The Utility of Podcasting
In 2017 I was visiting a friend in New York City and he told me he had tickets to a live recording of a podcast. Seemed like kind of a weird thing to be interested in, but why not. On another day we actually also went to see the Upright Citizen’s Brigade and they made fun of the prompt I shouted out, so between the two I guess I liked the podcast thing better. So let’s think back to then: I sat down for a show one evening in Brooklyn and I saw Chapo Trap House live. I had never heard of them before. This picture was taken at the show, episode number 104.
I didn’t really get it. The jokes kind of flew over my head, but about a year later I realized I was listening to the show pretty frequently. They were upset about the same things I was, and it felt good to know I wasn’t the only one. But is being upset all I can really do?
This year, as Bernie Sanders looked like he was going to sweep the democratic primaries heading into Nevada (ha ha) I started feeling very encouraged to pay even closer attention to politics. I watched Hasan Piker talk over the news commentary as Sanders demolished the competition in the Nevada Caucus. It felt so good I started watching him every day. I had become able to name a lot of the of the people who worked at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and some of the news networks, and I had very bad opinions of most of them. Jennifer Rubin, Bret Stephens, Chris Matthews. I also knew about a lot of the people running america’s political campaigns from behind the scenes. David Sirota and Briahna Joy Gray I liked (and still like), Symone Sanders and Charlotte Clymer I did not.
Then we were all reminded that the existing powers actually are capable of making things happen, so long as those things are bad for the majority of people. To this day the endgame continues to accelerate, but I digress. Fresh into coronavirus lockdown I had sort of lost the ability to work productively and spent several weeks barely eating or sleeping. I was doing one thing, which is an extremely bad choice for an extremely bad coping mechanism: I read the news and listened to as many leftist podcasts as I could. I was begging the universe for one more night like Nevada. Matt Christman had started doing these bizarre live streams on Twitch.tv and I had watched them basically every day he did them. I deeply believe that in a hundred years, they will be an invaluable primary source for anyone who wants to study the american left in this portion of history. He makes great points in lots of them, but he is also visibly on drugs for many of them. The Cushvlogs, as he calls them, are proof that just because you recognize your own insanity, you aren’t cured of it.
Matt Christman is a coward. He even admits it sometimes! Once he said on stream that he would have run for president in 2016 but he was too scared that he would come off as a moron. Interestingly, he also said that due to a recent revelation he definitely wasn’t afraid anymore, and would not be above running again if the need presented itself. That’s the thing about Matt in the year 2020: he keeps having wild, deep personal revelations about why the world is the way it is, but they always seem to lead him once again to the conclusion that all we can do is wait. Well, disagreed motherfucker! Do as much LSD or cocaine or whatever as it takes to convince yourself to be as confident as you actually need to be right now, because it’s time to actually do something; this is not one of your dumb-ass “look around you with the material conditions you have to work with, but I don’t know you so I can’t tell you what to do specifically” situations. You have a responsibility (and by ‘you’ here I also mean the girl reading this). No more grilling.
On the day of the election some pretty interesting things happened. For one, California’s Proposition 22 passed without any real difficulty. This was probably more important for the future of the United States than the actual choice of who would be president. The effect of this ballot measure was to enshrine the gig economy as being virtually impossible to eliminate through legal means. The California state house of representatives would need a seven-eighths majority to nullify it. Workers were coerced and tricked into supporting it. This was a knife up the dick of the working class, and I promise it will be coming to where you live too. If your job is at all precarious, then you should be scared.
The second interesting thing that happened was that I got to go on a Twitch stream in front of maybe 200 people and talk about what I was seeing. When I saw 22 pass I speculated that this was the beginning of a new mode of production, one step darker than even capitalism. I am scared that to the ruling class, human suffering is becoming more valuable than money. And, well, that is kind of an interesting and worthwhile thought, but after expressing it I realized that it also doesn’t really affect the left’s strategy for the future. We still have too little time to do too much work in the face of a hegemony that refuses to let us do anything about it anyway.
The third interesting thing that happened was that Matt Christman had another revelation. Due to the limitations of Medium I need to ask you to skip to 1:35:30 in the video below, and watch for a few minutes.
The revelation was that Matt now sees himself as an unwitting grifter, in his own words. He also feels he may as well continue with the grift because it’s better than a real job! I could continue to talk about matt’s view of his own place in society and how he mistakenly says he views himself as an artisan instead of what he really is, which is a gig worker for Patreon. His cowardice is really just obvious here: if he were part of the working class he would have to do something, but since he’s escaped into artisanship he’s helpless and somebody else will have to do the hard work. So, if you work in media as a leftist, don’t make Matt Christman’s mistake. And for the record, he has really called himself an artisan and not a member of the working class.
Actually, merely not making mistakes is not enough for 2020 and the coming end of the world. Unfortunately, if you work in media as a leftist you have a lot more responsibility than that. You, the girl reading this, are responsible for manufacturing consent for an absolutely necessary material change in politics. It is not enough to describe what is happening in the world; you must explicitly make prescriptions for what to do whenever possible, and say directly when you do not know what prescription to make. If this means telling people to donate to one fund or another, fine. If this means saying that a specific person needs to do a specific thing, also fine. This needs to become so fundamental a part of the leftist media ethos that the whole formula for everything we talk about needs to be augmented. On every issue, we must conclude with a prescription. If there is no prescription or excuse for the lack of one in a piece, we must ignore that piece until one is appended, and constantly be proposing our own prescriptions. The establishment has the luxury of separating the jobs of prescription and description, because they have think tanks in addition to a media apparatus, but we do not have enough people or money for that. It is not enough to say that things are bad because of x, y, and z. It is not enough to say that things are actually not so bad because of x, y, and z. In all cases you must prescribe a solution until things are good. Do not just describe the world. Tell people what to do. I promise with all my heart that they are listening.
So, the previous paragraph is my prescription. To end this piece, let me just paint a picture of a strategy we might be able to enact if we actually come to terms with the potential of this method. Imagine that I am a leftist podcast, and my show comes to the (correct) conclusion that the democratic party must be destroyed (which I will likely come back to in a later piece). The prescription that I, personally, would give is as follows: we need to convince the leftmost Democrats to separate and form their own party. How might we do that? Well, since we are in the lucky position that those democrats are the only people who will listen to popular outcry, we start a campaign to make them leave the party. We ask, how can you condone the party of the rapist Biden, the oligarchs Pelosi and Feinstein, the officer Harris, the murderer Obama, and the arch-neoliberal Clintons? What are you doing, helping these absolute wraiths after you already know you can win your own votes despite them? Ilhan Omar needs to know we see this contradiction. AOC needs to know it. Pramila Jayapal needs to know it. Jamaal Bowman needs to… well, he needs to stop being anti-BDS first, but then he needs to learn this lesson too! Lower down, Nithya Raman also needs to know it. Everyone does. You can switch parties. It is allowed. The world will not collapse and as long as you remain attached to this horrifying mass of human garbage it will suck the lifeforce out of everything you fight for. Let go. The left will help your ground game in 2022 and 2024, but you need to move now. And beyond that, even if we lose, we will emerge with a vanguard ready for something more than electoral politics, because to defeat us the enemy will have to make it absolutely clear to the world that they will not let us win an election.
