The Future Is A Mixtape

In the midst of global apocalyptic collapse, the so-called solutions on offer from the imperial core are miles away from even marginal forms of dignity. The disdainful refusal to muster anything more than symbolic misdirects buried under bureaucratic mazes of means testing illuminate how deeply incapable the neoliberal boot-strap ideology is of addressing basic human needs. An anxious capitalist class and its corrupt, craven supplicants are waging an all-out war against any measure of “socialist” “entitlements” that might help build the social infrastructure desperately needed in this age of climate chaos and psychic despair. To acknowledge that everyone deserves The Golden Square—the unconditional and universal provisions of Food, Shelter, Healthcare, and Education—should be as common sense as sunshine. As Peter Kropotkin detailed in The Conquest of Bread at the end of the nineteenth century, if society was organized around first meeting human needs, we could easily be living in a world of abundance and leisure for all, all while working much less. But instead of cooperatively creating a rational and egalitarian world of post-scarcity, the cult of propertarians and their armies of indoctrinated worshipers & wage-slaves have foisted upon us polluted cities and poisoned water, expecting us to be grateful for fast fashion and fast food, the complimentary side-dishes of batshit construction and bullshit jobs. What we need, instead, are walkable cities, shorter work weeks, balanced job complexes, and a post-scarcity economy based on care and freedom. Imagining such a future involves asking a series of questions that must be fully explored . . . How would our lives be different? How would work get done, and who would do it?  Would meeting The Golden Square require a focus toward centralization or decentralization? In this second of a three-part series envisioning The World of The Golden Square, Jesse and Matt investigate the experiences and methods of a world re-made to meet human needs in a rightful relationship with the planet. We live in capitalism – a patriarchal social order forever insisting that there is no alternative –  a system that has been violently curtailing ideal innovation for more than two centuries, just as feudalism and the divine right of kings did for so many centuries prior. The heartless handmaidens of this system are tyrannical mega-corporations living as “para-states,” floating above the world's so-called democracies, leeching every available drop of use-value from the earth and its inhabitants in a callous competition for monopolies of power & profit. These corporate parasites will continue to destroy everything in sight as long as the deeply irrational market-logic myths about “Supply & Demand” and “The Rationality Economic Man” are the organizing basis of our shared reality. This Age of Techno-feudalism – to borrow Yanis Varoufakis' neologism – is a bullshit system that makes batshit products, based on horseshit ideas. The urgent existential responsibility that we now face – to heal our scars and secure a livable future – will require nothing less than birthing a real global utopia as quickly as humanity can muster – an open-source world designed around The Golden Square.   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com   Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

We stand at the precipice of apocalypse – together bound by “The Legacy of Domination” to a dystopian world in the midst of full-melt collapse. The death-drive of empire can no longer hide behind a facade of limited bourgeois comforts, as the parade of twenty-first century catastrophes lays bare the macabre realities of a social order designed for maximum hierarchy. But another legacy of human history travels with us as a persistent revolutionary beacon – “The Legacy of Freedom.” While the pharaohs of our neoliberal capitalist hellscape continue to insist that there is no alternative – that the ultimate achievement of human potential is a do-or-die Battle Royale waged in the patriarchal pyramid scheme they call the market, the wise among us have always known that egalitarian, non-market social relations – “baseline communism” as David Greaber called it – are what makes society possible in the first place. To institutionalize freedom, we must first guarantee the right to live by provisioning an irreducible minimum to all. And though the nations of the world have long acknowledged that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services” as stated in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), all of these same nations have absurdly failed to make this a binding reality. Because to truly meet these minimum standards of human dignity, it would require the full decommodification of all of these basic needs. Alas, a deeply rooted ideology of scarcity continues to hold us back, like a dark ghost squatting on the future. To get to the radical root and finally unlock the post-scarcity future that is our common inheritance, we must re-make the world with The Golden Square as our new common sense. But what would it mean to organize the world based on the universal, unconditional, and life-long provisions of free Food, Shelter, Healthcare and Education to every person on the planet? For this half-century mark of the podcast, Jesse & Matt venture beyond the urgent and undeniably rational demands to decommodify our basic human rights, and begin to imagine what it might actually feel like to live in The World of The Golden Square. It's one thing to recognize the clarity of this Idea-Shape's moral demands, but it's perhaps more tantalizing and propulsively utopian to actually envision the profound implications of living in a world designed to meet those demands. With this episode – the first of a three-part series  – our exploration begins by tracing the definitions and foundations of a world built to ensure freedom from want and the right to well-being for all. Building another world requires smashing the denials from those above us and who haunt the insides of us. The World of The Golden Square is indeed possible – a world without property, without paywalls, and without physical borders separating humans from humans, flowers from flowers, water from land. Join us on this journey. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

Inhabitants of other worlds looking down on our earth for the first time may very likely deduce that this planet is dominated by a civilization of cars, and we humans are just puddles of mud hidden inside. We live in a world turned upside-down—a utopia for automobiles, where instead of being communities built for freedom & flourishing, our cities are glittering monuments to petroleum, patriarchy, and profit. But buried under the grotesque mélange of cul-de-sacs, commodities, and mind-numbing commutes that define our suburban dystopias, rest designs for liberation hiding in plain sight. Where social reproduction is not subordinated to the production of profit. Where food, shelter, healthcare, and education are all decommodified. And where the unconditional and universal provision of these human rights is the non-negotiable foundation for institutionalizing freedom and unleashing human potential. In this episode, Matt & Jesse embark on a dialectical synthesis of ideas, weaving together the liberatory notions of a Feminism for The 99%, The Right to The City, and Free Housing For All into a conception of The City of The Golden Square—by imagining every neighborhood as a university. This inventive world-building exercise illuminates a mixtape for the future, conjoining the joyful & egalitarian features of neighborhoods with the noble & emancipatory potentialities of universities. Paradoxically, despite histories of racist, colonial, and capitalist violence, along with ongoing plunder by the corporate neoliberal state, both neighborhoods and universities still carry seeds of emancipation and together offer a coherent set of social and spatial paradigms that prefigure the shape of a better tomorrow. Thinking about neighborhoods becoming indistinguishable from universities is a way to envision what might emerge in our cities if we can erode capitalism, abolish the cost of living, and build a just transition to a green future of radical egalitarianism—where real democracy might finally blossom. Universities should be as common as neighborhoods, and every neighborhood should shimmer with the wholeness that only universities can offer. Every Neighborhood a University is a vision rooted in Social Ecology, grounded in Anarchism, born of Communalism, aimed at Library Socialism, and based on a new social contract: The Golden Square. If the borders between neighborhood and university can dissolve, making them one and the same, humanity might open up a sociological singularity, unleashing the rainbow light of our caged fecundity into the post-scarcity future we all deserve. Join us in this conversation to explore how the architecture of a solarpunk utopia can arise from the ashes of the here and now.   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

The wealthy have enjoyed generations of post-scarcity, living as they do in self-isolated bubbles of private hoarding. But what about the rest of us? The billions of us who can't afford the last three months of unpaid rent, or have to ration life-saving medications, who skip meals in order to afford college textbooks, or who are washed away in the floods of climate catastrophes? Our shared reality in this global society is one of planned scarcity imposed from above: the shimmering Poison Pyramid of a callous status-quo swarming like a rapacious daggered virus into each blood-chamber of our secret beating hearts. While 21st century Pharaohs ride dickships through the stratosphere for suborbital self-love, the rest of humanity is kept from the secret that the ruling class has always known: we could always-already live in a world of post-scarcity for all, if only our politics unveiled it; that is to say: if common sense dictated it. This much is certain: if our institutions were designed to expand, not constrict freedom, fulfilling the universal right to free housing could quickly become a simple everyday reality. As such, it's time to remake the world according to a new social contract that is as easy, breezy and taken-for-granted as breathing the air that floats around us. To do that, we need an ecology of anticapitalist tactics that will uncover the urgency and achievability of The Golden Square. To accomplish this, Jesse and Matt attempt – in this episode – to trace some of the main avenues in the long, winding journey toward the full decommodification of housing as a guaranteed human right. In doing so, they'll navigate across three different waterways: access, affordability, and finally, the ocean of our pacific dreams: full decommodification. They will make the direct case that we can truly create freely available, zero-carbon, safe, comfortable housing for all – and guarantee it to every person on the planet from cradle to grave. But we mustn't think of this demand as merely some far-fetched goal; but rather, we should think of this aim as a thrilling organizing tool leading us toward The Utopian Sphere. Calling out like a siren from beyond the cruel cul-de-sacs of rents, mortgages, and the cost of living, the rainbow light of decommodification beckons to us – toward the truly liberated and fecund future we so rightly deserve.    Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

One of the many outrageous and surreal moral paradoxes of life in the imperial core  was made disturbingly obvious early on during the COVID crisis in a shuttered Las Vegas—then void of tourists—when its city officials moved unhoused residents into an empty outdoor parking lot. In a woesome illustration of capitalism's hallmark scarcity in the midst of plenty, looming directly above the forgotten were the city's glitzy-ritzy hotels with thousands of empty, unused rooms stacked skyward—taunting the unsheltered who were made to sleep below, partitioned by lines of chalked concrete. Let's call it what it was: an open-air prison. Fast forward a year later, with vaccines aplenty, millions of additional Americans are now at risk of joining the ranks of the unsheltered thanks to the soft-fascism of the Biden administration and its refusal to take direct action to prevent a looming eviction crisis. These days, few can afford to join the American-dream-home-ownership-cult, as prices have soared past their breaking points all across the nation, with California exemplifying the surge, where homes are now selling for $50-70,000 above their listing prices. And even for the renters who aren't behind on their monthly debt payments to land-barons, they are confronting increased housing precarity as well, with rents skyrocketing to ever outrageous levels. In a world where housing—a basic necessity that everyone needs—has become a speculative hyper-commodity driving unfathomable levels of wealth inequality in the midst of apocalyptic climate chaos, to say that there is a “housing crisis” is a tragic understatement. Our contemporary and abject social contract can be summed up as: “PAY RENT OR DIE.” So without pause or confusion, we must unapologetically recognize that housing is both a human right and a public good that must be provided unconditionally to every person on the planet. Accordingly, there should be no such thing as a “housing market”—a gross absurdity that does little more than guarantee that housing's exchange value will always trump its use value. Let us be clear: Housing is a human right. Therefore, rent is a human rights abuse and landlords are human rights violators, full stop. Not surprisingly, as the core feature of the second most important node along The Golden Square, free housing for all needs to be acknowledged as a non-negotiable, bare minimum provision to be expected from any decent society. In this episode, Jesse & Matt grapple with the unconscionable injustices of for-profit housing, seeking out those much too neglected vectors of emancipatory struggle where housing decommodification can begin, brick-by-brick, archway-to-doorway.   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

In the second part of our conversation and collaboration with the Coffee with Comrades podcast, we begin seeking out works of literature, cinema, and scholarship that might illuminate Anti-Anti-Utopian blueprints for building new worlds. As Matt remarks, it's virtually impossible to come up with a list of films that would be called utopian, but Pearson argues that you could – in fact – come up with a robust list of fiction and non-fiction texts that spell out the shape of this new genre of hope-making. A developmental syllabus of Anti-Anti-Utopian study may start with Ursula K. Le Guin's iconic and epic “ambiguous utopia,” The Dispossessed (1974), and include Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy of novels (1992-96), as well as  nonfiction books like Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek's Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), and A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos (2019). These visions of still imperfect, but radically more just & egalitarian worlds teach us that striving toward the utopian horizon is neither naive nor impractical, but instead all too necessary and prudent, especially now. As such, The Golden Square affirms that the decommodification of life and democratization of society are not just revolutionary goals, but in fact, the revolutionary project itself. Beyond the ceaseless academic obsessions with diagramming the corpse of our dystopian hellscape, we must chart a path outside our pyramid-shaped cages by realizing the unconditional rights to food, shelter, healthcare, and education for every person on earth – a readymade threshold separating us from the Utopian Sphere. Moving outward, Pearson, Jesse and Matt talk about the key planks that might make up the political philosophy of Anti-Anti-Utopia and how charting an emancipatory path forward requires an intersectional anti-capitalist compass magnetized to the many symbiotic, multilectical transformations necessary to abolish empire. As Matt has been fond of saying of late: “Be like an anarchist,” first and foremost. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram Support Coffee with Comrades on Patreon, follow them on Twitter and Instagram, and visit their website.

For this special episode, Matt & Jesse venture out of their self-inclosed Build-A-Bear tent thanks to the gracious prodding of their new friend and comrade, Pearson, host of the always excellent Coffee with Comrades podcast, in order to imagine alternatives and discuss the theory of “Anti-Anti-Utopia.” While each of us who've seen a Hollywood summer blockbuster, perused Netflix, or owned a dog-eared copy of a Hunger Games novel have sipped from the bitter cup of our Terminal Dystopia Syndrome, few have dared to dream of utopia. As something paradoxically both  dangerous and trivial to the tyrants and influencers who police the status quo, utopia remains largely a pejorative signifier for naive and unrealistic visions of the future. Simply by existing as a concept, utopia's most rude offense is the failure to acquiesce to the myths of our doomed fate built long-ago into the so-called “laws of human nature.” In the era of capitalist realism, the prescribed common sense drives a relentless anti-utopianism, a dangerous ideology that requires a countering through anti-anti-utopianism. So WTF is “Anti-Anti-Utopia” anyways? Coined recently by Kim Stanley Robinson in an essay entitled “Dystopias Now,” the science fiction writer starts by saying, haltingly: “The end of world is over. Now the real work begins.” What would it look like to admit that the world as we know (or knew) it is beyond repair, and that living through the Capitalocene means that we will have to build a better world from within an active apocalypse? In the first half of this two-part conversation, we discuss these terms – Utopia, Dystopia, Anti-Utopia, and Anti-Anti-Utopia – four corners of a semiotic square, a balance of contradictions and counter-forces that together light the way for new beginnings. So whereas Star Trek may have illustrated a far-off future of post-scarcity, it failed to imagine the contours of revolutionary change that would secure – for humanity – a utopia lovingly wrought on Earth. Star Trek instead scripted and drifted toward new but familiar conflicts outside of us, amongst the stars. So perhaps, to boldly go where Utopia might be found, an Anti-Anti-Utopianism is the voyage we must now chart for ourselves, together, here on this fragile planet. Trapped under the dystopian rubble of empire, we deserve all the light that glimmers above us, and so we must reach for it.   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram Support Coffee with Comrades on Patreon, follow them on Twitter and Instagram, and visit their website.

“Physical places like cities matter when we want to think about social change,” writes Leslie Kern. So in this third episode in a trilogy on 21st century feminisms, Matt & Jesse move from celebrating feminist manifestoes to exploring feminist geographies with a discussion of Kern's Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. This richly observed mapping of man-made urban spaces expertly juxtaposes pop cultural reflections, academic scholarship and hauntingly personal accounts of a lifetime struggling to claim feminine space in cities, first as a child, then a teenager & college student and later as a mother & scholar. As the feminist geographer Jane Darke once said: “Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.” In all-too obvious displays of crude masculine power, the towering phallic monuments to capitalist expropriation that define city skylines cast long shadows reminding us all that this is a man's world. From 12th century churches, to 20th century office towers, and from Beverly Hills mansions to billionaire's row penthouses—cities are monuments to myth-making, extraction, and exploitation—making concrete structures out of the poisoned logics of religion, capitalism, and celebrity. The world is built by and for patriarchy, and it's the “cosmic background radiation” of white, male, cis-hetero, and able-bodied privileges that allows men to coast through life on cruise control, never burdened by the realities of other people's lives. Free from the constant nagging fear of sexual violence lurking around every public and private corner, men not only enjoy the privilege of designing our global cities, but they're also free to explore them with unrestrained liberty. The geography of the city demonstrates clearly that the maintenance of capitalism is contingent upon an ever-present threat of violence, and primarily on gender-based violence. The sustained anxieties perpetuated by patriarchy and white supremacy are manifest not only in the violence enacted through policing and policy making, but also in the shape of our urban environments. So to transform the city, we must look beyond simply “gender-mainstreaming” city planning and vacuous liberal pleas for symbolic reforms. As Kern writes, “once we begin to see how the city is set up to sustain a particular way of organizing society—across gender, race, sexuality, and more—we can start to look for new possibilities.” So we must start to look for those possibilities to decommodify life and democratize society. Because the reality is, without challenging the notion of private property, we aren't challenging the patriarchy. Private property and the enclosure of land is the conscription of patriarchy on the planet. To demolish this structural domination and transform our cities into environments that are open, safe, and free for everyone, we must once and for all—abolish the motherfucking cost of living.    Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

How might feminism be reinvigorated to fully reverse our age of climate chaos and techno-feudalism? Will the next feminist wave be revolutionary enough to address the totality of capitalist cis-heteropatriarchal racism? Sitting on the knife's edge between despair and hope, humanity picks up a silhouette manuscript of its own death, but which, if flipped over, reveals pages that illuminate a way back to the womb of a better future-possible. If we are going to build a just world for all of us, it must start from a politics that addresses the deep complexity of our collective wounds. So in this second episode in a trilogy on 21st Century Feminisms, Jesse & Matt discuss Zillah Eisenstein's short book Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution (2019). This idiosyncratic manifesto (of sorts) swings in synchronicity with the ethos of this podcast as a brief polemic frustrated with the fucked nature of a besotted world of never-ending injustice, while nonetheless stubbornly insisting on radical, anticapitalist and intersectional solutions. As such, Zillah's voice swims very much in the form and feeling of conversational exchanges—a dialog with her past self and fellow feminists—yearning, groping and clutching onto new ways of thinking that drift into view. The text weaves in and out of many different dimensions at a rapid pace—with a frenetic, anxious energy and a morally righteous indignation—a splicing of many disparate references, experiences, and perspectives into a complex tapestry of exasperated fury. And rightly so. A long, long time ago, we should have already won The Golden Square, and be fluttering into the light of The Utopian Sphere; but alas, here we are instead: still trying to wrest ourselves from this locked, dismal future and leap into a spinning, dazzling and enchanting one. What we must continue to seek out—in the ongoing struggle for human liberation—is a politics that can confront the deep entanglements of compounded hierarchies limiting our collective potential. In order to claim the dignity we all deserve and to unleash the beauty of a shared utopian promise, our unfolding future demands the most radical feminism yet: to dismantle and shatter inequality itself and replace it with boundless love.   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

What would it mean if our society prioritized social reproduction above production for profit? Our racist, cis-heteropatriarchal, capitalist dystopia is a world turned upside-down—where the essential work that creates & sustains life is assigned to women and subordinated to the making of profit. Instead of aiming to undue this perversion, mainstream feminism of the past decade has prioritized a “Lean In” strategy, advocating “equal opportunity domination” as the ultimate horizon of gender equality. According to this liberal-feminist doctrine, what the world needs is not the abolition of social hierarchy, but simply a more diverse representation to maintain seats of power that already enshrine and expand inequality. Thankfully, this bankrupt approach has been counter-punched by a new wave of feminist strikes emerging in recent years, including ones in Spain, Poland and the #RedForEd strikes in the U.S. that swept across the country in the months after Trump's election. In the powerful and accessible book Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser articulate an urgent anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and eco-socialist vision of a feminism informed by the International Women's Strike Movement. So in this episode, Matt & Jesse celebrate this new, more radical, more intersectional feminist vision for the 21st century—by exploring this indispensable text that is a brief, focused clarification of key issues in our shared emancipatory struggle. While it may seem like an outdated term, “the personal is the political”—a key rallying cry of 60's Student Movements and Second-Wave Feminists—is a zeitgeist phrase that is ever worthy of being rescued in our Age of Climate Despair. The essential truth of this maxim is increasingly evidenced in women's lives, and especially for single mothers and women of color who represent the majority of Americans who are laboring for starvation wages, risking their lives during a global pandemic to keep the world working for everyone else that doesn't look like them. And though the voices and perspectives of women are so often silenced, shunted and brayed by Boyland Domination, we must recognize that the path towards justice and human liberation requires a robust feminist analysis. Because, on the Periodic Table of Injustice, the subjugation of women is the most common element found in the world. Misogyny is everywhere and it damages all of our lives, devaluing and dehumanizg women, trans, and non-binary folks, while unjustly exalting masculinity in a violently enforced tyranny of suffocating gender constructs. We live in a world designed by, and for, the interests of patriarchy, one of the very oldest forms of social hierarchy—an ancient institutional structure whose abolition must first start with the building of The Golden Square. So indeed, this rousing document, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, offers a forthright proclamation of values, and in so doing, properly identifies all those paper clips stuck to that sick magnet called capitalism. One-by-one, fingers to palm, the authors help us pry off those paper clips, so we can put them back in the bowl of new beginnings.   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

What would it mean to gain a sense of the world if it was nothing more than a series of geometric patterns? What if there were a few simple shapes that could describe the complex dynamics of our byzantine world and provide solutions to intractable global problems? Would this instantly recognizable geometry unlock long-obscured fundamental truths? Gilded upon the artwork accompanying these humble conversations between comrades sit three defining shapes: a triangle, a square, and a circle. So for this episode, Jesse & Matt will map out the contours of these three fundamental Idea-Shapes: The Poison Pyramid, The Golden Square and The Utopian Sphere. This simple arrangement of basic shapes illuminates an emancipatory trajectory: a systemic diagnosis of our dystopian world; a necessary and practical new social contract that extends dignity and freedom to all; and finally, visions of our utopian potential and the flourishing, post-scarcity future we all deserve. This triptych of Idea-Shapes outlines a comprehensive “No-Bullshit Theory” about the double-down shitty myths that ceaselessly gaslight us, the shared abundance that we must claim in the here-and-now, and ultimately, how the joyful promise of our utopian horizon should be a central cause for collective motivation. These radical essentializations of the world offer a framework for dealing with the chaos of the social order, and clarify how we can erode the compounding systems of hierarchy that poison everything with unending violence, despair, and disorder. As a condensed syllabus for this “Grad School for Radicals,” these three shapes unlock a critical deep-systems curriculum that provides transformational engagement without the typically mystifying pretense of intellectual knowledge-hoarding. And so these conversations seek to give unmistakable clarity in contrast to the shouting hordes of bad-faith actors who needlessly complicate things–both for their own fame-seeking vanity and to further the ruling-class drive to keep the masses from winning a deep democracy. So if we wish to reverse the apocalypse, we must answer these three deceptively simple questions: Where are we? Where are we going? And what should we be aiming for? The ruling elite never hesitate to assault our modest aims for meaningful lives with their garish distractions of consumer-glitter, privatized-pleasure, and the ritualized-worship of their god-awful ideas. Despite eons of bad myths blocking our potential, this certainty remains: we all live in a delicate interdependence upon this beautiful spaceship called Earth. There is no Planet B. It will take everyone one of us—not just the lone, logical Spock—to repair our ship's precious and damaged Warp Drive. Once fixed by our many hands, all of the stars, both seen and unseen, will beckon to us with open smiles.   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

In this, the second part of our double-album release, we return to our familiar conversational format to discuss the ideas and diagnoses put forth in CrimthInc's poetic manifesto, To Change Everything. The 48-page pamphlet documents a dizzying array of morbid disorders from the same sick nation-states that give you endless awful B-sides, such as: “Disney's Manifest Destiny,” “Healthcare, Sometimes,” “Bootstraps Best for You,” “Lock'em & Cock'em,” “Student Debt Meets Mr. Ramen,” and finally, “Do the COVID-Collapse.” Many of the threatening obstacles and dangerous injustices diagrammed in CrimethInc's proclamation adhere, like super-glue, to the plastic surface of the U.S. petroleum project. And so, the collective's polemic is always aware that the solutions required must be bigger than one state, one nation or one continent to contemplate, fathom or undertake. The manifesto stirs with telling details and insightful observations about what we know and what we wish to ignore in this, our shared reality that spins like a deranged compass. And while To Change Everything functions as a good primer to anarchist ethics and its attendant traditions, it's worth noting how little it offers in the way of clear, practical, and focused solutions—like The Golden Square—or what Jesse & Matt like to call the “No-Bullshit Blueprint for Socialism” explored in Episode #031. The promise of anarchism is not some grand plan, or some self-righteous political dogma that will magically release us from capitalism's death-grip, but its values demand us to make a clear paradigm shift away from the dizzying maze of domination and violence that perpetually blocks humanity from having any nice things. Anarchism points towards a deep-system critique and an egalitarian ethics of rights and responsibilities that we so desperately need in our institutions and social relations. By flipping the script on a world built on a logic of forced scarcity and do-or-die competition, we can instead design a world of mutual cooperation and shared abundance. As CrimethInc writes, “Every order is founded on a crime against the preceding order—the crime that dissolved it.” But we can't commit that righteous crime with a fetishization of poetic ambiguities; we must work in solidarity to build dual power—abolishing institutions of state violence while we build new institutions of care & freedom at every level. Above all else, if we are going to survive together on this fragile planet, we must decommodify life and democratize society. And to do it now, we must start by changing everything.  Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

The Dumpster Fire of 2020 is over, but the song remains the same: capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy rage on in a celebrity-fueled clusterfuck of mass death and ecological collapse. And so it begins: A new calendar unfurls like a blanket to smother or console our traumatized lives. The New Year is a time when Christmas decorations get wanly huffed into garage boxes and when people busy themselves by hatching plans for privatized notions of change; some post their resolutions publicly on social media, while others whisper theirs sheepishly to friends and lovers, almost all of which get thwarted by the exhaustion, depression, and despair of life in this capitalist inferno. But what if real change in our personal lives is contingent upon the collective emancipation of all of us? Let's face it: each and every year comes with the same urgent imperative: everything must change. But yet, too much is expected to come from within ourselves for ourselves. And our relationship with time is too passive. Upon any year that passes, we too often say that this 12-month cycle did us wrong, did a bad thing, crushed our diaphanous dreams to shards of amber. But what if a year was just a random collection of days, and “2021” is only worthy of its name if it inspires us to abolish what's unjust and hurts us all? This year, unlike past furtive ones, we must work collectively toward a global socialist revolution against the dark, driving engine of capitalism, which forever churns out newer hierarchies to grind against older, more ancient ones. We must start anew with a struggle that confronts the onslaught of climate chaos propelled by a capitalist death-cult. So to burst forth in this New Year, The Future Is A Mixtape humbly offers our version of a double-album. In this episode, Jesse will be flying solo by reading To Change Everything: An Anarchist Appeal from CrimethInc, an ex-worker collective that surfaced out of Olympia, Washington, more than two decades ago. Immediately following the reading, the next episode contains Matt & Jesse's conversation about this eminently accessible anarchist manifesto. This international network of anonymous, aspiring revolutionaries declares that we should be free to direct our limitless potential on our own terms, and that no government, market, ideology or sky-daddy should be able to tell us what our lives must be; and that, finally, the world should be arranged by self-determination and mutual aid, just as water from a lake is best collected from two hands rather than one.    Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

In the annals of Occupy Wall Street, in what seem like distant folktales, hundreds of sites burst open like wildflowers in the morning light of 2011. Born by water and sunlight, but pitched by wind and dirt, one encampment after another would rise only to be crushed by the brutal boot of the State before this movement could figure itself out. While this horizontal uprising's rejection of representation and managerialism were vital and narcotic to some, others found it disorganized and chaotic, garbled by its shrill mic-checks and lack of overt demands. As David Graeber, a co-founder and dream-seeker of this spectacle of mass democracy, wanly stated, “While Americans can do communism, they have absolutely no conception about how to do democracy.” Astra Taylor, Graeber's friend and skeptical co-conspirator at OWS, investigates our collective troubles with the idea of democracy in her most recent, gorgeously entrancing work of nonfiction: Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone. Published in 2019, as a philosophical couplet to her documentary, What Is Democracy?—released a year prior, Taylor's book hums in a noble persistence that democracy is a utopian ideal worthy of our time, despite the term having long been abused and defiled by politicians and plutocrats into a kind of milky nothingness. The author deeply considers the meaning of democracy in a graceful series of paradoxes bound by binaries within each chapter. Much like her meditative and dreamy documentary, Taylor's book asks big questions about the trajectory of democracy in both its idealized conceptions and in its less savory, dirt-dreary praxis points. Jesse & Matt will ponder the philosophical and intellectual questions of these works as masterful collages composed of many voices—where a formerly incarcerated poet-barber exchanges stories side-by-side with Plato, political scientists, immigrants, and school children alike. How can we take democracy from being breath and vibrations of air into a concrete system of self-rule? Astra Taylor's twin projects reflect what democracy does best when we fall into its enchanting thrall: real democracy is a conversation, a struggle to deliberate, to talk and to listen. Certainly, in this era of a global pandemic, economic devastation, and a climate collapse, now is the time—more than ever—to connect, heal and listen to the voices outside of ourselves. Democracy is a word for something that doesn't exist yet; but the quiet acts of deliberation, being vulnerable and listening to others might make this word real for the first time. These wondrous projects demonstrate this politics of listening, a reminder that the mixtape of a flourishing future must be gathered from the songs of us all. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

Dejected and defeated—by the slimmest of electoral margins—Donald J. Trump spent his post-election nightmare hiding at a Washington golf club straddling between swings of his Titleist 910D2 Driver and plans for a bitter campaign of denials, recriminations and lawsuits. Having narrowly snatched victory out of the jaws of their own defeat, McLiberals celebrate the vanquishment of America's cosplay fascist and promise to “save the soul of America” by bringing “decency and compassion to The White House”—a castle built by the ruthless exploitation of African slaves. Grazing through the deforested wasteland of our celebrity-food-chain media-scape, Blue-State Brunchers raise their champagne flutes to toasts of a “return to normal” on social media, while millions of desperate Americans remain unfed, unhoused, and unloved. Covid-19, like a knife that never stops, slashes into wounds already open. In the words of Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” So what must be done to bring a new world to life? While electoral politics should not be simply ignored or discarded, we must recognize that its feckless attachments to spectacle at the expense of direct democracy leave the world more disfigured than transformed. Voting is, ultimately, the excrement end of social change. It's a sign of where power turns to shit: sometimes fertilizing gardens of future flowers; but more often than not, it ends up poisoning our local water systems (e.g. Flint, Michigan). Real democracy requires deliberation: with strangers in the streets, with neighbors on the corner, with colleagues in the workplace, and at home with family & friends. More than just an American obsession with the reality-show dumpster fire of 45, the world has for decades suffered from a sick addiction to Presidential politics, a myopic deference to the almighty power of a single individual. Instead, what we desperately need is real democracy. So, for this episode, Matt & Jesse will consider practical solutions that can finally end the shit-parade of legalized bribery and pay-to-play campaigning that comprise electoral politics as we know it. Beyond the long list of obvious and necessary reforms (including abolition of the electoral college, public financing, and universal suffrage) lies the unearthing of a long-forgotten central pillar of democracy: legislative appointment by lottery. Sortition, or the drawing of lots, is a democratic tool as old as the notion of democracy itself, and may be a key to designing an egalitarian future. Democracy is a fragile, morpheus dream. And ultimately, democracy is a wish we release into the air like a question mark or a song; some sounds dissipate quickly, but others echo through the forest into the ears of others. As Mark Fisher once wrote, “The long dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com   Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

If aliens could beam to our shores with recording devices, a savage irony would immediately and immaculately light up their antennas: not only does our global society fail to provide The Golden Square to every person on Earth, humans are increasingly forced deeper and deeper into debt for those fundamental rights to Food, Shelter, Healthcare, and Education. The debt-staircase has become grossly absurd and toxically tragic—a ruinous prank laid upon us at an ever-accelerating rate since the dawn of neoliberalism. From cradle to grave, we're trapped on a noxious treadmill of Debt Achievement Goals: School Lunch Debt, College Debt, Credit Card Debt, Auto Loan Debt, Housing Debt, Medical Debt, and more. And even after death, debt collectors hound our family members and moralize about unpaid balances. As David Graeber once said, “As it turns out, we don't ‘all' have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.” And who is that “some of us,” exactly? Well, certainly not the 1%; rather only the rest of us—the great unwashed 99%—as we resign to rumination and self-blame for not being entrepreneurial enough. As capitalism forces us to pay for our own existence (while it indiscriminately tears through the Earth's remaining ecologies), we must seriously question the moral plea to “pay all debts.” And as it turns out, there is another path that leads us away from Terminal Dystopia Syndrome (TDS). Forged from relationships built during the prefigurative struggles of Occupy Wall Street —The Debt Collective has published an urgent and instructive new manifesto tackling the emergency of now: Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition. In this episode, Matt & Jesse consider the emancipatory ideas of this important book, the necessary demand to abolish debt, and how we might reclaim the  “intellectual luxuries” we all deserve. The Debt Collective offer a persuasive argument for how and why Debtors Unions have dynamic potential to become the most liberatory union movement in history, providing the leverage needed to redress hierarchies of racial capitalism and colonial plunder by inaugurating a new era of investment in “Reparative Public Goods.” Amidst the powerful and dark-tidal pull of the COVID-19 pandemic, Can't Pay, Won't Pay provides a capstone to a trilogy on debt: David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years (an anthropological reckoning); Sam Esmail's Mr. Robot (a popular awakening), and finally, this book by the Debt Collective—a battle plan plan for how we unfuck the world that capitalism has smothered and smeared into shit. A 21st Century Debt Jubilee must be wrought by all of us, collectively.   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

For this special episode, Matt & Jesse are joined by Shawn Vulliez from the SRSLY WRONG Podcast for a very important discussion about how the concept of Library Socialism might dovetail with the idea-shape of The Golden Square. As Shawn laments, the inexorable crisis of capitalism is that it turns us into “Tool-Handed Monsters who can't hug our own children.” But published in 1971, Murray Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchism provided some initial inklings of a world without work or want—where the even-flow of Social Ecology, Libertarian Municipalism, and an abundance of material resources would allow us to finally hug our children, our shared future. Yet, given the climate chaos of the here and now, it's hard to imagine how we might get there as we face the fast-Fascist collapse of the biosphere. Insects, animals and the Earth's ecosystems die-off while capitalism forces us into collectively stuffing more Big Macs into our mouths. How might we meet the human rights to food, shelter, healthcare and education, and in so doing, create a new horizon for physical objects, where we could live in an ever-revolving circularity of consumer abundance? Beyond the bleak choice between denial of reality or submitting to involuntary human extinction, is there a third avenue left unlisted by popular imagination, one that doesn't require a magic marker to see or decrypt? Thankfully, there is a clear path toward an Ecology of Freedom, where we say goodbye to the continued maintenance of hierarchy and make way for its utter annihilation and dissolution, replacing it with a shared prosperity. As such, we must Decommodify the means to a dignified life, and Democratize every area of society. This dual principle is the only game in town, and its consecrated demands will lead us toward a vibrant and fecund future. These principles need foundations, though, which is why Library Socialism and The Golden Square can mutually embrace as complementary concepts: The Golden Square as the new social contract for society, and Library Socialism as the means for organizing our world. This conversation between comrades traces the beginnings of a mutual vision to address our ecological & social crises with practical solutions and an imminently achievable purpose. Humanity has an infinite amount of untapped potential that these outlined concepts toward a dignified global society aim to unleash. We should break from the Baby Yoda Nostalgia Blankets © of the possible—that keep us swaddled in narrow dreams and demands—and chart a course toward The Utopian Sphere. To paraphrase the now-radicalized Mandalorian (upon hearing us): “The Golden Square is the Objective. Library Socialism is the Way.”   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

In terms of audience reception, art can be a source of ridicule and scandal in mainstream society: as seen in Marcel Duchamp's notorious Fountain – a readymade sculpture that's a porcelain urinal flipped upside down and signed “R. Mutt”; but just as well, art can also create terrifying horror with a political charge (Edward Kienholz's Five Car Stud), spectral presence and spiritual depth (Louise Bourgeois's Spiders series) or art can become a psychedelic wonderland for the masses: as seen in Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room – a dazzling and diaphanous fractal maze of half-silvered mirrors that make one feel endless and glowing. But when it comes to how we feel and breathe about art's raison d'être: What's art's purpose for existing? Who gets to make art? Who gets to experience art? Sadly and grotesquely, just the rich. In this capitalist hellscape of commodified depravity and celebrity-driven attention hoarding, all measures of real freedom, including the ability to choose a life in the arts, are reserved only for the rich & famous. No matter who you are or where you were born, there is an alternative version of you behind every dollar of your parents; the money your family has or doesn't have, shapes the trajectory of your life and determines your available options. As such, this tragic lottery is ultimately a game best tossed into history's garbage bin. Our co-hosts will reflect on lifetimes of dashed dreams, yearning for freedom and imagining what art might be like in a socialist future – sketching visions of a New Renaissance waiting just behind the doors concealing humanity's suppressed imagination. Once achieving The Golden Square, where dignified lives no longer worry about food, shelter, healthcare and education, art is inevitably what comes next. We don't need Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket to 15 seconds of Ocean Spray © TikTok fame, which is the newer, crueler, sadder reality of the American Dream. The Golden Square is how we get freedom for everyone, not just a few lucky lottery winners in this vicious, boring dystopia. Building real Socialism will unleash a gazillion blooming flowers of human creativity – singing out in a joyous weave toward The Utopian Sphere. New art will ask new questions, make new demands, and push us toward the unknown horizons of belonging, fulfillment, and happiness never-before realized in human history. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

As The New World burns into Old World ruins, climate chaos warps the safely contoured psychic borders between the dystopian films we watch inside versus the reality of scorched skies and deadly plagues outside. To build a world worth living for, we must find a way to transform our economies, build resilient communities of zero-carbon housing for all and keep fossil fuels in the ground – all while racing against the terrifying ten-year window of opportunity still left to avoid a catastrophic, civilization-ending bio-collapse. But after decades of fumbles and false starts in the environmental movement, a new dawn might be rising. Just one month after the IPCC's alarming 2018 report, The Sunrise Movement and AOC stormed Nancy Pelosi's office, demanding bold action to secure good jobs and a livable future. Just months later, AOC and Ed Markey would go on to introduce resolutions for The Green New Deal in the US Congress. Two years after the viral media success of the Sunrise sit-in, the movement's co-founders have put out a big, thick book called Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can. This volume arrives amid a wave of recent books from writers, activists, and scholars raising urgent calls for a Green New Deal. This anthology presents a collection of endorsements from famous thinkers and organizers of the broader Left who make up the voices of its 16 chapters; so, in accord with that project, we offer this episode as an additional chapter of endorsement; one too radical for its publisher, Simon & Schuster, to find “fit for print.” So while this book's target audience is presumably those liberals who are merely Green-New-Deal-Curious, we hope it will serve to expand the massive choir needed to sing a collective chorus for eco-socialism and the end of capitalism. In order to progress towards a just, utopian horizon, we must burn down old myths, heal our cities, and build a world where our collective responsibility to provide each other with the material means for a dignified life is the basis of a new social contract. The world we deserve is one that's as happy & wild as a child's mind in playful abandon.   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

During most summers in the U.S., one can expect soundtracked montages of pure Americana: music festivals, camping trips, BBQs, an onslaught of smash'em'up Marvel movies, beach parties, and 4th of July fireworks. But this summer, the world over, regardless of nation-state hallucinations and the petty borders carved by ancient violence, Mother Earth coughs up plagues, spits out wildfires, and vomits forth hurricanes. It's been a nonstop clusterfuck of catastrophes. Doomscrolling through our social media feeds, paralyzed by anxiety, we see how millions face unemployment, healthcare loss, and eviction. The entire West Coast of North America is now threatened by the largest conflagration in modern history. We live in a time of great calamities. But those calamities have an origin story that must be identified, criticized, and undone in order to build a world of The Golden Square. The origin of these calamities lies in the toxic designs that Jesse & Matt collectively call The Poison Pyramid, a rotten triptych composed of hierarchy-producing machines: 1) Religion; 2) Capitalism; and finally, 3) Celebrity. We are living in yet another summer of this Poison Pyramid—best illustrated in a stunt orchestrated by amerikkka's greatest huckster: Donald J. Trump, a raggedy pastiche of a man who trolled his way to the presidency. On June 1st, this flabby but unflagging con-artist directed police to deploy tear gas and violent tactics of domination to cleave through the George Floyd protests along Lafayette Square, so that he could stage a photo-op in front of St. John's Church. Waving a bible haphazardly in the air, Trump became the pure apotheosis of The Poison Pyramid run amok—the toxic fumes of religion, capitalism and celebrity enmeshed in an expensive, violent, & vacuous nonevent. A fundamental matrix of domination, The Poison Pyramid circumscribes a comprehensive series of hierarchies within hierarchies—a nesting doll hiding other cold cruelties. To design a world of dignity, this gross idea-shape must be dismantled from its insides, and the sick myths of this matrix must be discarded. We must follow the abolitionist arc of emancipatory struggle to dismantle these roadblocks to human flourishing. Only socialism will do   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

What would Socialism look like? All too often, when the Left tries to define “socialism,” they stumble into the weeds with seven pairs of trousers tied to their ankles as they hop helplessly with socks stuffed in their mouths, attempting to hit a golf ball with their neighbor's dildo—all done in order to get that hole-in-one, even though they had already swung three times, which had lead to them to the weeds in the first place. Sounds daft & confusing? It doesn't have to be. For this episode, Jesse & Matt talk about what socialism is, what it should be, and how we might best achieve this vaunted fantasia, making it so fully felt that it sounds like your loved one's heartbeat. Socialism should be straight-forward, obvious, and undeniable. Moving toward the full decommodification of The Golden Square – the universal and unconditional rights to Food, Shelter, Healthcare and Education – is a poetic starting point. Clearly, capitalism isn't working and its core myths are failing to persuade much of anyone anymore, especially the young. Capitalist mythology wants you to believe that we live in an unrivaled utopia of boundless consumer plenty; but what it won't tell you is that capitalism is a creepy, gyrating homogenization machine that ruins the beautiful, natural diversities of Earth and humanity in a drab, boring, tedious, and repetitive circle-jerk of dangerous rituals that lead to bio-collapse. It's over-run with all kinds of sick and sweaty M&Ms: Militarized, Monopolized, Market-Worshiping Malls, Mini-Marts, Megaplexes, McMansions, and Miles & Miles of Milquetoast Suburbs, Stacked with Super-Sized SUVs. Now more than ever, it is clear that we must cancel this dick-in-the-box ideology. At this moment, we must choose between socialism or more of neoliberalism's DeathCult barbarism. The former leads to utopia, while the latter leads to certain oblivion. The choice should be so dumbfoundingly obvious that it's akin to dropping your backpack to catch a falling baby from a window above. The Golden Square offers a No-Bullshit Blueprint for a socialist tomorrow that we can begin building today. It is a clear path to a world that is inclusive, accessible, sustainable, vibrant, colorful, diverse, dynamic, enriching, expansive, exciting, innovative, joyful, fun, restful, and yes: queer as fuck. It's the launchpad to a flourishing, utopian future. Let's right the wrongs and start building socialism now.   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

In the most famous scene from the legendary film, Network (1976), populist news anchor, Howard Beale, creates a viral sensation before the internet became a thing: he tells his viewers, “I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!” And thousands of people across the country yell from their windows and rooftops repeating the mantra, “I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!” More than 40 years on, in our neoliberal wasteland, we have every right to be mad as hell as we huddle in our unpaid Covid-abodes with no more Bernie Bucks or stimulus, while microbes attack us relentlessly. With the Siberian forests on fire, the Great Barrier Reef deforming into black bones & ash and the oceans gasping for oxygen while record temperatures make Death Valley feel like Venus, we must become mad – with a rage that runs on love for what's been lost and for what we might still win. This week, Jesse & Matt celebrate the multi-authored manifesto, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, published in 2019 by Verso Books. Our co-hosts will talk about the vitality and importance of this book and how the beating heart of any radical Green New Deal must include The Golden Square: the decommodification and universal provision of Food, Shelter, Healthcare and Education for All. We live in the worst version of a Cyberpunk world that doesn't even offer up androids or flying cars, while we gloat over our miniature technology & its secret surveillance as politicians offer up empty platitudes and technocratic masturbations. As the Social Ecologist, Murray Bookchin, once told us, the enemy isn't us; the enemy is the fossil fuel industry; the enemy lives inside McMansions and billionaire castles made by myths of perpetual market growth, peddled by the celebrity worshiping pyramid scheme of an influencer class clawing onto the old carcass of illegitimate hierarchies. We are in revolutionary times and collective actions require collective designs; so we must continue to draw the contours of what lies just beyond the horizon. We have a planet to win. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

For this episode, Matt & Jesse build upon their prior discussion (Episode 026) of Erik Olin Wright's posthumous book, How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century, by mapping out how we might best choreograph the dance steps in making revolution fully realized. Wright's historically magnificent project of delineating the internal contradictions of class in America (and the world over) made him the most important Marxist in Sociology post-WWII. After his mapping project of class was completed, the intellectual turned his attention in the latter half of his career to seeing how we might build real utopias in the here and now – after both the failure of statist “proletarian” parties and the success of neoliberalism's onslaught of rapacious transnational capital, where everything could be outsourced or automated, and where labor was left emaciated, fragmented, and unconscious of its own exploitation. While Wright's final work provided an excellent diagramming of the strategic logic of Eroding Capitalism, he never outlined how we might orchestrate these various movements on the playing field of global capital in order to build a symphony of revolution. Increasingly, the triumphant narrative that markets “heal the boo-boos” seems ever-less persuasive as capitalism reveals itself to be a harm-grinder against humanity and our desiccated biosphere. Matt will discuss what he argues is our most powerful anticapitalist wedge issue - money in politics, and Jesse will offer his Theory of Emancipatory Struggle along with the strategic directions of The Anticapitalist Compass. In closing, Jesse & Matt will examine how converging emancipatory movements joining in a chorus of revolution can build toward the first glimmers of The Utopian Sphere. The time has come to not only announce that “a better world is possible,” but to detail the choreography of transcending capitalism once and for all. We must make the future ourselves, collectively, and not let the future be made by an oligarchy that seeds DeathCults in its wake.   Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

On this episode, Jesse & Matt spin the radical salad by saying the quiet parts out-loud about how we go from the first manifestations of a rebellion—with the Floyd Uprisings—toward the massive euphoric heave of a revolution that must be made at a time when the Covid-Collapse is occurring in fast-break waves upon our no-job, no-rent lives. As organizers rattled through megaphones across America in July: “This is not a MOMENT; this is a MOVEMENT,” any successful revolution is one made up of a cross-stitching of other liberation movements: as seen in the work of Covid mutual aid units collaborating with BLM activists, while youth-led climate groups like Sunrise Movement have now hurled banners across freeways—not only to demand a #GreenNewDeal, but to #DefundThePolice and #CancelRent. Already, tens of millions of Americans have hit the streets to defend Black lives, while also identifying how the blood stains of police brutality connect to the patriarchal, colonial violence beating the drum of Capitalism's deathwish. We are in the midst of a generation-defining, global, mass-death catastrophe, and so Kali Akuno's call to “Unite and Fight, Build the General Strike” will need to have multiple connecting demands to Defund the Police; Care for the People; Cancel the Rent; Forgive the Debt and Build the Green New Deal. Anything less than this will mean the end of mass civilization, its past achievements becoming newspaper kindle to the fires of the post-apocalypse. Toni Morrison once said, “All paradises, all utopias are defined by who is not there, by the people not allowed in.” In fact, it's the poisonous ideas and myths that exist inside them and us that should not be let in. So let's start a very different kind of fire then. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

On March 30th, 2020—as COVID-19 locked millions of panicked Americans in their homes—the homeless in Las Vegas were forced to sleep in white-chalked parking lots as the city's gleaming and empty casino-castles loomed above them and whose closed windows hid empty beds that could have provided warmth and safety. On April 11th, ten thousand cars lined up for a San Antonio Food Bank—the aerial photos of which became viral online, spreading to each digital device as rapidly as the virus had taken over our lives. We need a new human rights more than ever. For this episode, Matt & Jesse discuss the COVID-19 Pandemic and the collapse of our Old Bad World as the New Badder, Sadder World floods its diseased blood into our digital igloos. The co-hosts will talk about how the COVID-19 chaos not only deepens the contradictions of capitalism but also makes the rights to a dignified life all the more urgent, as people struggle with food insecurity (or abject hunger), unpaid rent and mortgages, the mass loss of healthcare access due to millions of Americans joining the outcaste status of the unemployed, and the incalculable cruelty of student debt piling up, impossible to pay. While these attacks on human dignity have been increasing under the Age of Bio-death that is Neoliberalism, COVID-19 makes clear a momentous tactical urgency to demand The Golden Square: the full emancipation from want by creating a global guarantee for the universal rights to food, shelter, healthcare and education. Jesse & Matt will briefly chart the carcass of Covid Capitalism while spending more time mapping the way from the storm to reach the shoreline of a dignified world: one we can still achieve through bold tactics, strategies and collective will. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

On this episode, Jesse and Matt dive into Erik Olin Wright's posthumous work on imagining practical utopias, entitled How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century, which was published in the fall of 2019—just six months after the author's untimely death from cancer. Our co-hosts will talk about Erik Olin Wright's place in keeping the candle of socialism burning during its most bleak period: from Ronald Reagan's Mourning in AmeriKKKa—at the onset of the 1980s—to the dawn of the new millennium, when the “Battle in Seattle” signified the reformation of the Left, creating the contours for the wild new imaginings of Occupy Wall Street and the liberation struggles of a new century. Matt & Jesse will also converse briefly about Wright's highly collaborative Real Utopias Project (published by Verso Books) and his magnum opus, Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), the massive and daunting size of which moved the Marxist Sociologist to create a tighter, leaner version that would be of practical use to activists and organizers the world over. Questions to be formed and answered during the conversation: What are the merits of the author's claims? What are the weaknesses of this very important book? And finally, what are the truly transcendent aspects of Wright's ideas that deserve placement as key tracks for our mixtape of the future? As Antonio Gramsci famously said, dreamers and fighters for a better world must carry forth with a “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Less well known is Wright's gentle retort that to survive the 21st century, we will also need “a bit more optimism of the intellect” too.    Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com   Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com   Facebook Twitter Instagram

To build a better mixtape for the future, Matt & Jesse transition from diagramming how the George Floyd uprisings can move beyond defunding the police (and abolishing it entirely), and instead look at how this movement could lead to larger more long-term transformations. The demand first met must include a long-sought Truth & Reckoning Commission, which has not only happened in South Africa (and more recently Canada), but has occurred in 41 other nations and counting—all of which shows how this is not a dancing unicorn demand in a nation that largely ignores demands from below; there is a vital and visceral need for this commission to surface in the here and now. Our co-hosts will then talk about how this Commission can ramp up to justly deserved reparations for America's Twin Sins: the enslavement and genocide of Native & Black folks during the era of settler-colonialism, the lawfare and warfare of Jim Crow and the continued racist sadism of the State as COVID-19 ravages Black & Native communities across a country. While many Americans are faced with celebrating this 4th of July without fireworks or freedom, Jesse & Matt acknowledge how white folks' entrapment in their homes has built a secret solidarity with the lives of African Americans, who have been geographically and economically trapped by centuries of racial capitalism, and who have neither felt freedom nor fireworks in a nation-state that denies their right to breathe or exist. And lastly, money—our shared, mass hallucination—will be questioned and reimagined in order to create a new understanding of what “value” must include, so that we can firmly seed a future of what's so rightly deserved. To stand up, we must fight back; as the Black Communist & poet, Claude McKay, once wrote: “If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot [. . .] we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”   Comprehensive show notes can be found at thefutureisamixtape.com   Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

On this third episode exploring the Misfit Twelve, Jesse & Matt will assess Alex S. Vitale's book The End of Policing, which is equal parts a love letter to liberals—pleading for them to end their thumb-from-mouth habit with reformist politics, while also opening up a doorway to abolitionist thought. Published in 2017 by Verso Books to small fanfare, this book-length plea has rapidly flickered in-and-out of print since the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020; and so pressing is the topic and demand to #DefundThePolice that The End of Policing has been downloaded over 200,000 times from Verso's website. Our co-hosts weigh the pros and cons of the book's argument, audience-angle and whether it offers a bonafide vision of a world without police, or consider if it's just another leftward book diagramming the corpse of liberalism instead. Our co-hosts will then use the book as a launch-pad to other notions not discussed, but which circulate unseen, above or below the subtext of The Carceral State while imagining other ways of being free from the policeman inside our heads. Comprehensive show notes can be found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse deepen their discussion on the bad, bad behavior of The Misfit 12 by branching beyond myth-busting to diagram how we might abolish the police in strategically smart and tactical ways. The central core myths of what have kept them in power so long, as well as the brutal costs they create in their wake, go far beyond the victims, family members and the beloved community at large; even when we don't see the sun from seashore, The Carceral State's cloud-eyes peak over the financial aid packages of college students, monitor truancies of 12-year old Black children from their buses to their schools, strip-search working-class girls and check the inside of our souls without our consent. So to seize the means to abolish the police, how do we “defund, disarm, dismantle?” Where do we start? In what order? Or is it better for us to think about leverage-points than simple-step chronology? Our co-hosts will talk about the “low hanging fruit” of getting cop-killers and cop-gropers out of our K-12 system, freezing—then melting—police budgets and pouring that money into The Golden Square: Food, Shelter, Healthcare & Education. Jesse & Matt will also talk about how this realization of abolishing the police—amid the societal collapse of COVID-19—allows for new terrain struggles for Universal Basic Income & Medicare for All to make it into the Mixtape of the Now. And finally, they will suggest why this might be the right type of righteous storm to blow down the trap-house of capitalism, cleansing the Earth of its Visigoths and Goldman-Sachs ghouls, so we can return to our mother, Freedom—the same mother George cried out for. Only when we strip property definitions from our bodies, can we begin to decommodify the Earth's ecology and get on that Rainbow Light of the Utopian Sphere.    Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com   Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Facebook Twitter Instagram

After a long hiatus from The Future Is a Mixtape, Jesse & Matt return to a more battered and broken world, whose lungs throb with phlegm while a new world is breathing hard and fast, demanding to be born. For this episode, our co-hosts discuss how the Old World Tragedy of Police Brutality is ripping into the New World Tragedy of COVID-19, and why these clashing tragedies have made the Old World no longer tolerable among an increasingly young, queer, multiracial, working class populace who have “nothing left to lose but their chains.” While student debt, climate chaos, unemployment and the profit-seeking predations of private healthcare savage human solidarity, we hide in our homes, we question, dream, yearn, and now Americans are taking to the streets in the greatest uprising since 1968. What then must be done? In order to fully embrace a future of the Utopian Sphere, we must dismantle the twin seduction-myths that the police “protect us” and “prevent crime” (when they appear largely after the crime). Further still, we must realize that an institution designed for slave patrols and anti-union thuggery can no longer live in our New World of the Mixtape. As the Jim Crow adage goes, this “blue by day, white by night” institution has been—and will always be—a racist vector of domination, making any glorious and glowing future or radical liberation impossible. So this loaded gun of Patriarchy must lose its bullets and be melted by fire. Matt & Jesse chart a path on how we might best do that, while more importantly stepping back and listening in, as the Movement for Black Lives traces the first etchings of Police Abolishment.   Comprehensive show notes can be found at thefutureisamixtape.com Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.comFacebook Twitter Instagram

Beyond Blade Runners and Replicants, there must be a place “Over the Rainbow” for us to exist in solidarity and equanimity. And certainly, the 21st Century hovering above us should be a cause for hope, not despair; yet even with this new century being no way near its quartermark, it's already given us a planet wheezing from ecological crisis-to-crisis, where an untenable economic system of neo-feudalism ravages plants and animals, as well as the rights of those we love (or should love). In the Terror & Twilight of Our Broken Age, what ideology best speaks and acts from a place made from compassion and love? Instead of passively looking at the new century that hangs in the sky, blinking obliquely above us, we should instead reorganize our motions to The North Star of Human Decency, namely that of Anarchy. For this 21st episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse will finally come out of the “political closet” and show some raw & real skin: they are both Anarchists Without Adjectives, and they believe that this ideology of love is the only practical solution to the world's byzantine disorders, fraught with confusion, warbling on without a just antidote. In their most personal and revealing podcast since the show's first episode, Jesse & Matt explore their disparate journeys to humanity's greatest romance, Anarchy; they will describe its origin story, its turbulent relationship with authoritarian communists and how this political philosophy is not only the most idealist of ideologies, but also why it's the only one which can ride inside us--whispering out “hope” for a utopian future. HELPFUL RESOURCE GUIDES ABOUT ANARCHY: The Most Popularly Cited and Shared Introduction to Anarchy: David Graeber's “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer Might Surprise You?!” Thomas Giovanni in the Black Rose Anarchist Confederation: “Who Are the Anarchists and What Is Anarchism?” Have More Specific Questions? Go to An Anarchist FAQ from The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective. The Anarchist Library: A Deep Database and Archive of Out-of-Print & Hard-to-Find Articles, Books, Speeches and Interviews on Anarchy America's Legendary AK Press, Which Runs as a Worker-Cooperative Since 1990, and Publishes Important as well as Far Reaching Works of Political Theory, Journalism, Fiction and Non-Fiction Works. Freedom: The Oldest (& Once Longest Running) Anarchist Newspaper in Print (1886-2014) Get a ‘Memorial Copy' of Freedom's Last Print Issue for February/March 2014 KEY FIGURES & WORKS ON ANARCHISM: Lao Tzu (604 BC - 501 BC) → Most Important Work On Early Notions Anarchy: Tao Te Ching Chuang Tzu (370 BC - 287 BC) → Most Important Work On Early Notions Anarchy: The Book of Chuang TzuGerard Winstanley (1609-1676) → Most Important Work On Early (Western Notions of) Anarchy: The New Law of Righteousness (1649) William Godwin (1756-1836) → Most Important Work On Early (Western Notions of) Anarchy: Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) Max Stirner (1806-1856) → Most Important Work On Anarchy: The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority (1844) Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) → Most Important Work On Anarchy: What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government (1840) Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) → Most Important Work On Anarchy: God and the State (1882) Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) → Most Important Works On Anarchy: The Conquest of Bread (1892) & Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) Emma Goldman (1869-1940) → Most Important Work On Anarchy: Living My Life (1931) David Graeber (1961 & Still Kicking) → Most Important Works On Anarchy: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) & The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (2013) MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Judy Garland's “Over the Rainbow” & Where to Watch the Legendary Film in All of Its Proto-Camp Glory The Legendary Theme Song for the Reading Rainbow & Where to Watch the Show in All of Its Kid-Camp Fury Anarchists and Molotov Cocktails! Why Do Black Lives Matter? Why Do Comrades Lives Matter? Because the Police Are Still Swinging Butcher-Batons and Gatling-Guns Against People's Heads: Here, Here, Here, Here, Here and Lastly Sophia Wilansky--a Hero of the Dakota Pipeline Protest--Finally Speaks Out Here. The Rectum & The Shithole of the State Jesse Herring: “Anarchy is a dream . . . Anarchy is a beautiful dream. Anarchy is the North Star of Human Decency” Ursula K. Le Guin's Most Famous Quote: “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” What Is Anarcho-Primitivism? A Working Primer (However, if you want a popular conception of the idea, you can watch this popular piece of “ManArchy.” If you want the documentary version, you can watch this instead. Or--fuck all--if you just want a visual sight-gag of Anarcho-Primitivism, you can watch this ode to pre-millennium dread.) The Creators of Novara Radio, Aaron Bastani and James Butler, Discuss the Ideas of Anarchism in This Podcast: “What Is Libertarian Communism?” Ursula K. Le Guin's Official Website & Her Blog MusingsUrsula K. Le Guin's Career-Defining Magnum Opus: The Dispossessed (1974) The New Yorker: Julie Phillip's “The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin” Structo Magazine: Euan Monaghan's Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin: “Ursula K. Le Guin on Racism, Anarchy and Hearing Her Characters Speak” (2015) The Anarchist Library: “Anarchism and Taoism” A Working Biography of Paul Goodman: an American Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Psychotherapist and Anarchist Philosopher A History of Revolutionary Catalonia in Libcom: “1936-1939: The Spanish Civil War and Revolution” A Summary of The Dispossessed in Wikipedia Ursula K. Le Guin's Description of “The Wall” in in the opening paragraph of The Dispossessed:“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.” An Online Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin, Generated from Questions by Readers of The Guardian: “Chronicles of Earthsea” The Rules of Being a Mormon in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (or Mormon Church) In Ask Gramps: “Do I Need to Confess Masturbation to My [LDS] Baptist?” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: “Why and What Do I Need to Confess to My Bishop?” {Which Basically Avoids Mentioning All the Sex and Dirty Parts in Case Readers Become Too Inspired} Catholic Online: “A Guide to Confession” Terry Eagleton in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “In Praise of Marx” Karl Marx's Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (Originally Published in 1867; This Was Translated & Reprinted in 1992) David Harvey: A Companion to Karl Marx's Capital (2010) Louis Menand in The New Yorker: “Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today” Mary Gabriel's Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (2011) Rachel Holmes' Eleanor Marx: A Life (2015) Ralph Nader's Most Notable Works:   Breaking Through Power: It's Easier Than We Think (2016) The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future (2012) “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us”: A Novel (2011) A Fantastic Essay on Barack Obama's Patina-Presidency: “The Gap Between Rhetoric and Action: The Failed Foreign Policy of Barack Obama” Matthew Snyder's Ph.D. Dissertation: Welcome to the Suck: The Film and Media Phantasm's of The Gulf War (2008) Noam Chomsky's Most Notable Works on Politics & Anarchy: On Anarchism (2013) Who Rules the World? (2016) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (1988; 2002) Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration and Power (2017) On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume (1998) Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2007) Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky (2002) The Anarchist Library: Workers' Solidarity Federation's “History of the Anarchist-Syndicalist Trade Union” The Anarchist Library: Rudolph Rocker on Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism in “The Reproduction of Daily Life” Mikhail Bakunin, The Founder of Modern Anarchism: Mark Leier's Bakunin: The Creative Passion (2009) America's Most Famous Anarchist & Greatest Dissident; as Seen in Candace Falk's Love, Anarchy & Emma Goldman (1990), and Also in Kevin and Paul Avrich's Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (2012) Michael Albert, the co-founder of Participatory Economics (Parecon): as Seen in the Graphic Novel-ization Parecon: Sean Michael Wilson and Carl Thomspon's Parecomic: Michael Albert and the Story of Participatory Economics (2013) The Big Think: “Do Scientists Have a Special Responsibility to Engage in Political Advocacy?” Michael Albert's Parecon: Life After Capitalism (2003) & Practical Utopia: Strategies for a Desirable Society (KAIROS) (2017) Andrew Anthony in The Guardian: “Ex-diplomat Carne Ross: The Case for Anarchism” IMDb: John Archer and Clara Glynn's The Accidental Anarchist (About Carne Ross' Epiphany Toward Anarchy After Becoming Disillusioned of Serving State Power) Biola Magazine: “What Are the Key Difference Between Mormonism and Christianity?” Jehovah's Witnesses (JW.org): “What Happens at a Kingdom Hall?” Reddit: “How to Make Molotov Cocktails”  (!!!) David Graeber's Most Famous Essay on Anarchism: “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer Might Surprise You?!” The Anarchist Library: “An Anarchist FAQ” Bakunin on Karl Marx's Idea of Socialism Within the State: “A dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship.” The Anarchist Library: Wayne Price's “In Defense of Bakunin and Anarchism” (Responses to Herb Gamberg's Attacks on Anarchism) The First International (AKA the International Workingmen's Association) The Socialist International David Harvey's Most Recent Work: Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (2017) David Graeber's Idea of Baseline Communism Is Fully Explored in His Most Important Work: Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Lord of the Rings & Gandalf's Anxiety & Terror of the Rings Corrupting Powers: “Don't Tempt Me Frodo!” Jonathan Franzen About Those Facebook “likes” in The New York Times: “Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.” Jim Dwyer's Article on Marina Abramovic's Art Project to Stare at People, Eye-to-Eye, Twenty Minutes Each for Hours and Hours; As Explored in The New York Times: “Confronting a Stranger, for Art” Buzzfeed: “Watch Six Pairs Stare Into Each Others' Eyes as a Love Experiment” The Guardian: “Literary Fiction Readers Understand Others' Emotions Better, Study Finds” Annie Murphy Paul in Time Magazine: “Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer” Adam Gopnik Explores the Paris Commune in The New Yorker: “The Fires of Paris” The Anarchist Library: Murray Bookchin's “To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936” Noted Correction: Matthew incorrectly stated that members of Congress receive lifetime pension after only being in office one term (two years); In actuality, members of congress receive pension after five years (but Senators do get pensions after just one term of six years). For more information on this, go to FactCheck.org's article on the subject. Margaret Atwood's Interview on Canada's Q TV Where She Discusses Her Creation of God's Gardeners in The Year of the Flood (2009) & How Environmental Activists Must Make Friends with the Religious for a Truly Big Tent Movement to Save the Planet; Also Talks About the Split Between Christian Fundamentalists & Environmental Christians Who View Humans as Stewards of the Earth. Jessica Alexander in The Atlantic: “America's Insensitive Children?” {How Schools in Denmark Teach Students Empathy From a Young Age} Kevin Carson in Center for a Stateless Society: “Libertarian-splaining to the Poor” Learning About Worker Cooperatives: A Working Definition from the Canadian Worker Co-Op Federation Alana Semuels in The Atlantic: “Worker-Owned Cooperatives: What Are They?” National Community Land Trust Network: An FAQ About Community Land Trusts Mikhail Bakunin: “To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.” {For More Quotes by Bakunin, Hit Up His Wikiquote} The Future Is A Mixtape's First Three Episodes Exploring The Poison Pyramid: What Jesse Calls An Unconsciously Inspired Anarchist Idea-Shape: Episode 001: The Desire For Certainty: On the Terrifying Costs of Religious Tyranny Upon Humanity Episode 002: The Invisible Hand: Explores the Death-Dealing Nature of Capitalism Episode 003: Star-Fuckers: Concerns Our Toxic Relationship to the Cult of Celebrity-Worship Mikhail Bakunin's Quote on God as a Bad Boss: "A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.” Vivir la utopía: Juan A. Gamera's Documentary on the Anarchist Revolution in Catalonia: Living Utopia (1997) Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread (1892: 2017 Edition Translated by Jonathan-David Jackson) Utopia As Seen George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia Where He Describes How Everyday Workers Were in the Saddle of the 1936 Revolution: "The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle." Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (2009) Why is it that the German Air-Bombings during WWII (The Blitz) caused suicide rates to plummet so dramatically? British scientists discover the reason as seen in The Telegraph's article: “Terror Attacks Cause Drop in Suicide Rates as They Invoke Blitz Spirit” PBS NewsHour: “Sebastian Junger's Tribe Examines Loyalty, Belonging and the Quest for Meaning” How Spending $25 on Others (Instead of Keeping It for Yourself) Creates More Happiness; as Seen in The New Republic Interview with Scientists: “Want to Be Happy? Stop Being Cheap!” Time Magazine: “Do We Need $75,000 a Year to Be Happy?” The US Military-Industrial-Complex: $700 Billion on Murder and Machinery: Alex Emmons in The Intercept: “The Senate's Military Spending Increase Alone Is Enough to Make Public College Free” Armistead Maupin: “There is your biological family and then your logical family.” As Seen in His Autobiography, Logical Family: A Memoir Is Kamala Harris America's Future President or Just Another Transactional Politician Buried in Corporate Money? Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Universal Basic Dividend (UBD)? Matthew Bruenig's Essay-Report: “How Norway's State Manages Its Ownership Of Companies” (From the People's Policy Project) Michael Zannettis in The People's Policy Project: “Why Americans Are Going to Love Single Payer” Alan Moore's Most Important Works, Both Past and Present: Watchman (Released in 1986-87; Reprinted 2014) V for Vendetta (Released in 1989; Reprinted in 2008 Jerusalem: A Novel (Hardback Release: 2016 & It's 1280 Pages!) From Hell (2004) When V for Vendetta was published it was seen as an SF allegory for Margaret Thatcher's World Gone Mad; As Seen in George Monbiot's Excellent Essay in The Guardian: “Neoliberalism -- the Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems” But There's A World We Can Have from the Anarchist Principles of Mutual Aid, Solidarity and Community Wealth: Marcin Jakubowski's Open Source Ecology Project & It's Philosophy The Making of “America's Most Radical City” as Explored with the Founding of Cooperation Jackson; Jackson's History of This Struggle Is Also Explored in Ajamu Nangwaya & Kali Akuno's Book  Jackson Rising (2017) Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website . . . The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt discuss the slow, spiral reckoning of Ridley Scott's much-celebrated and increasingly influential film Blade Runner, whose long and winding road lead to a sequel, Blade Runner 2049. While detractors of the original film might feel they're viewing a sexy-time noir featuring little more than robots and porn-jazz, for the entranced, the film's hypnotic imagery and ruminations on universal themes like humanness, memory and belonging still keep many cineaste-hearts aflutter. After the blockbuster ascendency the Star Wars franchise and SF's increasing maturation as a cinematic genre, Ridley Scott's formerly “one-off” was released in 1982, and quickly disappeared at the box office and inside film critics' confused typewriters. However, unbeknownst to many, this leftover lasagna turned into the cult film of cult films. Blade Runner would later grow an organic fanbase from Arty Nerds, Noir Addicts and Cyberpunks, all of whom would despoil their underoos over spinners, unicorn origami and whether Deckard was or wasn't a replicant. Seeing blinking cash-registers in their eyes, Hollywood producers sought out Denis Villeneuve as their architect to extend the franchise with Blade Runner 2049. Your meta-guidance-counselors, Matt & Jesse, will provide a spoiler-bonanza of both films, weigh out Villeneuve's sense of cinema, and examine how the sequel's repeater bleakness short-circuits better questions and ideas. The co-hosts will finally imagine how this film might be retrofitted or retold, narratively speaking, and roust its viewers into utopian dream-scaping. Mentioned In This Episode: Opening Music Salvo: White Zombie's “More Human Than Human” from Their Last Album Astro-Creep: 2000 – Songs of Love, Destruction and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head (1995) Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Edition 2007) The Movie Art of Syd Mead: Visual Futurist Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 (Pre-Order) The Art and Soul of Blade Runner: A Visual Art Book Podcasts on Blade Runner 2049 (That May Or May Not Have Influenced Our Podcast): Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald's Podcast The Watch, Which Features Sam Esmail and a Discussion on Blade Runner 2049 and Mr. Robot Slate's Podcast Spoiler Specials About Blade Runner 2049, Which Features Dana Stevens, Forrest Wickman and Sam Adams The Director's Cut Podcast: Featuring Rian Johnson Interviewing Denis Villeneuve and His Critically Acclaimed Blade Runner 2049 The Collider Podcast: Episode 110 - Blade Runner 2049 Featuring Hosts Adam Chitwood and Matt Goldberg The Original Trailer for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) The Official Trailer for Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 Time Magazine: “Director Denis Villeneuve Proved to Us He Love Blade Runner More Than Anybody” The Three Short Films Set Between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049: Blade Runner 2049 - “2036: Nexus Dawn” Blade Runner 2049 - “2048: Nowhere to Run” Blade Runner 2049 - “Black Out 2022” Ben Child in The Guardian: “Blade Runner 2049: Five Things We Learned from the Shorts” Jason Sondhi in Best Short of the Week: “Hollywood's Embrace of the Short Film Tie-In” Clickhole: “Culture Shock: Everything You Need to Know About Blade Runner” Documentaries About the Original Blade Runner: Channel 4: On the Edge of Blade Runner (Featured on YouTube) Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner (Found in Most DVDs/Blu-rays of the the 1982 Film) BFI Film Classics: Scott Bukatman's Blade Runner Instagram: “Blade Runner Reality” Devon Maloney in Wired: “Blade Runner 2049's Politics Aren't That Futuristic” Marie Claire: “These Three Women Are About to Make Sci-Fi History” Angelica Jade Bastién in Vulture: “Why Don't Dystopia's Know How to Talk About Race? Darryl Hannah's Background in Gymnastics Helped in a Key Scene with Blade Runner, But She Still Had a Male Gymnast Stunt Double in a Scary Sequence. The Important Themes and Motifs of Blade Runner: Here & Here RadioTimes: "Rutger Hauer Dissects His Iconic “Tears in Rain” Blade Runner Monologue" YouTube: “Blade Runner - Final scene, ‘Tears in Rain' Monologue (HD)” Michael Shulman in Vanity Fair: “Untold Story: The Battle for Blade Runner” The Seven (Not Six) Different Film Cuts of Blade Runner (1982) Vice's Motherboard's Brian Merchant Reveals a Shocker: “The Studio Execs [Also] Hated the Blade Runner Voiceover They Forced Harrison Ford to Do” Vulture: “Which Cut of Blade Runner Should I Be Watching” No Film School: “Why Does the Ending of 'Blade Runner' Look Familiar? Ask Stanley Kubrick” A Mr. Kenneth Thompson Explains How YOU Can Make Gaff's Origami Unicorn (or How You Can Make a Purchase Order for HIM to Make It for You for $14.99) Duke Harper's Youtube Aide: “Origami Blade Runner Unicorn Tutorial” Vice: “Behold, the Moment Harrison Ford Decked Ryan Gosling in the Face” The Official Website for Blade Runner 2049 The Official Timeline for Events in the Blade Runner Universe Inverse Entertainment: “How All Three Blade Runner 2049 Shorts Connect to the Original” Forbes Magazine: “Blade Runner 2049 Is A Box Office Bomb: 10 Reasons It Was Doomed” Rolling Stone: “Why Blade Runner 2049 May Have Been a Victim of Peak Dystopia Fatigue” Forbes Magazine: “Box Office: Blade Runner 2049 Is A Bomb Because of Its Budget” Nexus 6 Versus Nexus 8 Versus Nexus 9?   Wahyd Vannoni in PBS NewsHour: “Brands Treat Us Like the Replicants in Blade Runner” Hilarious and Criminally Underseen YouTube Parody: “Trump Blade Runner Ad” Sadly, in 2049, the LAPD Still Exists & It's Even Bigger and Badder Than Ever: Here, Here and Here. BBC Newsbeat: “The Curse of Blade Runner's Adverts” Kevin Spacey Vs. Brad Pitt in David Fincher's Seven: “What's in the Box?!” The Original Miracle Birth Meme Collider Interview: “Robin Wright on Blade Runner 2049 and Roger Deakins” Joi as Joy: Your Pocket Girlfriend with Misogyny at Your Fingertips Self-Creating Replicants Is an Allegory to Marxist-Feminist Notions of Reproductive Labor A Joke Well-Deserved by LA Folks to California's Self-Satisfied Bordertown: San Diego Becomes a Waste Dump in Blade Runner 2049 Beyond the Blade Runner Burn: San Diego Visualized in Cinema Leah D. Shade in Patheos: “Watching Blade Runner (1982) in the Age of Black Lives Matter” PBS Newshour: “Where Does America's E-Waste End Up? GPS Tracker Tells All” Alex Acks in Book Riot: “Choose a Better Chosen One” In Blade Runner 2049, Las Vegas Is a Post-Nuclear Wasteland Whose Lasting Remnants Include Bees & Boobs (with Deckard on the Lookout for Interlopers Who Might Raid His Free Alcohol) Is Deckard's Dog a Replicant? That and Other Easter Eggs in Den of Geek. The Reflecting Pond and Niander Wallace: “Blade Runner 2049: Designing the Future” - Production Designer Dennis Gassner Discusses the Brutal Environments of Director Denis Villeneuve's Ambitious Sequel in The American Cinematographer. Esther Inglis-Arkell in io9: “10 Lessons From Real-Life Revolutions That Fictional Dystopias Ignore” NERD FIGHT: Were Sean Young's Eyes Truly Green? Some Say Yes. Others Say No. Why Joe Is Possibly an Allusion to Joe Chip from Philip K. Dick's Ubik & Why “K” Is Also a Potential Allusion to Franz Kafka's character Joseph K. in The Trial. Does Deckard's Daughter, Dr. Stalline, Really Have an Autoimmune Disorder? “15 Burning Questions We Have After Blade Runner 2049” Dr. Stalline Is Like Osama Bin Laden as Seen in Washington Post's Report: “Bin Laden Discovered ‘Hiding in Plain Sight'” Roy Batty: “Shores of Orion . . . Tears in the Rain” Jane Ciabattari in BBC News: “Is Borges 20th Century's Most Important Writer?” Blade Runner 2049's Full Cast Member List on IMDb Box Office Mojo: Blade Runner 2049's Current Financial Pulse Rate Deakins Nominated 13 times for Oscars & Comes Up Empty: A Working History Erik Abriss in Collider: “Oscar Snubs: 4 Times Rogers Deakins Should Have Won Best Cinematography” Roger Deakins in The Guardian: “Why I Won't Win an Oscar” The Screenwriter for the Blade Runner Franchise: Hampton Fancher: A Working History IndieWire: “Blade Runner 2049 Soundtrack: Denis Villeneuve Finally Reveals Why Jóhann Jóhannsson Left the Project Forbes Magazine (Japanese Edition): On Why Blade Runner 2049 Failed for Its Opening Weekend in the Box Office. {For those that can't read Japanese, I will summarize what Tomoko (my badass wife!) translated for me--while we were both laughing at the article's assessment: the film failed due to it 1) being aimed at middle aged men in their forties; 2) it wasn't appealing to women, and henceforth, not of interest to dating couples or married folks; 3) and lastly dads couldn't take their kids to the movie because of its “R” rating} Beth Elderkin in io9: “Director Says CGI Will Take a Back Seat to Practical Effects in Blade Runner” This Is Now Our Third Episode on Terminal Dystopia Syndrome (TDS); Here Are Some Prior Podcast Episodes Concerning TDS: The Future Is a Mixtape: Episode 019: Fake Plastic World (on Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation) The Future Is a Mixtape: Episode 004: Terminal Dystopia Syndrome (TDS) (on Dave Eggers' The Circle) Stephen Humphries in Christian Science Monitor: “Blade Runner 2049: Why Some Science Fiction Writers Are Tired of Dystopias” David Graeber in The Baffler: "Despair Fatigue" BBC News: “Blade Runner: Which Predictions Have Come True?” SyFy Wire: “How Accurate Is Blade Runner 2049's Prediction of the Future?” -{Futurists Grade Blade Runner 2049's Vision of the Future}- Mashable: How the Future Technology of Blade Runner 2049 Reflects Our Present Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) Verso's Blog: “In Memoriam: Mark Fisher (1968-2017)” Zero Books' on YouTube: “Capitalist Realism and Mr Robot” Frank Ruiz in The Sacramento Bee: “Salton Sea Is a California Crisis. It's Time for the State to Show Some Urgency” Ian James in The Desert Sun: “Toxic Dust and Asthma Plague Salton Sea Communities” California State Senator Kevin De Leon Sells Out the Public in Favor of Pay-to-Play Water Barons as Seen in The San Bernardino Sun: “Bill Targeting Cadiz Water Transfer Dies in Senate Committee” Abby Olcese in Sojourners Online: “Blade Runner 2049 Paints an All-White Future. Again.” Jess Joho in Mashable: “The Hidden Feminist Message Buried Inside Blade Runner 2049” Kyle Buchanan in Vulture: “Why Ex Machina's Take on Gender Is So Advanced” Is Joi Anything More Than Joe's Pocket-Girlfriend? As Explored in Collider: “Blade Runner 2049 and Gender: The Future Is Female” GQ Magazine: “Blade Runner 2049: Let's Unpack That Strange, Fascinating Threesome Sex Scene” Kyle Buchanan in Vulture: “The Secrets Behind Blade Runner 2049's Surreal Threesome” Mike D'Angelo in The A.V. Club: “An Aborted Three-Way (of Sorts) Is the Most Strangely Affecting Scene in Her” Nathan Rabin's “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” Essay (2007) in The A.V. Club, Where the Trope Originally Surfaced: “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown” Nathan Rabin in Salon Magazine: “I'm Sorry for Coining the Phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” John Guida in The New York Times: “Are Blockbusters Destroying the Movies?” Michael Moorcock's Infamous Take-Down: “Starship Stormtroopers” Angelica Jade Bastién in Vulture: “Why Don't Dystopias Know How to Talk About Race?” Sarah Emerson in Vice's Motherboard: “Cyberpunk Cities Fetishize Asian Culture But Have No Asians” Siddhant Adlakha in Birth.Movies.Death: “On Blade Runner 2049's Asian Influence [And Disconnect]” Amanda M. Franklin in The Conversation: “Mantis Shrimp Have the World's Best Eyes--But Why?” David Rudd Cycleback's “Eye/Brain Physiology and Why Humans Don't See Reality But a Translation of It” Sarah Benet-Weiser in The Conversation: “What the ‘Fearless Girl” Statue and Harvey Weinstein Have in Common” Jonathan Cook: “Wonder Woman Is a Hero Only the Military-Industrial-Complex Could Create” A Blatant Example of “Lean-In” Feminism or a Laughable Article on Neoliberal Progressivism? As Seen in IndieWire: “Wonder Woman 2: Patty Jenkins Highest Paid Female Director” Vice on YouTube: “Inside the Making of Blade Runner 2049” {Interviewer to Ryan Gosling: “Do you feel optimistic about the future of mankind?” Gosling pauses, gurgles, snorts, and then they both laugh . . . . . . And So The Future Must Be A Mixtape to Have Any At All . . .   Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website: The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt explore the paranoid dread and narcotic pull of Adam Curtis' most recent documentary of political-noir, HyperNormalisation. In 2 hours and 40 minutes, it charts the globe-hopping travails of terrorists, bankers, politicians and America's digital aristocracy--all of whom use humanity as pawns by promising simple stories to explain complex problems which can't be solved with “perception management” and pastel fairy-tales about “good vs. evil.” Considered by many to be the most talented and remarkable documentarian in Britain, Adam Curtis has weaved suspicion and suspense into a BBC career that stretches from 40 Minutes: Bombay Motel in 1987 (which explores the have and have-nots of the city) to his most recent film HyperNormalisation in 2016 (which explores how an entirely Russian condition has now passed into the wider-world). Curtis' documentary was released less than a month prior to the mind-gagging upset of Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump, and the film increasingly speaks to a disenchanted, rat-fucked future of no-returns. Jesse & Matt will discuss what makes this “dank” film so compelling and deeply-felt, as well as what makes it, almost equally so, such an evasive work of art. Mentioned In This Episode: The Original Trailer for Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation Vice: Watch Adam Curtis' Short Film,  Living in an Unreal World, Which Is Effectively a Non-Traditional Film Teaser for His Recently Released Documentary Watch Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation at This Youtube Link (While It Lasts) Adam Curtis' Official Blog on BBC Adam Curtis' Biography on Wikipedia Internet Movie Database (IMDB) on Adam Curtis Radiohead Does Some ‘Cosmic Shit' with Supercollider--A Tribute to LHC NPR: “It's Locals vs. ‘PIBS' at the Sundance Film Festival” Bondage Power Structures: From BDSM and Spanking to Latex and Body Odors The Sun: “Japan's Weird Sex Hotels -- Offering Everything From Prison Cell Bondage to Vibrator Vending Machines” A Satire of Adam Curtis, The Documentarian: The Loving Trap The Hydra-Headed Tropes of Adam Curtis Films: Chris Applegate on Twitter: “Forget ‘HypernorNormalisation,' Here's Adam Curtis Bingo!” Why Is It That Matthew & Jesse Lack Real Whuffie: Tara Hunt's “The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business” About New York's Most Legendary New Wave Band: The Talking Heads James Verini in The New Yorker: “The Talking Heads Song That Explains Talking Heads” Christian Marclay's The Clock at The LACMA Museum An Excerpt from Marclay's Film-Collage, The Clock Wired Magazine: “Film Clips of Clocks Round Out 24-Hour Video” A Youtube Excerpt of BBC News Coverage of Christian Marclay's The Clock Ken Hollings in BBC News: “What Is the Cut-Up Method?” William Burrough's “The Cut Up Method” in Leroi Jones' (Baraka) The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America William Burrough's The Naked Lunch A YouTube Clip of Taking Down the Financial District: The Ending of Fight Club Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club: A Novel Little Known X-Files' Spin-Off Pilot Episode of The Lone Gunmen Eerily Imagined A Plane Crashing Into The World Trade Center A Portrait by Gerard Malanga: “William Burroughs Takes Aim at NY's Twin Towers, from Brooklyn Bridge, 1978” Adam Curtis Documentaries Currently Found on YouTube: Pandora's Box (1992) The Living Dead (1995) Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh (1997) The Mayfair Set (1999) His Finest Achievement & Magnum Opus: The Century of the Self (2002) The Power of Nightmares (2004) The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007) All Watched Over By the Machines of Loving Grace (2011) Bitter Lake (2015) HyperNormalisation (2016) Talkhouse: “Tim Heidecker [from Tim & Eric Show] with Adam Curtis” Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine Matthew Snyder's Syllabus & Course Theme for Fall of 2016: “Presidential Material” Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times: “Can the Media Recover From This Election?” Nate Cohn in The New York Times: “What I Got Wrong About Donald Trump” Nate Silver in FiveThirtyEight: “Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else” People Pretended to Vote for Kennedy in Larger and Larger Numbers After His Assassination: Peter Foster in The Telegraph: “JFK: The Myth That Will Never Die” YouTube Clip of Alex Jones Getting Coffee Thrown onto to Him While in Seattle Fredrick Jameson on the True Nature of Conspiracy Theories in His Famous Work, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992):The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new de-centered global network of the third stage of capital itself. This is a figural process presently best observed in a whole mode of contemporary entertainment literature -- one is tempted to characterize it as "high-tech paranoia" -- in which the circuits and networks of some putative global computer hookup are narratively mobilized by labyrinthine conspiracies of autonomous but deadly interlocking and competing information agencies in a complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind. Yet conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt -- through the figuration of advanced technology -- to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system. It is in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions that, in my opinion, the postmodern sublime can alone be theorized. Perception Management: A Working Definition Adam Curtis' Remarkable Analysis of Neoconservatives and The Taliban in The Power of Nightmares (2004) The BBC Director's Finest Achievement & Magnum Opus: The Century of the Self (2002) Edward Bernays' Propaganda (Published in 1928) Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1968; Released on Criterion in 2013) Jaime Weinman in Maclean's: “The Problem With ‘Problematic'” Gore Vidal: A Working Biography James Kirkchick in The Daily Beast: “Why Did Gore Vidal and William Buckley Hate Each Other?” Morgan Neville's Best of Enemies: Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Christopher Hitchens: A Working Biography The Future Is A Mixtape: Episode 004: “TDS: Terminal Dystopia Syndrome” Dave Eggers' Half-Burnt Satire & Confused Omelette: The Circle Strange Horizons: Estrangement and Cognition by Darko Suvin Takayuki Tatsumi in Science Fiction Studies (V:11; PII): “An Interview with Darko Suvin” David Graeber in The Guardian: “Why Is the World Ignoring the Revolutionary Kurds in Syria?” David Graeber on Real Media: “Syria, Anarchism and Visiting Rojava” InfoWar: “David Graeber: From Occupy Wall Street to the Revolution in Rojava” ROAR Magazine: “Murray Bookchin and The Kurdish Resistance” About PissPigGranddad in Rolling Stone: “American Anarchists Join YPG in Syria Fighting ISIS, Islamic State” The New York Magazine: “The DirtBag Left's Man in Syria: PissPigGranddad Is Coming Home from Syria” IMPORTANT CORRECTION: Matt's claim that HyperNormalisation--the term--came from two Russian brothers, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who were both Science Fiction authors, is DEAD wrong. The term "hypernormalisation" is taken from Alexei Yurchak's 2006 book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: A Working Biography Guy Debord's Society Of The Spectacle (The Original 1967 Book) Guy Debord's Society Of The Spectacle (The 1973 Film on YouTube) Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry Mike Davis' “Not a Revolution--Yet” {His Brilliant Multi-Causal Analysis of Why Donald Trump Won the Election} Jodi Dean on Why Facebook Crushes Complexity of Thought: “Communicative Capitalism and the Challenges of the Left” China Mieville in Socialist Review: “Tolkien - Middle Earth Meets Middle England” Thought Catalog: “14 Unexpected Ways Your Relationship With Your Parents Changes As You Get Older” The Atlantic: “12 Ways to Mess Up Your Kids” Tim Lott in the Guardian About Children's Ruthless Engagement with Irony: “Are Sarcasm and Irony Good for Family Life?” George W. Bush Telling Americans to Still Go Shopping with Their Families and Travel to Disneyland Ranker: “11 Ways Dying in Real Life Is Way Different Than Movie Deaths” David Graeber in Baffler: “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven & Twelve John A. Farrell in The New York Times: “Nixon's Vietnam Treachery” Peter Baker in The New York Times: “Nixon Tried to Spoil Johnson's Vietnam Peace Talks in ‘68, Notes Show” Brick Underground: “Stop Blaming the Hipsters: Here's How Gentrification Really Happens (And What You Can Do About It)” Matt Le Blanc's Episodes Chris Renaud's Dr. Suess' The Lorax (The Fucking Godawful Movie-Travesty) Dr. Suess' Brilliant Book on Ecology and Capitalism: The Lorax A Historical Guide in How Women's Rights Have Been Used in War as Seen in Katharine Viner's Essay in The Guardian: “Feminism as Imperialism” Zillah Eisenstein in Al Jazeera: “‘Leaning In' in Iraq: Women's Rights and War?” David Cortright in The Nation: “A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions” Ricky Gervais' Extras: The Complete Series (On DVD) Annie Jacobsen's Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Salon Magazine: “The Area 51 Truthers Were Right” Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration How Adam Curtis Misunderstands Arab Spring, Occupy and Weirdly Ignores Bernie Sanders in Jonathan Cook's Essay in Counterpunch: “Adam Curtis: Another Manager of Perceptions” The Los Angeles Review of Books: Mike Davis on Occupy Wall Street in His Essay: “No More Bubblegum” Whuffie: A Working Definition Cory Doctorow Excoriates His Naive Idea of Whuffie in His Essay in Locus Magazine: “Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies” Dear Adam Curtis: Here's Some Actual, Real-Life Examples of Organizations Offering Alternatives to Our TDS World: The Next System Project Transition Town: United States IE2030 Open Source Ecology Democracy at Work Community Land Trust Network Democratic Socialists of America Corbyn's Labour Party Momentum: A New Kind of Politics The World Transformed Novara Media Marshal Ganz's Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants John Lynch in Business Insider: “The Average American Watches So Much TV It's Almost a Full-Time Job” Kathryn Cramer in The Huffington Post: “Enough With Dystopia: It's Time For Sci-Fi Writers To Start Imagining Better Futures” Jeet Heer in New Republic: “The New Utopians” (an Overview of Kim Stanley Robinson's Works & Other Authors Using SF to Imagine a Better Future) Radiohead's Music Video for “Daydreaming” The New Yorker: “The Science of Daydreams” The Australian: “The Benefits of Lucid Dreaming” Anna Moore in The Guardian Explores Our Twenty-Year Relationship with Prozac: “Eternal Sunshine” Larry O'Connor in The Washington Free Beacon: “Ending the Starbucks ‘Pay-It-Forward' Cult, for America” Mimi Leder's Pay It Forward (Featuring Haley Joel Osment, Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey) The Economist on BlackRock's Aladdin: “The Monolith and the Markets” Foundational Articles & Interviews With Adam Curtis: The Wire Magazine: “An Interview With Adam Curtis” Vice: “Jon Ronson in Conversation with Adam Curtis” Paste Magazine: “Adam Curtis Knows The Score: A List of Five Films”   Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website: The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt have a discussion with Matt Bruenig--a lawyer, blogger, political analyst and Twitter-dynamo who's got your back when you're kettled by Roaming Hillbots and Randian Regressives. More importantly though, Matt has just started the first grassroots, people-powered think tank called The People's Policy Project (3P). Funded by small donations from $5 to $15 dollars, 3P is an attempt to actually make Think Tanks “think” again, but for the purpose of actually benefitting the 80% Americans who now own only 20% of the nation's wealth, and are increasingly living lives of quiet desperation. We will discuss Bruenig's childhood, his educational experiences and awareness-path toward political change, his history as a blogger for the think tank Demos, and his surprising success at crowd-funding 3P via Patreon. We will also talk about where Matt plans to take this new and enterprising venture in the years ahead.Mentioned In This Episode: The World of Mattness: The People's History of Matt Bruenig Matt's Official Website and Blog Page Matt's Twitter Page & Wrecking Tweets (@MattBruenig) The People's Policy Project (3P) The People's Policy Project on Twitter (@PplPolicyProj) Some Notable Essays by Matt Bruenig: Here, Here and Here Some Notable Podcasts Where Matt Appears: The Jacobin's The Dig with Danvir: “Bruenig on Why Welfare Is Great and Need More of It” The Katie Halper Show: “Matt Bruenig on Liberals Who Are Actually Conservative + Get Out!” Delete Your Account Podcast: “The Welfare State” Why Snyder Was a Good Last Name (While It Lasted): Gary Snyder as Featured in The New Yorker: “Zen Master” . . . Then “Snyder” Found Bad Luck in the 21st Century: Fallen Marine, Matthew Snyder Heckled by Westboro Church Members as Seen in the SCOTUS case Snyder v. Phelps and in The New York Times: “Justices Rule for Protesters at Military Funerals” Zack Snyder (Awful Director of More Noble Comic Book Heroes) as Explored in The Guardian: “From Suicide Squad to Batman v. Superman, Why Are DC's Films So Bad?” Rick Snyder (Awful Governor of Michigan) Being Roasted and Cross-Examined in The Washington Post: “The Flint Disaster is Rick Snyder's Fault” Do Boys and Girls Like Trucks and Buses or Barbies and Conversation? Or Both? Simon Baron-Cohen in The Guardian: “They Just Can't Help It.” Here Is an Excerpt:"How early are such sex differences in empathy evident? Certainly, by 12 months , girls make more eye contact than boys. But a new study carried out in my lab at Cambridge University shows that at birth, girls look longer at a face, and boys look longer at a suspended mechanical mobile. Furthermore, the Cambridge team found that how much eye contact children make is in part determined by a biological factor: prenatal testosterone. This has been demonstrated by measuring this hormone in amniotic fluid." Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Generation X and the Millennials: A Generation Differences Chart Sarah Stankorb in Vogue Magazine: “Xennials, or 30-Something Millennials, a Micro-Generation With a Writer to Thank” Reality Bites - Metaphor and Symbol of the Grunge Age? Or Is It, as Expressed in Jezebel, Lindy West Writes “I Rewatched Reality Bites and It's Basically a Manual for Shitheads” Jim Puzzanghera in The Los Angeles Times: “Economy Has Recovered 8.7 Million Jobs Lost in Great Recession” PBS's 25th Anniversary Special: Looking Back at the LA Riots After the Beating of Rodney King Anna Deavere Smith's Stunning ‘Documentary Theater' Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 Savior America's Low-Morale Car Industry and the Comeback King in the 1990s Is Explored in Autotrader: “A Look Back at the Ford Taurus” John Bellamy Foster in The Monthly Review: “The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis” When Contrasting Presidential Terms, 22 Million Jobs Were Created During Clinton Regime Versus Bush 2 Million During His Eight Years in Office: “Job Creation by President: Number and Percent” Sara McClanahan in The American Prospect: “The Consequences of Single Motherhood” Michael Morris in The Huffington Post: “The Earned Income Tax Credit: A Pathway Out of Poverty for Millions of Americans with Disabilities” The Podcast Radiolab Provides A Moving and Deeply Thoughtful Exploration About the History of U.S. High School Debates & What Happens When A Black Queer Student Challenges This Culture as an Institutional Force: “Debatable” The School of Life Explores John Rawls' Life and His Most Important Contribution, The Veil of Ignorance: “POLITICAL THEORY - John Rawls” Lance Weiler in The World Economic Forum: “How Storytelling Has Changed in the Digital Age” Peter Guber in Psychology Today: “The Inside Story”  Excerpt: “Telling stories is not just the oldest form of entertainment, it's the highest form of consciousness. The need for narrative is embedded deep in our brains. Increasingly, success in the information age demands that we harness the hidden power of stories.” Sociology - Relight the Mechanisms That Justify Your Life Story: Social Construction of Reality and Dramaturgy Owen Jones in The Guardian: “The Iraq War Was Not A Blunder or a Mistake. It Was a Crime.” Theresa Amato in Vox: “I Ran Ralph Nader's Campaigns. A Political Revolution Is Vital — and Much Harder Than You Think.” Quinn Norton in Wired: “Beyond the Rhetoric: The Complicated, Brief Life of Occupy Boston” Occupy Riverside Still Exists on Facebook (At Least) The San Bernardino Sun: “Occupy Movements from Inland Empire Meet Together” The Dangers Found in Call-Out-Culture as Explored in Kristian Williams' Long Essay in Toward Freedom: “The Politics of Denunciation” Mark Fisher in The North Star: “Exiting the Vampire Castle” Yamiche Alcindor in The New York Times: “Black Lives Matter Coalition Makes Demands as Campaign Heats Up” “Folk Politics” as Explored by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek in The Disorder of Things: “Inventing the Future”Classical Definition of “Prefigurative Politics” Samuel Farber in the International Socialist Review: “Reflections on ‘Prefigurative Politics” Jo Freeman's Massively Influential and Famous Essay (Among Activists): “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” Jason Stahl in Jacobin: “Do We Need a Socialist Think Tank?” Nicole Gaudiano in USA Today: “‘The Sanders Institute:' Jane Sanders Launches New Think Tank” Alex Shephard and Clio Chang in The New Republic: “How Neera Tanden Works: Emails released by WikiLeaks reveal the maneuverings of a liberal think-tank president and member of Hillary Clinton's inner circle.” The Spoils System Dino Grandoni in The Atlantic: “Obama Likes the Spoils System as Much as Any President” TINA: There Is No Alternative Adam Curtis' Blog Post About the Origins of the First Think Tank in Britain: “The Curse of Tina” An Excerpt from His Survey About The International Policy Network: “Think Tanks surround politics today and are the very things that are supposed to generate new ideas. But if you go back and look at how they rose up - at who invented them and why - you discover they are not quite what they seem. That in reality they may have nothing to do with genuinely developing new ideas, but have become a branch of the PR industry whose aim is to do the very opposite - to endlessly prop up and reinforce today's accepted political wisdom. So successful have they been in this task that many Think Tanks have actually become serious obstacles to really thinking about new and inspiring visions of how to change society for the better.” Tom Liacas in Mashable: “How Online Activist Groups Are Raising Millions to Keep Corporations in Line” Cesar Chavez's United Food Workers (UFW) Was Successfully Committed and Focused Because It Relied Upon A Large, Balanced Ring of Small-to-Medium Donations; Now as Recorded in Miriam Powell's Article in The Los Angeles Times, “Farmerworkers Reap Little as Union Strays From Its Roots” A History of the National Labor Review Board (NLRB) J.K Trotter in Gawker: “Liberal Think Tank Fires Blogger for Rude Tweets”Michelle Goldberg in Slate Magazine: “Is Matt Bruenig a Populist Martyr?” Sam Levine in The Huffington Post: “Pro-Bernie Blogger Raises $25,000 After Getting Fired For Attacking Clinton Backers” “Scumbag Neera [Tanden]” Was a Play and Meme Allusion on “Scumbag Steve” Deadline Hollywood: “Reza Aslan Out At CNN On Heels Of Trump ‘Piece of Sh*t' Tweet” Matthew's Local Union from UC-AFT (University of California & American Federation of Teachers): 1966! The National Labor Review Board's Position on Social Media Matt Bruenig's GoFundMe Account After Demos Fired Him After Bruenig Raised More Than He Needed, He Asked Supporter to Donate to Eric Harwood's GoFundMe Page. You Can Read About the Story of Harwood in One of Bruenig's Blog Posts Here. Terry Gilliam's Famous Sendup to 1984, Kafka & Bureaucracy with Brazil George Zimmerman ($100,000!): Don't Look Like Him, Matt! “George Zimmerman Auctioning Off Gun He Used to Kill Trayvon Martin” The People's Policy Project (3P): Here Are Some Supporting Writers That Have Contributed to the Think Tank Thus Far . . . Peter Gowan and Mio Tastas Viktorsson's “Tackling Wealth Inequality Like A Swede” Peter Gowan's “Models For Worker Codetermination In Europe” Michelle Styczynski's “What Does The Stock Market Do For Workers' Wages? Nothing” Matthijs Krul's “Does The Dutch Healthcare System Show The Way?” The “About” Page for 3P & an Excerpt:“Unlike most think tanks, which are financed by large corporations and foundations, 3P is funded by small donors pledging $5 to $15 per month on the Patreon platform. This unique funding source enables us to publish policy insights untainted by the compromises typically demanded by monied interests. We are, as the name suggests, the People's Policy Project, not Walmart's Policy Project and not the Gates Foundation's Policy Project. The work of 3P aims to fill the holes left by the current think tank landscape with a special focus on socialist and social democratic economic ideas.” Gus Bagakis in Truthout: “Faith in Charity Is Hopeless: Philanthrocapitalism Has Failed Us” Instead of Philanthrocapitalism How About Givedirectly.org? As One Princeton Study Details, Direct Donations Are Far More Effective than NGOs Matt Bruenig's Policyshop (Blog) at Demos: “How Much Money Would It Take to Eliminate U.S. Poverty?” Alex Emmons in The Intercept: “The Senate's Military Spending Increase Alone Is Enough to Make Public College Free”CNBC News: “A $1,000 Per Month Cash Handout Would Grow the Economy by $2.5 Trillion, New Study Says” Reading the Fine Print, From the Roosevelt Institute, Which Is Glorious to Behold: “Modeling the Macroeconomic Effects of a Universal Basic Income” Matt Bruenig in Medium: “The UBI already exists for the 1%” A Counterattack from Tim Worstall in Forbes Magazine: “Matt Bruenig Says The 1% Already Gets A Universal Basic Income - So Why Not One For All?” Hillary Clinton invented UBI? Did She? Or Is This Matt Snyder's Fib? Dylan Matthews in Vox: “Hillary Clinton Almost Ran for President on a Universal Basic Income” Matt Bruenig's Vision For Changing Society with a Better Understanding of Transforming the Use of Capital: 1: Enlarge Our Welfare System to Something Akin to the Nordic System 2: Expand Labor/Union Rates Via Legal Protections   3: Develop Capital Social Fund Dividends as Seen in Norway Jesse Herring's Suggestion for 7-Point Platform, “The Slingshot Seven”: Healthcare for All Renewable Energy Plan Toward 100% Usage Universal Basic Income (UBI) for All Demilitarization: Both Domestic & Foreign Tuition-Free Education Getting Money Out of Politics $15-Hour Minimum Wage (Adjusted to Inflation) David Levinthal on the Koch Brothers Funding of Colleges in The Atlantic: “Spreading the Free-Market Gospel” Draft Bernie for a People's Party Matt Bruenig in the People's Policy Project: “The Contents Of The New Medicare-For-All Bill” Catherine Rampell's Inflammatory Op-Ed in The Washington Post: “Sanderscare Is All Cheap Politics and Magic Math” Michael Sainato in The Observer: “Recall Campaign for California Democrat Takes Big Step Forward” Physicians for a National Healthcare System: (PNHP): “California Speaker Anthony Rendon Calls for Hearings on Universal Health Care” Elana Schor in Politico: “Chris Murphy's Stealthy Single-Payer Pitch” Ryan Skolnick in Medium: “Rendon is Wrong: SB 562 is Not ‘Woefully Incomplete'” Frantz Pierre's Los Angeles - Basic Income Project on Indiegogo On Patreon: “Scott Santens Is Creating Support for Unconditional Basic Income” The Guardian: “What Makes Norway Is the World's Happiest Country” (2017) CNN's Travel: The Top-Ten Rankings for the Happiest Places on Earth for 2017 Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website: The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram

What would democracy look like if it first existed at the workplace rather than in the woesome consignment of America's party-politics, which renders our dreams for The Golden Square into Squalid Shit-mash? For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt have a discussion about this paradise where workers actually experience freedom, equity and solidarity with two folks who've jump-started one of the first media co-ops in Southern California: Dan Nowman Niswander, creator, host, and producer of The Nowman Show and Dr. George Kallas, a political analyst and Political Science Professor at Miramar College in San Diego. We'll learn about their chance-encounter and their epiphany to do the mind-meld by creating Arete Media Productions. Principally though, they will discuss why we mislabel democracy in Da Yankeelands, define what co-ops are, and also explain what makes worker-owned co-ops so very visionary in our Age of Workplace Tyranny & DollarDoom. Mentioned In This Episode: When We Recorded This Discussion, It Was Over 100 in Los Angeles But It Was Even Hotter in Record-Breaking San Francisco @ 106 F Erick Olin Wright in Jacobin: “How to Be an Anticapitalist Today” Jim McGuigan's Cool Capitalism How Neoliberalism Ramps Up Status-Games in University Life, and In Doing So, Creates Hierarchies of Abject Misery for the Rest of Us:Mike Rose for Inside Higher Ed: “Who Is Smarter Than Whom?” Benjamin Ginsberg in the Washington Monthly: “Administrators Ate My Tuition” Academic Rankings for Various Teaching Levels of Status Brandon Jordan in The Nation: “Building Student Power Through Participatory Budgeting” Participatory Budgeting Project: What Exactly Is It? Jason Rhode in Paste Magazine: “Kamala Harris Offers No New Hope” David Graeber's Legendary Haiku-Essay on Anarchy: “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer Might Surprise You!” Sherwood Ross in Veterans Today: “U.S. Imperialism Abroad Creating Police State at Home” Douglas Kihn in Truthout: “The US Is Not a Democracy and Never Was” Naked Capitalism: Interview with David Graeber on Democracy in America Does “UC” Stand for the University of California or the University of Capitalism? Lawrence Hunter in Forbes: “Why James Madison Was Wrong About a Large Republic” Ellen Bresler Rockmore in The New York Times: “How Texas Teaches History” Gail Collins in The New York Review of Books: “How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us” James W. Loewen: “Lies My History Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” RT America: Chris Hedges Visits Anderson, Indiana to Hear About Another “Sacrifice Zone” and How the Town Deals with the Loss of Thousands of Union Jobs Peter Richardson in The Los Angeles Times: “Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent by Ernest Freeberg” Home of Eugene Debs: Terre Haute, Indiana Biography of Eugene Debs: A Man Who Received a Million Votes for President While Still in Prison To Paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Real Duty in Gaining a University Education Is to Ask, ‘Why?' David Graeber on Why Going to University Is About Returning to the Questions You Had as a Child: “Lecture by David Graeber: Resistance In A Time Of Total Bureaucratization / Maagdenhuis Amsterdam” Is the Internet Killing Critical Thinking? If Not, What Is? Nicholas Carr in Wired: “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires the Brain” Dr. Paul Cartledge in BBC News: “Ancient History in Depth: The Democratic Experiment [in Greece]” Joshua Kurlantzick in The New Republic: “The Great Democracy Meltdown” The Nowman Show: KPFK Presents Richard Wolff at the Musician's Union, Hollywood Democracy at the Work: A 501(c)3 Organization Created by Richard Wolff to Inspire the Growth and Expansion of Unitary Worker Co-Ops. This Non-Profit Educational Organization Was Inspired by Wolff's Book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism Matthew Snyder's First Confrontation with Crunchies & Organic Granola: Bellingham, Washington's Community Food Co-Op Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, which details two well-regarded unitary co-ops: Alvarado Street Bakery and Isthmus Engineering Living Utopia (Vivir la Utopia): A Documentary by Juan Gamero Who Interviews 30 Surviving Anarchists and Revolutionaries During the Catalonian Revolution from 1936-39. Barcelona Was an Entire City Made Up of Worker-Controlled Co-Ops as Seen in Manolo Gonzalez's Life in Revolutionary Barcelona Noam Chomsky's On Anarchism Equality of Opportunity Versus Equality of Outcome: Dylan Matthews in Vox: “The Case Against Equality of Opportunity” Matt, Not Michael Dukakis! It Was Vice-President Dan Quayle Who Flunked a Kid By Suggesting the Incorrect Spelling for ‘Potato' as ‘Potatoe' John Quiggen in Jacobin: “John Locke Against Freedom” {“John Locke's classical liberalism isn't a doctrine of freedom. It's a defense of expropriation and enslavement.”} First Nations and the Indigenous Did Not View Land as Personal Property or an Economic Fridge: Woo Hoo! A Lesson Plan for 6th to 8th Grade Students Europe's Diseased Paperwork as Freedom: A Title-to-Land A Historical Guide of Worker Cooperatives: Past, Present and Possible Futures Dan Niswander's Clever Lyrical Reference to Pink Floyd's Song “Brain Damage”: “The lunatic is in the hall./ The lunatics are in my hall./ The paper holds their folded faces to the floor/ And every day the paper boy brings more.” Mondragon Company: A Multi-Billion Dollar Cooperative in the Basque Region of Spain, Which Was Created and Conceived as Far Back as 1956 Mondragon's Miracle Backlight: A Documentary About This Gift from the Basque Region Gar Alperovitz's America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, Our Democracy WSDE Workers' Self-Directed Enterprises -- by Richard Wolff Dan Nowman Interviews Matt & Jesse on The Nowman Show With a Later Panel Discussion with George Kallas Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website: The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram

On this episode, Matt & Jesse have a discussion with Kelsey Goldberg (@KelseyFGold) and Jack Suria Linares (@SuriaLinares213) from DSA-Los Angeles chapter about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Kelsey and Jack explore their childhood and later political awakening by describing the moment (or moments) that led to not only their transcendent belief in socialism, but how they went beyond mere beliefs by deciding to take action and become activists and organizers via their self-discovery process. We will also learn about DSA's history and contributions, as well as its future aims as a consequence of its recent National Convention. Additionally, our visitors to the show will talk about what DSA-LA has in the revolutionary pot that's about to boil over into a Mario-Brothers pasta of comrade-goodness. By the very end of this podcast episode, Kelsey, Jesse and Jack get our ‘DSA-Curious' Comrade, Matthew, to break down his resistance and finally #TrySocialism. Mentioned In This Episode: The National Website for Democratic Socialists of America The Facebook Page for Democratic Socialists of America The Twitter Page for Democratic Socialists of America The Official Homepage for the Los Angeles Chapter of DSA The Facebook Page for DSA-LA The Twitter Page for DSA-LAJeff Stein in Vox: “Nine Questions About the Democratic Socialists of America You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask” A Slacker-Ode as a Comic-Meme: Split Photo Abbott & Costello Vs. Jesse & Matt New Democratic Party (NDP) of Canada: A Historical Guide of Its Policies and Aims A List of Official (& Past) Political Parties in Canada The Guardian: “Thomas Piketty on the Rise of Bernie Sanders: The U.S. Enters a New Political Era” (Translated from Its Original Publication Source: Le Monde - 14 February 2016)The Entrepreneurial Myth Meets the Diseased Myth of the Star System: A Recent Propaganda Ad from IKEA The Service Employee International Union (SEIU): A Wikipedia History The Official Website for SEIU Richard Berman in The Washington Times: “A Story of Union Waste: The Service Union Squanders Millions on a Losing Cause” Rudolf Rocker: A Biography The Anarchist Library: Articles and Books by Rudolf Rocker GoFundMe Accounts for Boston Massacre (the record for GoFundMe, in 2013, was for Jeff Baumen, who raised $805,000.00 from donations) O THE IRONY: Free Healthcare for American Prisoners! (But No Deductibles or Copays?) PBS's 25th Anniversary Special: Looking Back at the LA Riots After the Beating of Rodney King Anna Deavere Smith's Stunning ‘Documentary Theater' Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent - The Documentary (1992) Noam Chomsky Admits He's Not Charismatic But Folks Follow Him Instead for the Ideas He Offers . . .Chris Hedges in Truthdig: “Noam Chomsky is America's greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of ‘brainwashing.'” Al Jazeera: “More Americans Joining Socialist Groups Under Trump” The New Republic: “Are the Democratic Socialists of America For Real?” Sarah Silverman at the DNC Convention in 2016: “Can I just say, to the Bernie or Bust People, You're Being Ridiculous.” Matthew Snyder's Co-Organizing for the First Fundraiser in the I.E. for Sanders' Presidential Run: “Our Barn-Storming-for-Bernie Fundraiser in the I.E.” {July 18th, 2015} Why People Support Bernie Sanders from Such a Broad Spectrum of American Society? James Walsh and Guardian Readers: “10 Reasons Why Voters Are Turning to Bernie Sanders” DSA's Official Endorsement for Bernie Sanders' Candidacy for President in 2016 Daniel Denvir's The Dig (Podcast): “The Democratic Socialists of America and the Fight Against Trump” Did Labour Really Gain 150,00 New Members After the General Election? The Guardian: “Heather Heyer, Victim of Charlottesville Car Attack, Was a Civil Rights Activist” The Guardian: “Mother of Charlottesville Victim Heather Heyer: They Tried to Kill My Child to Shut Her Up.” Michael Tomasky in The Guardian: “Should Obama Have Accepted the Nobel Prize?” Rob Wile in The Business Insider: “12 People Who Should Not Have Won The Nobel Peace Prize” Politifact: “Pants on Fire Claim that George Soros Money Went to Women's March Protesters” Antimedia: “That Awkward Moment When One Nobel Peace Prize Winner Bombs Another” President ‘Bomb-Bomb' Obama: This Map Shows Where President Barack Obama Dropped His 26,171 Bombs for 2016 (3,000 More Than 2015) A History of Democratic Socialists of America: 1971-2017 - A Merger of Two Different Groups Occupy Los Angeles: A History Old Memories, Old Photos: Soapbox: Jesse's Anarchist Book & Infoshop in Bellingham, Washington Fugitive Pieces: Matt's Son & Daughter at Occupy Riverside Amy Pleasant in The Huffington Post: “Artists as Activists: Pursuing Social Justice” About DSA-LA, which Started in 2011 & Now Has 1083 Members UCLA's Campus Facilities to Be Used as Athlete's Village for LA's 2028 Olympics The Los Angeles Times Gives Out Letter Grades for Public Officials: Why Eric Garcetti Is Mediocre or Even Awful The Chicago Reader's Article on the DSA Convention for August 2017: “Beyond the ‘Bernie bro': Socialism's Diverse New Youth Brigade” Jack L. Suria-Linares – 2017 NPC Candidate – Local Chapter: Los Angeles To Show Solidarity with Teamster Workers, LA Dock Workers Refused to Unload Any Non-Union Trucks Jia Tolentino: “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death” Catherine Baab-Muguira in Quartz: “GENERATION 1099: Millennials Are Obsessed with Side Hustles Because They're All We've Got” This Lousy Day in Bullshit Mythologies: For Example, The YFS Magazine as Delusional Self-Pandering: “The Age of the Millennial Entrepreneur Is Upon Us” The Huffington Post: Xennials: The Microgeneration Between Gen X and Millennials Indigenous Action Media: “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing The Ally Industrial Complex” Denise Cummins in Psychology Today: “Why Gen-X Doesn't Get Millennial . . . or Boomers” John Scalzi's Blog Whatever: “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is” Briahna Joy Gray in Current Affairs: “How Identity Became a Weapon Against the Left” East Bay DSA Support for SB-562 (Single Payer) Versus Multi-Platform Tendencies for DSA-LA with Nolympics, the Campaign for Making LA a Sanctuary City and Work on LA's Tragic Lack of Solutions for Skid Row. How to Become a Supporting Member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Childcare & Activism: “Caring for Rosie the Riveter's Kids” The DSA's Structure Oscar Wilde: “Socialism is great but it takes up too many evenings.” David Graeber's TEDxWhitechapel talk: “The Possibility of Political Pleasure” {Where He Fully and Sheepishly Admits That He Enjoys Political Meetings} Sophia A. McClennen in Salon Magazine: “10 Reasons Why #DemExit Is Serious: Getting Rid of Debbie Wasserman Schultz Is Not Enough” A Reddit Discussion on the History of the Rose in Revolutionary Socialist Movements The Worker's Song--Both Poignant & Powerful: “Bread and Roses” Joan Baez Sings “Bread and Roses” The Rose Emoji Revolution for DSA: It's Not Just for Valentine's or Mother's Day DSA-LA Videos, which includes the series 30 in 30, and profiles 30 Leftists in 30 days leading up to the May Day in 2017.Vice News (Sports): “Meet Los Angeles's New Anti-Olympics Movement” The Real News (YouTube): Michael Payne from the Charlottesville Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America Retells Harrowing Account of Car-Attack The Deceptively Brilliant and Charming YouTube Video Thanks, Capitalism! Created in Collaboration with DSA-Los Angeles & the DSA National Design Committee (Kelsey Goldberg Narrates the Video) DSA-LA Crashes Garcetti's Re-Election Bash IndieWire's Bullshit (Neoliberal) Article Celebrating Patty Jenkins “Breaking the Glass Ceiling on Director Pay” Snap Election - Thor Ragnarok parody with Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn Jack Suria Linares in New Politics: “DSA Convention: Mapping a Strategy, Avoiding Dead-Ends” Matt's Mention with the Problems with Folk Politics is Explored in Detail with Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek's Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work {And Discussed in Episode 15 of The Future Is A Mixtape} Nick Falkvinges's “3-Pirate Party Rule” in Swarmwise: A Tactical Manual to Changing the World Kelsey Goldberg in Left Side of History: “Do Not Merely Eat Cake” The Socialist Alternative Versus the Green Party Versus the DSA: Organizing Outside of Elections and What Should Count as Success? Mayor-elect Lumumba: Jackson 'to Be the Most Radical City on the Planet' Winning Mayoral Candidate in Jackson, Mississippi: Chokwe Antar LumumbaCathy Woolard for Atlanta MayorCathy Woolard's Competitors for Mayor of Atlanta Bernie Sanders on Democratic Socialism FULL Speech - Georgetown University - Given on November 19, 2015 Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website: The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram Or Just Become a “Cyberspace-Friend” @Matthew Snyder's Facebook Account

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt have a discussion with Frantz Pierre--a community activist and organizer who's leading a revolutionary project to educate Los Angeles residents about the benefits of Universal Basic Income via a local, first-of-its-kind, pilot program. But how might Frantz Pierre and other fellow comrades create this program on a citywide scale when the mythology and romance of the “work ethic” and the sin of “laziness” are so indoctrinated in our communities and belief systems? How will we demand “wages” if such an enslaved chunk of our lives--going to jobs we hate--has been entirely automated, and work for the 99% no longer exists? And if and when the argument is truly won, where will the money come from? This podcast will aim to answer those questions. It will also detail why this utopian notion should be viewed as the “New Common Sense” in our global age of shafted, precarious employment, and why UBI is an essential spring-step toward human liberation. Mentioned In This Episode: Frantz Pierre's Twitter Account Information About Pierre's Grassroots Basic Income Project for Los Angeles: The Official Page for The Basic Income Project - Los AngelesThe Facebook Page for The Basic Income Project - Los Angeles To Find Basic Income LA on Twitter The Basic Income Project - Los Angeles Indiegogo Campaign The Millennials Are Killing Everything! Here Is a List of Links and Articles on the Subject of Their Zombie-Schemes to Dismember Everything in Their Blind Rampage-Path: The Millennials' Morbid Obsession with Avocado-Toast Instead of Saving for Their Own Homes, Millennial Couples Aren't Buying Diamonds, They're Killing Buffalo Wild Wings and Applebee's, the Napkins Industry, Breastaurants, and More. Do 80% of Small Businesses Really Fail Within the First 18 Months? Fugitive Pieces: The only website on the internet that mentions Jesse's first business: “Soapbox” in Bellingham, Washington: An Anarchist InfoShop (Started in 2005); Matt unearthed an old photo of the shop. Why Community Land Trusts (CLTs) Are Vital to Making Universal Basic Income (UBI) & Guaranteed Housing Work for the Long Term Fast Company: “Everyone in the World Hates Their Jobs--But Americans Hate Theirs the Most” David Graebers' Legendary Essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” Originally Published in Strike Magazine, but Reprinted as “Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs” in Evoncomics Getting Two Workers for the Price of One: Domestic Workers (Often Women) Reproduce the Future Source of Labor Without Financial Reward; For Further Analyses, Here Are Some Fundamental Marxist Views on Domestic Work A Term Rarely Heard (or Felt) by Millennials: “Golden Handcuffs” The Los Angeles Magazine: “Mayor Garcetti Has His First Opponent, Apparently” (Discusses Frantz Pierre's Run for Mayor and His Idea for Dealing with the Drought) Here is Within Reason's YouTube Interview with LA Mayoral Candidate, Frantz Pierre: Part 1 & Part 2. (In the Race for LA's Mayor: 24 People Registered; 11 Made the Ballot with Pierre Coming in Eighth Place in Vote Tally.) Strange Currencies: The LA Chapter of The League of Women Voters Didn't Hold a Debate in 2017; And Corporate-Owned Media (Like the “Esteemed” LA Times) Didn't Bother to Make Visible the Opposition--Relegating Only a Minor Discussion of the Two Top Candidates, but No One Else: Duly Cited Here. Why Basic Income & Housing First Models for the Homeless Are Best When Put Together in the Mixing Pot. Case in Point: the city of Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada; It's Homeless Population Has Stayed at Zero for Two Years Running. J.E. King & John Marangos: “Two Arguments for Basic Income: Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and Thomas Spence (1750-1814)” The Biography of Abu Bakr & His Visionary Idea for What We Know Call Universal Basic Income: “The first Muslim caliph, Abu Bakr, introduced a guaranteed minimum standard of income, granting each man, woman, and child ten dirhams annually; this was later increased to twenty dirhams.” Additionally, a wider purview of Bakr's influence in Pakistan and other Muslim nations can be found in Grace Clark's book. The Alaska Permanent Fund: America's Quiet Basic Income Tradition . . . When It Started 1982, Every Alaskan Citizen Got About $1000 a Year. The Modern World's First Experiment with Universal Basic Income Happened in Manitoba, Canada from 1974-79: A History of “Mincome” and Its Results. Scholar and Shaper on the Basic Income Debate, Evelyn L. Forget, Provided the First Breakthrough Study on the Positive Health Effects That Came as a Result of Canada's Mincome Experiment: “The Town With No Poverty.” During Nixon's Administration, When Daniel Patrick Moynihan Served as the Assistant Secretary for the Department of Labor, He Walked Away from America's Potential First Expansion with Basic Income (Called Family Assistance Aid) because of the Professor's Concern with Early Studies Showing Higher Divorce Rates and the Program's Potentially Adverse Effects on Children and the Nuclear Family. Daniel Geary in The Atlantic: “The Moynihan Report: An Annotated Edition” A History of Basic Income Satiric Film-Shorts from CollegeHumor: “How to Tell If You're a Basic Bitch” & “How to Tell If You're a Basic Bro” “Fair Enough” as a Uniquely Irish Phrase The Importance of Storytelling and Testimony for The Basic Income Project Here's Why Frantz and Other Comrades Are Doing an Education-Based Basic Income Campaign . . . A Promotional Trailer for The Basic Income Project - Los Angeles Scott Santen's Essay, “How to Reform Welfare and Taxes to Provide Every American Citizen with a Basic Income” The Guardian: “Stephen Hawking Blames Tory Politicians for Damaging NHS” Learning Why Deflation Benefits the 1%, While Inflation Is Great for the 99% in Novara Radio's Interview: “The Production of Money: In Conversation with Ann Pettifor.”BIEN (Basic Income Earth Network): “Will Basic Income Cause Inflation?” The New York Times: “Guaranteed Income for All? Switzerland's Voters Say No Thanks” (In Article: “About 77 percent of voters rejected a plan to give a basic monthly income of 2,500 Swiss francs, or about $2,560, to each adult, and 625 francs for each child under 18, regardless of employment status, to fight poverty and social inequality and guarantee a ‘dignified' life to everyone.”) Rutger Bregman's TEDTalk: “Poverty Isn't a Lack of Character; It's a Lack of Cash” The United States' Bureau of Labor and Statistics: Union Membership Rates in Private (6%) Versus Public (34%) Workplaces Spain's Largest & Most Legendary Worker Co-Op: Mondragon Corporation Business Insider: “8 High-Profile Entrepreneurs Who Have Endorsed Universal Basic Income” The Los Angeles Times: “Full Employment: Dangers in Good Times” The Los Angeles Times: “California Faces a Looming Teacher Shortage, and the Problem Is Getting Worse” National Public Radio (NPR): “Where Have All the Teachers Gone?” The Los Angeles Times: “If California's a 'Bad State for Business,' Why Is It Leading the Nation in Job and GDP growth?” Global Voices: “Are Employee Transportation Allowances the Cause of Japan's Commuter Hell?” The New Republic: “I'm Insanely Jealous of Sweden's Work-Family Policies. You Should Be, Too.” Heather Long in The Guardian (U.S. Edition): “Americans Love to Ask People ‘What Do You Do' It's a Habit We Should Break” Why Is It a Chinese Custom to Ask How Much You Make? ABCNews: “Research: Older adults are happiest Americans” The Guardian: “Does Early Retirement Mean an Early Death?” The Telegraph: “Find a Hobby and Get Happy, Danish Style”Martin Luther King's Speech Advocating for Guaranteed Income at Stanford University (1967) To Email with Queries About Frantz's Project or Get Involved In This Movement: BasicIncomeLA@gmail.comTwo Podcasts and Their Respective Episodes That Jesse & Matt Referenced as Sources Throughout Our Discussion with Frantz: The UPSTREAM Podcast: Universal Basic Income - “Part One: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?” The FREAKONOMICS Podcast: “Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income? Other Links Exploring UBI (But Not Mentioned in the Podcast): Bootstraps: An In-Development Documentary in Support of Universal Basic Income From The Website's Concept Description: “Twenty Americans from all walks of life have just won a lottery: a guaranteed check every week that's big enough to cover basic living expenses. What will they do with this opportunity?” Scott Santens in Medium: “The BIG Library: Books About Basic Income” The Huffington Post: “A Universal Basic Income is the Future”  The Boston Review: “No Racial Justice Without Basic Income”    Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website: The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram

On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse explore the most exceptional work of utopian thinking since the days of Occupy Wall Street: Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams' Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015). This is the co-hosts third such “CliffPod,” and they will hum over some of the most far-reaching and visionary aspects of this book, weighing out the co-authors' success in diagnosing why the left has been--to use Jesse's apt phrase--“drowning in failures” amid the continued carnage of Neoliberalism's rotisserie blades. Matt & Jesse will also evaluate the insights the authors gain from how the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society were able to masterfully deploy “second hand dealers” and create a winning strategy for the right that the left has yet to match in any transformative way (and which go beyond the Cult of Direct Action and Paper Anarchy). Finally, our Abbot & Costello co-hosts will assess these authors' policy demands and solutions in order to learn why this book about a post-work world is so vital to read for our deserved Star Trek future. Mentioned In This Episode: The Brief Wild History of “CliffsNotes” (Inspiring Our Nascent CliffPods)The Background of Karl Marx's Illustrious & Legendary Quote: Marx's oft-cited comment in The German Ideology that in a communist society (or some version of a post-capitalist society) he would be able to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic" has become more famous than what he said in other places, more specifically.To Learn What Marx Actually Thought About What the End of Capitalism Would Look Like, You Would Have to Read What He Wrote in Chapter 32 in Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy:"Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” IMPORTANT CORRECTION: Matthew Snyder's allusion to “some weird kind of Mars landing where you have to do mine-work in some bad 1980's Science Fiction film” is actually Peter Hyman's Outland (1981)--the setting of which takes place on Jupiter where Sean Connery must find his inner High Noon as exploited workers mysteriously and ceaselessly continue to die. Caroline Fredrickson's Long Essay in The Atlantic: “There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts” Matthew Snyder's First Job at Seventeen: J.C. Zips (which is actually just barely in Richland, Washington) Charles Eisenstein's Book, Sacred Economics (2011) and Ian Mackenzie's Short Film Inspired by Eisenstein's Work of NonfictionAlex Williams and Nick Srnicek's Co-Authored Book: Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015) The Indigogo Campaign to Develop a Documentary Based on the Book Inventing the Future Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek's First Co-Authored Work Appeared in the Edited Collection: #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (2014) Joshua Bregman Visit With Us for Episode 6 of The Future Is A Mixtape: “Ye Are Many, They Are Few” Novara Radio's Podcast of Aaron Bastani Interviewing Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, the Co-Authors for Inventing the Future Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek Appear on Doug Henwood's Podcast Behind the News to Discuss Their Book Inventing the Future (April 6, 2017) Novara Radio & Aaron Bastani's YouTube Definition of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”Peter Frase's Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (Our CliffPod of This Masterful Work of Nonfiction Can Be Found Here) “Bernie Sanders Is Magical” as a GIF (& Which Later Inspired Shirt-Makers): Here. The Exact Shirt-Color & Design (the Image of Which Includes Bernie Shooting Rainbows from His Right Hand): Here. The Anarchist Library: Jan D. Matthews' “An Introduction to the Situationists” Jo Freeman's (aka Joreen's) Original Essay: “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”Vice: “We Interviewed the Revolutionaries Pouring Concrete on London's 'Anti-Homeless' Spikes” For a Very Different Interpretation, Read Mark Bray's Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism in Occupy Wall Street The New Yorker's Article on David Graeber and Occupy Wall Street's Offshoot Project, Rolling Jubilee: “A Robin Hood for the Debt Crisis?”The Press-Enterprise: “Occupy Riverside Encampment Removed” (Photo-Gallery) & Article Description of the Event on November 30, 2011: “Occupy Encampment Cleared from Downtown”Jodi Dean's Phrase Worthy of Legendary Quotation Status: “Goldman Sachs doesn't care if you raise chickens.” Here Is a Review from Local-Organic Only Activist Who Quotes the Phrase & Evaluates the Book Fairly. The Overton Window: Neoliberalism Now Owns This Sheet of Glass Laura Marsh in The New Republic: “The Flaws of the Overton Window” Robert Frost's Defense of Poetic Meter & Traditional Poetry Form: “You can't play tennis without a net.” Milton Friedman Defines (Right-)Libertarianism & His Awful Ideas About Accountability and Justice During His 1999 Appearance on Uncommon Knowledge's “Take It To the Limits” Episode The Origins of Negative-Solidarity from Private Workers Toward Public Workers' Pensions: MarketWatch's “The Inventor of the 401(k) Says He Created a ‘Monster'” Bacon's Rebellion: A History of Positive Solidarity & the Land-Barons' Reactionary Aims to Create Negative Solidarity:“It was the first rebellion in the American colonies in which discontented frontiersmen took part. A similar uprising in Maryland took place later that year. The alliance between indentured servants and Africans (most enslaved until death or freed), united by their bond-servitude, disturbed the ruling class, who responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705.” Adam Curtis' Excellent HyperNormalisation (Matt's Favorite Documentary of 2016) The Origin of Margaret Thatcher's Phrase: “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) Broken Social Scene's Brilliant New Album Hug of Thunder and Feist's Marvelous  and Moving Song Lyric: “The future's not what it used to be / but we still gotta get there.” Cory Robin's Magisterial Essay in The Nation: “Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom” Adult Swim's Hilarious and Cutting Satire Short: For-Profit Online University The Digital Aristocracy Versus the Digital Paupers: What Nathan Schneider Explains in America: The Jesuit Review: “How the Digital Economy Is Making Us Gleaners Again” David Graeber in The Baffler: “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” Fred Armisen in Portlandia: “Portland Is a City Where Young People Go to Retire” Dave Eggers' The Circle. The Novel Was Also Discussed in Episode 4 of The Future Is A Mixtape: “Terminal Dystopia Syndrome (TDS)” NPR: “Keynes Predicted We Would Be Working 15-Hour Weeks. Why Was He So Wrong?” Shana Lebowitz in Business Insider: “In 1930, economist John Keynes predicted we'd only work 15 hours a week — here's one theory why he was wrong” The Very Interesting But Quiet History of Paul Lafargue: The First to Argue for the 3-Hour Work Day Paul Lafargue's Most Well Known Work: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)Geoffrey Mohan in The Los Angeles Times: “As California's Labor Shortage Grows, Farmers Race to Replace Workers with Robots”David Horsey in The Los Angeles Times: “Robots, Not Immigrants, Are Taking American Jobs” Matt Bruenig's Just-Created & Emergent People's Policy Project (3P)--A Crowd-Founded Anti-Capitalist Thinktank Want to Help the People's Policy Project? Go to Patreon & Donate. The Dig: “Matt Bruenig on Why Welfare Is Great and We Need More of It”And to Close Out This Week's Shownotes About a Post-Work World, I'll End With a Revolutionary Fop Who Proudly Wore Flowers as Lapels . . . Oscar Wilde. As He So Movingly Put It, So Many Years Ago, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:"A great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine." Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website: The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram

On this episode, Jesse & Matt discuss their fraught and less than ambivalent feelings about their first time at Southern California's Politicon, and provide a discerning look at how it represents the shallow conceptions of what politics so often involve, and how it could have been reimagined as a democratic space for transformational insights and real debates. The majority of the podcast will discuss solutions to create a utopian future (or at least one that guarantees The Golden Square) by combining the co-hosts' deflowered experience at Politicon with Episode 12's arm-wrestling over how to get to this future they keep pressing for. Jesse & Matt will do this by offering up The Slingshot Seven: a policy platform of ideas for anti-authoritarians and activists to demand and work toward, and in doing so, build real power inside the Meth-house of America's 21st Century. Mentioned In This Episode: Ben Norton in Counterpunch: “Ann Coulter: A Jackboot in Guccis” Libby Watson in Splinter: “Why Did Politicon Make Me Want To Die?” Politicon's 2016 Art Gallery Exhibit Gone from the 2017 Convention: Where Did It Go? Some Memorable Photos from the 2016's Exhibit: Here, Here, Here, Here, and Here Clio Chang in the New Republic: “Politcon Is the Perfect Media Racket for the Trump Era” What is Whuffie? How Cory Doctorow's Celebrity/Fan Economy Lends Itself to the Following Predicament: “Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies”  Why Isn't the Price for Internet Dropping as Technology Accelerates with New Supposed Efficiencies? John Oliver's Last Week Tonight Explains . . . Peter Beinart Reviews Ann Coulter's Recent Book in “Trump We Trust” for The Atlantic Which Nazi Kicks More Ass as a Media-Monger & Sith-Lord Propagandist:  Roger Stone or Joseph Goebbels? Photos of Politicon's “Democracy Village”: Here, Here, Here, Here and The Future Is A Mixtape's Booth! Arty Leftists Infiltrate Ann Coulter's Discussion with Nazi Outfits Melina Abdullah: “Red hats are essentially the new white sheets.” Full Excerpt on YouTube. The Yes Men's Most Recent Prank: Coming to DNC as Democratic Party Officials by Announcing #DNCTakeBack Full of Bernie Platform Ideals. The Facebook 28ers' Event (October 6th, 2015): “A Madhatter's Theatre Presents: ‘The Yes Men Are Revolting' at UCR”: Here, Here, Here and Here Platform of New Democrats: Bernie Sanders Platform Was Widely Popular Performance Art Versus Social Practice Art: The Yes Men Embodied Change by Imagining It: The Duo Passed Out Fake New York Times Broadsheets to Imagine a Progressive Utopia Politicon's Schedule of Events: “Where Are All of the More Pressing & Important Topics Missing from the Convention?” A Nice Roundup of Political Gatherings in 2017 We Would Have Rather Gone To: The People's Summit (June 9th-to-11th) & the Socialism Conference (July 6th-to-9th) & DSA National Convention (August 3rd-to-6th) Our Local LA Democratic Socialists of America Meeting Versus “Draft Bernie for a People's Party” Wolf PAC & The 28th Movement: It's History & Official Website The 28ers' General Website & It's Swarmwise Campaign Page for SB-562 Bernie Sanders Won 43% of the National Primary Vote for The Democratic Party “The Democratic Party Is a Graveyard for Social Movements” & Lance Selfa's Book on the Old Adage: The Democrats: A Critical History Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers in Truthdig: “What the U.S. Can Learn from the U.K. Election and Jeremy Corbyn” Norway's Elections: Clear, Transparent and Publically Funded Bernie Sanders' Responding to The New York Times Magazine on What the Democratic Party Really Stands for:“You're asking a good question, and I can't give you a definitive answer. Certainly there are some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.” Keith Ellison Backs Out of Promise to Get Rid of Corporate Donations & Lobbying Money to the DNC to Win the Chairship Position The Tory Party's 2017 Manifesto The Labour Party's 2017 Manifesto   Jesse Herring's Suggestion for 7-Point Platform, “The Slingshot Seven”: Healthcare for All Renewable Energy Plan Toward 100% Usage Universal Basic Income (UBI) for All Demilitarization: Both Domestic & Foreign Tuition-Free Education Getting Money Out of Politics $15-Hour Minimum Wage (Adjusted to Inflation)   Grover Norquist: Taxation Is Theft: Sign This Contract to Promise No New Taxes: “Norquist's Tax Pledge: What It Is and How It Started” Are Our Shownotes Becoming More Unwieldy Than the Footnotes for David Foster Wallace's The Infinite Jest? You Decide . . . EDUCATION VERSUS FOSSIL FUELS: The Atlantic: “Here's Exactly How Much the Government Would Have to Spend to Make Public College Tuition-Free” (Answer: $62 Billion) OR ThinkProgress: “Producers of oil, gas and coal received more than $500 billion in government subsidies around the world in 2011, with the richest nations collectively spending more than $70 billion every year to support fossil fuels.” Richard Wolff on Capitalism: “What Happens to Workers' Necessary Versus Surplus Labor?” George H.W. Bush's at the 1992 Republican Convention: “Read My Lips: No New Taxes” (on YouTube) The Republican Party's 1994 Revenge Strategy: “Contract With America” Frank Underwood on “Ruthless Pragmatism” (on YouTube) China Mieville's “The Limits of Utopia” Published in Salvage & Why We Have to ‘Utopia Hard' Ursula K. Le Guin on Anarchy: “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” Why Alex Garland's Ex Machina Might Be Important to Think About . . . Why Might We Need Earthquake Prevention Warning Systems Instead of More Military-Industrial-Complex Waste?U.S. News: “Trump's Budget Cuts West Coast Quake Warning System Funding”  VERSUS Business Insider: “Here Is The Earthquake Warning System Japan Spent $1 Billion To Build” Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website: The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram

On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matthew & Jesse go beyond Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next and his apt citations of policy successes in other societies found outside the U.S., and will instead grapple with the stasis of the Left and its tragic inability to wrest change from the Death-Dealers of Neoliberalism. How can we learn from both the past and present to make another world possible? How can we transcend the suffering and carnage found in our daily lives that are as deceptively petty as buying child-socks at Target, but are, nonetheless, consumer rituals made heavy by unseen violence? Join our co-hosts as they do a politically drunk version of Jiu-Jitsu via the wreckage of what lies behind, around and ahead of us. Jesse & Matt will then imagine what strategies and tactics are most deserving of our attention in the here-and-now, so we can transcend The Poison Pyramid and finally arrive at The Golden Square. Mentioned In This Episode: Prior Discussions on The Poison Pyramid: Episode 001 on Religion: “The Desire for Certainty” Episode 002 on Capitalism: “The Invisible Hand” Episode 003 on Celebrity: “Star-Fuckers” Prior Discussions on The Golden Square: Episode 007 on Food: “Grammars of the Palate” Episode 008 on Shelter: “Gimme Shelter” Episode 009 on Healthcare: “An Apple A Day . . .” Episode 010 on Education: “Squaring the Golden Square: Education” Viewing Copies of Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next What is a ShitBox? “The ShitBox Commercial Product Review” The History of Basic Income's Origins from Thomas Paine & Beyond Mother Jones Magazine: “250 Years of Campaigns, Cash, and Corruption: From George Washington to Citizens United, a Timeline of America's History of Political Money Games” Moyers & Company: One-Hour Documentary - “The United States of ALEC” The Original Exposé on the Koch Brothers' Wealth and Political Manipulation by The New Yorker, published in 2010: Jane Mayer's “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging War on Obama” A Story of Winners and Losers in 99 Homes: YouTube Excerpt of Michael Shannon Discussing Why America Only Bails Out the Winners Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes: The Feature Film. Starring Laura Dern, Michael Shannon, and Andrew Garfield. The Los Angeles Review of Books: “On Bureaucracy and the Left” by Guy Patrick Cunningham David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and The Secret Joys of Bureaucracy The Norwegian American: “How Norwegian Do It: National Elections in Norway” The 28ers' Official Website: “The organization was established in 2012 from the ashes of Occupy Riverside, and is now a 501(c)4 non-profit that aims to pass a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by creating exclusive public financing for all federal elections, and forever sever private wealth from politics.” Joe Scarborough in Politico: “Obama's Friendship with Wall Street” (2011) The Sunlight Foundation: “The Max Baucus Health Care Lobbyist Complex” Lawrence Lessig's TEDtalk: “We the People, and the Republic We Must Reclaim” Counterpunch: “The Woman Who Blew the Whistle on Halliburton Gets Canned” Financial Times on No-Bid Contracts: “Contractors Reap $138bn from Iraq War” UC Davis' Center for Poverty Research: “What Is the History of the Minimum Wage?” The Official Website for Wolf PAC: It's Vision, Plan and Course for Actions Wolf PAC's Progress Toward Calling for a Constitutional Convention: Five States Thus Far What Is an Article V Convention? It's Origins, History and Potential for Change. The ERA Movement: The Equal Rights Amendment Act Beacon Broadside: “Phyllis Schlafly: Still Wrong (and Mean) After All of These Years” Old Enough to Die in War, But Not Old Enough to Vote? A Wikipedia History of the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and How Student Protests Pushed Congress to Enact Its Ratification Process for Later Passage in 1971. The Washington Times: “Noam Chomsky: The Republican Party Most Dangerous Organization ‘in Human History'” The Washington Post: “Democrats Troll House Republicans, Sing and Wave ‘Bye-Bye' as AHCA Passes” Youtube Video of Democrats Singing “Goodbye” Song Youtube Video of Democratic Convention Where Sarah Silverman Says to Berners: “Can I Say to the Bernie-Or-Bust People: You're Being Ridiculous!” Gawker: “Report: Hillary Clinton Used Static Noise Machine to Prevent Reporters from Hearing Fundraising Speech” CNN News: “Sanders Supporters Shower Clinton Motorcade with Dollar Bills” Jane F. McAlevey's No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age Moyers & Company: Marshall Ganz on Making Social Movements Matter: “Occupy Mistook a Tactic for a Strategy” Murray Bookchin: Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: The Climate Versus Capitalism Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams: Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work What was the Mont Pelerin Society, Its Aims & Who Was Its Founders? Nancy MacClean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America The North Star: Mark Fisher's “Exiting the Vampire Castle” Russell Brand's Brilliant Counterpunches When Being Cross-Examined by Jeremy Paxman on BBC's Newsnight (& Not Getting All the Ethical Issues Right - How DARE HIM!) Cenk Uygur's Ill-Conceived Idea of Starting Justice Democrats Instead of Doubling Down on Wolf PAC New Poll Shows Money in Politics Is A Top Voting Concern According to 2015 Study, 90% of Democrats, 84% of Republicans and 80% of Republicans Say That Money in Politics Has Too Much of an Influence on Our Democracy The Los Angeles Times: “California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon shelves single-payer healthcare bill, calling it 'woefully incomplete'” Ryan Skolnick: “Anthony Rendon Is Wrong: SB 562 Is Not Woefully Incomplete” Robert Pollin's Defense of SB-562 in The Intercept: “Why Single Payer, Now, Is for Real”   Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website: The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram

Beyond just talking about rabbits shitting outside their cages, in this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt will provide a sustained analysis on Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next. Not only was this the finest documentary released in 2015, but the film is Michael Moore's magnum opus without parallel or peer in his storied and fecund oeuvre. After shooting and releasing a misshapen and badly organized documentary Capitalism: A Love Story in 2009, it seemed that the director had lost his vision or was in some sleepy and lonesome lull. But it's important to remember that the same lull in vision during his early career with Canadian Bacon (1995) and The Big One (1997) also appeared right before his breakout films, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. By going invisible for six years after the release Capitalism: A Love Story, shooting in ‘secret locations' unknown to anyone, Michael Moore came back fully revitalized and more sophisticated in his rhetoric and tactics of persuasion, by rejecting partisanship and labels in order to reveal why other countries just simply do it better when it comes to solving daunting societal problems, such as work-stress, malnutrition, K-12 educational failures, student debt, work-life balance, drug addiction, prisons, as well as the loss of women's rights and demanding government reforms. Jesse & Matt hope to tell you why Where to Invade Next is so vital to revving up America's rudderless drift. They will also describe why the film's uses of framing and persuasion are worth stealing--especially given the left's tragic history at winning anything of lasting consequence amidst the Drum & Death March of Neoliberalism. Mentioned In This Episode: Wired Magazine's “Good Enough: Celebrating 25 Years of the Goonies” Noam Chomsky & The Rabbit Cage: Widening the Floors of the State to Eventually Shit Outside of the Rabbit Cage What Is Political Efficacy, and Why Is It a Better Measuring Stick Than Ideology? Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Manifesto Being Displayed at Campaign Tour-Stops Classical Rhetoric: The Three Means of Persuasion: Ethos, Pathos, Logos 1: Michael Moore Invades Italy - Rest & Relaxation Partial Clip of Where to Invade Next When Michael Moore Visits Italy LUXOS on the Italian Suit-Making Masters: “Lardini: A Story Made in Italy” The History and Personalities of Ducati as It Celebrates Its 90th Anniversary Italy and Its Untold History of the ‘Long Vacation': Six to Eight Weeks of Vacation Italy's History of the Paid Honeymoon & the Tradition of an Extra Month of Pay for Italian Citizen's Vacations (Called the 13th Month Paycheck by Matthew) John Maynard Keynes' Utopian Idea That the 15-Hour Work Week Was Inevitable Italian Five-Month Maternity Leave: “Maternity Leaves Around the World” Sweden's Poster Campaign for Paternity Leave: Here, Here and Here Why Do 90% of Sweden's Fathers Take Paternity Leave? Why Germans Call Americans ‘Robots': The U.S. Is the Most Overworked Nation Sam Lowry's Worker and Student Struggles in Italy: 1963-1973 Utopian, Revolutionary Socialism Requires Collective and Continual Struggle 2: France - School Lunches & Children's Nutrition Full Clip of Where to Invade Next When Michael Moore Visits France Quartz Media: “A Typical School Lunch for Kids in Paris vs. New York” British Mum & American Dad Experience French School Meals France Spends Less on School Lunches Than the U.S. France's Tax Stubs Details Where Its Taxes Go; America Doesn't ThinkProgress: “Study Confirms That Abstinence Education Has Utterly Failed At Preventing AIDS In Africa” Salon Magazine: “Abstinence only, rebranded: Failed right-wing sex-ed policy returns as “sexual risk avoidance” U.S. Teens Five Times More Likely to Become Pregnant Than French Teens Memorable Jesse Herring Quote: “Life in America Is a Maze of Electric Fences” John Oliver on Why America's Sexual Education Programs Rely on Ignorance, Fear, Shame and Punishment The Failure of America's D.A.R.E. Program: “Why ‘Just Say No' Doesn't Work” 3: Finland - Best Place for K-12 Education in the World The Atlantic: “The Place Where Ranking Schools Proves They're Actually Equal” Dr. Pasi Sahlberg's on Youtube: “What Can We Learn from the Finnish Education System?” The Bryan Callen Show: Podcast Episode 173: Pasi Sahlberg & Finland's Education System: Only 10% Finnish of Students Take Assessment Exams Because You Only Need  10% to Find the “Blood” Results; America Takes 100% of the Blood. Money in Politics: Testing Industries in America, Like Pearson, Make a Lot of Money Off Common Core and Testing Regimes The Washington Post: “Eight Problems with Common Core Standards” Chicago Study Finds Mixed Results for AVID Program Charter Schools Don't Need to Be Tested Like State Schools & Other Dirty Secrets About the Privatization of the Commons Noam Chomsky: Defund the Public Sphere, and Then Blame the Teachers When You Defund the Schools. “Manufacturing Failure” Let the things that are public fail. 4: Slovenia - Debt-Free College Education The Washington Post Highlights Slovenia: “7 Countries Where Americans Can Study at Universities, in English, for Free (or Almost Free)” Slovenian Student Protests Explode Over Worsening University Conditions BBC News: “Students Warn MPs of Tuition Fees 'Backlash'” The Daily Californian: The History of UC Tuition Since 1868 The State Hornet: “The California State University and University of California systems have changed terminology from “fees” to “tuition,” in hopes of clarifying where student money is spent and to address problems with Post-9/11 GI Bill processing.” (Published During the Tuition Crisis in 2010.) 5: Germany - Work, Labor Rights & Acknowledging State Crimes The Germans Have a 36-Hour Work week, But Are Paid for 40 Hours Boardroom Controlled by German Workers: Control Simple Majority Vote BBC News: Volkswagen's Lies About Diesel Performance Reported by Its Own German Workers; Whistleblowers Protected in Germany GQ Magazine: “The Real Story of Germanwings Flight 9525 Crash” Slate Magazine: “How Do German Students Learn About the Holocaust?” The Washington Post: “Germany welcomed more than 1 million refugees in 2015. Now, the country is searching for its soul.” The Huffington Post: “Why Doesn't America Have A Museum of Slavery” David Amsden in The New York Times: “Building the First Slavery Museum in America” 6: Portugal - Decriminalization of All Drugs Samuel Oakford in Vice News: “Portugal's Example: What Happened After It Decriminalized All Drugs, From Weed to Heroin” 7: Norway - Rehabilitation as Punishment Reddit User Posts Images of Dorms in Macedonia Versus Images of Norwegian Prisons Time Magazine Photo Narrative on Norway's Idea of Incarceration: “Inside The World's Most Humane Prison System” The New York Times: “The Radical Humaneness of Norway's Halden Prison” “A survey of inmates who were released in 2005 put Norway's two-­year recidivism rate at 20 percent, the lowest in Scandinavia, which was widely praised in the Norwegian and international press. For comparison, a 2014 recidivism report from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics announced that an estimated 68 percent of prisoners released in 30 states in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within three years.” Business Insider: Norway Has the Lowest Recidivism Rate of 20% Versus America's Recidivism Which Is 80% in ContrastHow Norway Best Expresses Ubuntu Culture? Prisoners Vote First in the Nation NPR News: Obama Is the First Standing President to Go to a Federal Prison The Express Tribune: “Norway Gunman Wants Japanese Psychiatrist: Lawyer” 8: Tunisia - Women's Rights & Governmental Reform: Part I Tunisia Live: “Abortion in Tunisia: A Shifting Landscape” ERA Movement (Equal Rights Amendment) in the US: Unfinished Business Article 46 of the Newly Passed Tunisian Constitution: “The state shall take all necessary measures in order to eradicate violence against women.” Mikhail Bakunin: “I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.” Time Magazine: “Bouazizi: The Man Who Set Himself and Tunisia on Fire” Al Jazeera News: “Mohamed Bouazizi: Was the Arab Spring worth dying for?” 9: Iceland - Women's Rights & Governmental Reform: Part II BBC News: “The Day Iceland's Women Went on Strike [in 1975]” Vigdís Finnbogadóttir: The First Woman President in the World to Be Democratically Elected ThinkProgress: “Iceland, Where Bankers Actually Go To Jail For Committing White-Collar Crimes” 10: The Berlin Wall - How Ideas Like Prisons Can Be Dismantled Nations, Like Any Human-Made Structure, Can Change: Nina Turner's Riveting Speech for Single Payer in California, SB-562: “Whenever you feel like you're in a tomb, imagine you're in womb.” The Huffington Post: “Bernie Sanders' Socialism Is as American as Apple Pie”   Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website . . . The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram

On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt finally shoot off some long-stored Roman Candles, letting their fireworks rain down on an area of community life they've spent an inordinate amount of time living inside of: the looking glass of education. As the fourth node of The Golden Square, education is the capstone of these most basic and essential human rights. It's hard to imagine any human future that's vital or dynamic without education's essential place in the foundation of society. The co-hosts will both celebrate this cornerstone of the Golden Square as well lament its capture and brutalization from Neoliberalism's Extermination Matrix. In the last section of the discussion, Matt & Jesse will blast-out their final volleys of Roman Candles by outlining a utopian future and framework for education that all of humanity so richly deserves. And in this slice of imagineering, our guides will assert that education is a right that should be extended from the cradle to the grave. Mentioned In This Episode: Stephen Jay Gould: “I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” As quoted in New Scientist, March 8, 1979, p. 777    John Rawls and The Veil of Ignorance: A Theory of Justice   Stephen Fry Narrates an Animation About John Rawls' Idea of The Veil of Ignorance   When Should Kids Learn to Read, Write, and Do Math?   Study: Holding Kids Back A Grade Doesn't Necessarily Hold Them Back   The Beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses   Can Jehovah's Witnesses Have Friends Outside Of Their Religion?   Number of Educational Institutions in the U.S.   The War On Teachers: Why the Public is Watching it Happen   George Bush's Dastardly & Doofus No Child Left Behind   Obama's Braindead Program for Education With His Race to the Top   In 2006, Finland Ranked #1. Even Though the Results Have Declined, Finland Still Ranks Among the Top Countries.   The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) - 2015 Interactive World Map   U.S. Students' Academic Achievement Still Lags That of Their Peers in Many Other Countries The 2017 Condition of Education Report LARPing: Live Action RolePlaying - The Future of Education? Study: Suspensions Harm 'Well-Behaved' Kids Chart: See 20 Years of Tuition Growth at National Universities Tuition and Fees and Room and Board over Time, 1976-77 to 2016-17 ‘The Tuition Is Too Damn High' The Student Loan Debt Crisis in 9 Charts Student Loan Debt Statistics 2017 Student Loans Owned and Securitized, Outstanding State Cuts to Higher Education Threaten Quality and Affordability at Public Colleges Who Got Rich Off The Student Debt Crisis Noam Chomsky: The Death of American Universities Henry A. Giroux - Thinking Dangerously: The Role of Higher Education in Authoritarian Times University of California: State Spending on Corrections and Education The High Salaries & Lavish Benefits of University Administrators Benjamin Ginsberg in Washington Monthly: “Administrators Ate My Tuition” The Utopia Of Rules By David Graeber Daniel Pink - “Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose” 10 Ultra-Successful Millionaire and Billionaire College Dropouts Famous Directors Who Never Went to Film School UC Davis Chancellor Resigns After Pepper-Spray Scandal Lecture by David Graeber: Resistance In A Time Of Total Bureaucratization Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms   Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website: The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram

On this episode, Jesse & Matt discuss the third most important element of The Golden Square which is so simple and obvious, that it's remarkable this idea is even contested as a human right in the Yankee-lands of Ol' Red, White and Blue: the absolute right to healthcare for every human being on Earth. Matthew will provide a surprising prologue about what's suddenly taken place in his personal life since this episode's initial recording and open up about his mother's life-long illness; in call & response fashion, Jesse will then talk about what it was like to get healthcare in Sarah-Palin-Land as a child. The co-hosts will also explore their personal relationships to this essential cornerstone to The Golden Square, and their own anxieties about having access to healthcare as middle-aged men with pre-existing conditions. And lastly, Matt & Jesse will look at healthcare systems around the world, and offer up a poignant portrait of the very near and immediate struggles facing activists as they fight for a momentous Single Payer bill in California (SB-562). Mentioned In This Episode: Matthew's Heavy-Breathing Prologue: What Is a Double Pulmonary Embolism? Wikipedia Wants to Help. The Speaker of the State Assembly, Anthony Rendon, Blocks SB-562 Why Is Single Payer in California Being Blocked? Money in Politics. The Start-Dates for Universal Healthcare in Other Nations: A 20th Century Invention Ready for America's 21st Century? Prologue Over & Now for the Actual Show! Kathy Griffin / Reza Aslan: Why Free Speech Is for Everyone! We Believe In It!Jehova's Witness & Blood Transfusions: Wikipedia Provides Bloodless Triage The Hanford Reservation, Plutopia: “The Bomb and the Explosions of U.S. Suburbs” Neil Burton in Psychology Today: “A Short History of Bipolar Disorder” The Fat Man & Little Boy Bombs: “The Men Who Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki”  Ronald Reagan's ‘Strange' Gift: COBRA: Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 PBS Newshour: 70% of American College Teachers Are Part-Time/Adjuncts Explaining Neoliberal Tourette Syndrome (NTS): Michael J. Sandel's What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets George Lakoff's Don't Think Like Elephants: Know Your Values & Frame the Debate George Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By YouTube Clip of George Lakoff: “Idea Framing, Metaphors and Your Brain” Salon Interviews Psychologist Gail Saltz: “Study: Liberals and Conservatives Have Different Brain Structures” Prefrontal Cortex Last to Form in Humans & Why Teenagers Do The Craziest Things Saul D. Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: A Practical Guide for Realistic Radicals Saul D. Alinksy on Being Your Own Witness & Why the Right Hates Him So Much Why the Left Falsely Thinks Logic Will Win the Day: “Keep Losing Arguments? A Psychologist Explains Why Emotions Are More Persuasive Than Logic.” Western Society's Classic Understanding of Rhetoric: “The Three Means of Persuasion: Pathos, Logos & Ethos” The U.S. Metrics For Healthcare Delivery Are Both Dizzying & Sad: We Spend 3 Trillion for Healthcare Annually U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective National Health Expenditures 2015 Highlights The United States Has Lowest Life Expectancy in the Industrialized World & the Rate Actually Went Down for First Time in Decades We Have the Highest Infant Mortality Rate in the Industrialized World 62% of US Bankruptcies from Healthcare Emergencies Medical Bankruptcy accounts for majority of personal bankruptcies Top 10 Reasons People Go Bankrupt Warren Buffett: America's Healthcare Costs “the Tapeworm to American Competitiveness” What Is a “5150”? A Wikipedia Working Definition. Time Magazine: “Here's How Much the Average Worker Has to Pay for Healthcare” Business Insider: Map of the Biggest Employers in the US: UC System Is #1 for California The Rich History of Workers Compensation Obamacare came from Heritage Foundation & It's Essentially a Nixonian Idea The Affordable Health Care Act for America Michael Moore's Masterpiece: Sicko (2007) - (At the Time the Documentary's  Release, France Had the Best System in the World) Top Ten Healthcare Rankings By Nation: Denmark Has #1 Healthcare System in the World; Not Surprisingly, Mostly Scandinavian Nations Are in the Rankings. Worldwide Spending on Healthcare Political Scientist Corey Robin's Book: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Irony of Ironies: World Health Organization's Study on Healthcare Efficiency Ranked America's System 37 and Communist Cuba's 39 (with Cuba Having a Lower Infant Mortality Rate). The New Zealand Herald: “New Zealand Reclaims Title as World's Least Corrupt Country” Rose Ann Demoro, the Executive Director for the California Nurses Association Says, “There is a conspiracy of silence on Single Payer.” Daniel Marans in The Huffington Post: HR-676 - Medicare-for-All - Representative John Conyers' “Bill Has Never Been This Popular” Pew Research Center: “Currently, 60% say the federal government is responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans, while 39% say this is not the government's responsibility.” The Economist/YouGov Poll April 2 - 4, 2017 Once Something Might Be Taken Away: TrumpCare Actually Made Obamacare More Popular and More Well-Known as to Its Benefits President Obama Jokes that Obamacare Is More Popular Than Trump Tragic Nostalgia Time: “Bernie Sanders for President” Website on Medicare for All: Save U.S. $5 trillion over 10 years; Families would pay $466 and save $5,807; Businesses would save $9,000 a year on average. Democracy Now!: “Report: Senator Max Baucus Received More Campaign Money from Health and Insurance Industry Interests than Any Other Member of Congress” Democracy Now!: “Baucus's Raucous Caucus: Doctors, Nurses and Activists Arrested Again for Protesting Exclusion of Single-Payer Advocates at Senate Hearing on Healthcare” The Problem with President Obama Thinking Like a Community Organizer: Unions Make Impossible Demands and Then Move to the Center, Whereas Community Organizers Start in the Middle: Jane F. McAlevey's No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age YouTube Clip: Rahm Emanuel Sold Us Short for Bad Healthcare Deals: “Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste” Curtis Black in the The Chicago Reporter: “Emanuel Is the Last Person to Give Democrats Advice on Strategy” YouTube Clip: During a Rare Townhall Appearance, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein Calls Medicare for All a “Government Take-Over” YouTube Clip: Lauren Steiner (from Robust Opposition) Questions Dianne Feinstein About Townhall Response Concerning Medicare for All. Healthy California's Website for SB-562: Healthy California Act Inland Empire: “The New Jersey of California” The 28ers: An Original Affinity Group from Occupy Riverside & Its Swarm Campaign for SB-562 Norway: #1 Is Now the Happiest Place on Earth - Very Strong Public Financing System: 74% Public Funds; 26% Party Memberships Dues Organizations in Support of SB-562: Healthy California Act California Nurses Association's Main Website Nurses Most Trusted Profession Again in America: 15 Years & Counting Bernie Sanders Gives a Shout-Out to SB-562 and Nurses Created the Biggest Ovation and Response at Chicago's People's Summit New York Quite Close to Getting Single Payer in the State: One Vote Short Vermont's Attempt to Establish a Single-Payer Healthcare System 2016 Colorado Care: “Single-Payer Health Care Dream Dies In Colorado” Previous Single Payer Bills in Calfornia “Dirty Little Secret: Insurers Actually Are Making a Mint from Obamacare” California Senate Passes SB-562 “Single Payer Would Save Us All a Lot of Money” Economic Analysis of the Healthy California Single-Payer Health Care Proposal (SB-562) - UMass Amherst Tommy Douglas: "The Greatest Canadian" Breaking Bad: All You Need To Know About The American Health Care System List of Countries with Universal Health Care Nina Turner's Keynote Speech in Sacramento for SB-562: “Dear Democrats: Stop Talking About Russia & Tell Us What You're Going To Do About Healthcare.” “Just when you think you're in a tomb, remind yourselves you're in a womb.” How The Labour Party Created Britain's National Health Service (NHS)

Gentrification. Housing Bubbles. Developers & Their “Pay 2 Play” Campaign Donations (Bribes) to City Council Members. And then there's the needless cruelty of permanent homelessness. On this episode, Jesse & Matt ratchet-up their manifesto on their Mixtape for the Future by talking about the second-most important cornerstone of The Golden Square: namely, the universal right to human shelter. While a good deal of the debate and conversation will provide a clear-sighted and information-packed survey on the problems, causes and solutions involved with creating universal rights to housing, Matt & Jesse will also expand past common notions of shelter that often go unnoticed in the popular conversations found in daily rituals. And in doing so, the co-hosts hope to transcend the blind and abject observations from America's TV-Clown punditry on housing. Mentioned in this episode: Prashant Gopal in Bloomberg: “Homeownership Rate in the U.S. Drops to Lowest Since 1965” After the Recession, Blackstone and Other Hedge Funds Are Big Buyers of Domestic Homes: The Real News Network's “Another US Housing Bubble?” Is Employment Actually Up? Birth/Death Statistics from the America's Department of Labor Hilary Osborne in The Guardian: “Home Ownership in England at Lowest Level in 30 Years as Housing Crisis Grows” BBC: “General Election 2017: Labour Pledges to Build 1M New Homes” David Harvey's RSA Animate: “Crises Of Capitalism” NPR's Terry Gross Interviews Historian Richard Rothstein: The American Government's Horrific Racism in Housing: From Blockbusting to Covenants and the GI-Bill's “Whites-Only Housing Loans” Median Home Prices in San Jose Versus Median Home Prices in Youngstown Poppy Noor's Guardian Editorial: “Utopian Thinking: Free Housing Should Be a Universal Right” MintPress News: “Empty Homes Outnumber the Homeless 6 to 1, So Why Not Give Them Homes?” Lack of Resources to Accurately Count Increased Homelessness in Riverside County & The Inland Empire The Los Angeles Times' 2017 Report Housing Insecurity: “L.A. County Homelessness Jumps a Staggering 23% as Need Far Outpaces Housing, New Count Shows” The Los Angeles Times: An Interactive Map of Homelessness in L.A. County (2015) Mela Megat in The Highlander: “UCR Takes Steps to End Food Insecurity Among Students” Rosanna Xia in The Los Angeles Times: “1 in 10 of Cal State Students Are Homeless, Study Finds” Matthew Snyder's Darkly-Lit Snark: "O Great: Amber Alert for the Homeless" Ken Ilgunas, Duke University Student: Walden on Wheels: On The Open Road from Debt to Freedom The New York Times' Feature Article on Ken Ilgunas: “When Home Is a Parking Lot” Twitter Page Dedicated to Millennials' Experiments with #Vanlife Part II of Matthew Snyder's Darkly-Lit Snark: "Make Millennial Poverty Hip Again" Wikipedia's Historical Overview of the “Rent Is Too Damn High Party” Wikipedia's Biography on the Founder of the “Rent Is Too Damn High Party,” Jimmy McMillan: “An American political activist, perennial candidate, karate expert, and Vietnam War veteran, as well as a former postal worker, stripper and private investigator from Brooklyn, New York.” Percentage of Rent-controlled Homes in Los Angeles City The Guardian's Major Reveal: the Panama Papers and the Explosive Investments (by Wealth-Squatters) Discovered in the Big City Real Estate Market of London Varying LA City Propositions to Deal with Both Housing and Homelessness: The Los Angeles Times' Editorial Board and Their Op-Ed Against Measure S The Los Angeles Times' Editorial Board's and Their Support for Measure H The Los Angeles Times' Explores Measure S Versus Measure H Joshua Bregman's June 1st, 2017 Facebook Post on LA's Housing Crisis: “This is one of the bluest cities in one of the bluest states in the country. This place is run by Democrats and has been since forever. This has nothing to do with Republicans or Trump. We've got high-rise luxury condos sprouting up all over Downtown that no one actually lives in. Massive gleaming skyscrapers sitting there empty while more and more people are forced out of doors. This is a disaster. I've been to developing countries that have less people living on the streets than the second-largest city in the wealthiest country in the world. So here's a proposal: how about not another goddamn viral clip, or tweet or magazine cover or open letter or vacuous emission of another goddamn celebrity or late-night comedian or entertainment industry luminary talking about Trump or Russia or “backwards ignorant America that votes against its own self-interest” or cracking jokes about the racist, sexist rubes that live out in the sticks until this shit is fixed? Do you seriously think this shit is not racist and sexist? How about not getting to be in the 1%, or even the 10%, to drive past literal tent-encampments on your way to work, to step over the dispossessed just moments before they turn on your spotlight and soundcheck your mic, and have a goddamn thing you have to say about politics and society get listened to? How about not getting to publicly opine about national, much less geo-politics until you can figure out how your own city council works and you drag your camera crews to right outside your studio doors and show the world what's going on in America in 2017, in one of the "strongholds" of "the resistance"? How about that?” How Police and Firefighter Unions Take Precedence Over City Housing Budgets The Los Angeles Times: Housing Developers Own City Councils Via Campaign Donations, But That Should End Excerpt from Jake Halpern's Fame Junkies: How Martha Stewart's Insider-Trading Scandal (130 minutes) Dwarfed the Coverage of the War in Darfur (26 minutes)    UN Report (2005): A Shocking 100 Million People Are Homeless in the World & Over 1 Billion Humans Face Inadequate Shelter Slate Magazine: How, in 2005, the Bush Administration Made Student-Debt Forgiveness Nearly Impossible (*Hint: Banks Lobbied Politicians) Vice: American Students, Debt Ridden, Now Flee to Europe to Avoid Loan Repayments Powerful Youtube Clip from 99 Homes -- Michael Shannon Spits Out the Truth to Andrew Garfield About How America “Always Bails Out the Winners” Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes: A Film About the US Recession and Its Epic Housing Foreclosure Crisis The Big Short: Michael Lewis' 2011 Book & Its Later 2015 Film Adaptation Background on the NINJA (or NINA) Loans: “Non Income No Asset” How the Repeal of the Glass Steagall Act Magnified the Great Recession's Reach Why Infrastructure Is Equivalent to Shelter: Its Benefits to Slum-Dwellings Clothing as Shelter Time Magazine: “Japan's Earthquake and Tsunami Warning System Explained” California Senate Leader, Kevin de Leon, Calls California the 5th Largest Economy After Britain's Brexit Vote The 2017 ASCE Infrastructure Report Card - America's Cumulative GPA Is Once Again a D+ An MIT Study, By Economist Peter Temin, Says America Has Devolved into a Developing Nation Instead of Looking More Like Europe's Infrastructure Peter Temin's The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy America's Stunning Incarceration Rates: The United States Has 25% of the World's Total Prison Population Even Though the U.S. Only Makes Up 5% of World's Human Population Jake Blumgart in Slate Magazine: “How Bernie Sanders Made Burlington Affordable” The National Community Land Trust Network: FAQ - What Is a Community Land Trust? There Are Over 250 Community Land Trusts (CLTs) in America The Common Good Podcast: “Episode 8: Community. Land. Trust” (Interview with Two Key Players in San Diego's First Land Trust Association) -{Matthew Snyder's Essay on “The Circle-Jerk of Gentrification” (Forthcoming!)}- The Village Voice: “National Punch a Hipster Is Tomorrow, Apparently” Peter Frase in Jacobin Magazine: “Resenting Hipsters” Tyrone Beason in The Seattle Times: “Seattle's Vanishing Black Community” The Los Angeles Times' Long, Heart-Rending Feature Article on San Bernardino's Crumbling Housing Sectors The Guardian at Cannes: The Riveting Feature Film Premiere of Sean Baker's The Florida Project Why Public-Private Partnerships So Often Fail Director Roko Belic's Documentary Happy Youtube Excerpt From the Documentary Happy, Which Explores the Powerful Benefits of the Danish Co-Housing Model UCR Housing: It's Rich, Beautiful History and Its Tragic & Barbaric Closing Maureen Dowd, from The New York Times, Complains About Student Dormers Self-Selecting Roommates: “Don't Send in the Clones” Other Supplementary Facts and Sources Concerning Shelter: HUD: The 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress NOVEMBER 2016: 549,928 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States. As of September 8th, 2016 — ATTOM Data Solutions, the nation's leading source for comprehensive housing data and the new parent company of RealtyTrac, today released its Q3 2016 U.S. Residential Property Vacancy and Zombie Foreclosure Report, which shows nearly 1.4 million (1,361,188) U.S. residential properties (1 to 4 units) representing 1.6 percent of all residential properties were vacant as of the end of the third quarter. On the Streets: A 12-part video series about homelessness in Southern California--with one of the stories involving a UCLA Grad student living in a car. HERE'S WHAT AN AVERAGE APARTMENT COSTS IN 50 U.S. CITIES Averages from all 50 cities on the list: Median rent for 1-bedroom apartment: $1,234.43 Square footage of 1-bedroom apartment: 678.32 square feet San Francisco, California $3600 San Jose, California $2536 New York, New York $2200 Washington, DC $2172 Boston, Massachusetts $2025 Los Angeles, California $2014 Miami, Florida $2000 ON CO-HOUSING COMMUNITIES: The Kalkbreite cooperative in Zurich suggests how co-ops will become a viable housing option for the 21st century. How Cohousing Communities Help Prevent Social Isolation.

For this week's episode, Matt & Jesse transition away from talking about which man-made myths must be stripped out from the the mixtape for the future (“The Poison Pyramid”) or what should just be ignored while they haplessly spiral in the drain (“The Circle”). Instead, our co-hosts will introduce a new idea-shape “The Golden Square,” which is comprised of the four most essential tracks in our shared mixtape for the future. All too often, the notion of rights in nation-states don't acknowledge the fundamental requirements of a just society, but our Golden Square is composed of four tracks that are essential for our shared future. The first fundamental and most immediate cornerstone of this square, and one we would be hard-pressed to ignore is the universal right to food. Mentioned on this episode: Racial & Economic Divides in D.C. Grocery Stores David Love & Vijay Das in Civil Eats: “America's Food Deserts Need Community Efforts, Not Big Box Stores” Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Difference Between Positive and Negative Rights The Difference Between Positive and Negative Liberty Abraham Maslow and his Hierarchy of Needs The Life & Work of the Social & Political Theorist Isaiah Berlin A Historical Overview of the U.S. Military Budget: 600 Billion & Counting How America Went from the Gold Standard to Becoming a Fiat Currency David Graeber's Debt: A 5,000 Year History Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel James Durston in CNN: “Airline ‘Fat Tax': Should Heavy Passengers Pay More?” Disneyland Had to Revamp It's a Small World Boats for Heavier Passengers Anohni's Belief in Wicca, Feminism and Obama's Drone Presidency Half of all US food produce is thrown away, new research suggests Food Loss and Waste in the US: The Science Behind the Supply Chain These 10 companies make a lot of the food we buy. Corn Flakes Were Part of an Anti-Masturbation Crusade Scientific Studies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Replication crisis José Bové vs. McDonald's Livestock and Climate Change California's Drought — Who's Really Using all the Water? Cowspiracy a film by Kip Anderson Veganism & The Environment: by the numbers Playing God in the Garden By Michael Pollan 7-Day Juice Challenge Forks Over Knives Food, Inc.

In the sixth episode of The Future Is a Mixtape, Jesse & Matt break out of their self-imposed duo-igloo and bring forth two friends far more adept at exploring the miraculous and shocking rise of Jeremy Corbyn in British politics: 1) Alex Biancardi, a dual British-American citizen who is an instructor of Political Science; and 2) Joshua Bregman, a “former American ex-pat” who was a film student in Britain during both the heady turbulence of the college-tuition protests and David Cameron's vicious austerity measures. Before Corbyn's rise, Tony Blair's ‘New' Labour had been melting in membership and participation after “Bush's Poodle” went into retirement; and, in turn, the Labour Party's center-left mildew of “capitalism with a happy face” had repeatedly failed to inspire a broad cross-section of a detached public, who spit-out in anger and voted for Brexit anyways. It was also a nation that was increasingly fragmented by class, race, religion and civic apathy. So who is Jeremy Corbyn and how did he reverse the Zombie-stasis of UK politics? What series of odd accidents and openings lead him into a position of power and acclaim, which now threatens the 40-year reign of Thatcherism and TINA (There Is No Alternative) -- the two seedbeds of which sprouted forth from an undying belief that markets will solve everything? So what is the DUP and why is Theresa May still clinging onto her Prime Minister position when the Tories lack the outright majority to implement their Voldemort manifesto? And how might Labour cross the MP-threshold to become the majority party, creating a space for another, more successful election that pushes Corbyn into May's residence at #10 Downing Street? From listening to our first guests, Alex and Josh, we hope you'll learn why UK's Snap election has created the most exciting opening for socialism The West-left has seen in several decades.Mentioned in this episode: Jeremy Corbyn's Majestic Glastonbury Speech at the Pyramid Stage The Guardian's Pass the Notes: “Run the Jez! The Hip-Hop Duo Playing Glastonbury with Corbyn” DJ Closes Last Hour of Glastonbury 2017 With Techno Remix of Corbyn's Speech Novara Radio: "Building a New Media for A Different Kind of Politics"The United Kingdom Student Protests in 2010Richard Seymour's Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso Press)Novara Radio's James Butler Interviews Richard Seymour's Verso BookJacobin Radio - The Dig: Richard Seymour: Under Corbyn, Labour's Got Momentum Joshua Bregman's Comments About Our Sweet Childhood Naïveté in How We Imagined Politics Should Function: Schoolhouse Rock - “How a Bill Becomes a Law” David Graeber's Brilliantly Incisive Article “Despair Fatigue” in The BafflerStagflation During the Jimmy Carter Presidency & “A Short History of Neoliberalism (And How We Can Fix It)”Jeremy Corbyn Offers Jam from His Allotment (Garden) to the TV Co-Hosts from OneShowYouTube Video of “Jeremy Corbyn Through the Ages” & Saying the Same Things With Moral Consistency and PassionYouTube of “Bernie Sanders - Through the Years” & Being Morally ConsistentVanity Fair's Article: “Nigel Farage, International Man of Mystery, Finds a Home in Trump's America”Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation (BBC Documentary)Musician & Producer Brian Eno in the Guardian: U.S. Versus Soviet Propaganda: “Lessons in How to Lie About Iraq”Alex Biancardi: “UK Parliamentary System Is Situation Where the US Legislative and Executive Branches Are Fused” Britain's House of Lords Could Be Stripped of Hereditary Members (2007)House of Lords Votes to Protect Rights of EU Citizens After BrexitSue Richards in The Guardian: “The Government Is Trying to Privatize the NHS Through Back Door Regulations”Tony Blair & New Labour Reinstitute Tuition Fees in Britain: A History Grants, Loans and Tuition Fees: A Timeline of How University Funding Has Evolved Current Student Visas to Expire and Immediately Be ShortenedWarwick University Students Accuse Police of Attacking Tuition Fee ProtestDavid Harvey's Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution Politico: “From Cairo to Madison, Some Pizza” (2/20/2011) Nick Clegg Promised No Tuition But Raised It After Joining Coalition with Tories Jerry Useem's The Atlantic Article: “Power Causes Brain Damage” Branko Marcetic's Article in Jacobin: “A History of Sabotaging Jeremy Corbyn” A Case Study: BBC's ‘Trumped Up' Accusations of Jeremy Corbyn Being Anti-Semitic The Right-Wing Billionaire Press and Their Smear Campaigns on Eve of Election Equal and Fair Coverage of Both Candidates Found in BBC's Impartiality Policy The 1996 Telecommunications Act That Killed ‘Fair & Balanced' in American Media Owen Jones on Twitter: “Labour Costed Their Manifesto. The Only Policy the Tories Have Costed Is 7p Per Pupil for Breakfast.” Joshua Bregman: “Theresa May Had to Reverse Her “Dementia Tax,” Which Made Her Look Wishy-Washy.” HARD BREXXXIT - Porn Parody by Directed Amory Peart for Television X (Of Which Alex Biancardi Professes to HAVE NEVER SEEN or Have BREATHED IN . . .) "Jeremy Corbyn's Dank Meme Stash” on Facebook "Depressed Vegetarians for Corbyn” on Facebook “Jeremy Corbyn Photoshopped into Appropriate Situations” on Facebook The Guardian: #grime4Corbyn - Why British MCs Are Uniting Behind the Labour Party Leader Photo of Jeremy Corbyn Being Arrested for Anti-Apartheid Actions Jeremy Corbyn Tells Why He Was Proud to Be Arrested for Anti-Apartheid Protest Bruce A. Dixon's Black Agenda Report: “Is It Time to Revoke John Lewis's Lifetime Civil Rights Hero Pass?" Bernie Sanders x Killer Mike (Run the Jewels) Interview: #FeelTheBern Barack Obama's Reveals His (Focus-Group-Managed) iPod Playlist The Labour Party's Majestic, Moving and Brilliantly Designed Manifesto 2017 Labour's “Shadow Manifesto” - Alternative Models of Ownership The Conservative Party's Awful, Badly Designed and Morally Depraved Voldemort Manifesto 2017 The Times Literary Supplement: The Biggest Party Vote Shift Since 1945: “Corbyn: Shifting the Possible” In Closing & On YouTube: “OH, JEREMY CORBYN” (White Stripes' “Seven Nation Army” 2hr Continuous Mix)

In this fifth episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse discuss Peter Frase's diaphanous, compact and idea-drenched work of “Social Science Fiction,” which revs up & rides out to the sweet page-count of 150 pages, and contains far more ideas than most books three-times its size (ahem, The Circle). Frase's nonfiction book, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, argues that there are actually four possible futures for humanity. The book accomplishes this task, ingeniously so, by threading together science fiction novels as well as marxist and futurist theories to see what aspects will appear in these futures, and how they might overlap or build off one another. The author doesn't simply re-shuffle the easy card-deck of the Star Trek versus The Matrix techno-binary--that Yanis Varoufakis and other activist-thinkers often cite as the only two techno-futures available. Instead, Peter Frase offers up four possible futures: Communism, Rentism, Socialism and Exterminism. And by coordinating these “ideal types” upon the axis points of equity vs hierarchy and abundance vs scarcity, the author illuminates what these four futures are likely to give us.   Mentioned on this episode:   How Captain Picard Likes His Nightcap: “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”   And When Captain Picard Gets Communist-Crazy: The Earl Tea Techno Remix   Peter Frase's Four Futures: Life After Capitalism   Matthew Snyder's Apologia Pro Vita: Verso Book Series (Correction - ABCs of Socialism Is NOT Part of the Series)   Peter Frase's Original Jacobin Essay that Became the Basis for His Debut Non-fiction Work, Four Futures: “One Thing Is Certain Of Is That Capitalism Will End”   Verso Book Talk with Peter Frase and Alyssa Battistoni Filmed in Brooklyn, NY Four Futures: Four Original Novellas of Science Fiction - As Suggested by Isaac Asimov Who Prods SF Authors to Detail Four Possible Futures to Overpopulation Jedediah Purdy's “The Art of the Possible: Peter Frase's Four Futures” in the Los Angeles Review of Books   Essays and Books on Doom/Paradise Future of Automation:   “The Robot Invasion” by Farhad Manjoo Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee "Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us?" by Kevin Drum Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford EXTERMINISM: Hierarchy & Scarcity:   Neill Blomkamp's 2013 SF film, Elysium Bong Joon-Ho's 2014 Sci-Fi Traintopia: Snowpiercer   Paolo Bacigalupi's Dystopian Science Fiction Novel: The Windup Girl   RENTISM: Hierarchy & Abundance:   Charles Stross' Science Fiction Novel: Accelerando   Philip K. Dick's Legendary SF Novel: Ubik   Open Source Ecology: “Open Source Philosophy” - Video Presentation   Open Source Ecology - Machines: Global Village Construction Set   SOCIALISM: Equality & Scarcity:   Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) by Kim Stanley Robinson   Mars Trilogy Book Series by Kim Stanley Robinson   Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit   The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin   Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy   Wanuri Kahiu's Brilliant SF Short, Pumzi   COMMUNISM: Equality & Abundance   Bad Trope-Texts About the End-of-Work: Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano; Pixar's Wall-E and E.M Forster's The Machine Stops (the latter work is a novella that's not only influenced Wall-E, but it's become the prophetic basis for most dystopian views on non-work and technology)   Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom   Cory Doctorow's Essay in Locus Magazine: “Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies”   Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Original Series   Picard's Spaceship That Makes His Secret Hot Tea: Star Trek: The Next Generation   Episode Outro: Captain Picard in Star Trek: “Money Doesn't Exist in the Future”

On this episode, Jesse & Matt discuss the mucky-malarkey of Dave Eggers' 2013 “satire” (?) of Silicon Valley: The Circle. While this podcast will focus on Eggers' conscious intentions and unconscious outcomes of his novel, some discussion will also be meted out on The Circle's even more miserable film-adaptation of the same name, featuring Tom Hanks, Emma Watson and John Boyega. Matthew will also explore the movie's unsettling “Fear of a Black Cock,” and what that says about the film's lack of awareness. Lastly, the co-hosts will illustrate why this science fictional novel is an easy signifier for contemporary art's failure to imagine possible utopias.   Mentioned In This Episode:Dave Eggers' The Circle   James Pondsoldt's Film Adaptation of The Circle   Wired's Review of Dave Eggers' “The Circle: What the Internet Looks Like If You Don't Understand It”Gawker's Review: “Circle Jerks: Why Do Editors Love Dave Eggers?”   Reuters' Review of The Circle: “How Dave Eggers Gets Silicon Valley Wrong”   Jessica Winter's Slate Review of The Circle: “All That Happens Must Be Known”M.T. Anderson's Young Adult SF Masterpiece: Feed   Gary Shteyngart's Masterful (& Better Researched) SF Novel: Super Sad True Love Story   SF Author Neal Stephenson's Landmark Essay in Wired: “Innovation Starvation”   Project Hieroglyph   Hieroglyph Anthology: Stories and Visions for a Better Future   Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887   Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed   Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next

On this episode, Jesse makes the case that the third point of “The Poison Pyramid,” which should be readily designated for the dumpster, is the worship of the Celebrity. Matthew makes the case that this is just a shiny, distracting feather to something that rides upon a much larger, deeper and more worrisome creature.   Mentioned In This Episode: Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82 - Obituary by The New York Times “How a 94-Year-Old Genius May Save the Planet” - Newsweek: David Shield's Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity Ty Burr's Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame   The Strange Power Of Celebrity - Tom Ashbrook's On Point Featuring Ty Burr Thomas Schatz's The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era   Paul McDonald's Star System: Hollywood's Production of Popular Identities   “Clown Genius” - Scott Adam's Blog   "How Dilbert's Scott Adams Got Hypnotized by Trump" - BloombergBusinessweek On Matt's Comments About How “Trump Rick-Rolled the Nation,” Here Is How Rick Astley Got Rick-Rolled Himself: “Rick Astley on the First Time He Was Rick-Rolled: "I Kept Thinking, 'What Is This Idiot Doing?'" - People Magazine Tim Heidecker with Adam Curtis and How Trump Operates as a Click-Monster Jake Halperin Commentary on NPR: Tom and Katie, Zeus and Hera: David Giles' Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity Don DeLillo's Mao II: A Novel “How Much Do We Love TV? Let Us Count the Ways” - New York Times: “Americans Check Their Phones 8 Billion Times Per Day” - Time Magazine Who Said It: Presidential Hopeful Donald Trump or ‘Idiocracy' President Camacho? - Jason Bailey's Flavorwire   Idiocracy star Terry Crews will reprise his role as President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in a series of ads targeting current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Buzzfeed reported. John Lennon's Comments on The Beatles Being "More Popular than Jesus" Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success Excerpt from David Foster Wallace's Commencment Address at Kenyon College in 2005: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion About Living a Compassionate Life:   Little Brown and Company's Book Printing of David Foster Wallace's This Is Water   “Here Is the Scandalous Father John Misty Interview You've Been Waiting For” - Pitchfork Magazine   Father John Misty and Zane Lowe go in-depth on his new album, Pure Comedy. - Interview on Youtube Genius prodigy-pianists are becoming all-too-common: “Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen” - New York Times

This week, Matt & Jesse discuss the second point on “The Poison Pyramid” -- namely the horror-show of Capitalism, and why it's an awful idea that we should refuse to carry with us into our much-deserved future.   Mentioned In This Episode:   David Graeber's Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit David Graeber's On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time   A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster - a Nonfiction Book by Rebecca Solnit Rebecca Solnit's Essay: When Media Is the Disaster: Covering HaitiBen Ehrenreich's Essay: Why Did U.S. Aid Focus on Securing Haiti Rather Than Helping Haitians? One Nation Under God - A Nonfiction Book by Kevin M. Kruse How 'One Nation' Didn't Become 'Under God' Until The '50s Religious Revival - an Interview with Kevin M. Kruse for NPR's Fresh Air The Corporation   Barbara Ehrenreich's Comments About Why Marx Would Be Shocked Over Capitalism's Ability to Create Scarcity Rather Than Its Promised Post-Scarcity   OXFAM: An economy for the 99 percent   The world's eight wealthiest people   Mark Zuckerberg is Giving Away His Money, but With a Twist by Fortune Magazine's Mathew Ingram YouTube Playlist: Capitalism   David Suzuki's YouTube Video on Capitalism's Savage Externalities   Anohni's Song - “4 Degrees” From Her Gorgeous & Ferocious Album Hopelessness   James Lovelock, the Prophet - Eminent scientist says global warming is irreversible - and over 6 billion people will perish at the end of the century Parecon: Life After Capitalism by Michael Albert

For the debut episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse introduce the concept of “The Poison Pyramid” -- an idea-shape composed of three very bad ideas that shouldn't be part of humanity's shared future. The discussion tackles the first of these bad ideas: Religion.   Mentioned on this episode:   “You know what's cool… a billion dollars”     Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity by R. Buckminster Fuller   Utopia by Thomas More   Saving Spaceship Earth By Matthew Snyder   Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future   HyperNormalization by Adam Curtis   Kim Stanley Robinson says Elon Musk's Mars plan is a "1920s science-fiction cliché"   Cell Phones And Flying · Louis C.K.   “The Four Horsemen”   “An Evening with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris” in Glendale, California   On Orientalism by Edward Said   Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Godless Parents Are Doing a Better Job by Tracy Moore