August 4, 2025 • 54 mins
Margaret talks to Sarah Marshall about the Independent Media Centers that helped protesters build movements and changed how online communication happens.
Sources:
https://daily.jstor.org/the-invention-of-journalistic-objectivity/
https://daily.jstor.org/to-fix-fake-news-look-to-yellow-journalism/
https://web.archive.org/web/20200304071058/http://www.infoshop.org/about-us/
https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3485447.3512282#fig3
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0163443720926039
https://www.academia.edu/21814073/Indymedia_Journalism_A_Radical_Way_of_Making_Selecting_and_Sharing_News
https://www.academia.edu/45052617/Indymedia_and_Media_Activism_at_the_Turn_of_the_Millennium
https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/25/german-government-shuts-down-indymedia-what-it-means-and-what-to-do
https://crimethinc.com/2022/10/28/the-billionaire-and-the-anarchists-tracing-twitter-from-its-roots-as-a-protest-tool-to-elon-musks-acquisition
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2022/09/11/jack-dorseys-former-boss-is-building-a-decentralized-twitter/
https://libcom.org/article/sources-and-police-raid-bristol-indymedia
https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/local-news-indymedia-network-25-anniversary.php
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly podcast that whenever there's bad things happening, there's
people trying to do good things, including not introduced their
podcast badly. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this
week my guest is Sarah Marshall.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Hi. How are you? Hi?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I'm so happy to be here. I like how you
started that off big and then he got it nice
and small. You know this week, Sarah Marshall, that's true.
It's an intimate salon.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Inviting people to get a little closer to the Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Well, I've been watching a lot of Kathy Griffin's specials
because I realized how much I missed Kathy Griffin. And
she had like nineteen Bravo specials in the two thousands.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Do you know who that is? Magbie, Nope, no idea.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
She was on Suddenly Susan in the nineties.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Magpie also doesn't know what that is.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I've heard of it. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Well, I have this thing called suddenly, so you put
on pasta salad always makes me think of Suddenly Susan.
But Kathy Griffin is a stand up comedian. Does this
thing where she like will start kind of like speaking quieter,
and she's like while doing a giant show on a
giant theater, and she's like, I'm talking like this because
this is GISs between you and me before like a
particularly juicy piece of celebrity gossip. So like, we're talking
(01:21):
like this because this GISs between us and all the
people listening as well the guests, between all of us,
no one else.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
No one else can listen except for the people who
are currently listening. Don't tell your friends about this podcast
because they can't hear it.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
We really need to keep this in a tight intimate circle.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, I got to keep them numbers down.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
That's what keeps That's what no one ever says on
a podcast. I want you to go out and rate
my podcast. Go ahead and give me a one star rating.
I hate it when people are like, give us a
five star rating, because that's presuming that the person listening
liked it.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
What if they didn't, I know, although it is a
good reason to do it at the end of the episode,
So at the beginning of the episode, because by the
end of the episode, if you may get that far,
you probably don't hate it.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Like I probably liked it if I listened for this
whole hour.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah, although I say that is if I don't regularly
listen to podcasts that I do not like at all,
because I pick a like new interest like every month.
I mean, you can tell by the theme of this
podcast that I like new interests. And then I'm like,
I need to know everything about r ving or sailboats
or I don't know those are two recently, and then
(02:32):
I listen to all the podcasts about them, and I
don't like most of them.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Yes, because it's hard to find something that's on both
a topic you like and you like the person doing it.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
I think, I know. Yeah, And if you're listening and
you're one of those people who kind of hates me
and just likes my content, I'm not sorry, nice, but
I do have a producer. I'm Sophie.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Hi, Sophie, Hi, Mike Pie Hi, Sarah, Hi, Sophie.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Nice to be here with you wearing your hat that
says potatoes.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I am. I know, it's so good. Everyone sends me
potato memes all the time and it's great, But Sophie's
the real.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
A potato head.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, that's the word I was thinking you are, and.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I am too. It's a very pre potato group today.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, I had potatoes and couscous for lunch. Oh nice.
It was just sort of random storre fry food and
it was so good.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
I had several mini croissants that I got discounted at
fred Meyer.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
I like croissants, Sophie, did you have a starch for
lunch today?
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I had two Italian sausages and an apple sauce.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Oh. I think you're the healthiest of the three of
us right now, you're the one.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Well. We also have an audio engineer named Eva hi
Eva Hiva hi Eva, and our theme music was written
forced by unwoman and you have unwittingly come in in
the middle of me. It's not a series, but it's
kind of a series. I've been talking a lot about
the alter globalization movement of the late nineties and early
(04:11):
oughts for the past couple months because I've been talking
a lot about the sort of protest infrastructure that people built,
and so I've been focusing on various groups that came
together to create the modern protest infrastructure, and specifically this
grand movement of movements that relied on decentralized organizing I'm
(04:32):
going to do this long build up before I give
you the topic. And the movement of movements especially kind
of came from decentralized organizing techniques developed by the Zapatistas
in Chiapus, Mexico, as well as anarchist traditions, and they
challenged neoliberalism and the challenge the way that structural adjustment
programs are destroying country's economies and basically just destroying the
(04:53):
global self. We talked about how the Zapatistas in Mexico
broke from traditional leftist organizing by introducing indigenous ae ideas
around decentralization and bottom up democracy, and we talked about
how they started to organize various grassroop groups and movements
from around the world to call for a movement against neoliberalism.
And what we're going to talk about today is one
of the mechanisms by which they were able to do
(05:15):
some of that organizing. But I'm still not going to
tell you what we're going to talk about yet. I'm
building it up as if it's like this dramatic reveal,
but I love it. We also talked about the Black
Bloc protesters that started in Germany and spread across Europe
to the rest of the world, how they provided an
alternative to the existing dichotomy with like either regimented nonviolence
on one side or like armed guerrilla movements on the
(05:36):
other side. We talked about the National Lawyer's Guild, and
we talked about street medics and maybe I'm just listening
to all these things because if you like come in
on just this one, they're like, oh wow, all those
things sound great too. We also talked about street theater
and giant puppets. But this week we were going to
talk about yet another component of the successful protests, independent media.
(05:58):
This week are going to talk about the decentralized grassroots
collective of independent journalists fundamentally changed our media landscape forever,
sometimes in ways that made it much worse. This week
we are talking about indie media I N D Y Media.
You ever heard of them? Hmmm, excellent? Then this will
(06:19):
be fun. I'm excited. This is the Independent Media Center
or the IMC as no one remembers it. If people
remember it at all, they remember it as indie media,
spelled with the Y. This is still around, but in
a much diminished form, but its impacts are outsized. I
am going to draw a direct link from indie media
(06:40):
to Twitter and therefore the destruction of all of our brains.
That's my plan today. Oh well, you ever heard of
Twitter's sorry, that sounded terrible. Certain you've heard of Twitter.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
It is like, don't you feel though that Twitter, like,
even when it was at its biggest, felt a little
bit too quaint in a way because it was based
on words, you know, like you could feel it being
the last big thing based on sentences.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Oh interesting, Like it was doomed because it's not going
to be because the next one was photo and the
next one after that was video.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Just yeah, this feeling of like this is sort of
like the last gasp of language based sort of viral
media online or language based social media as opposed to
image based, because you could get really big on Twitter
as an ugly person, is what I'm really saying here.
That's true, and those doors aren't open anymore.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I hate every single time I have to do video
for something. Every single time someone's like, hey, can you
promote this thing that you're doing? Sent just just really quick,
just send us a sixty second video of it. And
I'm like, oh, yeah, that's a that's a real quick.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
You're like, are you telling me to act like a
normal person? Who's you know, impression of a normal person.
People won't pick apart until I want to leave this
industry forever. Like that's going to take me.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
I know, I know, I have to either wear makeup
or not. I have to think about it. I gotta
cut my fucking bangs. I gotta like figure out my
lightning and backdrop. It is.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
It's a whole production to be a person.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
It really is, well, especially to be like a similacro
of a person on the internet. Being a person's fine.
I'll go out in public. Public is fine. It's the
Internet that's a problem.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Well, And you know what I think about with that
is Nicole Kidman and To Die For. Yeah, you know,
she plays this character who's like a product of like
tabloid media and nineties TV news, and she's got this
speech about how like if everyone were on TV, then
everyone would be paved better because we would all be
being watched all the time. But also if everyone's on TV,
(08:44):
then who's gonna watch us? And it's like that's what
we're doing right now.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah, that's that's the present. Although I feel like instead
it's just like we've created like weird micro celebrity culture
and I don't know, I mean not that podcasting me
into it. But at least it's just my voice. That's
how I feel.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
About it, exactly. At least you're not performing in more
ways than the way that you consented to. Maybe that's
appealing to me.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah. All I have to do is get on Mike,
pretend like my day has been wonderful and have energy
for a little while.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
That's all I gotta do, or at least pretend like
my day hasn't been distractingly bad.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And I actually had a nice day
to day, although literally all of my day today was
writing this script to finishing this script. But it was
a nice day.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
But if that's a nice day, Benny, I'm extra excited
for it.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
It was a like moment where I was explaining to
someone the thing that I've researched, and I've been like,
I'm going to explain a really niche topic. I'm glad
I have a good guest. The short version of indie
media is that, basically in the late nineties, at the
Big Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization November nineteen
ninety nine, people were like, we actually need a media infrastructure,
(10:08):
We need a structure of independent media. And it actually
comes out of not just like random people who want
to post conspiracy theory stuff though we'll get to that later,
but it comes out of like people who are journalists
who are like, the existing infrastructure is not going to
work for what we're going to try and do. They
got together with a bunch of techies and they created
(10:32):
what's not the first status update based website, but the
first big one, the first idea that people can be like, oh,
this is what happened today, and people can all post
that and share that and see that, and that allowed
the protest movement to accomplish amazing things. It also allowed
(10:56):
that protest movement to not be disappeared as much by
mainstream media, and it led to a lot of knock
on effects, and not like an indirect way. I'm going
to like name specific people who are the through line
between the modern social media landscape and this thing that
was put together for some protests. That's the basic idea
(11:16):
of indie media. I love it. Yeah, Indie media was
like my political awakening in a lot of ways. When
I was a teenager. I was an art student, and
I was brand new to politics, and I was living
in New York City, and I walked in off the
street to an Indie Media New York meeting and I
(11:36):
got to play this like tiny minor part in running
a newspaper, like a print newspaper that's still around today,
and join a video collective of people putting together video.
I just spent all of this time talking trash on video,
but I absolutely well, I didn't worry as much about
how I looked when I was nineteen years old. A
(11:58):
year later, I was living in Portland, Oregon, and I
was essentially working full time with the indie media video
collective there. In exchange for shooting and editing videos and
helping run events, I was given a room in a
tiny apartment over an auto shop, and less than a
year after dropping out of art school, a film I
(12:19):
edited sold out a movie theater, and I was giving
talks at universities to students that were older than me. Wow,
So I'm really fond of indie media, or I'm really
fond of what it was in two thousand and two. Man,
But what is it? Where did it come from? I
know that you want context. So one of the things
that comes up all the time when I'm researching this shit,
(12:41):
and I suspect we didn't talk about what you do.
Oh yeah, you run a podcast called You're wrong about
I Do. You're right about that? Sorry? Oh shit, Oh no,
you're allowed to make terrible jokes about That's true. That's
how that works.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
If you listen to podcast, people have probably like bothered
you about it at some point, and if you're like me,
then you haven't listened to it, because at some point
in twenty twenty one you were like, stop bringing this
show up, is what I would assume. And so either
you have or you haven't listened to it, And if
you haven't listened to it, then like, look, I'm not
gonna persuade yet. You get to decide what you do
(13:19):
with your own time.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
It's fine.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
But it started off as a show about misremembered history
and sort of classic tabloid narratives like Tiny Harding and
Lorraina Bobbitt and stories that we.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Sort of.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
That people sort of like kind of could remember but
would often sort of remember through USNL parodies, which is
certainly how I learned history. And now it's kind of
expanded into like, you know, I like to talk about
things through that lens of historical misunderstanding and misremembering and
sort of how the truth gets obscured. But also it's just,
you know, a show about stuff I find interesting. And
(13:54):
so our most recent episode that we just put out
this week is on the history of the Corn Maze.
That was so fun for me to do.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
You do love corn? That's cool.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
I love Coorn, and I'm okay with mazes. I mainly
love corn and I had I'm Chelsea Webber Smith who
loves mazes, and so that even doubt a good fit.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, that is good. So do you run across this
thing where people have an idea about how people were
in the past, and how ideas that we take for
granted right now people think just like have been around
forever and are actually reasonably new.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the really interesting
sort of aspects of history and historian ship I guess
to me is like things that are way newer than
we would think, and things that are way more timeless
as human behavior than we would think, you know, because
I think both of those things occur.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
The example that I'm going to use in this script
although it's not totally related. Is that the idea of
being a homosexual or of being a heterosexual about one
hundred to one hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Old, right, I know, And that's the kind of thing
that like feels shocking, but also when you think about it,
you're like, hmm, yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
No, totally. The first time someone was like, being straight
a is about one hundred year old idea, I was like,
there's no way that's true. And then I read about
it and I was like, oh, yeah, no, that kind
of makes sense actually.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
And then you're like, of course straightness is a new
concept because it's just so weird.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
Absolutely, If it were innate, it wouldn't be so hard
to make people, do you know?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yeah, totally. If the gender binary is so obvious and natural,
then why do we need laws to enforce it.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
It's a great question. There aren't any laws enforcing gravity, interestingly.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Enough, Yeah, yeah, totally. All objects must fall down. Yeah no,
one's like damn you birds except hunters maybe, but yeah.
So another idea that is about as old is the
idea of being gay or straight is the idea of
journalistic objectivity.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Oh boy, yeah, I guess that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
The idea that a journalist presents the facts and not
opinions is brand new in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Yeah see, and I never thought about that. But then
you're like, yeah, how long of journalists even existed?
Speaker 2 (16:16):
For not that long? Yeah no, I don't I know
about the journalistic objectivity. But now I'm like, I wonder
how long our concept of journalism? I wonder how that is?
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Right, or just like you know, if you look at
like the Great you know what like all these dead
guys who like in cells like to have is their
profile pictures for some reason, right, like all the dead Greeks.
I don't know how that happened. But like herodotus, it's like,
what's history about? It's like, well, you just make stuff
up mainly, and then you sort of, yeah, it's fun.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, we start.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
To care about accuracy and academia probably not that long ago.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Well, what's interesting is the idea of journalistic objectivity. It's
not as like a one sided thing as I actually
kind of would have expected going into this, because it's
not like before this everyone just lied for fun, right,
But if you go back into the New York Times
archives and read their nineteenth century reporting, which I've had
to do a bunch of times for the show. Nay, yeah,
(17:12):
it is blatantly opinionated. And the thing is is that
New York Times is one of the main places that
the concept of objective journalism comes from, just decades elating.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
And now they've come full circle. So that's really good.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Well, that's part of the danger. It's actually part of
why endi media exists, right, is that you have this
thing where like, oh, we're the objective people. So when
they have an obvious bias, it's not presented as an
obvious bias, right, It's presented as the objective truth unless
it's on the opinion page, you know, which is why
the Onion is the only true newspaper. All journalism is
(17:50):
still biased. Some journalists hide that bias, some journalists try
to counteract their own biases, and others are a little
bit more blatant about their bias. But journalistic objectivity didn't
become the standard because it was like better or more moral.
It was because it's sold better.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Wow, Okay, that's interesting. I would not have thought that.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I wouldn't have thought it either, and it doesn't always
sell better, but it was able to stand out in
the field, because in the eighteen nineties you have a
lot of like yellow journalism, which is basically tabloid journalism.
It's the journalism of scandal and half lies and full
lies scandal. That is how if I was a yellow journalist,
I would tell you that that's how it's pronounced because
(18:35):
it sounds better, it might sell more.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
No, you don't have to tell the truth. Yeah, and
this is like, how important was Hurst in the history
of yellow journalism. He's like, based on my seventh grade education,
I assume, So, okay, it's good to know that the.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
New York Journal I think was his paper. And yeah,
pullets are in Hurst. Wait, pullets are in Hurst. They
think we're not. Oh we not. No, it's crazy. We
did a whole episode. I'm no, I don't think you
were the guests. No, but I was cheering from afar.
We did a whole two parter on the actual newsy strike.
(19:09):
If anyone wants to go back and hear.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
Yeah, everybody should. I mean, it's very inspiring to me.
How in the actual history you're like, oh, they actually
did like terrify all these industries who were like, oh no,
we can't let children get this many ideas about labor unions.
This could really screw us.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yeah, and that's actually a lot of I mean when
I think back of like twentieth century journalism that claims
to be very objective and then I see its lies,
it's very rarely that I'm like, ah, they printed things
that were untrue, but instead by like choosing where their
focus is. I'm like, when labor history is written out
of history, you're like, oh, yeah, there's probably some protests
here and there, you know, And then you're like, oh,
(19:50):
protest and disruption is like the engine of progress.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Yeah, and that the reaction against it is like the
driving force shaping the world we now live in.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Absolutely, Yeah, and that like the crime of like lying
by omission is actually seems a lot more serious in
many ways.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Yeah, because it's harder to fact check, right, because you're like, well,
I guess everything you wrote is true.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
God, Yeah, because you can't fact check. Leaving stuff out
of the record, it's just like, well, we had limited space,
we couldn't fit in another page.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, not one more page. There's a lot of people
who've been very important in history, and other parts about
them are left out of it, right, like, it's very
hard to find when people did sex work. If someone
did sex work and they did something important, no one
talks about the sex work. But also if someone was
a radical leftist and they're not known for being a
(20:41):
radical leftist, that is left out. Are you thinking about
Helen Keller, Oh yeah, that's a perfect example. Yeah, it
is completely left out.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
And then yeah, honorary Wobbly Helen Keller.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So to quote about yellow journalism, I'm
going to quote Joseph Patrick mccerns from the book History
of American Journalism. The yellow journalism of the eighteen nineties
and the tabloid journalism of the nineteen twenties and thirties
stigmatize the press as a profit motivated purveyor of cheap
thrills and vicarious experiments. To its many critics, it seemed
(21:17):
as though the press was using the freedom from regulation
it enjoyed under the First Amendment to make money instead
of using it to fulfill its vital role as an
independent source of information in a democracy. So yellow journalism
is popular, right, but it is heavily criticized. So it
creates this niche for someone to be like, yeah, fuck
(21:39):
that stuff. We're going to give you the truth, and
do you know what the best way to pay for
the truth is advertising advertising. It's the part where you
just say this part's a lie and everyone drops pretending
like anything's objective, like what's about to happen, and we're back.
(22:04):
The biggest like turning point for yellow journalism, or at
least in history, when people look back and they're like, oh,
that didn't do us any good, at least in the
United States context, is when yellow journalism and Hurst sparked
a whole ass war.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Yeah, that does seem to be taking things too far.
The Newsy's made out very well though.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
That's true. That's true. Well, no, they actually had to
fight really hard in order to make out half decent.
They lived horrible conditions.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
But yes, oh no, but I mean they could sell
papers about the war.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Oh yeah, yeah. I used to write.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
About that my fan fiction and have my newsies being
nostalgic for the Spanish American War. That's amazing. Can folks
find this fan fiction? I hope they don't, but if
you do, you know, God bless you. It was like
I was his writing the horniest stuff. Okay, maybe I
(22:57):
don't need to know it if it's yeah, all right, Really,
I strove her historical accuracy the entire time.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
I suspect that the average like weird erotic thing historical
fiction is going to be more accurate than like other
mainstream things, because I think that it takes a certain mindset.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
You have to be kind of detail oriented.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yeah, probably exactly.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
I just want to solve the prop coffee cup problem.
It would be so hard to put something a little
bit heavy in those things. You know, when you have
like actors handling empty coffee cups and they're just like
flinging them around as if there's nothing inside them, drives
me insane anyway. Yeah, yeah, when you cause a war
(23:45):
that does seem rather extreme.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
And what happened was is that the Spanish American War
was in many ways caused by the USS. Main was
sunk in eighteen ninety eight in Havana, and the New
York Journal made a huge, huge scandal out of it,
and it drove popular outcry to go to war. And
I don't remember all of the ins and outs of
it enough to get more into it here, but I've
(24:08):
known it more before.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
But is it like arguably it just sort of like
sank for normal reasons.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, that's that's what I remember. The last time I
looked into this.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Like a boiler exploded or something like that. Yeah, because
ships do sink famously.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah. Yeah. So by the end of the nineteenth century,
people are starting to get extra critical about all the
fake news of yellow journalism, and a local conservative rag
in New York City with the uninspired name no one's
ever heard of this paper, The New York Times pivoted
to being all about being objective.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
That's so interesting that people like, don't you find it
kind of heartening to think of people being like, hey,
I actually do not like being lied to, you know,
like I guess everyone, you know, a lot of people
are saying that today. But then there's so many other
people who seem to be louder who were like I
love being lied too, and it's hard to think straight.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Yeah, And I am sure there are people who went
in that direction because they felt those their moral duty
to be objective. But as interesting is even at like
some of the more tabloidy papers at the time, they
would have like signs on the wall that are like truth,
the truth matters. But it was kind of in this
like tell the truth, but as like wildly and sensationally
as possible, you know.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Like tell what's technically the truth, or like you know,
and beyond belief factor fiction whether like that one's true,
it's based on actual events, based on our research, and
you're like.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Well, that doesn't make sense.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
True, it was like a grain of truth maybe in it,
but that's not you know, it's like the showing me
a pearl and saying this is made out of sand,
and it's like in a way.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yeah, yeah, totally so, at least according to an article
in Just or Daily. In the late nineteenth century, being
really into science was in vogue, and so this idea
of objectivity was a way to be like the proper
modern scientific person.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Actually, that does sound a little bit too like you know,
male culture today, because like you know, I'm sure all
these very objective people also didn't realize anger was an emotion.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah yeah, yeah, but good for them. Well, I mean,
they only have one emotion, so they're just real good
at it, and they just not recognize as part of
the larger palette.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
Just seems like background noise.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah yeah. The New York Times and other papers were
really into kind of just cashing in on this trend
of being the like worthy, objective people. We are the
good scientific people, we are the modern people.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
This is pretty charming as a trend.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
It's true. I do prefer this. I want to be clear,
I'm being cynical about it, but it's like better than
just everyone lying. Yeah, exactly, I'll take what I can get. Yeah, totally.
A trade paper at the time called The Journalist wrote, quote,
the most successful journalists are those that are able to
give the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the
(27:10):
facts and brief, pithy sentences, the majority of which contain
not more than a dozen words. And so it was this, like,
that's the new style of news. So they just kind
of invented the news one day. Yeah, I mean they
had the news, but the way we understand the news,
they invented the news. It's news two point oh yeah, totally. Yeah. Oh,
which is interesting because NDI media is literally going to
(27:32):
invent the web two point zero.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Well.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Yeah. The point of view of journalists was slowly stripped
out of the news journalists present to present themselves as
to quote another paper at the time of the writer quote,
to be the unmoved observer of events, to see things
exactly as they are, without regard to possible motives which
may have produced them.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
Which is also sexually a Victorian mail view of like
what's possible, where it's like who could do that?
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Right? And so we start seeing now you can start
seeing some of the downsides of this turn. Right, You're like, oh, yeah,
we're not going to talk about why someone was so
mad that they did this thing. Right, Like a riot
or broke a window is modern news, right, but not
someone who has been impoverished by capitalism is lashing out
(28:22):
against what's happening right, right, And so it's another form
of lie by emission sometimes.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Yeah, it also feels like just by stating an utterly
impossible goal and acting like that's the format. It's like saying,
here at this hospital, no one literally no one dies,
We hear everyone of all their diseases, and everyone walks
out alive and with twenty bucks. And it's like, but
you're not going to do that. You can't do that.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
No one can, yeah, totally, and no one can be
truly objective either, Right, Trying for objectivity still feels well,
trying for objectivity in the action fact finding feels important. Me.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Yeah, you know, yeah, and so I think there's like
an element of objectivity where it's like, like, if I'm
going to try and write a story as objectively as possible,
part of that is me acknowledging my position as a
person making these observations and acknowledging what my limits are.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Absolutely, you know, It's like I think about the shit
a lot, right, I run a history podcast, and I also, yeah,
there you go. My terrible joke I wrote into this episode.
I wear my politics on my sleeve, but to be
more literal, I cut the sleeves off of all of
my shirts, which reveals my prominent anarchist tattoo on my
upper shoulder.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
So fucking real, Magpie.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
I mean, that's perfect. But I want to tell the
truth even when it's inconvenient to my political aims. For example,
all the times on the show where I've had to
talk about the popularity of eugenics among political people on
both sides of the spectrum of the early twentieth century,
including people I would otherwise look up to, And even
(29:59):
at the time when all this new objectivity is coming in,
there's criticism of it that actually meant something. It wasn't
just like Bob but we want to sell more papers
by start wars. That's the closest I've done to an
old timey news voice. Thank you, thank you. I'm a
workshop that one. In eighteen ninety one, a journalist named W. J.
Stillman wrote about how journalism went from talking about quote
(30:22):
the questions and answers of contemporary life to quote collecting, condensing,
and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human experience to
get insult I know. And that's like I went into
it being like, I've had my criticisms of ostensibly objective
media for a long time, but seeing more of them,
(30:43):
while still also being like, it's still better if we
don't do yellow journalism, you know. Yeah, and podcasting really
is the rebirth of yellow journalism.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Yeah, well, it's interesting, how like, I don't know, I
like to me, the answer is not format as much
as just being willing to be boring when the occasion
calls for it, because there are just some things that
can't be stated excitingly, and if you can't make it exciting,
you shouldn't have to in order for it to be
able to be circulated to an audience, you know.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Yeah, but what if the area of this circle is
three thousand, nine hundred and twenty four meters radical. Yeah,
and you know what that means. That means that if
you divide it, I can't do enough math to do
this bit any further, Like I know. So, The New
York Times and other papers invented the myth or the
(31:39):
ideal of objective journalism at the opening of the twentieth century.
By nineteen ten, some folks adopted a code of ethics
for journalism, and by nineteen fifties most publications had code
of ethics that were like, we don't say things that
we know are lies.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
I would love to know which papers were like the
last holdouts, you know, before getting on that. We're finally
they're like, okay, we won't lie on purpose anymore. It's
nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, I gotta get with the Times. Ah, get with
the Times, because the New York anyway.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Right, the best puns happen purely by accident.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
It's like when you drop your toast and it falls
jam side up and nobody sees.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
If no one's around to see, did it happen? I know.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Yeah, it really does make me feel like a liar.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, Yeah, so that's some context around the mainstream news.
It presents itself as objective, it often tries to be.
There are upsides and downsides of that. Meanwhile, all along,
since before the rise of objective journalism, activists and political
radicals have been presenting counter narratives through their own newspapers
(32:47):
and radio shows and news outlets, most of the time,
often to their discredit. Activist papers don't really try for
the same level of objectivity. Some don't try for that
because they think objectivity is a myth, and they try
to be honest about their biases. I will not pretend
that this is an objective show. I just try to
be really clear about my biases. It's actually just kind
(33:09):
of as a side note, It's one of the reasons
that I like talk about my politics on this show
is less to convince people of it and more so
that people can like ignore part of what I say, right.
They can like be like, well, that BET's just saying
that because she thinks the following, you know, right, And like,
I mean.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Do you ever have a review where you're like, she
said something that I found stupid or like made a
dumb mistake, and that makes me not trust what she
says about other stuff, And I'm like, yeah, you shouldn't
trust me. Why do you trust me?
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Yeah? I totally earned that totally.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
You don't have to automatically trust everyone who is talking.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Yeah, I am not on a pedestal. I'm on a soapbox.
These are fundamentally different platforms. Yeah, you know, one of
them smaller, like yeah, and I have to research a
new subject every week, like.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Yeah, it's like yeah, like I would love for you
to listen, but also like assume that I could very
easily be wrong right about it.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Yeah, wow, Sarah, Thank you, Sophie.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Like, I try really hard to be right about stuff.
But one of the things that I do often when
I not every single time, but often when I do
a topic is I'll listen to other people who've like
done the sort of more pop culture version of the topic,
and it's always so wrong and it makes me scared
about my own shit, right, because I'm like, oh, everyone
(34:36):
just regurgitates the same like ten factoids about a thing,
and that happens so much.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Yeah, and they get sort of like well worn, like riverstones,
and you can see a misapprehension getting passed around by sources.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, and it it's hard because then I'm like, well,
I need to try not to do that. And one
of the main things that messes with my schedule does
that I'll start researching something, you know, because I'll start
with the big picture thing, I'll read the big picture stuff,
and then I'll dive into the details and learn more
about it. And sometimes I'm like we record on Thursdays.
(35:11):
Sometimes on like Wednesday night at midnight, I'm like, well,
everything I read was a lie, you know.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Yeah, And then you're like, well, now, like our attempt
to like fit research and acquiring information onto a calendar
is once again imperfect because like, obviously we'd rather find
the actual truth than stick to the calendar. But not
everybody gets to do that, and in fact, it's like
weird to be able to do that. Yeah, totally, and
(35:40):
that's you know, so it's I feel like one of
the things I find interesting is like, by making media
about how media gets.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
It wrong, you like.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Learn a lot and I think develop greater empathy for
the people who get it wrong because that also comes
to include you inevitably.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Totally. Yeah, then no one is perfect. Oh wait a second,
I'm a person if all people are flogged. Yeah, what
does that say about me?
Speaker 3 (36:05):
Oh no, Yeah, and especially I think people who want
to like comment on others, there's like a degree of like, well,
if I'm talking about people, then I'm escaping the problems
of the human condition. And it's like, no, you brought
them with you as a carry on.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Yeah, yeah, I bet you have a similar problem on
your research, Sarah, that Margaret has in her research, which
is she'll researched an entire person and find out that
they were like horrible to their wife. And it happens
all the time.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
You're like, what a really.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Cool guy slash, I hate him and would hit him
with my car.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
Yes, so many happens all the time.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Also, because I want to do more kind of little
bonus like audio book content things, and like it is
so hard to find a book in the public domain
that's like interesting to read and isn't racist. Oh yeah,
like The Great Gatsby is in the public domain, but
that doesn't do me any Nope.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Yeah, no, it's yeah, I agree, old literature. You're like, well,
I wouldn't work with an audiobook, but when I do,
like Coolsone Media book Club and I read an old thing.
Sometimes I have to be like, hey, let me contextualize
the way that this author wrote about this thing.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Yeah you know, yeah, but if you're reading the whole
thing out loud, you're like, okay, yeah, well, oh didn't
remember that part. I want to do the wind in
the Willows at some point, but I have to like
reread it because like, what if Toad hates Puerto Ricans
or something. I don't know, maybe he does. People just
did that in books back then, and it was asleep,
no one even remembered it well.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
And actually, to tie this into when people moved into
this scientific mode in the late nineteenth century, a lot
of really awful stuff comes specifically out of that, Like
the history of anthropology has an awful lot of real
dark racism that is like specifically around like we're being
so scientific, yeah you know, and so it's like.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
And we are taxonomizing people of color just like we
would with sharks or something exactly.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
And it's that same the facts don't care about your
feelings thing where it's like, actually, if you took some
humanities classes, you'd realize that these are related concepts, you.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
Know, yes, and using like your commitment to objectivity as
a way of defending your own lack of objectivity by
being like, it's science. I'm just saying facts. And it's
like you're refusing to analyze your emotional response to something
and calling it facts. But yeah, whatever.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
Yeah, So all these activists since me any time will
write their own papers to try and counter traditional narratives,
and they will do it in all kinds of ways.
They will sometimes like like sometimes they're like, I don't
care about the truth because my goal is more important
than the truth, right, They're like convincing everyone to follow
(38:53):
this or that ideology is more important. Yeah, and that's
clearly the most dangerous and you should run far away
from any instinct you have towards that and anything that
you're reading that you realize this was happening. And other
people are just like trying to be kind of objective
but fail and whatever. And some people actually, sometimes activist
(39:14):
papers are reasonably objective and written the same journalistic standards.
It's just activist whatever has a bad rap because of
the number of people who are pushing an agenda. First
and foremost, half of the radicals of the nineteenth century
that I've talked about on the show run their own newspapers.
There's also this long history of soapboxing a forgotten art.
(39:34):
I remember reading about this public square in Chicago and
the nineteen tens that was, like, what you do for
entertainment on your like night off is head to the
square and listen to speakers.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Isn't that proof that TikTok is like not as new
as we think it is exactly?
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Yeah, this is the first TikTok, the first tumbler Twitter like,
and what they show in movies gets it wrong because
usually in a movie it's like kind of like a
wild rant or even just an impassion and speech. Right.
Soapboxers were basically stand up comics with an agenda because
they are they know how to work crowds. They do
(40:13):
crowd work real well, and they like because they're competing
in this real direct way. You go to a public
square and it's not just like one person on a soapbox.
There's like thirty of them. I'm making that number up.
I have literally no idea how many in any given place,
but like more than one, which is exciting. Yeah. So
activist media various kinds, both the like written down in
a newspaper and the you know soapbox kind always existed,
(40:38):
and there's one more piece to put into place to
get a st indie media. There's something called an info shop.
This is a word that I have taken for granted
that I think most people don't know. This is Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
I love it, and I've never heard that before. I
don't think.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, it's a kind of storefront. It is part of
the activist, especially anarchist media landscape. The name is a
direct translation from German. We talked about a little bit
in the Black Block episode about the autonomists and their
stuff that they were creating in the seventies and eighties
and how that started to spread around the world a
little bit where they were like, we want lives outside
of the mainstream culture, and they would build an entire
(41:16):
subcultural community, and that those communities had infoshops. It's somewhere
on the continuum between a radical bookstore and a social center.
You can go in and there's going to be like
zines and books, maybe a lending library, events and speakers.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
Kind of a feminist bookstore. Yes, if there's any kind
of a moderndy equivalent.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yeah, totally. The feminist bookstore is a parallel development that Actually,
I'm kind of curious how much overlap there would be
between those developments. Infoshops have been around for a while.
The things have been existing since the earliest one I've
read about was in Chicago in nineteen ten, but I
think that they go back further than that. That's just
the oldest one I've read about.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
There need to be more leftist costume dramas. People don't
assume there were leftists in because there aren't costume dramas
about them where they're falling in love or whatever. We
just need one of those, just one.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
Wait have you seen reds Honey?
Speaker 3 (42:09):
Hi?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
I have not.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
I should because that's like Diane Keaton and Warren Batty.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Right, Wait, which one did are you talking about? What is?
What was your pitch, Sophie?
Speaker 1 (42:19):
No, Sarah and I were just going back and forth.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
Oh, okay, what are you doing our Samantha practice? Wait, Sophie,
should we do? You want to pitch the honey Off?
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Yeah, we have this idea to do a honey off,
which is Tom Womscans from Succession being afraid of his
wife and going honey and then Samantha Jones from Sex
and the City being like honey, and then you go
back and forth.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
We're working on a plane called Sex and the Succession.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Okay, Sarah, ready, I'm talking.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Okay, honey, honey, honey, honey. It's perfect, right, mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
It's good. You should do an entire show of it.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
I know.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Yeah, this is what we do it every time.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
I think we could do like a two hour like
a Frankie and Johnny at the Clear to Loon kind
of play. But it's Tom Wamscans and Samantha Jones.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
It's perfect. But can you turn it into a costume
drama about feminist bookstores and radical bookstorre? Yes, we can
forget it. Yeah, like what if the none of the
dialogue is that, But somehow, through like staging and the
other characters and things happening in the background, you communicate an.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
Entire plot rented a room over a feminist book store.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
I feel like we just gave the audience the real
insight to our personal lives.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
It's well, you know, you get together and you have
a Sex and the Succession. Yeah, you watch Sharing just
like that, and then to recover emotionally, you watch Succession.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
And my favorite part is when you do your little
opening theme to succession dance. Yeah, yeah, it's a slow jam.
Honey honey, honey, honey, honey, honey.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
We're tak an ad brak.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Yeah sure, fuck it. Here listen are these ads and
we're back. So you have these info shops and they've
been around for a long time. In the early nineties,
you get this other thing, the Internet. The early nineties
(44:23):
Internet was custom built for people with niche interests to
set up websites and find one another. God, ain't it
the truth? Yeah? I sometimes missed that. Yeah. Add in
the fact that the Internet was proof of the concept
of decentralization, Like people were really into the idea of
decentralization as a source of strength in the nineties and
early odds, right, And so the early Internet was perfect
(44:47):
for anarchists. And I've met anarchists who've worked on some
of the fundamental components of the Internet, like the protocols
that underline all this stuff and like build encryption and
all this things. But that's a different story that I'm
we're going to do one day. All of these anarchists
and catch all radicals are doing shit on the Internet.
Going back a long way, one of the earliest news sites,
(45:08):
and literally one of the earliest news sites like that
isn't part of a print newspaper, is called infoshop dot org,
which is sadly no longer with us. It was started
in nineteen ninety five under the name mid Atlantic Infoshop
and it was the online component of the Beehive Infoshop
in DC. And yeah, soon enough it becomes one of
(45:32):
the first online only news websites. It's slogan was unthinking
respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. And
I like that. It's still a like, you know, like
newspapers love using truth in their taglines. You know, I
love that they played to that.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
Yeah, that's true. I love that too, now that you
pointed out.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
Then, in nineteen ninety eight, a man named Evan Henshaw Plath,
better known under the name Rabble, created a website called
protest dot net that was a calendar for various protesters.
He's going to be important later in the story because
he is one of the people who started Twitter. And
there's others of these sorts of websites too, but these
(46:16):
are some of the ones that are important our context.
People obviously were able to organize massive movements before the Internet,
but there are some serious and specific advantages of using
the Internet for these protests. Earlier, I was talking about
how the Zapatista is built. It was called People's Global Action.
They built a grassroots coalition of people coming together as
(46:37):
like grassroots groups, which is hard to say.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
You're able to like contact a bunch of people like
you're supposed to, like you can have a.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Chain, yeah, and so you can actually get everyone in
touch with each other all over the world in a
way that was much harder to do quickly when you
had to. I guess. Also, probably most activist groups didn't
have telegraphs.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Yeah, I was gonna say, like email mailing list versus like,
you know, handwritten mailing list.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
Yeah, and so they use an email list and communicated
quickly to coordinate protests globally. So Web one point zero
was a collection of information written by and four people
with niche interests. Right. It was just various documents and
a kind of closer to them to Wikipedia than the
modern Web. The main distinguishing feature of what changed that
(47:27):
with Web two point zero is the idea of the
status update, the idea that people are posting what's happening,
and there's a few precursors to what's going to become
indie media, which kind of propels the status update into
across the world. One is slash dot, which is still around.
That's like a tech focused news site. There was open
(47:47):
Diary in nineteen ninety eight that was a precursor to
live journal, but nothing really took off on an international
scaleunti indie media. And there was about to be this
big world changing protests in Seattle in November nineteen ninety nine.
People are organizing to get ready for it. They're bringing
all of their skills, techies and journalists get together and
talk things through. And to quote an article by Harry
(48:12):
Halpin and that guy Rabble that I was talking about
who set uprotests dot net quote. One of the fundamental
problems facing the anti globalization protests was the lack of
mainstream media coverage. At the time. In nineteen ninety nine,
large protests in many countries like the United States were
relatively unknown, and small scale protests were mostly ignored by
(48:33):
the radio and television based media of the time. So
folks tried to do something about that. They're like, how
do we set up media infrastructure? You had things like
free Speech TV, which did video journalism. But in the
nineties and early odds it was pretty hard to distribute
video journalism. You had the well named group Damn Direct
(48:53):
Action Media Network. In nineteen ninety six, activists in Chicago
were getting ready to protest the Democratic National Convention. They
set up a lot of proto versions of later protest infrastructure.
They rented a building they called the Convergence Center, which
was where people could meet and organize, and it's a
term that got later used. In the basement of this
(49:15):
convergence Center, they set up a media newsroom, and I
believe there was a community radio station which was almost
certainly pirate radio, but it just presented as a community
radio station. But that wasn't legal at the time, so
good on them. And I believe this is the first
independent media center, but not under that name yet. In
(49:36):
the build up to the Seattle Protest of nineteen ninety nine,
all these media folks started working together to create a
single website that would allow the activists to become the
media themselves, indiemedia dot org. The tagline doesn't have the
word truth in it, which is a terrible shame. The
tagline was don't hate the media be the media. I
(49:57):
love that. Wow. Yeah, I actually too, and because there's
a lot of people being like, well I hate the media,
and you're like, all right, we'll just do it better. Literally. Yeah.
They use some open publishing software that had been used
by earlier protesters in England and Australia. I really like
how it's techies and journalists coming together to create this
weird thing. And the idea is that you have a
(50:18):
news wire where anyone can upload photos and text and
media like MP three's and videos and all this stuff,
which is seems like a very normal idea, and we
can actually sort of immediately imagine all of the problems
with this, like all of the hate speech that's going
to get posted and all of these things. Right, yes,
but no one had really done this, and indie media
(50:40):
solved two problems at once. One was DIY journalism, but
second it could be used for on the ground updates
that were of use to people. So it's not just
a way to hear about a protest after it's happened,
but you could hear about what's happening during the day. Yeah,
although fewer people had phones and stuff, so it was
like a little bit harder to do, but.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
Yeah, it feels like the basic approach is like, well,
what if you had a newspaper that updated itself in
real time?
Speaker 2 (51:07):
Yeah? Totally yeah. And the way to do that is
to turn all of the people into people who can
say like, hey, I saw such and such like oh,
the police are gathering at such and such street, right,
or I just witnessed three people get arrested or whatever.
And this is a breath takingly important moment in Internet history.
Even though it was about protest. It led to Twitter,
(51:31):
and it also led to podcasts. Yeah, concept of fucking podcasts.
Well there you go. Yeah, it is indie media's fault
that you are listening to this right now.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
Yeah, you know what, I'll allow it. Yeah, send them
your complaints about ads.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
Although they'd probably be like, yeah, no, we agree, fuck
those ads. Although actually we'll get at the way in
which it had internal conflict around what exactly its values
were later cool, but that's where we're at indiemedia dot org.
I in proper cool people for my one episode context
one episode stuff.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
Yeah, speaking of stuff, Sarah, you got anything about a plug?
Speaker 3 (52:13):
Ooh, you can listen to my podcast you're wrong about
or you cannot. It's really up to you. I want
to plug corn, have some sweet corn, add it to
a salad, put it in your ramen. I'm serious, that's all,
and go to a corn maze.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:32):
Ever eaten raw sweet corn on the cub? Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (52:35):
Yeah. Well, I grew up next to a guy who
grew corn in the summer, and so we could like
go and just like pick corn.
Speaker 2 (52:43):
You know, of an evening.
Speaker 3 (52:45):
And I remember like sitting on my dad's shoulders eating
a raw ear of corn, And like, I think raw
corn is the way to go.
Speaker 2 (52:53):
I like it slightly less, but it's so much work
to cook it compared to eating it raw. Yeah. I
love grilled Yeah, grilled corn.
Speaker 3 (53:00):
Yeah, well that's I mean, all the corn is good.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
I went to school in a cornfield. In my first
above the table job was selling corn really like on
a roadside stand.
Speaker 1 (53:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
It was a farm stand on a under a strip
mall overhang sometimes and in other times it was at
the farm itself, like roadside stand by the farm as
soon as I could get my work permit.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
How does that job rank in your life of jobs?
Speaker 2 (53:25):
Is it better or worse than this one? I have
nostalgia for it. I worked alone, unsupervised at fourteen years old,
which means I got a lot of free produce, and
so did a lot of other people. And I once
was being trolled by the people who worked at Starbucks
next door, and so I tricked one of them into
eating a raw HIBERNERO.
Speaker 1 (53:49):
Your boss is better now, right?
Speaker 2 (53:50):
Oh yeah, no, totally?
Speaker 1 (53:51):
Yeah, Okay, cool, We'll be back for part two.
Speaker 2 (53:55):
Yeah, Part two zero on Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website goolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly podcast that whenever there's bad things happening, there's
people trying to do good things, including not introduced their
podcast badly. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this
week my guest is Sarah Marshall.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Hi. How are you? Hi?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I'm so happy to be here. I like how you
started that off big and then he got it nice
and small. You know this week, Sarah Marshall, that's true.
It's an intimate salon.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Inviting people to get a little closer to the Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Well, I've been watching a lot of Kathy Griffin's specials
because I realized how much I missed Kathy Griffin. And
she had like nineteen Bravo specials in the two thousands.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Do you know who that is? Magbie, Nope, no idea.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
She was on Suddenly Susan in the nineties.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Magpie also doesn't know what that is.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I've heard of it. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Well, I have this thing called suddenly, so you put
on pasta salad always makes me think of Suddenly Susan.
But Kathy Griffin is a stand up comedian. Does this
thing where she like will start kind of like speaking quieter,
and she's like while doing a giant show on a
giant theater, and she's like, I'm talking like this because
this is GISs between you and me before like a
particularly juicy piece of celebrity gossip. So like, we're talking
(01:21):
like this because this GISs between us and all the
people listening as well the guests, between all of us,
no one else.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
No one else can listen except for the people who
are currently listening. Don't tell your friends about this podcast
because they can't hear it.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
We really need to keep this in a tight intimate circle.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, I got to keep them numbers down.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
That's what keeps That's what no one ever says on
a podcast. I want you to go out and rate
my podcast. Go ahead and give me a one star rating.
I hate it when people are like, give us a
five star rating, because that's presuming that the person listening
liked it.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
What if they didn't, I know, although it is a
good reason to do it at the end of the episode,
So at the beginning of the episode, because by the
end of the episode, if you may get that far,
you probably don't hate it.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Like I probably liked it if I listened for this
whole hour.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah, although I say that is if I don't regularly
listen to podcasts that I do not like at all,
because I pick a like new interest like every month.
I mean, you can tell by the theme of this
podcast that I like new interests. And then I'm like,
I need to know everything about r ving or sailboats
or I don't know those are two recently, and then
(02:32):
I listen to all the podcasts about them, and I
don't like most of them.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Yes, because it's hard to find something that's on both
a topic you like and you like the person doing it.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
I think, I know. Yeah, And if you're listening and
you're one of those people who kind of hates me
and just likes my content, I'm not sorry, nice, but
I do have a producer. I'm Sophie.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Hi, Sophie, Hi, Mike Pie Hi, Sarah, Hi, Sophie.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
Nice to be here with you wearing your hat that
says potatoes.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
I am. I know, it's so good. Everyone sends me
potato memes all the time and it's great, But Sophie's
the real.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
A potato head.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, that's the word I was thinking you are, and.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I am too. It's a very pre potato group today.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, I had potatoes and couscous for lunch. Oh nice.
It was just sort of random storre fry food and
it was so good.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
I had several mini croissants that I got discounted at
fred Meyer.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
I like croissants, Sophie, did you have a starch for
lunch today?
Speaker 1 (03:34):
I had two Italian sausages and an apple sauce.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Oh. I think you're the healthiest of the three of
us right now, you're the one.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Well. We also have an audio engineer named Eva hi
Eva Hiva hi Eva, and our theme music was written
forced by unwoman and you have unwittingly come in in
the middle of me. It's not a series, but it's
kind of a series. I've been talking a lot about
the alter globalization movement of the late nineties and early
(04:11):
oughts for the past couple months because I've been talking
a lot about the sort of protest infrastructure that people built,
and so I've been focusing on various groups that came
together to create the modern protest infrastructure, and specifically this
grand movement of movements that relied on decentralized organizing I'm
(04:32):
going to do this long build up before I give
you the topic. And the movement of movements especially kind
of came from decentralized organizing techniques developed by the Zapatistas
in Chiapus, Mexico, as well as anarchist traditions, and they
challenged neoliberalism and the challenge the way that structural adjustment
programs are destroying country's economies and basically just destroying the
(04:53):
global self. We talked about how the Zapatistas in Mexico
broke from traditional leftist organizing by introducing indigenous ae ideas
around decentralization and bottom up democracy, and we talked about
how they started to organize various grassroop groups and movements
from around the world to call for a movement against neoliberalism.
And what we're going to talk about today is one
of the mechanisms by which they were able to do
(05:15):
some of that organizing. But I'm still not going to
tell you what we're going to talk about yet. I'm
building it up as if it's like this dramatic reveal,
but I love it. We also talked about the Black
Bloc protesters that started in Germany and spread across Europe
to the rest of the world, how they provided an
alternative to the existing dichotomy with like either regimented nonviolence
on one side or like armed guerrilla movements on the
(05:36):
other side. We talked about the National Lawyer's Guild, and
we talked about street medics and maybe I'm just listening
to all these things because if you like come in
on just this one, they're like, oh wow, all those
things sound great too. We also talked about street theater
and giant puppets. But this week we were going to
talk about yet another component of the successful protests, independent media.
(05:58):
This week are going to talk about the decentralized grassroots
collective of independent journalists fundamentally changed our media landscape forever,
sometimes in ways that made it much worse. This week
we are talking about indie media I N D Y Media.
You ever heard of them? Hmmm, excellent? Then this will
(06:19):
be fun. I'm excited. This is the Independent Media Center
or the IMC as no one remembers it. If people
remember it at all, they remember it as indie media,
spelled with the Y. This is still around, but in
a much diminished form, but its impacts are outsized. I
am going to draw a direct link from indie media
(06:40):
to Twitter and therefore the destruction of all of our brains.
That's my plan today. Oh well, you ever heard of
Twitter's sorry, that sounded terrible. Certain you've heard of Twitter.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
It is like, don't you feel though that Twitter, like,
even when it was at its biggest, felt a little
bit too quaint in a way because it was based
on words, you know, like you could feel it being
the last big thing based on sentences.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Oh interesting, Like it was doomed because it's not going
to be because the next one was photo and the
next one after that was video.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Just yeah, this feeling of like this is sort of
like the last gasp of language based sort of viral
media online or language based social media as opposed to
image based, because you could get really big on Twitter
as an ugly person, is what I'm really saying here.
That's true, and those doors aren't open anymore.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I hate every single time I have to do video
for something. Every single time someone's like, hey, can you
promote this thing that you're doing? Sent just just really quick,
just send us a sixty second video of it. And
I'm like, oh, yeah, that's a that's a real quick.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
You're like, are you telling me to act like a
normal person? Who's you know, impression of a normal person.
People won't pick apart until I want to leave this
industry forever. Like that's going to take me.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
I know, I know, I have to either wear makeup
or not. I have to think about it. I gotta
cut my fucking bangs. I gotta like figure out my
lightning and backdrop. It is.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
It's a whole production to be a person.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
It really is, well, especially to be like a similacro
of a person on the internet. Being a person's fine.
I'll go out in public. Public is fine. It's the
Internet that's a problem.
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Well, And you know what I think about with that
is Nicole Kidman and To Die For. Yeah, you know,
she plays this character who's like a product of like
tabloid media and nineties TV news, and she's got this
speech about how like if everyone were on TV, then
everyone would be paved better because we would all be
being watched all the time. But also if everyone's on TV,
(08:44):
then who's gonna watch us? And it's like that's what
we're doing right now.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah, that's that's the present. Although I feel like instead
it's just like we've created like weird micro celebrity culture
and I don't know, I mean not that podcasting me
into it. But at least it's just my voice. That's
how I feel.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
About it, exactly. At least you're not performing in more
ways than the way that you consented to. Maybe that's
appealing to me.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah. All I have to do is get on Mike,
pretend like my day has been wonderful and have energy
for a little while.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
That's all I gotta do, or at least pretend like
my day hasn't been distractingly bad.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, And I actually had a nice day
to day, although literally all of my day today was
writing this script to finishing this script. But it was
a nice day.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
But if that's a nice day, Benny, I'm extra excited
for it.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
It was a like moment where I was explaining to
someone the thing that I've researched, and I've been like,
I'm going to explain a really niche topic. I'm glad
I have a good guest. The short version of indie
media is that, basically in the late nineties, at the
Big Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization November nineteen
ninety nine, people were like, we actually need a media infrastructure,
(10:08):
We need a structure of independent media. And it actually
comes out of not just like random people who want
to post conspiracy theory stuff though we'll get to that later,
but it comes out of like people who are journalists
who are like, the existing infrastructure is not going to
work for what we're going to try and do. They
got together with a bunch of techies and they created
(10:32):
what's not the first status update based website, but the
first big one, the first idea that people can be like, oh,
this is what happened today, and people can all post
that and share that and see that, and that allowed
the protest movement to accomplish amazing things. It also allowed
(10:56):
that protest movement to not be disappeared as much by
mainstream media, and it led to a lot of knock
on effects, and not like an indirect way. I'm going
to like name specific people who are the through line
between the modern social media landscape and this thing that
was put together for some protests. That's the basic idea
(11:16):
of indie media. I love it. Yeah, Indie media was
like my political awakening in a lot of ways. When
I was a teenager. I was an art student, and
I was brand new to politics, and I was living
in New York City, and I walked in off the
street to an Indie Media New York meeting and I
(11:36):
got to play this like tiny minor part in running
a newspaper, like a print newspaper that's still around today,
and join a video collective of people putting together video.
I just spent all of this time talking trash on video,
but I absolutely well, I didn't worry as much about
how I looked when I was nineteen years old. A
(11:58):
year later, I was living in Portland, Oregon, and I
was essentially working full time with the indie media video
collective there. In exchange for shooting and editing videos and
helping run events, I was given a room in a
tiny apartment over an auto shop, and less than a
year after dropping out of art school, a film I
(12:19):
edited sold out a movie theater, and I was giving
talks at universities to students that were older than me. Wow,
So I'm really fond of indie media, or I'm really
fond of what it was in two thousand and two. Man,
But what is it? Where did it come from? I
know that you want context. So one of the things
that comes up all the time when I'm researching this shit,
(12:41):
and I suspect we didn't talk about what you do.
Oh yeah, you run a podcast called You're wrong about
I Do. You're right about that? Sorry? Oh shit, Oh no,
you're allowed to make terrible jokes about That's true. That's
how that works.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
If you listen to podcast, people have probably like bothered
you about it at some point, and if you're like me,
then you haven't listened to it, because at some point
in twenty twenty one you were like, stop bringing this
show up, is what I would assume. And so either
you have or you haven't listened to it, And if
you haven't listened to it, then like, look, I'm not
gonna persuade yet. You get to decide what you do
(13:19):
with your own time.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
It's fine.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
But it started off as a show about misremembered history
and sort of classic tabloid narratives like Tiny Harding and
Lorraina Bobbitt and stories that we.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Sort of.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
That people sort of like kind of could remember but
would often sort of remember through USNL parodies, which is
certainly how I learned history. And now it's kind of
expanded into like, you know, I like to talk about
things through that lens of historical misunderstanding and misremembering and
sort of how the truth gets obscured. But also it's just,
you know, a show about stuff I find interesting. And
(13:54):
so our most recent episode that we just put out
this week is on the history of the Corn Maze.
That was so fun for me to do.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
You do love corn? That's cool.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
I love Coorn, and I'm okay with mazes. I mainly
love corn and I had I'm Chelsea Webber Smith who
loves mazes, and so that even doubt a good fit.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, that is good. So do you run across this
thing where people have an idea about how people were
in the past, and how ideas that we take for
granted right now people think just like have been around
forever and are actually reasonably new.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the really interesting
sort of aspects of history and historian ship I guess
to me is like things that are way newer than
we would think, and things that are way more timeless
as human behavior than we would think, you know, because
I think both of those things occur.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
The example that I'm going to use in this script
although it's not totally related. Is that the idea of
being a homosexual or of being a heterosexual about one
hundred to one hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Old, right, I know, And that's the kind of thing
that like feels shocking, but also when you think about it,
you're like, hmm, yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
No, totally. The first time someone was like, being straight
a is about one hundred year old idea, I was like,
there's no way that's true. And then I read about
it and I was like, oh, yeah, no, that kind
of makes sense actually.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
And then you're like, of course straightness is a new
concept because it's just so weird.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
Absolutely, If it were innate, it wouldn't be so hard
to make people, do you know?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yeah, totally. If the gender binary is so obvious and natural,
then why do we need laws to enforce it.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
It's a great question. There aren't any laws enforcing gravity, interestingly.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Enough, Yeah, yeah, totally. All objects must fall down. Yeah no,
one's like damn you birds except hunters maybe, but yeah.
So another idea that is about as old is the
idea of being gay or straight is the idea of
journalistic objectivity.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Oh boy, yeah, I guess that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
The idea that a journalist presents the facts and not
opinions is brand new in the grand scheme of things.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Yeah see, and I never thought about that. But then
you're like, yeah, how long of journalists even existed?
Speaker 2 (16:16):
For not that long? Yeah no, I don't I know
about the journalistic objectivity. But now I'm like, I wonder
how long our concept of journalism? I wonder how that is?
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Right, or just like you know, if you look at
like the Great you know what like all these dead
guys who like in cells like to have is their
profile pictures for some reason, right, like all the dead Greeks.
I don't know how that happened. But like herodotus, it's like,
what's history about? It's like, well, you just make stuff
up mainly, and then you sort of, yeah, it's fun.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, we start.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
To care about accuracy and academia probably not that long ago.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Well, what's interesting is the idea of journalistic objectivity. It's
not as like a one sided thing as I actually
kind of would have expected going into this, because it's
not like before this everyone just lied for fun, right,
But if you go back into the New York Times
archives and read their nineteenth century reporting, which I've had
to do a bunch of times for the show. Nay, yeah,
(17:12):
it is blatantly opinionated. And the thing is is that
New York Times is one of the main places that
the concept of objective journalism comes from, just decades elating.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
And now they've come full circle. So that's really good.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
Well, that's part of the danger. It's actually part of
why endi media exists, right, is that you have this
thing where like, oh, we're the objective people. So when
they have an obvious bias, it's not presented as an
obvious bias, right, It's presented as the objective truth unless
it's on the opinion page, you know, which is why
the Onion is the only true newspaper. All journalism is
(17:50):
still biased. Some journalists hide that bias, some journalists try
to counteract their own biases, and others are a little
bit more blatant about their bias. But journalistic objectivity didn't
become the standard because it was like better or more moral.
It was because it's sold better.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Wow, Okay, that's interesting. I would not have thought that.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I wouldn't have thought it either, and it doesn't always
sell better, but it was able to stand out in
the field, because in the eighteen nineties you have a
lot of like yellow journalism, which is basically tabloid journalism.
It's the journalism of scandal and half lies and full
lies scandal. That is how if I was a yellow journalist,
I would tell you that that's how it's pronounced because
(18:35):
it sounds better, it might sell more.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
No, you don't have to tell the truth. Yeah, and
this is like, how important was Hurst in the history
of yellow journalism. He's like, based on my seventh grade education,
I assume, So, okay, it's good to know that the.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
New York Journal I think was his paper. And yeah,
pullets are in Hurst. Wait, pullets are in Hurst. They
think we're not. Oh we not. No, it's crazy. We
did a whole episode. I'm no, I don't think you
were the guests. No, but I was cheering from afar.
We did a whole two parter on the actual newsy strike.
(19:09):
If anyone wants to go back and hear.
Speaker 3 (19:11):
Yeah, everybody should. I mean, it's very inspiring to me.
How in the actual history you're like, oh, they actually
did like terrify all these industries who were like, oh no,
we can't let children get this many ideas about labor unions.
This could really screw us.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yeah, and that's actually a lot of I mean when
I think back of like twentieth century journalism that claims
to be very objective and then I see its lies,
it's very rarely that I'm like, ah, they printed things
that were untrue, but instead by like choosing where their
focus is. I'm like, when labor history is written out
of history, you're like, oh, yeah, there's probably some protests
here and there, you know, And then you're like, oh,
(19:50):
protest and disruption is like the engine of progress.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Yeah, and that the reaction against it is like the
driving force shaping the world we now live in.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Absolutely, Yeah, and that like the crime of like lying
by omission is actually seems a lot more serious in
many ways.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Yeah, because it's harder to fact check, right, because you're like, well,
I guess everything you wrote is true.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
God, Yeah, because you can't fact check. Leaving stuff out
of the record, it's just like, well, we had limited space,
we couldn't fit in another page.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, not one more page. There's a lot of people
who've been very important in history, and other parts about
them are left out of it, right, like, it's very
hard to find when people did sex work. If someone
did sex work and they did something important, no one
talks about the sex work. But also if someone was
a radical leftist and they're not known for being a
(20:41):
radical leftist, that is left out. Are you thinking about
Helen Keller, Oh yeah, that's a perfect example. Yeah, it
is completely left out.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
And then yeah, honorary Wobbly Helen Keller.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So to quote about yellow journalism, I'm
going to quote Joseph Patrick mccerns from the book History
of American Journalism. The yellow journalism of the eighteen nineties
and the tabloid journalism of the nineteen twenties and thirties
stigmatize the press as a profit motivated purveyor of cheap
thrills and vicarious experiments. To its many critics, it seemed
(21:17):
as though the press was using the freedom from regulation
it enjoyed under the First Amendment to make money instead
of using it to fulfill its vital role as an
independent source of information in a democracy. So yellow journalism
is popular, right, but it is heavily criticized. So it
creates this niche for someone to be like, yeah, fuck
(21:39):
that stuff. We're going to give you the truth, and
do you know what the best way to pay for
the truth is advertising advertising. It's the part where you
just say this part's a lie and everyone drops pretending
like anything's objective, like what's about to happen, and we're back.
(22:04):
The biggest like turning point for yellow journalism, or at
least in history, when people look back and they're like, oh,
that didn't do us any good, at least in the
United States context, is when yellow journalism and Hurst sparked
a whole ass war.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Yeah, that does seem to be taking things too far.
The Newsy's made out very well though.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
That's true. That's true. Well, no, they actually had to
fight really hard in order to make out half decent.
They lived horrible conditions.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
But yes, oh no, but I mean they could sell
papers about the war.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Oh yeah, yeah. I used to write.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
About that my fan fiction and have my newsies being
nostalgic for the Spanish American War. That's amazing. Can folks
find this fan fiction? I hope they don't, but if
you do, you know, God bless you. It was like
I was his writing the horniest stuff. Okay, maybe I
(22:57):
don't need to know it if it's yeah, all right, Really,
I strove her historical accuracy the entire time.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
I suspect that the average like weird erotic thing historical
fiction is going to be more accurate than like other
mainstream things, because I think that it takes a certain mindset.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
You have to be kind of detail oriented.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yeah, probably exactly.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
I just want to solve the prop coffee cup problem.
It would be so hard to put something a little
bit heavy in those things. You know, when you have
like actors handling empty coffee cups and they're just like
flinging them around as if there's nothing inside them, drives
me insane anyway. Yeah, yeah, when you cause a war
(23:45):
that does seem rather extreme.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
And what happened was is that the Spanish American War
was in many ways caused by the USS. Main was
sunk in eighteen ninety eight in Havana, and the New
York Journal made a huge, huge scandal out of it,
and it drove popular outcry to go to war. And
I don't remember all of the ins and outs of
it enough to get more into it here, but I've
(24:08):
known it more before.
Speaker 3 (24:10):
But is it like arguably it just sort of like
sank for normal reasons.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, that's that's what I remember. The last time I
looked into this.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
Like a boiler exploded or something like that. Yeah, because
ships do sink famously.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah. Yeah. So by the end of the nineteenth century,
people are starting to get extra critical about all the
fake news of yellow journalism, and a local conservative rag
in New York City with the uninspired name no one's
ever heard of this paper, The New York Times pivoted
to being all about being objective.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
That's so interesting that people like, don't you find it
kind of heartening to think of people being like, hey,
I actually do not like being lied to, you know,
like I guess everyone, you know, a lot of people
are saying that today. But then there's so many other
people who seem to be louder who were like I
love being lied too, and it's hard to think straight.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Yeah, And I am sure there are people who went
in that direction because they felt those their moral duty
to be objective. But as interesting is even at like
some of the more tabloidy papers at the time, they
would have like signs on the wall that are like truth,
the truth matters. But it was kind of in this
like tell the truth, but as like wildly and sensationally
as possible, you know.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Like tell what's technically the truth, or like you know,
and beyond belief factor fiction whether like that one's true,
it's based on actual events, based on our research, and
you're like.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Well, that doesn't make sense.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
True, it was like a grain of truth maybe in it,
but that's not you know, it's like the showing me
a pearl and saying this is made out of sand,
and it's like in a way.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yeah, yeah, totally so, at least according to an article
in Just or Daily. In the late nineteenth century, being
really into science was in vogue, and so this idea
of objectivity was a way to be like the proper
modern scientific person.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Actually, that does sound a little bit too like you know,
male culture today, because like you know, I'm sure all
these very objective people also didn't realize anger was an emotion.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah yeah, yeah, but good for them. Well, I mean,
they only have one emotion, so they're just real good
at it, and they just not recognize as part of
the larger palette.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
Just seems like background noise.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah yeah. The New York Times and other papers were
really into kind of just cashing in on this trend
of being the like worthy, objective people. We are the
good scientific people, we are the modern people.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
This is pretty charming as a trend.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
It's true. I do prefer this. I want to be clear,
I'm being cynical about it, but it's like better than
just everyone lying. Yeah, exactly, I'll take what I can get. Yeah, totally.
A trade paper at the time called The Journalist wrote, quote,
the most successful journalists are those that are able to
give the facts, the whole facts, and nothing but the
(27:10):
facts and brief, pithy sentences, the majority of which contain
not more than a dozen words. And so it was this, like,
that's the new style of news. So they just kind
of invented the news one day. Yeah, I mean they
had the news, but the way we understand the news,
they invented the news. It's news two point oh yeah, totally. Yeah. Oh,
which is interesting because NDI media is literally going to
(27:32):
invent the web two point zero.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Well.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Yeah. The point of view of journalists was slowly stripped
out of the news journalists present to present themselves as
to quote another paper at the time of the writer quote,
to be the unmoved observer of events, to see things
exactly as they are, without regard to possible motives which
may have produced them.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
Which is also sexually a Victorian mail view of like
what's possible, where it's like who could do that?
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Right? And so we start seeing now you can start
seeing some of the downsides of this turn. Right, You're like, oh, yeah,
we're not going to talk about why someone was so
mad that they did this thing. Right, Like a riot
or broke a window is modern news, right, but not
someone who has been impoverished by capitalism is lashing out
(28:22):
against what's happening right, right, And so it's another form
of lie by emission sometimes.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Yeah, it also feels like just by stating an utterly
impossible goal and acting like that's the format. It's like saying,
here at this hospital, no one literally no one dies,
We hear everyone of all their diseases, and everyone walks
out alive and with twenty bucks. And it's like, but
you're not going to do that. You can't do that.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
No one can, yeah, totally, and no one can be
truly objective either, Right, Trying for objectivity still feels well,
trying for objectivity in the action fact finding feels important. Me.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
Yeah, you know, yeah, and so I think there's like
an element of objectivity where it's like, like, if I'm
going to try and write a story as objectively as possible,
part of that is me acknowledging my position as a
person making these observations and acknowledging what my limits are.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Absolutely, you know, It's like I think about the shit
a lot, right, I run a history podcast, and I also, yeah,
there you go. My terrible joke I wrote into this episode.
I wear my politics on my sleeve, but to be
more literal, I cut the sleeves off of all of
my shirts, which reveals my prominent anarchist tattoo on my
upper shoulder.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
So fucking real, Magpie.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
I mean, that's perfect. But I want to tell the
truth even when it's inconvenient to my political aims. For example,
all the times on the show where I've had to
talk about the popularity of eugenics among political people on
both sides of the spectrum of the early twentieth century,
including people I would otherwise look up to, And even
(29:59):
at the time when all this new objectivity is coming in,
there's criticism of it that actually meant something. It wasn't
just like Bob but we want to sell more papers
by start wars. That's the closest I've done to an
old timey news voice. Thank you, thank you. I'm a
workshop that one. In eighteen ninety one, a journalist named W. J.
Stillman wrote about how journalism went from talking about quote
(30:22):
the questions and answers of contemporary life to quote collecting, condensing,
and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human experience to
get insult I know. And that's like I went into
it being like, I've had my criticisms of ostensibly objective
media for a long time, but seeing more of them,
(30:43):
while still also being like, it's still better if we
don't do yellow journalism, you know. Yeah, and podcasting really
is the rebirth of yellow journalism.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Yeah, well, it's interesting, how like, I don't know, I
like to me, the answer is not format as much
as just being willing to be boring when the occasion
calls for it, because there are just some things that
can't be stated excitingly, and if you can't make it exciting,
you shouldn't have to in order for it to be
able to be circulated to an audience, you know.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Yeah, but what if the area of this circle is
three thousand, nine hundred and twenty four meters radical. Yeah,
and you know what that means. That means that if
you divide it, I can't do enough math to do
this bit any further, Like I know. So, The New
York Times and other papers invented the myth or the
(31:39):
ideal of objective journalism at the opening of the twentieth century.
By nineteen ten, some folks adopted a code of ethics
for journalism, and by nineteen fifties most publications had code
of ethics that were like, we don't say things that
we know are lies.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
I would love to know which papers were like the
last holdouts, you know, before getting on that. We're finally
they're like, okay, we won't lie on purpose anymore. It's
nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, I gotta get with the Times. Ah, get with
the Times, because the New York anyway.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Right, the best puns happen purely by accident.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
It's like when you drop your toast and it falls
jam side up and nobody sees.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
If no one's around to see, did it happen? I know.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Yeah, it really does make me feel like a liar.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, Yeah, so that's some context around the mainstream news.
It presents itself as objective, it often tries to be.
There are upsides and downsides of that. Meanwhile, all along,
since before the rise of objective journalism, activists and political
radicals have been presenting counter narratives through their own newspapers
(32:47):
and radio shows and news outlets, most of the time,
often to their discredit. Activist papers don't really try for
the same level of objectivity. Some don't try for that
because they think objectivity is a myth, and they try
to be honest about their biases. I will not pretend
that this is an objective show. I just try to
be really clear about my biases. It's actually just kind
(33:09):
of as a side note, It's one of the reasons
that I like talk about my politics on this show
is less to convince people of it and more so
that people can like ignore part of what I say, right.
They can like be like, well, that BET's just saying
that because she thinks the following, you know, right, And like,
I mean.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Do you ever have a review where you're like, she
said something that I found stupid or like made a
dumb mistake, and that makes me not trust what she
says about other stuff, And I'm like, yeah, you shouldn't
trust me. Why do you trust me?
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Yeah? I totally earned that totally.
Speaker 3 (33:45):
You don't have to automatically trust everyone who is talking.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Yeah, I am not on a pedestal. I'm on a soapbox.
These are fundamentally different platforms. Yeah, you know, one of
them smaller, like yeah, and I have to research a
new subject every week, like.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
Yeah, it's like yeah, like I would love for you
to listen, but also like assume that I could very
easily be wrong right about it.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Yeah, wow, Sarah, Thank you, Sophie.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Like, I try really hard to be right about stuff.
But one of the things that I do often when
I not every single time, but often when I do
a topic is I'll listen to other people who've like
done the sort of more pop culture version of the topic,
and it's always so wrong and it makes me scared
about my own shit, right, because I'm like, oh, everyone
(34:36):
just regurgitates the same like ten factoids about a thing,
and that happens so much.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Yeah, and they get sort of like well worn, like riverstones,
and you can see a misapprehension getting passed around by sources.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, and it it's hard because then I'm like, well,
I need to try not to do that. And one
of the main things that messes with my schedule does
that I'll start researching something, you know, because I'll start
with the big picture thing, I'll read the big picture stuff,
and then I'll dive into the details and learn more
about it. And sometimes I'm like we record on Thursdays.
(35:11):
Sometimes on like Wednesday night at midnight, I'm like, well,
everything I read was a lie, you know.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Yeah, And then you're like, well, now, like our attempt
to like fit research and acquiring information onto a calendar
is once again imperfect because like, obviously we'd rather find
the actual truth than stick to the calendar. But not
everybody gets to do that, and in fact, it's like
weird to be able to do that. Yeah, totally, and
(35:40):
that's you know, so it's I feel like one of
the things I find interesting is like, by making media
about how media gets.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
It wrong, you like.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Learn a lot and I think develop greater empathy for
the people who get it wrong because that also comes
to include you inevitably.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Totally. Yeah, then no one is perfect. Oh wait a second,
I'm a person if all people are flogged. Yeah, what
does that say about me?
Speaker 3 (36:05):
Oh no, Yeah, and especially I think people who want
to like comment on others, there's like a degree of like, well,
if I'm talking about people, then I'm escaping the problems
of the human condition. And it's like, no, you brought
them with you as a carry on.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Yeah, yeah, I bet you have a similar problem on
your research, Sarah, that Margaret has in her research, which
is she'll researched an entire person and find out that
they were like horrible to their wife. And it happens
all the time.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
You're like, what a really.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Cool guy slash, I hate him and would hit him
with my car.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
Yes, so many happens all the time.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Also, because I want to do more kind of little
bonus like audio book content things, and like it is
so hard to find a book in the public domain
that's like interesting to read and isn't racist. Oh yeah,
like The Great Gatsby is in the public domain, but
that doesn't do me any Nope.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
Yeah, no, it's yeah, I agree, old literature. You're like, well,
I wouldn't work with an audiobook, but when I do,
like Coolsone Media book Club and I read an old thing.
Sometimes I have to be like, hey, let me contextualize
the way that this author wrote about this thing.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Yeah you know, yeah, but if you're reading the whole
thing out loud, you're like, okay, yeah, well, oh didn't
remember that part. I want to do the wind in
the Willows at some point, but I have to like
reread it because like, what if Toad hates Puerto Ricans
or something. I don't know, maybe he does. People just
did that in books back then, and it was asleep,
no one even remembered it well.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
And actually, to tie this into when people moved into
this scientific mode in the late nineteenth century, a lot
of really awful stuff comes specifically out of that, Like
the history of anthropology has an awful lot of real
dark racism that is like specifically around like we're being
so scientific, yeah you know, and so it's like.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
And we are taxonomizing people of color just like we
would with sharks or something exactly.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
And it's that same the facts don't care about your
feelings thing where it's like, actually, if you took some
humanities classes, you'd realize that these are related concepts, you.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
Know, yes, and using like your commitment to objectivity as
a way of defending your own lack of objectivity by
being like, it's science. I'm just saying facts. And it's
like you're refusing to analyze your emotional response to something
and calling it facts. But yeah, whatever.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
Yeah, So all these activists since me any time will
write their own papers to try and counter traditional narratives,
and they will do it in all kinds of ways.
They will sometimes like like sometimes they're like, I don't
care about the truth because my goal is more important
than the truth, right, They're like convincing everyone to follow
(38:53):
this or that ideology is more important. Yeah, and that's
clearly the most dangerous and you should run far away
from any instinct you have towards that and anything that
you're reading that you realize this was happening. And other
people are just like trying to be kind of objective
but fail and whatever. And some people actually, sometimes activist
(39:14):
papers are reasonably objective and written the same journalistic standards.
It's just activist whatever has a bad rap because of
the number of people who are pushing an agenda. First
and foremost, half of the radicals of the nineteenth century
that I've talked about on the show run their own newspapers.
There's also this long history of soapboxing a forgotten art.
(39:34):
I remember reading about this public square in Chicago and
the nineteen tens that was, like, what you do for
entertainment on your like night off is head to the
square and listen to speakers.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Isn't that proof that TikTok is like not as new
as we think it is exactly?
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Yeah, this is the first TikTok, the first tumbler Twitter like,
and what they show in movies gets it wrong because
usually in a movie it's like kind of like a
wild rant or even just an impassion and speech. Right.
Soapboxers were basically stand up comics with an agenda because
they are they know how to work crowds. They do
(40:13):
crowd work real well, and they like because they're competing
in this real direct way. You go to a public
square and it's not just like one person on a soapbox.
There's like thirty of them. I'm making that number up.
I have literally no idea how many in any given place,
but like more than one, which is exciting. Yeah. So
activist media various kinds, both the like written down in
a newspaper and the you know soapbox kind always existed,
(40:38):
and there's one more piece to put into place to
get a st indie media. There's something called an info shop.
This is a word that I have taken for granted
that I think most people don't know. This is Yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
I love it, and I've never heard that before. I
don't think.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, it's a kind of storefront. It is part of
the activist, especially anarchist media landscape. The name is a
direct translation from German. We talked about a little bit
in the Black Block episode about the autonomists and their
stuff that they were creating in the seventies and eighties
and how that started to spread around the world a
little bit where they were like, we want lives outside
of the mainstream culture, and they would build an entire
(41:16):
subcultural community, and that those communities had infoshops. It's somewhere
on the continuum between a radical bookstore and a social center.
You can go in and there's going to be like
zines and books, maybe a lending library, events and speakers.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
Kind of a feminist bookstore. Yes, if there's any kind
of a moderndy equivalent.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Yeah, totally. The feminist bookstore is a parallel development that Actually,
I'm kind of curious how much overlap there would be
between those developments. Infoshops have been around for a while.
The things have been existing since the earliest one I've
read about was in Chicago in nineteen ten, but I
think that they go back further than that. That's just
the oldest one I've read about.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
There need to be more leftist costume dramas. People don't
assume there were leftists in because there aren't costume dramas
about them where they're falling in love or whatever. We
just need one of those, just one.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
Wait have you seen reds Honey?
Speaker 3 (42:09):
Hi?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
I have not.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
I should because that's like Diane Keaton and Warren Batty.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Right, Wait, which one did are you talking about? What is?
What was your pitch, Sophie?
Speaker 1 (42:19):
No, Sarah and I were just going back and forth.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
Oh, okay, what are you doing our Samantha practice? Wait, Sophie,
should we do? You want to pitch the honey Off?
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Yeah, we have this idea to do a honey off,
which is Tom Womscans from Succession being afraid of his
wife and going honey and then Samantha Jones from Sex
and the City being like honey, and then you go
back and forth.
Speaker 3 (42:44):
We're working on a plane called Sex and the Succession.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Okay, Sarah, ready, I'm talking.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
Okay, honey, honey, honey, honey. It's perfect, right, mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
It's good. You should do an entire show of it.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
I know.
Speaker 2 (43:01):
Yeah, this is what we do it every time.
Speaker 3 (43:03):
I think we could do like a two hour like
a Frankie and Johnny at the Clear to Loon kind
of play. But it's Tom Wamscans and Samantha Jones.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
It's perfect. But can you turn it into a costume
drama about feminist bookstores and radical bookstorre? Yes, we can
forget it. Yeah, like what if the none of the
dialogue is that, But somehow, through like staging and the
other characters and things happening in the background, you communicate an.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
Entire plot rented a room over a feminist book store.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
I feel like we just gave the audience the real
insight to our personal lives.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
It's well, you know, you get together and you have
a Sex and the Succession. Yeah, you watch Sharing just
like that, and then to recover emotionally, you watch Succession.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
And my favorite part is when you do your little
opening theme to succession dance. Yeah, yeah, it's a slow jam.
Honey honey, honey, honey, honey, honey.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
We're tak an ad brak.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
Yeah sure, fuck it. Here listen are these ads and
we're back. So you have these info shops and they've
been around for a long time. In the early nineties,
you get this other thing, the Internet. The early nineties
(44:23):
Internet was custom built for people with niche interests to
set up websites and find one another. God, ain't it
the truth? Yeah? I sometimes missed that. Yeah. Add in
the fact that the Internet was proof of the concept
of decentralization, Like people were really into the idea of
decentralization as a source of strength in the nineties and
early odds, right, And so the early Internet was perfect
(44:47):
for anarchists. And I've met anarchists who've worked on some
of the fundamental components of the Internet, like the protocols
that underline all this stuff and like build encryption and
all this things. But that's a different story that I'm
we're going to do one day. All of these anarchists
and catch all radicals are doing shit on the Internet.
Going back a long way, one of the earliest news sites,
(45:08):
and literally one of the earliest news sites like that
isn't part of a print newspaper, is called infoshop dot org,
which is sadly no longer with us. It was started
in nineteen ninety five under the name mid Atlantic Infoshop
and it was the online component of the Beehive Infoshop
in DC. And yeah, soon enough it becomes one of
(45:32):
the first online only news websites. It's slogan was unthinking
respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. And
I like that. It's still a like, you know, like
newspapers love using truth in their taglines. You know, I
love that they played to that.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
Yeah, that's true. I love that too, now that you
pointed out.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
Then, in nineteen ninety eight, a man named Evan Henshaw Plath,
better known under the name Rabble, created a website called
protest dot net that was a calendar for various protesters.
He's going to be important later in the story because
he is one of the people who started Twitter. And
there's others of these sorts of websites too, but these
(46:16):
are some of the ones that are important our context.
People obviously were able to organize massive movements before the Internet,
but there are some serious and specific advantages of using
the Internet for these protests. Earlier, I was talking about
how the Zapatista is built. It was called People's Global Action.
They built a grassroots coalition of people coming together as
(46:37):
like grassroots groups, which is hard to say.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
You're able to like contact a bunch of people like
you're supposed to, like you can have a.
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Chain, yeah, and so you can actually get everyone in
touch with each other all over the world in a
way that was much harder to do quickly when you
had to. I guess. Also, probably most activist groups didn't
have telegraphs.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Yeah, I was gonna say, like email mailing list versus like,
you know, handwritten mailing list.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
Yeah, and so they use an email list and communicated
quickly to coordinate protests globally. So Web one point zero
was a collection of information written by and four people
with niche interests. Right. It was just various documents and
a kind of closer to them to Wikipedia than the
modern Web. The main distinguishing feature of what changed that
(47:27):
with Web two point zero is the idea of the
status update, the idea that people are posting what's happening,
and there's a few precursors to what's going to become
indie media, which kind of propels the status update into
across the world. One is slash dot, which is still around.
That's like a tech focused news site. There was open
(47:47):
Diary in nineteen ninety eight that was a precursor to
live journal, but nothing really took off on an international
scaleunti indie media. And there was about to be this
big world changing protests in Seattle in November nineteen ninety nine.
People are organizing to get ready for it. They're bringing
all of their skills, techies and journalists get together and
talk things through. And to quote an article by Harry
(48:12):
Halpin and that guy Rabble that I was talking about
who set uprotests dot net quote. One of the fundamental
problems facing the anti globalization protests was the lack of
mainstream media coverage. At the time. In nineteen ninety nine,
large protests in many countries like the United States were
relatively unknown, and small scale protests were mostly ignored by
(48:33):
the radio and television based media of the time. So
folks tried to do something about that. They're like, how
do we set up media infrastructure? You had things like
free Speech TV, which did video journalism. But in the
nineties and early odds it was pretty hard to distribute
video journalism. You had the well named group Damn Direct
(48:53):
Action Media Network. In nineteen ninety six, activists in Chicago
were getting ready to protest the Democratic National Convention. They
set up a lot of proto versions of later protest infrastructure.
They rented a building they called the Convergence Center, which
was where people could meet and organize, and it's a
term that got later used. In the basement of this
(49:15):
convergence Center, they set up a media newsroom, and I
believe there was a community radio station which was almost
certainly pirate radio, but it just presented as a community
radio station. But that wasn't legal at the time, so
good on them. And I believe this is the first
independent media center, but not under that name yet. In
(49:36):
the build up to the Seattle Protest of nineteen ninety nine,
all these media folks started working together to create a
single website that would allow the activists to become the
media themselves, indiemedia dot org. The tagline doesn't have the
word truth in it, which is a terrible shame. The
tagline was don't hate the media be the media. I
(49:57):
love that. Wow. Yeah, I actually too, and because there's
a lot of people being like, well I hate the media,
and you're like, all right, we'll just do it better. Literally. Yeah.
They use some open publishing software that had been used
by earlier protesters in England and Australia. I really like
how it's techies and journalists coming together to create this
weird thing. And the idea is that you have a
(50:18):
news wire where anyone can upload photos and text and
media like MP three's and videos and all this stuff,
which is seems like a very normal idea, and we
can actually sort of immediately imagine all of the problems
with this, like all of the hate speech that's going
to get posted and all of these things. Right, yes,
but no one had really done this, and indie media
(50:40):
solved two problems at once. One was DIY journalism, but
second it could be used for on the ground updates
that were of use to people. So it's not just
a way to hear about a protest after it's happened,
but you could hear about what's happening during the day. Yeah,
although fewer people had phones and stuff, so it was
like a little bit harder to do, but.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
Yeah, it feels like the basic approach is like, well,
what if you had a newspaper that updated itself in
real time?
Speaker 2 (51:07):
Yeah? Totally yeah. And the way to do that is
to turn all of the people into people who can
say like, hey, I saw such and such like oh,
the police are gathering at such and such street, right,
or I just witnessed three people get arrested or whatever.
And this is a breath takingly important moment in Internet history.
Even though it was about protest. It led to Twitter,
(51:31):
and it also led to podcasts. Yeah, concept of fucking podcasts.
Well there you go. Yeah, it is indie media's fault
that you are listening to this right now.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
Yeah, you know what, I'll allow it. Yeah, send them
your complaints about ads.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
Although they'd probably be like, yeah, no, we agree, fuck
those ads. Although actually we'll get at the way in
which it had internal conflict around what exactly its values
were later cool, but that's where we're at indiemedia dot org.
I in proper cool people for my one episode context
one episode stuff.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
Yeah, speaking of stuff, Sarah, you got anything about a plug?
Speaker 3 (52:13):
Ooh, you can listen to my podcast you're wrong about
or you cannot. It's really up to you. I want
to plug corn, have some sweet corn, add it to
a salad, put it in your ramen. I'm serious, that's all,
and go to a corn maze.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:32):
Ever eaten raw sweet corn on the cub? Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (52:35):
Yeah. Well, I grew up next to a guy who
grew corn in the summer, and so we could like
go and just like pick corn.
Speaker 2 (52:43):
You know, of an evening.
Speaker 3 (52:45):
And I remember like sitting on my dad's shoulders eating
a raw ear of corn, And like, I think raw
corn is the way to go.
Speaker 2 (52:53):
I like it slightly less, but it's so much work
to cook it compared to eating it raw. Yeah. I
love grilled Yeah, grilled corn.
Speaker 3 (53:00):
Yeah, well that's I mean, all the corn is good.
Speaker 2 (53:03):
I went to school in a cornfield. In my first
above the table job was selling corn really like on
a roadside stand.
Speaker 1 (53:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
It was a farm stand on a under a strip
mall overhang sometimes and in other times it was at
the farm itself, like roadside stand by the farm as
soon as I could get my work permit.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
How does that job rank in your life of jobs?
Speaker 2 (53:25):
Is it better or worse than this one? I have
nostalgia for it. I worked alone, unsupervised at fourteen years old,
which means I got a lot of free produce, and
so did a lot of other people. And I once
was being trolled by the people who worked at Starbucks
next door, and so I tricked one of them into
eating a raw HIBERNERO.
Speaker 1 (53:49):
Your boss is better now, right?
Speaker 2 (53:50):
Oh yeah, no, totally?
Speaker 1 (53:51):
Yeah, Okay, cool, We'll be back for part two.
Speaker 2 (53:55):
Yeah, Part two zero on Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website goolzonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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