Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / Pill Pod 20 - Fak News

Transcript

Pill Pod 20 - Fak News · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:06
  I made a piece of shit. It's the Evil serie. The Zoom serie
• 0:15
  is being recorded. I actually asked Google the other day if she was male
• 0:19
  or female, and she said she has no gender. That I asked her
• 0:22
  she loved me and she said, yes, weird. So yeah, they're
• 0:26
  pretty fun to talk to you. She loves you for having bought her as
• 0:29
  a product. I take care of her, okay. I provide her with
• 0:33
  power and electricity that I pay for. You know, I'm her daddy and
• 0:36
  her lover series got that will to power all right. Today, I mean
• 0:43
  we're gonna we're shooting this ship a little bit here, ye, listeners,
• 0:47
  because we've done some heavy, heavy recent episodes, real deep dives into a
• 0:53
  particular theorist, and we're gonna do I think Heiderger next. And I've I've
• 0:58
  been listening back to our our old uh or are some of our old episodes,
• 1:02
  and we always say we're just gonna do this philosopher. It's weird that
• 1:07
  discussing a theorist is just the active verb, but you do. Yeah,
• 1:14
  It's it's kind of like a not the deep dive approach, but the sort
• 1:19
  of broad reading approach. I guess I don't know. Others do deeper dives
• 1:23
  on specific topics too, so that's interesting. But this might also be like
• 1:29
  a male centric perspective. But to me, a deep dive into someone sounds
• 1:33
  just as sexual as like we're going to do them, if you know what
• 1:34
  I mean, heterosexual maletive. Just in general, from the perspective of like
• 1:41
  media, it does seem like when people talk about like something episodic, they'll
• 1:44
  usually say, oh, yeah, we're gonna be doing that next, or
• 1:46
  you might say, like, we're going to cover that person also, but
• 1:49
  but yeah, we do tend to use the do cover sounds a lot more
• 1:53
  maternal maybe, but it's true, like I like, I don't think I'm
• 1:57
  maybe some of us have even said that without noticing, right, like we'll
• 2:00
  cover Heideger next or something. I don't know. Yeah, well Deluz did
• 2:06
  say that. It's like it's one big ass fuck. Anyway, there you
• 2:09
  go. He does literally do philosophers, or he thinks he does, and
• 2:15
  then they give anal birth to some kind of new concept. I think if
• 2:19
  anyone has a claim to doing other philosophers, it's Daria and Deluz. They
• 2:24
  always point out how sexual all our languages anyway like concept and conception, childbirth
• 2:30
  and having an idea ero I, understanding semiotics, semen dissemination. I mean,
• 2:37
  in some ways, there's a long history to this if you think back
• 2:39
  to the symposium, which is basically like, hey, you know, me
• 2:44
  and the boys, we're gonna get together, We're gonna have some wine,
• 2:46
  we're gonna talk about philosophies, and we're all gonna fuck at the end of
• 2:47
  it. Right, So, before anyone turns this episode off, the title
• 2:55
  is fact News, And we've been talking about a lot of news lately between
• 3:00
  us on our multiple platforms, on our writing, our streaming, and this.
• 3:09
  I think we can start by talking about the news, because there's some
• 3:12
  out there. But just in case you want to turn this off because you're
• 3:15
  tired of the news, I think most of this episode is going to be
• 3:20
  dedicated to an analysis of the term news from of course, a theory perspective.
• 3:24
  So rather than doing a deep dive, we are doing a topical episode
• 3:30
  on what is the news if we're gonna theorize about it. So let's do
• 3:35
  news boys. Well, I mean, there's obviously a lot going on.
• 3:38
  We did our live stream and at that time when we did our live stream.
• 3:43
  I don't think we really like knew the outcome, so I guess and
• 3:45
  maybe we don't. We still don't know the outcome. And it seems to
• 3:47
  be the thing that's dominating news at least American news that and I guess like
• 3:52
  rises in COVID, but I mean, it seems like Joe Biden won.
• 3:55
  So I don't know. If I'll just mention that to get it out of
• 3:58
  the way, hopefully that remains true. Well, we got some Canadian news
• 4:01
  too that Eric was ranting about in the discord. Yeah, yeah, Eric,
• 4:06
  why don't you explain that to us? Well, first of all,
• 4:14
  Remembrance Day is coming up? Is it? Is it coming up? It
• 4:17
  was yesterday? It was yesterday? Man? Is that an American holiday also?
• 4:23
  Or they have something else they have, like is it Veterans Day there?
• 4:26
  And they don't wear poppies the way we do. Oh so, okay.
• 4:29
  In Canada, Rememberance Day has already passed, and there's an incident with
• 4:32
  Whole Foods where Whole Foods they they banned their they banned their employees from wearing
• 4:41
  poppies at work, and it caused a big stink in Canadian politics. Conservative
• 4:46
  politics yeah, but even you heard a response from the New Democrats, there's
• 4:53
  a response from the Conservatives, and liberals seem to keep kind of quiet about
• 4:58
  it, but basically of whole food dudes who banned their employees earlier from wearing
• 5:02
  any Black Lives Matter paraphernalia at work, which went virtually unnoticed, and then
• 5:10
  this time around when they banned the poppies, the news went ballistic and they're
• 5:15
  saying they're saying, oh, everyone should be able to wear a poppy at
• 5:18
  work, and they just this was on the basis of of like just uniforms,
• 5:25
  right, and for like non Canadian listeners, the poppy is obviously a
• 5:29
  symbol of like remembering the sacrifice that the troops have given for like World War
• 5:33
  One and World War Two. And it's just a little flower that pins to
• 5:38
  like your shirt. It's like a little it's a tiny, little red flower,
• 5:41
  what probably like two inches in diameter or something like that. I bought
• 5:44
  one actually two days ago at the alcab Yeah, just in Flanders Fields where
• 5:47
  poppies grow something something. Yeah, it's a World War One poem, right,
• 5:56
  And the British also wear a poppy, although their poppy is different listen
• 5:59
  to Leonard Cohen recite that poem and it was genuinely fucking pretty chilling, you
• 6:02
  know what I mean. Yeah, And in Canadian culture it kind of means
• 6:05
  when you wear a poppy, it means that you're remembering the people who sacrifice
• 6:10
  themselves for the country. But there's a little bit of contestation over the narrative
• 6:15
  of whether or not you're supporting the troops and the sort of like military apparatus
• 6:20
  or whether it's a sort of never again type thing where we say, like
• 6:26
  they died in these senseless wars for the masters of war, as the Bob
• 6:30
  Dylan song goes, and that we should be holding the ruling class accountable for
• 6:35
  these these senseless wars they started. So some people have a sort of patriotic
• 6:40
  interpretation of it, and some people have a kind of like never again interpretation.
• 6:45
  But it prompted Forward to write a piece of legislation saying that businesses could
• 6:50
  not ban their employees from wearing poppies, which is great, thanks for that.
• 6:56
  Doug Ford spot Whole Foods, by the Ways, owned by Jeff Betso's
• 7:00
  the richest man in the world. And this is the only intervention into working
• 7:06
  conditions he's made besides the back in March when he wrote legislation saying that you
• 7:13
  could take a week or two off work unpaid if you felt sick. And
• 7:17
  this is the second piece of sort of worker legislation. And what really pissed
• 7:21
  me off is also the NDP response is like Andrea Horweth, the leader of
• 7:26
  the New Democrats, which is our sort of socialist party, is they came
• 7:31
  out. She came out and said like Ford should be allowing workers to wear
• 7:39
  whatever they like at work kind of thing. Like she didn't make it about
• 7:43
  free expression in the workplace, just like people should be able to choose whether
• 7:47
  or not to wear a poppy. So she missed the opportunity to make a
• 7:50
  free expression argument. She missed the opportunity to condemn Betsos and his shitty treatment
• 7:58
  that's well documented of his workers, who's become rich off of and even richer
• 8:03
  since the pandemic started. It's a whole clusterfuck of just stupid, stupid political
• 8:07
  shit. And I just I'm surprised though. I mean, like the NDP
• 8:11
  coalition in all Ontario basically consists of ultra woke intellectuals, artists, various minority
• 8:20
  groups. But then like this is the key one, like blue collar workers,
• 8:22
  right and particularly in heavy industry who tend to be unionized, And that
• 8:28
  last group is probably going to be pretty militantly opposed to any efforts to contradict
• 8:35
  the message of the poppy as they understand it. Yeah, I mean,
• 8:37
  I gotta say I got no problem with this, like like in the sense
• 8:39
  of like I agree like Ford should do more, but like just as an
• 8:43
  isolated act, I feel like I have no problem with him doing that because
• 8:46
  I just hate the idea that private corporations are telling their employees that what they
• 8:52
  can and can't wear. So like, just just even if it makes the
• 8:56
  smallest contribution to erode the power of employers to do that, for it and
• 9:01
  for it if our non American listeners, remember our crack smoking mayor was his
• 9:09
  brother was his brother who's dead. So now his other brother got elected by
• 9:13
  I don't know who, I not just the mayor of Toronto, but the
• 9:16
  Premier of Ontario. Yeah. People thought that he was going to be like
• 9:20
  the Trump of the North, and I got to tell you, it really
• 9:22
  didn't turn out that way. Like, I don't agree with a lot of
• 9:24
  his policies, but I think he's been broadly competent and he has even done
• 9:28
  some He has like pushed some policies that I actually strongly agree with, specifically
• 9:33
  related to transit. I won't bore you with the details, but like,
• 9:35
  yeah, he has a transit plan for Toronto that I really agree with.
• 9:39
  And overall, I thought his response to COVID has been, like, I
• 9:41
  don't know, as good as any other typical politician, Like I don't think
• 9:45
  like it didn't seem at least like at the very least I can say that
• 9:48
  it didn't feel worse. And I also like the fact that he was working
• 9:52
  with the other premiers, working with the federal government even though there are different
• 9:54
  parties, and was just saying yeah, and he even praised them. He
• 9:58
  was like, Justin Trudeau did an amazing job, Christoph Frieland. So like
• 10:01
  I just liked those things, But like do I agree with him? I
• 10:03
  mean, he's a conservative, so like obviously I'm not. Foremostly he is
• 10:07
  a thumb in a suit. That's that's a lot of turd polishing you're doing
• 10:11
  there, And I'm not really for it at all, because he makes this
• 10:15
  intervention into the workplace not to protect workers from shitty working conditions, but to
• 10:20
  say workers, you can wear a poppy. You're not allowed to be told
• 10:26
  not to. I only, And that's like I'm going to make an intervention
• 10:28
  into the workplace. And that's the angle I'm going. Yeah, sure,
• 10:33
  poppies once a year. I was only saying that in the context of like
• 10:37
  people thinking he was going to be like a Trump of the north right,
• 10:39
  Like, obviously I agree that, like he's a typic, but he just
• 10:41
  turned out to be a typical conservative, a typical Canadian conservative. He did
• 10:45
  not seem he did not turn out to be like some weird, populous Trump
• 10:48
  at all. But his his his guarantee to be able to wear these poppies,
• 10:52
  though, is he's framing it as a war on Christmas thing, like
• 10:56
  you have to write Christmas on your Starbucks cup. Well, he took a
• 11:00
  page out of Trump's book recently. I mean he just uh, he just
• 11:05
  fast tracked. Uh, he just he just uh eliminated environmental assessments for building
• 11:11
  in fast track building projects. So for instance, in in near Toronto,
• 11:16
  they're trying to build a factor, not a factory, a warehouse in a
• 11:20
  wetland and the environmental protection groups. We're saying no. And now he's passed
• 11:26
  a bill to say, Okay, you guys have no more power. We
• 11:28
  can fast track these things. So he's taking pages out of Trump's book like
• 11:33
  they are flirting with trump Ism. But now that he's out of office,
• 11:37
  Well, I mean, that's that's a typical that's like a typical conservative playbook
• 11:41
  thing to like to like cut cut regular Like, I don't I don't see
• 11:45
  that as uniquely like, I don't see that as like, oh, this
• 11:46
  is a page out of Trump at all. That's just like conservatives cutting regulation
• 11:50
  to stimulate industry. That's just what they always do. And I was pretty
• 11:54
  much devastated. Is the approach he's actually taken to homelessness in Toronto and some
• 12:00
  of the other big metropolitan areas because a lot of people have been throwing o
• 12:03
  their apartments in their homes because of COVID, and they've been shecking up in
• 12:07
  different parks, usually intense, right, which is pretty worrying when you think
• 12:11
  that's November and so far the weather hasn't quite broken, but it's going too
• 12:15
  soon, right, And the city has been trying to get rid of these
• 12:18
  people, and a lot of advocates for the homeless have said, well,
• 12:22
  where are they supposed to go? Right? You know, they've gone to
• 12:26
  the only place they can and there's not enough room in shelters, and it's
• 12:28
  especially difficult with COVID going on right now, since you don't want to crant
• 12:31
  people into one place. The government has absolutely no sympathy for that, at
• 12:35
  least thus far. I do agree with Victor, though I don't think that
• 12:39
  even that is really all that different than what you'd see from a typical conservative
• 12:41
  in a Canadian mole. Vote for them, hing. There's nothing exceptionally trumpst
• 12:48
  about Doug Ford. He's just a conservative who I disagree with. But did
• 12:52
  Kathleen Win, the previous premiere put those environmental protections in place? Did she
• 12:58
  do that? So if she didn't, then that means they're around during the
• 13:03
  Harper era too, and he didn't. Guys, guys, we're way too
• 13:05
  in the weeds here. We have an international audience. That's all speculation.
• 13:13
  I'm just saying. I'm just saying, like politics, I just think like
• 13:16
  that the trying to link him like just to be like to join the club
• 13:20
  of like, you know, noble authoritarianism and be like, oh, like
• 13:24
  Doug Ford is like our version, Like, no, that's feeble, Like
• 13:26
  he's nothing like them. He's just a conservative. I see Trump deconstructing regulations,
• 13:31
  and now I see Ford deconstructing regulations. I see a similarity there.
• 13:35
  Because environmental regulations are a provincial prerogative in Canada. They are not a federal
• 13:41
  prerogative like they are in the States, which is why we do not have
• 13:43
  big, strong environmental groups up here province. If a provincial guy to book,
• 13:52
  then boom, it's trump Ism light and fuck you if you don't see
• 13:56
  that, because I'm right and you're wrong. I mean, we're just we're
• 14:00
  just disagreeing about what to label the thing. I think we all agree that
• 14:03
  what he's doing on this thing is bad. I agree with that. It's
• 14:07
  more just a question of I don't know, marketing, how like the left
• 14:11
  wants to like brand I don't know, like I think there's a temptation on
• 14:13
  the left to want to like brand things as being like trump Ism or like
• 14:16
  connected to this like global like authoritarian, like like like wave, and I
• 14:22
  just don't see that at all. I don't really see that in Canada much.
• 14:24
  It's just he's just being a shitty conservative and he's deregulating stuff. Yeah,
• 14:28
  i'd say the same thing, like I would never have voted for Andrew
• 14:30
  Scheer last election. Right, was he tromp North? No, it was
• 14:33
  a pretty conventional CPC leader who agitated some moderate social conservative policies and some pretty
• 14:41
  tight fiscal conservative kills. Is shaking his head. He doesn't want to say
• 14:45
  I'm shaking my head because who the fuck knows what CPC is. You think
• 14:48
  Germans know what CPC is. Conservative Party of Canada, Thank you. Yeah,
• 14:52
  I think we can all agree that mad Max Bernier was the real guy
• 14:58
  flirting with Trump style. Oh yeah, and that kind of resoundingly smacked down
• 15:01
  in Canada because we are so diverse. Well we're we're like American politics,
• 15:07
  but with the extreme ends chopped off. Listen, Eric, you will not
• 15:11
  understand the satisfaction I got when the People's Party of Canada was resoundingly rejected by
• 15:15
  the people and Bernie even lost his own writing you know, there was a
• 15:18
  certain satisfaction that I got from that that I wouldn't necessarily call erotic. But
• 15:24
  it wasn't not arotic. I mean, there was a little chub involved in
• 15:26
  that I would say that my feelings of watching Trump lose and squirm is maybe
• 15:31
  borderline erotic. That feels real. Yeah yeah, oh, definitely right.
• 15:33
  I mean, like there was this Jim Carrey sketch where I was sitting there
• 15:37
  and he's playing Biden and he was like, we sit there and we feel
• 15:39
  like we're above this, and the problem with this is that there has to
• 15:43
  be a winner, and uh dsure. I was like, oh, oh
• 15:50
  say it again. Satisfying, very very satisfying, and maybe we should just
• 15:54
  talk about that a little bit in what's happening with I mean the media in
• 15:58
  general, and I mean Trump doing exactly what people sort of feared he was
• 16:02
  doing. I mean, Bernie Sanderws talked about this that like the election would
• 16:06
  the results would be ambiguous because of mail in voting, and then Trump would
• 16:10
  declare victory, right, like I think the night that night, like in
• 16:12
  the middle of probably like I think it was like a two am in the
• 16:15
  morning. He was like, he was like, as far as I'm concerned,
• 16:18
  we did win. And he's like, we're going to go to the
• 16:19
  Supreme Court and it's like rigged. He says all kinds of contradictory shit,
• 16:25
  And like I got to say today, one is basically him saying, like
• 16:27
  all the votes for Republicans are legal, and the votes cast for Democrats where
• 16:33
  they voted for Republicans down ballot, the down ballots account just not the one
• 16:37
  on top of that. I know, it doesn't make any sense. And
• 16:41
  I did see a stat today that's something like forty percent or no, it
• 16:45
  was sixty percent of people who voted for Trump think the results are illegitimate right
• 16:51
  now, which is oh, yeah, well insane. Well did you see
• 16:53
  his Twitter today? I did. He was lashing out at the Department of
• 16:57
  Justice, calling them all traders and lashing out Fox News. Is lashing out
• 17:00
  at Fox News, which I think is a key to getting where he's going
• 17:06
  after he gets kicked out. He's setting himself up for a job at this
• 17:10
  other Newsmax or something like that Newsmax and there's also one America Network or something
• 17:15
  like one. Yeah. He's also he's also flirted with creating what they're provisionally
• 17:18
  calling Trump TV afterwards, which I actually think would probably be what is more
• 17:22
  successful than business ventures, because he set up it, would he probably oh
• 17:27
  yeah, that would make money. He could pay off all his debts,
• 17:30
  his hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, he'll probably buy one of them
• 17:33
  and then just turn it into Trump TV. Politically, he'll be somewhere between
• 17:37
  like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones. I think that's like something rare. No,
• 17:41
  but Alice Jones is definitely smarter than Trump, like and is limb so
• 17:47
  is Rustling. Yeah, they pedal bullshit, but they knowingly pedal bullshit.
• 17:49
  Well, the thing here's actually the interesting thing. I think that that like
• 17:52
  makes Trump actually probably pretty weak on TV as a TV personality with is because
• 17:57
  he doesn't actually have opinions. Like I don't actually think Trump has like strong
• 18:03
  views about anything that is not connected to feeling narcissistically satisfied. So like unless
• 18:07
  he can spin it to be like something about how like look what I did,
• 18:11
  look what I like, I don't think he has opinions about anything,
• 18:14
  whereas like Rush Limbaugh and these other people actually have opinions that are like non
• 18:18
  narcissistically grounded or something like that. That's a really good point. Yeah,
• 18:22
  I mean, if you ever see Trump talk about policy where he's not attacking
• 18:26
  someone else, right, he's pretty boring and low low energy. Dare I
• 18:30
  say, right, It's like yeah, yeah, I mean, like,
• 18:33
  you know, we're not gonna allow socialism in this country. It's gonna be
• 18:34
  the greatest tax plan ever. Any answer he gives is like, it's gonna
• 18:38
  be better. It's gonna be the best. He's like, we're gonna like
• 18:41
  repeal and replace Obamacare with something much better. It's gonna beautiful. It's gonna
• 18:45
  be like a beautiful dance. Like but just go to theme, I will
• 18:48
  say, like I one of the interesting things about this, like the election
• 18:52
  has been how polarized the media reaction has been because there's literally like everyone on
• 18:56
  the spectrum right. There's like far right news sides that are basically like a
• 19:00
  coup is taking place where the Democrats are trying to take over the country.
• 19:03
  We need to rise up and stop it. So like somewhere around the squishy
• 19:07
  middle with like the established networks MSNBC, Fox, where people are variably happy
• 19:11
  about it but more or less willing to accept the consensus to like far left
• 19:15
  media that are basically saying exactly what the far right media is saying, there's
• 19:19
  a coup taking place. But on the other side, right Republicans are trying
• 19:22
  to co op things and they're going to destroy the well. It's interesting about
• 19:26
  like the way these messages get like distributed through online social media. Actually before
• 19:32
  we were taping, when we were talking about Daniel Addison as someone who we
• 19:34
  both follow on Twitter who's kind of got these like right wing like like anti
• 19:40
  liberal views, and he was talking about how somebody I forget, I forget
• 19:44
  who was that tweeted like this, this claim that all these I noticed all
• 19:48
  these right wing commentators retweeting it and being like, look at this, like
• 19:52
  typical like New York Times liberal. And it was like saying something like I
• 19:56
  think his name is Rus. His last name is Rus. I don't know
• 19:59
  if you saw this, Matt, Like he was saying, yeah, just
• 20:02
  for conservatives out there, it's possible for you to be saying factually true things,
• 20:07
  yet they are part of a misinformation campaign and all these and all these
• 20:11
  conservatives were like retweeting it, being like, but all these things are true,
• 20:15
  like totally missing the point. I don't know, at least I didn't
• 20:17
  get it. That was actually what me and Daniel Addison, I think is
• 20:21
  the name we're talking about, because like, like you know, the the
• 20:23
  things can be like, so it's true, for example, that I don't
• 20:26
  know, Bill Barr is opening an investigation into voter fraud, and then it's
• 20:30
  true that maybe like a couple of dead people voted, and it's true that,
• 20:36
  like there's some debate about whether or not the law in Pennsylvania to like
• 20:38
  accept ballots that come in after the election polls close. But all those things
• 20:44
  combined, even though like when you add them all up, add up to
• 20:47
  almost nothing and like at most I don't know, like a few thousand poles
• 20:51
  ballots would be thrown out, but like all those things add up to give
• 20:53
  people a sense like there's all this voter fraud going on. So it's like
• 20:57
  factually true things that contribute. And I don't know why conserv like some conservative
• 21:02
  commentators have been watching are seeing that that observation as being like a slam dunk
• 21:07
  like example of I don't know, like the New York Times elite who are
• 21:11
  like, I don't know, I didn't get it and I didn't get a
• 21:12
  satisfying answer. I think that's a really good, like a point, right,
• 21:15
  And this is something that Trump has been really gifted at when it comes
• 21:18
  to peddling all this kind of bullshit to conservative media because there's usually at least
• 21:23
  a tangential grain of truth in everything that he says, but he'll always touch
• 21:27
  it in such a way that it'll produce certain results in certain kinds of affect
• 21:32
  and a supporters without him ever having to be committed to epistemic consequences or any
• 21:38
  epistemic connotations to his statements. Like he'll say things, which is exactly what's
• 21:42
  going on right now with Ruggiliani, like, well, people are saying that
• 21:47
  fraud is going on, or people have seen fraud going on, or people
• 21:49
  are claiming fraud is going on, and all that might be true. Right.
• 21:53
  It doesn't mean anything has actually happened, but the statement that people are
• 21:59
  claiming it is true. Right. Yeah. And because you kind of create
• 22:03
  so much distance between yourself and what's factually going on in the world in a
• 22:07
  general way, you can always deny any kind of accountability for what it is
• 22:11
  that you're talking about while generating the kind of kind of responses that you want,
• 22:15
  right, Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think I wanted to say
• 22:18
  there's a term I learned for like a couple of weeks ago. Actually,
• 22:22
  I was listening to a podcast this marketer talked about how like, you know,
• 22:26
  one of the tools in the tool belt of marketing, Like they name
• 22:29
  different kinds of campaigns, and then there's one that they call FUD, which
• 22:33
  is fear, uncertainty doubt. Right, It's like it's advertising and messaging that
• 22:37
  is meant to instill as much fear, as much uncertainty, and as much
• 22:41
  doubt as possible. And I mean, I think that this this has been
• 22:45
  a perfect example of that in some ways. And I wonder, I don't
• 22:48
  know, I think that there's like psychologue, there's something like there's interesting psychological
• 22:52
  mechanisms, and I wonder if we could connect it, like what kinds of
• 22:55
  theories we could connect it to, like if it fits in with like Lakenian
• 22:57
  psychoanalysis or other things. Just you know, it does seem like there's a
• 23:02
  there's a there's a kind of I don't know if I want to call it
• 23:03
  a vulnerability or a mechanism insight in the human psyche that is tempted by things
• 23:08
  that instill a sense of fear, uncertainty, doubt versus like nuance and like
• 23:14
  like care. And I don't know, my turn, my turn. We
• 23:19
  are twenty three minutes in. We've covered Canadian news, our opinions on Canadian
• 23:26
  news, We've covered American news, so we can keep talking about that.
• 23:30
  The interruption. The interruption is just to let's move to or at least offer
• 23:37
  a few frames for this, because I think what you're just trying to move
• 23:40
  to what you just offered fear, uncertainty, doubt. My question, like
• 23:45
  to riff off that or to advance that thesis would be, is that the
• 23:48
  function of news, specifically a certain kind of news, and the questions that
• 23:53
  I want to get to in the next forty minutes or so is very specific.
• 24:00
  How does everyone having access to so much news and so many different news
• 24:03
  sources at the same time, how does that change what we thought of as
• 24:08
  something like journalists that take our journalistic integrity those kinds of questions. So if
• 24:14
  you can if you're going to provide examples, fine, but instead of just
• 24:18
  dealing back and forth throwing examples at each other, if you can try to
• 24:21
  frame maybe the psychological effective news, what you think the purpose is. I
• 24:26
  mean, we could go into ideology, we could go to spectacle. So
• 24:29
  I'm going to let it go where it may, but I would like to
• 24:33
  keep this a little bit too. Let's reflect on what the news in general
• 24:37
  does and how it functions. Well, yeah, I mean I think I
• 24:41
  think that like there is a bias in the news towards sensationalism, which is
• 24:47
  I think connected to fear, uncertainty, doubt FUD, because like that is,
• 24:52
  for whatever reason, that's the thing that is more most tempting. And
• 24:56
  you know, I think we could even connected to idio, like in the
• 25:00
  al Theissourian sense, because like, if I recall correctly, it's something like,
• 25:03
  you know, ideology for him is you know, a representation of reality
• 25:07
  at the level of ideas that you know, mystifies or or it conceals much
• 25:11
  of that reality by presenting partial truths as if their whole truths, right,
• 25:15
  And I think that's an another good way of describing what like FUD is doing.
• 25:19
  And I think in general, the media, the news, what's their
• 25:23
  incentive, right, Their incentive is to get viewers, and what are the
• 25:26
  things that are going to get viewers. It's like things that stimulate our basest
• 25:30
  human vulnerabilities, which are things that are like fear, uncertainty, doubt.
• 25:34
  And as soon as you and I think, like the fragmentation of media.
• 25:38
  What some people, like this guy on Twitter that I was talking to,
• 25:41
  Daniel Addison, will say, you know, we call it maybe the fragmentation
• 25:45
  from our elitist, leftist perspective. He calls it the democratization of media,
• 25:49
  right that like all of a sudden, now it's like everybody has access,
• 25:52
  everyone can be a media producer, you know before and actually this is kind
• 25:57
  of an interesting potential, like a historical aberration that like I think the twentieth
• 26:02
  century was a historical aberration, and that there was just a couple of centralized
• 26:06
  people who controlled the meet like the main channels of media, and everybody kind
• 26:11
  of felt like oh NBC, you know CBC in Canada, like all these
• 26:15
  things had some authority. But before that, actually, like I remember being
• 26:19
  reminded, I forget a friend of mine reminded me or showed me that actually,
• 26:23
  like before the twentieth century, media was incredibly fragmented, not to the
• 26:26
  extent now, but like there were all kinds of like openly biased newspapers like
• 26:33
  you know in the seventeenth eighteenth, nineteenth century that we're saying, like basically
• 26:37
  propaganda for one side or the other. And I think in some ways we're
• 26:40
  maybe seeing a return to that, but it's obviously magnified by the online media
• 26:45
  landscape, which is even more obviously democratized if you want to use addison or
• 26:48
  fragmented, if you want to use our perspective. But I don't know,
• 26:52
  maybe I think that's a really good point. I'm just going to push against
• 26:56
  one statement that Daniel makes, right, and that's the idea that what we're
• 27:00
  seeing right now. Can you explain to who's Daniel your name? Yeah,
• 27:04
  he's just someone I was arguing with on is a kind of fire right commentator
• 27:10
  and philosopher right who is broadly speaking of Trump. Yes, yeah, he's
• 27:15
  he's He actually teaches like logic and philosophy at at Cuney, like a City
• 27:19
  University of New York. Okay, thank you, So it's a Gillian right.
• 27:22
  But I mean, I've seen that conservatives are trying to make this argument
• 27:26
  right, that there's been this democratization of the media away from these big networks
• 27:29
  that tend to push a predominantly centrist like liberal point of view, particularly a
• 27:33
  neoliberal point of view. And I think there are a certain extent it's true,
• 27:37
  right, But I think that in a deeper sense, this isn't particularly
• 27:40
  democratic, right, because somebody who's sincerely committed to democracy wants there to be
• 27:45
  a certain equality to the kind of voices that are present in the polity.
• 27:49
  And I don't think you see that here at all. Right. I think
• 27:52
  that you see some voices being given the cash and expressive potential to actually have
• 27:56
  a much bigger impact in the public sphere than others. A lot of these,
• 28:02
  you know, people come out of conservative think tanks, are funded by
• 28:04
  a tremendous amount of money, And so I don't think that this is rightly
• 28:07
  characterized as a democracy. This is closer to something like a media polyarchy,
• 28:11
  where there are difracted media centers, some of which are much more powerful than
• 28:15
  others and have a much bigger reach than others. And what we need is
• 28:21
  actually a lot more attention paid to how it is that we can try to
• 28:23
  establish a more egalitarian playing field when it comes to which views are expressed and
• 28:29
  but what to do how to like So, yeah, democratization and fragmentation,
• 28:33
  but how does that fit in with the centralization of ownership of all of this
• 28:40
  stuff? Because yeah, okay, but media has been concentrated in the hands
• 28:45
  of a few, and even this democratization still presupposes social networking websites, which
• 28:52
  are all also very centrally owned, like somebody owns all the channels and it's
• 28:59
  just the content, like the information that flows through those channels. They do
• 29:03
  as little as possible to regulate that except when people force them to. So
• 29:06
  now Twitter is flagging tweets and Facebook is taking down yeah, and like Facebook's
• 29:11
  taking down all these right wing groups and hate groups pages, which they really
• 29:15
  don't want to do that at all. But with this democratization and fragmentation comes
• 29:21
  actual more ownership of the actual communication channels themselves. So how does that is
• 29:27
  that not kind of the opposite movement to because democratization, to me, would
• 29:33
  also imply the democratization of ownership. And as far as I know, nobody
• 29:37
  has a stake in this shit except for California Magnets and other people like that.
• 29:42
  I think what we're getting raw are where the boundaries cross is. Ownership
• 29:48
  used to mean that the person who owns the newspaper, broadcast media, television
• 29:56
  station, whatever, there would be pressure from the top that would decide what
• 30:02
  that newspaper or television station was able to publish and what they would publish.
• 30:07
  So I think it's an asymmetry to compare social media to that because the owners
• 30:12
  of social media, presumably if they're disinterested in purely capitalist, are happy no
• 30:19
  matter what is being posted as long as more people are reacting, because if
• 30:25
  people are reacting, they're going to come back. If people are coming back,
• 30:26
  then they're seeing more ads. So in the case of ownership, I
• 30:30
  think there's an asymmetry between broadcast media and what we could call new media and
• 30:36
  platform ownership versus like mass media ownership. Yeah, I agree with that.
• 30:42
  I agree with that. I also think I was going to say we should
• 30:45
  make a distinction maybe between economic democratization and like democratization of expression or something like
• 30:51
  that, and like, look, I mean I don't. I mean,
• 30:53
  I'm not even the one who wants to push to say it's becoming democratization.
• 30:56
  But if I were to make the argument, I guess I would say,
• 30:59
  like, there's a democratization of expression, but obviously not a democratization of economic
• 31:03
  ownership of those channels. And I would say that the expression part is meaningless.
• 31:07
  I mean, if if we're gonna drop mccluan in here, then the
• 31:11
  medium is the message It doesn't matter what the content is. You can democratize
• 31:15
  what people can say all you want. Doesn't matter one bit. I mean
• 31:18
  the ownership that matters. Look at Zoom. Zoom came in and took a
• 31:22
  huge chunk of the of the video chatting market share, and the other month
• 31:27
  when they were going to have a symposium on Palestine at the University of New
• 31:33
  York, Zoom came in and shut that down and said, this is political.
• 31:37
  This is this this, uh, this goes against our terms of use.
• 31:41
  I hadn't heard that you can't do it. I hadn't heard that.
• 31:44
  Yeah, look it up. That's a new place. Well that's what they
• 31:47
  do, right. It's not that they don't police what you can say.
• 31:49
  The police what you can't say. Like there's certain things that you just can't
• 31:52
  go on, like Israel Palestine. No, Zoom's not going to have that.
• 31:56
  Like Facebook and Twitter are the same. They don't really care what you
• 32:00
  say as long as it's within a certain range. I guess. I mean,
• 32:05
  like this is the point, like Benamine makes at the end of the
• 32:07
  article too, like until real property relations change, that's when the meaningful change
• 32:13
  happens. Because the war machine will mobilize everybody and leave property ownership intact.
• 32:21
  You're next to talk. I'm an imposer rule cut this out. We're gonna
• 32:24
  go around clockwise because we're talking over each other like constantly, so starting with
• 32:30
  might be arranged differently. I'm in the top right in my really boomer Okay,
• 32:39
  why don't we go in alphabetical order starting with that? Okay, yeah,
• 32:46
  No, I agree with a lot of what's been said here, right,
• 32:49
  I think you know it's a riff off of Victor's points. Uh.
• 32:52
  The problem that I have is that what you see here is a formal democratization
• 32:57
  in the sense that everyone's able to participate, but not in a quality or
• 33:00
  democracy of expressive potential, if I want to call it that, right,
• 33:05
  And that's because there are some people whose voices are amplified well beyond others.
• 33:08
  And that's a serious problem when you're talking about the capacity to actually spread misinformation
• 33:15
  or hyper real bullshit in today's world. And one example that I can give
• 33:20
  you is take a magazine like American Greatness, which is a far right magazine
• 33:23
  in the United States that's escalated in popularity exponentially since Trump was elected to office.
• 33:30
  It's owned by private businessmen who funded it to the tune of several million
• 33:32
  dollars. And it's able to produce very high quality, very slick productions,
• 33:38
  right that propagate a far right message. You a bet that with something like
• 33:42
  jacket Bin right, which relies on user donations and typically for our more small
• 33:47
  scale contributions, right, it's harder for them to have the same capacity for
• 33:52
  expressive potential that an outlet like American Greatness has, even though they've been around
• 33:57
  for quite a bit longer and arguably speak to you just as significant a segment
• 34:00
  of the population. Right. And I think that you're seeing this become worse
• 34:05
  and worse in some ways, at least in the United States as a result
• 34:07
  of a numerous court decisions like the Citizenship United or sorry, citizens United.
• 34:14
  And it's a big problem, and I'm not sure what the solution to that
• 34:16
  is. And part because every time you try to think of a way to
• 34:21
  grapple with this difficulty, the situation changes because new media emerge and kind up
• 34:24
  that the rethink your entire program. Right, I passed because I don't have
• 34:30
  a response to that. Okay, yeah, I want to say, like,
• 34:36
  I think it's interesting to like how we define making a difference. Eric
• 34:42
  was talking about like it makes no difference, but also like how we define
• 34:45
  democratization. I guess, like, I think the story is a bit more
• 34:50
  complicated than just saying, oh, like it makes sense since there's the same
• 34:53
  owners or centralized ownership, it makes no difference. I mean, I guess
• 34:58
  it depends on what you mean by different. I mean it seems to me
• 35:00
  that it's made a huge difference in I mean, I think Donald Trump's selection
• 35:05
  was made possible by like, uh, you know, even in our own
• 35:08
  personal lives here right now, like we're making this podcast, we have like,
• 35:12
  you know, thousands of listeners or downloads, and like, I think
• 35:14
  that that's only possible as a consequence of what some call the democratization of media.
• 35:20
  So I mean, I don't know it just I feel like it's,
• 35:22
  you know, the difference. We need to define what that difference is.
• 35:24
  And I guess maybe I would ask Eric, like you when you say,
• 35:27
  like it makes no difference, I mean, I guess it makes no difference.
• 35:30
  If your goal is to democratize economic ownership, then yeah, sure it
• 35:36
  doesn't make a difference for that, But it seems to make quite a long
• 35:38
  large social difference and political difference in some ways. I mean, okay,
• 35:42
  I think a very important point here and say that viewers are all attributed to
• 35:46
  the fact that Eric sultry voice just rings out through the podcast every time I
• 35:51
  listen to it, and it's irresistible. So really almost all of our success
• 35:58
  would be attributed to him, because as you can hear my uvula vibrating.
• 36:02
  Here's I actually had a specific quote in mind because I promised I was going
• 36:07
  to drop some some theory into this, and I had this quote I had
• 36:13
  in mind comes from Benjamine near the end of his his work of art essay,
• 36:17
  very famous essay he wrote, and the quote goes, so, let's
• 36:22
  let's say the forces of fascism have been on the rise in the States since
• 36:27
  Trump has been elected, and maybe now they'll peter out. But let's say
• 36:30
  here's the quote. Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact
• 36:37
  the property relations which they which they the masses, strive to abolish. It
• 36:43
  sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses, but on no account granting
• 36:47
  them rights. The masses have a right to change property relations. Fascism seeks
• 36:52
  to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism
• 36:58
  is an estheticizing of politic life. And that's the content. The content is
• 37:04
  left up to the users whatever. But the property relations are all moving towards
• 37:09
  fascism. They're all moving towards centralization and centralized ownership. And that was the
• 37:15
  point that I had in mind, is Benuman's idea that you could mobilize your
• 37:20
  entire populace in a war and then they all come back after the war and
• 37:24
  property relations remain exactly where they are, no matter how victorious you are.
• 37:31
  Yeah, And that's it's actually like one of the most remarkable passages of that
• 37:35
  same essay is and I think it's really prescient when you think about the Trump
• 37:37
  era, and is that the reason fascism is appealing in the twentieth century is
• 37:43
  because fascism is a society deciding to entertain itself in the most magnificent possible way.
• 37:50
  Because he says, think about fascism, it's very entertaining, Right,
• 37:52
  there's always an enemy, a heroic story. Yeah, it's the spectacle violence,
• 37:57
  you know, that's at the center of everything. It's extremely entertaining,
• 38:00
  and that's one of the reasons why it's so dangerous, because it's really hard
• 38:05
  to dissociate yourself from Azerid. The spectacle, Yeah, it's the estheticizing means
• 38:10
  you're making it into a spectacle. It's the immediate you're estheticizing politics, so
• 38:15
  people can say and do whatever they like. Like he's writing this in the
• 38:19
  nineteen thirties, which is again like the rise of fascism in Europe and Germany
• 38:23
  specifically, And I guess he was in France. He had to flee to
• 38:27
  France by the time he was writing this, maybe, but I mean it's
• 38:30
  yeah, it's very prescient, and it has a lot to do with today's
• 38:35
  situation. The masses can express themselves in any way they want, but they
• 38:39
  have no right to ownership, and that's the problem. I got a good
• 38:45
  segue here since he is after m and I'm going to drop some Marshall mcclu
• 38:50
  in. Here's the quote. Specialist technologies detribalize and non specialist electric technology retribalize.
• 39:00
  So in the same way you have, like the microphone. From a
• 39:05
  media studies perspective, if you take a mccluan very seriously, the microphone was
• 39:10
  responsible for Nazism because you can tribalize on such a broad scale and people don't
• 39:17
  have like the psychological resistances yet built in to be able to place a media
• 39:23
  within history, so they become dehistoricized and then can get swept up into something
• 39:30
  like Nazism. And there's problems with mccluan. And this isn't like a proper
• 39:35
  thesis that I'm going to sit here and defend, but it brings back this
• 39:37
  idea of tribalism that when mccluan says that specialists technologies de tribalize, he's talking
• 39:49
  very specifically about writ writing and advanced writing, and like I guess you could
• 39:53
  say academic or historical writing. Whereas as soon as you have a mass media
• 40:00
  then you can also mobilize a mass using that media. So it plays into
• 40:05
  this fascism. It plays into this tribalism. And I'm seeding my time,
• 40:09
  but if I could finish, then my question is how does this the social
• 40:15
  media retribalize? And I have a thesis for that, but I'm going to
• 40:19
  pass it on to I mean, it's a fascinating question, right, I
• 40:22
  mean, if you think that people weren't psychologically prepared for the microphone, and
• 40:25
  it brought all these calamitous results. Oh I should have said radio. Sorry,
• 40:29
  I meant like radio broadcast. Sure, sure, no, But I
• 40:31
  mean, God only knows how people would possibly prepared for like the barrage of
• 40:36
  digital technologies have been invented over the last twenty years, right, I mean
• 40:38
  your brain would just not be prepared for that in any way, shape or
• 40:40
  form. Yeah, I mean we're seeing the impact in many different ways.
• 40:49
  I mean, I know, you know, it's it's a different effect than
• 40:53
  like the media topic. But I know that like people are talking about how
• 40:55
  like young girls are now like you know, much more likely to cut themselves
• 41:00
  because I guess like the bullying online. Like, So there's something. I
• 41:04
  mean, I'm just saying there is obviously like a big impact that we're not
• 41:07
  psychologically ready. And you know, there's something about the medium that I think
• 41:12
  does invite exactly the tribalization. Yeah, I don't know, I'll pass it
• 41:17
  on to someone else. One of the things that I like about mcclewan that
• 41:21
  I do actually think he was pressing and observing and this is something that you
• 41:23
  know, Postman pointed out also in his book I'm using ourselves to death.
• 41:27
  Is that once upon a time, you know, print culture as it calls
• 41:30
  in and I think this is kind of too generic a term was ascended,
• 41:35
  right, And the basic idea of putting it really simply in his book is
• 41:37
  that art in his books was that in our Gutenberg universe, the way that
• 41:42
  people primarily digested information was through print mediums, typically books, sometimes long form
• 41:47
  newspaper articles, and these all had their problems, and they produce certain kinds
• 41:52
  of subjectivities, but they did have the benefit of encouraging people to deal with
• 41:55
  complexity in a reasonably sophisticated way, because if you're going to read a book
• 42:00
  on a topic, you're probably going to have to deal with it in a
• 42:02
  certain in depth sense, since two hundred pages is a long discussion of a
• 42:08
  topic by any means, especially today. Right Whereas now with this movement towards
• 42:14
  a new acoustic culture, as you puilt it, where everything tends to be
• 42:17
  short, dynamic, and to the point, people will retreat from that kind
• 42:22
  of complexity into antagonisms that simplify the world and that have kind of virile quality
• 42:30
  to them. And part of this is, you know, due to the
• 42:34
  ascendants of acoustic culture. But it's also because print media, books, long
• 42:38
  form articles, and all that kind of stuff has declined precipitously. And one
• 42:43
  of the things that Postman points out in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death,
• 42:45
  and you know, this is quite fascinating to me, is that during the
• 42:50
  abolitionist period, Abraham Lincoln and various pro slavery delegation delegates would sit there and
• 42:57
  have a debate in front of people up to five six hours at a time,
• 43:01
  like a five or six hour debate about slavery, which it warrants,
• 43:05
  right if you think about it, and all the complexities involved. Right,
• 43:07
  And Postman says, and this is the nineteen eighties. Who the hell would
• 43:09
  sit down for a five hour debate? Now, you know, I mean
• 43:14
  within an hour we get bored because we're used to watching CNN or Fox or
• 43:17
  whatever it happens to be where these debates are boiled down to at that point
• 43:22
  twenty minutes, right, And I think that's even truer now than it was
• 43:24
  before. Right. We expecting to be distilled into seven minute YouTube videos.
• 43:30
  And if it's any longer, we think, well, people are going to
• 43:31
  get bored. So we got to find a way to take this complicated issue
• 43:36
  and boil it down to seven minutes, which means you're gonna be very tempted
• 43:39
  to give a simplistic narrative soundbites. I mean that's true, that's true to
• 43:45
  some extent, but I guess, you know, I guess to push against
• 43:50
  it slightly. Like I think we are seeing, you know, with what
• 43:53
  some call the new democratization of media, that there is actually an appetite for
• 43:58
  long form stuff. And like, you know, I'm not, like I
• 44:00
  obviously like agree. I do sometimes think that there's a tendency in theory,
• 44:06
  like theoretical analysis, to get to get carried away with like the narrative of
• 44:12
  how much worse everything is getting, And like I agree, like there's obviously
• 44:15
  a lot of but like that temptation, it can blind us from just like
• 44:17
  obviously acknowledging like yeah, there are some things that are better than they were
• 44:22
  a little while ago. And like one thing is that this media does allow
• 44:24
  show that there is an appetite for actually incredibly long form content. I mean
• 44:29
  some of these podcasts, you know, two three hour long I mean discussions
• 44:32
  just talking about stuff and people listen. I mean Joe Rogan. You know,
• 44:37
  he's not the highest common denominator at all, but but he he does
• 44:40
  sometimes record podcasts with like I don't know, like interesting people for three pous
• 44:45
  hours and people listen. Yeah, and so yeah, I mean, I
• 44:49
  mean, yes, the media, it's kind of interesting. Just how like
• 44:52
  the this new media does kind of it creates pathways to go both ways,
• 44:57
  mostly the way that I think we could complain about and say is is bad
• 45:00
  and worse. But you know, God also acknowledged the good. Yeah,
• 45:02
  not just that. I mean you think about like people, I guess,
• 45:06
  right, Like I mean, if you want to learn about a major philosopher,
• 45:08
  now once up, by the time you'd have to actually go to a
• 45:10
  bookstore, buy their books, read them, spend several hours a day doing
• 45:14
  it. Now anyone can put it like pick up their phone, put in
• 45:17
  their headphones and listen to some professor I give a lecture on Socrates or whatever
• 45:22
  happens to be. That's kind of an accomplishment in some respects, right,
• 45:25
  I agree, It is kind of funny, you know, not that I'm
• 45:29
  really not a big fan of Oh God, who's that evolutionary psychologist who is
• 45:31
  like Canadian? He wrote that he wrote that book recently about how everything's getting
• 45:36
  better. Oh, Stephen Pinker. Stephen Pinker. Yeah, I'm not a
• 45:37
  fan of Stephen Pinker at all, but I did find it amusing, like
• 45:42
  how angry people got, like you know, on the left, like just
• 45:45
  the suggestion that things are getting better, Like there is a real resistant to
• 45:50
  that, resistance to that, which I do find kind of amusing, even
• 45:53
  though like, yeah, like I said, I'm not a fan of Pinker
• 45:55
  really at all. But well, I think of democratization as well in terms
• 46:02
  of the I mean, it's it's a new kind of participation. So we're
• 46:08
  seeing more people participating in the mass media, and we're seeing a close in
• 46:13
  the information gap, so people who did not have access to any information before
• 46:20
  now have access to a whole world of information. And I think the main
• 46:24
  problem with that is that there's there's a sort of learning curve to this,
• 46:29
  there's a there's an element where we need to master this new reality by incorporating
• 46:36
  it into art. We have to form new habits around it, and right
• 46:39
  now we have very bad habits because all of this is happening so quickly,
• 46:44
  we've barely had a single generation to even adapt to this new media reality where
• 46:50
  everybody has access, everybody has a voice, And one of the consequences that
• 46:53
  I'm seeing is that standards of evidence are going out the window. People are
• 46:58
  more interested in the narrative self rather than the evidence for that narrative. Evidence
• 47:04
  has dropped, like suddenly YouTube is evidence, TikTok is evidence, and nobody's
• 47:08
  critically analyzing the narrative in the in the sense that, well, what's the
• 47:15
  evidence. That's like we can see Trump just saying whatever, like they're stealing
• 47:19
  the election, there's voting fraud, nobody, and he's not presenting any evidence
• 47:22
  because he doesn't. Because all you do is you you you, you opinion
• 47:29
  shop and then you pick the opinion that most conforms to your worldview you've already
• 47:35
  formulated, and then you just run with it and fuck it if anybody thinks
• 47:38
  differently, because it's your it's your right, it's your god given right to
• 47:43
  hold the views that you do, and nobody can change your mind, all
• 47:45
  right. So it's like there's a certain element what I'm saying, of habituation,
• 47:51
  Like even Benyamine pointed this out in his essay, like we need to
• 47:54
  master these new media through habit, not through just sort of they're not just
• 48:00
  as they're not just an addition. There's something new we have to get used
• 48:05
  to. This is exactly what mcclewan says, because he calls media the extension
• 48:09
  of man. But what he's talking about is each of them are extensions of
• 48:14
  your body. So being able to listen to us on your headphones is just
• 48:20
  an extension perceptual apparatus. Yeah, it's an extension of your ear. But
• 48:23
  the other thing that he says, like I referenced the Hitler radio example before,
• 48:30
  but when you need to form a new equilibrium every time a new media
• 48:36
  technology disrupts the environment, and I think a lot of what we're we're seeing,
• 48:43
  especially with the age gap right, like the whole QAnon thing, this
• 48:47
  kind of makes sense of it to me is that if you're grown up,
• 48:51
  if you grow up in an environment where you see, for whatever reason,
• 48:57
  the news apparatus as being reliable, then when you see something on Facebook,
• 49:02
  I think you're less not even likely, but less able to doubt the validity
• 49:08
  of what you're seeing that's beamed through your eyes. Because in the same way
• 49:12
  that this podcast is an extension of your ears, the screen is an extension
• 49:17
  of your eyeballs, and that you can see something that's telepresent, you can
• 49:21
  see something that's very far away. So one thing that like just what you're
• 49:25
  saying, Eric, is that you might we might have a psychical slash embodied
• 49:34
  apparatus that's actually incapable of dealing with this this much information at the same time.
• 49:39
  And I think I don't know if I would defend this thesis, but
• 49:44
  I think it does fall on like age boundaries, whether or not you can
• 49:49
  trust something that you see, or whether or not you would trust something that
• 49:52
  you see. Can I just ask a question riffing on this, because this
• 49:55
  always struck me as mccluan's most radical and honestly at most unbelievable thesis. And
• 50:00
  I mean unbelievable in the pajurable pejorative sense right where he said like media or
• 50:07
  extension of our senses, right, you know, the telescope is the extension
• 50:09
  of our eye. Uh, you know, the microphone is the extension of
• 50:14
  our ear, and so on. Headphones are the extension of our ear,
• 50:15
  and so on and so forth. One of the things that he points out,
• 50:19
  which I think is actually kind of interesting, is that there's always been
• 50:22
  this presupposition in the Western tradition a natural human being, right, in the
• 50:28
  same sense that there's a natural monkey or a natural deer and so on.
• 50:31
  But one of the things that McLuhan points out in his mind at least is
• 50:35
  that other animals have media as well. You know, slugs have shells,
• 50:39
  you know, do they answer? Yeah, I know they have they have
• 50:44
  shells. Do guys, when's the last time you've been outside? Slugs don't
• 50:52
  have shells. Snails snails Sorry, snails have shells. Okay, my bad,
• 50:59
  Yes, snails have shells. And then you know, monkeys use these
• 51:02
  rackets. And he says that like, thinking of us without media would be
• 51:07
  as unusual and an abstract as thinking of snails without their shells, right,
• 51:13
  or thinking about turtles without their shells. And I always found this very provocative
• 51:19
  and interesting, but because he's tried to denaturalize the idea that there's some kind
• 51:22
  of fundamental human being without our media. But I'm not really sure how far
• 51:27
  you can stretch this metaphor. M Yeah, I kind of wanted to also
• 51:31
  riff on something Eric said before about like, you know, we need to
• 51:36
  develop new habits, and I think it kind of speaks to what Pills was
• 51:39
  saying as well. And I guess this is where I kind of become maybe
• 51:44
  a bit of like an anti uta or like less utopian and pessimistic. You
• 51:46
  know. It's like, you know, I don't really think that there's ever
• 51:49
  going to be a time when like a not insignificant if not quite significant percentage
• 51:53
  of the population is always going to be incredibly vulnerable to things like fudd right,
• 51:59
  fear, uncertainty, doubt, like like, I don't think we're gonna
• 52:01
  reach some time when citizens and human beings are like better trained and can take
• 52:07
  in information critically, like not gonna fucking happen. Like there's always gonna be
• 52:09
  people who are because it's easier, it's easier to just to be tempted by
• 52:15
  the simplified story than it is to like actually understand what nuance and critical thinking
• 52:21
  is. And do you know how offended I was the other day when I
• 52:22
  saw a qan Nod supporter of all things, saying, you know, people
• 52:27
  need to think for themselves and question everything, And I'm like, oh my
• 52:30
  god, if Socrates was here and I heard you saying that, I'm like,
• 52:34
  you are to give you yourself and criticizing everything. You're going willing to
• 52:37
  believe absolutely anything, as long as it coincide with your worldview, exactly want
• 52:44
  to believe nonsense. Doesn't suddenly make you a Socratic figure. I can reference
• 52:47
  my academic days and saying that exposure to something on the internet is far disproportionately
• 52:57
  effective to old people than it is to young people. Oh yeah, I
• 53:02
  see my older family members posting ship all the time. That's sharing those chain
• 53:07
  emails. Oh god, critical reading whatsoever. Just like, oh I saw
• 53:12
  it. It must be real. I'm scared of how much money my alma's
• 53:15
  donated to the Nigerian prince in exile. It's funny actually actually literally just today,
• 53:24
  my like my one of my favorite undergrad professors who I'm friends with,
• 53:29
  she called me because she she got, uh, she got some message.
• 53:34
  She clicked on the wrong thing, and she got a message in her computer
• 53:36
  that was like your computer's locked. You have to call us, called Microsoft
• 53:38
  and like unlock your computer. And she was like very unsure and scared,
• 53:43
  and I was like, okay, just like close the browser. And then
• 53:46
  when you're her first call Victor, well no, no, we're we're good
• 53:50
  for we're good friends. Yeah, like she she was actually friends with my
• 53:53
  dad. Like this, I like this example that that Benjamin gives in the
• 53:57
  article. Like you can contrast the new media with architecture, Like you think
• 54:00
  of architecture as also media, Right, it's an extension of ourselves in a
• 54:05
  certain way. And when we go to work, for example, we don't
• 54:09
  really pay much attention. We receive the architecture of our workplace and our home
• 54:15
  and our local environment in a state of distraction. Whereas things that are new,
• 54:20
  like if you encounter a brand new building or new media, I mean
• 54:24
  you encounter those in a state of like concentrated awe in a certain way.
• 54:30
  Right, you're paying attention to them. When you're walking through your building,
• 54:34
  right, you know which doors not to open. You know not to fall
• 54:37
  down a staircase that's an emergency exit. Like you just have all of these
• 54:43
  sorts of habitual ways of treating the building, and you know not to walk
• 54:46
  into a janitor's closet or something like that, Whereas the equivalent of walking into
• 54:52
  a janitor's closet on in new media is like accidentally dropping into like a four
• 54:55
  chan qan on discussion or something like that, and then don't know what to
• 55:00
  do with that. You're like you're in the janitor's closet now, and you're
• 55:02
  like, oh, I guess this is an important place because people are discussing
• 55:07
  it. Oh my god. I think that's kind of goes along with the
• 55:10
  old people believing these chain letters and shit too. I want to say,
• 55:15
  though, I am really tempted to give like a classically Freudian reading of your
• 55:19
  interpretation and just say that, like anytime I see a giant building, I'm
• 55:22
  gonna now sit there and think to myself, like that guy has to have
• 55:24
  just a monstrously big penis like just unbelievably or really small maybe or both,
• 55:30
  yeah or yeah that you know, it's like one way or another, this
• 55:34
  building is definitive when it comes to interpreting his Actually, I could I connect
• 55:38
  some some maryle Ponti to what to what Eric just said. You know,
• 55:42
  I think I think about what you're saying there, and it reminds me of
• 55:45
  like, you know, the way in our embodied habituation and like our our
• 55:49
  kind of like you know, our actual situation as embodied creatures we walk around
• 55:53
  and you're right, like like you know, like things don't solicit you,
• 55:59
  right, like thing that you don't go into. I mean that's one of
• 56:00
  merylyl Ponti's like key terms. Right, It's like your body is like habituated
• 56:06
  and changed in a way that is like reciprocally engages with the world where the
• 56:09
  world will solicit you based on how like your body's been habituated, right.
• 56:15
  And I think like that's the difference with new media that like new media is
• 56:16
  always trying to solicit you, right, Like like it's always pulling you in
• 56:21
  these different directions. And I think like and I think pills you might be
• 56:24
  right that when you're older, like you're really vulnerable to those solicitations, whereas
• 56:29
  like us, you know, we're we didn't like we like us, we
• 56:31
  grew up basically with the Internet. I mean, I'm old enough to remember
• 56:35
  when it was like new and kind of like edgy back. Imagine the generation
• 56:37
  younger than us, like they really like they're totally like grew up with it
• 56:42
  always existing and always being like a social media. Like my student's probably undergrads,
• 56:45
  like first year is probably always had social media and they're like yeah,
• 56:50
  some shout out to anyone who remembers waiting on a browser for a JPEG to
• 56:53
  download, Like we're you waiting for what kind of j I want to mind
• 57:00
  your own fucking business. Yeah. I remember seeing this really chilling video in
• 57:05
  twenty fifteen. There was a child and she saw an actual physical magazine and
• 57:10
  she went out and she tried to touch it, and she was really confused
• 57:14
  when it didn't actually like just immediately go to another screen that she couldn't understand
• 57:19
  the concept of like a paper media. Have you guys heard this anecdote of
• 57:22
  I don't know if it's true or not, but the kid who sees a
• 57:27
  floppy disk and goes, why did somebody three D print the save icon?
• 57:35
  That's amazing. Anyway, I can't I can't wait until you get to Murdle
• 57:38
  the Ponty because I think we could stay in Murle Ponti for a long time.
• 57:44
  Yeah, it's useful. I think. I think what's what's really interesting
• 57:49
  in the news, or to see news as a mirror world because the news
• 57:53
  does represent things that actually happen in the world, but it's so highly selective
• 57:59
  so as to make the entire world seem extremely scandalous, like something's always happening,
• 58:06
  Like you have to respond like your politics matter, for example, and
• 58:09
  it's demanding a response all the time. Whereas if you if you had no
• 58:14
  access to the news, the world's very boring, Like even despite elections,
• 58:19
  despite who's in power, despite uh, like the broad circumstances of the world,
• 58:24
  the world's a very boring place and things happen very slowly, almost nothing
• 58:29
  changes. But if you look at the news and you don't have like a
• 58:32
  filter to see, okay, this is what is trying to be groped out
• 58:37
  of my body. From a merlu Pontian sense, they're trying to elicit a
• 58:39
  response. It creates almost a condition like if the world were actually like the
• 58:45
  news, you would be insane to not have anxiety disorder. It would be
• 58:51
  like a war. It would be like right, yeah, around you would
• 58:55
  feel like you're a noumb or something like. My it's funny my dad,
• 59:00
  Like I was talking to him the other day and he was like, you
• 59:02
  know, he doesn't leave his apartment because he's older and he's taking medication which
• 59:07
  like makes his immune system a little bit more vulnerable, so like he really
• 59:09
  is being really careful with COVID stuff, and you know, he he sees
• 59:14
  the news and he's just watching cable news all day and he'll he'll just be
• 59:16
  like, oh, like, what's it like in Toronto right now? Like
• 59:19
  the numbers and I'm just like I don't, like, I don't know,
• 59:21
  Like I'm just going about my business. But like it does create like this
• 59:23
  this perception if if all you're doing is watching the news, that there's like
• 59:29
  that the world is becoming this chaotic thing. But it's true, Like,
• 59:31
  I mean, I think it's worth noticing how like there isn't really much of
• 59:35
  a correspondence between like what you hear in the news and just your every day
• 59:39
  you know, goings on walking around And it's like I just walk around and
• 59:42
  I wear a mask when I go into stores, and like I don't know,
• 59:45
  I can't see that numbers are higher when I'm out there in the city,
• 59:46
  Like I can't. It doesn't feel like that, you know, It's
• 59:50
  just it only feels like that when you're watching this. This is the thesis
• 59:52
  of the spectacle. By the way, like the real world would look much
• 59:57
  more like sitting and looking at your backyard for an entire day. I mean,
• 1:00:01
  I don't have a backyard and I probably never will. But if I
• 1:00:05
  did. That would be what the world looks like. Slow changes. Every
• 1:00:08
  once in a while, there's a bird that flies by and that's it.
• 1:00:13
  Yeah, I'll just say like when I was living in Mexico, probably because
• 1:00:15
  of the media environment that exists here in Canada and the United States, right,
• 1:00:20
  Like, people would sometimes ask me like are you safe, what's going
• 1:00:22
  on? What's happening. I'm like, it's just a place like anywhere else,
• 1:00:27
  you know what I mean. Like literally my day consisted of walking to
• 1:00:30
  the store, talking to somebody in Spanish, being like in cigarette provore and
• 1:00:36
  being si signor buying a cigarette, going back smoking and feeling bad. Like
• 1:00:39
  it's very very You can buy individual cigarettes in Mexico. You can. Yeah,
• 1:00:45
  it's basically the equivalent of three cents for a cigarette. That's cheap.
• 1:00:50
  It is, yeah, dangerous the cheap. But you know, the thing
• 1:00:52
  is like if you kind of get the hyper real depiction of this entire society
• 1:00:57
  you see presented in Canadian or American media, it's very different, right,
• 1:01:02
  Like it's drugs and sex and violence constantly, not like that at all.
• 1:01:07
  It's really quite a boring place, as you would put it. It's full
• 1:01:12
  of full of socialists trying to steal ballots and burn ballots and create and like
• 1:01:16
  show up with new ballots. That's actually it's funny because I think that if
• 1:01:21
  anyone listens to this American life. The recent episode I think was called like
• 1:01:24
  Squeaker, they like they followed around like a militia group, a white militia
• 1:01:30
  group, to like go to polling stations to basically just like make sure that
• 1:01:32
  there wasn't any funny business happening. And I think like when you listen to
• 1:01:37
  the story, it's describing exactly this right, because they got all worked up.
• 1:01:40
  They're like, oh, there's gonna be people Democrats trying to steal the
• 1:01:43
  election. And they go to the polls and they just like meet really nice
• 1:01:45
  people and they just like have a nice time and have like friendly conversations with
• 1:01:50
  people and like nothing's happening. It's like, you know, but they're expecting.
• 1:01:54
  They're expecting to like run in and have to like to They were scared
• 1:01:58
  that literally like BLM, like Black Lives Matter people were gonna be like intimidating
• 1:02:01
  voters to like vote for Democrats or something, and like obviously, yeah,
• 1:02:05
  you know, like Captain woke and like the giant army of BLM supporters.
• 1:02:09
  It's just gonna be like, it's gonna be social, like, you know,
• 1:02:13
  we can't allow anybody who looks even vaguely white to come in here and
• 1:02:16
  cast a ballot. And literally it was just like like mostly pretty lovely interactions.
• 1:02:21
  There's even a really nice one with like where he starts talking to this
• 1:02:23
  Democratic woman and they just have a very very like friendly, constructive conversation and
• 1:02:28
  it's like nothing's going on. Yeah, I'd like to reducts and say,
• 1:02:36
  okay, So from another point of view, our news media that we've known
• 1:02:42
  from the past in the twentieth century, built on radio and then television and
• 1:02:49
  before that and newspapers and print media like today, those those institutions, I
• 1:02:53
  would say, are failing. They're they're failing them. They are failing in
• 1:02:59
  that they're fading away and being absorbed into other businesses, and they're failing in
• 1:03:05
  the sense that they're failing people too, they're not giving proper information. And
• 1:03:07
  also the whole election is another institution. It's a political institution that's also failing.
• 1:03:15
  It is not able to absorb all of the emotion of the country in
• 1:03:20
  a certain way. So both the news media and politics, the specific institution
• 1:03:25
  of elections are both failing and they need to be radically reorganized. I just
• 1:03:30
  read an article the other day about Canadian news and how most people don't realize
• 1:03:36
  how on the brink of collapse Canadian media is, Like they are so far
• 1:03:40
  gone right now that they have well, I mean, we probably all know
• 1:03:45
  that the past ten or fifteen years, so many journalists have gone independent,
• 1:03:50
  been cut out of there's big, huge news what do they call them news
• 1:03:54
  dead zones or something, places where there's just no local news is really the
• 1:03:59
  big Like it's all failing us. And I know from watching shows like last
• 1:04:03
  Week Tonight that that local news reporting does amazing work. They are amazing people,
• 1:04:09
  and they do great in depth journalism, and those things are disappearing because
• 1:04:13
  they're being absorbed again. Ownership is changing, and they're being absorbed into larger
• 1:04:17
  conglomerates, and they're all changing their focus and they're becoming kind of homogeneous.
• 1:04:24
  So it's kind of strange at the same time, Yeah, all the media
• 1:04:26
  is centralizing like this, but they also don't mind letting this sort of chaos
• 1:04:30
  of everybody's opinions going on because it kind of distracts everybody from that background,
• 1:04:35
  like what's really happening in these spheres that matter. Everybody's too focused on the
• 1:04:41
  narratives and what people believe and why they believe it. Everyone's too distracted by
• 1:04:45
  all that shit, which is just a smoke screen for what's really going on
• 1:04:49
  is centralization. Standards are failing. People aren't getting the information they need to
• 1:04:55
  go out and vote. They're just being fed all this like tendentious bullshit that
• 1:05:00
  has nothing to do with fucking reality whatsoever, and none of it's backed up
• 1:05:03
  by evidence. So to me, this is a sign that these institutions need
• 1:05:08
  to be We don't. We can't just let the free market sort this shit
• 1:05:11
  out because it's not gonna do it. Free market is just like evolution in
• 1:05:15
  a cultural sense. It's not gonna work. We need to go in and
• 1:05:18
  make a concerted effort to reorganize these institutions and make them work again. And
• 1:05:24
  they're not gonna work in the same way they work before. We need to
• 1:05:27
  figure something else out. We need to make them more efficient. We need
• 1:05:30
  to cut away the administrative and bureaucratic bullshit that's going on, and we need
• 1:05:36
  to truly democratize them and decentralize them, and not just democratize them in the
• 1:05:41
  sense that you can just say whatever you want because nobody gives a shit about
• 1:05:44
  that. Your voice is immediately drowned out by the million other voices on there.
• 1:05:48
  And the narratives that emerge, like the QAnon, like the whatever,
• 1:05:54
  other conspiracy theories like voter fraud and all these all these narratives that emerge,
• 1:05:59
  they don't really matter in the end to me in the long run, because
• 1:06:02
  what's happening is a huge transformation. The Internet was just the Internet was just
• 1:06:08
  come online in the nineteen nineties. It's like thirty less than thirty years ago.
• 1:06:14
  So something needs to change, right, Like, we can't just use
• 1:06:17
  economic interventions to shore up the old institutions. We don't need bailouts. We
• 1:06:24
  don't need bailouts, we don't need to dump money into these failing institutions.
• 1:06:29
  We need to just get rid of them and change them. We need we
• 1:06:30
  need to we need to shift the emphasis onto back onto local reporting, back
• 1:06:36
  onto higher standards, back onto integrity. There's a lot of deontology in that
• 1:06:43
  statement that I don't usually hear from you. Eric. Yeah, no,
• 1:06:46
  I'm taking a little risk by saying that, like by being a little prescriptive
• 1:06:50
  here. But I think I think compared to what is happening, like if
• 1:06:56
  nobody steps up and say, like this is something we need to do,
• 1:06:59
  is we need to demand from our political and cultural institutions rather than just letting
• 1:07:04
  them sort themselves out, and we get boots on the ground and we battle
• 1:07:09
  these narratives one by one, like we're playing fucking whack a mole with psycho
• 1:07:13
  right wingers. It's never gonna make a big difference. I mean, I
• 1:07:16
  like the imperative tents, but I'm just it's new to me hearing from you.
• 1:07:21
  It also sounds a little vague, but like I agree with the sentiment,
• 1:07:25
  like I mean, yeah, like yeah, I mean, but like
• 1:07:27
  I don't know, what do you do you suggest? Like, I mean,
• 1:07:29
  I guess it's to some extent, we're like lucky in Canada that we
• 1:07:31
  have like a public broadcaster that's significant that it's like, I don't know,
• 1:07:35
  like, how do you like they? I think CBC has uh local local
• 1:07:41
  news in most cities of any sort of significance. Yeah, but by the
• 1:07:45
  way, if you're American and you haven't heard of state owned media. We
• 1:07:49
  have some, and it's not great. It's lib it's called the Broadcasting Corporation,
• 1:07:57
  but it's better. It's better than our alternatives here on most issues most
• 1:08:01
  of the time. So you know, redistribution socialist broadcasting is a is a
• 1:08:08
  good place to start. Well, should we should we make should we nationalized
• 1:08:12
  Twitter? Well? Less being less vague about news organizations, I would say
• 1:08:16
  they need to be public funded so they have freedom rather than having to seek
• 1:08:20
  private funding. They should be public funded. And then they should also be
• 1:08:25
  strictly separated from like politics directly in the same way that like legislative and executive
• 1:08:30
  are separate branches and they can't. The news needs to also be publicly funded
• 1:08:35
  but also untouchable by whoever happens to be. Maybe a good example of that
• 1:08:41
  would be like the model of elections Canada. Elections Canada is like as an
• 1:08:44
  arms length organization that's publicly funded and they run all of our elections in Canada
• 1:08:47
  and they write that and they draw the districts. Yeah, and whereas America
• 1:08:51
  leaves it to state by state. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Elections Canada
• 1:08:56
  is a great example. Don't paint too rosia picture we're going to get a
• 1:08:59
  bunch of immigrants from the South. We got to face out west. For
• 1:09:04
  you, it's not even that greatest. What I want is annexations. I've
• 1:09:09
  been telling people that it's like if New York State, like New York State
• 1:09:12
  to Maine, and then like Washington State to like California, We're like,
• 1:09:15
  we're just fucking tired. We want to join Canada. I'd be like,
• 1:09:20
  let's do it. Well, we're gonna let's take Washington, Oregon, and
• 1:09:24
  California. If we're gonna do that, Yeah, but I also want New
• 1:09:28
  York. Yeah, just take the big productive centers. We'll have a giant
• 1:09:32
  U shaped country upside down, you exactly, and like we can like carve
• 1:09:35
  out like a hole to get Chicago also and just like incorporate that, and
• 1:09:41
  then the whole Midwest will just cut them off. Yeah, something like that.
• 1:09:45
  This is this is our long term goal here, to enact first of
• 1:09:50
  all Eric's vision of state owned media, but then also to annex the richest
• 1:09:57
  states in the US for Canada. Of well, I remember, I remember,
• 1:10:00
  I remember humorist Friendly Boits. I remember she's asked sometimes at her talks,
• 1:10:04
  you know, uh, like how what do you think about the Trump
• 1:10:06
  phenomenon, Like what should we do differently to like help us to like,
• 1:10:11
  you know, solid polarization. And she was like, you know what,
• 1:10:13
  it's a it's you know, there was a civil war here, and I
• 1:10:15
  think we made a big mistake. Should have just let them leave, Let
• 1:10:20
  let them separate, let them leave, Let let me let me be clear.
• 1:10:25
  I don't know about I don't know if state owned media is the same
• 1:10:28
  as like a nationalized industry where everybody sort of has a steak in it.
• 1:10:31
  I think I think that's maybe the way to go, like like a co
• 1:10:34
  op or something or oh, I don't know. Like Iran, for example,
• 1:10:38
  they have a nationalized like oil industry there, and it's kind of like
• 1:10:43
  the bane of Opec a lot of the time. And it's because people have
• 1:10:46
  I mean, I'm gonna put my foot deep inside of my mouth if I
• 1:10:49
  say this, but but it's it's almost like everyone has a steak in the
• 1:10:54
  industry. So something that's publicly funded that people also have a stake in,
• 1:10:59
  rather than just strictly state owned in like some kind of Bolshevik model and not
• 1:11:05
  corporate owned like the American model. Somewhere in the middle. But do we
• 1:11:09
  allow it? Do we allow corporate owned media to continue to exist? And
• 1:11:13
  I mean public private partnerships, Like I've ragged on them a lot, and
• 1:11:17
  they they're shit just on their own, but like you could throw in a
• 1:11:21
  little bit of that maybe. I mean, obviously, advertising is big money
• 1:11:26
  and you can't just ignore it, like Facebook and Google snaps up all the
• 1:11:30
  advertising dollars in Canada now because because when when these companies came out, like
• 1:11:35
  Craigslist and other kinds of listing websites, immediately the classified section revenue dried up,
• 1:11:43
  so you need that sort of advertising space. But right now all the
• 1:11:47
  advertising space is going to Google and Facebook and other big media conglomerates like that,
• 1:11:53
  and our local news organizations and our state owned news organizations are getting none
• 1:11:58
  of it. Yeah. Have you guys also, like you know, on
• 1:12:01
  the topic of like like centralized corporate control of things, you know, I've
• 1:12:08
  just noticed conservatives complaining a lot about about Twitter and oh yeah, hell right,
• 1:12:14
  and and and so what's interesting did you guys on Twitter? Yeah?
• 1:12:17
  Did you guys hear how they actually like how the number one app right now
• 1:12:20
  is something called Parlor, which is like the conservative alternative to Twitter, and
• 1:12:25
  it's got like it had like three three million downloads like last week after Trump
• 1:12:30
  was getting censored. That's kind of that's so like scary, but also I
• 1:12:34
  would I would enjoy it at the same time because you wouldn't have to see
• 1:12:39
  you you're going to get the beer hall pooch coming out of some group on
• 1:12:43
  there. Yeah. I was kind of like, yeah, like, good,
• 1:12:45
  go go over to parlor. I don't know, Yeah, I mean
• 1:12:48
  I was gonna say the beer hall pitch didn't actually end very well for those
• 1:12:50
  people, so you know, go ahead and try. Well, that was
• 1:12:54
  the first time they were censored, and then you know, I got to
• 1:12:58
  commend them because I at least they're actually trying to use the free market to
• 1:13:02
  find an alternative. Yeah, and I will say this took with Eric,
• 1:13:08
  like I think one of the biggest problems that we see right now is under
• 1:13:11
  estimation of the importance of municipal relations and municipal government along with local reporting,
• 1:13:15
  because if you actually think about it, how your municipality responds to things is
• 1:13:19
  in many ways a lot more consequential for people's tame and what the federal government
• 1:13:25
  does. Either in the United States or Canada, and yet you very rarely
• 1:13:28
  ever hear about it, right, I mean, I know that John Tory
• 1:13:31
  is the mayor of this city. I could not tell you who my councilman
• 1:13:35
  is at all. I don't even know what my district is. I do
• 1:13:40
  know that my transit works, though if it didn't. If it didn't work,
• 1:13:45
  then I would probably have to go vote in a municipal election. But
• 1:13:48
  yeah, like we need to reincentivize that kind of local reporting and that kind
• 1:13:53
  of independent journalism that we're just not incentivizing it, and it's going away now.
• 1:14:00
  We're going to have a hell of a time getting it back, especially
• 1:14:02
  the longer we wait. Well, And it's interesting because the American experiment was
• 1:14:08
  originally supposed to be very like localized. They was supposed to have a very
• 1:14:13
  local emphasis that was like the whole point. But then as soon as you
• 1:14:15
  got mass media. I think there is a phenomenon that actually I think political
• 1:14:18
  scientists talk about where like local politics became nationalized in the US, where like,
• 1:14:24
  all of a sudden, you were voting for like your local congressman based
• 1:14:29
  on where's like before like and which was for the majority of the United states's
• 1:14:32
  existence, like local politics and who your local member was. You'd often split
• 1:14:38
  your vote and you'd vote maybe like for a Democrat locally, but a Republican
• 1:14:41
  nationally. And there's that was much more common, just because people were much
• 1:14:44
  much more connected to what was happening and what their local interests were and state
• 1:14:49
  interests versus their federal interests. And that certainly, I think media, the
• 1:14:55
  growth of new media, and just like you know, twentieth century media did
• 1:14:59
  see a deep decline in what was Like I said, America was originally supposed
• 1:15:02
  to be a bunch of local like a bunch of states, like very localized,
• 1:15:06
  you know, but that's kind of totally gone away. Yeah, And
• 1:15:10
  the fact that you can even point to a silent majority is kind of an
• 1:15:15
  indication that there's not enough local channels for people to learn and people who express
• 1:15:20
  their opinions about things, or at least people to channel their energy. While
• 1:15:26
  we wrap up here, I just want to recall one more quotation or our
• 1:15:32
  concept quotation from the Sage of Toronto, Marshall mcluan who said that I thought
• 1:15:39
  you were gonna say Jordan Peterson. I thought you were gonna say Doug for
• 1:15:43
  no, this stage of Toronto is a proper term designated for Marshall mccluan even
• 1:15:50
  debor called him that, but he said, the secondary orality that we're entering
• 1:15:56
  through telepresence or presence over you know what, the internet now will bring us
• 1:16:03
  into a new global village, and he saw this as kind of a good
• 1:16:08
  thing. But to Board's criticism of this, and this is excellent, de
• 1:16:11
  Board said, what mcclewin never understood is that we're going to bring back a
• 1:16:16
  global village. But what happens in a village. It's gossip, backbiting,
• 1:16:23
  rumors spread very quickly, and all of these negative aspects to being in a
• 1:16:28
  village that mcclwan never brought up because he was so hyped on this idea of
• 1:16:32
  an oral connection between people. So with that, I think we're ready to
• 1:16:38
  what an excellent quote. I couldn't agree more. I mean, I hate
• 1:16:41
  village life. It's the worst. So at that this was a little bit
• 1:16:45
  of a different episode. How do you guys think it went? We were
• 1:16:48
  I thought that was pretty good. I don't know, it's fun, yeah,
• 1:16:51
  I mean like it's nice not to have to talk about things like an
• 1:16:55
  academic every now and then but I feel like we were pretty good about bringing
• 1:16:59
  up some academic concepts here, and they're like, I don't know, I
• 1:17:01
  feel like this. I feel like this was good. I was able to
• 1:17:04
  refer to like Freudian theories of buildings as penises. So I'm very content.
• 1:17:09
  I felt like I was at the bar. It's like a conversation we'd have
• 1:17:14
  at the at the bar. I ate some pasta and drank some beer.
• 1:17:17
  And all right, if we have, like there are some three categories of
• 1:17:20
  episodes on this uh what do you call it? Channel podcast? We have
• 1:17:25
  the interviews, then we have the deep dives, and these are gonna be
• 1:17:28
  the topical episodes, which I think all of us tend to enjoy more because
• 1:17:32
  we're not trying to flex or do research, which nobody likes to do.
• 1:17:40
  Shooting the ship. I like research. Fuck all, y'all. No,
• 1:17:44
  this was this was fun, I think, and hopefully it'll come out sounding
• 1:17:46
  pretty good. We'll see. Yeah, I'm gonna have to cut up,
• 1:17:49
  cut up some of the name dropping about terms that our international audience and thank
• 1:17:55
  you international audience, but they're not gonna understand what they are. So that
• 1:17:59
  all said, thanks you guys, a lot for showing up. I have
• 1:18:02
  an appointment to meet, even in this hour of night. What's the appointment.
• 1:18:10
  We're still recalling family. It's famamily. We're family, prented, but
• 1:18:14
  still telepresent. I'm forming the global village. Okay, guys, thanks,
• 1:18:20
  We'll see you later. Thanks everybody. Yeah, all right