All the media, Hello and welcomed. It could happen here, and it could. My name is antress Age. I'm also ANTWRESSM on YouTube, and I'm here once again.
With James James Stout. People said I'd never say my last name.
And they can't work out who I am, so I guess I'll do that more.
Welcome James Stout. Thank you so ically. And I mean, this is an unfortunately common pattern of thought for me, but I've been thinking about just how totalizing this system feels. And it's like everywhere you turn, you know, walking down the street, look at the city, a pollution that every inch of land there's been claimed by the system, every bit of you know, the way you live and operate just feels like it's been manipulated and controlled in some way.
And so that's really what I want to highlight in today's episode, the infrastructure of this system and how it's used to control, you know, both in terms of the physical infrastructure and the digital infrastructure of our lives. So I suppose to start off, I'd ask, when was the last time that you noticed infrastructure shape in your choices?
That's interesting, I mean a lot in certain ways, right, like like the infrastructure of labor shapes a lot of my choices, Like I have to work a lot to make ends meet, right like, which means I can't do sometimes things I want to do, Like there are mutual aid efforts I'd like to participate in more that I'm not able to because I have this obligation to capital.
Mm hmm, I guess that's one of them.
Or just like the physical infrastructure limiting the people I get to see, right, Like, there are places I love to go out there with some really nice vegan places in Tijuana that I don't go to as much as i'd like because someone has built a giant wall and then another giant war next to it, and then stationed a bunch of people with guns to check if I have the right piece of paper to go back and forth to somewhere that otherwise I could ride my bike to.
Yeah, borders are very unfortunate and big one. Yeah, it's really frustrating, And I think that's one of the most obviously detrimental aspects of physical infrastructure that to de manipulate our lives today. I think on the digital level, there's things like just the way that social media is laid out. I think it really controls like how much time you spend on it, how much energy you invest in it. And of course even just our neighborhoods, our environments, our cities.
They laid out, it tends to affect, you know, just how often we go out, where we go, what needs a transportation we use, and I mean with physical infrastructures concerned, and how it's been used to control people. That goes way back into history. You know, coloneal powers often built transport infrastructure, you know, like roads and railways and ports with the very explicit purpose of extracting raw materials from
the colonized territories to get to the imperial core. You know, the systems were not designed to say over the mobility needs of the local populations. They usually create a direct line from the mines and the plantations and the resource rich areas to the coastal ports where they could be exported.
Yeah.
Yeah, And so for the British and perialists and lovers of empire, they often brag that, you know, we built ports, and we built bridges, and we built roads, and we built railway as well. It's the same pattern everywhere. You know, in India it was used to move cotton, tea and other resources from the interior to the ship. In ports in Ghana, it was used to move gold and coco. In any case, it wasn't to interconnect within the city, you know, the actual economic subtermination of the people in
that area. It didn't matter.
I think about this, like, I cycled around Rwanda in twenty twenty, which is an interesting time to be traveling, but I remember riding around them. The kny Rwanda word for dirt road is iqitaka, right, and so that's what mostly So we cycled on these dirt roads.
It was lovely, you know.
We'd go through the village and everyone would come out and wave at you, and like the little kids would come out and be like, what the fuck is this bicycle? And it was kind of fun, you know. And then we'd find someone. It's not really set up for like restaurants, so you just find someone and pay them an amount upon which you agreed and they would give you some
food and that was a beautiful experience. And then there are these roads that they call Chinese roads that just go directly from the mind to the place where the
raw material can be extracted. Because between the China was doing a lot of what you could generously call foreign direct investment or like neo colonialism in lots of places in Africa, right, And it was the contrast between those two traveling experiences was so profound, Like we obviously you travel faster on the smooth roads, but like you don't immerse yourself in the human experience of meeting and sharing that travel with people, which is why I do these
things in the first place. With just like such a profound contrast. I remember it really striking me at the time.
Yeah, I mean, and this is what empires and rulers in general have been doing, right. They they wield their control over labor to set things up in a way that fulfills their interests. Yeah. And then you know, even when people key in some sort of nominal independence and they inherit these clonial infrastructure grids or you know, they have investments coming in and they have set up they have these companies, it's a multinational companies setting up infrastructure.
It still continues, you know, this sort of extractivist and top down nature of the way the infrastructure is set up. You know, it doesn't remain all of them. Don't reimagine the logic of what came before. You're in part for lack of funding and in part for lack of imagination, and so in a lot of places, the peripheral regions in these countries are still lacking in connectivity, They're still
lacking behind the rest of the country. They still don't have access to some of the basic social services and resources that the urban core has. Because you know, the urban rural divide in many ways mimics the corporate free divide on the international stage. And then you have these neo colonial development aid programs coming in with the IMF for the World Bank, and you have even more infrastructure projects. So just repeat this extractive pattern under the ban of development.
Of course, real development would be connecting people, encouraging people to participate in society and distribute opportunity. But the infrastructure tends to be set up as more so for consolidating state power and channeling the movement of people in predictable, survailable ways, and prioritizing access for certain populations while excluding or marginalizing others. So, of course, infrastructure development has the
capacity to help people. You know, it can increase accessibility, can make people's lives easier, and it can also just manage and contain them and varied sources, and we see a lot more examples of this sort of infrastructure control. When you look at the class and racial dynamic within societies, those sorts of divisions and separations and stratifications, they of
course manifest physically. You know, in the US you had literal segregation areas that were designated for black people listening for white people, water fountains and neighborhoods and all these
different things. You also had redline in policy years, and nowadays you have spaces that were redlined and thus lacked investment, and thus when neglected infrastructurally due to that racial and economic inequality, those spaces are now right for development in the form of gentrification because the property is so cheap, so undervalued, and so the people who made something out
of that lack are are being pushed out. And in South Africa, I mean up until recently, these are partid era policies created townships that were deliberately located far from white urban centers. There were lacking and services and transit options that physically reinforced the racial division of that society. And even today around the world you have urban zoning laws and transit access limitations and public housing policies that
recreate historical class divisions and racial divisions, ethnic divisions. And I'm sure you and your oh, with all of the I mean, every time I talked to you have like a new travel story to tell. I'm sure you've witnessed something like this.
Yeah, I was just thinking of how like I was thinking of, like if we think about the Syrian state as a contiguous colony, right, Like it's called the Syrian Arab Republic, but not all the people who are contained within the territory in which it once claimed the monopoly on violence are Arab people. So we think of the parts of North and East Syria, majority Kurdish areas, as colonized. We can see that reflected in the infrastructure.
Right.
Part of that is, as you say, this sort of lack of investment, But then also part of it is every government funded building, right, schools, hospitals, the buildings you go in to do the paperwork you have to do
to exist under the state. They're set up like strong points, like they're designed with a big kind of war and then a big courtyard and then thickias like they're designed to be militarily defensible against the people they're supposed to serve, right, Like the school is designed to be used as a fucking machine gun position, and once you see it, you see it everywhere, and you think about the nature of the state that designs infrastructure with that explicitly in mind, Right,
it's fascinating. The other example I think of is like Chris Elam's done some fantastic writing on the development of Barcelona, and you have like the unregulated working class of Raval, like this area just next to the Rambler, where the streets are just fucking small and winding and crazy and there's never not laundry kind of over you know, over your head, and it's a very I like to go there.
It's a place that I enjoy.
And then you have the ijumpler, which means extension, where the infrastructure is extremely like it's probably one of the
earlier grid cities that you would see, right. And the idea was that like these these over crowd they'd kind of what were in the nineteen twenties and thirty slums would be like where the working class would be kept and the working class, to be clear, were seen as there was a colonial relationship between the boys who are and the working class in Barcelona, because most of the working class were not Catalan, they would actually put signs at the top of these working class areas saying like
Mutia begins here, right, these are the mutianos and people from Mussia, the people from outside of Catalonia. Catalonia stops
here where the working class exist. That later reflected in the working class self identity, like it came to refer to the raval as Chinatown, not specifically because of a high concentration of people from the Chinese diaspora, but because they'd seen Chicago gangster movies where Chinatown was like the area where the gangsters were, and they were like, yeah, we're fucking gangster, Like we're going to call it Chinatown.
That you want to come in here, will fucking shoot you.
Like I thought that was really fascinating, like response to the way that have been alienated by infrastructure.
Yeah, I mean, and that's why when you when you look at the sort of claims that oh, you know, it's just it's just roads, it's just the zoning, it's just a city grid, it's just an embassy, it's just a government office, it's like, no, these sorts of spaces,
these buildings, this infrastructure could never be neutral. Yeah, and when you see that, you can't unsee it because you look at the amount of decisions it would have had to have gone into, you know, some of the examples you mentioned or the examples I mentioned, you know, the design decisions. It's like, Okay, we're going to put this road here instead of here. Yeah, we're going to use
this material instead of this material. Who you employ to build those structures, that infrastructure or also has an impact in this surrounding area? Are you employing people within the community, employing people outside? What's happening there? Who's funding this infrastructure, who's maintaining the infrastructure?
Yeah?
What level of Seville LUNs has been implemented? Where are the public transportation routes and why they're here and not there?
You know, yeah, exactly, Like there's people whose opinions and views matter in that process, and there are people who are excluded from it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
One of the authors I tend to go back too often is he vandalist because he critics a lot of this stuff, so particularly infrastructure's control and tools. Look in viviality. He spoke about how modern transport and urban design have been used to alienate people from their own bodies and communities. So you call all the usual suspects suburbanization and car centric infrastructure, how it isolates people and increases dependence on vehicles.
And he called this dependence a radical monopoly because all the other choices have effectively been eliminated. Technically, you could walk along the highway, but you're not going to You're going to get a cut, right, you can't choose to walk a cycle, and that sort of scenario of.
Film's going to call the cops that you try that in America, right.
Yeah, So as a lich sor it, it's really a cultural imposition that shapes how we end up living, interacting, moving, and it's frustrating. On the global stage, you also see how infrastructure has the capacity to control the whole geopolitical board. You know, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Red Sea, the Straight orfor moves, all these places have a lot of power militarily, trade wise, dlematically because they control the
flow of oil or of goods or of data. Yeah, particularly in the areas where the undersea internet cables run and so speaking of data. Actually, the realm of digital infrastructure is also very insiguous when it comes to control. We tend to think of the Internet as that sort of ephemeral cloud, right, But the cloud is hosted physically. You know, there are sofas, there are fiber optic cables,
the air data centers, all these things. They're not as obvious as roads and railways and you know, neighborhoods, but they are just as if not in some ways even more powerful in terms of controlling what people access, how fast they access it, under what terms they access it, or because it's so intangible it's so hard to pin down, it can often escape scrutiny. But there are companies that
own these things. There's a small group of very powerful corporations that pretty much dictate how things are in it. You know, most people they know about China's Grade Firal and how it's used to coordin off China from the rest of the Internet in some ways. You know, its sensors, websites and sweet results. It monitors people's activity, and it usually has these state monitored alternatives to some of the
popular global platforms like Google and Base. Right, But Google and Amazon and Meta and Microsoft it's not like they're any better. You know, the dot run and things Republic could so if you will call out what China's doing with the with the Great Firewall, and I agree, I don't think that any government should have any control over what people access. But you know, it's not like censorship,
data harvested and surveillance are unique to China. You know, a lot of other governments, in collaboration with these companies, deploy soft censorship. You know, they de rank things in
the algorithm, they filter certain keywords, they selectively block certain things. Yeah, things are maybe automatically flagged or moderated, and that often affects people from the LGBTQ community in countries where you know that's that's a big no no. Or you have even the manipulation of language they will people use as
people try to get around censors. Hence the proliferation of terms like great and essay and self delete and unlive and all these other euphemisms, which I mean, honest, I don't use any of them, and I despise them.
Yeah, me too.
The thing is a lot of people assume that these words are censored and all platforms, but they're not. You know, they may be censored on one platform, usually it's TikTok or limited in one platform. And then if people take that sort of TikTok sort of way of speaking and spread it across the rest of the Internet, or worse yet, bring it into real life and end up saying things like un alive in real life. Yeah.
Yeah, everything you have allowed fucking TikTok's algorithm to determine the way you can express yourself.
Exactly, exactly, And I mean TikTok has a lot of heat these days because you know, rightfully, so it's very popular, it has a lot of influence, and it's you know, very bleatantly interventionist with its content in some damage and Wiz. But again, the other big cooperations are not immune either.
I mean, Facebook was famously found culpable for genocide, right, Yeah, They've played a major role in the sort of attitudes that were developing and the marginalization that was sort of Targetinghinger community and the subsequent genocide.
Yeah.
So I was on a panel with some Hinder people the other day and they are still by physical and technical infrastructure, being marginalized. So something myself and my union friends are trying to do is help the Hinder Podcast Initiative start podcasting right such that they can share their own voices with the world and their positions and their opinions.
It's very important at a time when they're facing marginalization, even from revolutionary forces within me and Mark, and we cannot sustain an Internet connection to allow them to do that.
Like we tried to do a liveanel and it was very hard for you know, these guys who are running around cox is bizarre where tens of thousands of bringing of people live in refugee camps trying to find connectivity, and like just another example of how they continue to be marginalized by the systems that first allowed them to be genocided exactly.
Yeah, because the private cooperations are low and not response. But for this is the governments too. You know, when the corporations still tell the government to do something, the governments comply. And then when the governments tell the corporations to do stuff a lot of the time, it's also like they comply. It's collaboration, you know, especially since the government has the power in a lot of cases to shut down the Internet when things are not going their way. Yeah,
you know, they used it and all of it. Recently, you have the suppression of the centering protests, you know, to influence elections or to restrict information, substructionalism and communication during crises. When you look at all over the world, Iran, India, than Myanmar, Uganda, even in Gaza. In all these cases, these governments step in and they limit or they shut down the Internet entirely to prevent the news from getting out. You know, they could target either the entire Internet or
they target it in platforms. They target WhatsApp, they target Twitter. They justify by saying, oh they're going after take news or there's a security threat. Yeah it's bullshit, but you know we could see through that. Yeah, and it's tough because I mean, this is where these are. These are the places where people have gathered. These are the online town squares, you know, and these these this infrastructure is very much centralized. Google controls most of the search on
the internet. Amazon dominates e commerce and cloud, computer and logistics, and Matter controls a lot of people's social interactions. You know, I could brag and say, oh, well I'm not on Facebook, but you know, as the use what'sapp, because everybody else uses WhatsApp. Yeah, and it's so easy for them because we're so concentrated on these platforms. It's so easy for them to popet us, to flex their their muscles and
control the direction of public discourse. And I mean it's amplifying things, suppressing other things, maximizing our engagements, exploiting our cognitive and vulnerabilities, polarizing discourse, distorted reality. It's like, what the hell do we do? Yeah, And so for the Opium segment of the podcast, I just want to point out that, you know, infrastructure can be used to consolidate power and control people, but it can also be used
to resist and to re clim a collective agency. You know, even infrastructure there was originally designed to control can be taken under our control. You know, around the world, communities have been able to challenge these extractive logics to build their own infrastructures on their own terms. You know, in digital spaces, this might take the form of community build
mesh networks or alternative Internet local servers. You know, you have projects like Guifi dot net in Catalonia, or you have the NYC Mesh in New York, and these are efforts to engage in you know, pay to pay and decentralized communications without the reliance and the telecom giants. And then you also of course physically have examples of infrastructure
resistant central control, participatory urban planet movements. You have gorilla urbanism, you have you know, of course, the long and storied history of squatting otherwise known as informal settlement, and these informal set of months hubs of innovation, and a lot of cases in tastes like Nai Ruby or in Rio Gario. You know, these these slums and favelas, they're hooking up their own electricity, hooking up their own internet, hooking up their own what is supply because they recognize that this
is within their hands, this is within their capacity. You know, we don't have to have everything, you know, passed on to us from one high you know, we can you know, sort of reclaim our own voices and design our own spaces. If you're really interested in how infrastructure has the capacity to control and really just how states sort of see things, I have to of course recommend the classic James Scott
seeing like a state. Yeah, I mean, it's such a foundational framework to understand and how infrastructure is used for social engineering it's really readable as well, so definitely give that a read. And you know, think about we is that you can contribute to shape in the infrastructure around you. And I don't know, James, if you have any stories along this vay and you could leave us off with.
Yeah, I mean I think of a ton right, like even I think about Like when I was a lot younger, I lived in a I guess what you could call a slum of favela, like a pretty economically disadvantage part of Karakas for a little while, and like at the time, and I've seen this when I lived in Barcelona too, Like I guess the English word would be info shop they normally call them. Social centers would be the Spanish word or social spaces, and like it was cool to see.
Is this is a city which is established through colonialism, right, And there was a brief time before things were terrible in Venezuela where people were trying to make it and
largely it was people trying to make things better. The state for a time allowed a space for that to exist before it stopped allowing a space for that to exist, which is where we're at right now, right and very clearly the state right now is very repressive in Venezuela, to be clear, Like I didn't want to give put fuel on the tanky fire or whatever, but it was actually a really beautiful thing and it facilitated right, I was like nineteen, My Spanish was dog shit.
I was hungry all the time.
It didn't have any food, you know, But it facilitated that community taking care of me because the spaces were public and people could see if people were falling through the cracks, right, And like, I think a lot about refugee camps, so obviously that somewhere has spent a decent amount of time right both within the US and outside
of the US. And one thing I've been thinking about a lot recently is how so many of the people I met on the way to the United States and the Dadienne had horrific experiences in the Dadianne and afterwards, but they also miss the community that they had, Like they also miss the profound solidarity of just talking to people the other day who were telling me, like when they were hungry in the jungle, strangers who didn't speak their language would try and give them food.
Yeah, you see that in a lot of disasters too, This sort of explosion and mutually.
Yeah, And like refugee camp is a place where you do not have privacy for the most part, and that's not always great, but it facilitates caring for one another.
And like, I don't know, I.
Have this recollection from seven or eight years ago now and while I'm walking through a refugee camp in Mexico and just a very little girl from six seven something like that, and I have long hair. People can't see me, but she likes to mess with my hand braid and shit.
And I'm carrying this little girl and like I've been coming for some time, and like the sense of community that you felt there amongst like a really terrible situation, but like because everyone can see you walking down as a little walkway, everyone's like, oh hi, how are you? Like you know, the kind of I'm trying to work out what they what they need and how we can
best help. Like I just remember thinking like what the fuck is wrong with and then going back to the United States right in and sitting in my little house and like, you know, you know, like like I'm fortunate to know my neighbors and to be close to them, but not many people are. And like for most people, you know that they get out their house to go to their car, they drive to their work, they don't say hi to anyone.
Like it's so strange that, like, in a sense, in those refugee camps were closer to the beautiful life that we want than we are in these million dollar homes in a My house does not cost a million dollars.
I don't own a house.
But this the profound alien nation that we feel in part because of the physical infrastructure, the ability of humanity to fall back into caring for one another, to like that's what we do when we are not like physically and like intellectually restrained from doing it by structures both both physical and digital and even emotional that divide us
from one another. And I've kind of thought about that ever since, Like, how do I build a place where people have more stability, but if I have privacy, people have their material needs.
Men, Yeah, does you want to strike a balance infrastructure? Yeah, I don't want. There's some cohoes and sort of plans that I've seen, for example, but don't even really factor any much privacy, which I'm not for it all. You know, people don't want to have to recreate their their dorm room experience or in my case, they're sharing a bedroom the entire childhood experience.
So yeah, says we need to have space for people to have privacy, but at the same time space for people to have community, and like cities can exist like that.
Communities can exist like that.
They're the theory of the mediterrane in public sphere that sometimes comes up where like again in working class Barcelona, right, people don't generally have air conditioning and it can't get very hot, so you just spend a lot of time outside balcony whatever, you know, front port, if you got one, that creates community, right, that creates a public sphere like a place, and it's not quite our home, but it's not controlled by someone else either.
It's like a community space.
And that doesn't exist in like suburb I don't live in the suburbs, but like suburban America, you know, where everyone has these like literal fences around all the shit that they own.
Yeah, that exists a very an extent in Trinidad. Yeah, you know, some areas are very much a communal and other areas like trying desperately to be America. Yeah yeah, so yeah, it's kind of a mix of both wheels there, at the very least from what I'm aware of, what I can tell people at least say height to their neighbors. Though, yeah, that's still like a horrify and you.
Know, respecter of not knowing your neighbors.
Thing that I've heard of American life that you don't even say hi. Yeah, you know, you don't even wave at people like that.
Yeah.
No, I'm always at my neighbor's houses and they're always at my house.
And like, I'm a.
Person who owns a lot of tools, you know, like different spanners and stuff, so like I'm like I will go out of my way to make sure that my neighbors know they can borrow my shit. And and like that does seem to be quite a new experience for people who are like new in the neighborhood or whatever,
but we should all do that. It's such an easy way to fight that alienation and that infrastructure that you know, like, yeah, there's a wall between where I live and where the person next door lives, but I can I can knock on the door and say, hey, it looks like you're having some trouble with your truck.
Do you need a hand or what have you?
Mm hmm yeah, So I mean what you're saying is it could happen here?
Yeah.
Yeah, you gotta make the good things happen here. Tagus enough of the fucking bad shays.
Indeed, Laza for me guys, All power to all the people.
Please, It could.
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