Oh oh oh we doing here hi welcome welcome welcome to material concerns i'm hannah and that's marcel and that's the sound of marcel pouring herself some wine and this is The subset of episodes that we do where we answer some of your questions. That's right. So we're going to do that. And then.
At some point, maybe 30 minutes in, we're going to stop after saying something exciting to try to lure you over to Patreon for the second half. That's right. Just when things are going to get juicy, we'll be like, oh, we're going to save that and pay a wallet. Well, where do you want to start with these here questions? I'm going to start since we were already talking about the horrors.
Yeah. I'm going to start with this question from PBN Nutella. Oh. Peanut butter and Nutella. Delicious. Good? Disgusting? I don't know how I feel about that. Well, the peanut isn't a nut.
So it's not like it's clashing with the hazelnut. You have to think about this. That wasn't the question. That's just your username. The question is, are you willing to be an emotional support Canadian for a U.S. citizen? Oh. You know, I think part of the problem is that Canadians, especially Canadians like us, are also... currently feeling really attacked because all of our federalist and nationalist
family members and extended community are, if you're me at least, starting to look at us and say, so are you finally going to become a nationalist when Trump tries to annex Canada? And I have to be like, don't make me choose. Sorry, are people saying that to you? Our people are like, bet you like the nation now. Yes. Beget better family. It's my spouse. No.
He is trolling me. To be clear, he is trolling me. He's not being arrogant about it, but as a sort of representative of the plight that those of us who... disrespect Canada as a nation are currently facing. It's really hard. So I'm not going to say no, because I have so much empathy in my heart for what you guys are experiencing. It is also coming down the pipe.
into Canada. Like, you guys haven't heard of Pierre Polyev probably because he's a huge dork, but he's also fundamentally evil. He's a really bad person. Yeah, you know, it's a little bit safer here for now. For now. And we have some rights that you don't have. And... I think it will be a little harder for fascism to take hold here in quite the same way that it is in the States. It's not that much better. No.
It's a little better. It's a little. Yeah. For now. Yeah. I mean, if anybody wants like actual support and figuring out how to move to Canada, feel free to reach out. We can try to help you. But because Canada is also experiencing its own right-wing dissent, immigration is getting harder here as well. Yes. Listen, here's the thing. We can emotionally support you by continuing to say things like sorry. In the fun way that we do. That we do. That we do. Also.
Like if you are in America and you feel like it's not safe for you and you need some people to help you figure out if it would be possible to move to Canada. You can reach out and we can see if we can help you with that. You know, I know somebody who works in immigration law. I literally can't help, but I can active listen. You can active listen. You can connect people to resources. You can do a good Google. You're very good at Google. I can do a Google. I'm very good at Google. That's right.
There's nowhere good to run away to. So we actually have no choice but to choose a place to be and then fight for it. Yeah. That sucks. No, yeah, it does. No, yeah. The utopian vision is beautiful, but it fucking sucks. It's not a utopian vision. It is, I would say, a brutally realist vision that has pretty much always been the case for all people everywhere.
fun okay sorry it's hard being a person the world's really hard and it's hard to be alive in it sorry sorry yeah yeah but we will continue to be here and we will continue to do our little piece of the work, which is, I think, reminding people of what is real and true. And you know how fascism really loves to erase history? Not on our watch. Because we love to do a history. Oh, we love to do a history. We love to do a history and we love to talk about a power.
Hey, listen, speaking of history and loving to do a history and the power of historical knowledge and maybe even the power of circulating information historically. I have a question here from ML, and I genuinely don't know the answer, but I wonder if you do, Hannah. Let's find out. This is more of a history question. But were pamphlets, thinking of like late 1700s political pamphlets, made on fancy linen paper? No cheap paper.
But what counted as cheap paper in the 18th century? Okay, so yeah, you've called it fancy linen paper, and the reality is that all paper was made out of linen. That fancy paper prior to the introduction of pulp was vellum. Like if something was really beautiful and expensive, it would be made on animal skin. Ew! Because that like lasts.
perpetually, basically. I mean, just look at my leather couch. Exactly. That was a bad joke. Terrible joke. Terrible joke. Exactly. I don't have a leather couch. Okay. Well, that was a really bad joke. It was terrible. Just take another sip of that wine, Marcel. Yeah, like to the point that, you know, vellum manuscripts would be like, they'd have the ink scraped off them and they'd be reused. which is what we mean when we say a palimpsest. Good job. Yeah. Yeah. So paper.
made out of linen was the cheap paper option. as opposed to vellum, right? Which came from not only from a finite resource, but also from a resource that once you made the decision to use it for that, you couldn't use it for anything else, right? It's like... I'm going to slaughter this calf. We'll have its meat. We'll have its skin. We'll make its skin into vellum. That skin is vellum forever now. Whereas, and Neil made reference to this, like the rag man.
Like rags were, yeah, rag pickers, right? People had, you know, much. less fabric in their lives like people didn't have you know obnoxious closets full of clothes Isaiah gestured my obnoxious closet full of clothes and You know, most people, unless you were very, very wealthy, most people would wear their clothes until they were rags. And then you would use the rags for cleaning and household.
chores until like there was no use left in them and then they would go to the rag pickers and they get like boiled you know and bleached and then emulsified essentially into like a pulp and then pressed into paper so it really is like kind of a material that at that point
couldn't be used for anything else. So I know it seems fancy now because we're so used to pulp paper and the idea of linen paper is so luxurious, but it really was paper made out of garbage. And one of my favorite... paper history facts is that, so the history of publishing is full of these sort of varying bottlenecks. Right. So it's like we've got in the Middle Ages, one of the primary bottlenecks is, I mean, literacy, like the number of people who even.
can read or write books, but also the like sheer labor of like some fucking scribe has to sit down and write every single book out by hand. That is bonkers. They're not using a ballpoint pen. They're not using a gel pen. They're using a fucking quill. They're using a fucking quill. Gross. And so movable type gets rid of that.
particular bottleneck. And then we've got the spread of more available texts. The next bottleneck becomes literacy. We get the Protestant Reformation. We get the rise of mass literacy. We get the publication of texts not in Right. Like in people's actual regional languages. And quickly the next bottleneck becomes paper. And so, you know, various paper innovations come up.
But one of the cultural shifts that led to a significant increase in resources for paper prior to figuring out how to make trees into paper was when... underwear became more culturally common in Europe. Oh my God. Say more about that. Yeah. So like, as more people started wearing underwear. Because you're wearing underwear close to your skin, it wears out faster than other clothes, right? Like we all know this. You have to replace your underwear more often than you have to replace.
Shirts. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like it wears out faster. It's right next to your body. And so it produced a spike in the availability of rags. So next time you're thinking about fancy linen. Just remember that actually that was the underwear of somebody who didn't have the germ theory of medicine. Ew. Gross. Okay, this is a really fun meme question. This is from Rice Pud. Hey, Rice Pud. So they're asking here about sort of what constitutes the original text of a meme. And they say...
If a young person doesn't know the context, can the meme be the original text to them? Yes. Unhesitatingly. Absolutely. Yes. Because... So we talked about memes. Did we talk about memes as adaptation at all? Not really, right? I don't think so. No. So we didn't really talk about adaptation, but I think we could. I think a different approach to...
memes and their circulation, we could have considered them as adaptations. Unfaithful, sure, but adaptations nonetheless. Unfaithful adaptations, still an adaptation. That's right. And so if I think, for example, about... adaptations that I have consumed but have no familiarity or no clear relationship to the source materials, that adaptation is for me the original content, right? Like I'm never going to play The Last of Us, but I'm...
I'm really into the HBO show, so I will never experience the HBO show as an adaptation, but I am going to experience it as... the original content. And so that's going to be the case for me also with so many of these memes, so much so that when I encounter the source material for the meme, it's kind of like, whoa, that's about that. No way. Oh, weird.
It's like the Charlie conspiracy theory meme from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with like the red yarn in the room and everything. That's like a lot more sad if you think that he actually just doesn't know how to read.
It's not like a funny, cool. I've never watched It's Always Sunny, so I don't know what's happening there. Yeah. And you're like, oh, it's actually kind of a bummer if you're like, oh, this guy doesn't know. This adult man doesn't know how to read. That's a bummer. That's sad. Yeah. Didn't he hear about the spread of mass literacy? Yeah, I have heard. It didn't make it to Philadelphia, apparently. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the really fun and interesting things about like looking at.
any object of study, any sort of cultural artifact simultaneously through a sort of historical materialist lens and a, I'm really lose, I'm like slurring my words. a historical materialist lens and a reader response lens, right? So you can take that step back and say, This came first and then this came next. And here's how this moved from here to here. And that is true. Yeah. And also you can say that like.
From the perspective from which an individual encounters a cultural text, the thing that they encountered first comes first. That's right. And the later things. come later and they're the relationship between those things even if they do then go back and read the original you know it's like yeah you watched The Last Unicorn was my favorite movie as a kid. And I didn't read the novel until I was in my 20s.
And so the movie is always going to be the primary text for me. And I understand that it didn't come first. But in terms of my relationship to those texts, it's always going to be primary. It's never going to be like a secondary adaptation. And I really love the way that like using two different reading lenses on something at the same time really reminds you that like.
Multiple simultaneous things can be true. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I think, what's that negative capability? Oh, I couldn't tell you. Is that Wordsworth? No, it's another one of the romantic poets. Oh, that's why I couldn't tell you. I don't give a shit about them. But it was like...
This idea, it was like one of the things that reading poetry does for you is allows you to hold two seemingly mutually exclusive ideas in your head at the same time. And that that's actually like a really valuable thing to be able to do. You know what? That is one thing I will give to the romantics. Yes, that is correct. I think that that, I agree, that is valuable. Yes. I mean, daffodils are also very pretty. He was right about that. They're okay.
I've seen better. I've seen better. Oh, my God, you troll. I'm truly evil. Okay, well. You know what? Hey, while we're on Rice Pud questions, here's another one. Oh, hey, Rice Pud. Rice Pud asks, how do I know if it's a cultural moment? Or just my algorithm? And I absolutely love this question because I often think things are happening. And then I enter into the hellscape of the real world and realize that things were happening in my life.
feedback loop. Which doesn't mean they're not happening. It just doesn't mean that they're happening at the scale or with the intensity you think they are. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is like such a tricky and relatable experience. And so here's the sort of mind fuck of it all for me.
is that our understanding of what monoculture, right? The idea that there's a culture that we're all engaged with. Monoculture is also... a kind of a myth because if you actually think about like who it's monoculture for right you've got to take that step back and be like No, no. Like the period when people are like, everybody tuned in to watch this. It's like, did they? Everybody? Did everybody or did Americans who could afford televisions do it?
And, like, who's excluded from that everybody beyond, one, the whole rest of the world. Yeah. And two, poor people. Yeah. Like, there's a lot of everybody outside. any of our senses of what is happening everywhere, right? What is the quote-unquote real? And part of that is we are always encountering... the vast majority of the world, you know, 99.9999999 repeated percent of the world through representation. Oh, yeah.
Right? You are actually experiencing a very, very small amount of total input. The rest of it is all storytelling. It's all storytelling. There have been historical moments when I think most people felt like, or when many people felt. a lot of faith in the story that they were being told. You know, people hearken back to, like, the 60s and 70s as this golden age of news media when, like...
I was reading an article about this today. It was like there was relatively little political polarization. There was fairly high regulation around who could and could not make news. And there were like stable news shows that like... quote unquote, everybody tuned into. And it's like, cool. So let's go back and look at the news that was being produced in the 70s and ask ourselves, what kind of stories were being told?
Right. In this supposedly monocultural moment that we're romanticizing. It's like, cool. Who had like maybe could be a consumer of that. Maybe. But was certainly never. being thought of, being included, could never be conceived of as a producer of it, right? I mean, like, Black people, people of color, disabled people, trans people, women. Just, you know, most of us had no access to that. Right. So it's like, cool. You know, maybe we had, I mean, not maybe, definitely we had.
significantly less like siloing and niching of how we encountered our representations of the world. But that's because a small number of people with a great deal of power had control over what... we all found out that's right and we just said yes daddy yes daddy i guess that's true and now we don't have that center and I absolutely hear people responding to the rise of fake news.
Rise of political polarization, the disintegration of anything like a sense of a shared public sphere by saying like, oh, we need to go back. Right. Right. We need to go back to a time when not everybody could be a publisher, when media creation was not so radically democratized, when there were like stable sources of authority. When we had one daddy. When we had one daddy and we all believed him. And I, one, yeah, I don't think that toothpaste is going back in the tube, but even if it.
I don't think nostalgia for a historical period that was radically unequal is a great idea. Yeah. Which is not, I'm not saying that this is like what Rice put is articulating. No, no, no. Of course. Of course. Yeah. And I think too, like a lot of folks who feel that sense of nostalgia are also themselves. And I think you're getting.
at this as well. They're not thinking critically about that period of time either. They're thinking about like not having trust in our sources of media anymore. And I think that if we consider the... I think oligarchy has re-entered the popular lexicon these days. Oligarchy has entered the chat. So I think if we consider briefly the relatively few number of people who have control.
over the media that we consume, it's not altogether different from what it was like in the 70s, but there are more channels. for regular people to disseminate information. And so it does make it harder to... differentiate between trustworthy sources and untrustworthy sources and deregulation right which is a function of neoliberalism this idea that like industry should be fully self-managed and that any kind of state or policy
Prevention is bad. You know, this is part of what has led to a situation where, like, you know, in North America, our collective primary source of information is meta. And meta is run by one terrible little man. And there's no laws insisting on the regulation of information. And if he wants to deregulate it, he can. That's right. That is its own.
sort of source of danger, the challenge of being like, cool, so I'm in this corner of the world where I'm actually not hearing anybody defending Israel. I'm not having that conversation with anyone. Right. And like, I recognize that part of what I need to do to like understand the larger context in which I'm operating is to like from time to time. dip my toe back into the rest of the world, right? To be like, okay, what's real? What's really happening here? While also recognizing that like,
It's not like, oh, you're in your little media silo and there's the real world out there and you need to engage with that. It's like there isn't a real. Yeah. It's literally impossible for us to know everything. It's impossible for us to have direct experience of everything. We're always encountering things through representations. And representations always have politics to them. And so the...
business of being like a critically minded person in the world is like encountering a lot of different information and figuring out what to do with it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's complicated. It's part of why humanities education is actually really vital to democracy. Yes. Unfortunately, spread the word.
I know. You actually really need to be good at like encountering narrative and knowing what to do with it because otherwise you're just like, well, fascism time. Yeah, the value in being able to like... Read for ideology doesn't mean read for the things that you disagree with.
whether the ideology is one that you share or not being able, because it also happens, this happens to me all the time, where I will read a thing that sounds right to me because it fits in line with how I understand the world. it is not actually entirely correct. There's information missing. And so being able to consume any media with that critical lens is vital.
Can I give like another little example of that? So you're familiar with, God, how do you say her first name? Christia? Christia Freeland. Christia Freeland. former deputy everything to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and then very publicly left, resigned from his cabinet, and has since announced surprising...
Literally no one that she is now running for leadership of the Liberal Party. For folks who don't follow Canadian politics, we've got a federal election coming up. And currently it is polling that we're going to get a majority. conservative government led by a heinous little fucking nerd like
A human being. Not a cool nerd. A shitty nerd. Not a cool nerd. Just a person who I want to bully so fucking bad. Man, I hate this guy. I hate him so much. I want to shove him in a locker. I do. I really want to shove him. I want to look. Put his head in the toilet and flush it. So, you know, Christia Freeland announces that she is running. And one of the things that makes her an intriguing.
candidate is that Donald Trump hates her because she is the person who negotiated the new free trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. And she is a hard... negotiator and she got more out of him than he wanted to give. And he called her a nasty woman. That's right. I forgot about that. Yeah. And so... She's leaning on that, right? She's like, we need to be tough on the new U.S. government. And I have proven that I can do that. Like, she's kind of...
writing a campaign in part based on he hates me and we hate him. So that's good. Yeah. And I had a moment where I was like, I was reading some articles about it and I was like, yeah, okay. All right. Like. I can kind of get behind that. And then I saw some coverage in, you know, the Palestinian youth movement Instagram feed about them protesting the event where she announced her candidacy.
Because she was an active and ongoing and vocal supporter of the genocide in Gaza. And it was just this, right? It's like, here's two different texts. I'm reading like the CBC News coverage. And like CBC. has been fucking like disgustingly heinously silent on Canadian political complicity in the genocide. And so CBC is saying like,
this might actually be great for us. And then here's some organizers being like, hey guys, could we have a historical memory that's longer than 30 seconds maybe, please? Could there be like any consequences for people's actions? Like the romantic said, it is possible for these two things to be true at the same time. She may in fact be a hard ass with Donald Trump, also an absolute apologist for Israel.
Yep. Yep. Man, and you just got to reside in that complexity is the thing, right? Because the urge to reach for simplicity is an urge to reach away from... the actual real complexity of the world that we live in. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And it fucking sucks. It's hard, which is why it's important to not be doing it 100% of the time.
Sometimes you get to be no thoughts, just vibes. And that's good, too. Yeah, sometimes you just got to listen to your gut. And if your gut is like, no, thank you. Yeah, then you get into the bathtub. Yeah. You light a tiny little candle. Sorry, when I get into the bathtub, I light a tiny little candle. Maybe a battery-operated candle. I don't know. I feel like that's how I die, but I don't hate.
Hey, any scientists out there, let me know if I drop a battery operated candle into the bathtub while I'm in it, do I electrocute myself? How big is the battery though? That's the question. Yeah, I don't know if that's how currents work, but I feel like I think maybe something has to be plugged in. No, I mean like I think maybe like you're okay.
The thing is that I don't know the answer. And I try generally not to do science based on vibes. Yeah. As hard as that is. Yeah. I respect that. Not me. I don't try not to. I don't try not to. It's like, listen, I know that gravity works, but like, I don't know how. No. The other day, I...
I was thinking about the fact that like things in my apartment are like, you know, you like put oil in your pan and it's like the oil slightly pools to one side because it's not like perfectly flat. Yeah. I'm like. Well, who decided what perfectly flat was? Actually, I can tell you, and it was the C. It was the C. The C decided. The C decided. I decided that's such a good answer. Oh, fucking C. Okay, listen, listen.
I think we should answer some Neil-related questions, but I also think we should paywall that shit. Oh, yeah. Ooh, Neil content. Neil content behind the paywall. Yeah. Hey, everybody, we got some tasteful Neil news. No nudes come behind the paywall. We do not. Just to be very clear, Neil, if you hear that sound clip, we have no nudes of you. Wink. No nudes.
Guess Neil will just have to become a patron and find out for himself. Oh my fucking God. Okay. Well, with that, we are going to wrap up this free and public facing. Dish. of material concerns. And if you want to experience more absolutely unhinged claims about our access to Neil's private photo collection, you will simply have to tune in.
to the paywall version available at patreon.com slash oh which please no we'll see you over there wink oh my god it's very important to me that at no point have i actually winked