TRASHFUTURE - Bunker Busting feat. Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

We had sci-fi writer and activist Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) on to discuss recent events, particularly Clearview AI and the horrible panopticon that we’ve tumbled headfirst into. Are laws real? Why do billionaires want to abscond to New Zealand? What happens if the mercenaries guarding your bunker don't want to bring you treats anymore? To find out, listen to this episode featuring (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum). It is a solid hour of only the most rigorous analysis. Please buy Cory’s most recent book RADICALIZED here: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250228581 If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture  *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS.com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ 

But you need no doors to find God if you believe believe If you believe my dear Francesca, you are gullible Can you look around this world and believe in the goodness of a God who rules it famine pestilence war disease and death They rule this world. There is also love and life and hope very little hope. I assure you No If a God of love and life ever did exist

He is long since dead Someone Something rules in his place Hello and welcome to a spooky Vincent price themed episode of trash future that podcast you're listening to right now It's me Riley Vincent price and I'm here joined by Alice Vincent price Vincent Tina price Vincent Tina price from Glasgow

Milo also Vincent price in undisclosed location. Yeah, it's me Ursats Vincent price who tells you no, no, I'm kill him. I'm the real Vincent price And and Corey Vincent price doctor out who were very pleased to welcome on to the podcast calling in all the way from, California Cory, how's it going? Very well Burbank, California to be specific Mmm spooky Burbank You know what we have three year-round goth stores Halloween stores and like a Ouija board museum We live in the goth district man. It is spooky Burbank. That's that's perfect. That's a utopia Well, I find myself I enter the Ouija board museum and find myself being moved around it by mysterious force

That'd be such a cool Vincent price movie if I could bring one person back from the dead, it would be him Call it the IDO motor, you know, I am staring up my life mask of Vincent price as we talk about this that I bought from Tom Savini at a science fiction convention once Other rules. Oh, it's one of the best sentences I've ever heard. We love You have to like this is a problem though, you have Facing yeah, you have to introduce Corey twice for like people who pretend not to know who he is Corey Doctorow is a digital rights campaigner He works with the electronic frontier foundation and also he's a science fiction author and we're going to be talking about a

Few ways in which this dystopia we find ourselves living in continues to be a whole-ass dystopia however before we get into all of that interesting stuff about technology the future and the way in which history is being written before our eyes in terms of Terrified tech overlords and mergers and acquisitions and stuff. I'm afraid we once again need to do our breaking news segment We have to talk about Britain the dismal country. Yes. It's first first We're gonna talk about Britain where we all currently live in Korea. You lived for quite some time Britain I believe is now the world epicenter of the doing twee horse shit to fight against the coronavirus epidemic an epidemic of its own

Epidemic calm and carrying on by being completely unhinged It sucks it fucking sucks. I've got a few I got a few examples of what's going on Matt Hancock favorite TF Labrador has well We thought he introduced new green and blue pins to recognize carers efforts in lieu of you know paying them more Because when he was asked should nurses get a pay rise for putting themselves in harm's way He was like now is not the time we're focusing on pins Now is the time of pins Matt Hancock is the only Tory minister with a brain simple enough to accidentally do something like yes

We're gonna do this pink triangle that you pin on your coat Yeah, just nobody tells them Yeah, uh, so it's cool. Cory, but you safety pin it to your coat. So you get to yeah Uh, so, uh, yeah, he's there's a little pin that's it's one for blue and one It's green the green ones for carers the blue ones for nurses and instead of getting a pay rise you get a little metal Um, but you have to buy the metal yourself is the thing it costs about nine quid Well, that's a bargain. So yeah, yeah, I mean well that'll suck people from engaging in stolen valor Yeah, will it though can can you actually can anyone buy these?

Can I just put like can I cover my entire torso in nurse pins and just walk through the queue at Tesco? The distinguished nursing cross with bar Everyone who's not a carer has been made redundant and has no money And so only the nurses can afford the nine quid. That's why it's there As we know if you don't have skin in the game, there's a moral hazard Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I suppose podcasters are still being paid which does make us care workers Uh, so where are the badges for podcasters? We're the fifth emergency service, right? We should we should absolutely get a little like a microphone badge or something emergency content

You know you you joke, but it turns out that my local paintball store is a Essential industry, which means that I can refill my co2 cartridges and get all the fizzy water I need while the world ends It's like the human right of people called Kyle Yeah, it's something that was put through by a mark from swinep So but that's not all that's not all Whoever is in charge of all the poppies has announced that they're doing a new and different set of poppies Uh, so they have blue poppies and green poppies So basically either you're a veteran of the coronavirus war and you wear a pin

Which is like a medal or you support the nurses and doctors and you wear a poppy Uh materially, however, we have us to assure you nothing will change because they've already gotten the best payment of all Which is uh boats in the Thames doing donuts in support of the nhs Yeah, I was sick just just the the ferry named after Vera Lynn doing donuts with the horn honking. It was There's never been anything stupider I just I I love to think about that that video of the like ferry doing donuts and the cops all like lined up clapping or jam together and think We live in a deeply insane country. Don't we?

There's something wrong with the the english psyche Uh that produces this kind of perversity. Yeah, I was gonna say do you have dog-faced? Uh, uh white nationalists Chanting outside of each of the national legislature is demanding me right now. Give it a minute. Oh, okay. Yeah, they're called the labor party The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed Yeah Yeah, uh, so yeah, that's what we have. We have boats in the Thames have started just just just Asinide dumbass shit to support the nhs from going out to your side and making a clatter which

And if you don't like it, you hate nurses. Well, here's the thing Initially going outside and clapping and making a clatter was like not official It was just something that then got co-opted by the media in the state And now three weeks on it's being like police are just getting getting together in shoulder to shoulder conditions to salute one another for arresting sunbathers and then Are drifting underneath the hungerford bridge It's it's a dumber version of threads, right? Everybody's deputized and everybody gets a little rib And there's a guy in a traffic warden cap with its face melted off just commanding you to clap for your food ration

But honestly, I mean Since the Blair years we've been working on adapting 1984 as a manual for statecraft So the two minutes hate was obviously going to arrive someday Hmm. Well, did you see the um the enormous screen of matt hancock? Uh addressing a bunch of uh nice and gale hospital work Is a parade rest Very cool It's cool that you love this hygiene War is peace look look look here's the thing you think that's not that's not cool

But actually it's just that they we finally instead of unionizing Uh, they were all given a video game system where they get to play as matt hancock And they were all just waiting their turn to get their 10 minutes of game time in Speaking of which if you if anyone develops games, please make that game What I love about britain with this is the is this element of like I think that uh, you know Like like there's been this whole brain worms thing in america where like all the libs are like obsessed with trump And what an aberration he is and like every every like fucked up dumb thing that he does They're all like losing their minds like how can this be?

But britain is even dumber than that because like they do all this dumb stuff and we're just like well I mean they're in charge. They must know what they're doing. Maybe we should be doing donuts and fairies Maybe that that seems to be the reasonable solution And maybe if you're against the donut thing, maybe you're a muslim Yeah, it's it's guided by the science. All right. Lee you have to chris witty was driving that fairy like australian scientists You gotta chuck some dais mate. I I do like some evidence-based policy Hmm. That's right

Like we've been doing years-long study on fairy donuts. I just I I I tweeted this very quickly before you move on I tweeted this but I think it's still apps to discuss How mad are the cops that they spent years doing the oh, we're kind of like the troops actually thing And the last second they got leapfrogged by paramedics Yeah, owned Sorry Yeah, just putting a big punish a skull on the front of my ambulance

Hey, look, maybe if there was an actual crime epidemic that you could leapfrog the uh The carers have become like the troops. Sorry. There's not better luck next time. You lose sweetie Um, but like what this has me thinking right is that like what when neoliberalism is in free fall the face of a systemic crisis Having rendered material solidarity completely unthinkable It's left with no other option than to find like the biggest or fastest vehicle it can and have it do a stunt Because it's like look all we can do is try to command people's attention And then hope they make a market decision to support this massive collective endeavor that's impossible in the market So in the end we're gonna know we're just gonna replace taxes just with every pensioner getting up and walking up and down their lawn

It's like a perverse version of the new deal for the attention economy. You know what it is. It's truckasaurus future I just I I I I'm so into the idea that we started with boris doing brexit by driving a jcb through some boxes And we've upgraded to a slightly bigger vehicle and we just go from there until it is mandatory monster truck rally time Sunday Sunday Sunday and downing street, you know, this is what they call a demand signal We've replaced the entire uh, uk ambulance fleet with monster trucks And you can applaud them as they crush the cars in your street Yeah, you can't even get people into the monster trucks because they're too high up You've got to like jack up the stretches because here's the by the way by the way

If you want to know about who's leading the charge to start like sacrificing people's lives to the economy again In the u.s. It's the psychotic tea party coke people who are like astroturfing protests in hawaii where people at hawaii Sorry, ohio same place Easy to get mixed up where people are like, uh, I want my lawn fertilizer. I will die for the greediness of my lawn Um, and it's those people and in the uk the sustained demand to end the lockdown to like bring the economy back comes from the Fucking labor party. So but cori to answer your question earlier. That's kind of where we are right now Well, you know, it it feels like you guys have really carried on the old tradition since I left and there has been No break in the uh in the upward trajectory of the british political consciousness and scenes. So well done. Oh, yeah

Thank you. Yeah, well, we are the country that is having the most normal one and we're keeping that vibe going for sure I personally am very excited for us to um fight the fight the coronavirus and the resulting poverty that comes from From fighting it by um dying the entire united kingdom blue in solidarity with the nhs We're gonna we're all the blue. We become the blue man whole country. That would be a blue man group Are they british? I mean they do mime with a british accent and they're in that one da safety video. I think Huh, uh, I bet they're french. Um, probably I I want to move on Imagining the first audition of the blue man group and like some big glass vegas producer chewing on a cigar going

Could we turn it down from black to blue? They're not french. Yeah, is that they're not wearing the blackface makeup over the blueface makeup So I want to move on to another topic though. This is a little bit less uk. It's a bit uk-ish, but it's more sort of techish Which is that uh amazon is now looks like has been cleared to purchase delivery so Remember that thing we said where um a small group of extremely powerful uh pools of capital such as companies like amazon Are going to start exerting more and more direct influence and power over your life because the state just vacates those areas Seems that's being borne out

I mean i'm sure it's one so i've got some collateral here Uh, the on this is from the the government's the cma's website They say the ongoing quote-unquote lockdown. So, you know not resorting to slang In the uk has resulted in the closure of a number large number of the key restaurants available through delivery And therefore a significant decline in the company's revenues as a result Delivery recently informed the cma that the impact of the pandemic on its business meant that it would fail financially and exit the market Without an amazon investment and stewart macintosh the key of the cma's independent inquiry group went on to say Without invest in additional investment, which we currently think is only realistically available from amazon

It's clear that delivery would not be able to meet its financial commitments and would have to exit the market Which could mean some customers cut off from online food delivery altogether with others facing higher prices or a reduction in service quality Faced with that stark outcome. We feel like the best course of action is to provisionally clear amazon's investment in delivery Excuse me while I just blunder through this and with my one-man band sessup with a big bass drum that I have labeled nationalize Now cori one thing you talk about quite a bit is technology and monopolism and it seems like something we're witnessing is The collapse of the competitive market and the failure of the state to do anything about that in fast motion Can you unpack that a little bit?

Yeah, I mean I I have this critique of tech exceptionalism which I think differs from the normal critique of tech exceptionalism in that it it Doesn't stop at people who think tech is quite good and that's why it's exceptional But it also includes people who think tech is quite bad and that's why it's exceptional I tend to think that like tech leaders are ordinary Mere deocrities like you and me and no more suited to run those social lives of like 2.5 billion people than anyone else And all of the reasons that people who are angry at tech give for tech monopolies

Are really similar to all the reasons that people who quite like tech give which are things like Network effects and first mover advantage But you know that when you look at actually how tech companies grow you see that they grow this way right? They acquire their competitors You know amazon runs a delivery service. They run a food service now They buy a food delivery service and this is true, you know, wherever you look, you know, apple is a Company that grows through massive acquisitions. I remember there was an interview with tim cook at the end of january last year Where he announced that he had bought 50 companies since the new year google bought 200 companies in calendar 2019

And you know when you look at what actual products they've developed in house google is a company That's like a one and a half product company, right? They made a a really good search engine in a pretty good hotmail clone And you know facebook has made like one and a half products and bought a bunch of other ones And so when you look around you see that like all of these companies are growing using the same tactics Which is that they're buying all their competitors They're merging with their major competitors and they're creating these vertical monopolies And the reason they're able to do that is that like 40 years ago margaret thatcher and august o' pinochet and

Brian Mulroney and ronald reagan and helmut kohl just dismantled antitrust law They they took on board these ridiculous theories of robert bork that said that the only reason to fight monopolies is if They raise prices on consumers in the short term And that otherwise monopolies are quite efficient There's something peter teal also says competition is for is for losers And so now like every industry has become super super concentrated, you know And if it is first mover advantage and network effects that makes tech so big Why is it that like all eyewear brands and every high street eyewear retailer is now owned by a single italian firm called

Luxotica and why is it that all of finance is consolidated into four or five companies and all of energy and all of rail and all of aviation You know, it's it's it's hard to see the network effects in just buying every high street eyewear retailer Then refusing to carry any eyewear brand that won't sell to you on the cheap until they're driven to their knees and then buying them for pennies on the pound so This brings me to this idea of ecology Which is that before the term ecology was coined there were people Who were quite upset about whales or owls or the ozone layer

But they didn't really think of themselves as fighting all in the same corner They were like, well, these are our issues and the term ecology came along and turned those issues into a movement by You know, locating a single problem that gave rise to all of these epiphenomena that the ozone layer and the die-off of whales And I think we're getting there for like pluralism and monopoly that someday people are going to wake up and go Oh, the reason the pro wrestlers I love are on go fund me begging for money so they can die with dignity in their 50s Is the monopoly in wrestling leagues, which is down from 30 to 1 And the reason that my eyewear cost a thousand percent more than it did a decade ago is the same reason And it's also the reason that the web is five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four

And maybe they all have the same cause. Wait, what I saw I didn't realize professional wrestling was like Logan's run Oh, yeah, it's grim. It's brutal And and it's been declared an essential industry. Oh, yeah, of course Amazing governor governor dissenters. Thank you No, I uh, we do have an answer to something that you suggested about the the eyewear companies or wherever else Just acting like the tech industry It's the wrong answer But it's the answer they keep providing that we talk about on the show is that

If you make eyewear or rather if you run a company that buys eyewear companies, you just say that you're a tech company And you your product is in some way tech because it involves Computers, I suppose while seeing is technology. It's kind of the first technology Yeah, exactly. It's the we work model. It's the we work model. We're a landlord, but we're also somehow a platform Yeah, you know and and and this is but I think Cory what you describe really is it is a Vision of monopoly and it's a vision of something happening here Where the it's formative dynamics are as you say like

Companies that sort of that grow through acquisition, but they don't just grow their profits They also grow areas of the world over which they have control I don't mean geographical areas But or partly I mean geographical areas, but I also mean service areas It means basically that like at all That amazon is going to be able to integrate like the work of amazon delivery delivery delivery whole foods and also um

Amazon groceries, right? It's going to be able to take all those things together It's going to be able to work a smaller number of people harder for less money And it's going to be and it's going to be able to do that because the state as you said I cut with everyone from Pinochet to helmet coal to brahead Mulroney from canada. Wow the expending and say We we believe the we believe the trusts are the future um Have essentially cleared the ground for more human suffering just so Jeff Bezos can maybe make another space program that doesn't work Yeah, I I think that's right. I I mean the the um rise and rise of monopolies is bad for everyone

Uh in in lots of ways, you know, I don't think markets solve all of our problems But they do solve some of them right like oftentimes if you have a firm that's doing something that's really terrible But also does something that people quite like another firm will come along and do something complimentary and say like Here is much, you know, here is a way that you can get say the benefits of amazon's book search tool Which is quite good and has reviews and is annotated and does amazing recommendations But here's an overlay that then just adds a link to your local independent bookseller And then amazon comes along and buys the company that makes that overlay as they did with the book

Depository and now you can use your awesome hindi. Yeah, right exactly There's here, you know, your artisanal hand-tooled portland-derived Heidel bar mustachioed leather apron alternative to amazon Is just like the duff beer spout, uh pumping out raspberry framboise Duff, you know, it's just another flavor our new calorie duff. That's right Um, right and I think the the ecology analogy I think is is a good one, right of seeing this as A set of interconnected problems with one major cause And I mean, I think that's not necessarily something that's super controversial for us or listeners to this show because We've kind of always seen these things as ecologically connected

But I think one of the our listeners are all Maoists is the thing But I think one of the one of the political developments, especially in like social democratic politics now Or even like social full socialist politics has been A lot of people who might have been sort of, you know, standard libs from watching the west wing or whatever some years ago Having taken off having taken that off and understanding this as an ecological issue as an issue analogous to analogous rather to ecology And so I think that is that is a very apt comparison and one that would be beneficial to think of when we think about the fact that like You know, Jeff Bezos just took control of another bit of everyone in britain's life

And he probably doesn't even personally know that he has I would say also that it lends itself to a kind of an appropriate urgency because when you talk about ecology and the, you know, physical environmental sense I think people are very aware that, you know, it keeps getting hotter every year And there's not a lot of time to deal with this and I I feel as if that is a comparable sense of A drive to action that we also need for Jeff Bezos turning all of us into wax for his big shiny head Well, I'm personally excited for next year's prime day when we all wear our prime poppies to celebrate the prime workers Who do important things like healthcare and amazon prime and the ceremonial prime ferry does its ceremonial prime donor

This kind of happened. Did you see amazon, uh, amazon's military program had a special amazon challenge coin Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Can we go back to the amazon military program? It's it's it's actually somewhat less sinister than it sounds. It's not the web services thing that like Does drone programming it's their thing for hiring veterans But they just call that amazon military as if they're going to start issuing them shock batons next Probably Yeah, of course, but they have they have like one of the uh, we should have had mason for this But uh, it's a troop thing is a challenge coin

You have a little coin with like a motivational thing on it and they had an amazon challenge coin with a little amazon smile On it and just says military and I was like I was looking at this and I was thinking that's some power for ideology Is going on there. Yeah, you love. Yeah, they'll do a set of wraparound oakley shades That'll be made by that same Italian company lexotica that bought all the other ones Yeah, exactly it all ties together you get the punisher skull decal, but it has the amazon smile somehow But oh, shit. I'm gonna photoshop that now I'm very excited for amazon to basically become the medellin cartel and just like have a huge private army And they're just like they have so much money. They have to bury it in oil drums

That's right. Well, that that's essentially bezos's space plan is essentially giant oil drums in space called uh, O'Neill cylinders. So yes, he kind of is doing that But I also we have so much to get through today. So I'd like to move us on a little bit to everyone's favorite um Everyone's favorite evil part-time model honed on that the uh, evil mystery So we've uh, we've talked about this in the past this facial recognition company clear view Which was backed by peter teal and was revealed by huffpo a few weeks ago to have deep ties to neo nazis Oopsy doopsy

We got nazis in our facial recognition app that every police station in the in the us and now some outside the us Now uses to chase down chomo's still don't do as good a job as fed smoker, but still This was the one thing we didn't want to happen We accidentally built our philosopher king like, uh, a total surveillance panopticon and oops, it's got nazis in it How did that happen? So um, and what and what file would really captured me about this right was the extent to which this wasn't just Some like weirdos who built a who built a company that ended up. Oh, no How could I have foreseen this happening? But in fact it was built with the far right in mind

And uh, it was built for cops, right? Yeah, that's what i'm talking about. Hey Uh, so I've got some quotes in the article here. It is by 2015 Uh, tawn that joined forces with mike surdvich That's hilarious The weepy divorce court guy is yeah, okay, cool I don't I don't I object to how you join forces with mike surdvich This is the thing right I object to the rising tide of fascism as anyone should but I also object to the like uh aesthetic of it of just these kind of like

Weepy guys with no skincare routine who just kind of like film themselves in portrait mode Just and now have the keys to the fucking panopticon Yeah, suddenly any guy with a map can be a white nationalist now not like in my day So, uh, chlorie you're you're familiar with this uh with this clear view. Yes. Oh, yeah, very much so indeed I thought I thought you might have done some thinking about it. I have thoughts about them Um, yeah, you know, does it surprise you that they're linked to the far right? Yeah, so that that obviously is is Entirely unsurprising. I think the other thing that's unsurprising though is that they're just dumb-dumbs, right? I mean, I think that this is like the the lesson of contemporary information security, right?

Like it's a thing that we learned with like say the ransomware epidemic a couple of years ago Where you had people who had just you know Found this like uh loose nsa cyber weapon rattling around that had been leaked onto the internet And they glued it to some old ransomware and then they accidentally started stealing entire hospitals And then they were like, what do you want for our house to give us back our hospital? And they were like $300 and You know, it reminded me of like the one time I parked a rental car and uh In a multi-story car park in gas town in in vancouver when it was the epicenter of the heroin epidemic

And I left like a 25 cent piece on my dashboard and someone smashed the window to steal a 25 cent piece It's it's you know, like all of our analysis about what our threats are in tech assume that our adversaries are You know making good calculus, right? And it turns out that they're making really really shitty calculus because they're super dumb They're just they're just not that bright and that is like that that I think is where we've we've uh ended up with these guys Is when you look at him, he's not a super genius. He's just a dim bulb With some off-the-shelf fr stuff and a scraper who has then made a tool

And he's got some pretty charismatic salespeople apparently went around and and you know Told a bunch of cops that they could use this to solve all their crimes and the cops are like don't know how to distinguish false positives or think well about them and uh, you know, they priced it in a way that allowed for a procurement without a lot of uh, a lot of oversight And you know lather rinse repeat and they're in in massive profit and have built this, you know, ghastly existential threat to our species that uh, you know is not the product of lex luther It's the product of you know, his his his dumb brother skippy who You know never never finished the second grade and has been and has been like doing coloring books ever since

But if it's dumb and it works, it's not dumb right and this clearly if if there's an ideological thing What better but like this is a success story up until the moment that it gets leaked if you're a nazi because you can just be like Yeah, I got my facial recognition technology into every police department in the us that wanted to play ball And it's uh, entirely at the discretion of a bunch of cops who are probably going to be sympathetic to the same aims as me Uh, so so like what what difference does it make if it's just if it's not particularly artisan all right if it still achieves the political aim I kind of I kind of have some thoughts about that actually which is that you have to you have to think of this not as not as the um

As the people themselves achieving some kind of aim But rather as all of the individuals like sort of itch and weave and uh, Of course he's in this as all of like the mini bosses All the people are just the mini bosses. They're that they're the henchmen But the then the the big evil genius. Is it peter teal? No, he's just another henchman It's ultimately capital itself is the boss In as much as like fascism and white nationalism stuff like they all exist to protect capital and decay And so I think you can you can understand that these are some profoundly like, you know, just fucking mediocrities of people

Yeah, how smart is a t-cell right? It doesn't need to be that's what i'm talking about Yeah, they're who are just sort of So I think the thing is that we want to we want to like understand our threat model right like is What are we what are we actually worried about and I think that when we talk about, uh, technological, uh, You know dystopia, we often imagine people who are very good at what they do and taking a very long view like like, um You know, David coke is a terrible human being but he's super good at what he does right? He's got an engineering degree He had some really key insights like all of his competitors were had very short amortization schedules and bought a bunch of coal extraction and and refining tools that had like 20 year amortization schedules

He could leave frog them in productivity. That's why you know, his firm grew a thousand percent under his His, uh management relative to when his father was running it and so on like we can at least like do some you know What is it that we think david coke is after what is it that we're after? What can we expect him to do as a counter measure? But in this case, it's it's like, you know, uh It's it's like trying to imagine what, uh, someone who's you know having a very bad meth experience might do if you if you intervene It's really hard right because they're just they're they're they're acting in this like super out ofistic way That would normally not uh project their will over billions of people, right? It would normally just result in like horrible domestic abuse or something

But now the same impulse that would normally end with domestic abuse ends with oh, we built up an opticon that has two billion faces in it Hmm. I I don't I don't think that it matters though. I don't think that composites on an individual level masters so long as there's a material Explanation they don't even have to be aware that what they're doing is is part of some Sort of greatest societal trend. They don't have to be aware of their roles within within capitol I don't think necessarily that they are I think especially like when you consider somebody like chuck johnson like noted brains genius Yeah, uh, that that guy is not having like a 10 year long-term plan about like the role of capitol ethno states or anything like that He's triggering the lips but the way in which he's triggering the lips doesn't arise from nowhere It arises from class conditions and those don't change based on how good or not he is at this

Yeah, at an individual level Effectively culture war has created the penopticon So if I'll carry on well, I think you guys are being Debbie downers I personally can't wait to do 20 to life in the tesla epic prison where it plays David Alice do D ream so who else is involved in this? Um And it's mostly through peter teal who's like collected this group of like pale weirdos around himself Um, so chuck johnson was like the big second figure here He told one source this is quoting from huffpo late that year that he viewed the technology in clear view as a way to potentially quote

Identify every illegal alien in the country in an early 2017 johnson introduced taunthat to another source saying he was a gifted coder Maybe not he'd hired to build the facial recognition tool Around the same time stated on facebook that he was building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants to send to deportation camps I want to know what chuck johnson thinks an algorithm is like Just defy define it for me chuck, please But what's interesting is that taunthat himself was into quote this esoteric reactionary sphere stuff Yeah, it's nrx shit. I remember super into that I remember he was talking about celibacy and the priestly order and being celibate

And thinking for the group and not having mundane concerns. No not forever He was into quasi catholic neotrad reactionary type stuff Um, which is described in the article in which I think is about right as a geeky subset of the racist far right It's festered in silicon valleys libertarian circles for over a decade Especially when the crypto kept within the crypto community members revere teal micro dis lsd And like to talk about totalitarian ideas with intellectualism that creates a moral pretext for them to engineer democracy Um, me and somebody just get together and talk about what kinds of blood are our favorite to drink Well, I mean it's almost literally like piece of teal watch the 2016 election results come in on a couch with mensius mold bug

Who is like the leading intellectual luminary of this shit? And I've never wanted to be a fly on the wall in a room anywhere as badly as The sort of inflection point where everything got Significantly louder and dumber than with these two fucking idiots watching it, you know So so that literally happened. That was not a thing that I knew about that actually happened. Yeah, that actually happened Men's just mold bug came to Peter Thiel's house and they watched the election results come in together And I I just that festered in my brain for a little bit until I could until I could bring it to you. Yeah Yeah, but also like that's what what what strikes me right is that is again not that these

dark enlightenment guys who've all You know basically gotten high on lsd in their own farts for like several years talking about how like What kind of bishop are they going to be when trump declares himself? Right. These are not particularly capable people, but because all of the ingredients and the and the institutions and the data sets are just sitting there They're able to just Scrape facebook facebook says oh that was against the rules too bad. I guess you've done it now mods

Yeah, and and then just hand over every single person's photo and name To every single police force which by the way also a lot of them have been infiltrated by nazis Well, that's like ocean infiltrated by water. Yeah Right and so you what you get is not is this is Just like in the case of the of amazon you want to look past as much as you don't want to look past all the individuals because they're Fascinating You have to look past that and see Where are the interests where the abilities where the institutions and again cori you've talked about this concept of adversarial interoperability

Which I read basically as um Kind of making a program that yeah might sort of scrape facebook like clear view But doesn't do it for like Mentious mold bug wants to be a special new kind of priest reasons. So can you go into that a little bit more? Yeah, sure. So when we look at the the history of tech This is the bit where I am kind of a tech exception list when when you look at the history of tech you see that that one of the reasons that it's been relatively dynamic until pretty recently is that um,

You know the the general purpose computer and then it's it's success of the general purpose network Have this general purpose character, right? Which which makes it really hard to exclude competitors who want to add new features So like you can make a printer that only accepts first party ink But then someone else can make a cartridge that plugs that allows you to refill the cartridge or or Use third party ink or what have you and it's very hard as a technical matter to stop people from doing it And when you look back in the history of tech you see that one of the reasons that it didn't get monopolistic early on With the exception of the the ibm monopoly, which which we can talk about separately

Was that over and over again when a firm would invent a thing that gave them a competitive advantage? Arrival firm would come along and exploit the installed user base to allow them to Claim that other company's market. So, you know, the best example is like facebook itself Where facebook came into a market that was dominated by myspace, which was capitalized by you know, rupert murdoch and and seemed to have like an unbeatable network effect entrenched That that entrenched it and facebook made a tool that you could give your myspace login and password to and every time You logged into facebook this little robot would go off to myspace and pull down all of your waiting myspace messages and put them in Your facebook inbox and you could reply to them there and it would push them back out to myspace

And you know with a little footer that said like why are you still using myspace? I sent this from facebook and as a result what had started off as myspace's wild garden Became like a corral in which all potential facebook customers could be located and extracted And you know apple did this when they made iWorks suite to compete with with office suite and made it file file compatible and so on and what's happened in the years since Is that as we've dismantled the antitrust protections firms have built these big monopolies that can extract monopoly rents And one of the things that a monopoly rent gets you is the surplus capital to go on lobbying adventures

And the lobbying adventures have produced some pretty amazing dividends in the form of making illegal every tactic that big tech used To get big so you know facebook scrapes myspace accounts on behalf of facebook users to get their myspace data Along comes a competitor facebook's called power ventures about five years ago That makes a tool to scrape facebook accounts on behalf of facebook users who want to be power ventures users And facebook successfully sues them under the computer fraud and abuse act a law that ronald reagan enacted in 1986 after having a panic attack Watching matthew broadrick and war games. That's that's not comedy that actually happened and and

What what you see now is this kind of thicket of patent law copyright law anti-circumvention law trade secrecy terms of service and so on that that Allow people who've gone up the adversarial interoperability ladder to just sort of kick it away And it's it's another reason that these firms have gotten so big and it it does have A kind of forced multiplier effect in that the bigger you get and the more concentrated your industry is The more money you have left over to lobby and the easier it is to all converge on a single set of lobbying principles So that no one defects from your from your Your position, you know

So like people look at the the tech leaders around a table with donald trump After the the election and they go well, that's terrible Those people shouldn't have all sat around a table with donald trump and and you know, they're right But the thing that's even more terrible is that everyone who controls tech fit around one modicide size boardroom table in trump tower Like that's super alarming. It doesn't matter a big table beautiful table huge one of the biggest tables we've ever seen Yeah, yeah, so so What is spherical table king arthur thought he was so great with only two dimensions? We've added a third folks We've added a third

When do you think the orb came from? so The question is like what what would adversarial interoperability do in the face of someone scraping all of facebook for the purposes of Creating a non-consensual facial recognition database. So what I advocate is that we should not allow firms to use the law to prohibit competitors from

From creating adversarial interoperable products for a lawful purpose, right? So in other words, like you can't invoke copyright law unless someone infringes copyright The fact that they like defeated your copyright lock to make your printer Compatible third-party ink doesn't matter because they never infringed copyright even though they broke a copyright lock And so what we do is we dispel the uh, the new Statute that has been created out of thin air called felony contempt of business model what we leave intact excuse me Is that what it's called? Well, no, that's what it amounts to Right, but that's what it amounts. I would I would I would totally believe that it was called that though

Well, I mean it's what it amounts to right when it's when it's a felony to remove a copyright lock Even if you don't infringe copyright then firms can deploy copyright locks in such a way That in order to do anything that displeases the shareholder you must first remove a copyright lock So that's like to activate an iphone screen after you swap it from a donor phone into uh into a phone that works But doesn't have a working screen you have to enter a code to say apple authorize this repair And that code is protected by a copyright lock circumventing the copyright lock is a felony under article six of the european copyright

uh, uh, Directive 2001 under section 12 1 of the digital millennium copyright act of 1998 and built I think a c35 in canada from 2011 and so you end up with um with with firms that are able to strategically Deploy these kind of tripwires such that doing anything that displeases their shareholders becomes literally a jailable offense. And so What I propose is not that we just have a free-for-all where you're allowed to do anything What I propose is that we dispense with private law So, you know, if you violate the gdpr, which definitely these guys did or the california privacy rules, which definitely these guys did or the Ohio um biometric privacy laws, which these guys did you've still committed an offense

But the offense was violating people's privacy not displeasing facebook Hmm And I think one of the things that we get here as well, right is that I don't I haven't seen clear view They haven't seemed to have faced many consequences at all from doing this. It seems like Yeah, that's weird. It seems to say something about how law is made and and enforced maybe uh, I wouldn't I wouldn't bet anything on making on like, uh, uh Public law as as a as a protective in this at all because the public law will just will just be enforced selectively I I don't have any faith in that

It's also just a very annoying hypocrisy because all of these tech billionaires are all like free market guys and like Oh, you don't like capitalism Well, why don't you go and live in communist north korea and see how much you like that and it's like Yeah, but you don't like fucking free market shit Like as soon as the free market interferes even slightly with their like outrageous profits They like go crying to the government and like sorry you have to make competing with me illegal That's what the free market I mean

I agree that there's that there's a large potential for law to be enforced unequally But this is where the things like impact litigation become really important because when you're when you're thinking about the the kind of tactical tools at your disposal one of the things about law making Is that it it's an auction that's kind of unbounded you can always spend more money in lobbying to achieve your goals and so If you have enough money you can make almost anything happen in a lobbying context But when it comes to impact litigation measured against constitutional principles

The amount that you spend reaches diminishing returns pretty fast right throwing more lawyers at it doesn't get you much The kind of exotic tactics that you see sometimes in impact litigation where you know You'll hire a bunch of academics to write a bunch of law review papers or whatever to show That your position is right that also reaches diminishing returns pretty fast And so in in cases where you can make appeal to constitutional law like say max shrem did that led to the gdpr uh if you have Uh once you pass a threshold of funding right once you have say a non-profit

I helped found one in the uk called the open rights group and there's eff here in in the us and so on Once you once you have a non-profit that has enough money to litigate um And you have a constitution that has a reasonably well-defined jurisprudence You can actually make shifts now like there's a big problem with the british constitution You know when I became a british citizen There's a big problem with the american cons and what's happened to the supreme court or in fact the federal judiciary at all Well, this this wave of trump appointees

Who that's that's going to be a wild time for civil rights Even even conservative judges appointed even recently by by idiotic people like like gw and and trump They tend to skew more constitutionalist than they do Ideological even though they are quite ideological. So, you know, most recently there was a question That was before a trump appointed judge About a shutdown in I forget which state it's a state with a kentucky Where they deferred to the democratic governor over the republican legislature

By having because it was a pretty like um plain language reading of of the constitution and the jurisprudence And so, you know, again, it's like it's not like i'm not saying this always works I'm saying that in an in an asymmetrical battle where we are massively outgunned That having impact litigation in a strong constitutional tradition Provides leverage that is missing in straight-up legislative battles, right that that that and and so it's a place where You can make tactical interventions that open the space for bigger broader Structural reforms Yeah, I I think it's I see this as one of many things that need to be happening

But also it's very Something that you can also get it's very it's very worrying that it's sort of this is one of our few weapons that we have In and to be staked entirely on on on legal positivism is an uncomfortable place to be And I think it's it should be we should be looking for sort of more more things in in the arsenal like, you know unionization and strike action and stuff like general like worker solidarity to like to And to face this alongside like like targeted legal interventions as well

Because we don't have much climate left, so we all like to say and also the far right has just created a facial recognition database of everyone And handed it to a bunch of to a bunch of guys who like, you know, I've taken steroids since they were in high school this is also the thing right is like if you talk about things like, uh, the travel ban or, um, any number of things involving ice for instance where, uh, Where judges are willing to intervene for the sake of constitutional principle What happens when the federal government tells them to go fuck themselves and this is not a hypothetical question This is something that is is actively happening now and the fact that it may not be happening Specifically in this in this if you like theater of class struggle yet does not mean that it's going it's going to stay that way

Yeah, no, I I agree right. I don't think that this is a panacea I I think that you know in a in a world regulated by norms and technology and law and uh and markets That sometimes when you run out of what you can do with say, uh technology that you might be able to make a A legal intervention that opens the space for a normative conversation that opens the space for, you know, something else right that that like it's It's about, you know, speaking as a fairly recent transport to southern california Who's very very bad at parallel parking. It's a you know, sometimes when you're trying to squeeze into a very narrow space You have to crank the wheel as far as you can go in one direction just to gain a few millimeters

And then crank the wheel in the other direction to gain a few millimeters in the other direction and kind of in that stepwise way Work your way in and I think our four directions of freedom Are things that make people money because they'll just do them on their own So, you know, to the extent that there are things that make people money that make us happy If we can make them happen, that's good But of course that generally like what they what what ends up happening is the part that makes us happy gets uncoupled from the Part that makes money and it just becomes a way to make money without making people happy So, you know, we also need normative shifts so that people who do that are frowned upon and we also need legal shifts

So that it becomes legally impossible to do it and we have a basis for challenging it and so on We'll get into this in a in a later segment, but I question also the efficacy of frowning Especially with with the timescale that we're on I wonder I wonder to what extent these people feel themselves to be frowned at and whether it keeps them up at night Well, let's on the on the subject of frowning. I think let's all get our frowns ready Let's turn our smiles upside down and turn them into frowns because with an eye to tie I would like to uh, and not to stop this discussion but to move it into our next segment Which is about what people do when they can act unilaterally to remove themselves from

Yeah, it was like I was it was like I was sessing you up for that segue indeed So a couple of uh, I never know when you're doing that a couple of weeks ago, uh, this there was the very rapid rise and fall of something called a harbor Which was which was incredible to me because it combined the savior complex of the tech billionaire With the utter paranoia about any other human and a desperate need for transcendence beyond that And a desperate need also to continue their own levels of obscene luxury while living as alice you might say Uh safe from the frowns or otherwise of the people who they have, you know, so serially Dispossessed

So harbor is a luxury two-month retreat in california Located focused on weathering the storm during the global covid pandemic Uh social distancing they say is great for flattening the curve But it's not the only option to stay safe during the type of crisis harbor is a community of makers thinkers And and doers that can become your sanctuary It will give you the opportunity to meet mingle and collaborate with some of the best forward-thinking individuals Make a thing because it's required. It's fucking busy town apocalypse And the villa is in southern california

And the exact location will be provided to the program participants once they have applied and are accepted Oh, so it's the bat first of all Cory are you planning on suing the people who started harbor for stealing your uh story? Yeah, it it does feel eerily eerily familiar, but you know like the the approximate um, uh, the proximate inspiration for my story mask of the red death was You know this prepper movement, especially the luxury bunker prepper movement the the new zealand types

And and they're you know obvious delusion that we do not have a shared microbial destiny and that you can somehow shoot the germs And you know that that this would obviously end very very badly not least You know even if you succeed in in squirreling yourself away and everybody else croaks Uh, the sanitation challenge of mountains of corpses is pretty significant I think my my upbringing was like tainted by by being raised by my grandma There was a survivor of the siege of leningrad and saw a lot of cannibalism and stuff But you know being the people who thrive as everything else is collapsing is not a sustainable situation And uh, so I have a few a few more bits of information about this

They they advertised a few more things Uh, they said there were going to be drum circles in movie nights for the dozen or so guests And they had to undertake an onboarding health check and it was going to cost $6,000 per person per month I might am I correct in guessing that that is literally they just like shoot you with the ir thermometer Oh, absolutely as you're coming in It just costs as much as like an old folks home. It turns out like for that money you could like stay at shady acres You know, that's that's your alternative. It just sounds like hell. That's all it sounds like so once again once again as with as with the nrx people it's

The aesthetic is the thing that surprises and annoys me the the actual material politics Uh, yes, they're very bad, but they're not surprising to me They don't affect me emotionally in the same way, right? Because it that that feels inevitable Of course, there's going to be this sort of Treadcath weirdo around of course The the rich are gonna sequester themselves like this because that's how you get the original mask of the red death What I begrudge them for is being so fucking twee about it that you have a drum circle, right? What what? Look, I mean the thing about preppers is that when you dig into what it is

They're preparing for you find that the apocalypses that they prepare themselves for Are not grounded in what is most likely to happen. It's grounded in which situation their skills would be most useful So, you know, there's there's this anthropologist who wrote a good book about this Dancing at Armageddon this guy from Oregon State University Richard Mitchell and and you know, he interviews like a Retired chemist water chemist who has put all of his energy into prepping for the future in which terrorists poison the water And the reason he thinks terrorists might poison the water is if they did he would really shine Right and so, you know viewed through that lens like the reason plutes want a luxury bunker Where you know, they give you a house your father on the way in and and then take $6,000 off of you

And then you know have yoga retreats and so on is the ability to like procure yoga instructors Is not in most people's world like the skill that we need when the world ends So they have constructed a very specific kind of Armageddon in which yoga instructor procurement Is in fact the skill that the human race needs to reboot itself after like an existential crisis I'm so excited for the apocalypse where there's a like complete existential shortage of tweets about come and finally Yeah, we've been joking about this for a while that in the waist So we'll just be like wandering from settlement to settlement like you need any podcasters and a guy just cocks a rifle and is like keep walking Yeah, that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna we we're gonna trade uh money for like

I look at a company that's created a new kind of rope tied to stick tied to rock And i'm like, what do they think this is gonna do creates kind of an evil mace you're more likely to take your own head off it Off with it and then alice will be like, oh, yeah, I bet that sounds like something One of these like slaver tribes in kent would do and I would be like alice Do you look at the notes again and she'll be like fuck off? That's right. That's exactly exactly what's gonna happen Yeah, um, so i've got some more information that this this group of sort of you know Drum circling morons who again the idea of a drum circle is it's it's no surprise that like it is again the

Hippy hippy pursuit of transcendence combined with the infinite Faith and technology produces this like It's such a weird future It's such a weird future that you have this kind of wellness culture as the bodies pile up outside the walls I think it's not because it's it was always fundamentally liberal It was always about the improvement of the self through like meditation and different kinds of oils It's just like that got transmuted into the improvement of the self through like Microdosing and transcendental meditation and javascript

Right Well, at least it wasn't php Three of your practices. Yeah, so i've got some some more quotes, uh, alice that you've sourced from another article Uh, steve huffman the founder of reddit has been prepping quote ever since I saw the movie deep impact It's such a nerd thing to like get your fear of the apocalypse and deep impact What too too much too much about pussy to see armageddon Everybody's trying to get out of the city, but they're stuck in traffic That scene happened to be filmed near my high school and every time I drew with it stretch of the road

I would think I need to own a motorcycle because everybody else is screwed Yes, so I need I need to own a motorcycle Yeah, so kori what you say about people only being able to see the apocalypse through the lens of their own skills and anxieties I think that's exactly what's what's being reflected in huffman where he's like, uh I have to stay on I have to stay better than everyone. I need to make sure I get a motorcycle Yeah, well, and especially if you if you struggle to like figure out how to Um cooperate with other people and and build systems in which other people have your back Not because of a transactional thing

But because everyone has mutual respect and engages in mutual aid Then you have to imagine a transactional post apocalypse where you have enough like bitcoin on thumb drives and you know gemstone quality rubies and ar 15s that you can like procure a harem and live a frasetta painting forever Otherwise, you know, you're going to be the one in the posing pouch In fact, this is this this this is um Said in our next line from huffman He says look if the world ends and not even if the world ends work If we have trouble getting contact lenses or glasses going to be a pain in the ass without them

I'm fucked so we got laser eye surgery being around other people is a good thing. He said I have this somewhat egotistical view that I'm a pretty good leader So I assume I'll probably be in charge or at least not a slave when push comes to shove Yeah, I I've invested 500 billion dollars in a bunch of in a team of ex-massad mercenaries Who was specifically trained to stop people from shoving me in a locker. Oh my god I I am loving this that like the guy the guy thinks that like all the people who ended up being slaves in history We're just because of a lack of leadership potential This is some business secrets of the pharaohs shit. Hmm

But here's the thing alice. I want to bring back a point you made earlier Which is I think a little bit of skepticism that these things can be fought with law and disapproval Because they're already thinking in terms of slavery. Yes. They're already thinking in terms of who's going to It's it's already been in those terms I don't want to speculate about the the the conversation that passed between peter teal and mensch's mold bug, right? But like that's always been implicit in this it's always been a state of The strong deal they will and the weak Suffer what they must right and the only thing that they're not immune from in a in a final sense is

Me with a pickaxe going hiking in fiordland just donking on the covers of bunkers Now the thing is I want to um, so I want to see there's this kind of tension here where We know we can make certain things better tactically through things like social disapproval and targeted litigation But I I I I'm just thinking like the people who are trying to make life Much worse like people like, you know a huffman or whatever But who are or who are trying to make much worse the CEO of reddits? I mean, yeah Like tech CEOs who are willing to basically burn down the world and start against somewhere else They're already thinking sort of in a much more broadly strategic sense

Like the hon'ton that's and chuck johnson's of the world aren't but these other people are so I kind of just want to know How you respond to that tension Yeah, so, you know those people I think have been within the mix forever as you as you you know As you say you go back through history and you find people who who believed in the the You know the dominion of the strong and so on um, and I think what has changed in the In the last 40 years is that rather than viewing those people as aberrant we view them as heroic

And you know when did that change? I think a change with thatcher. I I mean, I I'm a piquettiest right I think that what happened was that the amount of wealth in the hands of the top decile and then the top percentile increased to the point where they could start to make Really serious inroads in policy and in culture How is how is this guy materially different from henry clay frick, right? Well, how is he different from any steel baron? Yeah, no, I don't think he is I think the difference is that there was about 40 years Where for where we're in at least large pockets of our civilization?

This is the postwar years 30 30 to 40 years postwar Where where the henry fricks of the world were thought of as monsters by most people and if you didn't think they were a monster You were you you didn't say so because you were worried people would call you a dick It was the quiet part that you couldn't say out loud And then and then over the last 40 years we've been in this project to lionize those people rather than view them as as You know pariahs I I I I want to I want to live in the few decades where those people were pariahs But I I'm not sure I have any faith that I could identify it

Now regardless, I mean I think the the idea that is widely seen as something bad is To be these people is is good um, I just I I think that this has to translate into Into something to do with actual political power and what kind of dismay is me? Is that our attempts to do it thus far have not Have not really played out very well. I suppose the situation has developed not entirely to our advantage Yeah, no, I mean to be clear I think that we need to strip the the wealthy of their fortunes to end their ability to influence policy

Uh and to influence norms and you know, they do both right like the the point of Prager U is not to get a law passed It's to make sociopathy seem like the point of Prager U is to like the point of Prager U is to check out Dennis Prager because that guy is hot The point of Prager U is to make baffling outside her art that like future We'll argue over what it even meant in the first place Yeah, just just getting my Prager U CDs and just stenciling on them. This is not a place of honor No, it's deemed deed is commemorated here. It's just it's memory tv for white people. That's all it is Sorry, uh, Cory, I I interrupted you with my very Silly bit, please. I mean the reason Prager the reason Prager U

Got its seed capital was because You know of the bananism right politics flow downhill from culture that that that there are people who believe and are engaged in a project To change what we think of as normal. That's why there's an iron rand high school essay competition and so on right it's it's to It's to inculcate people with the view that sociopathy is Pareto optimal and that selfishness produces prosperity and you know, it's true that like We need to counter that ideology and we need to do that by

enacting societal change, but the tactics for getting to societal change include on the way nerfing down the capacity of rich people to make that argument and Buffing arguments to the counter, right? You know, this is like this is the science fictional project of like telling stories in which sociopathic greedy people are not science heroes But in fact are the authors of their own misery and you know die shitting themselves to death of cholera And you know where my my reboot of the mask of the red death

I was gonna say where could we have found out about that? Marvin Lau a former yahoo executives who is now a partner at a group called 500 startups Considered his preparations and decided that his caches of food and water weren't enough So to protect his wife and daughter. He said he was going to take classes in archery That's awesome. That rules All of these guys I yeah, I I can't get I can't get a truck Yeah, I can't get a truck. I need to own a motorcycle. I can't get a gun. I need to take up archery I need to be special. I need to be special. I need to be different. I need to be special

Yeah, what if we have the no gunpowder works anymore apocalypse? Yeah, right, right like if the laws of physics suddenly shift in this kind of you know catastrophic way and gunpowder stops working How are you gonna defend your your family? Oh, damn. We are actually gonna have to go crawling back to the people who studied the blade Yeah For the creative for creative and acronyms will be our new warlords Been saying that for a while Buffer swords for everyone kneel before the buffer sword

Holding france hostage with my roman ballista To be fair a lot of those guys probably are also within a reactionary movement Or maybe they're just gentle or maybe they're just gentle nerds who can say so I want to I want to plug a book here Which is eric flint's book 16 16 34? I think it's called Which is he's a marxist union organizer for me packing union organizer from chicago and he wrote military left-wing science fiction about a mining town Being trans transported through this not well explained process to the middle of the 30 years war And enacting a democratic socialist revolution in central europe during the 30 years war because they have like a coal mine

A power plant and a library and they do reboot like they they create an advanced technological civilization In the middle of the 30 years where they blow up the tower of london Cardinal rishi luke gets is in for some really bad likes. It's great. I mean, it's really fantastic Like every one of my mouse and blade games I've never figured out how to play that game. I never used to learn you just got to get the coal mine Yeah, so here's the other one though. And this is what really gets me More and more hedge fund manager managers are saying you've got to have a private plane But you have to assure that the pilot's family will be taken care of too. They have to be on the plane

Yeah, of course when they run So it's like I have to like keep all of these black water mercenaries with their guns Like I have to keep them in line with my natural leadership skills Yeah, I have to create like a gantt chart that's going to keep them from fucking like taking my ears as a necklace So that's I think a chilling portent of of things to come So i'm gonna say Everybody go get yourself a copy of kori's most recent book radicalized check it out check out the bask of the red death

It is a fantastic piece of writing. I strongly recommend it and it's weirdly prescient to our current situation today It's weirdly a direct description of everything happening right now Furthermore, you know what it is. You know, you can check out our second episode every week on patreon And you also know that our theme song is provided by ginseng. It's called here. We go check it out on spotify And I think now all that's left for me to say is number one Thank you very much for getting kori for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking to you Oh, it's been entirely mutual. What a what a treat. Oh, yeah And uh to check us out. Don't forget on on the twitch stream on wednesday thursday and sunday nights at nine o'clock london time

Yeah, buy a shirt. There are shirts. You should buy them. Yeah, you know what it is They'll be in the description send an email to the podcast with this size and whatever we'll sort it out We'll like to happen kori. You're a busy man. You've got stuff to do And our audience also busy people also have lots of stuff to do. So I think We'll see you all the patreon on thursday. Yeah, keep watching the skies Yeah, my to work at the business factory Hey, and check that check the skype chat. I photoshopped the amazon logo onto the punisher logo amazing

Oh