August 11, 2025 • 31 mins
Andrew is joined by James to discuss how physical and digital infrastructure can be used as systems of control, and how communities have resisted and built their own infrastructure.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All the media, Hello and welcomed. It could happen here,
and it could. My name is antress Age. I'm also
ANTWRESSM on YouTube, and I'm here once again.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
With James James Stout. People said I'd never say my
last name.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
And they can't work out who I am, so I
guess I'll do that more.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome James Stout. Thank you so ically. And I mean,
this is an unfortunately common pattern of thought for me,
but I've been thinking about just how totalizing this system feels.
And it's like everywhere you turn, you know, walking down
the street, look at the city, a pollution that every
inch of land there's been claimed by the system, every
(00:48):
bit of you know, the way you live and operate
just feels like it's been manipulated and controlled in some way.
And so that's really what I want to highlight in
today's episode, the infrastructure of this system and how it's
used to control, you know, both in terms of the
physical infrastructure and the digital infrastructure of our lives. So
(01:12):
I suppose to start off, I'd ask, when was the
last time that you noticed infrastructure shape in your choices?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
That's interesting, I mean a lot in certain ways, right,
like like the infrastructure of labor shapes a lot of
my choices, Like I have to work a lot to
make ends meet, right like, which means I can't do
sometimes things I want to do, Like there are mutual
aid efforts I'd like to participate in more that I'm
(01:42):
not able to because I have this obligation to capital.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Mm hmm, I guess that's one of them.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Or just like the physical infrastructure limiting the people I
get to see, right, Like, there are places I love
to go out there with some really nice vegan places
in Tijuana that I don't go to as much as
i'd like because someone has built a giant wall and
then another giant war next to it, and then stationed
a bunch of people with guns to check if I
have the right piece of paper to go back and
(02:08):
forth to somewhere that otherwise I could ride my bike to.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah, borders are very unfortunate and big one. Yeah, it's
really frustrating, And I think that's one of the most
obviously detrimental aspects of physical infrastructure that to de manipulate
our lives today. I think on the digital level, there's
things like just the way that social media is laid out.
(02:34):
I think it really controls like how much time you
spend on it, how much energy you invest in it.
And of course even just our neighborhoods, our environments, our cities.
They laid out, it tends to affect, you know, just
how often we go out, where we go, what needs
a transportation we use, and I mean with physical infrastructures concerned,
(02:55):
and how it's been used to control people. That goes
way back into history. You know, coloneal powers often built
transport infrastructure, you know, like roads and railways and ports
with the very explicit purpose of extracting raw materials from
the colonized territories to get to the imperial core. You know,
the systems were not designed to say over the mobility
(03:17):
needs of the local populations. They usually create a direct
line from the mines and the plantations and the resource
rich areas to the coastal ports where they could be exported.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, And so for the British and perialists and lovers
of empire, they often brag that, you know, we built ports,
and we built bridges, and we built roads, and we
built railway as well. It's the same pattern everywhere. You know,
in India it was used to move cotton, tea and
other resources from the interior to the ship. In ports
in Ghana, it was used to move gold and coco.
(03:50):
In any case, it wasn't to interconnect within the city,
you know, the actual economic subtermination of the people in
that area. It didn't matter.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
I think about this, like, I cycled around Rwanda in
twenty twenty, which is an interesting time to be traveling,
but I remember riding around them. The kny Rwanda word
for dirt road is iqitaka, right, and so that's what
mostly So we cycled on these dirt roads.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
It was lovely, you know.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
We'd go through the village and everyone would come out
and wave at you, and like the little kids would
come out and be like, what the fuck is this bicycle?
And it was kind of fun, you know. And then
we'd find someone. It's not really set up for like restaurants,
so you just find someone and pay them an amount
upon which you agreed and they would give you some
food and that was a beautiful experience. And then there
are these roads that they call Chinese roads that just
(04:37):
go directly from the mind to the place where the
raw material can be extracted. Because between the China was
doing a lot of what you could generously call foreign
direct investment or like neo colonialism in lots of places
in Africa, right, And it was the contrast between those
two traveling experiences was so profound, Like we obviously you
(04:58):
travel faster on the smooth roads, but like you don't
immerse yourself in the human experience of meeting and sharing
that travel with people, which is why I do these
things in the first place. With just like such a
profound contrast. I remember it really striking me at the time.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, I mean, and this is what empires and rulers
in general have been doing, right. They they wield their
control over labor to set things up in a way
that fulfills their interests. Yeah. And then you know, even
when people key in some sort of nominal independence and
(05:36):
they inherit these clonial infrastructure grids or you know, they
have investments coming in and they have set up they
have these companies, it's a multinational companies setting up infrastructure.
It still continues, you know, this sort of extractivist and
top down nature of the way the infrastructure is set up.
(05:58):
You know, it doesn't remain all of them. Don't reimagine
the logic of what came before. You're in part for
lack of funding and in part for lack of imagination,
and so in a lot of places, the peripheral regions
in these countries are still lacking in connectivity, They're still
lacking behind the rest of the country. They still don't
(06:18):
have access to some of the basic social services and
resources that the urban core has. Because you know, the
urban rural divide in many ways mimics the corporate free
divide on the international stage. And then you have these
neo colonial development aid programs coming in with the IMF
for the World Bank, and you have even more infrastructure projects.
(06:41):
So just repeat this extractive pattern under the ban of development.
Of course, real development would be connecting people, encouraging people
to participate in society and distribute opportunity. But the infrastructure
tends to be set up as more so for consolidating
state power and channeling the movement of people in predictable,
(07:02):
survailable ways, and prioritizing access for certain populations while excluding
or marginalizing others. So, of course, infrastructure development has the
(07:22):
capacity to help people. You know, it can increase accessibility,
can make people's lives easier, and it can also just
manage and contain them and varied sources, and we see
a lot more examples of this sort of infrastructure control.
When you look at the class and racial dynamic within societies,
(07:43):
those sorts of divisions and separations and stratifications, they of
course manifest physically. You know, in the US you had
literal segregation areas that were designated for black people listening
for white people, water fountains and neighborhoods and all these
different things. You also had redline in policy years, and
nowadays you have spaces that were redlined and thus lacked investment,
(08:07):
and thus when neglected infrastructurally due to that racial and
economic inequality, those spaces are now right for development in
the form of gentrification because the property is so cheap,
so undervalued, and so the people who made something out
of that lack are are being pushed out. And in
South Africa, I mean up until recently, these are partid
(08:30):
era policies created townships that were deliberately located far from
white urban centers. There were lacking and services and transit
options that physically reinforced the racial division of that society.
And even today around the world you have urban zoning
laws and transit access limitations and public housing policies that
(08:56):
recreate historical class divisions and racial divisions, ethnic divisions. And
I'm sure you and your oh, with all of the
I mean, every time I talked to you have like
a new travel story to tell. I'm sure you've witnessed
something like this.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, I was just thinking of how like I was
thinking of, like if we think about the Syrian state
as a contiguous colony, right, Like it's called the Syrian
Arab Republic, but not all the people who are contained
within the territory in which it once claimed the monopoly
on violence are Arab people. So we think of the
parts of North and East Syria, majority Kurdish areas, as colonized.
(09:34):
We can see that reflected in the infrastructure.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Right.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Part of that is, as you say, this sort of
lack of investment, But then also part of it is
every government funded building, right, schools, hospitals, the buildings you
go in to do the paperwork you have to do
to exist under the state. They're set up like strong points,
like they're designed with a big kind of war and
(09:57):
then a big courtyard and then thickias like they're designed
to be militarily defensible against the people they're supposed to serve, right,
Like the school is designed to be used as a
fucking machine gun position, and once you see it, you
see it everywhere, and you think about the nature of
(10:18):
the state that designs infrastructure with that explicitly in mind, Right,
it's fascinating. The other example I think of is like
Chris Elam's done some fantastic writing on the development of Barcelona,
and you have like the unregulated working class of Raval,
like this area just next to the Rambler, where the
streets are just fucking small and winding and crazy and
(10:40):
there's never not laundry kind of over you know, over
your head, and it's a very I like to go there.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
It's a place that I enjoy.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
And then you have the ijumpler, which means extension, where
the infrastructure is extremely like it's probably one of the
earlier grid cities that you would see, right. And the
idea was that like these these over crowd they'd kind
of what were in the nineteen twenties and thirty slums
would be like where the working class would be kept
(11:06):
and the working class, to be clear, were seen as
there was a colonial relationship between the boys who are
and the working class in Barcelona, because most of the
working class were not Catalan, they would actually put signs
at the top of these working class areas saying like
Mutia begins here, right, these are the mutianos and people
from Mussia, the people from outside of Catalonia. Catalonia stops
(11:28):
here where the working class exist. That later reflected in
the working class self identity, like it came to refer
to the raval as Chinatown, not specifically because of a
high concentration of people from the Chinese diaspora, but because
they'd seen Chicago gangster movies where Chinatown was like the
area where the gangsters were, and they were like, yeah,
(11:49):
we're fucking gangster, Like we're going to call it Chinatown.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
That you want to come in here, will fucking shoot you.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Like I thought that was really fascinating, like response to
the way that have been alienated by infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, I mean, and that's why when you when you
look at the sort of claims that oh, you know,
it's just it's just roads, it's just the zoning, it's
just a city grid, it's just an embassy, it's just
a government office, it's like, no, these sorts of spaces,
these buildings, this infrastructure could never be neutral. Yeah, and
(12:25):
when you see that, you can't unsee it because you
look at the amount of decisions it would have had
to have gone into, you know, some of the examples
you mentioned or the examples I mentioned, you know, the
design decisions. It's like, Okay, we're going to put this
road here instead of here. Yeah, we're going to use
this material instead of this material. Who you employ to
build those structures, that infrastructure or also has an impact in
(12:48):
this surrounding area? Are you employing people within the community,
employing people outside? What's happening there? Who's funding this infrastructure,
who's maintaining the infrastructure?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:58):
What level of Seville LUNs has been implemented? Where are
the public transportation routes and why they're here and not there?
Speaker 2 (13:06):
You know, yeah, exactly, Like there's people whose opinions and
views matter in that process, and there are people who
are excluded from it.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
One of the authors I tend to go back too
often is he vandalist because he critics a lot of
this stuff, so particularly infrastructure's control and tools. Look in viviality.
He spoke about how modern transport and urban design have
been used to alienate people from their own bodies and communities.
So you call all the usual suspects suburbanization and car
(13:38):
centric infrastructure, how it isolates people and increases dependence on vehicles.
And he called this dependence a radical monopoly because all
the other choices have effectively been eliminated. Technically, you could
walk along the highway, but you're not going to You're
going to get a cut, right, you can't choose to
(13:59):
walk a cycle, and that sort of scenario of.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Film's going to call the cops that you try that
in America, right.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, So as a lich sor it, it's really a
cultural imposition that shapes how we end up living, interacting, moving,
and it's frustrating. On the global stage, you also see
how infrastructure has the capacity to control the whole geopolitical board.
You know, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Red Sea,
(14:27):
the Straight orfor moves, all these places have a lot
of power militarily, trade wise, dlematically because they control the
flow of oil or of goods or of data. Yeah,
particularly in the areas where the undersea internet cables run
and so speaking of data. Actually, the realm of digital
(14:50):
infrastructure is also very insiguous when it comes to control.
We tend to think of the Internet as that sort
of ephemeral cloud, right, But the cloud is hosted physically.
You know, there are sofas, there are fiber optic cables,
the air data centers, all these things. They're not as
obvious as roads and railways and you know, neighborhoods, but
(15:15):
they are just as if not in some ways even
more powerful in terms of controlling what people access, how
fast they access it, under what terms they access it,
or because it's so intangible it's so hard to pin down,
it can often escape scrutiny. But there are companies that
own these things. There's a small group of very powerful
(15:36):
corporations that pretty much dictate how things are in it.
You know, most people they know about China's Grade Firal
and how it's used to coordin off China from the
rest of the Internet in some ways. You know, its sensors,
websites and sweet results. It monitors people's activity, and it
usually has these state monitored alternatives to some of the
(15:57):
popular global platforms like Google and Base. Right, But Google
and Amazon and Meta and Microsoft it's not like they're
any better. You know, the dot run and things Republic
could so if you will call out what China's doing
with the with the Great Firewall, and I agree, I
don't think that any government should have any control over
what people access. But you know, it's not like censorship,
(16:20):
data harvested and surveillance are unique to China. You know,
a lot of other governments, in collaboration with these companies,
deploy soft censorship. You know, they de rank things in
the algorithm, they filter certain keywords, they selectively block certain things. Yeah,
things are maybe automatically flagged or moderated, and that often
(16:43):
affects people from the LGBTQ community in countries where you
know that's that's a big no no. Or you have
even the manipulation of language they will people use as
people try to get around censors. Hence the proliferation of
terms like great and essay and self delete and unlive
(17:04):
and all these other euphemisms, which I mean, honest, I
don't use any of them, and I despise them.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah, me too.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
The thing is a lot of people assume that these
words are censored and all platforms, but they're not. You know,
they may be censored on one platform, usually it's TikTok
or limited in one platform. And then if people take
that sort of TikTok sort of way of speaking and
spread it across the rest of the Internet, or worse yet,
bring it into real life and end up saying things
(17:35):
like un alive in real life. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yeah, everything you have allowed fucking TikTok's algorithm to determine
the way you can express yourself.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Exactly, exactly, And I mean TikTok has a lot of
heat these days because you know, rightfully, so it's very popular,
it has a lot of influence, and it's you know,
very bleatantly interventionist with its content in some damage and Wiz.
But again, the other big cooperations are not immune either.
I mean, Facebook was famously found culpable for genocide, right, Yeah,
(18:10):
They've played a major role in the sort of attitudes
that were developing and the marginalization that was sort of
Targetinghinger community and the subsequent genocide.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
So I was on a panel with some Hinder people
the other day and they are still by physical and
technical infrastructure, being marginalized. So something myself and my union
friends are trying to do is help the Hinder Podcast
Initiative start podcasting right such that they can share their
own voices with the world and their positions and their opinions.
(18:45):
It's very important at a time when they're facing marginalization,
even from revolutionary forces within me and Mark, and we
cannot sustain an Internet connection to allow them to do that.
Like we tried to do a liveanel and it was
very hard for you know, these guys who are running
around cox is bizarre where tens of thousands of bringing
(19:06):
of people live in refugee camps trying to find connectivity,
and like just another example of how they continue to
be marginalized by the systems that first allowed them to
be genocided exactly.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, because the private cooperations are low and not response.
But for this is the governments too. You know, when
the corporations still tell the government to do something, the
governments comply. And then when the governments tell the corporations
to do stuff a lot of the time, it's also
like they comply. It's collaboration, you know, especially since the
government has the power in a lot of cases to
(19:40):
shut down the Internet when things are not going their way. Yeah,
you know, they used it and all of it. Recently,
you have the suppression of the centering protests, you know,
to influence elections or to restrict information, substructionalism and communication
during crises. When you look at all over the world, Iran, India,
than Myanmar, Uganda, even in Gaza. In all these cases,
(20:05):
these governments step in and they limit or they shut
down the Internet entirely to prevent the news from getting out.
You know, they could target either the entire Internet or
they target it in platforms. They target WhatsApp, they target Twitter.
They justify by saying, oh they're going after take news
or there's a security threat. Yeah it's bullshit, but you
(20:26):
know we could see through that. Yeah, and it's tough
because I mean, this is where these are. These are
the places where people have gathered. These are the online
town squares, you know, and these these this infrastructure is
very much centralized. Google controls most of the search on
(20:47):
the internet. Amazon dominates e commerce and cloud, computer and logistics,
and Matter controls a lot of people's social interactions. You know,
I could brag and say, oh, well I'm not on Facebook,
but you know, as the use what'sapp, because everybody else
uses WhatsApp. Yeah, and it's so easy for them because
we're so concentrated on these platforms. It's so easy for
(21:08):
them to popet us, to flex their their muscles and
control the direction of public discourse. And I mean it's
amplifying things, suppressing other things, maximizing our engagements, exploiting our
cognitive and vulnerabilities, polarizing discourse, distorted reality. It's like, what
(21:31):
the hell do we do? Yeah, And so for the
Opium segment of the podcast, I just want to point
out that, you know, infrastructure can be used to consolidate
power and control people, but it can also be used
to resist and to re clim a collective agency. You know,
(21:55):
even infrastructure there was originally designed to control can be
taken under our control. You know, around the world, communities
have been able to challenge these extractive logics to build
their own infrastructures on their own terms. You know, in
digital spaces, this might take the form of community build
(22:18):
mesh networks or alternative Internet local servers. You know, you
have projects like Guifi dot net in Catalonia, or you
have the NYC Mesh in New York, and these are
efforts to engage in you know, pay to pay and
decentralized communications without the reliance and the telecom giants. And
(22:42):
then you also of course physically have examples of infrastructure
resistant central control, participatory urban planet movements. You have gorilla urbanism,
you have you know, of course, the long and storied
history of squatting otherwise known as informal settlement, and these
informal set of months hubs of innovation, and a lot
(23:04):
of cases in tastes like Nai Ruby or in Rio Gario.
You know, these these slums and favelas, they're hooking up
their own electricity, hooking up their own internet, hooking up
their own what is supply because they recognize that this
is within their hands, this is within their capacity. You know,
we don't have to have everything, you know, passed on
(23:26):
to us from one high you know, we can you know,
sort of reclaim our own voices and design our own spaces.
If you're really interested in how infrastructure has the capacity
(23:47):
to control and really just how states sort of see things,
I have to of course recommend the classic James Scott
seeing like a state. Yeah, I mean, it's such a
foundational framework to understand and how infrastructure is used for
social engineering it's really readable as well, so definitely give
that a read. And you know, think about we is
(24:08):
that you can contribute to shape in the infrastructure around you.
And I don't know, James, if you have any stories
along this vay and you could leave us off with.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Yeah, I mean I think of a ton right, like
even I think about Like when I was a lot younger,
I lived in a I guess what you could call
a slum of favela, like a pretty economically disadvantage part
of Karakas for a little while, and like at the time,
and I've seen this when I lived in Barcelona too,
Like I guess the English word would be info shop
(24:40):
they normally call them. Social centers would be the Spanish
word or social spaces, and like it was cool to see.
Is this is a city which is established through colonialism, right,
And there was a brief time before things were terrible
in Venezuela where people were trying to make it and
largely it was people trying to make things better. The
(25:00):
state for a time allowed a space for that to
exist before it stopped allowing a space for that to exist,
which is where we're at right now, right and very
clearly the state right now is very repressive in Venezuela,
to be clear, Like I didn't want to give put
fuel on the tanky fire or whatever, but it was
actually a really beautiful thing and it facilitated right, I
(25:21):
was like nineteen, My Spanish was dog shit.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
I was hungry all the time.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
It didn't have any food, you know, But it facilitated
that community taking care of me because the spaces were
public and people could see if people were falling through
the cracks, right, And like, I think a lot about
refugee camps, so obviously that somewhere has spent a decent
amount of time right both within the US and outside
of the US. And one thing I've been thinking about
(25:47):
a lot recently is how so many of the people
I met on the way to the United States and
the Dadienne had horrific experiences in the Dadianne and afterwards,
but they also miss the community that they had, Like
they also miss the profound solidarity of just talking to
(26:08):
people the other day who were telling me, like when
they were hungry in the jungle, strangers who didn't speak
their language would try and give them food.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Yeah, you see that in a lot of disasters too,
This sort of explosion and mutually.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah, And like refugee camp is a place where you
do not have privacy for the most part, and that's
not always great, but it facilitates caring for one another.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
And like, I don't know, I.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Have this recollection from seven or eight years ago now
and while I'm walking through a refugee camp in Mexico
and just a very little girl from six seven something
like that, and I have long hair. People can't see me,
but she likes to mess with my hand braid and shit.
And I'm carrying this little girl and like I've been
coming for some time, and like the sense of community
(26:57):
that you felt there amongst like a really terrible situation,
but like because everyone can see you walking down as
a little walkway, everyone's like, oh hi, how are you?
Like you know, the kind of I'm trying to work
out what they what they need and how we can
best help. Like I just remember thinking like what the
fuck is wrong with and then going back to the
United States right in and sitting in my little house and like,
(27:19):
you know, you know, like like I'm fortunate to know
my neighbors and to be close to them, but not
many people are. And like for most people, you know
that they get out their house to go to their car,
they drive to their work, they don't say hi to anyone.
Like it's so strange that, like, in a sense, in
those refugee camps were closer to the beautiful life that
(27:39):
we want than we are in these million dollar homes
in a My house does not cost a million dollars.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
I don't own a house.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
But this the profound alien nation that we feel in
part because of the physical infrastructure, the ability of humanity
to fall back into caring for one another, to like
that's what we do when we are not like physically
and like intellectually restrained from doing it by structures both
(28:07):
both physical and digital and even emotional that divide us
from one another. And I've kind of thought about that
ever since, Like, how do I build a place where
people have more stability, but if I have privacy, people
have their material needs.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Men, Yeah, does you want to strike a balance infrastructure? Yeah,
I don't want. There's some cohoes and sort of plans
that I've seen, for example, but don't even really factor
any much privacy, which I'm not for it all. You know,
people don't want to have to recreate their their dorm
room experience or in my case, they're sharing a bedroom
(28:44):
the entire childhood experience.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
So yeah, says we need to have space for people
to have privacy, but at the same time space for
people to have community, and like cities can exist like that.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Communities can exist like that.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
They're the theory of the mediterrane in public sphere that
sometimes comes up where like again in working class Barcelona, right,
people don't generally have air conditioning and it can't get
very hot, so you just spend a lot of time
outside balcony whatever, you know, front port, if you got one,
that creates community, right, that creates a public sphere like
a place, and it's not quite our home, but it's
(29:20):
not controlled by someone else either.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
It's like a community space.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
And that doesn't exist in like suburb I don't live
in the suburbs, but like suburban America, you know, where
everyone has these like literal fences around all the shit
that they own.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah, that exists a very an extent in Trinidad. Yeah,
you know, some areas are very much a communal and
other areas like trying desperately to be America. Yeah yeah,
so yeah, it's kind of a mix of both wheels there,
at the very least from what I'm aware of, what
I can tell people at least say height to their neighbors. Though, yeah,
(30:00):
that's still like a horrify and you.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Know, respecter of not knowing your neighbors.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Thing that I've heard of American life that you don't
even say hi. Yeah, you know, you don't even wave
at people like that.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
No, I'm always at my neighbor's houses and they're always
at my house.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
And like, I'm a.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Person who owns a lot of tools, you know, like
different spanners and stuff, so like I'm like I will
go out of my way to make sure that my
neighbors know they can borrow my shit. And and like
that does seem to be quite a new experience for
people who are like new in the neighborhood or whatever,
but we should all do that. It's such an easy
(30:41):
way to fight that alienation and that infrastructure that you know, like, yeah,
there's a wall between where I live and where the
person next door lives, but I can I can knock
on the door and say, hey, it looks like you're
having some trouble with your truck.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
Do you need a hand or what have you?
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Mm hmm yeah, So I mean what you're saying is
it could happen here?
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Yeah, you gotta make the good things happen here. Tagus
enough of the fucking bad shays.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Indeed, Laza for me guys, All power to all the people.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
Please, It could.
Speaker 4 (31:21):
Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for it could Happen Here listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
All the media, Hello and welcomed. It could happen here,
and it could. My name is antress Age. I'm also
ANTWRESSM on YouTube, and I'm here once again.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
With James James Stout. People said I'd never say my
last name.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
And they can't work out who I am, so I
guess I'll do that more.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome James Stout. Thank you so ically. And I mean,
this is an unfortunately common pattern of thought for me,
but I've been thinking about just how totalizing this system feels.
And it's like everywhere you turn, you know, walking down
the street, look at the city, a pollution that every
inch of land there's been claimed by the system, every
(00:48):
bit of you know, the way you live and operate
just feels like it's been manipulated and controlled in some way.
And so that's really what I want to highlight in
today's episode, the infrastructure of this system and how it's
used to control, you know, both in terms of the
physical infrastructure and the digital infrastructure of our lives. So
(01:12):
I suppose to start off, I'd ask, when was the
last time that you noticed infrastructure shape in your choices?
Speaker 2 (01:22):
That's interesting, I mean a lot in certain ways, right,
like like the infrastructure of labor shapes a lot of
my choices, Like I have to work a lot to
make ends meet, right like, which means I can't do
sometimes things I want to do, Like there are mutual
aid efforts I'd like to participate in more that I'm
(01:42):
not able to because I have this obligation to capital.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Mm hmm, I guess that's one of them.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Or just like the physical infrastructure limiting the people I
get to see, right, Like, there are places I love
to go out there with some really nice vegan places
in Tijuana that I don't go to as much as
i'd like because someone has built a giant wall and
then another giant war next to it, and then stationed
a bunch of people with guns to check if I
have the right piece of paper to go back and
(02:08):
forth to somewhere that otherwise I could ride my bike to.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Yeah, borders are very unfortunate and big one. Yeah, it's
really frustrating, And I think that's one of the most
obviously detrimental aspects of physical infrastructure that to de manipulate
our lives today. I think on the digital level, there's
things like just the way that social media is laid out.
(02:34):
I think it really controls like how much time you
spend on it, how much energy you invest in it.
And of course even just our neighborhoods, our environments, our cities.
They laid out, it tends to affect, you know, just
how often we go out, where we go, what needs
a transportation we use, and I mean with physical infrastructures concerned,
(02:55):
and how it's been used to control people. That goes
way back into history. You know, coloneal powers often built
transport infrastructure, you know, like roads and railways and ports
with the very explicit purpose of extracting raw materials from
the colonized territories to get to the imperial core. You know,
the systems were not designed to say over the mobility
(03:17):
needs of the local populations. They usually create a direct
line from the mines and the plantations and the resource
rich areas to the coastal ports where they could be exported.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, And so for the British and perialists and lovers
of empire, they often brag that, you know, we built ports,
and we built bridges, and we built roads, and we
built railway as well. It's the same pattern everywhere. You know,
in India it was used to move cotton, tea and
other resources from the interior to the ship. In ports
in Ghana, it was used to move gold and coco.
(03:50):
In any case, it wasn't to interconnect within the city,
you know, the actual economic subtermination of the people in
that area. It didn't matter.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
I think about this, like, I cycled around Rwanda in
twenty twenty, which is an interesting time to be traveling,
but I remember riding around them. The kny Rwanda word
for dirt road is iqitaka, right, and so that's what
mostly So we cycled on these dirt roads.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
It was lovely, you know.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
We'd go through the village and everyone would come out
and wave at you, and like the little kids would
come out and be like, what the fuck is this bicycle?
And it was kind of fun, you know. And then
we'd find someone. It's not really set up for like restaurants,
so you just find someone and pay them an amount
upon which you agreed and they would give you some
food and that was a beautiful experience. And then there
are these roads that they call Chinese roads that just
(04:37):
go directly from the mind to the place where the
raw material can be extracted. Because between the China was
doing a lot of what you could generously call foreign
direct investment or like neo colonialism in lots of places
in Africa, right, And it was the contrast between those
two traveling experiences was so profound, Like we obviously you
(04:58):
travel faster on the smooth roads, but like you don't
immerse yourself in the human experience of meeting and sharing
that travel with people, which is why I do these
things in the first place. With just like such a
profound contrast. I remember it really striking me at the time.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, I mean, and this is what empires and rulers
in general have been doing, right. They they wield their
control over labor to set things up in a way
that fulfills their interests. Yeah. And then you know, even
when people key in some sort of nominal independence and
(05:36):
they inherit these clonial infrastructure grids or you know, they
have investments coming in and they have set up they
have these companies, it's a multinational companies setting up infrastructure.
It still continues, you know, this sort of extractivist and
top down nature of the way the infrastructure is set up.
(05:58):
You know, it doesn't remain all of them. Don't reimagine
the logic of what came before. You're in part for
lack of funding and in part for lack of imagination,
and so in a lot of places, the peripheral regions
in these countries are still lacking in connectivity, They're still
lacking behind the rest of the country. They still don't
(06:18):
have access to some of the basic social services and
resources that the urban core has. Because you know, the
urban rural divide in many ways mimics the corporate free
divide on the international stage. And then you have these
neo colonial development aid programs coming in with the IMF
for the World Bank, and you have even more infrastructure projects.
(06:41):
So just repeat this extractive pattern under the ban of development.
Of course, real development would be connecting people, encouraging people
to participate in society and distribute opportunity. But the infrastructure
tends to be set up as more so for consolidating
state power and channeling the movement of people in predictable,
(07:02):
survailable ways, and prioritizing access for certain populations while excluding
or marginalizing others. So, of course, infrastructure development has the
(07:22):
capacity to help people. You know, it can increase accessibility,
can make people's lives easier, and it can also just
manage and contain them and varied sources, and we see
a lot more examples of this sort of infrastructure control.
When you look at the class and racial dynamic within societies,
(07:43):
those sorts of divisions and separations and stratifications, they of
course manifest physically. You know, in the US you had
literal segregation areas that were designated for black people listening
for white people, water fountains and neighborhoods and all these
different things. You also had redline in policy years, and
nowadays you have spaces that were redlined and thus lacked investment,
(08:07):
and thus when neglected infrastructurally due to that racial and
economic inequality, those spaces are now right for development in
the form of gentrification because the property is so cheap,
so undervalued, and so the people who made something out
of that lack are are being pushed out. And in
South Africa, I mean up until recently, these are partid
(08:30):
era policies created townships that were deliberately located far from
white urban centers. There were lacking and services and transit
options that physically reinforced the racial division of that society.
And even today around the world you have urban zoning
laws and transit access limitations and public housing policies that
(08:56):
recreate historical class divisions and racial divisions, ethnic divisions. And
I'm sure you and your oh, with all of the
I mean, every time I talked to you have like
a new travel story to tell. I'm sure you've witnessed
something like this.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, I was just thinking of how like I was
thinking of, like if we think about the Syrian state
as a contiguous colony, right, Like it's called the Syrian
Arab Republic, but not all the people who are contained
within the territory in which it once claimed the monopoly
on violence are Arab people. So we think of the
parts of North and East Syria, majority Kurdish areas, as colonized.
(09:34):
We can see that reflected in the infrastructure.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Right.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Part of that is, as you say, this sort of
lack of investment, But then also part of it is
every government funded building, right, schools, hospitals, the buildings you
go in to do the paperwork you have to do
to exist under the state. They're set up like strong points,
like they're designed with a big kind of war and
(09:57):
then a big courtyard and then thickias like they're designed
to be militarily defensible against the people they're supposed to serve, right,
Like the school is designed to be used as a
fucking machine gun position, and once you see it, you
see it everywhere, and you think about the nature of
(10:18):
the state that designs infrastructure with that explicitly in mind, Right,
it's fascinating. The other example I think of is like
Chris Elam's done some fantastic writing on the development of Barcelona,
and you have like the unregulated working class of Raval,
like this area just next to the Rambler, where the
streets are just fucking small and winding and crazy and
(10:40):
there's never not laundry kind of over you know, over
your head, and it's a very I like to go there.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
It's a place that I enjoy.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
And then you have the ijumpler, which means extension, where
the infrastructure is extremely like it's probably one of the
earlier grid cities that you would see, right. And the
idea was that like these these over crowd they'd kind
of what were in the nineteen twenties and thirty slums
would be like where the working class would be kept
(11:06):
and the working class, to be clear, were seen as
there was a colonial relationship between the boys who are
and the working class in Barcelona, because most of the
working class were not Catalan, they would actually put signs
at the top of these working class areas saying like
Mutia begins here, right, these are the mutianos and people
from Mussia, the people from outside of Catalonia. Catalonia stops
(11:28):
here where the working class exist. That later reflected in
the working class self identity, like it came to refer
to the raval as Chinatown, not specifically because of a
high concentration of people from the Chinese diaspora, but because
they'd seen Chicago gangster movies where Chinatown was like the
area where the gangsters were, and they were like, yeah,
(11:49):
we're fucking gangster, Like we're going to call it Chinatown.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
That you want to come in here, will fucking shoot you.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Like I thought that was really fascinating, like response to
the way that have been alienated by infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, I mean, and that's why when you when you
look at the sort of claims that oh, you know,
it's just it's just roads, it's just the zoning, it's
just a city grid, it's just an embassy, it's just
a government office, it's like, no, these sorts of spaces,
these buildings, this infrastructure could never be neutral. Yeah, and
(12:25):
when you see that, you can't unsee it because you
look at the amount of decisions it would have had
to have gone into, you know, some of the examples
you mentioned or the examples I mentioned, you know, the
design decisions. It's like, Okay, we're going to put this
road here instead of here. Yeah, we're going to use
this material instead of this material. Who you employ to
build those structures, that infrastructure or also has an impact in
(12:48):
this surrounding area? Are you employing people within the community,
employing people outside? What's happening there? Who's funding this infrastructure,
who's maintaining the infrastructure?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (12:58):
What level of Seville LUNs has been implemented? Where are
the public transportation routes and why they're here and not there?
Speaker 2 (13:06):
You know, yeah, exactly, Like there's people whose opinions and
views matter in that process, and there are people who
are excluded from it.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
One of the authors I tend to go back too
often is he vandalist because he critics a lot of
this stuff, so particularly infrastructure's control and tools. Look in viviality.
He spoke about how modern transport and urban design have
been used to alienate people from their own bodies and communities.
So you call all the usual suspects suburbanization and car
(13:38):
centric infrastructure, how it isolates people and increases dependence on vehicles.
And he called this dependence a radical monopoly because all
the other choices have effectively been eliminated. Technically, you could
walk along the highway, but you're not going to You're
going to get a cut, right, you can't choose to
(13:59):
walk a cycle, and that sort of scenario of.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Film's going to call the cops that you try that
in America, right.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, So as a lich sor it, it's really a
cultural imposition that shapes how we end up living, interacting, moving,
and it's frustrating. On the global stage, you also see
how infrastructure has the capacity to control the whole geopolitical board.
You know, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Red Sea,
(14:27):
the Straight orfor moves, all these places have a lot
of power militarily, trade wise, dlematically because they control the
flow of oil or of goods or of data. Yeah,
particularly in the areas where the undersea internet cables run
and so speaking of data. Actually, the realm of digital
(14:50):
infrastructure is also very insiguous when it comes to control.
We tend to think of the Internet as that sort
of ephemeral cloud, right, But the cloud is hosted physically.
You know, there are sofas, there are fiber optic cables,
the air data centers, all these things. They're not as
obvious as roads and railways and you know, neighborhoods, but
(15:15):
they are just as if not in some ways even
more powerful in terms of controlling what people access, how
fast they access it, under what terms they access it,
or because it's so intangible it's so hard to pin down,
it can often escape scrutiny. But there are companies that
own these things. There's a small group of very powerful
(15:36):
corporations that pretty much dictate how things are in it.
You know, most people they know about China's Grade Firal
and how it's used to coordin off China from the
rest of the Internet in some ways. You know, its sensors,
websites and sweet results. It monitors people's activity, and it
usually has these state monitored alternatives to some of the
(15:57):
popular global platforms like Google and Base. Right, But Google
and Amazon and Meta and Microsoft it's not like they're
any better. You know, the dot run and things Republic
could so if you will call out what China's doing
with the with the Great Firewall, and I agree, I
don't think that any government should have any control over
what people access. But you know, it's not like censorship,
(16:20):
data harvested and surveillance are unique to China. You know,
a lot of other governments, in collaboration with these companies,
deploy soft censorship. You know, they de rank things in
the algorithm, they filter certain keywords, they selectively block certain things. Yeah,
things are maybe automatically flagged or moderated, and that often
(16:43):
affects people from the LGBTQ community in countries where you
know that's that's a big no no. Or you have
even the manipulation of language they will people use as
people try to get around censors. Hence the proliferation of
terms like great and essay and self delete and unlive
(17:04):
and all these other euphemisms, which I mean, honest, I
don't use any of them, and I despise them.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah, me too.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
The thing is a lot of people assume that these
words are censored and all platforms, but they're not. You know,
they may be censored on one platform, usually it's TikTok
or limited in one platform. And then if people take
that sort of TikTok sort of way of speaking and
spread it across the rest of the Internet, or worse yet,
bring it into real life and end up saying things
(17:35):
like un alive in real life. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yeah, everything you have allowed fucking TikTok's algorithm to determine
the way you can express yourself.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Exactly, exactly, And I mean TikTok has a lot of
heat these days because you know, rightfully, so it's very popular,
it has a lot of influence, and it's you know,
very bleatantly interventionist with its content in some damage and Wiz.
But again, the other big cooperations are not immune either.
I mean, Facebook was famously found culpable for genocide, right, Yeah,
(18:10):
They've played a major role in the sort of attitudes
that were developing and the marginalization that was sort of
Targetinghinger community and the subsequent genocide.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
So I was on a panel with some Hinder people
the other day and they are still by physical and
technical infrastructure, being marginalized. So something myself and my union
friends are trying to do is help the Hinder Podcast
Initiative start podcasting right such that they can share their
own voices with the world and their positions and their opinions.
(18:45):
It's very important at a time when they're facing marginalization,
even from revolutionary forces within me and Mark, and we
cannot sustain an Internet connection to allow them to do that.
Like we tried to do a liveanel and it was
very hard for you know, these guys who are running
around cox is bizarre where tens of thousands of bringing
(19:06):
of people live in refugee camps trying to find connectivity,
and like just another example of how they continue to
be marginalized by the systems that first allowed them to
be genocided exactly.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, because the private cooperations are low and not response.
But for this is the governments too. You know, when
the corporations still tell the government to do something, the
governments comply. And then when the governments tell the corporations
to do stuff a lot of the time, it's also
like they comply. It's collaboration, you know, especially since the
government has the power in a lot of cases to
(19:40):
shut down the Internet when things are not going their way. Yeah,
you know, they used it and all of it. Recently,
you have the suppression of the centering protests, you know,
to influence elections or to restrict information, substructionalism and communication
during crises. When you look at all over the world, Iran, India,
than Myanmar, Uganda, even in Gaza. In all these cases,
(20:05):
these governments step in and they limit or they shut
down the Internet entirely to prevent the news from getting out.
You know, they could target either the entire Internet or
they target it in platforms. They target WhatsApp, they target Twitter.
They justify by saying, oh they're going after take news
or there's a security threat. Yeah it's bullshit, but you
(20:26):
know we could see through that. Yeah, and it's tough
because I mean, this is where these are. These are
the places where people have gathered. These are the online
town squares, you know, and these these this infrastructure is
very much centralized. Google controls most of the search on
(20:47):
the internet. Amazon dominates e commerce and cloud, computer and logistics,
and Matter controls a lot of people's social interactions. You know,
I could brag and say, oh, well I'm not on Facebook,
but you know, as the use what'sapp, because everybody else
uses WhatsApp. Yeah, and it's so easy for them because
we're so concentrated on these platforms. It's so easy for
(21:08):
them to popet us, to flex their their muscles and
control the direction of public discourse. And I mean it's
amplifying things, suppressing other things, maximizing our engagements, exploiting our
cognitive and vulnerabilities, polarizing discourse, distorted reality. It's like, what
(21:31):
the hell do we do? Yeah, And so for the
Opium segment of the podcast, I just want to point
out that, you know, infrastructure can be used to consolidate
power and control people, but it can also be used
to resist and to re clim a collective agency. You know,
(21:55):
even infrastructure there was originally designed to control can be
taken under our control. You know, around the world, communities
have been able to challenge these extractive logics to build
their own infrastructures on their own terms. You know, in
digital spaces, this might take the form of community build
(22:18):
mesh networks or alternative Internet local servers. You know, you
have projects like Guifi dot net in Catalonia, or you
have the NYC Mesh in New York, and these are
efforts to engage in you know, pay to pay and
decentralized communications without the reliance and the telecom giants. And
(22:42):
then you also of course physically have examples of infrastructure
resistant central control, participatory urban planet movements. You have gorilla urbanism,
you have you know, of course, the long and storied
history of squatting otherwise known as informal settlement, and these
informal set of months hubs of innovation, and a lot
(23:04):
of cases in tastes like Nai Ruby or in Rio Gario.
You know, these these slums and favelas, they're hooking up
their own electricity, hooking up their own internet, hooking up
their own what is supply because they recognize that this
is within their hands, this is within their capacity. You know,
we don't have to have everything, you know, passed on
(23:26):
to us from one high you know, we can you know,
sort of reclaim our own voices and design our own spaces.
If you're really interested in how infrastructure has the capacity
(23:47):
to control and really just how states sort of see things,
I have to of course recommend the classic James Scott
seeing like a state. Yeah, I mean, it's such a
foundational framework to understand and how infrastructure is used for
social engineering it's really readable as well, so definitely give
that a read. And you know, think about we is
(24:08):
that you can contribute to shape in the infrastructure around you.
And I don't know, James, if you have any stories
along this vay and you could leave us off with.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Yeah, I mean I think of a ton right, like
even I think about Like when I was a lot younger,
I lived in a I guess what you could call
a slum of favela, like a pretty economically disadvantage part
of Karakas for a little while, and like at the time,
and I've seen this when I lived in Barcelona too,
Like I guess the English word would be info shop
(24:40):
they normally call them. Social centers would be the Spanish
word or social spaces, and like it was cool to see.
Is this is a city which is established through colonialism, right,
And there was a brief time before things were terrible
in Venezuela where people were trying to make it and
largely it was people trying to make things better. The
(25:00):
state for a time allowed a space for that to
exist before it stopped allowing a space for that to exist,
which is where we're at right now, right and very
clearly the state right now is very repressive in Venezuela,
to be clear, Like I didn't want to give put
fuel on the tanky fire or whatever, but it was
actually a really beautiful thing and it facilitated right, I
(25:21):
was like nineteen, My Spanish was dog shit.
Speaker 3 (25:24):
I was hungry all the time.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
It didn't have any food, you know, But it facilitated
that community taking care of me because the spaces were
public and people could see if people were falling through
the cracks, right, And like, I think a lot about
refugee camps, so obviously that somewhere has spent a decent
amount of time right both within the US and outside
of the US. And one thing I've been thinking about
(25:47):
a lot recently is how so many of the people
I met on the way to the United States and
the Dadienne had horrific experiences in the Dadianne and afterwards,
but they also miss the community that they had, Like
they also miss the profound solidarity of just talking to
(26:08):
people the other day who were telling me, like when
they were hungry in the jungle, strangers who didn't speak
their language would try and give them food.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Yeah, you see that in a lot of disasters too,
This sort of explosion and mutually.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah, And like refugee camp is a place where you
do not have privacy for the most part, and that's
not always great, but it facilitates caring for one another.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
And like, I don't know, I.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Have this recollection from seven or eight years ago now
and while I'm walking through a refugee camp in Mexico
and just a very little girl from six seven something
like that, and I have long hair. People can't see me,
but she likes to mess with my hand braid and shit.
And I'm carrying this little girl and like I've been
coming for some time, and like the sense of community
(26:57):
that you felt there amongst like a really terrible situation,
but like because everyone can see you walking down as
a little walkway, everyone's like, oh hi, how are you?
Like you know, the kind of I'm trying to work
out what they what they need and how we can
best help. Like I just remember thinking like what the
fuck is wrong with and then going back to the
United States right in and sitting in my little house and like,
(27:19):
you know, you know, like like I'm fortunate to know
my neighbors and to be close to them, but not
many people are. And like for most people, you know
that they get out their house to go to their car,
they drive to their work, they don't say hi to anyone.
Like it's so strange that, like, in a sense, in
those refugee camps were closer to the beautiful life that
(27:39):
we want than we are in these million dollar homes
in a My house does not cost a million dollars.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
I don't own a house.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
But this the profound alien nation that we feel in
part because of the physical infrastructure, the ability of humanity
to fall back into caring for one another, to like
that's what we do when we are not like physically
and like intellectually restrained from doing it by structures both
(28:07):
both physical and digital and even emotional that divide us
from one another. And I've kind of thought about that
ever since, Like, how do I build a place where
people have more stability, but if I have privacy, people
have their material needs.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Men, Yeah, does you want to strike a balance infrastructure? Yeah,
I don't want. There's some cohoes and sort of plans
that I've seen, for example, but don't even really factor
any much privacy, which I'm not for it all. You know,
people don't want to have to recreate their their dorm
room experience or in my case, they're sharing a bedroom
(28:44):
the entire childhood experience.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
So yeah, says we need to have space for people
to have privacy, but at the same time space for
people to have community, and like cities can exist like that.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Communities can exist like that.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
They're the theory of the mediterrane in public sphere that
sometimes comes up where like again in working class Barcelona, right,
people don't generally have air conditioning and it can't get
very hot, so you just spend a lot of time
outside balcony whatever, you know, front port, if you got one,
that creates community, right, that creates a public sphere like
a place, and it's not quite our home, but it's
(29:20):
not controlled by someone else either.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
It's like a community space.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
And that doesn't exist in like suburb I don't live
in the suburbs, but like suburban America, you know, where
everyone has these like literal fences around all the shit
that they own.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Yeah, that exists a very an extent in Trinidad. Yeah,
you know, some areas are very much a communal and
other areas like trying desperately to be America. Yeah yeah,
so yeah, it's kind of a mix of both wheels there,
at the very least from what I'm aware of, what
I can tell people at least say height to their neighbors. Though, yeah,
(30:00):
that's still like a horrify and you.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
Know, respecter of not knowing your neighbors.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Thing that I've heard of American life that you don't
even say hi. Yeah, you know, you don't even wave
at people like that.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
No, I'm always at my neighbor's houses and they're always
at my house.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
And like, I'm a.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Person who owns a lot of tools, you know, like
different spanners and stuff, so like I'm like I will
go out of my way to make sure that my
neighbors know they can borrow my shit. And and like
that does seem to be quite a new experience for
people who are like new in the neighborhood or whatever,
but we should all do that. It's such an easy
(30:41):
way to fight that alienation and that infrastructure that you know, like, yeah,
there's a wall between where I live and where the
person next door lives, but I can I can knock
on the door and say, hey, it looks like you're
having some trouble with your truck.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
Do you need a hand or what have you?
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Mm hmm yeah, So I mean what you're saying is
it could happen here?
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Yeah, you gotta make the good things happen here. Tagus
enough of the fucking bad shays.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Indeed, Laza for me guys, All power to all the people.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
Please, It could.
Speaker 4 (31:21):
Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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now find sources for it could Happen Here listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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