It Could Happen Here Weekly 26

know I have a new daily podcast. It drops Monday through Friday, and it's about ten or fifteen minutes long each day. It's a mixture of my favorite radio moments, curated around themes like finding your soul mate, second chances, learning to love yourself, and the power of forgiveness. Something

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Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compiletion episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Oh it could welcome year the podcast that

happens ship. All right, Well st Andrew, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna pivot to you to to pull us out of this tailspin. I've locked. Hello. Hello, what's the seen everyone today? I wanted to go on a bit of a personal meandering. I guess on um, some of the ideas and concepts that just kind of floating on my head um surrounding sustainable city planning and city living.

I want to see a lot of these ideas and stuff, um kind of just crimp them from like all over the place, and in some cases they are a bit less I would say viable and others. But I do find like the work of for example, Low Tech Magazine, dot com and UM and so on to be very inspiring in terms of all abilities, UM, what potential there is, an obsolete technologies, what the tech solutions exist for issues, and what we can do as people to just kind of make living in urban sprawl or suburban hell a

little bit less hellish. Yeah. That is definitely a topic close to my heart as well as someone who lives in a city. I would like cities to be less hellish. Yeah, that seems and I would like suburbs and not exist so internal more on the suburbs. We have to ally

with rural America and protracted people against the suburbs. Yes, yes, yeah, my my my crank proposal has always been reintroducing Macedons and just like just having Macedon is just like walking through and destroying buildings, because that's that's what the suburbs deserves. Masters is in the actual animals. Yes, yes, I thought you meant like the social media platform. No, no, I think we need to clone leopards so that they breed as quickly as rabbits and just let them loose. Wasn't

Dr diferen Schmitz raised by leopards? Sure? Why not? I would Robertino, who doctor difference verches. No, let's just let's just let's just let's just let's just move on. Okay. I think I'm I think I think we are. We are roughly the same, in the same age bracket for television. We watched so i'm movies to catch up on. I'm very familiar with the Good Doctor period, the platypus pilled. Yes, I am very, very very platipilled, as they say, platipilled.

Let's right. So, um, there are a lot of aspects of my evil plan to make the entire tri state area more sustainable, But I think I would want to start with something that tends to consume a lot of the energy in cities, and that is like heating and cooling. I mean, for me, living in a tropical country, heating has never been a consideration. Um. I mean, the coolst it gets isn't like the I would say, like eighteen

nineteen twenty degrees celsius area. Um, And to me, that is like chili, that's like layering up kind of thing because I can't handle that kind of cool um, which is kind of wild to me that I have a considered moving to Canada. I don't think I'll be able to handle it. It does, it does get it does get much colder. I mean we when I was in Canada, we would have not not uncommonly have minus forty celsius weeks. So yeah, yeah, experienced minus degrees before. I don't know, no, no,

it is. Oh, it's fine, it's it's not a big deal. You just put on an extra pair of socks. You're good to go. Okay, So when when it when it hits negative forty degrees fahrenheit, you've experienced negative forty degrees. It's not like it's not like temperatures like negative negative forty. Negative forty fahrenheit is the temperature of the surface of bars are a sunny day. Well, actually, negative fairness is the same as negative forty celsius. Oh is it they

actually converged that point. Yeah, it's like you just yeah, yeah, it's just her hain like it's not even cold anymore, Like you just like your your face just hurts. It's it's great, it's so many time I'm to call my my my favorite name again and have negative forty fahrenheit, negative forty selfius celsius clapping hands in the middle. Yeah, classics anyway, Yes, yea, Honestly, I can't even conceive of that kind of temperature. Um. I am an island boy,

so that's how I operate, and as an island boy. Um, how to say that? Like heat is very very uncomfortable. Humidic humid heat is even more uncomfortable. Dry heat is also extremely uncomfortable. When you have a hot day combined with like sahara and dust in the air and no

clouds in the sky, it is truly, truly miserable. I can't imagine, um, what life in a city would be like if, um, you know, these sort of temperatures continue to climb as they are climbing, Um, as we're seeing you know, global average temperatures rising by you know, a half degree or a degree or two degrees cells. Yes, that's just ridiculous, let alone three or four degrees celsius increase, especially compounded with the fact that in a city there's

this thing called the urban heat island effect. So cities are ten degrees it's hotter than the surrounding countryside, and the reasons for the other numerous. You know, you have like vehicles emitting heat constantly, you have air conditioners pumping heat into the air. You have concrete and covering every surface just like absorbing and radiating the sun's rays. And you have these urban canyons between tall buildings that prevent heat from escaping from and to keep it at the

sort of street level. It's miserable, right, And the typical solutions, the individual solutions, the short term solutions, they just make the situation worse because, I mean, when you're feeling hot, I mean I was just feeling hot just now and I fell on the e C. Right when you're feeling hot, you know, you're seeing on the e C. Or you put on a fan, but not to wash a fan, But the a C continues and fuels this vicious cycle of heating the outdoors to cool the indoors, making experience

spaces even more uncomfortable. So you end up with air conditioning use accounting for like one five of global energy electricity usage of building related global electricity usage, and you end up with the thing that'supposed to be cooling us heating things even more because you know, as developing countries, you know they have access to one and more air conditioning, especially and you know, to helping countries and to be

in the hotter side of the world. Um, you know, the use of their condition just continues to sky rop it and um the International Energy Agency actually estimated that it would take the amount of energy needed to cool buildings will triple by twenty which is equivalent to the

current elecacy demand in the US and Germany combined. So on top of all that, you will have an issue of like heat and heat deaths, right, the deaths and injuries caused by heat, I mean heat stroke is becoming more and more of an issue in cities, especially when

you know temperatures reach above twenty five degrees celsius. People you know, manual labels, people who work outside, people who have to move around a lot, you know, experience the symptoms the symptoms of heat stroke whenever there is like

the spike in temperature. Right, and then even you know, if you don't experience like a heat stroke, Heat is exhausting, It is energy draining, is utterly sapping, and it requires a lot out of your body to keep you cool and prevent you from like eating and surprisingly this overheating is you is not just like you know, a tropical issue or like a hot country issue like places like Moscow had like and asked me to eleven th people die due to heat wave in twenty ten, and so

with all these heat waves and stuff, we need to like figure out what to do with all these giant concrete buildings. I mean, and for some people like equal brutalism is you know, wow, so cool to me personally, And this is just my subjective opinion. I find it ugly and disgusting and I hated but you know, right brutalism discourse. I mean, what what do you all think of rutalism. I think Yugoslavia brutalism was cool. Every other kind of brutalism is just like my opinions on brutalism

boiled down to thinking the game control is fun. I had stayed in a Yugoslavian brutalist architecture hotel, which was one of the weirdest nights of my life because it was clearly made. It was like one of these gigantic like people's hotels that was meant to provide everyone with vacations and so there's like twenty thousand rooms and we were like the only three people there, so there was one person at the desk and it's just cavern of empty rooms such this. Everything felt like a liminal space.

It was. It was very odd. It can it could be very very uncanny. It wasn't like bad, it was like reasonably well constructed. It was just deeply strange. I mean that's to spend the night. I think that's what makes the game control so cool? Is that. Yeah, it plays with those uncanny feelings on Brutalism while still being like very cool, Like it's still it's the game that Jacob Keller made a video voute right, yes he made a he he didn't make a video like I watched

that recently. This is like the sort of oldest house kind of thing, right right, right right, yeah, yeah, I wanted to go that game because I mean that's what that's kind of like my issue at Brutalism. It feels like a boss level in a video game, like you have to go through each level clear what's all dominians,

and it gets it Tot and Pete the boss. It's kind of unsettling, yes, and then like Eco brutalism is just like, oh what if trees tres Yeah, and it's like okay, will But I mean, like one of my many occupations, and I still maintain it seasonally. Um. I was a power washer and I hate moss, and so to see moss all over buildings just really bothers me. Like I just want to get you know, my spring

gun and just clear it all off. Um. And especially in like this climate, mass is like a very significant issue. So that that makes sense, you know, Yeah, one of my pet peeves among many. So I mean there's many different ways we could combat the when heat island effects um that don't involve eco brutalism. And they can also help to facility, you know, creating more attractive spaces to

live and to play, you know. Um. Obviously the solution isn't just like build those every building there ever been built and make it more sustainable, you know, with vernacular materials and stuff. So of course new buildings should be built with principles in mind. Um, but you know, it's not practical to us even sustainable to destroy all the

buildings we've already built and rebuild them. You know, the best thing we can do is try to mitigate and adapt with what we already have, um, greenery and I know it's just roasting eco brutalism just trap slack trees and everything is an important part in that, right because you know it called it causes evapple transporation, which is like where water evaporates and plants leaves and cools the temperature. Um.

You know it also improve people's like psychological well being. Um. And they just the nice look at um, the nice look at the keep things cool. In fact, they can help cause temperatures to drop by like two to three

degrees celsius in the like the surrounding area. I think people certainly misinterpreted, but like this, this is one of the big things you can see with with racism in the U S. Where like you can literally like you can literally track racial divides in a lot of American cities by the by the temperature because like people places where not why people live just don't have trees. And you know this this has like a just this sort of like cascading series of environmental and social effects which

are a disaster and environmental racism, Yeah, yes, released stock. Honestly, if you look at the heat maps or some of these it's use and you could literally see, you know, where poor black folks live. You know, you can see the places with less trees, the places next to factories with like talks like you're on off and weese and that kind of thing. It's just you know, right there,

and it sucks. Which is why, of course, parts of any sort of efforts to improve cities and make things more sustainable would involve you know, social justice, and would involve responding to an addressing the compounding effects of like

environmental racism over the past several decades so. And part of the issue again sign things back to environmental racism is that a lot of the climate change policies that you know, ostensibly amends to fever, like high density urban and smart growth, you know, like sustainable blocks and that kind of thing. They are not conceived or implemented in a way that involves the people being affected by them.

You know. In fact, a lot of these like sort of green um projects raise the cost of food, energy, what transport housing for people in the area. You know, they create these sorts of like gentrified neighborhoods, essentially whether

original inhabitants can no longer afford to live there. So if we wants to develop like a sustainable city, resiliencity, sustainable oversilain neighborhood, it requires social justice, It requires you know, equity and you know, like the involvement of all affected through you know consensus or democracy UM to just really shape the future that you know they will be experiencing because they're the ones being affected by it. There are a lot of other ways as well to heap proof

a city. UM reflective roofs and roads. UM can also helped reduce the absorbedtive powers of UM solar radiation by concrete and asphalt. So in fact, in some cities like l A and in New York, there's this wide reflective coating that UM has been implemented in some five thousand meters square of roof space that saves an estimated two thousand two tons of CEO two per year from cooling emissions. I mean, all it takes really is just like that sort of white reflective coat, and it saves dividends in

the long run. UM NASA had done some research on this and it demonstrated the results demonstrated that a white roof could be twenty three degrees celsius or forty two degrees fahrenheit ruler than a typical black roof UM on a hot New York somebody UM and places where like yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, it's kind of like gloss the river that

is crazy. That is absolutely absolutely right. And then in cities where like we're like of the land area is like asphalt, you can imagine how that sort of UM, that sort of reflective ceilan can impact, um the cooling or the heating of the area. Water. Of course, it's another like important aspect of cooling cities. UM. In andaluse Um, which was like the Muslim kingdom in Gabrian Peninsula in the fourteenth century UM, they used to have these sort

of like courtyards with pools and fountains. They would stimulate water evaporation and cool the air, and so like cities today, you know take some hints from that. You know, you have ponds and pools and fountains and missing systems and

stuff that can sort of chill things out. I mean we see that being UM implemented in China, where you have like, for example, UM water miss does at like bus stops which can chill the air and you know, cool passengers as they wait um, and they found actually that adding water features and like cool coatings reduces the cooling requirements of an area by twenty nine and also lowers the overall averaging at temperature by one point five

degrees celsius. So it's like, honestly, why, how like these little things can have such a major impact on temperature. Speaking of like old methods of cooling um ancient methods of cooling, there's this Middle Eastern shading device called the mastra bil um or I think it's mastra ba, and it's basically an architectural element that is usually built by um wooden lattice work and sometimes stay in the glass. It's used to like catch and cool the wind through

like having these basins of water in them. Is I mean, so I could try to describe it. It's like a window jutting out of a building um with sort of decorated by lattice work, with jars and basins of water placed within them to let the wind pasture. And as the wind is passing through, it's caused an evaporative cooling then it chills out the interior. And to these mastra

beas um. They've been used since the Middle Ages by you know, the Coptic churches of Egypt and the Art Deco movement in Iraq, and and by you know, the architecture um in bad Dad as well. And so these sort of construction methods, while they tend to be developed for you know, individual homes or individual buildings, um, they can in fact be implemented um with even the aesthetics of Islamic geometry to help to cool a building and

produce its overall seor twe missions. So I've been talking about heating and cooling and stuff for a while now, and speaking of I should probably turn on me easy, turn off my a C. Rather, I think I heard either either it was you, Andrew, or maybe it was Robert talking about the ceramic kind of cooling idea. Yeah, I mean that's the thing. And like the parts of the Americans Southwest, like New Mexico, there's a lot of like swamp coolers that are basically worked, right, Yeah, swamp cool,

swamp cool. It only works in certain climates, right, Like you wouldn't really don't because it's if it's too it's too humid, it's not gonna work. You're just gonna Yeah. I think there's kind of a broader thing there architecturally, which is that like we have a lot of sort of like like we we've we've lost a lot of in the way we do architecturally. We've lost a lot of the sort of like building we we've lost a lot of sort of building techniques adapted to specific locations.

Yeah if not, yeah, yeah, And like that's something that has to be reversed, like immediately. Guess yeah, Like our our current model of building houses out of oil is going to get us all killed. Really, what's what's the problem there? What's wrong? What's on that? I mean on top of that, right, not just vernacular architecture, but vernacular clothing.

I mean it's I mean as again, so when living in a tropical country, I see it for myself, like working people going to work wearing like full long sleeve dress shoots and long long dress pants and you know, like formal shoes, and it's honestly up, you know sometimes like they have the whole tie like you know, pull up and everything. It's not it's entirely based on like European standards of professionalism, and um, it needs to be abolish.

Abolish dress goods, all right, abolished like this whole idea that you know, we have to rest this particular way, um, despite you know, the temperature, because it's more professional or whatever for professionalism. Honestly, yeah, we we have we have podcasting or in the vanguard of this, but we need to help to destroy professionalism once and for all. Yeah yeah, ye show up to where can you be then suit

h um. But yeah, like vernacular buildings as well. You know, obviously you had in in Africa, in different parts of Africa, you would have difference structures that were particularly ticults. You know, if you're in a in a tropical reinforcet environment, you would have a bill in a steeler to you know, keeping mosquitoes out and maintaining a certain temperature within and maintaining comfort as well within or you know, in cooler regions you would have um, certain construction that would keep

heats within the building and prevent um excessive discomfort you know. Um. And they were also of course, like when it comes to like cooler areas, you will also expected to sort of keep yourself warm as well as you know, keep your building woman. In fact, it was more so keeping yourself personally warm, so keeping yourself lay up even when you're indoors, and of course that's kind of lost today people are expected to just you know, turn on the heater and vibe for the months of winter. But it

isn't sustainable. A lot of things we enjoy today unsustainable. Keeps coming back to that. But yeah, speaking of things that we enjoy that are not at all sustainable, how about cause get rid of cause? Please get rid of cause. I mean, cause are very convenient in terms of like, if you want to get somewhere very specific, um, you know, if there's a place you want to go, I'm the one you need to know. I'm a car. I'm a car. I'm a car. You know kind of thing. But my

little musical interview there, thank you for appreciating it. But ultimately, like they honestly aren't sustainable. They honestly on something that we can maintain in the nail even for well potentially in the neighbuance. Where's the far future. I mean, people are already know the problems with gascars, already know my gascars are bad. But you know, things just just things are just sort of pivoted towards electric cars and who electric cars, Let's get a bunch of electric cars. Who

but electric cars aren't better. I mean the materials they require, the energy they required, it's quite frankly not sustainable in the long run, and it just lengthens the amount of time that we spend dependence on a cause for short and long distance travel. And especially how in the States we've built our cities around the idea of a car,

which has expanded the urban terrain unnecessarily. And if you look at like all the space taken up by like highways and overpasses, and how much of just like urban space is taken up but just been built around the idea of the car, it really kind of makes the whole idea of a city so much less useful. It's

it's really it's really frustrating. And I think it's also working at the cars are so unbelievably dangerous yea, yeah, yeah, we're very much used to like having these like death machines driving around at all times, and that that makes for like a very um cool like series of metal band song names or whatever. But the death statistics on

funny when it comes to cause. No, and like the average transport transportation time having cars has not actually decreased like the amount of time it takes to get from place to place based on like where you live in your city has not actually increased because now everything has just spread further apart. So a hundred years ago would take you know, like a fifteen minute trek to get

to like, you know, the market or something. It can take oft times longer, especially if you're driving in like rush hour traffic to get just just just like a couple of miles, where even in some cases a decent job get you there faster. Um, just because of how we've just designed the cities all around these rolling metal death cages. Um. Yeah, it's not it's it's not great.

It's one of the reasons I don't currently have a car. Yeah, And that's kind of that's something that's shocking to a lot of people when I tell them that, really, I have no intention if I a buying a call of ever owning a call. It's not something that I want.

And I mean I live relatively close to like some of the major transport um arteries of the country, and you know, not has like this unique ish transportation system public transportation systems, So we have these privately owned maxi taxis that um, they're like vans with seats in the back UM, and you know, you could you just kind of jump in UM depending on where they're going with Ruth. They're taken UM and they're they're convenient enough for me and for my purposes, so I just, you know, I go,

I need to go um with them. But they're also gas guzzling in efficient machines. I mean, they're better than you know, all those people driving cars. I mean as an island, you know, like I don't know why we're so obsessed with having more and more cars on the road, UM, but at the end of the day, they still aren't the best in terms of sustainability and in terms of viable, reliable, sustainable transport. UM. We also have like personal taxis as well,

but they have the same problems as regular taxis. And what's frustrating is that we used to have a train line UM that went along the entire east west corridor of the country, and that's where most of the people internet along the East West corridor UM. But that was destroyed in the nineties sixties, I think, to make way for highways and a priority bus route. So instead of having a nice, convenient, cute, little train that we could

take to go from place to place. You have to rely on busses and maxis and taxis and cause, yeah, that is quite that's not cool, that is quite not good, quite quite him, because we need to reconfigure. Seriously, I would love for them to bring back trains. He was to take a train, don't have to rely on I mean, government bureaucracy makes all things unreliable. But I think a train would have been slightly more reliable than a bus.

Very much on the pro train, on the on the pro train train a fewer, a few fewer, fewer moments more happy than writing the Portland's max line and streetcar in a no face costume. It's very it's it's very fun. I think. Also, like another thing about about cars, right, this is just it's just just on a very pure political level, like cars is the thing that allowed suburbs to exist, and the existence of suburbs has produced just generation upon generation of like frothing reactionaries who are the

source of like enormous percentages of the world's problems. And so if you get rid of those places, you produce less of them. Yeah, which is just a political benefit for anyone who wants to not die exactly exactly. I mean, we don't think about it because there already so many things to think about. But if you actually sat down and pondered the death tool of like cause, um we really and really brought to the forefront and really made

it less of a necessity. I think one more people would be open to the idea of rejecting cause to keeping them as at most benign a novelty um that maybe one or two exists in the entire community, UM for use if needs be UM, But otherwise I I don't see how each and every person in the world owning their own car, is that all the best way to go. Also cause it kind of ugly to me. Yeah, we really didn't design them to look cool, which just it's I mean, there's some cars that look kind of cool,

like some of the more classic ones. But and that's part of the issue, right, They're getting uglier to me, And they're also getting larger, you know, like people like they're raising their grills more and more so, like you basically a pedestrian killing machine. We've effectively undone most of the benefits of making cars safer for passengers by making them much more dangerous for pedestrians, which is entirely a

marketing choice. Like, if you like the fucking trucks they were making twenty five years ago are just as useful um and in a lot of cases more useful for like practical far more for hauling and whatnot, then the trucks they're making today they haven't meaningfully gotten better. They've just gotten a lot larger for no real reason other

than it makes people feel like big men. Well, and then you get these fun you get these fun you can you can look at the marketing people like explicitly talking about how like yeah, like they like basically explicitly playing into the fantasy of running over protesters and it's it's great, it's yeah, So get rid of cars and you won't have to deal with that. But Chris, how is that sustainable well viable? M hmm, good question. Introducing

super blocks. Oh yes, superblocks are basically um neighborhoods of nine blocks, So I don't think they have to be I think the philosophy and ideas behind super blocks can implemented suit different um cities of different histories and different layouts, especially localized especially like localized street cars within each city

block within within each superblock like system exactly. So, just to clarify, the idea of super blocks are basically um, you know, neighborhood of nine blocks where traffic is restricted to the roads on the outside of the block, which means that the interior of these super blocks are entirely walkable. That, combined with the idea of a superblock being um mixed use, means that people are mostly able to access their basic

necessities within their city block. Are you able to like spend more time, have more open space, to spend more time to meet with people, to talk, to do do activities, to you know, have some relief from noise pollution and air pollution from vehicles, and to really like connects people with the space they're living in and make the space

they're living in more livable. I mean, I don't live smack tab in the middle of like urban urban town, but I could imagine if people living in like New York or whatever, and you can't exactly step out of your apartment and playing the road on a typically if you have kids or whatever, you know, they can't exactly just go run outside, um you will die exactly exactly exactly, And I mean people complain about like, oh kids, lease

do some quo outside as much. But I mean, look at outside, you know, look at what look at what has been created, um and reflect on that. I mean part of the assuer is um the way social media algorithms are designed to suck people into like cycles of addiction. But that's a whole another topic, right, Um, I think a lot of people, more people will be willing to be able to pull themselves out to that sort of harmful algorithmic. Hell, if there was an outside pull themselves

out too, you know. But honestly, cities, especially a notorious for like not having places you can be where you don't have to spend money, and that sucks. So I think, um, super blocks being places where you know, libraries and um place so people can eats community. It does seem to be missing or ignoring what we're going to lose with super blocks, which is how how am I gonna roll down the streets smoking indow sipping on gin and juice if I'm not allowed to drive within my block? Wow,

I think we can. I think I've then you could just get a bike who's cruising all the bicycle? Have you tried smoking indow? Sipping on gin and juice while riding a bicycle. It's it's impossible get a couple holder

anything as possible as a Snoop dogg eraser. No. But the the idea of having like community gardens, community like kitchens, like a maker spaces, libraries, all these within like this super black framework, you know, like green spaces, it does make actual urban city living to seem attractive and not like you're just living in nested concrete boxes. Yeah. I mean people like living cities because that's where everything's happening, right, But yeah, you you want people to take part in

the things that are happening, but the places aren't livable. Yeah, you have the table that will continue to complain about until the end of time, which the table in Chicago Chinatown that threatens to arrest you for sitting at it.

Like it's yeah, like the hostility tea of this goes back to like racism because of course everyone does, everything does, but you know a lot of these loitering laws and stuff whichly designed to target black people and to target you know, poor people, um like vagrancy laws and that sort of thing just hostile people's existence. And that gets

into like hostile architecture and that sort of thing. But I think with these super blocks, you know, we open up our spaces to make them welcoming to human existence, spaces that are not built around cars, built around commutes, built around week And this obviously is a transformation that requires more than just you know, vote for so and so and make this a degree and kind of thing.

You need. You need something more substantial than that. You know, within these superblocks as well, you're you're able to take stock of how your block or whatever, you have a better mental sense of um community and able to take about a sense of even things like how your block can communally sustain themselves and you know, reduce waste and all these different things. This in conjunction with struggle against capitalism in the state, but you know that is implied.

This is you know, m this is the show. This is it could happen here. I don't know if you expect and like electoralism, but that's not really what we do around here. I mean the benefits to these sort of like super blocks, you know, these fifteen minutes soon so people can walk within fifteen minutes to get the essentials.

The benefits are innumerable. You know that'ster airquality, less noise, healthy lifestyle, mental health boost But the issue is without a combination of you know, these projects and these activities with like anti capitalism and anti statism, it's it's tends to lend itself towards gentrification. And we've seen that in Spain, which is where UM some of these super blocks have

been implemented. UM They've created like these locations that are obviously more desirable because who doesn't want to live in a superblock where you know, you actually have a sense of community because we're all desperate for that. UM and at least an increase in property demand, higher prices, higher rent it basically creates these pockets of unaffordable neighborhoods, displacing

local residents. So you have to get into the fight against gentrification in order to make this, you know, idea viable. The last thing that I want to get into really is, as con mentioned UM community gardens. I want to talk about urban farming because that is crucial. I mean, part of what UM makes cities cities in all the cases is the fact that they import all their food. Right, they have the urban rural divide that you know, delineates

the two areas, UM. But considering the transportation costs, the energy costs, all those things that compound UM two sustain a city, a city's food needs, we have to look to ways that we can sustain cities and sustain neighborhoods within cities, UM, within themselves. Before I continue, I just want to point out that the future of urban farming

is not in vertical farms. UM. They look very cool, you know, like those tall kind of like pillars of like letters or whatever, growing out sort of things, but the land that they save is usually canceled out by the land they need to produce the energy to power them, like,

they're very energy intensive UM spaces. So until that issue is resolved, and I don't know if it will be considering you know how the energy requirements is just sort of built into the vertical the concentration of energy requirements built in sort of into the vertical farming design, UM, we have to look to more practical methods. Landownership tends to be a major hurdle UM when it comes to

organizing community gardens and maintaining community gardens UM. I mean, like folks like Black Futures Farm, Oakland Avenue, urban Farm and the Victory Garden Initiative. They've been working to like provide fresh producers ito was in need, especially in urban food desert. But in a lot of these projects, they go in good for some years and then the city suddenly spins around It's like we need this land for development, so they just snatch it up, and you know, those

years of efforts just basically put on the dream. Um Community land trusts have been put forward as a potential um solution to that issue. But like a lot of these things, I mean, it's a good band aid, I would say, but it's not necessarily marking the end of capitalism. Another issue that there is with the whole urban farming thing is that um the culture that develops around them while they provide education and community and connection for people

within them, and that is extremely valuable. I think some organizers fall into this habit of treating of creating this sort of like shared delusion around community gardens, you know, claiming to be sort of feeding the people couldn't could And what really brought this to my attention was Inhabits

Territories newsletter. We had an article on it the last year I think, on you know, urban community Gardens, and it was written by Gibriel I've seen, the co founder of at Plant, which I find to be a very very creative name, basically asked the question are we really feeding ourselves? I mean, these local food initiatives, they do produce food that people eat, but it can be a bit harmful to be overly optimistic about our food autonomy at this stage, especially considering how irons we still are

on big agriculture. You know, like, yes, we are producing you know, organic nutritionally this dense crops and stuff, and that's great, that's helping people, but you know, oftentimes it usually just means that, you know, the people might be getting participants and be getting like a salad or you know,

a couple. To me too, is it's not necessarily they're cutting down their grocery build in a sustainable long term way, because I mean, if you've tried God, then you know that, like when you work here with a limited space, you know, you grow your foot set of To me too, is it means it was a cool, but they don't last forever, you know, and you have to wait until the next harvest to get more. To me too, it or whatever the case may be, same for like letters or whatever.

It's kind of rough, you know, it doesn't It helps for like a meal or maybe two depending on like living situation, but it doesn't meaningfully cut into our reliance and groceries and you know, food inputs. Yeah, it definitely takes a bit to get to that point, and you have to do it with a combination of like food preservation and like canning um, and like you know, like jarring and a whole bunch of other stuff to actually make that a worthwhile endeavor as opposed to just making

like great, I spent three months making these tomatoes. Now they're ready for one meal and then they're all gone. Yeah. Yeah, you do have to really kind of figure out how to grow enough to keep enough ready to be harvested for jarring and canning for future use um, and make sure like you're you know, harvesting them when they are ready so that you can you know, you don't lose stuff and that you have like you know, an ongoing, ongoing process of like preserving the fit that you do

grow for later um as well. So you can definitely take a lot a lot more like until effort and planning then just you know, planting it and then you know, using it and cooking it when it's when it's all ready. Yeah, I mean a lot of energy and self is put into growing things like greens and roots and fruit and vegetables. And they're healthy, you know, they have the vitamins and micronutrients. But you know, people still need meat, dairy, eggs, you

know protein. Yeah, heavy, high calorie dense stuff, you know, like potatoes and other starches, like a really holy boloof wheats and that kind of thing, and that just isn't being growing right now. You know, wheat and rice and soy and nuts and corn and sugar. These staples and stuff don't tend to be produced by these community gardens and by these garden plots. Not many many, not many legume patches at your local community garden. Yeah yeah, yeah,

yeah yeah. Like I'm I'm in the process of grin um some pigeon peas right now, and they are taking a very long while. And what I realize is that, um, I mean, I just plan to them, so I'm being a bit impatient. But what I realized is that when they do growth, and I've seen you know, some much your pigeon pea trees and stuff. I know how big they tend to grow right time harvest rules around. You know, you get all those different pots and you you know,

you put in the work. You put you pick all the pods and you m pry open the pods, and you know, you put in some more alliteration into the sentence. And you know you get those peas out. Once those peas out to the pod and you put them in a pot, they're not potent enough to whould you over

for more than one meal. You know, like you pick like a trees worth of peas in a pod, and you know that's like sometimes like half of I'm you and really honestly respect to the people who are producing all our food right now, because I can't imagine having to be shelling peas all the time. It's kind of ridiculous. I mean it can be fun, but I can't imagine doing it all day. I mean, workers work, right, it's gonna yeah, work as hell, we know this. But yeah,

So I mean community gardens they're good. You know, they have you know, education, they build community, they provide outdoor activity and stuff. But you know, I think what community gardens, urban gardens and stuff need to do is find ways to um and this this isn't a disparate The work has been done, you know, like massive support. I'm doing that myself kind of thing. But we've got to, like, as the article argues, we can't get caught up in

the fluffing up of the reality for marketing purposes. You know, we need to look for ways that can actually um feed ourselves. I means getting into caloric foods that means um like like dried beans, potatoes, fruit, trees, I kind of think grains, nuts, all that jazz. And also connecting with farms outside of the city, you know, local farms outside of the immediate urban landscape. Seeing what cooperatives can be developed that can work aid each other mutually to

build more potent capacity for food. What's on me? So, I mean, get in touch with the soil, you know, get this sign your face, but also think about what more we can to sort of take this to the next level. And ya, that is um that is what I believe could in fact happen here. This has happened here. Good. Yeah, it's nice to have a positive one of these. Yeah,

we should do that more often. If if only we had the power, well come back tomorrow when we'll be talking about another bad thing and then abandoning you to deal with your thoughts about it. Wow, we we try, we try, we do try. This is us trying well, this is us having st Andrew try. You're welcome, Thank you, thank you very much. This is a topic I wanted to discuss for a long time. In terms of use.

We get a lot of people talking about like, yeah, how you know and whatever, like post collapse fantasy that you can imagine where we're able to kind of reconfigure society. How would you plan urban living? And you're like, well, yeah, there's there's a lot of actually really cool ideas for like keeping people close together can be a very ecological idea if you do it certain ways. It's just a lot of the ways you've defaulted to over the past. Like really three years has made it not that with

the invention of the car really really screwing us over. Um. So yeah, thank you so much for talking about urban living and super super blocks and all this kind of stuff. Where can where can people find more of your work and writing on the interwebs. You can find me on YouTube at st Andreism, and you can find you on Twitter, which hopefully when you hear this, I am still not

on at under school seeing fantastic. Um, yeah you uh st Andrew just put together a really great episode about anti work stuff and the way that tobaccles has has happened and what we can learn from it and that kind of thing. Um and while you should still actually care about anti work um and yeah, so would definitely recommend the anti work video for recent recent recent stuff. Let's see. Um, if you want to feed your brain into the addiction driven social media algorithm, you can follow

us on Twitter and Instagram. It happened here pod and cools on media and uh yeah, let's uh go think about go think about microspaces and community gardens. That seems like a good a good way to dedicate your thought time and roll down the street smoking indow sipping that gin and juice while you still can on a bike. I am pluly sally used doing my moral judgments upon

you before before the fascist anarchists take away your fees. Yeah. Look, if if if we can democratize military grade weaponry the way the Ukrainians have, we can we can we can form neighborhoods that cannot be forced to live in the traffic the auto industrial complex really reduced fripless air travel. What otherwise will end up in a mad max wield

and I mean wants that right, well aspects of it. Yeah, alright, see everybody, Hey there, it's lee In Rhymes and I am so excited to share the third season of my Holy Human podcast with you. This season, we're creating a deeper connection to ourselves and each other with greater understanding, intention and joy. Join me as I sit down with some of the most inspiring and enlightening experts in the fields of self awareness and healing. As we make sense

of this crazy, wild and sacred existence we all share. Together, we'll sort through all of life's bits and pieces to explore our whole selves. Season three of Holy Human with Leanne Rhymes launches March one. Listen and follow on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sir, we got your test results back and give it to me straight Talk. You have to listen to the podcast Ridiculous News. Ridiculous News. The podcast Ridiculous News.

It's a podcast hosted by Bill Whorley and Mark Kendall. Ridiculous News. Thre's two comedians based out of Atlanta, Georgia. So you've heard of them, you know, I always knew you were my favorite patients. We have the best doctor I've ever had. And yeah, they're hilarious. I love their videos. Bill is actually my cousin. They talk about the news, but not like in a depressing way, you know what I mean. Like they did an episode about April fool. It's great. You get it, so you need to listen

to it. Where do I find it? You get it wherever you find podcasts, like in a cereal box. Well no, I mean that's not where you find a podcast, so like in the middle of a tree. No, do you know what a podcast is? Yeah, it's like like a shoebox size. No, no, got it. All is something that you listen to listen to ridiculous news on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The produce I absolutely not from Cavalry Audio, the studio that brought you The Devil Within and The Shadow Goes comes a new true crime podcast, The Pink Moon Murders. The local sheriff believes there may be more than one killery to It's been four days since those bodies were found and there's no arrest as it this morning. They were afraid it's face it out in that area, what if they come back or whatever. It scared me to death, Like it scared me, I was very very intimidating to

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get your podcasts podcast, thank you. That is it is. It's true. It's true. Actually it could happen here. Listening to the podcast is more or less the truth we have. We have Dreg Robert out of bed at before the crack of dawg at a legend forty two am. Um, and we're gonna talk about actually something very fun. I'm I've been I've been wanting to talk about this for a long time because this is one of actually one

of my favorite things. Um yeah, yeah, So I'm gonna I'm gonna tell a bit of a bit of a little story regarding one of my act all time favorite events and topics. So back in like there was this a cheesy little online university science show made by the

Rochester Institute of Technology called Can You Imagine UM. The the idea was to highlight some of the cool and weird things at the university UM in part to promote the Imagine r i T Festival, which was like the schools annual like innovation and creativity festivals think that they

put on. So yeah, today I want to talk specifically about episode three of the web series because the contents of which overlap with some of my like artistic interests UM and like just my love of illusions and paradox and I will kind of tie into some topics we other we always discussed on the show. So yeah, Episode three one of probably probably the most interesting episode UM.

Episode three opens with the hosts Kevin and Steph as they like stand awkwardly in a gloriously dated you like university film set like it's it's it's only twenties, it's only twenty thirteen. But it was like obviously like made in the nineties, like like like like the set's like it's all it's it's all very dated. What specifically are you referred? Oh, like they're they're like they're just like weird, like like weird, like like dated science stuff on the walls.

All the hosts of wearing like dorky orange T shirts like like over to over top the regular clothes. They yeah, yeah, it's it's it's all. It's all that kind of it's all that kind of stuff. So like dorkey orange T shirts with the letters r I T for the Roger CRUs Sister Institute of Technology. Um. Of course, because everything in this online video series is perfect, Kevin is wearing his shirt over top of like a button down. It's

it's it's it's great. Um. The first fifty seconds of the video are taken up with like plugging the upcoming of r a t Imagine Festival with a with a co host Steph beautifully stumbling over her lines when she says the events catchphrase, it's where the left brain and the right brain collide. And it's great, it's it's it's

it's it's it's perfect. So after all the plugs and the vamping, the hosts get down to the fun engineering feat and they'll be showing us today, which is a neat little architectural experiment a part of the r I T campus called the a Sharing and Stairwell UM, of course, named after the impossible staircases depicted in Dutch artist m c eshers artwork. So the video cuts two from the little like sound stage they're filming in to this boring, white,

seemingly typical stairwell. Our host Kevin ascending a flight of the gray concrete stairs UM explains that what located in Building seven of the campus. The stairwell was designed by Filipino architect Raphael Nelson Abegando and was one of the first structures put up when Our I T moved their campus from downtown Rochester to the more suburban Henrietta UM.

When when he's taking when he's reaching the top of the stairs, he turns the quarter and then suddenly seems to appear at the bottom of the lower flight of stairs, leading up to the landing that he just left from, all while continuing to talk about the architect behind this like kind of weird impossible feat um. So, as Kevin walks back up to camera, he says that the stairwell was built in the eight and it's been wowing ur I too students ever since. Um it's it is very cool.

It's like it's like you're like, okay, you get you get the little like like you get a little like architectural trick that they're doing. Um, but it's it is. It is still pretty fun to see. Before episode three of Can You Imagine aired you could, you can already find a few articles on the school's UH website about the issuaring stairwell, along with some like forum posts debating how the architecture in the stairwell works to like achieve

the effect. UM Also floating around on YouTube was like a random segment of what looked like a like a PBS style late nineties documentary about the physics and architecture of the school and specifically the stairwell that interviewed some like professors um and some like architects and like a symphysicist kind of discussing what like how to like bring

paradox into the physical world. Yeah, but but but but around the time that can you imagine episode aired, the now like infamous r RT stairwell was mostly unknown, so it was like, even despite it being very interesting, no one really knew about it until this episode of this

little web series aired. Um. The little episode dedicates around half its time to interviewing students, uh and righteously random people at the university about if they even know about the stareill's existence, um, and if they do, what like experiences they have with like me messing around with like the looping architecture, because yeah, you can you know, you can play a lot of games with this type of

with this type of design. Uh. So the rest of the short video like tries to demonstrate the disorienting ascent down and descent back up via the camera in various ways, like you know, like human chains or holding hands around the weird like vious loop types staircase, then like passing objects back and forth in a circle while inside and

around the enclosed stairwell. Um, there's one where Kevin walks around with a cup to show that the stairs aren't like clearly like heavily slanted, like the water stays pretty pretty level as he walks all the way through, and

like we follow with him the entire time. UM. So yeah, like the overall like nerdy and low fi style of the university video match, like the insane feet of our chitectural illusion is a really fun mixed like it's like it's like it's it's it is very like surreal, but not totally on purpose, because it's just all of these like regular college students showing this like really cool architecture by this really good architect and you're like, oh, yeah, they're just so chill about it. Uh, it is, it is.

It is pretty fun. It's pretty fun. UM. After the third episode of the Imagine r i T video was posted, finally the mind boggling looping staircase of building seven in of our T started to gain a lot of confused appreciation UM, and the dorky University science show went vital. People started traveling from out of state even other countries to see the Asherian stairwell themselves of and film videos

on social media as as they walk through it. This this one video of like people traveling to a different country and they're like harassing like the school staff to try to like tell them where it is, and they're like, oh my god, you're still doing this because it was because like this film was, this video is like like years old, but it's it still happens. People still travel

there to to specifically see it. Um. There is like tense online discussion and debate on how the Filipino architect Raphael Avugando was able to achieve the effect and what kind of other bizarre architectural experiments he may have worked on, because you can find his Facebook page and you can find some stuff about him, but he has not really because like this this steroile was built in the late sixties,

but you haven't. So he even though he has an online presence, he's like he's like he's not like active, so it's unclear like what else he's actually been doing. UM, but I would I would, I would love to learn more about this architect and what else he's done, because this it is it is really rare to have these very small, condensed but like high effort type like type builds and like the the existence of the whole thing.

Posted some really interesting questions around how extremely clever paradoxical design can push the boundary of how we make assumptions about spatial physics UM and how we visually and physically demonstrate things that we usually can only depict in two dimensions, right, Like you can you can easily depict the the issuing in stairwell in two dimensions, but when you're scaling that up to three dimensions, it's obviously more work like like that.

That is that is part of the paradox UM. Plus, you know, it also demonstrates the importance of art and how ideas once thought impossible or merely optical illusions can actually with enough data, can an effort break into our real reality. Uh. If a brilliant architect can manage to build this physically and like logically impossible structure, what other types of things can we actually view as possible? Um?

The video now has like over a million views on its original upload UM, and videos about the R I T stairwell have ranked up as many as like twenty five million views. Yeah it's pretty cool. Yeah. You know what else demonstrates the looping nature of time. Having to listen to all these ads that we do, Ye, we we are we are back. I've I've rounded the corner and we are back where we came from. Um. Because

of the fun paradox of architecture. UM, the one The one other thing I should mention before we continue on this episode is that the entire thing is fake. It's false. No way, not this time. We created it. Not this time, No, not this time. It's totally made. Because of course it's it's a staircase of breaks the basic rules of movement in physics. Kevin walks up the stairs and teleports to the lower stairwell. Belief them this this, that's not that's

that's not an architectural allusion. It's called good video and the thing and a don't be after effects like no, you're you're really gonna believe a video on the internet and some well placed, falsified Internet posts over the very basic rules that governed our universe. But like, oh boy, did it fool millions of people? Um, and if I played my cards right, I hope most of our listeners

until the last few seconds. Um, yeah it is. Uh so the whole the whole thing was a was a student like film and art project around around building a modern myth. Um the it's because it's sure, it's sure. Is interesting how good storytelling can overrule obvious logical processes. The tale of the Assarian Stairwell is one of my favorite case studies and how disinprobation spreads and it's believed while all in defiance of the basic rules of reality, because it's not a matter of what facts are true,

it's about what facts are compelling. And the idea of a logically impossible staircase being built by a brilliant Filipino architect is more interesting than it being someone's weird and disinformation art project. Um. So yeah, like I want to say, like how what what were you guys thinking as I was explaining the Assarian stairwell, Like where did you see this going? Okay? So I had in the back of my head, okay, we we should we should mention this.

Garrison has been hyping up this episode for like I don't even a pretty smif amount of times nothing, and

there's a staircase and I'm like what what? And it was like my my brain, my brain started going because he said and I was like, my like my counterham surgency brain flicked on and I was like wait a second, hold time is this like some kind of like weird Like we've redesigned the college campuses so they stopped people stopped taking the Dean hostage a thing that used to happen constantly and with all my favorite party about this would happen constantly, and you'd get New York Times articles

calling it non violent. Yeah, so yeah it was that was that was. Yeah. I spent more mental energy that I probably should have tried to figure out how it would work. And I was like, I don't know, maybe they just made it. Like if they just made it Acus Razor, it's obviously yeah. I mean I was. I was like I was in the like, okay, so they built the staircase, they built another the viewers cannot see my fingers, and it was like, it's a real staircase.

It doesn't tell it. It was like it was like, but you can't find videos of people traveling to the school to see if it's real. And they try it and they're so disappointed. They're like, oh, yeah, it's no, it's just stairs. It doesn't it doesn't. Yeah, it's disappointed in a lot of ways because it's not even like a thing where like there's like another back staircase that you walk down. Then again it's just it's just nothing.

It's just stairs. I was hoping there was like so actually clever thing is no it's just it's not really, It's just it was that meme where all the math doesn't add up in the person what is happening? I was like, all right, Garrison, you got us here, You

made Robert get up before noon? What is happening? Well, the reason, the real reason I got up before I got Bard up before noon is because I actually, um have scheduled an interview with the creator of the Assarian Stairwell, the actual one be like the online art project and building a Modern Myth idea, um, which we are now going to segue into. So yeah, what what follows is us talking with the creator of the Assarian Stairwell project. Hello, we are we are back from our probably very very

brief break. UM. And with me along with Robert and Chris and Sophie is uh Michael, the creator of the Assharian Stairwell project and the Building the Modern Myths project. Hello, greetings, Thank you so much for joining us to talk about one of my one of my favorite things actually is which is here a little to us to project? Um. Yeah, I've been a fan of this for a long time and found it to be really compelling and interesting. UM and I so I just walked through Robert and Chris

and Sophie what what it what it was? But from the perspective of it being true, for like for the good fifteen minutes I was I was episode was going was going through talking about it as if it were completely real, but curious to hear how you did that it was. It was slightly baffling because again we were told nothing, and then what we got is Garrison is talking about a YouTube video about an architecture thing and

I was like, what here? Yeah, and then and then then talking about how oh yeah, and I guess one more thing is that it's actually fake. Um. And it's

part of this whole, this whole thing. So yeah, I would I would love to talk to you about both like how how you like logistically like made the project, but also like the underlying you during thoughts that like inspired you to do it in the first place, and then like retrospected now almost like ten years later, like how do you view the project as like happening you know, right before like the peak of online disinformation? Um? Right.

So but first of all, I I just think we should probably start started the beginning, like what what was your inspirations for this type of like online like there because it seems it seems it seems built to go viral in a lot of ways. Yes, exactly. So this was around twenty eleven, I guess was when I first got the idea. It was for my master's thesis, my m f A for film at Rochester r I t and UM. The idea actually began from this like deep

anxiety about how to discern fact from fiction. Um. At the time, like I came into film school like really into like realism in films like Romanian New Wave mckel hanaka dar Dan Brothers, Like these are filmmakers who are like they're sort of like the modern day version of Italian nero neo realism, and they're trying to like depict like these um reality as it is. I wanted to like learn how to make those types of films um. So over like with each year, that's what I tried

to get better at. And the more I tried to do that, um well, like a number of things were

happening around that time. Right in class, they showed us these mockumentaries called No Lies, which was made in nineteen seventy three by this guy called Mitchell Black actually won a student Oscar at the time, and uh Delusions in Modern Primitivism two thousand one by this guy named Daniel Laughlin UM and these like I was like floored because I thought they were real, like real documentaries and um and it bothered me, like our teachers still this afterwards

that these were actually scripted works of fiction with like really really good actors, and it like I went into kind of like existential crisis mode afterwards, like how do I even discern what's true from what's not if I got fooled by these things, especially like that's like my concentration, that's what I've been studying for years, and even I was not even able to tell that they were fake, Right, There was that going on, And then there was like

smartphones were becoming a thing, like I just looked it up. Smartphones didn't start out out selling flip phones still, so around this time, like it was becoming a thing where

everyone would have the Internet in their pockets. So I guess there was that anxiety going on trying to think about, um um, how we're starting to function and how we're how I remember when I proposed my thesis to the thesis committee, I I UM one of the things things that I was telling them was, Um, I have this worry about how reliant we are on the internet to determine what's true and what's not. And this is like like my professors found my concerns like really abstract and theoretical,

Like why do you even care? Because this right, like why didn't you about fact and ficture? It wasn't like fake news. That wasn't even a term. It wasn't It didn't become part of the every day lexicon, like you said, until twenty sixteen when Trump started throwing that term around and suddenly we hear about it every day. Um, So

there was that going on. Trayvon Martin was a thing, and for the first time, like nationally, you could see like disinformation like on you know, just like exaggerated versions of different different accounts from like polarizing sides. So all that was going on, and so I I wanted to it was it was this film project was about, um trying to take something that was Are you familiar with with the difference between like a priori knowledge and a

posteriori knowledge? Yeah? Okay, So so so like you know, for for anyone who might be listening that doesn't really know the exact difference. A priori knowledge is the type of knowledge that you can have without needing to make observations or conduct experiments or look at surveys or do any research of any any kind. Is a sort of knowledge you can know just by reasoning it out, but just by sitting in a room by yourself in the dark, you could figure things out. This is the sort This

is a priori knowledge um. So for an example of that is like knowing that all bachelor's are unmarried, right, or all triangles of three sides. That's a priori knowledge. An example of oppos stereori knowledge um is something that you find out through observation or you using one or more of your five senses, right, like Joe Biden is the President of the United States, Um, the masses of Mars is six point four one seven one times ten to thes you actually have to go out into the

world and conduct surveys or do research. So that's oppos theory or knowledge. So the idea was to take something that was a priori false, something that could that could um be disproven by reason alone, like you wouldn't have you wouldn't need to do any research. In order to to know that it was false, you'd simply had to

reflect on it and UM think about it. Uh. So we could have picked anything, right, we could have We could have said made up like a fake news report that leaves mathematicians that m I T having invented like a square with five sides, something like that. You know, Um, I remember that weekend up there and SNL had this sketch. I think it was like, um, forget who it was. It might have been Kevin Nealon or something like that. The report was like scientists and mathematicians have discovered the

new number. The number exists between five and six, and they're calling it the numbers spleen, you know, something like that, which is like just impossible. So um, so come up with something that could be disproven by reason alone and at the same time surrounded with this wealth of online information UM supporting its veracity. So, like you know, it

was kind of a social experiment. So I was like, have we are we so far beyond rational thinking that even something that can be disproven a priori people would believe And it was like we didn't really know the answer to that, but we were going to commit to creating this thing as though it was real and but

which was like logically impossible. So in a way it anticipated the age of like this information absolutely because it wasn't just the thing I kind of alluded to in my little scripted portion is that like, yeah, it wasn't

just the YouTube video. There was also all this extra online content that was created, um, some of which yeah yeah, yeah, Like there was you can find like articles for them, posts, all this kind of stuff like like like if yeah, like so if you could look into it more and find these other things, but it's still contradicts the basic logical processes that we can use to discern what is real what is not, um in terms of like yeah, in terms of like believing in a five seed square,

like no that's not what that that that that's not how like physics and like spatial like spatial dimensions work. Um. So yeah, and then in terms of all the extra material you filmed for it, there was like there was like I think I read around like nine hours of documentary footage. Was also like a lot of footage, but

it was only made into like probably a thirty minute thing. Um. We got our friends like at the very very beginning we got our friends to play along with it, like so whenever you see posts about this, just comment like it's real, Like, yeah, I was there. It was really great, and um, eventually people would actually start visiting the stairwell, like from all over, like from Canada. They crossed the border to get there because it's in upstate New York, right, Um.

And I actually ran into a couple from India who happened to be visiting visiting New York, and they were like, since we're here, we'd like to see this starewell that

sort of thing. Um, I know. I felt really bad for a lot of the visitors, so we actually had to come up with souvenirs so that they wouldn't leave empty handed, right, So we made fake we made postcards like saying I've been to the Share and Starell and stuff like that program and um what happened and the way we explained it, so a lot of people were really mad actually you know, as you can imagine when they got there, but after or um, we would explain

what we were doing to them with the project. Like a lot of them actually like started playing along and thought was really cool, and they went home with their souvenirs and told their friends that they just saw this amazing thing. So, you know, it kind of built that way for a little bit. I mean yeah, because it's it's like telling kids that Santa isn't real exactly, and then some of them will be like play along with like okay, cool, this means I can play along with

the myth to help you other kids happy. And some of them will be like what, oh no, my entire reality is broken. And when you find out, is your trying to like pass it on exactly that. So a lot of that was going on, like Shock the basketball player posted about it. At some point, Joe Rogan talked about it on his podcast. They got kind of crazy. Wait wait did Joe Rogan know it wasn't real? Um, it's funny. You should see the clip of him doing it, because he was like it was him, and who's the

other guy, Bert Kreiser or something. Anyway, they were arguing about whether or not was really. The other guy was like, no, it's real, it's so real. Was like, all you guys are fucking idiots. You're all idiots. Let's google it right now. They google it and they look up an article and Joe Joe Rogan's like Okay, yeah, all right, it's still fucking stupid. The guy who built it is fucking you know.

That is so good. I you have You have no idea how happy you have faked me because I in my in my research, but like like I have like read your thesis. I read all the lots of articles about this. I did not come across the Joe Rogan clip, but I would right right, Um it's like way back right, it's like ten years ago, and it's like a lot

of stuff to dig through and I found it though. Again, um so I'd like to kind of go to like the logistics of like actually doing this in terms of like creating all the fake like web content, but also like you know, dreaming up this like family friendly science show that's made by r I T Like how like you know the thing between like naturalism and realism and making it like playing not trying to replicate reality, but playing as if it were reality, and how those those

are two different things. Um yeah, well, what we wanted to make it as real as possible, and like that's what I was was. I'd been studying anyway, but in like a dramatic context, like making narrative films UM, and the idea was to, um, there's this event at r I t every year which gets a lot of people, like thirty thou people a year. Go to the campus and look at like, um, these uh whatever the students are working on. It's kind of like a mini like

festival type of thing. Well, not many is pretty big, So we we wanted to make a video for that event. UM as though we were promoting the event, Hey, come see the assurance there. Well, when you get your r I t UM and you know you normally for these like for these for these events, if you have a booth or something, you'll see reservations and you'll see like

four people reserve fifteen people. Like we were like started getting nervous, and we found out we got a sense that this was gonna be big because like when I looked at like the reservations for like our non existent stairwell, there were like one thousand plus visitors visited. Um. Yeah. I still remember like going to campus that day at the festival Saturday, and like my friend Ira like comes

up to me. He's like, Mike, people want to kill you, Like cover get over here, And I was like trying to not show my faith, but anyway, yeah, that's what. So what the way, Like a lot of the legs of the project was just like word of mouth, I guess, and we actually ran out of money. Um, we didn't get to do like the web stuff on the scale that we wanted to. But it turned out that we

didn't even have to. In fact, like within a few days or maybe a week or something after the original video came out, I posted a video explaining that it's a myth. Like I posted it and I was like, all right, that was a fun ride. Now I's gonna be over because here's a video of me explaining everything, right, And people still didn't believe it. People were saying that my my video explaining was fake, that was a conspiracy. Like people were, you know, like there so invested the

inside the actual myth of it. Yeah, because it is it is so much for a lot of people, they thought that is more compelling than the idea that it is this like you know, project around what is real what's not. They've got so invested in the reality of it that they'll explain away every other explanation, right right, um exactly, Like my I had a teacher at Rutgers where I did my undergrad to Maudlin. He used to say that, you know, there's two types of thinking. There's

reasoning and there's rationalizing. Reasoning is when when you start from a play so ignorance, and you, um, look at the best evidence and the best arguments you can find and follow that through to the you know, the rational conclusion. Rationalizing is when you start from what you want to believe and working backwards and looking for you confirmations right, looking for the arguments that are already support where you're thaying. There. There was a lot of a lot of rationalizing going on.

I guess people wanted to believe it. Yeah, for for the how much how many people because they assume for all of the filming like like everyone was all like in on it. But yeah, you know, there a whole bunch of great stuff around, like all of like the Men on the Street segments are are are like perfectly done in terms of like people like just acting like regular university students, like talking about the stairwell and like how they've got like lost, and then they're like looping

around in a circle. Um, and all the segments with you with like inside the stairwell with all like the very like the very clever other thing. I assume you're using stuff like Adobe after effects um, and yeah, it's

it is played. It's played so well like it's it's I think part of the part of why it's so successful is that it's not filmed like you would film something too high like like like for a lot of films when they want to do like like you know, like like ah the term is like a wonner where they has like one long shot and then they like hide the transitions in between. You can you can obviously tell like they're filming it to make these transitions work

versus the way you film. This is just how people would film it if they were filming this four reel um and they tell that, and it's it is so carefully done because it's not trying to be something it is.

It is just being the thing so earnestly in terms of like how how the actors like stumble over their lines and the like the opening segment, um, like the aesthetics of like all of like the title cards and everything is just so it has this has this like aura of earnestness, which I think helps sells the whole

project so so much. Yeah. Yeah, actually speaking of the show and like the cheesy title cards and stuff, my girlfriend at the time was a producer for this show called this local show called Homework Cutline and where kids calling with their homework and they answer questions about it.

I studied the ship out of that show, just looking at how they built the sets and how cheesy and how awkward like the hosts were, because a lot of it was like a lot of the realism I think of it is just um, yeah, the awkwardness of the people, how it's not, um, it's not really meant to be and and like like the best the most convincing untruths, right is a combination of fact and fiction and you know a lot of and blending in the actors with real people you know, in in in the in the

actual video stuff like that. It's like, yeah, like it comes goes pretty viral. Um, you like pretty quick create a very easy explanation for no, it's not it's not real. It's started this project. People still believe it for years and years. Um. As kind of the decade progresses and we go into like the era of disinformation, everyone starts getting phones in their pockets. Everyone has Facebook with them wherever they go, everyone has Twitter with them wherever they go.

How is kind of your views on like the ethics of the project and what it demonstrates in terms of like a case study and like a social experiment, Like how has that changed over the years from like you like ten years ago when you're dreaming this up to you now after you know, we've had stuff like you know, like January six and two and on, you know, all these types of things which I feel like if are almost like foreshadowed in this in this weird way by

showing how successful your little project is. Yeah, so a lot of a lot of the criticisms that it was face from the get go, like from R I. T. Professors, even it's still facing right now, Like it's still the type of thing people bring up, which is set actually that hey, there's so much disinformation out there. At the time, we weren't even using those terms disinformation disinformation, right, but

basically people were. We're bringing up the same complaints, which is there's so much disinformation out there, you're basically just adding to it. What what are you even doing? So I guess the idea is that and you know, It's

a very noble idea, which is what's our response to disinformation? Right, we should I guess the idea is we should call out every instance of it when we can flag posts, UM, report posts that violate community community standards, you know, speak out, UM, provide counter evidence when you see fake news that sort of thing, And I think that's great, that's a good thing, UM. But disinformation. The problem of disinformation is at the time.

This is kind of how I explained that, like ten years ago, I I described it as a pen as an epidemic, Yeah, no, absolutely right, or or like a cockroach infestation, like every time you kill one, ten more spring up. And the this this notion of like we gotta call out every instance of disinformation and stomp it away is like it's great, but you're focused on killing cockroaches. Yeah, it's like addressing the symptoms not the actual problem. Right,

I want to get to the cockroach's nest. Right. And whenever whenever I give talks about this UM this project, people always approach me afterwards, you know, like wanting me to kind of because we we don't just talk about this project. We talk about like deep fake stuff, like we show speeches of Obama like looking like the real Obama, but it's like completely fake, right, And people start to realize the holy sh it, like I don't even know what's real or not anymore, Like what can I trust?

And they approach me expecting me to ease their anxiety somehow and kind of like guide them through how to discern what's true from what's not, as though my project was about finding some sort of solution, And I tell them that, like, my project wasn't about solving the problem. It was about seeing the problem, right, It's about it's about trying to get to the heart of the matter. And it's like to me, I think, like the heart of the matter, like the cockroach's nest is the I

don't know you. There are different ways to say, but basically, the the lack of critical thinking and individuals and like in this society we shaped together or um or lack of a willingness to think through things carefully. Maybe that's that's um. That's like if we had a society of

critical thinkers, this wouldn't be much of a problem. I think it's because so many people come at a lot of information from like when you would say the rational viewpoint it's like they're trying to use reason and stuff, like they're trying to think critically, they're trying to think logically, but they come at it in terms of rationalizing stuff

they already believe. Um. And I think that's a very prevailing type of idea in terms of like, yes, I'm gonna believe in this thing, so I'm gonna find evidence to support it um, which isn't critical thinking. I don't think. I not really know that it is. That is itself a logical fallacy. But that is so calm, especially on the Internet, because the Internet encourages the backfire effects. You know, whenever someone calls in on something, you want to be right.

So you're gonna as soon as as soon as someone calls something, you're going to backfire. You're going to like become even more entrenched in what you believe. Um when you you know, when when you explain to someone that know, Hillary Clinton is bad, but she doesn't eat the blood of children, like, no, she does. I saw all this thing. I have to believe it because like all of the things that are tied up in what makes you a person, and now all of these ideas that have that where

used to be just be. Conspiracy theories that you could believe in for fun are now so a part of like what people's sense of being are and how they have their entire world view that there's so much more because the Internet is such a bigger part of their lives. Everything on the Internet is a bigger part of the

lives for each person. So it is more of an ontological threat because these things are so closer together now, right, They used to be much more distinction between the Internet and you because you can only ask the computer every once in a while. We can now carry around a supercomputer wherever we go, so it is like a part of you. Like you bring it with you almost everywhere.

It's always in your pocket. So these things are so like stitched together that prying them apart and telling people know this thing you would carry around actually probably most don't you see on it isn't isn't actually true? Like there is People can like believe that in their heads

but don't actually don't. Actually the belief doesn't actually impact them because like we all know that there's like well we all know that people can still on the Internet and lie, right there is like part of the joke, but we still don't act like it, Like oftentimes we get so we get so like encased into the stories

that we tell ourselves. Right, the part of why the Issharing stairwell is so good is that it's such a it's such a compelling story like that, Like the idea of like a brilliant architect bringing like you know, building is paradox in the real world is like, is so much more fun than being like, yeah, some dude just

knows how to use Adobe after effects. Like right, So you get so entrenched in the storytelling because the story of like politicians eating the eating the blood of children is so much more interesting than no, politicians just don't care about you, like, and getting to the heart of that problem is so much more difficult than just you know, debunking things, because you can debunk things all day and

does that actually matter? Yeah? I think there there's there's a secondary problem that like you know, there's another like a lether level of it, which is that, yeah, like

everyone knows that there's information now, like everyone does. But but that just makes it worse because now if you want to do this information, what you can claim is like, oh, hey, look at all these other times that all the stuff has been fake, and then you know, and this is how you get everyone like doing frame by frame analysis of like a bombing and going oh, these are all crisis actors. And it's like you know, and you like you talk to these people and they're like, oh, no,

I I did. I did the research. Look I like I saw through the lives. It's like, no, You've just completely made this thing up in your head. You can see the green screen compression. They're like, no, it's just regular video compression. And it's like yeah, like everyone can be a detective now, so everyone can be so convinced to their own conclusions even when the conclusions turn out to be not true. Right, it's a problem. If there was an exy solution, we wouldn't have the problem. Right.

It's one of those things where it's like your project is a very good example of like it's it's it's it's a very demonstrative thing. You can like you you take someone along this journey and demonstrate, hey, this can happen to you, so you should watch out for us. Right, Look look at the story I crafted. Look how you become convinced of it for these six minutes and then you think, oh wait, no, you can't teleport to a

bottom stairwell. That's not that's not how that works. Um. But because you take them on that journey, it's a very it's a I love it so much as like a demonstrative process being like like this can happen, so watch out for in the future. Do you think is honestly more useful than just debunking somebody because you can

debunk all day, you can have the backfire effect and stuff. Yeah, And you're right about the demonstrative stuff, because it's like if a bunch of film students and volunteers with no connections and no resources pulled this off like we did, like a tally of all the videos at the end of the year of um, you know, all the videos that ripped it off and posted on their own channels and all that, Um, it was like fifty million, right.

So if if a bunch of film students like had that much influence, what more can like people who are actually fun like power and resources, right, what could they do? And we were just doing and ours was about like

this innocuous, silly stairwell. It wasn't about anything that would cause you know, anyone's death or anything like that, or and like you know, something like in me and are where the ME and MAR military basically systemically systematically created fake articles and fake photos to create like to arouse dis dame for the row hinge of people and basically they incited a genocide through Facebook, just through fake news

right in the Philippines where I live right now. Um, which a lot of commentators call like the patient zero of disinformation because this guy called was elected president basically ran running his entire campaign on disinformation, and after him was Brexit like a month later, and after that was Trump got the nomination. So like what's her named Kate

Katie Barth, Barth or or something like that. One of the executives of Facebook referred to the Philippines as patient zero in the era disinformation because like, um, and the thing that the president here right now was running on was basically like the same sort of um bothering and scapegoating of a certain group. And he said, basically he's the guy who said, like basically, if you're a drug user or a drug dealer, it should be okay to

murder you and kill you. And that's what happened. That's exactly what happened because they were posting all these stories about um, you know the same sorts of stories that you that that we saw in the US in twenties sixteen about undocumented immigrants or Muslims or something like that. This like oh, this undocumented immigrant raped the five year old girl, you know that sort of thing. And he would the the the organized campaign um making up stories

about drug addicts like murdering and raping people. Basically like got an entire nation too, well, not an entire nation, but basically this guy on the election and you know, we have a country right now that basically lived through just atrocities the last five six years, you know. And like the double edged sort of this, like Chris mentioned,

is like yeah, this type same type of thing. Because it exists, people also like retroractively apply it to like you know, like Sandy Hook was staged or like even stuff now with like you know the pandemic, right, people like what if what is what if the pandemic is a real? What if all these people have just you know conjured this thing into being and it's all a giant insifferation campaign, right, So it has this dual it has this double edged sword nature um, which makes combat

and information so challenging. It's like disiforation to combat information, to connect the idea of disinformation, and there's so many layers of it. Now, this, this, this, it's just yeah, it makes it, It makes actually get into the heart of it so much more challenging. It's been abstracted so many times. One of the things what didn't didn't the New York Times weren't it the first people to come

up with the term fake news? And then Trump started using it after like were watching Potificate, which newsuper was. But my memory if it was like it was, it was it was the media that came up with fake news and then like Trump just took it and it became this like this just like demon they absolutely could not control and was just turned on them. Do you do you remember the context in which they used it. They were like they were I think they were calling

like stuff that Trump said fake news. M M I am. I'm unsure at the moment who specifically coined to that term. But I mean we definitely see in terms like even in even terms like desperation, which used to be more tied to like a discording in philosophy, breaking like in like even even back even as back far as like the eighties, getting you know, turned into an actual like political term that everybody uses. It was actually somebody from

buzz Speed. An editor at buzz Speed was one of that makes sense, is one of the ones who first popularized it. Was Yeah, but there could be there could be you know, several other people that say that they coined it. I don't know, I mean, I even there's even uh an illustration from eight nine four by by Frederick Offer with reporters carrying newspapers labeled humble news, cheap sensation, and fake news. So it's I mean, in terms of

in terms of just mashing words together. I'm sure it has has had a decent history, but definitely Trump is the one that like launched it into the zeitgeist. Right right, right, Let's see, Robert, you've been pretty quiet. I know it's pretty early in the morning for you. Do you have any do you have any kind of thoughts to help us kind of generally start closing us out, not not not like super immediately, but generally having that direction. I mean you no, not really kind of brought up everything.

I would say, all right, all right, it's a yeah, I guess, uh, Mike, what have How is this project of impacted how you approach film and just like how you how you use the internet yourself in the past decade? Mm hmm, Well, I I'm fully aware of what we did. Every time I'm like looking at something, I'm like, they had done that? Could they have done this? And that,

you know that sort of thing. Um, I don't know if it's if yeah, I don't I'm not sure how it's how this project specifically impacted me, other than just trying to think through things a bit more carefully, trying to go through things like, um, I mean, like so we we basically came up with this idea of what eventually became troll farms, right like me and like my classmates would hey, we even make fake accounts and like talk about the stairwell and um, so, I don't know,

like a few years later, people we we learned that people were actually doing this, like to influence like elections around the world, and a lot of the strategy of like the Russian troll forms and stuff, um was to basically create caricature versions right of arguments from whatever side, like you know, whether they might present an argument from like the left or the right, but in like a

caricaturized version of it. And um, so what people would see when they see that, they'd see an argument coming from the other side, and they'd ridicule it, like look at these people who just seem crazy espousing this whatever view, you know, or they might say things like, um, like yeah, if you're a Democrat, you want to abort babe bees that like the ninth month or something like that, which

no reasonable person actually argued. So what happens is like, um, people talk about how the goal of Russia was to like polarize, you know, um, polarize the political spectrum. I think, like the bigger goal and the the goal that we're

going to be untangling for many many years. And the more, um, the more difficult problem to deal with was that they oversimple They successfully oversimplified discourse, you know what I'm saying, Like they found a way to like oversimplify the type of discourse we're having because everyone's like arguing with such

simplistic I'm not sure if I'm making sense. It's like it's like it's like the term I use is like politics as fandom, right, right, And that's why I think that like intersect not not exactly what you're saying, but like in a next with that type of idea of like condensing down actual discussions on like what you believe in, um and what politics you want and how you want to improve the world into this weird fandom lens of like this team versus this team which we we we

we we we we. We've had a degree of that for a long long time. But with the Internet and how how discussions on the Internet are designed to work, right, how algorithms want to boost content, how there's always these short snippets just in mirrors the way people discuss, like what Star Wars character is their favorite? It's just that. But for politics, um, so it's it's just this, like what if politics is just this idea of fandom and

you can debate what fandom is more valid than the other? Right, I like the last Jedi more you like Rise of Skywalker. This means your version of reality is less good than mine. So which is which is? But that it's that same idea but for how we like make social programs and how we address racism, how we like give food to poor people, and how we do affordable housing, and how

we handle the police. So it's that type of idea, which is just the disinformation kind of impacts this in part because when you flood the zone with so much conflicting information that people can't really get a handle on or easily sort of like when there when when you when you've put that much confusion into the air, um, it makes people more likely to just kind of grasp its sides because everything coming out is way too complicated and messy, and it's it takes too much work what's

actually true. So holding to some lubric of well, I believe this, so that means these are the good guys, these are the bad guys, and I don't have to analyze it any deeper than that I can reject information that comes from this group, where I can reject information that says this, because I just category categorically reject you know, anything that that fits in with that. Like that's the

benefit of disinformation for authoritarians of all stripes. You're seeing in Ukraine right now, where um, you've got all of these different authoritarian powers. You've got Turkey, you've got Russia, you've got um, you know, sucking the United States at least to the extent that like we impact a lot of things internationally. Um, and you've got them all coming down on different sides of this issue and of what's

happening in Ukraine. And because there's so much disinformation and misinformation about what's going on, people just kind of grasp at whatever side I'm have been more sympathetic to recently, I'm just going to believe whatever they say because it's way too complicated to actually analyze what's going on. Yeah, And this was this was the thing that I mean, this was explicit on the left. I remember this. There

was this around um that Sheen. There was a whole thing about how like people people like talking about anti imperialism would would literally say like nuance nuances liberalism. I don't like nuance of liberalism. Don't don't research this, don't think about this because nuances how liberals like you know, spread sort of pro promishing and change proplicanda, Like I remember those people like Ember Frost just just straight up

said this. And this was a huge and you know, like I I got a lot of shift for this because you know, like I remember when when when the coupon Bolivia happened, Like I I made a giant thread that was trying to that was like, okay, we need to figure out like how specifically the CIA was involved in this, Like okay, so did they plan the whole thing? Was it like were they working with local partners? Wasn't a thing where someone else planned it and they signed

off on it? And like to this day people think that I supported the coup because I was like, we should figure out who was who the actors were in the ground, because no one like this, this this, this this became like a like like like a tenant, like like an actual sort of like political tenants of of how a lot of anti impurialism, like in American left worked was you you were not supposed to do nuanced You were not supposed to look at who was like you know if if if you spent too long looking

at what was going on in the ground, people would be like you you worked for the CIA, and that you know, I think like we we we've we've finally seen that basically blow up in their faces because you know, oh hey, look how many of these people just like would up supporting Russia and then spent like three months saying that Russia would never invade Ukraine, that this happens.

But it's I don't know, it's it's it's it's extremely depressing how people who otherwise are you know, like in a lot of ways, like I've spent a lot of their time like trying to you know, filter out stuff from the media that's false just go into this because they just do not want to deal with the complexity of reality. Yeah, just easier not to. Again, if there was a simple problem, we wouldn't mean, if there was

a simple solution, we wouldn't need to discuss the problem. Yeah. Yeah, So I guess basically, like just to like, um, answer that question about how it I guess at the time, I'd say, like we got an up close look at how things were gonna be, Like you know, with with all these things, we we kind of anticipated the next few years. Um. So yeah, that's basically what happened. Um, sorry to interrupt your clothing, but no, no, no, it's the it's the best note that that we can go. Um, Michael,

do you where can people find you online? And if people want to look into some of your other projects, I mean you found me, Like, if they want to find me, they'll find me, right, I don't know, I still don't know you got my email, but Garrison is extremely good about this. Tope, not have any people? Are that good? Uh? Yeah, well they can check out the YouTube channel like I'm gonna be posting some new films this year probably, um so my name Michael Lock. Canna

allow or just search the issarians there. Well, I guess that's a way. Yeah yeah, I'll add your YouTube channel to to the description. Yeah. I just want to thank you so much for coming on to talk about your your project. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, Well,

that that does it for us today. You can follow us on the internets for some reason, um on Twitter, Instagram, that happened here, pod and cool some media and yeah, go go create a myth that people will believe and travel from out of country to walk over some stairs. Because that sounds like fun. Go to something like that for fun funzies. All right, bye bye, Hey everyone, It's Bobby Brown. You might know me as the makeup artist beauty expert. You might also know me as the founder

of Jones Road Beauty. But today I'm here with a brand new podcast, The Important Things. On this new podcast, I'll be joined by my co host and dear friend International Best selling author, Attorney and Ted Talk along a Julie Kumar. Together we want to answer the question how can you lead a life of fulfillment? The ongoing pandemic has given us all the opportunity to examine what really matters most to us and what brings us true contentment.

Each week through candid conversations with friends, thought leaders, creators and entrepreneurs, Bobby and I are looking for ways we can all learn to live more authentic, gratifying lives. You can look forward to learning from our amazing guests, including the incomparable Gloria Steinum, entrepreneur and designer, Jennifer Fisher, senator Corey Booker, charity founder Christy Turlington Burns, and many many more.

So join us every other week as we dig deep into the stuff that really matters on the important things. Listen to the important things on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What grows in the forest trees, sure know what else? Girls in the forest. Our imagination, our sense of wonder, and our family bonds grow too. Because when we disconnect from this and connect with this, we reconnect with each other. The forest is closer than you think, find a forest near

you and start exploring. I Discover the Forest dot Org. Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the AD Council. M Hi, I'm Elizabeth Dutton and I'm Elizabeth Dutton. Wait sorry, do you want to see your name? No, I'm good, good, go ahead. We're the hosts of Ridiculous Crime. People love true crime, right, the mystery, the intrigue, the human frailty totally. But what a lot of us don't like is the blood and the guts and the mayhem.

Wait wait, wait, wait, some of us do like the mayhem. Okay, but let's be real, there's nothing funny about murder. Our show gives you stories like the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr. And the Max Headroom signal hijacking. Oh so you mean ridiculous stories like the UK cat Shaver and Pablo Escobar's cocaine hippos. Yeah, stories like the dudes who stole Buzzy, the animatronic whatever he was from Disney World and the woman whose husband tried to kill her but came back

from the dead and surprised him at her own funeral. Yeah, that does sound good. You can find this new podcast Ridiculous Crime all over the place, the I Heart Radio app, the Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I don't know how you live ridiculous Crime. It could happen here. Uh, it being a number of things. Uh. This is the podcast about things falling apart and also maybe putting them

back together. And assuming there is not a nuclear war in the immediate future, you will probably be hearing this episode sometime in early March. I am Robert Evans. My co hosts as always well as often Chris and Garrison, and that's that's my job for the day. Done. I'm gonna I'm gonna sit back and chill. You guys want to take it from here, Yeah, I'll take it from here. We are doing one of our perennial things fall apart but also we sort of put it back together again episodes.

And joining us today is j MC from Strange Matter is a new libertarian, socialist cooperative magazine. J MC, great to have you here. Yeah, this is really great. So I guess we should probably explain what the magazine is, not just in of itself, but also because it's a good lead in into um um into what we're gonna be talking about so we basically there's five of us as co editors and we're all equal worker owners in it.

It's a magazine called Strange Matters, and the point of it is to explore radical new ideas, not just in terms of politics and economics, which is going to be kind of half the focus is trying to figure out like you know, libertarian socialists talk a lot about dual power, which I know y'all talk about on the show a lot talk about building independent institutions under the direct democratic control the working class to control real resources and are

not the state or capitalist firms. But like we talk a big game, but we actually know how to do that stuff, And do we know how to do stuff like run like you know, a big company as a as a self managed democracy, or do we know how to like run a city as a as a radical democracy like rooted in neighborhood councils or anything like that. The answer kind of is not really. And there's a lot of like, um open questions that we don't know yet the answers to, and that very few people are

working on those answers. So Strange Matters is um partly about discovering, uh, those answers, not because we the editors have the answers, but because we need like some kind of space within which we can bring lots of different people, different life experiences together, uh, in order to talk about

the stuff and figure it out. And then the other mission of it is to be a kind of general interest literary intellectual magazine doing the kind of journalism and philosophy and poetry and memoir and stuff like that that uh that uh perhaps gets shut out of capitalist society because it's not commercial, older because it's too weird, because it's like, I don't know, historiographical essay about it's been

called doon or something like that, you know. And and we think that there should be a place for that, um, just because it brings delight and meaning into people's lives, and it's what we're fighting for a more democratic society in order to do so. That's basically our vibe UM.

And the essaying question is a collective editorial that we uh, that we collectively drafted and edited uh, talking about our political views in particular and the recent history of libertarian socialism UM and then asked for me, I'm I'm a writer who's written for a couple of other places like

the point in the Brooklyn rail Um. And I also was involved in the d S as Libertarian Socialist Caucus and also the yeah yeah right, yeah, but a lot of history there, trauma, you know, some some uh yeah, but any who uh and also the Symbiosis Federation UM, which is a federation across Mexico, the US, and Canada that is trying to put together. It's a it's a confederation of local organizations that are trying to do this

kind of direct democracy stuff. Yeah. So I guess, well, okay, so the pandemic isn't I guess the perfect jumping in point for this. But I wanna go back and I guess getting into the meat of this piece because I

think it's very interesting. I wanted to sort of talk about the origins of like what's called sort of neo anarchism and how it's sort of begin to decay after after the collapse of occupying after well, I guess the sort the sort of kind of revolutionary arc of the two tens, so basically before you do the decline at

least is the way that we wrote it. And I kind of think that it's the way that I would tell it Um, you have to kind of do the rise first, right, because like there was this moment from roughly the fall of the Soviets in two roughly like two thousand and even kind of lingering in an afterlife afterwards, where it kind of looked like anarchism was going to take over the world. And that's a bit of a joke.

But it's also not a joke because in the context of like the radical left, which is of course obviously a kind of like you know, dissidents seen in any

country where it happens to exist. Um, you know, everything receded in terms of the traditional parties because the fall of the Soviet style uh Leninists states uh either through their collapse as in the case of the USSR, or in the case of their transition to a much more like clearly and obviously like state capitalist, uh semi liberalized model like in China, like the you you basically had like this total recession, not just in Leninism interestingly, which

obviously enough, right, like you know, it's basically a global collapse of anist style of governments, but also in like social democracy. Um, because it's a lot of the I mean, it's actually kind of interesting why it's it's unclear why it is. Uh, people have different theories, but they're you know, people often describe it in in um you know Fisher's

term the writer Mark Fisher capitalist realism. The attitude in the nineties was that, uh, you know, there's there's only one world that's possible, and it's the best of all possible worlds, and that's the capitalist world, where everybody's gonna have McDonald's in every country, and two countries that have the same McDonald's are never going to go to war, which we kind of found out the hard way this

week that that's not really the case. Well, and if people had paid attention more to other parts of the world, they would know that, like, well, there were civil wars in a bunch of countries that had McDonald's. Is it didn't stop people from shooting each other, as as the United States should tell you, people will kill each other whether or not they have access to chicken McNuggets. Yeah,

you know, I mean I think like that. That's that's a period that has it's full of the most wrong anyone has ever been, Like you got your Frantis Fukiyama, like the most wrong person ever You've got Yeah, you've you've got a lot of sertif idealogues, you like, have sort of deluded themselves into thinking this stuff is over and yeah, and I think you're right that that that sort of plays into this, you know, into sort of the collapse of of I guess, the party state left,

and then the way in which that, you know, the alternative to that I guess becomes new anarchism, and anarchists practice, even if it's not necessarily ideology with all the groups, kind of seeps its way into the rest of the activist scene. Yeah. So basically the story that we tell is that there's some you know, the stuff of East and rebellion in triggers these h It's not just that the stuff of East is are able to create their autonomous territory and chap us, but they it triggers this

wave U that UM. We use such term that sometimes it's used in academia called neo anarchism for this UM. You know, there's an anarchist revival in the nineties UM around the world, and it's not just people calling themselves anarchists. It's all these movements that were inspired by the libertarian socialist broadly speaking, um sabathistas UM adopting kind of similar methods in their local contexts in different countries, fighting against

I mean a lot of things. Initially it's against like you know, neoliberal trade deals, but it also ends up being against like sweatshops, because that's basically what a lot of outsourcing is is. You know, if if they have unions in this country from a social democratic period, they shut down the factory fire, everybody moved it to someplace where some dictatorship is going to shoot anybody who tries to do a union. Uh, and then that you know

that that lowers Uh. Logistics has gotten sophisticated enough by this point that you know, it ends up being cheaper for the company, even though they have to transport goods all across the world and do just in time delivering

that kind of thing. So UM. The a lot of the the the anti globalization movement that sprouted up around the two thousands was like UM, against all these things and usually using the kinds of direct actions, which is when you act kind of independent of the state and not trying to like, you know, convince politician to do something, but taking direct action to get your results, your desired result. UM. You know, and all this kind of stuff uh that

we're at using like direct democratic consensus methods. Uh. In the way that they organized stuff, uh, that was that was all basically an artistic And so there was this way in which anarchist methods, anarchist tactics, anarchists like attitudes towards what activism even is, started filtering into all these other movements. And this has been happening a little bit the eighties too. So there was like the anti nuclear movement had a lot of this, the feminist movement had

a lot of this. Um there was a whole um stream of single other ecological movements were actually like pioneered in a lot of ways by anarchists in the nineties um so, as well as indigenous movements in places like Mexico, Believia, etcetera. So the this is the kind of like rise of this neo anarchist movie you that we're talking about, which is not just about anarchists, it's about people who act

and think like anarchists without necessarily identifying as it. Yeah, I mean that's the kind of thing that I hope we can kind of more encourage as well in the next few decades as those typicode ideas can be I want I want to make sure that we can take these ideas and make them very approable for people, even if they don't use the terms that we might use. You can still kind of suggest these types of thoughts.

And this suggests these types of kind of lenses and viewpoints as much as we're about to get to how this sort of goes wrong or fails in some sense, Like, I think that was the strength of this movement was that it was it's tactics really easy to spread, and that led to a lot of people adopting me. It led to it sort of becoming this I guess activist consensus that you know, like you used in the consensus process. You you know, you have horzontal organizations, you have you

do direct actions, you mobilize people. You don't have these sort of like particle like parties. But that yeah, And I think I think the next part of the story that you want to tell is about I guess how that fell apart and the consequences of that. Basically what ends up happening is that, like there was this moment of our ascent because I would identify myself as being definitely like part of these, uh, the this generalan of you.

I mean I came, I hopped to board a lot later with like Occupy Wall Street, but a lot of the kind of explosion of movements that happened around the world in again not always right. It started with the Arab Spring, which started with somebody seeing themselves on fire in Tunisia and like you know, and then that spreads to um a, their countries in the Middle East and um, you know, protest against dictatorships and so on. But it starts getting kind of like transported beyond its initial Middle

Eastern context. And what a lot of people don't know is that the uh, the Occupy Wall Street movement in North America, uh, and like other movements that you know, some of them were called occupy some of them, I'm one of them was Maidan in Ukraine as a matter of fact, um, and other like you know, the the Hong Kong, the the the umbrella movements, yeah, the and all these kind of movements that that proceeded from after a lot of them were basically in a single kind

of wave, a protracted wave of copycat movements, uh that we're trying to adopt the same kind of tactics of like occupying public squares, uh, declaring them basically autonomous, and doing like direct democracy in those squares, modeling the kind

of society that they that people wanted to create. Um, you know, in this moment where it seemed like you could have this direct democratic uh sorts of movements the end in the US, there's like a direct line of succession from like occupy Wall Street through to like Black Lives Matter through to like the anti pipeline Indigenous protests. There's a lot of like shared movement experience, a lot of the same people showing up to it or teaching

the next generation UM in those movements. And I think this is something I mean, uh, it's difficult to find like sources on this, but I mean, y'all are involved in social movements. I think that that's like a rough that's roughly a description of of what's happened, right unless unless we're crazy. Yeah, I think you know what I think, I guess what you call the last wave that is occupied ice in Yeah. Yeah, you know, like I remember, like that was a sort of mix of I guess

two crowds. One is you know, I mean, like I I remember it was a bunch of you know, people who'd been in occupy and then also it was a

lot of people who radicalized essentially about Trump. Yeah, there was there was a pretty big new way of people, yeah, around around til sixteen and that you know, And I guess the other thing that that that's going on through this period is the the the ascension of consension of the right and the return also not just of you know, not just a sort of the fascist right, but of Leninism and social democracy as well. Um. Lapped around like

when Bernie's Hands was getting more popular. Yeah, yeah, and I think I think I think there's there's you know, there's a couple of there's like two threats here. There there's the sort of Bernie Sanders thread, and then there's you know, the the rise of the rise of the tankies, which has to do with Syria and has to do with sort of this backlash against the Just and eleven revolutions that you know, like some some of that backlash turns into like just you know, like air to one's

like hard right. I mean there's never like not a right wing, but like air to wants turn into just like fire bombing cities and um, and the living barrel bombing, you know, peaceful protests stuff. Um can overthrow governments if the government is not willing to bomb and shoot people who gather on mass in the central square because they're afraid of what the world's response would be if they

did start doing that. But you know, when Bashar Alasad did that in Syria against the democratic opposition movements, Um, you know, that basically sent the signal nothing, I mean nothing happened to us side, right, So that basically sent the signal that like, oh he has but yeah, yeah, right right, yeah, like like you can you can just

shoot people and bomb them and like it. And that basically defanged the kind of central tactic that a lot of these movements were trying to do, which is to have like large numbers of people do nonviolent civil disobedience and then through those like direct actions, cultivate this culture of like direct democracy in the hopes that, um, you know, the assemblies that are created in that space could in some way become the germ of the organs that could

run society, or at least that's like when it's taken to its logical conclusion. Because usually people who are involved in this, they get involved in it. They think the assembly stuff is really cool, they start learning more about it. They get radicalized by being in the assembly because like when you're in a direct democratic assembling, you're actually making the decisions like together, and then you come to an agreement and you execute the decision. You start asking yourself

like why can't we do everything like this? Um? And then um, you know all that that's what directs a

lot of people in this kind of anarchistic direction. But yeah, one of the reasons why these movements starts to decline is because they get smashed, um the But I think that there's always this other thing going on, which and I wonder how y'all felt about this, like reading it, like you know, there's there was this kind of both like an external critique at first from people like you know, Bascar Syncer of Jacobin and things like that, but then

also like this, increasingly over the years in the last half of the internal critiques of anarchism coming from anarchists themselves. Are people in this general kind of milieu libertarian socialism talking about how like anarchists didn't have solutions to the most pressing crises in the twenty century, Like if you like if you guys had to say, I know it's like kind of pretentious, but like, what is the most

pressing crisis of the century? What are like the top three just off the top of your heads without thinking? What would you list if you have to list three two or three separate things? Climate change, creeping authoritarianism, and rampant disinformation about basic facts of reality. Sweet? Okay, so let's tackle each one of those, right, Like, what's what's

an anarchist got to say about climate change? Well, okay, disrupt the pipelines, like you know, do uh, Like, you can't have infinite growth on a finite plan it, so you have to have like, you know, we we have all the slogans, right, I mean we've all heard them like a million times. Yeah, you have the diagnoses of

the problem. But yeah, yeah, but then like, okay, so how are we going to like you know, I guess we're gonna build some co ops and then the co ops are gonna democratized production and then we can do d growth somehow, but like also disrupting existing production. But there's like a missing step here, right, because like you know, the reason why we have all this production in certain ways because the entire economy depends on it's been set

up that way. Uh So you implied in the idea that we're going to do de growth somehow, is that we need some way of constructing a different economy. And how do you construct a different economy right through some kind of planning? So really the question is like how do you do economic planning? Uh? Second one, um, I goin to skip creeping authoritarianism for now because that's actually like feeding into the more the ending of the essay.

But the but the other one, right, disinformation? Another great question, right, like what do you do with social media? Like? Okay, again, anarchists talked in general a lot about like, okay, we're going to democratize all the companies because we're democratizing everything. We're democratizing neighborhoods or democratizing cities. So it's kind of

the same thing, turning everything into like a radical direct democracy. Okay, But if we're going to have social media, first of all, should we like, was it a mistake to invent a centralized system instead of the more decentralized internet that created that existed before social media? Right, that's kind of an interesting question. But then assuming that we do how do we restructure it? Not just in terms of how it's managed, but like, okay, we have the democracy of Facebook or whatever,

and let's say that we're the workers at Facebook. What do we do, like, how do we structure it so that it's not a giant misinformation engine? Right? Like once, once you actually have like the responsibility and the power of being in the saddle, which is what we spend so much of our time kind of just trying to do. You have to actually make decisions about what to do. And honestly, there aren't that many. I mean, do you what do you do with with the within with the

utility like that? Like, for example, who ought to be in control of the utility? Like that? Is it really just the workers of Facebook? Aren't all the people who are users of it? Don't they have a right to be making decisions about it too? And is it just an American institution just because it's an American LLC? Or is it like a global institution because everybody on the

planets on it? Um is there? You know? Are o there ways that it could be reconfigured, like fundamentally in terms of how users use it that would change the experience in some way to actually make it, uh, make you less liable to misinformation. But on the other hand, if you try to manipulate people in order to um, you know, not see something that's going to be misinformation, isn't that well, you know, like censorship or or or some other thing that we generally would oppose, right, like

the tool of centralized social control. So they like, these are really deep questions, and again this is generally a kind of silence, and of course, you know in that case, there's silence from the social democrats too, and there's silence from the Leninists. I mean, well, the Lenist just kind of fantasized about turning Facebook into the tool of the central party state uses in order to crush dissent forever

or whatever. But you know, social democrats are like list nationalized Facebook, and it's like, you know, yeah, sure we could, we could do that, and then you know the n s A owns on Facebook. I'm sure that that's a

that's a better scenario. Yeah, I mean I tend to think somewhat differently about what it means to have an anarchist solution to those problems, Like, for example, I don't I don't see anarchists or social democrats or leninists having any kind of stopping climate change solution um, Because I don't. I don't realistically see the organizing potential UM capable of actually stopping what's going on in any kind of reasonable

time frame. And I certainly don't think that the existing you know, neoliberal structure are the authoritarian structures that exist in you know, other countries or in this country, are going to stop it either. So when I think about solutions to climate change from an anarchist perspective, I think about how can anarchist organizing help people deal with the

consequences of climate change? And I see I tend to see the potential for actually like mitigating climate change coming more from there's as the consequences of this become more dire to people. If anarchists are better, are good at providing relief and helping people and organizing through that, and eventually there's some potential to actually get people organized to stop the causes of the problem. But UM, I just don't.

I'm not an optimist of about our ability to stop the worst of it at this point, UM, especially not after the most recent IPCC report. And I guess I'm kind of in the same boat when it comes to disinformation. UM. I and this is not just like anarchists. I feel like lack, as you've stated, at a like a good idea about like what do we do with Facebook, what we do with you do? What do we do with the way all of these things are set up in

the harms that they do at scale? Um, Nobody, and I include the people currently in charge, has any real

good ideas for that because they haven't. Like I've been working in this space for a very long time, I've I've spent a lot of time talking with and debating with a lot of the folks who are leading minds kind of in the fight against disinformation, and I just don't feel like there's any sort of solution that is an immediate term solution because so many the problem is so advanced as it is so as I guess that's kind of like where I land on a lot of

this stuff is we certainly need to be thinking about solutions, but I kind of like, I think it's less likely that there's going to be like you were you were saying, the kind of debate is between is there some way of like reforming or fixing making Facebook more democratic or is it just we need to decide that maybe we don't have some of this stuff. And I tend to land towards that that, like, well, I think the solution is going to be maybe maybe Facebook's a bad idea,

Maybe we should maybe we shouldn't have. There's aspects of it that are necessary, obviously, and I think aspects of things like Telegram and Twitter that are useful, But um, I I think the they're also fundamentally tied to the algorithms that drive them, which is also what drives so much of the toxic aspects that I think if you're divorcing the medium from the algorithm, you're talking about something that is very different and no longer than media. It's

no longer than media. It's it's so radically different that it's just it's it's not even useful to compare them. It's like it's like comparing Discord to Facebook. It's like they're not they don't operate the same way. That's the Yeah, that's exactly kind of where I where I tend to be on on that. And I know that's not like I I to the extent that like, uh, that's pessimistic. I guess I am kind of pessimistic about anarchisms ability

to stop the worst of things that's happening. Where I kind of look at myself as an optimistic anarchist is in the I believe anarchism offers solutions when these things go as badly as they're going to do, in a way that you know, the present systems or you know, more authoritarian systems that people propose can't solve the worst

consequences of these problems as as well. That's that's kind of where I feel like it is can feel a lot simpler to default to, like the dual power framework of a lot of these things, because otherwise the problems are so complex that you cannot approach them from from from every angle, because you really do need to simplify and condense them and collapse them into something that is more simplified, which often results in like a dual power

kind of framework for what you actually start doing. Yeah, and I think you have to. I think if you're an insurrection anist, if you're a revolutionary, whether you're an anarchist or you know, a Leninist or whatever, you have to be looking at what's actually happening in Ukraine right now and recognize that. All right, well, to what extent do you think you're going to be able to organize people in such a way that allows them to deal

with thermobaric weapons? You know? In what way are you going to organize people that allows them to effectively resist

cluster musician munitions? Um? And I think that when you kind of look at it that way, which is what it would take to overthrow any of the large hegemonic powers in the world right now, a much more realistic set of solutions is, all right, well, let's work on building power by building organizations and communities that are capable of taking care of themselves in the holes that these powers are increasingly going to be experiencing because because they

too are crumbling. And that's much smarter than being like, all right, well, I'm gonna try to get a bunch of my friends with rifles and and arm up a couple of drones and and go up against you know, people who have access to m l r s, you know, weapons systems and whatnot. Yeah. No, I think that that's

a really great point. Um. I. The way that I would think about it is the starting with the big picture problems is a bit misleading because, as you said, like nobody, it's quite like that nobody has solutions to these problems, certainly the social Democrats. Yeah, you know, and I say this as somebody who's like half a social Democrat by temperament. Um, it would be really nice if we like did it a little social democratic government and they swooped in and you know, did like new deal stuff.

I like new deal stuff. I like w p A stuff as much as the next. Uh. You know, um person who likes arts programs and infrastructure development. Well, you know, some infrastructure development, not others. Right, the war the war complex, we can do a little without. But you know, the the thing about it is those big problems. You're right, it looks like there's not going to be like a big solution, uh, and that we're going to kind of have to cope with the consequences of of it, at

least at first. Even coping this is this is kind of where I think the real kind of substance of of of the problem that libertarian socialist are facing right now. Even coping would require a greater level of organization than we have proven able to muster up to now. Not

because the methods that we choose don't work. Because in fact, as you point out, and as I actually really want to forcefully argue, and because because we do in the end of the essay, like authoritarian methods don't work and can't work for a lot of the specific problems that

we face. Uh. And history shows that very definitively. But um, there is also a serious way in which even kind of developing these like you know, local highly like you know, rooted in a community, uh like direct democratic institutions that control real resources, scaling that up to the point where it actually could start replacing some of the gaps left behind by uh you know, uh states and capitalist firms that are too dysfunctional or too focused on their own

goals to to to to meet those needs that would actually require us to be able, for example, to know how to build up a cooperative sector in a city, or how to kind of like network the tennis unions that already exist you know, across different uh you know, regions, maybe even across like a continent, and then construct like the way in which they self manage each other or or not each other self managed together the you know, the larger group or would require and you know, there's

a lot of people working on these problems, but sometimes there is a kind of like you know, you'll you'll see this like obstacle in the road because for example, like what do you do when and the it might not even be the state properly speaking, right, It might be like a posse that's funded by some rich billionaire asshole who's got like his uh, you know, his notion that some people are just better than others and that you should institute the dictatorship of the tech bros um,

you know, And then that billionaire's funding a bunch of people who have got now like you know, some industrial access to industrial infrastructure, and they don't like the fact that you're doing your d I Y like you know, commune or whatever stuff in there on their turf. So how do you fight back against that? I mean, some of it you can fight back against that kind of our current level of capacity, but some of it does kind of require us to start thinking like, well, how

do you how do you build up financial independence? What like, how do you build up the kind of independence where it's like if we get kicked off of the capitalist uh. Social media, for example, which is a great deal of what we use for fundraising. What kind of institutions could we create that would be like alternatives, um, that are not like the ones that the Nazis created when there was a purge of some of them that gab like highly dysfunctional, like you know, it didn't even work for them.

Uh not that I mean I'm happy about that, but like you know, my point is like the same thing could happen to us, So what would we do? Um the like they're there are all these kinds of things that are more little picture questions in a way, but they scale up relatively quickly to at least like medium sized questions where we need this kind of like um, these these because because part of what it is is also that like it's not that these questions are impossible,

it's that they're kind of neglected. And there's um there, there's these uh the thinkers like Christian Williams, who is an anarchist from the Pacific Northwest, who wrote a pamphlet about this called Wither Anarchism. And there was another pamphlet, uh an essay and CounterPunch by a person named Gabrielle Cohn who's an autonomous Marxist basically like a libertarian Marxist Marxist anarchist type um called What Happened to the Anarchist Century?

And both of those essays, which I highly recommend that people read, they may they make points basically like this, you know, like where where the focus on how to construct those institutions and the nitty gritty of how to do that has kind of receded from anarchism um as

it's actually practiced. Uh In like so there's like a rhetoric of revolutionary transformation, but not always the attention to the nitty gritty of how you actually can like build resilient institutions that actually like carry that through which you know, a hundred years ago people talking about like the one big union and the general strike. But that's kind of like, um, well, a it didn't work in exactly the way that they

were thinking it. What even in the most successful revolutions like in Spain and b it was also like the there's there's there's a certain way in which our tensions are focused on other things. And it's not that those things are bad, it's just that like there's been this kind of neglect of the question of large scale organization and how you do coordination, like you know, in order to tackle problems that are kind of like at the

scale that that I was talking about before um. And so basically the argument of the essay is that in the absence of that, like for the socialist movement that emerged after turned away from neo anarchist, I'm thinking basically that it had no solutions, which I don't think it's true either, but it's like, you know, like rather it was true in the moment, but it doesn't have to be true, but it was true, but enough people thought that it was that they turned to like the social

democratic route. But with the failure of Corbin and Bernie that kind of burned a lot of people out too, and a lot of what is seems like it's coming up now, and I'm wondering, I wonder what you guys think of this, Like a lot of the people that we see showing up in movement spaces, who we see kind of like getting politically activated for the first time or whatever, a lot of those people are really interested in Leninism and on specifically, because I don't I don't

know how true that is, that's at least that's that's that that part is not true, at least at least at least here in Portland. That's very much not the case or Portland. Yeah, got no other No other part of the country is like Portland, other than maybe Eugene. Like okay, that's that's fair. That's why a little bit

too like Portland. Portland is a big enough anarchist city that there are entire decade long like like inter anarchist wars that no one else in the US has ever heard of, that are like the most important thing that's ever happened in Portland's Oh boy, welcome to the Green reds. Let me tell you, Chris, you have just piste off sixty people who could not explain to you if you gave them a year, could not explain to you why they're angry. And I mean to be to be fair,

like I I am an anarchist in Chicago. When the first time I introduced two of my Twitter mutuals together,

they almost got a fist fight. So like that makes yeah, that's that completely scans even with like DSA stuff, I feel like there's there was at least was a trend a little bit too stale way from some of the more Russia communist kind of like types of aesthetics and en ideas because it is a turn off for so many people and it does not encourage us, and it has like encouraging forefront a form of authoritarianism that maybe is not great. Yeah, I don't know, Like I've seen

sort of both friends in walk. So I think the last like a year has been very different than I think the previous five. I've seen it on Twitter, but I don't know how much it expands into as I think.

I think it's like I saw more things happens in the d s A is that the Leninists essentially took over the International Committee and they had this kind of delicious division label inside the d s A where like you have like you have a part of the d s A that's essentially a social democratic machine, and then you have the International Committee, which is which is the foreign policy wing essentially run by by essentially run by by the Leninists. And I think, I don't know, I

think I saw it there. And the other thing I think I saw a lot of that I've seen even from people who are ordinarily not Stalinist, is what you know, part of what is talking about this is the sort of like climate Stalinism or like climate wow stuff like that. That is a huge problem that you know, I mean I think I think part of it also just has to do with the fact that people don't like Okay, so like we we have actually existing uh climate Leninism, like we have it. It's it's it's it's it's China,

Like the CCP changed, it's literally changed. State ideology in in in the mid two thousand tends, as you know, as an attempt to deal to deal with with within with pollution and climate change. It did nothing, Like they pressed every price. It doesn't it didn't like, it didn't work. Yeah, yeah, I mean they did carbon markets, they did. They literally just banned coal and entire provinces and it didn't work.

They they changed the contrat evaluations. I I the problem people. Yeah, Like Late lays this out specifically with China to an excruciating degree, like like in detail. If you're really interested in this type of like climate left authoritarianism. They call it climate now in the book, but you can call it climate climate leninism, you can call it whatever. But they lay out how it could work and how use cases of it have not worked. Um to a pretty

pretty intense degree. If you're interested in that, I would recommend reading the book Climate. Leviathan definitely influenced a large portion of the writing for this show. Yeah, and I mean to your point, I don't think that this is

the only trend I do. I agree with you that out of like the conjuncture, there was this um I I think that a lot of the more like establishment reformist aspects of the movement were discredited and that pushed people in different radical directions, like one of which very much is anarchism and libertarian socialism. I am seeing a lot more faces that are interested in in in those

questions for sure. Uh. And that's kind of counter to the trend that I was describing from the last like five years of like, you know, people becoming more disinterested

because of the real or perceived lack of Lucians. However, I do think that it's important, and this is kind of following on Chris's Climate Leninism point, to understand that there's at least a counter trend where a lot of people are have not only moved away from libertarian socialism, have not only moved but they've also moved away from

democratic socialism. And if you follow that pattern, which is a pattern that I at least have seen within the d s A, within various trade unions, in a lot of among a lot of like intelligencia type people like journalists, professors, blah blah, you see a very common set of arguments. And I think it's very clear that as the century proceeds and the crises get worse and start killing like even larger numbers of people than they already are, we're going to see this argument a lot more. Um and

and the argument is something like this. I mean, there's a quote from a tweet. Uh and and you know, one could argue that the tweet doesn't matter, but you are naive if you think this is the tweet climate. You are naive if you think climate can ever be solved without an authoritarian government at this point. That's and that's that's the whole thing. So it's a it's a nasty little tweet because it's ambiguous, right, it has this

like shocking and scandalous effects. You know, we need authoritarianism to to to solve climate change a scandalous you know, bougeois or whatever. But then it's like okay, wait, but what do you mean by authoritarian? Am I just being

hysterical reactor. It's the same as saying you're naive if you think that, um, climate change can be solved without nuclear power, or climate change can be solved without really big hammers, Like we have authoritarian governments, we have nuclear power, we have really big hammers, and climate change does not be solved been solved. Is it possible that any of those things might be a part of a theoretical solution

that may happen someday, Yes, but it hasn't. And there's like, if you're trying to say that authoritarian governments are better at dealing with climate change than the governments that currently dominate. Number on, hell of a lot of authoritarian governments are responsible for our current situation, our climate change. Number two the Soviet Union, which I suspect most of these people see as a guiding light, horrible for the environment, turned

the largest body of water in Eurasia into a poison lake. Yes, not not not good at the environment, you know. And here's here's what's interesting about the thing. To me. The other thing that it's doing is kind of signaling that it's like patently ridiculous to oppose this idea without specifying what the idea is like and like in other words, authoritarianism like but like, I mean, let's let's be blunt right, what they're implying as a Leninist is the one party state,

the secret police, press censorship, in the command economy. So does that help you fight climate cheese? That's actually an interesting and a kind of like you know, distant five thousand foot view, you know, from the god's eye view or whatever, like, uh, the that's an interesting technical question. Do the has actually helped or hinder a response? But we're not even having that conversation because instead it's this kind of underhanded attempt to get you to think that.

So again, does a tweet matter? Well, I think a tweet matters if it comes from a member of the National Political Committee of the d s A, because at least ostensibly if d s A is, which is who the person who did that tweet? Because at least ostensibly, if d s A is a mass movement, as it purports to be the mass movement of socialists in the US, and you know, and and the National Political Committee is ostensibly the leadership of the d s which I personally

don't believe, but that's certainly how they think of themselves. Um. Then this indicates that the largest most important socialist mass movement in the US, at least self branded UH, has people in its leadership who believe that the secret police might help in addressing climate change. That's an interesting thing and it's also very disturbing. And the thing is this, this person is not actually like important, He's a symptom be because this is something that's happening across the board.

And a more intellectually serious version of this argument was put forward by the Marxist intellectual and historian um a professor of human ecology called Andreas Mom. And people who are really into like Marx Nerds stuff will probably have heard Mom's Yeah, what a very good book called Fossil Capital. Everything he's written after Fossil Capital is a disaster. I like some of the sabotage. It's it's I mean, it's

a little romantic and impractically. He wrote an ethical discourse instead of a thing about like the risk of eco sabotage, which is the actual important part of the degree to which it can matter. Because eco sabotage, there's this idea on the left that like what we need to do is be targeting fossil fuel infrastructure. And again it's like what it's it's like what that ds A dude said, Like, yeah, that could theoretically be a part of but also process.

If it's like nine dudes who do it and then they go to prison or get shot, well that doesn't really fix climate. I think the book, the book A Ministry for the Future really lays out all of the all kind of like the best case scenario for all these types of things and how they can work together to overall trend in this direction. Because yeah, that type of like eco sabotage in conjunction with other like political

effects can be impactful on what things happen. But it's can won't necessarily be you know, it's not it's not as simple as we would like it to be, because yeah, it's it turns out a complex world has complex consequences and complex and I think I think this is you know, the trend that Mom was on, the trend on that you know, there's there's a big environmental authoritarian like thing

among among liberals is a huge thing. In political science, was a big thing, and in ecological studies that was essentially making a similar argument to to I'm almost making this like, well, okay, you need some kind of air quotes vague authoritarianism to deal to a climate change, and you know it's it's it's it's basically this this attempt.

There's like these people have have seen climate change, but they have no actual solution to it, so they wave their hands and pretend that like this, like you know, the state is going to descend from this guy and save them, and it's not. And I think that's you know, I think I think we're we're sort of I don't know, I think as we just I guess kind of wrap this up because we unfortunately they're running out of time.

But you know this like this exact moment like like these like few weeks are this moment of incredible like rupture on the left right, because we have we've had we've had in some way social democrats be discredited by the fact that like Corbin and Sanders both lost, right, their political project has been discredited. Um, we've had a

serious sort of anexist failures. But then you know, in the last couple of weeks, right, it was all of the sort of big state like authoritarian people like tied themselves through a bunch of imperialists, and you know, may staked their whole entire politicy off of them being the anti imperialist class. And then you know the state who's like a bunch of their press people like literally work for right and who who they've been arguing like is

the count imperist powers does imperialism? And so like, Yeah, I think we have this moment where everything is in chaos, in which we have to be the ones that that that have solutions or have or have the tools to build them. And I think that's why that's why this project is important, because that's that's something that we need

in this exact moment. Yeah, I think there's a tremendous value in being humble about seeking out solutions to these questions and not doing what so many do on the left and pretend that their tendency has an absolute answer,

because all we have is theories. And the reason I know that to a point of certainty is that no one has solved any of these problems yet absolutely, And and so there is a tremendous degree of humility that people need to have in terms of like, all right, well we are attempting to to arrive at the conclusions that can lead us to a better world, as opposed to we are trying to force through this thing that

we know will work. Um, because you don't you know, if you're a Marxist Leninist and you think that we need climate MAU, you don't know that that will work because it hasn't yet. And if you're an anarchist who thinks the solution is bombing as many oil refineries as you possibly can, well, you don't know that you're ever going to get enough people on board for that to mean anything. Um. And I think that there's the conversations

that we need to be having. I think it's it's important to see them as conversations as opposed to polemics aimed at just getting people in line behind this shining vision of a of a clear set of steps. Um. It's important to envision the end goal. I say that a lot. You know, we need to be looking and and accepting the possibility of a better future, but it's important not to be dogmatic about the road to get there because nobody, nobody really has a clear idea of

what that looks like. Yeah. So the piece ends up and if you want to see the ending of it, it'll it'll be up in um in sometime in the

next couple of weeks. But the basic gist of where it goes is precisely to the practical question, right, instead of like making these like polemical arguments that are rooted more in like kind of like what tribe you've decided to identify with within the broad family of socialism than in like actually trying to like solve problems for the people around you, right, or help contribute to the solutions, Like it's actually what we want to ask is like,

if we have like the giant ecological crisis, Uh, how do you how do you actually do it? Is it by trying to force people from the top down to do it as Um under his mom kind of draws on the failed uh policies of war communisms and inspiration for that. Or is it potentially by having like democrats democratized institutions that incentivize people with carrots instead of sticks, Like Naomi Klein basically uncovered a want of our journalism

and this changes everything. So this is kind of like the debate that we have to start having in order to be able to together formulate these kinds of solutions. Yeah, alright, well I think that's gonna do it for for us today. Um, what do we what do we? We do? You go, you guys gotta gotta gotta plug. You want to throw up? Throw up before we roll out? Yeah. If if you want to follow us at at Strange Underscore Matters UM

on Twitter. UM. We also have a Facebook and you can read our articles at Strange Matters dot co op, which is our website. Uh. And if anything that you read there that you've heard here inspires you at all, please consider donating. We're going to be in the next month raising money, uh for for the magazine and we want to pay writers above market rate because we think

market rates too low. So but in order to actually do that, and none of the money is going to the editors from the fundraisers, so if if, if we're gonna be able to do that, we've got to meet our fundraising target. All right, Well support them and you know, figure out how to save the world. It's it's up to you. And I'm speaking to exactly one person right now and no one else, but I'm not going to be more specific. Look for your children's eyes to see

the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasuring pebbles. They see a windy path that could lead to adventure, and they see you. They're fearless. Guide. Is this fascinating world? Find a forest near you and start exploring it. Discover the Forest dot org brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the AD Council. Look to your children's eyes to

see the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasure and pebbles. They see a windy path that could lead to adventure, and they see you. They're fearless. Guide. Is this fascinating world? Find a forest near you and start exploring a Discover the Forest dot org brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the AD Council. Hi, I'm Katie Lows.

You might also know me as Quinn Perkins from Scandal for Rachel from Inventing Anna. I'm also a mother to my son Albi and my daughter Vera. I wanted to create a space for open and honest conversations about all things parted, and I thought a podcast was the best way to do just that. Check out season five of my podcast, Katie's Crib. It is super raw, vulnerable, and hilarious. Katie's Crib in no way shape form is judgmental or telling you exactly how to parent or exactly how you

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following apart and putting it back together again. And today we're doing one of our I guess increasingly less rare but still sort of uncommon putting things back together again episodes and with Me today is Ted Men from Amazonians united to talk about different kinds of union union workers organizing, UM and the work that you all have been doing.

So Ted, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me so all right, one of the things that I wanted to talk about right off the bat is that Amazonians United is running a very very different kind of organization than a lot of the union efforts that we've talked about on the show, and a lot of the sort of like I guess, classical sort of business union model stuff that that you know, we've we've we've we you know, than than what you see in the press, and then

also that we've been covering. So I wanted to start off by asking you about solidarity unionism and how it sort of differs from other kinds of union organizations and campaigns. Sure, I think it's pretty simple. Actually. I think solidarity unionism is workers who believe in ourselves. By that I mean and it's workers recognizing that we don't need someone to save us UM when because we are the ones doing the work, we know how to run our workplaces, we know how to do it best, and we also deserve

the wealth that we produce. So UM, solidity unionism to me, is UH, building organization with each other where the fabric of our organization is our relationship and our solidarity as co workers engaging in struggle against UM, bosses, managers, owners, UM everyone. That's that's telling us what to do while UH taking the lion's share of the wealth that we create. UM. And it's by uniting, coming together around issues that we care about, taking direct action in the workplace, UM, building

our confidence and our strength and our consciousness. UM and our organization. To me, a solidary unioniszone UH. It is distinctly different from business unionism, which is the dominant form mainstream unionism, you know, legalistic unionism, whatever you want to call it, UM, that model that has been failing for several decades. UM actually is predicated on a deep distrust of workers, the disbelief that workers can organize ourselves, run

our own workplaces, represent ourselves, defend ourselves and each other. UM. And in business union I mean you know you you see the ads when they're posting UH for union staff job, come lead these workers, Come come join this union and lead. You're not even a worker in the work place? Are you going to lead someone in there? Like you know, you're you're a lawyer, you're you know you have a

different professional expertise. You're not moving the packages with us from with from within the warehouse and so um, yeah, I think that's that's the main difference to me of the model. Do you are you a worker? Do you believe in workers? Do you trust and have faith that workers we ourselves can build our own organization, lead ourselves? Um? And um? And when or do you think workers need to be led, need to be represented, need to be told what to do? Um, need to pay you to

go and save that? Um? And uh. Yeah, I believe

in workers almost. I'm a solidarity unionist. Yeah. And I think we were talking a bit before the show about this, and I think there's there's a lot of aspects about this that are I think very powerful in you know, in in in in secrecy, the economy that haven't been unionized and I haven't or unions ever treated from more people who were never sort of organized and to begin with, And I think that's you know something that there's there, there's the there's this problem that happens like with with

a lot of unions where you know, you you you get, you get this sort of beureacratic structure that builds up and the bereacratic structure that builds up like doesn't have doesn't necessarily have the same interests as the people in the union, and that's a real problem. And you get these entrenched like you know, you can get these in trenched caucuses, you control unions, and you get this the

sort of proliferation of of these people. And I think this is this was part of why a lot of the sort of the anti union techniques that you saw in like the sort of anti union persis in the eighties.

I mean you've been seeing them for a while. Like why they started working in the eighties was that, like you know, when when when when someone like starts ranting about union bureaucrats right like they're they're actually like there actually was a divide there, Like there there there was a sort of like I guess like like there was a sort of like a kind of fundamental class difference, which I think has a lot I mean, also has a lot to do with you know, when when you

get into your sort of like more more revolutionary context that that has to do with why a lot of unions when you know, France is infamous for this, right, Like France has had these giant like comunist trade unions and every time a revolution started at the trade union just like sits there and does nothing. And yeah, and you have to sort of ask yourself like, okay, so why is this happening? And I think, yeah, soldier to unionism, it has, it has a lot of answers to this

sort of I guess you call it like that. There's there's a there's a sort of like right wing critique of unions that has to do with like, well, okay, so we don't want workers to organize, we don't want them to reflective power at all. But then there's also you know, but but the reason that it works in a lot of cases because it's able to tap into a sort of like into these structural problems that a

lot of unions have. And I think so my understanding of how Yells organizing has been going, and correct me if I'm wrong that I've been interesting is that like unlike a lot of other campaigns that you've seen, even specifically with Amazon, but like a lot of other the sort of the campaigns that are getting a lot of press, like you're not active, like your goal isn't to just get like recognition as a collected bargaining in it. Right.

That's another key part of our key difference between solidarity unionism business unionism. UM. In business unionism, you're what defines you as a union is whether you are legally recognized by the state, by n l r B, um, by the appointed government body. Yeah. That is the point at which the folks in these organizations like, are we a union or are we not? Okay, let's let's do an election. Let's follow all these rules that, by the way, we're

designed to demobilize us. Yeah, century ago, but let's follow these rules. Let's try to fight in the courts UH to be recognized as a union. And then once we're a union, then we can fight for a legal contract that has benefited a lot of people in different ways. I'm not you know what I mean. Like, but that approach is different than solidity unism, where it's like, we know our power is in the workplace, on the shop floor, where our power is based on our unity and numbers

as co workers. We see this when we walk out and within a month they give us a raise. Along would it have taken to get a raise if we went for an l RB election. Yeah, what organization are

we even building in that way? And so um our instead of seeking legal recognition and waging our uh struggle again bosses in the courts, we are choosing to wage engage in struggle in the shop floor, where we are the experts, where we have the power, where we have the organization, where we are doing the work, where that is our home turf um. We have more power there, Like, it makes more sense to build power where we have power, not in the institutions that were specifically designed to disempower

us and give large employers to the upper hand. Um. All the different ways that they can manipulate how the votes happen, what is considered part of the voting unit, um, the contract negotiation process, I mean, all of these legal hurdles. I mean, for the vast majority of workers, you'll need lawyers to be even understand how to engage in that world. That's not our world. It was not built for us to be in. It was built to control and so um, it just doesn't make logical sense to try to wage

our struggle in that arena. We should be in waging it in the places that we work and so um. That yeah, that's I think another core UM principal solid or unism like build power where we have it um and that's the shop for Yeah, and I think, I

mean that's something that I've seen. Like in when I was in college there there was a big Grand Student Union organization campaign and it kind of they had this huge problem which was that Okay, well they were trying to do they were trying to get a National Labor

Relations Board like vote under Trump. But they couldn't do it because if you know, because because the National Labor Relations Board was controlled by just like the even even by National Labor Relations Board standards like like just unbelievably anti union, like viscerally anti worker forces. It was like, well, if if we try to get a vote, like there's a chance they could just you know, like literally destroy the right like destroy the organizing rights of all grad

students of the country. And yeah and you get you get that with the Nissan election or something like that. Yeah, yeah,

and definitely delayed it. Yeah, and it's and it's you know, and yeah, I think this this is a trap that like a lot of people, even even people who are really highly organized like get stuck in where you know, and end like eventually, uh, the Grand students just like essentially just started doing walkouts because that was you know, that that was the thing they could do when they start doing their own strikes, even til they weren't like

legally recognized, because that was the thing that you could do to you know, actually fight in a terrain that wasn't just inherently rigged against you. So, okay, so you've you've you've you've decided to to take to take a fight in the workplace, like on the shop floor where where you're where you're at your strongest. What does that

actually look like in terms of actions, in terms of organization. Yeah, honestly, I think it's simpler and more rudimentary um than one might think or that you might read about and you know, an academic article or something analyzing. I think it comes down to comes down to building community, comes down to building culture, and the principles of the community and culture that you build together with their coworkers is one where

we value ourselves and each other. We respect ourselves and each other, and that means that we fight for what is fair in the workplace. That means that we maintain integrity. Anytime a boss disrespects one of us. We need to confront it. We we need to address it. H if

not immediately, uh soon after. In numbers, UM, it means if we're getting overworked and underpaid, then we need to strategize and figure out how do we how do we compel the employer to stop overworking and underpaying us, How do we hit them in a place that they are forced to respect? And um as it goes In the world we are today, it's always the numbers. It's always the money, it's always the profit. So UM what that means on the day to day, I mean m Amazon

warehouses are a very isolating place. UM. Amazon has basically uh giggified warehouse work. You know, it's like the Uber for warehouse where you can pick up shifts. You can you know, exer shifts, you can take uh furlough days. You know, we called them videos. Um. Many warehouses like your work the ten twelve hour shift and you're for that entire time, you're near one or two be max because they're spaced out and it's loud, and there's machinery and your packing boxes and and so UM. On top

of that, you know that everyday dehumanizing. It's also um, you're pushed to work faster and faster. Um, it's difficult to have you know, deep human interaction when you're busting your gass, moving you know, thirty to forty five pound packages as quickly as you can. UM. And so the day to day of building and fighting in the workplace, building community means uh. For example, every week we have a potluck during lunch, bring coworkers together, new coworkers that

you know, someone could start last week. That's something that we hear a lot. You know. Part of the challenge, it's the turnover is so high. How can you possibly organize the turnover was so high? Um. That is a specific weapon that boss is used against us. High turnover means what it means we frequently have new cowork is harder to build relationship and organization. It means that the job feels more precarious. So people are always uh afraid

that we'll lose our job. You know, we could get fired. We could uh they could change uh staffing numbers, that could close warehouses. It create you know, as a tool higher turnover. They just they turn through workers. Okay, who who's willing to do the most work for the lowest pay and sacrifice the most of their body. Okay. If if you can't handle it, then you quit. If you can,

then you stay in here. Okay, let's find the workers in society that are most able to you know, produce the most that so on and so forth and so basic things you know, having every day. Uh. Sometimes it's just like talking with your coworkers is something that is that they try to keep you from doing in the workplace, and by engaging conversation, you're already resisting that isolation, already resisting. UM. Boss is trying to just control everything, keep everyone divided.

So weekly pot lunches, UM, having meetings inside or outside of the workplace, coming together. What are the issues that we care about? UM? How do we bring How do we build more unity around these issues that we know many people care about. Isn't doing a petition people sign on together? Are we delivering the petition in the group? UM? If the management doesn't respond, it doesn't give us a reasonable response. How do we escalate? Do we need to walk out? Do we need to take other action? UM?

Anytime we see a manager disres disrespecting a coworker, UM, how do we post up next to them, pull out a notepads, start taking notes ask questions, Um, we're a witness, you know, how do we defend each other in all of these basic ways? How are we addressing um and being honest with ourselves and each other of uh? Just the depth of disrespect when they're waiting for us outside of the bathrooms to write us up for time off task, when they're telling us to work faster when you know

we're already on a ten hour shift. We're on our ten of the ten hour shift. They sent a bunch of people home and are forcing us to finish all the work for a small number of people. Do we continue putting up with it? Or do we immediately walk out? Or do we talk with their co works about what we want to do? Just being mindful of being honest about what how we are being treated? What is fairwood is not in taking the necessary action to uh demand the the fairness to respect that each of us deserve.

I think like that's what the workplace struggle looks like. UM, I don't yeah, And I think it comes down to building that community um with each other and then building the culture of not putting up with bullshit, defending each other, looking out for each other. Um, there's them there's an us UM. Make sure you know inside you're on UM, and you know, I think that's the that's the foundation

of it. Yeah. I think that the aspect especially of culture building is really interesting to me because I think that's something that's not really talked about much with with with organizing efforts in both because you know, a lot of like a lot of what is discussed with you know,

it's it's especially not in academic circles. When when when you're when you're just you know, when when when you have people writing about union organizing, and when even when sort of like other union organizers are writing about unions, is that, Yeah, you don't hear much about the cultural aspects, and you don't hear much about just resisting the actual

like psychological degradation that you get. And that strikes me I think also as as yeah, as as you've been saying something that's that's very important not discussed enough as I mean both as just something that that is a goal in itself, like not having this sort of you know, not not having the just sort of horrible all de meeting and abusive sort of tyranny of the boss is just like existing as this kind of like normal force. But then also like yeah that that this destructs me.

Something that that is really important for anyone who's who's thinking about organizing is you know, getting getting people getting people to organize around just like how get get people to organize around just the sort of like the psychological decordation, like I think is really important because otherwise, you know, you get you can get you can just get these cultures where like I mean, I remember I had a job where I was in like we had a union, but like it didn't I mean I was so I

was I was a temp workers where I wasn't in the union, like they had a union, and it just sort of didn't do anything, and no one like you know, and this this is a real source that sort of right reing resentment because the union just didn't do anything, and then you know everyone's getting treated terribly like by by the bosses and by sort upper management and no one.

But it never even like it never really like is on a culture level, never occurred to them to sort of like use the union for that, because that's not

really what the union was there for. It was just to sort of like it was just this thing that existed and like occasionally when contracts came up, it would appear, and I guess, on on on that note, one of the things I was also wondering is what sort of so for for for for people who are who are interested in their own workplaces and starting doing this kind of organizing and starting to sort of, I mean, just fight back against their bosses in ways that don't you know,

either because they don't want to or because they literally can't, which I think is is true of a lot of people like who who want to organize outside of the business union model. How how do you how did you all start organizing like this? And what what sort of immediate lessons do you think people should should take away and should sort of bringing bring into their own organizing

in the workplace. Yeah, Um, I think at the base of the is that, um, I guess I mentioned something like this earlier, but that we we can organize ourselves. We can. You know, if you're talking if you have two coworkers that you're friends with, and um, you say like, hey, let's meet up them talk about what's going on at work, you're starting to organize, you know, UM. And I think part of part of the damage, part of the harm that business unionism has done. And also just I don't know,

hierarchical organizing Umlinsky and organizing UM. I think they're all part of uh sort of connected school of thought where it's like organizing and you know, building an union is something that like you need to be like professionals too, or you know, they're experts at it, the experts, and then if you're not an expert, then you need to consult an expert to figure out how to do it. Um. And I think that's bullshit. I think it's if you're a worker, then uh, you can be a union organizer.

If you're a worker and you talk with you know, another worker about what's going on in your workplace, like you're already starting to organize. Um. Like I said earlier, if you're calling a meeting, if you're you know, and workers do this all the time, confronting management about disrespect, you know, I think it's very much more frequently on an individual basis, But it's a matter of like connecting your issue with a couple other coworkers and then figure out, okay, well, um,

what what's our next step? But we need more numbers? How we you know, how do we build more numbers. Uh, if each of us can invite one more person, that six people. If you know, if the six of us can are starting a petition, we could probably get you know, signature is a fifty or sixty, you know, like it's it's step by step and saying if we want to build organization, we can do it from the bottom up. We can start it UM and we can figure this out.

I mean, every even within the same company, even within the same company in the same city there. You know, I work at UM a delivery station, Engage Park, other delivery stations in the city of Chicago have a completely different culture, you know, the neighborhood that it's in, the workers that are the bosses, you know. And so even in the same company, the same type of workplace in the same city, it's gonna be a different story for how that work place is gonna you know, get united,

come together, UM, figure things out, build organization. And it's just anyone there that is thinking about that that that kind of just begins the process of putting together the basics. All right, we need to start building up some numbers. We need to start having you know, addressing some issues that people care about and there's always I mean, there's always the you know, overworked and underpaid and that's gonna exist everywhere. And can always go after those issues, but

frequently they're small ones. Like our first issue was a water petition uh or or or or at was access to water UM and this is how we started as an organization UM. Basically, they were taking away bottled water. They said we were leaving around too much garbage. They're saying bottled water is only there for the summer, and now that's not the summer. That whatever. They're trying to save a few dollars a day on bottled water to make us, you know, work without it UM. And we said,

that's fucked up. We're doing warehouse work like this, hard manual labor and it's hot in here. We need a bottle water. It's you know, not just that broken, unfiltered fountain across the warehouse that you can't even get to while you're working. UM. And so, uh, just a few of us that we're talking at break it was like, okay, well there's six of us here. Well we're kind of you know, this is the this is the break room at work. They're like managers walking around their cameras in here,

like let's meet outside, uh and figure this out. UM. So you know, we we met at a at a Crispy Cream down on like ninety three, um, and uh we just basically said like, well, how are we gonna get this water? We've been asking management? Uh, you know they've given us the same reasons. We need to do something bigger that that they can't ignore. Um, how about a petition, and so we just drafted it. The six of us, we drafted it. We went around. We got

hundred fifty signature. Is I think from our coworkers are just like basic commands. We need bottle water stocked every day. They need to be you know, filters need to be clean. We need to get be able to take a break to get this water. Um. And we delivered uh, the hundred fifty signatures to management. UM. I think it was within thirty or forty minutes. They drove to a grocery store, bought you know, went to the nearest pizza bought every

case of bottle. While they have brought it and passed it out to everyone, We're like, oh, okay, like that was you know, people like that's just hey, we gotta do a petition for this thing we gotta do, you know what we should? Probably it was that I don't want to say easy, because it's definitely not easy to like, but the steps, the step by step of like how do you begin, how do you get something started? How do you start building some munity? Um? These are steps

that we have taken. These are you know, what we think is can be applicable um with everyone's own kind of personal tweaks based on you know, your own workplace, UM, to start getting something going from more coworkers to start realizing, oh yeah, like we should be in more control of what's happening around here because we're the ones that are doing all the work. We're the ones that are suffering the most from it in our bodies getting ground down

from doing it. And so um, yeah, I think that I think I look back to a previous question to but like how we started, how you engage in the struggle, and just like what that looks like for building building something up from nothing to something like that's what that's

what we you know what I mean, that's what we did. Yeah, from what I've seen, you all have been extremely effective, like at at getting management to recognize it but essentially getting them to like a seed to your demands because like this, this this kind of organizing like so solid you need what what I'm trying to say, this is all there. The unison of works. Like it's not like like and you know in yeah, it's it's a thing.

I think one of one of the things you're talking about it is like, yeah, it's like when like when you win, even on something fairly small, right, and you can show people that this works and that like you know, if if, if, if you actually come together on something, you can force management to do stuff like I think that also become becomes an important sort of like I don't know if catalyst is the right word, but it becomes it becomes becomes an engine that like feeds itself definitely.

I mean, especially for a big company like Amazon, Like I think the most common perspective, at least at the start is like, this is such a big company, Like what could we possibly do? They have a thousand warehouses, like what you know, they could choose to close one and open another one, you know, they do this, or they could suddenly you know and with two weeks notice, like change the schedule from an even time to overnight time, which is what they did to us. Basically, UM, what

can we possibly do? And so you know, but I think it's like the moment, it's like there's a a cliff or what do you call, like the watershed a point, like the moment you kind of take that first collective action and then get what you want. UM. It's like, oh wait, it's not as like within this space like we can actually make our lives a lot better pretty quickly. Yeah, we just come together and do it ourselves and recognize the power that we have. UM. And I think it's

like mhm. That's one of the reasons why it works so well is because it is different from the mainstream approach, which UM bosses in these companies understand very well and can easily maneuver around, such as, oh if we do if if one of our managers does something wrong, what will happen next is we'll receive one of our lawyers, will receive a grievance from one of their representative lawyers, and you know, this business union will have this many months respond and then we can do this and then

you know, uh, we'll do this paperwork and have this legal back and forth and then maybe we'll address this issue six to twelve months down the line. UM, no disruption, you know, nothing to worry about. UM. Let the bosses run amuck and we'll get a six to twelve month ad start to you know, and maybe get a slap on the wrist and a fix wherever you need to

or pay a small fine. UM. As opposed to that's business unions, like as opposed to Southern unism, where it's like they just disrespected us in a way that like we're not trying to put up with, like we are hurting. We can't even finish the shift without hurting ourselves more. We're just gonna group up the walk out right now. UM, they're gonna figure out, they're gonna have to figure out how to get the rest of these packages out without us. UM. And when we come back tomorrow, uh, we'll see, we'll

see if they want to keep treating us the same way. UM. And so it's like to me, you know, we we've had basic basic management confrontations where either immediately uh you know, they were understaffing and we grouped up rolled into office just like with seven of us, not even like the whole shift. Um, seven out of fifty people rolling off and said, you have too few people on the lines. You're you need an add extra person. We've been asking

you have it. Um, we've folded our arms. Within five minutes, they send an extra person over there. They're working the rest of the shift. UM. In the in the business union approach, like I don't even know, Like how you followed you know, understaffing grievance, Like what are the details? How does that happen? Does a union representative have to be contacted and then negotiate in some way? Um? But that like, let's just address us right now and fix it. Um.

I don't want to wait for some outside activity. Let's just improve our working conditions right now, like confronting and addressing it. UM. I think it's just you know, that's something that Um, the bosses are less it's less predictable for them, it's less in their control, it's less in their wheelhouse. UM. And I think that's a cury reason why it works better. Yeah, And I think one of one of the things the thing this reminds me of.

It reminds me of the kind of stuff that you needs used to do when they were strong, Like it reminds me of like yeah, you're you're like c I O like sit down, strike, right, It's like, well, okay, if if the manager is something we didn't we don't like so and blows a whistle, everyone sits down, and like it's like it's that that kind of not just sort of like way to go to the legal channels, but just just like im immediately taking action is like

it's it's something that it's like it's it's something that works, and it's you know, like that that's that's the kind of stuff that like build you built the original like labor movement. And it's really interesting to me that, like because because I think there's a lot of like I think a lot of people look back at that era sort of like nostalgically and go like, well, Okay, if unions were stronger, we could do this, but like that's

not really true. You can't actually just like like you can do the same things that like, you know, you're like nineteen thirties c I O was doing like and and and if you know and you don't you don't need the kind of institutional backing that that those people had. If if like if if you're organized enough in your in your specific location. I think that's a really interesting I don't know, I'm curious if you agree with us.

It seems like a skord of interesting lesson about like what happens to the labor movement, where like the more the more you get into this sort of like okay, well, the the union is now two lawyers sitting down with each other, right, the what what you're doing basically is and then like this is the this is this is explicitly what the National Labor Relations Act was, right, Like it was an attempt to get labor, labor and capital sit down at the table and stop fighting so that

they could, like you know, basically Selft production could go on. And like some sometimes sometimes that that you know, sometimes a favor the union. Right, sometimes you'd have the president be like like the actual like US president will be like, okay,

you come you like steal company. You have to like give workers what they're asking for because our steel production shut down, right, But like you know, the problem with that is that it's based on like it's based on at all costs trying to sort of preserve like it's based on cost like trying to preserve the labor peace.

And you know, I mean there's reasons for that too, Like, yeah, like I'm not gonna like like obviously there's there's any time you take a direct action, there's a risk and yeah, like I'm not gonna like, you know, I'm not gonna be like like it's it's hard to be really mad at people who don't want to go on strike because they don't like because you know, how how am I

going to defeat my family, etcetera, etcetera. But like, you know, bringing like having that kind of militancy in the workplace, just you know, without without any kind of formal recognition, I think is an extremely powerful tactic. And is I mean literally how the original labor movement like got built. It's difficult though, and it can be scary, you know.

And it's like I think you you posed kind of the question or or or kind of questioning the idea like where did how did the labor movement get to where it's at if the origins were more conscious um in the ways that you've been describing UM. I think that. Um. I mean, it's it's definitely, you know, the risk is always there. You're always confronting the power I mean in

the workplace when it comes down to it like that. Obviously, the power dynamics shift, and it's more complex than you know, bosses have more power than workers unless workers organized, and

workers have more power than bosses. That is true. And also for example, on the day to day, you know, the boss can fire anyone and then you're you know, however you end up dealing with it, Uh, you know, you could be out anywhere between two or twenty paychecks until something is resolved legally or even through direct Actually, there's obviously very directly oppressive power dynamic there, um, and I think that um to speak truth to power, to

directly confront it um. Of course it's frightening. I mean I would be lying if you know, like I'm I'm you know, talking on this on this podcast about doing this, and yeah, we're doing this, and like you know, I'm not gonna pretend that like when we were even when we were in a forty person mass, you know, confronting management, addressing everyone together, it's still like, you know, there's there's there's still this para dynamic here and we're punching up

like it's a punch, but like we're punging up to someone that's like a bigger, heavier, UM adversary, and so it's like they could swing back to like you gotta gotta be ready to and so UM, I think that what I'm describing on a kind of like face to face and the personal that moment in the workplace, I think on a broader scale also exists where it's like waging an extended you know, organizing struggle to be fighting this fight millions of times in many different ways and

then continually trying to bring people together. You know, people move on because everything that's happening in life. They got evicted from their place, so they had to move to a different place far away. Okay, suddenly they had to leave a job and they were someone that was contributing

a lot to the organizing. Some happened, someone has a family member, Uh, you know that they need to spend a little bit more time with um, everything that's happening, everything that's making, you know, reducing our time as working people to take care of ourselves and each other, like all of this, we're fighting against all of this, and UM, they're definitely ups and downs. They're definitely times it was like thing like we're you know, and then it seems

I get times. Uh, all of the struggles and life like it's like you take like two steps forward and then two steps backwards. Get that, and so you know, there's definitely a difficult reality permitting everything, you know, all of the organizing wins, the advents that we're talking about. We need to be fully honest about that and also

recognize that there's still like nothing more. There's like nothing more beautiful, powerful, There's there's no there's nothing that feels better than the that moment when you when the power dynamic was like this and you pull something off and it's like yeah, I was like, oh, like you you

just did what we wanted, you know, and more. And then now like you're being real careful with us, like we we change things here, like our lives are better concretely, UM, and we made it happen, and uh, you know, I think those are like celebrating the winds and like taking joy not always thinking so far, okay, we got more to go. Yeah, they're always there's always more that UM

we can and have to be building. And let's make sure that we're taking the time to recognize UM and celebrate each of the steps that we are UM advancing. So that you know, we we don't get lost in you know, assuming in the cycle of like taking permanent, infinite growth and organizing and being constantly stressed out about it, rather than like taking those breathers, taking those moments. Okay, like let's take this and strive, let's do this sustainable,

let's not burnout. Um. Yeah, I think that's all part of figuring out how to how to how to make

it happen. Yeah, And I think that's that's important. I think that that that's an important thing to understand with any kind of organizing, which is that like yeah, if if if you like if if if if, there's never sort of a moment in which you're reflecting on or or just celebrating like that the goals that you've actually accomplished, Right, you're just going to sort of be endlessly bashing your head against the wall, and you know that this is this is like yeah, I mean, this is this is

sort of a burnout machine. This is a a way that you know, it's something that also just sort of feeds despair, which is that yeah, like you know like yeah, okay, your your victory is a small victory, but it is a real one and that's that's something that it even in the face of sort of like the Cyclopean horror of like just the world that we're living in, Like no, your your small victories dude lead up to bigger ones and yeah, and you know, and getting people to lose

sight of that is a like it's it's in made your way. The system is held together by just sort of like manufacturing hopelessness, even when there there there are reasons for hope and there are reasons to sort of look at what you've done and go, hey, we we won this thing. Definitely. Yeah, I think that's a I guess unexpectedly cheery for the show not to end on do you have anything else? Yeah? I mean I think we touched on a lot um. I guess I have

a usual pits or some version of it um. But I think, um, maybe something to bring together different elements that we touched on and bringing some of the sheery, hopefulness and also put out some encouragement too. I think now is a time where there's a whole lot of uncertainty and I'm uh, you know, definitely and a global week to week or year to year scale, but also on an individual level, I think a lot of individuals

right now. UM, likely those that are listening UM, that that end up listening to this or UM those that are like seeing what's happening around the world, is like, what is my role in all of this? What am

I trying to do? Different people are joining different organizations and and trying to figure out how they should be living their lives, what the what principles they should be living out, how they should be applying themselves to for example, UM, combat and dismantle UM, I don't know capitalism and and and uh you know, prison industrial complex and reverse climate destruction and find fascism and everything all of the existential threats that we face. It's like, what, you know, what

is my role? And I think, UM, if if you at all have the capacity and curiosity, UM two, engage in some of this deep work yourself for building community relationships, culture among um, you know, just with workers, build building your own organization, building your own acts of resistance, building your own forms of of of you know, own forms of reclaiming your time and minds and bodies, and build something beautiful that can you know, be part of a

broader movement that that you know, lifts up working people that kind of gets back what we are building and what we what we deserve. UM. You think about think about the logistics industry, think about warehouse work, UM, think about joining in UM and Uh you know it's uh, it's hard work. It's hard manual labor, it's hard mental and emotional work. UM. But I think this is the future of what the winning, fighting, uh successful labor movement

UM will need. UM. And I think many people engaging in building more genuine, more worker focus, worker centered, worker run UH solidarity unions of our own democratic horizontal bottom up UM. I think building this way and connecting with each other, I think this is the way forward. I think this is the examples that we need. We need more people engaging in this work. We need more UM, more of that attention, energy and focus, Like how do

we build the real stuff? UM. That's gonna be the powerful organizational influence to transform society and and avert these forms of extinction and continued extraction, exploitation, oppression of all of us. UM, join us, join join the struggle, get get some of these jobs. Talk to your co workers, build something that It's really that simple, UM And UH, yeah, that's my that's my every day pitch. Um. So if if people want to find Amazonians United specifically, where where

where can they find y'all? Um, so in Chicago. So Amazonians United, Chicago Land, um is our name. We have a Facebook page, we have a Twitter. Um. Those are probably where we're most active. UM, and where you can follow and get into contact with us, tweet out us, message us on Facebook. UM. If you're really so inclined, UM, you can email us at a you Chicago Land at gmail dot com. Um. But otherwise, yeah, just look up, you know, follow our social media. You'll see what we

post occasionally about what's going on. UM. And uh, you know, feel free to reach out, get into contact, asking any questions you might have. UM, and you know, let's connect, let's build community. Yeah. And that's that's a Chicagoland at a Chicago Land on Twitter by the way. Yeah. Um yeah, sweet Ted, thank you, thank you so thank you so much for joining me. Yeah. Thanks havn't me. Yeah, it's really great. Um. Yeah, if you want to find us at you can find us at having here, a pod

on Twitter, Instagram and cool and media in the same places. UM. Yeah, go go go organize with your coworkers. Go do cool things, go be to a well a better place. Yes, yes, yes, sure, um yeah, thank you, thank you? Hey did you miss us? Truthans returns on March twenty two for season two. In its first season, the one of a kind of investigative podcast, hosted by comedians and real life friends Anna Sara Gina and kyle A Mazzono, dared to ask questions both mundane

and extraordinary, questions like why are some people mean? And why does and fly by when you're having fun? And now they're back for what experts are calling one of the most dramatic seasons yet. Tune in as Anna and Kyle put their lives on the line in the name of pod. This season will have you and your girls saying things like I came over here as fast as I could. Are you okay? I'm okay? But did you hear what they did on Truetown Season two? Oh my god?

Oh my god, Oh my god, oh my god. Listen to the True Towns and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi. I'm Elliott Caleb, comedian, author, history buff and host of the Who Was Podcast, a history quiz show based on the best selling book series where kid contestants go toe to toe for a chance to win fantastic prizes. My co host b and I asked the tough questions, like when Mozart right TikTok? But that's not all we talk about

on the show. You really a signature? Look is BedHead? Alright? I like it? I do gymnastics and I have two scars. Are the scars from gymnastics? Where were you like wrestling dinosaurs and things like that? I really white kiss you. Even my mom says I know more than most adults too. We've got fun games, silly songs, and don't forget to mention our amazing guests. It's all I'm gonna throw a fame.

How about everyone? It's me. I'll read the Franklin. Listen to the Who Was Podcast on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcast for Every Year podcast most podcast, because it's time to ard guard me arties. This is me. Are you doing a priorate voice? Which is kind of a bad a bad Irish voice. That's enough. That's enough of that. Um Hi, welcome to take it oppen. Here in the show where we're talking about things that could possibly happen and or are happening and go your harsh

l D. I'm Carrison. Welcome to this tech centric episode. This is very exciting with me, is Chris to help us discuss libraries and piracy or permanently pirate brained and and pay walls and all this all this fun stuff. So yeah, we're talking about kind of free access to information and uh, I don't know, like I really like libraries and I think a library based economy would be pretty cool. Yeah, you know, libraries for everything. Uh, food libraries you to take food, you know, deposit compost. Um,

it's the decent, decent system. Got the tool libraries so you can get you know, your angle grinders for taking apart in federal fences. You can get your you know, soldering irons for building your f GC nines, you know, all all of all of the basic stuff. And I guess book libraries are cool too. Um, but we already have those and we're gonna be We're gonna be talking with them a little bit. Where are we having a discussion on paywalls, piracy, ar and uh and how access

information is actually good? Um, contrary to what many people want to tell you. Yeah, I know. So Yeah, as as the Internet became easier to access and information flow accelerated. There's been kind of questions and speculation on how physical

book libraries will fit into our increasingly digital media landscape. Now, it's important to mention that the library is also one of the main ways for lower income people to access the internet, um, with their you know, collection of free to use computers as well as you know, a decent WiFi connection UM and many many libraries all so are expanding their scope to include stuff like maker spaces as well as you know, their printers and standard kind of

office supplies. So libraries are already kind of beyond just places to get printed media. But of course it is that is kind of there one that has been their main their main premise, but you know, they've been they've been including stuff regarding e books, computer use, WiFi access, all the stuff has been a part of libraries for like the past years. Um. Yeah, like it's it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not. It's not a new thing.

But I think when when people think of libraries, we just think of books are newspapers and stuff, but it is, it is definitely more than that. Because yeah, obviously physical libraries are mostly known for printing materials. And because we'll be talking about paywalls and piracy are um and and fears that access to free content will negatively impact creator's ability to make such content. I figured let's start by talking about book libraries, since they're one of the oldest

examples of providing information for free. So based on kind of surveys and data collected from you from library users across the country, it would seem that libraries and loaned e books are actually a very powerful economic engine for the book business. Now, yes, libraries do have special deals to buy the books that they you have in stock, sometimes they're donated. But even beyond that fact, like library users, like the fact that libraries exist for the users in

and of themselves increase book sales. Um, it's it's a it's it's pretty fun. So even as far back as there's been studies that show that libraries do increase book sales. Now, yes,

this is this is this is a capitalist argument. But sometimes when arguing with let's you know, let's call them normies, um, you can convince them to agree with a lot of kind of like anarchy leaning improvements to the world by carefully using their own rhetoric against them, right, this is this is like the same thing with the giving out free drugs and having safe drug in in like intake sites, and giving houses to homeless people, you know, all all

the type of stuff. You know, all of those things are cheaper for the taxpayer than what we're currently doing with how we use emergencies, like how for how we use emergency services spending. So yes, it's a capitalist argument, but you can still kind of you know, paint someone into a corner to to agree that like actual good improvements by using hey, this is actually cheaper, you know that that type of argument. So yeah, libraries they do

increase book sales, so that is mostly cool. There is There was a study that shows around this is studying around showed that library users report purchasing books by an author that they were introduced to through the library system, which debunks the myth that want a library bias books the publisher will lose future sales um Instead, it confirms that the public library does not only incubate and support literacy as it's you know, generally understood in our culture,

but it's also an active partner with the publishing industry for building up the book market, and also so including in that is the ever growing e book market, which I don't really like the books for reasons will kind of discuss in a bit for how I kind of have an aversion to the idea of like a digital ownership. But the books are undeniably a very growing industry that also you know, does does support writers in a lot of ways. Um, but I think physical books are a

lot cooler and more reliable. They are, as you can tell by my very nice physical book collection behind me, which you cannot listen to because this is a podcast and you can't listen with your ears unless you're on a lot of drugs, which good luck hearing the books behind me. People who listen to yeah you too, But yeah I'm not. I'm not talking about them. Um, this is an anti people who have jug induced cynthesia podcast. Now Lucky Bastard's gonna get canceled. Yeah, that's what's gonna

get me after all. Well bleep that I can't you said that? Whoa Chris just said one of the just one of the most one of the most one of the most horrible authors that I would never be caught

dead reading any of their books. Um, anyway. Ah, So the idea that like piracy and free information will like tank creative industries, and you know, the idea that you know, just having access to free versions of media will hurt the ability to make more of the media is definitely proven wrong simply by the modern existence and popularity of nu may uh in the United States, because we would not have anime Animal will not be what it is

today without piracy. Uh and uh because in the in the specifically like two thousands, late nineties, the piracy of anime became you know, big massive reason why it is the cultural jug or not that it is today over half of nime related sales revenue comes from overseas. Is

not not Japan. It comes from places like the States. Yeah, and you know, and it's also what I think worth mentioning here, Like it wasn't even just that they were like pirating the show, right, they were pirating they were getting a worse version of it, oh because like you know, yeah, terrible resolutions like I mean literally like VCRs that people had figured out how to like right like get subtitles on.

Like these versions of it are terrible. The translations are awful, and it's still just like absolutely like just catapulted anime from like an incredibly fringed thing for weirdos to a thing that is also still for weirdos, but it's still largely mainstream. Yeah, I'm gonna gonna take take this opportunity to plug our future episode just dissecting the politics of

attack on tited dot dot. It's coming, folks, It's strap in. So, yes, what not would not be the thing is today without without without privacy and again but the majority of of sales revenue comes from not Japan. So yeah, that's that's a pretty pretty pretty clear. So the discovery of new books and authors through the library system um is definitely searching right now, actually specifically due to e books and audio books being available online anytime, well like via library means.

So there's like, you know, there's there's ways you can access you can quote unquote borrow these types of things via via the library systems, despite them being like digital media, which again I prefer physical, but that's that's something we'll

talk about later. So even even while visits to libraries and like physical bookstores A pommeted during COVID nineteen digital library usage sword, which is you know that that that that that that tracks um more than four hundred and thirty million titles were borrowed from the Overdrive library platform in alone, and it would you know it, You could you could assume that this would cause a drop in the purchasing of books during the same period, but the

opposite is true. Actually, the overall purchasing of books also rose in including an eight percent lift in these sales of print books, despite a lot of people being out of jobs, out of work. You know that turns out people are boards They're going to spend money on books because books are cool, and even when they have access to library stuff, they still buy books. Yep, it's a. It's a it's a simple truth that the library patrons

are usually also book buyers. It's it's me. I am literally surrounded by books on all sides that they have me surrounded. I have no escape. And this is what happens when you grow up in a library. I mean I also grew up in a library. Mean I was, I was homeschooled. I grew a library. To my to to my left, I have books on urban exploration and Lemony Snicket. My right, I have books on alchemy. Behind me, I have books which I should I'll not name um and behind me I have a massive techo comic book

of Yeah, I have usually surrounded by books. It's the books are great and you you have them unless they burn up. You're gonna have them, no matter whether the Internet goes out, whether whether an online provider shuts down, you're gonna You're gonna have physical books. They are they are, they are pretty, they're pretty cool. So in libraries and like, the library system offers a really great way to discover new books, new series, new genres, or new authors before

deciding whether to permanently purchase those titles. So it's it's this isn't just like an assumption used to hype up

the idea of a library. But this has been proven by lots of studies, like the why I mentioned a few minutes ago from two US and eleven m. Also there was the Panorama Projects Immersive Media and Books Consumer Survey, which is a way too long the title real Mouthful, which found that one third of responders bought a book that they discovered through the library in So it turns out you you discover a book, you turn it and you're like, hey, that book actually pretty all just buy

a copy myself. I did that. I still do that all the time. It's a yeah, it's it's it's it's it's a thing. So why I own all my Star Wars books. This is why I have a beautiful copy of Splinter in the Mind's Eye, which I am very curious to see. Who will get that joke? I was. I was trying to think of the worst Star worst book that I have, and then you said that, and I'm like, I can't. I think I actually have that. Well, there I go, there's there's two. There's two for you

to uh. Yeah. So in our kind of in our life technology driven world of like, you know, wanting things very quickly, you know, instant instant gratification. UM library users are no different. Right, they still have that instant gratification drive and many times they will want a specific a book and they'll be happy to pay for it instead of waiting for at the library. Right, you can put a book on hold await a month, or you can buy it for ten bucks, and oftentimes people will buy

the book because we want things quickly. It's according to the same Panorama Project immers of the Media and Books consumer survey, about of respondents said that they just bought books rather than waiting for them if they are unavailable from from the library at the time. So and it's it's it's a great system. Like libraries are also frequently

used just as like a really good browsing tool. Um. You know, if you're unsure of what you want to read next, you can go to library, look at stuff and be like, Okay, this is what I'm interested in, and then purchase it online or in person at a later date. And it's not just it's not not not not just physical books. Library users are also are also driving the purchase e books and physical books um and audio books. Audio books have been actually very big at library.

I used to listen to a lot of audio books actually from the library because I would get c d s back when those great for road trips, back in the old days when you had a CD, I say with my gen z uh um outlook yes uh CDs classic Classic. According to the Audio Publishers Association also known as the a P A just acronym, daily audio consumption has grown seventy one since which is not surprising me. Like there's there's there's stuff like Audible and you know,

big big platforms that are are making high quality audiobook content. Uh, but that's that's that's a lot in alone. Audiobook revenue grew by sevent even even though the number of people who were commuting plummeted, right because a lot of people listen to audiobooks while like driving to work. So the number of you know, of commuting dropped in because there was this plague. I'm not sure if you've heard about that, but they know that's true. They're pretending it's not real.

But if yeah, if if, if, if you look at most if you look at you know, the the audiobook revenue, it grew despite their being much less, much less, much less work commuting. And that was the eighth straight year of double of double digit growth in the audio book revenue sector. And it aligns with other kind of digital library usage statistics. So yeah, like libraries and booksellers, will they work in tandem. They they library's drive interest for

content both physical and digital. You know, rising tide races all all of those floaty things on the water. Um as the saying goes are it's a piracy joke, everybody. Yeah, over drive has found that when a reader uses one or more digital library apps like a Libby I've never heard of until I had to research on this podcast. But once you if you use more than one one or more digit digital library apps you're sixty, you are more likely to increase your book resumption year over year

versus people who do not. So yeah, it turns out when you read more books, you want to read more books because it's fun. It's fun. So instead of instead of reading a book, I'm going to give our audio listeners an opportunity right now to listen to this carefully curated selection of ads unless they're by like I don't know, the National Guard or whatever. So here you go. Here's here's some ads, and we are back. What a lovely, lovely collection of audio treats to tickle your ears. Okay, okay,

you're God speaking speaking of tickling your ears. Sonic the Hedgehog. So a lot of a lot of the reasons why we're gonna so this this this will make sense, I promise, um.

We're about to talk about fly genetics, Sshnic Hedgehog. We're talking about how like when people are allowed to like do piracy and allowed to do like their own things with media and actually boosts the overall kind of like the presence of the franchise, right, So Sonic the Hedgehog would not be a current cultural steak if it wasn't for fan culture and the use of like fan games and fan media related to Sonic. So this the same

thing was like anime. Right. Um, you know, Sonic Sonic fan games which were allowed to be existed for years, which they get encouraged, are the only reason why there's a good Sonic games right now, like Sonic Mania, which were just they just hired people who made fan games. Um, the person who redesigned Sonic the Hedgehog for the movie what used to make Sonic fan comics and then got hired to make the actual official Sonic comics. Then they got hired to fix them. They got hired to fix

the horrible movie design. So yeah, say it has been very good about like not being horrible about like copyright stuff and trademark stuff. They've like really encouraged it because it turns out when you when you yourself don't make good games, you need to rely on fans to actually

make the good games. So we get we so wee that's how you get beautiful creations like the Sonic Dreams collection, which is a heartwarming, nostalgic look at Sonic through the Ages um and other great games like Sonic Mania, which, so we can compare this to like a Nintendo who unfortunately makes good games um, but also hates when fans make games or do like emulation or any like ports.

They will clamp down on that so fast. If you ever emulate the Nintendo game, you know, watch Watch your back, there will be there will be men in black studits following you around, just you know, like to do understanding of like how far this goes? Right, So super smash Bros And Bile. This game is like maybe older than Garrison.

It is. I think I actually don't know what that treade, but yeah, literally old and Garrison, right, this game has a still still to this day, Like copies of this game are extremely expensive because there's an enormous professional scene around it. Uh. Nintendo like basically was working to actively smash them because they were they were playing a yeah yeah, because they because they were playing on like an emulated like they're playing an emulated version of it for tournaments

because emulated software. Yeah yeah. And Nintendo again, who is literally getting like millions of views of completely free good publicity was like, no, we hate you. Nintendo will like this when people use they're they're like their their content and stuff in ways that are not not non official. And because they make decent games, they can actually get away with that. Um, Sega, let's not make decent games that are questioning, So they have to rely on fans

doing that. But yeah, that's the reason why Sonic is still a thing, just because fans have have been able to you know, through through piracy, through emulation, through creating, through ucing like Sonic code to code their own games all stuffs. Is the reason why that's still like a cultural staple that is releasing a new movie next month. But I'm very excited about I'm very excited about some Sonic the Headshug too. It's gonna be, It's gonna be.

I'm thinking, I'm thinking it could we could finally clamp down on the video game Oscar this time. I feel it. Well, that's that's look, this is this this this is just because Ace Attorney got Robbed. Okay, greatest movie of all time. That is that is my little side bit about about

about about Sega. Um. Yeah, we should also briefly mentioned that Nintendo just like put literally put a guy in prison for helping for helping jailibrate consoles like put put a man in prison for this for modifying people's software and a game console. I guess the other thing I'll talk about is, like, I mean, part of the reason why I really don't like digital ordership of media is because you don't actually own the thing. You own a license to use the content as long as the online

services active. So even if you buy a game on you know, the Nintendo Switch Store, you're not actually buying the game, you're buying a license to use the game.

The same thing for whether you're buying media on like Amazon Prime, right, it's it's it's it's the same thing if if you're if you're buying digital copy of it, it's a license to use it, so you can take You know, what Nintendo has done a few years ago is they shut down the U Shop channel, which means if you bought a game and it wasn't creanty downloaded, you can now you've just it's gone. You just cannot you cannot play it anymore because they just completely took

service down. So you don't actually you're not you're not actually buying the thing, you're just buying license to use the thing. Now. They did the same thing a few months ago for the w U Shop channel and the three D S channel. So yeah, rip ripped to that. If you, if you, if you have, if you bought games on there that we're not currently running, then you cannot get them anymore. They're just gone, like you can,

they're just lost, lost of time. Well and you know, and again if if you, if you modified the software on the game console that you like nominally own in order to play the games that you bought and paid for, they will throw you in prison. Nintendo will send men in suits to come and get you and throw you in the prison. Yeah. Who he it's a it's a Mario. It's a Mario joke, everybody. Um. Yes, So it's the

same thing with like subscription services. Like obviously, if you have a subscription service, you don't own the content you're watching. You are just getting permission to use it from a certain amount of time. So this is obviously, this is this is more obvious. Right, you don't owe what's on Netflix. You just are able to watch what Netflix has legal

rights to show. But you even see this thing extended to like cars, like Toyota was was trying out a program and that this may even it may even still be active for some cars where you need a subscription service to use the key fob on your cars like automatic like like door locking like fob, like you need a subscription to use that service of it. Just like why, Like it's it's just turning everything, it's turning everything into

us to us like a subscription service. It's horrible, like everything is becoming a new subscription service, a new a new thing to get your monthly payments for. It's it's it's awful, like you don't actually buy things anymore. It's just a subscription services and digital copies. It's not nothing is nothing is actually the thing anymore? Yeah, it's it's

it's all just rent extraction and the entire economy. Instead of you know, having a thing, they figured out way, what if we just distract rent and then you also don't own it. The same thing with like Tesla cars you have to like buy by you know, upgrades via software that are already built in and like subscribe to keep your car running nicely. Like what it's not like no, yeah, like I'm gonna I'm gonna go on a very small gamer rent here because this this is a this is

a thing. A lot a lot of the worst practices for this origidated gaming and this this was this was a big fight back in like the early thousand pens about okay, if you buy a game, right, do you own everything on the game? And there was a huge fight about you know, they'd have these like delayed DLC, like they have these new content packages that would be on the disc right that you've bought, but you can't

access it unless you pay the money. And this was like a fight and some gamers were like, you know, they're trying to fight it, right, but most gamers didn't care. And then they became the weaponized shock troops to the far right instead of you know, dealing with this ship. And now literally everything has fucking day and day one DLC on it that you buy the thing, you don't even get all you have to you have to buy the if you have to buy the season pass to

get all the content in the future. It's like you have to buy the season pass for your car to work properly. Yeah, so this is just how it started with start started with the season past for sixty for a sixty dollar game to then buy season pass to get more of the game, and now it's for your So yeah, that's fun. It's it's not, it's it's kind of sucks. So but yeah, a lot of these, a lot of these like play to win practices, these like free models which then like which lead into like a

subscription service based model. Um have did have definitely started in online gaming, and it's yeah, it's it's really frustrating because as we'll talk about here in a bit, like the Sega model is like better, Like turns out when you encourage your fans to play around with the stuff, it only helps your property. Like that's the reason why they there's still Sonic March available now and it's not like a dead franchise. It's because they like because they

allowed that to happen. So it's actually really cool when we're allowed to access free information and play with it how we want to, instead of like having this weird strict copyright like rules for not allowing certain usage of certain things. Like it's it's it's not. It's not great when you're restricting like emulation, restricting fan games, restricting the

access to information. It's not, it's not it's it's not it's not fun, but yeah, this is kind of it's kind of place into why I am very skeptical of digital media, which is why I start started collecting Blue Rays and all of all the things they like, because I've boughtened things on Amazon Prime which are now no longer available on Amazon Prime and that sucks. So like,

why do that instead just by your physical copy? Yeah? Well, the thing is like it didn't and it's so true to some extent, like if if you buy physical copies, like it didn't used to be like this, like Blue Rays used to it to some extense, so dubious the most times. Yeah, but like like if you buy the physical copy of it, they will give you a code

that lets you use the online version, a digital download code. Yeah. Yeah, and you know that's a much better way of the thing working than uh, instead of you know, you don't buying it, you don't have the physical product, and also they can take it away from you. Yeah. It's I'll circle back to this idea towards the end, but I kind of want to, I want I want to a little bit segue to like the idea of the same type of like paywalling subscription service issues, and like the

restriction of for information regarding like online news. So you know, there's a lot of people, whether they be like reporters, editors, authors, or just annoying people online. Um. But there's a decent collection of people that perpetuate the notion that readers or consumers are actually responsible for the dire straits of the media industry. But the problem with journalism and many other media you know industries. But the problem isn't that people

aren't paying for news. The problem is that newspapers and outlets are being decimated and dismantled by hedge funds, capital investment firms, venture capitalists, and tech companies in search of profit. Um. You can look at how Facebook tricked a whole bunch of companies and just switching over to video content, and then a whole bunch of companies we had to fire

tons of people because there was a lie. You can look at how Sinclair Broadcasting dominates local news channels and websites, um, and how well established local papers are struggling while big companies buy up all the competition. So it's it's it's especially the venture capitalist thing is actually a really uh is a really interesting idea that has been documented decently well and in a bed, I'll teach you how to

bypass uh newspaper headlines via different methods. But there's this actually good article in the Washington Post um that is titled as a secretive hedge fund gets its newspapers, journalists are fighting back. It kind of just details all of the different hedge fund adventure capitalists firms instead of like just totally destroyed so many local papers throughout the entire country.

It's actually kind of surprising once you learn how many of these papers are just getting destroyed by like just a few, like just like a few hedge funds are just doing all this damage. And it's it's like, yeah, I mean this is why the current like journalism industry kind of sucks right now, is because of these types of practices. And I mean, like no one likes it, like no one's happy with it, Like everyone hates journalism.

Journalists hate journalism, people who read journalism hates journalism, like activists hate journalism, like everyone's met at it um. And yeah, you can look at these these hedge funds and venture

capitalists who are just like making it such an impossible industry. Uh, and then you know how you have like you have internet sites and culture sites like Vice, BuzzFeed and Cracked, who had to frequently lay off large swaths of their editorial and writing teams, whether for like union reasons or because the company made failed attempts to chase some big tech companies or made your giants you know, proposed money, like in the Facebook switching over to video content kind

of debacle that happened a few years ago, and like it's it's, it's it's understandable why these writers, artists, the journalists are frustrated because, yeah, the work is hard and the salaries are low. Well, the work should be hard, and some people kind of slack off, but you know, for the good journalism is more is challenging, and salaries

typically aren't great. But even if audience monetary is support, where the solution to making creative and writing industries more profitable again, the kind of anti piracy folks would still be missing. A fundamental point is that kind of the the pro paywell people want you to get it through your head that journalism is just like other types of things you buy, whether it be food, you know, alcohol or entertainment um saying you know, all these things. You know,

Netflix isn't free. You know, Coca Cola isn't free. Right, This isn't journalism's fault. It's just how the world works. You have to buy it to use it. It's you know, it costs money to make. You have to buy it to use it. It's just it's it's it's like, it's

dumb to think otherwise. This is kind of their framework, But I beg to differ because enjoying art and worthwhile journalism, I think should always have the option of being free, because when information is in the public interest, it should just always be available to everybody, whether or not you've already used up your three free articles. Like this is really important, especially now when there's you know, the whole the whole war thing happening, and finding like pay all

the articles about it is incredibly frustrating. Uh. And yeah, I mean there was even when the there was a right wing right ring extremist who opened fire and killed someone at a Portland's uh black Lives Matter protests a few weeks ago. Uh, that that is you know, still definitely impacting the city because it was it's it's still very recent, but a lot of the news coverage. First

of all, it wasn't great. Uh, there was a whole bunch of news coverage was like was parroting the police lies and framing the framing the attacker is like an innocent homeowner who was defending himself. It was pretty gross. But even when even when the news articles started to like correct their previous agree with errors, um, almost all of it was paid walled, like all like all, like a whole bunch of stuff was pay welled about it.

And that's incredibly frustrating because this is like, you know, when information is in the public interest, it should be free to access. Like that's just there's like a good moral thing like uh and even um, and we've seen it. We've seen this before. Back in when the plague was a new thing, news organizations across the country started to lift pay walls to share coverage of the coronavirus pandemic um,

which was great. And you know, you can you can obviously see that once that changed over, a lot of people who we're making this happen behind the scenes probably hoped that which just convince people to become paying customers. But it was still like that's still the way things should be, is to have have the option of it being free than having the option to donate. And this

actually seems to be kind of the trend. Uh. The University of Texas at Austin surveyed about like a thousand Chicago residents about their local news consumption, and they found that respondents were more willing to give a ten dollar donation to support a free news site than pay ten dollars for a subscription to access premium news content. So yeah, like that's and that I definitely share that same like, uh,

that same idea. I will weigh sooner donate money to a newspaper that I enjoy that is also free, that I will pay ten dollars a month to read subscription service based news. It's a it's because it turns out when you like this, this applies to all cyps of media. But like when you enjoy media, you want to support its creators, whether that be anime, whether that be Sonic the fucking Headgehog, whether that be whether that be news or books. Right, if you like something, you're gonna buy it.

I got to introduced to te Lemony, stickets books to be the library, and now I bought lots because I wanted to I wanted to buy the books from the person that I like. Yeah, and there are entire like industries. I mean that literally just work on this person. This

is why free to play games work. Yeah, exactly. There there's another conversation with free to play games here about like addiction and gambling and manipulation about that, but like that, that's you know, like setting that aside for a second. It's like, yeah, these things if if if people didn't want, if didn't spend money on things they like, free to

pay games would not work like fundamentally as a model. Yeah, No, definitely definitely the idea of like, yeah, you get someone starts to enjoying the service, then they start paying for it, whether it be buying useless you know, skin for whatever third person shooter you have, or that be you know, buying books or copies of the film or like anime, body pillows whatever like you do. You want to financially support the things that you enjoy. This is just a

part of this is what humans do. So yeah, maybe more stuff should be have the option of being free. Uh, that definitely might take on it. Let's let's have a quick let's have a bit of a speaking of free content. This podcast is brought to you by these lovely sponsors, so you can listen for free while just skipping the ads. So good for you. We're back and now we're gonna talk about different ways of bypassing pay walls, specifically for online news, because paywalls frustrate me and as someone who

likes messing around with kind of computer e stuff. There's definitely a long list of ways to buy pass pay walls, depending on what types of paywalls we are talking about. So types of pay walls there are. There are typically two general types of pay walls. There's hard pay walls and soft pay walls. Um, hard pay walls require payment up front, so usually some some form of subscription fee

before accessing any content websites with hard pay walls. Maybe we'll let you lead like a tiny snippet of the article what you need access you need you need to pay subscription to access the full the full content. Soft pay wells are are are typically allow you to read a number of articles before you need to buy buy a subscription. So it's either's you have a set number of articles that you can read for a fixed period or session. Um, you know a lot of a lot

of a lot of websites operate like this. Most of the New York Times operates like this. A lot of a lot of a lot of news sites have a soft paywall model, which is great because they're typically a little bit easier to bypass the first first method. This works some of the time. It depends on how the website is constructed, but you can try to stop the loading page before it fully loads. UH so generally a

quick technique. It's effective on several different types of webpages. UH. You have to stop your browser from fully loading the webpage as soon as your breaser displays the text element of the pay well to content. So you you know, enter a page U R L into the search bar, press enter, and then press the x icon or the escape key as soon as you see some of the

text on screen before a paywall window pops up. UM. A major limitation of this is that stopping the website may not load all content elements, so it may only render like a portion of the text, or it may like miss out on like files like images, animations, or videos. UM. And it also depends on the order of which the website loads the page elements. So for example, if the website loads to pay well first, then this trick won't be successful. Also, you gotta have to be kind of

pretty fast in order to make this one work. Typically this isn't the first way I do it, because there's generally generally easier ways. But if you can do this,

then cool. It's definitely it's definitely a fast one if you can't get it to succeed for soft paywall So like I, I will say the stopping the browser from loading is actually successful at some hard paywall sites because if they do like load a portion of the text to read as like a stippet, sometimes it will actually load the entire text, but then just block it off with a separate window. So sometimes with a hard paywall you can actually stop it via this method. So that's

always fun um. But second method, generally more for soft paywalls is for is to delete your pages cookies. So you know, websites store cookies to track your browser um activities, including how much content you backsesst so blog publishers, news newspaper sites can track the number of frege articles you've read using the cookies stored on your browser. If you

hit the limit for for non subscribers. If like the limited articles allotted, then you can delete the website cookies to refresh the to refresh that counter and it will possibly reset the limit of articles. Um. You can go to the privacy or security section of your web browsers, like the option that allows you to check the cookies and site for all data, and then search for the website that you're looking for in the in the cookie

management page and then click remove all. You can do this on like Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge if you want to use that for some reason. Um Safari. Yeah, well, this trick may not work very well on hard pay walls because it that's that they don't really use cookies for the same purpose. And also you'll have to you know, do if you're doing if you're doing this for soft pay walls, you have to do it every time you

you reach the limit. UM. And if this won't work if the website is using other kind of more advanced tools to track your activity like I p logs, right, so if it's tracking your AP data instead of your cookies, then this probably won't work. So this one's this one.

I mean you you should clear cookies every once in a while anyway, just like generally a good practice, but to do this all the time, it's kind of a kind of a bit of work, especially because the next method is typically easier and does the same thing, which is just reading articles inside a private or incognito mode or in the tour browser. Um. So, as as as as explained earlier, not all paywalls are about the same.

If you know, if a website uses a soft pay wall, you should be able to read a subscription based content through incognito or private browsing because it'll check the it'll it'll check the website into thinking you're a brand new visitor, granting you access to the content before it had before it racks up enough of views to uh to throw up the paywell window. So this is this is a lot easier than just manually to leading the companies every

single time. Because yeah, most web browsers do not transmit pre existing cookies onto an incognito or private mode browser mode, so it doesn't switch those back over. And then although the website will deposit new cookies onto your browser during private browsing sessions, they will be removed as soon as

you close the window. Uh. One bummer is that some news pages are getting wise and actually are programming their websites to be able to be able to detect if they're opened in a private or browsing mode or even on tour um and they just like won't open. They'll they'll say, sorry, you have to we we've detected that you're using this in private browsing mode to view this content.

Boot up a regular browser, which which really sucks for the tour users because a lot of people getore are like, hey, yeah, I'm in China, I'm trying to get past the Great Firewall and fuck you eat ship. You should have somehow paid a subscription service to us to see information on this site that is literally illegal here. Like it's great, it's really bad for people who are like actually facing government censorship who need to use tour to view content. So yeah, that that is Uh, it's what we call

a major bomber. Uh A major sucks a major Oh no, capitalism did a whoopsie Um. Yeah, but yeah, this is definitely this is one of the modes I do most often. It's like I can typically get a lot of sites to be able to view through incongo or private or private browsing. But again, it does depend on what the site is. UH is a built to do but bar

far my favorite me. Oh yes, I'll mention. Another one that I don't really use very often is the paywall or removable extensions for for your browser, which is like third party browser extensions which UH try to automatically bypass pay walls. These are really hit and miss um and it's they're also a really great way to get nice

fancy malware onto your computer. UM, So I would I typically steer clear of this, but there there is allegedly a browser extension called bypass paywalls for Chrome and Firefox that allegedly has been found to be effective, UM that allows you to read the subscription based articles on hundreds of publications like New York Times, Wired, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post. Um, it is it is. It is free, but you have to manually load it onto your browser.

And just typically amount a big fan of browser extensions in the first place, so I kind of steer clear of these. But some some some people, some people swear by them, so maybe maybe they can work. They're not They're They're not only my thing. But my favorite method

is archive websites, UH, specifically archived dot is. So there are Internet archiving tools that preserve copies of web pages and social media posts for reference purposes, and you can use these tools to access paibled content and read subscription based news articles for free, including a lot of hard payworld pages. Archive dot i S or archive dot is is my favorite one. Um. Also it's it functions under archive dot today. Uh just it just it depends on

what surfers they're running at the moment. Of course, there's also the classic and pretty reliable archived dot org, which has a nice calendar feature. But it's definitely good to check both of these because sometimes an article will be archived on archived dot is really easily and it won't be our available on archive dot org. Sometimes it will be on archive dot org and not archive dot is currently the one that's currently live. I think it's not

pH It automatically switch is usually I could. I usually just type in our cave dot is um and it switches me over automatically. But yes, there is, there is, there is. There is a few of them. Yeah, yeah, you are right correct. It does automatically revert to archive dot phr at the moment. So yeah, but these these are the ones I use them because people who have access to hard paywalled content will often archives the hard paywalled stuff so it's available to people without the paywall.

This this this can include the screenshot mode for archive dot is and the regular archival method for archived dot org.

But both these are great UM and they're also really good for looking at past versions of the articles, so you can look to see what how the articles have changed over time, and so is your great just research tools and archive dot is is very easy to even upload stuff yourself, even if you don't have um the paywall, Like even if you're blocked off from reading the full thing, you can try to submit it to our chaive dot is and there's a good chance I'm and actually grab

an unpaywalled version of it because because of how because of how the site works. So let's go to archive dot pH r or or archived dot is, enter the web page u r L that you're wanting to access in the designated dialect box at the bottom. It's like to save. It'll go through a little process um and then then you will then you'll be able to select the screenshop mode or the webpage mode and be able to see what type of thing in archives. It's pretty

it's pretty cool. Um It's. The last thing I'll mention is outline dot com and twelve foot Ladder. These are web based tools, but not specifically archival sites. They're generally used to just get to the text of an article

it would via like web page nonsense and bypassing paywall stuff. Unfortunately, websites have also gotten wise to this, so stuff like New York Times and Wall Street Journal have figured out a way to get to these sites blocked so you cannot use outline dot com or twelve foot Ladder on them, but they still work on stuff like The Washington Post, so it always depends. But I definitely generally will prefer the archive dot is and archive dot org method to

viewing any kind of paybled content. Um. Yeah, and that's kind of my I mean, I'm not now, I'm not gonna explain how to do like regular piracy on the podcast because I don't have enough time. But like it's easy. There are there are lots of people who will tell you, I mean, like kiss Cartoon is like a very popular website, Like you don't even need to, like you don't even have to like properly tour and stuff anymore, there is

like so much pyraated media. Help. Yeah, and it's like okay, so like you've gotta be a little bit careful with your parting stuff. Sounds like you can get copyright strike, but if you stream it, they don't copy strike you for that. So yeah, yeah, I guess The other thing I will plug is a PLEX, which is a kind of an online movie hosting service like Netflix, except you

upload all of the content to it. So let's say you buy Blue Rays, it comes it comes with the digital download code, So now you can upload the digital copy into Plex and watch that wherever you want, as long as you're signed into the Plex account and you actually own the stuff on the service. So as long as the services online, you can use it because you

actually own the stuff on it. Um that includes if you have if you have pirated versions of movies downloaded, you can upload this versions onto Plex then then delete the actual hard copies of it on your hard drive. Then just watch the ones in Plex and you're totally fine. So Plex is great for having like ease of access because right, sometimes I don't want to sort through my Blu ray discs and make sure that I have a Blu ray Player with me so to watch my stuff.

So using plex is a great wet method to keep your stuff that you actually own accessible online to watch it as long as you sign into a web browser. Um. And the last thing I'll plug is library submission forms. So if you really want media and you don't wanna pay for it, and you don't want to like pirate necessarily, you can get libraries to buy stuff. Um. I did

this all the time when I was younger. I I found out that you can submit items for purchase via the via via the library on the online forum, and I submitted so many comic books. Uh, most of the comic books, I would say, I'm not like a good majority of the comic books in the Molton Moon County Library system are because of me. Every every Wednesday, when a new trade paperback would be released, I would upload

it to the library submission form and they would buy it. Uh, and not just one coffee, they would buy like twelve copies. So there's so many Batman comics in the in the in the Molton McKinney system because I would studiously upload upload all that stuff so that I didn't need to pay for comics. I could just get them from the

from the library. So definitely look into library submissions to kind of grow what your library has in stock, and then also looking to see what other things your libraries doing, because I know more libraries are looking into building like maker spaces and like tool libraries to um have access to things that are not just like books, you know, power tools, and then you know had to access to even cool stuff like stuff like vacuum formers and like

three three printers, laser cutters. All these things are kind of growing. So look into what your library is doing because oftentimes libraries have some pretty cool stuff. Um. So yeah, this is my little little bit on why I don't like pay wells, why I think content should be free because it actually helps creators in the long run any anyway, and how to get past news articles that don't want you to read them without paying too much money yep.

And remember folks, if Japan invaded your country pirrating anime as reparations. If you're mad about this tweet, find me on Twitter and I write, okay, yeah, make sure your tweet and I right, okay if you have complaints about that take So yeah, that is that is my little my my little bit talking about piracy argue and uh and yeah, I mean morest we should, we should, we should. I think it's I've always had I've always hold this opinion that I think we can all learn a lot

of lessons from Sonic the Hedgehog. Um. And I think one of the greatest ones is that turns out when you make stuff available to use, uh, for free and allow emulation, people like people like, people like the stuff, more people enjoy it, and it will actually support official uses of it as well. So more stuff for free, more more library based economies. Having having gold rings, having an enormous number of gold rings makes you nearly invincible. That that is this is this is also true. I

mean this, multiple franchises exist with that exact premise. Um. Yeah, So it turns out when you have more, more libraries, more rings, people are happier. Yep. That's the episode. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe. It could happen.

Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening. M Hey, Elizabeth, you're the co host of that new podcast, Ridiculous Crime. Why yes, I am. You

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