True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 324: Burn After Reading
Aired: 2023-10-05
Duration: 01:47:19


=== Stepfatherboard Strikes Back (02:33) ===

[00:00:00]  This is a message for all the enemies of Truanon podcast.
[00:00:05]  The haters, the losers, the people who comment on our episodes to say mean things about sometimes when we mispronounce words.
[00:00:14]  Our message to you is this.
[00:00:16]  You can actually pronounce words in any way you want.
[00:00:19]  And in fact, names doubly so because they're subjective words, meaning that you can kind of add your own funk to them if you prefer.
[00:00:30]  We have hacked into your DDoS systems and have made our way into your mainframe.
[00:00:38]  Into your mainframe and things of that nature, such as CPUs, motherboards, and even super highways, fatherboards, and even GPUs and CPUs as well.
[00:00:50]  Step motherboard.
[00:00:51]  Mother, but I said motherboard.
[00:00:53]  But repeat it, motherboard.
[00:00:55]  stepmother yeah i'm i'm not the stepfather board I'm the stepfatherboard that fucking powers your computer.
[00:01:05]  And I'm in it now.
[00:01:06]  I'm in your laptop.
[00:01:07]  Dell, Mac, uh, put another.
[00:01:12]  Compact.
[00:01:13]  I'm in all these things.
[00:01:16]  Alienware.
[00:01:17]  Alienware.
[00:01:18]  From Liz suggested, Alienware, laptop, gaming lab.
[00:01:24]  I'm in your gaming laptop for when you go out to go on the road.
[00:01:27]  I'm in there and I see your files and zip drives and Dropboxes and external hard drives and things like that.
[00:01:36]  And even your USBs.
[00:01:39]  I have entered your Android, your iPhone, and the other Chinese one.
[00:01:45]  It's not how you say it, though, Huawei.
[00:01:48]  But you know what?
[00:01:49]  That's the message of this program, Huawei.
[00:01:52]  We are a Truanon.
[00:01:54]  We do not forgive.
[00:01:56]  We do not forget.
[00:01:57]  We are Legion.
[00:01:59]  Expectos.
[00:02:25]  Sorry, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:02:27]  We just had a strange buzzing noise that came from the, of course, the mainframe we record this through.

=== Improv in Indy Media Frustration (15:49) ===

[00:02:34]  And then that message, I'm too terrified to maybe take it off.
[00:02:37]  My name, not that.
[00:02:39]  My name, of course, is Brace Belden.
[00:02:42]  And I'm Guy Fox.
[00:02:44]  Uh-huh.
[00:02:45]  Guy Fawkes-Ari.
[00:02:46]  This is...
[00:02:48]  I was just gonna be like, this is Young Chomsky.
[00:02:51]  This is Young Chomsky.
[00:02:52]  Who is the producer of this show, which is called?
[00:02:55]  True or not.
[00:02:56]  Why are you?
[00:02:56]  This is why you fucked up because you're doing my role.
[00:02:59]  I know.
[00:02:59]  I'm the guy who does that.
[00:03:00]  No, I am the guy who does that.
[00:03:03]  I am the guy who does that.
[00:03:05]  I was going to try to do that.
[00:03:06]  I've never seen Broken Bad Bad Bad Bad Bros.
[00:03:07]  I am.
[00:03:08]  I'm the podcaster who knocks.
[00:03:10]  I've never seen Breaking Bad, but I love it when he says, I am the guy who does that.
[00:03:15]  I'm the guy who does that stuff.
[00:03:19]  You talk about guys who sell meth and who fucking kill dudes and have a little, well, it's really a PC word to describe what his little sidekick is there.
[00:03:31]  But who have a white boy who's into rap and emulates aspects of black culture?
[00:03:39]  That's me.
[00:03:40]  I am.
[00:03:41]  Wait, which is you?
[00:03:43]  You're the white boy who did it.
[00:03:44]  I'm confused.
[00:03:45]  I am the white boy.
[00:03:46]  And welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the white boy radio hour, as Liz tried to call the show, but we in fact call it true enough.
[00:03:55]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:55]  Hello, how are you doing?
[00:03:56]  There's the beat you like.
[00:03:57]  There's the beat we like.
[00:03:59]  We do like to do that.
[00:04:00]  We've gotten into a groove.
[00:04:02]  We have our little groove, and then sometimes we, you know, mix it up.
[00:04:05]  We flipped a script.
[00:04:06]  We flipped the script.
[00:04:07]  Sometimes, you know, we do a little improv.
[00:04:11]  Brace's favorite game that he learned at his classes at UCB.
[00:04:15]  Okay, well, don't say, I obviously had a really traumatic event happen to me at that.
[00:04:21]  When you say, Mom?
[00:04:23]  You don't know about the UCB scandal?
[00:04:25]  The UC Brace scandal.
[00:04:28]  No, no, no.
[00:04:30]  Actually, I don't know enough about improv to even make a joke about improv.
[00:04:34]  Didn't that whole thing say, aren't they always like and then or something?
[00:04:38]  Yes, and.
[00:04:38]  No.
[00:04:39]  I thought it was and then.
[00:04:40]  And then.
[00:04:41]  And then?
[00:04:42]  It's just you getting the person to say that.
[00:04:45]  And then in front of a crowd of 50 people, which was huge.
[00:04:48]  And everyone laughed.
[00:04:50]  Everyone laughed.
[00:04:51]  And everyone laughed.
[00:04:52]  You see Brace last night?
[00:04:53]  He was a disaster.
[00:04:55]  And of course, that's when I began cutting, which I will resume.
[00:05:01]  Well, you did a sharp inhalation of breath.
[00:05:03]  I've been cutting.
[00:05:04]  You've been cutting?
[00:05:05]  You're done cutting.
[00:05:06]  You're bulking now.
[00:05:08]  Well, if you ever want to lose five pounds of dead weight, young Chomsky, I suggest cutting off your head.
[00:05:14]  I was going to say, start slitting your wrist.
[00:05:16]  Whoa, Jesus Christ.
[00:05:18]  You was like, Liz, you.
[00:05:19]  We were doing the cutting punch.
[00:05:21]  That's too far, Liz.
[00:05:24]  Jesus Christ.
[00:05:28]  Dude, you know what he, you know.
[00:05:31]  You guys, we have been in this room.
[00:05:33]  For a long time.
[00:05:35]  It's been a long time.
[00:05:37]  A long time.
[00:05:38]  It is now 5 p.m.
[00:05:40]  We have been in here since, I'm going to say 1.
[00:05:42]  I got here at 1:30.
[00:05:44]  You came after me.
[00:05:45]  I did come after you.
[00:05:46]  But I said, we, as in a collective, of course, Liz usually takes her individualist approach no longer.
[00:05:53]  So you might be like, oh my God, please.
[00:05:55]  I can't believe they're talking about improv.
[00:05:57]  Can't be talking about improv on this show wrong.
[00:06:00]  We are kind of talking about improv because we're talking about spontaneity.
[00:06:04]  Wow.
[00:06:05]  That's a great transition.
[00:06:06]  Yes, we have on the show today, old friend, returning guest.
[00:06:11]  We love a returning guest, Vincent Bevins, who he was on the show previously, which apparently that was three years ago.
[00:06:19]  That's fucking crazy.
[00:06:20]  Dude, if I had a kid, he'd be in then.
[00:06:24]  Like if Vincent and I had a kid when we did that, that kid would be three.
[00:06:28]  Yeah.
[00:06:29]  By now.
[00:06:29]  That's how that works.
[00:06:31]  He has a new book out called If We Burn the Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.
[00:06:38]  And he is here to talk about it and sort of try to make sense of various protest movements that defined the past 10 years and how they all failed and why.
[00:06:50]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:51]  It's a good example.
[00:06:53]  In fact, I would say fantastic examination of the decade 2010 to 2020 and the tactics used by protesters, the protesters themselves, their aims, and what actually happened.
[00:07:07]  Yeah, from Brazil to Hong Kong to Ukraine to Tahir Square and back around again.
[00:07:15]  He goes all over the world kind of tracking these different protest movements, what they learn from each other, what they don't learn from each other, and everything in between.
[00:07:25]  I think we should get to it.
[00:07:39]  Hey, y'all.
[00:07:40]  Welcome to the first episode of our new sort of revamped episode.
[00:07:46]  Sorry, a little nervous getting up here in the talking circle.
[00:07:50]  Revamp podcast.
[00:07:51]  It is called, what was it called?
[00:07:55]  It's called Us Anon.
[00:07:56]  It's called Us Anon, the world's first horizontalist, totally anti-hierarchical podcast.
[00:08:03]  Everybody gets a voice.
[00:08:04]  Everything is based on consensus.
[00:08:06]  Today, we have with us here in the, well, we used to call it a studio, but studio kind of has the letter U in it.
[00:08:13]  So we're just calling it the USEO, which also has a letter U in it, but it's sort of a different context.
[00:08:18]  And I think it's a different U.
[00:08:19]  It's more of a like a flat U.
[00:08:21]  It's a flat U, exactly, sort of a horizontal you, you might say.
[00:08:24]  And we're going to add the umlaut, which everyone knows feels international.
[00:08:29]  It feels international.
[00:08:30]  And it represents the two.
[00:08:31]  It represents the yin and the yang, which is what we're all about.
[00:08:35]  But we're about the like the meeting of the yin and yang, which makes it complete and whole and universal for all.
[00:08:42]  That's a you with an umlaut.
[00:08:44]  An umlaut.
[00:08:45]  With us here in the USEO, we have author of the Jakarta method and his new book, If We Burn, the Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, Vincent Bevins.
[00:09:00]  Vincent, welcome to the show.
[00:09:02]  Yeah, thank you.
[00:09:03]  Thank you very much for having me back.
[00:09:05]  I actually object to Vincent speaking right now, so I'm going to hold this podcast.
[00:09:09]  Vince, we have to establish full consensus that I'm allowed to start with my participation.
[00:09:15]  Okay.
[00:09:15]  Good?
[00:09:16]  Good.
[00:09:16]  Yeah.
[00:09:17]  Thank you very much for having me back, Trillium.
[00:09:19]  I'm glad.
[00:09:20]  We're so excited to have you on.
[00:09:21]  We had you on the show.
[00:09:22]  We were just talking about it.
[00:09:23]  When was it, 2020?
[00:09:24]  Three years ago, 2020.
[00:09:26]  That's crazy when you say that, Alex.
[00:09:28]  The pandemic, I was stuck in downtown Sao Paulo, which was going through a very, very difficult time for reasons we might even talk about now.
[00:09:36]  And then, you know, the United States was going through a tough, a special moment too.
[00:09:41]  But yeah, three years ago.
[00:09:42]  It was, and it was a tough moment in the United States, but we had the revolution.
[00:09:46]  And, you know, right now, we would say.
[00:09:49]  Comrade Biden is in the White House.
[00:09:51]  Comrade Biden's in the White House.
[00:09:52]  I'm glad to say that we live in probably the first anti-racist country in human history.
[00:09:57]  And I mean, it must be weird for you to come back, but welcome back to the States.
[00:10:02]  Vincent, what is this book about?
[00:10:08]  So it is, yeah, it is a work of history.
[00:10:12]  It does actually seek to try to tell the story of what happens in the entire 2010s in the entire world, actually.
[00:10:19]  But that's, of course, not possible.
[00:10:21]  You have to, in any work of history, sort of pick what the focus is, pick what you're going to select and what you're going to exclude, sort of guiding questions.
[00:10:29]  And this story is told as if the most important thing that happened in that decade is mass explosions of protests that fundamentally alter the trajectory of certain countries and indeed the whole planet.
[00:10:42]  I think, you know, that works as much as anything else as a way to guide the history of the 2010s.
[00:10:49]  And then the question that organizes the history, although I don't try to answer it exactly directly, is how is it that so many mass protests led to the opposite of what they asked for?
[00:11:00]  Yeah, you have a quote in the book.
[00:11:02]  So Praise asked that question, but we both read the book.
[00:11:04]  We did.
[00:11:05]  And it is fantastic.
[00:11:07]  I think that a lot of our listeners are really going to really, really enjoy reading it.
[00:11:11]  You have a quote in the book, the mystery is not only why this package of contention didn't work, but why we thought that it would, which I think is like a great framing.
[00:11:20]  And, you know, you start, I appreciate the fact that you start the book and you say basically like, I'm not going to talk about the U.S., which is refreshing.
[00:11:30]  As Americans, it's refreshing.
[00:11:33]  And it seems like, if I may, that a lot of this book was born out of your own frustration with what you experienced in Brazil in 2013.
[00:11:43]  And kind of watching all of that unfold.
[00:11:45]  And then, as you say, like why the sort of opposite of what maybe a lot of the people who were taking to the streets, well, we'll talk about that.
[00:11:55]  Why the opposite sort of occurred as history unfolded.
[00:11:59]  So maybe we can start.
[00:12:01]  there and maybe we can just talk about what did happen in Brazil in 2013.
[00:12:06]  Yeah, so you're absolutely right.
[00:12:07]  I haven't lived in the U.S. since 2006.
[00:12:09]  I don't know it that well compared to a lot of people that could write books about what's happened here recently.
[00:12:14]  And the way that I look at these particulars, particular type of protest explosion, the criterion that I, of course, made up myself, none of, you know, most of the countries that count are in the global south or at least outside the traditional First World.
[00:12:26]  And you're absolutely right that my deep concern for this topic is personal, like it is for almost everybody that I know that lived through June 2013 in Brazil.
[00:12:38]  Especially people like me that were there early enough to see the very strange direction that it took, to remember what the first protests actually looked like, and not only have the sort of historical memory that has also almost become sort of hegemonic of what they became.
[00:12:54]  So to summarize really quickly, in June 2013, a group called the Movimento Pasilivre, which is a group that was dedicated to full horizontalist practice, and also wanted to fully decommodify public transportation in Brazil.
[00:13:07]  So in the long term, they wanted all bus and metro rides to be free for everyone.
[00:13:12]  And they were founded back in 2005.
[00:13:15]  They really grew out of the sort of, well, they grew out of Indy Media Brazil, if you remember, like that website.
[00:13:19]  Yeah, I do remember Indy Media.
[00:13:21]  Yes, I remember Indy Media.
[00:13:22]  I definitely came up reading Indy Media.
[00:13:24]  And they had always, since 2005, anytime there was a rise in the price of a bus fare, they had organized protests, like direct-to-action, sort of prefigurative protests that would either stop people from paying for public transportation or enter into conflict with the police sort of inevitably.
[00:13:45]  They always did this.
[00:13:45]  Since 2005, they always did this whenever there was a bus fare hike.
[00:13:49]  In 2013, what happens, specifically on June 13th, 2013, they do this so many times that the mainstream Brazilian media and sort of the dominant voices in the country demand a crackdown on this movement.
[00:14:04]  But the police crack down so forcefully that people like me get hit.
[00:14:09]  They crack down so forcefully that members of the sort of respectable mainstream Brazilian media that is like owned by oligarchs and I think coincidentally is not part of the class.
[00:14:18]  Like these reporters are almost definitionally not part of the class that usually is repressed by the Brazilian military police or else they would have seen what was going to come when you call for this type of crackdown.
[00:14:28]  The crackdown that comes is so horrifying and creates so many viral images of like young, white, respectable Brazilian journalists getting attacked and getting really injured that the media flips their narrative entirely.
[00:14:45]  And they go from saying we need to clear the streets of these punks and these anarchists to this is a glorious patriotic uprising in defense of the right to rise up in general.
[00:14:55]  We are affirming our right to freedom of speech and self-expression.
[00:14:59]  And as the Brazilian media flips and sort of tells the country what it's now about, huge amounts of new people enter into the streets.
[00:15:08]  Long story short, some of these people are now, would now be very easily recognized as sort of proto-Bolsonaristas.
[00:15:15]  They're like the beginning of what comes together as an extreme right movement in Brazil.
[00:15:18]  Different parts of the Brazilian middle class get involved.
[00:15:22]  You get sort of beefy white guys that are anti-political coming in with a very different idea of what the protest is than the original punks and anarchists.
[00:15:31]  The original punks and anarchists try to explain to them like, oh, hey, actually, this is how we're supposed to do it.
[00:15:35]  You're not supposed to show up and wave a flag and just make it about whatever vague nationalism that's very dangerous that can even lead to fascism.
[00:15:42]  The new arrivals are not only entirely unprepared to listen to a lecture for some skinny punks that are like, you know, on the left.
[00:15:52]  Like, actually, you don't have time.
[00:15:54]  You can't speak right.
[00:15:55]  You have to wait until the mic is passed to you.
[00:15:57]  Yeah, we're here.
[00:15:58]  Our views are valid.
[00:15:59]  Which is like ironically what happens to the sort of horizontal group.
[00:16:03]  So many people enter, and they are sort of ideologically committed to not really speaking for anyone or taking leadership in any way that they have a hard time inserting some sort of centrality in the protest.
[00:16:13]  But long story short, just seven, ten days after this first protest that I map, that the crackdown comes, what I would call the proto-Bolsonaristas violently expel from the streets the initial sort of left-wing parties and punks and a lot of the kids that had formed the thing.
[00:16:32]  Yeah, yeah, well they physically throw them out of the street and they're sort of dejected and they all decide what to do with that and they go home.
[00:16:39]  But the movement that is reproduced to the country by the major media is very different than what a small group of us remember.
[00:16:48]  And this initial moment of euphoria, there was like this first moment when everybody's coming.
[00:16:53]  And I think I was guilty of this.
[00:16:55]  A lot of my friends were guilty of it too.
[00:16:56]  We interpret it as like, oh, it's happening.
[00:16:58]  Like there's, I mean, I shouldn't have felt this way because it was.
[00:17:00]  It was like millions of people.
[00:17:01]  Yeah.
[00:17:02]  I mean, it was like one of the biggest protests in the world.
[00:17:06]  I mean, like, it was massive.
[00:17:07]  Yeah, it went to two million people very, very quickly, and it was totally unexpected.
[00:17:11]  And so sort of understandably, the people that were at the beginning thought themselves broadly sympathetic to the goals of a better welfare state, better public services.
[00:17:18]  They thought, well, this is happening.
[00:17:20]  This is what we've always wanted.
[00:17:21]  And later, one of the members of the, I'm summarizing, I'm paraphrasing one of the articles written eventually by one of the members of the Mobimeta Pasi Livre.
[00:17:30]  He says something like, for eight years, all we tried to do was create a popular uprising.
[00:17:37]  And then we did, and it was awful.
[00:17:40]  Yeah.
[00:17:40]  Because different people came than they expected for different reasons than they expected.
[00:17:43]  And the whole thing just sort of blew up into this sort of, yeah, this sort of profoundly confounding mix of things that me and other, a lot of other people spent the next years, 10 years trying to figure out.
[00:17:56]  And yeah, this is sort of it, you're right.
[00:17:57]  This is at the core of why I came back to the summit so often.
[00:18:02]  Yeah, this story kind of serves as the backbone to the book, it seems.
[00:18:06]  And you kind of come back to it at different stages as you're sort of visiting other cities throughout the world that are kind of other sort of test cases for what you're trying to unpack, as we like to say in the SEO.

=== Unexpected Allies (09:27) ===

[00:18:23]  You mentioned the Bolsonaristas.
[00:18:25]  I'll say it's, I mean, the other part of that was a lot of the kind of like liberal middle class that showed up in with all good intentions, most likely.
[00:18:34]  But what that kind of, as that unfolds, it's sort of the seeds for what will become Dilma's impeachment.
[00:18:42]  And so you see these sort of two poles of kind of as we're watching history unfold over this decade of the, you know, the kind of middle class fascists of the Bolsonaristas and the sort of like anti-corruption Dilma, you know, good liberal, you know, pro-impeachment good liberals all sort of unfolding at this protest.
[00:19:06]  It's kind of, I don't know, it's like a little incubator or something for what will become the next decade of Brazilian politics.
[00:19:14]  And as I was reading it, it just, you know, I don't want to spend too much time on Brazil because there's so many other fascinating movements for us to kind of break down here.
[00:19:24]  But the kind of contradiction within the coalition that PT was trying to hold together, this sort of like the working class people and the middle class, that that coalition was just going to be untenable.
[00:19:38]  And it was always going to kind of fall apart into something that we see today.
[00:19:44]  Well, the carpet that is sort of pulled underneath that coalition, which proved remarkably successful and sustainable for quite a long time.
[00:19:53]  I mean, Lula's second term, he ends with like 88% approval rating before June 2013.
[00:19:58]  Dilma is incredibly popular.
[00:20:01]  But the thing that turns out not to be sustainable, and if you look back, it probably never was, is that the way that these people were brought together, and especially the way that the previously very marginalized working classes were brought into a sort of sense of citizenship, a sort of Full membership in the Brazilian nation was through consumer power.
[00:20:24]  Absolutely.
[00:20:25]  So it was sort of, you know, there's a nice, nice, there's a brilliant Brazilian scholar, Rosanna Piero Marciado, who calls this inclusion through consumption.
[00:20:36]  And when the second Dilma government falters, when the economy starts to crack, when this consumption power is taken away from the lower middle class, sort of the classic, you know, the classic subject of historical fascism, like the petty bourgeoisie, they no longer feel any loyalty to the party that has made their ascension possible in the first place.
[00:20:58]  It's being pulled away from them.
[00:21:00]  They become sort of often like micro-entrepreneurs that are very allied with reactionary forces in the country.
[00:21:07]  And in this moment, when Dilma's second term starts to falter, not only because of reaction, I mean, the economy gets worse.
[00:21:15]  This is, you know, it probably was inevitably going to happen.
[00:21:16]  There's some mistakes that are made in the Workers' Party.
[00:21:19]  Forces that are born, forces that learn in June 2013, that they're also allowed to pro they can also use this kind of the popular sympathy with whatever happened in June 2013.
[00:21:32]  Very cynical but well-organized, free market, libertarian, often funded by the United States.
[00:21:40]  I think thanks from the United States, one of the major characters who I interviewed had trained under the Cook brothers here in the U.S.
[00:21:47]  They realized Atlas Network.
[00:21:49]  We've talked about them on a show recently.
[00:21:51]  Yeah, so Movimento, so I explained at the very beginning, this original group of left anarchists is called Movimento Pasilivri, MPL.
[00:22:00]  This group of, which was at the time Estudanci Pella Liberdades, is like Students for Liberty, which was like the Brazilian franchise of the U.S. Students for Liberty, which is part of the, like, which is funded by the Atlas Network.
[00:22:13]  Liz and I met in uni, we call it, but we met through that.
[00:22:17]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:22:18]  Like, they have, yeah, they have like fun conferences all around the world.
[00:22:21]  They do like do like effective sort of like social transfer of like knowledge and things.
[00:22:26]  Yeah.
[00:22:26]  Thus, you trained with Moro there.
[00:22:29]  Beautiful.
[00:22:29]  Morrow wind.
[00:22:31]  And they, they, in, within this, like, cauldron, I think, would you say the incubator, like, you know, pressure cooker of June 2013, they decide to make a bid to re-signify the meaning of the streets.
[00:22:42]  And so they form a group called Movimento Brasilivri, MBL.
[00:22:45]  So this is smart.
[00:22:46]  They basically see this successful group called MPL.
[00:22:49]  It's getting all this attention.
[00:22:50]  So they start MBL.
[00:22:51]  Which sounds exactly the same in Portuguese.
[00:22:53]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:53]  To the point where when I was over the last two years telling people in Brazil, I'm interviewing all kinds of people.
[00:22:58]  I'm interviewing Hadad, now the finance minister who was mayor of São Paul at the time.
[00:23:01]  I'm interviewing the MPL.
[00:23:03]  Everyone would just be like, oh, the MBL.
[00:23:05]  Their brand is now so much stronger than the group that they copied that they actually won this bid to re-signify the streets.
[00:23:12]  So when consumption is taken away, when this sort of like, I don't want to call it neoliberal, but the way that the PT Economic model that had been formulated.
[00:23:22]  The assumption social democrat.
[00:23:23]  I mean, it was like a way for getting poor people's lives better, but it was through this sort of, there was a limitation there.
[00:23:30]  Especially when the economy slows down a bit.
[00:23:34]  It was built on getting, you know, everybody got better off, including the poor, but the rich got quite better off too when this all fell apart.
[00:23:41]  But then they had to suddenly share all their services with poor people.
[00:23:43]  Well, this was a huge problem, too.
[00:23:45]  People were furious in the Brazilian elite that they had to pay more to their maids in the peak years of Lulista economic success.
[00:23:55]  This is a big quote-unquote crisis for a lot of people.
[00:23:57]  But yeah, just to get back to what actually happens when this rug is pulled out, this MBL and the liberal middle class and indeed reactionary forces that at the very beginning, they're only sort of the people that you can ignore them if you want.
[00:24:11]  Some of the good liberals tell themselves that they don't really matter.
[00:24:15]  Get together to soccer fans.
[00:24:17]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:17]  Well, the soccer fans go in every direction in Brazil.
[00:24:20]  Ironically, a lot of the scariest ultras in Brazil are pro-Lula and pro-democracy, like the Corinthians ultras are in a real condition of street battles that they would probably win.
[00:24:33]  They're like pro.
[00:24:34]  They're on the left probably.
[00:24:36]  Well, they're definitely like pro-democracy.
[00:24:38]  But then they come together from 2015, 2016, sort of pretending to be the same thing as happened on the street in June 2013.
[00:24:47]  But they have an entirely different set of goals, and they're not horizontalist, they're not leaderless.
[00:24:51]  They're willing to work with elites and they're willing to take power in any way that they can.
[00:24:54]  And they ultimately did a lot of these MBL kids enter Congress in the same election in which Bolsonaro becomes president.
[00:25:02]  Yeah, you have a funny first little nod to Bolsonaro is when you say, oh, I'm at Congress.
[00:25:07]  There's all this chaos.
[00:25:08]  It's during Dilma's impeachment.
[00:25:10]  And you're like, I got a quote from this guy from Bolsonaro, but he's this fringe character.
[00:25:16]  I don't need to put it in my story.
[00:25:17]  It's not going to work.
[00:25:18]  And then suddenly, I mean, that was one of Bolsonaro's big defining moments when he says those awful things about her.
[00:25:27]  And, you know, kind of the stage is set for his bid, which is, of course, in the works for a very long time.
[00:25:36]  But the country takes a total right, I mean, total, total turn.
[00:25:41]  And like you say, these members from MBL who are very organized, who are very well financed, who are very, like you say, not leaderless, but they're suddenly in power and ready to move.
[00:25:53]  It's a bit disorienting, no?
[00:25:55]  I mean, yeah.
[00:25:56]  Yes.
[00:25:57]  Yeah, no, the years of 2014, like, everyone remembers, the years of 2014 to 2018 were wildly disorienting in Brazil.
[00:26:04]  Because going back and interviewing some of the members of MPL, in 2014, when Dilma faces off against the center-right presidential candidate, they're horrified that the center-right might actually win.
[00:26:16]  Like for the first time in there, you know, they're often there like 20, 22.
[00:26:19]  They're like the idea that, oh my God, the right, quote unquote, which is like, this is not the right compared to what actually comes into power in 2018.
[00:26:26]  Yeah, it's like a center-right.
[00:26:27]  Yeah, it's a party.
[00:26:28]  It's called the Social Democratic Party.
[00:26:29]  It's like, you know, it's like founded by Fernando Hiki Cardos, which he definitely neoliberalizes the economy, but he comes from a tradition.
[00:26:36]  He's a dependency theorist, you know?
[00:26:38]  Like a classic, but like, yeah, yeah.
[00:26:40]  Your classic South American center-right, like, yeah, I fought the dictatorship.
[00:26:44]  I think that we need to privatize everything.
[00:26:45]  This kind of guy.
[00:26:47]  And that even to them was like, they could not believe it.
[00:26:50]  And then when the impeachment started, no one could believe that that actually might actually go through.
[00:26:54]  And then they actually impeached her.
[00:26:55]  And then Michel Temer was actually the president for two years, and he had like 6% approval ratings, but it just didn't matter.
[00:27:00]  Like, there was demonstrably no, yeah, there was just demonstrably no support or legitimacy for this guy, and it just didn't matter.
[00:27:08]  Like, there's no referee that came in and was like, well, that's, you know, that's, they violated the rules there.
[00:27:12]  And then it just, and then Bolsonaro just went, and like, just there's this like, like, thing after thing just keep, like, I don't know, there's like, I don't even know if I want to even try to explain what the phrase is, but like there's a, like in Portuguese, they say, like, the well just like kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper.
[00:27:25]  You thought you were at the bottom.
[00:27:26]  It just kept, you just kept going.
[00:27:28]  Yeah, so yes, absolutely.
[00:27:29]  It's a long way of saying, absolutely, it was profoundly disorienting until the point when I was last on the show with you guys, like 2020 and the pandemic was insane.
[00:27:38]  It was like what Sao Paulo went through under Bolsonaro's governance in that pandemic was like literally unimaginable to the version of myself that moved into that neighborhood eight years prior.

=== Flattening Protests: Social Media Reflections (15:02) ===

[00:27:51]  It would have been impossible for me to conceive what ultimately happens.
[00:27:55]  So it's at this point, I mean, that you start going elsewhere throughout the world to try to kind of piece together what happened both in Sao Paulo, but also what was happening elsewhere and why everything was failing.
[00:28:07]  So where do you go first?
[00:28:09]  Well, like, personally, I moved to Indonesia after finally wrapping up my posting in Brazil in 2016.
[00:28:17]  And then, lo and behold, it's like one of these many things that popped up all over the decade.
[00:28:21]  There is like a, what appears to be a grassroots, like digitally coordinated people power protest.
[00:28:27]  But really, it's just Islamists demanding that the Chinese governor be imprisoned for being Chinese, basically.
[00:28:32]  Like, they accuse him of doing, of committing blasphemy, which he didn't, because someone had manipulated a Facebook clip.
[00:28:39]  And they all get together, they all wear white, they all swarm, they all swarm the center of downtown Jakarta.
[00:28:43]  And by this point in the decade, there's like a real flip because back in 2010 or 11 or 12 at the very beginning, which is where I ultimately go to start the reporting for this book, everyone sort of assumed that when the people swarm the streets and the internet is involved, that's automatically a good thing.
[00:28:59]  That's a good thing.
[00:28:59]  Yeah, necessarily, like necessarily, if the internet's involved and the people are on the streets, that's like history.
[00:29:06]  That's like Napoleon on the horse, like moving us forward towards the promised land of democracy, freedom, or whatever it is that you believe is going to come next.
[00:29:13]  But by the end of the 2020, indeed, by like, you know, after like January 6th and January 8th, we'd think probably the exact opposite.
[00:29:19]  If there's a swarm of people that see a viral post and then, you know, rush to on the Capitol for some reason.
[00:29:26]  So yeah, eventually when I start working on this book full time in 2019, I go back to where it kind of starts, which is Tunisia.
[00:29:32]  Yeah, I mean, you cover a number of different, I think, pretty notable protest movements that happened throughout the last decade, starting Tunisia, but also with Turkey, Egypt, South Korea, Hong Kong.
[00:29:47]  But I think starting with Tunisia is important because that was the beginning of the so-called era.
[00:29:54]  I love calling it the so-called Arab Springs.
[00:29:56]  Yeah, I never say Arab Springs straight up in my own voice.
[00:29:58]  You have to say so-called.
[00:29:59]  I say so-called.
[00:29:59]  You have to say so-called because that is a lot of Arab people that I interview get really mad at me if you just.
[00:30:04]  Yeah, it's a Western, it's a Western appellation or whatever, whatever you would call it.
[00:30:09]  It's a Western name for it.
[00:30:11]  But I think that is, I mean, we made this point on the show before, and I feel like a lot of listeners probably know this by now, but like that sort of promise of like digital revolutions, like this connectivity that the internet was bringing us and this, you know, this proliferation of images, you know, just transmitted from person to person, was going to bring a progressive change.
[00:30:35]  Just like that was that moment, right?
[00:30:38]  That and like the protests in Iran around this.
[00:30:43]  Yeah, 2008 was like the real beginning.
[00:30:45]  That was the first time all my friends put a square of a certain color on their Facebook page.
[00:30:48]  Yes, but not the last.
[00:30:50]  I feel like 2020 unfortunately killed that, but hopefully like another, when things cycle back, like in another eight years.
[00:30:56]  It'll be when we all have our little avatars.
[00:30:57]  We'll all have to do something.
[00:30:59]  We'll all want to kiss makeup.
[00:31:01]  Exactly.
[00:31:03]  So one thing that becomes pretty apparent with the Tunisia stuff is like the promise of the digital revolution, right?
[00:31:09]  Like you get, you know, you have this very viral incident of the, I think he's a fruit or vegetable seller burning himself or self-immolating.
[00:31:20]  And then, you know, that bringing a lot of people out onto the streets in this sort of like, in many ways, like a leaderless sort of just like mass protest movement.
[00:31:30]  In the case of Tunisia, you do point out that there is a Hojaist party, which I've always, that's been one of my little factoids, that I know that there's a fairly sizable Hoxhaist party in Tunisia.
[00:31:39]  They are not.
[00:31:39]  I mean, they're not huge, but they were involved at the very beginning.
[00:31:43]  The Workers' Party is probably one of many, many things that without which the Tunisian Revolution would not have gotten over the line from a regional rebellion in Citibouzi to something in the capital.
[00:31:53]  And I spent a bunch of time with these, this part of the Hoxhaist Tunisian Workers' Party.
[00:32:01]  They were a big part of it.
[00:32:02]  The fact that there was a big Tunisian labor union was a part of it.
[00:32:08]  But as you point out, the story that gets told, especially around the world, is more about Facebook, like media.
[00:32:15]  Whereas really, if you go and look, all these people had been organized and fighting and trying to form networks of people in the interior of brutally neoliberalized Tunisia for a long time.
[00:32:25]  But the thing that really becomes important, especially in the pages of the New York Times around CNN, is the existence of Facebook coordination and the internet.
[00:32:35]  And that becomes the actual of all the Arab Spring stuff, especially, I guess, the early Arab Spring stuff, that becomes sort of the story in the Western media.
[00:32:44]  It's like, yeah, they have these local demands and they're wonderful.
[00:32:47]  We'd support them, whatever, or we support the ones that we report about.
[00:32:51]  But really, we're actually just entering this beautiful new progressive age of the internet, which is so funny because that is such the opposite of really kind of the good liberal tack now, which is that Facebook especially, but social media in general is just like, it's only for misinformation.
[00:33:09]  But at the time, it was the new progressive tool.
[00:33:13]  And I think you mentioned, I can't remember who wrote this, some columnist being like, we don't need, you know, it's no bullets anymore.
[00:33:19]  It's like, we're firing off posts and stuff like that.
[00:33:22]  Yeah, like the Chegevar of the 21st century is the network.
[00:33:25]  Yes, yes.
[00:33:26]  Which is, it's just so funny in retrospect, isn't it?
[00:33:29]  Like, it's just.
[00:33:30]  That's the exact opposite.
[00:33:31]  Yeah, the idea was that the internet was going to Americanize the world.
[00:33:33]  And then especially after 2016, the narrative is that the internet is the vehicle through which bad other countries are conquering America, whether it be Russia or China or, yeah.
[00:33:43]  But it is funny because the internet did really Americanize the world.
[00:33:46]  I think it did.
[00:33:47]  Yeah.
[00:33:48]  And something that you take pains to point out in this book is that it really sort of almost homogenized in many ways, or at least drew a lot of these different protests happening in wildly different parts of the world drew inspiration in terms of tactics and messaging from other protests that were happening across the world too.
[00:34:06]  And so what were some similarities that you noticed between all of these different demands, different people, different places, but like similar sort of, I guess you would say, vibes.
[00:34:17]  What are the similarities you notice between a lot of these movements?
[00:34:19]  Yeah, so with the internet, especially social media, I think you did see a kind of a flattening of space and time, which in some ways could allow for this really cool, like very inspiring transfer of solidarity from one country to another, like contagion of revolutionary Elan of spirit.
[00:34:34]  And that's, I think, like entirely positive.
[00:34:39]  But like the type of protest that I choose to describe in this book, I think we have kind of already sketched it out, but it tends to be apparently spontaneous, digitally coordinated, horizontally organized, leaderless, mass protests in a public square or in public space.
[00:34:56]  And this is very far from the only type of the only way that you can respond to government injustice or that you can push for change in a given society.
[00:35:03]  But this became quite hegemonic, indeed perhaps seeming as if it's the only natural way to act in the 2010s.
[00:35:09]  And this really happens after Tahrir Square.
[00:35:12]  So Tunisia, while in Tunisia, you kind of, if you are paying attention, if you actually know a little bit about Tunisia, and again, a lot of people that showed up from whatever, like, you know, NBC News did not, you could identify, okay, that's that party, that's that union, that's that Maoist mid-level tendency in that union, which was quite important to flipping them in the final instance.
[00:35:31]  That's the professional society, that's the lawyers' organization.
[00:35:34]  Whereas in Egypt, what you had was when the protests, which again were organized by very dedicated and hardworking activists, some on the radical left, some who really believed in building a party and believed in building a working class power, they did not plan for them to explode as big as they did.
[00:35:53]  So they ended up being able in a strange position where after the first protest on January 25th, way more people come than they expect.
[00:36:01]  On January 28th, the police like lose control of the city.
[00:36:06]  They like flee.
[00:36:07]  And they're in a position to do basically whatever they want at that point.
[00:36:10]  But what they do is they take Tahir Square, because in these moments of revolutionary possibility, you tend to do what you know and that's what they knew.
[00:36:16]  A lot of people that I spoke to said, well, I wish we would have done this.
[00:36:19]  I wish we would have taken over the television station and set up a revolutionary cat.
[00:36:24]  This is also my advice.
[00:36:26]  You always want to get communications.
[00:36:27]  You want things to block the highways out of the city.
[00:36:30]  No one in or out.
[00:36:32]  Inferior.
[00:36:33]  Of course.
[00:36:33]  Yeah.
[00:36:34]  In armories.
[00:36:35]  Yeah.
[00:36:35]  So there's things they could have done.
[00:36:36]  But what they do is they take the square.
[00:36:39]  And in this square, there is kind of this apparent leaderlessness is kind of, you know, it is fundamental to the configuration of what's going on in the square.
[00:36:50]  You can't really say who's doing it exactly.
[00:36:53]  I mean, if you look closely, the Muslim Brotherhood is probably the most organized group in there, but there's all kinds of people.
[00:36:57]  And then this is the dynamic that really becomes important that you just described.
[00:37:01]  Like a lot of the people that I spoke to that had been working behind the scenes, like taking huge risks for a very long time, like watched in horror as like a viral post or someone that's good at Twitter or someone that gets selected by the Western media become the de facto spokespeople for something which is supposed to be everyone in the square.
[00:37:22]  And this like scene, which is like undeniably inspiring, like if you rewatch like all these, you know, like the footage and the films, even if you have this like, you know, critical view that I come to the book with, it's like, oh yeah, that is, you know, that, you could see how that scene broadcast to the whole world of every kind of Egyptian coming together in the square to call for the overthrow of a dictator.
[00:37:43]  Like lesbians and communists and Islamists and like Salafists, everybody's coming together and like breaking bread together.
[00:37:51]  That really inspires quite a lot of other movements around the world.
[00:37:55]  And whether or not they're directly inspired, because like Occupy Wise Wall Street is directly inspired.
[00:38:00]  The umbrella movement is a copy of Occupy Walk Austria, which is directly inspired.
[00:38:04]  Or in the case of Brazil and Turkey, for example, or even I think Ukraine to some extent in 2013, even if they weren't, even if they drew on local traditions of contention, they tend to be viewed by the media, which matters so much to the ultimate outcome of the protests, as the same kind of deal.
[00:38:22]  But like, doing the same kind of deal that you would do to overthrow a dictator in Egypt, where quite a lot of the people were for that, really brings up a lot of strange questions when confronted with a democracy, even if it's an imperfect democracy like Ukraine, or if it's a democracy like Brazil, where like actually, really, Dilma wanted as much as anyone on the streets to keep the price of a bus down.
[00:38:45]  She actually had pushed to keep that down herself.
[00:38:47]  And so the degree to which social media flattens our perception of space and time allows for a transfer of solidarity, but also like the adoption of stuff that looks really, really cool on TV and is represented to the world in a certain way by people like me who should not have been in a position to be interpreting anything for anyone.
[00:39:07]  We did not know, we did not have the sort of intellectual or material resources to be doing that.
[00:39:14]  We had no business, and we failed very often in doing that.
[00:39:18]  And I think all of that has a lot of consequence for the rest of the way the rest of the decade unfolds.
[00:39:23]  I think the flattening you mentioned in terms of social media is really important to this because so many of these protests almost seem like a real life reflection of the sort of promise of social media, right?
[00:39:35]  This kind of like this democratization, this direct democracy, which is, don't get me started on that, but one of my most hated little trends that gets brought up very often.
[00:39:48]  But this horizontalism, this like flattening, this democratization that comes from social media is like reflected in these like large leaderless movements.
[00:39:57]  And that's seen in itself as like a progressive thing, right?
[00:40:01]  Whatever the aims of the movement are, the fact that a lot of people of different beliefs are getting together in a central area without any clear direction or leader is itself seen as a progressive thing by the media that is reporting on it, right?
[00:40:15]  And I'm pointing at you, but that's just because I'm making a point.
[00:40:17]  I'm not.
[00:40:17]  I'm one of them.
[00:40:18]  I was one of them.
[00:40:19]  I absolutely am.
[00:40:20]  I am that.
[00:40:21]  That's another part.
[00:40:22]  I mean, go back to what Liz's first question.
[00:40:24]  That's another reason I put myself in this book is because I think that I was in a position to know enough about how news is produced to be very critical of the way that my class, like foreign correspondents, act in these very important moments.
[00:40:36]  Well, that's really what I wanted to ask, because something that you bring up several times in the book is that if your movement does not have its, like, does not select its own leaders, does not select its own representation, its own spokesman, then the media will do that for you.
[00:40:52]  Someone will, yeah.
[00:40:53]  Someone will do that for you.
[00:40:54]  Yeah, someone will do that for you.
[00:40:55]  Often the media, often the state depends on who's the most powerful, who has the biggest microphone in that.
[00:41:01]  A lot of times those are one and the same thing.
[00:41:03]  Yeah.
[00:41:04]  I mean, tell us, like, can you, can you give us some examples of like what we're talking about here, right?
[00:41:08]  Because throughout the book, several times, you do point out like the media selects these spokesmen or the state will select people to meet with.
[00:41:15]  Why is that?
[00:41:16]  Like, why is that important?
[00:41:17]  Why does it matter that that is the thing that's happening?
[00:41:19]  Yeah, there's a really famous essay that indeed these Brazilians pointed me to years ago, but everyone sort of cites it.
[00:41:24]  It's called The Tyranny of Structurelessness Back in the 70s.
[00:41:27]  Heavily recommend anybody involved.
[00:41:30]  It's like two pages.
[00:41:31]  It's great.
[00:41:31]  It's really good.
[00:41:32]  It's zippy.
[00:41:33]  It's good.
[00:41:33]  And the basic contention is something that she lived through in the, I think it was like that would have been called the women's liberation movement as a feminist activist in the U.S. Is that when you insist that there is no structure, when you insist that there's no leaders, no matter how good your intentions are, if the group's big enough, some leader or structure will emerge.
[00:41:52]  But often that leader or structure has not been selected in a self-conscious or democratic way.
[00:41:57]  Often it's just the person with the most social capital in a small group.
[00:42:00]  Or if it's a very big group, it might be the person with the most financial capital or with a really, really big situation, the people with all the guns and all the TV stations.
[00:42:10]  And so as you said, in some cases in this book, in Brazil, the MPI is horizontalist.
[00:42:15]  They really believe in full horizontality.
[00:42:20]  And in other cases, you just kind of get concrete horizontality, which is that, you know, even though many Egyptians would have loved to have an organized revolutionary party, just like it wasn't there because of the decimation of civil society under neoliberalism and Mubarak.
[00:42:34]  But to the extent that these things did exist, and this is like, you know, Jack Schenker, who was a guardian correspondent at the time, he talks about this in his book.
[00:42:41]  The prefigurative elements, the ones that seem most structuralist, seem most leaderless, are the ones that are perhaps least productive, but they're the ones that are the most likely to get you foreign, a positive foreign media coverage.

=== Prefigurative Elements (04:50) ===

[00:42:54]  Because if the people in the square, I mean, if you like, just like a thought experiment, if like the people, quote unquote, in the square are clearly united behind a revolutionary party of one type or another with clear goals, odds are that's going to be something different than what like the CNN wants them to have as a goal.
[00:43:09]  Because this is another slippage that happens all the time, is that the media outlets with the biggest microphones on the planet in the era of Americanized internet US global hegemony don't understand the properly third worldist aspirations of a lot of people on the streets.
[00:43:27]  If you ask people what they really, really wanted in Egypt, a lot of the time it would be like economic advancement, which would be more like, we want to live like the first world in the sense like we want to be as rich as you.
[00:43:39]  Whereas often CNN looks at this and they're like, no matter what is happening, it's just like, oh, they want democracy, which means they just want to ally with the United States.
[00:43:48]  Whereas what they want often is like, no, give us your money.
[00:43:50]  The global system is stacked against us.
[00:43:53]  We demand to be accepted into the rich, like we, like whatever promise that can ever be made to us to be allowed to enter the rich first world, that's what we want.
[00:44:01]  And then the other side of this strange, like, you know, this loop of representation and re-representation, the other side of it is like, oh yeah, they want to be on our side in whatever it is that we want, you know, whatever that means at the time.
[00:44:27]  Yeah, it's funny.
[00:44:28]  I was thinking about how a lot, you know, going through the, as you're sort of like breaking down and critiquing all these kind of various movements, that in each instance, they really show the sort of limitations of the historical moment in which they're produced.
[00:44:45]  And so much of that has to do with our early entry into social media, right?
[00:44:51]  And this new technology that I think we didn't, that we were very, I mean, I say we because I'm, you know, I don't want to, it's not, we're not accusing anyone here, but like that we, everyone was very excited about.
[00:45:05]  And it did feel like, oh, maybe this can be a tool for organizing.
[00:45:10]  This can be this neutral sort of space that as if technology can never be neutral or, you know, used in that way.
[00:45:18]  And instead, what we see is it kind of produce and reproduce that same, you know, I don't think it's a coincidence that the kind of networked horizontalism that the structure of the internet produced also produces the social movements that emerge out of it and receive the popularity from it.
[00:45:37]  Like there's a, you know, that's obviously, you know, there's a bit of a connection there.
[00:45:41]  Yeah, I think what I say at the end, slightly annoyingly, is that there's an elective affinity between pre-existing ideological currents that like draw on like libertarian or anarchist or new left tendencies.
[00:45:53]  There's an elective affinity between those pre-existing currents and the like material structure, the like built environment of the internet that we get.
[00:46:00]  And again, as you point out, it wasn't the only internet that was possible.
[00:46:05]  That tool could have been controlled and structured in many, many ways.
[00:46:09]  We got an internet that was structured by capitalist firms embedded in California ideology and California and U.S. in the political economy of the United States.
[00:46:21]  And at a moment of peak neoliberalism, who knows how things could have, what if the internet was invented in the 1930s and the Soviet Union and the United States both had different visions.
[00:46:32]  On the one hand, the Keynesian internet where they would have never, even on the U.S. side, would have never considered privatizing it in the way that they did automatically in the 90s and then Soviets doing, like, who knows what Chile would have cooked up if they had been able to continue experimenting as they were under Allende.
[00:46:50]  But yeah, you're absolutely right.
[00:46:51]  There was this, these things combined to to create this combination of yeah, what did you call at the very beginning this incubator that you got on the streets of June 2013 in Brazil?
[00:47:04]  And like the kinds of things that popped up in slightly different ways across the decade and the things that were often viewed in the same way even when they happened in profoundly different national circumstances.
[00:47:16]  And this, like again back to Brazilian, so this is like what I think about the most is like no one knew what to do, like literally knew.
[00:47:23]  No one knew what to do with what was happening.
[00:47:25]  Like the president didn't know what to do with what was happening.
[00:47:27]  The group that caused this mass explosion didn't know what to do with what was happening.
[00:47:30]  The mayor of some no one, just no one knew what, how to respond to this, this thing that it that had exploded, and everybody found their way, their way, their different paths out of it, and the right ultimately wins the battle to define uh, the future, you know, or at least the, the years that come.

=== Generalized Tendency To Organize (09:03) ===

[00:47:44]  Yeah, it's funny because it's almost like uh, there was a mirror between people, Doma and in power, wanting the same thing as the people on the streets, and yet both of them again in in sort of mirror image, not knowing what to do.
[00:47:56]  Yeah, it was a very bizarre situation.
[00:47:58]  I bring up the thing about the technology though, because I think that and and you don't do this in your book, which I think is good, but I do think there's a tendency, when you're sort of like looking back at these things, to be like oh, if you'd only done this yeah, then it would have turned out differently.
[00:48:12]  When it's just not that simple yeah, you have to reimagine an entirely different configuration of totally party force.
[00:48:18]  You have to imagine it or reimagine like the past 50 years, absolutely.
[00:48:22]  But I but saying that, I do think that you offer some very potent, we'll say, criticisms of the horizontalist approach and kind of breaking down why you know, as we're talking about here.
[00:48:38]  But I mean, you do really.
[00:48:39]  I mean at the beginning of the book you go back into like the new left right, where a lot of these ideas again from America really kind of get cooking in the 60s and then just don't stop cooking right until up until Seattle 99.
[00:48:54]  yeah i mean and you even go back further talk about lenin a little bit and kind of a more centralist approach and what he saw so maybe we can go a little bit in that direction maybe what some of those criticisms are the ones that come to learn at the very end of the book yeah absolutely i mean and i try not to i mean i try like the reason that i go try to go in chronological order is i really want to like show Where this comes from and why people decided to take the positions that they did, because it all makes a lot of sense at the time.
[00:49:21]  And I don't think anybody wants to hear from like me, Vincent Bevins, in 2023, being like, this is what the right wig, this is the logical problems with any given approach to a political organization.
[00:49:31]  We watch what happens over the whole decade.
[00:49:33]  And over that decade, hopefully we like, you know, hopefully if the book does what it's supposed to be, the reader sees what unfolds along with the actual participants.
[00:49:43]  And at the very end of the book, I try not to deliver again these final retrospective analyses in my own voice.
[00:49:50]  Like I try to find the most elegant.
[00:49:52]  Luckily, there's a lot of them.
[00:49:53]  They're very eloquent.
[00:49:54]  Yeah, I mean, they spent 10 years thinking about this stuff.
[00:49:57]  Absolutely.
[00:49:57]  From Egypt to Brazil to Ukraine, and you get overlapping themes.
[00:50:03]  To be wildly oversimplistic, you often see, if not a return to the historical Lenin.
[00:50:10]  Like some people come across, come away from this book just being like, read Lenin, read what is to be done.
[00:50:14]  Go back to the historical Lenin.
[00:50:15]  I think we've said that on our podcast.
[00:50:17]  It's really the simplest solution to this problem.
[00:50:21]  Some people, that's explicitly what they come back to.
[00:50:23]  Some people come back to something that I could call, again, maybe perhaps annoyingly, theoretically, like a kind of anti-anti-Leninism, which is like when in the 60s they just tried to reject every single thing that the Bolsheviks did because they didn't like the way the Soviet Union turned out, you end up throwing out a lot of things that work.
[00:50:40]  And if you just define yourself as the absolute inverse of what you thought the mistakes of the Soviet Union were, you're going to end up like really limiting yourself intellectually.
[00:50:48]  You have to, you know, as the MST says, and I spent a lot of the summer with them, and they like ironically, kind of, not ironically, because this was on purpose, sort of, I think, also provide an eloquent answer to the question of organization.
[00:51:02]  But that won't come out till later this year.
[00:51:03]  But what they say is you have to drink from many fountains.
[00:51:05]  Like, you can't just throw out, even if you are the particular type of new left actor that rejected this legacy of the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century, a lot of people from that long legacy told me by 2021, 2022, you just can't throw out.
[00:51:19]  You can't just do the exact opposite.
[00:51:21]  Some people end up in the same place.
[00:51:22]  Some people say, you know, like some of the people in the book remain committed to the ideals they had in 2010.
[00:51:27]  And hopefully, like, I reproduce also faithfully the way the reasons that they still do so.
[00:51:33]  But that is a that tendency was generalized, the tendency to say get as organized as you can before the thing happens.
[00:51:44]  Don't try to form something out of the viral post or the moment of heat that is going to get everyone on the streets.
[00:51:51]  Because I know, across a very, very set of different circumstances in the decade, a general rule for interpreting what happens is that the groups that are most organized and best at real collective action before the thing starts end up doing the best out of it.
[00:52:06]  And real collective action, historically, if you look at it, that often means some kind of decision-making process, that often means some kind of formal structure for deciding on what is to be done quickly.
[00:52:18]  It's very hard to get a group of people to reach consensus all at once about a change in tactics when situations change very quickly.
[00:52:26]  And also, when you are committed to this total horizontalism that everyone's equal, as the MPL was, they had no idea how to integrate.
[00:52:36]  And this is something that happened with SDS back in the 60s.
[00:52:39]  They did not know how to integrate huge amounts of people that actually came wanting to join their group.
[00:52:44]  There was a moment where they were riding really high, and people all across Brazil were really inspired by the MPL, and they said, we want to join the MPL.
[00:52:50]  We want to be in the MPL.
[00:52:51]  And so there's two options in that situation.
[00:52:54]  They could either create a two-tier system of the MPL, which like, no, that's Leninism.
[00:53:00]  That's a Leninist deviation.
[00:53:01]  can't do that.
[00:53:02]  If you were to create a one tier where there are people that, because they knew that their dedication was not something that everybody could.
[00:53:07]  It's not replicable.
[00:53:08]  Yeah.
[00:53:08]  Yeah, like regular people aren't going to go to 14-hour meetings every single day for six months.
[00:53:12]  But they thought if we formed like the central committee or the like, or you know, just like the Vanguard.
[00:53:19]  Yeah, or if we form like, you know, the organizing committee, which like the MST is totally fine with having, if we form like the organizing committee, but then like the regular members, like the rank and file trainees, that's Leninism.
[00:53:32]  Yeah.
[00:53:32]  But then if we let everybody in, then what is the MPL?
[00:53:35]  Because if you let in 1,000 people, then the original 40 people that have built this thing together for 40 to 80 people that have built this thing for the last eight years, they no longer have any say over what it is.
[00:53:47]  It just becomes, you know, the more people that join, it just becomes whatever Brazil is.
[00:53:53]  So yeah, I think that across the decade, and I could be repeating myself now, so feel free to remove it, is a generalized tendency to understand that representation of some kind in some kind of structure is probably inevitable.
[00:54:08]  So the task then is just to try to build the best organizations, build the best structures, build the best means for acting collectively and democratically that you can, given the complexity and very imperfect nature of global society right now.
[00:54:23]  One thing that becomes pretty apparent in reading the book too is that a lot of these groups, once they realize, because I think a lot of people understood pretty quickly on during the protests that like, okay, like maybe some of these like more horizontalist groups, like we actually don't have the ability to manage this or to get people to sort of join us and like this is going in directions that we had not necessarily foreseen.
[00:54:45]  Right.
[00:54:45]  And that are oftentimes the exact opposite of what we might have wanted, especially in the case of something like Brazil or Egypt.
[00:54:54]  But you make the point is that if you create a vacuum or if a vacuum comes into being, something is going to fill that vacuum.
[00:55:03]  There is no vacuum, basically.
[00:55:05]  You might have one for a couple of days, but like that's getting filled quickly.
[00:55:09]  And something that I notice is that like, and this is even just beyond what you write in your book, is that like a lot of people on the left, I think, don't take themselves very seriously in like a real way, right?
[00:55:24]  Like there's an allergy to power and to organization that is apparent even on just the level of their own organizations, right?
[00:55:34]  Like this horizontalist sort of tendency that has kind of come out of the new left, but really metastasized in the 90s and then now is essentially like, even if an organization claims otherwise, often very much at the fore.
[00:55:49]  You know, if you can't be willing to take power, somebody who is willing to take power will.
[00:55:56]  And people are generally not attracted to organizations that seem allergic to power and to seem to not want it.
[00:56:04]  And one thing that I think a lot of people think on the left in America as well is that if you just blow something up, that's all you really need to think about.
[00:56:14]  And people don't often actually blow things up.
[00:56:16]  That's actually usually the territory of people on the right.
[00:56:20]  But if you create as much chaos as possible and you destroy something, burn it all down, that something spontaneously beautiful and wonderful will happen in the aftermath because you were beautiful and you were wonderful in your tactics to achieve that.
[00:56:40]  Just like one perfect riot, one weird trick to end history for all times.
[00:56:45]  If we just do the perfect riot and it gets big enough, that's it.

=== One Perfect Riot (05:04) ===

[00:56:48]  That's the end.
[00:56:49]  They're just the end of the movie and then happily ever after.
[00:56:55]  Which is like, you know, it sounds like a bit silly, but like as tragically and like stupid as it sounds.
[00:57:02]  And like, I'm not trying to be like to shit on people that like risk their lives and things.
[00:57:08]  But like some people were like explicitly inspired by movies that end like that.
[00:57:13]  Like V for Vendetta.
[00:57:15]  I went back and I watched V for Vendetta.
[00:57:18]  Horrible.
[00:57:19]  I do like recommend because like it literally just hold up.
[00:57:23]  It's crazy.
[00:57:24]  It wasn't half the time people.
[00:57:26]  I know, but it's back then.
[00:57:27]  It's so weird because it was like, because it became, it had such a like mimetic power.
[00:57:32]  I mean, and you talk about it explicitly in the book, like because there's the kid who puts on the mask and goes viral.
[00:57:40]  I mean, in one of the first, the first, in one of the first instances of virality, like literally goes viral listing these political demands that then get picked up by like Globo or someone in Brazil.
[00:57:53]  And he basically becomes a spokesperson for those.
[00:57:56]  Basically, he defines the nature of the streets for like to some extent for a few days at least.
[00:58:00]  Yeah.
[00:58:00]  Yeah, in Brazil during this movement.
[00:58:02]  And it's just some kid.
[00:58:03]  I mean, you talk to him in the book and you're like, wait, so where did you get those ideas?
[00:58:06]  And he's like, oh, I just made it up.
[00:58:08]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:58:08]  It's like, what?
[00:58:09]  Stuff that he read on Facebook and like right, like on the Facebook feeds of like center-right or right-wing.
[00:58:14]  And it comes to like define how the sort of like protest movement like starts targeting the sort of like corrupt nature of Brazilian, this like very nebulous kind of feeling of corruption about the state of Brazil.
[00:58:28]  Yeah, there's a definite, again, there's an elective affinity totally between the concerns of the center-right media that once they decide that this is a good thing.
[00:58:36]  Yeah.
[00:58:36]  And I don't think this is a conspiratorial, this happens in a conspiratorial way, because I talked to Haddad, who's the mayor at the time, about this, and I was like literally in the newsroom of the Brazil's most mainstream newspaper.
[00:58:46]  I don't think this happens in a conspiratorial way, but when they're trying to supply reasons for why this is a good thing in the five minutes, then like after they said it was a really bad thing, they're going to come up with things that just like there are their own deep ideological assumptions.
[00:58:59]  Absolutely.
[00:59:00]  Because you're just literally riffing off.
[00:59:03]  I mean, you have the guy like, I can't remember which newscaster it was, but he's like looking at live, a live poll where the viewers are saying that they support the protesters.
[00:59:14]  And he had just been speechifying about how the police need to kind of beat all these people up.
[00:59:20]  And he just immediately has to find something in his own little bourgeois brain to make sense of it.
[00:59:26]  Yeah, why is it on the fly?
[00:59:28]  Because he's riffing like everyone else in the media.
[00:59:30]  And so of course his own ideological bias.
[00:59:33]  This happened with me.
[00:59:34]  I only spend like one sentence on this in the book.
[00:59:36]  But over the next few days, people like me had to go out into the crowd.
[00:59:41]  I mean, had to.
[00:59:42]  This was the task very stupidly handed to us by the particular configuration of media production and the global economy.
[00:59:48]  But people like me went out into the crowd and were like, well, what are you here for?
[00:59:51]  What are you here for?
[00:59:52]  Like put a little video together.
[00:59:53]  Dom Phillips, like a friend of mine who worked, like worked with me, he was like tragically killed in the Amazon last year.
[00:59:59]  He went out for this blog that I was editing at the Brazilian newspaper.
[01:00:04]  Everybody went out and spent a couple hours meeting.
[01:00:06]  What do you want?
[01:00:07]  What do you want?
[01:00:08]  And I found very quickly, again, without any of us, I think not consciously trying to impose our own ideological vision on this, we all came up with explanations that like, oh yeah, lo and behold, it's kind of like reflects what Vincent's politics are versus what Dom's politics are versus what Jose's politics are versus what Datena's politics are, which was this very populist kind of like law and order TV personality that was like, yeah, as you said, like in one second had to figure out how to, in his ideology, say this is a good thing.
[01:00:36]  And so anti-corruption.
[01:00:37]  So I don't have the numbers in front of me, but before the explosion in June 2013, corruption was listed as the biggest problem in Brazil by like 4% or 5% of people.
[01:00:45]  And this jumps to 21%, 22%.
[01:00:47]  And this is something that there is, again, an elective affinity between this one guy in the V for Vendetta mask and the media that like these types of demands more than the expansion of the welfare state.
[01:00:57]  It's easier to sell, it's easier to talk about.
[01:00:59]  And it doesn't cost any money to elites.
[01:01:00]  Just like, you know, wanted to want to jump ahead out of into like a more complicated and controversial uprising.
[01:01:07]  But like in Ukraine, when you ask for like economic justice and culture war, elites can deliver culture war for free.
[01:01:16]  Economic justice is going to be a problem for them.
[01:01:18]  So if you have a movement which is asking for both de-oligarchization and some kind of reconfiguration of the national identity or some kind of more formal, let's say, any kind of demand across the planet indeed, that doesn't require elites to give up any of their money, you're going to get the one that doesn't require elites to give up any of their money.
[01:01:39]  And so yeah, V for Vendetta, I re-watched it.
[01:01:42]  It was like, it's when did it come out again?
[01:01:44]  I think it's like 2008, 2006.
[01:01:46]  I think that's before 2010.
[01:01:47]  It's like 2006, 7, 8, 5.
[01:01:50]  It's crazy.
[01:01:50]  It's crazy that Natalie Portman – Yeah.

=== V for Vendetta Revisited (15:52) ===

[01:01:53]  Yeah, that's crazy.
[01:01:54]  Yeah.
[01:01:55]  Wait, you rewatched it.
[01:01:56]  You should re-watch it.
[01:01:56]  Well, because on the one hand, in the film, I mean, some people like the graphic novel.
[01:02:03]  Some people defend that as much better than the film.
[01:02:04]  I don't know.
[01:02:04]  But it was the film that really was famous.
[01:02:07]  Come on.
[01:02:08]  And the entire revolution is planned by one guy who just puts together shocking, blow your mind with truth video clips that he plays throughout.
[01:02:16]  Viral videos.
[01:02:16]  Huh?
[01:02:17]  Viral videos.
[01:02:17]  Yeah.
[01:02:18]  Yeah.
[01:02:18]  And then the final scene swarms, like huge crowds of like men.
[01:02:27]  They're all the same height.
[01:02:28]  So they probably, I guess it's men and women.
[01:02:30]  But it seems like just huge crowds of men in the scary mask just march on parliament and then movie's over.
[01:02:36]  Like, yeah, that's it.
[01:02:37]  That's the revolution.
[01:02:38]  It's a spontaneous uprising.
[01:02:40]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:02:40]  Everyone, like one man provides the spark for literally like all of Britain to march on parliament.
[01:02:46]  And then the way the movie ends is you're led to believe that like that's good somehow.
[01:02:49]  Like I don't know.
[01:02:50]  Like now, again, 2023, you see like thousands of men march on Parliament in a weird mask from a movie they saw because of something they saw on the internet.
[01:02:58]  You would probably think this is quite a dangerous thing that's happening.
[01:03:02]  But no, yeah, V for Vendetta.
[01:03:03]  And like, you know, this is something a lot of protesters told me like very, you know, like very wistfully.
[01:03:10]  Like, you know, we looked too much to Hollywood and not enough of like the very complex and difficult science of like revolutionary history.
[01:03:20]  Like we had, there was no, you know, like again, back to the MST just because I spent the summer with them.
[01:03:26]  They have like centers of cadre formation where anybody that wants to join, they're like, especially if they're into this kind of stuff, they're like invited to go spend months reading the history of social movements and the things that work and get trained by people that have been around for years and years and years.
[01:03:39]  When everything just comes together really, really quickly, you kind of reach for what's in the air.
[01:03:43]  And in the area of social media, it's often like the thing that gets your blood going, like the thing that gets you all riled up that moves to the top of the pile.
[01:03:50]  Which that, I mean, you talk about that feeling a lot throughout the book.
[01:03:54]  And I feel like you're a little bit up two minds about it.
[01:03:57]  Maybe because you also experienced it in 2013.
[01:04:00]  And I know the brace, I mean, we've talked about this.
[01:04:02]  I mean, that feeling like something's changing or that you're in the throes of history, like that you're in that moment is both, I mean, I think you're sympathetic, because I think that that is, it's understandable that people are drawn to that and find inspiration from that feeling.
[01:04:20]  And it is, it's like a euphoria.
[01:04:22]  It feels like it's unbelievable, but it's also a really dangerous feeling.
[01:04:27]  You know, you can get drunk with it, basically.
[01:04:30]  You're drunk on it.
[01:04:32]  And because it can be the thing that that's the only thing you're after, right?
[01:04:37]  Or the only thing you know how to chase is that feeling as opposed to the deep, hard work, the hard work of actually, you know, studying the movements and trying to build something more sustainable than just the fucking feeling like you're changing something without having the responsibility to actually do anything with it.
[01:04:55]  Yeah, and I mean, in the defense of that feeling, I think that there are tragically few opportunities in contemporary life to feel like you are really working and you're connected with other people and we're making a difference.
[01:05:10]  Because by all accounts, we're not working.
[01:05:12]  We're not parts of humanity.
[01:05:14]  We're not acting collectively.
[01:05:15]  We're totally individualized and we're not making a difference.
[01:05:18]  This book in many ways just deals with and sort of arises out of, I think, a real crisis of representation.
[01:05:24]  It's not just that certain anarchist inspired groups wanted to get rid of representation.
[01:05:30]  It's clearly not working.
[01:05:32]  So these moments where you can actually feel like, oh my God, me and my fellow brothers and sisters are actually changing something right now.
[01:05:41]  The reason it's so incredibly powerful is because we never get to feel it.
[01:05:44]  And ideally, we should be feeling it all the time.
[01:05:46]  But as you point out, it doesn't mean that that feeling necessarily puts food on the table for people in the long term.
[01:05:53]  It may be a glorious victory against the police tonight, but then the police go home and then they just go back to the street the next day.
[01:06:01]  I mean, in the case of Brazil, this is again very, very strange.
[01:06:04]  The protesters and the police were going to battle, but the real forces of power that control things in Brazilian society didn't really care about the outcome, really.
[01:06:13]  It was like, okay, well, whoever wins tonight, we're going to hire more military police and we're going to use them to reproduce the conditions of capitalism in this country.
[01:06:22]  And indeed, the mayor, who they're technically fighting, isn't actually in control of the police.
[01:06:29]  So yeah, I go back and forth.
[01:06:30]  And indeed, the interviewees go back and forth.
[01:06:33]  Some people say it can be like a drug in the sense that there's a hangover.
[01:06:37]  And a lot of people, and I'm very grateful to the people that did sit down with me because they often shared going through years afterwards of real depression or PTSD of what actually happened after that, the initial fever broke.
[01:06:52]  Or the people that they realized that they lost in one way or another.
[01:06:58]  And so yeah, I absolutely go back and forth.
[01:07:00]  On the one hand, I think we need to build a world in which this feeling is more common.
[01:07:07]  But history has shown it has to be part of a bigger package of strategic action and organizational thinking.
[01:07:16]  Well, what you're describing there is what you mentioned several times in the book, which is prefigurative politics.
[01:07:22]  And that is something I've encountered many times in my life.
[01:07:26]  But there's this, I would say, I guess, globalized tendency, although I mostly associate with people that I've done battle with in political circles over my lifetime, is that if you create this perfect egalitarian, I don't want to call it beautiful because I've never seen anything remotely approaching beauty in any of these circles.
[01:07:50]  But this egalitarian, equitable society or equitable group that is trying to overthrow the system, then that will naturally follow.
[01:08:02]  And that has obviously borne itself out not to be true.
[01:08:06]  But something that you, or as history has borne that out to be false.
[01:08:11]  I don't know what the fuck sentence I'm saying there, but I feel like listeners know what I'm saying.
[01:08:15]  But one thing that becomes very apparent is that like, is that the organizations that these people are fighting against or competing next to don't have any such qualms about using, I would say, traditional methods of organization to get what they want.
[01:08:30]  And something that like, you mentioned this in one of the final chapters, but like, you know, a tactic has been since time immemorial for whatever hegemonic group is in control of societies to divide and conquer the people that are against it.
[01:08:46]  And something that is just so fascinating to me since like the 1960, 1970s, really since the new left, is like that has been something that many people who seek to change that society will do themselves already.
[01:08:59]  They're like, we will divide ourselves already.
[01:09:03]  Infinitely.
[01:09:04]  Infinitely.
[01:09:06]  And it's funny because you hear all this like this rhetoric around class war, right?
[01:09:10]  Class war.
[01:09:11]  Well, what happens in a war?
[01:09:12]  You fight battles.
[01:09:12]  And what do you fight battles with?
[01:09:13]  You fight battles with an army and how our armies almost have been organized since we began to have structures of organization and society.
[01:09:21]  That is with full consensus.
[01:09:24]  Full consensus and everybody agrees.
[01:09:26]  Like, listen, some of the femmes have been talking that some of this has been a little crazy.
[01:09:30]  No, but what you have is like you have a structure, right?
[01:09:34]  And so much of this, I mean, you talk very early on in the book, too, about how, and we've discussed on this program today, how there's this like weird digital reflection, like the organizational structures that appear mirror in many ways the digital structures that they kind of come out of.
[01:09:54]  And what's fascinating to me is that for the left, I hear many people sort of claim to be scholars of history, right?
[01:10:03]  Scholars of revolutionary movements.
[01:10:05]  And so many lessons of successful revolutions are disregarded in favor of the sort of ecstatic joy of the 1960s and the lessons of personal self-fulfillment from that era.
[01:10:18]  And it's fascinating to me, just this sort of, like what I was talking about earlier, this like allergy to power.
[01:10:24]  But even this, like the idea that somebody giving you an order is fundamentally wrong.
[01:10:30]  And what that says about somebody who claims that they want to be part of collective action to me, I mean, that says that you actually don't want that.
[01:10:37]  And then you end up in this deeply undemocratic in reality, but highly democratic in rhetoric things like these popular assemblies where everybody has to give consensus or something like that.
[01:10:51]  I mean, it's just, it's fascinating.
[01:10:53]  Yeah.
[01:10:54]  And I mean, like, I think, yeah, I think you've, yeah, absolutely listen.
[01:10:57]  Like, I'm glad, like, I hope that even the things that are in this book that are like about faraway countries, hopefully they sort of rhyme with sort of experiences that different people have around the world.
[01:11:08]  And it sounds like you've had a lot of people.
[01:11:09]  Oh, I've had plenty.
[01:11:11]  Yeah.
[01:11:12]  But, but even, I mean, even, even, it's funny though, because, you know, you talk about how these sort of spokesmen, right?
[01:11:19]  Right.
[01:11:20]  Will be self-selected or selected by the media.
[01:11:23]  And like, I'm not unaware of the fact that like, just given the fact that we have a podcast that is fairly popular, that like somehow we become like de facto spokespeople or whatever.
[01:11:36]  I mean, that's not actually how we view ourselves whatsoever.
[01:11:39]  But like, that is how, that is, like, it's funny in America, it becomes very grouped along like media consumption lines.
[01:11:45]  Yeah.
[01:11:45]  I would say elsewhere in the world, because as kind of like theme of what we're talking about today, everything is sort of, is a kind of weird funhouse mirror of America.
[01:11:54]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:11:55]  Yeah.
[01:11:55]  And I think this work, I think, like the dynamic you're just describing is really interesting in its inverse too.
[01:12:02]  Because when you have a group, when your enemies are trying to define you, if you don't have an actual message that you have decided upon collectively and presented as this is our message, like the Black Panther Party would have, like a lot of the original civil rights organizations that inspired the new left would have, it becomes very easy for your enemies to find the stupidest guy in your group and be like, oh, that's who you are.
[01:12:25]  Which is what they've done with our podcast.
[01:12:26]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:12:28]  Don't look at me.
[01:12:29]  What?
[01:12:30]  No, I'm looking at us.
[01:12:31]  You look directly at me.
[01:12:32]  I'm looking around the SEO.
[01:12:34]  No, but I'm sure that everybody who's in a political organization is probably nodding their head, right?
[01:12:39]  Because you have always, I'm sure always the dumbest motherfucker is the one who is getting pushed to the fore by anybody who's writing about your organization.
[01:12:48]  And this is incredibly easy to happen when you have A particular type of street explosion.
[01:12:53]  You know, when the hegemonic media or state forces do not see it as a good thing, they want to discredit it.
[01:12:58]  Now it's incredibly easy to do so.
[01:13:00]  You just find three guys that are doing the dumbest thing that you could ever see.
[01:13:04]  You film them doing it.
[01:13:04]  You send the FBI in to do the dumbest thing that you could ever imagine.
[01:13:08]  And then, or you know, whatever version of the FBI you have in whatever.
[01:13:11]  FBI ow in Brazil?
[01:13:15]  You don't like that?
[01:13:16]  No, that is correct.
[01:13:17]  That is actually.
[01:13:18]  That is actually.
[01:13:19]  Yeah, like actually, well, I think Sojamoad would be very proud of his association with the FFBI or something like this.
[01:13:24]  I don't know.
[01:13:25]  Yeah, but it becomes incredibly easy to be like, okay, send one Arjun Provocative tour to blow up the statue that actually is the coolest, the best guy in your country's history.
[01:13:35]  Be like, oh, that's what the movement stands for.
[01:13:37]  Who's going to deny it?
[01:13:38]  You can't because you have no one that speaks for it.
[01:13:41]  So I'm telling you, the media or government of this country, that's who you are.
[01:13:46]  Or you can pick whatever political tendency you like.
[01:13:49]  You can pick the stupidest nine-second joke from this dumbest podcast that now is extinct and be like, well, that's what that political tendency is all about.
[01:13:58]  And who's going to say that it's not?
[01:14:00]  Because unlike the Black Panther Party, there's no one that says, no, this is the community.
[01:14:03]  Or unlike the MST, there's no one that says the communications sector for the Movement Sincterje has this is our official position on this.
[01:14:11]  And then like, but that doesn't exist in this particular type of explosion created by sort of globalized neoliberalism and digital media.
[01:14:20]  Yeah, I don't know if it's like an effect of social media, but one thing I really appreciate about this book is how seriously you present the effect of the media.
[01:14:31]  And like, I don't know, I feel like even to this day, people don't, maybe because everyone wants to, because of social media, everyone either thinks of themselves in even in an abstract way as part of the media, or they want to be in the media in whatever capacity they think that means or whatever it is.
[01:14:49]  But there is, it's, people do not take seriously the profound ways in which the media can alter pretty much anything and change the direction of reality itself and what we perceive to be reality itself.
[01:15:04]  I mean, I really do think that.
[01:15:05]  And, you know, you use Brazil as a great example, but elsewhere as well.
[01:15:10]  And I don't know, I feel like people still don't take that seriously enough.
[01:15:15]  Yeah, I mean, it's like, I think there's a risk of overemphasizing the media.
[01:15:18]  And like, I'm in the media.
[01:15:20]  There's tons of conspiracy, like a kind of like, oh, they'll just change.
[01:15:23]  But at the same time.
[01:15:25]  Yeah, so at the same time, if you think about it, really, human beings can only see what's directly in front of their faces.
[01:15:30]  Like, you can only, like, the only reason that I know that Joe Biden is the president is because of the media.
[01:15:34]  Like, I didn't go there to check with my, like, I didn't go to the White House to look.
[01:15:37]  Like, the media, we live in such a complex society that we rely on some kind of mediation for everything.
[01:15:43]  And again, because I'm in it, I probably pay a lot of attention to it.
[01:15:46]  Because this particular strange situation in Brazil, where the media representation changed not only the way that the world understood, but the actual material configuration of what was happening in the streets, which happens in a lot of cases elsewhere in the book.
[01:15:59]  That yeah, I think you have to be very careful about it because you can go in weird ways and like it's because it's everywhere, it can feel like a totalizing force.
[01:16:07]  But there's no reason to protest in the first place without the media.
[01:16:13]  There's a reason that there wasn't protests really before the media.
[01:16:16]  It's fundamentally a media action in some ways, I think.
[01:16:19]  And so paying very close attention to seriously, responsibly analyzing the political economy, the political economy of media and who's acting in which ways for what reasons, I think, yes, you just can't kick that out of the story.
[01:16:34]  Yeah, I mean, you are very circumspect in the book about your own role as a member of the media, because you've written for mainstream MSM publications, LA Times, Washington Post, as you call it, the WAPO, and your frequent mention of it in conversation, even if you don't need to mention it.
[01:16:55]  But yeah, I mean, do you come out of this with a re-examination of your own role as a, you used to want to be a journalist?
[01:17:03]  I mean, how do you feel?
[01:17:05]  I'm asking for the Vincent, your heart.
[01:17:09]  Yeah, I feel okay.
[01:17:10]  No, but it's absolutely true that all of my career has been in sort of the mainstream corporate media.
[01:17:16]  Like everything that I've ever done has come out of applying those tools to things that I ended up finding while working as a regular news correspondent, whether it was the thing that was what led me to write about the US-backed mass murder of communists in Indonesia or to reflect on the very real failures made by my class over this decade.
[01:17:40]  But it is like weirdly, ironically, exactly those tools that I like.

=== Ban Fuck Guys Journalism (06:34) ===

[01:17:46]  Often, if you just almost naively faithful to the idea of saying what really happened, then you end up in a decent place.
[01:17:59]  And I think there's sort of an analog.
[01:18:03]  This might sound like a cheap dodge, but let's see if it actually works.
[01:18:07]  I think that there's actually a kind of an analog between the way that you described that if you just blow something up, you think something's going to come around, which is necessarily better.
[01:18:16]  I think there's an analog to the media and being very critical of the ways that it can go wrong.
[01:18:24]  And also thinking that if you just destroy all of the people whose professional, whose profession it is around the world to do their best to tell the stories, that somehow magically you'll get a more democratic or independent media.
[01:18:37]  Because who's going to rush into that power vacuum?
[01:18:38]  Well, there already are.
[01:18:39]  Oligarchs.
[01:18:40]  Oligarchs are rushing into the decimation of media can lead to opportunities somehow if you have like an actual plan as to how to build things better.
[01:18:50]  And some of those projects exist, but just like praying for the full destruction of the existing media, I think is going to open the door for a lot of really powerful bad actors.
[01:19:02]  And whether we like it or not, and like, you know, setting aside like anarcho-primitivist options, a really complex society needs representation.
[01:19:10]  It needs some kind of journalism, needs some kind of media.
[01:19:13]  So hopefully what I'm contributing to is the necessary critique of the existing media practice that just like any state, just like any government structure, just like any order needs to be constantly criticized in order to be as good as possible.
[01:19:27]  And while I want it to be better, I'm also sometimes skeptical.
[01:19:30]  Again, that might be a dodge because this is my class that I'm perhaps just deep down defending.
[01:19:34]  But I'm sometimes skeptical of the cheerleading for the immediate and full destruction of actually existing journalism because I think what's going to happen is you're just going to get corporate marketing and advertising pretending to be journalism.
[01:19:47]  Well, I think a lot of people do want that on like a sort of instinctual level.
[01:19:52]  Just like fuck these guys.
[01:19:53]  Fuck these guys.
[01:19:55]  Which is like, it's understandable.
[01:19:56]  I like you.
[01:19:58]  I consider you a friend.
[01:20:01]  I don't like a lot of journals.
[01:20:03]  Yeah, right.
[01:20:04]  But on the other hand, it is just factually true, right?
[01:20:08]  Like if there's no media, then it's just like what?
[01:20:11]  Like some rumble show, us, you know?
[01:20:14]  It is also factually true that people like don't like, like, like poll, like polling demonstrates like an empirical fact that like people are rejecting like traditional media structures.
[01:20:25]  Yeah.
[01:20:25]  This is a real I would be surprised if network television exists in 10 years.
[01:20:30]  So I mean this is going to be people are going to call me crazy, but we're going to be just like streaming YouTube different it's going to be diffuse media everywhere in any kind of way that you can streamed like augmented reality in our living rooms, no television screen of just like some YouTuber that looks like, you know, just like our friend, our little friend, our YouTuber saying we're like a charismatic version of someone that we imagine we can hang out with.
[01:20:57]  Yeah, yeah, I mean, well, I mean, that'll be the next Don Lemon or whatever.
[01:21:00]  I wasn't saying like, you know, who's going to present us as a slide on us?
[01:21:03]  We're one of the greatest shows in human history.
[01:21:05]  But I mean like, you know, to actually be able to do like deep reporting and stuff, you generally need organizational structures.
[01:21:11]  And like, yeah, like you need people to be working with.
[01:21:13]  And resources and institutions.
[01:21:15]  Yeah, and this is another thing that like, again, as imperfect as mainstream foreign correspondence always was, as much as that even in the like 20th century had a tendency to reproduce neocolonial dynamics and reproduce like narratives which were favorable to the strongest countries in history.
[01:21:33]  Even compared to that in 2014, 2017, we did a worse job just because we had less resources.
[01:21:39]  So there was already the ideological problem.
[01:21:42]  And then you had a bunch of people that were facing the real possibility that they were going to be fired from their jobs forever.
[01:21:48]  I think that all journalists could be fired forever because journalism could stop.
[01:21:52]  And this, again, this deepens that tendency.
[01:21:55]  This worsens that dynamic in which the guy that happens to be in X country at whatever time is going to say whatever he thinks is going to get him more views, is going to get him more clicks, is going to hold on to his job.
[01:22:07]  In order for people to do this very, very difficult job as well as possible, which is arguably a job that should not be handed off to the external spokespersons or the ad hoc sort of microphones that are there.
[01:22:23]  But in order to do that job somehow competently, you have to have several people that really know the history of a given country and have full-time job stability, which is not at all what exists at all.
[01:22:32]  You have a guy that's like, well, maybe if I say this one thing that I know the editor wants to hear, I'll get $300 from this one paper in this part of the world.
[01:22:40]  And that has, again, as imperfect as mainstream journalism was clearly in the 20th century, like you know, in the Cold Wars, like my first book goes into this quite a lot, it just got worse.
[01:22:51]  Right?
[01:22:51]  Just like a lot of people were like, fuck you, to various leaders in the 2010s.
[01:22:57]  But then that initial, that very exciting moment when you were sticking it to them didn't like necessarily lead to something great in the long term.
[01:23:06]  I mean, I personally believe that I think all journalists just like the UN or like a parallel UN should just arrest most of all of them.
[01:23:15]  Maybe not like ones that I like, but all of them.
[01:23:19]  And then kind of just let out the ones that like a tribunal.
[01:23:22]  I mean, this is I like sort of actually defend the UN-led nationalization of social media.
[01:23:29]  Like I think that's the best way to do it.
[01:23:31]  I do think that sort of somehow or another in the long term, you know, I just think we should have upload caps.
[01:23:36]  That is, you know, what literally would just like end a lot of madness.
[01:23:40]  Yeah.
[01:23:41]  To stop people from we need, what's the well, first of all, that would be take a revolution at this point because there's just too much money involved now.
[01:23:49]  But to kind of cap how much people can upload and cap content upload would like dramatically shift overnight.
[01:23:58]  And then we ban group chats.
[01:24:00]  Oh, we've got to ban chat.
[01:24:01]  That would lead to a complete reorganization of society in one.
[01:24:04]  We don't ban group chats.
[01:24:07]  I'm like, well, I mean, yeah, the like dynamic that got Wilson R elected the full time was like WhatsApp groups?
[01:24:13]  WhatsApp groups?
[01:24:13]  Yeah, like they're showing condoms to my two-year-old.
[01:24:16]  No, they're forcing my two-year-old to practice oral sex.

=== A Storming Farce (10:40) ===

[01:24:20]  Yeah, wow.
[01:24:21]  Yeah, which didn't happen at all.
[01:24:22]  It was totally made up, but it didn't matter.
[01:24:24]  It still gets your blood going.
[01:24:25]  Yeah.
[01:24:25]  You know, still gets that feeling.
[01:24:27]  Okay.
[01:24:27]  Thank you.
[01:24:28]  My blood going.
[01:24:28]  No, anger, the feeling of moral outrage, which is like, which is like, again, like back in 2011, nobody really knew what made like for a great viral, like what was like caused virality, but moral outrage is a thing that really gets gotta be.
[01:24:41]  Listen, it's pedophilia.
[01:24:43]  I mean, I don't think it's like, I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that by 2023, you have like political tendencies in every part of the world that just like accuse their enemies of being pedophiles because it works.
[01:24:55]  It gets people mad.
[01:24:56]  Listen, it works, baby.
[01:24:58]  I'll tell you this.
[01:25:00]  Your book, and I'm quoting a scholar that I very much respect.
[01:25:06]  Your book contains with it a provocation.
[01:25:08]  That scholars live, of course.
[01:25:10]  Your book contains with a provocation.
[01:25:11]  And actually, really, that's not what I meant to say.
[01:25:13]  I just like to say that.
[01:25:14]  You just want to make fun of me.
[01:25:16]  No, I didn't want to make fun.
[01:25:17]  That was literally an actual in tribute, in homage to you.
[01:25:20]  I was not making fun of you.
[01:25:23]  It could be both.
[01:25:24]  The L word comes up quite a bit.
[01:25:28]  Love.
[01:25:28]  And would you consider love to be the ultimate goal?
[01:25:32]  No, Lenin.
[01:25:33]  Oh, Lenin.
[01:25:37]  The impish Russian himself, Lenin, comes up quite a bit in this work.
[01:25:46]  And you seem to, and I don't want to put words in your mouth here.
[01:25:49]  Sure.
[01:25:50]  But he certainly comes up a number of times in the sort of final two chapters where you're, I don't know what you would call it.
[01:25:58]  The final two chapters of the fucking book.
[01:25:59]  And they kind of talk about the.
[01:26:00]  The conclusion and then epilogues.
[01:26:02]  That's the word.
[01:26:02]  The C word.
[01:26:03]  Conclusion.
[01:26:04]  The C word, conclusion.
[01:26:08]  And I mean, it's.
[01:26:09]  I'm learning a lot today about the various ways.
[01:26:12]  A little punchy.
[01:26:15]  Well, he's great.
[01:26:16]  We love him.
[01:26:17]  But is that like something that you kind of came into?
[01:26:21]  Because I, of course, came into this book already with preconceived notions of like, this is what works.
[01:26:27]  Because I can look at history, right?
[01:26:29]  I have no great love for Lenin as a person.
[01:26:32]  I just think he was right.
[01:26:33]  And as a person, he was kind of cool.
[01:26:35]  But I just think he was right.
[01:26:37]  It was correct.
[01:26:37]  So I came to this book being like, I know what I believe already.
[01:26:41]  And did you come to your conclusion that it's likely true that Leninist methods of organizing are more effective for achieving and maintaining power than perhaps more individualistic forms of organizing?
[01:26:57]  Did you come to that conclusion throughout this sort of research for this book?
[01:27:01]  Or how did you get to that conclusion?
[01:27:03]  Well, this was a real-life ideological evolution that happened among many people that lived through this decade.
[01:27:09]  So a lot of the people that in 2011, 2012, 2013 are more pro-structurelessness, let's say, end up either being like, no, we need to return to some form of Lenin.
[01:27:20]  I mean, Rodrigo Nunes, Brazilian philosopher, he's one of the guys that's there in 2005.
[01:27:26]  He's organizing a space that they can set up.
[01:27:28]  I don't know if you remember this moment in the anti-globalization or ulti-globalization movement.
[01:27:32]  He's setting up a clown school where people can do like street performance as well.
[01:27:40]  Liz is in the third year of her.
[01:27:42]  She won't say this, she's embarrassed.
[01:27:43]  She's in the third year of her grad program at a class.
[01:27:45]  That is nice.
[01:27:45]  She's actually been in clown school for the past 15 years.
[01:27:48]  I met her actually at a sort of Verso clown school.
[01:27:51]  Soiree.
[01:27:52]  The clown loft.
[01:27:53]  The clown loft, of course, the Verso Clown Loft.
[01:27:56]  And so he's insistent.
[01:28:00]  I understand why he is that he didn't actually teach at the clown school, but he said, he was there when that kind of stuff was in the air.
[01:28:05]  You will never catch my ass at the clown school.
[01:28:08]  So he's there when this is the dominant sort of ideological approach to mass protests, performance in the streets, prefiguration, building new types of connection.
[01:28:21]  And he comes, you know, he, along with many other people in the book, come along to what he calls networked Leninism, which is like what was going to be the title for a book, which is eventually neither vertical nor horizontal.
[01:28:31]  Jian Tuyal.
[01:28:33]  You know Turkish, right?
[01:28:34]  His name is Gian Tual.
[01:28:36]  Bro, nobody knows Turkey.
[01:28:38]  I thought you learned Turkish.
[01:28:39]  By Boris Johnson?
[01:28:41]  I learned how to say Yolvash, comrade.
[01:28:44]  So a Turkish sociologist.
[01:28:48]  So a Turkish sociologist, I think I'm pronouncing his name more or less, Gian Tuyal.
[01:28:52]  He's now Berkeley, comes to like, we need to return to a neo, like a renewed interpretation of Bolshevism.
[01:29:00]  We need a renewed, everything needs to be a renewed networked, a little twist on the old class side of the world.
[01:29:04]  Well, we do live in a slightly different world.
[01:29:06]  I mean, we do live in a different world.
[01:29:07]  Whatever funky little appellations people want to do.
[01:29:09]  Everyone's going to throw their little remix in.
[01:29:12]  As long as it's there.
[01:29:14]  So this is a real life ideological transformation that happens throughout the decade.
[01:29:21]  A lot of people in different countries, you know, a guy in Ukraine told me, like, well, I used to believe in sort of self-organization, but now I believe that without an organized working class, elites will always take advantage of a street explosion.
[01:29:32]  He went back to like, what is to be done?
[01:29:35]  So there's that.
[01:29:36]  There's just like a real thing that happens amongst my interviewees.
[01:29:40]  And I understand that in the U.S., this like is it is a provocation.
[01:29:44]  It's a bit spicy.
[01:29:45]  But if it were not, I think, for that sort of deep assumption, like the deep anti-communist assumptions in U.S. political culture, the 2010s wouldn't have gone the way they did.
[01:29:55]  Like the tiny little story that I recount in the book about Malcolm McLaren choosing to make the sex pistols quote unquote anarchist because he tried communism for the New York dolls.
[01:30:07]  And they were like, nope, that's too far from that.
[01:30:09]  It's not going to fly.
[01:30:10]  People got really mad at the city.
[01:30:11]  People got really, really mad at us when sex pistols are anarchists.
[01:30:14]  Like, oh, that's, you know, that's spicy, but we can take it.
[01:30:18]  American culture still loves anarchists.
[01:30:20]  I mean, it's like, I think there is a deep, like, like deep sort of individualist, you know, individualism is at the heart of everyone.
[01:30:27]  No, no, no, everyone loves freedom.
[01:30:29]  Capital F. Like a particular type of individually defined freedom is at the heart of the American problem.
[01:30:34]  Everyone agrees on that, whether you're against it or whether you love it.
[01:30:36]  Like Republicans all agree on that.
[01:30:37]  And so that's one part of the answer.
[01:30:39]  Another part of the answer is that in order to describe where this stuff comes from, I have to go back to, or at least I choose to, maybe it was the wrong choice, but I choose to go back to this moment in the 60s where particular students in the United States growing up in the wake of McCarthyism choose to employ certain organizational practices as a rejection of or to be different than what they saw as the historical mistakes of the Soviet Union.
[01:31:04]  So you can't understand, because in the first half of the 20th century, or indeed by even into the 60s and 70s outside the U.S., what you call, or you said, in the way that you say that Lenin was right about organization, whether or not you agreed with all the other stuff, like some kind of a Leninist organizational form was quite hegemonic around the world.
[01:31:22]  You had all kinds of movements, whether or not they were actually socialist adopting the Leninist party form.
[01:31:30]  It was a party of a new type.
[01:31:31]  Like Both, like parties had learned in some ways from Leninist organizational forms.
[01:31:36]  Obviously.
[01:31:37]  Even the right took, I mean, quite famously, like the vanguardist right wing, even in America, took a lot of cues from Lenin.
[01:31:45]  I mean, Murray Rothfard was famously a huge, I mean, he called himself a huge fan of Lenin.
[01:31:51]  Obviously, not the.
[01:31:52]  He was quite substantial.
[01:31:54]  Anyways, that's the, yeah, that's the two answers is that there's a real evolution among people around the world that I like saw this happen.
[01:32:01]  And again, in Brazil or in Turkey, returning to Lenin is way less provocative than he has.
[01:32:05]  Yeah, that's not really.
[01:32:06]  No one's like, Matt, like, you know, the Brazil, like Lula's government has always governed very closely with the Pesé Dobe, which is a Marxist-Leninist party, hammering sickle on the flag, used to be part of this Hoxhaist international tendency, just like the Workers' Party in Tunisia.
[01:32:22]  Like, even like, there are like, of course, rabid anti-communists in Brazil, but the existence of like Marxist-Leninists in the political structures of places like Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, that's not like, that's not so shocking as it is here.
[01:32:36]  So I knew that it would be a little bit like, oh my God, in the U.S., but like the book's not primarily about the U.S. and this is a real movement that's become, you know, and like some members of the MPL have moved in this direction themselves, and other members of the MPL complain, like, fuck, like the young generation of leftists, they're all like back into Lenin now.
[01:32:52]  Like, you know, so it was a real thing that happened outside the U.S. and is not nearly as shocking in the global south as it is in like Brooklyn or California.
[01:33:01]  Yeah, no, I would say if you travel basically anywhere in the world, you'll find it.
[01:33:04]  Yeah, if you meet like Arab leftists are like proper like leftists.
[01:33:07]  They're often from communist party families.
[01:33:10]  Not always, but this exists in a way that we decimated in the United States in the 50s and it's a real historical exception.
[01:33:16]  Well, the book ends, spoiler alert, a little bit before or on the eve of Bolsonaro's failed reelection.
[01:33:26]  Right.
[01:33:27]  And I would be remiss if I didn't before we end this fantastic interview that we've been having, didn't ask you about the events of January 8th.
[01:33:39]  And for people listening, we did an episode on that when that happened, but the kind of Bolsonarista's storming of the Capitol, kind of, the Congress.
[01:33:51]  I mean, yeah, they stormed it.
[01:33:52]  Yeah, they stormed it.
[01:33:53]  In Brazil, yeah.
[01:33:55]  Very much a kind of weird, both mimetic performance of January 6th in the U.S., but also weirdly of the June 2013 protests where also the left stormed the Capitol.
[01:34:10]  There's a weird sort of kind of bookend happening there that sort of traces this, you know, the genesis of something in June 2013 all the way through to this kind of, I don't know, melancholic, farcical attempt.
[01:34:29]  Yeah, like first is tragedy, then his farce, then it's like really stupid farce.
[01:34:33]  Yeah.
[01:34:33]  And it's like an even more clownish, again, the clown kind of tradition, I suppose, version of, yeah, whatever that was on January 8th and the kind of like, yeah, just very sad Bolsonaristas, maybe also somehow thinking that if they too kind of just got there and made something happen, that something would happen.
[01:34:54]  I mean, these people were like the most pathetically and like actually tragically like internet adult guys.

=== Dealing with Tragedy and Farce (06:06) ===

[01:35:00]  Exactly.
[01:35:01]  Because if you spoke, I had that here too, dude.
[01:35:05]  It's the same guys.
[01:35:06]  Yeah, the January 6th guy.
[01:35:07]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:35:09]  But it's crazy to me because it does really feel like this funhouse mirror of June 2013 in a lot of ways.
[01:35:16]  Yeah, I mean, so in June 2013, at this point, at this point, probably it was a left started protest by this point when they ran up on top of Brazil's National Congress building.
[01:35:29]  You look at photos, it looks very futuristic.
[01:35:31]  They rush and there's all these big shadows.
[01:35:33]  This happens in June 23, absolutely.
[01:35:35]  And this is something that at the time, the broader anti-authoritarian left is like, well, yeah, this is an outpouring of support for whatever it is that we started.
[01:35:47]  But functionally, the actual concrete things that these human bodies are doing in the real world is the same thing.
[01:35:54]  And again, this is another point that comes up across the book.
[01:36:00]  A tactic can be used in many, many different ways.
[01:36:03]  It can be the right thing for the moment.
[01:36:04]  It could be the wrong thing for the moment.
[01:36:05]  It can be the right thing used by a bad guy or the wrong thing used by a good guy.
[01:36:09]  That's an important point, yeah.
[01:36:10]  And I think almost any tactic that I can think of is defensible in some instances, right?
[01:36:16]  Like in some instances, everyone defends violence against an invading force, or sometimes everyone defends ultimate destabilization.
[01:36:23]  What about cheating?
[01:36:26]  That's a very good question, like in a relationship.
[01:36:29]  Yeah.
[01:36:32]  Go on, though.
[01:36:32]  Go on.
[01:36:33]  No, I'm thinking about the answer.
[01:36:35]  No, never.
[01:36:36]  Never.
[01:36:37]  Never is the answer.
[01:36:38]  If that's the agreement that you have, you don't violate it.
[01:36:41]  No.
[01:36:42]  And so I was in Brazil for the election and you saw these increasingly pathetic, the 2022 election that Lula eventually wins, just barely even the Bolsonaro does everything he can to try to destroy democracy.
[01:36:56]  Beyond having U.S. support, if he had U.S. support, he would have been able to take a picture of the pressure.
[01:37:01]  So I think, so he lost the support of the Brazilian ruling class.
[01:37:04]  And the Brazilian ruling class is well allied with the, like, that's, you know, like, I think I put it sometime in one of the articles, like, he lost the support of the Brazilian, like, quote-unquote, business class or the support of the national bourgeoisie and their international partners.
[01:37:17]  You know, if you don't have the support of like the quote-unquote business elite in Brazil, what's the point of a dictatorship in the first place?
[01:37:23]  Like, why are you going to have a dictatorship in South America if you're not even helping the elites reaper like accumulate capital?
[01:37:29]  What are you doing?
[01:37:30]  So he lost the, like, not all, but a lot of the ruling class.
[01:37:34]  But he couldn't get the support for a real coup because he knows how you really do a coup.
[01:37:38]  You get the military behind the scenes, you get the military to agree to that.
[01:37:40]  You create an excuse, you shut down, you know.
[01:37:43]  Oh, we, believe me.
[01:37:46]  Yeah.
[01:37:46]  There's other ways, though.
[01:37:47]  Like, well, we saw the 2014 coup, different.
[01:37:51]  With 2014 coup?
[01:37:52]  With Doma's impeachment.
[01:37:53]  Oh, yeah, 2016.
[01:37:54]  Sorry, sorry.
[01:37:55]  Yeah, the really smart way to do the modern coup in Latin America.
[01:38:00]  Like, even Pope Francis did an article about this.
[01:38:04]  You don't bring tanks up.
[01:38:06]  That looks really bad.
[01:38:06]  What you do is you find some judicial.
[01:38:09]  Judicial, law fair.
[01:38:10]  Yeah, you do lawfare.
[01:38:11]  Yeah, like Pope Francis is a big guy in the law fair, like in law fair thought.
[01:38:15]  No, like, but he was like really, really like, free Lula, this is the contemporary way of doing coups.
[01:38:22]  And so all of the real attempts fall apart, and then you get these increasingly WhatsApp addicted guys.
[01:38:28]  And I went, so initially, they blocked all the highways in the country, which is like, that could work.
[01:38:33]  That's a part of an effective coup.
[01:38:36]  That could work.
[01:38:37]  You got some of your guys doing that.
[01:38:38]  So that happened in the first days after the election.
[01:38:41]  And ironically, it was like, to some extent, Brazilian football ultras that cleared the roads.
[01:38:46]  Like Corinthians is a pro-Lula team, pro-democracy team.
[01:38:51]  But then they're all camped outside of military barracks for weeks.
[01:38:56]  And a lot of them are quite close to where I just go, I'm like, well, what exactly do you think?
[01:39:01]  And either they don't have an answer or they have some rumor that they think that tomorrow.
[01:39:05]  The storm is coming.
[01:39:06]  The storm is.
[01:39:06]  Yeah.
[01:39:07]  Some magical force within the Brazilian deep state is going to arrest everybody and proclaim that Bolsonaro is coming back.
[01:39:13]  And eventually, the fringe of the fringe of this extreme right movement decides just to go turn this protest into an attack on the Capitol.
[01:39:24]  And I spent a lot of the time, I spent the last few weeks actually in Brasilia interviewing the most prominent Bolsonaristas in the government.
[01:39:32]  A lot of what they claim now, because they live in entirely distinct epistemic universes, they can just claim this as, oh, that was actually the left.
[01:39:40]  That was all the left.
[01:39:42]  It was all leftist infiltration that was pretending to be Bolsonaroistas that did that.
[01:39:47]  Or at least that was a big part of it.
[01:39:49]  So it's not us.
[01:39:50]  It was an armed state.
[01:39:50]  That was the, I mean, that's precisely the same response.
[01:39:54]  Well, these guys watch, like, pay a lot of attention to right-wing internet in the United States.
[01:39:59]  The war room.
[01:40:00]  Well, this is a big part of what I'm working on.
[01:40:01]  Yeah, or they indeed have actual conferences where they trade.
[01:40:05]  Group chats.
[01:40:06]  Shut them down.
[01:40:06]  Group chats.
[01:40:07]  Yeah, group chats.
[01:40:08]  And so, yeah, so you're right.
[01:40:09]  And this question came up on the 10-year anniversary of June 2013.
[01:40:13]  Okay, well, we understand that the initial demands were different, but what is in a democracy?
[01:40:20]  And again, it's very different when you're dealing with Mubarak and Egypt, right?
[01:40:22]  But in a democracy, what is the actual place for trying to physically eject the elected representatives, which becomes a big problem, again, in Ukraine, even in perfect democracy, what happens after the ejection of the person that was actually put there with votes?
[01:40:41]  And yeah, and this is, I think, an unresolved question.
[01:40:45]  We're still dealing with, like, the long tail of the consequence of this, of all of this.
[01:40:58]  Well, the book is fantastic.
[01:41:01]  If We Burn the Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.

=== Vincent's Lizard Confession (04:12) ===

[01:41:07]  Vincent, it's so nice to have you in the studio.
[01:41:09]  I'm so happy that we were able to do it not on Zoom.
[01:41:12]  Yeah, no, thank you.
[01:41:12]  No, truly, thank you for having me.
[01:41:14]  I've been looking forward to it.
[01:41:15]  Not that we use Zoom, actually.
[01:41:17]  We used Zoom last time, right?
[01:41:19]  It's a different one.
[01:41:19]  We use a different program.
[01:41:20]  No, that might have been, when we had Vincent on, that might have been a lot of fun.
[01:41:23]  It was like Zencaster.
[01:41:24]  What do you got?
[01:41:24]  We got one of them, motherfuckers.
[01:41:26]  Zencaster?
[01:41:27]  Yeah.
[01:41:29]  I believe it's Zencaster, yeah, but please don't D-D-O-S us.
[01:41:33]  I actually don't know what that means or how that would work.
[01:41:36]  No, but it is really.
[01:41:36]  But if you do it with a V for Vendetta mask on, then I'll allow it.
[01:41:41]  Then you are the de facto leader of the podcast.
[01:41:44]  Exactly.
[01:41:45]  You are Comandante V for Vendetta.
[01:41:49]  It has a lot in it, a lot that we did not cover today.
[01:41:52]  I cannot fathom a listener of this program who I'm calling it a program now.
[01:41:57]  I cannot fathom a listener of this program who would not enjoy this book in some funky way or all funky ways.
[01:42:05]  Yeah, there's a lot of really great information.
[01:42:08]  Yeah.
[01:42:09]  Yeah, thank you very much.
[01:42:09]  Like I tried to, well, like all I spent maybe too much time on this book, but I tried to make it like properly a book where like everyone's going to find their own thing.
[01:42:17]  Like not just be like, here's an argument and then like here's the padding.
[01:42:19]  Like I tried to put a lot in there and hopefully people will bring different things to it and come away with different things at the end of the story.
[01:42:27]  Well, Vincent, you kind of look like a handsome version of the actor Vincent.
[01:42:34]  He sucks.
[01:42:35]  You know what I'm talking about because you've heard this before, haven't you?
[01:42:37]  people's brains do this because you have it's because it's the same name Which guy?
[01:42:43]  I know what he's doing.
[01:42:44]  Some people do this.
[01:42:45]  It's a very like, it's a very lizard brain thing.
[01:42:47]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:42:48]  Lizard!
[01:42:49]  First of all, loaded language.
[01:42:51]  Wow.
[01:42:51]  Yeah.
[01:42:52]  Wow.
[01:42:52]  Wow, interesting.
[01:42:54]  Would you say it's a banker brain thing to do?
[01:42:57]  Does that lizard nose look like on that lizard?
[01:43:02]  What's his name?
[01:43:03]  Vincent Carthiser.
[01:43:04]  Who the fuck is that?
[01:43:06]  I know who you're thinking.
[01:43:07]  Vincent Cartheiser?
[01:43:09]  He plays like a shithead.
[01:43:10]  He always plays a douchebag.
[01:43:11]  Yes.
[01:43:11]  Yeah.
[01:43:12]  Dude, he's famous.
[01:43:13]  No, Vincent.
[01:43:14]  You don't look like the guy from Vincent.
[01:43:15]  No, I'm going to look.
[01:43:16]  He doesn't.
[01:43:17]  I've never seen this.
[01:43:18]  Do you know who his name is, Vincent?
[01:43:20]  No.
[01:43:21]  Yeah, that's something yesterday.
[01:43:22]  Vincent, are you talking about that?
[01:43:23]  That's like the cool French boncon.
[01:43:25]  The French one.
[01:43:26]  People do this.
[01:43:26]  Vincent Vincent.
[01:43:27]  But people only say this after they heard my name is Vincent.
[01:43:30]  They never think that I look like Vincent.
[01:43:31]  I've known your name as Vincent the entire time.
[01:43:34]  Okay, famousfix.com actors with the first name Vincent Vince Neal.
[01:43:39]  No, a little bit.
[01:43:41]  You got a Vince Neal thing to you, but Vincent Gallo, I would say politically, but not physically.
[01:43:47]  Vincent D'Anfrio.
[01:43:49]  To know Frio.
[01:43:50]  To know Frio.
[01:43:51]  Law and Order.
[01:43:51]  Law and Orders.
[01:43:52]  Vince is only three people long.
[01:43:54]  No, dude, he's the most famous guy named Vincent besides Van Gogh.
[01:43:57]  But then how come he doesn't come up on Google?
[01:44:00]  Wait, I'm not Vincent Vincent.
[01:44:01]  Do you know why the answer is?
[01:44:02]  It's because his name is Vince.
[01:44:04]  Vincent.
[01:44:04]  People call him Vince.
[01:44:05]  But actor Vince, I know you're going.
[01:44:07]  Vince Vaughan!
[01:44:10]  Yeah, he looks like a brain.
[01:44:11]  Like I said, it's just because of the word.
[01:44:12]  His brain, that's how the human brain works.
[01:44:14]  You look like a handsome person.
[01:44:17]  You're associating the word.
[01:44:18]  It's just the word.
[01:44:19]  No, you get the words.
[01:44:20]  You think it's a coincidence that I'm one of like six people you've ever seen that has the name Vincent that you think.
[01:44:24]  I'm talking about you should live with Vinnie Martini.
[01:44:26]  So seven.
[01:44:28]  Vincent?
[01:44:29]  I know so many Vincents.
[01:44:30]  Okay, six people?
[01:44:32]  Fourteen, I don't know.
[01:44:33]  Fourteen.
[01:44:33]  Whoa.
[01:44:34]  A lot of Filipinos named Vincent.
[01:44:35]  A lot of Filipinos named Vincent.
[01:44:36]  We didn't even talk about the Philippines.
[01:44:40]  So, yeah, but I think it's because of my name.
[01:44:42]  But whatever.
[01:44:43]  Well, I love you.
[01:44:43]  I don't live inside your brains.
[01:44:44]  And I love you, and I love the book.
[01:44:46]  Thank you.
[01:44:47]  And I love that you came on the program.
[01:44:49]  Yeah, thank you so much.
[01:44:50]  And with that being said, Vincent, farewell.
[01:45:12]  Well, Bruce, what did you learn today?
[01:45:14]  What did we learn?
[01:45:15]  Well, I think if you get enough people in one place, then something happens.

=== Farewell, Vincent (01:59) ===

[01:45:19]  Yeah.
[01:45:19]  And if you have a mask that looks kind of like a clown, but a little bit more twisted.
[01:45:25]  Dark.
[01:45:26]  Dark clown with like a twist or smile, you can get on the internet.
[01:45:31]  You should have seen, ladies and gentlemen, you should have seen the contortions which Liz's body went into.
[01:45:39]  It was almost like she had stuck a fork in an electric socket when the clown school came up.
[01:45:46]  I have never seen somebody shrink.
[01:45:48]  I would say Liz became three inches by three inches at that point.
[01:45:54]  And then she exploded, much like a sort of a jack-in-the-box type scenario.
[01:45:59]  You know, you make fun of me, but I trained with the former president of Clowns of America.
[01:46:02]  Ow, ow, ow, ow.
[01:46:04]  Sorry, Liz just fucking, dude, Liz just fucking had me smell a flower and then just it had water in it.
[01:46:10]  I didn't do that.
[01:46:12]  You know, I, you know, we don't need to get into my cloning work.
[01:46:15]  Well, I mean, you've trained with the former president of the clowns of America?
[01:46:18]  I took a pie real well.
[01:46:20]  I didn't know you were in Congress.
[01:46:23]  Oh, my God.
[01:46:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:46:26]  It's just, ooh, a piece of gum?
[01:46:27]  Oh, this is nothing bad could happen.
[01:46:29]  Ow, ow, ow!
[01:46:31]  Wait, Liz, oh, thank God.
[01:46:33]  I'm so hungry.
[01:46:34]  You're offering me peanuts?
[01:46:37]  Well, only peanuts could be.
[01:46:39]  Oh, my God, a snake!
[01:46:42]  And thus ends that.
[01:46:45]  I'm Liz.
[01:46:46]  My name is Brace.
[01:46:48]  Of course, we are joined by the shirtless, but two pairs of pants, producer Young Chomsky, and the podcast is called.
[01:46:56]  True and on.
[01:46:57]  We'll see you next time.
[01:46:58]  Bye-bye.
[01:47:19]  Come in.