It Could Happen Here Weekly 21

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You know what I love prop is live shows. Live
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(00:20):
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(00:41):
out and see y'all there. Well, you'll see us there,
you will see there. Hey, it's de Lieva. I'm here
to tell you about my brand new podcast, De Liva
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(01:01):
lot of disappointments, a lot of betrayals. It's turned out
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(01:25):
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(01:46):
Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know.
This is a compilation episode. So every episode of the
week that just happened is here in one convenient and
with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to
in a long wretch if you want. If you've been
listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna
be nothing new here for you, but you can make
your own decisions. Welcome back, to it could happen here

(02:13):
a podcast about things falling apart, and occasionally even about
how to put some other things back together. Um. Today
we're gonna be talking about something that is increasingly a
part of what we like to call the crumbles around here,
which is the health care system in this country, in
the hospital system in this country as it uh kind

(02:34):
of gets crunched by COVID. UM. And we're gonna particularly
talk about a really critical aspect of our entire medical
infrastructure that a lot of people don't know about traveling nurses. Uh.
And with me today is our guest, and and you
are a traveling nurse from New York to California all
around the country. UM, thanks for being on the show.

(02:55):
Glad to be here. Yeah. So, I live in Colorado
and I was at a right ular staff nurse UM
until COVID hit. And you know, at that time, we
expected it to crunch everywhere. UM, but my home hospital,
like many places that worked on the coast, UM ended
up being really empty when everybody locked down and stopped

(03:15):
getting into car accidents and going to parties and all
of the other things that bring people into the e
R and I see us um. So At that time,
I quit my full time job and went to New
York as a travel nurse. UM. And then I've been
dancing around hotspots since then. So New York, Texas, Ohio,
rural New Mexico. UM. I just finished my third contract

(03:36):
in California. I've been up to Oregon. So UM. I've
seen the health care system working and not working in
a lot of different places, and also like how much
disparity there is different communities related to covid as in
the health care that we can provide. Yeah, and I
am kind of before we move on to some of
the specific things going on with travel nurses, what is

(03:57):
your sense of like how often are you in a
place and feel like, well, this the hospital system here,
this particular hospital, they're they're like right on the edge
of a breaking point most of the time. Okay, that's
good to know where your seatbelts, folks. Yeah, I mean,
particularly since everyone was able to get vaccinated right Like

(04:21):
to me, I really feel like that that that point
of like the tipping point of like the quote unquote
crumbles kind of like after everybody was was able to
get their second vaccination, UM, and we had so much
hope last May and June and things were reopening and
it was kind of like, wow, things could go back
to normal. Um, and then like, I don't believe that's

(04:43):
going to happen. And since then, I've seen so much
more despair in my coworkers, and I've heard about so
many more healthcare suicides, UM staff, nurses, travel nurses, arties,
other ancillary people, and you know, the kind of running
joke and all out of workplaces is like, well, I
hope I test positive for COVID because that would be

(05:03):
better than coming into work another day. Yeah, alright, I
hope I get hit by a car so I don't
have to come in your job, I think, is what
a lot of people would the people who you know
are reasonable human beings and see what you're doing is
incredibly necessary, find that would find the work to be
something of a nightmare. I mean, it sounds like horrific

(05:24):
um to have to to deal with this. I mean,
it's it's it's not an easy job in the best
of times, being a nurse, but like with COVID and stuff,
it's it's just there's so much else on y'all's plates. Um.
And one of the things that has happened over the
course of the last year or well almost two years now, UM,
is that from January twenty the advertised pay rates for

(05:46):
travel nurses around the country have gone up by about
sixty UM, which in staffing firms of you know, increase
their building of hospitals by like so like this huge
rays in what um travel nurses are demand ending and
what is getting paid out. And I think a reasonable
person would go, well, yeah, of course, um And yeah,

(06:10):
I think anybody would go any reasonable person would go, well, yeah,
of course, you guys deserve much more money than that
for what you're dealing with right now. UM. I have
no problem with this, But people who do have problems
with this are the American Hospital Association UM, among other
folks generally the folks who are seeing this primarily as well,
now we're spending more money issue as opposed to a,

(06:32):
hey maybe we don't have enough nurses, which right, yeah,
so I guess I have maybe a couple of comments
on that. So one of the things about trafical nurses,
so if if you're not in the travel field and
you say I want to change hospitals, even if you're
an experienced nurse, they will take between a month and
six months to go through their hiring process, and then

(06:53):
they will give you a week, two weeks, maybe four
weeks of orientation. So that's a long process to hire
an Normally, for me as a travel nurse, I will
talk to a recruiter, I will say yes, I will
be on the road somewhere between four hours to twenty
four hours later, I will get to the hospital. I

(07:13):
will do a bunch of paperwork that is for compliance
and makes no difference at all. I will get between
two and six hours of orientation, which is basically, here's
the bathroom, here's the storeroom, this is what we're going
to audit in the charts. And then I'm expected to
take care of complex actively dying patients. So so you know,

(07:35):
people complain about how much we're getting paid, But if
you only have two hours of like where's the bathroom,
and like this is how most of the time when
you're spending with I t being like hey, I need
computer access, buddy, and then there you are and you're
in the thick of it with no backup. You know,
so you already have to be an expert in your field,
and you have to be able to walk into an
unfamiliar chaotic situation and hit the ground running immediately. So, yes,

(07:59):
making a lenning bucks an hour is a lot of money,
But I don't know that that's so super unreasonable for
two hours of Like yeah, it's now take care of
people who are actively dying and don't screw it up.
It's the way we're told the system is supposed to work, right, Like,
this is how capitalism is supposed to function. The demand
for something goes up, and the demand for nursing his

(08:20):
way the hell up, so the price goes up. Um,
if you believe in capitalism, like one assumes these people
who are responsible for you know, paying you and are
currently lobbying. So what's happening. I should go back because
we didn't note this. But the American Hospital Association and
a number of other folks are lobbying Congress right now
to put a cap on the amount of money that

(08:40):
traveling nurses UM can uh CAN can receive, and a
number of UM congress people have said that they're going
to be looking into the issue. Several states, Oregon, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Kansas,
and Kentucky have introduced legislation that's attempting to cap nurse
pay rates. So there's like this huge backlash attempting to

(09:03):
lock down the amount of money y'all can continue to
get paid UM because of all of the things. This
country I guess has money for the people dealing with
the I don't know what. I don't know how many
millions of additional sick and dying people UM are are
are kind of beyond what these folks are willing to
shell out for UM. And I got the size of that,

(09:26):
and I mean to clarify, so in a FEMA contract,
so what a lot of the contracts I take are.
So the nurse is making between a hundred and and
maybe you also have a tax free stipend or you
don't kind of depending on how you are in that.
And then but the bill rate to the hospital is
usually like so the legislation is against the agencies. The

(09:50):
agencies are making between forty. Of course, the agency is
then going to say, hey, well we aren't going to
pay you as much because we still want the same cut. Yeah.
My understanding, so the trickle down effect is likely going
to be travel nurse wages. But my understanding is it's
asking the FTC to take enforcement against the travel nurse agencies,

(10:12):
because the agencies, they're the ones that say they have
the person on the phone that says, hey, you have
these credentials, we want to send you to this hospital yes,
or now we've got this hotel arranged or we don't
or you know those types of and we're going to
do this type of on boarding. So they have their
own kind of infrastructure and they take, you know, half
of the cut. Some of those people are making a

(10:33):
lot of money too, Yeah, And it seems like it's
kind of the situation where the way this is being framed,
they're trying to crack down on these people who are
kind of profiteering or could be argued to be profiteering
off the situation um, rather than trying to cap the
amount that the nurses can make, so to speak, or
at least not by as much. But the overall effect

(10:53):
will be that because of the way these companies work,
y'all will still wind up making less money. Um. Yeah,
how um Within the traveling nurse community, what is kind
of where are people right now with this? Like what
is what is kind of the mood? Um? So I
think there's a couple of things to note. So in
the FEMA contracts. They're usually sixty to seventy two contracts,

(11:16):
so you're working back to back to back to back.
So I'll do eight weeks sometimes. And most people are
not white women like me. This is mostly first and
second generation immigrants and generally people of color. Um. So,
these are not people that are saving for Lamborghinis. These
are people that are paying off their student loans because
a lot of them went to private nursing schools because

(11:37):
that was kind of what was accessible to them because
all of the disparity and education and opportunities. These are
people that are trying to pay off their mortgages. These
are people who are paying off their parents houses. Um.
So this kind of idea that like nurses are greedy
is I think really unfair because most of us are
just trying to like, you know, a life that works.

(12:00):
And also, you can't do eight hour contracts fifty two
weeks out of the year, no, I mean doing it
for any extended period of time. I've I've worked those
kind of hours in a generally less stressful working environment.
Um and it like it breaks you down, um over time,

(12:21):
Like you you can't do that and at any time
in your life, for one thing, like, um, and you
can't do that forever. And it sounds like this is
kind of a lot of people are taking it as
like this is an opportunity. I can get my parents
out of debt, I can I can get a house, Um,
I can say for my kids to I can pay
off my own college. Like it's a chance for a
lot of these people by putting in an unbelievable amount

(12:45):
of effort to get ahead. Uh. And I can't can't
even imagine the frustration at seeing so many people be like, well, no,
not so fast. And I mean one of the things
that people are bringing up is right like it in
the same way that you know, we struggle to want
to pass minimum wage laws for the undocumented immigrants that

(13:07):
pick our food and you know, support this infrastructure that
is totally unseen now that we have, you know what
is mostly for stance second generation immigrants that are working
these FEMA contracts. Like you're targeting a section of the
population that are not the people that have doubled tripled
their wealth in the pandemic, right like, these are not
all of the people that got the small business loans

(13:30):
that didn't need them, and you know and have are
just putting all of that money into stock, right, is
there not? These are people who just want a middle
class American dream and we're working, will work really really
hard for it. And I mean there these are people
who are asking, can I have the thing we're all promised?

(13:51):
If I spend eighty hours a week watching people in
a lot of cases choke out their last fucking breaths,
is that okay? And a lot of are saying, oh,
of course, not right. And you know, so we're taking
care of dying people while we're getting yelled at at
the phone of like is cursing a lot on the
show or yes, of course? Yeah. I mean I had

(14:13):
a family member saying, you're fucking imprisoning her on a
ventil lator. I'm going to come for you. Where do
you fucking live? You know we have to get security involved. Um,
you know, we get death threats. I've had people like
threatened to find where I live and raped me. And
so I mean, yeah, taking care of your dying loved

(14:37):
one who also probably would say those same things to
me because I would say, hey, please be vaccinated and
they would say fuck you. But I'm still going to
do everything I can to take care of them, and
I'm going to do this abuse and like, yeah, if
I'm going to leave my home and the safety of
a hospital that works and go into these total cluster
fucks of hospitals where the educator has left, the manager
has left, the director has left, so there's no leadership.

(15:00):
It's travelers, some of which are great, some of which
are also hot messes, and trying to take care of
these people. Then like, yes, I want to be paid
accordingly for it. Now, would I trade that for a
social um, a social safety net of health insurance because
I have to get private health insurance which is shady. Um,

(15:20):
I don't get any disability insurance. I have no stick
leave right because you're you're you're a pinch hitter. You're
not like salary anywhere. Yeah, but would I trade this
high salary for a social safety net? Personally I would yes,
But I mean nobody's going to say, like, yes, you
will be able to retire with dignity if you play
by all of these rules. They don't believe that I

(15:42):
want to make the money. Yeah, it's I mean we're
all always in this kind of like yes, soccer way
as much as you can while it's coming situation, and
she's especially if you're especially if you're doing something you're
gonna need to recover from later, right Like, this is
I I you know, I've I've done overseas work. I
understand kind of the nature of like trauma. And while

(16:04):
you're doing the job at the rate you're doing it,
you're also like pushing off a day of reckoning mentally
and not having a cushion of savings helps with that. Yeah,
Like in the middle of it, you're in it, and
then you know, sometimes it's weeks, sometimes it's months. Um,
I hiked the Colorado Trail for mental health, and half
of those nights I had I See you nightmares. So

(16:27):
I was in these beautiful the middle of over places
where everything was quiet. I would wake up with all
of the beeps and people dying in my head night
after night after night. You know. Yeah, I mean, yeah,
I'm angry that they don't want to compensate me for that,
because I mean, they're definitely not paying for my therapist.
They definitely like aren't giving me access to disability if
I need it, right Like, yeah, because obviously again you're

(16:50):
you're a contractor effectively, Um, there's not like a union
for traveling nurses? Is there or Am I wrong about that? No? So,
I mean the only thing you have each you're negotiating power. Um.
So I have eight years of experience between emergency and
I see you um and a lot of very um,
big and highly regarded hospitals. So I'm a hot commodity

(17:12):
to them, so I can kind of pick and choose, um,
who I want to work with compared to someone that
has less desirable specialties. Not that those specialties don't also
work as hard, but they're just harder. They're easier to staff,
so therefore they're not It's a it's a market things.
I definitely don't believe that my specialties are more like
inherently valuable, just in terms of the market. Um. So

(17:37):
you know, so I get I can I have the
luxury of turning down contracts that aren't what I want.
But I mean, I have no idea what I'm walking into.
So on Monday, I'll walk into somewhere. Um, they said,
you'll do some paperwork, you'll get your orientation, you'll have
it'll all be it'll be a busy day and then
you'll be on your own. And I have no idea.

(17:57):
Sometimes you're oriented in one unit and you never see
that united get so um and I you know, you
have no idea what you're walking into. And how how
long are these contracts? Generally? For so, before COVID, the
standard nursing contract was thirteen weeks UM. Since COVID, a
lot of them are shorter. And I've only done short
contracts because if it's a decent place, then I can

(18:19):
renew and stay longer usually, and if it's a bad place,
then I'm pretty happy to get out early. UM. So
I do between four and eight week contracts, and I
usually do sixty plus hours a week. Is there any
kind of like organization that you've seen come together a
little more between people who are doing this this gig

(18:40):
since you don't have kind of representation. Is that something
that started to take form in the last two years
since COVID. I mean there's definitely a lot of talk
about it. Um. I think like those of us that
started traveling since the pandemic, you know, I would say
that I've only done crisis contracts, like I've never done
a normal thirteen week, thirty six hour a week, not

(19:04):
crisis assignment, like I've only gone into the ship show hotspots. Um.
And so therefore, like my needs and desires are different
than somebody who likes that previous lifestyle. So in some
ways it's a little bit hard for us to kind
of agree on common goals because we have a lot
of different you know, we're very diverse group of nurses. Um. Definitely,

(19:26):
the million Nurse March is kind of a step towards that.
Tell me about that what what is this because I
just learned about this pretty recently. Yeah, so I dropped
off the grid for the last five days, which was
fantastic for me, but it means I'm also just starting
to figure it out. Um. So the kind of general
idea is that you know, we have I think, uh,

(19:47):
I'm hopefully I don't get it wrong. Four millions some
nurses in the country, a huge number of nurses in
the country, and a huge number of dropping out. Um,
you know, hundreds of thousands quit last year. They I
think one estimate is five thousand make quit this year
and we were just so people know, tens of thousands
of nurses understaffed before COVID nation. Yes, right right, Um,

(20:10):
And you know, I think one of the things to
understand too is that like if you work I don't know,
what's what's the normal type of job that people work.
I don't know. If you work at the d m V,
a bookman, Oh right. If you work at the d
m V and the d m V is slow, you
will still stay there eight hours and you just get
paid for your eight hours. If you are a normal
nurse and you work thirty six hours and the e

(20:32):
er is running slow, they could say, we're just canceling
you for the rest of the day, go home. We
won't pay you for those classics hours. And so, like
we've always had pretty like flexible, like we've never had
like most of the places I've worked, I've never had
guaranteed hours. And so one of the reasons to go
to travel contracts too is also so you can at
least have guaranteed hours. So there's a lot of kind

(20:52):
of protections that nurses have never really had, like guaranteed hours, UM,
like staff ratios, so some states California and organ or
um two of them. If you go into the I
c U, which is the highest level of care, so
people are actively dying, actively unstable, things can go bad
within seconds. Usually it's a one nurse will have two

(21:12):
patients UM, which is pretty much all you can handle
because they're on multiple trips, multiple types of life's the
part keeping them alive. So ventilators UM being the one
that we see the most UM, and it's really your
responsibility to know every inch of that person's body UM
and everything going on with them, and you really direct
a lot of their care UM. So two to one

(21:35):
kind of makes a lot of sense since the pandemic
and not having enough nurses, sometimes that's slid to three
to one or even in bad situations four to one.
So one of the statistics that UM. One of the
kind of nurse influencers and comedians Nurse Blake talks about
UM is that for every additional patient that a nurse

(21:56):
takes on and I believe he's talking about medstart not
I su that patients UM mortality increases by seven percent.
So yeah, so asking a nurse to do more with
less is not just like hey, just suck it up,
be busier. This is actively contributing to people's disability and
early deaths. So one of the things that the millionaiurse

(22:19):
march Um wants to talk about is man man dated
staffing ratios. So I see you would be two to one.
MED starch is usually four to one. I think you
are they're asking for three to one UM. So these
have been studied by the American Nurses Association UM and
other sort of UM nursing organizations UM. And not only

(22:41):
do they make your job as a nurse so much
better because we go into nursing because we want to
fix things and take care of people. We want good outcomes,
right Like, you don't go into nursing to just run
around with your head cut off and watch everyone die,
right Like, that's terrible. You go into nursing because you
want the people to get better under your care, and
you want to be able to give them that. And
so when you're asked to take care of more patients

(23:03):
than you're able to, you're not able to do that
and it's just crushes you. UM. So not only is
it better for nurse satisfaction, it also saves patients lives
and also prevents things that will give cause lasting disability
like ventilator associated pneumonia or bed sores or delirium, things
like that. So you know, mandating UM patient ratios is

(23:28):
one of the really big things that the Million Nurse
Marks is for Um, there's a lot of talk about
pay and living wages. You know, like every section. Housing
prices and inflation have gone through the roof because you've
got to like be renting a spot whenever you're like
the hospital only putting you up right well, and for
staff nurses to write like if you're you know, maybe

(23:49):
you're maybe they gave you a two percent raise, but hey,
rent increase. UM. I used to be on the interview
board at my old hospital and we would just tell
people like, if you're moving to at Denver as a
single person, we lose most of our nurses because they
haven't looked at housing. So like they'll accept a job
and then they'll look for a place to live and
be like, oh, I can't afford to live here. So hey, like,

(24:10):
I mean, we can't ask if you're single moving here,
but like you probably can't afford to live here with
what we're going to pay you. I mean, cool, I I.
It's just it's so eternally frustrating that like the one
thing that everybody, when you sit them down, agrees is
incontrovertibly necessary medical care. Um. We can agree on a

(24:34):
lot of things, but not how to make sure that
people doing it have a good quality of life and
good income, Like we can. We have all these fun,
fun rules that make it possible to charge X number
of thousand dollars for a dose of insulin um, But
we don't just have a law that's like, hey, if
if you're working full time as a nurse, uh, maybe

(24:55):
you shouldn't have to be housing insecure. I don't know
how do you make that into a law, but it
seems like there should be some option for a country
that can make some of the things we make. Yeah,
I mean tying wages to housing prices. It seems like
I don't know, not being an economist and not being
an administrator, like that sounds super easy to me, Like

(25:15):
goes everybody gets a fifteen percent race, Like I'm sure
it's more complicated than that, but it seems super simple
to send you guy around with a stick to threaten
landlords when they raise rent. Like there's we can debate
the answers to this. What do you think I mean,
not not that like you have any sort of comprehensive

(25:37):
knowledge of all of the people doing this, but like,
do you think there's a possibility of like a wildcat strike,
which is again for people who maybe aren't is when
there's a strike of workers who are not unionized. UM.
I mean to some extent, with everybody quitting to do
travel nursing, it's not so different. I mean some students
have lost of their staff. Yeah, some like when a

(26:01):
unit says, oh, well, the last of my staff, I'm
kind of like, well, you did better than most, you know. UM.
So in some ways it's already happening. And in that
same way, I am seeing hospitals give better extent incentives
to their nurses that have stayed um, either retention bonuses
or UM increasing bonuses for pick for core staff, picking

(26:25):
up extra shifts, UM, or kind of other perks like
increasing education benefits or things like that. So I think
hospitals are responding to like, hey, we don't want to
lose these people to traveling, Like can we tip the
balance a little bit? And I think, you know, overall
hospital leadership is moving slower than they need to UM.
But I mean at least they're moving a little bit.

(26:48):
So I mean it's in that way I can see
a wildcat strike UM, just coming from the kind of
labor forces at play UM. And I could and I
mean there were one the hospitals in the South, I
think it was Alabama. All of their staff, their staff coordinated, um,
so that the ship that was on agreed to stay

(27:10):
late because you can't because abandoning patients, Um, you can
put your license at risk. Right, So we all walked
off in the middle of a shift and said fuck
you to the hospital. Patients died then, like our licenses
at risk. So we also have to kind of balance
that a little bit. But there was a hospital they
organized for the day shift basically to stay as late
as they needed, and night shift all stood outside of

(27:30):
the hospital and I wouldn't refuse to clock it in.
So sometimes these things are happening in small levels. Um.
Also um really interesting, yeah, because it is like yeah, um,
I mean, and that is like such a tough thing
to balance. Just the idea that like, well, you are

(27:51):
health care workers, like withholding your labor is a thing
that's going to be necessary from time to time. There's
also consequences for it that are not present if you're
making I don't know, tires, you know. Yeah, And as
much as teachers and nurses are the same, like I
don't think our country cares about educating children as much
as it cares about their parents dying, you know, like

(28:15):
for better or worse. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's another subject. UM.
Is there anything else you wanted to get into today? Um?
Before we we close out for the for the episode? UM,
I mean, if it's okay with you and you can
cut it if it's not. UM. You know, I try
and tweet about kind of what's happening on the ground

(28:36):
and the things that I'm seeing. UM. And I'm mostly
finished with a book about the first year on the
front line and seven different hospitals and kind of the
disparities between you know, critical access in New Mexico versus
trauma hospitals in you know, the Bay Area, and kind
of what that first year looked like. UM. So if
you want, you can follow me on Twitter. UM. It's

(28:58):
an A N N E like and of green gables
and urn, which is when I started traveling nursing, um,
you know, and so that I kind of talked a
little bit about like what I'm seeing and what's going on. UM.
I was recently in an ear where you know, people
often had to stay outside under the heat lamps for
thirty hours waiting for hospital bed just because everything was impacked,

(29:20):
so they couldn't even come inside the hospital and they
were you know, waiting, um to get their appendix out
and things like that. Again, where your seatbelts and a helmet,
be real, be real careful right now, guys, right um?
And I mean I think the other thing is the
blood shortage. Um, So most hospitals are revising their guidelines

(29:41):
of who won't get a blood transfusion, so you now
have to be much more critical before they will give
you a blood transfusion. So, um, there's a lot of
politics around blood donation, but if you feel like you
can donate blood, um, it's really desperately needed. And people
are gonna where your seats because people are really going

(30:02):
to legitimately die because we run out of blood. Yeah,
um boy, how do you please wear your seatbelts folks, Um,
just just hunker down for a little while. No, no
new risky experiments in life for just a minute. Not
the time to take up skydiving. Yeah yeah, maybe avoid that.
Maybe don't go skiing, uh if you haven't gone skiing before. Um,

(30:23):
I just did that and broke my wrist because I'm
I'm exactly as dumb as the people. I'm trying to
warn and then I guess just check in with your
mental with your the mental health of your health care workers,
because I mean, so many people have you know, I
think a lot of us are dealing with at least
passive sort of like fuck, maybe I should just drive
off the road instead of going into work today sort

(30:44):
of thoughts, you know. And oh, for a lot of us,
that's just defleeting thought and then we get our ship together.
But for some people it's going to be more than that.
And you know, nursing is one of those things where
people have to find themselves by their career and they
need to pull in their lives saying like if you
are never a nurse again, you are still valued, you
are still loved. Just being alive, it's enough, and this

(31:09):
is how you know we can help take care of
you if you need to quit for three months, you know,
um and supporting people with their intrinsic value rather than
like you are only productive and valuable because you were
there saving lives. Because I think a lot of us
really get stuck in that, and a lot of us
are drawn into nursing because we feel some lack of
worthiness without it, you know, well, that's the hard thing

(31:31):
to get other people to do, because in part this
is a society where we just have such generally crummy
attitudes towards mental health. But like we're great at at
saying things like, oh, you know, there's a pandemic. Our
healthcare workers are heroes. You're all heroes because of the
work that you're doing. The work makes you a hero,
as opposed to saying, hey, thank you for doing that.
I know things are still fucked up right now, but

(31:53):
if you decide you got to like take a break
or whatever, you know, you're you're you're, that doesn't mean
you like what you did was still wonderful and you're
still great and valuable, and maybe the best thing is
for you to take that break and not drive yourself
off of a cliff. Yeah, yeah, that's that's harder to
get people to like way of banners that say outside

(32:16):
of their apartment complexes, right banging on pots, to like
let healthcare workers know that no matter what they do,
their valued members of the community that people love. Um.
But yeah, all right, well, and thank you so much
for talking with us today. UM. I hope, uh you

(32:36):
you hold together and help the people in your life
hold together, which is all any of us can really
do other than we're a seatbelt. Yeah, and thank you
for being a part of the conversation, and thank you
for you know, listening to hard things. And you know
that's one thing that I think we really appreciate. It
is to people who will actually listen with open hearts
and will witness this with us so that we're in

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(34:47):
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(35:56):
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that's that's my job done. Who what are we? What

(36:17):
are we doing? What are we doing today? Hey? What's up? Hey? Andrew?
Back at it again with another podcast. UM. Today, we're
doing something a little bit different from the previous episodes
that I've done. We're having a bit more of an
open discussion about sitting book that has been passed around

(36:39):
for about a decade now and has polarized UM members
of the anarchist community. UM can put it that way. UM.
Today we'll be talking about the book the infamous uh
pollemic Dessert by anonymal Us. For those who, uh, you know,

(37:05):
not aware of this extremely controversial text, Desert is a
nihilist anarchist text for this published in two thousand eleven
that is mainly directed at other anarchists and seeks to
address issues of climate collapse and revolution. It became somewhat

(37:28):
of a meme to tell folks to read Dessert. I'm
not sure when that was, but I just remember seeing
it a lot um I think in yeah around read
Desert became a name, yeah yeah, all over Twitter and
Instagram and credit. But of course, being a thing that

(37:51):
exists on the Internet, people who naturally became torn on
the subject of it. And so there are a lot
of perspectives and innions and think pieces about Desert, some
more or less accurate than others. But we are here
to discuss the book, all personal experiences reading it, things

(38:11):
we think it gets right and wrong, and what we
could potentially looen going forward. So I would say the
floor is yours, whoever wants to go first. I mean,
I'm a huge fan of the quote that the book

(38:32):
takes it, or that the that it takes its name from,
which comes from you know, Tacitus, who was a dude
writing in the Roman period um and the exact quote
that it comes from is and he's talking Tacitus is
talking about the Roman Empire, robbers of the world. Now
that the earth is insufficient for their all devastating hands,
they probe even the sea. If their enemy is rich,

(38:54):
they are greedy. If he is poor, they thirst for dominion.
Neither East nor West has satisfied them a loan of mankind.
They are equally covetous of poverty and wealth, robbery, slaughter,
and plunder. They falsely name empire. They make a desert
and they call it peace. Huh, good ass quote. It
is a it is a solid Yeah, And obviously I

(39:17):
think people living in the shadows of every empire that's
ever existed can identify with that quote. Um, it's it's
a powerful kind of central idea to hang your extended essay.
I don't really know what the best term to refer
to it as all. It's it's it's a long essay. Yeah,
it's a very long essay. As we talked about kind

(39:40):
of coming into this, it's extremely two thousand tens um
three Arabs spring pre all the big uprisings and revolts
we had in twenty nineteen, and Um, there's definitely some
stuff that it gets very right, and I think kind
of One of the ways in which it's had an
impact on me is kind of I've I've thought about

(40:03):
what happens to sort of culture as the result of
this kind of Hollywood engine that is heavily tied up
with the United States military Industrial complex, UM, as a
process of desertification of ideas and the ability to like
conceive of of of new futures. UM. That said, I

(40:24):
I don't really I haven't reread it in a very
long time and haven't really felt um called to in
in many ways because I do think I don't know.
I think there's an extent to which it's been kind
of left behind. UM. Yeah, some of the things that
have happened since I think Yeah. UM, I will say

(40:45):
that as someone who really came into my owners an
archist in like, although I had identified with it before, UM,
when I had read the book, UM, I think it
was in late late so I read the book first

(41:07):
time I read it, and honestly, UM, it was some good,
some bad, some some very outdated stuff, and also some
stuff that I don't know, maybe the author felt it
was like groundbreak and at the time, but you know,
at this present stage just feels like common knowledge sense,

(41:35):
you know, I mean it was. It was groundbreaking in
a way for like climate realism, right, like this was
this was written before you know, this is written before
climate Leavy. This was written before um the Uninhabitable Earth.
This was written before a lot of kind of the
texts that view climate change is an absolute like this

(41:57):
was written one year before hyper Objects. Just really interesting actually,
because you know, the whole preface of that book is
that climate changes is done, like it happened, where we're
like there's no turning back the clock. And the Desert
was written even before that, Like it was. It was
one of the first things. Now and of course it's
it's it's much more niche, but like it was if
I if I look back in books that have like

(42:18):
impacted me, it was it's one of the first books
like that came out, like timeline wise to take climate changes, like, yeah,
it's there's no saving it, like there's no living in
the two thousands, there's no living in the nineties. Again,
it's like things are like the world's not going to end,
but things are going to get worse, right like and
that and that is kind of a big, big part

(42:40):
of the book because it's it's also it's also not
pro collapse like it it doesn't take collapse is an absolute.
It doesn't take. It doesn't it doesn't subscribe to global collapse.
And that's one of the misconceptions I think people have
about them. Yeah, that they's assume it is like this
collapse dumorous, like miss rupic kind of text, but which

(43:00):
I did not read it as that. I first read
it around the same time you did, um And I
read it as a part of a lot of books
I was reading to prep for the show when we
when we were writing our first five episodes on like
on climate change and like the crumbles. So I read it,
read it as a part of my kind of general
research and yeah, like at that point it was already

(43:22):
kind of mimified to be like, you know, like an
anarcho nihilist like Dumer manifesto, and I read it, I'm like,
that's not what it's saying at all. It's actually once
I read it, I was like, I was really taking
it back at how how easily um popular perceptions of

(43:42):
a piece of media good um, I mean honestly corrupted
beyond recognition. Yeah, you know, like if people are a
bunch people are telling you know that it's that about
is in texts or whatever. You know, it's kind of
shake It kind of shakes you up to like actually
consumed for yourself off and then read eyes. How did
you all get that? Yeah? How did you read that?

(44:05):
It is really interesting because I'm not even sure if
they did read out of it or if that was
the perception they had going into it. So they read
it through that lens, and that lens basically you know,
changed the text in their heads to fit that thing.
Because it is really interesting how how it is so
associated with like dumerism um yet if you like, engage
in good faith with the text. It's very much not

(44:26):
a Doumer manifesto anyway, although there are aspects of it
that I am um that I think attitude wise, that
I am critical of. But I think Chris was going
to say something, yeah, so I was just like, I,
I really I've always not liked this book, Like I
read it back, and I think she doesn't een when
it was first sort of like coming back, yeah, And

(44:47):
I didn't like it then, and I read it this
morning and I like it even less now than I
did then, And I think I think I actually, I
actually okay, so like, I think it's true that most
of the text doesn't do the duomer thing. But I
think I nderstand where people got it from, because you know,
you have quotes in this like uh here, here's one.
Yet I can already hear the accusations from my own camp,

(45:08):
accusations of deserting the cause of revolution, deserting the struggle
for another world. Such accusations are correct, I would rejoin
that such millinarian and progressive myths are at the core
of the expansion of power. And this is this is
what I really like, I think from an ecological perspective,
it's sort of okay. I strongly dislike Desert as an
anarchist text because I think that's just wrong. I think,

(45:30):
I think, I think there's there there's there's there's an
ingrained defeatism in it that is so strong that it
it it just it like warps the author's perception of
the past, like you get these things where he's talking
about these these kind of he's talking about like the
you know what you call the classical anarchist movement from
roughly like eighteen seventy two really sort of ends with

(45:51):
the defeat of the anarchists in Spain and like seven
and and he you know, they say things like from
Spain pre nineteen thirty six to the Jewish anarchists in
North America, the legalist of France, and the Italian and
Anarcho synicst of Argentina. The inhabitants of anarchist counter societies
were always, by definition active minorities. The minorities may have
gotten larger in an instructionary moments, but they remained at

(46:12):
minorities always, and that's just wrong. It's it's factually wrong.
Like these these movements were not minorities, like the like
the entire like the like the the largest union in
France was the CG like in the early Action hundred
was the the you do see it this deep that
all all of the French, Spanish and Portuguese country speaking

(46:36):
countries have a they have one union that's called the
U G C and one union it's called the CGT.
And I can't remember which ones which, but like like
that was that was the largest union in France, and
it was a syndicalist union right like it was like
and there's you know the same thing with Argentina, right
for a like for a while was the largest union
in Argentina. And I think, and this, this is sort
of my problem with this, which is that you know,
this is a person who's basically like they talked, but

(47:00):
like they are born in the seventies and they've they've
they're writing this Steals in eleven in just the midst
of the collapse of sort of like the complete and
total destruction of the old anarchist movement, right, the anarchist
movement that had been born out of sort of like
the Zapatistas and the anti globalization movements. And they've been
beaten so badly that you know, I mean, they were crushed,

(47:22):
they were completely destroyed, and they've been beaten so badly
that they they can't they literally can't imagine winning and
think that like like revolution in general, like is essentially
a secular theology. They repeat this over and over and
over again. It's like revolution is theology, Revolution is a myth.
And it's like and this is this is something that's
just a product of defeat. It's not a product of

(47:44):
sort of taking seriously the conditions that are emerging around them.
And you know, I was talking about this before the
recording it's like right after this is written, it's you
get the movement of the squares, and then you get occupied,
and it's like basically like major city in the world
goes into revolt. The revolts are anarchists inspired, and you know,

(48:06):
and and Desert like this is why Dessert vanishes for
like six or seven years, because Desert is a piece
that's written like it's it's it's a piece that's that's
only happens in a in a very specific part of
a revolutionary cycle, which is when like every everything has
been crushed, all resistance has been crushed, everyone's losing hope,
and then everyone starts reading Desert again, and then the

(48:27):
revolutions restart, and and at that point, like once once
once there's like you know, two thousand people in the
streets again like fighting the cops, it becomes less and
less sort of like like that that part of its
analysis becomes less and less relevant, until you know, inevitably
everyone like there's there's a defeat, and then everyone goes
sort of like and I think I think that's why

(48:49):
it has the duomer rep because it's it's it's the
text that people read when you've been beaten in the streets. See, Yeah,
that's that's an interesting look at it, because I mean
I definitely agree with the revolution is an idea, like
is a myth thing, like I I specifically within the
context of the United States, which I believe that's what
the books trying to mostly focus on. They do bring

(49:11):
up other parts of the world and stuff. Um, but
it's definitely written by in a by an American like citizen,
and that that that is I mean, I mean that
that could actually be wrong. Um. It may not be
written by an American, but I in terms of reading it,
it is kind of through like a very like Western
lens of like revolutions not happening here. Um. And I

(49:34):
definitely sympathize and agree with that viewpoint. And I mean
if if you're in a point of being like it
was two US and eleven then occupied happened and like yeah,
but occupied in't. But that that also fits like every
every attempt has not succeeded in this country to to
get any kind of big, meaningful change that we can
push towards something that's like post capitalist. Um. So yeah,

(49:55):
I mean I do think I think it's it's it's
it's mostly targeting people specifically like commun nests um or
marks Lendonests who like are just waiting around for the
revolution to happen and then don't do anything like that, right,
that is that but but but but but I think
this is this is why it's a text that's like
that's not good for the moment, because our problem isn't that, like,

(50:16):
like the problem right now isn't that there's no one
like there's no uprising on the horizon, Like everyone's completely
beaten down. No one's ever gonna go into his treats again.
Our problem is that like there's just there's there's there's
there's periodic uprisings everywhere, and every single time everyone is
caught off guard, and every single time, no one is
able to actually sort of mobilize off of it, and
you know, like like like no, no on, no one's

(50:39):
been able to like pivot it into something that's actually
like transformative. But but but but I think that that's a
very different problem then the problem that desert is because
desert has already abandoned the possibility that an uprising can win.
That's I mean, it's yeah, and then let's specifically been
the idea of like global revolution shan right, that is,

(51:00):
that is the thing that specifically targeting. They're saying smaller
specific they're saying like smaller local things actually can't succeed
in a lot of ways. But they're trying to tie
this idea of global revolution is like a pacifying idea, right,
just waiting around for this to happen, and tying that
to this at the time, which more niche idea Now
it's now it's way more popular. But this idea of

(51:21):
like global collapse and how people think if they can
people think believing in global collapse is smarter than believing
in global revolution. They think it's more realistic. But the
book saying no, this is this idea of global collapse
actually falls under all the same issues that global revolution has.
I think i'd want to um sort of comments here

(51:42):
um with regard to like the defeatist sort of reading
um in the text. I understand that reading um I
mean perasonally I distinguished like defeatism and dumerism. And I
always think, like my own personality and my own perspective
kind of like inoculates me in a way from like

(52:02):
adopting that kind of defeatist attitude towards um. You know, change.
But I don't think the book is entirely um, you know,
dismissive of like revolution um. It just I think the
main thrust of it is that it's critically the idea
of like one global revolution, one global collapse. What it

(52:24):
really emphasizes is that, you know, climate change brings new
possibilities for new anarchies plural to develop worldwide and response
changing circumstances. But at the same time, you know, in
some areas things are going to get worse than some
areas things are going to get better. And it's not
that really one broadbrush could be applied to the entire earth. Well,

(52:49):
but I think, I mean, I think like this this
is another thing that they're really guilty of, especially like
there's an entire section in here where they just keep
writing about Africa and it's like well, and then you know,
and they'll get pressed on it and they'll be like, no, no,
we mean sub Saharan Africa, and it's like, what are
you talking like. They they won't name countries, they won't
name movements, they won't name people. It's just they'll just

(53:11):
write something about the whole of Sub Saharan Africa, and
it's just like, well, I think that's evidence of the
kind of of what Garrison was talking about. This, right,
and this is something you see all over the place
with people writing about politics, with people trying to write
about like particularly revolutionary politics, UM in a global sense.
And I think it's usually a mistake to do that,

(53:31):
UM for the reasons we've kind of discussed. Any time
I see a left wing even as somebody who I
think is generally on point, who starts talking about, for example,
like extending their theories about revolutionary politics to places I
happen to know just a little bit about, it's always
very clear like, oh, you don't know shit about Syria.
Oh you don't know shit about Libya. Oh you don't
know shit about Angle like um. And that's and that's

(53:55):
like not even a moral failing, it's just that it's
impost It's it's impossible really to have in depth knowledge
of like what's actually going on in those places and
what's going on in those revolutions. It's why people default
so much to the whole Well, whatever side the US
is on must be the bad side, and whatever side
the Russians on must be the good side. It's the
easiest way to look at that ship. UM, I don't.

(54:16):
I think that's I think that's a worthwhile critique to make,
and it's a critique to make any time that it happens.
Um I I agree with Garrison and with Andrew that
I think the thing that is that desert gets right.
Um And the thing that I've seen in my own
life is that like the opportunities we should be looking

(54:37):
for are not suddenly that some sort of global revolution
sweeps all of the things we don't like out of
power and magically institutes something better comprehensively across the globe.
It's it's it's room for little anarchies. It's what we
saw in northeast Syria, right where the government pulls out
and people have an opportunity to do something not perfect,

(54:58):
but better. And I think that is That's kind of
one of the things we talked about a lot on
this show. That's why mutual aid is valuable, It's why
building these connections are valuable. It's because, um, as things crumble,
there will be opportunities two in local areas, piecemeal institute
and and push through for more just and and better

(55:21):
ways of living. Um And I think that if you're
looking at kind of the broad level, potentially optimistic point
is that when you have enough of those and when
they spread well enough, and if communication is good enough,
maybe the things that work will get adopted on a
wider scale. And there's always the opportunity that when enough,
when ideas spread far enough, they have a tipping point

(55:42):
and and they go viral, you know, so to speak.
But I I I don't. I think that while there's
a lot of specifics that Desert gets wrong, I do
think they were ahead of the curve and recognizing that,
and I think it's it's a more productive way to
look at the idea of revolutionary change. Then we're going
to finally have nineteen seventeen. But everywhere, you know, with

(56:04):
regards of the African chapter, the impression that I got
while reading that chapter, and I think the book itself
references Um Samba Um, I got the impression that the
author had read Um Afrighan anarchism History of a movement
by sam Member and they were just kind of like

(56:28):
inspired by that, I would say, because as I do
point out, they didn't like specify the specific cultures, which
is an issue considering, you know, the tendency that Westerners
have of you know, being to Africa this large brush
as if it's you know, all one way or the other. Um.
But I think what we do see now, um is

(56:54):
you know, from the Horn of Africa to South Africa
to Nigeria too, I mean recently Sudan. I believe, Um,
there are Africans, smaller number organizing under the mount of anarchism,
and they are anarchic elements that continue to persist on
the continent. Yeah, I mean I think that's like, you know,

(57:16):
I mean one of the things that they sort of
got they got right, was about how like this the
sort of the the sort of renewal the spread of
urban anarchism they're talking about like Chile in particular, they
got right, Um, Indonesia Bangladeshtra somewhat. But but but I
think I think there's there's another like my, my, my, my,

(57:36):
my biggest issue with them in terms of the way
they think about ecological stuff that this comes this is
something they talk about with like they have this thing
where they think that forger societies are like, Okay, they're they're, they're, they're,
they're they're more careful than most people. To frame it
as like the forging societies can be a galitarian but

(57:57):
I think they they they wind talking about these sort
of like the way that sort of forging nomadic society
sort of inherently defy the boundaries of the state, and
like that's true. But you can also have like nomadic
forging societies that have are hereditary slave societies. And this
is this is a problem because there's a there's a

(58:20):
lot in here about that that that's about sort of
like they're you know, they're they're taking this is sort
of like soft an anti su right. Yeah. It has
a few lines where it does specifically say civilization is
the cause of like I think it's like the civilization
is genocide, um, which yeah, and that can't silly, Yeah,

(58:44):
by civilizations commit genocide. Sure, if they're saying that they
do cause genocide, if you're if you're trying to make
the case that it seems to be that civilizations, Uh, well,
I don't know every civilization does not commit genocide, but no,
but civilization gives you a constant Yeah, civilization gives you
the framework that makes genocide possible, well, like potentially contentional

(59:07):
genocide possible. I don't know that I would agree with
that because I think you see examples of genocide from
hunter gatherers societies and from from so societies, and that
the obviously documentation on that isn't as extensive because we
weren't documenting things for a lot of it. But you
do have examples from from what we know of, like um,
the Americas of their word genocides committed by societies we

(59:29):
would call stateless. So I think I might argue that like,
genocide is a thing that human beings do in civilization
because it allows us to do everything on a larger scale,
allows us to do way better genocides. That's definitely in
our think. I think. I think my problem with it
is that they're going back into this sort of like
that they're going back into the you know, there's this

(59:50):
inherent binarya between foragers and sales societies and that you know,
and and specifically they think that that that these sorts
that the forager scietas are you know, inviably gonna become
a galle Ryan. It's like that's not true, and it's
not true in ways that you can see right now,
in like like they're like they're like there are lots
of places right now where you can look at you know,

(01:00:10):
forging societies that have incredibly right, but like there's there's like,
for example, you get sort of you get the Filani
joining like right wing Islamist groups, right, and that like
that kind of thing. I think it has a problem
with It's the same thing as looking at indigenous societies

(01:00:33):
and and seeing them all on one side of the
fight with with colonizing nations as supposed I'm reading a
book about the history of the Mapucha right now, which
are historically like the indigenous group in Chile that resisted
the law and the indigenous group realion, and you could
argue in all of Latin America that resisted the longest
and most effectively. But even then, when you look at

(01:00:53):
like the campaigns of the Chilean government in the eighteen
sixties and eighteen eighties, large like significant chunks of the
Mapocha sided with the government against other Mapucha, and like
that's the like it's it's always a mistake. I think
this is a good one of the things that you
get out of the dawn of everything. It's always a
mistake to like look at any of these groups hunter gatherers,
stateless societies. Is like one thing or another they're people

(01:01:15):
and some of them sucked, just like yeah there, yeah, anyway, Yeah,
there's there's one thing that I wanted to sort of
pushback against. Uh, Robert, you had said that genocide is
a thing that humans do. Um. I don't think I
agree with that assessment, um in this sense, or at

(01:01:36):
least i'd rather I would like to clarify. Um, Well,
if you an opportunity to clarify what you mean by that,
I you know, I don't know that it's just humans,
but I think that genocide is a thing that as
long as we have evidence in recorded history, it seems
like we have done not just against are not just
against other humans, but against other kind of hominid species.

(01:01:58):
We have we have examples of things that it seems
fair to call genocide going back further than we have
any kinds of written records. Um. You know, villages and
the Balkans that were you know, burnt in people who
like groups of people, tribes and whatnot, who seem to
have been killed in mass and you know, there's there's
other theories for some of that. Some of them may

(01:02:19):
have been like people trying to stop a place we
don't plague or whatever. Like, there's not any kind of
comprehensive solidity. But what we do know is that as
long as we have documentations of humans doing things, we
have documentations of things that we could call genocide. I see,
I see, look into that a bit more. I appreciate

(01:02:39):
the glarification. Yeah, can I can I do a Balkans
pivot because there's a there's a there's a thing like
like it genuinely disturbed me reading it in here about
the Serbs during the Bosnian genocide. Were so that they're
they're they're quoting. That's disturbing about that. Oh yeah, but
this is this is a I uh okay, So they're

(01:03:02):
they're they're doing they're they're reading a quote from the
book Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild where
he's talking this is about the bonding genocide. How is
this possible in Europe at the end of the twentieth
century was the question that played obsessively through my mind.
What the war in former Yugoslavia forced us to suggest
the fact that people proved willing to make a conscious
and active choice to embrace regression, barbarity, a return to

(01:03:25):
the wildness. Take the serve fighters who dreamed of a
return to the Serbia of the epic poems were quote
there was no electricity, no computers, when the serves were
happy and had no cities, the breeding ground of all evil.
And then this is this is the next thing. That's
that's the text coming back and commenting on it that
some modern day militias reflect romantic desires, while shelling towns,

(01:03:48):
massacring villages, and being killed in turn should neither surprise
us nor necessarily fully invalidate romance. It does, however, suggest,
along with the honest expression of joy destruction mouth by
some soldiers in every war, as well as many anarchists,
that there was a coupling of some store between a
generalized urge to destroy and disgusted at a complex human society.

(01:04:10):
And there's there's there's another part um only later on
they're talking about ethnic diversity and autonomy will often emerge
both from mutual aid and community and animosity between communities.
I like to think, and our history back this up,
that self adantified anarchists will never inflict such pain as
Serb nationalist militias. An example I shows purposely for the Repuglicans.

(01:04:30):
But we should admit that our wish to function up
is partly driven by the same urge to civilizational dismemberment
that can be found in many interethnic conflicts and in
the minds of fighters more generally. And I think that's fucked.
I think that's true. That's I think there's commenting a
specific type of anarchist literature, which is like the make

(01:04:52):
total destroy thing. And yeah, I definitely I have observed
that in people the same the same urge that you're
you're are so broken down by everything that the only
urge that is the only creative verge you have, is
to destroy the things around you. I've seen that. I
don't think they're necessarily celebrating that, but they're pointing out

(01:05:15):
that that urge can be there. When I think they
get really wrong here is that I don't think that's
the urge that that is is like that, that's when
when when you're dealing with inter ethnic conflict, when you're
dealing with genocide, I don't think that's urge that's going on.
It's specifically with the Serbs, because the Serbs, like you know, okay,
like when when when an anarchist is doing made total
destroy right there, you know, they're like there, there's there's

(01:05:37):
a very specific that of things they're attacking or they're
you know, they're attacking, builing, the attacking the physical infrastructure
of the world. When the Serbs are doing the Bosnian
genocide like that, they have a very specific thing they're doing,
which is killing Bosnian Muslims. And I think that's extremely
different urge than the sort of like I don't I
don't think that's about sort of what it's civilizational dismemberment

(01:05:58):
or whatever that's about is homophobia and genocide. And I
think that's a different I think the genocidal impulse is
a I think a very different one than this sort
of the like the impulse to break the society that
has harmed you. Yeah, I think it's important to draw
a distinction between you can kill a shipload of people
without it being a genocide, um, And I think and

(01:06:21):
it's also one of those things I think sometimes why
people I think why there's hesitation to see certain acts
and early history of genocide is that they're not as
complete as modern genocide. But but what a genocide really is,
and I think it's important to lay this out. It's
not necessarily killing every member of an ethnic group or
a religious group or whatever kind of community. Um, it
is stopping their ability to propagate and continue themselves. That's

(01:06:45):
why things like destroying churches and destroying the cultural distroyal
markers are part of genocide. And it's also why a
lot of genocides they left the women and children alive.
They would kill all the men, and they would take
the women in and they would breed with them. They
might kill the kids sometimes, but it was this The
goal was not necessarily were we need to kill all
of you, it's we want to kill this, this culture,
this population. Um, I think the I think the I

(01:07:10):
think the parallel he's trying to make here or they
or she? Uh? Is that? Uh? That like that type
of like genocidal cultural destruction is targeted against specific groups.
The difference here is with this type of like you know,
he's he's writing this for other anarchists. He's pointing out,
like our destructive urge, our cultural urge, isn't even for

(01:07:33):
a specific group, it's just for everything, and that can
be unhealthy. Sometimes sometimes there's ways to do make total
destroy that's totally fine, but that can go to unhealthy places. Now,
he's not equating like ethnic cleansing with that. He's like
they are like they are different. But when when your
total destroy urges against all of culture, then yeah, that

(01:07:56):
that can like that's something you should probably ponder. Yeah,
I mean that's definitely I would agree that that's the
thing that's potentially problematic, right, like with a number of
different desires. Uh, there's a way in which that can
lead to people doing really fucked up things. Yeah, it's
like it's like it's pointing out that that type of
accelerationism not specific to ideology, but just like accelerationism in general.

(01:08:20):
I mean, I think when I when I talk about
things like the fact that because not every culture commits
genocides and every civil civilization does, um, and throughout history
there have been more that found the idea repugnant than
found the idea acceptable. Um. But it is really a
consistent thing in history. And I think the lesson with
that isn't necessarily that everything could end in genocide. So

(01:08:41):
I don't think the lesson is necessarily like, oh you
should look at make total destroy as if you know,
the this kind of trend in anarchist thought could lead
to genocide it's that people in groups are nearly always
capable of killing a shipload of other people for a
variety of reasons if applied in the proper ways, And
so those of us who seek mass movement should always

(01:09:02):
be conscious of that, because human beings in large groups
can do wonderful things, but there's a long history of
them doing really fucked up shit, sometimes in ways that
surprised the people that got the large group of human
beings together in the first place. The other thing I
wanted to bring up is kind of more circling back
to the dumer kind of idea UM, because Yeah, a
big part of the book is trying purposely is to

(01:09:25):
dissolution people with this idea of global revolution and dissolution
people with the idea that we can save the earth
because we can't. UM. So that's a big thing and
for I think, I think for some people, if you
stop right there and you that's how you end that thought, Yes,
that does lead to dumorism, obviously, like that that is
that is, But the books, the book doesn't stop there.

(01:09:47):
The book continues on from there. Now they continue on
from a nihilistic standpoint. I'm not a nihilist. I prefer certinism.
I prefer to escordionism. But those two things are pretty common.
Like there they are more are similar than not um
is that you can be disillusioned with global revolution and
the idea to save the earth, but that should not
change what we do or how we feel or operate

(01:10:12):
as anarchists. It's not that we should be disillusioned and
then do nothing and step aside. That we should be
disillusioned and then find that disillusionment itself a form of liberation,
like the freeing nature of being free from this idea
of revolution. Is that like, no, we are living our
lives now. Don't live for a revolution. Live your life

(01:10:35):
now and do things now, because that's what you actually have.
So it's like that type of nihilistic, absurdist and Discordian things.
This is, this is this is This is where I
come back to having problems with it again because this
this is literally just there is no alternative except it's
it's yeah, and that's it's do anarchy. I mean, but
that's how I live like that that I think I

(01:10:57):
think this is a bad I think that's a bad plan.
And I think if if you look if you look
at what happens with because you know this, this was
the thing that was really big in the American anarchist movement,
like in you know, from about seventeen like roughly now,
and it's like a lot of people were rising too.
Yeah didn't succeed like that, like not like but I
think like like this is like I think I think

(01:11:20):
this is like like one of the reasons it didn't.
We were like, okay, this is like the thing that's important.
One of the things is important of revolutions, even when
they don't succeed, is that for a very brief window
you actually can like it becomes it becomes possible to
imagine another world. And what what what this entire thing
is saying is don't do that. That's not that's not
that's that's that's that is not what it absolutely not.

(01:11:42):
This is no no no, okayn I kind of finish
this sentence, yeah, like yeah, okay, so what what what?
What What I'm saying here is that what what they've abandoned, right,
the thing that they're giving up when they when they
give up revolution, when they're like this is a progressive myth.
This is like I see oology. What what they've abandoned
completely is our human capacity to actually shape a different world.

(01:12:07):
What they're arguing is that, like the the you know,
it's essentially that the combination of ecological and social forces
are strong enough that humans humans no longer have the
capacity to reshape the world into a way that is
different than this, and that this is now the eternal present,
and you know, and yeah, inside of the eternal present,

(01:12:28):
they're saying, you should be fighting for the same things.
You should be fighting for, like you know, you should
you should be in your own sort of local domain.
You should be Like, I mean, there are some of
the recommendations are wild, Like I think, I think their
conservation stuff is sketchy, given, I mean, it doesn't but
it doesn't apply to an eternal present though, Like they

(01:12:49):
lay out, like the world is changing a lot and
will for the next fifty years, Like they will be
massive changes and how things are set up in the
next like in the next century, and we need to
take advantage of that. We need to turn those liabilities
into assets and start making those little anarchies like that. That
That that is what it's trying to do. And I

(01:13:09):
would add as well that as it points out the
situations and plastic Stooke and Bangladesh are difference in the
present and will be in the future. You Know, what
I think is is trying to be sort of drilled
in here, is that, at least in the text and
how I read it, um, is that yes, things will

(01:13:31):
be different in different parts of the world, and probably
maybe they won't be this you know or as the
what the is, They won't be you know, this one
global revolution. But at the end of the day, Um,
I think what it's trying to emphasize is that we
don't have the structures. And I think what part of

(01:13:51):
what is trying to emphasize is that we don't have
the structures in place right now to launch an introduction
we can meaningfully defend. And so that is the sort
of thing we should be focusing on. Yeah, but but
but they, but they but this and this, this, this
is going back to my problem with it, going going
back to the thing where they go on the rant
about how anarchists are like a permanent cultural majority and
will never become a majority. Is that even even in

(01:14:13):
situations where people had that capacity and did it, they
go back they project back onto it. Go no, no, no no, no,
they couldn't have done that. Like it's it's not about
it's it's it's they they have a belief and this
is something that they do explicitly say that that anarchist
will always be a permanent minority. Right there, There will
always be an active but permanent minority. And that is
the like like that specifically, I think is just an

(01:14:37):
actual rejection of the belief that we collectively can make
a better future. Because if if, if you think that
our ideas that you know, if being free, right, if
if society is mutually if you think that that is
permanently always going to be a minority, you are you know,
you are condemning. You're condemning the future to the people

(01:15:01):
who don't believe that. And and I understand why, especially
if you know, if if, if, if the only thing
you've ever known is fifty years of when the new
Liberals actually did the thing right. They took over the
entire world, restructure of the entire world economy, seized every government.
Like if if that's what you lived through, I understand

(01:15:21):
why you would think that. But I think the fact
that it was possible to do it from the other
direction is in some ways a sense that like, yeah,
we could do it too. I don't know. Sorry, I
will stop harping on this one specific point. It just
extremely annoys me. I think it's not giving up the
idea that the world can be better. It's that like,
we don't need to have the majority of people be

(01:15:43):
anarchists to make the world better. We can still spread
our own anarchies and people don't need to self subscribe
as anarchists. But as long as we start building those
systems in the places around us, people start using them,
and people might start like living them out, even if
they don't call themselves anarchists, right, like the majority and
if people will probably prefer some type of state or government, right,

(01:16:04):
you can even look at Rosa and be like, yeah,
it's still is state issue in some ways, but some
ways not right, Like it's it's it's going we're not
going to get an anarchist world. That's not going to happen,
but we can make it better through the lens of anarchy.
And I think that's what it's kind of trying to say. Yeah,
I think it's it's worth acknowledging that, like, yeah, the
majority of people are never going to be what anarchists

(01:16:27):
are right now, which is people who comprehensively reject the
systems they live in. Most people are always going to
think more like, well, I want to be comfortable. I
want to I support changes kind of that that, you know,
fix this thing that I've noticed as a problem or
that thing. Most people are never going to comprehensively reject
the system. But I do have hope that in time
and given you know, space to build things and show

(01:16:50):
people other ways and improve life for people, you can
get to a point where most people believe a lot
of the things that I think are important. Yeah, and
I think that's what's time. I think that. I then
that's what the as specificitis um tend to advocate for
in terms of through the process of social institution in

(01:17:11):
these larger movements, generalizing the ideas of anarchist ideas as
a whole, making them more common throughout the population. It's
only trying to get each and every post in the
world to self identify as an anarchist, communist, or whatever.
It's more so that you're trying to spread these ideas
to the point where they are I suppose the common

(01:17:34):
sentiments the popular will yeah, like I it's it's um
that's like the point of culture jamming and and and
ship like that, Like it's the the idea that like
it doesn't so much matter, like like like what matters
is inserting the things you think are important into the
culture and getting people to identify with them and understand them.

(01:17:56):
The terms that they specifically use aren't aren't as important,
like that that's not really what matters. Well, okay, I
don't think they're arguing that though, because I mean, like
do they have lines like this. We cannot, however, remake
the entire world. There are not enough of us. There
never will be. But then you know, they like they
they they specifically talk about the oh well they don't
have to all be anarchists, and you know, I mean,

(01:18:18):
here's their line. There is unfortunately little little evidence from
history that the working class, never mind anyone else, is
intrinsically predisposed to libertarian and ecological revolution. Thousands of years
of authoritarian socialization in favor of the jack boot. Neither
we nor anyone else could create a libertarian or global
or ecological global future by expanding social movements further. There
is no reason to think that in the absence of

(01:18:39):
such a vast expanse a global transformation concurrent to our
desires will ever happen. I think, I think, I think
the keyword there is global, Like, yeah, that's they're trying
to write about that, and it's important, Like they're writing
this specifically for anarchists who are kind of already nihilistic,
kind of already anti sif, right, they are writing this
for other anarchists, that this isn't a book to radicalize

(01:19:00):
a normy or a communist by anarchists for other anarchists
to be like, hey, you already kind of think the
world's kind of going to ship. Here's a way that
we can still do things despite the world being shitty.
Because once you're once you're disillusioned, it's hard to be
illusioned again. Like it's it's hard once you give up

(01:19:22):
on the idea of global revolution, once you give up
the idea of global collapse, it's hard to re enter
those even if you see things happening the world, like
there can still be uprisings and revolts, absolutely, but there
is a distinction of between uprising and the revolts and
like a global revolution, right, and specifically like the Marxist
Leninist sense, and I'd also like to um continue the

(01:19:45):
paragraph you're reading from there. We had said that as anarchists,
sweet he had. They had said that, as anarchists, we
are not the seed of the future society. In the
show of the old, it may are you one of
many elements from which the future is. For me, that's okay,
when faced with such scale and complexity. There is value
in non cervile humility, even for in surgery. But this

(01:20:06):
is this is just this is just giving up. This
is this is the old. It's too complicated, it's too
like and like I think, I don't know, like it's
it's it's it's giving up on it's giving up on
trying to do any kind of on on like humans
as a whole, trying to do any kind of large
scale like you know, like's trying to do transformation of

(01:20:28):
what the society. I disagree to continue that that code
to give up hope for global anarchist revolution is not
to resign oneself to anarchy, remaining any to protest. Seaweed
puts it well. Revolution is not everywhere or nowhere. Any
bioregion can be liberated through a succession of events and
strategies based in the conditions unique to it, mostly as
the grip of facilitation that area weakens through its own

(01:20:50):
volition for the efforts of its inhabitants. So aisation didn't
succeed every at once, and so it's undoing might only
occur to varying degrees in different places at different times.
In if an area seemingly fully under the control of authority,
they always places to go, to live in, to love in,
and to resist from, and we can extend those spaces.
The global situation may seem beyond us, but the local

(01:21:11):
never is. And I think that's beautiful. I think that's
like a That's one of the things that keeps me
alive is ideas like that, honestly. And at the same time,
I also hold the opinion that none of us, including
this author, is a fortune teller, you know. The desert's

(01:21:31):
picture of the future is not the only possibility, you know,
And I think in a lot of ways and a
lot always I believe that they can and have already
been proven wrong, you know. Like, and there's an issue
that I really take a lot of contention with the book.
Part of the book that really pisces me off is

(01:21:53):
the sort of persistence of the overpopulation myth. I don't
remember it being sun as done since I reread it
UM a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, So this sort
of nonchalance the author seems to have about like mass
die offs and that kind of thing, you know, I
think that's very troubling to me. That's very specific to

(01:22:14):
It's a type of anti civil literature that's like, we
view civilization is going to progress towards genocide anyway, and
the way to actually avoid more deaths is to kind
of help the collapse along because that will end civilization quicker.
So therefore less people, less people will be born, and
less people will have to die. So that's the type
of thinking they have. I don't necessarily agree with that,

(01:22:37):
um necessarily, but like, yeah, that is that is very
typical of this type of literature. So again because it
is written mostly for other anti civ anarchists, but like, yeah,
it's not like pro genocide. It's saying genocide will happen.
So the way to make less of it is to
actually kind of slowly start kind of help help putting

(01:23:00):
the crumbles along essentially and while still you know, making
people's lives better in your immediate community like with that,
with that very local focus. So again not not saying
I necessarily agree with that, but that's the that's the
type of thought it's engaging with. I mean, I think
that's true of some of it. But there is definitely

(01:23:20):
a lot of like panic about there's going to be
nine billion people and like population grows all the over
population stuffs a little iffy, you know, there is there's
a discussion to have on carring capacity, but we are
not there yet. We right now we way overproduced for
them for the amount of people we have. Yeah, that

(01:23:41):
and that I don't know. That also frustrated me immensely.
They're like, yeah, we we have becauseiner they're talking about
carrying capacity, right and they're like, we already can't. We
have a billion people going hungry. And it's like, yeah,
but that's not about the carrying capacity. That's just that's
that which was just liter that and that idea gained
more prevalence after Dessert was written. We kind of more understood,

(01:24:04):
like like culturally that it is a distribution issue, not
necessarily a production issue. Now we do overproduce, right because
and the amount of production we have contributes this tough
like climate change and that is bad, so we should
tone down production, but we should make the ways that
it's more sustainable and ecological. Um. Yeah, that I think
that does point towards the data and nature of the text.

(01:24:24):
I think also my my last like thing with it
is I think I think it could have benefited a
lot from like in an indigenous stewardship perspective, because the
way it thinks about its, particularly the way things about
wildness versus conservation, is just very messy. And yeah, if

(01:24:45):
it falls, it falls. It does a better job of
it than some other antis of things that I've seen,
but it definitely falls into the like trap of like
here is the wild and then any attempt to manage
it is uh, you know, is is civilization and you
need to go back to the wild and it's like

(01:25:06):
this is already stewarded and managed. Yeah, that is the one. Yeah,
it does fall on that slope of like nature being
another that is sacred, which isn't necessarily a great idea
nor is it really true. Yeah, this is very two
two ten. Yeah, right, So I think the book is

(01:25:28):
critical conservation and that sort of binary way, And I
agree that indigenous stewardship perspective was sorely needed. But at
the same time, I do think that the way that
the book predicises um or ever just points out Um,
the su conservation may have been one may still be

(01:25:49):
new for some people. You know, the idea that these
sorts of government conservation projects which sort of preside over
the sort of static vision of nature and ecology and
stuff that is supposedly threatened by humanity. UM. I think
criticizing that approach to nature's good. I mean the sort

(01:26:13):
of romanticization of the wild that is very typical of
anti set of text and thought. UM is very much
anti Seve. But I do believe that people should look
ah or should rather resist these sorts of conservation impulse.

(01:26:38):
As I was rereading it a couple of weeks ago,
I wanted to know, um, what you guys thought of
the section of the book that speaks of the different
modern different the the idea of fourth and fifth generation war.
Oh boy, that's ah um um sort of a contributional

(01:27:05):
approach to analyzing conflict. So I figured out, as you
have been in you know, actual war Zoon's rout, that
you might have a thing to see. Um. I mean,
it's the kind of thing that we should probably cover
in in detail on because this is a lot of
like William Lynde stuff. I think he's the guy who

(01:27:27):
came up with the idea of like fourth generation war
less at least and it's UM. It's basically the idea.
It's the idea that warfare UM today is conducted through
a lot of stuff that's not conventional weaponry, right, so
stuff like UM, like like like putting bought networks together
to like push social division, you know through UM social

(01:27:49):
media UM, or carrying out cyber attacks on infrastructure, disinformation UM,
all of that kind of stuff, which is I think accurate.
I've been reporting on what you could call fifth generation
warfare since some UM. I think it's I think to
the extent that it's relevant here. I think one thing

(01:28:11):
that people on the left need to acknowledge is that
they have UM been blindsided by the effectiveness that the
far right has adapted to UM the key components of
this kind of warfare. And I think nothing is more
key than social engineering and disinformation UM, and they've been
much more successful at it over the last release ince

(01:28:33):
two that in fifteen in particular, UM than the left
hast by basically everywhere, every and by I think, every
single measure of of success. And I think this is
something we should save in depth for another day. UM,
but I think that it is worth acknowledging that this is.
And I also think that and this is again part

(01:28:55):
of a bigger conversation we talked about the concept of
like culture jamming, when we talked about like operating should
mind fuck you know, which is Discordian idea. Um, all
of which you can see is kind of pre predecessors
to the concepts of fifth generation warfare. I think there's
a strong argument to be made that those efforts by
leftists in the eighties and nineties in particular, actually contributed

(01:29:17):
to the substantial right wing victories that we're seeing right
now in this space. UM. And I think maybe it's
I think there's a number of reasons for that, um,
including some to some extent, the idea of arrogance, that
that what that we were just too smart, that they
were never going to figure out how to utilize the
same means we had, or to kind of judo like

(01:29:38):
take the momentum for that and spin it around on us.
But they were and they did, And UM, yeah, that'll
that'll lead into another episode. We'll have to talk about
this in more detail. That's something like Grant Morrison actually
talks a lot about in regards to discordionism and this
type of how how you know he used to work
for a company called Disinformation back when disinformation was yeah, yeah,

(01:30:00):
and now it's like one of the leading causes of
mass death in the world, right, so he That is
something that Morrison talks about a lot in terms of
how they did have that arrogance and now the same
forces that they used in hopes of making the world
better and now being used to regress the world and
make it worse. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I had a big

(01:30:21):
copy of Disinformation on my coffee table when I was nineteen.
I just ordered good. There's some fun essays in their Garrett. Um,
all right, that'll probably I mean, did you have more
to say on that? And yeah, I just wanted to
say that, you know, regardless of the uncertain future, um,

(01:30:44):
regardless of your stance on that's its message, however flawed.
Um here now, as the minor goods in Alis Souxley's
Island so often repeat, um, we kind of should be
attention to what we can do to support ourselves for
whatever outcome you go through, you know, projects within the

(01:31:06):
spaces we inhabit. I believe that I guess it could
be the seed then you will. I do believe that
we have an impact, a huge impact on society and
on politics, and I believe there are still many possibilities
for liberty still. Yeah, I I do as well. I

(01:31:28):
think that acknowledging, you know, failures, both of of of
you know ideas and of of methods doesn't mean m
giving up hope or or ignoring the successes of those
same things which which we're are also present. Um yeah,
So I don't know, stay optimistic. Read something doesn't have

(01:31:50):
to be a desert. But just go go read a thing. Yeah,
back of your shampoo, but especially if it's Dr Browner's
a lot of good stuff in there. Um right, that's
gonna do it for us this week. Take care look

(01:32:13):
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(01:32:33):
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(01:33:14):
of the podcast History Unplugged. And if you're dreaming of
being a full time podcaster someday, you and I have
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From my heart, welcome to it could happen here the

(01:34:21):
podcast we already recorded and I messed up um or
something happened with the zoom and we lost the audio.
So now we're recording it again, as is, as is
the cycle of life. UM, thankfully I can. I'm now
on my tenth shot of Espresso of the day and
it is eight pm, so I'm I'm ready. I'm I'm
ready this time today we're gonna be doing another one

(01:34:43):
of our chronicles into open source and OSENT style research
or open source verification and this kind of side of
of generally, you know, this is kind of a field
of like anti fascist research UM and journalism. So we're
looking at one of these case studies UM. But today
I have someone with me, Alistair from Opossum Press is

(01:35:08):
here to talk about and UH and this type of research. Hello, Hi,
thank you for being with me again on this on
this call, on this very deaf experience for us. I
would actually first like to talk about how Opossum Press

(01:35:29):
got started as like a collective of of people dedicated
towards this goal of you know, surveying the fascist creep. UM.
I had an interest in UM and journalism. I have
no experience in it, but I have other friends that
are into writing and stuff, and I just kind of

(01:35:50):
reached out to friends and like, hey, would anybody be
interested in doing this? And UM there are several friends
that were like, hell, yeah, let's do this, and pretty
much it after we got it all formed, UM, we
set up some open source intel like workshops and we'd
about every other week we get together for two or

(01:36:12):
three hours and learned stuff that sounds that sounds lovely actually, UM.
Most of my stuff is usually done alone in my
computer dark when I'm on my again tenth cup of
coffee of the day, do we go sent in a
group of people like that? Sounds like it could be
actually kind of fun. So yeah, we're gonna In our
last episode we talked about how I tracked down and

(01:36:34):
found out who Written House was the night of of
that happening in Kenosha um, and today we're gonna be
talking about someone related to January six, um, the infamous
zip tie guy as he became known for like two
days on the internet before he got his actual day. UM. First,

(01:36:55):
I guess I probably I probably in case you haven't
listened to the previous episode I did on Written House,
so probably kind of explain what open source stuff is
and what like OSAN is and verification. So it's about
trying to track down information using open sources um on
the Internet. So in terms of like nothing is uh,
it's it's all. It's it's it's it's it's already sitting there.

(01:37:17):
Nothing requires like special access, nothing requires you know, you
to hack into anyone's system. Um, it's it's stuff is
just the stuff that's already sitting there. The data, whether
that be you know, geographical data, personal data, data from
social media accounts, data from every time you've entered your
email into a random website that you maybe didn't know

(01:37:37):
quite what's going on, but you did it. Something that's
that gets stored somewhere as data and someone can probably
find it. Um. So it's all the stuff about you
on the Internet that is all open if you do
the digging. UM. Often cases this results in going through
social media profiles. UM. That is a good portion of
Osan's work is learning how to use Google really well

(01:37:59):
and how to how to how to go through social
media UM. Start using like Google search operators, start using
social media tools that help you sort through information. Because
the information is there, you just have to learn how
to sort through it, right, because there's just so much
of it. Um. So that's kind of the just to
what open source stuff is. You mean, eventually you can
get into the stuff like using like Python, using code

(01:38:19):
and scrapers, like. All that stuff is there too, But
for our purposes, we're gonna stick to the more simplistic
stuff because this is an audio format and I'm I'm
not going to start explaining Python code on a podcast. UM.
So let's let's let's turn back the clocks a year. UM.
A little over a year and it's January six. What's

(01:38:42):
kind of you or your collective's reaction just to kind
of watching things unfold, you know, Like as a researcher,
every every time I look at these types of you know, protests,
you know, whether they be big or small, always part
of my brains like trying to make connections and do
stuff right. So, as January six is unfolding, what's what's
kind of going through? Everyone a post and pressed his head.
The first thing that seemed to be collective in everybody's

(01:39:05):
mind was, oh my god, none of these people are
wearing face masks. Yea, Like the immediate thing is this
is probably going to be really easy for a lot
of people. There's nobody. Nobody is in any type of
like block or trying to hide their identity in at all,
something you see the European fascists actually doing more often.

(01:39:26):
There was a I think of a video from Germany
of a whole bunch of far right dude was just
to iatan black block, because black blocks a tactic. Um
So yeah, but in the States they're specifically January six,
it was, Yeah, no one was really worried about keeping
their identity secret. They really did not think what they
were doing was wrong. I think the other thing we

(01:39:46):
were a lot of us were really angry. Um, just
like we had been like yelling that this was gonna happen,
screaming it out, like trying to get people to pay attention,
and we got blown off so much. I remember, just
like a few days before, I got in an argument
with the Facebook friend and like people need to be

(01:40:09):
paying attention, like they're planning something. They're like, oh, it's fine,
it's fine, and then you know, just a few days later,
I'm like, oh, is it fine? Like that is kind
of always the curse of surveilling all of these things,
whether they be like a specific event or some movement
in general. Right, people who are really into q and
on before the Libs knew what qunan was and we're

(01:40:29):
warning about it for years before you know it resulted
in people dying. Um, Right, That's that's kind of always
the curse of these things is that it's it's you get,
you get the mix of the shock and horder of
the thing finally happening, and a weird relief. It's it's, it's,
it's it's it's a very bizarre feeling to watch these
things unfold because you're like, oh, I'm vindicated, but it

(01:40:53):
sucks that I'm vindicated, right. I remember, like the December
watching all these groups like I would just it was
just filled with dread. I knew something was gonna happen.
I didn't know what was gonna happen, and it was
just so much anxiety. And then like it's funny, January six,
after it happened, like it all went away. I was

(01:41:14):
able to get a decent night sleep just because there
was I didn't have that build up of suspense of
what what is it gonna be? What's it gonna look like?
How bad is it going to be? Um kind of
had that release. Yeah. Unfortunately they were all like amateur,
didn't know what they were doing, and it wasn't as

(01:41:34):
bad as it could have been. Yeah. Well, I think
as for the open source stuff, I'm going to kind
of walk us through chronologically and of in terms of
the journey of zip tie Guy, because I was doing
like archiving on January six, but zip Tyke I was
really the only dude I was interested in identifying. There

(01:41:55):
was there was a lot of other people doing really
great identification work. I was also generous six. I was
going through all the social media history of Ashley Babbitt,
archiving all of her Twitter and Facebook, like years of stuff.
I was to chronicle how she went from like an
Obama voter to a q and on from a proponent.
So that was what I was doing, and I was

(01:42:16):
writing an article with Belling Cat about that. Um. But
the only only other guy I wanted to identify was
zip tie guy because he was really interesting. He was
one of the few guys that was masked up. UM,
he had what he had visible weapons on him. He
was obviously carrying zip ties. You know, it gives you
images of like, oh yeah, it's like they're planning to
capture and execute people. That was like the general kind

(01:42:37):
of vibe um of that. So he was the only
person that I I was actually put work into identifying, and
I put a decent amount of work in. Now, I
I failed where other people succeeded, and we can talk
about like why in a sec But for like a
day at least, all we had to go on was
the picture of the guy holding the zip ties in

(01:42:59):
a mask. UM. There's a few other pictures of him
around from that day, but it's mostly mostly one picture
and the biggest clue that we had to start with, Um,
what what what what? Why don't you explain what the
what the first clue is and how that may be
piqued your interest. He had two patches on his vest,
and one of them was a thin blue line patch,

(01:43:21):
but it was in this uh shape of the state
of Tennessee. So so yeah, in terms of having a
decent lead, that is like, okay, well that that narrows
it down to one of fifties states, probably right, Yeah,
I should say I'm from Knoxville, so like it be
in Tennessee that I picked up on that because that's

(01:43:41):
my state. Yeah, that it becomes a local problem. I
and as someone in Oregon, I definitely understand that feeling
of of yeah, when fascism becomes a local problem of Yeah,
So that definitely piqued your interest specifically, but then also
gives a really good lead for like where to look
because ozar he's not trying to do a meta thing

(01:44:03):
by tricking us into giving us a false lead. Generally
people don't do that as often in real life as
they do in television. Um, but there's still has plenty
of other ways to detect I mean, I I love
I love detecting, and there's there's enough, there's enough stuff
to do otherwise that making it needlessly complicated as honestly,
I'm fine with it not being that. Um. So, yeah,

(01:44:27):
we had we had that to go off initially, so
starting looking for like far right activity in Tennessee. Now
I was an outsiders. I didn't really know where to
start in terms of specific rallies. But I know, used, Uh,
at what point did you start looking trying to like
go through pictures of specific rallies to try to like
match clothing or stuff. I think it was probably it

(01:44:50):
may have been that day or the day after when
I started going through the notebooks that I had, like
names of just people we suspected may become problems. Um,
and I started looking at their profiles again and you know,
didn't find anything. And in our research that we had

(01:45:12):
already done, we didn't see anything on OK. Yeah, I
mean that was kind of the case for me as well.
With just the picture of the zip tie a guy
with the patch, I mean, it's it's a lead, but
there wasn't tons to go on. But thankfully, thankfully are
are good friends. At January six, we're giving us more
clues as because as the Simpsons meme goes videotaping this

(01:45:35):
crime scene was the best idea we ever had. Um. So,
like January I think seventh, there was a live stream
video that was kind of circulating through like anti facist
group chats um. It was. It was posted like publicly
to get everyone's attention on it on January eight, um,
but for like a day it was kind of passing
through back channels and throughout in this live stream, which

(01:45:57):
is Yeah, there was so many people were live streaming
that night and it is a kind of surreal thing
to watch of them. This this this live stream in particular,
it is the zip Ti guy if you his friends, um,
I think his mom and a few and just ran
the people from January six all hanging out at a
hotel room afterwards, like it's it is it is the
night of the six and they're all just hanging out

(01:46:19):
again totally like no masks, they're they're they're in a
hotel lobby, no masks, um, and they're just like hanging
out on chilly like sitting on the couch and chatting
for like half an hour. It's one of the weirdest
videos to watch. All all of the live streams from
that night are so surreal because it is like this
transitionary period of like after the capital attack but before
every before, like people like go down on them, so

(01:46:42):
they don't really know how to behave They still think
what they did was kind of fine, even though at
this point, like I think like four or five people
are dead. Um, but it's so weird just watch them
just interact like such normal people in this moment, like
after they did this thing. Then they go in this
hotel room and they're acting completely normal. So it's it's
just a weird video in general. But what it does

(01:47:03):
have is someone in the same outfit as zip Ti
guy with no mask on you actually we actually can
see his full face yea. Getting to see his full
face was a big, big, health, big help because we ever,
everyone was looking for pictures of this guy without his
mask all like for the entirety of the day. So
now having a whole video where we can see like

(01:47:24):
all of the angles of him was great. It was perfect.
The best. The best thing that was really the beauty
of of all of of all of all the January
six documentation is how many people were live streaming themselves
doing crimes and their friends. Um it did. It did
make the archiving and uh well not the archiving part.
Archiving is always painful and tedious, but it made the

(01:47:45):
actual research afterwards a lot easier because there was so
much the documentation of it. So, yeah, we we got
we got this video. I'm gonna explain how I kind
of took this video and failed to reach the conclusion,
and then we can talk about how you succeeded. But first,
but first we're gonna hear some ads from our lovely
products and services. Robert was here for our previous recording

(01:48:08):
uh that we tried to end I failed, and he
made some very good jokes uh and very good segways
about how all of our sponsors support insurrection just like
January six, And if I tried to repeat the jokes,
it will be stupid. So I'm just gonna I'm just
gonna give you the sense there was a joke, and
now you're gonna be left with that dissatisfaction. So bye, goodbye.

(01:48:29):
Here's some ads. Okay, we're back, and I'm going to
give an extremely brief rundown on how I failed to
do uh well, I didn't fail to do research. I
did research. I just didn't reach a proper conclusion. Um
and I knew that. So the the the other the
other thing about Zip Tie Guy he had he had
the patch of like the thin blue line in Tennessee.

(01:48:50):
And then that's at then I soon after got the
video of his face and uh interacting with people. And
the the other thing is I think, um we the
hat he was wearing in the Siptie Guy photo was
I think was tracked back to be um our favorite
coffee company, Black Rifle Coffee merchandise. It was it was

(01:49:13):
like what was what was one of the hats they sell?
So me, being clever, I'm like, okay, here's this Black
Raffer Coffee hat, this patch in Tennessee. I know Black
Ripe Coffee is based out of Tennessee. I'm gonna go
look through everyone who works for Black Raffle Coffee, which
you mean isn't a bad instinct as an outsider. But
it did not. It did not succeed. But the funny

(01:49:33):
thing is is that while looking through all the employees
at Black Apple Coffee, all of them do look identical
to Zip Tie Guy. They all same characteristics. They all
look exactly the same on their their beards, their nose,
their forehead, their hair, all of them identical, every single
one of them, to the point where the only way
I could tell that it wasn't the zip tie guy

(01:49:54):
was being like, Okay, no, he has a mole here,
he has like a birthmark here. This way, his like
his eyes or his eye wrinkles are different. So it's
like it's going down to the very like fine tuned
facial features, because all of their face shapes are like identical.
I think there's a point that I had the same instinct.
I think I know there's a point that I went through,

(01:50:15):
um the black coffee rifle. All of their people look um.
I don't know if it was for Eric until or
if it was like maybe around the written house stuff.
I don't know. Uh. Yeah, So that that's that's what
I spent my time doing, is going through everybody who

(01:50:35):
works there of Uh. But but by the time I
kind of gave up on that, the identity was already discovered,
um and posted by your team at a Possum Press.
So how how did you get from you know, this
zip Tygi picture than the light the archived livestream video

(01:50:55):
of him without without a mask, to to the point
where you could say, hey, this is his name. But
well I was I wasn't even really in contact with
Like we as a group weren't messaging each other trying
to figure this out together, but we were, like it
turns out a few of us were working separately. So

(01:51:16):
while I'm going through social media. UM, a friend in
Nashville was um going through pictures of the protests from
there over the summer, and they ended up finding about
five different pictures, I think, and we knew we knew
most of the people in the pictures. That are maybe
like one or two that we did not know, And

(01:51:37):
one was always Eric Munchell and he's wearing the exact
same gear he wore January six. Um, I say, Eric Munchell,
we didn't know his name yet then, so UM, from there,
we kind of we went ahead and posted what we
had to Twitter, and then we went back to the
social media and I started looking through the UM profiles

(01:52:01):
that were the people we knew, and sure enough, one
of them, Kurt Dennis, had a live stream that was
telling the story, um, the same story that Eric Mutchell
told him that thirty minute video, and he actually while
telling it, he's like, yeah, my buddy Eric. So at

(01:52:25):
that point we go to his friends list and sure enough,
he only has one Eric there and it's Eric Mutchell.
And there we go to that page and find some
of the same gear in the background of the pictures
that he has publicly posted. Yeah, he like puts the
pictures of him and his gear with like guns, and yeah,
you can. You can track all of his like facial
like like like like birth marks and stuff. They're all

(01:52:47):
the same. So yeah, you and that that's you. Uh,
you definitely got him of Yeah, their own mistakes. Yeah,
that's that's my favorite part. Like they they gave us
his idea, and they often, if not handing themselves to
you on a silver pill adder, they at least have
a platter um. They they often there's often enough bread, right.

(01:53:08):
The reason why these things are solved because there are
enough bread comes to follow and often they kind of
leave pretty big chunks of bread. Um. Just the fact
that again added to the surreal aspect of that whole
live stream video, the fact that he's like, you matched
it by telling the same you can hear them someone
tell the same story, is just such a weird weird
surreal thing. Yeah, so I think in terms of like

(01:53:31):
oas and stuff, what this case study in particular really
highlights is the importance of archival stuff. Right. The reason
why you were able to solve this and not me
is because I wasn't. I mean, I did my own
archival thing for archiving, like the video. But um, the
way that you were able to really crack this open

(01:53:53):
and everyone else who worked on it is because you
had like those lists of connections of people who are
already kind of active in this like al right far
right scene within your local community. Like you already had
documentation of the major players who they interact with, or
you you already had pictures of this guy in gear
with other known people. So the fact that there was

(01:54:16):
already previously work archived really made the success of this
so much more possible. That's what they but People's Plaza
and Nashville during their protests, they were really big on documenting.
Um they documented everything with the police and um any
counter protesters they would. They had professional photographers out there

(01:54:38):
making sure we had good, clear quality pictures of like
everybody on the other side as well, and that definitely
helped us a lot. Yeah, because especially before January six,
they there was they did a decent job of archiving themselves,
well not not archiving, but like filming them selves and

(01:55:00):
documenting themselves, and then you know, it takes takes other
research to then archives that. So not only is important
just to like look at the research and look at
like the documentation of the that people do of themselves,
but then make sure that you have a source for
that that's not their own uploading of it. Right. So,
like a great example is like all of the live
streams from January six, including like this one from this

(01:55:22):
hotel room. Pretty soon it was deleted by the person
who posted it because they realized, oh maybe I shouldn't
have this living record of my crimes. Um. But at
that point, people already saved the video. They already like
I already ran it through a video of saving program
that I had. UM. So it's it's important not only
to get archiving having having having previous documentation of people

(01:55:46):
and known players, but then as new information is coming out,
make sure you make separate copies of that for your
own sake so that you actually have it and then
you're not gonna be stuck looking for something that's gone right,
the worst case scenarios to like you know that there
is an important thing, but you just don't have access
to it anymore. It's like you you remember seeing it,
you didn't save it, and now it's gone. That's a

(01:56:07):
horrible feeling to do when you're trying to get this
kind of research done. Um. And like it happens. We all,
we all make mistakes like this. Um, I definitely have
it happened to me actually this week. Yeah, it happens
all the time. And it happens to me. It happens
to be all the time. I'll look at something and
be like I should probably save this. I get distracted
or I just don't want to because our chindague is
boring and tedious, and then I check again that's gone.

(01:56:29):
I'm like, well that's I should have archived it. Yeah.
So on on top of all of the archiving stuff,
which in general, anti fascist research is really that that's
the thing that really excels at even like um above
above journalism is like you know, getting like traditional journalism
is like getting a good documentation of like key fascist

(01:56:51):
players in your area, key people who are kind of
pushing far right stuff and far right violence. Actually getting
like a good a good, a good idea of who
they are and having that knowledge always handy. Um is
something that this type of research is is really that
that is really what it excels at, or like what
what the what those researchers excel at. This is the

(01:57:12):
thing that they do very well. I think a lot
of us probably started doing it just out of curiosity
looking into people. That that is certainly how I started,
Like I've been doing it long before, I just didn't
know that's what it was called. Because like I'd see
somebody make a messed up common online, I'm like, who

(01:57:32):
is this person? And then you know, trying to find
as much as I can about them. Yeah, that's that
is certainly how I got started with this type of thing,
because it can be fun to look for bad people.
It is, it is. It is kind of pleasurable. Um
and one of one of the again another big contributing factor.

(01:57:53):
And how you got zip tie guy, How how I
got written? How how a lot of this stuff works.
Um is the beauty of Facebook as a research tool
because often in order in order in order to do
the archiving, you need to have stuff to archive, and
a lot of the stuff that gets posted from these
things by the people doing them UM is done on Facebook,

(01:58:15):
or at least it used to write the past five years, really,
Facebook has been the main main source of this UM.
Now it's maybe now people are kind of getting wise
and maybe some stuff is moving to telegram. Facebook is
becoming a little a little bit less important of a
platform for this type of research. And I know Facebook
has changed the way that they um that you can
use their service, so it does make research kind of

(01:58:37):
harder in some ways, but but even still it is
it is one of the better tools to UM to
dig into certain types of people, because there is certain
types of people who are going to be more likely
to use Facebook. UM. And yeah, in terms of how
getting Facebook was the method, it's not where the place

(01:58:58):
where you're able to make the link between the fascists
you already knew and and Eric um because of because
you are you already you you already knew who the
players were, and then Facebook had the visualized network to
actually make those connections. So Facebook itself and social media
in general is really is really useful. And then in
terms of how this operate, it's like going through friends

(01:59:19):
lists is really easy. UM but oftentimes a lot of
people will not maybe have those public um and what
what then there's again it's not a dead road. You
can still look through likes, you can still look through shares,
you can still look through like um if you like
people are tagged in photos. Um it it really it
really is a is a great is a great system

(01:59:42):
that is good at making you not have privacy. That
is the thing. It really it really excels it. Yeah,
and even even if people don't have like an active
social media presence per se um, it can still be
really useful in getting specific names of people or or
just make or just having a connection be known like this.

(02:00:06):
This was mostly how I was able to identify the
all the anonymous um riot cops in when when the
Portland Police Bureau took took away their badge numbers and names.
Um is that I could get like a list of
cops and we could start figuring out like, okay, this
is probably this is this is this is pre cops
previously on the right team, right, and start doing facial

(02:00:28):
matching um and then if I want to learn out
if if I wanna if I want to learn more
information about like their first name and more information about
them in general, even if they don't have a social
media profile, often their wife might or their mom might.
You know, there's a UM And in terms of fun
sentences to say, really learning how to exploit people's family

(02:00:51):
as a weakness is is is wonderful um for this
type of stalking stalking violent bad people. UM Because yeah,
because a lot of a lot of a lot of
the riot cops were smart enough to not to at
least to either not have their presence at all on
the internet UM or to have it very locked down
in terms of you know, no one can see their posts,
no one can see their friends, no one can see anything.

(02:01:12):
But still their wife will occasionally tag them in photos
or uh maybe not even photos of them, but like
they'll they'll just take them in a photo of like
their kid or something. And then this just creates more
ways to make connections that you can you know, learn
more about these specific people. UM because sometimes that's fun
and interesting. I've noticed some people with socks that I've

(02:01:34):
found their identity. It's by going through the likes and seeing, um,
you know, the same woman is always the first to
put a heart react there, and you can go to
their pages sometimes it's a little if you go through
their pictures and you see a picture of the guy
there with they'll have like somebody in the comments, Oh,

(02:01:55):
Mark looks really good. There something you know. Naming the
it's been in frim Mary, you can get the last name.
You know, you've ne the wife's last name, you have
a good chance of that being their last name. Yeah. Yeah,
So Family Families really is really great for finding people

(02:02:15):
because because like all the research is is learning how
to make these open sourced connections, right, A lot a
lot of it is connections and networking, and people usually
always have an innate connection and networking and that that
that is their family UM. And often this like extends
out in terms of you know, political organizing, whether you're
part of you know, militias or just kind of smaller groups. Yeah,

(02:02:38):
that is another network. Um Friends is another network. But
you know, for people who are kind of are are
more locked down, it is possible to find the information
about people, um, you know, especially if they have like
if they have like a not very common last name,
you know, that can make finding information about them much
easier if you're using tools like Facebook, um, and then
it's you know, just a matter of doing all the

(02:02:59):
other you know, open source research of you know, comparing clothing, um,
you know, and comparing to what other kind of information
you already know about the person, email addresses, phone numbers,
if you can, you know, get that, get that kind
of stuff as well. But I think that's all I
had on Zip tie guy out mostly. M Yeah, he's
a really easy one. There's not a whole lot to

(02:03:19):
really dive into their Yeah, no, for for someone for
someone who was one of the few people massed up,
wasn't was not was not that hard to find. I mean, yeah,
of course, the fact that he was found by local
people in his area not surprising. Um. That's another thing

(02:03:40):
anti fascist research is really good at, is that type
of local research, because you know, they they have they
have all those local connections, they have those local um
documentation of like a political events that have happened in
their area. So again, it's the the importance of of
having stuff archives and having stuff like sorted and having
stuff organized well so you can access your archives. Information

(02:04:02):
is really important. It's it's it sucks that it's it's
the part of OS and I hate the most. Everyone
Everyone hates, Everyone hates I'm I'm sure there's some sick
of out there who likes it, but everyone else, everyone
else hates all of the You hate all this organizing
and sorting. And I find archiving to be tedious. Archiving videos,

(02:04:23):
live streams, it's tedious, it's difficult. Um, it's time, it's
time consuming, it's repetitive, it's not generally not a good time,
but it is so useful and in the long run
of trying to get these like a list of of
like established players in your area. This is how you
start seeing patterns, right. You need to have this information

(02:04:44):
already laid out so you can actually watch the patterns unfold.
Otherwise it's just a whole bunch of chaotic information that
means nothing. So it's it's super important, as as much
of a bummer as it may be. Yeah, let's see, Um,
is there anything you've been working on since then that
you like that you would like to talk about, or
any upcoming research projects. Right now, I'm really focused on

(02:05:09):
our local UM school board, and you know, like many
towns across the country, we have fascists trying to take
it over and going to the meetings, and so I've
been watching that group very closely for the last several months.
It's probably about October our school year. We started out

(02:05:31):
without a mask mandate. UM and a couple of parrots. UM,
who's children need like they're there, I mean a compromise
like their their kids need the everybody else to wear
a mask. So their parents sued the school board and

(02:05:51):
our governor UM to have a mass band aid, and
the judge issued an injunction and like the next Monday,
all the schools had to wear a mask. And the
anti mask crowd is like losing their ship over it.
Still UM trying to figure out how to fire the judge. UM.

(02:06:13):
It's like, yeah, we have a member of Patriot Church
who's involved in it, and you know they're the ones
with the Church of plan Parenthood. It's Ken Peter too.
I think he's from Washington, yes, spoken, I believe, yeah,
and he's he's moved down here. UM. I think he
still goes up there to the to the church stuff,

(02:06:35):
but most of his time is spent down here in
Tennessee and m causing just as much trouble as he
does up there and his followers. So I'm curious to
see how how does a research project like this school
board thing differ from like the research surrounding you know,
trying to identify someone at January six. Um, for one,

(02:07:00):
this is local. It's you know, I'm going to the
school board meetings. Um, I know it's easier to know
where to look for this because like I'm watching it
as it happening, where, like you know, January six, most
of those people you have no clue where to even
start from. Um, So this more now, it's it's monitoring

(02:07:21):
and documenting as we've you know, figure out who these
people are, like linking telegram names with Facebook names and
all of that. So I guess now it's more record
keeping and getting that documentation done early so when one
of them goes too far, we have and we haven't ready.

(02:07:42):
I mean, that's that's that's the sad part where it's
like you're watching inevitive inevitability almost as it can mean.
But that's yeah, that's also how like January six works. Right,
we were able to identify these people because there was
a lot of documentation of a lot of major players already. Right,
So a lot of the work in between these big
pro tests and events is is the is this is

(02:08:03):
the slow, tedious documentation because we have to do it
now so that it's a useful later. Let's you know,
A big part of research is like yeah, trying to
spot potential you know, issues and archiving it and then
if the issue ever becomes a bigger issue, you already
have information on it, right, whether that be you know,

(02:08:23):
watching someone online who you might think is who like,
watching someone who's like a Nazi who you might be
worried that, like they're posting and plans about how to
kill people. You're like, okay, so probably look into this
dude because he's doing this in case he does something
in the future. Um, it is that is kind of
it sucks because yeah, you are watching this thing where

(02:08:45):
you feel kind of helpless, but you know that documenting
it is worthwhile. Um they get oah. It's the same
thing where like you don't want to be vindicated, but
if it does happen, it's better to be prepared. I
don't think people realize like how much anti fascist research,
how much of this type of like ohs and stuff

(02:09:06):
like my journalism, Like most of the work that you
put into it is never seen. Even if you do
complete investigations. Sometimes by the end you're like it's getting
getting them, getting them out in enough time for them
to be useful. Sometimes it isn't even worth it. Um.
So you know a lot of it is, you know,
writing stuff and doing research that never actually sees the

(02:09:26):
light of day for a long long time. Right with
Eric Mountchell. We had like probably twenty people we had
on our list too, and he wasn't even one of them. Yeah,
so you do all this and like, on one hand,
it almost felt in a moment like all of that
we did was really for nothing. But now it did
lead to Yeah, it did lead. And even when you

(02:09:49):
do find the correct answer, sometimes sometimes could via circumstances.
You know, it's not something you need to post about immediately.
Sometimes it's worth just you know, hanging onto um and
not being super super public about every horrible thing you fight.
It's not like you don't need to post every time
you fight a horrible thing on telegram. You don't. You

(02:10:10):
don't need to tell Twitter that. It's like, it's it's
about collecting these things and keeping them there for future use. Um. Well,
thank you so much for coming on to talk with
me again, um after after already already discussing uh, mostly
the same things. Where can people follow your stuff online?

(02:10:34):
We're on Twitter at um at a possum press really easy. Yeah,
we're on Facebook. We don't actually do much on Facebook though.
Um yeah, as we've discussed now, you probably probably shouldn't.
I mean, like in in a lot of ways, a
lot of like fashions organizing that you used to be
done in primarily like Facebook groups or just even just

(02:10:55):
like through like like incidental organizing through just through like
posting and cross posting. A lot of that has been
moved over to Telegram at this point. Telegram is kind
of the new main nexus, whereas Facebook and like the
days of the early alt right, Facebook was a pretty
big nexus for like the more normalis right. You know
it's there. There is actually fascist forms that we're doing organizing,

(02:11:17):
but as a place for Again, like a lot of
people in January six who didn't really know what they
were doing was wrong. They were mostly you know, make
American Great again people or quing on people. A good
portion of like most of them were not you know,
swastika waving Nazis. Um. They may they may agree with
fascist ideas, but they don't they don't self describe as Nazis.

(02:11:39):
So like, um, but we're even seeing after after January
six with you know, um Facebook like cracking down on
these groups, other platforms like Partla going offline a lot
of these normies themselves, or even migrating onto Telegram. UM.
So you know, Facebook used to be a really great
research tool and I'm using it less and left off
less and less often now on fourtunately because I mean,

(02:12:01):
it really didn't have a lot of strong suits. Telegram
doesn't have his own strong suits. But you know, it's
it's still it's still different. I think the norm is
moved into Telegram is troubling though, because a way easier
time that is there. That is the obvious thing is, Yeah,
now that those groups are in closer proximity, it's easier

(02:12:23):
for one to seep into the other, whereas before there
was more of that distinction. Um. Yes, that is a
worrying thing that I believe we've talked about before and
we'll talk about again um in the future, in terms
of having this like fascist milieu or cultic milieu, UM
of a place where the the amount of the amount
of overlap between you know, your uncle who's a regular

(02:12:47):
Conservative and you know a member of Adam often, or
you know someone who wishes they remember ab Adam often.
Um is very small. It's an these they are they
are very close together. Yeah, well, thank you for talking
about all of these things on our on our second
o Sand Case study episode. Like guess big big big

(02:13:10):
takeaways is uh, archiving is great, archive live streams, archived
things because it's better to have them um and not
use them than not have them and need them. Um.
And then you know, archiving and documenting local fascists is
really great even for things beyond your locality, like in
January six. Um, so those are those are my main

(02:13:30):
takeaways from this and uh, you know, also everyone a
black life coffee. They all they all look like everyone
at day six, all of them do they do all right?
That doesn't for us, Thank you so much. I can
follow the metoposus and press um good bye. Everybody. Look

(02:13:53):
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(02:14:13):
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(02:14:57):
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(02:15:18):
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(02:16:00):
could happen here the only podcast you are legally allowed
to listen to right now. Um, I'm Robert Evans. We
talk about things falling apart, putting them back together, all
that good stuff. With me as it's like seventy of
the time. Is my co host Garrison Davis Garrison, how
are you doing today? I'm doing great. This is early

(02:16:22):
for you. Yeah. I get they have to they have
to drag me out of bed, but I I made
it just I'm excited to talk about a hair after three. Okay,
I have my second coffee already, So our topic is
gun culture. Uh, and to discuss gun culture with me
and a number of aspects of it, including how to
maybe make a better one. Uh. Is Carl cassarda from

(02:16:46):
ranged TV. Carl, Welcome to the program. Hey, thanks for
having me. I'm really stoked to be here. And it's
a topic, as you can imagine with my work on
range TV, is a near and dear to my heart
because it's a challenging one. We've got a lot of
are things in this community and a lot of challenges
to Yeah, gun YouTube has gone some really interesting places
in the last um. Really, it feels like most of

(02:17:09):
the growth happened the last five six years, Like there's
been a real significant increase in Yeah. I feel like
there's been like a wave. I feel like there's generations
of gun two. There's like gen one, Gen two, Gen
three in theres Russian back in the day and stuff
totally Yeah, and so there's a whole thing there. There's
there's generations of what was addressed in the conversation and

(02:17:30):
the cultural significance as well as the gear impact. I
think we've got different kind of generations of the yeah.
And I think this stuff obviously when when aspects of
gun YouTube go viral, it tends to be stuff that's
like particularly problematic, But in my experience, most of it
is just dudes shooting stuff to see what happens, or
you know, trying out different guns and stuff like. It

(02:17:50):
is mostly if you're someone who you know believes in
the right to bear arms, it's mostly pretty much just
like people drying out guns and stuff with guns. Yeah. Yeah,
when things go viral, it's like my my experience with that,
there's a number of reasons. A right, one is that
it's particularly gross that someone does something or says something
fucked up, somebody's out there dressed as a rotation a right,

(02:18:12):
stuff like that. That kind that tends to push the buttons.
But yeah, most of the time, the stuff that gets
the largest volume of viewership are quite honestly more banal.
It's things like a fifty caliber exploding or shooting a gallon,
you know, fifty five gallon drum of gas. That kind
of stuff. Is that that stuff appeals to people that
aren't just gunned people, so they're like, oh, I want

(02:18:34):
to see shoots fload, so let me click on it. Well,
one of my favorite things is to look at videos
of people destroying safe life fests one of my favorite
ways to watch gun YouTube. But I guess this is
probably what we'll probably talking about this as the episode
goes on. But once you watch enough of those from
like one channel, you'll you'll get to a video when
they fantasize about like shooting Antifa or something. They're like, Okay,

(02:18:55):
well yeah, that yeah, that's that's just the way it
goes sometimes. And it is, you know, the thing that
my first I guess the first time I became aware
of like online gun culture UM was a site that's
still really near and dear to my heart. I'm sure
you're familiar with it, Carl the Box of Truth, And
it was like, and I think it is like fifteen
years ago or something like that is when I started

(02:19:15):
reading their stuff, and it's it's just like some kind
of bubbay dudes in Texas who will take different who
will try out like, hey, there's a myth that UM
this specific round in Korea got stopped by people who's
were wearing multiple layers of like clothing in the cold.
Can winter clothing stop this bullet? And they would they
would you know, mock up the clothing on like a
target and they would shoot it, or like, how many

(02:19:36):
books does it take? Like if you have a full backpack,
how many books would it take to stop a round
of nine millimeter? If? I like, it's it's all very
much like practical Hey, people you know say this works
this way or this works that way. Well let's go
out and shoot some stuff and test how it works.
And um, I think was like it is, as you said,
the kind of thing I think, even if you don't
own guns you might find interesting just because like a

(02:19:57):
lot of it is dealing with here's things you've seen
in Hollywood, what ACTU really happens? Um? So I do
think like fundamentally there's always going to be a place
for that kind of content because it's it's not just
like stuff that people who like guns are interested in.
It's just stuff that has kind of objective value. You know,
you're trying to expand what people's understanding of things. Yeah,

(02:20:18):
I call that g whiz content. It's like g whiz
what happens if right? And so on? In range. The
closest equivalent to that, which are the videos that the
most views are are somewhat now infamous mud tests. Um.
And it started up six years ago and it was
literally it was G whiz, let's go do this. And
of course there's this long standing lore everywhere outside of
the gun community and in it about the A K

(02:20:39):
M being this undestruct indestructible unicorn you're right into combat
that no matter what happens to it, it fires, and
they are A fifteen being this fragile piece of ship.
And in our mud test, which we've now done multiple
of it will initially it was just G whiz. Over
time and aggregate, it turned out to actually have really
interesting data points and that the A k doesn't do
well in mud and they are excels in mud, which

(02:21:00):
is completely against the lore about Vietnam, which is a
different problem. But that kind of thing extends beyond the
gun community because people are like guns and mud. What
happened is it's MythBusters kind of stuff. Yeah, and I think,
but it's interesting how you can learn from it. Yeah,
And I think one of the problems that is, uh
we we could say like has is an issue on
on gun YouTube. One of the things that has become

(02:21:22):
an issue, and this isn't just within the gun culture,
it's everywhere, is that like, if you're into that stuff
and if you're if you're coming into it like I
want to see people do this g with stuff, or
I just want to see reviews of different guns because
I might be buying one. Um, Google's algorithm is going
to feed you a lot of stuff, and some of
that stuff is going to be people who, yeah, are
preparing to like shoot folks at protests, and our filming

(02:21:43):
videos about that and stuff, and that it has this
um it has this radicalizing effect on a lot of people.
And it also has this kind of can have this
kind of radicalizing effect on content where you know, most
political stuff you see isn't kind of that over it,
but it does if somebody has a video where they're
being more explicitly political outside of you know, you know,

(02:22:04):
arguing in favor of gun rights, but if they're getting
kind of political and a broader since, and that does
really well the way that content works. As other people
might be like, oh, well, folks want me to do
a political video, Folks want me to talk about I
don't know, Nancy Pelosi or whatever. Um, And that that's
you know, not just a problem with gun culture or
gun YouTube, but it has increasingly become a thing and

(02:22:26):
in the n r A kind of very famously. There's
a good podcast on the how that organization has kind
of gone from where it started to where it is
that talks about like n r A TV. But they
their YouTube channel had some pretty outrageous ship for a while,
and I think it left an impact even though it
failed in this eventually, well, the n r A is
until we can get into that later. The NA has

(02:22:47):
changed so much since its organs to what it is now.
It's not even the people have found it. It It wouldn't
recognize it, I don't think at all. But you're touching
on a topic there that's also near and dear, and
I'm not trying to promote Ranger. That's just work having
a conversation. But years ago I decided to proactively demonetize.
I turned off my AdSense and I take no money
from any views, so it's not like advertising doesn't drive

(02:23:08):
what I do. And I feel like the reason I
did that was partially just fuck you YouTube. It was
the hacker manifesto of you come watch my content, I
cost you money versus make you money, which is kind
of a statement on my part. But additionally, I do
feel like whether it's firearms or any other content that
is completely advertiser supported. There is a dangerous thing there
in that you have to pursue the clicks like a

(02:23:30):
heroin addict, and the clicks make you the money, and
therefore you're gonna make the stuff that's gonna make the
clicks because that's how you make your income. And even
if you don't want it to do, it can affect you. Yeah,
and I'm curious, like, how do you kind of how
do you, um, how do you how do you approach

(02:23:50):
sort of dealing in this space where it is so
easy for things to become politicized? Like do you is
that is that a kind of thing that you have
to be conscious sort of picking your battles. I guess
I'm just kind of interested in how you because you
definitely have been more open about having kind of more
on the left libertarian side of things politics than a

(02:24:11):
lot of people talk about in that space. How do
you decide kind of what is worth inserting and what
is worth kind of just you know, no one needs
to hear that within this context. Oh yeah, I don't
think that that's an easy thing to answer, right, It's hard,
Like there's a lot of landlines. But when um introspectively
for me, the answer for me at least was, I'm

(02:24:32):
just going to come to this content as my honest self, Like,
if I'm just going to produce what I want to produce,
it's and since I don't have to worry about advertising dollars,
I'm just gonna make this ship I want to make.
And as a result, I guess it's sometimes considered an
alternative voice, but I don't think it really is. I
think that the loud loud mouths have made it sound

(02:24:52):
like there's only one voice in this community, but there isn't.
And so by just being legitimate and honest and being me,
there's turned out to be a lot of ground swell
if you want to use grassroots type people out there
that want to hear something that's not just evangelical American
Taliban so. But but in terms of what where to where,
what where to put your foot on? What landline, I

(02:25:14):
guess I did. For me, my decision has been to
do topics that have been intentionally ignored that shouldn't have been.
Like I've done a bunch of videos about the confluence
of civil rights and firearms ownership, which there's a lot
of it, and it's it's really amazing how much there
is and no one talks about it. Yeah, I mean
we yeah, we We've chatted about that a little bit
in some of our episodes. It was like nineteen nineteen
when there were all those like race riots around the country,

(02:25:36):
or even if you're looking at like the post construction period,
there's a history both of like gun control being used
for racist purposes, but also just of communities arming themselves,
Black communities arming themselves. That is is woefully undertold, although
it is people are starting to deal with it more thankfully. UM.
I'm kind of interested in talking to you about sort
of the culture jamming aspect of we have this huge

(02:26:00):
gun culture. Aspects of it are very toxic and becoming
politicized in a way that is um aggressive, Um, how
do we how do we have a positive influence and
kind of hopefully pull things back, because I do think
within kind of the issue of gun rights, there's more
actually more possibility for people to sort of come together

(02:26:22):
and reaching a chord than there is on something like abortion. UM.
And I think a lot of that conversation is going
to start in spaces like the one you inhabit. Yeah, no,
I yeah, I like what you say culture jamming, because
another term I've heard is subversive. Well that's not the intent,
but like you mentioned the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen,
and yeah, I talked to when I talked to a

(02:26:42):
lot of people that that are really hged historically interested
in minded, and I was astonished how many people have
not even heard of it. Never mind you only like
the explicit realities of it. And so when it comes
to the culture jamming thing, there's one video I did
about or two of the events of Red Summer of
nineteen nineteen, one of them here in Bisbee locally, and
it's an interesting problem to someone who normally would be

(02:27:04):
considered as a very standard issue firearms content creator. In
that particular Red Summer nineteen nineteen episode, it turned into
the local police attempting to disarm the tenth Cavalry soldiers
who are off you know, military soldiers in bis beyond recreation.
And so you've got this interesting cognitive dissonance. Do I

(02:27:25):
support the cops that a lot of firearms people are
like just blindly support, or do I support the military
which a lot of farms people blindly support. When both
of them converge and the and it's a racist agenda
in it. That poses a question that I like to
do with like this kind of content because it means
that the viewer has to really, if they get through
the video, have to introspectively go, Holy funk, which do

(02:27:46):
I support or do I support either? Or is there
a problem here I haven't been considering. I think asking
questions like that really matters when you try to like
start these conversations with people who are kind of in
the same space but but not you know, I haven't
considered talking about this stuff before or on what would
traditionally be seen as kind of very opposed political um wing.

(02:28:09):
How do you kind of start these conversations in a
way that makes it most likely that you're gonna be
able to have a positive dialogue that actually moves forward
as opposed to kind of getting bogged down in the
and the things that caused people to just kind of
lock horns generally when you we start getting into these areas. Yeah,
you know, I don't know, it's totally possible you're gonna
have that problem no matter what you see that with

(02:28:29):
your work. For surely when you take an honest approach
to history and just be like, here's the facts. Um,
there's gonna be people that are just gonna be completely
resistant to that. They're not going to take it. But UM,
I think the best way to do that is to
just be that honest approach to it. Like one of
the things that I think we do with firearms content
gears cool tech is cool. Guns are neat, They're fun.

(02:28:50):
I enjoy shooting with guns. I like the foard of it.
I like going to competitions. But one of the things
that gets left out of the conversation a lot is
what are the implications of arms and the sociological economic
environments that we live in. And I think that's one
of the things that didn't get talked about. And so
if we talk about it fairly and also tend to
I think it's hard to do, but have people from

(02:29:12):
all sides of this perspective, as long as they're not
completely dangerous and toxic, being part of the conversation. We
can have a better middle ground. That's the hard part.
Like so being inclusive, ironically, even of views that you
aren't necessarily your own, as long as the person you're
dealing with isn't my line is if you're actively supporting
bigotry or the harm of other people, there's a no go,

(02:29:35):
We're done. But if we have different views but we
realize that that's not the intent, then then we should
have a conversation. I think that that's a big difference now.
I think one of the areas in which this can
get murkiest is when you are talking to people and
I've had a few of these conversations who are convinced
that there is uh that they're kind of on the
precipice of of a violent conflict sparked by someone coming

(02:29:58):
to take their guns right that, and it in you know,
there's the version of this that is like, I'm worried
that the a t F is going to do some
fuckory in a bunch of my ship is going to
be illegal, which is pretty reasonable. And then there's the
I'm worried Antifa's going to come to my small town
and and and take my you know, guns or do
whatever like Because that there are often people in that
who are just kind of um tragically misinformed and radicalized

(02:30:21):
in a way that they're not so much eager to
harm people as they are just like broken and frightened
because of the things that have been fed to them. Um,
do you have any kind of best practices when it
comes to sort of approaching those conversations and trying to
improve the information those people are getting. I guess for
me in that regardless of what I when I see

(02:30:42):
people like that, and I think all of us have
those people in our world, whether it's your your aunt
or your uncle or a friend, right, Like we've seen
that over the last couple of years for sure. Um,
I think the best thing you can do there for
me again, I'm just talking to my approach and is
a break the echo chamber if you can? And so
the echo chamber of the problem when we suck from
the fire hose of only one source like NonStop. Yeah,

(02:31:03):
that's gonna be dangerous. That's the kind of stuff that
pollutes your mind to the point where you can't think
outside of that box. So like being more inclusive and
that word is kind of a trigger word, a catchphrase,
but being legitimately more inclusive and presenting a lot of
different diversity that really is part of the firearms community.
Can I can in some circumstances break the echo chamber?

(02:31:23):
Like I'm really happy with this one. Project on the
channel where I'm working with the net Evans about specifically
a female or woman's approach to self defense with firearms,
and you don't really see that. You'll see like channels
that are only for women, and you'll see like all
the majority of gun channels that are only for gun
fascinated dudes. But like throwing that into the mix, there's

(02:31:43):
gonna be some subset of people that will clicking and
watch it out of that g whiz lewel and that
kind of stuff can break a paradigm in terms of well,
I never thought of that. I never looked at it
from that perspective, And that's at least that's what I
think is the great answer is do your best to
make sure you're approachable and try to break the echo chamber. Yeah,
that makes complete Yeah, I mean that makes a lot
of sense. Um. I think on the other side of

(02:32:07):
this is also worth talking about because we've kind of
been focused on how do you break the echo chamber,
how do you get people who are you know, in
the gun culture on the right to be more open minded.
The other side of this is you have a lot
of people who are kind of liberals um or on
the left who have a really reflexively negative opinion to
the reaction to the very idea of gun ownership or

(02:32:30):
gun rights and have these you know, you will generally
see there's there's a mix of people who can come
to it from a very reasonable and argued point in
a mix of people who are just going to, like
in the same way that folks on the right to
throw out a handful of quotes that they've seen on memes, um,
that they can use to kind of, you know, shut
down debate. How do you do you have a lot
of those conversations where you're kind of trying to make

(02:32:51):
people at least more open to because this is something
my work is dealt with a lot. Is kind of
trying to sit down to Like, I get why you
don't think these things should be legal. Um, obviously I
I see the same mass shooting news that you do.
There's a problem, a deep problem with guns in this country.
I don't deny that, But like, let's also talk about
the idea that the state should have an absolute monopoly

(02:33:11):
on on the ability to do violence. Let's talk about
the ability of marginalized groups to defend themselves. Let's talk
about the history of gun control and how it's like
it is it is. There's a lot of conversations that
kind of get wrapped up in that. Um, I'm wondering,
do you have thoughts in terms of like how to
kind of broach those and progressive avenues to go down
to when you're having that side of the conversation. You know,

(02:33:33):
it's totally interesting. I think I feel like I don't.
I'm curious what you think about this from your work
as well. I feel like over the last for good reasons,
over the last couple of years, more than a couple
of years, I think I've seen, maybe it's just my
own echo chamber, I've seen a lot of people on
that side of the political spectrum coming more and more
around too being pro gun. Yeah. I mean then the

(02:33:54):
statistics back that up. Supportive in central in the United
States is the lowest it's been in quite a while.
Into that like if there's that joke on that side
of the political fence, but you go far enough left
to get your guns back right, um so Um, But
I think there's been a real wake up call for
a lot of people that used to be very much
vehemently against the idea, with some of the stuff they
saw and went, whoa, Um, this isn't These aren't going away.

(02:34:17):
And if you're reasonable, if you're willing to have a
rational thought about, at least in this country, the reality
of firearms ownership, whether you like it or not, it's
not debatable. This is real. It's what it is. They're
not like they could ban everything tomorrow and there's gonna
be air fifteens in this country for the next hundred years. Um,
so that ain't gonna change. So with that realization, maybe
the maybe the better idea, which I think is with

(02:34:38):
all technology, is instead of being afraid of it, is
to actually learn about it and understand it. Whether you
want it or not. You but like learning and understanding
it is at least a step further forward than just
complete abject fear. Yeah. That that is often kind of
where I start the conversation with just like we have
to deal with the reality as it is on the ground,
which is that there's million firearms and I have at

(02:35:00):
hands here, which is not all that far from half
of all of the guns in the world. Um So
any any sort of like plan you have, it's the
kind of like one of the things that often comes
up in those conversations is Australia and people they were like,
well they were able to do it after Now Port
Arthur was Scotland. Um, I forget the name of the massacre,
but there was a massacre in in in in Australia

(02:35:20):
that they banned most kinds of firearms after and confiscated them,
and it gets brought up a lot were like, well,
they did this in the short frame of time, and
there was this this impact on gun violence deaths. Why
couldn't we do it? And the reason is that they
had to confiscate a total of two hundred thousand arms
and there's four hundred million guns in private hands in
the United States. Um, it's it's a different scale of problem.

(02:35:43):
And that that's before we get into sort of illegal
barriers because Australia didn't have a Second Amendment. Obviously, like
whether or not you like it, firearms have a level
of protection that is equivalent to the protection free speech
enjoys in this country. And you can't just pretend that's
not the case. There's a tremendous body of jurisprudence around it. Yeah, no, totally,
and like so that that's that's part of it is

(02:36:04):
the reality there Australia and here is a completely different
beast as well as culturally, like the people that were
into guns there, and I don't mean to offend any
Australians listening, but it wasn't like here, like in a
place of Arizona. At places like Arizona, guns are just
if you're in Arizona, and they're just intrinsically part of life,
whether like they're just constant, they're everywhere you go to,

(02:36:24):
like you see them open care, not always do she
open care either. Sometimes it's like reasonable open care. Sometimes
you see the other side of it. But they're just everywhere.
It's just part of the deal. And it's like a
lot of that in a lot of the country. And
so um I actually think that that fear based ignorance
of them is more dangerous because then we don't teach
people what to do around them or how to be
safe around them, kind of like abstinence, Like education and

(02:36:46):
school teach people not to have sen that's fucking dumb,
that ain't gonna work, and guns exist in this country.
Does just be afraid of them that don't work either,
So in the regard, I think that the reality is
it's much better to to approach this. What I think.
I guess the way I try to deal with that
is if you don't fetishize them, people that are more

(02:37:07):
afraid of them are less likely to just click away.
If you talk about them like this is a thing,
here's what they are. They're not a totem against evil.
They're just a tool. And here's a historical story or
narrative or sociological impact of this that's not fetishizing it
as some religious item. I think that that helps break
that barrier a little bit. And I think that that

(02:37:28):
does bring me to something I think about a lot,
which is the how you're in and actually has I
think gotten a bit better than it was prior to
Sandy Hook, but the very sorry state in a lot
of cases of advertising of gear and guns. Um. I
think the most famous example was a I believe it
was a Bushmaster ad that got pulled after Sandy Hook
that was like an a R fifteen that came with

(02:37:49):
a man card that you would get like with your gun,
Get your card back. I think it's get your Man
card back. Your man card has been reissued because you
have this gun here and that I I you know,
I've seen a lot of different gun cultures because it's actually,
like we've just talked about how unique u s gun
culture is, but a lot of people actually own firearms

(02:38:09):
around the world. There's a lot of even like in Europe,
like France has a very significant gun culture, UM, and
in Germany you'd be surprised, like people can own a
lot of the same weapons you can here. There's a
lot more hoops to jump through to to get access
to them. Um, But there's still like there's gun cultures
all around, and especially places like Iraq and Syria. It
was really going to um when I saw kind of

(02:38:29):
the gun culture that I most wanted to put some
things over to hear from there. It was in northeast
Syria in Rojava, where like damn near every not every individual,
but every like family had an a k because in
part there was this understanding that you have a duty
from time to time to like patrol and watch your
neighborhood and not in sort of this like I'm gonna
set up a checkpoint for Antifa, but in I like, hey,

(02:38:52):
isis just carried out a big attack. Let's let's get
some folks out into the streets to like watch our neighborhoods,
because that's just the reality of the world, and we
don't we don't do we don't just have like a
group of militarized police rolling around every neighborhood. Like, we
also are responsible for protecting our communities, and so we
train with weapons. And there was a lot of conversations
I had with women about like, well, the fact that

(02:39:14):
I have this and know how to use it now
means that things can't be done to me that were
before because I have an a K forty seven, and
that means something I would like to port the kind
of like what you were talking about, not just seeing
it as a tool, but seeing it as a tool
with societal responsibilities. You don't just have a gun so
you can hold up in your house in the zombie apocalypse.

(02:39:35):
You have a gun because you're part of a community
and because there's there's some value that we see in
members of the community being armed and not just the state. Yeah, no, totally.
So I mean that goes that kind of goes way
back to the old like now sort of silly sounding thing,
but like God made man called me them equal, right,
so before that, like if you were a frail human being,

(02:39:57):
for whatever reasons. Um, you really a sort of defenseless,
especially in the places like the frontier, but skill at
arms could change that. And um, and that it puts
it can put a more balanced power infrastructure in place. UM.
Not that I want to live in a world, but
we're always like at this point of mutually assured destruction.
But it is much better to have more power balanced

(02:40:19):
than power imbalance. And firearms absolutely provide that in trained, responsible,
educated hands. UM. And that's what I think the story
should be, right, that's the emphasis. Like when when the
whole thing happened went down in Iraq like you're describing,
I think it was ironic. One of the things that
the US military did was allowed every home to have
an AK, like because you get to keep one gun
and it's one of these and uh. And you talked

(02:40:41):
about gun ownership worldwide like, Um, once you've jumped through
some of the hurdles in some of these countries, it's
actually easier to own certain things than you can like
like for example, Yeah, like a machine gun in the
US is highly regulated. It's four and pretty difficult and
highly expensive because of a specially closed market. But like
bloke on the range, one of the guys I work

(02:41:02):
with on on on YouTube, once he gets his permit,
like he's like, I'm just gonna go buy a fully
automatic stent, and he just does. And it's not at
an exorbitant price like it would be in the United States,
So it's not apples to apples. Like these controls, whether
we like them or not, some of them are actually
more liberal than we have in the United States. Yeah,
and I think a good example of that, and an
example of where like a lot of folks who might

(02:41:23):
kind of reflexively think this is insane, but like it's silencers,
you know, suppressors being the more accurate term, but silencer
is what you call and it's the thing you see
James Bond screw on the end of his gun to
make it quiet um. And there's the like this attitude
that they should be heavily restricted because there's this misnomer
that for the most part, they make things sound like

(02:41:43):
stuff in James Bond. Now, there are some ways to
get a firearm that is incredibly quiet um, particularly using
like a smaller round and sub sonic ammunition. There are
some very some weapons you can effectively make quiet enough
that people won't notice it. But when you're putting a
silencer on an a R fifteen, it is not quiet.
No one will miss it firing. But what it won't
do if you have to defend yourself in your home

(02:42:05):
is shatter your ear drums forever, right, Or this is
honestly the bigger case for suppressors. If you are hunting
with an animal, as a lot of people do with
your dogs, you can have a suppressor on your shotgun
as your bird hunting or whatever, and you will not
destroy that dog's ears. Um, you know, it's the same
thing like I'm hunting for deer. You know, it's it's
it's easier. Um, it's like less dangerous for you potentially,

(02:42:27):
Like I. One thing you know is if you've spent
a lot of time around hunting dogs, they don't have
good hearing by the time they get older because they're hunting.
You know. It's funny suppressors, like everything that's that's more
controlled has got a allure of magic around it, right, Like, oh,
a suppressor, a silencer or or for that matter, of
machine gun, and like therefore it is the forbidden fruit,

(02:42:47):
and everyone wants it more than they ever would have.
Once you own I have one transferable machine guns with
tax stamped the whole nine yards, and I shoot it
like once a year, because you shoot it and then
you're like, wow, that was expensive and fifty bucks and
it's like, oh we that was fun, and then you
put it away. And the truth is the sum automatic
stuff is far more interesting and actually generally more effective.

(02:43:08):
What's you use full auto fire? It's got very limited
use um fully there there, I mean there is like,
if we again are being complete, there's one mass shooting
I can think of where a fully automatic weapon made
the shooter more dangerous and it was the Las Vegas
shooting because he was in a set fixed position UM.
He was hold up UM and he had he was

(02:43:28):
not like moving and standing. He was like braced while
firing into a crowd from a building. As a general rule,
if you're talking about like what's someone going to be
more dangerous with, if they're somebody who decides to shoot
up something, it's a semi automatic weapon. Because an automatic
weapon number one going to jam more often requires a
bit more understanding and know how on behalf of the user,

(02:43:48):
and also is a lot harder to hit with. And
we'll run out of ammunition very quickly as opposed to
it and a semi automatic a R fifteen. The reason
they are so often used in mass shootings is it's
kind of the best weapon to use for that. If
that's it's all so prolistic, right, there's like or cordwood
in this country. You can like, they're literally everywhere. Um,
the Las Vega shooter, though I don't know that he
had actually any truly select fire guns, weren't they. Yeah,

(02:44:11):
he was using a bump stock. I think it's close
enough to Yeah. Well, no, it's a good analog. But
it is interesting to note and that guy. What's interesting
about that guy's um Well, of course his act was
horrific and evil obvious, but he used a bunch of
air fifteens with like shitty bump stocks, and he had
planned something like this for years apparently, Yeah, Tanner right
in the set up too, which is yeah, no one knows,

(02:44:33):
I mean as we know, no one currently. I don't
know anyone knows what his motivation was, at least it
hasn't been released. But he had been planning something like
this for a very long time. And what's ironic about
that is that if he had bided his time he
could have actually had a real select fire like belt
fed machine gun. He just did a millionaire. Yeah he
could have done that, and uh, um, this could but

(02:44:54):
he just went with this bump stocks kind of garbage,
which is weird. Um. That's a whole other topic, but
it is and it it is like that is one
of those cases when you talk to people in the
right where it's like, after that shooting, Um, Donald Trump
and his administration banned bump stocks. Um, which is more
gun control than we got out of eight years of

(02:45:14):
Obama's Like you know, oh boy, you point that out,
at least on the center. In fact, um, Uh, there's
always this narrative that you know, this political party will
take your guns and this polaritically party waved. But the
truth is, statistically and historically speaking, both tend to err
on the side of trying to add more restrictions over time,
Like if you do it over time, like Obama didn't.

(02:45:36):
In fact of balla open things up. I think he
liberalized h concealed carry of pistol or firearms in national parks.
Actually he actually made guns a little easier to deal with. Um.
But then via essentially executive order edict you've got Trump
banning bump stocks, which, whether you like bump stocks or not,
I think the way that went down is questionable legally speaking,

(02:45:56):
but that's another topic. And and obviously bump stocks we're
also somewhat questionable. They were speaking right right, totally totally,
But but that's that's an interesting precedent with what he
did was just like fiat edict um. But that that said,
like historically, over time, there's always been more restrictions, not less,
from both sides. And when you point that out, the

(02:46:18):
people that just kind of drink the kool aid from
one side or the other, I want to just re
immediately knee jerk on you. And you're like, no, this
is weird. This is coming from all directions really, Yeah,
and I think it is. It is a big part
of it is just that, like as a general rule,
people who are rich and powerful do not want poor
people to be armed. It doesn't tend to work out
in their favor. The only time they want poor people

(02:46:39):
armed is when they send them to a war they
decided to have. Yeah, obviously the history of gun controls
would have lay tied to racism and the Black Panthers
and a little stuff around California's gun laws being started
to curb black people from from owning fire arms, and
so it would be we would be could argue in
some ways that Reagan had a big role in inventing

(02:47:01):
our modern concepts of like what gun control means and
what kind of gun control laws like liberal states tend
to go after on open carrying bands, on you know,
concealed carrying of arms, that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's
deeper than this, and there's always nuance to really hard right,
but like, um, like California, which is kind of one
of the flagship states of gun control. UM, and I
think that their methods are bizarre to me and almost

(02:47:25):
on not understandable. But like you talk about Reagan, pretty
much they were like, guns are cool, and then the
panthers walked around with some guns. Are like, whoa fucking
we better do something. And uh. Of course, the the
image of the panthers with their guns out walking down
the street, which was their legal right, um, and it
was brad and it motivated um of course a lot

(02:47:48):
of things in California, which now we see where where
that has led in California gun control laws UM has
also changed the narrative for so many people that are
unwilling to look at things from a truly broad historical
perspect That's only one tiny thing the Black Panthers did,
and the rest of their actions are so lost to
just the pictures of them standing around them on car beings.
And that's another example of leaving out, like the sin

(02:48:11):
of a mission. We'll talk about one thing, but not
the rest, and therefore the historical narrative is only one thing,
and it is also there's a lesson in that for
people who are on the left and who are advocates
of gun ownership about what happens in terms of media
and in terms of how your movement is thought about
and remembered when guns are a part of it, Because
that's always going to for a variety of reasons, and

(02:48:33):
we can say a lot of those are very unreasonable reasons.
But if you are a political group who is armed
and makes that a visible part of your activism, that
is going to really dominate a lot of conversations. It
doesn't mean you shouldn't be, but it means you have
to go into that understanding that like that's just how
it works in this country. Yeah, you will immediately get
you will immediately from at least some part of the perspective,

(02:48:56):
whatever whatever side you're on, you will immediately get someone
slinging like streamist militant at you. Yeah. But by the way,
I mean, those are real things too. There are those.
I'm not saying there aren't extremists. Yea, we talk about
them all the time. Yeah, this country is full of them,
as is the world. So that's not that's not an
unreasonable thing that does exist. But the minute you go
ahead and stand with that gun, you're gonna get that label,

(02:49:16):
whether it's truly something you earned or not. There's a
very deep conversation that we've talked about. We've had it
in in pieces on this program and other shows that
we've done on Cool Zone about like win makes sense
to be openly armed and win makes sense to be
openly armed as part of a group, because that is

(02:49:38):
a very fraught question as like the what happened in
the chas and made abundantly clear, but in you know,
a bunch of cases Kyle Rittenhouse and whatnot. There's a
ton of different reasons why choosing to be openly armed. Um,
there's a debate to be had about like how that
influences everyone around you had, that influences influences the demonstration.
And I've seen and heard it used in in good

(02:50:00):
ways in an irresponsible ways. I've seen people carrying guns
at political events in order to intimidate others. I've also
seen people carrying guns at political events to create essentially
a buffer where it's like, Okay, there's going to be
people fighting at this event. There's going to be clashes.
If we're standing here as a group with guns, there's
a place people can run back to and the fighting
won't continue because nobody wants to push that. And that's yeah,

(02:50:21):
without talking about specifics of intent in any of those
situations you already talked about because I can't, but yeah,
I think I think it does, Like it always comes
back to this thing of intent. Right. So to me, um,
you're right for the firearm, absolutely true, regardless, like even
if I disagree with you, this is a right, like
we said, it's protected like the First Amendment, it's the
second um. But I think the problem starts to come

(02:50:43):
when you've decided to bring the firearm solely for the
intended purpose of intimidation, Like that's that's where I start
getting like this is this is a troubling right. But
if you're bringing it for personal defense or community defense,
or there's a need because your community is really at risk.
I mean one of the examples of a civil rights
one was this is some someday I'll do a video

(02:51:04):
about this. A community knew that the clan was coming
to intimidate them, and they armed up with surplus m
one garren's and steel pot helmets, literally dug fighting positions
and fought them off. The clan ran for their lives.
No one was killed, but they literally used m one
grands to uh to stop the clan from manfiltrating their community. Um,
that was not used as a weapon of intimidation. It

(02:51:26):
was used as a weapon of community defense. I think
that's intent goes everywhere. Yeah, that's fucking dope too. Um
and yeah, I uh, I think um one thing that
that that kind of I think there's a conversation that

(02:51:47):
needs to be had when we start talking about when
is reasonable and what situations are reasonable to carry a
gun opener concealed about also what should be carried. Um,
I've certainly seen because I don't I think that the
most harmful thing is certainly people carrying gun to intimidate.
I've also seen people carry guns as a fashion statement,
which is not the same thing but as bad. For example,

(02:52:09):
people on the left people at a protests bringing a
loaded mosen um too, because it was the gun the
communists used, which is like, you don't you don't want
to be in a firefight in a dense urban environment
with a mos in negat did you bring? It is
a gun that doesn't function without a sizeable hammer, you know.

(02:52:35):
And of course people on like I remember outside of
this anti mask rally, these two guys who are up
and carrying a RS, one of whom had an a
r tin with with a hundred round drum was talking
about it. We had like four hundreds something rounds on
him and it was like and in case stuff pops off,
and it's like, what are you? Number one? Like, if
you're talking like that, you've spent no time thinking about
what actually happens in the situations in public areas in

(02:52:58):
which gunfights occur, But because none of them that have
happened in any time in the recent future have involved
people needing to four hundred rounds of ammunition or or
drum magazines or whatever like you are. You are not
in Fallujah, you are in Salem, Oregon. Um. The extent
to which a firearm can be useful for uh self defense,
and that does not like bragging about the number of

(02:53:19):
bullets you have is just like weird and gross. You
know this is gonna come off maybe a little strange
or even counterintuitive. But when I hear someone like that
at what you just described in that particular person. First
of all, that guns barrel would burst in four and
a rounds, but that's a whole another topic probably, But
that said, UM, when I hear that, I almost have like, um,
it's kind of sad because the reason that's sad is

(02:53:39):
that person is doing that one because they've been sold
the idea, but the firearms and talisman like that. To me,
that person is acting like that's a talisman. Secondarily, the
reason they have four in a rounds is because they've
been sold a pretty big bill of fear. And that's
that's sad for anyone to live a life based on fear. Yeah, yeah,
I would agree with that, And I really, um, do

(02:54:01):
you have anything else you wanted to get into and this, uh,
this conversation, well, I don't know. I mean we're just
here to talk about like community. I just I think
one thing that's really important and it's something that UM
is a positive and I'm happy to see this is
that it was kind of a happy accident with my work.
I didn't even think about it. It It is hard to happen,
but this is a much the people people that love,

(02:54:22):
first of all, just the sport. There's a lot of us.
There's a lot of us of all spectrums across the
board UM. People that believe in the right from the
person purposes of personal defense and community defense there across
the board. And I think that one of the things
that we need to do is not let the narrative
be only one, which is we see so much of

(02:54:43):
UM very much just like right wing I'm gonna usually
say Christian white males need like completely dominating this conversation
as though, and they think they owe as a result
own the space. Now it would be in their interest too,
from the perspective of preserving fire and rights, to be
inclusive and have everyone that believes in that a particular

(02:55:03):
thing work together to make sure we don't lose a right,
because the right unexercised is lost right. So even if
I disagree with you on economic policy, but we agree
on firearms rights. We have an agreement there, and that
makes us somehow interestingly in the same space. We have
something in common versus something diversive, and I think that
part of the conversation, at least within reason. I mean,
there are people that are legitimately dangerous, you don't negotiate

(02:55:25):
with them, but within reason, like agreeing on that topic
means well, we've got something in common here. There's probably
other things too, and maybe that could be a place
where we kind of try to make that conversation better,
not worse. And so by being more open inclusive and saying, hey,
there's people here and people there and here we are
all together doing this together. Um, perhaps conversation can be

(02:55:46):
had that's better than what we've been having. Maybe it
can be actually a community builder versus a community destroyer. Yeah, yeah,
I would like to see that. Um well, I think
that's as good a note as any to uh to
close out on car You wanna you want to throw
your plug ables up before we were right out of here? Yeah, sure,
I mean so I run in range TV. You can
find me an in range dot TV, um completely viewer

(02:56:10):
supported like I said, I don't wanty sponsors or anything
I like. I like the idea of the people liking
watching it support it. So if you like it cool,
come check it out all over the place. YouTube bit
shoot decentralized video contrat distributions another thing I believe in
strong would the corporate oligarchy. But yeah, come out. If
you want to have a little bit different take on
fire and stuff, or you're just in in the confluence

(02:56:30):
of civil rights and guns and stuff, come check out
in Range TV. I'd appreciate I always appreciate new viewers,
and thanks for checking it out. Awesome, all right, um, yeah,
check out in Range TV, and uh check us out somewhere.
We won't tell you where, but you can find us
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(02:56:58):
the forest trees, Sure you know what else? Girls in
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(02:57:19):
you and start exploring. I Discover the Forest dot Org.
Brought to you by the United States Forest Service and
the AD Council Hello, and welcome to our show. I'm
Zoe de Chanel and I'm so excited to be joined
by my friends and cast meetes Hannah Simone and Lamar
and Morris to recap our hit television series New Girl.
Join us every Monday on the Welcome to Our Show podcast,

(02:57:40):
where we'll share behind the scenes stories of your favorite
New Girl episodes, reveal the truth behind the legendary game
True American, and discuss how this show got made with
the writer's, guest stars and directors who made the show
so special. Fans have been begging us to do a
New Girl recap for years, and we finally meet a
podcast where we answer all your burning question is like

(02:58:01):
is there really a bear? In every episode of New Girl?
Plus each week you'll hear hilarious stories like this at
the end when he says you got some schmid on
your face. I feel like I pitched that job. I
believe that I feel like I did. I'm not on
a thousand percent. I want to say that was I
tossed that one out. Listen to the Welcome to Our
Show podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,

(02:58:22):
or wherever you get your podcasts. So I Burnett X.
All right, this is this is me Christopher Wong, realizing
that I have done like sixteen consecutive actual real introductions
and that if I keep doing them, everyone's gonna expect
that I do a real introduction every time instead of

(02:58:45):
like randomly yelling something. So yeah, well, welcome to it
could happen here. I am trying to make my job
function as it should and not professionalize it. Um and
this is this is a podcast about beings that are bad,
but it's also occasionally a podcast about things that are
good and how, in fact, there can be a society

(02:59:07):
beyond this one, and to talk about some of the
shades of what that could look like. I have with
me the co host of the General Intellect Unit Kyle
and June, which is a podcast on the Emancipation Network.
That is I to this is the tagline the podcast
of the Cybernetic Marxists. I am. I am very excited. Yeah,
so it's really exciting to be here. Absolutely, thank you

(02:59:30):
for coming on. Um yeah, I guess okay, we should
start at the the very very beginning, because I don't
think most people know any of this. What is cybernetics, right? Um, so,
cybernetics is I guess a term that comes from what

(02:59:52):
is it the Kaibernetes right, steering, uh, the idea of
steering a boat um, so using your ore to navigate
the waters. Um. And so essentially it is a science
of control. And that sounds really scary, but what it

(03:00:15):
means is that it's that kind of connection between the
steers person, the oar, the boat, their body and the
water around them and getting all of those things in
sync in such a way that the steers person is

(03:00:39):
going where they want to go, the ship or the
boat doesn't capsize and they don't lose the ore um.
And so that's what control means. It's a kind of balancing,
a kind of connection between the organism and the ironment

(03:01:00):
in such a way that it can survive and thrive. Yeah,
and that's what cybernexs is focused on. Yeah. The thing
I love about them, the steersman metaphor is that like
it's all about it's control in the sense of regulation,
but also like very importantly in cybernetics, it's almost always
self regulation um because like the one of the kind

(03:01:22):
of core principles. Again, like the because the term usually
calls to mind this like kind of terminator like UM
like cybergothic kind of domination. It's actually not what the
field is about at all. It's UM because one of
the core insights of cybernetics is actually that any given
system UM, the only thing that can really control it

(03:01:43):
is itself because of the sheer complexity of systems. So
that like UM, like the kind of like top down
external domination of an organism that we all fear is
kind of like actually, if you look at the cyber
cyberanetics literature, that's not not actually really possible because the
the the the external controller would never have enough complexity
to match what the organism is capable of. UM. And

(03:02:07):
you know, organisms are self regulating systems. The steersman with
his boat is a self regulating system that like regulates
its upright position in the water and regulates its course
that's directed towards its goal. UM. So it's it's that's
why it's so important. I think that's why we think
it's so important for the left and like people who

(03:02:28):
are concerned with these like you know, visions of a
politics of autonomy and liberation that really need to look
at this stuff, because it turns out there kind of
is a science of like autonomous self guiding organic systems.
You know, yeah, no terminator here, yes, and yeah, I
mean you know when you see uh, scary videos of

(03:02:52):
militarized robots and they're learning to you know, jump and
fire weapons ends and all that kind of stuff. There
certainly is cybernetics involved there, but that is a kind
of domain application of cybernetics. Rather than defining what cybernetics is,

(03:03:14):
it's really kind of holistic systems thinking in general is
what cybernetics is. Yeah, yeah, that that's that. That's that's
probably worth emphasizing, right that, Like um, um, cybernetics in
some ways is kind of like out of fashion these days,
like it kind of evolved into systems thinking and like, um,
I guess a lot of its lessons got kind of

(03:03:35):
absorbed in general. But we find there's great value in
going back to them, the kind of originators and like
focusing on that field. It's like we on the show,
we got into the cybernetics angle by reading Andrew Pickering
in his book The Cybernetic Brain, in which um, he
kind of acknowledged that like there's he kind of split

(03:03:55):
it intoo, like there's American cybernetics like which had that
kind of like um dour kind of military domination sort
of flavor to it. That like it's kind of an
earned reputation there. But Pickering was more concerned with like
British cybernetics, Um, it's like a lot of British thinkers
that and it had a very different flavor there where
it was more open ended. It was kind of had
more of a focus on kind of liberation than like

(03:04:17):
politics and stuff. And in fact, some of those like
Gray Walter was like explicitly an anarchist, like wrote in
Anarchist UM like journals and stuff like that, um. And
for him, like those two things went hand in glove
right like that, like um liberatory politics as like um,
the politics of like human flourishing, like as human human

(03:04:38):
beings as autonomous units flourishing in their own contexts, and
of like social systems that would enable that kind of flourishing.
To him, that was just hand in glove with cybernetics.
There was no real distinction there. It was just like, yeah,
these these two things fit each other perfectly, which you
lose later with like general systems theory sort of stuff.
You know, it's like there's there's plenty. I don't know

(03:04:59):
whom I think here like them like the Tally, that
guy with the like black swansor to stuff like he's
biggest system and stuff. But like isn't so much um
isn't so much into the libratory politics. I guess you know,
a lot of that angle is kind of lost. Yeah,
And I think this is awesome. This is you know,
this is sort of a product of, I guess, the
broader ideological course that's going on while such a cyberie

(03:05:22):
comes in and out of fashion. I think I think
we should go back a bit to the begetting to
sort of situate this because I know, like when I
like before I ever did any reading, What's ever next,
Like my immediate assumption was that it was it was
you know, this, this is the thing that was entirely
just based off of computers, right that this is like
this is and that's not really true from might understandtanding

(03:05:46):
of us. Can we go back and sort of like
talk about where this came from a bit and how
it's sort of moves over this over sert of the
sexes and yeah, go from there. Yeah, I think you
can kind of trace it back in it's sort of

(03:06:07):
European origins to UM. You could probably say Hagel, Uh,
you know his his move towards like UM understanding being
not just as substance but as subject I think is
a move towards a kind of cybernetic understanding where you

(03:06:30):
understand the whole system as a holistic entity as opposed
to just an individual interacting with an external environment. UM.
And you can also see this come up in say

(03:06:51):
there was a ecologist X skill in the German ecologists
in the early twentieth century, I believe, who was trying
to understand, you know, the organism in its environment. Uh.
The sort of precursors to ecology can be seen as
precursors to cybernetics UM. And then when you get to

(03:07:17):
the kind of development of cybernetics as a science or
as a discipline UM in the mid twentieth century, it's
not exactly about computing it's UM. It's more about balancing

(03:07:37):
a machine with its environment. So UM. The sort of
prototypical UM machine of this kind was the servo mechanism,
which was used to help guide a like an anti
aircraft gun in shooting down enemy aircraft. So making sure

(03:08:00):
it tracks properly with the target, it doesn't lose the target,
and is assisting the operator in operating the gun instead
of just being a inanimate object that has trouble tracking
what it's a very fast moving target. I mean, you
can even think back to like the you know, in

(03:08:23):
World War One when they discovered, hey, we could actually
like synchronize the timing of the propeller and the timing
of our gun on the front of this plane so
that our guns aren't destroying our propellers and shooting and
we're we're we're shooting our own planes down with our
guns when we're dog fighting, right, Like It's yeah, that's

(03:08:44):
the system's understanding, right. So that's um, that's that's Norbert
Leonard Rice and working on the m automated gun turret stuff.
And that's he coins the term cybernetics to like um
given name to the thing he was starting to discover.
And it's like he was kind of pulling to other
a bunch of rights there, and like one of those
kind of important insights is that like, um, like they

(03:09:05):
couldn't get an improvement in like targeting and accuracy without
like basically making the gun turret and agent of its
own that link and the like the turret and the
gunner would be cooperative agents that in combination would m
achieve their goal. But like there was there was there's
something strange and spooky about that. And I think that
then this feedback mechanism inside the turret gives it a

(03:09:28):
sort of weird agency that combines with the agency of
the gunner to like guide to the whole system towards
the goal um. Yes. And what it ends up becoming
then is a kind of boundary space where the distinction
between human and machine UH starts to become ambiguous because

(03:09:54):
they both start to possess they're both understood to have
a kind of agency, they're both understood to have kinds
of like functions, And then you kind of get this
sort of like human machine interface idea, and you can
start to bring in all of these different ideas from
like anthropology, from physiology, from math, from ecology, UH, and

(03:10:22):
they all start to interact in this domain of cybernetics.
And like the core, the core idea of them that
kind of ties everything together is that of feedback. UM. So,
like weener realizes that what he needs to do achieve
this goal is is a feedback mechanism, and that would
is error correcting feedback, right like if the if the

(03:10:43):
gun is slightly too far to the left, it corrects
itself right words and so on. UM. But that, as
you said, that that connects across all sorts of things, right,
Like you start to realize that's present everywhere in ecology,
in neurology, in UM, like that learning is based on feedback,
you know. So it's really funny to read to read
Norbet Leaner like in the fifties basically describing what would

(03:11:06):
become machine learning, and he's just like he just off
the coff is like, yeah, like if you could, if
a machine could like UM, or if if any system
could just like UM analyze its own performance and then
feedback onto itself, it would it would learn any old
pattern you wanted it to. And he's like yeah, he
turns out he was completely correct. And that's that's where
kind of like gets into like you get later thinkers

(03:11:27):
like Ross Ashby who was UM and like other folks
like we in in and around psychiatry, we were like
really interested in how the brain worked. And that's that's
the other thing that feeds into like cybernetics is like, um,
it's It's why Pickering called his book the Cybernetic Brains,
because like the brain and like nervous systems show up
so much in that field, right that, Like the brain

(03:11:51):
being a kind of learning and adapt an adapt adaptation
machine attached to the body or whatever, and like, um, yeah,
I don't know, there's there's something fascinating there, and like, um,
the I mean there's something kind of possibly troubling and
kind of melting down the distinctions between living organisms and
machines or whatever, but like there's also something very compelling
and just like recognizing the same patterns happening at all

(03:12:14):
these different levels, right that, Like um, like you get
similar behaviors and similar kind of outcomes, and then you know,
it turns out like you can kind of do with
science on these things and and come up with even
better explanatory frameworks based on your observations across many fields. Yes,
and so it is in a sense about computers. But

(03:12:36):
the computers are really just understood to act like a
kind of brain and that's connected to a nervous system
which is connected to you know, like actuators of some
kinds some kinds of like machines that actually do things
in the world. So it's not about like say computer

(03:13:01):
science specifically, it's more about, like, well, computers are a
useful way to do cybernetic design because they can act
as a control system and they're flexible. It's not that
this is about computers really, yeah, yeah, absolutely, And like
that you brought you brought up something very important there

(03:13:23):
that like, um, in all cases of like cybernetics, like
the the systems that we're considering are not like isolated
like braining a box kind of things. They're all the
things that are directly engaged with a world, um Like.
So it's it's not that kind of like monatic kind
of rationalism of like computation just happening in a box
somewhere and like perfect intelligence and that kind of the

(03:13:45):
kind of stuff. These are always, like the separantations, are
always working with systems that were engaged in real time
emergence situations UM. And because of that, they rapidly kind
of like acknowledge that for so many of these system
is the only way to figure out what it's going
to do is to let it do it UM because

(03:14:05):
you can't like pre compute all the possible outcomes. You know,
of these like very sticky and complex real world situations,
the best way to figure out what it's going to
do is to let it do it and watch. Yes.
And I think I think that's an interesting sort of
like if if you look at where a lot of
the sort of like techno fetishists like social attempts to

(03:14:29):
sort of like manipulate a side e technology of God,
it's like, yeah, you get like like blockchain smart contracts,
and it's like the blockchain smart contract is like, Okay,
we're going to think of literally everything that could possibly
happen an attempt to put it in like a very
small amount of code, and if anything like literally anything
at all happens that you know that we didn't expect.

(03:14:53):
Where now everyone is now screwed because we have just
made this thing imautable and put it in such a
way that we can't change it. Yeah, I think that, Yeah,
that's a I think this is a useful sort of
I mean corrective just it just in the way that
we've we've we've now like like we've gone backwards, like
we've we've gotten into this place where you instead of
like we need to let these systems play out, we
need to let them control themselves. We've gotten to like

(03:15:16):
we think that we can actually just sort of like
you know, turn turn the entire system into code that
we can break ahead of time and have you know,
the basis of some sort of social system off of Yeah,
I mean it's I think it's something that like the
Sarpetitions and like maybe Pickering what described as like a
kind of perversity of modern cost like the modern mindsets

(03:15:39):
like that, that kind of like rational like um kind
of mindset right like um, and like to the sarpetitions,
that that whole thing with like the bloock chain stuff
will be just truly laughable because it's immediate, It's immediately
obvious to them that the problem. There's like, okay, proposing
we're going to use a blockchain to regulate some sort
of social process or whatever, smart contracts, whatever, and it's

(03:16:01):
like that thing has nowhere near the fidelity required to
regulate social processes. Because social processes are unimaginably complex and
have just incredible variety. There's a there's a there's like
a law that's at the House of Cybernattics called Ashby's
Law of requisite variety, And in short, it basically states
that given a system um, the only thing that's really

(03:16:22):
capable of regulating is regulating it is itself, because a
regulator needs as much variety as the thing it's regulating
if it's gonna like actually succeeded it um. And so
that's that's the kind of thing that nudges everyone towards,
like like when you get to someone like Stafford Beer
is his whole model of like organization pushes all a

(03:16:44):
lot of the intelligence downwards to the to the bottom layers,
because there is basically the people on the ground on
the shop floor are the people who are best informed
to actually deal with their own situation. And that's that
sounds like a banal observation, but like it for Beer
that was actually quite a step forward to like just
admit that like trying to trying to like in his context,
it was like often the organization of a firm, like

(03:17:06):
at our company, like trying to manage a company from
the boardroom is just fucking ludicrous, Like no nobody there
has enough information to act on They're all dumbasses anyway.
So for Beer, it was just like this is where
it starts to get interesting and it connects to the politics,
right that like for one of these scientists just observing
reality and like you know, using you know, pretty pretty

(03:17:27):
good stray intuitions and like scientific frameworks, just looking at
it and going like, oh, it is obviously the case
that the best way for society to organize is bottom
up self organization. Um. And that that like it's not
just a moral point, it's actually a technical point as well,
that like, um, these these top down, bureaucratic kind of
micro tyrannies are not only morally objectionable, they're also technically

(03:17:50):
inferior to the kind of like cyber communism we want
to institute. Yeah, and I have like what if one
of my what if? What of my favorite stories about
So I worked as a maintenance worker for a while
and one day my boss was like, there's some problem
with a sink. And my boss was like, no, we
don't need the plumbers. I can do this. And so
he goes in there and it's it's what it's like,
it's it's like a sink in like a building, right,

(03:18:11):
So it's it has just one of those things that
there's like a pipe that connects to the top of
the sink to like the wall, and he goes, okay, here,
look at this, I'm gonna I'm gonna turn this valve
and this is gonna turn the water off. And what
he instead does is he take he takes the pipe
off of the wall and just like a torrent of
water is just now shooting out of this pipe because
he has removed the thing. Yeah, he's removed the pipe

(03:18:34):
from the wall. This is you know, this is this
is why I think like, yeah, go this this, this,
this this, you know this this is like a particularly
funny example of how these sort of top down management systems.
And this guy like like used to be a maintenance guy, right,
but he just like most a plumber and so you know,

(03:18:54):
and he accepts into it and he's like, oh no, no no, no, no, no,
hold on, I know I know how this system works.
It's gonna be fine. And it just there is a
guys like the guys are of water has so much
force to it's like it's like pushing our tool cart
across the room. It's like a fighter hydrants come out
with walk now I wanted to I guess beers is

(03:19:16):
an interesting way to go to go into the sort
of the politics of what this actually looks like. Do
you want to talk about and I know I briefly
talked about this in an episode in The Liberalism a
while back, but do you want to go into sort
of more detail into what Beers was up to and
the eventually failed attempt, because of military coup to try

(03:19:38):
to implement like a cybernetic system for organizing essentially an economy. Yeah, sure, um. Yeah,
So Stafford Beer was a UM management consultant UM he
and a cyberneticition. He got his star sort of doing

(03:20:01):
operations research UM, which is kind of a precursor to
cybernetics UM that is kind of like interested in logistics
and organizing systems UM in the British military UM in

(03:20:23):
World War Two. And then he came out of that
and became a corporate UH consultant for operations Research and
Management UM. And so in working in the corporate world UM,
he saw all of the things that were really screwed

(03:20:48):
up with the status quo UM way of doing business
and of organizing things, you know, the way that autocratic
power of management creates all kinds of ridiculous problems, the
way that managing organizations. According to org charts, which are

(03:21:10):
there to assign blame more than anything else, creates all
kinds of perversities, the way that organizations fail to adapt
to their environments because they get into these kinds of
strange neuroses. Um. And you know, just sort of going

(03:21:31):
through all of that and more often than not being
unable to intervene in an effective way uh to um
address these problems and just sort of like seeing how
these little instances of perverse corporate culture are indicative of

(03:21:55):
the broader problems of our society as a whole and
of capitalism, right. Um. And so you know, he had
a basis from his time in India during the Second
World War in uh kind of like tontra uh kind

(03:22:16):
of like you know, Eastern or specifically Indian um, spirituality, yoga,
all this kind of stuff. So he kind of had
a cult countercultural side to his personality. UM. And he
was always doing tinkering strange experiments with cybernetics. He wasn't
just the straight lace corporate guy. Uh. But it was

(03:22:40):
a combination of that sort of countercultural background with his
growing frustration with corporate systems that led him to start
to develop ideas about how things could be different and
this kind of meshed up with the thoughts that were

(03:23:00):
happening in Chile during the Chilean Revolution in the early seventies.
Um So they reached out to him to come and
help out with organizing their economy as they were undergoing
this revolutionary process of trying to sort of throw off

(03:23:22):
the shackles of imperialist dependency and create a society that
was focused on the flourishing of workers, h end of
society as a whole, as opposed to one that was
based on sort of you know, resource extraction where everything
flows to the top. Yeah, you want to explain some

(03:23:45):
more about how that went well? So, um yeah, it
it went well and then it went badly, I guess.
Um But from from from the reading we've done and
from our research, it seems like if basically, if the
if the US hadn't sent in the fascists to kill
them all, um this this would have worked. Like it

(03:24:06):
was working, and it was that the project was actually
going pretty well. We explained briefly what like I think
it becomes it's called product cybersyme, But what exactly is
like what was it doing? So? Um so, like Beer's
big kind of innovation is what we call the viable
system model or VSM, and it's a model that's, um

(03:24:26):
it's a model for these like autonomous social systems that
is kind of taking It's not I wouldn't say it's
entirely based on like the structure of the human body,
but it's like taking a lot of lessons from biology
and neurology and neuroscience and and cybernetics and just kind
of meshing them all together. Um. So, basically, like it's
like if your body is basically a bunch of autonomous

(03:24:47):
organs that all take care of their own business, plus
a nervous system that synchronizes them and unifies them into
a workable hole, then you can kind of see the
whole system as having this kind of mixture of vertical
and horror suntal aspects. Like on the one hand, it
has this horizontal aspect where the autonomous like system one
units are are well autonomous, more or less like the

(03:25:10):
harsh takes harsh takes care of its own thing. The
lungs take care of their own thing. But then the
nervous system meshes them together in layers so that it
can say, oh, hold on too much oxygen dial it
down a bit, and then the organs responds dynamically to
those those signals, right, So it's kind of like up
down feedback loops, right where then the lower levels of

(03:25:30):
the system are the smart bits that are doing all
the important work. But there's this supporting infrastructure of the
nervous system in the brain that unifies the whole thing
and keeps it all on the rails. Um So, and
importantly it's a kind of recursive model. So like a
human being is an autonomous unit, and then that it's

(03:25:50):
that unit is composed of more autonomous units, like the
organs and the muscles, and then each of those is
composed of cells which are autonomous units, and then you know,
so on. But like that latter goes upwards as well,
so that like a team is an autonomous unit composed
of human beings, a firm, or like a department, is
a autonomous unit composed of teams. A firm is composed

(03:26:12):
of departments, like a secretor is composed of firms. And
it's the same kind of structure at each layer. Um.
So that the kind of upside there is that like, um,
you don't like you kind of have a unit fairly
unifying like set of principles and like a science for
doing this kind of like coordination of autonomous units at

(03:26:34):
every level, at every every layer of society. So like
in principle, the sort of like the serbonetic principles that
get applied to cohering members of a team are the
same storty of principles that get applied to like sectors
in an economy. Um, with the same kind of you know,
bottom up kind of feedback online as well. Um. So

(03:26:56):
Stafford was invited to Chile to by the in a
government in so that that was like nineteen seventy, right, Um,
that that that election happened. So he arrived in late
nineteen seventy I think, Um, I mean certain on the timeline,
but we're looking at those those first few years of
the seventies as as the time when this is happening. Yeah, yeah,

(03:27:18):
I d elected in set in nicktey seventy. Yeah, so
it's towards the end of that year that he's he's
invited and he's basically kind of given the task of like, hey,
do all this stuff but with this entire economy, and
he's like, yeah, sure, cool, Um, so puts together projects
cybersen UM and there's kind of long story there of
like and then building out this kind of infrastructure and

(03:27:38):
like it's it's all highly experimental UM and highly tensive.
Like they one of the big problems they run into
is that like they don't have very much in the
way of like hardcare, especially because they're under embargo. So
they had like, um a pretty what at the time
was a pretty crafty old mainframe that they ran the
around the software on UM. But like step step one

(03:28:01):
was like UM installing this like huge communications network amongst
all the factories and UM like setting up like the
workers committees and stuff. Would feed information into it and
it would kind of again this like feedback thing where
you kind of take signals from the economy, integrate them,
and then go, oh, you're producing too much steel, Route
some of your product over to this this factory and

(03:28:22):
it will be better used there. And then you know,
you guys over there turn up this dial, you turn
them down this dial. So and then if that plan
doesn't quite work out, then you've got another layer of
feedback tomorrow to say, Okay, that plan didn't quite work,
here's an adjusted plan. So it's it's just like both
bottom up and top down sort of loop of feedback.

(03:28:42):
That's like, I think that the phrase pickering is is
reciprocal adaptation where the economy and its firms and its
workers are all kind of adapting to each other in
real time in a kind of in a in a
full system. UM. Uh, yes, no, that I mean, that's

(03:29:03):
that's essentially what Cyberson was. It was a system designed
too largely, I think, at first supplement the market, although
Beer later realizes that like, actually, if you have a

(03:29:24):
good system of this kind, you probably don't need a market. Um.
But essentially it was like, Okay, our economy has been
one that has been built around dependence too, uh, you know,
especially the United States, and it's been organized in that way,

(03:29:47):
and we need to reorganize the economy both to promote
the well being of the workers, the autonomy of the workers,
realized the ideals of socialism in that way, and also
to create a system that is less dependent on those
existing structures of imperialism. And so having this reciprocal adaptation UM,

(03:30:09):
having systems in place to connect things that were previously
disconnected would allow you to move in that way of
increasing autonomy and increasing freedom. UM. And that was generally
the idea of cyber sin Um. Yes, and there was

(03:30:30):
something very interesting like when we were reading the reissue
of his book Brain of the Firm, where he has
a section the end that that documents this whole experience
in chile Um, there's a really interesting parents where towards
the end of it he's like, and this is like
getting up towards the coupe where he's like, um, he
and the other cyber Sinem operatives, like the people are

(03:30:50):
putting this together, realize that like the workers and link
people in towns are are like just on their own,
just like using this stuff and these kind of principles
to just like abolish the value form basically like but
notably without the involvement from above, like as in Beer
and Company, stumble upon this just happening where they're like,

(03:31:12):
oh my god, they're just they're just dismantling the market,
and it's like it's all just kind of happening, and
that's there was something really wonderful to that then, Like
it it indicated like there was there really wants something
to it that like you could like as in people working,
people could use these tools and this like new way
of organizing themselves. Two just like liquidate market relations and

(03:31:38):
wage relations like spun spontaneously. But it's it's a spontaneity
that's that's not really it. It's it feels very different
from the kind of spontaneity you often get in it,
like the way leftist sort of anarchists talk about it often,
like the kind of spontaneity is like a magical sort
of thing, which is like where freedom just arrives from
out of nowhere. But this this was like installing infrastructure

(03:31:59):
to enable freedom and then it actually kind of happening
until the fascists showed up. You know. Yeah, what I
think is really interesting about it is that so you know,
you have you have like you have the sort of
central control center from which a lot of stuff is
being run. But you know, yeah, it's it's it's it's
it's a weird system because it's trying to link together

(03:32:19):
like a lot of different kinds of firms. Like you
have something saying in private firms, but you have a
lot of you have a lot of state run firms.
You also have firms that throughout this whole process, people
like workers just taking over factories, they're setting up these
sort of like call them industrial cordons. I think I'm
remembering way Spanish rights, Like yeah, they they you know,
they start setting up their own institutions, and it's it's

(03:32:40):
this becomes this way is sort of like networking these
groups together. And the thing that's the other thing is
it's interesting is you know, so you have you have
them on the one hand, like just getting rid of
markets and going like okay, well we can just coordinate
production through this and like not have markets. And then
the second thing they do is it's the freedom immediately
becomes political in in the sense that like, yeah, like

(03:33:01):
one of one of the things they do they there
that that's what's going on in this period is that
and there's Chile has a very very right wing like
it's basically like the even today, it's like it's like
really like one of the only like union like huge
unions left in Chile is is truckers unions. And those
guys are extremely right wing. There in this period of
being backed by the CIA, they're being trained by f

(03:33:21):
l c I O as I say, like every episode,
but like yeah, and and they're you know, they're intentionally
doing strikes trying to oversaw the government by blocking production,
and you know, like the workers are like, Okay, hold on,
we can just use this symenetic system to figure out
where these blocks are, figure out where materials need to

(03:33:41):
move through, and we can just you know, we can
just stop the kind of revolution. We can just sort
of like we can we can just we can just
fight our way through it. And and it's interesting, is
like this happens, and so then that that like the
the original plan of using sort of of using these
truckers is like the sort of right wing like the
first attempt fails, and once that fails, it's like they

(03:34:03):
have to go to the military m and the coup
eventually works. It's it's hard to it's hard to resist
a coup outright, isn't it. Um? Yeah, Yeah. The thing
with the trucker strike is not like yeah, it's you
can very well imagine like the CIA and stuff going
into it thinking about that this is what we'll do.
That's right, this will sell it up, but not realizing
that the workers actually had in their hands a like

(03:34:26):
vastly more sophisticated system for out maneuvering them. Yeah, and
that system works like a charm, like like clockwork, just
like and even like you read the accounts from this thing,
like both in eating Medina's cybernetic revelation areas and in
Beer's on account, and there's like the sense that was
actually kind of spooky and weird. But I like even
the people involved didn't quite expected to work out that way,
and that like they were surprised at how effective it is,

(03:34:49):
but that it gets back to the core of cyberneticsent like,
feedback is weirdly effective at getting things done. You know,
these like highly tuned feedback systems, they give you a
lot of to maneuver this complex you know. Yeah, And
I think in some sense, like this is like people
talk a lot about Chile is sort of like the
sort of foreclosed future of like an electoral demarcratic socialism,

(03:35:11):
But like, I don't think that was the potential of
the moment. The potential of the moment was this. And
it's interesting to me that well because Beers kind of
traces out a political history that never quite happened, which
is so okay. One of the one of the sort
of big political trends over the course of the twenty
century is you have all these people who were sort

(03:35:32):
of like they they basically got turned into planning bureaucrats
Dree in June World War two, because every government basically
turns into a giant planning engine, and then you know,
some of them go into some of them, you know,
essentially stay on in the government doing planning stuff. Beers
like goes into the corporate world, and the corporations are
also you know, they start doing they also start doing
this planning stuff, and you know, but Beers is interesting

(03:35:54):
because he he pivots, like he pivots in a direction
that the world doesn't, which is he pivots towards Okay,
the solution to sort of you know, the kind of
like decay of these like authoritarian planning systems, whether whether
they be like the corporate versions of it or the
sort of like state administered like total economic planning from

(03:36:17):
the top down versions is oh well, okay, we need
to have planning from the bottom up and distributed. Yeah. Yeah.
And he, like everyone involved with Iverson gets murdered. The
only reason Beer survives because he wasn't in the country.
And it's it's just really interesting, like like it's kind
of not a story. Everybody got murdered, but some of

(03:36:39):
them did, and some of them were in exile. Uh,
some of them were imprisoned. Yeah, it was, it was,
it was, you know, it was not a good time.
Beer got out early and he knew things that we're
getting we're getting bad, and everybody around him knew things
were getting bad. Um. Yeah, like he was on him.
He was on a kind of I guess, like it's
almost adic mission to like try and get some of

(03:37:01):
the blockade stuff. Like he was trying to. I think
he was trying to flog like a container ship full
of iron or something. You know, he was shopping shopping
it around to try and trying to help out the
likely appine to the world. That's what it was. Yeah.
But um, yeah, it's um hold on, I had a
thought there. Um. And then like after afterwards, um, like

(03:37:23):
Beer spent a fair bit as time like trying to
get his his comrades out of out of Chile and
get them out of prison and got the got them
resettled in um in the UK and so on America
as well. Um. But yeah, I think that Um, this

(03:37:44):
is like that's a very interesting point about the the
you know, the sort of the real value of this
moment being that movement towards autonomy, that that reorganization of society,
not towards UH neoliberal engineering of markets and uh sort

(03:38:08):
of reinforcement of private dictatorships, um, but towards a kind
of like holistic control system that is still informed by
you know, the principles of autonomy and UH and and
and science. UM. It's it's definitely like an answer to

(03:38:28):
the crisis of the seventies which was not taken up.
And in that sense it is a foreclosed future, but
of course one that we can take lessons from now. Yeah,
I think there's something else that's very interesting me about this,
because you know, if if you look at how like
if you look at how the socialist block sort of

(03:38:50):
responds to the crisis and seventies, and you know, they're
sort of decaying the eighties, like they have this option
available to them, right they had they had They have
made a lot of plays, they have a lot they
have a lot better technology than with the lands are
using that have more resources, and every single one of
them goes no and instead just sort of like transitions,

(03:39:12):
you know, instead of I think it has to do
with there there there's a line this this is this
is like slightly before this, there's a line in UM
a debate Maw and Joe and Li are having in
I think it's seven. This is like the peak of
the sort of workers led part of the culture revolution,
like the works have taken Shanghai, and Maw and Joe

(03:39:35):
and I are talking and they're they're trying to figure out,
like what are they gonna do? You know, they they've
set off this force. It's now become uncontrollable. And there's
there's this line where they're talking about, Okay, well, if
if we give if you give them, if you give
them a commune, they have to have free elections, and
Joe and La is like, well that would be anarchism.

(03:39:57):
And then they're just like, oh god, we can't do that,
and they never do in the end, you know that
the end result of this whole sort of that whole
sort of processes that trying to like instead of doing,
instead of sort of like devolving any level of control
down to like any of the workers who are doing things,
they're like, Okay, well we'll just we'll just you know,

(03:40:18):
we'll we'll we'll do capitalism instead. Well, well you will,
you know, we'll create markets will sort of like maintain
our firm structure, but you know, the party into it. Yeah, yeah,
And it's it's this, it's it's a very interesting thing
to me too, because like there have been other like
you know, like they're like lots of socialist parties of

(03:40:40):
sort of various like degrees of radical nous have come
to power like since nineteen seventy three, and to my knowledge,
not a single one of them has ever picked any
of this stuff back up, like even even you know,
like like the most radical sort of like like you know,
like like like early Chavas never like touches this, like

(03:41:01):
even like I don't like I I don't I don't
think like I don't think the easy Lends ever done it,
Like I mean, they have petological issues there, but like
it's it's it's it's interesting to me that like basically
no one who's ever taken power since has ever attempted
it again. H which again is changed because this is

(03:41:24):
you know, one of one of the sort of like
this you would think this is like this is at
least a potential solution to sort of this this this
this problem of the stagnation and sort of collapse of
the old sort of adults. There's a plenty of economies,
but no one takes it up. And I'm interested to
think what you too think about that, like why this

(03:41:47):
doesn't happen? Yeah, there's a I think there's an interesting
dimension of Beer's work in Chile that kind of I
think um might provide some answers to that, which is that. Know,
he he was in charge of setting up Cyberson, and
Cyberson was kind of a system for optimizing the economy,

(03:42:14):
but he had other concerns and other briefs that he
was working on at the same time. And what he
came to realize was that there was a layer of
management and experts in the organization of the economy that

(03:42:37):
were happy enough to sort of work on a Cyberson
that was designed to improve production numbers, but they had
real resistance to the idea of worker autonomy because of
the because of of of wanting to maintain their their

(03:43:02):
job privileges, and because of the prejudices of their their habitats.
I guess you could say that what they learned when
they were educated as engineers or managers or whatever, and
you know, where the people who know things the workers
don't know things, they shouldn't be in charge that kind
of thing. And so he starts to he starts to

(03:43:23):
realize that in order to really make cybersen effective as
an engine for autonomy, what needs to happen is that um,
sort of what you are describing with the Shanghai commune Uh,
the the workers need to learn the cybernetic principles themselves

(03:43:46):
and implement them through autonomous action. UM. And so he
starts to try to kind of like right up, like
right pamphlets that can be distributed to the workers so
that the information that he has as theory is not

(03:44:07):
being filtered through a bureaucracy, but is instead, like you know,
involved in an educational process of self mode mobilization among
the workers. UM. And so you know this really uh
doesn't mean that expert knowledge is irrelevant, but it does

(03:44:27):
mean that it does imply threatening the social privileges of
management and expert knowledge, because in Beer's conception of management,
management is something that is done by anyone who has
the power to affect an organization or change and organization.

(03:44:51):
So if the workers are able to change their organizations,
they are also managers. That's not something exclusive to experts.
For for Beer, management is a function. It's not a person.
Right in Beer's ideal world, like management would just be
these like decision nodes that emerge among among workers. I

(03:45:11):
can like the management manager would never be a person.
A manager would be like a kind of structural information
processing like, um, thing that happens among people. Um. Yeah yeah.
And so like when you see in for example, the
USS are the option of creating a planning network, a

(03:45:34):
computerized telecommunications planning network throughout the whole union. Um, it's
basically shot down for two reasons. One, it would be
very very expensive for them to develop. It would be
on the order of of doing you know, their nuclear

(03:45:55):
weapons development, perhaps more expensive than that. Uh. And two
it is simply at odds with the system of like planning,
the command economy that had that had grown up in

(03:46:15):
the wake of the revolution. Right, it's simply at odds
with the power of all of the factory managers, the planners,
all that kind of stuff. It just kind of makes
it threatens their identity and it threatens their position of power.
And so I think that when you look at the
socialist countries and why they didn't adopt this system, I

(03:46:39):
think it's because they it would require the people in
power to really rethink their entire role and identity as
members of society. Um. Yeah, And then it's kind of
there's a treadful irony really in that link. It's it's
Stafford me or somebody who comes out of like bourgeois

(03:47:01):
like management stuff, um and is deep in the pocket
for that. He's the one who actually sincerely pursues the
most radical project in like socialist history that we've ever seen,
vastly more radical in its intent, and it's like kind
of it's the beginnings of its impact than anything any
Leninist has ever done. And it's basically because he actually

(03:47:22):
did want real freedom and autonomy for working people, and
your average leniness just doesn't, you know, like again, like
to go back to the example from earlier, right that
like when when under pressure, they will they'll do capitalism
before they'll do anything that even resembles um, autonomy for workers,
they will take that path rather than doing the right thing.

(03:47:44):
You know. That does speak to the character of the thing,
and it's it's it's it's it's it's that class interest
basically of those kind of functionaries, right, Like, And the
thing that makes Beery different is that he sincerely actually
wanted to do it, you know, and the worker's autonomy
thing wasn't just a smoke screen for him, you know. Yeah,
And when when he starts to come up with these
ideas of like thinking like, okay, like an economic planning

(03:48:06):
system is not adequate, we need to go beyond that
to thinking about the constitution of the social body, he
he quickly finds that he's being marginalized within those circles
of planners in the Chilean government because this is not
something that they are enthusiastic about. They're actually quite concerned

(03:48:30):
about this idea. Even if I end would be, you know,
all for it, right, because he was he was very
sincere about his interest in an autonomy, UM, there were
still many people around beer who did not particularly like
the idea. UM. Yeah, absolutely. And I think if we

(03:48:51):
look at it, you know, in terms of why hasn't
it happened since then, in in all of these intervening decades,
I think you also have to look at, um the
international system and the way that countries figure into it,
because we have all of these um neoliberal structures of

(03:49:16):
management and organization that were created in the eighties and
nineties and early odds uh that socialist government has to
contend with if they are to embark on a program
like this, which isn't to say it's impossible, but what
it does mean is that there are all these sort

(03:49:39):
of um, highly complex regulatory and organizational structures that have
roots deep in our societies right now, and it is
the path of least resistance to not attempt to engage
in a in in uh an effort to kind of

(03:50:01):
you know, let the market atrophy as you develop an
alternative structure for social organization, um, because all of these
structures are there and you have to kind of like
root them out and replace them with something new, as
opposed to having all these ready mades of what's already there,

(03:50:22):
the market centered solutions, the the the kind of autocratic solutions, um,
you know, all of the management systems that have been
developed with an autocracy in mind instead of something that
is truly democratic and uh kind of self just dating
mm hmm. And I think as well, um, there's there's

(03:50:44):
a kind of other thing that like, um, like the
left has been kind of in a very weak position
for quite a while now, like since then, since the seventies,
right and like um, yes, like we're we're just we're
just starting to come around to maybe being on possibly

(03:51:04):
an upswing. But also like I think there was this
kind of long depressive phase at the end of the
at the crossing in the centuries right where a lot
of like left is kind of and this this this
actually gets into like why some of the reasons why
we started general into that unit that like we felt
like we needed to bring this kind of like systems
thinking and like technical seriousness back to the table after

(03:51:27):
the kind of weird depressive phases where like you know,
like say the ultra globalization stuff for the occupy stuff,
where people kind of take an almost explicitly anti strategic
kind of turn and like a kind of anti technical turn.
You know, there's that kind of depressive hangover of like
oh my god, like capital and it's it's it's technology
is is hegemonic? Like how the funk are we ever

(03:51:48):
going to get out of this? Like it would have
been heard to make an argument for a scientific and
like technical kind of fusion with with the humanist kind
of impulses of socialism, But that's I think we're getting
to a point where we can startish actually having that
conversation again, like we're we're seeing a bit more of
a turn towards that, and it can turn towards like

(03:52:09):
this kind of serious kind of like more and more
serious kind of discussion of like hey, like okay, like okay,
like we we we we fucking hate the current order
of things. We want to we want to see it
gotten rid of what would we actually replace it with?
Like functionally, how would things actually work? Like I think
those kind of conversations are coming back on the table
in a way that those were just impossible in the nineties,

(03:52:30):
like after the Berlin Wall came down or whatever. They
were impossible a couple of years ago. You know. Yeah,
the the market as the fundament of society basically seemed
to be invincible at that time. Um, And there was
a lot of just sort of wrongheaded assumptions about what

(03:52:56):
was and wasn't true about it and about society as
a whole. And you know, we've had a lot of
chaos in the years since then. That was um that
affected not just the countries that we were you know,
being restructured by the I m F, but actually came

(03:53:18):
and affected the core of the world economy as well. Uh.
And I think that that that's sort of like, you know,
in the same way that World War One kind of
disproved the idea of the white man's invincibility and superiority,
like having those like market chaos dynamics come home to

(03:53:39):
roost in the core of the world system has has
undermined that invincibility, That that that idea that oh, the
market is just naturally the best and there's nothing that
could possibly be better. At the same time that we
have all of this technological development that's happening, um, you
know in our economy that could be used for something

(03:54:01):
different as opposed to you know, I don't know, making
n f T s or something. Yeah, absolutely right, that
that's all super important. I think that that kind of refines,
like my previous thought is refining in my head now
like that like right now, Um that that kind of
market chaos and especially even like the chaos of like
the system's response to COVID and stuff really puts um

(03:54:24):
like in general, and for the left in particular, it
puts like the question of governance back on the table
in a way that it had kind of been off
the table for a while. Like I think there was
there was a period on the left where like left
activity was kind of like railing against governance. Like it
was like we we want freedom from governance and that
sort of thing. Right, And I'm not going to say
those are necessarily bad impulses, right, but I think they're

(03:54:44):
also kind of a bit wrong headed as well. Right,
But like the kind of reality is that, like, for
for human life to flourish and for our lives to flourish,
we need governance. And like because like governance actually like
as a word has the same route as cybernetics does.
So kaiberneties, the Greek word becomes kubernettes, becomes cybernetics, right,
but that's also the root of governor, so kuberner, kubernator,

(03:55:09):
those are the roots of governance. So governance and cybernetics
are one and the same kind of concept. Um And
this question of like if we intend to create a
world of self governance, um that is effective, it's viable
in Beer's terminology, like viable self governance, that what we're
proposing is opposed to the chaotic vortex of nonsense that

(03:55:30):
we have to put up with right now. And that's
back on the table in a big way. That like
because I think especially with with COVID, people look at
like just the sheer idiocy and ineptitude and chaos of
our governments and realizing like, oh, those are decrepit, completely
screwed up systems and in parat because their goal is

(03:55:50):
the maintenance of capital accumulation. So this gets us back
to the goal directed behavior cybernetics, right, Like the steersman
steers the boat towards a goal, right, and it's it's
always about or like a you know, a serponetic device
like a thermostat has a goal temperature that is trying
to regulate the temperature to water towards um You know,
we have these governance systems that are completely awful. They're

(03:56:13):
just like not suitable for like the regulation of human life,
for flourishing. They're only suitable for the regulation of this
insane system that just keeps capital accumulation going, like that's
the control variable that it regulates. And we're now in
a position, we're on the left, like more and more
of us are saying like what we're proposing is not
like a sort of magical escape from governance. We're proposing really,

(03:56:37):
you know, we should have samee governance and it turns
out that same governance is bottom up self organized governance. Um.
And that's that's both the moral position and a technical position,
and I think they're both of those. The moral and
technical valances feed off each other. Like we're we're we're
able to be the serious people in the room. This
this is a very big change of pace right for us,

(03:56:59):
because like for a while we were railing against like
the very serious people of like the Centrists and like
the fucking Blairites and the Clintonite sort of people. We
are the serious people now saying what what this what
this system actually does is absurd and ludicrous, and it
needs to be dismantled and rebuilt with a totally different
like feedback circuits, a different kind of goal orientation, um.

(03:57:23):
And it needs to be oriented towards human flourishing. And
that's it turns out there's a science of doing that,
and it's called cybernetics, you know. And we also have
a runaway ecological crisis where we learn about we see
that you know, like the capitalist market system is absolutely

(03:57:48):
leading us all to death and the earth to death.
And so it is human flourishing. But we also are
concerned with the flourishing of life in general. Um. So
I think that that that is something that wasn't as
much on the horizon in the seventies. You know, I

(03:58:08):
certainly think you know, people were thinking about it. But
breaking down this barrier between economics uh and UH and ecology,
I think is a very cybernetic impulse and I think
one that you know, we need to keep working at
because like you know, whenever we think about these things

(03:58:29):
is separate domains were already uh, we're already engendering more
destruction of the environment. Yeah, yeah, I think cyberenetics and
miltill help us in that kind of link um on
a kind of for left projects, like on an aggressive
footing of like if we recognize that like the capital

(03:58:50):
and its kind of governance system is it is cybernetic,
like it has its own feedback circuits and like saying
that the explosive feedback circuit that we're on with with ecology, right, Like,
how do you intervene in a system to halt and
disrupt those circuits celested so as to disintegrate the system?
Is um is something like you can you can learn
a lot from cyran NICs to to get lessons on

(03:59:11):
how to to intervene there. The last thing I want
to talk about is just what is the society that
is non capitalist and based off of sort of cyberbetic
governance principles. What does that look like for just a person?
Because I think you know this, this has been one
of the big sort of like political challenges of the

(03:59:33):
last you know, fifty years. It's just the complete foreclosure
of the ability to even just sort of imagine a
system that's not this mm hmm, yeah, I think it.
It means UM In the first instance, it means a
different orientation to your workplace and your community, right, because

(04:00:03):
when you grow up in a society where um power
is exercise autocratically, it has an infantilizing effect on on
you as an individual. UM. And uh, you know, maybe
your relationship to work, is your workplace is one of

(04:00:25):
sort of emotional detachment or of tantrum throwing, right, because
these are these are reactions, These are natural reactions to
being in an abusive environment. UM. But if you are
in a system where the work of management is not

(04:00:50):
only open to you but expected of you, you have
a different orientation to that workplace, to the community you're
in because it's your responsibility. If you don't do it,
you know, you're going to lose your autonomy and also
you're going to have real problems that you have to

(04:01:11):
grapple with as an individual. So there is a responsibility
that comes there. But also like that means an opening
up of horizons in terms of well, things don't always
have to be the same, Things don't always have to
be handed down to you for management on high. They
can actually change, Like you can see the possibilities in

(04:01:34):
front of you, You can plan for the future in
your context, and you can have that meaningful freedom in
your life and be you know, a a full human
being in that sense, right, um, And so I think
that that's a very core every day change that you

(04:01:54):
could see, um in terms of you know, sort of
your horizon of where you might work or what you
might do. You know, you could expect that there would
be more possibilities for each person to be like quote
unquote entrepreneurial right to to have initiative in their life

(04:02:17):
and be able to envision and create things around them
that uh, you know they can't do right now because
they either are stuck in a job that doesn't give
them that freedom or they are actually not even able
to have a job right now where they can have

(04:02:38):
a reasonable expectation of survival because their workplace is oriented
around just making sure the work gets done and you know,
the consequences be damned. UM. So I think that you know,
that is another area that's important. UM. And that sort

(04:03:00):
of freedom of management um extends all the way up
to uh, you know, working in different kinds of capacities
or jobs. Like some people in kind of a middle
middle ranking area in a corporation these days might get
shuffled around from department to department to try to kind

(04:03:22):
of get a well rounded understanding of what the corporation
is uh and how it functions. But you know, we
can kind of expect that these roles would be more
open to everybody because again, you know, a system in
the v s M is not a person. A system

(04:03:45):
is a function and that function should be fulfilled in
a way that is as flexible as possible. UM. So
there's a lot less kind of well, I'm stuck in
accounting and that's my life now, and that's all that
that all ever be. Of course, there are limits to education,
their limits to specialization, all of that kind of stuff like,

(04:04:06):
you know, it takes time to learn these things, but
you could expect some more flexibility there without having that
terror of oh yeah, you know, in the neroliberal era,
everybody's expected to have like fifteen jobs in the course
of their quote unquote career. But also each of those
jobs is going to be interspersed with a period of
absolute terror as they live with unemployed in a society

(04:04:29):
without a safety net. Right, Um. I think that that's
that's you know, those are real consequences for everybody's life.
I think, yeah, yeah, absolutely, And I think like at
a very very high level, the way Beer puts it
as that we are trapped in this kind of crazy
system that's like it's control variable as profits, like that's

(04:04:53):
the little variable that it's it's like doing feedback onto
to maintain um. Where is what we're proposing is like
the sort of cyberanetic future. We a society that's optimizing
flourishing Like what what beer Beer? The word he uses
a u demony, which is borrowing from Aristotle, just like

(04:05:14):
flourishing um. And yeah, a lot a lot of stuff
flows out from that, like to imagine a world where
because we we all feel it, right, that like everything
around us is kind of like micro tuned as like
a little feedback loop to keep money and profit flowing
and to keep capital accumulating. Just imagine a world where

(04:05:34):
that's just not true anymore, and the the sort of
social infrastructure that you grow up in is an infrastructure
that instead optimizes for the flourishing of life. Yeah. Um,
And I think you know, when we we we look
at sort of the broader patterns of society today, we
see all of these hair brained schemes that you know,

(04:05:58):
very rich men are embarking on and they're they're setting
the agenda for society. You know, we're that you know,
Mark Zuckerberg is telling us that the metaverse is the
future and you just have to get on board with this,
even though anyone can see that this idea is patently ridiculous. Um.
And in a society where that kind of management, that

(04:06:23):
kind of money power doesn't exist anymore, Like you don't
have to live under that kind of future horizon anymore,
where it's like eight men with absurd amounts of money
cook up, you know, ridiculous schemes and everybody has to
follow them, just like they were following the orders of
pharaoh back in the day. I think, do not be

(04:06:46):
ruled by pharaohs is as kind of places and he too,
leave off unless you tell if anything else do you
want to get to? Okay, there's there's one little line
from Beer's book what it's actually a set of presentation.
It is called designing Freedom that I absolutely love. Cracks
me up every time I read it, so I'm just
gonna need to for the listeners. It gives you a
sense of his absolute like ridiculous radicalism, like these off
the fucking chats with this stuff. Um. At some point

(04:07:09):
he says, and I'm quoting here, every time we hear
that a proposal will destroy society as we know it,
we should have the courage to say, thank God at last. Yeah.
Really a real maniac, ye yeah. And and and he
had this this dictum of if it works, it's out

(04:07:30):
of date. So you know, it's it's like like, yeah,
don't be complacent, you know, don't be a traditionalist. And
I think also that there's been there's been really horrific
consequences of sort of the right being the ones to
like take the urge for creative destruction. Just like you know,

(04:07:51):
what was that line there's some I forget some some
venture capitalist things like move fast and break things, and
it's like, yeah, so when they move fast the thing
they breaks us. But you know we can move faster
and break things that are bad. Yeah, definite to a
creative and playful kind of motive, being right that like

(04:08:14):
you you might be able to work, wake up in
the morning and think, God, you know, it would be
really cool if we could have like a like a
child care nurse ory just like like out in the
out in the common area between these buildings and stuff,
and like go to your go to your local like
your your workers council or whatever, and have really plausible
like way of actually getting that and like collaborating with
people to make that happen, and then being like, Okay,

(04:08:36):
well we'll try it as an experiment for twelve months.
We'll keep we'll see how it goes. And then there's
a feedback cycle where it's like, Okay, some aspect of
this design didn't really work out. We'll we'll go talk
about it some more, and then it aerate on that
and that's that's like as it's it's an entrepreneurialism that
doesn't bear much resemblance to what that word means right now.
It just means that human beings, living real things, real workers,

(04:08:59):
will be able to actually control their environments in this
substance of their lives in a meaningful length. Yeah, and
like this, I think you know, back in the nineties
early odds, sort of before the two thous crisis, in
the hoary days of your um it's there was a

(04:09:21):
lot of talk about flexibility and dynamicism and adaptation. But
what that always meant was we make decisions about what's
going to change, and you have to adapt, right. It
was it was it was, you know, always this arbitrary

(04:09:41):
power from outside that would just be changing the social fabric,
and you had to be flexible enough to cope with
what you were being subjected to. It's very different if
you know the planning is being done by you for you,

(04:10:02):
and you're moving towards adaptation and flexibility out of a
sense of oh, yeah, this would be better and I'm
going to adapt to be in a better state to
to work with my environment, uh, in a more healthy
and a more flourishing way, as opposed to just like

(04:10:24):
oh yeah, you've got to work three jobs now, so
figure it out right, that's a very different kind of flexibility,
very different kind of adaptation. And you know, those things
have sort of become dirty words in some ways, but
they are really core to the way that we all
exist as organisms in the world, and they don't have
to be just synonyms for abuse. Mm hmm exactly. Yeah,

(04:10:47):
I think okay, we can take this as a place
to leave off. Yeah, do you two have stuff you
want to look and I know you you want to plug,
but plug the things that you want people to listen
to because they are UM. Yeah, we're General intellecting It. Um.
You go to General intellecting It dot nets and it's
got all the episodes on there. We're on Twitter as
g I unite pod um. Yeah, you can find us

(04:11:09):
on all the podcast things. UM. We're also part of
a podcast network called emancipation and so that's emancipation dot
Network on the web. UM. And yeah, some really excellent
shows on there. We were collaborating with Swampside Chats and
um Mortal Science, from Alpha to Omega Jumps Utopia. They're

(04:11:29):
they're really wonderful shows that are all UM. It's it's
a variety of different sort of takes on things. But
like UM, there's a sort of common there's a sort
of spiritual common grounds they all have. Um, yeah, we
we all were all interested in thinking systematically. We're all

(04:11:51):
interested in emancipation, as the network name says. We're all
interested in sort of building something going forward, trying to
construct an alternative as opposed to simply getting caught up
in day to day politics or getting caught up in

(04:12:14):
uh dumer mentality. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's systematic, it's critical,
but it's also constructive, and I think that's what we're
all trying to do there. Yeah. Yeah, Well, thank you
too both for coming on. Thank you. It's thanks for
having us. Yeah, this this has been make it happen
here you can find us that happened here pod in places.

(04:12:36):
There's also stuff atquals on Media that you can also
find in those same places and possibly also different ones. Yeah,
we have a we have a website. Everyone asked me
for my sources every single week and they get posted
there once a month. So yeah, go go to quoson
media dot com and you will find all of the

(04:12:56):
sources so you don't have to DM me every week.
All right, Bye, Hey, we'll be back Monday with more

(04:13:17):
episodes every week from now until the heat death of
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