True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 147: You Are a Serf with Jodi Dean
Aired: 2021-03-31
Duration: 01:28:31


=== Why The Rabbit Rap? (03:47) ===

[00:00:00]  All right, here's my rap.
[00:00:00]  I gotta get really, I gotta get.
[00:00:02]  Hold on, let me wrap on some weed real quick.
[00:00:03]  Put your eight-mile hoodie on.
[00:00:05]  No, yeah, I'm gonna drink.
[00:00:06]  What was his name?
[00:00:07]  What was the rabbit?
[00:00:08]  MM.
[00:00:09]  No, didn't he go by the rabbit?
[00:00:12]  Well, no, Marshall Mathers is his real name.
[00:00:13]  He goes by.
[00:00:14]  No, in the movie.
[00:00:16]  The movie about MM.
[00:00:17]  Oh my God, you're so annoying.
[00:00:19]  All right, here's the rap.
[00:00:19]  Here's the rap.
[00:00:20]  All right, I gotta get Liz.
[00:00:21]  Can you give me a beat?
[00:00:22]  No.
[00:00:23]  Can you, like, with your fingers or something?
[00:00:25]  Can you give me a beat?
[00:00:27]  Come on.
[00:00:28]  Just say, come on.
[00:00:29]  Come on.
[00:00:30]  Come on.
[00:00:31]  Okay, fucking fine.
[00:00:32]  I'll just do it.
[00:00:34]  Hey, Liz, you're a jerk, and I think you're a snitch.
[00:00:37]  In fact, I think you're a big fucking bitch.
[00:01:02]  Let's hope that, you know, sometimes we do like, you know, we do the intros and outros after we record the interviews.
[00:01:09]  And I'm always like, I hope the person doesn't listen.
[00:01:15]  But, but Jody said her kid listens to the show.
[00:01:17]  So shout out Jody's kid, but please do not show your mom this episode of the show or be like, actually, it starts like 10 minutes in.
[00:01:25]  It's crazy.
[00:01:25]  They fucked up the thing on it.
[00:01:27]  It's Young Chomsky's fault.
[00:01:28]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:30]  Hi.
[00:01:31]  My name.
[00:01:33]  Sorry, say that again.
[00:01:36]  My name is.
[00:01:37]  Oh, my God.
[00:01:38]  Sorry.
[00:01:39]  Okay, do it.
[00:01:40]  God, you always do this.
[00:01:43]  My name is Liz.
[00:01:44]  My name is Brace Belden, aka Marshall Mathers, aka Rabbit from the movie Eight Mile.
[00:01:50]  And we have, of course, here on the ones and twos, DJ Young Chomsky, real name, at producing the episode.
[00:01:59]  And we have, we actually have an illustrious guest for you assholes today.
[00:02:04]  Wait, was his name Rabbit or was it someone else's name that was Rabbit?
[00:02:07]  I never saw it.
[00:02:08]  I just watched one of the raps on YouTube one time.
[00:02:11]  Okay.
[00:02:11]  Because isn't that where the Mon Spaghetti thing's from?
[00:02:13]  Yeah.
[00:02:15]  Yes.
[00:02:16]  I watched it at work six years ago.
[00:02:19]  Yeah.
[00:02:19]  And I still remember.
[00:02:20]  So pretty good.
[00:02:21]  Well, I don't remember.
[00:02:22]  Sorry.
[00:02:22]  But I did watch Richard Jewel.
[00:02:25]  What?
[00:02:27]  Dude, how is this not the first thing you said?
[00:02:29]  We've been talking for like...
[00:02:30]  Psyche, bitch!
[00:02:34]  Gotcha!
[00:02:36]  All right, Jewel watch.
[00:02:37]  Yeah, still at zero.
[00:02:39]  Still have not watched the movie Richard Jewel.
[00:02:42]  This will be a fun one.
[00:02:44]  We have with us here in the studio one Jodi Dean.
[00:02:48]  You know her, you love her, and you're about to hear us.
[00:02:50]  fucking talk to her.
[00:03:04]  Fuck.
[00:03:05]  All right.
[00:03:06]  What I was about to say was, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Dean Zone, which is the toughest thing I could have said.
[00:03:12]  So I'm going to say, ladies, ladies and gentlemen, Liz, no, we are literally in the Dean Zone right now.
[00:03:19]  You can't get it.
[00:03:21]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Dean Zone.
[00:03:24]  We have with us today Jodi Dean, who is, you know, her, you love her, the author of many different books, 13 of them, in fact, including Comrade and the Communist Horizon.
[00:03:33]  Jodi, welcome to Truanon.
[00:03:34]  It is a pleasure to have you here.
[00:03:36]  I am delighted to be here.
[00:03:37]  Thanks so much.
[00:03:39]  We're so happy to have you.
[00:03:41]  I am almost a little shocked that you came on the show.
[00:03:44]  So I want to thank you for coming on.

=== Neo-Feudal Tendencies (03:59) ===

[00:03:48]  A lot of your recent work has been focusing on this kind of term that you use called neo-feudalism.
[00:03:55]  This is kind of something that Bryce and I have talked about kind of, I mean, not specifically, but kind of generally in the past year, as COVID and the kind of response to COVID has, I don't know, unraveled.
[00:04:09]  I don't even know what to call what the past year has been.
[00:04:13]  We've sort of seen a lot of, I don't know, a lot of talk about sort of new forms of intense capital exploitation emerging, monopolization, kind of what they call the K-shape recovery, the sort of like work from home and the people who don't work from home.
[00:04:33]  And that sort of taking the shape of what could maybe be seen as like a neo-feudal development in capitalism itself.
[00:04:41]  And you've actually done a lot of work around this stuff.
[00:04:45]  I'm wondering if you kind of explain some of what you've been seeing or some of your kind of theories around this.
[00:04:52]  Yeah, so I use this term neo-feudalism to think about where we are right now and where we're heading, right?
[00:05:00]  What are the tendencies of capitalism?
[00:05:04]  I think this is an important thing to think about on the left because typically we think about, oh, well, as capitalism starts to destroy itself, then we get communism and everything is wonderful, right?
[00:05:15]  But it's not, that's not what's happening.
[00:05:17]  In fact, we're seeing a really, a much worse kind of capitalism.
[00:05:21]  And for the last 30 or 40 years, we've called this neoliberalism.
[00:05:26]  But it seems like, particularly since 2008, thinking about the political and economic form that we have right now as neoliberalism, which was supposed to not involve massive state bailouts of the finance sector, it doesn't seem like it's the same, it's as accurate.
[00:05:44]  And now that we've seen the massive state bailout of non-finance corporations in the name of COVID relief, it also doesn't seem all of that neoliberalism doesn't seem so accurate.
[00:05:55]  So I think we should think about the present as kind of as having neo-feudal tendencies.
[00:06:02]  And like the maybe the easiest way to think about neo-feudal tendencies would be like, if we've got the last 50 years of intense wage stagnation for the majority and intense concentration of wealth for the 1%, what does that lead to after 50 years?
[00:06:19]  It leads to something that looks a lot like feudalism, right?
[00:06:21]  With a few very, very powerful billionaires and millions and millions of people in a position that's like proletarianized serfs.
[00:06:31]  So it's like neo-feudalism is the effect of what happens as capitalism consistently over time socializes risk and privatizes rewards.
[00:06:40]  We get this unbelievably intense wealth distribution and opportunity distribution and power distribution that really looks a lot like feudalism.
[00:06:51]  And so in the piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books, I emphasize four aspects of this neo-feudalism.
[00:07:00]  Parcelization, which is another way to talk about fragmentation, the kind of new lords and serfs, which Jaron Lanier already talked about this with respect to the tech sector like over a decade ago, with like the lords and serfs of the internet and the way that everyday normal people share and a few people get super rich.
[00:07:23]  And then hinterlandization or just like the spread of just sort of mass areas of combinations of capital flight, but massive warehouses and call centers and just looks like crap everywhere.
[00:07:36]  And then I think the kind of more affective dimension of sort of apocalypticism and catastrophism to kind of bring in the element of feeling and ideology.
[00:07:45]  Yeah, I actually had a question about that.

=== Partialization of Sovereignty (15:22) ===

[00:07:48]  So, well, not about that final one, but about partialization of sovereignty, rather.
[00:07:56]  That was one I struggled with a little bit because, first of all, not too familiar, trying to figure out what partialization meant.
[00:08:02]  I figured that out after a second.
[00:08:04]  But I feel like a lot of stuff I read about tech coming from both the left, but mostly from the right, talks a lot about sovereignty.
[00:08:11]  And so how do you mean that in this context?
[00:08:14]  Like, I know you're talking about transnational, not only corporations, but like, you know, combines of corporations and monopolies.
[00:08:20]  Is that like where a sort of new type of sovereignty lays to you?
[00:08:26]  I don't want to talk about it in terms of a new type of sovereignty, but like the breakup of sovereignty.
[00:08:32]  So let's think about it like lots and lots of little courts, right?
[00:08:35]  And this was pretty common in Europe during the Middle Ages, which lasts hundreds of years.
[00:08:41]  So I can just say this and just throw it out as if this were a concrete thing to say.
[00:08:45]  But you can have a kind of giant sort of empire which ostensibly has sovereignty, but really what's going on are little courts making their own rules.
[00:08:55]  And so we see this transnationally as corporations' forum shop for where they're going to incorporate.
[00:09:03]  They're a forum shop for which kinds of adjudication measures they're going to be subject to when there are complaints against them.
[00:09:12]  They don't have to, they're not anchored in stone when it comes to law.
[00:09:19]  So it's not like that a company starts out in the United States doesn't mean that all of the legal things that it comes under has to happen in the United States.
[00:09:29]  We see variations on this with the kind of pools of offshore money.
[00:09:34]  That's a way of escaping kinds of jurisdiction.
[00:09:37]  We can also drill way down and see this in more local levels with the way that courts actually aren't vehicles for justice.
[00:09:47]  Instead, these days, what is it, something like, you know, I don't know, over 3 million people now or some have some connection with the criminal justice system in the United States, as they're made to have plea deals.
[00:10:00]  They're made to, then they get subjected to all sorts of fines, and then they're imprisoned for not having paid the fines that they ostensibly agreed to, but they can't.
[00:10:10]  So you get these little courts then that have nothing to do with justice that are actually squeezing people.
[00:10:16]  So I think of these, these are like, just think about like cops are really much more like low-level vassals coming in to squeeze people to take what little bit of wealth they can to fund the cops.
[00:10:29]  So that would be the low version of this sort of fragmented sovereignty, where it's nothing, it has nothing to do with the passage of good laws that the community has made in some democratic, general way.
[00:10:42]  Rather, it's just the police sitting on people, generally working class people and people of color, in order to fund themselves, namely the cops, in all sorts of different little jurisdictions.
[00:10:54]  So you've got it at an economic level with companies and corporations all over the world.
[00:11:00]  You have it at, and then at much more granular local levels with the operations of small police.
[00:11:06]  So again, it's not like what we would think of as sort of the classic mid-20th century state structure.
[00:11:15]  Rather, it's all sorts of little different sovereignties that are pretty much operating without having to be accountable.
[00:11:21]  They're not accountable at all.
[00:11:24]  It's interesting.
[00:11:25]  I was, I feel like this gets at something that I've been trying to wrap my head around for a long time.
[00:11:31]  And Brace and I were talking about this the other day, which is like when we talk about the U.S., like when we say like, okay, the U.S. state, like what exactly we mean almost?
[00:11:41]  Because I think that what you're describing is absolutely correct.
[00:11:44]  But it's very difficult to kind of, and I know that sounds crazy when I say, you know, say it.
[00:11:50]  I'm not suggesting that like the U.S. doesn't exist or whatever, but just that the organs of this, the various organs of the state have become like so enmeshed and some of their borders so porous as the like, you know, over the past, I don't know, like whatever 60, 80 years, you know, like when we say we've got, okay, a voluntary military, right?
[00:12:13]  And we've got, you know, bases in almost every country.
[00:12:18]  We have an economy that is like, I mean, completely and totally enmeshed, inseparable from the world market.
[00:12:27]  You know, it's questionable, like, what are even our domestic productive capacity is, right?
[00:12:32]  And so what you're saying about these kind of, I guess what I'm trying to get at is when we talk about these kind of transnational sovereignties, like some of that is also happening with, I mean, like with the consent, not against the state, right?
[00:12:48]  Like this is all kind of like they're in partnership together or, you know, these boundaries are very porous, it seems, at that level.
[00:12:59]  Yeah, I think we could say that the U.S. state is a vehicle for this porosity, right?
[00:13:06]  The United States is one of the instruments through which it happens.
[00:13:11]  So U.S. law is a primary vehicle for, you know, one language would say capitalist globalization, another language would say U.S. imperialism.
[00:13:23]  But it's a vehicle for it.
[00:13:24]  So one of the like the sense that somehow when we have a fragmented sovereignty, we don't, so it's not, my claim is not that if there's fragmented sovereignty, there's no U.S. state.
[00:13:34]  It's that the state operates through these fragmented sovereignties.
[00:13:40]  And also we've got to recognize that corporations do as well, right?
[00:13:44]  And different kinds of interests, but corporations have always acted through the state, right?
[00:13:48]  They use the state to further their own interests.
[00:13:53]  But I think one of the things that I'm thinking about this in terms of something like neo-feudalism lets us express is that it's really coercive power.
[00:14:02]  It's really coercive power all the way through, from something like a non-disclosure agreement to something like a plea deal to something like a trade policy, rather than some versions of the state as an instrument of the will of the people, which is what we were told it was, at least in grammar school.
[00:14:23]  It's now totally transparent that that's not what's going on.
[00:14:27]  And it's not operating in the forms that it used to.
[00:14:30]  It's operating in this much more fragmentary way.
[00:14:46]  So you also talk about new lords and peasants.
[00:14:49]  And of course, I like to think of myself as lord of the internet.
[00:14:52]  In fact, I've built my entire career off of it.
[00:14:55]  But what exactly do you mean by that?
[00:14:57]  Because I actually was a little confused about this part in the essay.
[00:15:00]  Because who precisely qualifies as a peasant here?
[00:15:04]  You know, we're talking about, I think you mentioned like, you know, tech workers and people who work at these large tech firms or actually not so large when you think in terms of employees.
[00:15:13]  And then the people who service them.
[00:15:15]  Because living in San Francisco for since I was almost the entirety of my life, I've seen that sort of like bifurcation of San Francisco workforce essentially into people who work at these tech companies and people who own these tech companies, which I sort of group together a lot of the time, even though obviously they make generally vastly different sums of money.
[00:15:34]  And then people who, you know, work at like what I did, like work at flower shops or work at the gyms that they go to or work at, you know, serve them food, deliver them food, et cetera.
[00:15:45]  And so like, what exactly do you mean by this?
[00:15:51]  I kept wondering about the use of the word peasants.
[00:15:53]  Like that may not have been the best term because there's nothing really agricultural going on.
[00:15:59]  And what I wanted was a term that would capture sort of something like a proletarianized serf.
[00:16:05]  Yeah, no, I know that's, I didn't think you were like, oh, they're, well, you know, they got their little plots of tomatoes and stuff.
[00:16:10]  You know, they go to the watermill.
[00:16:13]  So we try to think that what we really mean is something like the sort of proletarianized serfs.
[00:16:20]  What I really have in mind are is the rise of a mass, the mass service sector economy.
[00:16:27]  And for a lot of folks in tech, particularly those at the lower end of the wage scale, they are a form of, they are a kind of service worker, right?
[00:16:36]  For a while, they were called knowledge producers, but that seemed like that was never really all that compelling.
[00:16:44]  And for the most part, I mean, most of the job gains in the economy that tech has sort of lords over are not in the tech sector at all, right?
[00:16:54]  They're things like home health aids, personal care aids, aids to healthcare workers, right?
[00:17:02]  So a whole stretch of like an expanded vocabulary for saying servant is the primary place where there are job gains in the new economy.
[00:17:13]  So it's more like, yeah, I think we should think of the service sector in the broadest possible way.
[00:17:24]  And we do that in order to recognize the commonalities among the kinds of service work, which it's actually not making something like manufacturing would have made, but it is contributing to the, it's contributing to the reproduction of a particular kind of class relation, which keeps these tech lords at the top.
[00:17:43]  Yeah, I mean, I think you also really see that too in the like COVID recovery.
[00:17:47]  I mean, I think it's made really explicit where you see like, okay, who are the people who can work from home and who are those who have to serve those who can, right?
[00:17:56]  I mean, I think that, yeah, I think you have a total, like an explosion in growth in a precarious underclass that's there to facilitate people's consumption or kind of like, you know, what seems to be like, you know, broadening, if not kind of maybe a little fragile middle class, right?
[00:18:22]  What we would call in America, middle class.
[00:18:25]  The delivery sector, the people who, I don't know if the same people who deliver, say, items are the ones who stock them on the shelves, right?
[00:18:35]  Is it like the kinds of, there's sorts of personal shoppers, right, who buy the items or take them off the shelf?
[00:18:41]  What's the problem?
[00:18:41]  Oh, it was totally surreal.
[00:18:42]  The first time I went to the parent time, I went to the grocery store during COVID.
[00:18:48]  I was the only, in one aisle, no exaggeration, the only person who wasn't shopping for somebody else in there.
[00:18:54]  Everybody else is working for Instacart.
[00:18:57]  I mean, that's pretty shocking, right?
[00:19:00]  Wow.
[00:19:00]  I've never seen anything like that.
[00:19:02]  I mean, that's a major new development in our economy.
[00:19:05]  We don't even shop for ourselves.
[00:19:06]  I mean, it's a variation, right?
[00:19:08]  An extension of the personal shopper, which I always thought was like for super, I always associate it with like super rich elite women in cities.
[00:19:17]  CEOs and stuff.
[00:19:18]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:19:20]  I had a friend who used to do personal shopping for somebody.
[00:19:22]  Well, what's funny is they used to always work through like a department store too or something.
[00:19:26]  It was like always this, like I remember when I was a kid, you would see, they would have a department where it would be like the personal shopping department and always be in this like one place that you would go to.
[00:19:36]  And now it's like, you know, on call, people, you know, all of the costs are offloaded onto the person who's doing it, you know, which is a whole nother thing we can get into.
[00:19:45]  But it is interesting that I think that, you know, that kind of separation or this new sort of, you know, bifurcated kind of like service class.
[00:19:57]  I mean, it is really, really explicit in the year since COVID.
[00:20:02]  I think to the point, I don't know, anyone ignoring it is just doing so on purpose, you know.
[00:20:08]  And I think we see more occupations, their character as service, as in being servants, it becomes a lot clearer.
[00:20:18]  Like when you can't actually go to a doctor, but you go through a screen and maybe a phone call, right?
[00:20:26]  What do they call it?
[00:20:26]  Telemedicine.
[00:20:27]  Telemedicine.
[00:20:28]  Now that's sort of separating out what medical work is.
[00:20:32]  The various kinds of, I mean, now teaching is much more when trying to teach online really, really difficult.
[00:20:39]  And that's separated out to who can provide this kind of service versus the old school face-to-face occupation, which had some kind of profession attached to it.
[00:20:50]  But now the service component is turning everyone into a servant just to maintain the lifestyle and consumption patterns, the way of life of the now stronger upper class.
[00:21:03]  Yeah, it's interesting.
[00:21:04]  This also sort of, I mean, not totally, but it does kind of dovetail a little bit with like a very popular theory about elite overproduction.
[00:21:12]  you know that theory that like yeah what the what's i can't remember his name No, I'm going to totally butcher this.
[00:21:19]  Turchin, I guess, Peter Turchin.
[00:21:21]  But it's the idea that a lot of the kind of like anxiety, political anxiety that you see coming out of the middle class, that is, that's sort of, you know, I think a lot of people.
[00:21:38]  There's too fucking many of them.
[00:21:39]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:39]  The idea is like, you see with a lot of the graduate students talk about this, I think, that like, you know, there's so little, there's so little jobs out there and so many overeducated people.
[00:21:49]  And this produces kind of political anxieties as, you know, people are kind of calling at each other for more and more.
[00:21:58]  Or fewer and fewer jobs, really, when there's more and more of them.
[00:22:02]  But that sort of like kind of intersects with a little bit of what we're talking about here with this expansion of this kind of servant underclass.
[00:22:12]  One of the things that's interesting about this is that, of course, it predates COVID, right?
[00:22:17]  Yeah, of course.
[00:22:19]  The so-called, I don't know, the recovery since 2008 has been primarily with jobs in that sector.
[00:22:27]  Again, for almost all precarious labor, yeah.
[00:22:29]  Exactly.
[00:22:30]  Precarious labor.
[00:22:31]  And then back to your earlier comment, Briece, I think maybe if I would say like the peasants would be sort of this new kind of a version of the precariat.
[00:22:40]  But what I wanted to, the reason I wanted to talk about them as peasants is because of the way their own items, their own possessions are used for the enrichment of the Lords, right?
[00:22:54]  So like a peasant has maybe some of their own land or their own tools or their own stupid cow or whatever it is to make money or not money, but to labor for the benefit of the Lord.
[00:23:05]  Now the new precariat has this extra dimension of their items, right?

=== Democratizing Networks: A Pyramidal Perspective (15:10) ===

[00:23:10]  Like their possessions, their car or their apartment or obviously their phone or laptop are instruments for their exploitation, right?
[00:23:20]  Their consumer items are now instruments for their own exploitation.
[00:23:23]  So there's a way that thinking about peasants gives you this tie to some sort of materiality that's a little bit different from just regular proletarianization.
[00:23:32]  Yeah, I thought that was that was a really interesting point because, I mean, you see it in sort of the advertising and just in the way in general that these companies like Uber, Airbnb, et cetera, are talked about in the media is that your car is actually a way for you to make some money on the side.
[00:23:47]  When in reality, it's a way for you to, it's an instrument of your own exploitation, right?
[00:23:53]  It's a way for you to make Uber a lot of money at your side and then barely break even if you do it all.
[00:23:59]  Exactly.
[00:23:59]  Oh, exactly.
[00:24:00]  It's a way for you to like for Uber to make money and you actually to drive the medallion taxi drivers out of business.
[00:24:06]  Exactly.
[00:24:06]  Right, right.
[00:24:07]  To amiserate the women, the middle class.
[00:24:09]  It's actually a form of the production of a new class relation, right?
[00:24:14]  Drive out the middle-waged taxi drivers as your own wages are going to be totally, totally collapsed and pushed down.
[00:24:21]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:24:23]  And it's, I think, too, like that also like dovetails into this like, and you know, we'll probably get onto more of this later in that this tool, your telephone, your, your car is, is not only an instrument of you making money, but it's like an instrument of this like kind of new sort of liberation too.
[00:24:40]  Like it's this democratizing thing.
[00:24:41]  You don't need, you know, to sign up for, you know, to do a taxi thing, you know, like you can just work whenever you want.
[00:24:46]  It's flexible.
[00:24:48]  And that's, that's, that's really the thing that gets me because every job I've had that says you have flexible shifts means you'll work when the fuck we want you to work.
[00:24:54]  And if you want a day off, well, too bad you might have to work this day.
[00:24:58]  And that's, that's sort of what drives me nuts is because I think a lot of people sort of implicitly fall for this and sort of see like, I see this on the left a lot, is like buy into it a little bit and be like, no, they're doing it wrong.
[00:25:11]  Like we could have this, like we did recently, an episode on the blockchain and we sort of encountered this a lot when talked about that stuff.
[00:25:18]  It's like, well, the way they do it is bad, but like we would do it good.
[00:25:22]  And what I think there's probably no way to do that good, you know, in a way that doesn't exploit people.
[00:25:30]  Not under capitalism, right?
[00:25:31]  Not under capitalism, absolutely, right?
[00:25:33]  Flexible chains are still chains.
[00:25:35]  Just because they're made of a more malleable substance does not make them not chains.
[00:25:39]  And I, I mean, and the mistake is always like it could be better, but not under capitalism, right?
[00:25:47]  It's like, as long as you're still talking about capitalism, it's still going to screw people.
[00:25:51]  Yeah.
[00:25:53]  And it almost like it allows you to kind of sidestep the political battle that that would necessitate, right?
[00:25:59]  Because if you say, oh, well, we can just keep doing this.
[00:26:02]  And, you know, at some point we'll make it better because at some point we'll be in charge.
[00:26:05]  It's like, well, wait, when is that some point?
[00:26:07]  Because you're completely sidestepping that in order for that to happen, and by in charge, I mean, by totally overthrowing and installing a radically new system of production, that requires actual politics.
[00:26:23]  Yep.
[00:26:24]  And the generation of political will and the organizing, it gets so much more complicated than, you know, than just having a good app.
[00:26:31]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:31]  But I think a lot of people, and not just talking about the left, just a lot of people in general sort of buy into this promise of technology as a liberatory force and this sort of excitement about the future and about all of these things.
[00:26:47]  And like, you know, I am famously bad at technology.
[00:26:51]  I actually, it's difficult for me to work anything more complicated than a text message.
[00:26:56]  And most of the time, I don't even respond to those.
[00:26:59]  But I think that, like, and this is sort of what I was trying to get to earlier, is that like people view like technology as like a means in itself of liberation.
[00:27:10]  And I think that to me strikes me as totally bizarre because like, you know, like you point out in this piece, all things seem to be leading to a place that like, yeah, maybe beyond capitalism, but like, you know, and again, like in the face of sort of any historical determinationist, not necessarily towards socialism.
[00:27:27]  In fact, necessarily away from socialism and sort of a regressive and also not, I shouldn't say progressive, but like a step forward and a step back at the same time.
[00:27:37]  Yeah, I think with technology, I keep going back and forth trying to figure out, do people now, maybe in California, do people still think of technology as like an exciting, new, great thing?
[00:27:52]  Because it seems like there hasn't been any real innovations in the objects in a while.
[00:27:59]  Maybe the blockchain stuff is the most new, exciting thing, but I can't imagine how anyone who's not a billionaire would care, right?
[00:28:09]  So I think technology was a mistake on the left.
[00:28:13]  We think about like the 90s when everyone, not everyone, but when a dominant mode of the left was saying like, oh, you know, if we just had some sort of free indie media, then everything would be great.
[00:28:24]  And if we just all organized ourselves with media, it would be great.
[00:28:28]  But it's like they transferred the actual goal of political organizing into the means of making media as if that was going to solve the problem rather than just create a really, you know, a larger media environment or media market.
[00:28:49]  I mean, you know, if you want to create markets, okay.
[00:28:51]  But if you actually wanted to stop the triumph of neoliberalism and stop the attacks on the working class that were going on, stop the directing, stop the economy, stop the political culture from going in this utterly libertarian direction, then that wouldn't have been what you do.
[00:29:14]  You would actually think about building a socialist society.
[00:29:19]  Think about the equality and not just the instruments of technology.
[00:29:24]  Yeah, I mean, I think too, like, you know, I think that, you know, you mentioned the 90s.
[00:29:29]  I mean, I think that that exact thing is happening now too.
[00:29:33]  And if it's almost like, you know, the tragedy first joke is always used.
[00:29:37]  I don't even know if it's a farce at this point, but it's like taking that kind of like alt-Gen X attitude of the 90s left and then mixing it with like social media, which is like a whole beast that's, it's like almost worse.
[00:29:53]  It's not even farcical at that point.
[00:29:55]  It's like some other kind of monster.
[00:30:00]  You know, it's difficult to know exactly what to make of it.
[00:30:04]  But you've done a lot of work kind of mapping is the wrong word, but trying to like tease out these kind of network market structure.
[00:30:12]  I mean, you use network and not market, which I noticed.
[00:30:16]  And I wanted to ask you about that and what you see what the difference is there, perhaps.
[00:30:22]  Yeah, when I was working on this idea of communicative capitalism, which I developed, I guess, in the late 90s and the first decade of the 2000s, networks were all the rage.
[00:30:37]  And in part, there was the material thing, like putting down the fiber optic cables and building the infrastructure and all of that.
[00:30:45]  And setting up the kinds of communication that were going to be different.
[00:30:49]  This is pre-social, before there was anything like social media.
[00:30:54]  And so that's, so I use the language of networks then, because in fact, the capitalist domination of what was going to be the internet wasn't there yet, right?
[00:31:02]  That starts with the Telecommunications Act in the late 90s, when then the use of the Internet for commerce becomes not just guaranteed, but really opened up and flourishing.
[00:31:16]  But earlier than that, there was the promise at Town Hall for millions and the thought this is going to be the new democracy.
[00:31:23]  And if everyone can just go online, then everything will be transparent and government will be accountable.
[00:31:29]  And that's what happened.
[00:31:31]  Well, that's just funny because that sounds exactly, and we made this comparison in our blockchain episode.
[00:31:36]  It's exactly how people talk about the blockchain now, this radical transparency, this new horizons for democracy, which they never, of course, explain exactly what that means.
[00:31:47]  And the people building it are all total, you know, libertarian psychopaths.
[00:31:51]  So I'm not sure we'd have the same definition to begin with.
[00:31:54]  But I mean, I kind of recall that stuff very vividly, how like there was this strange, and I was pretty young at the time, there was this like sort of strange like mythos around like blogs and stuff like this.
[00:32:05]  Like we're democratizing the media, to go back what you said, and like that will somehow solve this problem that exactly, exactly.
[00:32:19]  Which is totally absurd to me, but I feel like people just, I mean, I still don't know if people have necessarily totally shaken that.
[00:32:25]  And I can't help but think about how like Occupy, for instance, was started by adbusters who are, I believe, you know, public enemy number one when we're talking about this kind of stuff.
[00:32:34]  You know, it is, it is, it's like this stuff just repeats itself over and over.
[00:32:40]  Well, it's interesting because you just said, Brayce, when you were saying that, you know, this stuff repeats itself over and over again.
[00:32:48]  And basically what I'm saying is, you know, you mentioned blogs.
[00:32:53]  We've got podcasts now.
[00:32:55]  There's this idea that we were going to democratize the internet and we're going to have all these town halls.
[00:32:59]  And yet we did, we do actually kind of have that, by the way.
[00:33:02]  Like we have Twitter and we have, you know, all these political town halls on CNN that people participate in and everyone can sign up for social media and everyone can join the conversation.
[00:33:13]  And it actually is democratized in this way.
[00:33:18]  And yet we're still having that same conversation that's like, well, wait, that's not what we meant when we meant this, when we said this, right?
[00:33:24]  It's like we're kind of doing the thing that we're criticizing.
[00:33:26]  And I, I mean, I'm not implicating us.
[00:33:28]  I'm saying like, I guess what I'm suggesting is that even the way we talk about like there isn't a better way for this stuff to be.
[00:33:38]  Like there isn't, this is what democratizing the internet looks like.
[00:33:43]  Do you know what I mean?
[00:33:44]  Yeah, I think that's a great, that's a great point, right?
[00:33:46]  Because what I think it points out is that it can, if you don't look at the material structure of ownership, then all of the democracy in the world is just going to reproduce new patterns of inequality and ownership, right?
[00:34:01]  It's not going to go, it's not going to get rid of the fact of inequality and ownership.
[00:34:07]  It might, and I actually think it tends to intensify it.
[00:34:09]  You know, this stuff from Albert Laszlo Barabasi, these power laws, right?
[00:34:14]  Where free choice growth and preferential attachment always lead to more and more hierarchical distributions.
[00:34:21]  And the internet makes that just explode so much.
[00:34:26]  So like the way that Twitter makes some people be totally, you know, have hundreds of millions of followers.
[00:34:33]  Is it still like Katy Perry?
[00:34:34]  For the longest time, she was like the person with the most followers of anybody bizarrely on Twitter.
[00:34:39]  But the way that, I mean, the initial promise was, you know, everyone can be influential on Twitter and everyone can have this.
[00:34:46]  But in fact, it produces these, you know, now we call them influencers, I guess, from Instagram and other things.
[00:34:52]  But it makes these, it's not a dramatic equalization.
[00:34:55]  It's the creation of new markets or networks with new hierarchies in them.
[00:35:02]  Yeah, because this is how free markets work, right?
[00:35:05]  You know, this is the creation of markets.
[00:35:07]  And so you have, you know, leaders and losers and everyone is competing, quote unquote, fairly.
[00:35:14]  And so that's why I always find it funny when people are saying, you know, like, oh, no, but we can do this different.
[00:35:19]  We just have to, you know, tweak this or that or, oh, blah, blah, blah.
[00:35:23]  And it's like, no, no, no.
[00:35:24]  Like, this is producing this because this is what it's designed to produce.
[00:35:28]  This is what it can only produce.
[00:35:30]  Right.
[00:35:31]  Well, the way you describe it, too, is that it's almost like a pyramid scheme, right?
[00:35:35]  Like the more people that join in and the more people that you got at the bottom, essentially more people who are participating in this hierarchy, which sort of feeds the people at the top.
[00:35:44]  Absolutely, yeah.
[00:35:46]  And we know that for, I mean, but that should be the case.
[00:35:49]  This shouldn't be a surprise to us, but it seems like it is.
[00:35:53]  So it's like more and more people go to graduate school.
[00:35:56]  It's like, oh, no, there's no jobs.
[00:35:58]  Well, there's no jobs because there's more and more people who are competing for them.
[00:36:01]  Or, you know, we've got millions and millions of people on Twitter.
[00:36:05]  Well, of course we're going to have a power law distribution because you can't read millions of other people's tweets, right?
[00:36:10]  You're only going to be ever able to read a subset of God.
[00:36:14]  Yeah, right?
[00:36:15]  I mean, it would be even worse.
[00:36:17]  And as long as the basic structure of ownership underneath isn't grappled with, then we're just going to keep going around these circles.
[00:36:27]  I like what Liz says earlier about sort of the permanence of farce, right?
[00:36:31]  We don't even get tragedy anymore.
[00:36:33]  It's just like the perpetual living of the farce.
[00:36:36]  Yeah, I mean, I do think that maybe one of the reasons why we act so surprised is that it implicates so many of us.
[00:36:42]  I mean, you know, like I've got 100,000 or whatever it is, something stupid followers on Twitter, and we are on a podcast right now.
[00:36:50]  Like we're very heavily implicated in this conversation.
[00:36:54]  I mean, this is something that drives me insane all the time.
[00:36:56]  Like if I, yeah, I think about it a lot.
[00:37:00]  Yeah, I just think that like, you know, you mentioned the grad school thing.
[00:37:03]  I mean, I think that a lot of these kind of these conversations about these, the like the market incentives and the kind of social relations that are produced out of, you know, the kind of like these networks or these markets, these, you know, communication markets, however we want to describe social media and it's kind of like whatever, ensuing detritus.
[00:37:28]  But like, you know, there's a, there's a drive to deny that they actually are markets, even as like as we're participating in them, because I think the fear is that then we're implicated and there's Like some sort of there's some sort of like dissociation that or like that that causes a kind of like disruption of the self.
[00:37:50]  Maybe I don't know.
[00:37:51]  I think that like people have a really hard time confronting how kind of enmeshed we all are in these networks because it feels like maybe we should be able to step outside of them or or or something.
[00:38:03]  Does that make sense?
[00:38:04]  Maybe I'm getting too psychological here.
[00:38:05]  Yeah, I think that the symptom of what you're describing is people's constant like trashing of one another, cancel culture, and then the then this the kind of sense the guilt that comes from being involved in all of this.

=== Fighting Over Mental Terrain (14:45) ===

[00:38:20]  But what all the but because all of that stuff, we actually also know that that's just unbearable and sort of trivial.
[00:38:28]  It's a displacement from the actual material conditions that these communicate the networks of communicative capitalism are sites for our displaced class struggle.
[00:38:41]  Like we're actually not fighting the class struggle in on Twitter, right?
[00:38:45]  We need to fight.
[00:38:46]  If we were going to fight it on Twitter, we would be, you know, what's his name?
[00:38:49]  Jack Dorsey?
[00:38:50]  Is that his name?
[00:38:51]  Yes.
[00:38:51]  Yeah, like we would be like seizing his stuff and, you know, blowing up the server farms or organizing those.
[00:38:59]  I like where you're going with that.
[00:39:00]  All right.
[00:39:01]  Oh, and all power to the Amazon workers.
[00:39:03]  I guess we know this are the ones in Bessemer, Alabama today.
[00:39:07]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:39:08]  They're voting.
[00:39:08]  The vote's supposed to be, I guess, counted by the end of the day.
[00:39:11]  So in light of the discussion we've been having, we can hope that there's going to be not a farce or a tragedy, but a wonderful victory for the people.
[00:39:21]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:39:22]  I mean, I think that's absolutely true.
[00:39:23]  Like, like Liz, you're saying, like, it's sort of people don't like to examine it.
[00:39:27]  And like I was saying, it drives me insane if you think about it.
[00:39:30]  But like, I think that's that's a it doves.
[00:39:34]  I can't use the word dovetails twice in a fucking episode, but I can't think of another word.
[00:39:37]  So let's say it fishtails.
[00:39:39]  It did.
[00:39:39]  All tails are the fucking same.
[00:39:41]  All those two-tail things are the same.
[00:39:43]  It goes together.
[00:39:44]  Oh, wait, no, it's interdigital.
[00:39:46]  Check that one out.
[00:39:47]  That's that.
[00:39:47]  All right.
[00:39:48]  Yeah, that's a grad student word.
[00:39:49]  That sounds wrong.
[00:39:50]  It's true.
[00:39:50]  It's when you go like this.
[00:39:52]  That's when you put your hands together.
[00:39:53]  Lock fingers.
[00:39:54]  Anyways, what I'm saying is, is that, and again, like, I have basically only been involved in like organized left-wing politics since the beginning of the 2010s.
[00:40:05]  And, you know, besides some scattered stuff Stuff in my youth.
[00:40:08]  And what I see, and like, again, this implicates us.
[00:40:11]  This implicates me, and this implicates more people, not just that just do podcasts or anything.
[00:40:15]  But it's like, I see it as like a series of almost, and this is, it's on Twitter, especially, of like competing or maybe interlocking fandoms and like, you know, followings rather than like, it's like, it's not even, it's to turn away from the party form or it's, it's even almost a turn away from movementism, like in that sense, where it's actually just following personalities who may not have like necessarily the most together politics or anything, or even like us who are, you know, it's like, I don't think that there's any people who base their politics off our show.
[00:40:45]  God, I hope not.
[00:40:47]  But like, you know, it's, it, it's, it's, it's almost like it fits perfectly with the rest of the way society is going, right?
[00:40:55]  Like it fits right alongside the people shopping for you at Whole Foods and the people delivering the food and all that kind of stuff.
[00:41:01]  Is this turn away from like any actual effective means of politics into essentially just like, you know, it's like the Kiss Army, but for like guys with beards and glasses.
[00:41:12]  I didn't think there was something kind of worse on the left than movementism, but I think competing fandoms is.
[00:41:20]  I think you totally named that.
[00:41:22]  And I think it fits really well with neo-feudalism because fandoms are about loyalty, prestige, status, right?
[00:41:30]  All of this, the sort of the pageantry of did you insult my lord or something like this, rather than actual, an actual fight over terrain.
[00:41:37]  I mean, it's a fight over mental terrain, right?
[00:41:40]  Commutative terrain.
[00:41:41]  And then everyone kind of fighting each other for the right to defend the Lord.
[00:41:46]  You know what I mean?
[00:41:48]  Because you've got these sort of petty hierarchies that then emerge.
[00:41:52]  I mean, the social relations are just completely bizarre.
[00:41:54]  And I think like, you know, kind of going along with what Briece said too, it's like in its other turn away from something that has any kind of relation to anything political is that there is a kind of complete and total rejection of any kind of self-criticism.
[00:42:14]  Yeah.
[00:42:15]  Like, at least that's what I've noticed as like a larger culture.
[00:42:19]  Like, it's funny, like, because when, I mean, we've talked about this on the show a lot, but when the Bernie collapse happened, like, I didn't really, you know, I had some ideas, but I didn't really know what to make of it.
[00:42:30]  And I had, it really just like, I just wanted to like sit and think for a long time, right?
[00:42:35]  Because it was like, okay, this is like a huge failure, it felt like this was supposed to a lot of people, you know, it had a kind of a running start.
[00:42:43]  It had a lot of years, you know, in the making in terms of like his popularity within the Democratic Party and whatever, whatever.
[00:42:53]  And, you know, socialism on the march and all this shit from the last like five years that was in the kind of popular culture.
[00:43:00]  And it totally just like, boom, was extinguished just like almost immediately, right?
[00:43:06]  And very, very quickly and easily.
[00:43:10]  And so I was like, well, that seems like, this seems like a moment.
[00:43:13]  I mean, not to like give some like Maoist cards away, but this seems like a moment for everyone to kind of sit around and like fucking think about what just happened and try to like, you know, examine like what went wrong, like what went wrong.
[00:43:27]  And instead, you see an immediate like doubling down, like, oh, we already know what happened, or, or my favorite move, which is, oh, well, I didn't think it was actually going to happen anyway.
[00:43:36]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:43:36]  Which is like the other thing.
[00:43:38]  And it's, it's just completely bizarre.
[00:43:40]  And I see the kind of like social forces that reinforce this kind of like, yeah, there's a zero openness to thinking critically or analyzing or implicating oneself in some of that.
[00:43:54]  And I think it has to do with something you've talked about, which is the kind of subjects that emerge out of these networks, where their identities are completely tied to these network social relations and how destructive that can be, particularly when it starts getting enmeshed with what gets either mistaken for or, you know, in some ways displaces like the political.
[00:44:21]  Yeah, it's the defeat of Bernie should have been a good time for a good struggle session.
[00:44:26]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:28]  And we have all of this media that was supposed to be openings for, like we were talking about democracy, but we could say openings for, you know, better reflection or a conversation, but it's been the opposite.
[00:44:39]  And I think it's the opposite or it's been the opposite because there's so much, right?
[00:44:46]  Like we're subjected to these essentially market laws online, right?
[00:44:52]  You got to get the shares, you got to get the hits, and that means you got to have the hot take.
[00:44:57]  Because with millions or billions of people participating, there's always going to be something new just by the different addition in.
[00:45:04]  And so if you're going to have any kind of even a second of possibility of people reading what you have, it's got to be hot and it's got to be quick.
[00:45:15]  And that's not, you know, that's not long form thinking.
[00:45:18]  And then if you say something like, I guess I was wrong, then it's like, oh, God, you know, either they ignore you because who cares, or then you get trashed as just having been horribly, horribly wrong.
[00:45:29]  And like, there's no, the affective structure of these networks is just one that's completely makes reflection impossible because it's because the networks themselves become reflexive.
[00:45:39]  Like you say this and I'm going to say this plus one.
[00:45:42]  You're going to say this plus one plus one.
[00:45:44]  And it always keeps accelerating rather than letting you have a little bit of time and space for actual reflection, right?
[00:45:50]  It's like it's built into the system that we can't have that.
[00:45:54]  Exactly.
[00:45:54]  That's what it is.
[00:45:55]  And I think this is what democracy looks like.
[00:45:58]  Yes, I think that's what.
[00:45:59]  Yes.
[00:46:00]  Yes.
[00:46:00]  I think that's what people mistake for being like.
[00:46:04]  That intense polarization that's created, like is actually, like you know, confusingly is actually very like stable for the market right the the, the instability is actually very stable and actually these kind of the kind of market logic demands a kind of unstable stability right not to get too like cheesy or whatever.
[00:46:32]  But so I think people like, you know, think that, oh, this is disrupting, this is doing all this, this is doing that.
[00:46:37]  This is kind of like, these are ruptures.
[00:46:40]  Oh, is that a rupture?
[00:46:41]  Is this a ruptures?
[00:46:41]  That's my favorite game when the left plays, is this a rupture?
[00:46:45]  Just pointing at the news or whatever.
[00:46:48]  And, you know, so it's easy to feel like these kind of like, you know, the extreme volatility in markets is somehow makes them more and more precarious when, in fact, that actually, it is precarious, but also strong at the same time.
[00:47:05]  Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
[00:47:07]  We know that capitalism always has churn and crises, right?
[00:47:12]  Capitalism is always throwing off.
[00:47:15]  Close off people.
[00:47:16]  This is totally necessary.
[00:47:18]  So why would we expect our communication markets or networks to be any different?
[00:47:22]  No, they're going to rely on these boom bus crises, throwing off people, bringing up new ones.
[00:47:28]  And that's the form of stability, like you were saying.
[00:47:32]  I think that that's exactly right.
[00:47:33]  And that also then tells us why this, you know, the revolution is not going to be tweeted, right?
[00:47:40]  It's not going to come through these forms of media, even if the forms of media are helpful and useful.
[00:47:47]  I will say, like, one of the things, so in the interest of self-criticism, in the first, you know, I don't know, decade of my thinking of communicative capitalism, I was really like just only completely trashing it, all social media and forms of networked communications as only forms of capitalist co-optation.
[00:48:10]  I think it's true.
[00:48:11]  They are forms of capitalist co-optation, but I was insufficiently dialectical and I was insufficiently dialectical to the extent that one of the things that's been cool over the last 10 years or so is the creation of left media.
[00:48:25]  And so not trying to be a media for everyone, not trying to replace big mass media, but actually media that does try to build a left and does try to let there be an actual left discussion and a left debate, which is why we can even say it's frustrating that there's not a time of reflection.
[00:48:43]  If we only had like CBS, NBC, and ABC, we wouldn't have said, oh, it's a shame they were not reflecting on the loss of a socialist candidate because that would never have happened.
[00:48:52]  But I can understand our left media and wondering, like, how do we have a space within that general ecosphere?
[00:49:01]  Now, we haven't been able to do that very effectively yet, but maybe it's possible.
[00:49:05]  So, I think that all of the capitalist stuff is true and awful, and yet maybe there are points of forms of convergence that we didn't have, say, 10 years ago, forms of building socialist consciousness, building left consciousness that we didn't have before, or we only had in local areas and face-to-face interactions, or with a few of the paper magazines that were still available.
[00:49:34]  But those don't have the capacity to bring as many young people in as, say, the kinds of media we have now.
[00:49:41]  So I think we should keep being really critical, but there's also, there is an element of hope that we also need, you know, essentially that we need for the revolution, because if we don't think, if we only live in farce land, we don't have the space for building the other thing.
[00:49:59]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:00]  But that actually does make a lot of sense to me.
[00:50:03]  But I think, Jody, what my kind of worry is, is that people become more and more enmeshed in these networks.
[00:50:09]  And I see this just happen particularly like with our show or with left media in general, is that these networks sort of become it for them.
[00:50:17]  Like there is nothing outside of there.
[00:50:19]  I mean, that's sort of the, you know, there's kind of the trope about the Twitter communists, which is fairly real.
[00:50:25]  You know, somebody who's sort of maybe like a little socially stunted, spends much of their time online, is sort of agoraphobic in a way, and like doesn't really go outside or interact with the wider world much.
[00:50:35]  And I think that's actually like, that's sort of what drives me insane because as more and more people are driven online, not, you know, COVID absolutely 100%, you know, put the pedal to the metal, like, you know, took this, accelerated this forward.
[00:50:50]  But like more people were spending like a lot of their time online.
[00:50:54]  And now it's like some people are spending a lot of all of their time online.
[00:50:58]  I think it creates like a stunted political being.
[00:51:00]  And like that's sort of what worries me is that like without interacting with like, you know, people face to face and without having like, you know, sort of the joy of comradeship or, you know, or even just friendship in general, I mean, it makes for a sort of like schizophrenic political environment that sort of bounces from here to there.
[00:51:24]  And that's like, I mean, we see that sort of reflected in the, I guess you would say mainstream, but also on the left too, with a lot of these like Instagram infographics and like what you can do to like be a better person and stuff like that.
[00:51:35]  So we have like on one hand, sort of this like network that relies on people being inside and this sort of like anti-social sociability, but then also this like extreme sort of like zealot like, you know, thrust towards self-actualization and like, you know, the, you know, disclaiming your sins and get, you know, getting, getting this internalized whatever, and, you know, et cetera, out of you.
[00:52:02]  And it creates, I think, like a schizophrenic bean, right?
[00:52:05]  Because you're just like, I am inside all the time and I'm all fucked up because, you know, oh my God, like I read on Instagram, I'm like, I'm a racist.
[00:52:13]  Like, holy shit.
[00:52:14]  And, you know, I think it just drives people totally mad.
[00:52:17]  I mean, that's what I freak out about because it's like, I mean, I've been to political meetings before where I'm like, Jesus Christ, like, it's like these people learn how to communicate on Twitter or something.
[00:52:26]  It's all invectives or these, you know, these buzzwords or something like that.
[00:52:30]  And it, you know, it freaks me the fuck out.
[00:52:32]  Yeah, I agree with everything you said.
[00:52:35]  I think that's right.
[00:52:36]  I mean, you can't be, comrades are not people who are born and made online, right?
[00:52:41]  Comrades, comradeship requires a face-to-face dimension, a sense that, essentially, a sense that you know the person's got your back, right?
[00:52:51]  That you're in a struggle where you can rely on the other person.
[00:52:54]  And the thing about, I'd say, all or nearly all of our interactions in sites like Twitter is you can never rely on anybody to have your back, right?
[00:53:04]  You really have no idea.

=== Shifts in Production? (07:01) ===

[00:53:05]  People could turn, you know, turn on a dime.
[00:53:08]  You don't even know who they are most of the time.
[00:53:10]  And they're trashing you for absolutely no reason, just because it's fun or because you opened yourself up for a quick rejoinder.
[00:53:19]  So I think you're right about the problems of a totally online left.
[00:53:27]  And so it means that, okay, so when we have left media, people still have to go outside and interact with actual people and do something, not just talk on media, right?
[00:53:38]  Not just, in fact, I think it's the just being there, which is why folks resort to these moralisms of, you know, like do these four things to be a good person, or if you had these four thoughts last week, then you're bad.
[00:53:53]  That it's because people are, it's when people are not involved in actual struggles on the ground, that that becomes the place where they feel like they can do something.
[00:54:03]  It's like, well, you know, I'm not out there, I don't know, repairing bikes or storing headlights in a mutual aid network, but at least I circulated this on Instagram that will help people be better people.
[00:54:15]  I mean, but the understanding is super individualized and super moralistic rather than an understanding that's anchored in sort of organizing for struggle, organizing for power.
[00:54:27]  So they sort of go hand in hand.
[00:54:29]  Or what did you call it?
[00:54:32]  Interdigital.
[00:54:33]  Yeah, my PhD word.
[00:54:34]  I'm doing my dissertation on that word.
[00:54:38]  In that neo-feudal essay, you wrote that capital accumulation occurs less through commodity production and wage labor than through services, rents, licenses, fees, work done for free, often under the masquerade of participation, and data treated as a natural resource.
[00:54:54]  And I think that like, I can already hear people criticizing what we've been saying on this episode because they're saying, why are you guys focusing on Twitter so much?
[00:55:03]  Or this is just about media or whatever.
[00:55:05]  And I guess what I'm trying to maybe to bring it to kind of like connect these things together a little bit is that these markets emerging or networks, however we want to call them, emerging actually have a lot to do with kind of new modes of capital accumulation.
[00:55:23]  And that like, therefore, what happens on these networks does have like very political content out of the social relations that emerge, right?
[00:55:32]  And that like, so if we think of, I mean, we've talked about this on the show too, like with data as a kind of like it's hard.
[00:55:41]  I don't totally know how the best way to kind of think of big data.
[00:55:44]  And a lot of people have written a lot over the, you know, past couple years about this.
[00:55:48]  You've written a lot about kind of capital's relation to data and these platforms and how they're using it.
[00:55:56]  And it's hard for me like to kind of grasp how much of this is kind of like the like frothy speculative stuff that's fun for capitalists.
[00:56:06]  You know what I mean?
[00:56:07]  And how much of this is actually, yeah, yeah, totally.
[00:56:11]  Even though that to me is just like weird libertarian democratization of patents, which is very interesting.
[00:56:18]  And how much of this actually shows a kind of shift in production and perhaps a shift in value even?
[00:56:30]  A couple of things come to mind.
[00:56:33]  One thing is really thinking about intellectual property.
[00:56:37]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:56:38]  So it seems to me that it's less the actual data of big data than it is the intellectual property over the, let's just, I don't know, better word than the algorithms that do something with it.
[00:56:54]  And so it's really like there's all of this resource out there, but where the money is going to come from or the perspective money is figuring out cool ways to do something with it.
[00:57:04]  And those come don't even have to come from actual making products, but from patentable sort of ideas or algorithms.
[00:57:12]  I think the key is intellectual property.
[00:57:16]  And then that is a strange kind of asset that's not a material asset that is part of a, essentially it's rent seeking, right?
[00:57:24]  Right, right.
[00:57:24]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:57:25]  So it's rentier capitalism.
[00:57:27]  And rather than an old school industrial commodity production, it's, it's, it's, you make money from the rent.
[00:57:33]  And that, in fact, you know, you guys, I'm sure, already probably I've talked about this a bunch of times.
[00:57:39]  More rents are the primary way now in the United States rather than goods.
[00:57:46]  It's the primary form of accumulation now, of capital accumulation now.
[00:57:50]  So I think that there is that connection with the big data stuff.
[00:57:53]  So it's more like, it's like the reflective or extra dimension.
[00:58:00]  Well, I think what's interesting is that now, and, you know, again, like, I mean, this sounds crazy.
[00:58:04]  Like, I don't know, it sounds a little like out there like stuff, kind of stuff that I don't particularly like to indulge too much in.
[00:58:11]  But I do think about this a lot.
[00:58:12]  Like, so much profit is now realized out of activity that's not considered labor.
[00:58:18]  And this is something that really trips me up, I think.
[00:58:22]  And I guess why, yeah, I think that talking about these kind of networks and these sort of relations is really important.
[00:58:29]  But like, for example, like when you go home and you turn on Netflix, like you're not working and yet someone is making money off of you, right?
[00:58:38]  And so there's this sort of like new, I mean, you know, it is rent sinking, absolutely, but it's this new kind of relation that's emerging.
[00:58:47]  And I guess what I'm like curious about is how much of this is like, you know, as we talk about these sort of like new neo-feudal forms, like what is this a new, is this a transformation in capitalist accumulation itself?
[00:59:04]  Or is this some sort of like speculative bubble, I guess?
[00:59:08]  And maybe no one knows, you know, I don't know, you get, you get the kind of benefit of, you know, looking back on this in the future and seeing the way that this all kind of develops.
[00:59:20]  But it's difficult when, I guess, kind of like tying this all back in together, everything we've been talking about, like you have a kind of these, this, this sort of overproduced, or I don't even really like that story, but you have this very like broad middle class that is this not totally, not, I mean, it's petite bourgee, not totally, I mean, you know, in America, it's the middle class.
[00:59:46]  It's always kind of occupied this kind of nebulous space, right?
[00:59:50]  But that is serviced by this underclass, but that also produces Like value out of like data that it that it, you know, allows to be extracted for these platforms.

=== Speculation and Froth Messing Up Value (08:05) ===

[01:00:07]  Like, I guess I'm trying to tie all of this together and kind of what this new ecosystem is, and then trying to then understand in the past, like as we've kind of been witnessing this transformation, I'm not making a lot of sense, I apologize, but as we've been watching this kind of the beginnings of what possibly is this transformation in the West, then what that then maybe explains about the politics that we've witnessed and are continuing to witness that are emerging.
[01:00:36]  Because I think that that tells us more about the kind of various upheavals over the last decade than maybe some of the other stories we tell ourselves.
[01:00:50]  So, if we recognize that for Marx, value is always exchange value, right?
[01:00:56]  So, value is always this relational quality, which then means that value is really just this overhang or crust over social relations.
[01:01:11]  So, I think one of the ways to think about the sort of value question with respect to big data and communicative capitalism is there is a way that this big data world tries to seize the social substance directly and avoid the commodity form or even maybe avoid the value form.
[01:01:36]  And so that value becomes displaced instead of this grasping of the taking of the social substance.
[01:01:44]  So, that's why all of our interactions leave trails of metadata that can be scraped.
[01:01:49]  The interactions remain somewhere that can be scraped.
[01:01:55]  We walk through a city and all the different cameras and things like take our traces.
[01:02:00]  So, there's a way that the social sub that big data is about the, and the Internet of Things together are about the taking of the social substance without the value form.
[01:02:09]  Now, if that's if that first part of a hypothesis is right, then it would start to let us see why there's been a problem in the translation of all of the big data stuff into value, right?
[01:02:21]  Instead, we have, as like you were talking about, the froth and the speculation, you have this massive amount of froth and speculation, but we don't know what it's making.
[01:02:30]  We do know like the doggone buzzword of disruption that's real.
[01:02:34]  I mean, Uber is horrible that they did disrupt the taxi services, right?
[01:02:40]  They've really done, they've disrupted urban forms of transportation that were there.
[01:02:45]  They've disrupted the lives of millions of people.
[01:02:48]  Airbnb has a disruptive effect.
[01:02:51]  And at least with Uber, it doesn't seem like it's producing value, it's sucking up value.
[01:02:55]  Yeah.
[01:02:56]  And so I think that maybe the combinations of like speculation and froth and the dissolution of value, they're going to be a mess for quite a while.
[01:03:04]  Yeah, because that's what I've always understood is that a lot of that data that's collected, I mean, for all of the sort of the myth around it and sort of the almost like, yeah, magical quality it has for people is like pure gold.
[01:03:16]  A lot of it's bullshit.
[01:03:17]  Like it's not worth anything.
[01:03:18]  It doesn't mean anything.
[01:03:19]  You can't glean anything useful from it or if you can glean anything at all.
[01:03:23]  Yeah, there was some study.
[01:03:25]  I don't remember any of the details, but it involved like generals and wars or something and big data.
[01:03:30]  And it was like the big data did nothing, right?
[01:03:32]  Like it had no predictive capacity at all.
[01:03:34]  It was just like, like any study that has said something about big data has always been retroactive.
[01:03:39]  Like, oh, after this happened, we saw that all the data was there.
[01:03:43]  But it's had like really, really minimal predictive capacity, you know, a really small degree of predictive capacity.
[01:03:51]  Yeah.
[01:03:51]  Yeah, it seems like its only use is creating cottage industries for like a bunch of people to throw money at and then see kind of what sticks.
[01:03:58]  You know, that's always been my feeling about the digital education stuff.
[01:04:04]  Whereas it's like, I mean, I don't think anyone likes it.
[01:04:08]  I don't think the kids like it.
[01:04:09]  I don't think the teachers like it.
[01:04:11]  But I don't think the parents like it.
[01:04:13]  And yet they'll just continue throwing money at it no matter what.
[01:04:17]  Because surely there has to be a reason that we could do this.
[01:04:21]  Like if we have the technology, then we can do it.
[01:04:23]  And therefore it must be.
[01:04:24]  The Jetsons did it from home.
[01:04:25]  But I don't think it'll ever catch on because I don't think anyone actually really likes it.
[01:04:29]  I mean, I think a lot of people will make money.
[01:04:31]  It'll be like a jobs programs for a lot of like, you know, sociology majors probably.
[01:04:35]  But like, you know what I mean?
[01:04:38]  Like teacher America types.
[01:04:40]  Was it like more than, was it 10 years ago?
[01:04:42]  I don't know.
[01:04:43]  What do they call the MOOCs?
[01:04:44]  Massive online blah, blah, blah classes or something.
[01:04:49]  And there were two or three of these big, big companies that were trying to.
[01:04:54]  It was called MOOCs.
[01:04:56]  I don't know.
[01:04:56]  I can't remember the name.
[01:04:57]  I think it was like a MOOCs.
[01:04:59]  I think it was like M-O-O-C or something like that.
[01:05:02]  And a few universities thought that this was the way they were going to get rid of problems that they thought they saw like too many students in freshman composition, which means how we don't have to teach people to read and write anymore.
[01:05:15]  And so they were going to use these big, massive classes, a way to underpay, continue to underpay adjunct labor.
[01:05:22]  And it was basically a failure because nobody likes this.
[01:05:26]  And it seems nobody, it's awful.
[01:05:28]  And it seems like with the COVIDs, the goal is going to be to try to bring it back and make it stick.
[01:05:35]  I actually think it won't.
[01:05:36]  I think, in fact, this might be one good thing is that people realize learning happens better face to face.
[01:05:42]  Yeah.
[01:05:42]  And that students at every level prefer to interact with people.
[01:05:48]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:05:50]  I completely agree.
[01:05:51]  And I also think, yeah, I just think that people, I mean, you know, even myself, this is something I struggle with.
[01:05:57]  I mean, we discount how much like just people like rejecting something will actually work.
[01:06:04]  Do you know what I mean?
[01:06:05]  Like that's why I have such a hard time talking about these new technologies and these new kind of modes of production and all of it and like what comes out of it because it's so difficult to see like Yeah,
[01:06:22]  what's real what's not I guess which is a terrible way of putting it when you're talking about digital things that makes me want to go back to the part about the services right and why there's been this increase in jobs and services in part It's because those are places in the economy that can't easily be automated.
[01:06:39]  Right.
[01:06:40]  So and so that's a place where there can be you know that it's the labor costs are relatively low because they can't be because the people don't have to have high degrees of expertise to let's say be personal at home health teams.
[01:07:00]  And then that means that the cost of entry for a capitalist is relatively low.
[01:07:05]  And automation is not going to be a source of sort of sort of intensification of that market.
[01:07:11]  So those are going to be where the where the jobs are going to be.
[01:07:16]  And that's the kind of employee or worker underside to all of the froth and over accumulation at the top.
[01:07:25]  But these frothy Silicon Valley speculative data things, like they don't create the jobs.
[01:07:34]  That's not going to be a site.
[01:07:35]  And then we can go back, like they're not really value producing areas.
[01:07:40]  They're more sites for getting wealth in other ways, like seizing wealth through investment wealth, creating an international intellectual property, but not forms of investment that actually produce that actually lead to value producing labor at all.
[01:08:01]  So like what you're saying is like a lot of these tech companies, they might provide ostensibly some people with some jobs, but they don't make any money off of that.
[01:08:08]  They make money off of like the intellectual property and investment and all that kind of stuff.
[01:08:11]  Yes, exactly.

=== Suburbs vs. Cities Predictions (05:35) ===

[01:08:12]  Which is a totally, I mean, that's the thing.
[01:08:14]  It's like, you know, growing up, I was taught about like the rational, like how the market sort of like is rational, you know, of course, the invisible hand of the free market, all that kind of stuff.
[01:08:23]  And democracy too is like, you know, self-correcting and rational.
[01:08:26]  And it's like, how anybody could make it to 2021 and believe any of that, even a little bit to me, is totally absurd.
[01:08:33]  But like, you know, it's, it, it's, this engine seems like it's just going to keep fucking going, right?
[01:08:39]  Like with COVID, especially, so much of this has snowballed and gotten bigger and larger.
[01:08:43]  And I like, you know, I do agree, Liz, I think people will reject stuff like the online educations.
[01:08:48]  I mean, it is people I know on every single side of that, parents, kids, and teachers fucking despise it.
[01:08:55]  Yeah, middle-class parents are pretty powerful, I guess is what I'm saying.
[01:08:57]  Exactly.
[01:08:58]  Yeah, yes.
[01:09:01]  Never, yeah, well, because now they can't fucking, you know, get waste to the country club or anything.
[01:09:06]  I mean, they got to take care of the watch the other day.
[01:09:08]  Yeah, they got to wait till they can get their vaccines.
[01:09:10]  Exactly.
[01:09:12]  But, but that's sort of drives me insane.
[01:09:15]  It's like, it seems like this stuff is just like accelerating.
[01:09:19]  I mean, you know, not to not to, I'm not making any illusions with that.
[01:09:23]  I mean, it really is just like, you know, it's getting bigger and faster.
[01:09:27]  And it seems like there's no like real counter force, right?
[01:09:31]  Like people sort of just accept it and like, well, yeah, I drive Uber after, you know, I get off work sometimes and then, you know, work just becomes Uber and stuff like that.
[01:09:39]  And like, you know, it's, it's, it's, I find myself sort of just waiting for like, you know, you talk about hinterlandization in the essay.
[01:09:49]  And like, you know, it's almost in a way, it happens in the cities.
[01:09:53]  Like I'm in LA right now and I walk outside.
[01:09:55]  I've talked about this on a million fucking episodes.
[01:09:57]  So if you're sick of hearing it about it, you know, I don't give a fuck.
[01:10:01]  But I walk outside and there's basically favelas everywhere.
[01:10:06]  You know, like, I mean, it really has to be seen to be believed.
[01:10:08]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:10:09]  San Francisco.
[01:10:10]  Like, I mean, there are like, you can't even call them 10 cities because, you know, people build houses and stuff like that.
[01:10:16]  I mean, I think if building codes were like 5% looser, we would have something resembling favelas all over the place.
[01:10:21]  I mean, there was just a big battle at a park down here when they tried to clear out this giant encampment.
[01:10:26]  And like, you know, that stuff, it's like, it's like there's, you know, yeah, we have this sort of like wasteland outside the major cities.
[01:10:33]  You know, you know, anyone who's driving through like Mississippi, for instance, will probably know what I mean.
[01:10:38]  But like in the cities too, there are like enclaves of hinterland where there's like absolutely like nothing for anybody, just like, you know, dirt and trash and, you know, people who are sick or people who just like, I mean, I had, I've had coworkers who lived in their cars.
[01:10:53]  I had a coworker who used to sleep in the fucking dumpster, which he actually didn't need to do, but he was, you know, it's kind of out there.
[01:10:59]  But yeah, it's, it's, it's, it seems like there'll be like sort of this like centralization of these like glittering populaces.
[01:11:07]  And then this, yeah, there's this like sort of mass, massive space, maybe not even filled with that many people, of just like desolation.
[01:11:16]  And that, that really, I mean, well, as Mao said, the countryside surrounds the city.
[01:11:23]  So that's, that's what I always get thinking of.
[01:11:25]  It's like, well, that's my sort of trick for the future.
[01:11:28]  It's like, well, we just need to make most of America into a third world country.
[01:11:32]  And then, of course, you can do Maoism too and take the cities.
[01:11:36]  The problem is that we need Maoist to account for the suburbs because the problem we're having now is that everyone is fleeing the city for the suburbs.
[01:11:45]  Yeah.
[01:11:46]  And that's what's been a very interesting thing.
[01:11:48]  I wanted to ask you about this actually development since COVID.
[01:11:53]  And I think since you've been writing about this neo-feudalization and kind of these makeup of these cities, because at least in San Francisco, and I think this is happening also in New York and a couple other cities, but like the amount of people that have fled and, you know, and a ton of businesses that are just not coming back, a ton of offices that are then related to those businesses and then like lunch places that are related to those businesses, you know, and the entire little micro economies that these things create, like are just,
[01:12:22]  it's not those like tech, that tech utopia city anymore.
[01:12:25]  Like no one wants to live in San Francisco.
[01:12:28]  And actually the housing prices are going through the roof in like the out in the suburbs outside of it, which is really fascinating.
[01:12:36]  And so now you have, I mean, like what Brace is saying about what's left of these cities is, I mean, it's, it's pretty shocking how quickly this has all happened, you know?
[01:12:46]  Just total desolation in a lot of what used to be some of the richest places in the world.
[01:12:52]  It's going to be interesting to see if that keeps going after COVID, because it could also be the case that this is, I mean, again, now thinking within market, like within market terms rather than proper terms.
[01:13:09]  It could really be the case that the prices within the cities go down and then younger people move back and then the small business owners come back as well.
[01:13:19]  And because there's still very low interest rates, everybody gets a loan and you have a nice little momentary capitalist utopia.
[01:13:25]  I think that the attraction of cities may not go away that quickly.
[01:13:30]  That cities, particularly for younger people, people who are right out of school, they want to be around other people.
[01:13:42]  They don't want to live out in the middle of nowhere and have to drive a stupid car and be stuck at home with the same people.

=== Return to Utopian Dreams (07:54) ===

[01:13:48]  I mean, I guess I'm not convinced it's going to stay this way.
[01:13:53]  I think this could be a good thing for cities.
[01:13:56]  Maybe I'm wrong.
[01:13:57]  I'm a terrible predictor.
[01:13:58]  I mean, like really, really bad predictions.
[01:14:02]  I'm great at predictions.
[01:14:03]  I promised my daughter the day before the 2016 election that Trump would not win.
[01:14:08]  I'm like, I promise.
[01:14:08]  I'm a political scientist.
[01:14:12]  Oh, man.
[01:14:13]  Wow.
[01:14:13]  Well, that's self-criticism, right?
[01:14:16]  Yeah, there we go.
[01:14:18]  I do think that, like, speaking of young people, and check out this fucking segue, guys.
[01:14:22]  Speaking of young people, what do you make of like the attraction that a lot of people have now to these sort of like, I would call it like a return to utopian socialism almost, like the fully automated luxury communism?
[01:14:33]  I mean, that was such a crazy, and I by crazy, I mean mentally fucked up.
[01:14:39]  It's still here.
[01:14:40]  Yeah, it's still, oh, it's, it's different.
[01:14:44]  So I would say like a lot of the like more out there trends in the past.
[01:14:48]  Like you know, whatever decade it it, it maybe it had its like brief, you know, flare-up and you know moment in the sun and then it diffused and sort of like became part of like the uh, I don't really know what body politic mean, but I'm just gonna say it part of the body politics.
[01:15:02]  People got into it without necessarily knowing their body, the idea, their body.
[01:15:06]  You know they felt the beat of the Foliogamated luxury communism but like a post-work stuff or a lot of like the really outre, like anarchisms and stuff like that.
[01:15:14]  That like didn't revolve around.
[01:15:15]  Like you know, what I have traditionally thought of as socialism, which is a, you know, a party uh, you know, led by and for the working class that institutes a dictatorship of the proletariat, you know, advancing towards communism, pretty fucking, pretty fucking simple.
[01:15:29]  But, like you know, I mean now it's like I see it's with the, with the flowering of technology.
[01:15:35]  You know Liz, I think you said let a thousand mataglesiuses bloom, but this is let a thousand, you know, and I speak as a florist, a guy who hates flowers let a thousand flowers bloom and people coming up with all of these sort of like new utopian visions and some of them which which kind of caught on and some of them which have caught on in a way that like people who even would would think of themselves as having more like I hate to say this but like traditional socialist politics, have actually accepted some of these things and it has warped their politics slightly and like it, it it?
[01:16:05]  What do you make of this?
[01:16:06]  Like this this this, like antipathy or even actually like hatred towards work by people who are like, essentially socialists.
[01:16:12]  What it's like who I said, talking to some of these people, I'm like you seem like you would rather die than fucking work at Walmart.
[01:16:20]  You know it blows my mind.
[01:16:22]  I think the on the, the fully utopian luxury communism, I think, is part of a.
[01:16:29]  You got to get a technological fix.
[01:16:31]  You can quickly.
[01:16:32]  There can be like we can just automate our way out of class struggle.
[01:16:36]  It's a denial of class struggle.
[01:16:38]  It's a denial of the working class.
[01:16:39]  A person would actually rather have an app than talk to a worker.
[01:16:42]  It's not not even imagining.
[01:16:44]  They can't imagine themselves as a worker, but they can't even imagine interacting with workers.
[01:16:48]  It's like work does not appear and that's the same thing with the post-work imaginary.
[01:16:52]  It's part of an erasure of work um, and an erasure of workers and the working class.
[01:16:56]  And that's what I one of the the reasons I think that stuff is super dangerous for any kind of actual socialized movement.
[01:17:04]  Um, it it's like fantasy world that looks for a technological fix, Does not think about get involved with organizing or really actually engage in proper work by any stretch of the imagination.
[01:17:20]  I actually think it's damaging.
[01:17:22]  Yeah, I think the one good thing, you know, gets the word out there, but then people are like, oh, you know, all we need, it's like a unicorn or something with a rainbow coming out of its butt or something is usually the picture of it.
[01:17:34]  No, that's a bad call.
[01:17:37]  One word, or like one weird trick, technocracy.
[01:17:40]  That's all I think of it as, to be honest.
[01:17:43]  I mean, it feeds the same impulse.
[01:17:44]  It's like, why you see all these same people talking about like, oh, the only thing we need to do is just get rid of the Supreme Court and then, oop, no more politics.
[01:17:52]  Because once we get rid of the Supreme Court, we can do whatever we want.
[01:17:54]  And it's like, there's just like so much going on when people say shit like that.
[01:17:57]  It's like, one, why is everyone a schmidian now?
[01:18:00]  That's a little dangerous and scary and strange.
[01:18:03]  Two, like you can't just erase, first of all, you've completely erased politics from just getting rid of the Supreme Court.
[01:18:12]  Like, what are you even talking about?
[01:18:14]  What does that mean?
[01:18:16]  You know, I'm using that as a, for instance, you know, people have all these other kind of legislative like bugaboos.
[01:18:23]  They always talk about the filibuster, all this, this kind of like shit as being the impediments for achieving whatever, you know, it's become what they say is socialism, but really I don't know what they mean.
[01:18:34]  It's usually just a bunch of issue politics that they want to pass.
[01:18:38]  It's like one trick ponies, right?
[01:18:40]  It's like, oh, if we can just, if we just get rid of the filibuster, if we just get rid of the Supreme Court, right?
[01:18:44]  Then all the problems are solved really, really quickly with just one fell swoop.
[01:18:48]  Again, without doing class-based organizing.
[01:18:52]  It's like we can let the people in Congress and you lobby your congressman.
[01:18:56]  So it's really the imaginary is a liberal, even as it wants to change part of the, you know, the structure of the current state.
[01:19:03]  It wants to change part of the structure without looking at the basis, which would have to be a change in property relations.
[01:19:11]  One more thing I wanted to add about the doggone luxury automated communist is I think that they, in their fantasy around technology and automation, they totally obliterate care work and service work, which is actually where most of the, we've been talking about this the whole time, but where the new jobs are, you're new, I mean, like most of the job growth is, where there's actually a social crisis, right?
[01:19:39]  A crisis around social reproduction, a crisis around these kinds of care because they're underfunded.
[01:19:46]  The wages are low, families are desperate, and yet that kind of work is totally invisible in automated luxury communism.
[01:19:55]  And like the people who provide the luxuries, the people who are building the automation stuff, all of that is just a race.
[01:20:01]  And I think there's something sort of symptomatic about the real turn away from the fact of working class life and what it looks like in the United States and England, because some of this stuff is coming out of England.
[01:20:16]  And right now it's like a turn away from the stuff on the ground, actually.
[01:20:21]  Yeah, it's always been confusing to I always assumed that they, I was like, oh, where's their stuff getting made?
[01:20:25]  And I just assumed they meant the third world.
[01:20:27]  But I mean, I just asked you to say that.
[01:20:30]  Whenever Westerners talk about shit like that, I just assume that that's what goes unnamed.
[01:20:35]  Yeah.
[01:20:37]  Yeah, I mean, it's that kind of utopianism.
[01:20:42]  I'm not sure.
[01:20:43]  Some people say that it has some use because it gets people's imagination.
[01:20:50]  But I actually disagree.
[01:20:51]  And I agree with you that I think it's quite damaging because it imagines that the kind of work of building society is not like a collective project, but that can just be kind of automated away, like we say.
[01:21:09]  I don't think that's the case at all.
[01:21:10]  I think the challenge right now is, I mean, yeah, we do need to do some imagination work, but maybe the bigger work is generating political will and that the political will has to be to organize a working class and in fact have a working class party that seizes the means of production.
[01:21:31]  And the problem with some of the versions of imagination, like we imagine this experience, is never goes all the way to actually thinking about the organizing, right?

=== Climate Change Scenarios (03:36) ===

[01:21:42]  It's just like, it's like scenarios.
[01:21:44]  There's a lot of stuff in climate writing and writing about climate change and responses to climate change that unfolds as like as just scenarios.
[01:21:54]  Like, well, this could happen or this could happen, but they don't tend to be connected into accounts of people organizing, accounts of trajectories.
[01:22:04]  It's more like, well, let's have an electrical grid everywhere or let's abolish this.
[01:22:10]  Not like, how do you build the kinds of political power necessary to accomplish these things?
[01:22:16]  And that's one of my problems with some of these utopian experiments, utopian imagination experiments, is the actual work of generating the political will to do anything is completely effaced.
[01:22:28]  It's like pushed aside.
[01:22:30]  Absolutely.
[01:22:31]  This is so fun.
[01:22:32]  I know.
[01:22:33]  This was a blast.
[01:22:34]  I've enjoyed it.
[01:22:36]  I feel like you all really did a lot of homework before this and have a lot of prep and stuff.
[01:22:42]  That's high praise from a professor.
[01:22:44]  I did a lot of homework.
[01:22:46]  Literally, nobody in your position in society has ever said that to me in my life.
[01:22:51]  This is thrilling.
[01:22:53]  Yeah, thank you so much for joining us, Jody.
[01:22:55]  This was a blast.
[01:22:56]  And I encourage you to enjoy it a lot.
[01:22:58]  I encourage all you fucking peasants out there to read this goddamn article.
[01:23:03]  And Jodi has some great lectures on YouTube that we're also going to link to in the show.
[01:23:08]  Yeah.
[01:23:09]  Yeah.
[01:23:09]  Thank you so much.
[01:23:11]  Great.
[01:23:11]  Well, thank you guys.
[01:23:34]  you cool cats who made it to the outro.
[01:23:36]  My name is The Salamander.
[01:23:41]  That's going to be on Wikipedia.
[01:23:42]  I'm here to slither under your rock and lie around for a while, borrow some money from you, maybe spend it, maybe get you a credit card number, spend that, maybe get you a social security number, sell that, maybe give you a kiss.
[01:24:03]  That's a good new character, Brady.
[01:24:05]  The salamander?
[01:24:05]  Yeah.
[01:24:06]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:24:07]  Mr. Slithers.
[01:24:08]  Very, like, very meth, like Ur Matthew McConaughey.
[01:24:12]  He's a salamander.
[01:24:13]  You know what I mean?
[01:24:14]  Absolutely.
[01:24:14]  I hope he runs.
[01:24:15]  I'm thinking.
[01:24:16]  Wait, what do you mean?
[01:24:17]  Runs for what?
[01:24:17]  He's like running for governor of Texas or something.
[01:24:20]  For governor?
[01:24:21]  Yeah.
[01:24:21]  Some like that.
[01:24:22]  No way.
[01:24:22]  Yeah.
[01:24:23]  Yeah.
[01:24:23]  Oh, yeah.
[01:24:24]  He should absolutely do that.
[01:24:25]  I just got there's a I'll tell you about it after the show, but he's there's another podcast did an episode on his audiobook, which was very fucking funny.
[01:24:34]  It's insane.
[01:24:35]  Yeah.
[01:24:36]  And he does it.
[01:24:37]  He does.
[01:24:37]  Of course he does it.
[01:24:38]  Yeah.
[01:24:39]  I mean, why else would you listen to an audiobook by McConaughey?
[01:24:41]  Can you imagine?
[01:24:42]  You're like, okay, sitting down, ready.
[01:24:43]  You got your little cup of Joe ready, getting cozy.
[01:24:46]  Turn on the Matthew McConaughey audiobook that you ordered, and it's not his voice.
[01:24:51]  Yeah, yeah, it's me.
[01:24:53]  Or it's like a guy approximating his voice.
[01:24:56]  Or no, it's just like some just like, hello.
[01:24:59]  Yeah.
[01:24:59]  We're chapter one.
[01:25:01]  It's just like totally sober, blank voice.
[01:25:05]  I often record myself reading books and then play it back to myself.
[01:25:09]  Really?
[01:25:10]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:25:11]  That's cute.
[01:25:12]  And so I can get better at podcasting.
[01:25:14]  You don't do like podcasts, like training like that.

=== Anne Sexton Mondays (03:11) ===

[01:25:19]  No.
[01:25:20]  Do you have like, do you, they're splits?
[01:25:22]  Do you do like certain, like, is there like a certain training you do on Monday, certain training you do on Wednesdays?
[01:25:28]  Yeah.
[01:25:28]  I do Anne Sexton on Monday, Anne Sexton on Tuesday, Anne Sexton on Wednesday, Anne Sexton on Thursday.
[01:25:34]  On Friday, I actually do James Mason from the book Siege.
[01:25:38]  And then Saturday, I do David Foster Wallace and some other sexist guys.
[01:25:42]  And then on Sunday, of course, I do the classic, it's Mussolini's wife's autobiography.
[01:25:50]  On that note, I'm Liz.
[01:25:52]  My name is Countiano.
[01:25:56]  We're joined of course by producer Young Jomsky and the podcast is called Truanon.
[01:26:01]  We'll see you next time.
[01:26:02]  Buh-bye.
[01:26:11]  I don't even think we're in the 1890s yet, baby.
[01:26:33]  No, no.
[01:26:35]  We're in fucking 1320, motherfucker.
[01:26:37]  You are a serf.
[01:26:41]  Bitch, you live in Alsace.
[01:26:43]  You are a peasant.
[01:26:44]  You need to give your fucking lord the grain.
[01:26:47]  Your fucking children, you've had 15 children.
[01:26:49]  You've never taken a bath.
[01:26:51]  You've literally never washed your penis.
[01:26:54]  You're fucking, you've never used toilet paper.
[01:26:57]  Motherfucker, you have worms.
[01:26:59]  You are dying.
[01:27:01]  You've had 40 children.
[01:27:02]  Three of them are alive.
[01:27:04]  Two of them are child soldiers in the Duke's army.
[01:27:07]  Bitch, the greatest thing you can hope for is to die at the ripe age, or excuse me, the old age of 36.
[01:27:15]  You fucking can't read.
[01:27:17]  You fucking, you don't know what TV is.
[01:27:20]  You are literally, if you were transporting today, you would be the worst gamer of all time.
[01:27:26]  You don't know shit.
[01:27:27]  You literally probably don't even know what the direction left is.
[01:27:31]  So I'm sure some medieval guy is going to get mad at me for this.
[01:27:34]  Bitch, I've been to the Renaissance Fair.
[01:27:36]  I have eaten a large turkey wing, which the juggalos call bitch beaters, which I think is problematic, but a funny thing to call them.
[01:27:43]  Motherfucker, you got to recognize where you are, and then you got to get past that.
[01:27:49]  You got to be unemotional.
[01:27:52]  I mean, I know I'm not being a great, a great, you know, display of that myself, but you got to, you, you can't sink into this hole.
[01:27:59]  You live in the oobliette.
[01:28:01]  Your job is to crawl off the ladder, motherfucker.
[01:28:03]  You live in the hole.
[01:28:05]  You're in the hole.
[01:28:06]  You are a rat.
[01:28:07]  And the rat, when he's in the hole, gets fucked.
[01:28:10]  Oh, people only throw trash in the hole.
[01:28:12]  You know what?
[01:28:12]  You need to eat.
[01:28:13]  You need to eat a body.
[01:28:14]  And you need to carry the plague.
[01:28:18]  And you need to carry a plague around this whole world that will change this whole fucking world.
[01:28:25]  And all your enemies will vomit black bile and they will choke on blood and grow boils and die.