Ep 223 - Calm Before the Solar Storm
Added 2023-08-09 10:00:10 +0000 UTCWe take listener Questions! covering a range of topics including the climate apocalypse and hopes for a better world, if we should take over the internet or destroy it, visions for postwar Ukraine, conspiracy theories turning reactionary, squatting and being aging punx, Bidenomics and much more!
Show notes:
RIP Mario Tronti: https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/mario-tronti-i-am-defeated/?fbclid=IwAR0TeJLflUGKjO8tN_CLlE9DvPZb5qq0sppNliaml9Lgmdk1Yh9wQ8nEwnY
https://libcom.org/article/strategy-refusal-mario-tronti
New York Year Zero: https://gittlitz.substack.com/p/nyyz
NYT on conspiracy theories: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/opinion/conspiracy-theory-qanon.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
The ‘monumental consequences’ of Ukraine joining the EU https://on.ft.com/44Xvr3d
Dog Breath: https://dogbreathnyc.bandcamp.com/album/dog-breath
Iggy Pop '77:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZth4CNaEBA
Song: Blackhole Sun by Soundgarden
Comments
I can’t speak to your experience at all, but depending on what you mean by that it would be at odds with the ideas they publicly advocate. Regardless, if you agree the type of politics I’m talking about are relevant, the point stands that I think it should be part of the discussion - but it never is on this show. Anarchism is always equated with small-a/neo-anarchism, insurrectionism, lifestyleism, etc. I think it would be helpful to talk about a tradition that - even if you feel it’s not being put into practice well in the US - is surely part of the debate?
Matt Crossin
2023-08-13 08:10:12 +0000 UTCAlso, real banger guys
Taz
2023-08-12 22:47:58 +0000 UTCRE: The tech Q. I'm a senior engineer at insert company here. I'd put the potential for even social democratic/ labor politics in that workplace is near zero. It's become extraordinarily atomized since COVID and WFH. And in the broader sense, 95% of the internet tech is built to maintain networks of capital. What's being built now are layers of obfuscation on probability machines. This tech will never be anything other than speculative future value imo
Taz
2023-08-12 22:43:27 +0000 UTCI'm not making the obviously absurd claim that all of history was an inevitability, but the equally absurd reverse is not true either; that everything in human history was purely the product of entropy and chaos, and that one technological advancement never leads to another. I *am* specifically claiming that, from the very moment humans discovered electricity, we were going to make semiconductors, and we'd eventually create some kind of computer. If you don't recognize those things as an inevitable outcome of society's interest in electricity, you probably just haven't spent enough time around EE and CS nerds. I'd actually go further and say that these technologies probably would have developed even faster if they weren't constantly hamstrung by capital or the bourgeois state. If anything, the story of the development of the Internet in the latter half of the 20th century is a story about inefficiencies, corruption, and elitist gatekeeping. Regardless, I'm not particularly interested in whatever passes for "populism" on any given day—since we're talking about ideas that are vague and meaningless—and I'm also not interested in a version of so-called luddism that's just a feverish anti-technology regression fantasy masquerading as a labor movement. So if in some hypothetical post-revolutionary world there has to be a group of people defending the utility of the Internet and working to make it better, I will be in that group one way or another, as will many other people. That is a simple fact of modern life that any revolutionary struggle will now have to contend with.
synthmage
2023-08-12 00:49:09 +0000 UTCI mean things could easily get bad enough for a populist Neo-Luddism movement. I am extremely in favor of that. One can also take the position that everything that has occurred in all of history was inevitable because that can’t be falsified, it’s not particularly interesting and doesn’t say anything. The idea that technological progress is somehow an inevitability is just motivated liberal reasoning.
Fellow Worker
2023-08-11 23:29:40 +0000 UTCBarring some bizarre popular streak of misguided puritanical luddism, digital signaling and computing—and ultimately some form of global networking—were inevitable outcomes of humanity harnessing and studying electromagnetism. The RFCs might have looked different, for better or worse, if the standards were written in a communist utopian mode of production, but any quasi-organized version of human society that cared about technological advancement for any reason would've seen the value of developing these technologies. There's plenty of room for more a more thoughtful and considerate regime not guided by the profit motive to cull lots of waste and inefficiency from Internet infrastructure as it currently exists; and the current version of the web where everything is plastered with advertisements for scams isn't beloved by the majority of people who aren't its financial beneficiaries; but people clearly like parts of it, and it has nurtured and shared lots of different sub/cultures. Disavowing such a major branch of scientific/human advancement just because the bourgeois state was the only entity with enough resources to build it at the time is akin to ascribing reaction to life-saving medicine because the research was funded by a pharmaceutical corporation. Either way, the paste isn't going back in the tube, so I personally can't take seriously any supposedly positive revolutionary project that can't reckon with something as fundamental as communications infrastructure.
synthmage
2023-08-11 20:08:19 +0000 UTCIt is a trap that keeps us deep in the simulacra and far away from reality, and ultimately it is not a tool that is necessary. We just think that we need it because we are all trapped here in by the internet, and have a very hard time imagining a world without it.
Fellow Worker
2023-08-11 19:45:15 +0000 UTC“________” is just a tool arguments are always total fallacies. What exactly do you think we have gotten out of access to some big library? At best, we are just hobbyists learning random facts on wikipedia and skills through youtube. We still have brick and mortar libraries. I don’t think that just “getting rid of the internet” will make the world better, but I do think that the internet is, at this point, making it much harder for us to make the world better. It is not connecting us, it is actually spreading us out and disconnecting us from each other.
Fellow Worker
2023-08-11 19:42:37 +0000 UTCEntire systems built exclusively by the military and massive corporations, were inevitably going to be used for these ends. It is actually a completely by chance that we wound up with useful and good cultural bits out of the existence of such systems. A lot of people involved in building the internet were utopian libertarians but that doesn’t mean that the people paying their wages were not totally in control.
Fellow Worker
2023-08-11 19:37:36 +0000 UTCi haven't seen black rose IRL in about six years when they were acting like peace police out for a photo-op during BLM. i obviously identify more with black rose's ideas of organization and struggle more than RCP, but the conversation was about who has lessons for us. so if they have ok ideas, butcan't put what they say in practice, i dont think they have lessons.
The Antifada
2023-08-11 18:33:19 +0000 UTCAs opposed to who, the Leninist sects mentioned? The point is the politics reflect what you’re talking about
Matt Crossin
2023-08-11 11:18:32 +0000 UTCSome optimistic holiday fiction for youse https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/8128485.Phil_Brett
Chris Tupman
2023-08-11 09:29:40 +0000 UTCi'd be interested in them if they had any relevance whatsoever
The Antifada
2023-08-11 04:51:47 +0000 UTCIt’s funny to hear you guys talk about the need for some kind of more organised communist organisation which can intervene in struggles and jump to either DSA or some Leninist or Stalinist group — I would think you would be more interested in groups like Black Rose which are part of a global network of anarchist political organisations looking to revive the classical mass anarchist tradition.
Matt Crossin
2023-08-10 23:22:19 +0000 UTCSurveillance is absolutely not a core function of the Internet. That was _allowed_ by the telcos and tech firms who privately own major parts of the infrastructure and built the apparatuses—in concert with the state—to make it possible. The same goes for all the advertisement and marketing that begat things like social media; these are functions of capital, not immutable characteristics of computer networking. And if we're talking about things that are unique to the Internet, misinformation, CSE materials, and reactionary propaganda were also around well before the advent of home computing. These, and even things like cryptocurrency, are the products of social problems; the Internet didn't invent antisocial behaviors, but it does reflect their presence in society in complicated ways.
synthmage
2023-08-10 18:12:00 +0000 UTCI want to push back on this idea that the world will magically be better if the internet went out, maybe social media, but the internet is a basic way people access information. Yes you're destroying the hellsite and the panopticon, but you're also destroying the biggest most accessible library to ever exist. Leftists need answers to these questions beyond "just smash it" and "just take it over".
M.R. Alchemist
2023-08-10 14:23:53 +0000 UTCIt is an extremely useful tool to surveil us, sell us stuff, waste our time and attention and addict us to social media apps, spread misinformation and child pornography and organize nazis too. Not to mention all of the financial scamming, cryptocurrencies and AI crap. I’ll happily go back CDs and floppy disks. EDM ain’t worth all the pain that the internet has given us so far.
Fellow Worker
2023-08-10 10:52:53 +0000 UTCWell...specifically things like Hyperpop and Glitch music wouldn't exist at all, and genres like IDM and and DnB wouldn't sound anything like they do now, but the advent and proliferation of DAWs and advances in analogue emulation have made music of all genres much easier and less wasteful to produce. Maybe technically possible without a global WAN, but nowhere near as accessible or inclusive (to the extent that they even are now). The same goes for things like digital drawing, animation, and 3D modeling. All of these technically existed before the Internet, but were just seedlings compared to how they evolved on the Internet. CAD and CNC are prime examples of digital technologies that existed in a relatively rudimentary form before the internet, but have advanced dramatically in part due to recent increases in accessibility and availability. Hell, even just the distribution of the software tools necessary to do all of these things is just objectively better. You don't have to go to an office supply store and buy a boxed CD of a design or production program for $500. There are freely available, open source options now that you can download in seconds, and the energy cost is somewhere in the mW range. The Internet has a complicated relationship with production and commoditization, and it has facilitated plenty of Bad™ things, but it *is* an extremely useful tool.
synthmage
2023-08-10 02:56:32 +0000 UTCI gotta know what art you are talking about because acid house existed before the internet. At this point, I’m happy for it to all get thrown out, I can’t think of any art that only exists directly because of the internet that is worth keeping it around
Fellow Worker
2023-08-10 02:33:43 +0000 UTCThat’s definitely the best schedule we work 5:00-1:00 beat the traffic and actually have a LIFE. I do metal stud framing and drywall. Carpenters local 68-L Oakland baby.
Robert Booth
2023-08-10 00:45:49 +0000 UTCNot to put too fine a point on it, but I don't want to live in a communist society without Acid House.
synthmage
2023-08-09 22:47:15 +0000 UTCThe thing about the Internet is that it has actually done *some* good. Computers and the availability of creative software are just plain essential for some kind of art, and make others easier. I'm all for excising markets and commodities from the Internet as part of some post-capitalist revolutionary project, but when we start talking about destroying the Internet, it's inherently also a discussion about destroying lots of art and culture by proxy.
synthmage
2023-08-09 22:45:12 +0000 UTCLet me expound a bit, I drive food from NC to CA and from CA back every week. I know some of the people I work with, and I hear enough people saying “I will hang myself if Biden is re-elected” on the CB across the country to tell you we need more comrade truckers
Adam
2023-08-09 20:06:23 +0000 UTCAs a trucker, gotta have some CDl entry-ism…. Trust me, there are not enough people in the field right now that would not side with the warlords
Adam
2023-08-09 19:53:02 +0000 UTCI bought tickets to that pg 99 show but I ended up having to resell my tickets because me and all my friends couldn't get off. All the videos Jake posted made it seem like it was a good show
self loathing egomaniac
2023-08-09 14:40:14 +0000 UTCWell if you mean tech as social media then no, but if you mean tech as computing software then you're talking more about about logistics which is very useful. I don't know how effective salting Silicon Valley without already existing dual power; we should probably start organizing makerspaces as alternatives sights of production first.
M.R. Alchemist
2023-08-09 13:32:20 +0000 UTCWe delegate authority that we simultaneously subordinate ourselves to, and we leave open the process to recall that authority. And there is no other option, it's all the path of reification without authority being delegating under such self-conscious conditions. This is where the subject-object position ala Lukács is necessary. We learn how to become objects for ourselves, how to objectify ourselves, we properly dialecticize (sorry) the notion of subordination through this process of self-conscious collectivity. Hope that made sense.
dusted
2023-08-09 12:52:30 +0000 UTCRe prepper communism; check out prepperpig
gavin curran
2023-08-09 12:21:15 +0000 UTCAmerican warlords are car dealership owners
E
2023-08-09 11:08:51 +0000 UTCHell yeah news ep now need diving thru the wreckage my fav series ☺️
E
2023-08-09 10:48:12 +0000 UTC
