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Friends, I’m so excited to share this episode about punk rock with you. Not only does it weave in and out of where the source of many of my ethics come from, it also features a reunion between myself and an old friend, the musician Ted Leo, who I haven’t spoken with for almost twenty years.
Ted is best known for his band Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, but also for his project with Aimee Mann, The Both, his solo albums, and his hugely influential mod-punk band, Chisel.
On this episode, Ted and I talk at length about how punk changed our lives, but – perhaps more importantly – why that punk rock network and community matters now.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? One of my favorite AEWCH moments was when Fugazi/Minor Threat frontman and Dischord Records founder Ian MacKaye agreed to be on the show… and our conversation on AEWCH 119 was really incredible. A very different kind of conversation than this one with Ted, but still adjacent to everything.
WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ? A great introduction to the ways art and politics and mutual aid interwove during our punk coming of age is We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews which features longform interviews with musicians, but also leftist political figures of the time.
MORE ON TED Ted’s website is here, and he also posts frequently on bandcamp, where you can support his music via donation. Here’s Ted’s Stereogum interview about his solo album The Hanged Man. And just for the fuck of it, here’s Ted singing a karaoke version of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You’ve Been Gone” with comedian Paul F. Tomkins in tow.
Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST viaPatreon
Friends,
In the midst of 2022, so many of us are seeking peace and meaning. So here’s my series on one meaning-rich tradition and religious stream: Christianity.
But this will be a different sort of Christianity: occult and esoteric Christianity. Some of it might look familiar. Some might seem absolutely bizarre. All of it, I hope will stir a feeling of warmth and depth of meaning for you, whether you feel any affinity with Christianity or the occult. The first episode in the series is AEWCH 181, featuring Rev. Patrick Kennedy from the Christian Community – a religious tradition informed by occultism. The second, AEWCH 182, was on with writer and spiritual teacher Lisa Romero. The third is AEWCH 183 on Christ and technology with tech worker-turned-spiritual-philosopher Andrew Linnell. And the fourth, AEWCH 184, is an examination of esoteric christianity and friendship in the Holocaust and now with historian Anne Weise.
Now we turn to the very practical fruits of esoteric christianity: how it can flow into cultural, political, and economic life in lasting and powerful ways. The name for this is social threefolding, a process articulated by Rudolf Steiner in the early 20th century based on principles in human life.
To discuss social threefolding I invited Seth Jordan onto the show; Seth is an educator and writer at The Whole Social. In the spirit of threefolding, I ask three times: Why do we have no idea of how to move forward?
SHOW NOTES
WHATBOOKYOUSHOULDREAD?A great introduction to social threefolding can be found in Nicanor Perlas’s book, Shaping Globalization: Civil Society, Cultural Power, and Threefolding. Nicanor was a presidential hopeful in the Philippines and has received the Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize), the Outstanding Filipino Award, and the UNEP Global 500 Award for his work. He was also Seth’s teacher and is a lucid writer.
WHATOTHERAEWCHEPISODEYOUSHOULDLISTENTO?Well, two of them:One of my favorite episodes of the show is AEWCH 76 with money historian Conor McCabe where we talk about the phenomenology of money. I had Conor back on the show a year or later to discuss how to reinvent money and economics with anthroposophical economist, John Bloom, on AEWCH 110.
WHATSHOULDYOULOOKINTOFURTHER?Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) is an initiative that came from biodynamic farming (an esoteric christian approach to agriculture) and social threefolding. It’s incorporated other traditions and thinkers along the way, as exemplified by this good article on CSAs. As Susan Witt, from the EF Schumacher Society says: “One of Steiner’s major concepts was the producer-consumer association, where consumer and producer are linked by their mutual interests,” she explained. “And oneofSchumacher’smajorconceptswas‘todevelopaneconomywhereyouproducelocallywhatisconsumedlocally.’ We began to see CSA as a way to bring these key ideas together.”
And one of the farmers at a community farm elaborates the principles:
Newformsofpropertyownership—The land is held in a common by a community through a legal trust. The trust then leases its property long-term to farmers who use the land to grow food for the community.
Newformsofcooperation—A network of human relations replaces old systems of employers and employees as well as replacing the practice of pledging material security (land, buildings, etc.) to banks.
Newformsofeconomy(associative economy)–The guiding question is not “how do we increase profits?” but rather “what are the actual needs of the land and of the people involved in this enterprise?
FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.Buy the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 163 on bookshop.org!
Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
Friends,
I’m so excited to share this episode (and its long intro about revolution and violence!) with journalist, author, and filmmaker Jon Ronson.
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Jon, read his books, of course. But also you can go to his website, and find his series The Butterfly Effectas well as The Last Days of Auguston Audible. You can also watch Jon’s collaboration with Parasite director Bong-Joon Ho, Okja. And here’s Jon’s semi-autobiographical movie (featuring Michael Fassbender), Frank.
FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Buy the books mentioned on and related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 146 on bookshop.org. Bookshop.org sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback.
Friends,
Why do we get stuck in revolution? Around the revolutions in France of 1968 – university students were staging occupations, resisting capitalism, resisting consumerism, resisting shitty art. And their resistance led to general strikes that began to threaten people and institions in power. I don’t have the space to go into detail about those revolutions here, but I want to hone in on one comment on them.
When the university students approached psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan to see what he thought, his answer frustrated them. He said, “as revolutionaries, you aspire to new masters.”
What did he mean? Lacan was addressing the way that we become so stuck in the struggle that we identify with it.
It’s a huge challenge to the thought that if we just change social conditions change, everything will be great. That just isn’t so; because we end up cleaving to our struggles and identifying with them, simply changing the social and material conditions doesn’t work.
So what’s the way out? There are a lot of components, but music, poetry, magic, art, sex, conversation, gardening, forgiveness, knowing our neighbors, etc etc. – those are a start. They allow us to create new rhythms in our lives.
I decided to talk about all of this with rapper and activist Vic Mensa – I’m sure a lot of you know Vic already, from his own music as well as his collaborations with Kanye and Chance the Rapper among many others. He’s also the co-founder of the mutual aid organization Save Money, Save Life and their Street Medics program.
We talk about how to disidentify with the enemy and our struggle against that enemy, about meditation, talking with the dead, about music as a restorative space, about the power sexuality in hip hop, and more.
• Learn more about Julius Jones, who was wrongfully convicted of murder in Oklahoma when he was 19 years old. He’s still there, and in solitary confinement for most the day, victimized by a racist “criminal justice” system.
• Listened to Body Count’s “Cop Killer” a bunch of times during the 2020 protests.
• Here’s the video for “3 Years Sober” which, um, made a lot of people mad.
• I talked about the “desk killers” with Dan Gretton on AEWCH 128.
• Vic was hanging out with Michael K. Williams who is just… the best. Off of that, I mentioned Alex Vitale, who I talked with about ending policing waaaay back on AEWCH 29.
LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker• Anchor • Patreon This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? Srećko’s latest book is available here. To buy his other books, or books mentioned on/related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 143 on bookshop.org. It will help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too. (And once After the Apocalypse is available via bookshop.org, I’ll add it to the list!)
Friends,
A few conundrums:How do we deal with the fact that we keep envisioning a destructive future, yet so few of us are acting to stop it?
When we talk about systems that (like capitalism and patriarchy, for example) that are oppressing us, do we mean they’re…like…spiritual forces? Invisible vague laws of social nature? What?And how is being separated from so many people we love affecting our notion of space and relationship?
To answer these questions, and in what I hope becomes an annual tradition, I invited philosopher, author, and activist Srećko Horvat back on the show. You might remember out first conversation, about a year ago, was on AEWCH 107, just at the start of the global crisis in 2020. Well, obviously, things haven’t resolved themselves since then, and it’s because we haven’t taken steps bold and miraculous enough.Srećko is not a class reductionist nor an identity politics thinker, but instead, (like Michael Hardt on AEWCH 120) Srećko brings together strands of ,any different aspects of being human – philosophy, art, music, poetry, activism, economics, politics, and more – and tries to survey our current, future, and past predicaments. His new book After The Apocalypse brings his multi-layered perspective to the apocalypse, which, Srećko reminds us, has already happened:
People huddled in tents in their houses in freezing Texas evenings. Empty streets. Lines for groceries at Tesco, where the food is all wrapped in plastic. Borders closed. The threat of disease at every turn. Riots against murder by the authorities. This is what it feels like to be in an apocalypse.
So what about after? Can there be an after?
The answer is yes, but it will take a liberation of time and space and a reinvention of the political, economic, and cultural realms.So… let’s get to it.
PS: After the Apocalypse has a playlist, which I’ve replicated as much as I could on spotify. Here’s the playlist for the book.
ON THIS EPISODE
What we mean when we talk about capitalism doing things
The destruction and seizing of time
Why reincarnation matters
How to deal with knowing an end is approaching but still needing to live in the now
Does “climate change” help us take action? And how are climate change and failed communism related?
Why science can’t save us (and in fact can do a lot of harm)
The return of the power of the state, and the public health utopia
Silence as a commons
The need for mutual aid
What the world should have, but refused to learn, from the HIV crisis
How to liberate “problematic” thinkers
The importance of working with the dead
How do we use the tools we have without reinforcing the terrible structures the tools come from
• I wrote about Wittgenstein’s quote – “When we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction.” – and how it relates to the current crisis for The Irish Times.
• I talk with economics researcher and author Conor McCabe on AEWCH 76 about the entangled relationship between money and time (it’s one of my favorite episodes!). And I talked all about the way the vision of the Earth changed when we landed on the Moon waaaay back on AEWCH 5.
• Some of Günther Anders’s work is available online in translation here.
• Here’s a story on the the Tallaght wetlands. I can’t find the information on the murder investigation there, but I did read it shortly after the wetlands were destroyed. If you find an essay on it, send it along!
• I haven’t yet seen The Midnight Sky, but, okay, Clooney and sci fi. And here’s the trailer for the other movie Srećko mentioned, Space Sweepers.
• Here’s Walter Benjamin’s Theses On A Philosophy Of History. It’s, for me, one of the most influential theoretical works. From the essay: “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.”
• Bill Gates’s crazy plan to block the Sun is underway. Steiner’s warning (from 1913, I believe) is a bit complex if you don’t know the anthroposophical lexicon, but: “…the Ahrimanic beings strive to ensoul the living limestone with a kind of astral rain… If the Ahrimanic beings could realize their hopes the whole of humanity would gradually be dissolved into the earth…”
• I still can’t believe I got to speak with Fugazi/Minor Threat frontman and Dischord Records founder Ian MacKaye on AEWCH 119. Really.
This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib onPatreon! Thank you so, so much.
Wanttobuy the booksmentionedonthisep? For Mitch’s books, and other books mentioned on or related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 137 on bookshop.org. It will help supportindependentbookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
Friends,
As 2021 begins, we’re faced with a simple question which you might not have thought of, and it’s a simple question…what do you want? What do you want the world to look like?
While everyone else is stuck in the crazed call out of news items and resistance to what they’re afraid of, what do we actually want to aim for?
My friend Gordon White has observed that “optimism is a spell,” and I agree.
And?
I think we need to extend that further — envisioning the world as you want draws optimism into the personal world. It gives you the impetus and even the tools and substances to build with. In that vein, it’s also important to think about how you want your year to go.
It’s an impertinent question, almost, isn’t it? With some pagan-horned douchebag on the Capitol steps and the lockdowns and the conflicts, you might think: How dare you want to improve your life this year!
But how can you be effective if you don’t center your vision and center your desires? And how will you even know what you’re against and what you’re not against if you don’t put your desires first?
To flesh out all of this, I asked my friend Mitch Horowitz, new age/occult/self help scholar & writer, back onto the show. I talked to Mitch waaay back on AEWCH 30, and I was so nervous: he was one of the first guests I had on who I didn’t already know well. We had a great time, even if the episode is mostly just me talking. This conversation goes much deeper – and it’s because both Mitch and I have become more and more involved in the ideas we’re passionate about and the experiences we’ve had since then, and it’s really great.
We end up discussing why self help matters now more than ever; what Mitch’s cosmology is; and (at length) leftist attacks on new age, spirituality, and occultism: bad faith arguments that ultimately reveal a leftist desire to lose the battle.
So proud to share this, the first AEWCH guest episode of 2021, with you to set the tone for the year.
ON THIS EPISODE
The need to be right as original sin.
“We say we want to be listened to, but actually we want to be obeyed.”
How can focus on improving our personal lives in such a crazy polarized time?
Developing new habits right the fuck now.
The spiritual value of cleaning.
Why pleasure and happiness matters in discovering your spiritual and social quest.
Is it okay to have personal desires in the face of spiritual necessity?
“Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.” – Augustine
Was the Buddha wrong?
Get away from cruel people. And don’t be one!
Deleting facebook (WHY HAVE YOU NOT DONE THIS).
That time Steve Bannon called Mitch.
Leftist hit jobs on occultism.
Asking yourself: I/We/Cosmos.
What’s Mitch’s cosmology, anyway?
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Mitch, support his patreon. He gets posts so much stuff for his patrons, including his 10 Day Miracle Challenge. And visit the bookshop.org list; he’s edited and introduced countless books, but I’ve included the ones that he’s authored and the ones in which his voice is most prominent.
• I was so excited to talk with anti-work feminist Kathi Weeks on AEWCH 123. What an honor!
• Such a shame that Franz Bardon’s major works aren’t as readily available as they used to be. That said, you can learn about this important, lesser-known occultist here.
• The New Life Foundation is dedicated to the work of Vernon Howard, and there’s plenty on their site about him.
• Byron Katie’s system, The Work, has been instrumental in making me a better person.
• “There can be no doubt that the follower of anthroposophy is by definition an opponent of National Socialism, or at the very least, must remain an outsider to National Socialism.” – Heinrich Himmler
• And here’ s Hitler: The Occult Messiah, by Gerald Suster. Suster’s book has some mistakes, but he at least takes the occult seriously as something other than just religious mind-control and stupidity. That said, it’s a very difficult book to get!
• Camphill communities are some of the most beautiful and loving organizations for people with disabilities and the elderly. If you don’t know much about them, check them out.
This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep, including Dan’s book? Go to my booklist for AEWCH 128 on bookshop.org. It will help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
Friends,
Albert Speer – who was a close conspirator of Hitler’s said of the process of Nazi-fication that, “Each man should only think about his task and not be concerned with that of his neighbor.”
This was right down to the most menial functions – that each person would carry out their own labor without creating a networked understanding of what was going on.In other words fragmentation and compartmentalization are key for mass atrocity.
This is, potentially, bad news for us, as we seem to live more and more fragmented and compartmentalized lives. Fragmentation and compartmentalization is a kind of swaddling that keeps us safe from understanding what we’re doing to others. It shelters us from the harm our lives are doing, and also keeps us from seeing what others are going through. And this sense of safety can breed a sort of calm apathy.
“Wherever people feel safe (…) they will be indifferent.” – Susan Sontag
Another way of saying this is that we feel safe because we lack compassion. Compassion means, literally, to suffer with. If we were to really enact compassion, if we were to allow our lives to intersect with the suffering of others, could we ever feel safe? How could we bear it? Instead of ignoring the suffering of others, we need to look directly into it.
Dan’s book is all about people who murder by policy – people whose participation in compartmentalized and fragmented work have permitted them to engage in murder while feeling safe. And through that safety being permitted a luxurious indifference.You may be one of these people. Or you may become one if you’re not now.How do we commit ourselves to atrocity? Could you do it? Could I?
Here are 10 points Dan identifies – a list of factors is an inverse of spiritual development, a sort of path of black magic:
Have you engaged in any of these? Has your company? Your family? Your loved ones? How easy would it be to absorb you into a structure that required any of these and would you even know if it were happening?Furthermore, is your activism, your attachment to your own suffering, occluding the suffering of others?
If you want an intervention, I suggest you read Dan’s book. It is one of the only books of which I have ever said, everyone should read it. Everyone.
It is a voluminous book detailing genocides and murders – in Nazi camps, but also via the executions of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni men by the then Nigerian military government through their entanglement with Shell oil, in colonial Ireland and at Kenyan airports. Dan talks to the relatives of Nazis and people who work for corporations who kill. He seeks out the truth behind the desk killers – people who kill from their desks, whose murder weapon is not a gun or a knife, but a pen or a computer.
These are the killers that are most abundant.
At the end of the episode, Dan reads an unpublished letter to the future – it’s a beautiful moment, full of sorrow and hope.
Listen. Breathe.
ON THIS EPISODE
Why we focus on serial killers but not desk killer
How we pay attention to certain forms of activism to avoid bigger atrocities
Where some people who we think are progressive draw the line at human rights
Voting and not voting based on purity politics
The failure to reckon with national pasts of genocide and colonialism in America and the UK
Can we kill without reservation? Are we capable of killing? What stops us (and when will it stop stopping us?)
How do we allow such pain and suffering of the world in and then breathe
Who keeps their humanity in the midst of atrocity
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Dan, here’s a great interview with him on the BBC with Nihal Arthanayake. And here’s the art and activism group Dan founded, Platform. Here’s the link to a review article of I You We Them, “The desk killer and the spider” in Race & Class. (It’s behind a paywall!)
• Here’s the trailer for the serial killer series Dan mentions at the top, Des.
• There’s still not enough information on the Herero and Nama genocide, but here’s a very short article to get you started.
• Here’s a short video of Jan Karski talking about what he witnessed when Jewish people were being herded into trains like animals.
• Below is a great photo from Joseph Beuys’s exhibit, “I Like America and America Likes Me”. If you’d like to learn more about Beuys and his work, go to the booklist at the top of this page.
• If you don’t know about human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa’s execution at the hands of the Nigerian military government, spurred into action by Shell Oil’s policies, you should learn more. Here’s a documentary (in parts) on YouTube.
Friends, one last push here: Buy and read Dan’s book, I You We Them. It is absolutely essential and it will make you a better person.
Friends, does this show have value to you? If so, I ask that you support it on Patreon! The show is funded exclusively by listeners like you, and your contribution is vital and deeply appreciated!Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? Go to my booklist for AEWCH 124 on bookshop.org! It will help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
Friends, It’s been a long time since I made a porn scene for public consumption that I got paid for and so much about production has changed since then. I was used to doing studio scenes for Raging Stallion and Hot House and Falcon and Joe Gage, but now things have shifted over to an Only Fans performer-produced model. And while I’m so happy that workers have partially seized the means of production, so to speak, I’m not so sure I want to, uh, seize them myself. I’m focusing on other things, and I’m also expressing myself in ways that are a bit more interesting to me. But the fact remains that it is the most widespread and available medium for performers and viewers now. Because I stopped my just over 7 year porn career before these platforms existed, and because the world is changed, there are so many new challenges and enthusiams and tactics navigated by performers now. So I asked adult performer and writer Ty Mitchell onto the show. Ty is a brilliant performer and an articulate and thoughtful writer. His scenes give you the sense of an immediate quality of performance, and his essays, including the now classic “Boy Problems,” about navigating age and power differentials in gay experience, have given so many of us so much to think about. This is a long episode and for good reason: there’s SO much to talk about when it comes to sex, especially in our moment.Ty has emerged as one of the most thoughtful voices on gay sex & culture; and I’m so glad he has because we need people that can take this movement, and conversations that come out of it forward. This will give you a glimpse of where he’s going and the fact that he’s so articulate that many will join hands and follow him there.
ON THIS EPISODE
The guilt and doubt that follows pleasure
The mystification of porn production
The exploitative practices of self-produced scenes
The intensities of power differentials in sex
The reasons why women and gay men have trouble seeing eye to eye
The constitutive elements of homophobia
How should we view incest arousal?
Working class men in adult scenes
Joe Gage’s directing style vs other directors, and why the aesthetics matter
• I’ve talked about sex directly on the show many times, including about consent with Katherine Angel on AEWCH 101, about the good of adult work with Missy Martinez on AEWCH 38 and the not-so-good with Johnny Hazzard on AEWCH 88. About sex addiction and the problem of sex & culture on AEWCH 56. And with Whores of Yore historian Kate Lister on AEWCH 102 among others!
• We talk a lot about Joe Gage on this episode. If you don’t know him, he’s a revolutionary director, and you should check into his work, whether you watch gay porn or not. Here’s a thorough interview with him in BUTT Magazine. Also, you can watch me watching one of my own Joe Gage scenes (from After the Heist which I had three scenes in and which became Joe’s best selling film ever for Dragon Video) with a straight guy from Buzzfeed. It’s funny, gotta say.
• Probably the best-known thing I’ve written so far is “What I Want To Know Is Why You Hate Porn Stars,” about the challenges of navigating a relationship while making porn and how that relates to anti-porn sentiment in culture.
• I talk about the intensity of desire and repetition with Maggie Nelson (still can’t believe I had that conversation!) on AEWCH 95.
Thank you for your support in this time, friends. This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. If the show is keeping you company and making you think or inspiring creativity, please give what you can.
Contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? Go to my booklist for AEWCH 115 on bookshop.org. It will help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
Friends,
In my final episode (at least for now) in my mini-run of episodes on the challenges of tech, I thought I’d turn the lens a bit: What does tech feel like for us? What is the experience of it, particularly using the internet?
To answer this question in a deep and engaging way, I talk with author, cultural critic, and internet historian Joanne McNeil. Joanne’s book, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, is unlike any book on the internet that you’ve ever read. Why? Because it’s not a book of praise or even condemnation of social media founders, or a journey through start-up-dom. Instead, it’s an exploration of what it’s like for us to be on the internet. What were and are the contours of our experiences on Myspace, Hotbot, Friendster, Google, writing and reading blogs, and (ugh) Facebook? What kind of people do we become engaging with these “spaces?” And perhaps most challengingly, what’s good about them?
(NOTE: Joanne and I had some sound challenges in the episode, so you’ll notice a few quality discrepancies, but nothing terrible. Just a heads up that you’ll get the glitches. mid-ep.)
ON THIS EPISODE
Respecting the interactions on the internet
What the internet has done to memory
The way pop culture just before the internet hit got lost
The gay history of the internet
The shaping of love on the internet
What sort of relationships are forming in quarantine conditions?
The fulfillment of wandering and lurking on the internet
Craigslist’s lost potential
The asymmetricality of anonymous users and open users
How twitter acts like capitalism
The difference between caring about wrongs and being involved in the stories of them online
The three times I had twitter pile-ons
Why we need to get rid of facebook and not replace it
Where to go from here and all this mess
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Joanne, here’s her website, which has tons of links and a great HTML aesthetic. And here’s a great interview with her just after the release of Lurking.
• Have you seen Brainiac: Transmissions After Zero? Also, did you know that there’s a severely distorted sample of a Brainiac song in the AEWCH theme? Well, there you go.
• The Tech Won’t Save Us podcast featuring Joanne is here. And they have a patreon!
• I wrote a bit about my trip to Florida to meet Ron in my essay “Gay For Pay, Part 1”
• Who else remembers the Pet Shop Boys’s 2002 song about falling in love via online text, “Email“?
• Here’s my old essay on hookup apps as pornography, “Facing The Torsos“.
• SESTA/FOSTA was passed years ago now, but I and other workers fought against it. Here’s a review of what it is.
• Yes, I was really into Unwound, and I still like them a lot!
• Yes, I’m changing my twitter in the next few days. We’ll all be okay, promise!
• Melissa Gira Grant comes up a couple of times in the episode, so check out her writing via the twitter link and her website!
Against Everyone With Conner Habib · AEWCH 114: WENDY LIU or AGAINST TECHNOCRACY
LISTEN ABOVE OR ON: iTunes • Stitcher • Soundcloud
Thank you for your support in this time, friends. This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. If the show is keeping you company and making you think or inspiring creativity, please give what you can.
Contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? Go to my booklist for AEWCH 114 on bookshop.org. It will help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
Friends,
Collectively, the world is waking up to the problems of big tech, and the challenges that lay ahead. But to understand what the problems are, and how to overcome them, we need guides, particularly guides who have been through the anti-life equation of tech themselves and somehow managed to not become deadened by it.
So I knew the best to talk to would be Wendy Liu, Bay Area software engineer and start up founder, and now the author of Abolish Silicon Valley, a practical memoir about awakening within and then challenging tech.
With a book title like that, Wendy’s stance on tech has obviously changed since the start of her career. Her public presence now focuses on revealing turn after turn of unsound ethics, structural inequality, the problems with data gathering, and even darker impulses in tech. To that end, Wendy and I talk about what’s happening now, how theory and activism can help with what’s coming, and lots more. This is a great episode, and I’m so happy to share it with you.
ON THIS EPISODE
Why tech workers can’t “change things from the inside”
How tech used to solve the problems of centralized “analog” forms of power, and what happened
The collective discontent with tech
The way identity politics issues in tech
The evil embedded in tech itself and how to spot it without becoming a luddite
Theory language vs coding language and how code completes the inner state for you
My goofy undergraduate hot-guys-on-geocities site
Why the pandemic regulations aren’t exactly new conditions
Repression and oppression as a tactic for tech
The pitfalls of tech socialism (and Wendy says, “Conner, don’t worry about that just yet!”)
The elimination of emotion
How (and how not) to resist the tech monster
The neoliberal tech erosion of Ireland
SHOW NOTES
• For more on Wendy, here’s her website. Here’s a great interview with her on the gay Marxist podcast, Twink Revolution.
• Also on the you-should list, check out Doug Rushkoff if you haven’t yet. He’s one of the most brilliant thinkers I know.
• Although I’ve been doing a sort of mini-run of episodes on tech, the first one, really, was AEWCH 105 with apocalypse writer and tech critic Mark O’Connell. If you haven’t yet listen, go for it. And here’s the article on J.G. Ballard that Mark wrote, and which both Wendy and I loved.
• I’ve learned a lot from Owen Barfield (pictured) about language, consciousness, and art.
• J.G. Ballard’s Myths Of The Near Future isn’t available, but you can get his collected stories (or selected stories) via this episode’s booklist link.
• The economics, political, and cultural sphere stuff, is social threefolding, developed by Rudolf Steiner.
• Here’s a little rundown on the death of honeybees from 5G radiation. It’s on a honeybee-centered website, but you can find the data corroborated by other entomologists and tech workers.
• Learn more about Wilhelm Reich’s occult tech on AEWCH 59 or other forms of occult tech via AEWCH 112 with Peter Berbegal or AEWCH 113 with Duncan Laurie.
Conner Habib 