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Nov. 14, 2019 - QAA
11:27
Premium Episode 49: Machines of Loving Grace feat Dale Beran (Sample)

Project One. Community Memory. The first message board in history. We track how the techno-utopians of the 60s and 70s gave way to otakus, image boards, 90s nihilism and — eventually — the incel & alt-right movements. Dale Beran, author of the book It Came From Something Awful, joins us to explore how activism and technology have been transformed by capitalism & marketing. Thanks for supporting us on patreon and allowing us to stay ad-free! Get tickets to the live show (Sat Feb 8th in Los Angeles): http://tickets.qanonanonymous.com Follow Dale Beran: twitter.com/daleberan Music on this episode by Nick Sena: http://www.nicksenamusic.com http://www.instagram.com/nicksenamusic

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What's up QAA listeners?
The fun games have begun.
I found a way to connect to the internet.
I'm sorry boy.
Welcome, listener, to the 49th premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Machines of Loving Grace episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakotansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week we are exploring the very first community message board ever created, a project dubbed Community Memory.
Emerging from 60s activism, a merry band of techno-utopians believed that posting could be a radical act.
Building physical communities in California, they endeavored to imagine a future where mids stayed mids and the fascists died out.
Today we have hydroponics and groipers, so I guess they succeeded.
We'll also be speaking to Dale Barron, author of It Came From Something Awful, a book on the evolution of message boards and how the communities they spawned led to our current late capitalist joyride.
He'll help us understand what changed in the 80s and 90s, the effect of Japanese otakus on Western online culture, and how capitalism employed marketing to co-opt and profoundly transform the techno-utopian dream and activism in general.
Before we jump in, you may already know that we are doing our very first live show in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 8th.
It's going to be a lot of fun, Jake will tell a live story, you can BYOB, and we'll of course have a meaty topic to cover.
You should go get tickets now!
Head over to tickets.qanonanonymous.com and get them before they're gone.
We look forward to seeing you there!
All watched over by machines of loving grace.
I like to think, and the sooner the better, of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.
I like to think, right now please, of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.
I like to think it has to be of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature.
Returning to our mammal brothers and sisters and all watched over by machines of loving grace.
Richard Brautigan 1963 The same year this poem was written, a young man named Lee Felsenstein entered the College of Engineering at Berkeley.
Both of his parents had been Communist Party members, and Lee was attracted to radical politics and activism.
When he was 12, as part of a group called Teens Ahead, he had participated in a national march on Washington for civil rights.
That was 1957, and he saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
speak at the Washington Monument.
In high school, he was a member of the Student Peace Union, an organization founded by the Socialist Party, and picketed City Hall and the White House during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Entering college, Lee found himself confronted with the difficult realities of his field.
In his words, Engineers and other technologists were almost universally participants in large commercial or military institutions, or both the, quote, military-industrial complex.
You worked as a small cog within a massive structure, with paper, pencil, and slide rule as your principal tools.
Numerous file clerks, documentation clerks, secretaries, and technicians provided supporting services.
The upshot was that in your vocation you disappeared into a vast technological machine which was visible to the general public through its products.
The space program, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, and aircraft.
The public relations machine of the institutions for which he worked extolled the products as inevitable triumphs of administrative vision.
Whatever resulted was described as the inevitable result of, quote, progress, against which resistance was understood to be futile.
No alternate outcomes could be posited.
Lee continued to be involved in radical politics at Berkeley, picketing alongside Allen Ginsberg when the First Lady of South Vietnam visited the college.
He wanted nothing more than to be a part of a greater whole.
Disappear.
Be swallowed up in the human throng.
This was a kind of death wish.
Not for my body, but for my personhood.
My credo was, in effect, be useful or be invisible.
But above all, don't depend on anyone.
Despite his politics, Lee grew increasingly unenthusiastic about his fate, to become, in his own words,
a foreordained functionary in the grand process of automation of labor.
Working for a mega corporation.
Lee ran out of money and was forced to take a full-time job as an electronic technician
in the physiological optics lab.
His grades fell as he found himself increasingly unable to juggle the workload.
So he left the lab and entered a work-study program that saw him working as an engineering aide at the NASA Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base while continuing his studies.
The FBI did a background check on him and he was asked to swear he had known no communists.
He checked the box, knowing little of his parents' specific history at the time.
But the fuckers found out.
Fearing he would picket the base as he had done in the past, they told him to return to school.
One personnel specialist even drunkenly telling him that his parents were commies.
The professor in charge of the optics lab, a 1938 refugee from Nazi Germany, immediately gave him his old job back.
But the school was going through a full-on student revolt.
The neocon dean tried to crack down on civil rights activism on campus.
The students told him to fuck off, setting up a recruiting table on the main plaza.
This is known as Sproul Hall.
The cops showed up to arrest one of the people involved, and the students sat around the cop car, immobilizing it for the next 32 hours.
They used the vehicle as a pulpit to address a growing crowd recounting the college administration's various unjust actions.
Lee felt inspired.
In his own words, I read the literature and listened to discussions.
I knew the sorts of students who were activists.
I would have been among them had I been there.
But I had just been admonished to, quote, keep my nose clean by the representative of the security apparatus.
While growing up, I had read much about quote, destroyed careers, especially in the professions, as an outcome of red baiting.
Was my career in jeopardy?
That was the question.
And what career?
I had seen that not everyone was about to shun me in the off-campus world.
I remembered well the face and southern accent of the security director at NASA and the drunken personnel specialist.
It came down to whom I was willing to throw in with, especially at a time when my career direction was still ahead of me.
Plastic.
Moldable.
Recalling Huckleberry Finn's existential decision to help his friend Jim, an escaped slave, I said, alright, I'll go to hell, and made up my mind to help in the struggle.
It was my own existential decision, one that cut to the heart of who am I and what is my place in the world.
I took it somewhat reluctantly as it meant that the easy path was closed to me.
At the wrap-up of the free speech movement, I recall hearing Mario Savio, a philosophy major, comment that, quote, Kierkegaard was right.
The only free acts are those you can't help taking.
When referring to a moment when hundreds sat down around the police car, I had my own such moment.
I cannot imagine what might have become of me had I decided to play it safe.
Lee got involved helping to set up a distribution network for the movement's printed materials.
He grew fascinated with the idea of improving their efficiency through information networking.
The free speech movement in 1964 succeeded in forcing the academic senate at Berkeley's hand.
They would not regulate the content of speech on campus.
This was the era of the great exodus towards the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, and the counterculture was gaining momentum fast.
It drew together multiple causes.
Civil rights, anti-war, feminist, and gay right activists worked together in ways not seen before.
Lee continued pondering what it meant to affect change through networking.
He wanted to transcend the quote, centralized media emitting identical information from one point.
and he had noticed that, The information structure that had worked in creating a
revolution was not hierarchical, one way, broadcast in nature, but non-broadcast.
Its best analog was the telephone network, but this was still not a complete equivalent.
As the underground press started evolving into a more classic transmission model,
Lee attempted to create what he called the Berkeley Network Bolton,
a sort of physical social network connecting the intentional communities,
houses where many like-minded people settled, almost always temporarily.
This took the form of a quote, mimeographed collection of announcements, solicited from each house, and delivered to all houses, by courier.
So it's essentially like a message board, like a physical message board.
Like analog.
Like he would go by and collect everybody's posts, and then he would give everybody what had been posted.
It's wild.
Yeah, manual posting.
Yeah, that was his idea.
It's amazing.
It's mind-blowing.
It'd probably be better if it was still done like that today.
Yeah, if you had to meet the person, and you have to have to do the post, and then hand the person the piece of paper, knowing full well that when they unfold your piece of paper, it says, like, the Jews, you know, something, like, you might be a little bit less, a little bit more hesitant to, you know, not place that in the hands of a stranger.
Yeah, it says kill yourself at the end of every day, just multiple messages, like, the Jews did it.
So by 1967, unfortunately, Lee began experiencing clinical depression and halted the project.
Years of therapy later, in 1971, Lee's mental health had improved, and he had learned quite a bit about computer networks by working as a junior engineer in Silicon Valley.
So he joined a community where he would meet others who thought like him.
This would eventually lead him to create the very first Electronic Anonymous Message Board.
San Francisco, 1972.
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