The Antisocial Socialist

 Podcast Friday Saturday. Whoops, no one told me that yesterday was Friday. I should have known based on it being called "Good Friday" and the previous day having been Thursday, but to be quite honest I am very tired.

Anyway. This week's podcast that you simply must listen to is the season finale of AURORA AWARD-NOMINATED PODCAST Wizards & Spaceships "AI and Transhumanism ft. Robert J. Sawyer." The renowned sci-fi author talks about the existential threats posed by GenAI and the deep rot and grift at its core. 

As you know, Bob, I have strong, spicy, and controversial opinions on this topic and in particular on why, even though no one asked for this, even though GenAI is not a profitable business for anyone and is threatening to tank the global economy when its speculation bubble bursts, it is still being rammed down our throats. While there are more obvious and immediate threats—the genocide in Gaza, the mass deportations of immigrants and citizens and persecution of trans people in the former US—GenAI to me is a microcosm of the lie at the heart of the liberal democratic order. It improves no one's lives and adds nothing good to the world and yet we are all being forced to believe that it is inevitable. Sawyer's righteous rant is the counterbalance to that narrative that you need right now.

P.S. does anyone want more art history posts from me? I mean you're getting them regardless, but I'm curious to know.

 This week's dubious winner is Conspirituality's "Kings of Pain," which the runner-up to last week's. (IDSG won because it's more directly relevant to my interests and because their schedule has been so irregular lately that any new episode is worth noting.)

This episode is about purity, and specifically the convergence of woo-woo health purity with political purity. I first noticed this when Mike Harris's regime in Ontario back in the 90s started talking about putting the population on a "diet," "trimming," and so on. By which they meant murdering people like single mother Kimberly Rogers. It disgusted me then, as a child, and it disgusts me now, as the Mad King and his minions starve their own subjects, both at home and in countries under their imperial rule, using the language of "detox." 

The idea that suffering will make you pure, that it's fine to swallow litres of snake oil but not to vaccinate your people or your chickens, that anyone who falls short of an Aryan ubermensch must be purged from the body politic, is one with deep roots that of course include every fascist movement ever. The episode draws really excellent connections and insights into what I think is still underexamined.

I'm in Canada; I don't know a lot of people who would have voted Trump if they'd had the option. I do know a lot of people who didn't vaccinate their kids, or who had doubts about it, or who have a distrust of science in general. Obsession with micromanaging health and bodies is an underexamined pipeline to fascism (Maintenance Phase covers it well but doesn't post as often) so I really appreciate this episode.

 I have an obscene amount of emails that I'm unlikely to get through this weekend, so this is a late and somewhat abbreviated post. Check out Executive Disorder from It Could Happen Here. It's a weekly roundup of all the bullshit that the Trump-Elon chimera gets up to in a week. It's very informative without mostly having to listen to either of them talk with their stupid voices, and has some good analysis on likely results.

 I continue to take refuge in history (not really true; I listen to a bunch of current-events stuff, but at a certain point I BSOD about it because I can't comprehend the horrors). Behind the Bastards just did a two-parter on Versailles and the court of Louis XIV: "In Honor of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles" (Part I | Part II). It's really good. I had to learn a fair amount about Versailles and the French Revolution in high school but it's all very condensed and amounted to "Louis XIV reigned longer than any monarch in history, centralized power, and created the conditions that eventually resulted in the guillotine and the Terror." It's worth imo a far more detailed examination.

In particular you need to look at it in detail because the historical parallels between Versailles and Mar-A-Lago cannot be overstated. Centralization by bringing all your nobles into a party house/death cult compound. Arcane rules of etiquette and court intrigue that trap anyone who could theoretically oppose you in endless psychosexual drama. A strange obsession/aversion to the physical—overeating rich food and shitting in strange places. Intentional hypocrisy between the debauched behaviour of the elite, which engaged in adultery, black magic, and poisonings in conflict with the arch-religiosity of the people. The leader's all-encompassing cult of personality; I think I knew that when Louis XIV was suffering from an anal fistula, his courtiers wore bandages/diapers over their asses known as le royale, similar to how the MAGA cultists wore bandages over their ears after the first of several time travellers failed to assassinate Trump. It's an instructive case study in how a reality distortion field works.

It's also very funny because these people are ridiculous and eventually their descendants got guillotined. Anyway, it's a nice reminder that monarchy is a bad system.

 Come away with me from this hellscape a moment to listen to the latest Wizards & Spaceships, where Shawn Whitney, writer-for-hire and also writer-of-his-own-stuff, talks about pulp fiction and its influence on genre fiction. "Toxic Schlock Syndrome" features manly men, feats of derring-do, and a rather funny and awful bit about lizard alien warriors.

 There's been a lot of good content this week (the It Could Happen Here one on Myanmar is really great) but nothing got in my brain like I Don't Speak German's "Estranged Parents, with George Daniel Lea." 

I'll be a bit more forthcoming than I normally am in public posts. Maybe about 15 or 20 years ago, I fell into the kind of rabbit hole that George describes here. Video was less of a thing—I lurked on estranged parent forums and devoured every single post. I think I had read an article about them on one of those websites (remember websites?) and I went looking for the trainwreck and my God did I ever find it.

And yes, dear readers, I was looking for my biological father. Did you even need to ask?

Did I find him? Who the fuck knows? He was alive back then; he isn't now. He wasn't very internet-savvy and also he frequently forgot that I existed so he was probably not one of the people posting. But any one of these estranged parents could have been him. They had the same scripts. They wrote exactly like he did (spelling and grammatical errors and all). They claimed to be just as baffled as to why their children no longer wanted anything to do with them, and blamed the same factors, usually the other, non-estranged parent, or a partner. Therapy and therapy-speak was not so widely accepted that they blamed a therapist or the internet, as today's estranged parents do, but the pattern was the same. They'd had a happy relationship with an adult child, nothing was wrong, until suddenly, some horrific outsider turned their child against them, and they had no idea why. 

The online fascist movement was not as organized then as it is now, so these grievances were less politicized, except where the family is inherently a political construct, with children, even adult children, framed as property. It was ripe for the next development, which George and Jack discuss in this episode. Of course these people are MAGA now, of course the primary trigger for estrangement ties into the culture wars. Some nefarious outsider has transed their child, etc., and only Trump can get them back, repairing the pater familias arrangement, not just for their family but the country. The world. 

The other weird change is that most of these people are female now? I swear it was more evenly split in my lurking days—or, at least I assumed that the people who spoke exactly as my biological father had were also fathers, not mothers. But the real batshittery here is coming from women, who make actual videos with their actual names, rather than hiding in anonymous text posts. Estrangement has gone mainstream.

George appears to be a family abolitionist, which is admittedly not a thing I know a ton about or necessarily support, so I don't agree with every take. But I find family abolition an interesting concept and this is a useful framing to add to the issue.

It's a very lengthy, rambling conversation, but I found a lot of value in it, so maybe you will too.

I have two very short ones for you today, both from It Could Happen Here, and both related to the Current Unpleasantness. Both deal with the fact that we don't have a model for fighting back, and that the lack of people in the streets suggests that most people already know that doing the same thing as in 2017 (marching around with signs) isn't going to stop fascism.

The first is "The Age of Cowards and What Happens Next," with Robert Evans. I know everyone reading already listens to these things or isn't going to, so if you're in the latter group, I have good news, which is that there's a written version of the podcast here. He talks a lot about overconfidence and how the fascists have won largely by trying different things until something stuck; how the left has lost primarily due to a lack of ideas.

The one thing we do have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated to them not out of enthusiastic consent but exhaustion, cowardice and above all a feeling that it didn’t really matter.
 

 

That last one, the feeling that nothing matters, the system is fucked, there’s no point in engaging or organizing- that is the most powerful weapon they have right now. Because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them. From interrupting as they reach out, yet again, to take something you love or need.

It echoes the thing Billy Bragg says so well in "The Sleep Of Reason" (and that he, and many others have been saying for years): "The greatest threat faced by democracy isn't fascism or fanaticism / But our own complacency." It's something that, as a long-time Marcher In Circles, is actually a surprisingly hard pill to swallow, largely because its natural conclusion leads to. Well. The kinds of things that Robert talks about and has personally experienced in places like Rojava and Myanmar and that we all cheered on in New York.

The other one is Mia Wong's episode, "About That Nazi Salute." Which takes Elon's Nazi salute that you all saw with your own eyes and was definitely a Nazi salute and never let anyone tell you otherwise as a jumping-off point to discuss Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. She attempts to make sense of the firehose of bad shit in the past week and how everything in our culture has converged around interacting with images and symbols rather than material reality.

Neither of them have answers or recommendations (Robert said on the podcast yesterday that you should be very wary of anyone who claims that they do, and he's right) but I think both provide very good framing, and you can't solve a problem until you define the problem.

 It's a busy week—Cool Zone Media is at the Consumer Electronics Show, which means that I get hours and hours of my favourite kind of content—not-sober people making fun of AI. God I love it. There's so much of it, though, and it'll take me awhile to wade through.

In the meantime, here is an older episode from Tech Won't Save Us: "Maybe We Should Destroy AI with Ali Alkhatib." It's based on a post Alkhatib made last June that you can read if you're not a podcast person. He makes a very clear cost-benefit analysis.

1) No one asked for this
2) No one wants it
3) In cases where the harm outweighs the good, we should destroy this technology rather than learn to adapt it or try to somehow force it to be ethical.

He offers the parallel of a restaurant that poisons its customers. Such a restaurant would be shut down. We have legal mechanisms for shutting it down. When we have a lot of clear harm being done by technology, we should be able to do the same.

 Every Christmas, Behind the Bastards profiles a non-bastard, someone whose existence has made the world a better place, and the second the title for this one dropped I knew it'd be the episode I'd feature this week. "How Woody Guthrie Turned Folk Music Into a Weapon" (Part 1 | Part 2) is about Woody Guthrie and features Margaret Killjoy as the guest and is basically my entire identity because certain mothers of mine showed me Alice's Restaurant when I was a tiny child and the entire cultural tradition of leftist folk music from Joe Hill to Billy Bragg imprinted on me as a wee one. Woody Guthrie, obviously, is the guy who is responsible for the lion's share of that and thus obviously I want to listen to two of my favourite podcasters talk about him for a few hours, warts and all.

If you have an awkward parasocial crush on either of these two, finding out that Robert is a cousin of Pretty Boy Floyd or hearing more stories from Margaret's trainhopping days will not solve that problem, incidentally. Also hearing what is probably Robert's actual accent is a trip and a half. 

Anyway it's really good and they include a lot of Woody's music in it, as one should.

Before I dive into the post requests (and thank you all for supplying them!), here is my regularly scheduled Podcast Friday.

Okay it has to be It Could Happen Here's "Luigi Mangione Was Radicalized By Pain." If you aren't a podcast person, you can read a text version of it for free here. Robert Evans does an excellent job of summarizing all the feelings I've been having. It's a very nuanced look at Luigi through what we can tell based on his digital footprint, and his trajectory from wealthy, right-leaning tech bro to folk hero. It's a compelling narrative, and one that's very personal for me. As I've said here and elsewhere, I have a spinal fusion; my x-rays look not dissimilar to Luigi's, and it is a life-altering experience. My daily pain level varies from "annoying" to "agonizing," but I am never comfortable, and never will be again. As I age, it will get worse. It's likely that by the time I hit 60, it will be so debilitating that I won't be able to work anymore, and I have to consider every aspect of my life, from career choices to housing, with that in mind. There are no adequate treatments available, and the best I can do is daily physio to hold off the worst case scenario, much like we, as a society, need to be doing everything we can to avoid the worst climate change scenarios even knowing that we've blown past a lot of the best outcomes.

I live in Canada; I am not in debt because of my experiences, and while I did have to argue with insurers, it's nowhere near what an American would go through. It still derailed my life and career.

I can really sympathize with what it is like, as a young person, to have the future that you envisioned for yourself curtailed. To go from comfort to precarity (because as wealthy as he was, all it really takes is one serious medical issue).

Robert says:

I know many people who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I will tell you that it is not uncommon in dark moments, after fruitless hours-long calls about dropped medications or receiving surprise bills, for them to joke about what they’d like to do to the executives who run these companies.

These are jokes, made in moments of despair and pain. No one I know would ever act on them, because they all have lives, people to care for and to whom they are responsible. They would never really do anything because the consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe.

This is true. Not just in the case of chronic pain but in every way that people suffer. I have never nodded along so hard. This is what keeps our grotesque Moloch of an economic system turning—the bits of family and community that we manage to squeeze in between our exploitation.

The issue of Luigi's awful and contradictory beliefs is addressed here, but again, it's nuanced, and Robert paints the picture of a young man on a journey. The guy is 26 and grew up in a wealthy bubble. He's allowed some grace. Even if he retweets Jordan Peterson and drinks Starbucks. If anything, that makes me more sympathetic to him, because yeah. Even wealthy libertarian tech bros. Even then.

Anyway this is a short and stellar episode and you should listen/read.