It Could Happen Here Weekly 55

a body checking. Uh yep, this is the sports episode. Welcome to It could happen here your favorite sportscast. I'm not the host of this episode, but I'm talking for some reason. Uh, James and Chris, why are we talking about sports? To distract us from the crumbling of society around us, but more specifically to talk about how sports I used to laund other reputations of dictatorial regimes. And I know Chris has got some interesting stuff on Balsonaro's

Brazil and sports. This is this is this has before that? Sorry, yeah, I should measure this. This is okay, like this is this is this is this is some wonderful pt era of vintage crimes. Oh good stuff. Okay, I love a Brazilian crime, no matter what the vintage. So I'm excited to learn about how the NFL legitimizes the military police state anyway. Um ye. And it's not even football, is it.

So multiple things they're doing wrong. I want to talk first about like the original incidence of what we're going to call sports washing, because everyone else calls it sports washing too, So it's like using these big global mega events to launder the reputation of a pretty reste of all regime. So the o g instance of this is the nineteen thirty six Olympics, which were held in Berlin. You'll probably familiar with who was in charge in Berlin. It was the Nazis. That's a spoiler, and the Anazis

were actually given the Olympics. The Olympics were given to Biby Germany, which was considerably less ship than the Nazis, but the Nazis took them on and they're really round with them. And lots of the symbology that we associate with the Olympics today, that the raising of flags during the medal ceremony, the playing of national anthems. The parade of flags are, the opening ceremony, the torch relay. The torch relay goes from o g Olympia in Greece to

wherever the Olympics are being held. It's it's this big ceremonial thing, right, that all of these things were created by its guy called Carl D. M who was a Nazi, to draw stronger links between the Nazi Party and the ancient Greeks and position the Nazis the inheritors of this classical legacy, right, and the civilized people in the barbaric world, like the Greeks saw themselves. And obviously the Olympics, if you aren't familiar, draws its legacy from a largely mythical

construct of a games that did actually happen in ancient Greek. Right, so they claimed to be like a reconstruction of this Greek tradition, except in the Greek truition everyone was naked, which I think would make the Olympics much more watchable. We could, yeah, it's that is. I would watch the male gymnastics way more, not just naked but oiled. Yeah, honestly, men's men's swimming would be a lot more interesting yes, it would yep, naked Olympics, we can get behind. But

they didn't bring that back. Nazi didn't bring that back. They didn't have some naked statues, but they weren't big into nudity. But they fused a whole lot of fashy eugenic shit. Right, So the reason that they started having these medal tables was very much to reinforce their idea of the superiority of one race over other races. Right.

Didn't really work out for them in the nineteen thirty six because Jesse Owens turned up and owned them lots of different events and c into being of course of black American sprinter and long jumper, and it didn't well. The Natietics Olympics did exist to did help significantly in laundering the Nazi image. They hit away a lot of their bullshit, like they for instance, like all the Nazi Party newspapers like weren't distributed for the time that foreigners

were in the country. Right, they hit away anti Semitic slogans. They even had a Jewish woman on the German Olympic team, because there was lots of sort of fluster and and sort of they're like neoliberal liberal complaining I guess about like, oh, no, you're being anti Semitic, or you shouldn't. Oh look there's a Jewish person on your team. It's fine. You guys are great. You guys aren't anti Semitic at all. It's good.

We're sorted. And the US did nearly boycott the Olympics, but they decided not to, and that this guy called every brandage who went on to be a p of ship of some right now, So like this Olympics, I guess set the tone for the use of these massive events to put on a show to the world and bring the world's press and show them what you want them to see and hide the stuff that you don't want them to see, which I think is a nice transition to talking about Brazil. Yeah, so we'll talk sort

of about that effective it. Their sports has a second sort of incredibly important internal political effect, which is that when when when you have a sports thing that's large enough, like when you have you know, like we have a World Cup, you have the Olympics, show up, you have even to something the super Bowl, like you what what What it basically creates is this like like it basically creates a temporary sort of state of state of exception where just like the sort of sort of normal function

of society stops, right, and you know that this can going this and going a number of different ways, like I and anyone wh's ever lived in Philadelphia, like, okay, there there's a version of this in Philly where like after after the Eagles win, like for like fifteen hours, there are no laws like or like when they just killed like thirty people, yeah, well like a hundred, Yeah it was a ye, yes, yeah, I think yeah, yeah, you got ahead of the sports for killing tons of people.

I think that likely to blame where the cops were sports. But I mean, but that, but this, this is the thing about sports, right, is that in order to sort of like do security blah blah blah blah, blocks and etcetera, in order to make sure the game's worked, you can

do fucking anything. Yes, right, justified. Its nasty as ship. Yeah, And you know what, one of one of the things, one of the sort of like examples that I wanted to talk about about this happening is one that is really not talked about that much, which is the two fourteen World Cup in Brazil, which wound up I think actually having a pretty big impact on the way Brazilian politics went and also just destroying the lives of unfathomable

numbers of people. So okay, so this whole thing, like I've been in like since it's happening to us fourteen. It's been in the works since like Lula was in office in like the late twenty like late late two thousand's right, Um, this is this is like this is like one of this is like one of the workers parties like big things is that they're they're they're they're going to have this World Cup. Um, they've taken a

ship ton of corporate money to do it. They've taken you know, they've they've they've spent they spent enormous amount of political capital making sure this is gonna happen, and the consequences of it are just like astronomic. Something like two d fifty thousand people like lost their homes in order to like make way for like the fucking stadiums and the fields and like all of the sort of like bullshit around like all the sort of security, theater stuff,

all of like just like debate. Yeah, and this is something that happens with Olympics, is to more famously, but like when whenever you have a sports event like this, there's just this giant cleansing that happens of like anyone who's like onto the street, who's homeless, right, anyone who's just sort of like doesn't look right, particularly anyone who's black just sort of like suddenly is like disappeared by

the police from this area. Um. But this, this this particular one in in in Brazil was interesting because this is happening to just in fourteen, so and she doesn't thirteen, they were like enormous protests in Brazil and actually there there's been another like set of soccer events there in thirteen, like something like eight hundred thousand people were in the streets across Brazil like protesting it. But yeah, there there's these like there's enormous street movements. Is like like six

percent of the entire Brazilian population was in the streets. Um. They were like basically started as sort of like antiosterity protests because cities were sort of like we're increasing the price of like fairish first off, and it gets it gets the just get kind of weird very quickly because on the one hand, so like you have the workers party in power right and like that the Workers Party has been sort of sliding right by this point. But you have a sort of like you have like a

really bilitant left that's industry. You have a bunch of anarchis, you have a bunch of autonomist or sort of like doing stuff. But then also right wingers start showing up because it's a protest against the governments and the government's like nominally a left government. And yeah, this leads to

just a really confusing stative affairs. But but you know the next year, this like and the protest like keep going for like a long time, and there's still like even after like the largest ones are kind of pee doing out, there's still protests happening. But when the World Cup hits, like the World Cup, is that like is one of this sort of like like the arth, like

the law suddenly doesn't work anymore. Like in orders to do this, you have to sign like there's something called the General Law of the World Cup, which is like a bunch of like laws that you have to sign it like physically change what you're calls are like in order to have this event magnificent. I mean that's actually

that's actually great, you should do more of that. The great thing about FIFA is that they've sharing a commitment to human rights, to quality and democracy, and so I'm sure there's rules are good rules, and you know so so there are fun things like like it literally like parts of the Brazilian constitution are suspended parts like well so physically a bunch stuff about the right to strike, Like there's a special court that's set up that like

it like that within forty eight hours, like like decide on whether it's strike is legal or not and what the thing is going to be. Like that's not very good. It's really they're all not real very bad. Like like there's there's the Brazilian governments like seventy million dollars buying basically police equipment and like from the U S. From Germany and from Israel, which is like the holy trinity of good normal countries where if you're buying shipped from them,

you're doing a good thing. See I you were going to talk about how you know, there's moments in our society where the regular rules of engagement are suspended, and in such we can use this moment of extra opportunity to find new ways of liberatory of experiencing liberatory freedom. People tried that, and and and and instead of a bunch of literally like they were driving tanks through the street like into like like blockading off like roads leading out of the favelas with tanks like it was. It

was nuts, like some incredible videos of this time. Yeah, there are like laws in Brazil about child labor, right, um, guess what doesn't apply to FIFA, so you can just so they can have fucking ball boys, they said, they also have they have these. There are twenty thousand people who are working for this event who are who are classified as volunteers. You can just use them as basically

they started doing slave labor. Yeah, what's the what's the shocking? Yeah, I know, are they forced into this or do they actually volunteer? Kind of Okay, so sometime the actual you know what it's actual slavery because it's it's not actual Okay, so the Brazilian government will do actual slavery, but like this is yeah, this is not quite that, but it's

a bunch of people who are kind of its volunteering. Yeah, but yeah, who have who have no labor rights, like and the everything happens is there's there there are enormous crackdowns, like they just start they start doing the thing that like the US does it too, but I think I think like Canada, this is more than the US where it's like when when when they know a protest is about to happen, they like go find the like six people who they think are protest leaders and just arrest

them beforehand. They started doing that. They there's a bunch of people who get tortured. There's a bunch of like the police are basically just going ape shit. They like, yeah, they there are some like that. There's a point in this where like the garbage workers go on strike and they actually win because it turns out that if if in the middle of the World Cup there's fucking garbage

piling up on the street, like it's really bad. But like yeah, like this has like this has a just like absolutely disastrous effect on like just just sort of what's like everything is going on president in politics like

um one of the things that Lula does. I'm gonna talk about this more in another Brazil episode, but Lula like sent a bunch of Brazilian troops to invade haiti Um, which fucking sucks, and then those troops came home and they were used to occupy the favelas in real well this was going on, and this kind of crushed like what was left of the sort of left that had

been in the streets. Like they just got like they just got they just got stomped because the Brazilian police are on terrifying and like literally they're deploying colonial troops like in the streets, and yeah, and so so this this is a sort of second kind of thing that you can get with sports, which is like on the one hand they're used to sort of whitewasherzimes and on the other hand they're used as as basically a way to like do fascism inside of the state where you

can you know, like you can you could do a state of exception, right like the law seas to exist, the state becomes like this entity that can just sort of like do whatever it wants in order to preserve itself.

And it's a way that you can just you know, you can socially cleanse two people, and which is something that would be like you know, would genuinely be pretty difficult if you try to do this in any other circumstance, but you know, it's it's sports, so you can just basically do ethnic cleansings, and yeah, it sucks as sometimes you can do it with the support of the other side.

Like the World Cup. It's coming to Qatar, right and and they one of the things is happening against it's quote unquote security consultants from the participating nations are coming. So you have this like incredible situation where like a the Qatari and like police chief I believe, has been like, hey, for your own safety, fans, if you do happen to be gay and it's illegal to be gay right in Qatar.

Like just guys, just don't hold hands with your partner because it's not us who's going to come and beat you up. It's it's the regular qataris right like you, you won't be safe and we can't protect you from their violent homophobia. And then we've got like Britain's sending soldiers to be like, yeah, let us help you with your security consultations. Guys, you we need to keep this country safe. Oh god, okay, so did you do you

know what else those violent security consultations? Is it? Britain? Yes? Yeah, we were now sponsored by the Nation of Britain help better help online counseling. If you don't sign up for therapy, a military a military team will break through your windows and force you to go to therapy with that's that is, that is the better health guarantee. And we're back. And I am not thinking about the people who I know who were physically dragged by cops in the therapy. It's great,

it's a great never happened. Never happened. No one's ever been forced to go to therapy non consensually. It doesn't have Yeah. Yeah, other things that don't happen include include sports. Yeah, sports aren't real. Their fingment of our imagination if we simply the ontology of sports is fatally flawed. One might say that's sports for a way of teaching people to be complying with rules and to be administrators in the

colonial empire. Or people can argue that sports offer a gamified version of the world that allow you to recognize problem solving in fun and creative ways and encourage team building so that you have join online squad. I don't actually like sports very much. On the other hand, do quite like sports, but I'm aware of the role they play. Okay, so this is like a big thing that the Gulf

States do. Um is particularly lead do this sports bullshit, and Carter, I think, usually is smarter about it than like Carter just has better pr people in the Saudias do. And I mean they're they're slightly helped by the fact that they are marginally less bad than Saudi Arabia, like marginal like this is a this is this is a this is a fucking a bar that is so low you can trip over it. Like I think we can just say both bad. Yeah, So should we talk about

the Catholic system a little bit? Okay, So the Gulf States have this thing called the catholicis now and there have been some alterations to it and something that made it less bad in the last few years, but basically this is the system that lets Okay, So there's a there's a lot of mirket workers, particularly from Southeast Asia, that like take jobs in the Gulf because they pay they have the Gulf States have a like an obscene, fanatical, like world rending amount of oil money um and so

people you know, come seeking these jobs because they need to feed their families, and you know, there's a huge amount of oil money here, like they have just every petro dollar. Um. But the way this labor system basically works is that like in order to like be in the country, you have to have a job, right you like, you like very specifically have to have a job, and

your employer has to be there. And so very very bad things start to happen when you have a group of people who you can just like instantly destroy the life of. And so these will happen where for example, like so you okay, so you show up, you show up to Carter right, and your boss will just take your fucking passport and it's is gone, right, and you know, it's like okay, if if you don't do literally everything they tell you, like you, you're not gonna get your

hasbro back. You're just fucked. And this creates a like a genuinely like very close to slavery, has a lot of the fucking horrors. Like you, there have been a bunch of stories people like fucking jumping out of buildings trying to escape and then like being dragged back. Like it's fucking horrifying labor conditions. Um, it's and it's not not indentured serviceude, Yeah, absolutely is. It's yeah, it is

it is one of the worst. It's it's one of the worst labor regimes on earth that is not literally slavery. It is. It is. It is in the category of technically not slavery, but like very horrificly close. Yeah, it is.

It is. It is one of the worst things that exists a serious and genuine solution to if you want to solve like a bunch of the problems of all of the all ship that's happening in the Gulf region, if you gave every single one of these migrant workers like several artillery batteries and a bunch of assault rifles like instantly, like so many of the problems of this region would be solved. Yeah. So I was just looking

at statistics. Six thousand, five hundred of these workers have died in cutter since it was awarded the World Cup. Like that's that's uh, that's that's a pretty alarming um number of Like so it's from India, Bangladesh, ne poll for Lanka prices like that, right, I think, Yeah, these people have absolutely no rights and they have incredibly dangerous

working conditions. And also we got about like people are super fucking racist, Like yes, like the it's it's it's the kind of racism that you get when you have literally, like basically pure absolute power over someone. It is a it is a fucking trip. Yeah, people will literally have to pay off the debts that they include. You'll pay a recruitment trophee or a travel fee to get these jobs. Like we're not messing around me, said the indentured sertitude. Yeah,

and it's very hard to do that. Your your your employees could just you know, like they can just withhold your pay for whatever the fun reason, because yeah, because it's absolute power. There's like a few should I read this one? That's an example of one of these deaths that I could read if we want so. This guy, um mad Hubal Apoly I think his name. He's from India. He was forty three. He left his wife and his thirteen year old son, Rejesh in India to take a

job in catering, and they never saw him again. One late night, when his roommate returned to his dorm, he found Bullapai's body on the floor. Like thousands of other sudden and unexplained death, it's passing was recorded his heart failure due to natural causes despite working for his employer for six years. His wife and son received a hundred and fourteen thousand rupees it's about a thousand pounds about a thousand dollars now as well in compensation and unpaid salary.

Jess had no idea why his father died. He had no health problems. He said, there was nothing wrong with him. Yeah. Pretty, there's I'll will link the Guardian story. But there are dozens of these stories of people who die working in extreme heat for long hours with no breaks and terrible conditions.

It's pretty terrible shit. Yeah, And a lot of these And also, and this is the only thing we should point out, is a lot a lot of people have died directly building, yes, the stadium stadium, Yeah, which is like just like the absolute human horror of why on why are we using like why are we building a giant fucking soccer stadium in the middle of like in the fucking desert, Like, yeah, Jesus Christ, in a place

with no endemic soccer culture. It's not that the stadium is like, you know, going to be packed week in and week out with the Qatari Altra is doing tea pots and ship like it just exists for people to come once to watch this spectacle and then leave again. I mean it's the same thing with all the Olympics stuff, right, Like they like tank a city's economy to build a whole like basically miniatured like village in town that then

becomes useless after like a month. Yeah, some of them will just get turned into like I don't know, that's

what the Olympics are for. The Olympics are like a gathering place for a transnational bourgeoilie and they have always been there, right like they when they started for a very long time, the Olympics had an amateurism clause, which meant that like quote unquote, professional athletes couldn't take part, which was designed such that like Boua, people who had enough leisure time to train could compete, but working class people who needed to take time off to train couldn't

be compensated for that time off. Right, they couldn't even be compensated for their time off taken to travel and compete at the Games. So like, the Olympics are doing what they're supposed to do, which is is bringing these elite people together. But Coca Cola benefits more from every Olympics in the city that hosts it. Yeah, yeah, I mean and obviously the the Olympics are heavily tied to nationalism. Um that has a whole bunch of you know, not great.

A munch of the national symbology comes from the Nazis directly like that, yeah, exactly, But also on the flip side of that, there's other stuff like um have like Taiwan having to compete compete as Chinese Taipei and not use their actual flag, which is other Like, yes, the alternative would be more, you know, embracing the country as like as a nationalist thing, like as it's as its

own nation. But still it's it is, it's still not great that they can't they can't compete under their actual you know, it's like a name and yeah, and and and and you know, like and then this is like Carter's kind of Weirdly, this is slightly backfire on Carter a little bit because, like Carter, Carter works the best as a sort of diplomatic power when nobody pays attention to it. And then the like absolute funk brain geniuses at the Gaitari role elite were like, what if we

fucking drew attention to ourselves? And that everyone was like, wait, hold on, this place is fucked, but this has not stopped it. FIFA is like maybe the only ruling sports body more corrupt than the Olympic Committee. Like it is is incredibly staggering, like a group of people who have figured out a way to just like help a city ethnically cleanse a bunch of its population and then extract enormous amount of wealth and then look good while doing it. Yeah,

it is. It's it's an exercise and like pointing, pointing over there while you steal someone's wallet, you know. Yeah, So I think that the last thing I think we want to talk about was talking about what the STA Saudis have been doing this too, because yes, one of the sport I'm most familiar with obviously is like cycling. It's a sport I competed in, and it's recently seen

this influx of money from petrochemical states. Right, so we have like you a E teen, We had a Dubuy team for a while, and we there is like a tour of Cuta and a tour of you buy Now that like these are not places ayone wants to go, right about it? Right, they're hot, they're flat, they're terrible. But like, bike races have always served as a way to consolidate nations, right, That's why the Tour of France exists.

It's like it's literally a loop and being like, hey, you're included in this, And like in in Europe, they're often used to consolidate nations that exist outside of states, right like Flanders, Catalonia, the Basque country, Wallonia. All of these places have bike races that delineate who belongs in and who belongs out. Slightly different in these petrochemical economies, because more delineates a look at us, We're a great country and totally normal, and you can come here and

do sports. And please don't look at the way that we treat our workers from Southeast Asia like um, it's it's please ignore our seventeen wars like all the school bus full of children we've blown up. Do not look at Yemens like yeah, which also, by the way, I do want I do want to just put this room. And Carter also fucking involved in Yemen. Same with the u A. They nobody ever talks about it. They also are fucking doing this. Do not left them off the

book for this bullshit. Uh, yeah, yeah, it's interesting to see it. Like, yes, it's interesting to see some fan groups organizing like against this ship, right And chiefly I think it's gonna it's about stuff that you're about to talk about, I think, which is the purchasing of clubs by these these very wealthy interests. I find it fascinating to see that there's always been an anti fascist element in football actors, right, there have always been clubs that

have been anti fascists. Those clubs have always tended to oppose like ownership of the clubs that they are fans of by finance capital. But it's interesting to see that now articulated against these petrochemical regimes in the Middle East, right, Like it gets Keith from fucking Bolton and his mates who go to the football match every Saturday, and now I'm fucking past because I allow an lgbt Q rights in Qatar. But yeah, it's it's very funny to see.

And also it's nice to see, right, Like, it's good to see people sharing so darity, like you can't display in theory, you can't display pride flags in stadium or anywhere else in Qatar right now, No people were talking about taking them anyway, So maybe someone will do an epic like Pride flag or TFO at the Olympics, which would be uh, I don't know, I've never seen the World Cup. Then they might all get disappeared. But yeah, then the entire with caution. Yeah, then then the stadium

collapses and there we go. Okay, So the other thing that's sort of been happening is that Starily has been buying up a bunch of clubs. But they brought Britain's Premier League Newcastle United team. There's like bought it that they have. They the Stardies have this this thing called the Public Investment Fund, which is like it's kind of like a sovereign wealth fund kind of. They just use it to like it buy ship and they've they've been doing a bunch of sports stuff. They've also been pushing

into the sports, which is interesting the disasters. Yeah, so they bought the e s L, which is the does it still stand for Electronic Sports League especially? I think it's all does so there doesn't. Okay, you're about to be a Biggert and say sports on sports. No, they're video games. It's better than actually better than regular sports. They're different Chess the same ship is happening here. So the E s L is like one of the it's

it's it basically ate a bunch of the other. So they used to be a bunch of sort of circuits for a bunch of different like E sports games, right, things like kind of strikes seems like StarCraft. Um, those are those sort of I think there's another. What's the other big one that s L does. Um, seems to be counts. Yeah, it's it's mostly kind of striking. They basically consumed all of the like StarCraft, So they used to be I M and dream Hack that dude stuff,

and they've eaten them all. And the E s L just got like bought out by like like the Saudiast fucking investment company, by and by by by a new sort of like media group thing at the Saudiast Forum that's headed by fucking former Activision CEO Brian Ward. Actually unbelievable. Yeah, who who's the guy who engineered the fucking Activision Blizzard merger and is now going on to do this bullshit

savvy games group. Yeah, I mean, like like East Sports as always, there's funds always sucked, Like a bunch of the stuff is funded by like fucking cryptocurrency. Right now, I think somehow sports I just can't take it seriously. It's the best. But yeah, they the Saudis have taken by beloved StarCraft League. I will be waging an unending holy war against them until they fucking ceased to exist. And yea, yeah, you become a stock craft too. Again, it sucks. All I know about East Sports is Sonic

Fox and Smash Brothers. That's all I know because everything else just seems like people who are having a fun

time playing video games. That's great. It was very so my my post was founded by the IOC and like at the time I was there, there was just massive Like first of all, there was like a lot of boom iss discussing av sports for sports and then whether they should be incorporated in the Olympics, and it was extremely funny to watch, like these people completely failed to understand the fundamental like you know, sports of physical contest with the metal element, right, don't matter if you're moving

a thumbs or your whole buddy. But it was very funny towards these people. I want to say this because this is okay, so it's just really funny, but also people get like really seriously injured doing the sports ship like particularly Starkers. There's a lot of Starker players who like sucking paralyzed, who have like serious year damage of their spines. Yeah, because they have like StarCraft players, like

especially older days. You know, people like practicing sixteen hours a day, right, and they're sitting in a chair and they're they're fucking you know, they have like a PM right, so you're doing like like six hundred actions in a minute, and people's people's risks just explore loads, Like people get fucking like damage to their spines to get nerve damage

like as it sucks. Um. I have a friend who's a human physiologist who used to work for the Department of Defense here and said, diego helping like you know, like high speed MB people be better at killing people, uh a Navy people, I guess in San Diego, and then left to work for Red Bull in their sports to oh yeah, yeah, yeah, to be the human physiologist who like, yeah, optimizes people set up so that they arrested a right angle and like, guest, I'm actually training.

I guess we won't be happy until Taiwan is playing Fortnite in a democratized, decentralized East Sports league that has union workers and I guess that's what we're advocating for now. Yeah, that's the one goal of this podcast. There is a

there's a MYANMA National Unity Government e sports team. So actually that there was actually a whole thing in competitive StarCraft where someone someone held up someone held up a Hong Kong flag and they fucking like they cut the stream and fired this actually fired the two like like they not only fired the guy who held the thing up, they fired the two fucking casters who like who were just there. Well it happens. Yeah, so critical respect that

person is. See the John Carlos, that's the raised fist moment of the sports Yeah. So yeah, fuck sports do

bad things, make them do good things. Overthrower local governments. Yeah, I mean the the revolutionary I mean this is this has been written about by like actual academics, but the revolutionary but the revolutionary potential of like soccer hooligans and football hooligans are like it's massive, Like on what one day, We'll do one episode about the fucking the Turkish soccer ultras who fucking stole a back hoe and we're driving

it around Turkey, doesn't thirty destroying fucking police barricades with it, sick of ship every lots of like in Rear Square their Egyptian Ultras were leading in the Maidan it was Ukrainian Nottras. And there's a really good book called people should read if they're interested in the political potential of football ultras. We should we should do something about like hooligans in general. But yes, this was supposed to kind of be about the various ways that there's sports things

that are kind of messed up. Yeah, maybe just regular one more thing. You can stop these fucking giant mega events from happening in your city, like people. People successfully do this. They've done this with the Olympics, have done this sub lesser sounds World Cup. But yeah, and if you can do that, like please do like don't you don't have to let these fucking sports company bullshit like exacts ethnically cleanse your city. You just don't. You can stop.

No Olympics l A is something that people in the U s should look up. Yeah, that is that is your action item for today is look up. I think we've talked about an Olympics before, but the ton Olympics. On the podcasts I Think and the Last Thing I Will, I will give an Easter egg. There's there's one sport I actually un ironically enjoy curling. No, not fuck you, You're racist racism. That's the episode Hello and Welcome to

It could happen here. It's a podcast about the world falling apart and people who are putting it back together. Today we're joined by Jimmy and Rain from mutually Disaster Relief. They are helping to put back together some of the parts of the world that are acutely falling apart right now. My colleague Gare is here as well. I guess, and Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna get into it. We're gonna talk about the response that mutual A disaster relief have made

too hurricane Ian. We're going to talk about how we can solve these things without necessarily giving a bunch of money to the wrong people, and people can help people in a way that is natural, organic and good for everyone. So Jimmy and Rain say hi everybody. Hello, Hey, and can you explain to us a little bit first of all about what mutual aid disaster relief is and how

it operates in these natural disasters. SURE mutual Aid Disaster Relief is a people power disaster relief network based on the principles of solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomous direct action. And we act as a Swiss army knife for the larger autonomous disaster response and mutual aid movements UH and work with UH affinity groups, local mutual aid groups UH and other disaster survivors to help form and foster or

communal recovery. That sounds great, That's very inspiring. Can you explain, maybe for listeners who aren't familiar exactly what mutual aid means in this count text. Sure mutual aid is a voluntary, reciprocal, participatory exchange among equals. It's about sharing resources, but it's also about sharing power. I'll spend a lot of my life in poverty, and I know that many people in the same experiences would rather not receive something than receive

something with a downward gaze. If if something costs us our dignity, it's not worth it UM, and so mutual aid is a way to share with each other UH, where we're UM sharing as equals UM instead of a powerful giver of aid and a powerless receiver of aid, and it also has the dynamic of addressing the root causes of the need in the in the first place. Okay, that's yeah, it's really that's a good description. Thank you

very much. What what you've done recently, right, is responded to Hurricane Ian, which most people I think will know hit Floorida and I think the Carolinas after that. Can you take us through some of the work that you've

been doing down there? Sure? A lot of what I've been involved in it supplies distribution, So we're UM every day loading up vehicles and going doing mobile distribution to trailer parks, to public housing apartments, uh and other communities that are hit in historically, you know, left out of top down relief models, UM and providing tarps, water, food, other essentials that people need. Yeah, sure, that's very important.

What's the situation like where now? What like with ten days out something like that from when the hurricane first made landfall? Is that right? I'm not sure exactly right? Do you know? Yeah? No, time, time is not a thing when this is happening. It's just kind of like all of the days go together, or nights or both. Yeah. Yeah, that's yeah, that's totally fine. So's you know, UM, in some places, power is starting to get turned back on. Gas is easier to find than it was, you know,

several days ago. UM, but there's still um, you know, like a lot of need for solidarity based relief. There's uh just like every disaster, there's uh many communities that are left behind. UM. And it's the same communities that are left behind by the disaster of capitalism and colonialism and white supremacy. And so you know, even though power is starting to get turned back on in some places, it's gonna be months or years, you know before people

recover from this. Yeah, there's a lot of folks that are not UM like to me he's talking about. There's folks that are renters who you know, don't don't know what they're supposed to do with their with the apartment that they're in. The roof is caving in, and if the landlord is not responding, then where do they spit to do. So if there's folks on the ground, they go in and they'll try to help get the tarp up,

you know, on the roof and things like that. So that's usually the kind of stuff I'm involved with when

I'm when it's happening more in my area. But there's a lot of us that are working like remote as well to help support on the ground, like doing calms and organizing supply lines through the autonomous supply line chain that we have, and just kind of trying to mobilize more affinity groups in the local areas, like Food Not Bombs, UM sitting and Food Not Bombs came down and helped out and did a food chair and so just trying to get everybody who's close by to be able to

address the immediate needs and start planning for the long term because Jimmy is right, it's going to take years. Yeah,

that's really fascinating. I think you're right that often like and I think we should contrast actually that like that they sort of not the large global nonprofit model or the service provider model that they contrast with this, right, which often kind of floods an area with resources whether or not it needs them, and then withdrawals kind of once attention is going to when people are left to

rebuild their lives kind of on their own, right. Yeah, Yeah, time and time again, Um, from Hurricane Katrina to Hurricane Maria. You know, our rain, you know uh. In Louisiana has experienced a number of hurricanes, you know, in recent years. Um, you know, time and time again, we we we had we learn over and over again that the state is not coming to save us. The market is not going to save us. The nonprofit industrial complex, it's not gonna save us. We have to save each other. We have

to take care of each other from below. Yeah, I think it's very true. I remember in eighteen when the last seven mid terms came, there was a large migrant caravan that came to Tijuana, which is just south of where I live, and there are a number of these big international non profits, but they weren't actually allowed to

enter the area where these people were. So you had these people in a football stadium and you had large non property outside, and they cut off the water to the place where these people work because they wanted them to go somewhere else. And it was this bizarre scene where you had tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars of resources sitting outside, and then you had little children who hadn't had a drink of water that day sitting inside.

And it was really illustrative to me of how these massive nonprofits can raise a ship time of money and still completely fail people when they need help the most. So it's great that you guys are out there doing that.

Can you take us through some of you You mentioned Hurricane Katrina, you mentioned being in New Orleans, like, can you take us through some of the other natural disasters and how you've helped UM well, UH in twenty six when we first kind of got our paperwork UM official or whatever, we had the flood and plank rouge and it was one of the most history excellent since like

the early nine and it barely made the news. And there were several other major floods that happened with the climate cause floods in the Midwest that UM summer that barely made the news. And now people are starting to talk about it right, starting to talk about climate change because it's inevitable. Every single disaster is you know, more just more and more frequency or higher intensity storm, more

rainfall in a shorter amount of time. And so we had that flood and we hit the ground pretty much running, just doing lots of bucking and gutting and organizing a lot of folks coming up from UH, Texas and south in like New Orleans area, and you know, east from Florida all the way over Mississippi. UM. And then, like Jimmy said, we just kept getting hit and hit. I can't even remember everything after that, I knew there was IRMA, and we responded to IRMA. We had national calms running

U which was really cool. People were signing up for workshifts and helping out on the ground while people were running around and getting transportation and getting people out of places, delivering supplies, helping you know again with starping or like things that might have happened homes UM. And then we've had Maria. I went down to Puerto Rico for that UM and helped out with some of the solar and

water issues there. And then we have Laura and Harvey, and I cannot even remember all of them at this point, Fiona. They just all they're all going to keep coming either into the Gulf or they're going to head along the East coast because of the way that the climate has affected the currents and the surface water temperatures in the Gulf in the Atlantic. Yeah, and like you said, they're going to have a disportionate impact on people who are

already marginalized. What is it you were talking about people signing up for work. That's interesting. So do you seems like you're mostly volunteer organization to people who have special skills just got up to a website and say hey, I'd like to help. Well, how does that work? It happens in a lot of ways. Sometimes folks will reach out via the email on the website, um, or they'll reach out on one of the social media, or they'll know somebody and be like, hey, I want to get involved. Um,

it's really grassroots. Some people are in the ground. There's a lot of folks that have gotten involved more long term because um, you know, there was a response on the ground in their area. They kind of got into it just because that's you know, what ends up happening when there's no one else around, you rely on each other and you build that community. It's kind of it's

kind of just what happens. Yeah, that makes sense. So what's your sort of national Do you have a sense of how many people how many volunteers you have on a national I'm guessing your national or international scale. Now it varies, you know, like in in times of you know, when you know, between disasters, uh, you know, there's you know, dozens of people involved or you know, like a hundred

or two hundred, um. But then we're very you know, participatory and um so when a disaster happens, you know there's a lot more people involved, hundreds and thousands of

people that participate in one way or another. Like in Louisiana, we've had a lot of different like DSA groups or sri A groups come out and help out, like mobilies on the ground and kind of come out as deffinity groups and do different jobs, help out with different homes and so really it's just like it's a network of facilitating anyone who's interested in ensuring that all of us have what we need when we know the response is going to be slow from those that are supposed to

be handling that quote unquote right, and then you guys can connect people with skills or people with time to people who need help. Yeah, so really, anybody who has skill of any kind or as welcome, that's great. Yeah, where can they find that people do want to sign up? I guess the easiest they would be yet I don't know. Jimmy money in that I'm on the ground a lot. Check out our website. Mutual Aid disaster relief dot org and our emails mutual Aid Disaster Relief at gmail dot com.

We're on all the social media's as well, and yeah, we we love it when folks uh reach out to us and tell us how they want to be involved. I wanted to ask you there are obviously some other organizations who, like maybe I would name it, you can if you want to, who have received a lot of national press for doing helping people in times of disaster, and maybe you can explain why, like some folks wouldn't necessarily be comfortable asking them for help or going to

them if they needed help. Yeah. UM, so oftentimes, uh, you know, you know like organizations you know, um, you know, top down organizations. You know they partner with you know, police or homeland security or carcetral institutions like that. There's um a shelter after um uh when Hurricane Michael hit

the Panhandle. UM, you know, people who had warrants you know, we're we're signed into the shelter and then police came and scooped them up and brought them to um, you know, to jails into prisons and you know, so you know, um and also you know, even with with you know with those you know, extreme situations aside um. You know, the the top down approach is patronizing, it's stigmatizing it. Um can um At sometimes provide the water, the food that that people need, but oftentimes comes at a too

high of a cost. Uh, and people long for a communal recovery. That's how we heal from disasters. Likeness from crises, events is part of you know, a communal recovery. We were all able to kitchen and receive what we need and and give what we can. Yeah, can you tell us can you give U an example of a communal recovery, like that's something that's happened somewhere. Well, you guys have been able to assist a community or a community be

able to assist a family or an individual in recovering. Yeah. Um. One one example that I think that's really representative of of our approach is um there there there's a family who was evicted you know, the um illegally you know, after after a disaster, and uh that you know, single mom was looking after the other single moms making sure they had you know, uh fuel for you know, their generators to um you know, to power their their phone

in different different devices, and that they had diapers and that they had you know what, what they needed to get by even though you know, they no longer had a roof over their head. And so when mutually disaster relief comes across people like this, our resources are their resources,

you know. So so when we both local mutual aid groups just the matriarch on the block who's taken care of of of the other folks on the block, mutually disaster relief exists to uh to share you know, um this this network of supplies and labor and you know, back up and support with with efforts like that that are spontaneous that arise after every crisis. Okay, that makes sense.

That That's the thing I really wanted to get to here was like, as you mentioned, climate changes causing these natural disasters and the worst that things get them, the worst that things get. And like you guys have started this organization that helps people to help people, and I'm wondering, like what a like, how can people organize to help and be how can people in communities organize to be more resilient and in the time when natural disaster is

becoming more and more commonplace. So one of the things that I think what Jimmy spoke to regarding like a matriarch on the black building, that community in advanced and after if it happens to just be after, which is kind of what happens a lot of times, is when it's that forced, um, I don't want to say forced, but out of necessity, right, Like necessity is the mother of invention, right, And so there's these iterations of what

community can become. Every time there's a disaster, there's like a clean slate and there's a vacuum in which something can be created because there maybe nothing. And so if you can see an opportunity and if you if you have any kind of network on the ground or you and it spontaneously erupts, then that can be the new growth or the like or however you to phrase it. But I think for the resiliency to happen, that solidarity in the long term is built from those networks on

the ground. There's people recognizing each other and seeing each other. And I think COVID is so interesting because people have become so nuclear and like isolated the technology and then forced into these pods of technology and that was the only way people existed and then all of a sudden, there was this need to be around people like people like no, no, no no, I really want like human contact. And so I think that kind of speaks to the reality of what we need to survive and that's going

to be through disasters, through pandemics. So building that building a community garden, like saying hey to your neighbor, finding out who on your street is like an elder and maybe doesn't have anybody checking up on them, Like knowing what is in your what are the resources, whether it's people, whether it's a food bank, whether it's like a water fountain, Like what are the resources in your area? And where

can you spontaneously take over areas when something happens. There's so many empty lots, different places that are you know, really on the verge of being gentrified. And when something happens, if you can help in the areas where you can maybe take over a building, that would help maintain that building for the persons who would otherwise be getting pushed

out soon. Right, Like we've worked with people that allow us to set up school libraries, for example, in their areas while we're while we're doing disaster the response, and we helped build that house or that community center for that school up while we're there and creating a community space for people to then run with that concept of what they wanted to build, like what they wanted to put there. The best way you know, to prepare for

disasters is ongoing mutual aid projects, groups and efforts. You know, the more that we can connect with each other, those relationships and those connections, they're the groundwork for uh a vibrant people power disaster response. You gotta know who's who. You gotta know what people are able to do, wanting to do. You know, what are people's strengths. It really

is about that resiliency. Knowing who you can count on for something like who knows about you know, wiring, who knows about plumbing, who knows about you know, the streets, who knows the area the best? You know, certain members in the community that are founders in the community that others will respond to or navigate or gravitate too. I

got you. Yeah, Yeah, that makes a lot of sense that, Like, I think it's really interesting to contrast this with the model of like surviving natural disasters that we've seen portrayed so often, especially on like TV shows like Preppers, Right which is like I will see on my own with a ship ton of ammunition and shoot anyone who comes off to my Roman noodle castle. But what are you gonna do with that? When you're supplies right now? Then? When you who are you gonna rely on? All we

have is each other? We're not. We're not. I mean, more power to the you know, outlier individual out there that can literally do everything for themselves. But I just don't think that's humanities function we have. We have much more UM when we share with each other um than we have individually. When we pull our resources together, we have enough for everybody. Uh. We you know, we take what is in our cabinets, you know, as far as food or sup supplies, we take what's in our medicine cabinets.

We make it liberated communal uh space and supplies and and very quickly thinks snowball and uh small first aisation becomes a wellness center or a clinic. And and and that's you know, the hour of sharing with each other and building building alternative infrastructure infrastructure together, and the alternative

infrastructure for me is really important to UM. I think for us to be resilient, we we have to teach each other the skills we have to start learning the ways in which we will be able to actually build back the way we want, the way we foresee our communities to be. Whatever that looks like. But we need those skills if we are going to divest, if we

are going to have autonomy. Yeah, I really like that model of thinking of your natural disasters like an opportunity to rebuild in a more a more equal way, rather than thinking of it it's the thing which just has knocks down, you know, the amount of stuff you've accumulated or whatever. Instead of seeing it as an opportunity is really positive. It is an opportunity to reevaluate, is an

opportunity to see each other, to see your neighbor. It's an opportunity to be more sustainable in the rebuild, which is the thing that I really struggle with in a lot of responses. Um, it's just the dependency on the existing supply chains and the existing methods of transportation like that. That whole needs to be addressed for resiliency in the future.

There's got to be an entire real world of how we respond in some ways in general, Yeah, divest the way we want now, I think that's the sustainability thing. If just reminded me of something which like, for whatever reason, I bought one back last time I was somewhere. But

people can't see this being an audio podcast. But one of the things you often see in natural disasters is these things that are called humanitarian daily rations and it's like a it's like an m R E. And it comes in a pink packet and everything else comes into

packet and like it's within like two days. And obviously this is a time when like sort of systems for disposing of rubbish have been overwhelmed within two days, these things and the foil packets and little brown experience of fucking everywhere, and it's just it always strikes me as so sad that like we've taken this time when people are in crisis, and we've made at a time when also that their environment is in crisis now as well. Yeah, and it's a lot, and that's one of the things

I struggle with, um with water as well. Water is kind of like my thing. I know that irony, but um, when whenever there's a response, there's a heavy dependency on bottled water and there's other alternatives, but it would require you know, a little bit of advanced skill training, a little bit of advanced infrastructure development, but that response could

be prepared in advance. And I think in in some cases there's communities, especially in the local South, where that advanced thinking about it's gonna happen, right, It's gonna happen here, right, it's gonna it's gonna have what's gonna happen everywhere in the Gulf Coast, and it's going to keep going up and up, And whether it's a fire, whether it's a hurricane where there's a math, to tornado, whether to drought, in a food shortage or a pandemic, if we're not

thinking in advance and be just and I don't want to sound like you know, necessarily prepper individualistic, but as a community thinking in advance, like for example, small plug but cooperation Jackson is thinking about building um their own water infrastructure so that they are not going to be dependent on just municipal water, which is yeah, I mean why not even if it's small scale, why not start

developing community owned micro grids, water treatment facilities. Why is it just capital large capital, Like Jimmy said, we're stronger together. So if we pull together in these communities style, just like old school see essays we can do that, then we can. Essentially it's an it's another opportunity divested to build it ourselves. We can do it before, we could do it after. But I think for resilience for me, finding ways around those existing models and supply lines is

critical to avoid the gap in the disaster and the response. Yeah, talk us through a community on water sustainable water project like that, like what does that look like? What are the what are the components of it? It would So that's a fabulous question, um. But it's also when that I personally can't answer. I can because I'm not the entire community. So there's so many questions that are involved with that, like who's gonna who's committing to maintain it financially, operationally,

maintenance wise, you know how many people? A is it going to be be used by? How frequently is it intended for all the time? Used for just as a response in a backup, So there's a lot of things that are involved there, and also financial structures. There's so many different ways that I can get set up, um, And like Jimmy knows, I do not like to involve myself with money aspects, I'm just straight hammers and like

you know, solar um. But there there's a lot of the good examples of community owned my grigrids for solar, and that's really the I don't know that there's that many, especially in the US community owned water systems, but if you look internationally that is likely different. Um. Yeah, but as far as solar, that's a pretty common thing. Diversity. Well, there's a lot of different ways my grogrids can get

set up and who could own it. So again it depends on the scale, right, like who's going to fund the operation at the beginning, if you have a few angel owners that want to do it, or if you have a community that's willing to pitch in an equal amount for person you know, and how much they want to use for it. So you calculate how much you need for each person's use, you know, what's the distribution area, how many camels do you need and how are you going to get it to everybody? Are they going to

have battery paints for autonomous use? Are they going to

be like tied in? So there's it's a lot of models that you could do for hurricane just before hurricane Ian Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico um and it wiped out, you know, for for a time the whole islands power grid, but the autonomous off grid solar infrastructure that was built up at the central state point of Mutual the Mutual aid centers across the island stayed the lights stayed on, and they were able to continue powering their communities through

autonomous infrastrure infrastructure. Oh yeah, that's really cool. I know some indigenous nations and on the West Coast certainly have their own micro grids as well. Nice. Yeah, it's it's smaller scale, like how many like people are in the communities? Sorry, yeah, the smallish scale. I think like maybe a few hundreds, maybe a couple of thousands something like that. That's good. Yeah, it's an area of interest, I know for other Indigenous

people for very obvious reasons. But yeah, that's really cool if someone was interested in that. Like let's say I'm at home with my community and I hear this and I'm like, hell, yeah, that's what I want to do. Can they reach out? Can they reach out to you and be like, hey, help me, help me join together. These fifteen press car batteries or would you be able to help them with the like planning stages of that

or is that beyond the scope of your work. Um? So, my my main area of knowledge is around water um, and I dabble with solar a lot. But there are a lot of folks in the network who have insane skills. Like we have people working on all kinds of projects, so many cool things. So I would say, yeah, reach out, um, because that's kind of what the network is. It is a lot of really cool people trying to just make positive change. It's super awesome skills. A lot of folks

have pretty cool skills. Yeah. In the beginning of this interview, you mentioned how you felt like times just kind of slowed down or like it's all kind of blurred into one. Um. Is that like a common feeling whenever these things happen and people are on the ground, the type of otherworldly nous or how everything feels so stretched out. How does

that kind of like what's your experiences with with that feeling? Um? Yeah, I think that feeling is partly trauma, right, there's a lot of trauma associated with the work, and you know, those conversations happen a lot and it's UM really. I mean personally, I won't speak for everybody obviously, but personally I've feigned a lot of UM support just in our collective network, everybody's UM. I feel really focused on the same thing. So I personally gain strength from that. But

I think there is a lot of UM. I feel like you can get a lot of hopelessness sometimes right like you start to see the the long term need and the fading of the spotlight because the next disaster happens. And I mean there's literally still people in ban Rouge who still have houses that haven't been fully rebuilt and that was from the flood. And there's still places that don't have electricity in Puerto Rico right now, and it's been like, you know, I don't know what, over a month.

So you know, Flint, Michigan, just like name of thing. Right, So I think, my, my, I don't think I could do this work without the support of other people who do this work, who have that same UM feeling, who who experienced that. And the time. The time work I think is partly for me again, partly exhaustion, partly trauma, UM,

partly UM like excitement. There is so much excitement right, seeing seeing it, seeing the love, like, I don't want to make it sound all bad, Like there's like beautiful moments every day with the love that you have on the grountain with everybody. Um, and so yeah, go for it often. Um. You know, Dorothy Day, after the San Francisco earthquake over a century ago, said, while the crisis lasted,

people loved one another. And what oftentimes we experience after a major crisis or disaster is is that our lives before we're disastrous. You know that capitalism and colonialism, in the isolation and alienation and the meaninglessness, drudgery of the work and selling ourselves to the highest bidder so that we can survive, you know. Um, all that is an ongoing,

invisible disaster. And in in the moment where the the ruins are around us and we see them, you know, we we come together in a way that that draws on on on that feeling of solidarity and love and and those those ideas of a better world that we that we protest for, that we march on the streets for that we you know, envision coming you know sometime in the future in a microcosm, they exist here and now in in these local pockets of people taking care

of each other against all odds. Two. Yeah, I think that's really that's really well put. Like it's sort of it made me reflect on like I've reported from it and worked in lots of natural disasters, and like that time when they like alienation, boredom, and despair they associate with everyday drudgery under capitalism goes away and you have a purpose and everyone's working together and you're also on

like Twitter dot com all the time. It's very and and in time stretchy is in at the same time compresses It's it's very addictive in a sense, like it feels wonderful and hopeful. And then it's the feeling that an uprising tries to replicate. It's it's the it's this moment of peak experience that makes you. It forces you to fall out of the kind of the drudgery of collapsing capitalist infrastructure and you're forced to actually live around

people and it's the weirdest feeling. And it happens when horrible things happen, like disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, or it happens people getting shot. Yeah, the moment of like national uprising as well like it's the same it's the same function and for a brief moment you're able to actually live the things that you like preach um and you're

able to see them get applied to the world. I think a lot of us getting away from that just being a peak, right and having to come back down, because I'm really is to build that resiliency, right, to to create it so that the lights don't go out and we just keep rolling and if they do go out, you know, we've got a backup plan, like you know, there's a wood burning stove and we make some pizza. I don't know, but you know, I think, yeah, the peak shouldn't be a peak, there should be just a shift.

So how do yeah, so how do we how do we keep that right? How do we rebuild and keep that momentum that that that net for each other? Yeah, it's yeah, yeah, I think that Letton had an answer to that that it did not work out the best. Yeah, and and we're still here, yeah, yeah, here we are listening to podcasts. But yeah, I think that was wonderful. I really enjoyed that. I think your point just to close out that discussion about like how you guys have

a network that supports people. Some of the most profound depression I've experienced has been not like directly around disasters

or conflict, but coming home and feeling useless. So I think that like checking in on people and continuing to feel like you're pushing in a positive direction, Like more people will experience a natural disaster after listening to this and have done before listening to this, and next year will be bigger than this year, and it will get worse until but like you will feel elated and that's okay, and you will feel devastated and that's okay. And checking

it on people is super duper important. And speaking of that network and making connections, where can people find in support the work that y'all do? All right, Jimmy Scene, We can go to mutual a Disaster Relief dot org or on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, mutual a Disaster Relief on Twitter it's mutual Aide Relief and our email is Mutually a Disaster Leaf at gmail dot com. I would love for more people to join uh this movement, you know, both Mutual A Disaster really their local Mutual Aid Project

um and and and other other similar efforts or start one. Yeah, that's a question we get a lot is like, Yo, you guys talk about mutual aid and stuff, but there's really nothing in my area. There's I don't I don't, I don't know what whatether's to do. Like okay, well there's some that can fix that problem. I mean, like, do you have any like resources to help people kind

of figure out how they would absolutely? On our website, mutual a disaster leaf dot or there's a resources tab and one of the sessions is mutual aid about you know, diving into the subject of what is mutual aid and how to form a group or a project UM and and other resources along those lines. We also have a newly formed UM mutual Aid Toolkit Relief Toolkit that's on our website. So if there are local mutual aid groups, UM, this is a public form, so there's a big bold

like warning about it and happening it's public. For intention we have our own obviously like internal threads, but this is more like for folks who maybe haven't ever plugged into mutually before, like being able to see where's all the different mutual aid projects and what they're doing. So UM again we talked about the resiliency, so This is kind of our attempts to be able to map for each other UM away where we can see what every where where everyone is that's interested in responding and doing

what they're doing. So if it's a you know, bom screw or like whatever your mutually things that you're doing, if you want to join on to that UM that's a fun way to see who might be in your area. If everybody start stilling it out, fantastic. Thank thank you so much for taking time out of the stretched out or fis concept of litera progression of time to talk with us about the fantastic work that you are all a part of. Thanks for having us appreciate it. Hey everyone,

and welcome. It could happen here. I'm Andrew the YouTube channel andrewis UM. I would like to borrow some of your time today or tonight, whenever you're listening to talk about movements, the fact that humans move around and the most Indian restrictions on it in our modern world. Today, I'm joined by my co hosts. Hello Garrison here, Hi, it's James as well. Right. Glad to be here and to be here with you guys. So even before I was an anarchist I would say there were three things

I really despised. Things I despised from like fairly early each that being the education system, advertising and porters. I believe freedom of movement is fundamental. I don't know if that's controversial or anything, but these days it feels like it has reached a point of like really great restriction, more so, I think than at most points of human history. So I want to talk about the history of borders,

the role of borders, and the fight against borders. Not to give you some context, cause you can't about my accent and from the Caribbean, particularly from Trina and Tobago, and being from an island nation, twin island nation. Actually I have been made away of the constant through history that has been into Ireland migration, whether you're talking about the Polynesian migrations across the Pacific, whether you're talking about even within the Malay Archipelago or the Philippine Archipelago, or

even when you're talking about of course the Caribbean. There's always been, you know, this movement of people going from Ireland to Ireland. You know, like Tronada is very close to northeastern Venezuela, only eleven kilometers off the coast of northeastern Venezuela out in the Northern Area in literally called Northern Range, is an extension of Venezuela's maritime and these mountains, but the connections to end there. Human settlements in Turad

dates back at least seven thousand years. In fact, one of the oldest human settlements discovered in the Eastern Caribbean, the Banouari trade site, is found in southeastern turn Dad. One of the leading theories of human disposal across the world places the migration of the Caribbean as beginning in

Turnad and going up the Antillian chain. A lot of the indigenous groups that settled in turn Dad and in the other islands north of Trindad and for the most part migrated up the or Nocle River in what is now Venezuela. So exchange in migration between the continents and the island has continued undisturbed freely for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish, and today in our free quote and code post colonial code and code world, what was once the norm is now criminalized. Now you

have to go through this proper process. In order to migrate. You have to ask permission from governments who draw these invisible lines or in some cases violently physical lines in the sand and demanded deference. And yet still migration continues, because migration is a constant of human existence, legal and illegal. Recent Venezuela crisis and subsequent migration is just another uptake

of the same. Refugees, desperate escape the present um of American imperialism and Venezuelan government mismanagement and all the component is us that have caused Venezuelan crisis have been flee into Colombia, to Brazil, to the Dutch Caribbean Islands, to the other lastin American countries, and of course to turn that well, this migration is extorted by opportunists, facility, by the organized crime of human traffickers, because when you try

to restrict that kind of demand, when you illegalize that kind of movement, the people on the margins, we'll try to take advantage of those who are who need to

move around, because that need is still there. And so lines also, of course are not necessarily creating, but they serve to exacerbate essues like xenophobia, which is you know, only amplified by the existence of orders, and they also deal with, due to their paperless status, a lot of gross exploitation because they struggled to find work and secure

the basic necessities of life. The Venezuelan refugee crisis is a disaster I've seen unfull before my own eyes when I have witnessed firsthand, and one that is facilitated and exacerbated by the existence of borders. And you've seen similar issues of cool another part of the world too, you know, borders are enforced between the US and Mexico, between Haiti and the Republic, between Spain and Morocco, when you euroupe in the Swanna region, between India and Pakistan, between Australia

and Indonesia, um between Palestine and Israel. And being journalists, I'm sure you guys have experienced, perhaps foodstand other examples of the violent enforcement of borders. James, you have any experiences, Yeah, for sure. I actually live just about the same distance you live from Venezuela. I live about the same distance from the US border with Mexico, so I've spent quite a lot of my journalistic career crossing the border and

reporting on the border. And like it's as you said, it's become increasingly violently enforced, and it's just ugly scar on on the landscape now. And it's and I often like to say, the border doesn't protect people, it controls people. Yes, yeah, it's a very cruel and vicious and entirely arbitrary distinction between what is Kumi is Land to the north of the border and Kumi is Land to the south of

the border in my case, Yeah, exactly exactly. The way that borders have cut through, um the homelands of any different indigenous groups has been absolutely disastrous for them. This has taken place, and of course the us UM and most I suppose recognizably in Africa, where these clunial borders have been causing tremendous harm to this day. Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point. I remember, just talking of

like weird border things. I remember just before the pandemic, I was on the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. And when you it, it just seems so absurd, like to think that you know, some literally some I'll do it in England or a line on a map or whatever in Germany. But one of the things that it creates is this weird situation where plastic bags are illegal in Rwanda because they're trying to protect

the environment and they're not in Congos. So there's like this illegal arbitrage trade of plastic bags across this border. And it's just such an odd and constructed, entirely unnecessary and strange sort of legacy of the colonial plunder of Africa. Yeah. I didn't even hear that before. That sounds quite interesting. Um, he says, between Rwanda and Democrats Republic of the Congo. Yeah, I think it's sending the border town there. Um yeah,

people people will come across with their plastic bags. Be interesting to see how that develops. I know they are attempting to unify Democratic Republic of the car and go Tanzania, Kenya, you can salt Sudan, um, I think Jubooty and and Somalia and a few other places I think into like an East African federation. So be interesting to see how

those um discrapan seas and laws developed. Yeah, the Rwanda border with Congo is that there's a soldier every fifty meters with a big machine gun, even going right through the middle of the New Way rainforest, which is very remote by rewinded standards. Under a busy country with lots of people. But yeah, yeah, that's a very militarized border right now, right, yeah, yeah, that reminds you it's a

less militarized example. Um. I mean, people point out the disparity between the US Canada border and the US Mexico border, but I remember reading a story somewhere about how persing on the Canadian side UM had like they could very easily cross over onto the US side, but there was like a steep trooper or something just standing there and it's like if you cross over, have to arrest you. And it's just it's like you're right there, we're literally having a conversation face to face, and yet if I

walk over this our cherry designation, I have to be jailed. Yeah, it's bizarre. There's a very arbitrary The border between Myanmar and Thailand is it's a funny example like that where like it's a river and this is unfortunately resulted in people trying to cross it here and able to swim dying, which is terrible, right, But one thing that happens is like if you're in the river, you're in neither country.

And so people will make stilts like little stands on stilts which come up to the level of the river bank, such that they can stand in like no man's land or every man's stand, maybe every one's land, and sell alcohol without paying the Thai taxes and to people who are standing on the bank in Thailand. And again it just really illustrates how stupid now but treat this whole

thing is. So as we're talking about the absurdity of boarders, I suppose it's only fair to get into their history because for most of the rule, and for most of human existence, really free movement has when the status cool traders, migrants, hunter gatherers, nomads, they freely traversed this little blue marble, as they call it. Of course, many ethnic groups maintains it in relationships with particular lands. But even when city states on such rules, it was rare for rulers to

delineate precisely where their realm ended and another's began. The first like large scale restrictions really a rose under the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century, when he forbade serves from leaving their lord's land. Documents, of course, had to be created to request safe passage. To ask O king, will you please allow me to move from point A

to point B, my lord, your majesty soon whatever. What what do we call the first passports is what quickly and rules the medieval era essentially bound large parts of yours population in place by sufdomb and movement was viewed by rulers as ruin us to their law and order. They needed static populations to stay in place so that taxation and the raising of troops and whatever they wanted

to extract could easily be extracted. Because you know, if if these presidents were able to just move as they pleased, they will probably try to evade taxation that a little bit too excessive. Um, they would probably trying to evade

the oppression of their rulers. And that they did. I mean throughout feudalism, passant revolts and uprisings very commonplace, and it's due to those revolts of the masses that sift them would come into a decline as a wage labor rule was in the fifteenth and sixteen centuries, but that would mean that free movement came back because now people were commodity that a country's government wanted to keep within its borders. Sur rulers offered citizenship and tax incentives and

want to encourage migration. And yet while they were encouraging migration,

they were also kicking people out. So countries like Spain and France were either executing or expelling ethnic and religious minorities and mass So this period also bring about the rights of you know, nationalism, which were tapped into an earlier sense of um I suppose connection and sort of subvert that from connection to community to connection to this abstract notion of nation state, the imaginary community of the nation.

Nationalism in Europe would attempt to unify a vast and diverse range of cultural groups and classes under one state while defining themselves against outsiders. And of course this ruling class meta narrative exists as a mechanism of manufactured, meaningless loyalty in order to control you. But that's a topic

for another time. This era has also been described as one of the large just periods of involuntary migration in human history, that be in the Transatlantic slave trade, which trafficed an estimated twelve point five million in slave African people between the sixteen and nineteenth century. But there was this one key movement in history of borders that would

have lasted effects to today. At the end of the Thirty Years War, the Peace of Westphalia was signed by a hundred and nine principalities and touchies and imperial kingdoms which basically agreed in sixteen forty eight that the state's borders were inviolable and an absolute sovereign state could not

interfere in the domestic affairs of another. Now, of course, this is all just talk, right at the end of the day, states have continued to interfere the domestic affairs of others, would continue to violate the borders of other states. There are plenty of board of disputes that are alive and well some decades or even centuries old um on this planet. And then, of course this idea of West Pralian severenety would not really be applied to people outside

of Europe. The actual inhabitants of the interesting looking maps that the West Filian era produced, we're not actually made privy to any of those um decisions about the drawing of borders. They would also be moving, of course, people continuously, so you know, Spain was kicking out um Jewish people and more's and people who relate the heretics as Uni inquisition um. The British was moving their dissenters, criminals and general pains and the Bombacy to settle colonized in places

like Australia, which is why Australia is like that. And things progress a bit further, you have the notion of free trade and free market gain in some ground thanks to Adam Smith this new school of economics. At the same time, concerns of population of MOUTHUS, unemployment and social unrest in Europe led governments to start facilities and emigration moving out their colonies. The more general free flows settler clonalism,

which would lead to domestic depopulation in Europe. And then there was another shift, as tend to be the case in human history, as in the nineteenth century, migrants from now underdeveloped regions began to stream towards the more developed areas and drews. So you had North Africans going to France, Italians and Irish headed to New York and all the while, of course racism and xenophobia festering and proliferating as nationalists with top fay against the so called threats to their nation.

Of course, Italians and Irish were eventually assimilated into the hegemonic notion of whiteness. But North Africans in France have not been so lucky. Oh I said, who is lucky? Could and could because there's a little conversation about how whiteness destroys cultures and erases the unique identities that these people would have come up with in an efforts to unite them against minorities such as African Americans in the US. So you see this period of lockdown, of this increased

nationalism and these restrictions. These bad restrictions would also try to manipulate access to certain technologies, um, the telegraph, the rail road. Yes, they enabled central governments to assert their presence across the whole territory, but they would also try to compete with other nations UM and keep certain secrets regarding technology. See that particularly um during the Cold War,

but we'll get to that a bit later. During the First World War, we have of some sixteen million people, the Great War UM as you should probably call it if you ever happened to time travel to that period. I don't think people would want to hear that this is just the first two wars. But after the World War, the Great War UM, the seggregationist Wouldrew Wilson, who was US President at the time, proposed fourteen points to the

international community in order to prevent such horrors. And one of those core principles of the fourteen points was it the globe's borders. We were drawn along clearly recognizable lines of nationality. And like I said before, this is of course just in Europe. It's not like any of these WILL leaders actually care about the territories they coughed up

in Africa. And I think there was a point that I wanted to make about technology and how technology has been restricted because when you look at again the real road and telegraph, while they enabled central governments to suit their presence and assut their control, and like ever before,

the potential these technologies was kind of lost. Yes, the railroad in the telegraph can help a government to suit its control over its territory, but it con justest as easily empower people to travel further and faster than they ever had before, so communicate across greater distances and they ever had before. And insteadin the hands of the states, these technologies are of course used for oppress events. Back

to the end of the First World War. In the post war period, which saw the collapse of four European empires Ottoman, Russian, Austro, Hungarian, and German, millions of refugees were left in a world where immigration controls had continued to tighten and passports gained greater prominence. Last once the nation state was mented in place, Fascism and Nazism would

quickly arise to god its supposed purity. The world would once again be plunged into war, the second one, this time which would again leave millions of uprooting and displaced people that states like Switzerland quote unquote neutral and the US would largely refuse to assist. After the Second World War, nation building would continue to displace and slaughter millions of

ethnic and religious minorities. Millions of refugees have been dismissed from lands that have been colonized and imperialized, and intervened with wars and wrecked with just the destruction of climate change and poverty, and yet immigration controls only tightened further, and they will likely continue to tighten due to the effects of climate migration and climate collapse, especially in our

post ninety leven reality. US border patrol in particular has escalated to employed twenty thousands and agents, and Israel Run is the largest open air prison in the world. These days, militarized borders with heavily guarded barbed wire and electrified fences, which were once common in times of war, have now been a staple of times of peace. These marginary lines in the map have become in some places violent fixtures on the landscape, with thousands of people lose their lives

every year for simply trying to cross. We've entered an era of essentially bordering without precedent, and thanks to today's technology, governments no more now about the people they govern, the people within their territory, but at any point prior and human history. Cross border surveillance keeps neighbors in the new managing and monitoring their populous like lab rats. Data has become of aluable then black cold itself. These governments have chosen to wall and survey. This is our will now.

It's not some future cyberpunk the stupia, The curveillance capitalist health keepers here now and borders have an important for rule to play. But as our power structure their system of control. As the writers that Crime Think have said, there's only one world on the border is tearing it apart. And I think the idea of borders extends much further

than just the nations borders. When you look at the Internet, fire walls, the checkpoints, the hidden databases, the for profit prisons in the gated communities, all these different boundaries enforced by ceaseless violence, enforced by a deep aortation, enforced by vigilanty, attack by street haraspment by torture, All of these boundaries

are holding us back and tearing us apart. Migrants, due to their vulnerable status or often the first target when it comes to the economic down to and oppression, civiilians and scapegoating nations wield of fair of this other and they use that to prevent their people from fighting for better.

They turned their eye towards another victim. I doesn't even get into all the different categories that have been constructed migrant expert, refugee, asylum seeker, illegal alien, and that one in particular really grinds my cares because it is I believe, the pinner cool of the humanization to look at a person who's dice just man just managed to like just by happensands fell on the other side of the border, to look at them and to deem them alien, deem

them illegal, to brand them that, and I even acknowledge their humanity when referring to them. And it's become a normalized part of political discourse to speak of illegal aliens. But I don't think we should reget just how violent that kind of languages. It's particularly violent when you count for the fact that while these borders are used to restrict people on the lowest rung of society, capital has

very few restrictions. In fact, that has much less restrictions, and people the right and their capital can cross borders with ease, go from place to place without munch process. And in fact, we look at Jeff Bassos and we say that, oh, well, he's the richest man the world for say soon, But when you account for the wealth that has not been accounted for, I think it must be put into perspective that Bill Gates, Zackaboo, Jeff Bazos, etcetera. They are the richest people that we know of, not

necessarily the richest. A global economy has also been of course moving resources for a while now. Resources have more freedom than people. The unequal and even development has extracted minerals and materials from some parts of the world, process them in other parts of the world, manufacture them in other parts of the world, and then sold worldwide for the profits to be hoarded by select few countries and select a few people. These wealthy countries plunder the poor

and then brutalize those who follow. Where the opportunities of Antica. But I don't think that one's opportunities one freedom. One's freedom should be restricted by where they were born or by the wealth that they do. To not control passports, inequality is yes, you that should not exist. Passports should not exist. Palestinians can travel visa free to only thirty eight countries and territories, yet those in the West Bank are restricted by violent by violent checkpoints and those who

live in gas are call you distript at all. Meanwhile, other regions enjoy fast visa free travels, such as Germans who have access to countries and territories, or the Japanese, who enjoy the most freedom piece of free of all, with ninety three countries available to them. A billionaire like Elon musket flying wherever he wants in his private jet. A political prisoner like a Jory Luta, who can be

kept in solitary years on end. Traditional seafear and channels and land has been militarized and guarded by these vast navies, by these vast troops, by these these machines, These structures that disconnected, unraveled the deep ties between communities, borderston us all into prisoners, and I think it's about time we resisted them. As the underground railroads of anti Nazi and anti slavery resistance has shown everyday people can help every

day people, no matter the obstacles. If you live in a border sanctuary city or a migrant community, they are probably already groups that are put in this work and you could join that infrastructure resistance. If not, you can help to create that infrastructure to connect with people who

are affected by borders in ways that you aren't. I mean, perhaps you have a neighbor or a cool worker who's undocumented and could you use a help in that try to connect cross border formal and informal, public and coland design because these connections, these networks, or how people move,

live and evade state violence. Obviously, I can't speak for everybody situation because different people's legal status, language, ability, education level, gender, raised class, commit muns and ability would affect their contribution to the anti borders movement. But however you decide to contribute, I hope that you would remember who it is we're

trying to help. We're not trying to act as you know, these saints for the media, and I recognized the irony of saying saints in particular considered my old YouTube name. But the media is not our focus. The audience of our actions is not public opinion. It is those we want fighting with us, people who need our help, people who know the violent supporters forutand so they get into direct action two, you know, directly affect the material outcomes

of people influence our borders. You know, whether you're helping my creation prisoner managed to escape, or helping one person get a roof over their head, helping an asylum case, having a person who is trapped in this system to find the strength to get through a day. These actions refuberating our communities and they help oup others do the same.

We also, need, of course, more infrastructure, networks, alliances, skills and resources to be cultivated to strengthen our autonomy from these structures and to develop ability to defend against them, and of course these actions should be rooted in some strategy long term and short term for overcoming this regime onnths and for all. Just for a final would I would say that there is nothing necessary or inevitable about borders.

Only the violence of their most ardent believers keep them in place and without them what as with seats to exist, waters can only exist if they are enforced, and together we can make waters and enforceable. Together we can create a will in which everyone is free to travel, free to create, and free to exist on their own terms.

Now's it. If you like what I spoke about in this episode, or if you just like to hear my voice, feel free to check out my YouTube channel and Truism and you can support me on picture and dot com slash Seeing True, will follow me on Twitter at and Disclosing True. Hey everyone, and welcome taken up in the hare, I'm Andrew the YouTube channel Andrewism, and today I want

to talk about the squatting movement. Actually, before I do that, I'm joined today by my co hosts Your Cause Andrew or Garrison Davis and James Stout, and I am your producer Sophie and I am here Andrew, please continue, Thank you, Sophie. I want to talk about the squatting movement and particularly how people love overcome the analities of privatizing land and restricting people's access to it so they could cove a

life for themselves. Um in this troubling world now, I think a lot of people are least passionally familiar with the squatting movements, the political squatting movements where be an anarchist, a tournament store, socialist of nature that I've taken place in Italy, the US, and most famously Denmark where they had you know, Freetown Christiania set up. But outside of the global North and much of the rest of the world, squatting is just a fact of life. It doesn't typically

though sometimes it does have radical political ambitions. So today I'm not going to be spending time discussing the squatting movement in Europe or North America, but instead discussing the millions of people in the world lack of access to land where they can find secure shelter. And I turned to what has been deemed informal occupation or squatting to find residents. Most specifically, I'll be discussing the Caribbean, but first I need to get into some statistics. It's always

that kind of weird, right. In nine fifty, only eighty six cities around the world had populations of one million people or more. In twenty sixteen, there were just over six hundred cities that met this threshold. Over half of the world's population now lives in urban areas, and nearly a billion, if not a billion, are estimated to be living in informal settlements, mostly in the urban and perry urban areas of less developed countries. I don't know if any of you have read Planets of the Slums by

Mike Davis. I don't think I have, but he discusses this phenomenon, this explosion in urbanization, and the fact that, unfortunately, you know, these cities aren't exactly urban Eden's. They are deeply impoverished, filled with m makeshift and often unsafe, whether it be you know, poison us or just poorly constructed or disease written dwell ends areas such as their roots Quarantina, Mexico cities Santa Cruz, Maya, Huaco Ros Favelas, and Cairo is a city of the dead. We're up to one

million people living homes made out of actual tools. Now Davis addresses the issues root cause, that being post colonial neoliberal policies driven by free market Catholics principles. It is yes, cities modernized in the wake of the colonial era, a lot of the same zone and boundaries enforced by imperial

powers across racial and soce economic lines were continued. So quality colonization did not really take place, and did imperial rule didn't lead to a magical increase in equality e galitianism.

It's just that post colonial rulers took up the mantle where a colonial rulers left so and of course this switch, this changing of hands of power was kept up by the International Monetary Fund, which stepped in on behalf of these elites and pushed the poorest citizens basically into thickly concentrated slums by making it easier for the ruling class

to ignore these issues and prioritize the affluent. The debt restructure and policies and nine also LEDs a lot of governments cutting down on their public health and education investment expenditure so that they could repay the loans that they had been forced to take out David spent a lot of time talking about Asia and sometime talking about the increasing hardship in African cities. But the situation of squatting is often overlooked in the Caribbean, and so I'd like

to draw some attention to that. I think that anyone who has lived in the Caribbean or as family in the Caribbean would be somewhat familiar with the idea of family land, which is this idea that you know, you have these plots that the family essentially owns collectively, maybe somebody living there, or it may just be landed as being passed along for anyone who needs it. UM. A lot of this land was acquired by purchase, and a lot of it was acquired by squatting in Trinidad, in

Jamaica and Puerto Rico and Martinique and Barbadoes. Squatting was how a lot of recently emancipated people gained some foothold to live now they could not stay on the plantation system. UM. Now, the early squatting movement was largely wiped out by the growing plantation system UM, but eventually a new squatting movement would arise due to escaped slaves and maroons and post indentured individuals who would resettle um on those regions that

were previously wiped out by the plantation system. I'm going to spend most of the focus of this episode discussing what took place in Jamaica because I discovered this really excellent research paper done by Professor Jean Besson. But Jamaica is really quite an interesting example because Jamaica is one of the few Caribbean countries that had a successful, sustained

maroon movement that lasted into the twenty one century. And so what happened, as is the case for a lot of these colonies, is you have this Cittain model of land ownership called crown land. Basically all the land of the crown deemed themselves to own by virtue of colonized.

In these places, crown land would often be you know, parceled out when they want to attract new colonists to their different colonies, and so enslaved people in Jamaica created these squatters, settle months on crown land, basically recaptured that land and created villages and communities um in as maroons in that context of colonial violence, and of course these governments would demolish the squads settlements and try to effect

land capture. But in Jamaica, the Maroons succeeded, particularly the Leeward Maroons, as they were two different groups to win Wood Maroons in the Leewood Moroons, and that's a whole different history. Today, a Kampong Village is the only survive in village for the Jamaican Leewood Maroons, and there's also

the oldest persistent Maroon society in African America. After the enslaved Africans and Creoles escaped the plantations and squatted Crown Land, they waged successful guerrilla warfare against the British colonists in the First Maroon War and the leadership of Kujo and that land would be the basis of two Leewood Maroon villages that be in Kujo's Town in St. James and a Kampongs Town in St. Elizabeth, a Kampong being named

after Kujo's brother in arms, Captain A. Kampong. Eventually, Kujo Town will be renamed Trelawny Town after the treaty between the British governor would grant the Maroons their freedom and fifteen hundred acres of legal freehold land. A compound town, on the other hand, did not really get any legal recognition until a land grant was given to them to some two thousand fives around a couple of decades later between six the Second Maroon War before between the Trelawny

Town Maroons and the British colonists. Because of course the British did what they would do and whipped two of the Maroons for the theft of pigs in Montego Bay. Of course, this is just the insight and incident, as these things tend to be, for the deeper discontent regarding access to the land. And after this Second Maroon War, the learning Roons ended up being deported to Nova Scotia. So, for those a bit familiar with you know Canadian history,

the Maroons are moved to and resettled in Canada. As a result of this and the Trianytown ruins Land being confiscated, a compunc Town became the soul surviving village and today

it remains Common Treaty town. It is owned in common by the some I believe it's like just over three thousand adults, all of which, by the way, claimed descent from you know Couju and they sort of have a mixed settlement, producing for household use, rare and livestock, utilizing in the forest of medicines and timber um, cultivating food

forests and provision grounds. And even after that was of the communitude migrate, they would still have that connection to their commons and often returns to either live or visit. Trilony Town. On the other hand, after being recaptured by the crown, it was eventually purchased and transformed into family lands by the descendants of slaves, lanterns, and ruins, and

of course squatting played a part in that development. Most recently in Latin America and the Caribbean, there has been a move by governments switching from a policy of trying to eradicate squatters and instead trying to give them titled their lands, either granting them or usually selling it to them in an effort to alleviate poverty so they could use their house as you know, collateral for business loans

and that kind of thing. And that's basically what happened for a compound town and for Trelawney Town, where the captured land was surveyed and subdivided and put for sale and so the squat was able to purchase the land and the government was able to impose taxation on the people who lived on that land. Now, I I spoke of squatting in the Caribbean Latin America typically being not radically political, but there are political slash religious movements that

have used squatting to gain a foothold. For example, the Revival Zion movements and offshoot of Rasterfarian movements. If I'm honestly, couldn't find much information about them, but they're enough from Jamaican religion and slash cult and so they managed to capture a lot of the land near Trelawney Town and we're often settled their homes right behind the city councils,

no squatting signs. Eventually, you know you have about thirty house shools who have basically recaptured their land from Babylon, as Rastafarians would describe the state um. Their community, which they called Zion, became a very vibrant squatter settlement of

some seventy house yards on about thirty acres have captured land. Eventually, the land was surveyed and subdivided, of course, trying to tax and control the people that were there, But the situation led to a lot of people still you know, not being able to afford the land, and still of course having to squat on the land that they lived on. But so long difficulty with squatted land is that it's a very um tenuous, very fragile, wild state of being.

The future is often unswittan and cleats. It's more secure, i would say, than being like homeless, but you're still very much subject to state violence. Um And even when so called legal avenues opened up for you to get the land, you know, through purchase, the fact that you had to squat in the land in the first place should be some indication that you probably can't afford to

buy land. But squatting enables people, at least in the interim two potentially you know, develop some funds and stuff until they are able to secure a future for their families. I think a lot of the liberal solutions to the issue of squatting and poverty is to replace these sorts of systems and put it instead like proper private property rights and giving these people private property so that they could achieve sustainable development goals and all the other buzzwords

that you know, these programs tend to use. I think the future of these kinds of projects, however, should be more along the lines of commons. I think that the fact that they were able to secure that land without the government's approval should be an indication that the government should not need to approve for people to live on the ether You're called home. I've spoken a previous episode about barb Uda and they are commons, and I really

don't see why. I do see why, but I really believe the solutions these isssues lies in reclaiming the commons, lies in rejecting these colonial and post cluonial governments which based themselves on exclusion and illegality. And bring a boat, participatory local management of the land, by the people, for the people. And that's about it. Thanks, and do you think it was re fascinating? Any any final thoughts, Scare James.

My final thought is that we have a live share wonderful And yeah, just the thing I was thinking about as we talked about squatting this one. You will be excluded unless you can pray the cost of entry or work out how to not be excluded, I guess. But it's on the twenty six of October I nearly forgot what month it was, And you can buy tickets on the internet. Yeah, so we're doing this live stream October

twenty six, six pm. It is a live virtual event and you can get tickets at moment dot c o slash I see h H will link that in the episode script. Will be a fun, spooky themed light show. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and welcome to it could happen here. You know, when we started the show, when I did the first season of it, you know, the one about all the Civil War stuff. Back in this was basically a place for me to write long essays explaining my

vision of the future and the present. Uh, And people seem to like that a lot. We did a little bit of that at the start of this new Eternal daily season of the show. Um, but obviously over the last year or so, it's it's morphed into something very different and something wonderful and successful, and it's brought a lot of new voices, or at least voices people maybe hadn't heard from as much out in front of the audience,

and I've been really happy about that. But what I also haven't been doing is writing any more essays about the world and how fucked up shit is. Because you know, I've been managing a bunch of stuff and there's been a lot of work to do, but I like doing that stuff, and I think you people like it, So I'm gonna try to do more of that. And I wanted to kind of start by talking a little bit

about Silicon Valley. And I'm going to say something at the start of this essay that a lot of people are probably instinctively gonna want to disagree with, which is that Silicon Valley and the tech industry have been gigantic failures by every metric that matters. They have made life comprehensively worse for humanity, and there is no real fact based counter argument to that statement. This is a hard

pill for people to swallow. I'm sure a lot of folks are frustrated in me for saying it right now and are thinking of counter arguments. Most people today are critical of the tech industry, obviously, particularly made your social media companies, but they still tend to acknowledge the tremendous wealth created by Silicon Valley, as if there's some sort

of inherent value to that. Behind a number on a spreadsheet collectively, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, the so called Big Five had a seven point five trillion dollar market cap. And every person listening to this keeps a device in their pocket made by or using the software of one or more of these companies. And so when people want to make the counter argument to what I

just said, they'll tend to point out some version of this. Uh. Yeah, companies like Facebook have done bad things, but the Internet is still a tool for good. It connects people, YadA YadA YadA. Smartphones empower us. You know. There's all these positive things about the internet, to which I will say, present me with your fucking evidence that that has mattered for people really in terms that actually, inaggregate improve their lives. I will show you my arguments to the col dry.

In the period of time from Harry Truman's election to the end of the Nixon administration, American productivity on a per capita basis increased at a faster rate than it did at any other point in history. But then something happened. From nineteen seventy three to two thousand and thirteen, income growth was eighty percent slower than it had been in

the previous three decades. If productivity had continued to grow at the same rate from nineteen seventy three to two thousand thirteen as it did from nineteen forty six to nineteen seventy three, the economy in two thousand thirteen would have been sixty percent larger than it actually was. Now, I'm going to guess a decent number of the people listening to this grew up watching The Jetsons. I know I did, and for the most part it was a silly,

pretty harmless animated show. But at the center of it was a dream about the future that seems unfathomable in light of current events. George Jetson, who was in the show a pretty normal working class guy, worked three hours a day for three days a week. One of the running jokes in the show is that he considered himself overworked despite this idyllic schedule. Now, this was never particularly a focus of the show. It was just kind of

something that was mentioned from time to time. And that's because the idea that a work week might just be nine hours in the future wasn't a joke. This was the direction of futurists in the nineteen sixties, looking at that surgeon productivity I just mentioned, and all of the middle class wealth that had been created from the forties

through the early sixties. This is the direction they saw us heading in around a decade ago, in a period that was still significantly more optimistic than our current age. The Atlantics. Alexis Madrigal, when on a reading spree of some early twentieth century futurist novels, his conclusion was this quote. Technological optimists sold the world on automation by telling people it would create unimaginable amounts of leisure for them. The big question for the workers of the twenty first century

would be how to spend their copious amounts of free time. Now, the future we've actually gotten has given us the opposite of this dream. To try and cover up the rank and rampant ways modern technology has failed. Human think tanks funded by venture capitalists and tech gurus produce an endless stream of identical futurist thinker types who write columns about how the world is actually better today than it's ever been.

A good example of this would be this June column by Rob Ascar titled the World's getting better, Here's why your brain can't believe it. It opens with this paragraph life has improved for most people around the world over the past generation, temporary pandemics aside. The rub is that you can't get anyone to believe the good news, and the result is a toxic political environment and the potential collapse of democratic norms if too few people feel that

a stressed system is worth saving. Now, I might point out, for example, that if people don't actually feel like the system is good, perhaps it's not really working well. There's a number of counter arguments you can make to this. Now, two years later, this again was written in June, We've got a massive war in Europe. People are worried about nuclear warfare as a result of that. Again, we've got a degradation of democracy world I that's continued to pace

from where it was. We've got soaring inequality, we've got inflation the likes of which a lot of people alive have never seen, myself included prior to this point. And we still have a pandemic. So it's clear that Rob is at least not as smart as he thinks he is, which is what I would say about everyone who makes versions of the same claim that he was making. Now, this doesn't mean I'm saying that life is worse now than it was at some imagined pre lapse arian version

of the past. I actually think that's kind of a useless way to think about the past. In the future, there's different things people would have preferred. There's things that are objectively better, there's things that are objectively indebatably worse. You know, that's hard to make those kind of claims about history, especially when they often rely on saying, well, X amount of more people have been pulled out of poverty.

And the question to that is, well, I don't know, before colonization of Africa, would you say all of those people in what became the colonized parts of Africa were in poverty or were they simply not part of a system that measures poverty and anyway whatever. We can go on and on about that. My point is that the metrics these people used to claim the success of our current system to talk about how wonderful things are today

are constantly shifting, and they're widely arbitrary. The same year Rob wrote his stupid column, an in O r C studies showed that Americans self reported being happy at the lowest levels in fifty years. You can quote Jukes statistics about wealthare access to luxury goods all you want. But the modern world and the post two eight financial crash economy, all of which was built in the shade of the tech industry, is making people miserable now. Happiness is obviously

not a perfect measure of progress either. Self reporting is always dicey, but things like the consumer price index in per capita income, which are often used by folks on the optimist side, are also juked and jiggered to hell and back. So to provide a bit more of an international scale, I'm going to quote from the Berkeley University's Greater Good magazine. Quote released annually on the International Day of Happiness, the World Happiness Report ranks countries based on

their life satisfaction the Gallop World Pole. Residents rate how satisfied they are with their lives in a scale of zero to ten, from the worst possible life to the best possible life. This year's report also analyzes how global happiness has changed over time, based on data stretching back to two thousand five. One trend is very clear. Negative feelings, worry, sadness, and anger have been rising around the world, up by

from two thousand ten to two thousand eighteen. The others also found troubling trends and happiness in equality, which is the psychological parallel to income inequality, how much individuals in society differ and how satisfied they are with life. Since two thousand seven, happiness inequality has been rising within countries, meaning that the gap between the unhappy and the happy has been getting wider. This trend is particularly strong in

Latin America, Asia and Sub Saharan Africa. And this is kind of getting it. I think, what is an incredibly important point, for one thing, if you want to look at how people have self reported their unhappiness rising. This massive recent surge and unhappiness occurs almost at exactly the period of time that the smartphone takes off and becomes ubiquitous.

And the smartphone is such a bafflingly useful device. I would never want to give mine up as a thing that I had access to, And the Internet is an incredibly powerful tool. I wouldn't want to give the Internet up either. But the usefulness and the the undoubtable brilliance behind these products makes it seem inconceivable to argue that they haven't made us better at accomplishing the things that matter to us. But the evidence on this is pretty clear. I want to quote now from a write up in

The Atlantic. No matter how aggressively you torture the numbers, the computer age has coincided with a decline in the rate of economic growth. When Chad Civerson, an economist at the University of Chicago's Business School, looked at the question of missing growth, he found that the productivity slowdown has reduced GDP by two points seven trillion dollars since two thousand four. Americans may love their smartphones, but all those

free apps aren't worth trillions of dollars. The physical world of the city, the glow of electric powered lights, the rumble of automobiles, the roar of air planes overhead, and subways below is a product of late nineteenth century in early twentieth century invention, the physical environment feels depressingly finished. The bulk of innovation has been shunted into the invisible

realm of bites and code. All of that code, technology advocates argue, has increased human ingenuity by allowing individuals to tinker, talk, and trade with unprecedented ease. This certainly feels true. Who could dispute the fact that It's easier than ever to record music, market a video game, or publish an essay, but by most measures, individual innovation is in decline. In two thousand and fifteen, Americans were far less likely to start a company than they were in the nineteen eighties.

According to the economist Tyler Cohen, the spread of broadband technology has corresponded with a drop off an entrepreneurial activity in almost every city and in almost every industry. Now you might think from all this that I'm out ahead into some sort of techno dumer anti si primitivist rant here. I'm not. Perhaps I should, but I'm not. I am a person who loves technology. I got my start as

a journalist. As a tech journalist, I joy as Lee traveled the world for years, visiting conventions looking at new gadgets. And a lot of this was in that pretty wondrous period if you're a gadget nerd from two thousand eight to two thousand eleven, where there were there's these amazing, new, weird sci fi gadgets dropping every single week, stuff that you'd grown up watching and like Star Trek, the next generation suddenly getting mailed to your door for you to

test out. I tested hundreds of tablets and smart gadgets in that time frame, and there's some really great products that came out from that period. Bluetooth speakers are wonderful. A lot of people, including me, use them happily on a daily basis. But when it comes to legitimately life changing applications of technology that's come to us in the last fifteen years or so, I can really only think of three things. Number one is the ability to navigate

by GPS basically everywhere. Number two is the ability to be in constant contact with people around the world. And number three is the ability to store a shipload of media on a portable device. So I'm not anti technology, Nor am I saying that big tech doesn't make things that are cool or useful? And what am I saying

we should get rid of this stuff? The point I'm making is that viewed at thirty thousand feet, the tech industry has produced very little of quantifiable value to the human race, and it has caused unfathomable harm at the same time. Now, in my opinion, this has nothing, or at least fairly little to do with how the technology inherently works, and instead has everything to do with the ideology behind the people who developed and who continue to

marshal that technology. In nine, two of the smartest guys in the twentieth century by my estimation, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, wrote an essay about the ideology that animated the men who had come to dominate the twenty first century tech industry. They titled their essay the Californian Ideology, and I think it still counts as one of the three or four most incisive accurate essays of that century.

The gist of the idea was that as the first wave of the digital boom started to hit in the mid nineteen nineties, the thinkers behind it were fueled by a mix of left wing by a x of left wing egalitarian, often anti status beliefs that got wedded to right wing free market fundamentalist libertarian ideology and created this deeply toxic way of thinking about the future. You can see this in the story of guys like Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the personal computer, who was also a

former phone freaker. He committed federal crimes as a kid, hacking the phone system primarily because fuck the man. But then when he's a young man the Waws hooks up with a guy named Steve Jobs, and Jobs is a brilliant but heartless con man who cares about nothing but market dominance. Jobs recognizes the naive brilliance of Steve Wozniak, and he turns it into an engine for wealth creation.

At one point, he steals money that Wosniak was owed for a project that they took on together, money Wniac probably would have just given him if he'd asked, and he used it secretly to fund their business, which became Apple. In their essay, Cameron and Barbara, who are much better

writers than I, described the Californian ideology this way. The Californian ideology is a mix of cyber and etics, free market economics, and counterculture libertarianism, and is promuligated by magazines such as Wired and Mondo two thousand and preached in the books of Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and others. The New Faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, thirty something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats, and even by

the President of the USA himself. Now, the tech industry as we know it got its start courtesy of government money. Everyone knows that the first version of the Internet was developed as part of a Defense Department project, but the entire computer industry, all of the coders and engineers who would form the first generation of Selincom Valley profit engines, all these guys got their start working for or as

defense contractors. When the US pulled out of Vietnam, thousands of these people were left out of jobs and they were forced to move into the private sector. Everything worthwhile that's come out of big tech has involved a titanic amount of public funding, one way or the other. And I'm gonna quote from that essay again. Almost every major technological advance of the last two hundred years has taken place with the aid of large outs of public money

and under a good deal of government influence. The technologies of the computer in the net were invented with the aid of massive state subsidies. For example, the first difference Engine project received a British government grant of five hundred and seventeen thousand, four hundred and seventy pounds a small

fortune in eighteen thirty four. From Colossus to EDVAC, from flight simulators to virtual reality, the development of computing has depended at key moments on public research handouts or fat contracts with public agencies. The IBM Corporation built the first programmable digital computer only after it was requested to do so by the U. S Defense Department during the Korean War.

The result of a lack of state intervention meant that Nazi Germany lost the opportunity to build the first electronic computer in the late thirties when the Wehrmacht refused to fund Conrad Zooz, who had pioneered the use of binary code, stored programs, and electronic logic gates. One of the weirdest things about the Californian ideology is that the West Coast

itself was a product of massive state intervention. Government dollars were used to build the irrigation systems, highway schools, universities, and other infrastructural projects which make the good life possible. On top of these public subsidies, the West Coast high tech industrial complex has been feasting off the fattest pork barrel in history for decades. The US government has poured billions of tax dollars into buying planes, missiles, electronics, and

nuclear bombs from Californian companies. Americans have always had state planning, but they prefer to call it the defense budget. Now this state of affairs is more or less unchanged today. Elon Musk is probably the most celebrated modern tech visionary. Miss Sundry companies have taken nearly five billion dollars in public funding, subsidies, and government support since two thousand fifteen.

All of these libertarian visionaries, who push in their political lives for a world of lossyfair economics and corporate sovereignty, only produce value with the help of taxpayer dollars. Period. The irrational exuberance of public financing and the narcissism to ignore its role in innovation has given us a generation of tech industry overlords who seem bound and determined to

destroy their own creations. Steve Jobs represented the most successful and probably the most intelligent manifestation of the Californian ideology. Every tech industry ghoul currently boiling away fortunes for the sake of their ego. I'm thinking of Zuckerberg and Musk most prominently right now is trying to be him. Steve's skill was being able to perfectly inhabit the form of a visionary, and he was so good at doing this that he convinced this generation they could follow in his footsteps.

But Steve Jobs was only ever playing at being a creator, at being an inventor. His skill was not in making things. He had other people to do the making. Steve was an exceptional confidence man, and like all good confidence men, he was able to make money because he understood on

a deep level what other human beings wanted. This skill allowed him to lock Apple into spending hundreds of millions of dollars on R and D for what would become the first proper smartphone, and for a while, he was just having them toss that money into an apparent chasm, repeatedly turning back iterations of the product that weren't quite right, on the strength of his belief that when they got

it right, it would be worth it. In the year since, we've seen many wanna be Steves try to follow in his footsteps, igniting tens of billions of dollars of venture capital for absolutely nothing. One of the best examples would be Uber They lost eight point five billion dollars in

two thousand nineteen six point eight billion dollars. Once upon a time, The understanding the jobs and vision of what Uber could be was that all of this ignited VC cash would be worthwhile because eventually the company would succeed in replacing human drivers with autonomous cars, cutting out the primary cost in the entire professional driving industry, and making

the potential for a shipload of profit. But after investing more than a billion dollars in self driving cars, Uber sold their entire autonomous vehicle division off at a loss. All of that expense had resulted in self driving cars that averaged one half mile travel per accident. Despite this, after a two point six billion dollar loss in August two, Uber stock sword. Now the realities of what generates profit and loss in the tech industry have been completely divorced

from productive reality or value created. For quite some time. The delamination of real value in big tech happens subtly. It's not hard to see why Apple, who created a device every human being wanted to have in their pocket, became worth a shipload more money, right, pretty obvious. The value case for Google's core business search is also pretty obvious.

And as much as I hate Facebook, it became initially successful because it provided people with something of real value a way to stay in touch with human beings they

had met over the course of their lives. Younger folks may find this odd because they've grown up with the Internet, but as a kid, I can remember very vividly my parents talking about the friends they'd had in high school and in college, and how a lifetime of moving regularly had severed many of the connections they'd valued with these people.

When I joined Facebook and my freshman year of college, I found real value and the ability to maintain and sometimes even build stronger connections with people I would otherwise have lost touch with entirely. There is the core of something good, or something at least valued inherently by people in Facebook, and that's true with most, if not all, of the Big five companies. When people reflexively leap to defend the tech industry as an engine of innovation, they

can point to these successes. But the point that I'm making isn't that no good ideas come out of Silicon Valley, or that there isn't anything valuable that is involved in what these companies do. It's that the endless quest for profit and the narcissism of this Californian ideology lead inevitably to the destruction of whatever value the industry creates. This is why none of these innovations have actually led to surges and productivity, why none of them have made us

any happier, which I think might be more important. Any potential these creations had was smothered by the ideology that drives Silicon Valley money. Facebook took the connections that they'd made with people and used them to feed those same people rage bait. They destroyed the open Internet, shuttered countless local news sites, put tons of people out of business, while algorithmically pushing millions of folks around the world towards

whatever kept them angriest and most online. Google spent billions on an endless stream of spinoff products like Google Plus and Google Glass, which were nearly all catastrophic failures, at least on a financial sense, and all the while they gradually turned the search results they prided themselves on into a sponsored ad feed. Google is less useful now than it was a couple of years ago. You noticed this immediately if you just get on there and start asking

it questions. Elon Musk has taken the visionary technology that underpins the Tesla, all created by other people and used the clout from that to shatter any chance of California developing a high speed rail system. By the way, in June of two, Tesla stock value plunged seventy five billion dollars, which is substantially more money than the company has ever

actually made. Elucidating the full scale of the failure of Silicon Valley an American techno optimism would take more time than I'm able to spend right now, So instead, I want to talk about the idea that's behind so much of the recent big failures that we've seen from big tech stuff like Meta pissing away ten billion dollars half the budget of NASA in a year to create a worse version of vr chat. The idea is called blitz scaling, and it basically means attempting to achieve massive scale at

breakneck speed. You take big risks and you spend huge amounts of money very quickly to try enforce apps or other products onto the market that are then adopted rapidly by huge numbers of people. This brings in a shipload of VC money, and as a way that you can make a fortune. In the years since Jobs brought the first iPhone out, on stage. This has become the dominant

model of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. Everyone is looking for the next iPhone, right, something that can take over an industry, something you can take over the world that rapidly, that can change human life almost overnight. In Funding Calls, Mark Zuckerberg says this. In Funding Calls, Mark Zuckerberg says this very directly, comparing his company's metaverse dreams to the new smartphone.

The thing that Mark misses because his ideology renders it invisible, is that Steve Jobs didn't make people want the iPhone. He was able to figure out what they wanted already, what they had talked about wanting for decades, starting with trike orders and communicators on Star Trek, and he lashed his dev team until they built the damn thing. Now.

The metaverse has some analogs in fiction, including the thing that it gets its name from, um, but number one, most depictions of the metaverse in fiction are not aspirational things people want their dystopian uh, there's no evidence that people actually want this thing that he's igniting a fortune to build, or that they'd spend meaningful periods of time

in it if it existed. There's not a lot of polling on this data, but one in seven but one seventeen thousand person survey I found showed less than twenty respondents respect expressing an interest in meta in a metaverse like the one Zuck is trying to build. The last time Facebook provided any kind of information about how many people are on Horizon Worlds, which is kind of the core of their metaverse efforts, it was somewhere around three

dred thousand people in the most recent quarter. They declined to provide an update to those numbers, which suggests the number has not increased um And if you just want to look at what happens when people create a digital product that actually has a strong base of interest, look at how quickly World of Warcraft went from, you know, a thing that very few people outside of nerds would have known much about, to a thing that was entirely mainstream,

millions of users, regular references to it on television. You're just not seeing that with any of this metaverse ship because there's nothing in it that people actually want. The sheer hollowness of big tech is starting to become financially obvious to Facebook. Stock has lost fifty seven percent of

its value in the last year. Amazon is down Google by and even Apple has fallen by fourteen sent More to the point, I think any honest person has to look at the last fifteen years or so in which these companies have ruled our economic and social lives and asked, are we better off now? Over the course of the nineteenth century, productivity and income rose at unprecedented rates. There

was a lot of brutality in this process, right. We talked, you know, on behind the Bastards regularly about all of the horrible labor things that happened in the nineteenth century. It also marked the beginning of the fossil fuel age, which may well kill us all. But while all this was going on, another thing that happened is wages for the working class doubled in the first half of the

nineteenth century, and the second half. Life expectancy rose faster than it ever had before as well, and that continued through the first part of the twentieth century. Now, near the end of the first quarter of the twenty one century,

we're not seeing that kind of movement. The United States is now ending its second consecutive year of declining life expectancy for the first time in any of our lifetimes, and real average wage adjusted for inflation, has remained flat for almost half a injury progress has flatlined, and nothing about how brilliant the modern tech industry is or how cool some of these gadgets and products are can change

those fundamental facts. It's a failure. 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.