Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 216: Double Dare Direct Action

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

We start out with our own spin on the controversial show "The Activist," then take a look at some of the new company town proposals on offer from our tech overlords. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

yesterday when we tried to record and failed we had um there was a bit that i missed out on i missed like the punch line so i was like kind of had to sit and hum a few bars um but if i remember correctly tom you had an idea for the show The Activist. I would just like to run that bit back because I was in the dark. Like I said, since my internet kept dropping, I dropped it right when you were

explaining. Yeah. Here's what I pitched to the network heads. It was reported this week they were going to do it as a competition game show style thing. But now they've since thought, okay, maybe that's a little callous, and we're going to go and do it documentary style. Well, I disagree.

I think they should go back to the competition style. But with this twist, I think that whatever your organization is advocating against, let's say. Whatever your organization is advocating against, let's say, so the example I used yesterday was, let's say you're fighting toxic masculinity. Okay? Yeah. So here's what you'd have to do. You would have to go against the American gladiators, the sort of pinnacle of toxic masculinity in the 90s, you know, Larry Zonka hosting special. And here's what's at stake, though.

If you lose in the games, you have to renounce whatever it is you're advocating for and admit that the other side's right. So, like, if you lose an American gladiator style competition if saber hits you with that big you know ball cannon thing you know while you're trying to run the obstacle course or whatever then i'm sorry my hands are tied you have to get up there and say that a woman's place is in the is not in the house nor the senate but rather the kitchen those are the rules okay all right okay okay like how like how much are you willing to give up to fight for what you believe in is really

are you willing to put your old physical abilities on the line yet right right so also you know what they could do is like uh uh you know it could be also like um like fear factor right so like if you're if your team is like those racist anonymous people that we talked about i guess a couple months ago like your mission is like you go and like joe rogan's on the microphone but you have to go visit a dominican barber shop you know what i mean exactly or or the example we used you gotta like you gotta take like the train like uptown from like the upper uh west side in new york to like the bronx or something you know and encounter all the people that in daily life you would try your best to avoid to avoid

normally exactly yeah or that you would antagonize in a situation where you have the upper hand exactly exactly or okay so all right so then the example yesterday did work you could have a like a legends of the hidden temple style competition but it would be in chernobyl like if you're an environment if you're an anti-nuclear activist you have to do legends of the hidden temple in chernobyl you mean like in a nuclear like reactor core some shit like that yes exactly nice you have to get out with like under a certain dosage of radioactivity in your body also wearing a hazmat suit already to make it like like physically like difficult to like do these stunts and shit.

Okay, alright, yes. Okay, alright, so yes, so then my example of... We're basically taking the battle from the marketplace of ideas to the marketplace of physical competition. Exactly, exactly.

Right. You're right, okay. Casual listeners will say, well, that sounds a bit fascist tom sexton that's why you have to meet them on their own turf and destroy them on their own turf only way to do it so like um you know how they had like triathlons like yeah biking, and running. Yeah, you're an anti-offshore drilling activist. You have to swim through the gulf while it's coated in oil. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, exactly. As an obstacle course, you have to dodge pelicans covered in oil and shit like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is much better okay yeah this is tight this is tight okay i'm gonna give y'all like an organization you gotta tell me what their like sort of uh game show like competition they'd have to do is i think the example okay let's go back to this because the example i used yesterday before we got cut off was surge and what what would you say surge showing up for racial justice what would they what what kind of gauntlet would they have to run um okay uh so like the person who's most active in surge is like a white person right because like the whole idea of surge is like

if you're white you use your whiteness to dismantle racism to show up for racial to show up for racial justice right so all right so then you could do like a cannonball run type thing where you have to show up but if you don't show up you have to admit that racism is good i guess nah i'm thinking i'm thinking more like you have like the example i was using yesterday you have like um like after work or like social settings you know maybe you have like a cinco de mayo like party or something like that or maybe you have like an event where people should be culturally sensitive okay yeah yeah yeah

and you have to try to convince your racist co-worker who's wearing a sombrero or some shit like that like who's a white dude why like that's not cool you know what I mean so they're less about physical you could take that back to the legends of the hidden temple, too,

and talk, you know, like when the Aztecs, guys dressed like Aztecs, would jump out? Yeah. Instead of letting them push you into a ball pit or something, you try to tell them why what they're doing is culturally insensitive. Wait, as they're trying to push you into a ball pit. Right, right, right. So you're actually bringing the marketplace of ideas to the marketplace

of physical competition and we're gonna see which one wins out yeah you're shuffling around on like this small like pillar or some shit like that with it well try to convince them why yeah what about okay what about aclu that's like a social justice cause right like um that's a good way like if you're an aclu activist what what would be your gauntlet what would be your physical um gauntlet i got you like a moral conundrum that like, you know, pits you against like defending like the freedom of speech of Nazis versus like doing something that the ACLU probably should be doing. You know what I mean? Like something that puts them in a dialectical, I guess, conundrum, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, but what game show would fit that the best? Family Feud? I was going to say Family Feud. Family Feud might do it, yeah. Okay, but what game show would fit that the best? Family Feud? I was going to say Family Feud. Family Feud might do it, yeah. Yeah, Family Feud, yeah. Over here we have the Mingala family to our left. We don't like what they have to say, but we respect their right to tell it. And then Steve Harvey comes out and knows.

Steve Harvey fresh from the trunk of a car in Eastern Kentucky. Or the back seat of a car. Clombs out smooth as his suit out. Yeah. Yeah, just like, yeah, just pulls the wrinkles out and then just. God damn it. Okay. Okay.

I got one. I got one, I think, here. Let's just get right into it. The Democratic Socialists of America. Okay. Okay. Oh, shit. That's a good one.

What do you think? Well, I'm trying to think about like um physical competition game shows all right so there's like the amazing race um double dare remember was double dare the game where you got slimed yeah mark summers was the host yeah and he hated slime yeah like a nickelodeon back in the day yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and if you remember there was a spinoff of that called guts and then eventually global guts okay okay okay should we do double dare what's i mean because i can't you're right there was a

spinoff called guts i never watched it so on double dare correct me if I'm wrong I'm trying to jog my memory But they ask like questions And if you couldn't answer the questions You could say physical challenge Right And then you would have to do something like Run across like a rickety bridge With like a slime pit underneath

Right and they'd be dumping slime Left and right So the DSA one Would be slime pit underneath or something right and they'd be dumping slime left and right yeah so so the dsa would be the dsa one would be like you have to fix a brake light or i mean you have to like okay it's the amazing race but unless you get your brake lights fixed, you're going to get pulled over by the cops. Yeah. And, like, missed work and, like, you know, yeah, child support payments and, like, actually, like, go to jail. Yeah. Like, real-world consequences.

I'm kidding. All right. Well, we'll stick that one back in the oven for a little bit and see see what happens with oh shit oh boy in any case yeah nevertheless well so no so then they're not doing the activist show like they said. Is Usher still involved? That's all I want to know. Is Usher still involved with the new revamp?

I think all three. It was Julian is it Ho? Julian Hoff? Or is it Ho? I don't know. Julian Hoff. Yeah. I forget the other. Who actually Julian Hoff wore a black face apparently for Halloween one year. She was.

Yeah. I forget the actress's name from Orange is the New Black. But the woman who plays Crazy Eyes, I think her name is. She. Yeah. This woman wore a black face and like her hair twisted up in knots like the character from the show a couple years ago so yeah and by the way yeah well then what's her activist like what is ushers activist bona fide i mean like being black in america i don't know dude i don't

fucking know here's like a popular figure in america no i do it's like uh did they just find like three celebrities who have like had like teachable moments based on their like public misdeeds that are that got exposed and it's like that's that was the oh yeah like julian hoffman face so she gets on this because now she's learned right right yeah yeah exactly and usher cheated on his wife or girlfriend or whatever made an album about it yeah but i feel like he did his public penance he made a whole album off of it like yeah and got extremely rich that thing sold a million copies in its first week this man this man literally had his cake and ate it too i that's a i will say that album is great i mean like not every song on it it's got some filler

for sure but it's like i'd say like 70 of it is an excellent album oh yeah yeah i feel like that's back when like you could listen to an album like all the way through and almost every song was a hit. Totally. Who is Priyanka Chopra? She's the third person on this show. That is Nick Jonas' wife. She's an actress. She was on that show Quantico.

Yeah. Where she's training to be an FBI agent or something. So this is her penance. Okay. Did she come out of Bollywood type of stuff? Is that her, like, her... No, I think she's just... I think she's American,

but I think... Yeah, I think... She's been on a bunch of shows. I can't really... She's winner of Miss World 2000 pageant. Was she briefly married? Hold on a second. I think she might have been.

I want to check this before I say this out loud, because I'm wondering if... No, no, no. I think all of these people, I think Chopra Us Usher, and Julian Hoff, I think they're all involved in celebrity-type philanthropy, like celebrity-type activism. You know what I mean?

Oh, yeah. UNICEF. Yes, exactly. I'm looking it up now. At UNICEF, they speak out against infanticide, stuff like that. You mean? Just low-hanging fruit. Nobody likes infanticide. uh you know stuff like that like you mean just just like low low hanging fruit like nobody yeah

like the worst most generically worse like you know crises crises you could think of you know but that don't really require much of a like like you know you're not taking much of a risk like no one is against like you know like child like sex trafficking or anything like that you know what i'm saying yeah yeah you know environmentalism now it's not it anything like that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. Or environmentalism now. It's not dodgy. You know what I'm saying? In the early 2000s, like Darfur was one of these.

Yeah. Do you remember that? Like George Clooney was big into that. And I'm not saying that didn't deserve attention or anything, but it was like, you know, it seemed like, you know, something everybody could agree on i'm fucking i'm pissed i'm pissed that this show's not actually happening now that they're just doing like a boring ass documentary like no come on like yeah they should have stuck they should

have stuck to their guns man and just like had the original vision play out out of a day yeah i mean because like i mean if you're a leftist like whatever you're doing isn't really threatened by this anyways like this is just it's like gamified activism of like the uh what was the coney type stuff you know what i mean like yeah yeah yeah i mean it's yeah it would have been some good content. Oh my god, it would have been so good. We could have tuned in every night and then report back on it. That would have been so good.

It would have been something to hate watch. It would have been perfect. It's funny because the presumption is certain causes are going to lose out and just get a door prize. You know what I mean? That's just so absurd to me.'re literally playing out a pressure or something yeah it's a pressure olympics like you know like on tv that's what it is man no i said we weren't ready for that like i said yesterday it's the it's like the

back to the future meme, Marty McFly. Like, your kids are going to love it, you know? There's a Wikipedia page for activism. It just says activism. What's the definition of activism? Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct, or intervene in social, political, economic, or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good. And some of the examples they offer, like civil rights activists. All right.

That makes sense. Women's Liberation March in Washington, D.C., August 1970. That makes sense. And then they have like barricade at the paris commune march 1871 okay oh my god they really do the famous the famous occupyune, man, as we all know, man. Oh, shit.

Speaking of Occupy, speaking of Occupy, did you guys see that tweet going around from, was it Occupy Democrats? That was like... Retweet if you support landlords. Yeah, it was basically like, yeah, RT. RT, if you think, it says, Breaking, a large Florida landlord announces that he will begin requiring all new and existing tenants to provide proof of COVID vaccination, saying, you don't want to get vaccinated? You have to move. And if you don't, we will evict you.

RT, if you support the landlord's move. Bruh, didn't they have some shit? I don't know if it was the occupied democrats but it was some some wing of the democratic party like social media wing where uh this woman was uh under threat of losing her child because she wasn't vaccinated and they were like retweeting this like to show like so like the judge i guess who like handed down this ruling like you know was doing the right thing and it's like the same kind of like yo this is not a good thing man we have to be punishing people like this you know did we talk we had an episode about this

a few weeks ago about like judges um you know telling people you have to get vaccinated or you're going to jail and then in this case the one that you're referencing here and i think that was in georgia the judge denied this woman custody of her child because she wasn't vaccinated or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. I don't know. I don't know.

Today isn't the, today, like, the 10th anniversary. I saw people posting that, too, the 10th anniversary of occupy speaking of which i saw people posting about that today is holy shit you're right yeah well like today yeah like this month this month of september this year it's the 10th anniversary damn 10 fucking years i remember riding down to the um i remember riding down to the courthouse in austin which is where I was living at the time. I was biking down there and I was on the phone with my friend, Eric. And I was like, this might really be it, man. This might be the revolution.

Oh, man. I should have known. I was in Little Rock, Arkansas working at the Clinton Library. This was before I was swimming upstream from liberalism. And I should have known something was up when they were just like,

yeah, come on in. Hang out. Like all the Occupy people just welcomed me to the library. Like gave them like cake and cookies and pops and shit. Like, oh, it's that easy, huh? And that's when I started believing in the power of public-private partnership. Listen, we're only going to change things when we bring the NGO world to the business world.

I've been saying that. That's what I believed then. That's what I believe now. I've been saying that. That's what I believed then. That's what I believe now. I've been saying that. Go ahead, Terrence. No, you go ahead. No, I was just going to say, I was in New York at the time.

I was going to community college and I was taking this political, it wasn't political science it was american government but i could tell my like professor you know probably like like had probably taught political science courses um and definitely like was trying to kind of inspire like the kids there you know like taking this american this like remedial i think american government class and uh like you said ter, I really felt too at the time. Like I was like, oh, shit, it's about to pop off.

Because even my professor, you know, he made this, tried to make this kind of grand speech, you know, in the last day of class. Where he's basically like, you know, what's going on just a couple blocks away, you know. Like he's trying to say that's history, you know. And that's the way it really felt, man, at the time the time you know that it felt like this was something like monumental and then you know well it happened at the same time it happened like maybe six or seven months after the arab spring so it felt it had that kind of like world historic feel to it you know what i mean yeah are we like a shock wave are we next yeah yeah is it gonna happen here i mean which we should have known like after we saw the holographic image of the pale

horse riding through the terrier square what was in retrospect probably uh a uh a harbinger of things to come. Yeah. But you know. Who could have known, you know? Mm-hmm. Right. Well, do you guys want to hit some softballs? How are you feeling today?

You want to hit some softballs? Yeah. I'm down for that. Are you want to hit some softballs? Yeah, I'm down for that. Are you talking about big swollen softballs? We're talking about big swollen softballs today. Big swollen barricose softballs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm talking about the article going around in Bloomberg, the op-ed about company towns um even softer balls even softer balls um amazon's new factory towns will lift the working class um plentiful new jobs at higher

wages in places with cheaper housing sounds like a solution to inequality um i was like out in new mexico the past week and i don't watch a whole lot of tv but um in the hotel like i had the tv on and a commercial came on for amazon i don't know if you guys have seen this have you guys seen this commercial it's it's like i've seen several from amazon yeah it seems like it was made probably right before or right after the unionization attempt in alabama um but it features a guy who is basically talking about how amazon helped him like go on to find a better paying job as a nurse they like paid for his tuition and all this and like did have y'all seen this yeah i've seen the i know exactly which one you're talking about um i don't know if it's the same one but similar where they talk about the education opportunities

that amazon has afforded to people and like the twist at the end is like you know you can get a job like outside of amazon beyond amazon or right back at like you know you can get a job like outside of amazon beyond amazon or right back at amazon you know but i guess i'm like a higher like echelon or something like that right i know what you're talking about yeah pretty dark um just very dystopian yeah yeah uh i think this kind of goes in that same vein like you know i think that they they're trying to make the case that they are a public good rather than a public nuisance um you know and they're obviously like they're taking over everything um but it kind of seems like natural that they would want to also take over like municipal governance and kind of you know become a sort of like sub-government to the u.s government exactly you know exactly yeah i i

promise you you will see this in the coming years if you live in a place your municipal water supply will be at some point taken over by amazon your electricity utility will be taken over by amazon because none of none of like the things that we deem sort of uh you know and i grew up in a town where those were were public things at least you know on the water side until fairly recently and if you're wherever you're living like none of these like companies private companies that provide those services can like stand under the weight of like the sort of the onslaught of like amazon's societal takeover in every sector it's like you know you could already order your groceries on amazon you know what i mean all that kind of stuff it's like it's not that far of a

leap to think that they can also infiltrate like every single thing we need for like day-to-day existence I've mentioned this on the show before but even like not even like immaterially speaking like not even something material like my town which is like Stonecrest they were going to change the name to Amazon in the hopes of capturing that bid when Amazon was shopping around for a new warehouse. And my town where I live was willing to change its name to Amazon in order to attract that attention. In fairness, Stonecrest is a trash name.

It's like a generic,uely british sounding thing exactly exactly also known as lithonia which i guess is a more preferable name but yeah yeah it definitely sounds like a manufactured it's so thirsty it's like come on like why would amazon oh it's so bad well that's that's funny you say that eric because like every town in eastern kentucky is named after a coal company like i never i didn't even know this until a few years ago but like i think vico like the city of vico which kind of got uh famous uh you know probably seven eight years ago for having you know the gay mayor johnny cummings that uh was on the colbert report and all that stuff but i think vico is an acronym that means

is is it viper something coal and coke organism something like that virginia coke and coal virginia coke and coal yeah okay And Seco is the same. Seco is the same. Southeast Coal. Seco. Yeah, it used to be a company town. Yeah, no. I mean, it's...

But this op-ed is kind of interesting. And, you know, while I was, like, looking at it, you know, it's the one that's going around on Bloomberg right now. But there was another one from a few years ago that also made the rounds. And it's called also on Bloomberg. Bloomberg really, really wants us to live in company towns. It says, what Facebook can learn from company towns? As the technology firm plans to build a village in silicon valley

history suggests that can what can sustain a company town long after its founders are gone like in the whole point of this article like it found two company towns like one made by hershey and one made by like a still you know corporate corporation i think and it was like um you know like it was it was it's one of the subheaders is how a company town can last and it like went through all the things that hershey did to make this company town like sustainable and like people want to live there and stuff i don't know it's pretty crazy no this from the uh from the bloomberg well the first one that we brought up, the most recent one, the Amazon Company Town one. It's just like this amazing in the beginning of it, like where he's trying to present, like he doesn't even call company towns company towns.

He keeps calling them factory towns. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it just reminds me of like if you ever watch like Mad Men, you know, when Don Draper is, like, pitching an idea to you. He's like, but what if you shifted that focus to a different kind of community? Let's call them factory towns. Like, you know what I mean?

Like, he's trying to sell you. Factory town has the connotation of, like, this, like, town too tough to die. Right. It's, like, proud of their work ethic and all that stuff. Company town, the connotation is exploitation authority yes yeah yeah yeah it's it's like authoritarian and stuff but factory town sounds like that mid-century like robust middle class thing that everybody loves because we live and work together in a factory like we cohabitate this space instead of being owned and

exploited by yeah okay in many ways it's kind of like the, I mean, I was thinking about this the other day. Like COVID obviously has changed a lot of things to say the least, but like one of the more fundamental changes in political economy that it's initiated is like our merging with technology and the internet. Like in the sense that now there is a sort of almost

singularity and it's crazy that they they want us to move physically into their spaces but they also want us to inhabit their spaces virtually like the whole facebook metaverse thing like can you imagine a scenario where you wake up in the morning you put on your ocular vr set and go to your conference meeting everything in that meeting is rendered realistically um and so you have a meeting like you would in real life but it's virtual reality um but they can monitor you even more closely and make sure that you're not like communicating with anybody else or, you know, like that you're, I don't know. You know what I'm saying? It just, it's that seamless integration with the internet that they want.

But they also want our physical locations to be integrated into their sort of like vertical operations as well. I think, Tom, you've mentioned this before. operations as well i think tom you've mentioned this before we talked about it like the fact that like you know what's what's most profitable now is not even like physical you know like it's like all this like data i guess and this kind of metadata and i saw a tweet like this really dystopian tweet somebody said something like you know imagine that um like you know you live in a smart home right that's that uses that internet of of things you know uh where you have like devices on you that read your biometrics or something like that you know and um you try to call out of work you know and this these devices can tell whether or not whether you're lying based on your yeah exactly whether

or not you're fucking lying or not i try to just get a day off you know what i mean which you know listen like uh lying that calling in sick is a time-honored tradition you know what i mean also stealing from work time-honored tradition right yeah a little wage theft its thing is they don't like it when it comes back to them but they're they're happy to engage in all that wage theft and everything else yeah um okay let's read this real quick um this is written by a guy named connor sin connor with one n connor with one n and what kind of name is that his last name kind of sounds like sin like this is Sin Dog from Cypress Hill. This is his real name.

Nom de guerre. Their sin dog is his nom de guerre. But this is government now. This is government day. He's also written such bangers as Amazon and Walmart are winning the labor market wars. Itching to reinvent your career now is the time um this motherfucker lives in atlanta too also how i could just kill a man and uh anyway i'll stop i'm showing my age here this kid's like what the fuck saprasil um the campaign against economic inequality

has put a bullseye on cities local governments are encouraged to raise minimum wages change their zoning laws and build more housing particularly in affluent communities that are squeezing out the lower class but what if you shifted that focus to a different kind of community consider these burgeoning new places strung along the interstate and other highways leading away from urban cores, populated by warehouses and fulfillment centers that are being built to serve the needs of e-commerce customers. Let's call them factory towns. These are places where working class jobs are being created in large numbers and where wages already are rising. class jobs are being created in large numbers and where wages already

are rising. They're not much in the spotlight yet, but making these modern day company towns more livable for the working class might be a better approach to solving inequality with a higher likelihood of success than continuing to fight against entrenched interests in coastal cities

and high cost parts of Metro. Hold on, hold on, hold on. and high-cost parts of Metro. Hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. It's even worse than I thought. You know, I did the requisite just like retweet this thing because it's like, yeah. I always know when one of these articles is going around because invariably we'll get tagged in a picture of me and Terrence

standing out in front of the Seacoast store. Terrence has got bleach on his shirt. Me with bird shit on my shirt. Yeah, not bird shit. Contrary to popular belief. And me bloviating about company towns and stuff. That's pretty bad, though. Hold up, though.

He's like, you know what? The real path forward here is to rob them of what little autonomy they have left. Basically, what he's saying is, like, politics is impossible. You're never going to win. So let's just give up and let's turn over everything to the tech companies because they'll look out for us because they have technology and resources. But hold up, though.

This motherfucker said, they're not much talking about these factory towns they're not much in the spotlight yet i mean there's a reason why motherfucker like given like a hundred years of like labor history why like company towns aren't very fucking popular you know what i'm saying like it is pretty it is pretty impressive how um you know of all the things it isn't pretty it is pretty impressive how deeply Americans have internalized that idea that, like, company towns are bad. Most people hate the idea, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's funny.

I talk to people, like, my mom grew up in a company town. A lot of people back home grew up in company towns. back home grew up in company towns and it's funny because like people that are younger like the younger end of boomers like people in their 50s maybe 60s like tend to have like negative associations but like older people like in their 70s and 80s were like lord we had a movie theater and we had a grocery store and we had this and it's like i'm like god were your conditions that spartan that you didn't even consider all the autonomy that you've ceded? Not you. You've been exploited into it, but you know that you've had to give up for those things.

Right. We had our own money that we could only use at stores in the company town. Yeah, we had this money. It had the boss on it. Not the president, but the boss of the company um it used to be that when you were driving out of a metro area on a highway you'd note the change in scenery as it went from urban to rural today what's most noteworthy is the transition to humongous warehouses and distribution centers, both currently in use and many more being built. Retail and e-commerce Goliaths, Amazon.com and Walmart,

have distribution facilities everywhere, and while they may have the biggest footprint, companies that make building materials have their fair share, as do other e-commerce players like pet supplies company Chewy Inc. Economic realities dictate where these facilities get built the need for speedy deliveries makes it important to be close to large concentrations of customers but because the facilities require so much land hundreds of thousands of square feet or more they tend to be built they tend to be on the outskirts of cities

where land is abundant and cheap highway proximity is a must so that trucks can quickly get in and out. These warehouses also provide jobs to large numbers of people. An 800,000 square foot Amazon building employs between 1,000 and 1,500 full-time workers. So when you have multiple large warehouses operated by different companies packed along both sides of the highway in close proximity you can be talking about a cluster employing many thousands of workers when you pack people like sardines we're talking about like my god they won't forget that here yes listen if if if you've considered the model in uh more densely populated areas of China and Bangladesh, I think that could really work for West Virginia. Now consider Amazon's announcement this week

that it's making another big hiring push at its fulfillment centers with jobs paying an average starting wage of $18 an hour, up 20% since 2018. So generous, $18 an hour. Wow. Up 20% though, since 2018. So generous. $18 an hour. Wow. About 20% though, since 2018. Or what you can get by working at Arby's down the street here these days. Thinking about the growth of fulfillment

and distribution centers in general, maybe these highway warehouse communities with jobs that pay increasingly respectable wages are what the future of the working class looks like. And doesn't it make sense then to think about how we can make these communities better for the people who will live and work there? It starts with making the jobs as high paying and safe as possible, whether that can be done by running labor markets hot or perhaps with unionization or the threat of it. If these sorts of jobs get to an average wage of $20 an hour, or the threat of it. If these sorts of jobs get to an average wage of $20 an hour, then a household with 1.5 full-time workers in it could make $60,000 a year with benefits.

People can argue about what constitutes a reasonable working-class lifestyle, but that would seem to offer the prospect for a much better existence than service workers had a decade ago, particularly considering lower housing costs on the outskirts of metro areas. Yeah, I'm sure peeing in bottles and shitting in fucking bags and shit like that because you can't take a break on delivery, you know what I mean?

Or when you're in a warehouse, I'm sure that's a reasonable working class lifestyle. Well, listen, all these illiterate reprobates want is to be able to go watch the latest Dwayne the johnson movie at the theater and eat at applebee's on the weekend what happens between monday and friday is strictly just you know just in support of that so well i like the i like the implication that like sixty thousand dollars with benefits wow i mean amazon has found a heart and it's just i mean like you know it's almost so cliche at this point to even bring it up but like how much money did bezos make during the pandemic wasn't it just an obscene amount like all of these fucking people like you could you could afford to pay

the world's first trillionaire in like 10 years or something. Exactly. Oh my God. You could pay these workers probably like $2,000 an hour and it still would not even cut into Bezos' bottom line. You know what I'm saying? Like you could pay them so much more. They could be making probably half a million dollars a year and it wouldn't even fucking make a blip

in Bezos' wealth. Yeah. He could turn like literally swaths and swaths of the world into millionaires and it wouldn't it wouldn't even come close to touching his his nut no i mean there was this thing going around and i haven't had time to like verify it or whatever but it was like a small business in ohio that like for a day it was like a gimmick thing it was like for a day um the workers ran the shop and uh everybody got paid the same and like their hourly rate was like 75 an hour you know what i mean and like this was a small business in ohio you know what i'm saying

like yeah i don't know just magnify that by like whatever bezos's wealth is and however much profits amazon takes in and every worker could reasonably be making like half a million dollars a year at amazon i'm confident saying that um i don't i'm just like just trying to like just conceptualize like not only like what what having that much money is like but like how literally you are able to change the world like you know at your command at will you know what i mean like the way you want it to be and how terrifying that is you know and like but the but like what this guy is suggesting and what's even worse is that he had like a it was like a thread the thread twitter thread they had started this with posted it with um he somebody had asked him like um you know what do you what do you think he's like oh well this you know i just wrote this because it's

going to have implications you know for leftists and they need to start thinking about this you know so like you know already in this person's mind like the autonomy of like the people that work on at amazon right it's like something that's not even considered you know right you know amazon is the one that gets to shape the reality for these people and they're the ones that they should be grateful because they're getting homes and jobs yes exactly it's a weird thing terrence have you ever driven through huntington and saw the big fulfillment center over there? Just how weird it looks in the landscape of it all? Yeah. I don't know.

It's just something unsettling about that. I guess it's just we're pre-biased with all the stories about pissing in bottles and everything like that. But there is just something naturally creepy about putting these big, huge, futuristic facilities right in the middle of some of the most impoverished places in the country. Yeah.

Well, they've completely taken all... What they're trying to do, ultimately, is not only take over, not only be the source for all online goods, groceries and other things, but also take over all local logistic lines. I mean, like they're trying to take over everything. that that warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, weren't they able to like through the city, like facilitate, like controlling the traffic lights like of that that intersection so that the the workers that were picketing and trying to pass out like, you know, flyers and stuff like that to people just driving past the the traffic lights were tuned in such a way

that the city basically relinquished the power of the traffic lights to Amazon so that people were not able to stop as long as they would have otherwise. And the workers also, too, were like under threat of possibly getting hit by fucking cars, you know. Well, it's on one hand, it's really dark that like this is what they're going for. on one hand, it's really dark that, like, this is what they're going for, but on the other hand, it's kind of like, you know, kind of fits right into, like, the whole Marxist analysis of this. It's like, it kind of creates, seems like they're creating the conditions of their own, the contradictory conditions of their own undoing. Like, if they take over everything, if they eventually become you know infused into every aspects of our lives it almost seems that like that presents even greater opportunities for

us to take over them you know what i mean like yeah yeah i don't know but maybe maybe not maybe that's the maybe that is the genius of the whole tech thing. I don't know. One thing that you have to address right from the jump, some of this shit is just going to have to be addressed. At a certain point, all those robots that do backflips and shit that they're making, we've got to nip that shit in the bud because some of this shit, like AI, once the horse is out of the barn, there ain't shit you can do about it it you know what i mean like we should have been addressing that already you know what i mean like yeah sure okay we'll work these shitty jobs because that's sort of a reality at this moment but like those robots and those backflips and shit i'm i'm gonna break those

in half when you're not looking like we gotta do that's just gotta happen those goddamn robo dogs and shit yeah that's not theoretical that's like that's that's happening you know you know there's that the iconic uh picture from the civil rights era of like you know the the pigs like unleashing the dogs on people and stuff like that it's not hard to see something like that happen in the future but those dogs are those weird robot things and it's bezos is the one that's pulling the strings instead of fucking bull connor or whoever you know yeah i will say i have much less compunction about beating the fuck out of a robot dog with a bat than i do an actual dog so you know yeah it's like i would even let that good sweet boy even though he's

his mind's been perverted by the cops i would just listen man you would even got to beat those robot dogs apparently there's like a uh a manufacturing flaw where you could just pop the battery out from underneath or something like that so yeah so, people have already found that out, so, yeah. Well, okay. This is a pretty short thing. There's only, like, two paragraphs left. But people can live... Oh, shit. It's trying to make me pay.

Oh, no. It's trying to make me pay for a subscription. Hold on. That's exactly why. Dude, I wish you could pop the battery out of this motherfucker. All right. Let me give $5 so I can continue to read Connor's sin. People can live close to work with shorter commutes,

plus the possibility of employer-provided shuttle buses, when their jobs are in a cheaper, less crowded part of a metro area. If there's a push to increase density by building affordable apartments or townhouses for workers, there's less likely to be wealthy homeowners mobilizing to stop it, since those sorts of homeowners probably will live closer to the city core. As wages rise and more jobs are created at warehouses and distribution hubs, you'll get a secondary increase in economic activity as amenities like retail and dining are built close by to appeal to the workforce. These new factory

towns will presumably have new issues that need addressing, such as adequate amounts of housing, presumably have new issues that need addressing, such as adequate amounts of housing, schools, and healthcare facilities. But the point is that we need to be thinking about what sorts of communities are being created by the growth of U.S. e-commerce infrastructure and what they'll need to thrive. To urbanists, contemplating the potential of the areas surrounding Interstate 75 in Ocala, Florida, outside of Orlando, might not be as sexy as upzoning and

building transit in san francisco but it's these types of new communities that are going to be the future of a large segment of the working class did i read the right article i guess i did yeah okay yeah i don't know it's just um anyways that's uh connor Sin I mean also like this idea that like whatever land that Amazon these warehouses are going to be building on is just going to be like land that's already like you know

barren you know it's already like unowned by anybody it's not like anyone lives there or has been living there for generations who's going to get kicked out nah it's just like land that we just bought from the municipality you know that was just there you have to kick people out of their fucking homes yeah exactly exactly it's gonna be so ugly too and they're gonna put it up as cheap as they possibly can like they already sell like tiny houses on amazon and shit that are just basically made with popsicle sticks and fucking

particle. It's like you go up, you go to Hayman, Kentucky and go look at the company houses up there and look, see if they're like, you know, built to stand the test of time. You know, they are not decidedly. Uh, Connorson is the co-founder or is the founder of a investment firm called peach treeree Creek Investments. He lives in Atlanta. I know. I know. And it is incumbent on you to go find Connor Sann and put hands on him.

I'm about to pull the fuck up, man. Shit. Well, it seems to me like, yeah, what he's saying is you've got these corridors on the outsides of like metro areas like you were saying aaron that like they're just being like taken over by these large e-commerce like warehouse logistics centers and everything like that and that this will be good for the working class because it will attract greater infrastructural investment to those areas as well i guess right like is that kind of what he's saying i don't really know what he's getting

at here to be honest if he's getting at that there is absolutely no historical precedence for that because that's the opposite exactly exactly exactly like like seriously go to any coal fucking camp and in that's ever been existed in this country. And like people straight pipe into the creeks, not because like they're just gross and uncivilized, but because these companies that establish these communities built no infrastructure, put no money into it. Like they're going to try to do this. It's a max extract situation. I mean, dude, you don't build like, you know, here in Atlanta. Right. I mean, in any like, you know, city like you know here in atlanta right i mean in any like

you know city like the term food deserts right like sure there are a lot of people who work in this community or yeah people travel outside of the community but just because people live there doesn't mean there's any development in the community there's not even a fucking supermarket you know what i mean or consider this they don't even need to use any of the on the ground infrastructure at a certain point because aren't they trying to build like a fleet of drone delivery you know delivery drones those don't those don't need roads you just fucking fly those to the house deliver it and like you know what i'm saying like they have ways around this sort of like nexus of so wait terrence you say

that the same drone that you just like you know like uh uh furnished and packaged with some shit at the factory is gonna like travel like two miles to your house in the factory town that you live in on the same fucking day like i guess so yeah they have no incentive to invest in any of those things. You know, I mean, they don't even really have an incentive at this point to invest in an actual company town. It feels like a lot of like hot air. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't even make sense.

Like it would it would cost them a lot of money to do it. I mean, the reason they built company towns back in the old days because it felt like workers were maybe, well, shit, I don't know. I mean, I guess they did it for geographical demands, but also because workers were pretty mobile, and there was a lot of immigrants coming into the country, and they needed to confine them in one place. We needed to contain the growing lithuanian threat exactly isolate them to what uh to what region yeah it had to be done up front otherwise they proliferate yeah it seems like it was a it was a mechanism of control the the requisites for which may not exist anymore. But maybe they do.

I don't know. It just seems to me like they're not going to sink all those costs into building an actual housing subdivision for workers. Unless, as you said earlier, Tom, it's just like cheap Ikea shit. It's just like Popsicle State houses, which I can see that. It'd be like an Olympic an olympic village they'll be sleeping on like cardboard no fuck boxes and shit like that i think this is one of those things like like you know bluster about automation that it's like connor sin probably knows that people

you know sort of getting an uproar about the insistence of company towns and so forth. And he's probably doing this shit for clicks because that's the whole sort of news economy at this point. I don't think you could go into this. Or he just thought he had the take of the century that nobody thought of yet. Right. Even though. You know. It's been around for a after a while could be it's clickbait too yeah you're right but tom you just you just uh hinted at something that seems like this is just like like if you're a journalist like you're an op-ed dude like the

the profitable thing to do is to write an op-ed about basically how everyone needs to remain slaves pretty much you know what i mean like convincing people like to go back to work like you know post-pandemic you know convincing people that company towns are a good idea and i don't know i think i think terence you were saying like is it profitable for them to even like make these company towns and maybe in the past that had something to do with what was being produced. If you're mining coal, that's something that's in a specific region, a location. But now these factories, these warehouses that are just popping up, they're not making anything. They're just shipping things out like right well why wouldn't amazon just like you know uh invest money in a public private partnership uh the same way that corporations

um that are located in atlanta are doing with the belt line like coca-cola for example right they're throwing tons of money at this atlanta belt line i've told you guys about that that ring that's being built around the city part of that is supposed to go to affordable housing supposed to so i mean if amazon really wanted to they could just like throw money at like you know these cookie cutter like houses that like you were saying tom that you know it's just basically a fucking popsicle that collapses in like you know like a week or something you know yeah i think that's a good point you make aaron about not making anything here it's's like, basically our, our economy is just a convenience economy.

It's like, how can I get from one place to the other, like at the fastest possible clip? That's why, like if you look at like logistics sectors, like all those, that kind of shit is just doing nuts. You know what I mean?

Others like Uber and others are just like weirdly operating at a loss and yet their evaluations are like still sky high i'm not sure how that works but like yeah there's nothing physical material that we're making these things are made in other places and we just figure out the most you know expedient way to get them into people's hands and that's basically what what we do here you know yeah yeah i'm was in like 70 of the economy of service you know oh man yeah i don't know for them to actually want to make company towns they would have to see their workers as like something that they would want to invest in um but at this point everybody's pressed so hard and because the economy is 70% service,

they see workers as expendable and therefore easily replaceable. So I don't see a scenario in which they would actually expend those kinds of quote-unquote investments to retain workers because they know they can just treat them like shit, discard them, and be... I mean, I don't't know it's even darker than company towns in a way you know what i'm saying like yeah i know exactly what you're saying man as you were talking go ahead go ahead tom what do you

want to say oh no no i was i was just gonna say it's it's it's like even if let's say let's say there were no moral quandaries with this and it could work, I mean, you would still be relying on the better angels of Jeff Bezos' nature, who is by all indications a guy that just thinks the system works, right, and thinks that as long as he's continuing to accumulate wealth, there's nothing wrong with that. You know what I mean? These rigid tech guys like Steve Jobs were sociopaths, but I think they rationalized it as,

well, these people around me are inferior to me because they can't figure out how to make this thing that's in my head in two minutes and present it to me. Right. Yeah, I don't know. I just think that Terrence is right. I just think that it's like they really don't have, like, any compunction to really, like, treat people better.

Even for something like this to happen would rely on Jeff Bezos, like, thinking, hmm, okay, maybe I want to treat people better. But this is a guy that hasn't given any indication of that. This is a guy that just thinks that, like, well, if somebody quits or somebody can't hack it, then there's like 5 000 more people ready to take those jobs so it just it just falls apart under scrutiny even if it even if we're stepping away from like the arguments of like you know uh people's autonomy and so forth

yeah yeah but even like you know as terence we were talking i was thinking like you know i'm sure people have written about this like better than i can I can, like, kind of talk about now. But, you know, like, I wonder how Marx would describe, like, the Silicon Valley, like, tech industry, you know? Like, these aren't, like, I guess these, like, you know, these factory tyrants are all barons of old you know these are again like immaterial products where like their influences stretch into like every part of human life you know where like you can point to jeff bezos as like an enemy but like you know instead of like striking you know at a coal mine or something like that or a factory where do you go to like take down amazon right do you just attack their warehouse houses do you blow up servers that are buried like hundreds of

feet below ground you know like there's this weird immaterial but very material aspect now that like the tech industry has that it's kind of like given the fact that 70 percent of like the economy is also like the service industry it makes it hard to know where to attack those nodes, right? Where to attack those weak points at. It seems to me Marx would probably think that these tech guys probably split the difference between Andrew Carnegie and some weird occultists in Europe or something. You know what I mean? That's probably what he would think. You know what I mean? That's probably what he would think. Right.

Because not only do they have like this sort of economic imperatives, but there is also this sort of like cultural thing to them as well. You know what I'm saying? It's the reason why Elon Musk has so many stands and stuff. It's even though, I mean, there was that video of tesla that was going

around this week of that tesla like swerving in the pedestrians i mean like the self-driving car yeah did you see that i heard about it i heard about i'd see it though yeah it was a video of it was like a dash cam of a tesla and it's like it's the same you know you know how there was that video of the of the spacex rockets like fucking exploding and then like elon musk and one of his nerdy you know uh you know servants or whatever we're like this is it's a learning experience well in this tesla video the same exact thing happens like this tesla was driving on a busy street and it like swerved into pedestrians and the guy behind the wheel managed to catch it on time but he was like dang oh dang well it's not

it's not perfect but but we still got some work to do. But it's not perfect, but it's a pretty good demonstration. And it's just like, how many fucking people have to die? Just sacrifice a couple grandmothers and babies and carriages and shit like that. In the name of progress, that's fine in these people's minds, as long as it's not them. Yeah. Well, that's because I think we see these people as like you know elon musk and well elon musk specifically right i don't know about bezos but musk and all his stans is like these are the people that like the the the tech geniuses who are going to like help us get out

of this thing that we all know we're in you know right you know i mean they're gonna help us like get out of this like horrible like dead-end situation as a civilization that we're in with their technology you know what i mean so well this op-ed itself basically says that like politics are dead in it's impossible so all we got to do now is just hope that like you know hope for the you know benevolence of and and like the intelligence and smarts and technology and everything of like the tech industry and it's just like yeah yeah yeah i don't know like uh you know howard schultz was the ceo of starbucks uh i forgot what podcast i was listening to but um it's kind of like talking about him and um there might have been democracy now actually

talking about the unionization efforts at a starbucks in um uh upstate new york and schultz uh how the way that he talked workers down from forming unions was basically saying that he has their best interest in mind you know yeah and they don't even call their workers workers they call them partners you know what i mean yeah like to say we were earlier we were talking about instead of using company town using factory town you know just like that that slight language change and like yeah yeah man i yeah if no why would any of the workers at the tesla factory who were doing this great service for the rest of humanity by building like these electric cars like why would they want to unionize you know

because of course elon musk with his futuristic mind and humanistic thinking has their best interests at heart you know what i mean yeah yeah right well speaking of unionization efforts y'all been paying attention to anything about the heaven hill workers in bardstown kentucky going on strike yeah i i mean i have I have to say, when I heard that, I was excited until I figured out that fighting cock bourbon is bottled by Heaven Hill, and so the cocksman community, which I consider myself part of, not happy about that. But, you know, you still don't cross the picket line.

Why don't you get the fellow cocksswain to go on strike, man? Yeah, man, what the fuck? Well, we have our own agenda. Yeah. In any case, it's funny because you talk about one the like few material things that we make in this country still but booze you know and everybody's got their own morality uh with all that kind of stuff but it is a material thing that we make and i think at one point i mean this was true 10 15 years ago i don't know if it's true now but bourbon was the third most expensive liquid on the planet behind crude oil and printer ink.

God damn. And it's funny to think about, like, you know, like, the bourbon industry has just boomed out of control, like, crazy. Like, even, like, down-shelf brands are, like, getting, like, bought and resold on the aftermarket for many times what they are. Shit, you could just go into Rite Aid and buy for $15 a fifth. Yeah, like top-and-bottom shelf type of shit. Yeah, two years ago, it's now $60 resale, and you can't find it anywhere, unless it's just regular white-label Jim Beam or something like that. Oh, damn.

Yeah, but it's funny that that industry's or something like that but uh yeah but it's like funny that like that industry's taken off like that and heaven hill's been a huge beneficiary of it and uh you got all these guys that have that are making it you know and bottling and everything else out here trying to get a dime and i don't know it's i felt like uh you know, shout out to the Heaven Hill workers. We need to. Yeah, critical support. Yeah. What else does Heaven Hill make? Oh, man.

I think they make, I saw a big list of their brands the other day. I can't remember. I mean, when I was in college i drank uh uh you know a war pension and green label and now even that's like getting resold for right crazy amounts so uh i think they make they might make elijah craig and uh i see yeah some other brands i can't remember exactly off the top of my head. Yeah. Well, yeah, critical support for the distillers. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, guys. Let's wrap a bow on this one. Sorry for the change in audio quality and the mini technical difficulty just the just all the things we had to do to get this one episode out two days two days of technical difficulties internet issues good fucking lord there's there's some love of podcasting, man. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Seriously. When you least expect it. Seriously. Thanks for being patient with us.

I probably should have tweeted out this was going to be late yesterday. I forgot to. Yeah, well, apologies. Some things are just beyond your control, though. And now that we rely on these modes of communication for everything, and we ourselves have no autonomy or control over it, um, it's not a good formula. Damn.

Yo, that's the way that all kind of like that. That was, that's a little bit too on the nose. Damn man. Um, bug out of the matrix. Right.

All right. Uh, well well thanks for listening this week everybody we'll see you on the Patreon in a few days and if not there we'll see you back here next week until then be safe take care of each other we'll see you then bye

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