Hancockian thing to think. Oh, so Hancock deserves the second chance. Absolutely. You know. Absolutely. I think I, you know, I'd like to welcome him back with some kind of party.

Perhaps we could get him like a cake. We could get him a Colin. Oh, how happy would Matt Hancock be with a Colin the Caterfilla cake? I mean, I think he'd be delighted. I think he'd be momentarily confused. Matt Hancock shirtless emerging from the serpentine, slicing himself off a hunk of Colin. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. Great.

Ready to return to frontline politics now that everyone else has broken the COVID rules worse than him. I'm so happy for Matt, you know, he got out of the high pressure ministerial job. He's run off with his love interest. No, I think he's a bachelor. I mean, he is looking jacks and the thing and the thing that people refuse to admit is that he's looking good. I saw that video of him climbing out of the lake and I was like, damn Matt Hancock kind of nice.

He's like, yeah. So he's like a sink. So he's like a single bachelor with loads of money. This is now the find Matt Hancock again. And he's like, yeah. And he's, and he's now just like pivoting fully into tech. Like what he wants is a big TD tech golf GF and we want to find it for him. We are going to find it for him. We're going to find him a gun girl.

We're going to find him an aide. If anyone was going to marry an NFT, it would be him. But somehow lose everything. You think of like NFTs themed around different supermarkets. Well, you know, you know, you can get those NFT girlfriends now, right? Now you've been always been able to get those. You've been able to get those the whole time. There's going to be a Boris Johnson party.

NFT isn't it? No, fuck off. No, led by Donkeys is going to try to mint an NFT and they're going to end up getting all of the money they get donated stolen. I'm sorry. I was holding the laze. I'm sorry. Well, I didn't mean to. Anyway, so that's that's that's that's that's that's the British stuff done.

But I'm going to put the British stuff over to one side, back in its little box. And time to put away childish things. Absolutely. And I think that's that's the last word I think I really want to talk about. Let's go talk about some normal stuff. Yeah. Unless something really fun or interesting happens in the ongoing like Tory party, civil war, press, including the press,

like unless like Liz trust comes at Boris over the dispatch box or the knife. Like, yeah, that's fun. Otherwise, whatever, you know, it'll collapse the government or it won't. It'll lead to like a long structural change in the Tory party or it won't. I'm just here playing with my fucking mosaic set. Man, yeah, don't talk to me. I think the conclusion, the conclusion that I feel good coming to around the whole thing and ready to kind of put the saga away now is that when sort of functionaries of the state

become celebrities, things have gone badly wrong. So I want to talk a little bit about the frontier. The frontiers that are being invented by, of course, our our various gods and masters. As we know, capsule needs a frontier to exploit like more than its core. And so, of course, as we know, with no frontier left to go to sitting in the imperial core, like glad no one's going to imply any imperial violence to me. Safe, safe from that. Yeah. Oh, that's the one good thing about being in the core, baby.

No matter what happens, the violence never comes here. That's right. So is that our, I don't want to focus a little bit on Zuckerberg and Musk, their journeys into conceptual frontiers. Zuckerberg, of course, to the ongoing, you can see the sort of the structure of this, of his dream of this thing called the metaverse, whatever it may be, emerging in front of your eyes of the mind, but you could also talk about Musk, where he's has it. He has a new, he wants to create a new technological frontier, which is, of course,

brain-computer interaction through Neuralink. There have been developments in both, and I think there are interesting things to capture about both of them. Join me in the brain. So, I want to talk first about Neuralink, because I have less on that. We can combine the two, because eventually you'll be able to log on to the metaverse with your Neuralink. You'll be able to be on the computer in your computer.

Yeah, can't wait. Levels of being on the computer await us that are hitherto unprecedented. You think you're on the computer a lot now? No, you're going to be on the computer in ways you can't even imagine. I think Mark Zuckerberg wants the metaverse, because he just wants to interact with people in an environment where they're all moving as jankily and clipping through the environment as he does in real life. So, basically, Elon Musk's Neuralink company has hired a clinical trial director,

which means they're ready to start human trials. Again, every time Tesla announces something or Elon Musk's connected company's announced something, they're like, yeah, it's going to be here in 10 minutes. Then it's just like a guy in a suit, and they have no intention of ever making the real thing. Yeah. And so, given the safety record of other Elon Musk projects, the official trash suture legal medical advice is volunteer for that trial. Oh, yeah, just completely safe.

Like to them and get more than one put in. Yeah, that's right. Get one put in your dick as well, just in case. Take all of this with a grain of salt that he predicted that he would already have these inhuman skulls widespread adopted by like 2020, right? He predicted that. I don't like thinking about Elon Musk in reference to skulls, or my skull. Elon Musk is something of a world leader, so I think you could think of him as a throne of

skulls, brass, big axe. He's the most coronate of the billionaire. Sure. Yeah, so he was a higher clinical trial director for Neuralink. He says, as the clinical trial director, you'll work closely with some of the most innovative doctors and top engineers, as well as working with Neuralink's first clinical trial participants. You will lead and help build the team responsible for Neuralink's clinic like

research activities, developing the regulatory interactions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You'll be furnished with a pool of roots upon whom to conduct experiments. Just by the way, not only does I have all of Elon Musk's brilliant tunnels under Las Vegas now just filled up with cars that explode if you look at them, his car, a lot of his cars explode if you look at them weird. Yeah, don't look at them. It's a biblical parable. Also, yeah, it's a biblically accurate Tesla.

And also, additionally, that fully self-driving tends to kill people. Because it hungers the blood, which is, you know, just in case. Yeah, that's why he's a that's why he's a coronate. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We've managed to build a racist Tesla. They didn't manage to build it. They built it already.

It was already built. It's very, it's very smart. It's able to do racism. This is a level of advancement we didn't expect from cars. We thought we were going to have to teach them racism over many years. Finally made a car that has become British. Yeah, but also, also on top of that, right? Just a few days ago, there was a revelation that like a popular Tesla,

third party extension, which like, so you can like, you know, track your. Why are the Tesla mods like again? Yeah. Well, hang on. What happened was none of the default admin passwords were changed from admin. And so one security researcher was just able to take control of like 25 Tesla's at random in California. And so this is the guy who's like, I want to put a chip in your brain.

Also, the password is password. Yeah. I got the fucking Neuralink installed and now a Macedonian teenager has control of my right arm. It's like, it's kind of like that movie, that really bad movie, Gamer. But if any of you remember that, do you remember the movie Gamer with Gerald Butler? I remember. Well, he has control. Yeah, where they get controlled by teenagers.

And I think all of the, all of the kind of real life players are prisoners, right? It's like a similar premise. It's sort of in reverse, right? Because like instead of a Macedonian teenager being able to make Gerald Butler like say the n-word or whatever, instead it's just, you know, you haven't done anything wrong or been accused of doing anything wrong. You're not a prisoner. If anything, you have to pay for the privilege of getting a Macedonian teenager to make you

say the n-word. On the other hand, you do now have a bulletproof excuse for being racist. Yeah. I was like, yeah, that's, that's, that's. You can drop any slur you want at any time and all you have to do is turn your head slightly and tap the Neuralink a couple of times and go like, ah, they fucking got me again, man. You can wear one of those cars. Not believable.

Not believable. Macedonian teens would only have you saying terrible things about Greeks. Yeah. So I'd be indistinguishable from the way I already am. You can wear one of those like cars on the bus. So like when you kind of just like. I'm a special lanyard. Yeah.

Like when you kind of go off, yeah, on a genocide or to raid against Serbians. I'm exempt from the slurs like a TFL badge. It's, just think about how badly Tesla's fuck up constantly, right? How like, how janky and shitty this technology actually is. And I don't know, is this what you want in your, in your brain? Because it's like, it's, it's the flying cars thing about technology or it's like, yeah, well, technology means more faster. Yeah.

I mean, the thing is like, it's, it's always going to be possible to be like, this is insanely dangerous because that's all human trials. That's why you do the trials, right? But like. Well, this is dangerous at it. So this is like, what if Merck like did all of their shit in a bathtub? Yeah, that's exactly my point. It's like, okay, fine.

Doing human trials, that's, that's important. And that's worthwhile. Doing human trials about stuff you don't know anything about. That's also fine because that's the point of doing them. If you then agree to do the trial and you walk in, and it's a South African man with a bathtub full of ice, then I think you're entitled to go. I've been hard to do some work.

Like, hey, this guy needs some tests. Some clinical directed jerk vendor clerk. He's technically a doctor now. Remember, right? Is that the fig leaf explanation for the Neuralink thing has always been, it's going to be used to help people with disabilities. So what, what Elon Musk is, as said though, right, is that this is also because general AI is going to outpace humanity so much

that we are going to need to stay relevant in the workplace by interacting with the computer without being mediated by our stupid hands. Yeah, you need to, you need to be on the computer more in order to achieve productivity. Yeah. And so it's a vision of the future that's about, well, we go on the computer a lot now. What if we could go on the computer more?

And as you say, Alice, in ways you'd never possibly imagine. There's another thing going on here, which is like, the reasons why things are like rotting and things are falling apart is because like, you know, everything is terrible and ways that we've explored. And the sort of the thinking here that Neuralink or like the metaverse or any other way of being on the computer will fix this is sort of like going, okay, well, if it takes like one person 10 minutes to dig a hole, then if I get like, you know, 600 people, it'll be done in a second.

Yeah, that's right. And, you know, on top of all of that, you know, it's... Do not check my math on that. I'm not confident that I know how many seconds are in 10 minutes. You're not asking so whether or not the hole should be dug. You're not being liberated from digging holes. And also it's just... No, you'll make it faster, which is its own thing

is that like the only thing that's available to you is like doing like French futurist maximalism where like the only permissible question and answer is the word faster. But it's also like, that just doesn't work that way. There's diminishing returns. There's only so much you can be on the computer. I'm on the computer as much as I can be. I'm jacked in to the fucking cyber zone. Well, also there's another thing on top of this, right?

Which is the paradigms don't extend infinitely. You can't replace... You can't because keep making faster, more automatic cars because eventually you run up against like the fact that they're going to be either crashing to each other so often with horrible casualties, like blowing buildings down or whatever. Or alternatively, you're going to have to make them so complicated that you have... You've hit this point of diminishing marginal returns. This is the thing, right?

You have to start questioning. Why do we have, for example, cars? Why do we have humans interacting with computers in this way? To process data? Well, the new flash. Because this is the big structural issue with capital that we're trying to resolve the contradiction of. Is this sort of like this debate that on the one hand, right, you can't have an infinite frontier. At some point, you have to have some sort of material cost that eventually the frontier is

going to run out. You can't just move on to strip mine the next thing because you're going to run out of that versus no, we won't. It turns out that just saying, no, we won't has worked out remarkably well. Yeah, we have to keep making a car that we can keep selling for more and this progress has to keep going. Faster, faster, faster, faster. And so even that the frontier isn't physical or somewhere in cyberspace like the with meta, the frontier is a fake frontier, obviously.

It's not a real thing. But the frontier is just conceptually more and faster, this constant movement. And it's the movement that's kind of killing everybody. I want to talk a little bit about the patents that meta has recently filed in terms of answering the question, how are we going to be profitable when people are no longer on Facebook? They're instead on a VR headset, dancing around their living rooms. The new ways to make you be on the computer. And the sort of various peripherals that you're going to use on the metaverse,

like your weighted vest, your chastity cage, your laser whip, cock ring. Wait, hang on, laser whip is not a real one. Shotcaller. Is laser whip a real one or is that one you've made up? You're going to use the laser whip to whip through. It's definitely not going to be like you used against you in order to make you work in the days of mines. Understood. I don't know if you've all seen that new ad for the horizon worlds that's gone around,

where it's like the lady in her pajamas in her flat, just like there dancing around with her VR controller. While her husband behind her is doing dishes, she is hanging out in the metaverse and just flirting with guides. That's feminism. That's right. And say, in the metaverse, you can drink black coffee through a crazy straw, and then it cuts to a woman wearing the metaverse headset in real life,

drinking black coffee through a crazy straw in real life. It's basically, they have somehow weedened more than anyone could have thought possible. But in her VR world, she's sucking off a guy. Yeah, thank goodness for that. And you too could do that. The proper technique, you're sucking off a guy. You're drinking a lot of coffee through a really long, bendy straw. Yeah, it is the soyest ad for dystopia.

I think I have ever seen. It goes to, I mean... That would be funny if in the real life, she was just drinking the coffee through a regular straw, and the utility of the metaverse was that it made her believe the straw was crazy. Any straw can be crazy in the metaverse. Yeah, like I'm sucking off a guy in real life, but then in the metaverse is dicks all fucked up. It's like all kinds of weird spirals and stuff. Finally.

And I'm like, oh, wow. You think that's coffee you're drinking? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, in the metaverse, my staircase in my house is one step shorter. So every time I go down there, I'm like, wow. No, but I mean, again, it's like... Really adds excitement. It's like second...

We've said this before, right? It's a combination of like Second Life and... PlayStation Home. And PlayStation Home and Project Milo. And all these things, right? It is, there is nothing there. Everything about it, every release of it is incredibly buggy and shitty. And again, Facebook is trying to push the bounds of an AI-enabled supercomputer

to try and create the metaverse. This thing that nobody fucking wants... Looks like shit, too. Yeah, looks like shit is shit. No one really can explain what it is. What it is, is it's another frontier, right? But the frontier isn't the actual digital space. The frontier isn't you.

It's the amount of information that Facebook is then able to capture about you. I don't like how philosophical this is getting. I would have preferred that we had dumber capitalists, so that when they ran out of frontiers, the thing that they decided to do was, much like NFTs are, simply lie about there being a frontier and go like... No, you can't see it. It's in the back.

This is why I was less about this sort of moronic ad. We've discovered Africa, too. Don't ask me any questions about it. Less than the sort of moronic sort of terrible ad that sort of says, you, too, can be like the cool HR person in the metaverse. I want to look at the patents that metafile. Yes, the laser weapon, the cock rings, and so forth. So essentially, they've looked at systems for tracking

microfacial expressions through a headset that will then adapt media content based on those responses. So if you look at a McDonald's and frown, they'll show you a Burger King. And if you frown again, they'll keep showing you different fast casual restaurants until you smell. If you keep frowning, it will decimate the little Suicide Squad bomb in the back of your head.

This is very bad for us because I imagine that everyone listening to trash future is frowning constantly. There's also a wearable magnet. This is it from the FT, by the way. There's a wearable magnetic sensor system that's to be placed around the torso for, quote, body pose tracking, which again... Tells you if you're jacked. Yeah, absolutely.

But the patent includes sketches of a user wearing the device but appearing in virtual reality as a soldier complete with a sword and armor. But again, they can track if you're leaning into something, what your movements are. I'm always leaning into something. Cheryl Sandberg's working on this project. But, right, they also say another patent proposes a, quote, avatar personalization engine that can create three-dimensional avatars

based on photos, including using tools called a, I'm not kidding here, skin replicator. This is fucking Warhammer 40,000. I mean... Well, no, what this actually is is ripping off the, like, your face in the game thing that, like, EA has been trying to put in every sports game for the last 20 years. Yeah, like, you could be a running back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Finally. You could post a, like, a JPEG of your face from your, like, shitty webcam. It should be your body in the game. Wow, that's fair. Like, you should be able to be, like, a statted up, like, linebacker, but with, like, weighing, like, 150 pounds somehow, just being, like, really thin.

Well, so this is quoted in the FT. Meta, this is, they were talking to an academic about this. Meta aims to be able to simulate you down to every skin pore, every strand of hair, and every micromovie. Please don't do that to me. The objective is to create 3D replicas of people, places, and things so hyper-realistic and tactile that they're indistinguishable from what's real,

and then to intermediate any range of services between you and them. Oh, God, I gotta weigh in the mess of us already. They're undertaking a global human cloning program, but for the purposes of targeted advertising. This is cool. The dumbest possible way of doing the matrix. It's in order to sell you, to sell you what? Like, fucking McDonald's.

Sex dildos. Sex dildos. Yeah, look, well, because, like, that's the reason that, like, I mean, the other reason that sort of everything gets dumped into either advertising or war is that that's where you put overproduction, where you can't, like, sell anything domestically. Advertising is there to induce demand, and war is there to suck up excess.

Yeah, and then sooner or later, you'll be able to, like, take control of soldiers from within the mess of us and make them say the n-word at the run. Why am I getting all these targeted ads for javelin missiles? It's, um... Oh, sorry, I was still logged into the thing, so I... It appears to be an old Soviet Polaris missile. Well, this is the idea of trying to make an advertisement that's so perfect

that you can induce any demand in anyone is basically, like, I don't see how you get... You can move to another level of sort of fixing, say, what you might call some inherent contradictions that are present in a certain economic system, right? Smash cut to Riley in 10 years, in the metaverse being shown a 3D rendering, and it's like, we found a new Niagara Scarface.

Just extend all the way across, yeah. Yeah, girl, I'm sure there's, like, some unique microclimates in the metaverse somewhere. So in the metaverse, every microclimate is a unique microclimate. That's right, that's correct. Another patent explores how third parties could sponsor an object in a virtual store that mirrors the layout of a retail store. Sponks are an object.

You could go to the mall and get advertised to by Claire there. This display rack of crisps barely has enough to afford to live, but for just two pounds a month. Yeah, you could go to the mall. There's a kiosk there, except you're in your house still, and you're wearing like a headset, and you're going to the mall, and maybe you're wearing... And the dream, of course, of these people is always to merge

Web 3 in the metaverse, right? That you can wear the NFT of your sunglasses, all that shit. Zoomers can finally hang out the 90s mall in the metaverse. That's right, except they're all seeing a slightly different ball that's designed to induce as much consumption as possible in them, which is great. I can't wait to do all of these things that are... It's like DMT, kind of everyone sort of sees their own thing, you know?

It's like, it's hype to DMT, but the effects are more like Datura. Yeah, one person is like, oh, I saw a lot of ads for Pandora bracelets or whatever, and the other one's like, oh, I was mostly getting fucked by an alligator that was like 100 feet high. All right, all right, children. So there's all of this discussion, right, of how to fix Downing Street, how to fix the culture of non-accountability, whatever.

All of these things that are ultimately unimportant, boring nonsense, there are actual things that are happening that like just zero effort is being directed towards opposing. And of course, I'm talking about the final sort of killing strokes against the welfare state are sort of being laid, right? The long process of the welfare state becoming that in name only is sort of continuing and is about to... Like, you know, like the tax bill was kind of that for the US, right?

There's the kind of just the federal government just kind of saying, you know what, more of American life is just your own role. Right, this doesn't have any hot generals in it. So how am I supposed to pay attention to it? Yeah, there's no fun characters to pay attention to. You know what would have improved? I am Daniel Blake is having a hot general in there. They should have brought in General Grievous to do Downing Street.

They should have put General Grievous and I am Daniel Blake, yeah. Yeah, so, right, and this is what I'm talking about, of course, is like, again, the thing that if we actually had any kind of politics that was grounded in people's material existence of their lives as opposed to like, you know, a glorified debating club where people bandied the definition of the word party back and forth, then we'd be making more of a big deal of the fact that like there is a seismic change to universal credit coming. And I think it's related in some ways to some of the things

we've been talking about on recent episodes. So the Tories feel like they're kind of administrators who've been brought in to wind up the failing company that is... Yeah, turning the lights out, putting all the chairs up on the tables. Yeah, yeah, we're not doing a like, Katari investor rescue of Britain. We're doing a like, you know, paying off as much of the creditors as possible, winding it up as a going concern type administration. The tantalizing prospect of an episode of bar rescue, but the bar is Britain.

Gordon Ramsay's Country Nightmares. Oh, there's fucking ingredients in this. Yeah, you call this a train, it's fucking shit. So it's not great Ramsay, but I tried my best. I mean, I believed it. Yeah. So what I'm talking about the changes to universal credit, some of the most important ones are sort of generally a tightening of sanctions, but the big one that caught me

was they're reducing the amount of time you have to like, look for a job in your preferred sector from three months to four weeks. But the thing is right, this is a panacea for the economy like shitting itself, because now we can just move everybody into whatever they need. You're a lorry driver now. Yeah, I mean, look, if there's one thing that we learned from 2008, it's that when you cut all of the social safety net, it's really good for the economy, especially in times when the economy is bad.

Yes, that's right. And it never has untoward consequences. The risk of doing a sort of led by donkey's thing here, I will say that the important thing about sanctions and the reason why benefit sanctions are necessary is because if you don't have extremely punitive and unpredictable enforcement of rules, then people might start thinking that they can just go out and have a drink and some cake in their garden. Well, it's also right, what they're doing is they're saying you have to take any job,

and I think it's no coincidence that this is another way that capital is dealing with the great resignation. I mean, say capital as, again, the monolithic edifice of the British state party system, capital, et cetera, all being this part of one big block that has different awful faces. We're going to bring Corvay back, and you're going to have to work a shift building a giant glowing orb in East London. Or the workhouse. Oh, yeah, we can bring back the workhouse.

I've been saying for a long time that we don't get enough opportunities to wear like stripey waistcoats and pocket watches and just kind of like deny orphan's food. So the specific policy we're talking about here, it's being introduced by Therese Coffee. It's sort of, again, it's coming out as the, well, Boris is doing his like, no, please, don't you like me? I'll do anything you want for like the more, you might say, ambitious, the further, almost like we talked about before, these restive rebellious and somewhat ungovernable parts of the right that just want their insane dreams

realized no matter the cost. And of course, and so Therese Coffee introduces this, right? It's the way to work campaign it's called, which focuses on, again, like it says it's focused on filling on filling vacancies as though again, like the vacancies are just there to be filled that humans are these formless lumps of clay that can just be beaten into shape. It's operation red meat and you are the red meat. Yeah, it's your job as a human to fill a vacancy with your meat.

We talked about before how, how like there are different ways of responding to the great resignation. There have been increased efforts at unionization. There have been some, you know, various like, you know, enterprising web three quote unquote organizations like brain trust that we talked about, right? That's like a fake form of worker empowerment, but that's like themed as worker empowerment. There are people doing, you know, like the Zoom concerts with the cast of various Broadway shows and so on and so on. People are trying to figure it out and the British state is doing all it knows how to do,

which is solve a problem by threatening to starve people, essentially. And I mean, if I would have infinite respect for someone who went on hunger strike to avoid becoming a podcast, they keep giving me podcaster at the job center and I won't do it and fair enough. And of course, they always talk about how this is to support people into work faster and that those are capable of work were expected to search more widely. What it also means is like, again, it's the way that Britain, the British state tends to conceive of these issues is it only ever looks at one side, right?

It never looks at, say, the available jobs, where they are, what sector they're in, or indeed, the transforming nature of work. Say, for instance, right, you are out of work, you're on universal credit and say you actually, you want to, you feel able to a new, you want to do a new job, you want to do something else. Is the government going to help you to get to that new job? Is it going to help you to like get trained and how to do it? No, of course not. What it is going to do is if you struggle with any of those things, it's just going to cut

your benefits. And if you want to know what the reviews of this thing are, again, like that there was boasting about the reviews they're getting for this policy from like business leaders around the UK, Jonathan Gow from Blood Sucking All Peas. This vampire says this blood is delicious. This vampire says you can keep your benefits if you can spend just one night in his house. The VP, this is the VP for customer fulfillment at Amazon UK. He must be a nice guy.

Amazon is a great company. Amazon is proud to offer excellent career opportunities to job seekers. Again, just listen to any episode we've done with like Alex Press about this. Oh, you'll get an opportunity, all right, to do stuff. How do you like putting things in a box? And wait, fuck, it's all just like the phone jacker, a Pierre sketch. Does anyone remember this? This is a real 2000s deep cut, but where he phones up a guy who's

myself. He's lifted himself in the yellow pages as a drummer that you can hire for events. And he's like, hello, Pierre, you are a drummer, correct? And he's like, yeah. And he's like, can you keep the beat, Pierre? And he's like, oh, yeah. And he's like, how about 15 hours? He's like, what?

And he's like, it's for an event. That's basically what Amazon are like. And yeah, and you have to take their job. Yeah, that's right. You have to go and keep the beat of the weird sex event. Because the thing to remember about any kind of work for welfare or any kind of tightening of the benefit system for unemployed people, any kind of tightening of that will always be in aggregate a move in favor of bosses.

Because it means that you are less able to go find another job. You have less time to go find another job. You have, it means the boss can do more to you before you can decide to quit, really. Just because they've changed the incentive structure outside, right? Do you know who's a subset of bosses? Girl bosses. So no one knows if it's good or not. No, that's right.

Yeah. So it's why in the US, they have a new form of serfdom where if you quit your job at a health care company, for example, they can say, well, you can't work for another health care company until your previous one fills the vacancy. So they've fought it through the overbearing and overpowerful American court system where, again, some judge will just get elected from the local chapter of the federalist society and then decide. It's just a guy who used to own a McDonald's franchise who's now a federal judge for some

reason. I mean, that kind of thing happens. More often than not. And in the UK, in the UK, the stick version of the response to people leaving their jobs in this brief moment where almost by accident, labor small K cell has just more power than historically it had been getting in recent years, right? The stick version that we've used is to use our extremely draconian centralized and cruel benefit system.

And it's really good for the economy because when you have some guy who gets laid off from being like a fucking civil engineer or some shit, which is a job that there aren't loads of because there aren't many of those people and they need some benefits to tide them over. And then you're like, no, you have to go and work at a fucking Amazon warehouse because that's the soonest available job. That's a great use of that person and their skills. And it's good. And there's no problem with it.

Well, I mean, again, this is something that's it's been happening. That's kind of an obtrusive example because it's that's unlikely to happen. I'm not sure that it is unlikely to happen. And like the other thing is, right, I think it's a question of prioritizing, right? Like if the bridge that you're driving on falls down because there's no civil engineers, like that's stochastic. And like, you know, that's also... But you've never been getting Amazon parcels faster.

Yes. All those guys are. Genuinely, yes. I think it's a pretty calculated bet that it matters more to most people that they get their treats on time than that the bridge they're driving on has a, you know, slightly lower risk of collapsing. Well, I think the way to understand it, right, is all of these moves are just, it's just the state saying to employers specifically like Amazon or Hayes,

or others of these like shitty sort of either with poor conditions, low pay or low predictability jobs and employers like, hey, you take control of just more people's lives more of the time because that's a way of, because they always have a vacancy. And it's just a way of kind of grinding people into those, you know, worse positions because again, it's all done at the threat of you're going to starve. And we in fact will starve you. And I mean, we've got this history of these huge numbers of people dead from austerity, the individual stories of people who've essentially been like not just sort of,

not just sort of social murder where this happens in a diffused scale, but who've basically been murdered by the DWP directly. And we're saying we are going to do more of that with where we are going to empower them more. And we are going to intensify this system basically because there was this brief reprieve where a certain subset of workers in this country had certain conditions alleviated for them. I mean, I think it almost goes to show the inverse as well, right? Which is that if you can alleviate any condition like the eviction moratorium is a good example,

right? The eviction moratorium meant that for a while there was one fewer thing that was going to just come down on you like a hammer if you left your shitty job with terrible pay and a terrible boss, right? And that these things, if any of them happen, they create enormous amounts of worker empowerment. And the problem is, right, is if you have a sort of a very sort of strong, politically ambitious trade union movement, then, and that's big enough, that can take advantage of and channel it.

And if you don't, then people just quit their jobs and get better jobs and wages go up and that's all good, but could be better. And it just goes to show, I think, like, how much they had to react to things getting better, even a little bit, that if you want that fighting this kind of thing is about fighting it directly. But it's also about fighting things. It's also about joining like tenants unions. But it's about like reducing. I think you're just like, I disagree slightly in terms of where the desperation is, right?

Like, I think that this is a sort of a policy that's like primarily done because as red meat, it's easy. It's easy for the government to do. Like, certainly they would have done it anyway. Certainly it like benefits them in all of the ways that you're saying. But I think it is very much kind of like, you know, we'll throw the CBI some fucking, like some more job seekers. You're welcome.

You know, now please, please, please support Boris. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think both of those things can be true at once, right? Which is, you have these diffuse reasons, right? These things I'm talking about are why this is such easy red meat. And I think, you know, the main reasons that they haven't done it yet are that as you were saying earlier, Milo, like the British sort of, the British establishment more broadly sees its goal as like the orderly winding down of the UK. Or I guess, sorry, the Labour Party now sees itself as overseeing the orderly winding down of the UK.

Extremely conservative, extremely socially fascist thing that's also like winding itself up. I love to live in Colonia Dignitas. Whereas the Tory party is all about the disorderly unwinding of the UK. You know, we're, instead of slowly pairing back the state's ability to reproduce society, they're just hacking off big chunks. But they're both, they're both concerned with. But I think what we're seeing here is like, is an example of, yeah, as you say, Milo, like, well, we're going to just continue winding down the state,

winding down the state until basically like, why bother doing anything but having generals in charge because you're on your own. Yeah. Well, and this is the point where I'm kind of like, it's, it's funny that this is still red meat to the CBI, because you presume there have got to be some people at the top of big companies in the UK who are like, in the long run, this is bad. Like, it's not good for, like, it's, it's genuinely not as good for capital as it first seems, aside from all the ways in which is bad for like the people who are going to be fucking crushed by it. Well, that's because capital, capital is rational, but it doesn't mean it's perfectly

rational. No, it's, in fact, it's, you could say it's an extraordinarily irrational way to allocate the benefits and burdens of social cooperation that will eventually implode on its own short-sightedness. Counterpoint, no, it won't. Yeah, Steve Baker thinks it won't, so I'm going to go with him. Or, yeah, of course. But also, otherwise, to answer your question a bit sincerely, Milo, right? Like, there are segments of, there are, there are capitals that isn't monolithic. Like, you're seeing that kind

of long-termism is more sort of apparent in certain sectors of the, certain sections of the finance industry, insurance and pensions. But like, if you're talking about just like the CBI, where your job is get people in warehouse, move goods, or put thing together, or, or pick, pick vegetable, whatever, you don't care. Because that's, that's like, um, hey, hey, you know, you know, you, you really need low paid workers for your warehouse that makes like trinkets and googles and such like, you know, if these economies fucked, no one's going to buy those. Do you know that? Are you familiar with that as a concept? Well, look, I mean, last time while we did was massively extend credit. And then, of course,

continue to destroy the state further to see if that would work. So, I guess we'll see. We did. We did. We don't know. Maybe next time. Yeah. Let's do the same thing again and presume the result will be different. Let's call the definition of business. Hi, everyone. It's me, Milo. When we were recording this episode, we got too excited about the concept of eating dinner and forgot to actually wrap up the episode. So, hey, that was the episode. We have a Patreon. It's $5 a month. You can subscribe to it. You get bonus episodes, you know, the drill by now. Also, I have shows coming up if you want to come and see

Smoke Comedy, 15th of February, 8pm at the Sekford. There is a link in the description to my website, which is where all the tickets for all the shows are. Similarly, I'm also doing a show in Prague on the 20th of February, which is in English. There's also a Russian show in Prague, which you can also come to, which I think is on the 19th or the 18th. It doesn't matter. You'll find it. You'll find it. The links are there. Please come to those. Also, on the 8th of February, so even sooner, I am doing a Russian show in London just like running over some jokes, running over. No, not exactly running, running through some jokes to see if they are good ahead of doing the shows in Prague. So, if you want to come to any of that, just get a ticket.

Otherwise, we will see you on the bonus feed on Thursday. Bye.