#847: Chatting with Sophie From Mars
Today, Jordan sits down with Sophie From Mars to chat about an array of topics, from the value of the term wokeness to the sincerity of the Wachowskis.
Sept. 8, 2023 - Knowledge Fight
57:44
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Dan and Jordan, knowledge. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hello, everyone. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| My name is Jordan. | ||
| Unfortunately, I'm without my co-host Dan today, but I am joined by Sophie McAllister, or Sophie from Mars, as I've always known you. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| Hey, Jordan. | ||
| It's lovely to be here. | ||
| I'm here on my favorite podcast. | ||
| What an honor. | ||
| Yeah, people don't know me. | ||
| I'm Sophie from Mars. | ||
| I make video essays on YouTube. | ||
| Someone once called me a video philosopher and I found that phrasing of my job pretty helpful because I do think too hard about everything and then write it down and then say it on video. | ||
| So that's probably the easiest way to say what I do. | ||
| My kind of structure of how I make content is like... | ||
| A lot of long projects that I spent way, way, way too long working on and then kind of fill the time in between with shorter stuff. | ||
| So my portfolio of bigger, more noteworthy stuff is like a while ago I breathlessly defended the Matrix sequels with absolutely no shame. | ||
| More recently I talked about leftist spaces where there are like conspiracy theories. | ||
| So very relevant to knowledge, right? | ||
| You know, I looked at Jimmy Dore. | ||
| The Grey Zone, some people like this. | ||
| And I just released a video called The World Is Not Ending, which is about climate change and how the world is not ending. | ||
| However, some people who are not familiar with me, so have no trust, no reason to trust me, might be thinking, oh, that sounds... | ||
| Bad. | ||
| It's not climate denialism. | ||
| It is my belief that the way things are going to shake out... | ||
| It didn't even occur to me. | ||
| Yeah, no, that's right. | ||
| It could be. | ||
| The world isn't ending. | ||
| Yeah, because nothing is wrong. | ||
| That I would not have seen coming. | ||
| A friend of mine shared it, and someone in her replies was like, is this climate denial? | ||
| And I was like, why would you think that she was sharing climate denial? | ||
| That would be a hell of a turn for her. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| I was more interested in the mushrooms. | ||
| That was the big thing. | ||
| Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, we can talk in more detail about it. | ||
| But yeah, it's a project I've worked on for two years. | ||
| And basically, for reasons that I detail in this two and a half hour documentary essay thing, the monstrosity I've created, I believe the world is not ending. | ||
| And it's all about combating Doomerism. | ||
| And yeah, as you say, I've incorporated mushrooms throughout as a kind of motif. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bringing my interests together. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So, Len, I suppose the obvious next place to go is... | ||
| Which one do you think is better? | ||
| Reloaded or... | ||
| Revolutions. | ||
| Which are we going for here? | ||
| Well, tragically, I have the worst possible take, which is that Reloaded and Revolutions are two halves of one movie that should be viewed in one sitting. | ||
| And a lot of the hate for them comes from the fact that they were released with a big gap in the middle. | ||
| Which is just not the right way to approach them. | ||
| It's one text. | ||
| Reloaded people tend to feel as better because they're watching the first two acts of a three-act story where all of the hype and action is being built up. | ||
| And then Revolutions is like all the payoff and it's just one long protracted and this is how it all worked out. | ||
| Which, yeah, to watch on its own is really boring. | ||
| I admit that. | ||
| Okay, so then that's not really an unabashed defense. | ||
| That's somewhat embarrassed. | ||
| Like, well, listen, if they had done a better job, I wouldn't be struggling to defend this movie, is basically what you just said. | ||
| I think cringe is the mind killer, and I think that we have to approach everything the Wachowskis do, seeing that they are just sincere posting through it all the time. | ||
| No room to cringe at absolutely anything at all. | ||
| And, you know, bad, terrible, full of mistakes, lazy, awful CGI. | ||
| These are words people throw around, but do they mean anything? | ||
| This is what I'm trying to get at. | ||
| Are people actually describing real, objective things about movies when they say those words? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| That's an interesting question. | ||
| Are people using objective? | ||
| See, now here's the other thing. | ||
| You think, oh, the Knowledge Fight fanbase, the wonks, we talk about conspiracy theories most of the time. | ||
| Swear to God, most of what we talk about is movies. | ||
| Alex and Infowars, the whole right-wing sphere, it's all movies that they're basing lies off of. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| We might as well be talking about Reloaded when we're talking about what Alex thinks of the current political climate. | ||
| Well, hang on. | ||
| I've just realized my position as having this platform for a moment, and I just want to voice my deep, deep discontent that we didn't get more Reset Wars. | ||
| I was so hyped about Reset Wars, and I just, like, since, you know, if we're talking about Alex, if we're talking about living in a simulation, if we're talking, right, where's my Reset Wars? | ||
| Like, I was so excited about it. | ||
| I can't begin to describe to you exactly how we felt the same. | ||
| The exact same. | ||
| When we had finished recording the episode, we were like, I'm kind of excited to see what Reset Wars is about. | ||
| And then, of course, the rug was pulled! | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that is, like, I am actually working on a shorter essay about Alex Jones at the moment, and I've said this to you already, that I worry a little bit about running afoul of your rules of how to cover Alex Jones, but I think I'll be okay. | ||
| We're fine. | ||
| But, like, these are the kind of questions that I wind up with. | ||
| You know, I thought it was cute to do a who is Alex Jones intro, and then I ended up naming all the other sections. | ||
| Why is Alex Jones? | ||
| What is Alex Jones? | ||
| How is Alex Jones? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The who is almost the most meaningless part. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, who is a tornado? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| As far as all of your professional work has gone, this I want to kind of tie together with the rampant transphobia that Alex kind of spits out on the near constant and is now kind of infected the entirety of that conspiracy space world, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How is it... | ||
| From your point of view, because I spend all of my time looking at all of this stuff, but I'm a straight white dude. | ||
| It's all made by people who look like me, you know? | ||
| I don't look out and feel an attack on me personally. | ||
| So I'm interested in how it is that you consume this whenever it's just horrific shit. | ||
| Well, it's a bit strange because a lot of this media that goes around like... | ||
| I think in the UK, maybe it's a little different. | ||
| In the US, I'm sure that there are a lot more people who are much more directly plugged into QAnon space, Alex Jones space, and then going out and doing a hate crime. | ||
| Here, it's like there are a lot of... | ||
| People we would call gammons or whatever. | ||
| Like, just dudes who are completely red in the face all the time and they read the Daily Mail and whatever else. | ||
| And it's a lot of, like, mainstream bigotry that actually fuels their hatred. | ||
| And then we have a parallel conspiracy space of tufts who are doing a lot of the most Alex Jones-y stuff in the UK and yet, like, not contributing directly. | ||
| To the hate crimes, there's about six or seven guys in between, say, Posey Parker and someone who screams at me in the street or whatever, which is a thing that's happened to me a bunch and increasingly over the last few years. | ||
| This is something I point out fairly frequently. | ||
| The right-wing media loves to talk about woke snowflakes, crying, screaming, demanding, whining. | ||
| And it's like, my practical experience is that I'm just trying to go to the climbing center to have a little rock climb, and some guy stops and just screams at me in the street, like red in the face, practically to the point of tears, wanting to attack me. | ||
| It's like, our side of this is not the screaming, crying, emotional side. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't know. | ||
| How I feel about it. | ||
| As I said, this is kind of why I prefaced it a little bit. | ||
| I have a strange brain and I listen to a bunch of Alex Jones and I'm not as phased as maybe I should be. | ||
| But it has had a noticeable effect. | ||
| I can see the influences of this conspiracy space stuff. | ||
| I think that for me, I'm a materialist, so this is... | ||
| Putting it together is relatively simple because a lot of time you can just look at the money and who's funding what, right? | ||
| And it's like the attacks on bodily autonomy, and I say bodily autonomy because it's not transphobia per se, because a lot of people are like, well, it's politically LGBTQ people are organized into one political block to protect our rights together. | ||
| But in terms of who's being attacked, It's an attack on bodily autonomy. | ||
| And this is why people keep on saying abortion is next right after transphobia. | ||
| Abortion is next because states need people even more than they need land. | ||
| The first thing states need is people in order to function. | ||
| And then they need to control how those people work, how those people live and work and think and feel and so on. | ||
| And bodily autonomy is a huge question of that, right? | ||
| Silvia Federici's Taliban and the Witch, great history of this stuff. | ||
| In the European Middle Ages and pre-Christian religions, there were a lot of beliefs of animism and magic and so on that were literally tortured out of people. | ||
| Because as the enclosures took place to enforce patriarchal capitalism, they needed to do several things: regularize time. | ||
| Eliminate any myths about the mind and body and create a mental structure for people that they believe that the mind and the will is more powerful and controls the body, which is like a machine. | ||
| And that's crucial to the functioning of the state and to capitalism. | ||
| And so people discovering or defending rights that they have to their own body and life, such as Living authentically as myself as a woman or for people who may need abortions getting abortions. | ||
| These are issues of bodily autonomy and the state controlling them has to do with it trying to enforce a picture where everyone should be not only productive but reproductive. | ||
| It's very much all tied together towards states becoming more authoritarian. | ||
| We had this bizarre little bubble that, you know, I for one was born into 1996, of the capitalist end of history, like a unique moment of peace and stability, and everything was relatively chill. | ||
| If you lived in the imperial core, if you lived in the richest countries in the world. | ||
| And then as... | ||
| That starts to falter. | ||
| And as shit falls apart, especially post 9-11, neoliberal states need to become more authoritarian and they need to clamp down on stuff. | ||
| I don't see it as separable at all. | ||
| So when I say I'm a materialist, I think that the fact that capitalism is really, really running aground, it's really crashing into its potentially final crisis now with climate change. | ||
| And at the same time, all these states are becoming extremely authoritarian. | ||
| Politicians are allowing a bunch of space for demagogues and conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones to gain massive support and their sharing and funding in spaces and platforms. | ||
| Yeah, I see this as all extremely, extremely connected. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That sums it up pretty well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry for not being more supportive, I suppose. | |
| You were just on a roll. | ||
| I didn't want to cut in and start tearing things apart. | ||
| No, Jordan, please, debate me. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| I have zero to debate. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| This is when, out of nowhere, I turn out to be the huge staunch defender of United States capitalism and imperialism abroad. | ||
| That's my heel turn. | ||
| For the last moment, I got purchased by a Coke brother. | ||
| Extremely unexpected. | ||
| The surviving Coke brother runs out, but he's not holding a chair. | ||
| He's holding a comically large check. | ||
| All of this, piecing this together, this is why I say I'm a materialist. | ||
| People focus a bit too much, I think, on political tendency on the left. | ||
| David Graber described... | ||
| This one's just an in-joke for my audience. | ||
| Sophie said David Graeber, everybody drink. | ||
| But David Graeber talked about schismogenesis, right? | ||
| A tendency when communities of people are near each other that because your neighbors are like A, you need to be like B to contrast yourselves. | ||
| And so, you know, the context he was pointing this out in was like... | ||
| A lot of evolutionary biologists, evolutionary psychologists will have an argument towards efficiency. | ||
| If something would be efficient, there's no reason not to do it. | ||
| But human psychology isn't like that, right? | ||
| Our neighbors have developed this tool that's more efficient, but we don't use that because we're not them, right? | ||
| So schismogenesis, this is this tendency. | ||
| And I think that a lot of... | ||
| What people call leftist infighting is this schismogenesis. | ||
| And people are way too focused on like, I'm an anarchist and I'm an ML and I'm a Trotskyite and I'm a Sockdam and I'm in the DSA and I support this thing. | ||
| And it's like, well, so we all want a society where everyone gets what they need and contributes what they can, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| We want a society where our needs aren't mediated by capital anymore because capital is killing the planet. | ||
| We want a society free of racism and transphobia and ableism and these things, right? | ||
| So why are we arguing so much? | ||
| And that's why I say I'm a materialist. | ||
| I am an anarchist, but I just will not waste my time arguing too hard. | ||
| I'll talk about stuff that I think is a worthwhile strategy, and this is part of... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think that a lot of... | ||
| There's old... | ||
| Workerism that I could spend far too long rambling about, as in the strategy of the 20th century, like, organizing the proletariat for revolution. | ||
| It's all about the workers. | ||
| The workers of the world unite, etc. | ||
| It's like, parts of this strategy are still useful, but people cling to it a little bit too nostalgically. | ||
| Whereas if you look at our actual material conditions right now, people are much more easily organized and mobilized around, and this is something I touch on, and the world is not ending, about six things, okay? | ||
| The fossil fuel industry is killing the planet. | ||
| Finance capital will always find new ways to kill the planet. | ||
| Fascism is rising up. | ||
| Borders are violent and murderous by their nature. | ||
| The way we do justice in society is fucked and far from any notion of actual justice. | ||
| And we need networks and systems of mutual aid to support each other. | ||
| That's about six things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And everything more or less falls into those six things. | ||
| And that's what we should be spending our time on. | ||
| This is a point that I make in the world that's not ending because I figured if I'm combating people's depression and doomerism and kind of feelings of like absolute certainty, climate change is going to kill us all. | ||
| One thing that's really important is to not treat depression like sadness. | ||
| I, I've struggled with depression a lot of my life. | ||
| You know, I don't mind saying, I think it's actually important for me to acknowledge. | ||
| If I'm talking about how I'm talking to people who are depressed. | ||
| It's something I have a lot of familiarity with. | ||
| And it's not just being sad, right? | ||
| When you're depressed, it's not so much that you feel overwhelmingly sad. | ||
| Usually you don't feel much at all. | ||
| You just feel numb and hollow and you can't go anywhere. | ||
| And it feels like you don't want anything. | ||
| And I think that's a really crucial part is a lack of desire. | ||
| So something that I focus on a lot in The World Is Not Ending is our desire. | ||
| What is it we want? | ||
| Because if we're so sure the world is going to end and we're all fucked, well, it sounds like we just can't imagine moving to a kind of world that has solved the problem of climate change. | ||
| If we're saying, well, we have to stop capitalism to stop climate change, damn, that's a lot of work. | ||
| Well, okay, firstly, worst case scenario, capitalism causes climate change and climate change is going to make capitalism impossible. | ||
| To call it self-resolving would ignore the billions of people who are going to die. | ||
| It's obviously horrible. | ||
| We can't just let it be. | ||
| That's a bad strategy. | ||
| But let's just look at our worst case scenario. | ||
| It is essentially self-resolving at that point. | ||
| It will take care of itself from then on out. | ||
|
unidentified
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You are no longer a part of the equation. | |
| Yeah, so yes. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| But to use your analogy, How far we throw the grenade away or whether we can hold onto the grenade for some amount of time until we find a deep, deep well to drop it down or something like this, right? | ||
| There are other things to account for. | ||
| But the worst case scenario is we will reach a point where we're no longer waiting for the grenade to go off. | ||
| This is true. | ||
| But this isn't the total of my arguments, right? | ||
| A lot of my point is if there is some kind of point... | ||
| Before when capitalism makes capitalism impossible via climate change, where people can see that that's going to be true, and so they'd rather jump before they're pushed and move to something other than capitalism, well, when is that point? | ||
| When does that happen? | ||
| And my belief is it's a lot sooner than most people think. | ||
| I mean, I suppose my concern there, though, isn't... | ||
| Isn't any disagreement I have so much as it is like, I agree completely with you. | ||
| We should have done that in 1987. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Whenever they knew what was going to happen. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So it's like that foreknowledge of we will get to this place, that was there 40 years ago. | ||
| But for who? | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| But that's what I'm saying. | ||
| Did they steal it from us? | ||
| Did they fuck us over? | ||
| If we had all known about it 40 years ago, if everybody had had a clear base of knowledge and we weren't lied to for 40 years, maybe we would be fucked! | ||
| I think it's easy to spend a bit too much time focusing on people denying climate change. | ||
| Something I've been thinking quite hard about for a little while now is the rights politics is not no... | ||
| At first blush, the right-wing's politics would appear to have no climate change in it, because they're climate deniers. | ||
| To be on the right-wing nowadays involves denying climate change to some degree. | ||
| The most centre-right people are still arguing that capitalism can stop climate change. | ||
| Factually, it can't. | ||
| So the mildest right-wing position is still a climate denial position. | ||
| In fact, it's not that they have no climate change politics, it's that they have entirely climate change politics. | ||
| All of their politics is rooted in the idea that we're completely fucked, there's nothing we can do, because they know that it would have to involve stopping capitalism to stop climate change, so they are just focusing on, to put it kind of grimly, the fun they can have before the world ends. | ||
| To bring it back to Alex Jones, everything he says, the transphobia, the isolationism, the nationalism, the kind of bizarre, simultaneously Nazi-adjacent and also libertarian politics that he holds onto, is trying to describe a world where he gets to ride around in an ATV with a machine gun because they've built the wall and he's the head of some little cult of Proud Boys or whatever. | ||
| It would be fun for him from his perspective. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It would also suck, and he would probably find out the ways in which it would suck, but he would have turned it to a point where it couldn't be turned back. | ||
| Yeah, and it's all grabbing as much power and wealth and everything as they can and having as much fun as they can before what they see as inevitable. | ||
| And that's because they're counter-revolutionaries. | ||
| There is a natural... | ||
| There's a revolution here to fight against climate change, to stop the conditions that are killing us, that are killing the planet. | ||
| And counter-revolution emerges when the social fabric ruptures like this, right? | ||
| People are like, well, shit should change. | ||
| Shit should become more equal. | ||
| I do not like how things are. | ||
| The material conditions are bad. | ||
| I want something different. | ||
| And then... | ||
| People who have some degree of power or perceive themselves as having some degree of power or relate to the people in power form a counter-revolution, either organically or artificially. | ||
| It's on the side of power, so it's often artificially formed because some state or institution funds it, props it up, makes it happen. | ||
| A term that's worth thinking about in the context of the history of the last 70-odd years is the American global counter-revolution. | ||
| America assassinates democratically elected socialist leaders or the CIA makes coups happen or whatever. | ||
| It's worth viewing this through the frame of America has been enforcing a global counter-revolution for the last 70-odd years. | ||
| Sometimes because they're just afraid of communism, sometimes to increase the price of bananas, to increase the profit margin on bananas by doing a massive genocide of indigenous Mayan people in Guatemala or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, generally speaking, there will be a business person who goes to our government and says, I would like to be more rich. | ||
| And they'd be like, okay, how much will you give us to do that? | ||
| And they go, less money than I'll make. | ||
| And nobody realizes how stupid everybody is. | ||
| And socialism is the... | ||
| Absolute epitome of business people losing out. | ||
| Must be stopped at all costs. | ||
| I mean, there's bigger epitomes of business people, like volcanoes. | ||
| That's a good place to make business people lose. | ||
| That's another one. | ||
| There are options, is what I'm saying. | ||
| But it is not surprising, though, considering that, to see the faces of the American counter-revolution, the global counter-revolution, share the same faces as everybody who's a fan of big oil, as fucking Elon Musk. | ||
| These are the faces of people who are... | ||
| I would say probably if you imagined a fucking spear, it's these people who grab the LGBTQ plus diaspora and try and stab people at the end of their spear. | ||
| It is that in order to keep you from doing anything about larger material issues. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think that... | ||
| When we talk about class consciousness, something that's important here is... | ||
| Well, Mark Fisher talked about group consciousness instead of class consciousness. | ||
| I think that's really useful framing. | ||
| So he talked about, for example, feminist group consciousness. | ||
| There's an example where you could apply what you'd call a class analysis to feminism. | ||
| Men are in a ruling class and women are in a subjugated class. | ||
| Or maybe to be a bit more inclusive and accurate, cis, het men are in a ruling class and everyone else is broadly in one subjugated class. | ||
| But there are different shades of subjugation to the nature of that and so on. | ||
| And you could argue about who is subjugated in which ways under that. | ||
| But the point is, group consciousness is the broader version of class consciousness. | ||
| So class consciousness has historically been focusing on the proletariat realizing their antagonism to the bourgeoisie, and what do we do about the peasants, and so on and so on. | ||
| But it's like, well, capitalism's become an absolute fucking mess, right? | ||
| In the 21st century, capitalism has become an absolute fucking mess. | ||
| And the proletariat is where? | ||
| Because there are still industrial sector workers inside the imperial core. | ||
| There are absolutely tons of people employed in factories and people doing mining and so on. | ||
| But the largest sector in the imperial core now is the service sector because the industrial sector got really, really organized and unionized. | ||
| And Reagan and Thatcher were like, well, we can't have that. | ||
| They pushed it all into the imperial periphery and started importing manufactured goods from the imperial periphery instead and changed everything to the service sector, which doesn't have any unions. | ||
| At the same time, Silicon Valley gave us this fantastic, sparkling new revolution in the way we do work, which is called the gig economy. | ||
| And this arguably introduced a new class called the precariat, whose employment is so much more precarious than the proletariat ever was that it's worth designating them as a different class, the precariat. | ||
| You know, a proletarian laborer for all that is shitty and oppressive about their work conditions can rely on them, unless they're explicitly fired, going to work next week. | ||
| And a gig economy worker can't, right? | ||
| So this is the precarity. | ||
| So it's like, it's a huge mess. | ||
| So is it class consciousness that we need? | ||
| I think it's group consciousness. | ||
| I think we need to understand... | ||
| What the broad sides of this are. | ||
| And I think one way that we can do that is start by latching onto the word woke. | ||
| I really like the word woke. | ||
| We've shied away from it really quickly because the right wing started using it as an insult for everything that they don't like. | ||
| And it's like, well... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh no, they don't... | |
| Alex Jones doesn't like things being woke? | ||
| Damn, I'd hate to be woke. | ||
| I mean, I think it's more just that No, but why are we letting them tell us what the meaning is, especially if that meaning is nothing? | ||
| Because what they're describing is that in the 2010s, there was a huge push towards a general understanding that we can really easily identify the problems in current politics. | ||
| So there is a colonial imperialist history to the world, that racism is still extremely present, that the patriarchy is still extremely present, that society functions in an ableist way, that capitalism is both harmful to us in our everyday lives and is killing the planet. | ||
| And these broadly define political tendencies that emerged in people and were massively popularized through social media. | ||
| So social media is a huge part of this. | ||
| People were able to communicate to each other on a mass scale. | ||
| The closest comparison would be the Gutenberg press, in terms of leaps forward, of people being able to share information quickly and easily. | ||
| And the Gutenberg press had huge implications for politics across Europe when it was invented. | ||
| The internet has had as well. | ||
| And I think that we, partly because of the capitalist end of history, have been not looking at what's happening around us with a serious enough lens. | ||
| Yeah, a bunch of people became woke, became aware of the problems in the world and the kind of obvious solutions to them. | ||
| And then there was a massive counter-revolution pushing back against all those progressive ideas that became extremely popularized. | ||
| I respect the way that that's framed because it does track, but I kind of disagree. | ||
| Simply because the explosion from the internet was not a unipolar thing. | ||
| It came simultaneously. | ||
| It was a big bang. | ||
| So just as people are being exposed to progressive ideas, so are they also being exposed to gigantic, massive, racist pieces of shit ideas. | ||
| I'm talking about the Gutenberg press very carefully here, because one of the huge political implications of the Gutenberg press was the Protestant Reformation, which led to enormous amounts of reactionary violence across the world. | ||
| Sure, sure, absolutely. | ||
| And that's kind of the thing there, is that it is not... | ||
| I want to say it in a very specific, kind of narrow way. | ||
| I don't think that it is good or bad, the internet. | ||
| I think it needs to be gone. | ||
| It should not exist. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| It is a thing that I wouldn't wish... | ||
| Dan and I were laughing about this, but I wouldn't wish the internet on my worst enemy. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| At no point in time can you tell me that an ape is evolved to know things from around the entire goddamn planet. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Are we prepared, physically, for this much information? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| It's not possible. | ||
| We are not rational, reasonable, what's the word, sapient beings. | ||
| We are literally apes with the capacity for apophenia and depression, and that's it. | ||
| I do agree, but I also think that the genie's out of the bottle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do wholeheartedly agree. | |
| You can burn that bottle. | ||
| Burn the bottle. | ||
| Well, I think you're taking what broadly gets called an anti-siv position, right? | ||
| New technologies have emerged, and their consequences are bad, and maybe the solution is that we get rid of those technologies. | ||
| But how realistic is getting rid of those technologies? | ||
| As opposed to trying to use them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Return of Jafar. | |
| They melted the lamp that Jafar was in. | ||
| See? | ||
| We have established precedent. | ||
| But I think I take your point and I want to be really clear that I'm not calling the internet inherently and implicitly good. | ||
| Like all material conditions, it is simply something we should try to make the most of. | ||
| And one of its implications since its invention has been people using it to What was one of the most immediate and biggest reactions? | ||
| The Protestant Reformation. | ||
| What was one of the second or third biggest immediate reactions? | ||
| The publishing of the Communist Manifesto. | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| Maybe leftist ideas take a little bit longer to formulate and say the right way on these new technological informational platforms. | ||
| And therefore, yeah, maybe every time we find a faster way to communicate with each other, the first thing that's going to happen is some absolute dickhead is going to be like, we should kill all of the, and a bunch of people will agree with him. | ||
| And then after a little while, someone will be like, we should share all of the, and people will be like, oh, hell yeah. | ||
| I think one thing that people leave out often about the explosions of technologies is that the first thing that really happened was a shit ton of masturbating. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| A lot of erotica. | ||
| Every time. | ||
| Every single time. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Instantaneously. | ||
| One has driven human technology far more than the patriarchal capitalist system we have will ever admit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| One big hope I have for a feminist, eco-socialist future is that we can just finally acknowledge how important porn is to every living person ever. | ||
| It's astonishing. | ||
| I remember one literature class I took was about the flowering of the written word. | ||
| And it was so much like... | ||
| Hey, you know where you got your underground Bible? | ||
| Same place you got your underground porn? | ||
| Same place you got, like, it was all wrapped up together. | ||
| You had to get your New Testament and your dick-flogging material at the same place, on the same network, you know? | ||
| And it's so fun that it is like, that's the internet, too. | ||
| You get your evil racist hate and your jerk-off material. | ||
| You got two windows open now. | ||
| You know, it's easier than ever. | ||
| Again, we gotta get rid of this internet thing. | ||
| I also, I want to make an addendum to something I said earlier as well, because I just want to be clear that when I say starting with the word woke can be really useful, you know, when you then say about, like, it's become meaningless the way the right wing has used it and so on, this is why I say starting with. | ||
| I purely think that the important step I'm trying to communicate is that we, with politics that combine wanting to stop climate change, being anti-capitalist, being anti-fascist, being against borders, being against cops, and wanting to take care of each other as these six points, which a lot of people agree on, need to say we all share these points. | ||
| And we need to have some kind of... | ||
| Group identity. | ||
| We need some kind of group consciousness. | ||
| That's what I'm getting at. | ||
| And so when I say the word woke, I think it's a starting point because I think it's of any word I can possibly find, the quickest one to communicate all of these politics together. | ||
| But it is not... | ||
| I'm not necessarily the word. | ||
| I'm not looking for people to fly the woke flag and lead the woke revolution. | ||
| You don't want woke attacks to become your enduring contribution to the culture. | ||
| I mean, I find, because I live in Britain, probably, and, you know, you're gonna spit at this, but, like, probably the place with the most reactionary media climate on Earth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I... | |
| Oh, do you mean... | ||
| Britain has the most reactionary media. | ||
| So here's what's fun about that. | ||
| I don't disagree with you. | ||
| And I think it's easier for people to think that the American media is more reactionary because we're louder. | ||
| But y 'all hide so much more vitriol and hatred. | ||
| Like, even the most even-keeled person in Britain is screaming the N-word at me all the time for no reason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| It's awful. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| Well, so this is what I wanted to say. | ||
| As someone who lives in Britain, unfortunately, on this wet rock covered in racist barbarians, I would find it personally funny. | ||
| If there were a group of people organizing under the word woke and taking pride in being woke, just because of how much the British media hates. | ||
| Like, they talk about the woke blob and stuff like this. | ||
| They talk about wokeism and wokery. | ||
| And it's just like, this is, you know, it would be very funny to me if they're... | ||
| Someone described it as the right-wing are hallucinating a communist enemy. | ||
| And it would be very funny to me if... | ||
| If their hallucination materialized in front of them, because they probably all just shit their pants. | ||
| Like, truly and utterly, like, go completely bonkers. | ||
| Yeah, it does have that vibe of, like, if they were confronted with the enemy that they believe they're fighting, they would realize that they are gigantic cowards and would run away. | ||
| And the only reason that they have the courage to fight this enemy is that it is imaginary. | ||
| And that the people who they hurt through it are small enough in number that they either never actually have to meet or, you know, they can... | ||
| Well, minoritized enough in political power, I think, is a crucial part. | ||
| So it's like trans people are small enough in number, but then by contrast, like, well, I suppose migrants are actually small enough in number as well. | ||
| I was going to say that migrants, like, the two... | ||
| Probably most focused on groups right now in the British press are trans people and migrants, and arguably the two groups most demonized in British society right now. | ||
| But yeah, I suppose migrants are actually a smaller number as well. | ||
| But the point I was going to make is that they are the most politically marginalized, the people with the absolute category of the least power of anyone, which is why it's just disgusting on a level I cannot communicate that people would band together to bully them. | ||
| Because it's just like, what's next? | ||
| Should we just go kick toddlers in the playground? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| How it's possible for us to sit here and then have a person with all the power tell us that the people with no power are the ones who are causing our problems is bananas. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He wants to take your cookie away. | ||
| The guy with all the cookies. | ||
| But you have all the cookies! | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Nah, nah, nah, nah. | ||
| These are my cookies. | ||
| That guy wants to take your cookies. | ||
| What are you talking about?! | ||
| I baked these cookies myself. | ||
| I'm a self-baked man. | ||
| You stole those from my great-grandfather! | ||
| Yeah, I think, you know, to pause on bullying for a second, I think it's important to acknowledge fascism as political bullying. | ||
| And this is kind of an obvious enough statement, but at the same time, I think it's important for us to note, right? | ||
| The bullying is the point. | ||
| If they can successfully bully any group of people, successfully create a climate in which those people's rights are materially worsened, then other people who have just that personality type, they are just a bully, right? | ||
| They are a bit of a social fascist. | ||
| We'll see what's happening there and they'll go, ah, those people are gaining power in a way I can understand, so I'm going to join in with them. | ||
| And this is why anti-fascism on every level is so important because it's just... | ||
| And when you say, like, they would realize they're complete cowards, it's absolutely true. | ||
| Fascists are the most cowardly people because they're bullies, and bullies are cowards, right? | ||
| So as soon as they are visibly outnumbered, they will give up and they will run away and they will stop holding these beliefs because they don't even really hold them. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard, and it's hard to really kind of communicate in the moment. | ||
| Like, it is... | ||
| It is the group that they are targeting now. | ||
| That's who they're bullying now. | ||
| That could be... | ||
| That is just a matter of date. | ||
| That's a matter of time. | ||
| You could go back 100 years. | ||
| Well, again, again, you know, there's some degree of material conditions. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Again, there's some degree of material conditions because climate... | ||
| Climate change has driven a huge migrant crisis. | ||
| Therefore, there are more migrants than there were previously into the richer nations, into the imperial core. | ||
| So materially, there is not a basis for hating on migrants. | ||
| There is no argument for racism materially, but the material conditions have driven concerns that people latch onto about migrants. | ||
| The material conditions have driven the state wanting to clamp down on bodily autonomy, and that has driven... | ||
| Concerns that people latch onto to create anti-trans fascism. | ||
| But again, it's just about telling them to fuck off. | ||
| That's really it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have this analogy I've been using a little recently about the ways that fascists lie, which I find helpful, and hopefully people will find helpful listening to Alex Jones and Steven Crowder and whoever else. | ||
| Oh, Tucker Carlson, actually. | ||
| Since you're covering Tucker Carlson recently, this is very useful for watching Tucker. | ||
| It's obvious enough to say fascists lie. | ||
| It's obvious enough to say everything that they say is a lie and you shouldn't trust them. | ||
| And it's obvious enough to say they don't really believe the things that they say. | ||
| And we can find loads of examples where they'll be anti-trans and they have trans friends in private or they're anti-abortion and Alex Jones has paid for abortions and these kinds of things, right? | ||
| But a crucial mechanism here is getting you to believe that what I say is what I believe. | ||
| I want you to believe that I believe what I say. | ||
| So it's like, this is my analogy, it's like you're out with your friend and he turns to you all of a sudden and he says, "Hey Jordan, do you think it would help if I karate chopped you in the throat as hard as I possibly can right now?" And you're thinking, "Help with what? | ||
| What situation does he perceive me to be in that a karate chop to the throat would possibly help?" You're already falling for the problem here. | ||
| He just wants to do it because he thinks it'll be fun. | ||
| And it doesn't occur to you because you think that he's like a normal, reasonable person with like empathy for other people. | ||
| But no, he just thinks it would be fun to karate chop you in the throat really hard and hurt you. | ||
| And this is the same with fascists. | ||
| They are just seeing an immoral and unethical root Yeah, it is. | ||
| It's kind of, I mean, to bring it back to woke, it is like they take words and remove meaning from them. | ||
| You know, you and I impart meaning to words in order to communicate with the people that we're talking to. | ||
| And they see that and they remove the meaning from the words. | ||
| And they try and get you to do what it is they want you to do. | ||
| Like the Jean-Paul Sartre quote about the anti-Semite. | ||
| That is the whole right-wing politics now. | ||
| They've adopted this as their strategy for absolutely everything. | ||
| A really good example of this would be the patriarchy. | ||
| An enormous amount of the way the patriarchy is maintained in day-to-day practice is men pretending not to understand that the patriarchy exists, that it still exists, or how it works. | ||
| I have no idea what you're talking about. | ||
| Tell me more. | ||
| And, like, pretending not to is this same function, right? | ||
| Like, making statements like, making statements like, women don't have it worse, or asking questions like, tell me in what ways women have it worse, or pretending, like, being told, like, five times a day you should smile isn't that big a deal, because it's not the worst sexual harassment you could receive. | ||
| All of these things, again, Rely on you believing that he believes what he's just said. | ||
| And so when he says that the patriarchy isn't real, that it's some feminist lie, it's like, no, we all live in society and have eyes and ears and so on, and we can see this. | ||
| It's right there. | ||
| Of course you know it's there, and it serves a purpose to pretend that you don't know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You can't... | ||
| They're going to say, I don't know. | ||
| But what they should say is, it is in my best interest to not know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this brings me to where I'm a real nerd about this stuff is the political philosophy going on here, right? | ||
| So we've got epistemic lacunae, right? | ||
| So there are gaps that have been created, these gaps in how we know things. | ||
| If people aren't familiar, lacunae just refers to gaps. | ||
| And epistemology is the study of how we know things, right? | ||
| So organized ignorance of this kind, even just pretending not to know stuff, is allowing for a space where people leave a gap in their knowledge. | ||
| And that's a comforting space into which they can withdraw and protect themselves from the obvious consequences of knowing that this is true. | ||
| That's when you know your Catholic priest has been... | ||
| Doing all kinds of stuff. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Everybody suddenly really doesn't know anything about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How funny. | |
| Right, exactly. | ||
| No, that's a perfect example. | ||
| There are loads and loads of examples and clips you can pull from the last, like, 50 years of people making jokes on the British national press about Jimmy Savile being a pedophile. | ||
| It's just everywhere. | ||
| And demonstrating that they knew. | ||
| And then... | ||
| It was made clear and published as news, and suddenly, oh, nobody knew. | ||
| How could we possibly? | ||
| And it was like, people were called out on this. | ||
| Everybody knew, and this was part of the horror. | ||
| But it's very much the same situation with a Catholic priest, like you say. | ||
| Yeah, anywhere there's a position of power and trust, that can be abused. | ||
| You know, it's a Catholic priest or Cosby. | ||
| It is the same, like... | ||
| We have given you culturally so much trust, so much power, that for us to really reckon with what you actually are would fuck tons of us up in a way that we'd rather just pretend that you only hurt four or five people, you know, that kind of thing. | ||
| Whereas it's disgusting, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and to go on with the political philosophy, because this is kind of the bedrock of my interest here, this is some stuff I discuss in The World Is Not Ending. | ||
| Okay, so Marx has this formulation for what ideology is. | ||
| He says, Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es, which means they don't know what it is, but they are doing it. | ||
| It's like people are under some kind of magical spell, right? | ||
| Ideology is happening if people don't know they're doing it, but they're still doing it. | ||
| But here's the thing, right? | ||
| In modern society, a lot of people are aware of their political ideologies, and this is really important to confront, that people can know what it is they're doing, and it's crucially a deliberate disconnect that people manufacture between what they are doing and the consequences that makes the ideology happen. | ||
| So my formulation is, instead of sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es, sie wissen das es nichts ist, aber sie tun es, which means they know that it is nothing, and still they do it. | ||
| So my example in the video is, if you have someone who works in the finance sector in Canary Wharf in London, odds are they live in one of the shoddily built, ugly, crappy new-build apartments around London that have these concrete constructions with these brick facades, and they're hideous, and they're everywhere, and a lot of them are being built on London's floodplains. | ||
| The finance sector is driving investment, which is driving climate change, and it's also driving construction. | ||
| So simultaneously, they are causing the building of these shitty houses that are also going to be flooded also by their work. | ||
| So, you know, my example is this finance worker, right? | ||
| And living in them. | ||
| Exactly, that's what I'm saying, right? | ||
| So you get up every day, you go to work, you spin the wheels on the big machine that's going to flood your ugly house because you've manufactured an epistemic gap. | ||
| I mean, yeah, that's a pretty good way of describing how we've kind of segregated processing and production throughout every commodity. | ||
| The fact that I will never have to look a cow in the eye before I eat it. | ||
| That kind of concept is, by creating that distance, we don't have to confront Obviously, the truth of it. | ||
| Or for you and I, as meat eaters, we may well know that the biggest personal consumption change that someone can make in order to combat climate change is to become vegan. | ||
| And we may well want to stop climate change, but then do we want to become vegan? | ||
| No. | ||
| So we're making an emotional defense, not a rational defense, but an emotional defense by creating this gap. | ||
| I'll just carry on eating meat because it's nothing. | ||
| What can I do anyway? | ||
| It doesn't really matter. | ||
| And still, I'm doing it. | ||
| The problem there is that in terms of inertia, right? | ||
| So climate change has an inertial force beyond anything I think we've ever experienced in truth. | ||
| And so when you're dealing with that, you can have a massive number of people do a small thing. | ||
| Or a small number of people do a massive thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And you're never going to get enough people to suddenly, quickly stop eating meat in order to make a difference towards it. | ||
| Whereas we all know that most of the emissions are caused by a very small number of companies. | ||
| With names and addresses, sure. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So if somebody is telling me, ah, you know what you should do is not eat meat, that makes zero sense. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. | ||
| And that's kind of why I get frustrated with the, like, here's what we do. | ||
| We take personal responsibility because in its face, it seems like it's the opposite of what you just described. | ||
| You know, we're looking directly at it. | ||
| When in reality, what you're doing is you're looking at a problem that has no effect on anything and going, I'm proud of myself. | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| I did it! | ||
| Well, my position on this is that I will happily become vegan in a socialist society. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| Because it will be necessary to end industrial livestock farming to stop climate change, but it will be necessary alongside a lot of other stuff. | ||
| And when that stuff's all happening, I'm super happy to become vegan. | ||
| I will not complain in the slightest. | ||
| I will tell as many other people in my life as I possibly can, hey, this is tough, but we gotta go through with it. | ||
| It's gonna save the world. | ||
| When that's happening. | ||
| But under capitalism, right. | ||
| But anyway, to return to the word woke, again, I don't think that this is going to be the word we start organizing under. | ||
| But to get back to my formulation of capitalism is going to make capitalism impossible through climate change, and then some point before that, people are going to recognize that that's going to happen, and so they're going to jump before they're pushed. | ||
| We can make that point sooner by spreading group consciousness. | ||
| And I find it fun that, like, the original metaphor of being woke to stuff, right, is a metaphor of alertness, and that all of the right-wing, everyone who's organized themselves as anti-woke is fundamentally organizing themselves around the idea of not being alert. | ||
| They are fundamentally organizing around, go back to sleep, carry on with things. | ||
| When you say about inertia, like, they are literally arguing for the inertial force. | ||
| Yep, totally. | ||
| And they are arguing to just stay asleep. | ||
| Don't look up. | ||
| Carry on. | ||
| And, yeah, I just think that, like, that's the main thing. | ||
| That's the kind of... | ||
| Yeah, that's the main thing. | ||
| Like, we need to spread a group consciousness, and then we need to pick one of these six things, or, you know, probably a few of them, and dedicate our time to those things. | ||
| Yeah, it is very annoying how much of my life has just been watching conservatives react the exact same way they said they weren't going to five years ago now, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, sheeple, everybody needs to wake up to what Obama's doing out there. | |
| Everybody, this is what's going on. | ||
| Hey, everybody, let's go back to being sheeple. | ||
| We don't need to think about what Trump's doing right now. | ||
| Everybody go back to sleep! | ||
| You know, it is just like it's never going to end. | ||
| It just keeps spinning round and round. | ||
| Well, this is why I say that like... | ||
| Philosophically, what interests me probably more than anything is just the philosophy of lying. | ||
| People telling lies, I think that's where some of the most interesting applied philosophy happens in the entire world, and so it's only natural that I would be drawn to political philosophy, because as we all know, politicians are born liars, right? | ||
| Where can I find more lies than in politics? | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| It's hard to find. | ||
| I mean, you know, money. | ||
| Yeah, but that's politics. | ||
| The finance and politics are the same thing now, so that's why, yeah. | ||
| Makes the most sense. | ||
| But yeah, the reception to the video has been good. | ||
| I think, yeah, I'm very proud of it. | ||
| It is the best thing I've made so far. | ||
| It's hard to imagine what I will make that's going to be better than it. | ||
| A lot of people have been telling me about how much it's pulled them out of their depression. | ||
| I've had some very personal comments where people have been talking about, like, Honestly, they were depressed to the point of suicidality and that it's helped them out of that. | ||
| And I knew this kind of going in. | ||
| Climate depression is very real and really, really fucks people up. | ||
| But I also could see going in, we are not actually approaching this question rationally. | ||
| We are approaching it emotionally. | ||
| Because we can see that however this shakes out, a lot is going to change about the way we love our lives. | ||
| And we just don't want to think about that. | ||
| That's scary. | ||
| So it's easier to just think, we're all going to die. | ||
| Than to think, what is realistically going to happen? | ||
| I'm very happy with it. | ||
| I liked it a lot myself. | ||
| I think that's a great place to end it. | ||
| Could you please tell people where to find it? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, as you said, I'm Sophie from Mars. | ||
| So if you just type in Sophie from Mars and Google or YouTube or wherever you want, but it is on YouTube on my channel. | ||
| As I said, it's about two and a half hours long. | ||
| I appreciate that that is a long video. | ||
| But it's also something I worked on for two years. | ||
| So how selfish are you thinking that's a long time? | ||
| I mean, if it takes more than two hours to talk about climate change, aren't you just like, it's not that big a deal, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly, right. | ||
| Beating a dead horse, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, I wish it was a simpler topic. | ||
| Wish I could sum it up in five minutes. | ||
| But, you know, this interview has been poking around it and it's already been an hour. | ||
| So, like, that's, yeah. | ||
| Anyway, it's Sophie from Mars on YouTube. | ||
| And if you want to support my work, that's patreon.com slash Sophie from Mars, all one word. | ||
| I'm working on something about AI right this second. | ||
| As I said, I've also got some stuff to do with Alex Jones coming up. | ||
| There's one that focuses on him quite specifically. | ||
| And then I have another big project I may need to get out for Christmas. | ||
| called Apocalypse Preachers, which will focus on him and a few other people and what they're up to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Awesome. | |
| I'm looking forward to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks. | |
| Thank you so much, Sophie. | ||
| This has been an absolute delight. | ||
| I hope people check your stuff out. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| We will see you again. | ||
| I'm sure we'll talk soon. | ||
| That would be lovely. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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