TRASHFUTURE - XP Grinding at the Spreadsheet Factory

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

This week, Riley, Hussein, Nate and Alice discuss the cost-of-living crisis in Britain as seen through trade periodicals for grocers and the growing sentiment among the police (yes! Even among the British police!) that shoplifting to survive shouldn’t be punished. We also discuss new developments in the endless hackathon purgatory of the crypto world, where they want to make everything you’ve ever done in your working life tied to your identity, on the blockchain. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free 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 our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Nate, you were talking about the comments on German YouTube videos in English. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, it's just more that like, if you know, if you follow anything with like German music at all, or like sort of German rap culture, there's so much English that gets incorporated, but using German grammar, and it can be very, very funny. I went and looked up one of the German rap songs that I know, the song Mind Block by Cito, which is from like the mid 2000s. And it's become like a German hip hop classic at this point. But one of the comments on the bottom, if I remember correctly, the guy said,

Mideism shit, how'd their boy, the guns, a game, get changed? This is what Brexit took from us. We could, we could have been, we could have slowly merged English and German into an official, like single, wonderful language, where you could end a sort of a sentence with a phrase like Pimp on Schwag. And you know, here we are now. You know, you have those guys who are just like, if it wasn't for Churchill, like we'd always be speaking German right now. Well, fuck Churchill, because actually that would have like been sick. And if we could have had weird German English rap, then it would have

all been worth it. Only the language, not the politics. Trying to arrange it so that we get the Kaiser Reich timeline, where we lose the first world war, and we end up speaking German that way. I mean, I do remember that there was a, there was a line, I'm not going to quote it verbatim, but in that song, mind block, where it's something to the effect of like, I'm fear to get stuck in Caroline studio, I wrapped and mocked traps and off the beats from Coolio. And it's just like, you don't really have to speak German to understand that. You'd have Nadine Dory is doing her weird TikTok rap, but it'd be in hybrid

German English. I think that'd be very funny. Milo and I have now, because Milo doesn't speak German, but he's been to Berlin enough times that he's just sort of gotten used to hearing this, that I have actually seen people post stuff that basically is like, yeah, kind of so, but do this X low key off some gay shit. And it's just like, I can't believe that this is meant to be taken seriously. In the mid 2000s, I can't remember who like who the artist was, but there was like this Muslim rapper who like was very popular in the UK among kind of like British Muslims. And,

but he was from like, he lived in Denmark. So it was like a mixture of like Palestinian, Arabic, Danish and English. And it was just very funny because you sort of have like, I have no idea if like the Arabic and the Danish like work together, but you'd have these like Danish which I'm not, which I'm not going to try like reproduce, but then every so often, you just have things like fuck the police in English. And it just seemed to be very, it was, it was very funny. I was worried or I was kind of laughing internally. I didn't want to make a joke that would just be like full on me, me picking on Hussein in a way that sounds like it keep any way come across as like intolerant, but I was going to be like,

Oh yeah, I remember the guy who did dirty kuffar. That was a great song. It was actually, it was a very good song. I actually like, look, look, I, I, it's a, it's a banger man. Seriously, I enjoyed dirty kuffar. I go into trouble. Like I had a CD and the CD cause like my friend like made a copy of it for me, except he wrote on the CD dirty kuffar. So when a teacher found it and the teacher, like, you know, bear in mind that this teacher was not like, you know, didn't keep it discreet, went to the class and was just like, so what does it mean? What is dirty kuffar exactly? Have you brought enough for the whole class?

That's right. That's right. And I actually got this, this really great video you guys should watch. Yeah. Cause like, cause at the end of the video, there was a fucking beheading wasn't there? Jesus. No, at the end of the video, he says like, we're going to take him over like we took over the shot, like we took down the twin tower and then like it was 9-11 and everyone's laughing. There was another one of those viral songs where at the end there was a beheading and it was just like, there's definitely some violence. There was a person getting like obviously shot to death

in the video and stuff like that. So yeah, it's, it's pretty. And then obviously ISIS or proto-ISIS al-Qaeda doing monkey bars shit, like in the ISIS gym, but um, simpler times man. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Now you know. True medium of cultural exchange, European hip hop. Well, now the problem is, is that production value is too good, right? Cause like, I think one of the appeals of Dirty Kaifal was just that it was all really grainy and like, it was like this mishmash of like, and it was definitely made on like what I don't know, it was before final cut pro, but you know, like windows XP, like the

default like video editor, right? It was movie maker. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. With some animations of Tony, of Tony Blair turning into a pig and stuff like that. Yeah. And the problem is, is that production value is just too good though. And that's why like you weren't, it won't ever have the same impact. I'd like the idea though, that you could get like, what you essentially had was what like jihadist pen and pixel. Yeah, basically. Yeah. I'm using. So like instead of, cause what was the kid in the no limit empire who that the

little Bentley made for him, like Bentley go-kart. Oh, I don't remember. I don't remember. Yeah. Get that, but like get like a power wheels that's a high lux with the gun on the back of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So hi everyone. It's TF. Podcast about sort of 90s boot like hip-hop or 2000s boot like hip-hop. 2000s. Yeah. Cause I was in, I was in university and we were seeing that shared around on forums and you were supposed to be like, oh, isn't this horrible? And I was like, actually, this song is good.

And those forums, could it, was it Lasse Fair? Was it Lightfighter? Who knows? Lasse's fair wasn't around yet. It was general bullshit on the something awful forums. I do remember that because I am officially old. Yeah. I was talking to Lasse. It is 2005. You are listening to a banger about how the West will be converted to Islam by any means necessary. You have four tabs open of like more tabs hadn't been invented yet. Four windows open. You have four windows. Yeah. You have four windows open where you're googling like Zootone saxophone

player feet. This is the best your life is ever going to be. I remember at that time, I had one computer for forums and one computer for World of Warcraft. My life has gotten a lot better since then. Yeah. Cause the two different kinds of going on the computer. Yeah. Absolutely. But hi everyone. This is, this is a podcast. It's the podcast you're listening to right now. It's TF. And we're recording a free episode. A week in advance. It's the free one. God damn it.

Deputized. Milo's out having been taken out by the forces of Islam. Yeah. Milo is on a secret mission to go and bring. He's been hired by Pfizer to test the efficacy of a new anti-diarrhea medicine. But first he has to get the worst diary of his life. So it's TF. It's the free one. We're recording it a week early because Riley is about to go on holiday. And I'm going to be taking some well-earned time off having fun in the sun. That's right. I'm going to Afghanistan as a trip that I'm just doing myself. And then I'm going to go get elected mayor of South Bend.

Sounds great. Make sure you take a photo of yourself holding an AR-15 with the weirdest overhand grip you've ever seen in your life. A grip that if you were to swing the rifle up to the high ready, you would throw your, the crook of your elbow over your own eyes. That's the Pete Buttigieg promise right there. I'm just telling you, I'm going to demonstrate it to you on here and maybe Hussain and Alice, you can see this on the camera, Riley in front of me. Pete Buttigieg is holding his rifle in such a way that he's basically holding his right hand on the pistol grip with his finger over the trigger well. And his left hand is over.

He's got his elbow over the barrel and he's holding it that way. So if he were to swing it up to the high ready, as I'm going to demonstrate, he would do. Yeah. So he's holding the gun in the same way that Lil Wayne held a guitar. Like back in those years when he was like playing guitar for some reason. This is 2005 episode. That's actually the special kind of like gun holding that you unlock when you prestige the regular kind. And it's like no scoping, you know, you get, you know, some extra sort of. I just, I just, here's the thing, right? Like, I know I'm not enough of a gun guy. I'm not a gun guy at all. I don't care about guns at all. I just happened

to use one particular gun in training a lot. But it's like, when you look at that photo, the sort of authentic rat for Democrats or it's like, see, I, I, I did my time in the salt mines fucking for empire. And now, now I can, I can prove that this is why AR-15s belong killing people in Afghanistan, but not on our streets. But then you post this photo of yourself in such a way that like it looks as though you have come to earth as an alien and you'd be like, oh, is this a weapon? How does one conjure this? And it's holding it in the strangest way possible. Like he has, he has like sweated through turf bangs and a Kubrick stare in that photo. So it's sitting on a folding chair. It's so weird. I don't know why I thought of, of that Pete

Buttigieg photo, but as soon as I said I was going on holiday, it just popped into my mind, bitten from nowhere, coming up from deep file storage. But look, I've got some stuff to talk about today. There are some items, some doings. We got the Zutons and talk about Los Camposinos for a little bit. Yeah. We're going to talk about how the David Getta album, Getta Blaster. I've got a few things. Look, the main development in local, like local, Britain's local news, beep, beep, beep that I want to talk about is. Sorry, is that the non-detector? Yeah, that's the local news detector. Two detectors you don't want to get mixed up. This is the local news detector is going, going crazy, which is that essentially what is now

happening, all across sort of the sort of the broader West, Britain, New Zealand, Canada, the States, et cetera, et cetera, is that trends in shoplifting have been radically changing for the last year. People are going Jean Valjean Mose. And somewhat, yes, Alice. It said usually, statistically, this is from The Grocer, the grocery industry's trade publication that I sometimes read. That you religiously subscribe to, yes. Well, I like the funnies in The Grocer. I used to, I mean, I very briefly worked at their competitor magazine, like back in the day. The Green Grocer. No, not the Green Grocer. It was called, oh, fuck, well, I mean, the company that like published it was called Neutrade.

So anytime, anytime the Grocer does like a transphobic editorial, they're always like, oh, it's the Sunday Grocer. It's got a different editorial. Yeah, I was actually the reactionary columnist of The Grocer. I'm just imagining like a lifestyle brand magazine for people who work in corner shops called Cornerist or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was, so there was called, so I used to work for this place called the Retell Express, which was basically the like a competitor paper that was designed specifically for news agents. And I got in via nepotism, which is to say that one of the reporters came to my parent shop looking bored out of his mind. And I was at journalism school at the time,

and I had been rejected from a internship at the Observer. So I was just like, hey, I'm starting journalism school next week, and I really need something. Can I like join your paper? And he was just like, yeah, I don't care how many just left. And that's how I got my stuff. This is also how I got on this podcast. You basically are like, look, it's not easy to get a foot in the door in journalism. I had to work at the Grocer. No, it was a competitor. We were less reactionary and also crucially, we had less money, so we couldn't have like the fucking brenton. You're hungry. You are underdogs.

Yeah, I did. I did a lot. You're doing real journalism. That's right. I did. I did a very big story about a change of price of cigarettes, which may, which got four complaints. Sorry. So here's the, here's the substance. I just love the idea of tacky writing an article about how like the Nazis actually had the best Mr. Sprays for green produce. So this is, but they adhere. In the past, people would usually steal stuff like booze and razors and all this. But essentially, now the Grocer is saying that the, with the cost of living, these choices are getting different. And essentially, we have a return, which it's,

it was at multi decade lows of the activity of stealing to eat rather than stealing to sell on. What you might loosely call like crimes of subsistence or of survival. And the thing I wanted to bring up here is that 7.3 million adults in Britain skipped meals or went without food for a day due to costs. Like this is, that's like fully more than 10% of the population of the population is about 60, 60, 70 million. That's just adults, which is astonishing. And then, but, and so we, and this is the point where now we've seen images, I've seen images at least sort of reading sort of various sort of trade publications. Cause that's where a lot of, a lot of the stuff that you just

the Grocer, the Grocer on Sunday, one of the real reasons they tend to read trade publications is it's the people in those industries writing and talking for one another. It's kind of the same reason I read the FT. It's just like, no, you have to just get the information out. And so this was one analyst shore capital quoted in the Grocer said that police in courts are essentially unable to cope as the temptation to shoplift is likely to grow for some. But yeah, so we've seen now the individual chocolate bars or whatever, in the same kind of like plastic armored security packaging that you would see like, you know, fucking razors in at this point. And that's only being applied to more food to do is get a little like neodymium magnet and

pretty much any of these security packaging just pops right open just for the record. And yeah, but I mean, so we've systematically defunded the criminal justice system, which is not just the police, but also the courts to the extent that like, whether they want to or not, you know, enforce the law and shoplifting for these sort of crimes of desperation, it's sort of immaterial anyway. And the strange thing is, and this is sort of what I'm driving at here, right, is that we have number one, this again, we this return to kind of the the battle days, if you will, whether it's Victorian diseases, sort of power cuts like the 70s, confusing met imperial system,

all of this return to the battle days, the vibe shift, it's real, it's coming. But that is essentially that what that it's it's so driven from the top, right? Where, for example, like, as you were saying, Alice, like, whether or not they want to police police, police chiefs are now saying, can we we're basically saying, look, we're if we see someone stealing to eat, we're going to try to not prosecute them to the full extent of the law, which was which is like on the face of it, both very embarrassing that the Conservatives would outflank the cops from the right. But you know, you can sort of say, oh, this is a nice thing about British liberalism is that it allows this kind of like, you know, moral compass and the

parochialism of the local chief constable to be like, actually, I don't want to enforce that law. But it doesn't matter, it's an irrelevant because even if you had your your James Anderson or whoever, who was like, no, actually, I think if you take a chocolate bar off the shelf and walk out without paying, you should be shot. It doesn't fucking matter if you don't, if you can't do it, if you don't have the budget to provide for that, which none of them do. So what Kit Malthouse has said, the policing minister is he said, no, all of the laws have to be enforced completely. Yeah, no, all the laws have to be enforced evenly. Because this is because he says justice should be blind. And by lowering the crime rate by prosecuting people stealing to eat, you will somehow magic.

This is what he actually said, by lowering the crime rate by prosecuting people stealing to eat, you will improve the economic prospects of an area because crime drives down prosperity, not the other way around. That's exactly the kind of thing that you get when you have a policing minister, when you have a job that is like, relatively unempowered to do anything except chase statistics, which is like, actually one of the ways in which you can make an already bad model of policing much worse is to try and like do predictive policing or targeted policing based on statistics. And so all you can do is just this kind of like numbers chasing this kind of red meat. And it's so irrelevant because nobody has the police officers to go and arrest somebody for

shoplifting. Nobody has, and if they are arrested, then they won't be prosecuted. If they are prosecuted, they won't go to court because at every stage, there's this attritional aspect of austerity where there's no police left because we can't pay for them. There's no lawyers left because we can't pay for them either. All of the courts are backlogged through for the next five years and we're closing half of the courtrooms anyway. I think it's also not to say that it would be better that they were. This is not a choice. This is something that has been imposed as a consequence of austerity. I'll give you another example of this that's just related to the British state in general because I'm in the process of trying to get my British driver's license.

Booking a test, a road test takes months right now because there's an enormous backlog and their solution is, well, during COVID, we limited testers to doing six tests a day, but now we're going to take it back up to seven tests today. But there's still a backlog of millions of people or similarly for visas. When they added in the Ukraine family scheme, which is responding to an emergency, they basically said, oh, yeah, and by the way, we're going to delay everybody else's immigration stuff because we just don't have the capacity for it. And so if you're waiting on immigration stuff, capacity right now. So if you're waiting on spouse visas, student visas, settlement visas,

all the things you need until you get a British passport and you no longer have to deal with the fucking home office, that's all being delayed because the budget's been cut. Now granted, the home office makes an enormous profit on visas, for example, but none of that's reinvested in the home office. It's immoral that they do it, but they don't even do it to sustain themselves. They just do it to be punitive, to be punitive. Similarly, they are charging a health surcharge for everyone who gets a visa in this country that's notionally supposed to pay for the NHS even though you pay for the NHS with your income taxes, but that money they charge immigrants to renew their visas doesn't go to the NHS. It goes to a general fund for parliament.

So you have all these instances of the state at capacity or way, way overstretched, continues to get worse. And it's like that same problem we have with the police, you have with the immigration system, you have with basic things like the drive. The immigration system has been mostly privatized in terms of who processes stuff, but even that completely at capacity. And it's like anything that requires an interaction with the British state, you realize just how threadbare it is and how people are like, we haven't gone far enough. We need to get rid of more of it. And it's just like, what are you going to replace it with? Because even the privatized stuff, like I said,

VFS Global, the private company that handles immigration stuff where you can pay extra to have it expedited through a private company, they can't take any more stuff. They've been shut down by and large because the Home Office is at capacity. So it's like... I was going to say that there's a very good chance I'm not going to be able to go on my honeymoon this year because my passport is still somewhere in the passport office because of the same things. And it's like, every time I phone them up, bearing in mind that you're not really talking to the passport office, you're talking to a contracted company that does all the phone, all the customer-facing stuff for the passport office to the extent

where it becomes so absurd that I was calling someone in the passport office while I was inside it because I couldn't talk to someone who was working in there. A very absurd day in Pittsburgh. But it's just another example of just like, yeah, these guys can't handle the crisis. And crucially, like a couple of weeks ago, the answer that the government gave to the ongoing situation and the fact that loads of people are missing important flights and everything was, we're going to privatize the passport office even more. So that's good. I want to focus back on the food issue, right? But let me just bring it back to that, which is to say that Britain's dedication to austerity

is very strange to me as an American because even though America loves austerity, it doesn't love austerity for cops. And that's the thing that's very interesting here is that you have the situation in which you have both austerity cutting economically so bad over the course of the last 12 years, that you're now in a situation where a significant chunk of British people are food insecure, something like estimates between 33% and 50% of children in this country live in food poverty. There's so many problems. And that's now being manifested here where literally like the cops are saying, well, morally, maybe we shouldn't prosecute these things. There was something that really struck me, which is that the most recent police federation conference,

there was a young, like very junior detective who sort of savaged, per se, for telling the basis that to work as a police officer, to work as a starting police officer, she was below the poverty line doing it. And it's like, that's not typically the sign of a society that cares about maintaining its own continuity. The people that you get to enforce the law are not like... What we were talking about earlier, right, is that this is, I think, emblematic of the fact that in Britain, there are two big machines that are designed to crush you. There's one that's shaped like a cop, which everyone in charge absolutely loves but doesn't maintain. And then there's the one that is actually crushing more and more people, which is

the fact that there is nothing, that there is... That things are... It's just a neglect. Yeah. Yeah, it's the... There is the sort of the jackboot of the law that's almost become, I wet the exception of big sort of showpiece protests or just harassing people for being young and black in the street. You can get like the big showpiece things. You can get like, sort of drive by acts of brutality or cowardice or neglect or whatever. I think that's also something that's like... Strangely is also a consequence of defunding is the kind of people who would become cops now, the kind of people who are truly in it for that, because there's

no security from it otherwise. Yeah, and I think the food insecurity part comes... The overwhelming majority of people who are in food poverty in this country work. It's just that wages are so low in this country and the wage growth has been so anemic that people are earning in terms of purchasing power, earning less than they were earning in 2008 in this country. And food prices have skyrocketed because of supply shocks and inflation. And so now you're in this situation, yeah. I had this horrible scenario in my head of the sort of the cop as drug dealer thing turned on its head, where instead of the cops robbing drug dealers and selling drugs, the cops harassing shop

litters and taking the food so they can eat. It's just genuinely insane situation that... You know what you're describing? Is you're describing Tunisia in 2009? Yeah, that works out great. But it was... I think the thing to remember is it was food insecurity and an encounter with a heavy-handed police officer. Yeah, I just think about the upcoming price rises for most obviously wheat, but there's going to be everything downstream of that, mostly beef. That's going to be an interesting moment in our history. I'm just imagining how would good morning Britain react to someone immolating themselves

after an encounter with the police like what happened in Tunisia? And I'm just imagining them just being like, no, that's not very green, is it? That's not very environmentally conscious, is it? I think the answer is you dox their family. The left-wing activists who... Professional self-immolator. He burned himself with wood and that's actually not sustainable. This member of the public who committed hirakiri outside of the Tesco in Swindon actually was a member of the Labour Party in 2007. We've obtained their credit card records from Open Banking and you can actually see that

they did in fact buy a Big Mac rather than the saver menu. And so we are going to just assume that food poverty in the country is not a problem. It's... I think it's the... For me, it's the conch... It is the two things of the ability, the desire of British society to reproduce itself, whether by allowing itself to reproduce in a way that is, say, upholds human dignity, for example, by paying people enough to be able to eat, or the other part, which is, well, if we're not going to do that, then we're going to reproduce society through the sheer jackbooted imposition of order. And there just seems to be... There seems to be such a disconnection.

The jackboot machine is itself breaking down. And what's really funny is that the amount to which they claim to love it, it's like, I love my car. I drive it everywhere with a handbrake on. And for some reason now, it's making these weird noises at me. Well, Riley, I don't know if you wanted to move on on something, because there was one point that I wanted to make about this sort of a difference between... In the United States, obviously, they're dealing with similar issues with inflation, with commodity costs, with lack of availability of things like new cars.

Groceries have increased in price. Fuel has massively increased in price. Americans love huge fucking trucks and cars that have terrible fuel economy. So you have a situation where it was already expensive for someone to fill up their car, truck, whatever, and now it's even more expensive. And the American response has, by and large, been to say, let's go branded about it. You know what I mean? Like lose their minds and blame Joe Biden for everything. Even stuff that's completely exogenous to American politics.

But then you also hear in Britain, it seems like that never seems to happen. Instead, it's just moral on the lines of people being like, well, I can eat this fucking shit for 12 pence a meal. And I liked it when I eat fucking pigeon droppings. So why are these fucking lazy people on benefits not eat shit like me? It's this bizarre sense of I'm all right, Jack. And I'm not saying that the American total psychotic response that's obviously egged on by the fact that you have a non-Republican president right now is the right one.

But I think the extent to which, even when you have this very obvious, incredible, stupid situation on the part of the government, they have fucked it. And people seem so unwilling to confront it that way. It's always sort of like, you know, it's always sold or discussed as like an individual failing. And it's like, it's not really an individual failing when wages haven't gone up. They've actually shrunk in purchasing power in the last 14 years. And overnight, people's gas and electric bills doubled, which ruffled in some cases.

My power bill went up by 100%. My gas bill went up by 200% overnight on April 1st. And it's going to go up again in October. And like, thanks be to fucking God, I'm great because I'm basically a professional circus clown. And as a result, I have income. But like, I know everyone around us is suffering from this shit. Like, and if I, if I was even when I first started doing this on my own, when I quit my job and started producing, if I had been hit by a shock like this,

I don't know what I would have done. I genuinely don't know what I would have done. I wouldn't have had enough money to pay the bills. Like to have your, to have this stuff happen overnight and you just look at what the way that this is being addressed is sort of like this moral failing. And it's like, look, man, what, what are you, how am I supposed to morally heat my home? There's only fucking two ways to do it.

The fucking socket or, you know, the gas, the gas boiler. It's the, I think the way I tend to see it is that more than anything else, it is, is that both what you're describing, right? That the let's go Brandon stuff or sort of the, the British sort of, just systemic winding down of even the repressive functions of the state. It's in both senses, it's a form of denial of, of just, of, of looking at a set of problems that are too complex, that you're too complicated to solve or not the problem you want to solve.

And then just solving the problem you feel like solving instead. And then just allowing things to slowly unravel in front of you. And again, it's, it's, at this point, I think my, my perspective on it, right? I think the one we've been talking about is more like, it is very strange to see a state voluntarily fail, right? Because it, yeah, that's, that's the strangeness of it, right? To know, to have the playbook for where it goes, right? And to just see it, just this be, to be entirely self-inflicted,

whether it's because of, and in Britain, I don't think it's not even because of elite capture necessarily, it's just, there is, it's, it's, I think that in, in the sense of, well, it's not as though the, the British elite had to be subject to capture in order to like, systematically starve like, you know, British people. But I think that there is a sense of elite disconnection, that even the repressive functions of the state are being allowed to wither because of this very strange phenomenon of total disconnection from and denial of just the reality outside, outside Westminster. That's why it's sort of, you come back to,

this feels very much like the Roman Senate debating, you know, who should be made a Queester or whatever this year, while the Goths are in the city, you know. There's, there's see my chemical romance in Milton Keynes. That's right. That's right. We should, we should have taken this as a sign. Every time Goths come back, there's a recession. Well, also, yeah. Oh, I also bear in mind that the 80s, 2008, ancient Rome, now. I don't think that the Helvedi or the Visigoths had an album as good as the Black Parade though. I mean, I was also going to say that emo, like emo music like came out of,

or it sort of like emerged during that kind of weird period between like, everyone's sort of acknowledging that the Iraq war was a failure and like, the on the upcoming recession, right? So the revival of emo, like, I feel like some smart C-pants analyst who like does FT, like lunch with the FT, should have known, but like when emo was coming back, there would be a big problem. Yeah. Doing, doing the like hemline measure of political economy, but instead of that, you're looking at people's fringes. Although that's that, that can be a statistic that's that can be confounded with other

fringe related beliefs. Just the fringe on one side is what you're going to look. It is, it is very, and to see again, the other side, right? Of the, with the alleged other side of this, right? Well, while the, well, one side is sort of so caught up in its fantasies, it's not even able to, it's not even able to execute the thing that we don't want it to execute, but that it wants to execute. The other side is, or the other side of the same side seems to just be, every time they go on, on these, again, polished media operators, unlike the other,

other generation, cannot stop going on the radio and then just immediately stepping into a bucket and falling down the stairs of being asked a question about trans people and then just basically sputtering a, sputtering an answer as though the smoke bomb now, it's fantastic. I was, you know, I'm very hopeful that Australia is the sort of death knell for this kind of politics, but on the other hand, Britain is far more deranged about trans people and it works much better here. So, yeah. Yeah. It's unable. And that's, it's just these other, this other thing, this thing I, I keep picking up this theme is just the inability to collect and process new information. It's just

the same kinds of things, just repeating over and over again as the outside world slowly gets worse. And even the way they want to exercise coercive control over the outside world slowly becomes less able to do that. It is very, I don't know, very odd to see building syndrome. Yeah. That's right. Speaking of things with sick building syndrome though, did we remember a name for like a leftist architecture podcast? Remember web three? Yeah. It was a web for each of the genders. So the, if we remember, we all remember web two, the promise of a, oh, you're into, oh, you're into web three. What's a one?

Yeah. Web two was when there were guy things and when there were girl things and there was, there was a me, there was a separation between those. You had the polypocket forum and you had something awful. Now web, web for web three is blown by all apart. I was on weird polypocket in like 2005. It was really foundational to my sense of humor. Yeah. Web one is the space jam website that's still around. Web two is, web two is the interactive website they made for Suicide Squad. Web three is that you put on a VR headset to experience the Morbius launch event. And somehow that's highly financialized. Yeah, exactly. So we remember web three, right? Yeah, the Morbius launch event.

Yeah. We all went to the Morbius launch event. We all bought the special NFT that says we're true Morbius fans. And then wouldn't you know it? It turns out that one wallet just bought all the special NFTs and now none of us got to go to the Morbius launch event. It's very sad. It's bullshit. So the, I have once again done the thing where I have read a paper by a Vitalik Buterin, the guy who came up with, well, the guy who was J.P. Morgan came up with Ethereum because if you recall, he got mad at World of Warcraft for nerfing a spell. Could you explain that when World of Warcraft was big, I think I was not on the computer. I was never a World of Warcraft fan. So Vitalik Buterin is the founder of Ethereum.

And I get also with some very big banks, but claimed that he got the idea for Ethereum when some or another ability in World of Warcraft was unilaterally made worse by Blizzard. And then he said, ah, the problem is centralization. Because Web 3.0 is a protest against the mods. Yeah, essentially, yeah. And who are the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve, but the mods of money? And what I sort of thought was, we sort of talked about quite a bit on the show, of course, was that the moment this sort of idea of circumventing the mods by creating a kind of append-only database where you could buy and sell, you know, Excel spreadsheet, random entries created by a graphics

card from one another, was, of course, that this whole idea of a decentralized art market, of democratizing access to lending through this, of decentralized finance, all that stuff, immediately it became rife with speculation, Ponzi schemes and pyramid schemes. It was completely useless right away. It's like there's a bunch of mushrooms on this rotten log. Yeah, I thought they'd be great. And so what happened was, right, they said, okay, well, hang on, we need to fix this. We need to have Web 3.1, which was completely about decentralized NFTs and getting loans so you could play a game or whatever, turned out to be a highly financialized

mess that basically bankrupted everyone involved except the very early people who were there on top of the pyramid. Speaking of people being bankrupt, unless they're on top of the pyramid, the founder of Celsius, Stablecoin, has recently said that he's going to airdrop enormous amounts of stablecoins to anyone who puts money in and keeps it there for more than three days. That's really bold to do, like, the last round of fundraising for your Ponzi scheme, like, at the point where all of the money is out of the door. So when you say airdrop, does he mean literally, like, you get it? It's a Marshall planning.

It's like Berlin airlifts. No, no, I mean, like, you have to have an Apple iOS device so he can send you an NFT of Jared Leto as the Joker. At airdrop, it's a term in crypto where for holders of a certain, say, currency or NFT, they'll just send more of it to all of the wallet addresses, call an airdrop. Okay, okay. I was thinking more about, like, you're on the subway in New York City and someone tries to send you a picture of their dick via airdrop. Yeah, Jared Leto is a joke, really into the character.

So basically, airdrop from Morbius. So if you recall, right, this is what they've done. They created this system that more or less gave rise to that. We've talked about so many different ways in which it fucked up and failed and was incredibly predatory and terrible and, you know, was rife with counterfeiting and all this. Everything about it was awful. And they've said, okay, we need to go back to the drawing board here. Yeah, Web 3.2.

Yeah, we are going to do Web 3.2. Or they said, look, Web 3.2 today centers around expressing transferable financialized assets rather than encoding social relationships of trust and yet many poor economic activities. I see immediately what's going to happen here. They've realized what's a part of a functional banking system, a functional financial system that we need, that we don't have, is like reputation, is good faith, right? What if we put that on the blockchain? Yeah, essentially, they say, rather than social relationships of trust,

yet many core economic activities, such as building personal brands, are built on persistent, non-transferable relationships. Again, you could have just said, well, I guess that means the whole realizing this Web 3 was bullshit. We should never have tried it in the first place. It was a badly thought out idea and I'd always serve to make, again, like a couple banks rich. No, they have one weird trick to try to encode social relationships of trust on the blockchain and fix the financialized mess that is Web 3. It's also a reference to World of Warcraft. Oh, fuck me. I hate these fucking nerds. I'm sorry, man.

Do you want a little funny aside? Yes, please. My buddy, when he was in Afghanistan, one of his soldiers, they pooled their money together and we call it a beehut. It's like a long house where you have lots of beds where people would sleep in. There's this Polish company that sold satellite internet and he couldn't understand because they were in the middle of nowhere why this dude wanted satellite internet so bad, but he convinced the other guys in his bunk house to do whatever the fucking insane fee was per month for satellite internet because he had a side hustle in 2009 XP grinding characters in World

of Warcraft, even while deployed to Afghanistan and then sell them on eBay. This kid was literally out doing fucking foot patrols in the mountains of Wardak province and then coming back and just be like fighting orcs or whatever the fuck you do in World of Warcraft so that he could XP grind to the level that they then sell that character to someone who didn't want to do that work. To me, I imagine that that soldier has either died of substance abuse issues post leaving the military or as a crypto guy now. There is no in between. That's the most American story I've ever heard in my life. That's right. In this paper, Buterin and his co-authors say, we illustrate how non-transferable

or soulbound tokens represent, so instead of NFTs, soulbound? Yeah, it's bound to your soul. Also, instead of wallets, instead of wallets, it's now called souls. This sucks really bad. So it says in this paper, we illustrate how non-transferable soulbound tokens representing the commitments, credentials, and affiliations of souls can encode the trust network of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation. So you get these like souls bound tokens to represent how long you've been doing this shit or like how many followers you have on social media? Or you could, for example, say, I love that like their use cases are always stuff like things that aren't a problem really. It's like, look, instead of getting a diploma from your university,

you could get a token that you'd be unable to sell on. I feel like if you just made it socially acceptable for people to walk around carrying buster swords, these guys would have normal jobs and we would never have to hear this shit. But because they feel as though there's something shameful about that, they've now found ways to work this into a thing that people are notionally supposed to care about. So like, for example, remember how everyone said, oh, great, NFTs are going to democratize art, but then because they can be freely traded and you kind of have no way of knowing where they come from. Yeah, the All My Apes Gone problem. Or also the sort of proliferation of fakes as well, right, where I could be like, hey,

this is the real Captain Tom Moore. It's a photo of Captain Tom Moore. I've uploaded it. Captain Tom Moore uploaded it before he was killed by the British state by being sent to Barbados during COVID. Yeah, so this is the real one-of-one Captain Tom Moore. And you would know because the soul of Captain Tom Moore on the blockchain, now that it's on the blockchain, would be in the constellation with other souls of his family. And so you'll know that, yeah, well, a scammer, Captain Tom Moore, would have put, he wouldn't be like friends with his daughter and son and all this. So I know this is the real Captain Tom soulbound NFT that's selling me this thing. So it's a way of essentially saying, what if we took all of the things that

were just reproduced, all of the stuff it was purporting to criticize? What if we just tweaked one bit of the functionality? What if you had an Ethereum-based Ouija board and you could commune with the soul of Captain Tom? And the way you knew that it was authentic was you had to listen for him to speak to you through the Ethereum Ouija board, which is also the reason why you can't buy a graphics card. And he basically, he would give you his key phrases that would let you know it was the genuine article. They would be, I'm racist, I cheated on me wife, I've always been a Tory. That's right. That system is his normal voice as well. It's weird. But what I think is interesting is because this is the whole way of seeing the world when you are

the Ethereum Foundation is that there is insufficient freedom because we know that because there are insufficient transactions happening. If there are more things were publicly available transactions, the more people would be able to express their freedom by transacting with one another based on perfect information. It's basically a Milton Friedman ideology. And so they were saying, yeah, one of the great things we could do with soul-bound tokens by making NFTs you can't sell basically is that they will be reputational collateral. So for example, you could, as you complete programming tasks, and those programming tasks would accrue to your soul, your spiritual human essence encoded on the blockchain.

But if I had a little thing of achievements that I could just follow. They're trying, they're fucking, they're trying to like invent religion, but in a really, because like there's, you know, it's, it's, I don't know whether this is true for like every Abrahamic religion, but like one of the key kind of like tenant, well, one of the things you're taught when you're very young, when you go to like Islamic school is that all the sort of good deeds you do like translate into like bricks and those bricks like build your house in heaven. It's very sort of like when George Lucas decided that he wanted to quantify the force in like the prequels, doing the whole like midi-chlorian thing. It's very much like in Matt Vane. And

that was like not, you know, it was designed because it was like, okay, how do you sort of explain this like to children? This sort of feels like they are trying to do religion, but for children, but also to sort of like quantify. Yeah, I don't know. It just, it feels like a very, you know, I'm just thinking because a lot of these guys are also just so obsessed with like, you know, the idea that, you know, of like living in godless societies and everything, but they're trying to kind of, they're desperately trying to like invent a religion, but they don't want to do all the kind of like moral philosophy. They just want to quantify everything. This just feels like a hackathon where everyone involved doesn't realize they're

dead and they don't realize that it's, the hackathon is over and they just keep fucking going and adding more to this shit. And it's like, no one has been able to explain to me like a use case where this whole concept would be better than the way things are done without a blockchain. And I've got one here. Oh, great. Which is, so I said, like all of your little like programming tasks that you do accrue to your spirit. And then, you know, that makes you sort of a Baraka coin or whatever that makes you more worthy on earth. And they say one of the examples of that is you could then do uncollateralized lending to that person based on everything they've ever done. And the more you can encode your entire social life onto the blockchain,

the more credit worthy you can seem to coderies of people who will loan you fake internet money that no one uses. The more you can XP grind in a shed in Afghanistan on Polish internet. Yeah. It's basically it's saying, look, we wanted to build an economy where XP grinding was something you could do and it would be quantifiable and unchangeable. But the problem was that all of those things were too freely exchangeable. And so instead, we need to like, basically, you have a digital twin that's just a blockchain wallet that stuff just accrues to and then people can random to just decide to lend you money on the basis of what they see in your wallet. I just love the idea though that everything about your work, everything about your employment,

history, the tasks you've completed, everything about that is logged in such a way as to stick with you permanently. And people think, oh, this is a good idea. Let's be perfectly honest, a solid third to half of white collar workers would only achieve maximum stats on spent time in bathroom in terms of how their employment history would be translated to the blockchain. And it's like, why would anyone fall for this? This just seems... No one needs to is the thing. I think the thing is, this isn't web 3.2 in the sense of, oh, this is a fun new little tweak around the edge we can make to try and make it work. This is the Alpine redoubt, right? This is the last fighting position that crypto can come up with

is, oh, no, no, no, there's definitely, there's got to be a use case for this. The blockchain brook discarding, basically. Exactly. And what if the last use case was time spent going to the bathroom coin? They even say, look, to be sure, there are dystopian scenarios to consider. For example, they say regulatory capture could be codified in community tokens where, say, homeowners have disproportionate voting power and stall housing construction. So they were in, like, yeah, they nimbified the whole thing. I wonder what it would be like if that happened. Yeah, that's right. Or soil-bound tokens could automate redlining. Again,

I wonder what it would like if that happened. What a dystopia. Imagine living in that. All of these problems are like problems they're envisioning, which would require a huge amount of success to get there. They would have to replace traditional, centralized banking finance. And then it might do the same problems that regular finance already does. Well, I think the dream is always that by presenting people with the freer version of society that's based on infinite transactions, that it will be so manifestly what people prefer, that all of the legacy banks will, say, just fold because no one will transact them anymore. And then they're going to abolish restaurants. But that is, of course, the theory underpinning

like this entire thing, right? Where they're asking what they're going to do when they finally take over society. And they still don't realize that they are a token for the parting of suckers with their money and giving it back to JPMorgan. They say, we call this pluralistic ecosystem decentralized society, a co-determined society where souls and communities come together, bottom up, as emergent properties of each other to co-create plural network goods and intelligences. Can you imagine if your society were decentralized? Yeah, you couldn't have the Joker on the blockchain because he relies too much on a centralized society. All of this, once again, just seems like if you had told me, oh, psych,

this was actually an AI-generated text that I was just fooling you guys with for this whole episode, I would believe you. That would be fun. But no, I'm afraid it was generated by an actual AI. But they say, once you solve these problems, right? Because you realize, well, we tried to create this trustless world of no institutions, and then oopsie daisy by making the entire universe of your life centered on the idea of transacting, it became hyper-financialized and unusable. They said, okay, finally, now it's going to take this to make all of these DeFi stuff, all this Web 3 stuff, actually able to support activities that are just ubiquitous in the real world, like signing an apartment lease. They were like, this was the thing, not everything

else, not the fundamental theory. As much as it is, there is some Schadenfreude and seeing all of these things basically fall over, and there is some Schadenfreude in it. Again, you said, well, a smaller number of people are going to be suckered by the promise that, oh, it's going to work now. I don't necessarily know if it's even Schadenfreude, because I feel like Schadenfreude implies that you're just taking post from someone's misery, but they don't deserve it. I feel like these guys definitely deserve it. This is just Freud. I wanted to ask who's saying this question specifically, but please, everyone weigh in. I used to write for my high school paper a long, long time ago. I started high school in 1999. I graduated in 2003. None of

my articles, my columns that I wrote as a high schooler, are still available online. If they ever were available online in the very, very primitive Web 1.0 website, my high school newspaper might have had, they're no longer there. I would be surprised if any of the columns I wrote for my college newspaper are still online. If they are, they're deeply, deeply buried. I'm very grateful for that, because I would be embarrassed by some of the dumb shit that I said when I was 17, 18 years old, genuinely. I would be embarrassed by the dumb shit that I said when I was in my early 20s. I am grateful that some of my early bylines don't exist anymore, for example. The last thing on earth that I would want is every single thing that I have ever done

in terms of professional employment, accomplishments, things along those lines, to be tied to me easily accessible. Hussain, I know you've worn a million hats in your journalistic career. Do you feel the same way? Because to me, the idea of this, this seems like, I feel as though I've escaped this fate by the skin of my teeth, but everyone else who might be socialized into a world where even just like one, you know, one-one-hundredth of this shit that Riley's just read becomes the norm. That sounds horrible. Yeah. I mean, like, I'm pretty sure some of my, like, columns of slurs that I wrote for

the retail gazette were still, no, actually, you know what, this kind of like, so there are, you know, because before, you know, I've talked about this on the show about how, like, you know, for lots of people who kind of find themselves, like, becoming interested and engaging with, like, leftist politics, it didn't sort of come naturally. It came as, like, a result of sort of getting fired from, like, multiple jobs, like, getting, like, go for multiple jobs. And, you know, so before, like, I wasn't always kind of like someone who would identify in the left. And, like, there are certainly columns or, like, articles that I wrote for my student newspaper were, like, you know, including one that I think was, like, supportive of Western intervention in

Syria, which, like, they exist. And if people, and, like, people have sent them to me and they've tried to do, like, this you. And, like, you know, it hasn't really sort of had the effect that they wanted, which I guess is the reason why they've stopped for now, although, like, I wouldn't be surprised if it, if those ones emerged again. But yeah, it's not, for me, it's like a broadly broad inconvenience because, like, thankfully, being a professional clown, I somehow now have, like, some, like, career security. But I think for, like, younger people who work in media, but also just like younger people generally who are, like, writing online, because that's the only thing you can really do to sort of express, like, dissatisfaction and stuff. Like, the idea of,

you know, that's already tied to you, right? Like, people are already finding that people are already sort of developing an idea of who you are, a composite character of you, based on most things. And as we've sort of spoken about on the show, and as I speak about on, like, 10k posts, like, from time to time, quite often, those composite characters tend to be more definitive in, like, bigger aspects of your life than you would like to. And every time I hear, like, you know, crypto stuff, and crucially, people kind of making the use case for crypto being, oh, you know, this is, like, an uneditable, like, you know, ledger, where, like, you know, every, every thing you do online will be, like, recorded, which means that you'll be, you know, you're presenting your true

authentic self. It's like, no, that's horrible. That's like, not only sort of, like, like, antithetical to, like, that's the thing that religions threaten you with. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, that's why I like the right to be forgotten. I think it's part of the reason why everyone is so insane now is because we all have to act as if we've always held a consistent ideology. We've never been hypocrites. We've never been wrong and been right. Yeah. And crucially, as, like, people who are kind of, you know, especially, like, I think people like us, who have, like, a certain kind of small degree of celebrity, but definitely people who are, like, on, you know, broader levels, like, the fact that, like,

people do genuinely think that you are, like, the online character that you sort of present yourself as, and they get, like, genuinely offended, like, some people getting, like, genuinely offended and disappointed, but, like, you are not the character that you appear to be online, right? Or they get very confused when they sort of confront you and, like, oh, you're a normal person. Like, that's really disappointing. Like, you know, like, I find that very funny, but, like, if you sort of extend that for, like, more periods, it's like, yeah, having this expectation that, like, you are this kind of curated character that, like, platforms incentivize online and that you sort of have to live up to in order to sort of

maintain a very basic level of income in this extremely precarious economic climate, like, that's a lot of pressure to put on people, but it's also, like, incredibly inhuman. And I think, and I'll, like, end this, I'll end my kind of rant at this point. Like, I think that, like, all the kind of, like, these sorts of you, making these sorts of use cases for blockchain and web free and everything, like, this sort of being how tech guys, like, define authenticity is really just, like, just the, it's really just entrenching this idea that, like, organic human interaction and reception and compassion and empathy that comes with that, like, is now completely obsolete. And, like, ultimately, you are judged by, like, how you curate yourself at all times.

Mason We have the other thing that it makes completely obsolete as well as all of that is interiority. You are not your interior, you are not anything about your interior life. You are purely what is recordable, as you might say, XP grinding, whether that stuff you've thought or JavaScript tutorials you've done. Mason What if we made real life as miserable as MMOs? Mason Yeah. Well, that seems to be what the, like, Vitalik Buterin was so burned by MMOs that he's decided to make real life into one. And effectively, right? Like, what it's saying is, well, it's a vision of truth telling and authenticity that says everything about you has

to be public and searchable and decomposable, but also decomposable by, say, potential employers. So, because what happens, I think, the thing to always remember is that when information is about you and people comparable to you is taken and aggregated, then the person who has access to that information and can slice it up as they choose then has power over you in a very meaningful way. And what the Web 3.2 promise seems to be is by trying to force a lot of this information to the surface from everyone by making it, by, again, the utopian dream that they have is to make everyone sort of have to just close all this stuff all the time to be able to just say transact and live normally because they want

these ubiquitous activities like signing an apartment lease to be through their system. Is what that's asking for is the total obliteration of any kind of interiority in favor of the ability to be perfectly researched by anyone who has the wherewithal to do it. Mason It's basically granting, like, you know, the capabilities of quote tweeting and saying this you to the eye of Sauron. And it's basically like, oh, you claim to be against homophobia, but in 2010, your display name on the Apple Games portal was a fat gay man. So, you know what? I feel as though you have no right to comment. And it's just, there's a part of me that also wonders if the logical follow-up to this would be people just really not caring at all. You know

what I mean? Like the opposite of rather than people being way more circumspect, it just being it like normalizing the things that we are trying to discourage in our society. Mason Yeah. And we're kind of sort of seeing that with like, you know, I don't want to bring up like the culture wars, but just like even sort of like the cancel culture backlash and everything and how that sort of being used and leveraged by certain people to kind of advance like types of behavior and language that is like, you know, really like, you know, slurs and like offenses and stuff and trying to frame them in ways that are like, oh, you know, it's a joke or like, you know, do you know what I mean? Just like, you know, we're sort of seeing kind of,

we're sort of seeing that type of backlash emerge from a particular sector. So it's kind of like what we're actually seeing is not necessarily like the eradication of like, you know, cancel culture or eradication of like this type of like surveillance, but rather like seeing one side with like a lot of power and with like tech behind them and like fully supportive of them getting to sort of like define what that territory is. And because they have like the power and resources, again, as we've spoken about earlier on, at a time when like state power and like, you know, state institutions are like on the brink of collapse, they can sort of define like what acceptable language is.

Yeah, the cops stop you and the issue with the shoplifting SB2. That's right. And it happened like, and it just so happens that like the acceptable behaviors and language and so on are like extremely compatible with like ASTSI services that render everything to be transactional. So I think I'm going to pull it to a close roughly there. And then to wish our dear, sweet, stricken colleague, Milo, a very fond, please stop shitting. We hope just in general, go too far in the other direction and go bolstern the arm vote. Never shit again, Milo. Never shit again.

This sort of forgotten more bond movie. But in order to perform the role of Milo Edwards tonight, American Milo Edwards, I can only say we have a Patreon, it's $5 a month, gets you a bunch of content. You also have Britnology and the second Britnology available on the Forbidden $10 tier. Thank you so much for being listeners. Thank you so much for supporting us. Milo, do you have any tour dates? I do. I am completing a world tour of between my bed and the toilet. Yeah, he's going to be driving his beloved car slowly up and down Mayor Street.

And also I want to say something I've forgotten to do for a while is to thank Jinsang for the use of our theme song. Here we go. You can find it on Spotify. If you're wondering what it is, that's what it is. And I'm going to try to remember to start referencing it every episode now. And so now we close with Here We Go by Jinsang. Thank you for listening.