Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that whenever there's bad things happening, there's people trying to do good things, including not introduced their podcast badly. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week my guest is Sarah Marshall.
Hi. How are you? Hi?
I'm so happy to be here. I like how you started that off big and then he got it nice and small. You know this week, Sarah Marshall, that's true. It's an intimate salon.
Inviting people to get a little closer to the Yeah.
Well, I've been watching a lot of Kathy Griffin's specials because I realized how much I missed Kathy Griffin. And she had like nineteen Bravo specials in the two thousands.
Do you know who that is? Magbie, Nope, no idea.
She was on Suddenly Susan in the nineties.
Magpie also doesn't know what that is.
I've heard of it. I don't know what it is.
Well, I have this thing called suddenly, so you put on pasta salad always makes me think of Suddenly Susan. But Kathy Griffin is a stand up comedian. Does this thing where she like will start kind of like speaking quieter, and she's like while doing a giant show on a giant theater, and she's like, I'm talking like this because this is GISs between you and me before like a
particularly juicy piece of celebrity gossip. So like, we're talking like this because this GISs between us and all the people listening as well the guests, between all of us, no one else.
No one else can listen except for the people who are currently listening. Don't tell your friends about this podcast because they can't hear it.
We really need to keep this in a tight intimate circle.
Yeah, I got to keep them numbers down.
That's what keeps That's what no one ever says on a podcast. I want you to go out and rate my podcast. Go ahead and give me a one star rating. I hate it when people are like, give us a five star rating, because that's presuming that the person listening liked it.
What if they didn't, I know, although it is a good reason to do it at the end of the episode, So at the beginning of the episode, because by the end of the episode, if you may get that far, you probably don't hate it.
Like I probably liked it if I listened for this whole hour.
Yeah, although I say that is if I don't regularly listen to podcasts that I do not like at all, because I pick a like new interest like every month. I mean, you can tell by the theme of this podcast that I like new interests. And then I'm like, I need to know everything about r ving or sailboats or I don't know those are two recently, and then I listen to all the podcasts about them, and I don't like most of them.
Yes, because it's hard to find something that's on both a topic you like and you like the person doing it.
I think, I know. Yeah, And if you're listening and you're one of those people who kind of hates me and just likes my content, I'm not sorry, nice, but I do have a producer. I'm Sophie.
Hi, Sophie, Hi, Mike Pie Hi, Sarah, Hi, Sophie.
Nice to be here with you wearing your hat that says potatoes.
I am. I know, it's so good. Everyone sends me potato memes all the time and it's great, But Sophie's the real.
A potato head.
Yeah, that's the word I was thinking you are, and.
I am too. It's a very pre potato group today.
Yeah.
Yeah, I had potatoes and couscous for lunch. Oh nice. It was just sort of random storre fry food and it was so good.
I had several mini croissants that I got discounted at fred Meyer.
I like croissants, Sophie, did you have a starch for lunch today?
I had two Italian sausages and an apple sauce.
Oh. I think you're the healthiest of the three of us right now, you're the one.
Yeah.
Well. We also have an audio engineer named Eva hi Eva Hiva hi Eva, and our theme music was written forced by unwoman and you have unwittingly come in in the middle of me. It's not a series, but it's
kind of a series. I've been talking a lot about the alter globalization movement of the late nineties and early oughts for the past couple months because I've been talking a lot about the sort of protest infrastructure that people built, and so I've been focusing on various groups that came together to create the modern protest infrastructure, and specifically this grand movement of movements that relied on decentralized organizing I'm going to do this long build up before I give
you the topic. And the movement of movements especially kind of came from decentralized organizing techniques developed by the Zapatistas in Chiapus, Mexico, as well as anarchist traditions, and they challenged neoliberalism and the challenge the way that structural adjustment programs are destroying country's economies and basically just destroying the
global self. We talked about how the Zapatistas in Mexico broke from traditional leftist organizing by introducing indigenous ae ideas around decentralization and bottom up democracy, and we talked about how they started to organize various grassroop groups and movements from around the world to call for a movement against neoliberalism. And what we're going to talk about today is one of the mechanisms by which they were able to do some of that organizing. But I'm still not going to
tell you what we're going to talk about yet. I'm building it up as if it's like this dramatic reveal, but I love it. We also talked about the Black Bloc protesters that started in Germany and spread across Europe to the rest of the world, how they provided an alternative to the existing dichotomy with like either regimented nonviolence on one side or like armed guerrilla movements on the
other side. We talked about the National Lawyer's Guild, and we talked about street medics and maybe I'm just listening to all these things because if you like come in on just this one, they're like, oh wow, all those things sound great too. We also talked about street theater and giant puppets. But this week we were going to talk about yet another component of the successful protests, independent media.
This week are going to talk about the decentralized grassroots collective of independent journalists fundamentally changed our media landscape forever, sometimes in ways that made it much worse. This week we are talking about indie media I N D Y Media. You ever heard of them? Hmmm, excellent? Then this will be fun. I'm excited. This is the Independent Media Center
or the IMC as no one remembers it. If people remember it at all, they remember it as indie media, spelled with the Y. This is still around, but in a much diminished form, but its impacts are outsized. I am going to draw a direct link from indie media to Twitter and therefore the destruction of all of our brains. That's my plan today. Oh well, you ever heard of Twitter's sorry, that sounded terrible. Certain you've heard of Twitter.
It is like, don't you feel though that Twitter, like, even when it was at its biggest, felt a little bit too quaint in a way because it was based on words, you know, like you could feel it being the last big thing based on sentences.
Oh interesting, Like it was doomed because it's not going to be because the next one was photo and the next one after that was video.
Just yeah, this feeling of like this is sort of like the last gasp of language based sort of viral media online or language based social media as opposed to image based, because you could get really big on Twitter as an ugly person, is what I'm really saying here. That's true, and those doors aren't open anymore.
I hate every single time I have to do video for something. Every single time someone's like, hey, can you promote this thing that you're doing? Sent just just really quick, just send us a sixty second video of it. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's a that's a real quick.
You're like, are you telling me to act like a normal person? Who's you know, impression of a normal person. People won't pick apart until I want to leave this industry forever. Like that's going to take me.
I know, I know, I have to either wear makeup or not. I have to think about it. I gotta cut my fucking bangs. I gotta like figure out my lightning and backdrop. It is.
It's a whole production to be a person.
It really is, well, especially to be like a similacro of a person on the internet. Being a person's fine. I'll go out in public. Public is fine. It's the Internet that's a problem.
Well, And you know what I think about with that is Nicole Kidman and To Die For. Yeah, you know, she plays this character who's like a product of like tabloid media and nineties TV news, and she's got this speech about how like if everyone were on TV, then everyone would be paved better because we would all be being watched all the time. But also if everyone's on TV, then who's gonna watch us? And it's like that's what we're doing right now.
Yeah, that's that's the present. Although I feel like instead it's just like we've created like weird micro celebrity culture and I don't know, I mean not that podcasting me into it. But at least it's just my voice. That's how I feel.
About it, exactly. At least you're not performing in more ways than the way that you consented to. Maybe that's appealing to me.
Yeah. All I have to do is get on Mike, pretend like my day has been wonderful and have energy for a little while.
That's all I gotta do, or at least pretend like my day hasn't been distractingly bad.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And I actually had a nice day to day, although literally all of my day today was writing this script to finishing this script. But it was a nice day.
But if that's a nice day, Benny, I'm extra excited for it.
It was a like moment where I was explaining to someone the thing that I've researched, and I've been like, I'm going to explain a really niche topic. I'm glad I have a good guest. The short version of indie media is that, basically in the late nineties, at the Big Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization November nineteen ninety nine, people were like, we actually need a media infrastructure,
We need a structure of independent media. And it actually comes out of not just like random people who want to post conspiracy theory stuff though we'll get to that later, but it comes out of like people who are journalists who are like, the existing infrastructure is not going to
work for what we're going to try and do. They got together with a bunch of techies and they created what's not the first status update based website, but the first big one, the first idea that people can be like, oh, this is what happened today, and people can all post that and share that and see that, and that allowed the protest movement to accomplish amazing things. It also allowed that protest movement to not be disappeared as much by mainstream media, and it led to a lot of knock
on effects, and not like an indirect way. I'm going to like name specific people who are the through line between the modern social media landscape and this thing that was put together for some protests. That's the basic idea of indie media. I love it. Yeah, Indie media was like my political awakening in a lot of ways. When
I was a teenager. I was an art student, and I was brand new to politics, and I was living in New York City, and I walked in off the street to an Indie Media New York meeting and I got to play this like tiny minor part in running a newspaper, like a print newspaper that's still around today, and join a video collective of people putting together video. I just spent all of this time talking trash on video, but I absolutely well, I didn't worry as much about
how I looked when I was nineteen years old. A year later, I was living in Portland, Oregon, and I was essentially working full time with the indie media video collective there. In exchange for shooting and editing videos and helping run events, I was given a room in a tiny apartment over an auto shop, and less than a year after dropping out of art school, a film I edited sold out a movie theater, and I was giving
talks at universities to students that were older than me. Wow, So I'm really fond of indie media, or I'm really fond of what it was in two thousand and two. Man, But what is it? Where did it come from? I know that you want context. So one of the things that comes up all the time when I'm researching this shit, and I suspect we didn't talk about what you do. Oh yeah, you run a podcast called You're wrong about I Do. You're right about that? Sorry? Oh shit, Oh no,
you're allowed to make terrible jokes about That's true. That's how that works.
If you listen to podcast, people have probably like bothered you about it at some point, and if you're like me, then you haven't listened to it, because at some point in twenty twenty one you were like, stop bringing this show up, is what I would assume. And so either you have or you haven't listened to it, And if you haven't listened to it, then like, look, I'm not gonna persuade yet. You get to decide what you do with your own time.
It's fine.
But it started off as a show about misremembered history and sort of classic tabloid narratives like Tiny Harding and Lorraina Bobbitt and stories that we.
Sort of.
That people sort of like kind of could remember but would often sort of remember through USNL parodies, which is certainly how I learned history. And now it's kind of expanded into like, you know, I like to talk about things through that lens of historical misunderstanding and misremembering and sort of how the truth gets obscured. But also it's just, you know, a show about stuff I find interesting. And so our most recent episode that we just put out this week is on the history of the Corn Maze.
That was so fun for me to do.
You do love corn? That's cool.
I love Coorn, and I'm okay with mazes. I mainly love corn and I had I'm Chelsea Webber Smith who loves mazes, and so that even doubt a good fit.
Yeah, that is good. So do you run across this thing where people have an idea about how people were in the past, and how ideas that we take for granted right now people think just like have been around forever and are actually reasonably new.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the really interesting sort of aspects of history and historian ship I guess to me is like things that are way newer than we would think, and things that are way more timeless as human behavior than we would think, you know, because I think both of those things occur.
The example that I'm going to use in this script although it's not totally related. Is that the idea of being a homosexual or of being a heterosexual about one hundred to one hundred and fifty years.
Old, right, I know, And that's the kind of thing that like feels shocking, but also when you think about it, you're like, hmm, yeah.
No, totally. The first time someone was like, being straight a is about one hundred year old idea, I was like, there's no way that's true. And then I read about it and I was like, oh, yeah, no, that kind of makes sense actually.
And then you're like, of course straightness is a new concept because it's just so weird.
Yeah.
Absolutely, If it were innate, it wouldn't be so hard to make people, do you know?
Yeah, totally. If the gender binary is so obvious and natural, then why do we need laws to enforce it.
It's a great question. There aren't any laws enforcing gravity, interestingly.
Enough, Yeah, yeah, totally. All objects must fall down. Yeah no, one's like damn you birds except hunters maybe, but yeah. So another idea that is about as old is the idea of being gay or straight is the idea of journalistic objectivity.
Oh boy, yeah, I guess that makes sense.
The idea that a journalist presents the facts and not opinions is brand new in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah see, and I never thought about that. But then you're like, yeah, how long of journalists even existed?
For not that long? Yeah no, I don't I know about the journalistic objectivity. But now I'm like, I wonder how long our concept of journalism? I wonder how that is?
Right, or just like you know, if you look at like the Great you know what like all these dead guys who like in cells like to have is their profile pictures for some reason, right, like all the dead Greeks. I don't know how that happened. But like herodotus, it's like, what's history about? It's like, well, you just make stuff up mainly, and then you sort of, yeah, it's fun.
Yeah, we start.
To care about accuracy and academia probably not that long ago.
Well, what's interesting is the idea of journalistic objectivity. It's not as like a one sided thing as I actually kind of would have expected going into this, because it's not like before this everyone just lied for fun, right, But if you go back into the New York Times archives and read their nineteenth century reporting, which I've had to do a bunch of times for the show. Nay, yeah,
it is blatantly opinionated. And the thing is is that New York Times is one of the main places that the concept of objective journalism comes from, just decades elating.
And now they've come full circle. So that's really good.
Well, that's part of the danger. It's actually part of why endi media exists, right, is that you have this thing where like, oh, we're the objective people. So when they have an obvious bias, it's not presented as an obvious bias, right, It's presented as the objective truth unless it's on the opinion page, you know, which is why the Onion is the only true newspaper. All journalism is
still biased. Some journalists hide that bias, some journalists try to counteract their own biases, and others are a little bit more blatant about their bias. But journalistic objectivity didn't become the standard because it was like better or more moral. It was because it's sold better.
Wow, Okay, that's interesting. I would not have thought that.
I wouldn't have thought it either, and it doesn't always sell better, but it was able to stand out in the field, because in the eighteen nineties you have a lot of like yellow journalism, which is basically tabloid journalism. It's the journalism of scandal and half lies and full lies scandal. That is how if I was a yellow journalist, I would tell you that that's how it's pronounced because it sounds better, it might sell more.
No, you don't have to tell the truth. Yeah, and this is like, how important was Hurst in the history of yellow journalism. He's like, based on my seventh grade education, I assume, So, okay, it's good to know that the.
New York Journal I think was his paper. And yeah, pullets are in Hurst. Wait, pullets are in Hurst. They think we're not. Oh we not. No, it's crazy. We did a whole episode. I'm no, I don't think you were the guests. No, but I was cheering from afar. We did a whole two parter on the actual newsy strike. If anyone wants to go back and hear.
Yeah, everybody should. I mean, it's very inspiring to me. How in the actual history you're like, oh, they actually did like terrify all these industries who were like, oh no, we can't let children get this many ideas about labor unions. This could really screw us.
Yeah, and that's actually a lot of I mean when I think back of like twentieth century journalism that claims to be very objective and then I see its lies, it's very rarely that I'm like, ah, they printed things that were untrue, but instead by like choosing where their focus is. I'm like, when labor history is written out of history, you're like, oh, yeah, there's probably some protests here and there, you know, And then you're like, oh, protest and disruption is like the engine of progress.
Yeah, and that the reaction against it is like the driving force shaping the world we now live in.
Yeah.
Absolutely, Yeah, and that like the crime of like lying by omission is actually seems a lot more serious in many ways.
Yeah, because it's harder to fact check, right, because you're like, well, I guess everything you wrote is true.
God, Yeah, because you can't fact check. Leaving stuff out of the record, it's just like, well, we had limited space, we couldn't fit in another page.
Yeah, not one more page. There's a lot of people who've been very important in history, and other parts about them are left out of it, right, like, it's very hard to find when people did sex work. If someone did sex work and they did something important, no one talks about the sex work. But also if someone was a radical leftist and they're not known for being a radical leftist, that is left out. Are you thinking about
Helen Keller, Oh yeah, that's a perfect example. Yeah, it is completely left out.
And then yeah, honorary Wobbly Helen Keller.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So to quote about yellow journalism, I'm going to quote Joseph Patrick mccerns from the book History of American Journalism. The yellow journalism of the eighteen nineties and the tabloid journalism of the nineteen twenties and thirties stigmatize the press as a profit motivated purveyor of cheap
thrills and vicarious experiments. To its many critics, it seemed as though the press was using the freedom from regulation it enjoyed under the First Amendment to make money instead of using it to fulfill its vital role as an independent source of information in a democracy. So yellow journalism is popular, right, but it is heavily criticized. So it creates this niche for someone to be like, yeah, fuck that stuff. We're going to give you the truth, and do you know what the best way to pay for
the truth is advertising advertising. It's the part where you just say this part's a lie and everyone drops pretending like anything's objective, like what's about to happen, and we're back. The biggest like turning point for yellow journalism, or at least in history, when people look back and they're like, oh, that didn't do us any good, at least in the United States context, is when yellow journalism and Hurst sparked a whole ass war.
Yeah, that does seem to be taking things too far. The Newsy's made out very well though.
That's true. That's true. Well, no, they actually had to fight really hard in order to make out half decent. They lived horrible conditions.
But yes, oh no, but I mean they could sell papers about the war.
Oh yeah, yeah. I used to write.
About that my fan fiction and have my newsies being nostalgic for the Spanish American War. That's amazing. Can folks find this fan fiction? I hope they don't, but if you do, you know, God bless you. It was like I was his writing the horniest stuff. Okay, maybe I don't need to know it if it's yeah, all right, Really, I strove her historical accuracy the entire time.
I suspect that the average like weird erotic thing historical fiction is going to be more accurate than like other mainstream things, because I think that it takes a certain mindset.
You have to be kind of detail oriented.
Yeah, probably exactly.
I just want to solve the prop coffee cup problem. It would be so hard to put something a little bit heavy in those things. You know, when you have like actors handling empty coffee cups and they're just like flinging them around as if there's nothing inside them, drives me insane anyway. Yeah, yeah, when you cause a war that does seem rather extreme.
And what happened was is that the Spanish American War was in many ways caused by the USS. Main was sunk in eighteen ninety eight in Havana, and the New York Journal made a huge, huge scandal out of it, and it drove popular outcry to go to war. And I don't remember all of the ins and outs of it enough to get more into it here, but I've known it more before.
But is it like arguably it just sort of like sank for normal reasons.
Yeah, that's that's what I remember. The last time I looked into this.
Like a boiler exploded or something like that. Yeah, because ships do sink famously.
Yeah. Yeah. So by the end of the nineteenth century, people are starting to get extra critical about all the fake news of yellow journalism, and a local conservative rag in New York City with the uninspired name no one's ever heard of this paper, The New York Times pivoted to being all about being objective.
That's so interesting that people like, don't you find it kind of heartening to think of people being like, hey, I actually do not like being lied to, you know, like I guess everyone, you know, a lot of people are saying that today. But then there's so many other people who seem to be louder who were like I love being lied too, and it's hard to think straight.
Yeah, And I am sure there are people who went in that direction because they felt those their moral duty to be objective. But as interesting is even at like some of the more tabloidy papers at the time, they would have like signs on the wall that are like truth, the truth matters. But it was kind of in this like tell the truth, but as like wildly and sensationally as possible, you know.
Like tell what's technically the truth, or like you know, and beyond belief factor fiction whether like that one's true, it's based on actual events, based on our research, and you're like.
Well, that doesn't make sense.
True, it was like a grain of truth maybe in it, but that's not you know, it's like the showing me a pearl and saying this is made out of sand, and it's like in a way.
Yeah, yeah, totally so, at least according to an article in Just or Daily. In the late nineteenth century, being really into science was in vogue, and so this idea of objectivity was a way to be like the proper modern scientific person.
Actually, that does sound a little bit too like you know, male culture today, because like you know, I'm sure all these very objective people also didn't realize anger was an emotion.
Yeah yeah, yeah, but good for them. Well, I mean, they only have one emotion, so they're just real good at it, and they just not recognize as part of the larger palette.
Just seems like background noise.
Yeah yeah. The New York Times and other papers were really into kind of just cashing in on this trend of being the like worthy, objective people. We are the good scientific people, we are the modern people.
This is pretty charming as a trend.
It's true. I do prefer this. I want to be clear, I'm being cynical about it, but it's like better than just everyone lying. Yeah, exactly, I'll take what I can get. Yeah, totally. A trade paper at the time called The Journalist wrote, quote, the most successful journalists are those that are able to give the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the facts and brief, pithy sentences, the majority of which contain not more than a dozen words. And so it was this, like,
that's the new style of news. So they just kind of invented the news one day. Yeah, I mean they had the news, but the way we understand the news, they invented the news. It's news two point oh yeah, totally. Yeah. Oh, which is interesting because NDI media is literally going to invent the web two point zero.
Well.
Yeah. The point of view of journalists was slowly stripped out of the news journalists present to present themselves as to quote another paper at the time of the writer quote, to be the unmoved observer of events, to see things exactly as they are, without regard to possible motives which may have produced them.
Which is also sexually a Victorian mail view of like what's possible, where it's like who could do that?
Right? And so we start seeing now you can start seeing some of the downsides of this turn. Right, You're like, oh, yeah, we're not going to talk about why someone was so mad that they did this thing. Right, Like a riot or broke a window is modern news, right, but not someone who has been impoverished by capitalism is lashing out against what's happening right, right, And so it's another form of lie by emission sometimes.
Yeah, it also feels like just by stating an utterly impossible goal and acting like that's the format. It's like saying, here at this hospital, no one literally no one dies, We hear everyone of all their diseases, and everyone walks out alive and with twenty bucks. And it's like, but you're not going to do that. You can't do that.
No one can, yeah, totally, and no one can be truly objective either, Right, Trying for objectivity still feels well, trying for objectivity in the action fact finding feels important. Me.
Yeah, you know, yeah, and so I think there's like an element of objectivity where it's like, like, if I'm going to try and write a story as objectively as possible, part of that is me acknowledging my position as a person making these observations and acknowledging what my limits are.
Absolutely, you know, It's like I think about the shit a lot, right, I run a history podcast, and I also, yeah, there you go. My terrible joke I wrote into this episode. I wear my politics on my sleeve, but to be more literal, I cut the sleeves off of all of my shirts, which reveals my prominent anarchist tattoo on my upper shoulder.
So fucking real, Magpie.
I mean, that's perfect. But I want to tell the truth even when it's inconvenient to my political aims. For example, all the times on the show where I've had to talk about the popularity of eugenics among political people on both sides of the spectrum of the early twentieth century, including people I would otherwise look up to, And even at the time when all this new objectivity is coming in,
there's criticism of it that actually meant something. It wasn't just like Bob but we want to sell more papers by start wars. That's the closest I've done to an old timey news voice. Thank you, thank you. I'm a workshop that one. In eighteen ninety one, a journalist named W. J. Stillman wrote about how journalism went from talking about quote the questions and answers of contemporary life to quote collecting, condensing, and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human experience to
get insult I know. And that's like I went into it being like, I've had my criticisms of ostensibly objective media for a long time, but seeing more of them, while still also being like, it's still better if we don't do yellow journalism, you know. Yeah, and podcasting really is the rebirth of yellow journalism.
Yeah, well, it's interesting, how like, I don't know, I like to me, the answer is not format as much as just being willing to be boring when the occasion calls for it, because there are just some things that can't be stated excitingly, and if you can't make it exciting, you shouldn't have to in order for it to be able to be circulated to an audience, you know.
Yeah, but what if the area of this circle is three thousand, nine hundred and twenty four meters radical. Yeah, and you know what that means. That means that if you divide it, I can't do enough math to do this bit any further, Like I know. So, The New York Times and other papers invented the myth or the ideal of objective journalism at the opening of the twentieth century.
By nineteen ten, some folks adopted a code of ethics for journalism, and by nineteen fifties most publications had code of ethics that were like, we don't say things that we know are lies.
I would love to know which papers were like the last holdouts, you know, before getting on that. We're finally they're like, okay, we won't lie on purpose anymore. It's nineteen fifty seven.
Yeah, I gotta get with the Times. Ah, get with the Times, because the New York anyway.
Right, the best puns happen purely by accident.
That's true.
It's like when you drop your toast and it falls jam side up and nobody sees.
If no one's around to see, did it happen? I know.
Yeah, it really does make me feel like a liar.
Yeah, Yeah, so that's some context around the mainstream news. It presents itself as objective, it often tries to be. There are upsides and downsides of that. Meanwhile, all along, since before the rise of objective journalism, activists and political radicals have been presenting counter narratives through their own newspapers and radio shows and news outlets, most of the time, often to their discredit. Activist papers don't really try for
the same level of objectivity. Some don't try for that because they think objectivity is a myth, and they try to be honest about their biases. I will not pretend that this is an objective show. I just try to be really clear about my biases. It's actually just kind of as a side note, It's one of the reasons that I like talk about my politics on this show is less to convince people of it and more so that people can like ignore part of what I say, right.
They can like be like, well, that BET's just saying that because she thinks the following, you know, right, And like, I mean.
Do you ever have a review where you're like, she said something that I found stupid or like made a dumb mistake, and that makes me not trust what she says about other stuff, And I'm like, yeah, you shouldn't trust me. Why do you trust me?
Yeah? I totally earned that totally.
You don't have to automatically trust everyone who is talking.
Yeah, I am not on a pedestal. I'm on a soapbox. These are fundamentally different platforms. Yeah, you know, one of them smaller, like yeah, and I have to research a new subject every week, like.
Yeah, it's like yeah, like I would love for you to listen, but also like assume that I could very easily be wrong right about it.
Yeah, wow, Sarah, Thank you, Sophie.
Like, I try really hard to be right about stuff. But one of the things that I do often when I not every single time, but often when I do a topic is I'll listen to other people who've like done the sort of more pop culture version of the topic, and it's always so wrong and it makes me scared about my own shit, right, because I'm like, oh, everyone just regurgitates the same like ten factoids about a thing, and that happens so much.
Yeah, and they get sort of like well worn, like riverstones, and you can see a misapprehension getting passed around by sources.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, and it it's hard because then I'm like, well, I need to try not to do that. And one of the main things that messes with my schedule does that I'll start researching something, you know, because I'll start with the big picture thing, I'll read the big picture stuff, and then I'll dive into the details and learn more about it. And sometimes I'm like we record on Thursdays. Sometimes on like Wednesday night at midnight, I'm like, well, everything I read was a lie, you know.
Yeah, And then you're like, well, now, like our attempt to like fit research and acquiring information onto a calendar is once again imperfect because like, obviously we'd rather find the actual truth than stick to the calendar. But not everybody gets to do that, and in fact, it's like weird to be able to do that. Yeah, totally, and that's you know, so it's I feel like one of the things I find interesting is like, by making media about how media gets.
It wrong, you like.
Learn a lot and I think develop greater empathy for the people who get it wrong because that also comes to include you inevitably.
Totally. Yeah, then no one is perfect. Oh wait a second, I'm a person if all people are flogged. Yeah, what does that say about me?
Oh no, Yeah, and especially I think people who want to like comment on others, there's like a degree of like, well, if I'm talking about people, then I'm escaping the problems of the human condition. And it's like, no, you brought them with you as a carry on.
Yeah, yeah, I bet you have a similar problem on your research, Sarah, that Margaret has in her research, which is she'll researched an entire person and find out that they were like horrible to their wife. And it happens all the time.
You're like, what a really.
Cool guy slash, I hate him and would hit him with my car.
Yes, so many happens all the time.
Also, because I want to do more kind of little bonus like audio book content things, and like it is so hard to find a book in the public domain that's like interesting to read and isn't racist. Oh yeah, like The Great Gatsby is in the public domain, but that doesn't do me any Nope.
Yeah, no, it's yeah, I agree, old literature. You're like, well, I wouldn't work with an audiobook, but when I do, like Coolsone Media book Club and I read an old thing. Sometimes I have to be like, hey, let me contextualize the way that this author wrote about this thing.
Yeah you know, yeah, but if you're reading the whole thing out loud, you're like, okay, yeah, well, oh didn't remember that part. I want to do the wind in the Willows at some point, but I have to like reread it because like, what if Toad hates Puerto Ricans or something. I don't know, maybe he does. People just did that in books back then, and it was asleep, no one even remembered it well.
And actually, to tie this into when people moved into this scientific mode in the late nineteenth century, a lot of really awful stuff comes specifically out of that, Like the history of anthropology has an awful lot of real dark racism that is like specifically around like we're being so scientific, yeah you know, and so it's like.
And we are taxonomizing people of color just like we would with sharks or something exactly.
And it's that same the facts don't care about your feelings thing where it's like, actually, if you took some humanities classes, you'd realize that these are related concepts, you.
Know, yes, and using like your commitment to objectivity as a way of defending your own lack of objectivity by being like, it's science. I'm just saying facts. And it's like you're refusing to analyze your emotional response to something and calling it facts. But yeah, whatever.
Yeah, So all these activists since me any time will write their own papers to try and counter traditional narratives, and they will do it in all kinds of ways. They will sometimes like like sometimes they're like, I don't care about the truth because my goal is more important than the truth, right, They're like convincing everyone to follow
this or that ideology is more important. Yeah, and that's clearly the most dangerous and you should run far away from any instinct you have towards that and anything that you're reading that you realize this was happening. And other people are just like trying to be kind of objective but fail and whatever. And some people actually, sometimes activist papers are reasonably objective and written the same journalistic standards. It's just activist whatever has a bad rap because of
the number of people who are pushing an agenda. First and foremost, half of the radicals of the nineteenth century that I've talked about on the show run their own newspapers. There's also this long history of soapboxing a forgotten art. I remember reading about this public square in Chicago and the nineteen tens that was, like, what you do for entertainment on your like night off is head to the square and listen to speakers.
Isn't that proof that TikTok is like not as new as we think it is exactly?
Yeah, this is the first TikTok, the first tumbler Twitter like, and what they show in movies gets it wrong because usually in a movie it's like kind of like a wild rant or even just an impassion and speech. Right. Soapboxers were basically stand up comics with an agenda because they are they know how to work crowds. They do crowd work real well, and they like because they're competing in this real direct way. You go to a public square and it's not just like one person on a soapbox.
There's like thirty of them. I'm making that number up. I have literally no idea how many in any given place, but like more than one, which is exciting. Yeah. So activist media various kinds, both the like written down in a newspaper and the you know soapbox kind always existed, and there's one more piece to put into place to get a st indie media. There's something called an info shop. This is a word that I have taken for granted that I think most people don't know. This is Yeah.
I love it, and I've never heard that before. I don't think.
Yeah, it's a kind of storefront. It is part of the activist, especially anarchist media landscape. The name is a direct translation from German. We talked about a little bit in the Black Block episode about the autonomists and their stuff that they were creating in the seventies and eighties and how that started to spread around the world a little bit where they were like, we want lives outside of the mainstream culture, and they would build an entire
subcultural community, and that those communities had infoshops. It's somewhere on the continuum between a radical bookstore and a social center. You can go in and there's going to be like zines and books, maybe a lending library, events and speakers.
Kind of a feminist bookstore. Yes, if there's any kind of a moderndy equivalent.
Yeah, totally. The feminist bookstore is a parallel development that Actually, I'm kind of curious how much overlap there would be between those developments. Infoshops have been around for a while. The things have been existing since the earliest one I've read about was in Chicago in nineteen ten, but I think that they go back further than that. That's just the oldest one I've read about.
There need to be more leftist costume dramas. People don't assume there were leftists in because there aren't costume dramas about them where they're falling in love or whatever. We just need one of those, just one.
Wait have you seen reds Honey?
Hi?
I have not.
I should because that's like Diane Keaton and Warren Batty.
Right, Wait, which one did are you talking about? What is? What was your pitch, Sophie?
No, Sarah and I were just going back and forth.
Oh, okay, what are you doing our Samantha practice? Wait, Sophie, should we do? You want to pitch the honey Off?
Yes?
Yeah, we have this idea to do a honey off, which is Tom Womscans from Succession being afraid of his wife and going honey and then Samantha Jones from Sex and the City being like honey, and then you go back and forth.
We're working on a plane called Sex and the Succession.
Okay, Sarah, ready, I'm talking.
Okay, honey, honey, honey, honey. It's perfect, right, mm hmm.
It's good. You should do an entire show of it.
I know.
Yeah, this is what we do it every time.
I think we could do like a two hour like a Frankie and Johnny at the Clear to Loon kind of play. But it's Tom Wamscans and Samantha Jones.
It's perfect. But can you turn it into a costume drama about feminist bookstores and radical bookstorre? Yes, we can forget it. Yeah, like what if the none of the dialogue is that, But somehow, through like staging and the other characters and things happening in the background, you communicate an.
Entire plot rented a room over a feminist book store.
Yeah.
I feel like we just gave the audience the real insight to our personal lives.
It's well, you know, you get together and you have a Sex and the Succession. Yeah, you watch Sharing just like that, and then to recover emotionally, you watch Succession.
Yeah.
And my favorite part is when you do your little opening theme to succession dance. Yeah, yeah, it's a slow jam. Honey honey, honey, honey, honey, honey.
We're tak an ad brak.
Yeah sure, fuck it. Here listen are these ads and we're back. So you have these info shops and they've been around for a long time. In the early nineties, you get this other thing, the Internet. The early nineties Internet was custom built for people with niche interests to set up websites and find one another. God, ain't it
the truth? Yeah? I sometimes missed that. Yeah. Add in the fact that the Internet was proof of the concept of decentralization, Like people were really into the idea of decentralization as a source of strength in the nineties and early odds, right, And so the early Internet was perfect for anarchists. And I've met anarchists who've worked on some of the fundamental components of the Internet, like the protocols that underline all this stuff and like build encryption and
all this things. But that's a different story that I'm we're going to do one day. All of these anarchists and catch all radicals are doing shit on the Internet. Going back a long way, one of the earliest news sites, and literally one of the earliest news sites like that isn't part of a print newspaper, is called infoshop dot org, which is sadly no longer with us. It was started in nineteen ninety five under the name mid Atlantic Infoshop and it was the online component of the Beehive Infoshop
in DC. And yeah, soon enough it becomes one of the first online only news websites. It's slogan was unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. And I like that. It's still a like, you know, like newspapers love using truth in their taglines. You know, I love that they played to that.
Yeah, that's true. I love that too, now that you pointed out.
Then, in nineteen ninety eight, a man named Evan Henshaw Plath, better known under the name Rabble, created a website called protest dot net that was a calendar for various protesters. He's going to be important later in the story because he is one of the people who started Twitter. And there's others of these sorts of websites too, but these are some of the ones that are important our context.
People obviously were able to organize massive movements before the Internet, but there are some serious and specific advantages of using the Internet for these protests. Earlier, I was talking about how the Zapatista is built. It was called People's Global Action. They built a grassroots coalition of people coming together as like grassroots groups, which is hard to say.
You're able to like contact a bunch of people like you're supposed to, like you can have a.
Chain, yeah, and so you can actually get everyone in touch with each other all over the world in a way that was much harder to do quickly when you had to. I guess. Also, probably most activist groups didn't have telegraphs.
Yeah, I was gonna say, like email mailing list versus like, you know, handwritten mailing list.
Yeah, and so they use an email list and communicated quickly to coordinate protests globally. So Web one point zero was a collection of information written by and four people with niche interests. Right. It was just various documents and a kind of closer to them to Wikipedia than the
modern Web. The main distinguishing feature of what changed that with Web two point zero is the idea of the status update, the idea that people are posting what's happening, and there's a few precursors to what's going to become indie media, which kind of propels the status update into across the world. One is slash dot, which is still around.
That's like a tech focused news site. There was open Diary in nineteen ninety eight that was a precursor to live journal, but nothing really took off on an international scaleunti indie media. And there was about to be this big world changing protests in Seattle in November nineteen ninety nine. People are organizing to get ready for it. They're bringing all of their skills, techies and journalists get together and
talk things through. And to quote an article by Harry Halpin and that guy Rabble that I was talking about who set uprotests dot net quote. One of the fundamental problems facing the anti globalization protests was the lack of mainstream media coverage. At the time. In nineteen ninety nine, large protests in many countries like the United States were relatively unknown, and small scale protests were mostly ignored by the radio and television based media of the time. So
folks tried to do something about that. They're like, how do we set up media infrastructure? You had things like free Speech TV, which did video journalism. But in the nineties and early odds it was pretty hard to distribute video journalism. You had the well named group Damn Direct Action Media Network. In nineteen ninety six, activists in Chicago were getting ready to protest the Democratic National Convention. They set up a lot of proto versions of later protest infrastructure.
They rented a building they called the Convergence Center, which was where people could meet and organize, and it's a term that got later used. In the basement of this convergence Center, they set up a media newsroom, and I believe there was a community radio station which was almost certainly pirate radio, but it just presented as a community radio station. But that wasn't legal at the time, so good on them. And I believe this is the first
independent media center, but not under that name yet. In the build up to the Seattle Protest of nineteen ninety nine, all these media folks started working together to create a single website that would allow the activists to become the media themselves, indiemedia dot org. The tagline doesn't have the word truth in it, which is a terrible shame. The tagline was don't hate the media be the media. I
love that. Wow. Yeah, I actually too, and because there's a lot of people being like, well I hate the media, and you're like, all right, we'll just do it better. Literally. Yeah. They use some open publishing software that had been used by earlier protesters in England and Australia. I really like how it's techies and journalists coming together to create this
weird thing. And the idea is that you have a news wire where anyone can upload photos and text and media like MP three's and videos and all this stuff, which is seems like a very normal idea, and we can actually sort of immediately imagine all of the problems with this, like all of the hate speech that's going to get posted and all of these things. Right, yes, but no one had really done this, and indie media
solved two problems at once. One was DIY journalism, but second it could be used for on the ground updates that were of use to people. So it's not just a way to hear about a protest after it's happened, but you could hear about what's happening during the day. Yeah, although fewer people had phones and stuff, so it was like a little bit harder to do, but.
Yeah, it feels like the basic approach is like, well, what if you had a newspaper that updated itself in real time?
Yeah? Totally yeah. And the way to do that is to turn all of the people into people who can say like, hey, I saw such and such like oh, the police are gathering at such and such street, right, or I just witnessed three people get arrested or whatever. And this is a breath takingly important moment in Internet history. Even though it was about protest. It led to Twitter, and it also led to podcasts. Yeah, concept of fucking podcasts.
Well there you go. Yeah, it is indie media's fault that you are listening to this right now.
Yeah, you know what, I'll allow it. Yeah, send them your complaints about ads.
Although they'd probably be like, yeah, no, we agree, fuck those ads. Although actually we'll get at the way in which it had internal conflict around what exactly its values were later cool, but that's where we're at indiemedia dot org. I in proper cool people for my one episode context one episode stuff.
Yeah, speaking of stuff, Sarah, you got anything about a plug?
Ooh, you can listen to my podcast you're wrong about or you cannot. It's really up to you. I want to plug corn, have some sweet corn, add it to a salad, put it in your ramen. I'm serious, that's all, and go to a corn maze.
Yeah.
Ever eaten raw sweet corn on the cub? Oh my gosh.
Yeah. Well, I grew up next to a guy who grew corn in the summer, and so we could like go and just like pick corn.
You know, of an evening.
And I remember like sitting on my dad's shoulders eating a raw ear of corn, And like, I think raw corn is the way to go.
I like it slightly less, but it's so much work to cook it compared to eating it raw. Yeah. I love grilled Yeah, grilled corn.
Yeah, well that's I mean, all the corn is good.
I went to school in a cornfield. In my first above the table job was selling corn really like on a roadside stand.
Yeah.
It was a farm stand on a under a strip mall overhang sometimes and in other times it was at the farm itself, like roadside stand by the farm as soon as I could get my work permit.
How does that job rank in your life of jobs?
Is it better or worse than this one? I have nostalgia for it. I worked alone, unsupervised at fourteen years old, which means I got a lot of free produce, and so did a lot of other people. And I once was being trolled by the people who worked at Starbucks next door, and so I tricked one of them into eating a raw HIBERNERO.
Your boss is better now, right?
Oh yeah, no, totally?
Yeah, Okay, cool, We'll be back for part two.
Yeah, Part two zero on Wednesday.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website goolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.