00:08:21.840And it's interesting because, of course, it's this nonprofit inflated as this public entity.
00:08:31.780And really, so many of these institutions are just clubhouses for organized capital, which part of these ideas I'm taking right from your book and things that I've thought about before as well.
00:08:43.400And I think it's interesting to understand how this institution has shaped place.
00:08:55.300And I guess I'd just love to hear more about the planned and unplanned ways Stanford was created as an institution of power and wealth accrual.
00:09:05.120yeah well if you think about stanford i mean stanford leland stanford junior university
00:09:11.900comes to be we talk about characterizing social forces right it comes to substitute for leland
00:09:19.880stanford junior who is the heir to the stanford robber baron fortune who dies unexpectedly as a
00:09:26.600young teenager and his parents decide that their children are going to be the children of california
00:09:32.560they say. And they had a pretty specific idea of what that meant, but they are sort of transferring
00:09:39.300this curse, right? It's the activities that they've done, what they've done, and been part
00:09:46.960of the colonization of the West in order to transfer that wealth to this institution that0.77
00:09:54.720then is going to spread it to the children of not California per se, but the Anglo-American
00:10:00.780settlers of California. That's the premise of Stanford University. That's what happens. And
00:10:06.220quickly, that spins out of the founding family's control as Jane Lathrop Stanford dies and or is
00:10:14.080murdered possibly by the president of the university. And it becomes an institution
00:10:19.900that's really obsessed with the eugenic perfection of man in the service of America.
00:10:27.140What do we make of the reality that universities like Stanford are often simultaneously hotbeds
00:10:33.500of student resistance and the beginnings of technologies of war, surveillance, and control?
00:10:39.720Well, just like any workplace is, right? I mean, any place where you're going to have to put people
00:10:44.240to work under capitalism, any exercise of power includes the possibility for resistance.
00:10:51.680So I think wherever you have people working, you see resistance to that work, to capital, and you can find it wherever you look. The key question for me, I guess, is what the importance of the particular resistance that you see in Palo Alto and its character over time.
00:11:06.600yeah there's so much to say about universities and academia and in your other book kids these
00:11:17.780days you write higher education is just one industry and it follows sometimes leads the
00:11:22.560same trends as the rest of the labor market end quote and it's an interesting quote i guess it
00:11:29.200makes me think about there's so much critique of academia in ways i don't think there were before
00:11:36.200because of the state of the world and the future opportunities for people who do graduate.
00:11:42.840I think at one time, if you graduated from Stanford, for instance, your opportunities
00:11:48.740were probably more abundant, where now these institutions are churning out, I don't want
00:11:56.140to say robots because people are people, but it's almost like they're just churning out
00:12:00.260more people. And not to say there's not more jobs, but I don't think that there is the same
00:12:06.980amount of opportunities. And we see that with housing and maybe before a PhD would have held
00:12:14.100more weight than it does now because of the way the world is growing and resource extraction and
00:12:22.240materialism, capitalism, disposability, culture, so on and so forth. And so I guess I think about
00:12:29.620these young adults like myself who might have these dreams of going into these institutions
00:12:37.580thinking that it will open up worlds and for many it does now maybe the worlds that it opens up
00:12:43.280are sinister or are not actually the dream of what young excited people have in mind
00:12:51.920And so I guess there's a, maybe even like a dream shattering effect of what these institutions can actually provide for us anymore. And, you know, of course, like we can tack that onto some of the boomers, some boomer ideologies of like, oh, kids don't work anymore.
00:13:12.100you know there was so much more dignity when I was young and we we really you know we really
00:13:17.900showed up and I'm like well it's not the same world and I have compassion for people who don't
00:13:24.620want to show up in that way what are they fighting for what are they working for what are they looking
00:13:29.080forward to and we can get more into that in terms of how social media plays into that and the making
00:13:35.480of millennials which I and I maybe I'm skipping ahead too far because that's a whole other topic
00:13:40.760that I really want to get into with you, but maybe we just stick right now before we jump
00:13:46.700into the millennial and Gen Z world about how these institutions actually fail young
00:13:53.080people and shatter the dreams that they may come into these institutions with.
00:13:59.560Well, I mean, that's not really their job, right?
00:14:02.600It's like, yeah, if they sell themselves as ways to help you achieve your dreams, then
00:14:09.780I don't know people you can use them that way you can there are resources at every university even
00:14:16.920outside of universities that people can use to educate themselves so I don't think there's like
00:14:21.880nothing there but no people shouldn't go into college expecting that especially an elite
00:14:27.880college like Stanford thinking that the institution itself is going to give them purpose I think
00:14:33.080mostly what they think it's going to give them is a strong working credential and they're mostly
00:14:38.580right about that. Or, you know, connections to the kind of people they want to know in their
00:14:43.400future job, which again is probably the case. So I think that the value of a Stanford degree is
00:14:49.100probably only increased. So I don't think it's their, the disillusion is necessarily coming from
00:14:55.020their individual lack of options. I think it's probably coming from their reasoned analysis of
00:15:03.260the national global situation, right? They see what's happening in the world from a capitalist
00:15:10.120system. Whether they personally can benefit or not, you still have to be pretty willfully ignorant0.97
00:15:18.500not to see what's going on, as well as, for that matter, the participation of our leading and elite
00:15:25.500institutions with what's going on right so the historically student activists have been really
00:15:33.820intellectual and really like strong researchers about the complicity of their institutions
00:15:39.860in american imperialism in uh capitalist violence and tried to hold those institutions to account
00:15:49.860maybe they have less room to do that now i think that's possible because the job market is so
00:15:55.060competitive and they have individually may want to feel insecure and might want to hold on to
00:16:02.720their options. But no, I don't see it as people getting disillusioned because they're personally
00:16:09.900insecure per se, at least not at Stanford. Yeah. Part of me just thinks intellectualism,
00:16:20.180um which really maybe has a home in higher academia um is failing us to an extent and
00:16:30.940and young people specifically because think we are delusioned to think that it's critical
00:16:36.360thinking or at least that's what we're we're taking part in or i think it's actually quite
00:16:42.360narrow and i think it really is serving a type of capitalist uh dystopian um dream that i i just
00:16:56.280tend to think you know maybe there are of course every there's all different types of people
00:17:01.040different types of dreams and desires but i guess what i see is most people want to be good people
00:17:11.980They want to, quote, change the world for the better. And they put a lot of time and energy, go into debt, and then come out the other side, actually just being potentially more indoctrinated or less hopeful.
00:17:27.600And with these institutions having so much money and power, one would hope that they were trying to evolve into something that is more mutually beneficial. I don't know. I mean, I'm definitely in an idealistic thought right now.
00:17:49.320But and maybe this kind of plays into the plight of millennials. And there's just been so much rapid change in this generation, as I'm sure generations before us would feel as well. But there's, you know, it's like, what does it mean to witness late stage capitalism from childhood? And how does that affect millennials or Gen Zers?
00:18:15.040And I guess, you know, of course, that plays into like what it means to even go to college and what that even means to enter the job market when we're entering knowing that we are in the throes of late stage capitalism and an extinction crisis, climate change, so on and so forth.
00:18:31.640It doesn't I would imagine it doesn't have the same meaning of what it was even 20, 30 years ago.
00:18:38.580in some ways i think that's true but i think also past there are past generations that lived under
00:18:44.380the shadow of world war that lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation right like constant
00:18:50.900threat of nuclear annihilation um and they weren't wrong to like assess that the the anti-nuke
00:18:58.460movement for example which i think we can draw a lot of inspiration from should draw a lot of
00:19:03.300from in today's climate movement probably wasn't wrong to see that as like an existential threat
00:19:09.780to humanity right just like we shouldn't be wrong we're not wrong to see one today but it's not a
00:19:16.080it's not a unique experience i guess um in that way but we do have to like historicize the
00:19:22.180particular coordinates of what's going on right now right and what does it mean to struggle over
00:19:27.820the environment and what possibilities does that open for future kinds of struggle right and so
00:19:35.860it's like the acceleration of the indigenous movement in North America opens up whole new0.69
00:19:43.580vistas of future struggle and that's a product of the current environmental crisis like directly
00:19:49.640right and this book is partly inspired by that situation and so that's a that's arising from
00:19:56.840conflicts uh out of our particular circumstance that isn't just about the
00:20:02.340like the magnitude per se but about the the actual coordinates
00:22:11.680Yeah, I think that's a great question.
00:22:13.080The classic internet booster story about the internet is that hippies translated their ideas about the world and oneness and such into this new electronic medium and produced a new space of freedom with the internet and cyberspace.
00:22:36.460And that's still a very popular historiography of the early internet.
00:22:44.700And some people view it in a critical way.
00:22:55.460But the research that I was doing, which I was mostly concerned with the Cold War, the
00:23:01.920global struggle over the mode of production, which is the most important thing that was
00:23:06.040happening at that time in the 70s and 80s not like some guys writing grateful dead lyrics
00:23:12.000and their computers played and connecting computers the inner networking of computers
00:23:18.120played a very very specific role which is that it allowed the united states and like unaccountable
00:23:25.160wings of the united states security apparatus to coordinate clandestine operations really awful
00:23:31.820violent uh massacres basically as well as the the financing and the weapons moving needed for them
00:23:39.900um across distances without being held accountable and without people spying on them so like that's
00:23:46.040what the first laptops were used for you know was doing this kind of cold war network and that to
00:23:53.760me is a much much more important history to understand in terms of understanding the internet
00:23:59.360and the role it plays in our lives and our world and society, then the idealistic sort of the
00:24:06.340internet is a product of our concepts about our relations to each other. Yeah. There's a couple
00:24:15.000quotes from your article, Are We Living Under Technofeudalism, that I want to unravel with
00:24:22.320you a bit. One of them is, quote, we do technically spend less time working for our bosses than we do
00:24:29.020informing on ourselves to tech companies no matter whom we work for or whether we're employed at all
00:24:34.560we're generating value for bezos and zuck end quote yeah i just would love to hear your you
00:24:41.940expand on that a bit uh that was a concession that i'm then spending most of the article
00:24:47.000contrasting with so i don't want to put too much emphasis on it right uh that it sometimes seems
00:24:52.960like these days that uh our main relation to capitalism is through these apps that we spend
00:25:01.640a bunch of time on but that's not true our main relation to capitalism for almost all of us is
00:25:08.200being exploited through our labor and so despite you know our consciousness maybe a disproportionate
00:25:16.240out of our consciousness being occupied with these apps or ads, that doesn't mean that that's
00:25:23.420what constitutes our material relation to the mode of production. Just because you can't stop
00:25:28.820looking at your phone doesn't mean you work for Mark Zuckerberg. But we are giving the tech
00:25:37.520companies our information they're learning about what we want to buy where we are
00:25:44.080you know what is the benefit for them of i mean i think i know but like i guess i would imagine
00:25:52.260spending so much time on these devices on these apps giving data is doing something like it's not
00:25:58.440we are selling ourselves on some level but i don't know what we're receiving in return
00:26:04.920Well, it's more or less the same as when you watch television. And I think the industry itself, and there's a phrase I like called critic hype, where you hype up a technology in the way that you criticize it.
00:26:20.120And it's pretty common, especially around these sort of surveillance technologies, where people exaggerate how effective they are, just as the tech companies themselves exaggerate how effective they are.
00:26:30.620Whether you're doing it critically or to hype it, it's still exaggerating how effective they are. And I think that we know that Facebook and other of these companies misrepresent how useful this data is all the time.
00:26:44.820The infamous case is Facebook told everyone that videos were doing super great and so they should all switch to videos. And it turned out that they had sort of made up that data and everyone had changed their business plan based on what Facebook had said about itself.
00:27:00.620So I take all those claims with a certain amount of a grain of salt, how the security services have used the like back doors that these companies have offered to surveil individuals and like get information on targets is a totally different thing.
00:27:17.620Because they're actually focused on individuals and they're targeting people for these purposes and they're able to do this through the same pseudo impersonal tracking regime that the social media companies have installed.
00:27:35.420But in terms of like have social media ads revolutionized society and capitalist production, I do not think so.
00:27:47.620Well, there's another quote where you say, if everything the would be cryptocurrency sovereigns and metaverse real estate developers said was true, we might well be ruled by cyber barons. So it's a good thing that they're totally full of shit.1.00
00:28:02.580The internet's true landlords aren't even tech companies, as researcher Daniel Green notes in a newspaper. They are the real estate investment trusts that own the vast majority of data centers and the links between them. When you get behind the scenes and down to the cables, Google and Amazon are renters, end quote.1.00
00:28:20.200so yeah it is i'd love to hear you expand on that and how does the scale and form of the
00:28:26.420internet and e-commerce reflect and refract various entanglements of property and power
00:28:33.020yeah i thought that paper from dan green that he'd been working on for a really long time was
00:28:38.340super informative about what the actual physical structure of the internet is right
00:28:45.120because you think about who owns the internet you think it must be like you know
00:28:49.880the government or one of the big tech companies but it's not really either of those it's these
00:28:55.960trusts right it's these financialized instruments that own buildings where cables go and the
00:29:01.780interlinks between the cables um that connect to each other and then the big tech companies
00:29:07.420like everybody else uh rents some of that for them and you might read about uh facebook or
00:29:15.380some of the other big tech companies building their own data centers, but those are a minority
00:29:20.460of the data centers they're using. Even for a big firm like Google, they like the flexibility of
00:29:25.980being able to rent space as they need it, as opposed to building the centers themselves.
00:29:31.420And that definitely reflects the industry and its character. Yeah, it's really fascinating to learn
00:29:37.780more about this like the underbelly or the details that so many of us have no idea
00:29:45.380how all of this really works and I guess part of me wonders what does this do for the user
00:29:52.920to understand the way the internet actually works and the infrastructure of course there's the
00:30:01.100actual infrastructure of the internet and the resource extraction used to power the internet
00:30:06.540and servers and all that. There's that infrastructure. And of course, then there's
00:30:10.380the foundation of ownership and capitalism. But let's just say for me or anybody else who's just
00:30:19.680a user, what does it do for us to understand these things? Would it help us not use it,
00:30:26.800use it more, use it differently? I'm kind of just in this moment of, I mean, I'm fascinated by this,
00:30:33.360But I'm like, but why? Or what is it doing for me to understand more?
00:30:38.300Yeah, well, as an individual consumer, right, it could either inform your choices or not, depending on how you want to consume, right?
00:30:46.540You could be like, oh, I need to set up a VPN. I need to pay for a VPN to use when I'm surfing the web on my devices, which is a thing I advise that people should do.
00:30:57.340People should get a virtual private network they're using to browse the web. That's a smart thing to do.
00:31:03.360But that's not, I guess, the most important thing about insights about how an impersonal system in which you're part of can work. It sort of goes back to the first quote you read, because it's about how you can interact with it to change it with other people.
00:31:20.140And so knowing how it works is what allows you, or hopefully is a precondition for, let's say, organizing a response that might be efficacious, right? It might matter. And that's what we're here to do.
00:31:37.080So an example in the book is when anti-war militants have an understanding of what the early computers and the computer data systems in their universities are being used for, which is war work in Vietnam.
00:31:55.880And they sort of understood how they worked and they use that information to target and attack those computer systems to try and aid the North Vietnamese war effort. And that required some intelligence about, you know, how these, how the system works and where you can be effective in, you know, putting your spoke, putting your stick in the spokes of the wheel.
00:32:19.680Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what my stick is. Because I do see the harm that the internet
00:32:33.300causes us. I don't think that it's all just a great encyclopedia. I mean, this is a funny
00:32:45.780example but i'm trying to build a greenhouse right now and i'm trying to google or search
00:32:51.560and i do use google but i also go and other things
00:32:56.580and so i'm trying to search like homemade greenhouses or hand-built greenhouses recycled
00:33:04.620greenhouses and it's truly the same sponsored ads over like for pages and pages and pages and i'm
00:33:13.380like, wait, why am I still being shown this one pre-built greenhouse to buy? I don't want to buy
00:33:19.860this. I'm literally asking how to build a recycled greenhouse. Not very good targeting after all.
00:33:27.120No, no, no. So of course there's that, which is a very light level of just like, okay, this isn't
00:33:31.860actually giving me what I want. And it's just trying to sell me things. I'm not even trying
00:33:36.660to buy things. I'm actually trying to inform myself on how to have hard skills. So that felt
00:33:42.460like a big downer but it's not even that that i'm concerned with of course for me on an ecological
00:33:49.140level even the terminology like the cloud there's no cloud the cloud is on the ground in factories
00:33:56.900being fed by massive power structures like even you know cryptocurrency which again seems like
00:34:06.440this thing in the sky is coal plants in montana that were shut down to power towns are being
00:34:14.400reopened just for bitcoin so i think cloud it's the matrix yeah it's a very heavy matrix too it
00:34:24.320weighs very heavy ecologically to have this thing called the internet that a lot of us here in the
00:34:31.920states have access to 24-7 to get subpar information that takes a ton of our energy
00:34:38.480away from actually where we live, connecting with people in front of us. And of course,
00:34:43.960I say all this having a podcast talking to you on Zoom from my laptop. So there's no,
00:34:49.020I'm absolutely complicit in the matrix. And I know that every single day when I wake up with
00:34:56.420my alarm clock on my iPhone that is on airplane mode, but nonetheless is on by my bed. And so I
00:35:03.620just, yeah, I'm really, I really question this, this matrix that I think at one point I thought
00:35:15.100was benefiting us. And I know of course the tech industry definitely likes to say that it is like,
00:35:22.880i know google has a project called the next billion users and they believe that getting
00:35:27.580the next billion people on the internet is evolution and it's good for people and it's
00:35:34.780helpful and i wonder what are we lacking as humanity that the internet is helpful
00:35:43.640like what is it helping us with well it's making it's helping some people make a lot of money was
00:35:50.200part of it um i don't think it's i don't think it's like a natural product of humanity right
00:35:58.000like there's so many different ways we could connect to each other and share data over networks
00:36:06.080um or like you know passing printing books around and passing them around as a way to share data
00:36:11.880over networks right like libraries are networks so i don't think there's anything particularly
00:36:16.700unique about the internet like capital t capital i that is this connection of computers and i don't
00:36:25.040think it's going to last forever i sure hope not so i think there's a danger in like you said about
00:36:30.160the cloud naturalizing it uh as some hyper object right maybe it's timothy morton's term um
00:36:38.860that is just part of the world now and will be forever as opposed to a particular conjunction of
00:36:48.100objects at a particular time people in relation to each other that is not that old and will not
00:36:54.620last forever explain why you think it won't last forever what that means well nothing lasts forever
00:37:02.740This is a particular connection of a set of cables. Those cables will break one time or another, one way or the other. And hopefully in a non-catastrophic future, which is what I hope for, we'll find different ways, I think, to network with each other across spaces.
00:37:27.660I think the internet is based on a particular moment in time.
00:37:34.440Obviously, ARPANET is originally a backbone for U.S. nuclear response and goes from there.
00:37:45.160So I think we probably have a different...
00:37:47.200And people have talked about different kinds of internet and wanting a new kind of internet
00:37:51.060and a mesh net and lots of different...
00:37:54.320We're still using very centralized technologies that capital built in the 20th century, right?
00:38:00.100It's still like phone lines, more or less.
00:38:03.920So, yeah, it's important to historicize the internet, I think, both as a proper noun and as a connection of all internet-enabled computers.
00:38:15.320Okay, well, I'm going to move away from talking about the internet because it's a real wormhole.
00:38:19.440And I want to talk to you about the culture of work or cultures of work and work outside
00:39:11.620You can still find artisanal producers even under capitalism, right?
00:39:16.360And I think there's a reason people like that kind of branding is because they aspire to that kind of unalienated activity.
00:39:25.000Myself, as the writer of books, right, that's a job or role kind of work that precedes capitalism.
00:39:33.200And it's work that I feel really privileged and excited to have.
00:39:36.780So it's not that like every single person's job is awful and overcoming capitalism means finding a job for yourself that isn't awful.
00:39:47.280If that were the case, it would be a little bit easier. But it's about the structure of the system itself forces the body of working people into a position where they have no choice but to sell their work and their time for less than it's worth.
00:40:06.820work and labor. Labor in an abstract sense acquires this capitalist character as capitalism
00:40:16.220becomes the dominant system for the mode of production and reproduction in society.
00:40:23.940Yeah. I'm also thinking about how so-called innovation has often rested on increasing
00:40:32.460productivity without simultaneously lessening the amount of time people are expected to work.
00:40:38.660And if we go beyond the capitalist assumption that productivity and rapid growth should take
00:40:43.620precedence, what options are there for alternative innovations and other ways of growth?
00:40:50.360They're pretty limited, right? I mean, that's the problem of a capitalist system is that if they
00:40:56.400let you do it otherwise, then we probably would. At the same time, I do think we have a certain
00:41:03.700amount. There's a difference between that and saying like, oh, you can't do anything, right?
00:41:07.740We have a certain range of activities we can take part in if we're trying to organize alternative
00:41:16.180metabolisms between ourselves and the world, right? But that's a collective process. It's not
00:41:20.360just about, oh, I bought the right book or even I bought the right coffee beans or I bought the
00:41:25.900right, organic fruit. It's about organizing the kind of spaces with other people that provide for
00:41:33.180the possibility of resistance against the dominant system, which I think has to come in a pretty
00:41:38.880direct and conflictual way, ultimately. I guess I'm thinking back to Palo Alto and
00:41:47.740thinking about the importance of history as we consider our future directions. And
00:41:54.880then I, that kind of brings me to resolution and land back that you speak to. And I guess,
00:42:05.900um, you know, one, one quote from Palo Alto is I'm committed to this planet,
00:42:13.080which means I have to hold on to the possibility of an alternative to capitalist exhaustion.
00:42:18.860What then would that look like? Palo Alto and California's many Stanford children have been
00:42:24.440our focus thus far, Herbert Hoover and Bill Shockley and those who followed. I doubt that
00:42:31.120these same people will have profitable answers for every problem they cause because we know
00:42:36.540enough of their history to know they can't fix themselves. What else is Palo Alto to do with
00:42:42.800itself. How about giving it back? What would that look like to give it back? Or what does that mean
00:42:50.180to you? Well, it's pretty simple in this case. And that's why I think one of the reasons I can
00:42:56.200suggest it as a very pragmatic operation, right, is that you have this nonprofit that because
00:43:02.480unlike the covenants that indigenous people have had with their land, the covenant that the
00:43:08.140Stanford's had with their land, which said that it cannot be sold, was maintained, right? And so
00:43:13.960they've held on to thousands of acres, 8,000 acres in the Bay Area, which is pretty amazing territory
00:43:20.900to hold on to throughout this period of capitalist exploitation. At the same time, the Muwekma or0.99
00:43:27.620Ohlone are a constituted tribe. They're politically organized. They have, you know, corporate existence
00:43:32.920or whatever. Even though they're not recognized by the federal government, they're recognized by
00:43:37.600stanford as having an ancestral claim to the territory stanford has ceded land before two
00:43:44.620governmental agencies particularly the veterans agency to build the va hospital on the land
00:43:52.200stanford has recognized the muekma when they've returned remains choosing to disregard the federal
00:44:00.200government's refusal to recognize the tribe in order to recognize them and to return the remains
00:44:05.120that are from the land that affirms their ancestral connection to it.
00:44:12.460So in terms of how can we do land back,
00:44:15.960land back seems like an insurmountably complicated thing to figure out.
00:44:21.500Here is a very, very straightforward way in my thinking
00:48:58.440And in Palo Alto, you write, quote, America's post-war suburban culture wasn't white, patriarchal, and conservative by coincidence.
00:49:09.240It was careful design, end quote. And I guess I'm wondering, how does alteration to the environment, to specific neighborhoods, et cetera, reflect particular ideologies?
00:49:22.940Well, you see that in Palo Alto, absolutely, that zoning and zoning control has been heavily politicized recently, but so much of it comes out of Palo Alto.
00:49:36.620So Palo Alto is really an inspiration for zoning, prohibitive zoning around the country.
00:49:43.160And Herbert Hoover, who is Stanford's first son, really, he's the one that pulls together
00:49:48.820the real estate industry folks who come up with sort of the first zoning, the model zoning
00:49:54.320law, and come up with the legal rationale for zoning, which is police power, which I
00:50:00.640but Palo Alto itself is very strange in the way that it's laid out in that it feels like the
00:50:07.180industry is constantly hiding like they have these huge setbacks and these low-slung offices that are
00:50:13.160kind of like behind bushes and it's like you would be putting something sinister in a place where
00:50:18.900people are living and that's sort of what they did right that they had to hide something sinister
00:50:23.800in a place where they also wanted to live that's interesting and I guess I'm thinking about
00:50:31.940the yeah I'm trying to think how to say this but like how does historical distance reinforce ideas
00:50:40.180of disposability culture there's a quote I could read from Palo Alto that kind of
00:50:45.660made me think of that but um I could read it or if you're if that kind of tapped into something
00:50:50.840for you. No, no, go for it. I'd love to hear. Yeah. Well, so you write, quote,
00:50:55.620the Palo Alto system isn't old from a world historical perspective, only 150 years or so
00:51:01.820as of this writing, but it's not nearly as new as Palo Altans believe that forgetfulness is
00:51:10.100an advantageous adaption. The past is a distraction when you're creating the future
00:51:15.140to the new round of capital drenched rocket boys, the earth is but a launchpad for interstellar
00:51:21.440capitalism, end quote. Ignorance and forgetfulness about the specificity of a place has really been
00:51:29.860the mode of accumulation in Palo Alto in the system that I talk about. And that contrasts
00:51:38.740so heavily with the indigenous people who lived in the same space for so long, which is that their
00:51:44.380societies were based on a real density of knowledge about the place where they actually
00:51:49.400live, right? It's like ignorance was the last thing that their society could afford, whereas
00:51:55.880in this capitalist society, ignorance is what leads to disruption, right? Ignorance, not
00:52:02.120remembering what a bus is so you can invent a bus for the first time is what makes millionaires
00:52:07.800and billionaires. And so we have this society of ignorance, of forgetting, of not knowing where
00:52:14.760you live. That's really been, I think, globalized, right? They've pushed that on the world very
00:52:21.240intentionally. Yeah. When we focus so much on the ideals and myths of capital, we often forget that
00:52:30.720we are living on a finite earth and that all of the things we have, all of our websites are
00:52:37.140inventions and war machines have to come from something somewhere. And your book does such
00:52:44.500a good job of pointing out these complicated material ties. And as we start to come to a
00:52:51.120close, I would love to hear about the ways we can continue to uncover these connections and make
00:52:56.300meaningful change to the material structures of the world. That's the struggle, right? Constantly.
00:53:03.240And so I think for me, drawing out this history that I'm in some ways a part of, I guess we're all in some ways a part of, if it's a global history, part of the goal is to orient in terms of what's possible and what's impossible for the future and how can we think about it.
00:53:21.660And I pose this sort of challenge, this land back as a challenge to the system at the end, where this seems like the smallest reasonable step we could take, the system could take towards addressing the actual scale of the problem.
00:53:38.860But if that's met with, you know, people think that's ridiculous, right? People still treat that as an unreasonable demand and like it's not even within the realm of political possibility.
00:53:51.620And if that's true for the system as it exists, right, if that's impossible, if a restoration of the land to forces and modes of reproduction and social metabolism that could responsibly care for it and restore it to a way where it could care for life, then we're not dealing with the situation of like negotiation or convincing, right?
00:54:18.020then we're not when and that's important for understanding what our options are going forward
00:54:23.000yeah well malcolm thank you so much for taking us into the matrix and beyond it's been a really
00:54:33.560expansive conversation and i appreciate all your research and thought process behind
00:54:38.880these very large and looming topics thank you so much for having me and i can't wait to listen
00:54:48.020thank you for listening to for the wild podcast the music you heard today was by harry foster
00:54:56.020harrison bosch and ian george for the wild is created by ayana young erica ekram