TRASHFUTURE - Troika? I Hardly Know 'Er! feat. David Adler

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

This week, we're discussing the Eurozone's very transparent turn towards even more austerity, as evinced by their paltry fiscal response to covid-19 and the fact that basically everyone in charge has tax fraud charges on four continents. The crack Trashfuture team of Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum) join special repeat guest David Adler (@davidkradler), general coordinator of the Progressive International (https://progressive.international/). It's a fun romp with a grim prediction and some incredible, *incredible* names. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping.   *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/   

Support for this Australian life comes from the North Queensland Holden Ute Appreciation Society. The best part of life, whatever comes your way, whether it's a crate of VB, a flytip sofa that's probably still good, or a hop and dog that you hit on your way to the bottle shop, is that you can throw it in the back of the Ute and be good to go. Welcome to this Australian life, I'm Sheila Kanig, and as autumn turns to winter, you might be asking yourself, crikey, is it finally time to tinker about in the garage, maybe build those shells that Bloody Sandra's been nagging you about for ages? You could do it with what you've got, but the state of your toolkit is absolute cactus,

so you pile into the Ute, and you burn it to a bunnings for a stack of brackets and a wooden mallet. You get to the car park, you find a spot, and you're about to enter the store, and struth, it hits you, the smell of a perfectly cooked bunning snag. What is it about a sausage served in sandwich bread that seems to go hand in hand with buying lumber and nails? There's something ineffably Australian about perusing the hinge aisle with a gob full of meat, like seeing the Southern Cross or having a dingo eat your baby. Much ink and blood, frankly, has been spilled about bunnings' recent edict to banish the fried onions to the depths below the sausage, but today I feel we should ask a deeper question.

Why do we do it? What about this big desert island in the middle of the ocean makes us crave it so? I went down to my local bunnings to find out more. Ozzy rules football. V-neck t-shirts that Borat would blush at. The bloated carcasses of roadkill kangaroos on the highway from Perth to Darwin. These are just a handful of the singularly Australian things for which I find it difficult to arrive at an explanation. They just are. We know them by sight and smell. We feel a loss without them, and yet we seem to be the only nation on earth that has them. Add to that list the Bunnings Snag, a humble, foundational tradition of the Australian people, to have a sausage at the tool store. I spoke to some people at my local

bunnings to get a flavour of what the sausage and bread means to them. The first person I encountered was something of a local character. He was buying a large funnel and some tubing, which I assumed was for a meth lab, but which he said was for gardening. Fucking yeah, nah dude, the Bunnings Snag is kuda. It's ripper shit. Honestly, hard out. The Bunnings Snag, I'm fucking hungin' for one right now, to be honest. If you don't think the Bunnings Snag is sick, you're honestly a drop kick as far as I'm concerned. When I'm finished with it, you're gonna have a face like a smash crab. And don't even get me started on any rats who are going down to bunnings and having a snag without the sauce in their sauce and onions. And if you were telling me I can't have that

shit, I'd rather shit my hands and clap, to be honest. As if by serendipity, there was some pom in the shop who claimed he was a famous comedian, and I had a chance to get his reaction. These kinds of outsider perspectives are always so valuable to good journalism. How do they see us? How do I see myself? Is there something edifying in that distance? I have no fucking idea. Hello, my name's David Bedeal. You may have heard of me. I'm in Australia promoting my tour of my Twitter mentions. It's just a program talking about the daily indignities of being alive. And, you know, I decided something was lacking on stage, so I came to Bunnings to get materials to make a, I don't know, statuesque representation of gender to a company on stage.

Why are there so many genders? What are these SJDubs still talking about? Anyway, as soon as I arrived, I saw people grilling sausages at this DIY shop. Are these Islington Corbinistas grilling jackfruits or something? They're probably vegans. They're probably saying, hey, you can't in my mentions write this moment. Oh, I've got to get away from this drongo. I think in sum, to bring this segment to a close, all we can really say is, crikey. Hello and welcome again to Trash Future, that podcast you're listening to at the moment. It's Riley. I am recording having just eaten a fine summer squash soup

with a bit of freshly baked bread and a Pacifico lager. I'm joined by Milo, who recently entered the studio. Yeah, I'm in the studio. I'm in the studio for necessary reasons. So I'm recording it, but I couldn't park my car because all the business bays were full of rude boys in Prius' smoking weed, which I gather is the new business around here. That's business. Also joined by Alice. Yeah, in my Prius' smoking weed. And calling in from Rome, it is our friend, a second time guest on the show, David Adler, the general coordinator of the Progressive International. David, how's it going? It's going very well. I mean, I don't even know which day of the lockdown it is. I haven't left

my house in weeks and my underwear, I've been in my underwear for, I think, 10 days straight. So I get what your listeners can't see me. So I can just ask in this underwear glory as long as I need. Pleasure to be here. You know what they say, when in Rome, absolutely do not leave the house. Just free balling. Yeah, no. I feel like if this coronavirus is going to kill a couple of things, it might kill the restaurant, it might kill the cinema. It's also going to kill pants. And I for one, am entirely supportive of this. Oh yeah, absolutely. And other things that the coronavirus is doing, we're just going to go over a couple of quick news hits, is breaking news. The breaking news. All of the

liberal columnists in the UK have gotten an incredibly high judging this week, because Owen Jones gently suggested to them that if they can afford to, they should continue paying their cleaners and not have them come in so they don't, you know, die. Oh, it's been wild. Every single one of these women who's getting mad at him is also a massive turf, which is very funny. Julie Bindle had the funniest possible take, which was, oh, that Owen Jones, I bet he just loves fucking watching pornography of women and paying women to suck his dick. It's like, well, not sure. Not sure about this one. News about Owen Jones. Yeah, interesting. The one person in England who did not know that Owen Jones was gay is just like

loudly declaring that this is proof of his misogyny. Yeah, it's awesome. I mean, I think the thing you've got to remember, though, is with the turf columnists, if they don't have their cleaner come in, how are they going to check inside their pants? So it's basically, this has been twisted to Owen Jones says, it's great. Owen Jones can say or do anything and legions and legions of people with columns. This is not just limited to... People of column, please. This is not just limited to like the Janice Turners and Sarah Dittams and stuff. Everybody with a column will basically, like, I think they must have some special pair of glasses

that where it turns everything he says into something just completely horrifying, because as soon as he said, maybe you should pay them to stay home, they were like, oh, what? You just think women belong doing the housework Owen? And it's like, wait. But if cleaning is a job that is primarily feminized labor and done by women, who do you think there's doing the cleaning? And then Sarah, my favorite one, this is a quick news here, we're going to move on from it quickly. Sarah Dittam. Her husband, Nathan Dittam, is a Minecraft YouTuber. I'm so glad we found someone I can feel superior to as a podcaster. He cleaned the house parody in Minecraft. And she said, you know, I, oh,

you think it's so easy. You just think I have to do all the work. And it's like, can't your family just do it? Like, are all columnists just married to like the sitcom dad from King of Queens? No, he's a neat. He's like, no, mom, I can't stop playing it. It's online. Finally, she ended on the argument. She was two things. She was like, no, besides my cleaner likes to come and clean for me. She says it gives her a sense of purpose. And it's like, yeah, absolutely, Sarah. I'm sure that's exactly it. I have a subdom relationship. Yeah, I am. I am doing the Duke of Burgundy stuff, or like the bit of tears of Petrofon can't with my cleaner and I that you respect my DS

Polycule. What it is, is it's the great chain of being just repurposed for like, you know, columnists who live in zone two. Like, no, I naturally, like, I have a naturally ordained relationship by God with the person I pay minimum wage to clean my house because no one in my house wants to do it. And if I don't do that, then if they don't come to clean my house, if I just give them a handout, then the feudal compact has been broken. And they'll be left rudderless and directionless. Matt Ridley was right. We are all French kings now. The Matt Ridler. I was just going to say that the DS Polycule was one of Nintendo's most controversial consoles. David, any thoughts on this before we move on to the second quick news hit?

I just can't, I mean, it's worth stepping back and reflecting on how utterly depressing it is that we live in a world where there is a full class of people of column. I mean, we really, we're grasping, we're grasping for entertainment here so much that we're focused on people that really do not belong even anywhere in the rear view mirror. It's really, I just, yeah, not to introduce even more sadness into a sad moment, but God damn, man, cannot believe you're crying all the time. Yeah, you're so mad that you have to know who these people are. It's taking up space in your brain that could be used for like learning how to garden or something.

Well, I don't know if you saw this, you know, everyone's having these freaky dreams, and you know, no one really knows why. And National Geographic comes out with this, with this piece that finally sets the mystery to rest saying, the reason why you're having crazy dreams is because the brain processes stimuli that you encounter during your day, and we're all stuck in lockdown. So what's happening is the brain's processing stimuli already has, it's going back through your past and sifting through the memories that you already have. And the same thing applies for the Twitter feed. You know, you're like, I'm having dreams about people that are just, you know, little sort of anger soundbites popping up

on my web page. And yet they're appearing in deep recesses of my brain because I just have nothing else to populate with. I don't know what you're talking about. I woke up with a phrase, a, a Scrivener involved, Bartle being in my head this morning. So like this is fine. I'm fine. What I find most funny about this is, again, like we, and we, again, we stand by our TF promise when I predicted that one of the, one of the people yelling at Owen Jones, just just willfully misunderstanding what he said, because like, I don't know, he killed their father in a previous life or something, like some kind of millennia old grudge. They are in Jones is one of the main, yes. Yeah, exactly. So what, but what that, that and Julie

Bindle or Sarah did him actually got a spectator article out of it and so has made 250 pounds performatively misunderstanding Owen Jones. And my promise to you, the listener is you will never hear that article on this show because it is too fucking boring. The only reason we even talked about it right now is because Sarah did, his wife is a Minecraft YouTuber and she was like getting mad because well, obviously I couldn't ask my idiot board of a husband to clean that house. You just force fam Nathan Desson by calling him his, her wife. Misgendering the Minecraft community. Another, another quick hit is the Daily Mail published a headline, attacking teachers unions for trying to ensure a safe return to school

back to the 70s. Millicent unions. And it has said, magnificent staff across the nation are desperate to help millions of children get back into the classroom, but militant unions are standing in their way to them, the male employers, let our teachers be heroes. Damn, the classic, the classic conflict between teachers and the unions that represent teachers. Age old story. I hate when militant unions come to my work and like slap the clipboard out of my hands and tell me that I'm not doing shit. We're really profound here. I mean, I think that the way that hero has just become synonymous with future dead person, martyr. Yeah, I mean, but you look at the way Trump was using it, you know, in a recent quote where he was talking about how

doctors and nurses are flinging the doors of their hospitals, running in like soldiers into bullets. You're just like, what are we doing here? Since when did our definition of heroism just require people to sacrifice themselves to this virus? It's very strange to me. Because we only, the only legitimate form of collective sacrifice or working together or whatever that we've understood as a culture at this point is the troops. And so everything's a war because we're fighting an enemy and we're going to lose some of our people. But we are going to keep honoring them. And the thing is, the more we refuse to like just for some just culture war horse shit, allow the possibility of working together for some collective goal other than

struggle, we are going to expand more and more and more spheres of people working in some in social occupations like teachers or doctors and stuff to just become troops until we're a society of two classes. We are the until it's with the class composition society changes to the troops who are represented by everyone who's constantly dying like to keep the Eloy above them fed. Yeah, I love to be, I love to be a sparse and healer because I'm not in the NHS. I can't wait to see people stealing valor as a teacher just like, you know, swanning into a restaurant and sitting backwards on a chair telling you to call them by their first name and then demanding a discount. And then they're like, Oh, sir, you did not serve in the

teaching battalion. You're wearing that tie incorrectly. There is something just a little bit, well, extremely perverse about just the nature of this virus, I mean, which is that like the nature of the phenomenon of the pandemic where most of us are inside enjoying little treats and then many people are going out and being exposed to this virus and dying as a result. We're like, the relevant metric is of course going to be death because on the opposite side, let's say when we flatten the curve or when it's successful coronavirus response, there's no bang, there's no victory, you know, it's you can't declare anything doesn't feel, you know, emotively, it's tough to craft a narrative around that. And so there's a kind of fatalistic tendency where like, the only way

to measure the thing is in fatalities. And because you can't measure the reverse and life saved, I think that, you know, it feeds on that general tendency towards the war analogy we're mentioning, for like, we can only conceive of this thing in that fatalistic capacity, because, you know, how else are we going to understand ourselves in our own relationship to the pandemic other than, you know, I didn't die or I did die? Yeah, I mean, we can talk about like the idea of the front as like a hermetically sealed environment as, you know, the same as the hospital ward, you know, people go in and then a lot of them don't come back out again.

They did it for us and they did it for the nation to be a hero. We will be able to like raise a flag over the virus at some point. This just reminds me, in fact, of Umberto Eco's definitions of fascism. Yeah, the 11th point. I know, thank you, Alice. Everybody is educated to become a hero because in Ur-fascist ideology, heroism is the norm and the cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. So just something to process there in our response to the virus. Yeah. Sure.

Anyway, I'm going to start up. I've got a startup for us to talk about. Today, we are talking about invisible AI, invisible AI. I'd like guesses from David first and then my two beautiful co-hosts about what you think invisible AI does. What this general AI does. Startup is called invisible AI. That's the name of the company. What do you believe this company does? It washes your asshole.

That's a useful service now. Non-Muslims finally discovered the bidet, right? All it took was a massive shock to the toilet paper economy. Alice, hit me. Oh, invisible AI. I don't know. It sounds like we found a way to make those Boston Dynamics robots more sinister. Now they just have like fucking tentacles and it's all taking a turn towards the hentai. Yeah, Milo.

Remind me the name of the startup again. Invisible AI. AI isn't normally visible, so this seems like a weird clarification to make. Are you sure you haven't just misread it and there's no just invisible owl? Just a guy called owl. You can't see. You can call me invisible owl. Is it like robot ghosts somehow? Milo is the closest.

Of the three, yes. Milo is the closest and you'll see how. The first bit of the marketing text I'm going to read to you has no blanks. It merely says quality products start with quality processes. We're going to just loop back around. David, what do you got? Quality products and quality processes. Okay. Judging by the utter banality and as Milo pointed out, the kind of tautology of invisible AI, I want to double up on saying it's something really fucked up, really sinister. It washes your asshole but it doesn't fuck that way.

Is it like a euthanasia? No, not that. Well, I think Marx would probably see it as a kind of euthanasia applied to the labor process, but I don't literally know. Quality products start with quality processes suggests to me some kind of nutrients. Oh, I know what it is. I know what it is. If you say that it's like euthanizing a labor process, it's killing quality control. The guy who stands over the production line and makes sure that there aren't any fucked up skittles going out. They're just like a six foot wide single skittle with an enormous thing on it.

It'd be really difficult to bowl in that scenario. Yeah, exactly. That's what it's replacing. So, Alice is so close to getting it right. Oh, God, what's the twist? There's going to be some fucked up twist like it. So, it's our AI-enabled blanks. So, our AI-enabled plural nouns, frack blank and blank. This is the last one before I tell you what it is. David, start us off. Is it like a productivity machine? Like it's sort of dragging your... Yes.

...offing your own blink and your fingers. It's another spying on your staff machine. Yes, Milo's got it. No. Every week. This is a different one. The one we did two weeks ago spies on what they're saying and thinking. This one spies on what they're doing. It does include them going to the bathroom. Okay, we're all linked together.

Led by Eric Danziger, the CEO, Invisible AI offers a no-code, edge-based computer vision platform embedded in AI cameras, which track body movements to improve and standardize manual assembly processes in manufacturing facilities. A no-code computer vision solution. I can explain what that is. There are two... Because when you have a platform, it's something that you build applications on. Quite often, a platform will be like a code standard or a code wrapper or whatever

that you'd put something that you'd code in. However, in this case, a no-code platform allows you to build an application using like drag and drop or what have you. It's not the final application. It allows you to build applications on it. You don't have to know how to code. There is code. It's just hidden from you. Invisible, if you will. It is a camera that you put it in front of workers who are working, and then it tracks all of their movements by articulating along their elbows and wrists and so

on in their arms to make sure that they're taking the most efficient paths between a box of bolts and a thing that they're putting a bolt onto. This is a very horny technology. Yeah. I love to get a little shock and some electrodes somewhere when I lean on some boxes. Yeah. Do not lean, citizen. The time of opening is over. Just buy a fucking big quip all of your stuff with posture collars. You were heading that way anyway.

Although they've just invented an AI deputy head teacher who comes around and goes, the wall doesn't need your support. Well, essentially, again, what supervisory labor does is it's not real labor. It's just a way to make the hyper exploitation of other labor more efficient. So what you've basically done is you have automated supervisory labor, which is not a new thing either. Forget the platforms, man. This is like raw 19th century Taylorism.

I mean, this is not new stuff. We wrote books about second by second production processes and how assembly lines need to be bolted down and divided into sub, sub, sub, sub, sub divided. This is the farcical nature of this disgusting and humiliating moment we're at. We're not even confronting novel crises. We fucking had pandemics. We've had the same Taylorism pulse to micromanage all the way down to hyper exploit. We've been through this, and now we're just doing it in a shittier, scarier, and more grotesque way.

Well, it's a little unfashionable, right? Like for a while there, the way that we were going to eliminate supervisors was just by making you your supervisor. I know. I'm my own supervisor. It sucks. No, because then you're doing two jobs. You're disciplining yourself according to a supervisor of your supervisor. No, anyway. Yeah, no, now we've just taken a turn back to the 1890s, and we're like, why does this steam-powered foreman bot have the fucking arc generator on the back of it, and like a shock baton?

I think very robot wars at this point. If I could ask about that, I mean, so you're the one who's looking at a rally. Does it come with an enforcement mechanism? Because it's also just creating room for more labor, right? Because let's say they're like, ooh, the elbow needs to twist at a 73-degree angle. Someone has to be there to choreograph that shit. So I mean, how can this thing be helpful? Yeah, I can tell you.

It's very interesting. Let's say helpful for the purposes of labor exploitation. So because it's a platform, they've said, no, we haven't built the actual application on it. This is just the capability upon to which you build the application. So they, for example, you could say that it feeds into a little screen beside the production workers station that says, you miss step eight in the production process. So go back and do it. Or it could say something like, you could be told that the most efficient way

to clip this gasket onto this half of the radiator is to go in from above with your elbow. And you would feed that motion into it, and it would track that motion and sort of tell you you could actually probably do this more easily. And again, this is one of these things where these technologies are not inherently good or bad, right? And if this was used by, say, I don't know, a cooperative, then who just wanted to who was like seeing the fruits of this, who wanted to avoid things like injury, I don't know, I could see this being like, not super bad, especially if the workers themselves

had as say, and how it was used and what happened with the information and so on and so on. Yeah, well, like athletes and stuff already use technology like this for like motion correction and whatever, that's normal. And so you, but the fact is because it's not going to be deployed in that kind of environment, it would be probably trivially easy to say for a boss to say what we've done or another startup to say what we've done is we've taken the invisible AI platform and we've bolted onto it a haptic feedback system that shocks you if you like, you could do that very easily. We've hooked it up to Matilda from Robot Wars, who will stab your ankles.

Yeah, just a little robot just ramming into your shins and like totally destroying them. But like, here's the great thing, right? Make Jals just commentated on the production line. Basically, with a lot of these companies that look like they could be hyper exploitative and it's really obvious the CEOs and venture capitalists will like try and assuage those fears preemptively. We've seen this a few times. So this is from, oh no, that stands for the Bob V. This is from the prospectus of Sierra Ventures, who invested along with several others.

Their justification was that human involvement in manufacturing typically leads to errors, which are often not caught immediately and can cost the manufacturer. No, they always do this. They always say, oh, well, when humans are involved, blah, blah, blah. Humans in AI, we call it. I love to repeat the bit where the robots like take over the UN and the animatrix forever. Humans with their weak and fee-blind flesh are unable to create items with the efficiency of a machine.

And like the items that we're talking about here are the shit that you see on wish.com, right? They're unable to create a pair of shoes with like a plastic fish in the heel. To be fair, no human can even come up with that idea. Whenever, whenever any of these companies say human, you always have to replace the word worker. And whenever they say something like manufacturer or company, they all just replace the word, that word with the word owner. So worker involvement leads to cost for the owners, which means we need to discipline the workers.

And that's what that's what they're saying. They're just trying to make it sound nice. So they said invisible is working with manufacturers such as Toyota to catch errors as they occur and eventually prevent them through improving and reinforcing assembly processes. Reinforcement is obviously not elaborated. This is like the kind of shit that like you used to take like a huge bong rip in the 1920s and be like, man, they're turning the people into machines, man.

They did. They don't want you to like act totally robustically and like never make any, but that's literally like explicitly what they're trying to do. It's sad, especially because, you know, you mentioned Toyota there. And like Toyota, if you look at the case like their new me plant in California, these, they were famous for having this highly socialized production process, where instead of it being one guy, one bolt, one guy, one bolt, one guy, one bolt, it was teams of workers who would go down the whole assembly line together.

And then at the end of every day, you know, early week, they would have a performance review where they would look as a kind of workers council and say, how can we improve the production process to make it more efficient and feeding back into the overall design, you know, and then you can do this, you know, and there are, there's good literature to suggest that those kinds of socialist practices are really efficient as well as being egalitarian. But there's ways to do this that don't rely on this really grotesque description or sort of glossing over the dynamic of exploitation and can actually feed back in. And it's, you know, it's the kind of to Jenna's face nature of the technologies that we're just using them all for

evil. And we don't have to design a production processes or our legal frameworks to enable that. Yeah, one of the really surprising twists of the last 50 years of the 20th century was the Japanese turning out to have a real passion for like good, compassionate working environment. I mean, well, once again, shout out to the Japanese Red Army for like pushing that along a little bit. Oh, yeah, if you, we could talk about the history of organized labor in the Communist Party of Japan and like making a lot of this happen. But so from the assembly line operators standpoint, the venture capitalist goes on, they're often blamed for mistakes they didn't make and don't receive recognition for being error free. Again, this is just a technical,

a technical thing, of course, where workers are blamed for mistakes they didn't make and don't get recognition for doing their job. Well, this is obviously a technical problem to be solved with a technical solution, not a political problem. So invisible solution actually puts operators in the driver's seat, providing them with more visibility into areas they're excelling at and areas in which they can improve. Again, you know, the driver's seat where someone else tells you exactly what to do and how to get where you are, basically just turning you into it again, it is turning you into essentially a part of the machine. The Soviet Union, but worse and more expensive. So like at some point, you just like you move your arm in the right series of predetermined

motions and a little like 3d printer spits out an order of labor. Children getting their hands stuck in the steam loom is a problem as old as manufacturing. No, I love I love to like be rewarded by like having like a complete copy of like what's the capitalist equivalent of like the collected works of Lenin just like given to me as 1984. Yeah, like an Amazon gift card. Yeah, he's just Jeff bucks. I get I get a little token amount of Jeff bucks for my like my heroic labor, which has been recognized. So here I have a few more quotes from the CEO and then we're going to go on. So this is from a tech crunch interview says with the article says crunch. Yeah, tech crunch. It's just my accent. Obviously, right in the outset, this sounds like

the kind of thing that results in pitiless computer overseer that punishes workers every time they fall below an artificial and constantly rising standard and they could have stopped there. Yeah, but CEO and co-founder Eric Danziger was pleased to explain that this is the idea at all. No, no, no, no, no. The most important parts of this product are for the operators themselves, because this is skilled labor and they have a lot of pride in their work. They're the ones in the trenches. So they're troops to cleaners again, it gives them purpose and meaning. They're the ones catching and correcting mistakes is a big part of it. So really, they just want to perform this set of movements as efficiently as they can and then take some of

what they make. Don't ask where the rest of it goes. No, it's just like it's like break dancing. Yeah. Well, our product does contain the taser features. We would expect that they will be used very sparingly next to the good worker button. Oh, my God. We are literally, I reckon, less than a year away from a company trying to turn their production line into a TikTok dance to encourage people to do it better. Stop it. No, stop it. I'm still into the DS thing. Step away from the lathe. No, we are like, we're two steps away from just like the drone floating overhead, giving you head pads. We're doing a good job. It's easy to imagine a system, a version of the system where, like in Amazon's warehouses, workers are pushed to meet nearly

in human quotas, blah, blah, blah. But Dan Zigger says that a more likely outcome based on anecdotes from companies he's worked with already. So bosses tell me that they're not abusing it at all. Don't worry. What's our best kind of evidence? Anecdotal. The SMF got anecdotes. Yeah. I think it is really interesting that the overriding anxiety, if you think back to like the early 2000s, the overriding anxiety was like, we were getting sluggish and fat and we were not moving at all. And the whole kind of exercise of, let's say, the kind of third way of social democracy was to get us to be more active. Because the concern was that we were all becoming these kind of office monkeys. And now we're really,

we're staring at the barrel of like, everyone being going back to the factory, you know, it's like, and we're talking about these, the hottest startups are the ones that help you discipline your workers. I mean, it's so unbelievably nostalgic for a economy, an industrial production system that we thought we'd left behind completely. It's amazing to see it return in full force and for Amazon warehouses to become the primary site of exploitation, not this tertiary kind of abstract form of labor where we're mostly concerned about people's nutrition. Yeah. In fact, this is David, you might as well have prefigured this next bit, but I know you haven't, because you haven't actually seen it. Having built a product day in

and day out year after year, production workers have deep and highly specific knowledge of how to do it right. But that knowledge can be difficult to pass on formally. So hold the piece like this when you bolt it, bolt it or your elbow will get in the way. It's easy to say in training, but it's not so easy to make standard practice. Invisible AI's posture and position detection could help with that. We were essentially trying to use a no code AI camera platform to kind of recreate a grand manufacturing tradition that we haven't had for 50 years. I love to work at the dick sucking factory where Clippy the paperclip tells me what angle to have my jaw at for maximum efficiency. But it's so funny here, as he says, like any compelling

new technology, the possibilities for abuse are there, but unlike clear view AI, this platform is not built for abuse. It's a fine line. It definitely reflects the companies it's deployed in, said Danziger. The companies we interact with really value their employees and want them to be as respected and engage in the process as possible. Okay, then eliminate management, just let them own it. This helps them with that. This helps them by tracking their movements and ensuring that they do the optimal movement the same every time. And don't worry, we won't be attaching a shock collar to this. However, I'd like to emphasize that it is possible to attach a shock collar to this. When all the workers are moving in perfect synchronicity, then they will

open a portal to hell. I mean, great efficiency in the workplace. David, really, you have got me thinking about manufacturing. I worry the extent to which we have been like, oh, man, it'd be nice if manufacturing came back as like a sector and then the monkeys pour cold. And we just had, yeah. And so we're back to the steam loom. You know, are those our only options? Yeah, David, what do you think? Well, I want to go, we could go down along, we'll have a much longer conversation about, you know, not just the right politics of this, which are to sort of heighten the exploitation, deepen the exploitation, make it ever more efficient like we're talking about,

but what it meant to be talking about building in Britain. I mean, there is, we are staring down. So, you know, I think you make a joke, Alice, but we're going to be de-globalizing in ways that... Oh, no, no, no, I absolutely was not. This is like my thinking about the coronavirus and then our like incipient climate disaster is that at some point we're going to have to start building stuff domestically or stuff. My question is like, I was expecting a less abrupt transition for between just, we all work in a we work and we will work in a we work that is now converted into hitting a girder with a big hammer. My tattoo is German for the globalizing. But so much of the exploitation was out of sight, out of mind for so long. And, you know,

there's a certain... I don't want to paint this in a positive light, but I think there's a certain confrontation that's coming between, okay, we're going to reshor, we're going to bring, you know, bring those jobs back, we're going to build it in Britain, we're going to bring those jobs back to countries in the industrialized West that haven't had them for a long time. But there's a big battle that's going to have to go down in terms of being like, oh, that's what these jobs were like. We had forgotten that they were grueling in ground life expectancy down to a minimum and encourage us all to smoke until we're dead. And, you know, the silver lining would be, okay, that can be the groundwork for a fundamental re-evaluation of the kind of standards of labor domestically and

around the world. But I just think we haven't thought enough about what manufacturing looks like because it hasn't been anywhere in sight for so long. I agree completely. I think there's two ways that you can kind of like disavow this. You can do the Maoist Third Worldist thing of be like, well, if this is where the class struggle is happening, then it's those workers' problem, right? We don't really have to think about it because we're the imperial core and we're hopeless. And I admit there are some justifications of thinking that last bit. Or... That's in the Don Draper form of like left internationalism, which is admit what a piece of shit you are and then carry on being a piece of shit.

Exactly. Exactly. Or you can do People's Republic of Walmart, right? And you can say, yes, these globalized supply chains are very exploitative and very bad, but I do like the products of them. So what if we made them nice? And I don't think... Now, if there's one in my head, which is just star up guy Don Draper. That is just Don Draper. Would you have to move stock? Like, no, this is... I don't think either of those really anticipated just how limited the

lifespan of offsuring and globalization would be and how quickly it sort of brought about its own demise, right? And the coronavirus being like the really obvious, like the trigger for that. But like, we've been seeing this come up for years and years. And I don't think anyone on the left really took that process like seriously enough. Well, like the satanic mills, like they don't stop being satanic. We've just moved the... We've outsourced... We've moved the hell away. But yeah, like production... I think also, like in the meantime, like our working culture has moved on a bit, like not

enough. I mean, if you look at the kind of manufacturing that there is and say Britain at the moment, it's like primarily quite high tech. And I think like the working conditions aren't that bad. I mean, I'm sure they could be improved, but they're nothing like working conditions and say the average factory in like China or Southeast Asia or whatever. We've moved all these exploitative products. Well, okay. If you want to be more specific about it, you've got to look at kind of like who has outsourced, who has deindustrialized fastest. So let's just take these two models. There's a coordinated market economy of a Germany and it's a liberal market economy of a Britain,

right? There's a shitload of manufacturing that happens in Germany, but it happens on much better terms. It's much more coordinated. You've got robust systems of apprenticeship, really decent wages. You've got a nice career set out for you as an apprentice where you're going to move into this trade and be involved in production. And what that meant is they grappled with those questions of what manufacturing is and was going to be and they looked them in the face and I don't want to gloss over quite complex political economic histories, but they arrived at some kind of tripartite settlement between the state employers and employees where it was going to work. Now, the liberal market economies, namely the Anglos, they just were like, you know what,

fuck it, those guys can do a better over there from what cheaper labor we're going to export the hell out of it. So what that means, I think I disagree with you, Milo, where when that stuff comes back, it's not like we've sorted those questions out. We've had those tripartite negotiations where we have a settlement and we can Germanize quickly. It's going to be those same practices that were highly exploitative when they were in Britain that we sent out where they're going to come back, I think, just as bad. So we'll have that conversation. Yeah, we'll see the groundwork for the destruction of labor law as we currently understand it in the UK pretty much now. It's already happening. So that's going to happen. But I also want to

say really quickly before we move on is that the German idea also, I think we all recognize, not ideal, having the workers have two seats on the board is a hell of a lot better than none, but it's like 80% fewer than they should be having. Yeah, I feel like a crossover. Germany relies on extremely cheap labor in Hungary that basically feeds its entire industrial model of the same unit costing five pence in Hungary and then $5 in Germany so they can massively amplify their value add. So there's lots of stuff there. I just mean we're in a way more primitive position in the Anglo country. I don't know. Hungary is a pretty normal country. I can't say anything bad happening there.

So it's very good that we're talking about Germany now because I'd like to shift gears a little bit from the, let's say, purely from the political economic to the political economic. Where there have been this constellation of responses to the coronavirus pandemic that have been discussed to death, including on this show. And they have happened at a UK level, which we've talked about relatively frequently. They've also happened with the European Union, which we have talked about less frequently. And it's interesting to point out where those approaches have diverged and where they've converged and what the two visions of the future are, which I think are more similar than they are different. So David, I've got, I've grabbed a

couple of articles that you've written on this subject on what the European Union has done at a super national level and how the diplomacy between the borrower countries in the south, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, and the frugal four up north, which is that Netherlands, Germany, Finland, and well, who's the fourth frugal four things Finland, Austria, Germany, and Netherlands. Yeah, yeah. So we, we were where the it's, it has a combination of an institutional problem and then a diplomatic problem between like these two groups of countries. So I'm going to start with one of your some quotes from one of your articles about how Europe coming into this crisis was politically very confident, but in every meaningful respect

on very shaky ground, you write that the recovery measures introduced in the last crisis barely staunch the bleeding the last crisis being the sovereign debt crisis by 2019 youth unemployment in Italy, Spain, and Greece was still at over 30% and COVID-19 had ripped the plaster off to reveal the carnage underneath. So give us a little context. What are we Europe entering coronavirus? I think it's how are we doing? Yeah, I think it's helpful to start the story in May 2019. So in May 2019, we had this great experiment of the European Union elections. This is when, you know, millions and millions of people turn out to vote for their members of European parliament abroad, the symbolic body, but it still has a big influence over the direction of the European

Union institutions in Brussels, Strasbourg, and Frankfurt. In 2019, it was taken as a, as a big victory for the, let's call them the pro-European establishments. There was a big uptick in turnout, voter turnout, historic uptick, I think of 11% from 50 something to 60 in these elections. And it was seen as a huge vote of confidence in the European project. And it was matched by a lot of these sort of annual surveys like the Euro barometer that really reflected that not least because Brexit at the time was such a rank disaster. It looked so costly and so complex to lead the European Union that it really fortified public opinion around the value of sticking together. And that married with a narrative of triumph over the crisis that had

dominated the Eurozone and the European Union more broadly since 2010 and certainly since 2012. And gave a fresh confidence to the sort of technocratic elite in Brussels to speak with a lot of bravado and confidence about their continent. This is when you see the emergence of programs like the Green Deal that we discussed last time I was on the show, saying really confident pronouncements. Europe is, you know, we're doing a man on the moon. Europe's going to be a first decarbonized continent. And they're speaking in this language, you know, of presenting Europe as being a kind of, not just a pioneer in policy terms, but as a truly integrated continent. And I think they really got used to speaking that way. If you fast forward a few months,

not so long from there, we are right back, right back 10 years ago. And the reason we're right back 10 years ago, as you mentioned, you know, you could go to the piece that I published with a lot of new review of books is because the measures that were introduced 10 years ago were what we call a Merkel fudge. We call it a Merkel fudge because this is what Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, is brilliant at. Truly a maestro that one has to appreciate. But I thought she was a big time communist, Stalinist, fascist like EU irredentist. She was like incredibly dangerous. Well, that's the whole point. She's a Rorschach test. I mean, people really do see what they're going to see with this wonderful, steely chemist.

And what she did there, you'll remember when the Greek situation is okay, she basically was able to find this fudge, this compromise point while still pushing through horrendous austerity measures, but finding some political compromise that could essentially defang the series of government and their allies across the pigs countries you mentioned, you know, the Spain, Portugal, and Italy in particular. And the pigs is just a little bit on the nose. I know, like the fucking honks countries. The gips. You can rearrange those letters however you like. And so there was this kind of political settlement, but there was no economic settlement. And if you look over the course of the last 10 years, there's been net zero public investment

in the eurozone over 10 years, you know, 10 years when Europe was supposed to be taking seriously things like the green transition, things like investing in the future and building its own European Facebook and Google, there's just been no public. Okay. So this COVID pandemic hits. And as it's doing everywhere, it's just ripping at the seams of integration, right? We talked a bit about already on the podcast about the kind of impulse toward de-globalization. That's already happening in this highly integrated zone known as Europe. And so you end up right back 10 years ago where, you know, different countries are being hit at different times. You saw Italy was first, where I'm speaking from now, Spain came later and ultimately had

even a bigger impact in Spain, other countries were better prepared. And that stuff was all being filtered through decisions that were made 10 years ago. So your fiscal absorption capacity, as it's known, essentially how throttles you were by austerity and forced to cough up increasing amounts of money while also drowning in debt, you know, that's going to determine how robust your response was going to be the pandemic. So it amplified actually existing inequalities and just wrecked and ripped apart Europe. And that was, you know, piece one, we can get into kind of how it's unfolded since then. But yeah, I think the theme that we always keep coming back to is that if you think the coronavirus imposed these costs in a new way, or has created

economic and social crises, then I've got a bridge to sell you because all of these things existed before. What I'm reminded of is last summer, people seem to forget this, but a record number of people died in Greek wildfires because the Germans basically closed down all of their fire departments. The profligate Greeks with that fire department. Look, a fire department is just an unreasonable expense. You spend all of this money on a big red truck, and then most of the time, nothing's on fire, and you don't even go anywhere in it. That's wildly responsible. Don't even call it suffiable. So I've got another quote, in fact, from Ursula von der Leyen. Oh yeah, a friend of the show. A friend of the show Ursula von der Leyen. Which I think

really gives the quote from von der Leyen, and then I'm going to do some numbers. So von der Leyen said, this is the European way. We are ambitious and we leave nobody behind. This is what she said. Yeah, Greek firemen and anyone who's like face down on a beach in the med is yeah. Yeah, we leave those people. We don't leave anyone behind who is a net payer into the system. We need to rediscover the power of cooperation. She told Wef and Davos this year based on fairness and mutual respect. This is why I hate the politics. This is what I call the geopolitics of mutual interest, and this is what Europe stands for. Now, the European Union response to coronavirus included many different expenditures of money and creations of financial and fiscal instruments,

and I've got two to compare for you right now in light of what Ursula von der Leyen has said. About no child left behind or whatever. 800 million euros. Yeah, no firefighter left behind. 800 million euros has gone into a solidarity fund, which is essentially to just pay out like people in Italy who need it, right? It's one coronavirus recovery, Michael. What could it cost? $10. That might sound like quite a bit, but just remember that like, I don't know. It's less than those bureaucrats stealing pens every year. Britain has now spent some like tens of billions just on its furlough scheme and business support scheme, not to mention other things. Oh, yeah. You're paying like a week's wages for one city.

Yeah, this is going to like help out Palermo for like a month, and that's it. Now, that's 800 million euros. People keep talking about how much money the furlough is costing. Sorry, just on an aside, and I keep losing my mind. They're like, oh, it's costing $10 billion a week. It's like, okay, so it would cost like, I don't know, like what, like $500 billion a year, which is like still less than like the UK spends annually for like the entire country to not collapse. Yeah, it's like measure the furlough scheme in F-35s for me. So 800 million euros for the Solidarity Fund, which actually does something. 164 million for startups who are coming up with innovative solutions to tackle COVID-19.

Podcasting subsidy. David, it's the green deal again, but for COVID. I'm just doing some quick numbers here. What is, okay, what is a GDP? What is your GDP? I'm trying to remember. European... Well, I mean now, 18.8 trillion US dollars. While you do that math, I would get my rant out of the way, which is the reason why I hate the fucking EU so much is because plenty of political institutions could have fucked up a recovery like this. Plenty of them could have fucked up a response like this. Very, very few of them would do this kind of bullshit fucking homily about how we're closer together and how we're all friends as we're just like just throwing money into Frontex or...

Yeah, guys. I'm going to do a quick update on the numbers here. That Solidarity Fund is 0.04% of the European Union's GDP. I want to repeat that. 0.04% of the European Union's GDP. They're dedicating to an unprecedented health and economic crisis that we've never known before. Sounds good. We can get into the weeds a bit more about what exactly transpired. We had a really big month, last month in April, it was just total explosion where I mentioned all these things were filtering in and the old wounds were being ripped open and we were seeing a lot of the diplomatic flare-ups, as you mentioned Riley, that dominated the headlines before. Out of that, there was a

call for these things called the corona bonds for a type of neutralization of debt to be technical about it. The idea was like, look, the eurozone, we all share the same currency. You cannot imagine more fertile ground for a politics of solidarity than being like, oh yeah, if you're fucked, I'm also fucked. We literally have the same paper money in our hands. So people were like, okay, listen, why don't we team up and we'll generate money together and through the power of unity, we can issue these bonds that investors are going to like and trust because they bring us all together. Eurovengers style. And we can use all that money. You can talk about the amounts, but way more than 800 billion, something more like 30 billion immediately.

You could spend that money according to need and everyone could be totally happy about it. And so this is being pushed by the Italians, we're being pushed by the Spaniards, and we got further, we speak with a quite royal we, that proposal got further than any proposal for a similar sort of mutualization scheme. So far, you know, nine eurozone countries, including the French, including the nasty French, whose primary anxiety is looking Italian, even the French. Like François Thierry. Teamed up and cosigned this, however, cynically, cosigned this proposal. And then it came to, you know, game time came and it threw the proposal down. And, you know, guess, you can just guess

what happened. I remember, in this section of the notes, there being an absolutely incredible Dutch name. Yeah, I triple underlined this. Yeah, that's how racists indicate the Dutch. So this is the, this is pure, pure season three stuff, right? So this is a quote from your article to the Italian finance minister Roberto Galtieri, who I'll be referring to as Polly Galtieri for the balance of this show. The he believes that Corona bonds are still on the table after the meeting of the euro group agreed to create quote, innovative instruments consistent with EU treaties in order to fund the eurozone's economic recovery. So Polly Galtieri is like, yeah, Corona bonds are still on the table. To whereas to Dutch finance minister Woepke Hoekstra.

Yeah. Yeah. Honkball Hoek to class and professional. Fucking wompty, dumpy, dumb ass, fucking. Yeeps van der Boestjen says some opinions. It means nothing at the start. Shortly after the meeting, he said he was not okay with Corona bonds, was never okay with it and never will be. And so the can, I was never okay with it. I love gold. Well, that's the thing, folks, the Dutch, the Dutch have created this much tropes.

The Dutch have created this tax haven in their, in their country where like any, any European, any firm has a strong incentive to like headquarter a domicile themselves in the Netherlands. So they have to pay like, you know, 20 euros and some waffles and tax and free shoe polish. Hey, you want to hear something funny? What? Before he joined the government, Hoekstra was a partner with the consultancy firm Mackenzie. Oh yeah. You guys really, you guys should really see my mentions. I mean, the Dutch and I have become

very close over the past four months with the publication of these articles and the kind of crusade that we've, we've led against them. I must say, I didn't realize what the Netherlands was, which is like a goblin America. I mean, it was an amazing video that came out like a week and a half ago of some, I think trucker, it was just like, so Mark Rutte, who's the PM of, of the Netherlands, who's a real piece of work. He's a super polished guy, you know, writes his bicycle around Amsterdam, stuff like that. Yeah, it's a particular kind of polish that you might be familiar with. He was walking around this and his trucker was sort of like, hey, don't give any fucking money to those Italians in those Spaniards, eh? And Mark Rutte was like, yep, ah, yep. And gave him like

a big thumbs up and started walking away like, man, fuck you. On the subject of amazing cursed Vox pops, last night there was a segment on the news about Pennsylvania and there was a Trump supporting owner of a bowling alley who was like, you know what, people might die, but we have to reopen the bowling alley. People got a bowl in the American way. No, what's that guy who bowled the perfect game on 9-11? He got us out of that crisis. He'll get us out of this one. There are just two pins left standing at the end in a total split. He's just like, Bismillah. So, so basically, I think you can apply the logic of the bowling alley owner saying, sorry, people have to bowl to this where it's

like, yep, sorry. I'm just, I'm afraid that I cannot, I cannot bear the idea that a small percentage of a small percentage of my, of my tax money will go to making sure that people, I forced to share a currency with me so I don't allow them to print their way out of crises, don't get killed by a completely preventable pandemic. And that's pure season three stuff because in 2008, Italy had a welfare state for Germany and the Netherlands to cannibalize. What do they have left in order to like fire truck? Yeah, collateral in order to like credibly in the eyes of the Germans and the Dutch receive support. So again, they don't like become anarchy. You have to do cuts and like if people protest,

then you have to brutally repress those people. And yeah, what is there left to cut? So let's, I mean, let's be a bit clear about how the response is actually going to get financed. So basically, the refusal for the Corona bonds proposal. And I think I've watched the numbers on the 800 million, I think it's actually like a full order of magnitude, like three zeros less than that. I think it might be like just really, really, really small. I don't think that it's, yeah, I missed the million to trillion jump. So how are they going to get the money? The way they're going to get the money is that national governments are free to raise the money and to spend the money themselves. Now, as you'll remember, the European Union has these very

rigid treaties, like the Maastricht Treaty that basically has a stability and growth pack that says you can only have this much debt basically. It's less of course your friends in Germany, in which case you can just do whatever you want and never get punished under the terms of the SGP. So they basically suspend, no, they basically, they suspended the SGP and they basically said these are extraordinary circumstances and national governments should feel free. Now, we can also go into a longer conversation about what happened with, when this first kicked off, just to speak to the kind of idiocy of the technocrats in, well, in Frankfurt and Brussels, when this was first starting to happen, the pandemic was first hitting, especially the south

of Europe first, you know, Christine Lagarde, head of the UCB, gave just a hall of fame speech, where she basically said, it is not our job to close spreads. It is not the job of the fucking central bank of Europe to make sure that, you know, it's the member states are not being slammed by the markets to, you know, help them out and make sure that the spreads, their bond yields are roughly equivalent. And they just went, the markets were fucking crazy and then she had to retract it, which was just a remarkable moment. But back to what is actually going to happen. What's going to happen is these countries are going to spend, spend, spend because they have no choice. They have to be covering people's wages while they're stuck at home.

They have to be investing in public health infrastructure. They just have to spend a lot of money. I love, I love how partridge that is. Sorry, just like, I actually think it is our job to close spreads, despite what I said earlier. Yeah, it was like that. And the tweet is just, I mean, to tweet it, it was like, it's one of those things where you read and you're like, that will be in a textbook. I just know Trump vibes about that. Yeah, I think it's a very good point to note that for all its sterling reputation as a sort of technocratic bastion, these people are often just as idiotic as the most kind of loony right wing populace. But I digress. The point is, is that the Merkel fudge that they have gone with now, the Merkel fudge 2.0,

is that the SBA Day in Germany, the finance minister, Olaf Scholz, has basically said, we're not going to do Crohnabands, but everyone should feel free to spend as much as they want when he said, literally, we will not send you the Troika. He actually used the phrase, you know, we used to use tort, he admitted, this is not even 10 years down the road, we use torture techniques against the Greeks, and we won't do it again. So feel free to spend your money. And also we did austerity after 2000 and a day. So then, so they're going to spend, spend, spend, but only, you know, you have to be so naive to think of what's not going to happen next. What's going to happen next is from these massively

inflated debt levels, surprise, surprise, the Germans and their allies in the European institutions are going to say, Hey, we've got to surveil your finances now. You know, for everything, you should know that your commission has a fiscal surveillance team already set up. It's kind of their purpose. But sorry, we're going to have to send our teams down there. It's not the Troika. It's not the Troika. It's just a different, it's just a team of support. It's a support. It just has three guys. It's a three pronged team. It's a triumvir at this time. A trident of men. But if you think, I mean, this is, this applies just as much to the UK as it does to continental

Europe. If you think that this is not wind in the sails of an austerity 2.0, you know, that there's, they're not going to turn around now that they've successfully staved off the drive towards a corona bond approach where debt and risk has actually mutualized. They're not going to turn around and be like, Italy, you're on your own. We're going to come down on you so hard and you have to slash those finances to become fiscally sustainable or in the context of the pandemic, fiscally resilient. So if we get another pandemic, you'll have some fiscal absorption capacity like we had as Germans to spend on preparedness. That's kind of what I'd like to, what I'd like to talk about to bring us into like our last second is austerity and ideological austerity. And my question

to open that up to you, David, is why, like, is there anything other than just pure ideology underpinning, doing more austerity, a thing which nobody really wants to do in and of itself? It's just like the only lever that like this generation of politicians has. I think it's an impression of Zizek if you did Coke, just for clarity. I think it's a self-reinforcing thing. If you look at the way it's played out, I don't, you know, austerity has always been a kind of suicidal economic approach. And the economic evidence has always been there to show just how it creates these doom loops where you are being forced to fork over more money. And as a result, you're suffering economically, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is that we've shifted away from

that strong economic logic. Austerity will not work to drive economic recovery to actually a stronger empirical hand for the Germans, for the so-called Fangs or for these creditor countries, where they can, I hasten to add, I don't mean this seriously, but they can kind of credibly say the reason why we were able to respond so effectively to the coronavirus, both economically and in terms of health, is because we had more fiscal absorption capacity, because we were more responsible with our finances. The reason why it was such a fricaso in places like Spain and in Italy is because you guys were physically irresponsible. Now, the Greeks managed to pull something off that might throw a wrench into that story. But for the time being, it looks a lot

like the Germans can come to the table and try to make the case. This isn't just a question of, we're not talking the language of sinners. It's not corruption. We're just saying, you've got to be prepared. We've moved to an even higher, like the boss just keeps getting bigger in terms of how you kind of slay the austerity myth, and it's going to become even more challenging to mount a defense of public spending from that political position that we're in now. And it's going to be especially hard because there's not a rise so far. There's not a glimmer of a left populist or a powerful left popular movement to challenge that. I mean, we're running a big risk of letting that narrative really sink in and Germany flying its flag as being the chief

kind of success story. And if we let them do that, and we don't point out the ways in which, as you guys pointed out before, austerity laid the framework, laid the groundwork rather, for the pandemic to ravage Southern Europe. If we don't challenge that narrative now, I think we run a huge risk of them basically winning that ideological battle before we even started the war. Well, it's like in the UK, right? We said, all right, we're going to try to turn off austerity. We're going to try to stand up hospitals. We're going to try to buy ventilators, spend, spend, spend. But then you get run into the problem that having saved up a bunch of money doesn't let you respond to a crisis because these things aren't perfectly fungible.

And so I think the idea that Greece, I think you could immediately think, right, the idea that Germany was able to respond to this crisis well because it just had a big bank account, misses the fact that actually what Germany has and all the frugal countries have, in fact, is they're only frugal when it comes to like other European countries. They actually do have investment. They have high levels of investment from across the board. And manufacturing, as we talked about earlier. You make masks in three places in the world, China, the US, sort of, and Germany. But I think the other thing I think, right, is that systems are always, the purpose of a system is always what it does. And I'm just saying,

in a world where global supply chains are being fractured and torn apart, it's very convenient that much closer to the northern European frugal countries, they are creating a permanently indebted underclass of labor that, right to their south, very useful for them. But look on the bright side, right? If you were in Southern Europe, there is one thing you can guarantee the European Union will continue to fund. And this is the way that we'll get recovery in whether it's Greece or Spain or wherever else. And that is we have to make every citizen of those countries a border guard. Yeah. I thought you were going to say invisible AI.

No, no, no. We literally, we literally just do the frontier provinces thing that has been implicit in the European project since the early days. And we just, we just make everybody, it's, it's Cops on Greece, Cops on a big siren on top of Greece. It's funny you mentioned that because, you know, I think that there is going to be, people will be looking to the state, of course, for, for employment opportunities. It's an opportunity in that regard to kind of try to reinvest in the public sector. At the same time, in the shutdown, if you, you know, if you're reading these stories coming out of Sicily, like, you know, if no one can work, the black market really does flourish.

And if the state's not providing, then it leaves huge room for the mafia and their friends to basically be that social service. Of course, they've never disappeared in that regard and kind of being the backbone of many of these communities and having, you know, providing services the state refuses to provide. And that's only in the strength that you're going to end up in a situation like a Jets and Sharks situation where it's just front-text people and mafiosi. The only, that's dialectics. Yeah. Is those the only two jobs left? Like that and then working in some kind of like, again, third world condition factory in where the Coliseum used to be,

putting together a shit for Germany. But it, coming off over to the UK as well, right? There's been this leak from the Treasury, again, that says, that has been shown to Rishi Sunak, where he said, look, we're getting a lot of debt. And as debt, and it says, quote, as debt is likely to reach significantly higher levels after the crisis, it will be important to stabilize the debt to GDP ratio to prevent debt from continuing to grow in an unsustainable trajectory. Because we, as we all know, if that line goes up, it makes other lines sad. Exactly. We can't have that. The lines are going in all kinds of directions and we need to make sure they're all going up. The leaked Treasury memo has said that this could be

funded through a combination of a rise in income tax, a scrap on the triple pension, triple lock for the elderly, and a freeze in pay for all the public workers that we're sending to die as troops fighting the coronavirus. Heroes. They are heroes, but they are heroes. And we suspect that being a hero will be pay rise enough. Yeah. And also, like, not to get too, somebody stopped, had to stop listening to this because it was too blackpilled. This, the show cowards. How about this? Maybe it's easier to freeze pay if a lot of the people in that sector fucking die. Like, I don't know. Less of them. So then that would be less expensive to pay them all. It's going to pay for itself. But these are being presented as hard,

limited choices. And they have this has been cast this way since the, for the entire duration of the furlough, where we, oh, we must to live now. We must suffer in the future. Meanwhile, we have the world's first trillionaire. We've got, you know, Richard Branson getting, getting a government bailout for his like hobbyist airline. And it is just still beyond the pale in terms of what is considered acceptable to have this tax come from the wealthy instead of quote showing solidarity by taxing everyone. So David, can you talk a little more on this idea of hard choices? And this is Europe, UK, all of it. I think that we've this, I think this comes back to my point about they're not being a rising force to challenge many of the narratives that are developing now.

It's the dog that hasn't barked. Yeah, exactly. And I think part of that has to do with the politics. If we were to play out the European story and give it a bit more of a narrative flourish, it results in kind of, you know, this Merkel fudge was really, I should call it the Schultz fudge, because Schultz was really its architect, massively deflating this push. You had a ream of op-eds from people, even like Pedro Sanchez, the PM of Spain, basically being like, Europe itself is at stake, speaking in a super inflamed language about what was really going to happen in the course of this Coroban standoff. And then they just fudged it. And that was kind of the end of the story. And I just feel like we're in the wake of major

electoral defeats in Anglo America, in the wake of the evisceration of the left and even the center left and its transformation into a kind of, you know, institution of the Austrian establishment. We've got to reorganize. We don't have, we're really at a historical nadir here. And unless we can pick ourselves up and get excited about that fight, I just think that we're not going to even have the power to frame our own, to challenge the perception of those trade-offs and create a counter narrative that we can win. That's something that we were talking about before we started recording of like my, I said this earlier, but like my entire political life has just felt like we've been, we've been in the car speeding down the highway. And I've just been watching the

different off-ramps go past and thinking, okay, well, surely this one is going to be like the inflection point that makes people enter like what I've taken to calling the cool zone. It has never happened. Surely we're not going to drive straight through that gigantic tire fire. And we're now like the fifth tire fire and we're not even, we're arguing about whether or not we can put the windows up. The car itself is entirely made of flaming tires at this point. I'd like to talk about the state, the status of the car and the sort of what fourth or fifth tire fire, which right is like, these are being presented as the hard choices we need to make to save the economy. Sure. But we're not, we're doing this without a public sector left to cut.

We're doing this with, we're raising income taxes with wages at historic lows, with most people out of work and having their wages paid by the state. Like we said, the line is done. The hard choice, the hard choice is which lane of the freeway would you like me to approach the tire fire in? Yeah. Off-ramp. It's right there. Austerity is an ideological project about transferring public goods into private hands, but there's not that much left to transfer. There's, I don't, I don't see, I don't see what this is supposed to do for the rate of profit. I don't see, I present to you, that the cops provided privately by Richard Branson. Virgin Frontex. In fact, before we can, before we finish up, I have some quotes from Ken

Rogoff about Britain's death. Another friend of the show. Yeah. The last thing on earth you should be worried about in the UK right now is the budget deficit, said Ken Rogoff. And that the COVID-19 shock is actually an illusion. The costs are partly a statistical illusion because fiscal money is flowing from part of the economy to another part, but then it is not being destroyed. Nothing is destroyed so long as firms and households are kept whole. But at this point, and this is back to me now, when this intervention is the only thing keeping them whole and there's no incentive for privately held capital to keep them whole anymore, I don't understand how we aren't any, we're no longer just coasting on momentum.

That's my question. That's my question about austerity to David is like, why, when it's architects are being like, now we got, we got to stop doing the austerity boss. It's getting a bit late in the day for that. We still find these fucking suits still wanting to do it. Yeah. Because I don't think they see a downside. I mean, one of those really striking things about this crisis that does separate it from the last one is, in the last one, there was a perception of a generalized crisis. So everyone was being hit. There was like a small group. It was counter intuitive because some banks did go down. A lot of bankers lost their jobs. Wall Street was responsible, but they seemed to also be, but the rich people are getting richer in this crisis.

If you look at the distribution, it's actually just living out the Marxian thesis of immiseration and accumulation. I don't think that they perceive anything to lose as long as that dynamic continues to drive their accumulation on the one hand. It's our job to kind of force the form. It's so basic. We can't believe we're talking in the language like it's fucking 1945. Force the kind of 40 in compromise again, of being like, no, we're all in the same boat together. No, you can't do that. We're at that point where they are like, hold on, wait, I'm getting richer from this pandemic. Why would I want to reinvest in infrastructure that could give even a glimmer of hope to a different kind of...

Awesome. More pandemics, please. Well, we're heading that way. Wait till that permafrost starts melting. Yeah, so, hey, continues melting. So in that vein, David, I have $5 a month too many. Is there something I could possibly send that to? I'll take the plug. Yeah, so I think this does give me that glimmer of hope because I feel just as black-pilled as your listeners in terms of really struggling with the kind of nihilism at the moment, I think if you look at the face of this virus, it's very difficult to find silver lining. So it's in that context that along with several luminaries of the international

left, people like Chomsky, people like Naomi Klein, people like Arun Dutty Roy, as well as sitting ministers from Argentina, past presidents like Rafael Correa, the Prime Minister of Iceland, and many others, we launched this new progressive international. I think the idea behind this is just that there's such a big appetite for international solidarity and people just have no idea of where to put that. Something we've also discussed the last time on the podcast is like people love to tweet shit like, I stand in solidarity with the people of Brazil. It's like, as if that was anything, as if the symbolic was sufficient. We get it. You like asses. We understand.

No, but I think we ended up in a kind of solidarity as a signaling politics, which is really, really dangerous to the very concept of solidarity as a kind of meaningful shift. Yeah. It's almost as though all of life is being experienced as an immense accumulation of spectacles. So that's what we're trying to counteract. So the premise of launching this progressive international is first and foremost that we need a new international. We just need a newer, better infrastructure for coordinating left movements around the world, especially in this dire time when most of us are going to have to rely on a kind of boomeranging politics where we're losing domestically and we rely on learning things from other people

around the world and building together in that more international community, especially in the context of a pandemic that's going to require international response. So that's much of the sort of premise of why we've launched this new international. And it's quite a capacious thing. I myself am not a huge fan of the tag progressive, but I think it does give us a lot of latitude to be working across a certain degree of ideological diversity in terms of bringing together left forces around the world into a common program. And the idea is that the art tag is we unite, organize and mobilize progressive forces around the world. And that's really our hope. So past internationals were about bringing

political parties together in the same roof, which is fine or really important, but I think we all recognize in the 21st century that's ill-suited to the type of international we need because you may have much more loyalty to your podcast than you do to your political party. And so our conception is that we need to bring all of those types of organizations. That's a very Pete Buttigieg thing to say. Sorry. I'm so sorry. Please carry on. Pokemon Go to the international. Pete Buttigieg in coordination with Verca Herkstra.

Sorry. Please carry on. I'm a piece of shit. Think about from a generational perspective, how many of us are unionized? Right? How many of us respect the leadership of our political parties in a deep sense and there's a reason why we have social movements, be they like momentum or sunrise or the DSA that are emerging. It's because we don't trust the party elites that have cartelized and that have basically betrayed our trust year after year, election after election. So the premise of this international is like, okay, from each of those organizations, according to their ability, this also includes you guys. I mean, everyone has a part to play in kind of fostering this more

internationalist political culture and helping to organize more internationalist politics. But also we want to bring them under the same roof to basically as members of this progressive international. So yeah, I mean, the pitch would basically get involved. We have a super infrastructure that we built in terms of pillars, one that was focused on activists and organizers and coordinating to work across borders, one that's really about policy where we craft this kind of shared vision and reclaim the internationalist imagination that weathered her tremendously over the past 50 years. And the last one is a kind of media-based, a wire service essentially where we translate and disseminate stories from around the world to try to have a more

internationalist media environment. So, I think it's a quite ambitious project. I also think it's no more ambitious than the present moment demands. And the hope is that we can kind of continue to institutionalize this international over the coming weeks and months. We have a summit plan in Reckoning in September to bring together the members of our advisory council. But the idea is just where we can make this a more, you know, it continues to move away from a model of, you know, internationalism became so thoroughly like fried in NGOification. If we can kind of revive a deeper meaning of internationalism that actually has substance and is action-oriented, I think that would be a huge victory for us. So, that's what I'm really hopeful about building.

Excited to cork us within the podcast to see if we can affiliate to you. Well, I've given you five of my extra dollars a month and I thoroughly encourage anyone listening who can to also do that. So, a Greek firefighter's anonymous fund. The problem is in Greece, without the firefighters, when the donkey is on top of the church roof, there is no one to rescue donkey and the priest has to throw donkey from church roof. That's true. That's great. Anyway, look, I've done that. I encourage you to do that if you can. And also, you know, you know all about how we've got t-shirts that have our logo and some art by a friend of the show, Matt Lepchansky, who's going to be coming on again soon, I believe.

And also, we've got the Patreon five bucks a month. You know where to go. You know how to support it. Global political change. And you can do like listening to our shitheads talk about movies that we saw for the same price. That's an incredible bargain. That's right. It's buy one, get one for, well, buy two, buy both. It's buy two, get two. That's right. What you see is what you get when you're talking about trash feature in the Progressive International. Exactly. Also, you know the times for the Twitch stream. It's 9 to 11 Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday of every week on Twitch.tv slash Trash Future podcast. I think that's everything. Yeah, take us on. Yeah. So I think the last thing to note is that we have a theme song. It's Here We Go by Jinsang.

Listen to it early. Listen to it often. I've started listening to it again and decoded what the lyrics are. So I'm taking my own advice. Anyhow, I also want to thank David very much for coming on today as well before we leave. I hope it's on the last time, guys. It was so fun. You definitely have to be back. Welcome back any time. Although, hey, what next time? Let's like watch a movie or something so we don't get depressed. Can we have a podcast outside today? Next time, David comes back. Let's just do something fun. Anyway, so with all that, I will see you all later, everybody. Yeah. Bye, everybody. Bye.