It Could Happen Here Weekly 11

that was a horrible is ship. That was maybe your talk ten worst. This is it could happen here a podcast where an incompetent Rube Fox up starting the show and then we talk about how things are falling apart or how to make things not fall apart, or some version of things in between those two facts. Yep, yep. That's a kind of kind of not great time going on right now. A lot of people are That was our second That was our b pitch for the name. Kind of time going on right now? Actually not that

far from what was. Yeah, I mean, it's like, especially especially right now, there's there's a lot of a lot of trials going on, m feet on stuff, and the ad Our Very trial is happening, the one about you know, Unit Unite the Right is going on, and of course the kind ofn't have his trial as of as of recording is um. People, the jury is still in deliberation. UM, So no idea what's going to be the result by the time this episode up. I've actually been like not

commenting on it or neither to think about it. There's nothing we can do about it. There's nothing you can do. And like a lot of people, there's been discussion about how much civil unrest there's going to be depending on the result of the trial. I know there's been a lot of like National guards sent to Wisconsin. It's been you know, FBI door Knox and activists tombs trying to scare people so they don't you know, go out and ride or whatever. Discussion online the people you know planning

protests in response to in response to whatever the result is. Um. I know just today there was a post from I think the Ohio Proud Boys claiming that they be sending like like, uh, was it hundreds or thousands of like people armed with like a RS to Wisconsin or yeah,

there's there's a fucking post. People are saying, like, you should take it seriously because it's from a Proud Boys internal chat, and it's like, we've got three hundred guys heavily armed heading to and there's already X number of guys there, and we're gonna kill a lot more Communists than Kyle Rittenhouse did. And YadA, YadA, YadA, and ya.

If I could give you one piece of advice now, and who knows where the world is at the point of which this episode drops, it's when people talk about, say when if you are at a protest and someone starts talking about the Proud Boys and the Proud Boys are coming or the Proud Boys you're here, if you don't immediately see uncontrovertible visual proof that they have access to showing it, assume it's nonsense. Okay, Yeah, that is my advice as someone who has heard a thousand times

people say versions of the Proud Boys are coming. Okay, insist on evidence or ignore it. But you know, whenever, whenever these big civil you know, unrests and types of stuff happens, there's always an increased chance that there will be some kind of protest related shooting. Especially people are definitely absolutely it may happened by the time this episode dropped.

Especially people are bringing guns, people people bring firearms under there's been a lot of there's you know, for the demonstrations outside the courthouse, there's been you know, guns there. Um there's been you know, an increasing uh in the rate of shootings at protests on the West Coast throughout

the past few months. Um. So I'm gonna be kind of talking about, you know, some things that you can do if you're at home and you feel competent enough in the aftermath of one of one of these shootings.

You know, if if if you know, if a proud boy does bring a bring a gun and shoot somebody, what you can actually do a video if you're in a situation where you've been following something happening all day, there's a shooting and like low quality footage starts coming out of somebody killing someone or someone's else, here's what to do next if you want to maybe be a positive part of that, of that process, well not of that process, but of like the aftermath of it. You know.

And and because because the universe is cruel, I I originally wrote this road right up about the written house shooting. UM, because the universe is a cruel place and it's gonna, you know, continue to This particular incident is going to continue to be impactful. Even though it's not the first, it's not gonna be the last one of these. It is still impactful because of how much of a symbol has been turned into. So I think a lot of people forget about how how chaotic the night on the

internet was the day of Kenosha shooting. UM like it was. It was wild being online as that was going on. Uh No, one had no idea what was going on. People could not agree on who the shooter was beforehand. There was a lot of pictures floating around. It was. It was, it was. It was a nightmare. Uh we know, we knew that people were shot, we couldn't know how many or who. Like it was, it was pretty bad and chaotic, And it is always that way in the wake of a shooting. UM, And it is the in

any given shooting. Always keep in mind when you're when you're online or in person and there has been a shooting and people are saying things about said shooting other than we should take cover from the shooting. If they're saying anything else about it, Um, you have to assume they're probably not either wrong or not entirely accurate. Um, because it's hard to be. It happens constantly. I mean,

that's not it's something against any of them. I can remember a moment when you and I were out last year Garrison and there was a shooting I don't know, like forty ft away, um if nobody hurt, thankfully, but like the the immediate report from it was some guy had gotten pulled an a R fifteen out of his car and uh. And I think the thing I said to you was, I'll bet you right now it's a nine millimeter handgun. And sure enough, within minutes there was

a photo. Yeah. It's and it's not that those people were like dumb or bad. It's that, like shootings are scary, guns getting pulled is scary, and people funk up um in in their recollections. Um. It's the same way in which, like if a bear comes after you, uh, you may exaggerate the size of that bear in your head because you're scared as ship because it's a bear. Yeah. So so I was home on AUGUSTUM just and I I was I was actually about to go out to to uh a cover a purchase in Portland, but then I

saw this happened on my phone on Twitter. It was like I cannot go out. I will be more useful at home. UM. So, with with some so much uncertainty online or the details of the actual shooting, it was it was clear that trying to provide concrete information would be crucial in the hours to come. So I spowed it up my computer and started to try to begin

to search for you know, information and verifiable stuff. Um. So I spent I spent all night looking looking for details about the shooter you know, um, uncovering his supposed identity um. Ultimately about an hour before the police announced their investigation even started um and and twelve hours before the police announced the shooters arrest um And also to my surprise at the time, I discovered that the shooter was the same age as me. Um. Yeah that was that.

That was That was a night so um Because because I mainly use Twitter and most of the video of the instant was on Twitter, I started, uh my my investigation by looking at Twitter. Uh. My first goal was to find as as many videos of of the shooting that I could and collect pictures of all of the alleged suspects, all all the people who were claiming this, this is this is the shooter. I think I think I got a picture of the shooter. Who's here's what he is? Um. So, I I kept my eye on

trending terms. Uh. So, I searched under the hashtags like Kenosha, Kenosha shootings, Knosha shooting, Kenosha protests, boogaloo was trending a lot, A lot of people thought the shooter was a boogloo boy. Um was not um and also uh hashtag militia. So the search has brought up a lot, a lot of photos of of multiple young men, most of whom were carrying long guns, and a lot of unconfirmed reports that the shooter was a Boogaloo boy was trending on Twitter.

This was the main the main thing that night was boogloo boy shot. All this stuff that that was the main, the main trending topic. A lot of a lot of confucting details, and I did not want to kind of add the misinformation, so I decided to not make any posts but whatsoever about the end of the of the shooter until I was one percent confident um that I

had the correct idea, which takes a while. It's it's not you know, Twitter wants you to post stuff quickly as soon as you find it out out, and it's way better to hold off your information and wait until you are absolutely sure it's the right time to post it and because it's the correct, correct stuff. Because mismismisidentifying a suspect, you can have a serious, serious consequences for

any individual um involved. It's when when the worst things you can do is is mis misidentifying any any suspect. So I was looking through all the videos that I collected for kind of unique um or identifying clothing that that the shooter may have been wearing. The first video I found useful was from a right wing videographer named Drew hernandez Um who a few months later called from Bloodshed at the Capitol. He also testified at the Written House trial. This video did not actually show any any

actual shooting. It had a wounded person on the ground being treated by a medic and a man standing over the scene with with with a gun um and wearing a green shirt, a tan baseball cat jeans and like purple latex gloves, he had, he had a he had a black and orange bag. Um. The person in the green shirt then runs towards the camera while talking on the phone, and he says into the phone, UM, I

just shot somebody or I just killed somebody. It's hard to tell where he's actually saying if it's it's one of those things where if you think about it, you can hear both ones. Yeh. But but he he says something like I just killed somebody on the phone and he runs past the camera. So this this this, this was the first kind of really important piece of information personal that was brought up in the trial too. And he he was like, I don't remember what I said.

Oh interesting, okay, Yeah. And to be honest, like, even if if this was I don't think any of us believe this was legitimate self defense. But like, even if it was, either of those things would be perfectly acceptable things to say. It's a surprising moment, and you probably wouldn't remember what you said. I don't necessarily think he's lying about that. It turns out he he was. He was on the phone with the person who bought him

the gun of a en of his um. So, but but that this was my first important piece of information, you know, the the night of Right, this is before anyone's analyzed any of this stuff. So this is the first video that I can find. It's like, okay, here's a person admitting on camera that they shot somebody. Um, and we're wearing a few potential identifiers, namely the green shirt, baseball cap, and bag. Um. So now I can search for all of those items together and the rest of

the footage collected throughout the night. Looking over the top viral videos of the night showing multiple people getting shot. Uh, this is from this is from later on after the first person gets killed, we can see someone in a baseball cap, black and raunch bag and what could be a green shirt running through a street. Um. Somebody runs over to the individual with the gun and kind of punches them in the head, not knocking his hat off. So now the person running with the gun does not

have a hat. Individual with the gun he keeps running, but trips and falls on the ground before people try to disarm him. Uh. Four more shots are fired from the suspect, and uh. One more person dies as a result of this. Other person gets their arm nearly blown off. Uh. There is one continuous video of all of this happening.

Extremely useful having having one video of this whole shot. Yeah. Um, so the shooter, who appears to be the same person is the other video because of the green shirt and the hat at the beginning, continues to get onto his feet and runs off again. Uh and the orange orangine orangine, a black bag swings in front of him as he's running, and a purple glove is also visible. Um. Multiple vehicles

drive past, like police vehicles. Um. The shooter then walks up pretty close to police vehicle and he just he just he just with with with the rifle and nothing, nothing happens. He he like he wait, he waves to the cops and they just keep driving and he walks away. So after finding watching these videos, I had, you know, I had no reason to believe the shooter was in custody. Um, and I had a good idea of his clothing and attire.

So now it's time to compare this information that I gathered, uh two pictures of the supposed you know suspects circulating on Twitter. Um. But but first I think now it's it's the time to listen to people selling new stuff, you know who doesn't oh boy trampled to another state to show up armed in a community to threaten people. They don't do it. I'm saying they don't. That's good, Okay. The products and services who supports Hello Fresh Black Coffee Patrol?

What do you actually? A number of our sponsors will show up unwanted in your community armed. I forgot the Washington State Highway and the FBI have both dropped dads. Now we also highway patrol to forget about those motherfuckers like Kyle Rittenhouse. A number of our sponsors may show up in your home neighborhood with another one also Black Liffle Coffee, Kyle's favorite brand of coffee. Remember, well it was until they disavowed him. But here's here we're bad.

So there was there was a lot of pictures of suspects on Twitter, some of them who look nothing like the person we now know who shot those people. Um, funny how that happens. It's uh, well it's not funny. It's it's pretty pretty, pretty pretty bad. Yeah, yeah, it's it's not great just to share stuff like like that when these things happened. Um, which is why I said I'm not gonna share anything until no, um, I know

that it's it's it's actually worth posting about. So in uh, I'm gonna go through go through all some some some of the pictures and stuff of of I'm going through at least one of the pictures of one of the people people claimed to be the shooter. So in one picture circulating, you see someone in a green shirt, a baseball cap, and big, big, big black rifle. But this man's also wearing shorts, a black hat, not a tan. One has no bag, appears to be wearing like a

tactile vest that is also green. So not the guy, even though he's wearing a green shirt and hat. Not the same dude. Was be pretty easy to check. Not you don't. You really don't need to share that kind of stuff. Pretty sure, Pretty sure a lot of people own green shirts. Yea. So two other photos that were circulating,

they're claiming to be the guy. We had a green shirt, a tan baseball cap put on backwards, jeans um one of the one of the pictures has a bag in front of which is an orange and black one where one of them doesn't. One picture has purple gloves, other picture doesn't. But these dudes look pretty similar despite the same differences. I'm pretty sure this is this, this is this, this is the same guy. But you know, I'm a decision at the night, so this is probably the same dude.

Um And he does appear to match the shooter a lot better. And there was a few few clear fixed pictures of his face um here, but honestly, the face of if if you look at all the pictures of the Connection shooting that night, the pictures of the suspect are really unclear because the way that the light hit his face, he looks like an incredibly generic white boy.

Um like, extremely generic. It is hard to tell any any I identifying features from his face because they look like he looks like every every white every white boy. It's really hard to say everyone you went to high school with, who I don't know sniffed a girl's chair when he likes that's that's Kyle rittenhouse visual. Now that I decided that I have, like I have a decent collection of pictures of who I believe the actual actual suspect, is time time time to figure out who the suspects

like name actually is. And this is this is one of the one of the harder things but often you can have a lot of help in ways that you might not expect. Um Often, once you can get a good picture of someone you know, it'd be like, yes, yes, this this is actually the dude. Once it gets shared enough, often somebody knows who this is already. You know, the

internet is a pretty big place. I believe the first I believe the first person to actually like like I was the I was the person to like prove online who who Kyle written that kind right knows was the shooter. The first person to actually tie Kyle's name to the shooter UM was a neighbor of his on Facebook. Um. They they saw pictures of the shooter on on Facebook and said, hey, I think this I think I recognized

this guy. I think I think this is my neighbor. UM. So often, once you start, once you have like enough pictures and those can spread, people will feel to find names. It isn't as hard as you would think that. The hard part is is finding out what personal connections are making those links and finding out where where where those are. But stuff, stuff spreads in a weird way, and right for this, you know, I find I was able to prove that it was Kyle pretty quickly. Um, for a

few reasons. So after I was doing my my my clothing comparisons to figure out this is to prove, like he said, this is the actual person who who did these things. Um. The other thing I I found that was not it was not viral at all, um, but just because I was digging through so much stuff, was this meme shared by uh I by some like small boogaloo account. Um. It was a picture of the shooter.

UH compare right beside a collection of Blue Lives Matter pictures of someone who looks kind of similar, linking to a Facebook page or no, not not linking it was it was it was screenshot from the Facebook page. And I can tell because of the font and it was, like I said, like a written house's photos. So this was the first This is the first thing I saw on the like buried deep inside like Twitter's, Twitter's, Twitter's images.

But by using all of like these a hashtag terms was this meme and and and and then the meme said so y'all think he's still a boogaloo. No, no he wasn't. But because because of all of the pro police stuff, because Google is generally are not not that fond fond of police. Yeah so so yeah, um, given given. So you know, if someone was to look at this, you know, look at this meme itself, he's like, okay,

you know, the job was done. You know, information, This dude looks vaguely similar ish to the guy on this written house Facebook. Um, the gun looks kind of similar because one of the pictures of the Facebook was was a guy holding was a guy holding in a r um. But you know, just something looking similar or even holding a similar gun in one picture from a Facebook account.

That's not enough to be sure about publishing a positive I d that there's's there's there's no actual really, there's no like definitive proof there because honestly, if I was to look at these two guys faces, they don't look incredibly similar because faces can distore it with lighting and compression that it's it's it's. It can be really difficult.

And this is where you know, trying to idea shooter is hard and requires complex judgment calls and posting inaccurate information or like incomplete information um can have you know, extremely harmful effects. And there's there's a lot a lot of examples of this happening in the past. You know, probably the biggest example, or the most notorious one of

false identification is the Boston bombing incident. Um. So, you know, right after the right after thirteen bombing, you know, thousands of users on sites like Reddit and four chan became combing through footage to try to identify potential suspects. Screen Caps of the people they deemed suspicious went viral online on on various social media sites. Unfortunately, the slew thing work done on four Chan and Reddit was incredibly shoddy um and seemingly had way more to do with like

racial paranoia than actual detective work and evidence gathering. The New York Post subsequently published a picture on front page that that originated on Reddit that users had declared that that was showing the two suspects with without doing any further verification. So it's it's it's real bad how stuff can spread from me out like this that's completely unverified to you know, a newspaper, even as one as unreputable

as the Post, that's still a very popular paper. The Post also claimed that the law enforcement we're looking for those two to uh two individuals in that picture, um. One of the one of the people identified by the post was harassed online. UM police police later told him just to delete his social media accounts entirely because there was no use at that point. UM. When the FBI did officially release photos of the unnamed suspects, Reddit users

again false he identified these people? What one of the people they false he identified went went missing for weeks prior UM his his family received media inquiries about the false, unverified rumors of their son's involvement. UM, and rumors of of of involvement were spread by reporters from Politico News, Squeak Newsweek, NBC News, and BuzzFeed. UM. Eight days after the bombing, this guy was actual does have the bombing. This guy was actually found dead and his family said

it was a suicide. UM. It was not not one of the shooters, not one of the bombers. UM. Again why even more than the tactics you could use to try and you know, verify things online, the most useful thing you can take out of this is if there is a mass shooting or other active violence and people on social media are saying it is this person, don't share it. Don't just don't share it. Just wait, especially in sharing it if they have don't have anything to

verify this at all. So yeah, like I'm not gonna I'm not gonna don't again, that is the overwhelming thing. We were not gonna you know. That's why you know I'm not gonna share this Kyle rittenhouse um boogloomy because there's no proof for it. It's it's not there now. Eventually, after digging, I would realize that this meme comes from his neighbor saying that she thinks the suspect is him. So that's that's what this meme was created. Um but still there there there was no no proof for it,

so I don't I didn't share it. So all the Boston bombing stuff was like going through my mind as I know found this and was trying to dig for dig from my details. So yeah, I knew that I could not post a name on the social media um or any info until I until I could prove it like without a shadow but doubt that this is the same person because a lot a lot of times it

is possible. It just requires work in time, you know, And a big part of doing this on Twitter is like you want to get it out fast, so you're the first person to do it. So that you know you can go vital on your thread of identifying this killer, and like, no, that's not the reason to do image verification.

It's not to go viral on a thread. It's because whenever that's your goal you're gonna do, you're gonna do shitty fast work that is gonna end up causing some kind of horrible consequence, like in the case the Boston bombing. And to be even extra clear, the primary use for this that kind of what you're teaching people image verification, which is something that like like Belling Cat, which is has been like kind of a part time employer of mine.

Um is an open source journalism collective that's broken some of the biggest stories in the last couple of years. And in the classes we teach a class on image verification.

And the point is just whenever someone is sharing a piece of what is like supposedly breaking news based on video or images that have been taken at the side of a whatever, image verification tactics can help you to know whether or not it's whether or not either it's true or false, but also just whether or not the image the information they're presenting gives you any reason to believe it, like it's you might be full of shit,

like that's super important. Yeah, Like there's there's a thing that happens like and any time there's something that looks like a war starting. There's like this video of a bombing from two thousand fourteen in Gaza that goes around

it's like every time. Yeah, um, there's there's actually five or six different kinds of things that are like that Chris, that are like, oh this is There's actually footage from like a rush in video game that people keep keeps getting like mistaken for action combat footage and it's like, no, it's fucking from a video game. This has been on,

this has been three wars now. There's this famous footage of like a fucking um an air soft battle at night with glowing with soft pets with the glowing pellets and it it kind of it kind of looks because it's black and white and not a great camera, it kind of looks like tracer fire. And it's there's like three Wars that people have said like, look, this is still combat footage from it happens all the time. And again grant account to follow is a hoax I on Twitter.

They do really good work pointing out just like kind of more like more like less high stakes kind of image image verification stuff. Um So, but before I get into the actual like verification work of like proving, Hey, I can actually prove that that by by not just someone's face, I can prove that this shooter is the same guy from from from the Facebook page. Um, I'll explain that next first short short ad break and then we will fit finish up with this actually will proving section.

Yeah you know who is not Kyle? Oh wow, you have really dropped the ball out all of the transitions today. Yeah. I am not proud of myself or my place in society at the moment. Um. Here's ads, We're back. I feel terrible. Garrison. And So, even even though the booloo meme was not hard evidence, uh it did. It did provide a lead. So after seeing the meme, I did the first most obvious thing that I could see was compare the gun in in the two frames. Uh they

do look similar. Uh they're not. They're not identical. Uh the optics are different for each rifle. Um. But the rest of it, but the stock, the grip um and the barrel do do seem do seem to be do seem to be, if not, if not identical, at least extremely similar. Again, still not enough to make a positive idea on an individual basis, Like this person is its person, So that the next step is to scour the actual Facebook account itself that is alluded to in this meme

and see what I can find there. The goal obviously being to find statements or pictures that will tie this person in the images of the shooter to the person on the account. So that's you know, clothing, location, intention, you know, all these types of things that could tie the pictures of the shooter to the pictures of person

on on on this account. Um So Kyra no houses old public Facebook profile was mainly made up of Blue Lives Matter and pro police images going back as far as um with a few uh then recent pictures of him holding his Air fifteen style rifle. Uh those the the the rifle pictures were like from June. The shooting

happened in late August. Um it appears I think it came out in the trial that he got his rifle around like may um So, yeah, a lot of a lot of a lot of pro police stuff, a lot of them blue lining blue lives, matters type things UM. His public his his public page is is relatively sparse UM and there was no public friends list to look through. UM. One one noteworthy piece of information was that he did he did list another name for himself as Kyle Lewis

believe his mother's maiden name. Sure but uh but even so, even though I wasn't able to view a friends list and there wasn't many public posts, uh, this is his page is by no means a dead end. I could still see everyone that has commented on, shared, or liked his public posts because like so, he did not have he he did not many have any pictures himself on his page that that I could use for verification. He didn't have like not nothing that I could tie to

the shooting besides the actual guns. So not not tons of useful not tons of useful stuff. But there's perhaps there's still other other leads to look through. Like every one who's liked, shared, or uh commented on his posts, So I opened up new tabs for every single person

that interacted with Kyle's posts. While looking over their pages, I was searching to see if any of them had listed Kyle as a relative with a focus on anyone with the last name of written House or Lewis um and and you know, ideally was looking forward to see if anyone had pictures of Kyle or someone who seems to be Kyle. Uh. One post from May eighteen eventually eventually proved useful. One comment read, Kyle, you sure do look like a Louis. So there's the alternate last name.

And two people had liked that comment, Kyle himself and and uh and someone who is his mom which or would would later find out is his mom. Um. Uh. So she said that lived. She said that she lived in uh is it anatok Illinois? Probably Antioch, Illinois, which matches uh with Kyle's uh Illinois based pro police posts. He made a lot of like Chicago Blue Lives Matter posts,

so I assumed that Kyle was from Illinois. And also, um, uh Antioch is that you said whatever Antioch to to Wiscon's Antioch to Kenosha is only like three minute drive, so that is also like, okay, that's that's that's that's pretty close. That is that is doable? Um. So it was the next I went. I went through a lot of the relatives pages, but I'm gonna focus just on the person who I found out who was, um, Kyle's mom, because they're the one that had the most useful information, right.

A lot of other information I looked through just didn't turn out to be useful, right, So I'm not not including all of that here. Um uh. One post from from uh Wendy's mom uh featured a younger Kyle wearing a police outfit. Um. I'm sure people have seen this sure online before. I think I was probably I was.

I was probably the first person to share this photo of Kyle in this in this younger Kyle wearing this this police this police costume, an unbelievably cringe e photo, like the side of the fact that he took two lives, Like just yeah, I mean we all have photos we took when while an r OTC. Like so yeah, ideally we would we would give There's actually there's actually a lot more of these photos. There's photos of him touring

so this is this stuff. I also found that night photos of him like touring a target with police as he's in a police uniform. He was part of like a police Young Cadets program. He was he was like twelve. Um, so that's where he got this outfit, and he like tagged around with police for like a day or something, and this photos of him like in a target with police. Even when I was like a shitty right wing kid,

that sounded like a nightmare. So so yeah, so Kyle's the person who I figured out was Kyle's mom posted this this photo of of her and Kyle, which which Kyle liked, and then in another picture of another picture from from Kyle's mom, I found, uh, it's a family picture including Kyle wearing what I would say is like an army green shirt kind of similar, but it's a green shirt like I have. I have shirts that are

pretty similar to that. I'm not gonna that's not gonna be anything so super definitive until we got there's one one picture that that proved to be much much more, much more useful U of Kyle on or someone who assumed was Kyle. You don't, you don't you don't actually see his face, but he is wearing horribly cringe e American flag crocs, which which Kyle, which which so and and and on. On Kyle's page, there was also pictures

of him wearing those same crocks. So like even even though I can't see the face, the crocs the same probably the same guy. He's also wearing a tan baseball cap. Um. And on this I can actually see that it has an American flag on the front of the cap, which I did not notice on anything else before. So that's, you know, that's something different. But again not that that's that's not that's not that's not like a red flag. That's just you know, a thing to a thing of note.

Um because the bay the baseball cap is tan um and it has like white mesh on the sides. Um. The one. The one thing I did, I did make one post before I actually did any kind of I claiming to do I identity stuff. I did ask my Twitter followers if there's any pictures of the back of the Shooters cap um, and I got them to to send me those, and then I got one picture of of the back that actually has uh. I couldn't see, like, Okay, the back of the Shooters cap also has the flag

on it, so I was able to actually show that. Okay, so the baseball cap on the back of it, uh. But they're both tann baseball caps. They both have whitemush on the side they both have to have an American flag. And then I got another picture that was even closer that showed a tear on the brim of the hat. And if you zoom in on one of the beach pictures, you could also see a tear on the same position on the hat. So this is this hat? Is the hat is the same hat? The hat was definitely it

was definitely in both locations. So at this point, based on the gun, based on the hat, based on the location being very close to kenosha um and being closed on the rough facial similarities, um, there was there was enough enough to enough to to um enough to put put stuff together to be like, Okay, I I think I think this is this is probably this is probably

fine in saying I think this is probably the dude. Um, So at this point I wasn't wasn't again, I'm not gonna post this immediately, and I'm not going to post something by saying this is who it is without providing the evidence. So instead of like running a thread tweet by tweet, I read the whole thread out and then tweet the whole thread at the same time. UM. So,

so I I put to the thread documenting my relevant stuff. Um. I I wrote the first eight posts the same time and posted them together with all the evidence of uploaded um and then and then uh, as I was writing the threat, I came across another piece of evidence. There was one I was going through one of the live streams of of that night from a channel called the

Rundown Live, which I've not heard anything of before or since. Then. Um, but you know one of the many streamers that were out um, and you can see you can see Kyle inside the frame and then like pans away, but the people are still talking. Um. So so Kyle, Kyle is actually off camera now, um, but he I think someone like asks him his name and he and the person who I think is Kyle replies Kyle. Now, of course it's off camera, so it's not you can't be totally sure.

There's there's enough context clues and that plus only other evidence. I'm like, Okay, this is enough to add to the thread because it again it's it's not enough proof by itself, but it combined with everything else, completes a much fuller picture. So I posted my like niner yeah, like eight or nine thing thread on being able to prove its Kyle via you know, comparing stuff like the gun, uh, the hat, the shirt and demonstrating my work tracking across Facebook and

how it's able to like link these two people together. Um. Twenty two minutes after I posted the threat identifying Kyle Kosha, police announced that they were that they were starting an active investigation. UM. I soon added a court document to my thread about a traffic violation by someone named cow written house, filed a few days before the shooting. The traffic violation thing also included stuff like a dress, which I I blacked out the addressed for that just because

sharing the sharing for reasons I'll soon explain. Because again, if it's if it's a it's a track of violation, if people really want it, they can find it themselves, right It's it's not making impossible to find it. And this was able to confirm it. It was in the same location um antioch Um. And also this this proved that Kyle was seventeen at the time. Uh. This is how we knew that he was seventeen years old at the time of the shooting was because of this traffic

violation document found online. So the the address on the violation document was the same one I had linked to Kyle's mom by doing other like ocean address work, I was able to find out where what what her address was. Um, so so yeah, that was That was most of my work that night. Uh. It took about I don't know, like tooh maybe you know it. It's hard. It's hard

to break up. Uh, it's timing it. It took about half an hour to get from the boogaloom me to finding the matching baseball cap on on Kyle's mom's Facebook page, about another half hour to write out the thread, and you know, about an hour of work previous to that about you know, trying to find out the actual you know, footage and categorize it. And Okay, this is the clothing

he's wearing. Here's the clothes I I need to look for on social media right see see see see if I can find these shoes, these pants, this, this shirt, this hat, this bag, that kind of stuff. Um and I was able to find enough of those items to make it pretty pretty clear that it was it was you know linked. Um and that makes you Garrison, one of the first people in the world to get to no way more about kyle rittenhouse than you ever wanted to know. A lot more. This nightmare has been going

on longer for you. Yeah, and so, and I want to know a few other ways to do image verifications, specifically on Kyle that that I didn't do, but other people did after after I had after I said, hey, this is part of the guy. So afterwards people found other kind of evidence on Kyle's TikTok um and snapchat. So it turns out Kyle was snapchatting his night in Wisconsin, um, which we would find out later. So he was that

he was snapchatting from kenosha Um and Garrison. First off, I do feel as the representative of zoomers in in this call. Why are you Why are you guys all using the snapchats? Huh? I don't use I don't use the snapchats. Um. Well, I'm making you answer for the crimes of your generation, the crimes like the snap Now. Well, technically speaking, I have one friend who I only talked to you through Snapchat, and we both only use it

for that and we don't know why we use snapchat. Yeah, there's a few people who are like snapchat, people who only text or snapchat, and I don't. I don't get it. Yeah, except neither of us are like that. We just specifically there's got a signal anyway, So yeah, the Snapchat, there's also uh TikTok Um. There was a footage of of Kyle attending a Trump rally at TikTok Also him like assembling and testing out his gun was on a Snapchat.

I believe eclips that it were also shared on TikTok so I could have got a lot more closer details of the gun if if I looked on if if on Snapchat or or TikTok Um, and I think, if this is this is a good advice that I've taken since then, and for other people looking to do this stuff. If if a suspect looks as young, um, you know, Snapchat and TikTok might be or and and Instagram might be apps that are worth we are worth checking out

for information as opposed to like Facebook. Right. I lucky, lucky enough there was enough stuff on Facebook on this instance typically probably because you know, Kyle's family was conservative so and he was conservative, so higher chance of being on Facebook there. But you know, in general, if someone's younger and maybe look on younger apps. Um. But yeah, so you know, good thing to think about you know, whenever these like chaotic panic moments happen, you know, missifforation

can spread very very quickly. UM. Cannot stress enough how dangerous and I responsible it is when a suspect is named without proper verification. UM. You know. Uh, last last September, uh Ian Miles Chung falsely identified a suspect in the shooting of two l A Police officers. Of this resulted in the falsely accused got a man and receiving many death threats online. I think emails chalnging to this like again a few months later. He he was doing this a lot. Last year he was doing it. He was

really bad about trying to identify people. Um. But you know, doing solid solidarification work is possible, but extreme caution needs to be taken. UM. I need to be very mindful of the consequences of your actions when when you're doing this work. Yeah. I also want to put out Garrison is very good at this. That that's why it took two hours and a half hours. It's going to take it takes a lot longer. Yeah, Like honestly, like I was like it. Finding Kyle was just the right mix

of things in one moment. Often it doesn't often it doesn't go that fast, and it doesn't need to be right like a big The problem is that if people think about it needing to be like a fast paced thing, that's where that's where the mistakes happen. I was just lucky to have enough like dominoes fall in the right

place too. I identify how the night of having having his neighbor say, hey, this guy looks similar to my neighbor, extremely useful in in in in the long run, right like that that happened faster than that happens in a lot of cases, and so that really accelerated things. Sometimes it will be easy sometimes like a good example of when it's harder. We have a decent amount of footage about the individual who placed bombs outside of the Capital

bomber before the sixth um. That person has not been identified and the FBI seems to have no goddamn cluse. But also what they were way more intentional, and they were smart. Whoever they are, they're very capable. They were the only thing that we have on them is their shoes. Basically, those are those are kind of the polls of this right on one like that with with Rittenhouse, you've got this situation where it's like all of the information you

need to identify the is there openly online. UM. And part of ops sex if you're doing things that are crimes UM is to make sure that is to limit that that that whatever it is you are going to to the to the crimes in UM. There nothing exists on the Internet that connects that to your name and face, and that that doesn't That doesn't always mean black block. That can mean other clothing, especially if you've been photographed

in black block a book. I think like if you look at if you look at UM, the guy who dropped off bombs at January six, he's not wearing black block because black block draws attention. He's wearing like grays. He's he's wearing that guy that well, that individual person is either a former FED or former Special Forces. They were very capable, leaning towards FED who showed up in clothing they had never weren't worn before and paid for

used in cash, probably from a variety of places. UM. That clothing was burned as soon as they got away. They were of the state as early as it was possible to do so, plant them and then immediately get

out like, um. And you know, by the time the Capitol, right by the time their bombs had been found, they were they were if they were smartly gone, you know, like that's how anyway whatever, Like Like oftentimes it can be if someone knows what they're doing, this, this process can be a lot harder, like in the case of the people of of the guy who left the bombs at the capitol. Um. You know, Kyle, it was not you know, wasn't wearing much identified clothing, wasn't even wearing

a mask because COVID was for cox. Um. So you know, there's a lot of these things that that made this process, um, you know, easier than a lot of a lot of other verifications. But like I said, there still was a lot of false ideas going around that night. UM, and so it kind of still happens. I'm kind of on the fence myself as to whether or not it would have been safer like for our country or the society

or whatever you want to call it. If um, like, how much more damage or less damage would have been done if Kyle Rittenhouse had been someone who showed up in impeccable like clothing that he could not be identified from fucking ran off and was never caught, and we just knew there was the shooting of protesters in Kenosha um by somebody. UM Like, I don't know how much better or worse that is for society if that happens. I don't know. I'm thinking about terrible things. But sorry,

first off, I want to apologize. Sometimes talking about this stuff winds up seeming like advice for how to commit crimes. That's not the intent. It's just when you talk about what makes something difficult to identify, your kind of by default talking about like here's how to here's how to get commit a crime and get away with it, um.

And it's the kind of thing like if you're doing verification work, one of the things that helps is to kind of put yourself in the mindset of somebody who, Okay, if I'm in this situation and I do this, um, what are the decisions that I might make afterwards? Um? And you can kind of try to uh think through this person. Like it can be helpful, especially if you're trying to like track someone through a day. So you know, someone was at this point at a protest at X

hour because they shot somebody, Um, you know, think through. Okay, what else happened that day? Where their other protests? Where their other gatherings like or is this one in a series of events? Can I go look for you know, videos from other things in the area that this person might have also been at and might have worn the same clothing. Um, there's anyway. Image verification is fun, catch the fever. It is. It is a fun thing to do.

It's good to if if if you're not able to attend in person demos for like like physical reasons or whatever, or like mental reasons, doing the stuff from home is is another way of getting involved, especially already out tracking down bad people after they after they do bad things. Yeah, so you can, you know, if you want to learn more about this with you know, the benefit of also visual aids um belling cat has if you just type

image verification belling Cat. There's gunners and advanced guides to verification. Um. There's talk about like manual reverse image search tools and like how well they work. There's quizzes, So go go there if you if you find this interesting, Um, it can be quite a hoot. Um. But you know what else is quite a hoot? Ending a goddamn podcast which I'm doing. Now we're done, goodbye. Welcome to America. It's not great. Here's a podcast, right, this is this is

it could happen here the podcast Welcome it is. If you're an international listener and you're not American, that was really get the fuck off of our podcast, just like left people all like, are you going to do one for every other country? I think they're being rude for barging in the internet is clearly American soil. I would

pay good money for a wacko things. But with Roberts saying all the all the countries of the world, well, you know what you need to do in order to be able to pay good money for something Garrison, you need to you need to. You need to get money by by working well to be born rich. But if you're not born rich, you have to work. And a lot of people are saying what if we did, what if we didn't? And now they have a subreddit and

that's what we're talking about today anti work. Uh, not just the subreddit, but that's why we're talking about it today because the anti work subreddit has grown hugely um and it's got like a milli it's or it's it's like doubled. It's been around for years. It's more than doubled. It's it's almost. It's almost. Yeah, it's it's it's well, well I'll have the numbers for later. Yeah, yeah, okay, great.

Um So, Garrison, why don't you kick us off? Now that I've let everyone know what to expect, I will stop working um in solidarity with the anti work movement. Thanks Robert um. So. Yeah, if the past few months, if you're anything like us um and and if you're online in the same ways that we are, you've you've probably seen like a flurry of posts and screenshots depicting

text conversations between like an employee and their boss. Typically, the boss like asks them to come in when they said they were going to have to have to be have to have having to have time off or something. The employee objects, the bosston gets mad and makes threats and demands the employee be a better team player or

some bullshit like that. Um and and then like the employee said something like, well you know what, actually I quit, good luck filling the shift now by and then the boss like pleads that the now former employee comes back and offers like concessions and end of screenshots. So pretty soon this type of like screenshotted text conversation became like a meme format with with people joking and obviously like staging fake ones as well. Uh, you know, similar to

the scene I just described. But but but by all accounts, this trend started incredibly like sincerely with with genuine text conversations showcasing like worker abuse um and and uh you know, bosses being unreasonable and cruel um and some people putting their jobs just to stand up for themselves and um, all the stuff is kind of tied up in the worker shortage kind of miss the great resignation as as a lot of pundit yes, yeah, people of people resigning.

And then you know a lot of like big companies complaining about worker shortages um and and. Central to this like text conversation online kind of meme trend thing and and and employee resignations is a sub credit called anti work. So the antiwork subredit has has been a growing place specifically the past year. Um. Their motto is unemployment for all,

not just for the rich. Uh. It's a it's a good good it is it is a solid it's a solid botto of their their their own like a description is uh a subredit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work free life, want more information on anti work ideas, and want personal help with their own jobs slash work related struggles. So back in back in February,

um it only the subur it's been around. But back in February it had like two hundred and thirty five thousand UM subs, and now it has over one point one million UM It's grown. Most of that growth has been in the past two months. Uh it's it has

kind of kind of exploded in popularity. Um And actually it got it got so big, and there's so many posts on it that they have to they have they have now they have to like restrict text message conversation screenshots to only being allowed to be posted like on one day a week, just because of the intense influx of of these posts, you know, some of them genuine,

others maybe not so much. Um And And even though the suburn it may not be the biggest in terms of like subscribers, um it's it has more like daily posts than something like the Wall Street BET's suborb it has so even though it doesn't have as many subscribers, the amount of actual like posting on it is higher than a lot of other suborates as well. So it is it is growing in popularity, like in in multiple ways. It feels a little bit right now, like the social

media equivalent of a of a sort of damolea. It's like Wall Street Bets made a not insignificant uh splash earlier this year. It was it was quite a thing for the national economy for a little while there. Um and Anti Work hasn't had that moment, but I kind of feel like it might be getting close to critical mass, Like something, something might come out of this um which I think would be rad. For for the record, I

think would be rad absolutely. And you know, it may not be one big thing, but it could be a lot of smaller things, right. You know, sometimes it's harder to see bigger change when you're like having more anarchist adjacent I is and and and the and the Anti works that when it does does try to keep itself being a radical subred and does trying to fight off neoliberal sentiments and stuff. And there have been there have

been some complaints. I've seen a people being like, ah, the liberals have gotten in and and people are talking about like, well, I just really want a life that's like I'm not stressed all the time and I have enough money for for bills and stuff. Really, people have been talking about like, oh, this job, Like I I left my old job and I got into a better situation.

That's good. And there's complaints about that. And I think it is important to like push against de radicalizing the subredit, But I don't think it's bad that you're getting a lot of liberals in there who are not turned off by the name anti work um, and I think that's I think it's positive that that they're even if they're you know, they're not coming at it from kind of a revolutionary perspective. But hey, it's okay to quit my job if if the conditions are shipped and try to

find a place where I'm treated better. If that's their in road to this kind of thought, I still think that's pretty pretty awesome. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, because I mean

it's not realistic for every single person. Well and actually it is realistic for every single person to quit their job, but it's it's not realistic for only a few people to write and sometimes if if not, if if everyone's not gonna do it, like literally everyone, then he knows some people can't can't afford to quit their job um right now because they have like kids, defeat or whatever um for themselves or you know, there's a lot there's a lot of reasons, which I'll kind of talk a

little bit more about later. So and so the term anti work just does not does not come from the sub credit UM and anti work has been like a post left term for a while now, and it kind of kind of applies to a broad spectrum of like anarchist adjacent kind of thought around Hey, if we're gonna if we're gonna question like capitalism, uh and the state, we should probably also question just the idea of work itself and how it functions and how the state kind

of works only possible with the state. And it's that specific line line of thinking. UM. A few examples of like of like you know, seminal anti work books UM is. One of them is Bob Blacks The Abolition of Work. UM. Crime Think has a really good book just called work, which is another another one that gets referenced a lot, even even in the subredit And also Bullshit Jobs by David Graber, and uh, bullshit Jobs was also kind of

partially inspired by Bob Blacks The Abolition of Work. Um, all of those are are great resources and uh specifically like bullshit Jobs is great and like a in like a for a modern outlook on this, like Bob Black's book was written, was written a while ago, and the Bullshit Jobs is definitely very timely and even even even crimes thinks work book also also addresses stuff or even

though it wasn't not written within the past. I think it is maybe slightly older than than a decade, but I think that they are updating it with more information about like the gig economy and stuff like that. Yeah, and it's it's not as it's characterized as as anti work is often characterised by critics. It's not saying like nobody should have to do anything in a way. It's not actually we'll talk about Diogenes later. Um, but it's not everyone should just like lay around and do nothing.

It's people shouldn't have to do the thing that we call work, which is destroy your body or your mind or both. Uh, most of your waking hours, most of your life in the hope that you'll get ten years as an old person to not do that, like and and and and a little bit that that that's bad. That's a bad way to be a person, like a bad way to have to be And it's not bad to do that, it's it's bad that you have to do that. Yeah, yeah, and I mean and and there is a there is a little bit of it that

is about finding time to chill out. It was going to apply a lot of you know, a lot of the ways if you have to keep a job, you know, the different ways you can you can go about that job that does that makes it so doesn't like kill you. One of my favorite ways of about anti works just

like anti capitalism put into actual practice. So it's sort of you know, just debating online about anti capitalism as some you know, future things like no, like what can you do to actually you know, make capitalism less important part of how you live your life every day, which means you know, not obsessing over careers and all these

kind of other things. So I think I think first of all, it might be useful to kind of think about like what do we actually mean by work, because works kind of a works like a it's it has a lot of definitions, depend depending on what like you depend depending on like what you mean by it, right? Is it just like wage labor? Is it just forced labor? Um? You know, is cooking for yourself or your family considered work?

But not always? But you know, like at times when I when when I when I'm like relaxed, I can I quite enjoy cooking for friends and family. But but certainly, but certainly it can feel like work sometimes, especially if you especially if you just got home from like a work shift. So in a way, like work creates more work. Um, And it's it's not it's it's it kind of it's doesn't It isn't just it isn't just about like wage labor or something. It can kind of apply to a

lot of ways about how you live your life. There's a lot of looking laying down wood chips or sad. If that's like your job, every day can be like a miserable, backbreaking process. If you actually have a huge yard or like own a little bit of land and you're making your own garden, that can be an intensely like the best part of your week. It can be Yeah, yeah, it's it's not. The problem is not the individual tasks necessarily, it's what work is as a as a a platonic

kind of concept in our society. Yeah. Not and and again one of the things, and I think this is one of the things speaking of you talked about David Graber earlier, who's an anarchist anthropologist and widely seen to be like one of the most brilliant anthropologists of his generation.

He recently deceased, but a book that he wrote before he died with another and another fellow, came out recently called The Dawn of Everything that talks a lot about how yeah, these ideas, that kind of capitalism has a vested interest in you believing that the world was always hard in the way that it's hard, by which I mean like, in order to get basic necessities you have to make somebody else rich um or find some grift

of your own. And as opposed to like, yeah, life is always hard, but life wasn't didn't always involve labor the way we think about it. Labor has not been a constant in human civilization. In fact, most of human civilization people have not done a thing that we would recognize as labor. And I think also even if you go towards things that like look more like labor to us, right, Like I don't know, like look look like if you

look at like feudal levies, right, you're a peasant. You have to get some amount of grain to your lord. But like, okay, we work way longer than medieval peasist did.

And not only do we work longer, is something greater and David Beno talk about in that book is like yeah, like not only do we work much longer, like the amount that we work would have been considered absolutely, like even even if feudal lord would look at that much work and go no, like this is this is this is like and you know, and I think there's there's

another grip hasn't. As another point um he wrote a piece called Turning Modes of Production inside Out, where he has his argument that like, okay, so if if you take you know, if you take like Plato, right, you're like, you take any of the Greek philosophers, even the conservative ones, and you show them this the thing, the thing that

we do every day. Right, you're you know, you have you're you're completely under the command of another person for like at least a third, probably more of your day yeah, I monitor you and Garrison's bathroom breaks. I look at your texts with family and friends. Um, it's it's really

it's an incredibly strict surveillance state. From Robert Evans. Yeah. Yeah, this is like like you know, if you show a Greek person that this is like this is the apocalypse to them, this is this is the worst thing that could possibly happens. Every single person in society has like essentially been reduced to a slave, and you know that's bad and it doesn't have to be like it's not that they've been because I want to push back on that terminology because it can go to some uncomfortable places.

It's not that they are treated as a slave. It's that in the hours in which they are expected to labor, there's a societal expectation that they act as the property of whoever owns the business or manages them. Right. The idea of like if it if it like that attitude from like like working in a kitchen or or working at a fast food restaurant, like if you lean, if you're if you can lean, you can clean, Like that attitude is saying you do not have any autonomy when

you are at work. You are the property of the of the employer while you are at work. Um, I think, yeah, and and I think and I think, you know, but I think there's a specific thing with Greece is that, like, you know, you the only way you could do that to someone in Greece is if you owned them. Yeah, Like you know, I'm like, the grease has wage labor, right, but the only people who like has wege labor, but

it has wage labor for slaves. And that's like it right, like this, you know, and this is this is not like obviously not to say that, like you know, we're like having a job is the same thing as slavery, but it's it's to say that, like the kinds of things that we think of as normal, like are things that like the people who you know, the people who run the system and the people who you know get cited all the time to justify stuff would have looked at as like the worst thing that could possibly have

happened to a society. Yeah, sure, like daily life for a very substantial chunk of of the American workforce is that would be a nightmare to large percentages of the

human population prior to the modern period. Like it's it's and and if you think about it that way, like one of the things Graber does a good job of going into UM is like the way in which uh and this is also something that comes up in in in tribe by you or the way in which, like during the early period of colonization of North America, UM, it was very common for you know, Europeans to leave the cities and in towns being established behind um and

and join up with indigenals, with the tribes. The reverse never happened, like like, not willingly, not without kidnapping being a part of it. UM. And it's because like their attitude was, they were looking at the lives these people were living in these cities and like, well, why would you agree to do that? And um, this is turning anyway, Garrison, you should you should take us back on the rails.

This is getting more but first products. You know what has nothing to do with the fact that human beings are forced to labor for basic necessities in order to keep up a system that steals the freedom of the many in order to provide impossible liberty to the few. You know what isn't related to that. The advertising lutely industrial complex not has nothing to do with it, totally unrelated.

Why would you say that? Garrison? By the way, did you know that McDonald's muffin is turning fifty years old and it's giving the breakfast they're they're they're they're selling it for its original price of sixty three cents during breakfast hour six a m. To ten thirty am, exclusively on the McDonald's app. That I can't, I can't do you guys? Do you guys want egg mcmuffins for sixty three cents? That's the original price. I wonder what else the McDonald's app is looking at on my phone? Anyway,

here's some mats. Oh, we're back and we're talking about anti work. We're talking about how works kind of bullshit for our jobs. Um yeah, yeah, we sure are, We sure are. So you know, like there is there there's a lot of people who like enjoy stuff like gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even like you know, just fighting, fighting computer programming just for their own sake. Like a lot of the stuff that we like quote quote needs need for uh

society to function. A lot a lot of those things people like doing as hobbies in their spirits. For example, if you're a police officer, gunning down a man in cold blood might be kind of like your day job and like frustrating, and there's a lot of ship you have to deal with. If you're a mash shooter, though, you just love it. You know, you're just doing it. That is that That is exactly what the cow writtenhouse thing is though like like like like like actually like

literally that that that is what that is. This is we I mean, we're not going to get the verdict today. It doesn't look like not today, which by the by the time this airs, it may already be done. Um. But anyway, like a lot of a lot of people like doing those things without getting paid, and sometimes you know, often like costing themselves money, right, A lot of these hobbies are you know, are costly in their own in

their own right, um. And I think it's interesting to you know, think, think of a society where you're well, you're free to do those things when you feel like it, and you don't need to drag yourself out of bed at you know, earlyer than wanting to work to work a ten hour shift as like a cash register. And it's not just even when you feel like it. Because

there will be things that you have to do. Even if I will discuss this like toget yeah, yeah, yeah, in any but like yeah, but it's not it's it's not work if you're if you're going out and harvesting food that feeds you in your community, that's not like work in the sense that we talk about modern work.

The amount of extra energy we have by not having ten hour horrible shifts that drain ourselves mentally and physically and more in with you know, the amount of most of the work that we people do, as shown in

David Graper's bull bullshit Jobs, is like not necessary. Like a lot of like a lot of the work that we do as a whole is not There's there's some squibbling about because the book was based off of a study, like a survey that kind of showed a lot of very significant chunk of the workforce thinks their job is

like pointless and doesn't do anything. And there's been some criticisms of that, but it is undoubted that a very significant amount of total labor time spent is stuff that isn't necessary ry for really like reason of like making people's lives better. And another part of like anti work theories is looking is looking at our society as it's built, you know, because it is it is HyG to anarchism and be like how much of this is actually necessary? Like how do we do we really need a mac rib?

Like do we do we go? What do you? What do you? What do you? Garrison? Do we do not need a macrib? We do not? Did the company training? And they the company training says you can't attack someone for their religion, and Garrison just attacked the McRib, So that actually is you know, it is a religion for a lot of people. Did you just see that there? There? They they did sell a macribb n FT a few weeks ago. Um and tell me that ship that is

so upsetting, thank god damn it. Yeah yeah, just saying society with no money would not have n f T s. Yeah, so gosh. But you know, think thinking of like anti work as as the theory. You know, it's about cutting down those those unnecessary things that fill people's time. Um. And you know and for a more you know, forward forward looking sense. It's it's a general kind of like a like abolition of the producer and consumer based society. Um. So you know, life is not dedicated to the production

and consumption of of goods and commodities. So you know this this applies not not just a capitalism but also to you know, like state socialism um where you know, work is still you know a big part of state

socialism UM. And you think, you know it's humans, it's it's it posits the future that humans can be way, way, way more free when they you know, can reclaim their time from jobs and employment um, instead of you know, spending a lot of their time doing that and spending spending a lot of like not just time, but also just like their energy. Right because even if you work, you know, eight hours a day, you still have a majority of the day to yourself. But you're exhausted. You

can't doom it, you can't do much right it. It drains you of everything. So you know, the main point one of the main points of like of the abolition of work, I say by Bob Black is but like there's no one should work because because work is as defined as like as like as like a forced labor practice um. Is. You can kind of track this to being the source of most of the mystery in the world from you know, in in individual people, um, who

are forced to do this. So like this is where a lot of a lot of their pain comes from. Um is this I is this is this forced labor concept? Um? I think I think a good a good way. You know, there is you know the point that Robert brought up earlier is like you know, what about the tasks that aren't fun? You know what about what about the stuff that isn't isn't maybe as as enjoyable. Um, you know, there's there's there's there's a list of list of things

that the standard rep. Who's going to clean up the poop? Right? That's that's the thing. So you know I I kind of I I kind I kind of look at this as like the I kind of kind of look at this as like whenever I have to turn the compost, which is not my favorite thing to do. I I don't look forward to having to turn over our massive, shitty,

rotting compost bile not not my favorite thing. Um. But no, but now like if there's if if there's like friends around and we're playing music and we're all we have like some like have I have have like an iced tea or a dr pepper and we're like talking as we're turning the compost. It's a lot more doable. You know, it's there's there's because it's it's it's one task that's

going to help all of us in the future. Um and I'm not getting watched over by a boss to fill a certain quote so I can pay my rent, right, It's it's this, it's this. It's this thing that helps everybody and I and I do it because I want I want the goal of it to succeed. So there's there's, there's gonna there's is gonna be tasks that are less

pleasant than others. You know, what we can do is, you know, imagine a world where the amount of work actually needed to be done is greatly reduced so that the tasks that are necessary and some of them unpleasant, can be spread out, um and among more people, because less people will be wasting upwards of eight hours a day, five days a week doing mostly pointless time filling work.

Because yeah, there's there's gonna be things that sucked, and we'll be able to do those a lot better if there's more people and we don't have to waste our times doing stuff that is is honestly a lot more bullshit than actually scooping bullshit. Wow, what a good joke. Speaking it's time. It's time to scoop up some more ads. Wait, really, haven't we done too? No, we only only one. Alright, we went a while without doing one. Guys, listen to

the products because everyone loves a service. It's not like the thing we're talking about is bad. It's different than that. So it's fine. Yeah, we're back and we're still still

talking about anti work. Um, I do. This is something that the Crime Think workbook points out, and you know it is a pretty it's pretty obvious thing I've I've certainly thought of this before is that, you know, we've been told that the like technological progress will soon liberate humanity from the need to do work or from you know, having to do work as much um. And today we have the capabilities that you know, our ancestors couldn't have even imagined for free, the amount of work that we

could get done. Um. But these predictions still like aren't true. We're still working more than ever. Even though we have developed so much um technologically, we're still working more than ever. And if I think it's silly to think that we'll we'll we'll reach like a magic threshold where somehow now we have less work to do because we'll have like I don't know, like robots being a server at Adam

Adam McDonald's or whatever. Right, we're there's still there's still is forcing people into this thing because this is the only way that we can live. Right this. We've we've built our whole society around getting work for money, So this is the only the only thing that we can do. Yeah, David Creeper. One of the things he's arguing in Bullshit Jobs is that basically, you know, okay, so so if if you have like you have the Soviet economy, right, okay, so the Soviet economy has has a policy of of

full employment. And for a little bit they were like, okay, what if we make everyone work less? And then they stopped and then like everything went to ship, So you know, okay, but if if if you can't make people work less hours and everyone has to work, what do you do? It was like, okay, well you pay a bunch of

people to like stand in a doorway. Right now, we also do this And then one of the graps, like the funniest points that he brings up is that the total number of bureaucrats in the x U s s are like increased dramatically after the us R fell, which is incredible, and you know what what it points to is that like, yeah, you know, Greverer called this total beer auctratization, which is that, you know what, what we did, instead of like giving our seals more free time, is

created this just like endless, enormous, incredibly violent bureaucracy that all of us have to spend all of our time, like dealing with bullshit from our insurance companies, and like fighting with like the Comcast service person and all of this just like you know, incredibly violent, de humanizing stuff that you know, it's it's it's a make work program, right, it's but it's a make work program that just the work that it makes everyone is making everyone's lives miserable.

And we could just not do this. Mh yeah, I mean we could. It's always more complicated than that, right, because the thing that is when we talk about anti work, I think that's on the other side of this is like, Okay, well, what if you get a kid, how are you going to feed that kid? Like what if like, yeah, how are you going to keep him in a house, Like how are not just if you have a kid, But like, yeah, you people die in our society when they do not

have access to adequate resources. And the only way to have access to adequate resources is to be born rich or to work. Those are your options. Yeah, that is why without without robust mutual aid and the commitment by a lot of people to try to make sure that a lifestyle is sustainable outside of you know, this system, Like it's not impossible, but it's somewhere along the line

there has to be input. I mean, yeah, like we've we've been talking about Yeah, we were talking about antiwork as like as kind of like a broad hopeful like future goal in some other you know, post scarcity, well not not post scarcity, but like it's post like a post crumbling, post kind of collapse future. But I think you know, for us now, as you know, the antiworks is about people now, right, the antiworks it is not

about a future world. I think the anti work now is like an alternative to the obsession with living your life with the goal of a career. Yes, it's about trend you know, it's it's like a project to radically reframe the how we think of work and leisure. Um, it's like like like like a cognitive antidote to like the like this culture of like hustle and hard work, which is like taken over our minds and and and

our time. So it's like for for those who can't just resign from their job for whatever reason, whatever moment, the anti work is about like thinking of this movement as like the antithesis to the mainstream capitalist hustle culture. You know that that includes like slacking off more, finding ways to waste time, possibly even finding ways to steal or scam your boss. I I've I've read certain certain alleged ways of doing this inside the antiwork Garrison car

for Days where they got it from. But yeah, no, but like you know, like there is you know, like ways to like scam scam whatever corporation you work for, right that There's been examples shared in the anti right in in the Anti Works I brut it. So you know, it's about actually like finding, you know, making sure that you hate your work because you should, and then figuring out how to live your life with that in mind.

And I think what one of the really hard parts about this is for people who like kind of like

their job? Who who? Who? People who are like you think like either like their job or think it's like kind of important or like they're special to have it, right, It's like, oh, you're like, I'm lucky to have such a good job, because like, when you're stuck in that mindset, you can often put in like a lot of extra unpaid labor because you think it's important because you're like, oh, no, this is worth doing because it's gonna have some like

benefits to the world. So you end up like putting in actually more work that you don't actually get paid for. And like it's about trying to kill that instinct as well. So that's a whole, a whole way to think about like working, because like we're gonna be stuck. A lot of people are gonna be start doing it for for for a while. So how can you kind of reframe what we do on the job and how kind of jobs live in our minds when we are at home.

And I think the best thing about what you've said, in my opinion, is the idea that like this is not the importance is not on whether or not this this it causes everyone to stop having to work immediately like whether or not it leads to you know, directly to Like, the measure of success of this movement isn't that nobody ever has to work again. That's a that's

a long term goal. The measure of the success of this movement is that people accept in mass that no, the American dream as it's sold to people is not a good thing too. It's not a thing. To aspire to work is bullshit, and we should aspire to a

society that doesn't do it. It's getting back, honestly, like it's getting back to some of the ship that people were talking about in like when The Jetsons was on TV, the idea that like, well, with labor saving devices, the like a hard work week will be four hours and like that's the way life will be for everybody, and like um, and the it's the acceptance that like, no,

a better future involves me not having it. No one having to spend forty hours a week of their limited human life working at a fucking sonic or like listening to some middle manager brate them for not answering phones fast enough. Um, that doesn't exist for any human being in a world that is achievable and better than the one that we live in, like convincing people of that and getting that to be whyly accepted. Is I think what I think what is what I would consider the

terms of victory in in this particular struggle. Yeah, kind of moving on from this side of things into like the great resignation and the other kind of things that people are doing. So um, in August alone, four point three million Americans voluntarily left their jobs um and the rate of people quitting increased to a a decent, a decent record high of like a two point nine percent, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. So and

this this, this, this has been a growing trend. You can look at like I think June was like a like a little under four million. August was four point three. It's like it was you know, it's it's ramping. I don't know what if. I don't know if we have data for September or October. Yet this was the most recent one I could find. Um. So yeah, like it's stuff, stuff is stuff is going up. People are because because

people are like a big part of the antibo. And it's like, yeah, if your job sucks, you can quit it and probably find another one that pays better in decent time, especially especially especially right now, Like right now, if your job was really terrible, you have a decent chance of finding a better one. Um. This wasn't the

case like two years ago. Um, it is the case that at this moment, so a lot of the antiquos spa and it's like, yeah, quit your job, like say fun you to your boss and leave because if they're being shitty then they don't deserve to have you. Um. So resigning has been been a big part of this, and there has there has been attempts at other kind of organized stuff and this kind of falls into in my opinion, this kind of falls into the same kind of traps as sole internet organizing kind of always does.

So the big thing that they're organizing for is called Black Friday Blackout, which is about kind of trying to get everyone to as many people as possible to not work Black Friday, um and not buy anything on Black Friday. Um. So, like a post from the subrendt here is like spread the word call sick if you're forced to work black on Black Friday, spend time with your family instead, remain

at home and participate in your favorite activity on Friday. November, talk to your family and friends about about your work life struggles. Pass up flyers, join our slash anti work. Um, So this is you know, I think this kind of falls into the same like you know, general strike organized

online stuff that we talked about before. How kind of like a lack of like real like in person solidarity and like non internet you know, networking and organizing results and stuff like this just you know, like proposed like one day strikes or actions that are ultimately kind of non effectual, right, Like they can be like a good symbol sometimes, but like you know, they're not. It's it's it's not. It's not really gonna matter that much even

even if it works. Well, what I think it'd be cool if literally no store was open on Black Friday because everyone quit. Yeah, that would be rad. But that's that's not I don't that's not gonna really happen. Um, it would be fun if it did, but like, realistically, it's it's not, it's not gonna happen. And there is people on the subward who also point this out there there there was there was a reply to this post that was like, oh look, another online call for a

general strike with no union support whatsoever. Don't worry y'all this one, this one is definitely gonna work. Um. So it's like, yeah, like there's a lot of people in the sub also recognize that like without like actual like organizing support um and in person stuff and you know networks to support people on like you know, lengthy strikes. These types of things are kind of are mostly symbolic actions that will have, you know, in the end, little

little impact. Um. They may make you feel powerful as you're doing them, which is you know, which is good. That is a lot of activism is actually just just

about you feeling powerful in that moment um. But you know, as as an end goals, remember it's important to be remember to think like it's not it's that this isn't you know, this isn't gonna reach whatever anti work utopia, which and I know people people organizing it aren't thinking that, but you know, it's it's it's important to keep this within context of like the limits of of of online organizing.

You know. So a lot a lot of people like recommend you know, focusing on organizing your own workplace and community, um, discussing you know, discussing having discussions with with unions kind of in in your area. Um, and yeah, a part of, part of, part of kind of the part of the reply to to this original like a black Friday blackout post that that someone that someone wrote was was Seriously though, I would love for an actual gent general strike to

kick off. But these online calls for gen general strikes, it's no union involvement, no demands, no supports for strikers of any kind, no nothing whatsoever beyond social media hashtags don't do anything. Focus on organizing or workplace and community discussed with unions which might be sympathetic to what criteria, uh, what criteria they might need from such a drastic action. There's a lot of unions on strike right now, so if there ever was a time to kick one off,

it's now. Most general strikes in the past started off with specific strikes that started pulling in other union unions and solidarity than anything else. Focus on that and we might get somewhere. I think. Is it's a decent Is a decent advice for the people who are really dedicated onto this kind of like general strike thing is Yeah? That is that is? That is um, pretty pretty good

advice in my opinion. I want to say something kind of briefly just in general about general strikes, because I think we've talked about it a lot on here, but they're really really hard. I mean, there there, there's there's an example, like and like just to just to get a picture of like how how actually hard it is

to pull off. There was there was one in Sudan in in summer nineteen and you know, I mean this is this is in the middle of the revolution, right the the Sudan is incredibly highly organized, as incredibly militant. People have been like you know, I mean people like the like the chance in the street is like you cannot kill us. We already dead, like you know they and you know, and and it's the whole revolution is being led by the Student Professional Association, which is an

association of like seventeen trade unions. Right, so this this is a population that is enormously better organized than like

anything really that exists in the US. And you know, in in the middle of the summer at the army opens fire and starts killing protesters, and so they call general strike and you know, the turnout is massive, right, they have millions, millions upon millions of people show up to the strike, and on day one is successful, and then on day two of the strike, people start having to pull out, especially people the informal sector, because even

with the level of organization they have, they can't support everyone. And by about day three, most of the strike is collapsed because even even with levels organization they had, even with you know, the coordination, even with the fact that they're in the middle of revolution, they just they couldn't support particularly people in the informal sector. So this stuff is really really really hard, and yeah, it is even

it is definitely hard. Yeah, like even even highly organized, highly motivated people who are you know, like literally willing

to fight to the death will lose. And that's that's something that you have to sort of keep in minds think when you're talking about this, because a lot of people are more focused on the kind of their individual resignations, finding other ways of making money, and just slacking off at work in general, because those are a lot a lot easier than trying to organize a general, a mass

at general strike right now. And I think one of the really optimistic things about this whole anti work thing in including including the suburn, is that it has made some big executives kind of nervous. Um. There was a fantastic article by Yahoo Finance that by fantastic I mean funny for me. You know, they did not think it

was as funny. Um about they talked with like the Golden Sacks CEO of and uh and they pointed to the anti work subarate it of being what was the what was the phrase, um, a long run risk to to labor force participation? Good? This is see that that When I first read that in the article, I just like flashed to my head in my head to that scene from Starship Troopers where Neil Patrick Harris puts his

hand on the brain bug. It goes, it's afraid some raid. Yeah. Yeah, he said, uh, we see some risk that workers were elected will elect to maintain out of the workforce for longer, provided they can afford to do so. Of pretty pretty

good stuff. And I think and everything that's worth mentioning that hasn't been talked about very much is that so this is actually kind of working in some sense, Like the last few months in general, last few months particular have seen basically like the highest levels of wage increases that we've seen in decades. So you know, like, yeah, we haven't overthrown capitalism yet. But like, if you can keep quitting your job, keep quitting your job at at

your regular job, work less, keep doing it, it's working. Yeah, this is stuff I wish we need to in the future. I would like us to be focusing more on stuff like that, like this that is legitimately, as you point out, Chris, there's a lot of reasons to be very optimistic about about some of the numbers that we're getting from what

is happening to labor right now. Um, and it is important as we all like right now we're all miserable because we're sweating through the rittenhouse case, it is important to talk about stuff like that that like, yeah, some ship people is doing is hitting home. Some motherfucker's have found the glowy vulnerable spot on the Boss Monster and

it's yeah, it's just not working. Yeah. Like again, as we started the series with, like yeah, general strike is is kind of the best available solution, um or a path to a solution that I can find. Um But anyway, uh what what what what what? What? I think I think that that does it for us today. I know special special like sequel stuff happening. Uh so tune in tomorrow for our list, and like like all of the

best sequels, this one will be directed by James Cameron. UM. So we're all very excited to bring our pal j sch the pod, to bring our pal James and the reanimated corpse of Stan Winston. Um. It's going to be amazing. So check it out by everybody. Fuck work, Hey, hey, hey, hey, good introduction. I'm Robert Evans. This is it could happen here. That was Chris Garrison's also here, so is Sophie, who is changing her name to Sophie. What is your new name?

Sophie dot Com Arena, Sophie dot Com Arena. She's doing this to deal with the trauma of the fact that Los Angeles just agreed to change the name of the Chase Bank Arena to the Crypto dot Com Center. Oh, Staples Center, Sorry, I'm getting my arena's named after Veno Brand's mixed up Nay. Speaking of the pointlessness of work, there are people laboring right now who worked at Staples so that Staples would have enough money to name a place where people go do sports after a place where

people get fucking pencils. Um. And now Staples has declined enough that it's just crypto dot com. Fucking Crypto dot Com, book Upon, Look Upon the Worst Cryptocurrency e formerly Mighty Staples in despair, fucking the osman dius of the Office supply World. I don't know, whatever, what are we talking about? We're going to no that comes in the middle, but right now we're gonna go to a place where they banned crypto mining for the most part. So and that

that place is China. And I wanted to talk about specifically a lot of us been going on the Chinese Internet, what's been going on Chinese labor because so Garrison Garrison told me we're doing the Atgework episode, and I went, oh, yeah, there's a there's you know, there's a version of this in China. And then I realized that like a almost no one has heard of lying flat and be it rules and see that nobody really know in the US knows what's going on in the Chinese Internet because it's

effectively siloed. And I mean, you know, there's there's there's there's there's lots of different way to silo. I mean there's there's literally the Great Firewall, there's factors in different languages, people use different apps, and you know, the Internet has become this sort of like you know, it's it's it's

it's a bunch of bubbles that don't interact with each other. Yeah, the wald Garden thing, and it's you know, the sort of national level wald Garden stuff is I think in a lot of ways, way more dangerous than the stuff you know that like people complaining about if what sucond Audie logical bubble and like that's bad. But the fact that we have bubbles like this where it's like you know, the like with with like actual they basically borders but

online Yeah, yeah, because they're enforced by governments with forces. Yeah. Yeah, the place it was always going to go. Um, once we decided not to be rad with the internet, which everyone collectively decided in I'm going to say one thousand four. Yeah, do you think do you think do do you think? Do you think that was nine eleven fault? Nine eleven played a role. Nine eleven did play a role. Um, the dot com boom played another role. Um, there were

there there there were a number of factors. Um, but we can all blame it on let's blame it on low tax and continue so anti work in China before we get into lying flat, which is China's version of anti work. Isn't the right word because this actually started a few months before sort of anti work blew up in the US. But before we fully get into that, to understand what's going on here, we need to talk about something called involution. And did you say that again?

Like inval involution in involution? Yeah, so this this, this is this is originally this is a very obscure anthropological developed by my old nemesis, Clifford Geertz, who's one of the most famous and most important anthropologists in history, who also sucks ass and I hate him. I thought your nemesis was Noam Chomsky. Yes, also, but for different reasons. Should I cancel the hit sub sub nemesis something I have many? I have many nemesses that I have been

on the side God here, Jodi Dean episode at some point. Now, thank you. I appreciate allies in my one person intellectual wars, although this does seem to be a pretty boring intellectual war. Yeah said most of them. Yeah yeah, but what what what Gears was describing? Basically, so she doesn't feel work in Java? And what are you describing what what involution means. It's the system where people keep working harder and harder for there's no increase in output, and so that there's

no there's no rewards for working harder. And so you know, in Java, you'd have these plantations, right, and the plantations would get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. But because each new person was only like harvesting just enough to feed themselves, you never actually got any productivity increases. And so you know, yeah, there's no there's no output increases and in really the case in America in a

lot of ways. Yeah, and what's interesting, Well, okay, so the reason I want to talk about this also is because basically everyone who's been writing about this sormation news outlets has missed about half of the story of how how this like incredibly obscure anthropological term that like I don't like again, I was an anthropology major. I don't think I ever ran into involution while like while I

was studying anthropology. Yeah, and no one has ever heard of this, Like fucking everyone in China has like it's like a treatise they can spout at you about this now. Um. Yeah, and and you know I want to talk a bit about how to emerge. And part of this is because you know, in the last about two years, people be getting increasingly piste off at you know, just the sort of incredibly comp editive nature of Chinese society and particularly work.

And you know a lot of this is because everyone's working what's what's called, which is nine am to nine pm, six days a week. And as actually do you make this good? When I say everyone, that's like an average schedule. The schedules get a lot worse than that, but the nine six is the one that sort of gets the attention because a lot of people work in especially the

tech industry. This is you know, as we do. But you know, everyone focused on the tech industry, everyone ignores a bunch of market workers who also do this and worse. And you know, there's just a normal societal pressure to sort of keep moving and keep competing and keep working.

And simultaneously, you know, people in China today are working like basically as hard as anyone's worked in China since like people would literally collapse a bostion in the fields and the great leap forward, like that's a lot of people are working this hard. And but but instead of you know, getting rewards for this. Chinese growth rates have been collapsing for a decade, and yeah, this is you know,

this is this is the thing that you get. In the U s too, was like well okay, people were like, well, if you work out to get into the middle class, but then you know everyone's working nine six, No one's getting into the middle class. The like, China has incredibly low rates of social ability, and you know it into this comes involution. But the weird part of what what's happening here is that involution doesn't enter the Chinese discourse

through like people complaining about work. It's it's actually a product of a bunch of middle class people complaining about

Chinese industrial policy. And this is the hardest story that nobody really talks about, even though I think it's it's really interesting because again, like this, you know, anti anti work in in the US stars and the left right involution, which is the thing that's going to bring about sort of the Chinese version of anti work is the right way is originally right wing discourse, um and and it's interesting, it's it's it's a right wing, very nationalist discourse that

gets you know, the right wing part of it gets essentially expunged and it gets pulled left. So originally, you know, China is h I don't have a more elegant way of saying this than China's leaders and more online than ours, like significantly more like they actually that's right, that's hard to abash it. It's people people like like local government offices right have like they have these like internal sites

that like show them what people are posting. And this this goes from the from the bottom levels, it goes away to the top. Like people actually listen to bloggers, like like they're there, you know some of them, some of the people I'm about to talk about it are incredibly influential. And there's a bunch of arguments in the early two thousands about how China is gonna industrialize and

these are basically online arguments. Um and the guys who win that argument, right, she Shanping basically takes their industrial policy and implements it, which is you know, which is which is scales? Like how online these people are that Like, yeah, people are taking acont policy from like literally, I mean, you know, it's it's not solely that I don't take

a policy. People arguing on the internet. This is this is an incredibly online society and it you know, but the worst part is that for a while it works. You know that the ECHINAR policy basically is they're getting increased the size of the Chinese economy by investing in sort of high tech industry and moving up the value chain. This this has been very standards or Chinese second on policy for a while. Um, the problem is in the

last about decade, it's it's it's stopped working. And you know, the CCPs response was to do more financialization, and this piste off the like the the online they were they were called like the industrial Party. This this is off those guys because you know, the whole thing was don't financialize, just keep investing in like building airplanes and stuff, and

the Chinese economies will work itself out. And but eventually even they can't keep making this argument because you know, I mean like like he doesn't tend right, Like the Chinese GDP growth rate was ten percent and now it's like maybe five and last year, I mean last year twenties, so you know it was really low. But I mean the Chinese growth rate has been imploding. And so what you get out of this is is this group of

people called the Cooists based on this guy named Cow. Okay, so how is the guy who who who essentially introduces the concept of involution and he's arguing that this is happening because I'm gonna quote him here, people can't get quote a peaceful life, get a pretty girl, live in a big house because of the US. And so there's the solution to this, basically is is to deal with but to destroy America as a hedgemon. And then once you do that, you know you can get all of

these things. And as you can tell, like, you know, okay, peaceful life, get a pretty girl, live in a big house. This this is like a very conservative framing of this. Yeah, yeah, I mean this is this is the Chinese equivalent of two point five kids in a white picket fence. And it has all of this sort of associated gender politics

and class politics to go along with that. And you know, and when when Cow and the Cows you're talking about involution, what they're talking about is they're literally they literally mean Chinese diegnated economy, right, so that they're talking about, okay, that you have more inputs, you have labor, technology inputs, but the output for input is declining, and the only way to restore economic growth the chief prosperity is by solving a decline output by defeating the Americans. But you know,

and this this is kind of a big deal. And for a while in sort of like twenty this this is, this is going places, but very quickly people are like, my life fucking sucks, Like I don't care about this econ ship or this like grand national struggle against the world hedgemon, Like I care about the fact that, like my life is this incredibly pointless, ever escalating rat race with like literally no rewards. Yeah, that would that would concern me too, if that were a thing that we

were capable of feeling in our country. Yeah, it's why there there's been some really funny stuff with involution, where like you read accounts of it and you'll get like anthropologists going like, oh, yeah, this is this is the thing that this is the thing that's unique to China, and it's like have have you worked a job in

in the US? Like, but you know involution, you know what happens to it over over the course of sort of it goes from being the general you know, it goes it goes from being this thing that's about like very specific like technical industrial arguments about industrial policy too is when one anthropologists put it, quote the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows as meaningless. And so people are, yeah, we couldn't, we couldn't imagine that.

This is yeah, and it's you know, and people people start talking about finding individual solutions to this, and so you know, then this is things like working last, moving

to lower tier cities, getting less protgious jobs. Um, but you know, and I want to think about this again because this this is a really interesting thing where you have a very incredibly right wing, nationalistic and sort of like like middle class like nostalgia kind of like you know, like Milt aggressive foreign policy thing and then it just flips and and part of how it flips and this is a part of the story that is almost completely ignored, but I think it's really important. Did you guys know

about There's the YouTuber named leads It. She she's the biggest Chinese YouTuber. She has sixteen million followers, and most of her followers are not on YouTube because you know, YouTube like blocked by the firewall, but she has she has fifty five million followers on the sort of Chinese version of TikTok, and yeah, she has across the world. She has a hundred million followers, right she she's she's one of the biggest media stars in the world. And

her origins are kind of unclear. The like official biography basically says that like when she was twelve, instead of going to high school, she's being a waitress, and then she had to like you know, but she she she'd gone to the city and then she had to return to Revels to take care of her grandma. And she makes his videos that are these like very soft and calming videos or like calming music of her going into the woods and like harvesting materials and making fires out

of logs and like cooking things. Okay, and it's it's it's just like it's you know, it's it's very much this this really utopianism. There's there's basically no industrial technology like cottage coor returned to nature. Yeah. Yeah, I know a lot of people who watched it like that just to like soothe them after a day of work. Like see somebody like dig a cave and turn it into

like a bath or something. Using just hand tools or whatever. Yeah, and there's it's interesting this kind of almost like turned into a sub genre. But she's by far the biggest

like version of this. And you know, so she she gets picked up by a media company and from goes viral and you know, and interesting because so she's doing this because so she she has to go back to take care of her grandma, and so she like opens a store and she's trying to support herself but and like her grandma by opening a store, and so the videos were like a way to promote the store. And then you know, now she has a hundred million followers and she she gets adopted as this kind of like

like national culture ambassador, I guess by the state. Sure, And and it's justestly you know, so there's nothing overtly political about these videos at all, right, which is especially offering and like trying to sell is this you know, this like fantasy of retreat from industrial majority into world life. And I think it's really easy to look at that esthetic can go like this is basically fascist, Like this

is reject majority embraced tre it issues. Some people online when they see that immediately sees after I was like, oh, no,

it's eco fascist. Um, yes, I think that. Yeah, And I think, you know, and I think like that interpretation, I think is actually a lot of y I got picked up by the Chinese, by Chinese media companies and then like sort of by the Chinese state because you know, like having an actual positive utopian image of rural life is politically useul with them and something that's like not hasn't been true since like we've had this for a long time. Yeah, well no, and I think I would

say this. I think this is the thing that's different in China is that there hasn't been like a positive conception of rural life really since I guess the Great le Forwards and then are like there were some people in the Cultural Revolution, but then they actually went there and we're like, oh god, this sucks, and so you know, so they didn't even a new one they come up

with this. But you know, the thing that's different about China than the US is that China's might get worker population should like is almost the entire size of the population of the US. I mean it's it's like twenty million people, right, I mean it's it's enormous and a huge number of these people. You know, I'm some of these people are going from like city to city. You're like town of town, but a lot of these people

are coming from from rural villages into cities. And you know, I mean these are this is this is the background of the Chinese workforce. And like these people like they see their family once a year because you know, like they can't afford to go home, so they go home once a year for New Year's because they get some time.

Often they come back and and this is where you know, like these videos are an obvious fantasy, but you know, they suggest an alternative to work in the capitalist city that's sort of plausible, you know, especially if you come from rural village. And this is where this whole thing

completely backfires on the Chinese ruling class. And you know, because this this, this this cowisted involution discourse is about diffuse with this style of rural rural utopianism into a movement that is going to shake the foundation of work itself. But first, but first, ads again all sudden not connecting to anything we're talking. Why Garrison don't even bring that up. There's no needs, there's no reason for people to think about about the fact that about that. Don't think anyway,

here's about ads. Yeah, think about the Washington State Highway Patrol primary sponsors. If it could happen here, if it happens to you, you'll want the Washington State Highway Patrol the border. It's so funny. Anyway, we're trying to but I think it's we're working on it. People. I think it's hilarious. Yeah, please don't, please don't join the Washington

State Highway Patrol. We're back. And I don't know about y'all, but I thought I knew what I was talking about, and I after those ads, I am fully Washington State Highway Patrol build. I'm on board. Let's do it. Yeah. In April of a guy in Chinese social media makes a post and I'm just gonna started. So, yeah, I'm just gonna read this post because it's kind of short and it rules. I haven't been working for two years.

I have just been hanging around, and I don't see anything wrong with This pressure mainly comes from the generation with your peers and the values of the older generation. These pressures keep popping up, but we don't have to abide by these norms. I can live like Diogenes and sleep in a wooden bucket. I can live like Heracletus in a cave thinking about logos. Since this land has never had a school thought that upholds human subjectivity, I can develop one of my own. Lying down is my

philosophical movements. Only through lying flat can humans become the measure of all things based. Oh my god, that's the best. I love that. Can I talk about Diogenes now? So my my man Diogenes is he's from this trennd in Greek philosophical thought during kind of the high period of Greek civilization where a bunch of things come out of it.

You kind of get anarchism, Western anarchism out of it, you kind of get you get elements of like Puritan culture from it, because there are a lot of them are very much anti like the pleasures of sex and like anything pleasing, and like you don't you don't do anything that feels good because then you become dependent on it. Like there's whole bunch of ship going on um. And Diogenes was like one of the one of the first motherfucker's who were kind of playing around in this in

this philosophical space. And when he gets into so his early life is his dad is uh kind of a grifter. It sounds like we know that he got in trouble. He and his dad got exiled for debasing currency, which could be as simple as they were watering down for lack of a better term, like the gold or silver and currency with less precious metals and hiding it in order to make a profit, right and like keep the

extra gold. That could be what they were doing. It also could have been like it could have been political because some people who were doing this in Sinope, I think is the city which is now in Turkey. We're doing it for political reasons. We don't really know why. But there's actual documented archaeological evidence of this, including right

around the time he would have been a child. We found from that period a cash of debased gold and silver coins that had been destroyed, so someone had like realized they've been debased and destroyed them so they couldn't be used. So there's evidence. Anyway, he and his dad get exiled, which means from an early stage he goes from being someone of means, if your dad's making the currency, you're not probably not like a poor family um. And then they get kicked out of their city state and

they're like kind of stateless. And so Diogenes evolves over time and like gets into philosophy. He tries to there's this I always forget the name of the guy that he he loved it first. But there's this philosopher who's like, you know this cynical like that's the school of thought he comes from. He's like a cynic um that Diogenes really wants to study from. And the guy like assaults him as as Diogenes is like, hey, man, I want to learn from you, Like he like hits him or something.

This keeps happening, and eventually he's like this guy is like why do you keep doing this? And Diogenes is like, you have something I can learn from, uh, And so I don't really care what you do to me. I'm gonna I'm gonna keep persisting. And so he becomes this

guy's student, YadA YadA. And the guy who he becomes the student of is like kind of a poser because he's talking about like we need to give up you know, these kind of like pleasures of of like civilized life and and return to a more simple time and like not enjoy all of these, you know, the benefits of wealth, but he like he's also a rich guy and he doesn't give up his money. And Diogenes is like poor as hell um and stays that way. Um. And so he becomes famous for he goes to Athens and he

becomes famous for a bunch of like troll ship. We don't actually have He wrote like ten books, we don't have any of them, so we don't actually like know what he actually wrote in his philosophy. We just have stories from other philosophers and it's all Diogenes being a fucking troll. So like um. On one occasion. He one of his big things was he believed that people that if if something was an acceptable behavior, it was an

acceptable behavior everywhere, right. And so the start of this was in an ath you were supposed to go buy your food in the market, but you weren't supposed to eat it there. That was like considered rude, like like like like kind of obscene almost, And Diogenes would like get food and then usually by begging, because he was that was the way he got everything. He had no money, he would like get food and he would eat it

right in the middle of the market. And everybody was like, that's disgusting, and Diogenes would be like, well, if it's okay for me to eat, it must be okay for me to eat here. That's great. Diogenes took it a little bit further than that, because yeah, yeah, I can see a few ways you can take this. He extended that too. If it's fine for me to urinator ship, it's fine for me to do anywhere. And he defended

himself masturbating it. We can get people in public as if this is okay for me to do in my bedroom, why can't I do this here? Right? Um, it's very like he's he's he's a troll um Diogenes, And he's also like again, the stories we have him is he is like uber an aesthetic, so like, at one point, for a long time, the only thing he owns is a wooden ole that's his cup and and for his food.

And then, according to you know legend, he sees this poor peasant child drinking from like cupped hands and he throws away his bowl and he's really angry and he's like, god, damn it, I spent all this effort carrying around something useless, Like I said, ship, in my hands. He's he's a very entertaining character and a very like yeah, yeah, he's absolutely an eugle um and he's yeah, he's just kind

of like an endearing piece of ship. Is like his the the idea you get, but also like smarter than I mean, because because fundamentally, what Diagenes is doing is he's he's saying, like, hey, all this stuff that we think is important and good about our culture and and like valuable, what if it wasn't, what if none of

it matters. He's like he's provoking the thick and he's he's big into like one of his his Like the things he comes back to a lot is that like dogs are clearly happier than us and like better creatures than us, so we should just seek to be like dogs. Um. And one of the ways he might have died is getting bitten by a dog and his bike getting infected. We don't really know how he died. Um. The ever thing about Diogenes, this guy fucking hates rich people. Oh

he's he's and he's very funny about it. So Alexander the Great apocryphal Lee, maybe this probably never happened, But the story is that Alexander the Great comes to Athens, you know, while he's on his his blitz through conquering the known world, and finds Diogenes. Alexander the Great was

like raised by Aristotle, right, so he knows his philosophy. Guys, like he's he's he's seeking Diogenes out because he's a fan of this dude, probably through stories that were told to him in the same way that like I'm telling them to you now. So he comes up to Diogenes and he's like, oh my god, I'm Alexander the Great. I'm a big fan. If I couldn't be Alexander the Great,

I would want to be Diogenes um. And Diogenes response, well, if I couldn't be Diogenes, I would just want to be Diogenes, which is a fucking flex again but probably never happened. But like, I want to, I want to read this meme that Garrison sent me, because it happens. It's absolutely a perfect encription to what what this whole thing is sort of about. So, okay, this is me. The philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher It or not a process.

Guest name Aristippus, who is living matter some dead ass Greek, some guy who's about to get absolutely destroyed. He's living comfortably like flattering the king. Aristipis says, if you would learn to be subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils. Theogenus supplied, learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to be subservient to the king. Oh, sorts of based ship like that

my favorite. But know our Plato is like, is like trying to determine, trying to define like a human in the simplest way possible. Yes, yeah, like the Platonic idea. And he was, so he comes to the conclusion that like, well, it's a it's a it's a it's an unwing biped um. And Diogenes supposedly goes grabs a plucked chicken and says, behold a man, Like I found a dude, rules um.

He would he would famously walk around town in broad daylight with like a what do you call it, like a lantern, like looking around and people like, what are you looking for? It's like I'm looking for a man. He would like, look at a dude and you're like I'm looking for a man. And as it is to say, like none of you motherfucker's are people like you all think that you're human beings, but you're really just pieces

of ship. It's just an amazing asshole. Sorry that that we should move back to anti work, but that's what yeah, yeah, but and this is this is the funny that both both both American and Chinese like anti work people both fucking love Diogenestely. Yeah, you know, very popular on our slash anti work. Yeah, and you know, and the thing I was reading about the like you know, learned to live on lentils and you'll never like after such a game by King that that's a lot of what lying

down becomes. So very rapidly, this whole thing spreads into this like really it's a sort of astounding, you know, it starts out of the meme and it spreads incredibly quickly, and the CCP gets like really really mad about this.

Um so, so it's like so this this starts in April, right, and in May there's they have this like enormous media blitz where like like the party is like outlet basically and Guandong publishes like a four page long attack on the concept of lying down, like the cc the end of the newspapers everywhere published this stuff like the CCP like bands flat weed yet yeah, and it's funny becase it's like if they do this, but it's too late, Like it's yeah and you know so, so part part

of the lying down is is about, you know, you have this incredibly fast paced, intense work culture, you have involution, You're working more and more and you're getting nothing out of it. Lying flat is just going no, like you just lie down down, you refuse to work. But it's it's it's also it's more than that. And I think this is this goes back to the sort of broader conception of anti work. So on one of the slogans of this movement is don't bribe property, don't buy a car,

don't get married, don't have children, and don't consume. And you know that the last part of this is implied is don't work. And you know there's a lot of sort of going on here. I mean, you have you know, it's not just sort of a critique of like we work too hard. It's about you know, it's about the sort of fall system. It's about the sort of patriarchy involved in this. It's about this sort of like force

capitalist consumption. It's about like, you know, the fact that like literally a quarter of Chinese of China's economy or Chinese GDP is like all this real estate bullshit that everyone knows is going to collapse and even when it gets built like sucks. Thank god we don't have anything like that here. Yeah, I know, it's great. It's one of one of the fun things about larding histories. You could just watch every country do exactly the same thing

with their housing market, like Japan do. It's like, it's greats like you also think this will work? What what? What extra fun thing is you get to watch every country do the same thing with farms and it always

ended the same anyway. Yea. So there's there's a lot of you know, in order to sort of like facilitate this, you know, you get back to the Diogenes, so a lot of it what's happening is people sharing tips about how to make the cheapest food you can possibly survive on so you don't have to work, and so you know, and people the guy who wrote the Diogenes post like he spends thirty dollars a month. And he does this by only eating dried ramen and eggs and like rice. Yeah, yeah,

one way to do it. This is like the most extreme example. I actually don't even think it's the most extreme example. A lot of people. One of the things that happens a lot is a bunch of people just like have left their jobs to become monks. This, this

is like a whole thing. Yeah. I got to be a Buddhist, like honestly, like absolutely like, and I used to live in a place in the middle of fucking nowhere, one of the most like isolated places I've ever lived that like had power um and one of the people who was like by neighbor they were within several miles of us, was a monastery. This is in the United States, And like I went there once because I heard they made good wine to try and get some of their wine,

and like, none of them would answer the door. I could see them inside all staring at me. They didn't do ship, And my my overwhelming thought was like, yeah, that seems like a pretty good way to do it. Yeah, I see why you guys have picked this life. It was also during the election back from the r N C and the d n C and was like, yeah, that seems smarter than what I'm doing. Yeah, so there's a lot of you know, yeah, that'd mean the stream example,

like if people going to become monks. But like one of the things that's happening a lot is again you know, China hasn't known with micro worker population, and people are just like fuck this, I'm going back to my village and so and you know, and this is you know this this this, this is where they really screwed up with the YouTube stuff because you know, people were people, you know, they were gambling that that you know, you could just sell this as an aesthetic, and you know,

you can sell it as an aesthetic like Chinese TikTok has this integrated thing in it where like if if you if you if you plug like something to buy it, like you can like click it and it'll just it'll take you like to a link like to to to to the thing it's selling, you know. And so yeah, they don't make a norse amount of money on this, but you know, the the the other side of that sword is a bunch of people were like I don't have to work this, Like I don't have to work

in a city, I can just go home. Yeah, and you know, and you know and you know, so you know, as as you're talking about the antiwork stuff, it's not actually possible for a lot of people to leave their jobs. So the solution to this was there there's a culture that to fell up called petting fish, which and but but before you talk about petting fish, you said something about, uh plugging things on TikTok and you know who, you know, you know, like plugging like advertisements, and you know who

also plugs plugs advertisements? Chris, Oh, no, is it us to Joe Rogan. But our new sponsor is the Joe Rogan Experience, brought to you by Honda. Honda drive a car, do fascism? Honda? Really yeah, Honda Garrison. Look, we don't We're not nearly a big enough podcast to get fucking to get a Toyota ad. Are you crazy? Yeah? That's what we can dream big, Yeah, I mean that is the dream to sell Toyota's. I mean we could become

used car salesmen in the valley. All right, here's that AhR back cut that head and fish monk, Chris, handle it, keep it all in baby, Yeah, so there's there's all this thing called the petting fish, which is like Chinese slack off culture, and it's you know, somet of people sharing tips how to slack off at work, and it's it's kind of the equivalent like I love that it's called petting fish. And then also like, yeah, it's it's kind of the Chinese equivalent of like boss makes a dollar,

I make a dime. That's why I shoot on company time. So people do just a lot of like they have a lot of like genuinely fun things they do. Like people people started putting like fake beatings on their calendars and people wouldn't bother them. They like they just like people like that. That is also that's that's that's also what I do. Yeah, yeah, I mean the if you want to make I love the term petting fish as well, but if you want to like make it sound cool.

They're waging an insurgency from within capitalism by by by trying to take resources away from their employers, um without being spotted. Yeah, there's a there's a thing in Volume one of Capital about this that I was like, oh, I could pull this up, and then I was that is too much work. I'm not going to do it, so I don't have the thing in volume one where talks about struggling between about labor time. But instead you get a bunch of people like the Smike, smuggling whiskey

into work, taking through our lunch breaks. My favorite one, absolutely favorite drink at work, especially if your nurse, Oh boy, you probably killed about fifty people. This is gonna be crossed. Fingers crossed. So you know how like companies all have these like these really annoying like mindfulness fitness things. So one of these people started doing was okay, so you know the thing like you have to drink eight hour,

eight times a day. So they would set these alarms that's like, oh, I have to go drink my water. And so like every like every like fifty minutes or something, they just go up and like spend twenty minutes getting water and they sit back down. It's like you've just eviscerated enormous part of your work day. And and the product of this, you know, this CP is really piste off about this. And you know you get these giant billboards to say no lying flat, no petting fish on

them or something. It would have been liter really incomprehensible like a year ago. It's amazing. And you know, and I think this is something you know in the U s anti work, like the actual political class kind of has been ignoring it. I mean, you see a couple of acial antists in China, Chesing Ping like made a speech. It was like, you know, he have a private speech a bunch of hog people in the party, and so a part of it a printage like a month ago

or something I've I've lost track of all time. But like like like specifically in this speech that Esping is making that is published in the official like theoretical journal, he's like explicitly saying like don't lie flat and saying quote happy life is earned through heart, hard work. And yeah, and he also has this, he has his ranch, but like denouncing welfare ism, which is great the the communist vanguard there. Yeah, yeah, preaching the immortal science. Yeah, socialism

with Chinese characteristics. Motherfucker's don't be a welfare queen follows. Even thought it's great, you know, but it's interesting people, this is the one people are really freaked out about. Like I saw, I saw like an American writer about this, who you know, they wrote like an article about this whole thing, and then they were like, this is gonna this is gonna cause inflation. It's like, this is gonna be the driver of like what people just use the

word inflation to mean whatever scary thing they want. Yeah, well they're they're like, oh, this will this will increase wages and that will lead to inflation and we'll get the seventies again. And I'm like, God, maybe, but a tallow disco again? Did you ever think of that guy that we that were are reserves of a tallow disco are critically low? Do you wonder what a tallow disco is?

No idea? That's a shame. All right, let's continue what what what type of like is there is there like any like you said this kind of stuff started to like move left words. Is there any like actual like leftist organizing in these types of places? So so this is the thing I was getting to, which is that, like,

you know, people are starting to do reading groups. But the problem, the problem with leftist organizing and China is that, you know, so state policy in the past three years has been like if you poke your head above ground, you get arrested. So you know, I mean, for example, there was there was a strike at Jasick and you know, a bunch of student groups who've been organizing for a long time like tried to do all drety with it, and they all got arrested. The people who are people

who let the strike got arrested. All the students who are doing so ald Aretay got arrested. People like people got arrested for like like dancing with like university students got arrested for like dancing with the people who were like cleaning the floors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like the yeah, like it's it's incredible and like you know, and the other thing that you can see about this was so so. For example, there was there was a guy doing like

delivery driver organizing. It was kind of weird. He was like kind of an entrepreneur kind of doing delivery driver organizing.

Like he got arrested, and then you know, like a couple of weeks later, this is people like, oh, we're gonna like do things to improve the conditions of of of delivery drivers and know who knows if that's going to happen, but like you know, basically like any anyone out for some reason that the people in the tech sector have been able to get away with more for reasons that are probably class based, and I think this doesn't take them seriously in the way they do with

students factory workers. But you know, and actually I mean the fact that the tech workers like kind of recently like that there's a tech worker thing calling for like like democratic control of production, which is wild. But other than those guys like you can't you know, you can't

stick your head up, you get flattened. So this has sort of been the result of this, which is this like you know, the sort of the like lying flat is this, you know, it's this mass to centralized movements that you know, there's there's no one to hit with a hammer, and you know, and and I think, like, okay, so one of one of the other quotes that's that's been going around about lying flat is it's it's a poem. It doesn't poem as well in English, but this, this

is the best we've got. Lying flat is to not bow down. Lying flat is to not kneel. Lying flat is to stand up horizontally. Lying flat is a straight spine. And so you know, what was basically happening here is is it's a combination of the tendencies you see in the US, where you know, a bunch of people terrible jobs, realizing that everything is pointless. And then also, this is a way you can, like, this is the way you can like fight your boss without like the police showing up.

And so there's there's some interesting like political stuff. So there, there's there, there's there's there's if if you look at that, there's there's a bunch of memes here because they're great. So there's there's been a thing with these people talking about how people are leaks, which are like their leaks, they're harvested over and over again and they're being exploited and like the plants, yeah, like leaks like yeah, you eat. And so they have this thing that's leaks that life

flat cannot be so easily harvested. It's just like a knife go like try like a machete, like trying to swing out a bunch of leaks, but leaks are flats, so they can't hit them. And what I like, I

like all of this. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's you know, and so and so what the product of this is that yeah, like this this this this has this stuff has actually been effective enough that the CCP, like, you know, I mean, the CCP is is taking it seriously, but you know, there's not much they can do about it, because like if someone's just like, oh, I'm going to go from a job that's really high stressed to one that's less high stress, like what are you're gonna are

you just gonna arrest them? Like what what are you gonna do? And so this, yeah, this, this has been building for a while now and I don't know who who knows exactly like where it's going to go, but it's it's it's already you know, it's something that people can do as an individual in a place where organized political action is impossible in a way such that you know that their individual actions have a collective effect, but

one that can't be just you know, pounded down. Yeah, I mean, it is certainly interesting to see two completely separate, like anti work style movements around basically around the same

same exact time, with the same exact points. If you're different, if you're someone who's interested in massive global revolutionary change, this should probably be a thing that you are looking at and studying and thinking a lot about, because perhaps while we're arguing about ship that people started talking about in the eighteen seventies. This, this might be a better thing to do than than that, because because it's it

seems like there's some potential here. Yeah, and I think, yeah, I mean, you know, if if if you if you know any any any any actual revolutionary project that makes the world better is going to have to be international. And that's been you know, that that that that that's been the bane of all revolutionary movements forever. But you know, okay, so we have you know that we we have something to change the American working class agrees on, which is

Diologenes is based in work sucks. Yeah. So as you go forward into your life this week, um, take a page from Diogenes as his book and the people ship on the floor of a free people or yeah, free people are in h and M. Go walk into one and just just just go absolutely ruin that tile. I mean, fuck it. This is why my my my biggest political advice to friends who has always been learned to run fast, because if you learn to run fast, you can do so many more fun things in a store and then

run fast that it's done right. The problem is that a lot of people like, who who want to do this can't run fast enough? So learn to run fast to do this there, It's like Moose said, all political power comes from being able to ship really fast and from the doors of a free people. Just get that out of there. The immortal side, look, I think I think I think we should leave with with the the real immortal science, the the immortal words of a skeleton

from the share zone. Just walk out. You can leave work, social things, movie, home, class, dentist, clothes shops, to fancy weed store cops if you're quick, friendships if it sucks. Hit the bricks yeah yeah, As as some comedian who I can't remember now said, always have an exit plan like that that that should be your thought for everything

everything in the world. Hit the fucking bricks. Get out anyway, Get out of this podcast episode now, Welcome to it could happen here podcast about things falling apart from what you can do about it. My name is Christopher Wong, and today I'm gonna be talking about sabotage. But this

is not the episode on abotage that you expect. I will not be discussing, for example, the destruction of machinery throwing monkey wrenches, slow down strikes, or the myriad of other tactics that workers have used since time immemorium to strike back at their bosses. No, instead, I'm going to be talking about a four more common and infinitely more dangerous form of sabotage, corporate sabotage. Now, the most conficuous form of corporate sabotage is the mass destruction of a

corporation zone products. The fashion company Burberry, for example, destroyed three hundred and seventy million dollars of its own product in one year alone. Louis Vutton and Chanel also systematically destroy their own sold stock every year, joining H and M and literally lighting their own sold products on fire

in order to prevent anyone from using them. Quote business insider Rischemont, the owner of Cadalier BoNT Blanc, destroyed more than four hundred million pounds of watches over a two year period after an excess in goods in the Asian markets. Nike has also admitted at a New York store slashed unsold trainers before throwing them away, and last year, an Urban Outfits employee said he was instructed to pour green

paints on the unsold stock. These of course, are only the stories that have made it into the press, and this behavior is by no means limited to high fashion. Grocery Stores routinely throw away normous quantities of unsold goods, and when communities realized they could feed people in need by taking the still good products from grocery store dumpstairs, the stories began to destroy their food intentionally. But these acts of destruction, as callous and horrifically greedy as they are,

are by no means the extent of corporate sabotage. To explain, I turned to the work of the economist Thorston Veblen. Feblen is perhaps best known today for the theory of conspicuous consumption, but he wrote extensively on corporate sabotage in the first part of The Engineers and the Price System, a work that is broadly ignored even by his followers. Feblen wrote a section call on the Nature and Uses

of Sabotage from that work. Writers and speakers who dilate on the militarious exploits of the nation's businessmen will not commonly allude to this voluminous running administration of sabotage, This conscientious withdrawal of efficiency that goes into their ordinary day's work. We are not used to thinking of the ordinary work of a corporation being sabotage. But for Veblen there was

no other explanation for what he was seeing. In the wake of World War One, there was an enormous explosion and unemployment, an enormous need on half of the population. But even as the unemployed begged to be let in to create the products that could build the needs of their fellow humans, business owners steadfastly refused to open their factories.

As Veblen explained, but for reasons of business expediency, it is impossible to let these idle plants and idle workmen go to work, that is to say, for reasons of insufficient profit to the businessmen interested, or in other words, for reasons of insufficient income to the vested interest which controlled the staple industries and so regulate the output of product. Feblen was not alone in observing these are similar conditions.

John Maynard Keynes, writing during the depression, observed newly precisely the same thing. For Canes, the solution simply was to have the government step into increased demand. But for Veblen,

dismissed the core of the problem. The real problem was at a core of absentee owners had the ability to shut down the factories in the first place by simple virtue of their ownership, Feblin argued, was simply sabotage, no different from the hated strikes of the I w W that's so racked and perturbed the capitalist ruling class of his time. At least, the workers could argue that they were simply fighting for a better share of what they

had created. Absentee owners, on the other hand, who had no actual involvement in the production process whatsoever, simply carried out sabotage on an enormous scale in order to secure their own returns, and this was true even in times they weren't marked by mass depressions. In order to make payments to capitalists, Feblin argued, who expect a certain rate of return on their investment, corporations must maintain prices at such a level that they can meet their returns, and

the only way they can do this is sabotage. For the good of business, it is necessary to curtail production of the means of life on pain of unprofitable prices at the same time, that the increasing need of all sorts of necessities of life must be met in some passable fashion on pain of popular disturbances, as it will always come of popular distrust when they passed a limit of tolerance, the sabotage Febran argue was simply a product

of the price system. Any production that was too efficient would simply and inevitably be sabotaged for private gain, because in order to maintain prices that would maintain the returns of investors, it was necessary when sure that production never

became too efficient to produce too many goods. Feblen used as his example the twentieth century post office, but we could just easily point to Trump sabotaging the post office in due a bid to privatize the service by causing it to collapse and prevent mail and votes from being counted as part of his attempt to win the two

thousand twenty election. In their book Capitalist Power, Condition, Shaan Bickler and Jonathan Needson take Feplin's argument and expand on it, noting that capitalism, far from encouraging productivity at large, makes things inefficient on purpose. They used the example of public transportation, which is by bay, essentially any measure a significantly more

efficient way of moving people around the US. As an example, in the US and the nineteen forties, a hundred electric rail lines were brought up and destroyed by car companies. Those same companies likewise twice destroyed incredibly efficient and popular electric cars, once in the nineteen thirties and again in the nineteen eighties because the profit rate was lower than

that of gas cars. They then set out to cause everyone to forget that they had actually done this until Elon Musk figured out a way to sell electric cars that was profitable, namely by selling himself as a brand and not the cars themselves. Now, if capitalism was simply destroying its own products in order to create Elon Musks, you could argue that the system at least produced advancements

before it stopped them. But the most violent forms of sabotage are reserved for productive systems that are simultaneously efficient and outside of capitalist control together. Perhaps the best known example of this is the East British East India companies.

The industrialization of the Indian textile industry, not to be outmatched by their British forebearers, American settlers and their allies in the American military sterminated the buffalo herds of the Great Plains in an attempt to starve out the indigenous tribes that lived there. In doing so, they destroyed an

enormously productive and sustainable agricultural system. They did so precisely because the system was efficient, so efficient, in fact, that it allowed indigenous tribes to repeatedly defeat the American army and defence of their lands. We are used to thinking of capitalists as the system of production, but here, amidst the fields of buffalo corpses something else, entirely capitalism appearing

in its true form, a system of organized sabotage. To fully untangle what this means, let us return to Veblin. Feblin divided capitalism into two separate processes. The first he called industry. Industry, Feblin argued, has existed long before capitalism and will continue to exist long after. It has a bit clear and nietzs and put it quote when considered an isolation from contemporary business institutions. The principal goal of industry.

It's reason, according to Veeblin, is the efficient production of quality goods and services for the betterment of human life. Industry is an inherently collective undertaking. The basis is cooperation and integration, the creation of communo knowledge that allows production and scientific advance to occur, and coordination and cooperation between people to create things for each other. Left to its own devices, industry would simply produce goods for people. It

has no concern for profitability, rates of returns, or capitalization. Unfortunately, capitalism is defined by private ownership. This is what Veblen calls business. Business is a system of power that extracts wealth from industry by means of sabotage production to serve human need. The basis of industry is useless to business unless it can be turned into a revenue stream. It does this by taking control of industry and its products and the restricting access to it particular and NICHS input it.

The most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not. Technically, anyone can get in someone else's car and drive away, or given order to sell all of Warren Buffett shares in Berkshire hathaway. The purpose of private ownership is wholly and only an institution of exclusion. An institutional exclusion is a matter of organized power. As we can see from the genocide on the plains. This

power is no abstract force. Beblin tends to focus on the power of absentee owners to stop production, and for good reason, but business stands in the way of industry in more immediate ways too. After all, the purpose of cooperative industry is to make goods to improve our lives.

And yet in between us and the proceeds that industry creates to serve our needs, there is a cash register in a cop Even the creators of a Louis Vetton bag, or for that matter, a tomato, have no claim on it once business takes over, and business would rather destroy

it than see it fall into their hands. The famous Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kirpotkin was writing along similar lines to Feblyn just a few years before Feblen, it seems, have been exposed to anarchist ideas through its association with the industrial workers of the world. In early nineteen hundreds, it was not altogether unusual for economists to move in

radical circles. The great Italian economist Piero's rap for smuggled pens and papers to Antonio Gramsey, while Grumsey, the head of the Italian Communist Party, was a prisoner with the Italian Fascist regime. Grapha would later extract the writings that Crumpsy had written in prison, unleashing Gramsey's prison notebooks onto the world. But Feblin was unique even among these economists for the extent that he incorporated radical theories directly into

his work. As you've seen, was his adoption of sabotage as a way of thinking about capitalism. This led Veblin to call the end of the system of what he described as vested interests and absentee owners. Feblin solution, however, which he described as a quote Soviet If technicians would manage production for all, society leaves a lot to be desired for. So let us return to the source, her

spotkin and the conquest of bread. The minds, so they represent the labor of several generations and derive their sole value from the requirements of the industry of a nation and the density of the population. The minds also belonged to the few, and these few restrict the output of coal are prevented entirely if they find a more profitable

investments for their capital. Machinery, too, has become the exclusive property of the few, and even when a machine and contestedly represents an improvements added to the original rough invention by three or four generations of workers, and nonetheless belongs

to a few owners. And if the descendants of the very inventor who constructed the first machine for lace building a century ago were to present themselves today at a lace factory and bail or Nottingham and demand their rights, they would be told hands off, this machine is not yours, and they would be shot down if they attempted to take possession of it. Here we see the competition between

two different kinds of rights. On the one hand, the right of industry, the right of creativity, the right of those who produce and care for each other to be able to determine where the proceeds of their labor go. From industry's point of view, this is to each other, to those in need, into society as a whole. On the other hand, there is the right of property, the right of men with guns to throw oysters into the ocean because it's not profitable for anyone to eat them.

Capitalism has developed a myriad of iterations precisely the same principle, and the world is now infested by them. Patent trolls haunt. They already fraught waters of intellectual property, buying up patents for cheap or on rare occasions, creating something themselves for the sole purpose, or preventing anyone else from using it,

making money by suing anyone who dares try. Large corporations, of course, stu precisely the same thing, see for example, Disney's War and the concept of anything, anything at all, falling into the public domain, the sabotage, and on this all four of our interlocutors, Veblen, Popkin clear needs and degree as long as private ownership exists, because sabotage is all private ownership really is. But it is not simply

enough to answer corporate sabotage with their own sabotage. As Veblen pointed out, this is simply the ordinary state of affairs enter capitalism. For Capotkin, the answer was simple. This rich endowments, painfully one builded, fashioned, or invented by our ancestors, must become common property so that the collective interests of men may gain from it. The greatest good for all, There must be appropriation the well being of all, the

end expropriation. The means how precisely to go about doing such a thing as been the subject of endless debate for nearly two hundred years. And I am not arrogant enough to propose to solve the problem here. But a system where a company can prevent even the US government from attempting to produce ventilators by simply buying up the company that won the contract and refusing to fill the order to maintain the value of the ventilators it was

already producing. Is a system based on nothing less than ensuring that people will die for or five percent rate of return. If we are to have any hope of stopping the ravages that climate change promises for our future, we cannot afford to be sabotaged at every stop. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen.

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