(300th Episode) Hungry Ghosts in the Capitalist Machine: Unraveling Consumerism, Politics, and Activism with Mike Watson

The episode dives deep into the connection between capitalism and our digital identities, exploring themes of addiction, anxiety, and the pursuit of validation in the online realm. Mike Watson articulates the detrimental effects of social media on mental health while highlighting the need for authentic community engagement beyond mere digital expressions.  Mike Watson is an editor at Revol Press and the co-host of Theorize And Be Damned. He is the author of Hungry Ghosts in the Machine: Digital Capitalism and the Search for Self (Revol Press 2023) and many other books about capitalism and culture. 

• Examination of capitalism’s role in shaping digital identities 
• The emotional voids filled through social media engagement 
• Discussion of Mark Fisher’s concept of depressive hedonia 
• The intersection of addiction and spirituality online 
• How social media exacerbates feelings of loneliness 
• The perils of empty activism and horror posting 
• Call for genuine action and community building beyond digital platforms

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:48 Exploring Online Identity and Capitalism
• 13:17 Rethinking Fisher's Political Positivity
• 20:33 Contemporary Critiques of Nietzsche and Resentment
• 29:52 The Rise of Online Resentment
• 42:01 Facing Death in Capitalist Society
• 53:23 Debating the Impact of Psychedelics
• 1:01:58 Contemplating the Impact of Atrocity
• 1:11:34 Unpacking Trauma and Capitalism
• 1:16:22 The Illusion of Political Awakening
• 1:21:42 Navigating Leftist Activism in Online Media
• 1:32:02 Dependency on Capitalist Media and Work
• 1:42:27 Collaborative Book Project Discussion

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:49

Hello.

Mike Watson: 0:50

I'm here with Mike Watson, co-host of Theorize and Be Damned. Is that the podcast name?

C. Derick Varn: 0:59

That's the co-host of Revo Press. Theorize and Be Damned.

Mike Watson: 1:03

Yeah, co-publisher at Revo Press, technically my editor and author of several books for both Zero and Now One for Revo. And the book we're talking about today is Hungry Ghosts and the Machine. And your new book for Revo, hungry Ghosts and the Machine, is kind of a exploration of the intersection of capitalism and, let's say, electronic identity that's how I would put it. But how do you think capitalist dynamics is affecting the way people present themselves online, which is, you know, the major theme of the book? So we'll start there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52

Okay, yeah, which is, you know, the major theme of the book, so we'll just start there, okay, yeah, well, it is a lot about how, how people present themselves, but also how they try and deal with the conditions of being uh, which are certainly exacerbated by capitalism. So we have a situation where, as people, we tend to try and fill an emotional void or cover over the the the reality of of life and and death. Um, so we do that through consumerist kind of uh, attempts at satiation through consumerism in various forms, and that's long been the case, and even prior to that there were other ways to try and evade reality, through religious belief or magic ritual or what have you. But today the specific challenge we have is the speed at which the object which satiates you ie that could be a meme or, you know, image on the internet, video, it could be people responding to your posts on social media that satiation is is very short-lived, so we're in a constant loop of struggling to then re, kind of cover over cover over again, the essential despair that we feel.

Mike Watson: 3:03

So I mean, it's kind of existential in a way, although I don't mention any existential theorists, but it goes into those kind of themes that are not very often talked about in our kind of broader left-wing, very online socialist circles yeah, I mean I was surprised when I was reading your book that you start off with a quote but um, and and you do make an observation that that, uh, I want to have you tease out a little bit where you pick up on the idea of the opium of the masses and you tie it to both spirituality and addiction and you talk a little bit about Mark Fisher's uh uh depressive hedonia as opposed to a hedonia a bit, and I wanted you to like tease out the way those concepts interact in your analysis of the way people interact online in response to capitalism right.

C. Derick Varn: 4:05

Okay. So I mean there's quite a lot going on in the book, uh, as there often are in my generally very short books, but somehow they seem to pack a lot in and then I get to the point of recounting what I said, and it's not always easy. But yes, it starts with Jung, and actually I've had other people say that was a surprise. Of course Jung has been somewhat co-opted by the right wing, if you think about the figure of of Jordan Peterson, but I wouldn't take him as a right wing thinker particularly. He's not actually used that much in the book. There's literally a quote in the beginning of the book and I think I refer to his concept of synchronicity later on. But the quote I start with is addiction is the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness. So addiction is a spiritual thirst, for for wholeness. You know, I think we have to be a little bit careful using terms like spirituality, unless we hedge it with hegelianism and say, well, spirit essentially is material, and then it gets a little bit less woolly. So, without mentioning Hegel, that is kind of where the book goes. It's a strong socialist message that also talks about spirit in terms of a healthiness, or what would be called colloquially, a well-being, and Fisher was referred to at several points in the book, partly because Fisher talks about this contradiction whereby psychology it encourages a notion that we can simply just will ourselves into a better position. Okay, and it's actually very dangerous because it's almost like, well, if you can't do it, then you just, uh, it's your own fault. Okay, so actually comes about with good intentions, so that you know we have got the tools to. Psychology would have it, we have the tools to improve our situation. But if you go too far down that route, you get into a kind of magical thinking whereby what actually is called by David Smale voluntarism which actually Fisher picked up on this term and used it himself magical voluntarism. It's just a mechanism by which you just wish yourself into a better position and it runs throughout therapies actually.

C. Derick Varn: 6:34

So I use that and I point out that, whilst the online realm actually exacerbates a lot of our problems, so actually we go to the online realm feeling anxious. We go there to somehow feel, you know, to feel better, to feel satiated, to feel more complete. We generally end up feeling less complete. It creates a cycle of anxiety, anxiety. So we might go there. We want to. We want approval from posting selfies, from posting kind of wishy-washy spiritual messages. We're not even immune in our circles because we might want approval from posting about adorno or marx.

C. Derick Varn: 7:09

So, you know, you post your kind of smart message about adorno or one post. Their message could be me, in fact and you kind of think, well, am I going to get? You know, I'm going to get much adoration of that am I going to get likes from c derrick vahn and matt manis, you know. So I think we're all, we're all kind of guilty of it. However logical we think we are. Um, and you know it's very short-lived that kind of that moment of relief when you get people responding in a positive way to your messages. So you end up chasing it again and again and and that actually causes more anxiety, and where people sometimes end up is is having their head kind of done in by this negative cycle online, is they end up going online again to look for spiritual answers. So so, meditation courses, advice from spiritual Instagram stars or YouTube stars, and a lot of that advice is actually very dangerous.

C. Derick Varn: 8:01

So it partly really messes up the synchronicity mechanism or what Jung calls synchronicity, which means kind of meaningful coincidences which might guide you through your life. But there's kind of a hard scientific version of this and there's kind of a more fluffy spiritual version. And Jung puts himself very much on the fence. He's not very clear what he really means ever, because he has to speak like a scientist, because he was a, he was effectively a scientist, but he obviously has strong spiritual leanings. So you could take synchronicity to mean basically there are kind of signs coming spiritually in your life. So you could take synchronicity to mean basically there are kind of signs coming spiritually in your life.

C. Derick Varn: 8:34

So you, you know, you keep seeing a certain animal or pictures of a certain animal that could be your spiritual, your spirit animal. That's how how it would be, how it would be portrayed in new age circles, um, but there's a kind of harder scientific version. It's not, you know, it's not kind of spirit animals or angels trying to trying to communicate through numbers or animals or what have you images of animals or what have you. It's just that there are coincidences which carry meaning for individuals and it's completely yeah, it's completely down to the individual. It's not, it's not, it's not any kind of spiritual force trying to communicate with you. But there's no doubt that there are very strong coincidences that we, we all see in our lives and synchronicity can, in that case, mean it's literally a coincidence, but you can choose to take that as meaningful and make it part of your narrative, even in the meaningless universe. So this can be actually quite useful.

C. Derick Varn: 9:26

But one of the things this is that comes up a lot now online is linked to numerology. So you have these currents of um meaning found in in in meaning, found in numbers that go back to um. They have their roots in in in um religion, you know, in in ancient spiritual practices and religions, um, but there is just very crude readings of the, of the meaning of numbers and what numbers might represent in your life. So one famous one is 1111 or 1111. So it's, it's called, these are called angel numbers. Okay, so by certain kind of new age influences and new kind of spiritualists, um, they'll say that these are your angel numbers. So it's your angels trying to speak to you.

C. Derick Varn: 10:16

So if you keep seeing 11 11 on your clock and maybe on till receipts in another context, then whatever you're thinking at the time when you see it, that's your angel trying to give you a sign about that thing you're talking, you're thinking of, so you're thinking of breaking out of your partner, and every time you see 11, 11, when you're thinking of so, you're thinking of breaking out of your partner.

C. Derick Varn: 10:32

And every time you see 11, 11, when you're thinking it, um, then that's a sign you know that's a positive path. Um, the thing is, once you get into googling this kind of thing, obviously it's going to keep coming back at you. So you're going to keep seeing 11, 11, because the algorithm is going to keep feeding it to you and there are a range of numbers like 333, 777, and actually it's very, um, it's very haphazard, like there's not actually a single meaning. So it's also where it's dangerous, because you can start googling this stuff for somebody who's genuinely you know, mentally insecure and you're getting all kinds of different meanings. You're going to keep, you're going to keep googling till you get the right meaning perhaps. Um, so this is just going to lead to an explosion in these numbers coming back at you, uh, through google and through your social media.

Mike Watson: 11:20

So, yeah, I basically talk about how, how this kind of screws up with, uh, our science system yeah, uh, I was actually thinking about gematria, which is the jewish system of that and how it's been decontextualized, and, like tiktok, uh. So you know, um, a lot of gematria has to do with in the fact that, like uh and semitic, and in uh, early roman uh languages, letters are numbers. I mean, they are, um, and so the assumption wasn't I mean, it's kind of botched, but it wasn't as weird. And then when I your book had me thinking about, oh yeah, the moment you start plugging this into your algorithm, it's going to give more of it to you, um, particularly if you do it on a social media algorithm like that's what, that's how they operate. So there's going to be a, a mutually enforcing feedback loop of paranoia. Um, and I was thinking about all kinds of weird uh. You know, uh, like I've messed up my algorithms doing research for things and then all of a sudden, I'm getting the most bizarre shit in my feed. So if you are given to a certain kind of fluffy synchronicity and you're not thinking about the setup of these online communication systems, it can seem like you're actually, you know, getting positive feedback on this weird interpretation of ancient magic and now it's just the algorithm kind of feeding you what you want. So yeah, that's. That's an interesting set of problems about the way mental instability and confirmation bias can be like almost leveraged against you by these capitalist firms to give you what you want.

Mike Watson: 13:17

Uh, I do want to ask you a question about fisher though, because I've always found fisher's thinking around david smells to be a little bit hard for me to understand. Um, and the reason why is his is Fisher's stuff around like democracy as joy and Corbynism seemed to me to be out of sync with his insights from smells and I wanted to ask you what. You didn't write about that in the book. But I want to ask you what you make of that, because, because a lot of his stuff around social democracy as a means of of getting beyond stuff like the perils of capitalist health, mental health care, always seemed to me actually voluntaristic itself. So I wanted to see what your take on that was okay, yeah, um, so, yeah, going back to smell.

C. Derick Varn: 14:06

So we're talking about basically the risk that that um wellness practices and, and, and psychotherapy and psychological practices lead you down the path of thinking you can manifest, you know, a better reality. Now, fisher did get this moment of, uh, extreme positivity and, and, and, and you know whether it was tipping into mania, I don't know when when corbyn um first emerges, you know, popular and and and there's a figure that was really motivating young people in england and I think it was around that point. He started a. Was it a facebook page called summer is coming, yep, um. And so there were lots of posts that just said things like summer is coming, and there were some political posts as well. But the whole summer is coming was a thing of. There was going to be a new bright movement and counterculture in england and it was going to be based around corbyn um, yeah, and, and. What year was that? Was it? Was it long? Was it far off? His um support for russell brand when russell brand went on news night yeah, it was so.

Mike Watson: 15:16

so, yeah, when I mean, it was interesting to me because at at the time when we published the the the vampire castle piece, which is one of the one of the main pieces of for russell brand, um, uh, I didn't realize that that was actually a signification of what was going to be a change in his politics. And in retrospect, if you look at Democracy is Joy and those essays which come out after that, it was. It was actually a major shift in Fisher's politics. So I think it was about six months after the the vampire castle piece that we saw.

C. Derick Varn: 15:56

Yeah, Well, I mean, I know Corbyn went and addressed the Glastonbury crowd. You know there's a big festival in England called the Glastonbury festival which has been going since the seventies, and that made I mean, that was just a moment where it just became apparent that corbyn was was embodying or perhaps fronting something that we hadn't imagined possible that there could be a kind of young adult movement that was very moved by by democratic socialism and it could encompass music, because it happened to be a festival and he was speaking out and you've got football crowds as well chanting for Corbyn. So it seemed like something could happen. But you know, I think that most people who've watched British politics for as long as Fisher has and myself and I'm a fair few years younger than he would be now we tend to be quite cynical and think, well, that's not going to happen because the government's going to shut it down, because they're just so good at shutting down. You know potential, potentially incendiary left-wing movements in the UK. I mean, I think that you know America and Britain. They have an edge on most of the world in this, which is why you don't see massive uprisings. So I was a lot more cynical than Fisher fisher.

C. Derick Varn: 17:13

I actually left some kind of sarcastic comments on his facebook thread and I mean, I used to be in contact with him anyway, but I don't think, I don't think we really had it out, you know, in any between us, um, in private chats, um, but um, yeah, I think I think he, I think it, yeah, you, what you identify is actually very smart and I hadn't really looked at it exactly like that. But Fisher did seem way over positive about some things and he seemed to drop his normal call remove, because I would have taken him before that to be a little bit of a slightly edgy leftist that wasn't going to be moved by all this stuff. He was a bit more in the accelerationist camp, accelerationism which kind of develops of his own accord. You know he wasn't in the camp of hey, let's have a. You know, let's have a street movement, and you know anything's possible. Um, so I would, yeah, I would say that he had mood fluctuations possibly, although I'm not that close to him to know that, but it seems a bit like that because he's thinking kind of know, it took on emotional currents and the whole Russell Brand thing I think was very mistaken.

C. Derick Varn: 18:16

It seemed from my own point of view, again being British, when Brand went on Newsnight because it came from Russell Brand going on Newsnight. I think probably your audience are very familiar with this whole scenario. But Brand went on Newsnight and he said to Jeremy Paxman, who's actually a very it was a very talented news anchor who used to hold people to account Seriously. He said, like we need a revolution. And he kind of you know, he used it as this kind of moment almost similar to the Sex Pistols on the BBC many years ago when they got very rude and antagonistic towards this very stuffy um bbc host. I think he kind of wanted to turn into that moment. So he kept pushing uh, paxman, on this thing, we need a revolution.

C. Derick Varn: 19:00

But anyone who's followed brand's work knows that he's far off having any idea on how to have a revolution. You know, and this is even before he he kind of took this populist turn, right-wing turn that he seems to have taken in recent last couple of years. So you know, there was kind of a big debate in England then between me and everyone I really knew about, you know, with the people who were like, you know, wow, someone has to say it. You know, brilliant, we're so glad Bran just went on TV and said the thing you have to say. Then the other people just like, well, this isn't going to get us a revolution at all.

C. Derick Varn: 19:35

It's really sad that it's being said by brand in this way. You know, that's very populist and and and it's kind of absorbed the energies of many people who should be thinking about revolution but it's just completely distracted them. You know, um. So it was kind of surprising to see fisher very embroiled in that um, and yes, it is a bit like, hey, we want a revolution, um, so let's just make it happen. There's enough of us who want one. You know, that's the kind of vibe you get. That's the vibe I got from around that brand um moment, um, and later on the corby moment and the way that fisher was talking about that, that there was nothing of um apart from fisher, you know, in his actual intellectual work. But there's nothing about that whole scene that had the sense of people willing to really do the work, you know.

Mike Watson: 20:24

So that's why it's all out yeah, I was actually thinking about reading your book last week.

Mike Watson: 20:34

I was thinking about the implications for Fisher because I have come to see the Vampire Castle piece as an indication of a major change in his thought that I think is actually underexplored and people focus on his condemnation of identity politics in particular.

Mike Watson: 20:56

They read it, unfortunately, in an American context and not in a british one, which doesn't help. Um, but uh, there's actually a pretty big shift in that essay where I think, when he's talking about the problems of ultra leftism which he links to identity politics, as you know, just telling working class people no, you can't do this. And I read that now very differently than I read it when we published that essay, and I read that now as somewhat I think I might, you know, be one of the only people who reads it this way but as Fisher arguing with himself that part of the people that he's seeing as the vampire castle is is, you know some of the things he said about social democracy and capitalist realism, and he's not directly like saying I changed my mind. He is putting it in this aggramated, you know, uh, vampires invading the castle, but one of those vampires happens to look like a younger him. So uh, which I laugh. I actually don't find it funny because I think it has dire consequences.

C. Derick Varn: 21:59

Yeah, yeah, I get the feeling is a little bit like we could all do better now. And then he got taken as him berating people. Um, yeah, I, I, I can, I can agree with you there. Yeah, that does make sense.

Mike Watson: 22:17

This brings us to the Nietzsche and the nihilism of shitposting we have. I think we have moved on the left from an under criticism of Nietzsche to an over criticism of Nietzsche. Yeah, of course Nietzsche was a reactionary thinker, but I think you know admitting that does not mean that everything he said was useless or that anyone who's ever cited him is somehow secretly a fascist. So I found that interesting because, despite all that, I think even the debates about Nietzsche on both sides actually illustrate something about the nature of Ressentiment and the way that it operates. So I wanted to ask you about the way Resentiment seems to play in shitposting, because it definitely seems to be an addictive thing that you see online. I know that. I've fallen into it personally, so I'm just stirring up shit to do it.

C. Derick Varn: 23:32

For sure, yeah, yeah, for sure. Not for sure that you've fallen into it personally. So you know, just stirring up shit to do it for sure, yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, not for sure that you've fallen into it, but as you, as you say you have, I'll take that to be the case, but for sure, for sure. That is a general problem we experience. I don't generally write about much, so I don't think I'm also guilty of, to be honest. I mean, it depends on the context of what is that exactly what I'm saying? Um, but but yeah, there has been a reignited debate about whether the left should speak about Nietzsche, but I think that may be maybe a little bit distorting, because I don't. I'm not sure Daniel Tartt was actually full against the left talking about Nietzsche. No, he was just saying that it needs to be done a bit differently.

Mike Watson: 24:11

Yeah, he wasn't. I'm not sure Lacerdo was either. Yeah, I mean, I do think certain Nietzschean ideas have been decontextualized by the left in a way that's problematic, and there's certain elements of Nietzschean thought that we yeah, there's a risk of us losing sight of the fact that he was indeed very right wing.

C. Derick Varn: 24:37

Yeah, I think so. It doesn't help that he says many contradictory things and then you have to just find a strong current running through his work and that's from current. To me doesn't seem to be that he's, that he's right wing. There are more interesting things I would pick up on. I just I just think he's right-wing. There are other more interesting things I would pick up on. I just think he's brilliant in terms of metaphysics and aesthetics even more. And it's what he offers us in terms of aesthetics I find really useful, and I think a lot of us inherit Nietzsche as a valid figure via the Frankfurt School, so we don't even question it. And yeah, I think okay, okay when we should look at the roots of this, because of course, I suppose if you forget, if you, if you forget the roots, and then they can kind of reroute or take root again in obnoxious ways. I suppose we do have to be careful what we're dealing with. But I don't see that as a as a particularly big risk when you're dealing with this issue of resentment, which is very useful for the left, because the left suffers a lot from resentment. So I think, basically, we're obviously all very insecure beings. To be human is to be insecure and we try and cover over that in in different ways.

C. Derick Varn: 25:53

And one is religious practice. So prayer. And the funny thing with prayer if you pray, if you're praying in front of an idol, is that you often become as still as the idol. So your fear is death or irrelevance, or frailty. And so you pray in front of a statue and then, in praying in front of a statue, you become mostly immobile and you become as lifeless as the statue itself. Arguably this is the kind of argument Nietzsche would make, and he says that's what's so very dangerous about the Christian faith which he had a personal bugbear with, because his dad was a minister who died horribly, I think quite young. His dad was a minister who died horribly, I think quite young. But yes, how does this manifest in today's use of the Internet?

C. Derick Varn: 26:43

Well, I think it's a similar thing, where we try and assert our kind of you know life, as kind of you know vital living beings that are not about to die in any sense. We try and do that through posting to make ourselves stronger. So we'll post to try and get more popular, basically, in whatever sense that means. So whether you're somebody who's posting selfies because you're potentially, you know, perceivably attractive, or you're somebody posting critical messages or spiritual messages, and in the posting we're very static, so we're a bit like people praying in front of idols. You know, whilst we talk very big, we need revolutions, we're actually doing anything, but we've actually been reduced to, you know, just still slightly kind of moving beings in front of our keyboards.

C. Derick Varn: 27:27

Um so, and I think actually if you're very angry, you can see that kind of image even more. Somebody's posting very angrily because they tense up in that way. It's almost like a kind of rigor mortis which links to a image actually of Adorno and Horkheimer's in Dialectic of Enlightenment when they talk about the anger of the dictator. If you look at the grimace of Hitler as he's giving his speech, his speech is that he almost becomes exactly what he's not trying to be. He tenses up in a kind of rigor mortis-like position and that's the kind of the tension that you get from fascism and other kind of angry political forms for Adorno, and I think you can kind of see that in the figure of the very angry political meme poster or, you know, or tweeter. So that's basically how I would see that and I think that is very useful coming from Nietzsche.

Mike Watson: 28:27

Yeah, I definitely see. I was thinking about the obviousness of resentment. I mean, you mentioned the extreme cases in the very beginning of the essay, which is like incel menospirit posting, and when I talk to people who have, like, I've talked to people who are addiction specialists who also work with incels, work within cells, and they're like, they're really really hard to reach because the resentment has just piled up and makes almost all interventions suspect and all hope suspect. And I do, I do worry about that. You know I teach young people. You know I teach people who are in there between 15 and 18 years old, and they're the amount of like resentment language that you see in young people, even in very young people.

Mike Watson: 29:24

If you look, you know, if you look at the way that, like, kids that are in the United States are interacting with teachers, you see a lot of what I would consider justified resentment that comes out in unjustified ways, Like they, you know, the anger just bleeds out and it attacks the people who are the closest emblems of authority for you know, teachers, women, etc. But who are not the actual authorities who are ruining these kids lives. Um, and so what I started thinking about about from your book was how this was already kind of innate in online culture. It's just now. It's ubiquitous, like. This is one of the things we always talk about how you know the online world isn't real life. But in some ways I'm like yeah, but it presages it. A lot of stuff that you see online you're going to see in person eventually, you're going to see in person eventually. Um, uh, so I wanted to know what you made of that, considering that transcends to be intensifying.

C. Derick Varn: 30:27

Yes, uh. Well, yeah, you do see this resentment and and the kind of uh, displacement of the resentment onto onto the wrong themes and wrong figures, for sure, yeah, that's, that's totally pervasive in the, in the populist right-wing realm, um, like like the anti-mask movement and the anti-vax movement, and it feels a lot like, uh, fuck you, I won't do what you tell me type sentiment, which it kind of burns itself out. There's nothing else coming from it. Um, so, yeah, and, and I think things that are online often appear in reality. But also, you know, the online realm is real in its moment. It has a real consequence.

C. Derick Varn: 31:14

So all of that energy is going online, but again, the, the actual people engaging are not, you know, they're not being very energetical. The energy is going online, but again, the, the actual people engaging are not, you know, they're not being very energetic. All the energy is not being consumed in any useful and healthy way. Um, so I mean, I actually think, in terms of posture, um, you know, when you're writing, if you're angry when you're typing, that's, that's already a bad thing. Um, they're probably damaging themselves just just from sitting there angrily typing, um, but, um, you know it's to have a huge kind of reserve of resentment and just to be chucking it at a screen is a very dangerous thing.

Mike Watson: 31:57

Um, it's probably one of the biggest problems we have today, I think yeah, I, I think it's a, it's highly distorting, if nothing else, and it I would say I definitely see it more pronouncedly on the populist white, but it seems culturally ubiquitous, like I. I think we know plenty of leftists who are, who are like yeah, yeah, it goes screaming over resentment now uh it's going.

C. Derick Varn: 32:26

It goes both ways. Yeah, yeah, um. Yeah, I mean it's looking at the us election. This is very confusing. It's confusing how, how the vote is so close, um, but then you know, if you look at it, it's not like. It's not like there's been much reach out. You know there's been some very silly platitudes and efforts by Kamala Harris so she will have like an all-party you know advisory board in the government if she wins. But that's not really a way of reaching out. It's not genuinely a way of reaching out between the populist right and the idpol left or vice versa. You can imagine, if there's going to be any reach out, it should be coming from the idpol left to the populist right.

Mike Watson: 33:10

But people are just very consumed with their resentments, so there's no real way of people communicating One of the fascinating things about the United States is you always hear that we're super, super polarized and we are. But if you look at what we're polarized over, it's vibes like, um, the actual policies between biden and and trump. There are differences and they're not totally insubstantial. But even If you were to compare the policy difference between, like, say, goldwater and Nixon, who were on the Obstinately the same party, there were bigger differences Than between Biden and Trump and I think that leads To this weird sense of like there's no addressing the needs. I mean, for example, yeah, you live, you don't live in the UK anymore, but yeah, you know, you're from there and you know about, like, the Norse degeneration. Well, we have swaths of our country. That's basically the same, not as severe because we're not having the same economic problems that Britain is.

Mike Watson: 34:31

But Alabama has very little social infrastructure. A lot of the Mountain West has very little social infrastructure and the one in the places that do have it, they have it for from religious institutions. Like I live in a place that has decent social infrastructure but it's from the mormon church. So, like then when you go to a place like california and there's pretty good social infrastructure but there's like the only people there can access it are either the very poor, the extremely wealthy um it, it is just socially distorting, um. So you know, if the id poll left wanted to reach out to the right, the best thing they could do is be like we can help you build social infrastructure if you get over your racism. But that's never been on the table at all, you know that's true.

C. Derick Varn: 35:25

Yeah, well, I think. I think sometimes things are just not seen as left-wing issues, because it's not. It's not the left principally talking about them. So in finland we have an issue of language and the apparent kind of well, the fact that the Finnish language is is less and less spoken. There are more and more immigrants coming in that are not learning Finnish and it's a very difficult language. So I don't know Finnish. I know some very basic Finnish after six years here, whereas when I lived in Italy I learned Italian in a couple of years.

C. Derick Varn: 35:58

Um, and one issue is that Finn speak english very well, so it's kind of hard to find a moment to practice with people. But in any case, there is um. You know, there's a kind of strong critical tendency from the right in in in the media now, um, and you know, I think the left could really benefit. What's missing here is no one's teaching us, there's no community vibe. Finland is a place where people tend to be very kind of insular, so it's not like you're going to meet people who are like hey, I'll help you learn.

C. Derick Varn: 36:32

But also, the government provision of language tuition is only for unemployed people. So the complaint this week in a newspaper was. There's a lot of snobbish foreign professors who don't want to learn Finnish, whereas a lot of you know unemployed immigrants that are learning. So you've got a lot of cleaners now. You know who get. They learn Finnish when they're unemployed because there's a scheme there for them. They get a job and then they can speak Finnish as a cleaner, as a taxi driver, but the professors can't speak Finnish. Therefore the professors are kind of out of touch and removed.

C. Derick Varn: 37:04

Anyhow, you know, I think that this is a topic for the left. The left could simply say we're going to provide free language tuition to foreign people, regardless of whether they're unemployed, whether they're workers. But the left just say this isn't a topic for us. You see where I'm getting to're on kington now. The left is such a topic because the topic of foreigners speaking finnish is a right-wing topic. But I don't understand why it has to be, because if you care principally about people community, then surely that becomes a left-wing topic. So yeah, yeah in.

Mike Watson: 37:36

In america this gets even more pronounced. Uh, for things like like being honest about the ineffectiveness of public education. Like the left won't touch that for the most part, the problems of and some of them are left, I think should be inherent left and wing shoes. One of the problems that we have is in the United States is we use the educational system as our only social safety net for children, which also means that there's a bunch of contradictory impulses and stuff put on teachers and stuff put on teachers, and while occasionally you'll get leftists to admit that like, okay, we're asking people to be, you know, teachers, guardians, you know, in some cases, literally in my state, every school has a volunteer guardian who gets a one-time payment of $600 and carries a gun on them True facts and there is not a lot of discourse on the left about what to do about that, because you know talking about, for example, administrative bloat in elementary schools and high schools. We talk about in colleges, but in elementary schools and high schools it seems to be beyond the pale. And I say that just because this is my field and I know it very well and I don't see leftists talk about it ever. And it is talked about on the right, and often, sometimes I listen to right-wingers and when they're diagnosing the problem I'm like, well, they're actually talking about something very real. Their answers to it are insane, but they are talking about a real problem.

Mike Watson: 39:30

And what I see on the left is like talk about gun violence in schools, which is bad. Here I mean, compared to Europe, it's exponentially bad. However, as I like to remind people, you're still way, way, way more likely to get hit by lightning than you are to be in a school shooting. Like it's the, the, the, the. The number of the number of school shootings here is quite severe, and they, they're after.

Mike Watson: 40:03

They're actually not while they're presented in the media. The media presents them mostly as these big event school shootings that are random. Most of them are actually, you know, tied into the stuff that you would expect shootings to be tied into, which is like botched drug deals or fighting lovers or whatever, um, uh, and that isn't discussed. And then the other thing that people kind of pick up on is and the right makes good use is, it seems like well, the Democrats and I don't mean the left here, but the Democrats have a strong support base amongst the administrators, so they're not going to go after it and it seems like, for some reason, the left in America follows the democratic lead without even thinking about it Like it's. It's a very interesting problem and I I've wondered what, uh, social media and politicized identity does for that, because it just it seems like there's this oppositional orientation where where the resentment sticks up and you just won't even look at issues that are legitimately brought up because of who brought it up first. You know.

C. Derick Varn: 41:29

Well, this is true, yeah, yeah. And there are subjects which are simply right wing or left wing subjects, or even better We've already kind of said that, but taking it on a bit there are problems which are right-wing problems or left-wing problems, and it's like well, society has problems. You know, you can't have only right-wing or left-wing, either right-wing or left-wing problems, and what side you're on dictates which problems you're going to think about or admit to existing. So there is a problem there. And how do we get there? I think it's a lot tied into.

C. Derick Varn: 42:02

Going back to the book, our insecurities we are frightened of. I mean, if you look into adorno, hegel, mark user, you get this kind of we're frightened of nature which is kind of it's hard to relate to. In a way, you have to kind of um, be fairly habituated to german philosophy or philosophy generally to go along with that, because of course we're not really generally frightened of nature. As, in a way, you have to kind of be fairly habituated to German philosophy or philosophy generally to go along with that, because of course we're not really generally frightened of nature as we understand it, because we're not frightened day to day of even if you have hurricanes in Florida, you're not walking around thinking I'm frightened of hurricanes, I'm frightened of volcanoes or tigers or whatever you know. You're frightened of illness and injury and dying, and this has a profound effect on us constantly. And what we try and do is we try and make ourselves stronger than the threat constantly. So you get a point of subjugating our surroundings, subjugating nature, subjugating, therefore, each other. So this is where it gets into forming identities, because to subjugate you need to have sides and you need to decide who's the enemy.

C. Derick Varn: 43:06

Um, so this is where in the book, it says that the left wing needs to basically overcome its fear of, of nature and I put it quite bluntly in the book, as the fear is fear of death. So it ends up being a book quite a lot about death, which is not really what intended. Um, I don't know how it's going to hit the sales, but um, but yeah, there's a lot, a lot of talk about death in there, and what I say is that there's this um quote we associate with che guevara, but it was used by a lot of uh, of socialists in south amer. Still is there's socialism or death. So you know, we want socialism or we're going to die trying, which is all good and well, though it's not very applicable to the Western situation at the moment, because that's just not how we're going to achieve anything right now.

Mike Watson: 43:55

Because we very quickly die. Yeah, yeah, the odds are very much against us.

C. Derick Varn: 43:59

let's just say that. So then you know, I say what would be more useful would be this line socialism and or death. By that I mean the socialism that comes about is going to have to accept death, because it's actually our fear of death which is driving capitalism, it's our insecurity which is driving us to try and fight nature, which ends up with us fighting each other. So we need basically to become more comfortable with the conditions of existence. It won't make death go away, but it might help to bring about socialism, is my point.

Mike Watson: 44:36

Yeah, I was thinking about that a little bit because I've thought about the evolution of socialist slogans. You have the old one, socialism or barbarism, and you know World War Two happened, so we got barbarism, we you know. You have socialism or death, and a lot of Latin American socialists are dead, so I guess I got that and and then you have socialism or extinction and I'm like please don't make us pick the wrong side of that one. But I'm also thinking about you know, I was reading your book.

Mike Watson: 45:07

Actually I was thinking about Norman O Brown a lot, the terror management theorist and the and and I kept thinking about the way that is used in capitalist social reproduction. Like the way in which extending, you know people have superficially noticed, you know, the capitalism obsession with youth. But what, what is that actually about? Like it's, it's about manipulating our, our, our natural fear of death. You know, and and what that means. And you know trying to freeze natural life cycles.

Mike Watson: 46:04

And I do think there's a way in which that is used against us in ways that makes us like, miss how much death is actually around?

Mike Watson: 46:17

I mean, in the United States, know, we can talk about violent dust, but you can also just talk about the fact that, like, um, for a great majority of the population who, uh, are blue collar here, which is like 60 of the population, the way it's defined by liberals, um, their lifespan has has either stalled in the case of oppressed minority groups, like Black and Latin people, or it has dropped in the case of, like quote, white, unquote working class people, where there is a closing of the gap, but it's all negative.

Mike Watson: 46:56

Like it's all, it's all, it's all race to the bottom. Like it's all, it's all, it's all race to the bottom. And it is amazing to me how little I actually see that discussed, even amongst people who are supposedly really interested in working class politics, because it's like there's a reason why this populism stuff really works, because in these people's daily lives, um, they're just seeing people dying younger of all kinds of stuff. And it actually ties a little bit into the fourth chapter of your book, because one of the major increases of death we always call them death by despair, but let's like be quite honest about what they are it's death by alcoholism and addiction, which has gone up pretty dramatically. And I often feel like that's a place where the left doesn't have a lot to say, and when it does have something to say, it's like unrealistic teetotaler stuff, like just everybody lived perfectly clean life, but most of the time it doesn't say much about it at all.

C. Derick Varn: 48:02

Yep, there's a fairly yeah, I mean there is the acid communist movement, if it can be called. That is largely online. So the response recently as far as there is one is that we can take we can take psychedelics and that will lead to a healthier outlook. But I'm not convinced by that. As I say in the book, so it might work individually for a while, but it doesn't scale up societally. Okay, so we could scale up potentially, but there's no government who's going to scale it up. No government that's going to get in power in the West is going to scale up psychedelic use so that every depressed person can undergo psychedelic treatment. Of course you can just take psychedelics on your own, but the results will be very mixed.

C. Derick Varn: 48:59

But, yeah, in terms of conversations about alcoholism, yeah, it's not something really covered by the left or by yeah, by um, critical theorists. I mean, eric frome talked a bit about addiction actually, and it's certainly suggested by marcuso, and he talks about how we're kind of given false desires and then we're given the kind of resolution of that desire. So capitalism manufactures false desire. Then it makes you believe you've been satiated, but when the desire was never really you know it wasn't a good desire in the first place. I guess addiction links to that. But yeah, I mean there's a big problem. Yeah, I think you know. I don't know if you get this.

C. Derick Varn: 49:43

In America still Young people go to university often far away from their hometowns. In Britain it's actually getting less common with the introduction of bigger tuition fees, but people kind of suddenly at 18 in the UK are kind of let loose and they're sent packing and of course that has a big impact and people kind of find solace or they adjust through alcohol and drugs a lot of the time. So I don't know why that really exists, that mechanism, because now it's about 50% of people go to university at around 18 or so. So it's definitely like a societal rite of passage or if not a rite of passage, it's a thing that you make people do because it's somehow, you know, conducive to the functioning of a capitalist society. But in any case it produces alcoholics and other kinds of addicts.

Mike Watson: 50:41

So in America that was pretty common until very recently. In the last five or six years we've seen a massive drop-off of particularly young men going to college. They pretty much don't now, and that is we're different than a lot of the developed world and that is gendered so strongly here than a lot of the developed world, and that that is gendered so strongly here, and what we're finding is blue collar boys just don't think college has anything to offer them, but also 10 percent of them aren't working. And this, this transition of lifestyle that we used to see, that was associated with college binge drinking Right. That was a big phenomenon in the 80s, 90s and aughts. Here we're actually seeing that without the college.

Mike Watson: 51:29

You know, people are just turning 18 and going through a period of massive consumption, and that is cross-class too. It is not one class doing it. I guess the upper middle class does it less, but it's kind of across the board. It's across genders, but it's more associated with men, and you've seen increasing signs of complications from alcoholism. You know, in early life and I was. I was interested in it, though, because one of the things that you get into why acid communism and ego death was really important does seem to be like. This is partially this is the, this is the capitals, and giving you a desire you you don't really actually have and replacing it with something really socially and personally destructive. But also, I do think part of the reason why they can sell you that desire is there is a real desire of which they are shifting, related to ego, identity and the burdens of that, and so I wanted to get your thoughts on that, because I I think your book actually, even though you didn't explicitly make this argument at least those two things in a way.

C. Derick Varn: 52:46

I haven't linked them before well, yeah, I mean I, I ran a platform called the acid left with adam ray atkins, who's a who's a poet and artist based in Florida, and then I kind of I had too much happening. I had a child and university job and I gave over to Adam, or I left and Adam carried on running it and then he stopped after a while. I think we both just found that whatever we were trying to say, we weren't really saying it. We were just getting absorbed into the algorithm and concerned about the viewing figures et cetera. But we made it for a while and obviously with a name like acid left. You know, people assume that you're very pro-psychedelics. As it happened, um, adam was more pro than I, was what I saw in acid communism, which was a book that mark fisher began but he died before finishing it.

C. Derick Varn: 53:37

You can read the introduction online and and in the k-punk book um, which is a collection of fisher essays. Um, so you can find it. Um, basically, in the introduction we don't know really where it's, where it's going, but we can try and guess. Um he. He suggests that. You know there's a. There was a strong kind of trend towards a breaking down of of social boundaries and and and traditions in the uk in the 60s and 70s which was very much linked to music and a diffusion of psychedelic culture throughout society. But he very much said it was psychedelic culture, not just psychedelics as in. It wasn't just because people were taking lsd. He didn't suggest you had to take lsd, he was suggesting that something in the music hinted at an erosion of rigid, previously existing rigid um traditions and codes in the uk, codes of behavior. And he actually talks about the limit experience there, which is a term coming down from fuko and um butai before fuko. The limit experience means a experience which could be um, could be led by psychedelics, but it could be led by meditation, could be led by physical activity, by artistic endeavor or artistic practice or other.

C. Derick Varn: 54:57

I should say um. But it leads to a kind of dissolution of the normal. What is suggested? There is a normal subject, object boundary, so the normal boundary between the individual and the world around them. So this in itself can produce experiences where you're no longer fighting the natural object or no longer fighting. That we could say using the kind of vocabulary I've been using in the book. So that's all good, but I just don't see how we could claim that that's going to come about on a societal level through the taking of psychedelics. And I actually did worry when I ran the acid left channels that kids were going to go and do psychedelics, because we kind of made this sound okay. But actually I tended to be saying on most of our broadcasts that this was really as much about art and meditation practices and activities like that.

C. Derick Varn: 55:52

But in the book I say well, you know, it's not like you know, acid is going to suddenly change society. There's a drug that's having a huge impact on society. It's alcohol and it's very present and acid is present. The alcohol is nearly always present in the same space anyway. Um, so you know, at the end of a uh saturday morning so people got out friday night, getting into four o'clock in the morning, the the there's a couple of people lying down in the in the paper looking at the stars because they're taking lsd, and there's also a lot of people vomiting and eating kebabs and getting in fights because they've drunk alcohol. So, um, I suppose I was just trying to make it look, I was just trying to like put in perspective um, that that we're not. This isn't going to happen like that and there's not going to be any massive.

C. Derick Varn: 56:42

How do you call it? Ego death movement? Although ego death is to some degree desirable, that's not a system. Ego death basically just means what I just went through with the limb experience. You somehow, through drug taking, meditation, physical activity, you lose your ego momentarily. That's good by analogy, because you lose it momentarily, you return back to your normal ego state and you you think well, something happened there that was interesting. What if I can make that happen all the time and for all the society? Well, great thinking. But we all thought that smoking pot when we were 14 or whenever we were doing this, and it didn't manifest. It's not going to manifest. We need a more realistic reckoning with the conditions of our existence and then to kind of try and build communities from that. But I'm sorry, I don't think I answered exactly what you asked, but that was kind of my thinking there.

Mike Watson: 57:36

Well, you bring up the concept of living experience right. I first encountered it in Bataille. It also shows up in Carl Jasper's, which means it has two kind of genealogical uses. One is Bataille, foucault, blanchard lineage, the other, weirdly, is in pop Buddhist philosophy, going back to Buddhists using Jaspers, like hippie Buddhist using Carl Jaspers.

Mike Watson: 58:02

So you occasionally see a concept like limit experience. Also, it isn't that exact word I think they often call it like. I'm forgetting what Jack Cromfield calls it, but he's describing the vague sense of ego depth. It's temporary that that a Bataille is describing. Actually, like if you read and I don't like Jack Kornfield as a Buddhist philosopher, but if you read like after the ecstasy, the laundry, it's about having to come down from a limit experience. And it's funny that you bring up meditation because that's what they all say to do that with. And it's funny that you bring up meditation because that's what they all say to do that with, right is you use meditation to achieve that Atman which is the realization of the Lacanian reappropriations of it, particularly through Bataille, and how that gets tied into a kind of some of the few things we get outside of, say Wilhelm Reich, about those kinds of experience in critical theory, because critical theory by and large doesn't actually, for the most part, except through battalion, occasionally, foucault and deluse, touch that stuff.

Mike Watson: 59:25

It's not something that's usually in the critical theorist realm of, I would say, like understanding of experience, or, if it is like in adorno, there's a strong distrust of it.

Mike Watson: 59:38

Um, even though Adorno is also very interested in undoing you know what he calls identity thinking. But identity thinking for him doesn't mean like it doesn't mean the way we think about it, just like as identitarian thinking. It means like identification with, with a position at all, like if you go through like negative dialectics. So I was very interested in that and and your own stuff about acid communism, cause I I did get the feeling. I mean, you know, you guys picked up that banner and a lot of people around, matt Cushman Cushman picked up, uh, matt chrisman picked up that banner, you know, and I do sometimes worry the same thing you do, because I'm like, yeah, using psychedelics and self-dosing by yourself, I'm not a prude and I wouldn't say that there's anything necessarily wrong with doing it, but, um, if you're mixing it with alcohol and other substances, which, as you mentioned, is extremely easy to do, it can have all kinds of effects way beyond any kind of limit, experience and so um for sure.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:53

I mean, it's very unpredictable if you, if you're at all prone to, um, to psychosis or or um, what's the term. I'm looking for hypomania, so you don't not fall on, uh, bipolar mania, but something approaching that which which people, many people get uh, but many people have moments of hypomania, so like intense kind of kind of thoughts, intense energy, um, yeah, if you do acid and you're prone to hypomania, that that can be dangerous. I mean, if you do it on your own and you're depressive, that that might not have the best effects, um, that's true for meditation it can be very intense for people with autism and ADHD.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:40

Actually, yeah, it's so. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, I mean it's tricky. I think Fisher would have hedged that a lot in his book. The book, if finished, would have stated that this was not really a book telling people to go and do LSD. And the introduction is not very lsd oriented. I mean he's talking about things like um somebody recounting their experience of what was their childhood, childhood holiday in the 60s with a radio playing in the background. What fisher was fixated on is in that period you could have, you could have family holidays. The workers could have family holidays. So he was could have family holidays. So he was talking about that more than he was talking about festival culture or LSD.

C. Derick Varn: 1:02:25

That's probably the strongest kind of analogy he gives or example he gives is he's actually recounting Danny Baker as a British radio person and then he actually ends up losing his job for saying something stupid on Twitter. The Fisher has the worst luck with people. He's backed Brand and then Brand's now not well, he's kind of cancelled by official media and he backed Danny Baker and Danny Baker. Then he made a tweet of when one of the children of Harry and Meghan was born, he made a tweet of these people walking out of hospital with a monkey and then people said hang on, isn't that racist? They told him.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:09

People immediately said Danny, danny, take it down. People were tweeting, take it down. Do you realise what you've just done? And he took it down. But the damage was already done because it looked like he was saying that the kid because it half what kind of a quarter african-american uh would be a chimpanzee. But he said he wasn't saying that at all. I actually quite believe him. He was just saying he was taking the piss out of royalty, basically, um, but then he got. He got kind of cancelled, um, but yeah, he, he recounted a family holiday and fisher picked up on that and and that's the image I take away from from that introduction to acid communism um, yeah, anyhow yeah, that's um.

Mike Watson: 1:03:49

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that last chapter in your book.

Mike Watson: 1:03:53

We brought up the, the socialism and or death, because it does seem to be that one thing socialists need to embrace is the finitude of what we do, which is why what we do is important, like if, if life is is limited and we know that death is part of the cycle, then, um, the life stultifyingness of capitalism is, and in its refusal to acknowledge death, even in the midst of actual genocide, and the fact that it can render I mean, this was way before, this is way after your book was written Um, so you know, this is not a critique, that's not in there but I think about the way in which, like war porn, uh, on both the IDF side and and unfortunately, in the Gaza, and showing the, the, the other horrors are happening to Gaza and children.

Mike Watson: 1:04:59

I mean, I've seen more dead children on social media than in the last year, than any time since the Iraq war, and actually probably way more.

Mike Watson: 1:05:16

And I've been thinking about that because, on one hand, you know, raising consciousness about the war, whatever that's important, on the other hand, there's a risk of that reducing that life to something that you can like, consume, and you feel the horror of war. You might give five, 10, $20 to one of those Palestinian aid, go fund these and then it's over. You know you, you don't feel like you have any other responsibility for that because in some ways there's not a lot you can do right. And I was thinking about what that last chapter has to say about that, because that element of the repurposing of social rebellion is one of the most horrifying things, which is like the fact that we can even repurpose and denude the meaning of actual atrocity through presentation, because clearly that is happening Right and a lot of people are very motivated about it. But, as I pointed out, you know, you can't be on social media and not be exposed to that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:37

It doesn't have the effect that people are hoping yeah, um, I generally don't think it's a great idea to try and counter horror with images of horror. Um, that's a very adornian point. But I often end up agreeing with Adorno. Adorno has this whole. There can be no art after Auschwitz, which is often kind of misread. He just means in a society that's gone that far towards barbarism, there can't be art in that society. Already the artistic moment is kind of gone. Can't be art in that society. They already already is the artistic moment. It's kind of gone, um, um. But yeah, he also said the images of, of horror play back in in into the same horror. Um, and you know, I tend to agree. I also think we need to know what's going on. But I just try and think of, I'm trying to get into the mindset of people who share those images, apart from the people who actually firsthand saw the atrocities, who can share the images, to say I saw this, which is actually a tendency that goes back to Goya.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:46

Goya made this print in which he wrote I saw this. It came from the Peloponnesian War. This came from the Peloponnesian War, was it in Spain? I believe it was 1700s. He made an etching of a torso that had been slung, you know, slung on a tree like tied to a tree, but limbs had been lopped off and he'd seen it and he was shocked by that. So he wrote, wrote on the thing in Spanish, in the Spanish of the time, so I don't remember actually the phrase he said, but in English it is. I saw this and of course, that's very powerful.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:20

It's the kind of basis of today's photojournalism. But, you know, when it's other people who didn't see it, it becomes something different. So they didn't see it first. It becomes something different, so they didn't see it first. They're just sharing it, often to reinforce their solidarity with the Palestinian movement or, you know, whichever movement it is. But you know, I wonder to what degree people doubt their solidarity. And this is the real thing happening that people do not feel, uh, empowered.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:56

Generally today, people feel insecure, as they always do, and by posting the image again and again, it's another form of selfie posting or posting about politics. It, it shores up their identity, it makes them feel, you know, like they're real, but of course it's not going to work for very long. They're going to have to keep doing it. So you get people who are almost like, well, if you're not posting, they then transfer on to other people. If you're not posting about Palestine, you're not, you know, you're anti-Palestinian. If you're not posting about Palestine, you're liberal, capitalist and pro-war, and you kind of feel that that's what they must feel about themselves as well, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:43

So in a way, they've lost. There's no victory in doing that and, aside from the fact of whether we can stop the war or not, they, as people in faraway countries that have the freedom and liberty to do anything, become reduced to, you know, these constant reposters of dark imagery. So you know it's almost the worst outcome because it's like well, you would think that maybe they'd be like well, hey, I've got my freedom, I'm going to do this with it. Not, I've got my freedom, I'm going to get stuck in a loop of horror posting. You know where doing this, rather than horror posting, would be perhaps a street movement, but anything that builds community in your area, not ending up in some nihilist despair in front of a computer. So I think I guess by saying that, I'm kind of agreeing with your sentiment there.

Mike Watson: 1:10:45

Yeah, I mean, it's something I worry about because I think the people who do this are doing it for the right reasons. But I also think like man, if you haven't gotten the point after seeing one dead baby, you're not going to get it after seeing 500 yeah, yeah, but also then I totally agree with their reasons but they're right me too.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:03

That might be fine, but yeah, you just said you did.

Mike Watson: 1:11:05

I'm saying, yeah, I also do, but it themselves, I mean it's, it's, uh, you know atrocity exhibition is one of those things that always, you know, I think about it, going all the way back to the work of jg ballard, which I know this is a very abstract, intellectual way of thinking about it but but also as a person who's worked. You know, I worked in Egypt for a while with kids who survived both one of the other intifadas and people who were running out of Yemen from the civil war there, trying to work with kids who had seen that stuff at like age six or seven, and the last thing they really want to do is to be constantly reminded of it, even though you know they definitely want those wars to end and they definitely want people to understand what they went through. And that, and that's always in the back of my mind when I see these images, because I'm like well, you know, I don't want to get on the whole like trauma train, because you and I both know that is a psychological concept that has been abused by capitalist management to the point of almost being useless, even though I think it's a pretty valid psychological concept. Um, I do think there's a way in which we have to kind of like. Is the like? Is this having the effect you think you thinking does, or is this like proving to yourself that you care, because you're exposing yourself to this, to this horror, all the time? And I wonder about about that, not just in the, not just in specific context, but when the way?

Mike Watson: 1:12:59

Uh, I sometimes get into arguments with people about anti-imperialism, not because I impose anti-imperialism I absolutely don't but because you know I'll try to say to someone hey, liberate, even liberation from genocide is not in and of itself a positive politics, right, and people just respond as if I'm critiquing the idea that we should end genocide and I'm just like, no, like there's just stopping a genocide tells you nothing about what happens afterwards at all, like, so, like as a politics that is a good, negative, but it is just a negative politics and negative politics will never be good enough in the sense that all kinds of people can appropriate and reappropriate it, including capitalists.

Mike Watson: 1:13:47

And I mean the commodification of anti-imperialism and the right-wingification of anti-imperialism is something we should be able to see, and yet, like, trying to get people to think about it is really, really difficult, and the reason why is I think it actually damages their sense of self, like if that's not enough, and I don't like because the reason why, when I go, okay, we don't have a positive politics right now, we know that we need to stop this horrible thing from happening, but that's all we got and whether you like it or not, I'm not going to say that's reactionary politics, because reactionary has moral implications, but it is a reactive politics. It is not a politics about a greater vision.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:33

Yeah, it is reactive politics, it is not a, it is not a politics about a greater vision. Yeah, it's when they put crucially that this is just an outcome of capitalism, or arguably. So, you know, to kind of be constantly alarmed at what's happening as if it's a surprise. I mean, I know it's a new modality in many ways, um, of conducting warfare. Um, there have been some new kind of things trialed, like exploding devices and AI selection of targets, but you know just the sheer brutality in front of the I would say the world's media, but in front of social media. You know it's something, you know it's something you know new, which um beckons perhaps a, a dark, uh, even darker, reality. Um, but it's still an outcome of capitalism. So you know the constant alarm on in terms of why is this happening is misguided. And you're correct, yeah, that there should be a wider anti-capitalist movement or socialist movement yeah, um I mean, I think, I think people kind of feel that that is to hijack.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:43

Um, you know, that's hijacking. What's the humanitarian cause? That that could be one argument, but, um, I don't think so. I think, yeah, I think, that this is very much an issue of capitalism and no doubt, the military-industrial complex. So, you know, it's about sending weapons, it's about, you know, rebuilding contracts, same as Ukraine. So, yeah, this shouldn't be seen as an aberration, same as Ukraine. So, yeah, this shouldn't be seen as an aberration whereby we need reminding every day what horror looks like. It seems to me that those people, they're somehow alarmed because they haven't put the pieces together completely I mean some of them, surely many of them because they're not allowed to put the pieces together, because we keep getting stopped. You know, the media stops us from understanding.

Mike Watson: 1:16:37

Basically, yeah, I mean it, it, it compartmentalizes it or um, the underlying logics are left art scene, you know, I think today, even on the left's seen solely as a function of geopolitics and not as a function of political economy, and I don't think you can actually separate those two things out, you know, and so it's, and I get, I mean it's horrifying. I mean, you know, having seen some of that stuff, I mean I've seen some of it close up, like not even online, and it's not something that's easy to deal with. But it's also something that I think we as communists have to, you know, do more than just say we're going to stop this one event. We have to go okay, we're not just going to stop this one event. How do you organize the world so this doesn't happen? Period, right, because the specific event a lot of the problems with these responses to atrocities is the specific atrocity will end Right, one way or the other. You know, it might be in the worst way, but it will end. But the impetus towards atrocity has not been addressed, right and? And so whenever you're responding to a specific, a specific, you know, atrocious, traumatic event, I think about, like the response to the Iraq war, there's all these kinds of incentives.

Mike Watson: 1:18:19

Once you get one thing dealt with, our time just handles it to miss the underlying logic that led you there. It's still absolutely in play and you can rest on your laurels. And in that sense I do think that bourgeois social movements actually often distract from dealing with the underlying problems, which are more than just the specific geopolitical instance, and I think a lot of people have a hard time with that. I mean, I don't just think general people who are encountered. I mean like yeah, most people who know about what's going on in Gaza are horrified by it and you see that in in public opinion polls. They also don't seem to think they have enough control over it for it to be like a major voting issue or whatever. But then I'm like, okay, let's say you did stop this specific instance, and I'm I and we absolutely should. I don't want to belittle people, but you still haven't dealt with the larger reasons why these things happen, the little people, but you still haven't dealt with the larger reasons why these things happen, right, like you know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:18

Um, don't people think that if it was stopped, it would be because whoever's like really putting the springs? I don't mean that in some kind of conspiracy, conspiracy thinking way, but you know, wouldn't it be because elite powers were ready to stop it now, yeah, you say so. Powers were ready to stop it now, yeah, they're ready to stop it now, okay. Well, that doesn't mean they're not ready to start again whenever they want, or to start again elsewhere, which is effectively what you're saying.

Mike Watson: 1:19:50

I mean, it's not like, even if you accept the narrative that the protesters ended the Vietnam War, which I don't I think the Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong ended the Vietnam War. But even if you accept that narrative, it didn't end war Right At all.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:06

Yeah, exactly yeah.

Mike Watson: 1:20:08

In fact it got worse after it, not better. So it's something to to think about. Um, one of the things that the last little bit and this will be my last question, our rumination I get you started on, but I was thinking about the current attempt to, to live stream communism like, uh, we've seen a lot of that. It's led to some weird political formations in the United States in particular. The self implication in this that a lot of that stuff presents itself as politics because they see politics, as you know, awakening people to the situation, but it's actually a form of entertainment that binds us up into capitalist logics effectively, you know.

Mike Watson: 1:21:08

I wanted your your thought on that, because you it's like the last thing you talk about in the book.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:12

So yeah, I talk about it in this book and I've talked about it in in previous books. I've been one of the most consistent people saying this from our yeah, you have the online left. Um, yeah, I mean it's. It's totally the case that you know, this is kind of an industry. It's a very small subsection of you know the online realm generally. It's a very small byproduct of the online realm.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:42

Democratizing published expression, democratizing publishing and broadcasting which it has done I mean democratizing carries all kinds of connotations around electoral systems. So, let's say, horizontalising, making it possible for more and more people to broadcast and publish their thoughts, which is a great thing. But you know its kind of main output. You know it's things like cat memes and selfies, suggestive selfies. You know the left wing is a very small part of that. So I think we we over imagine, overestimate our reach often.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:25

There's certainly some positivity in the sense that people are talking about Marx. They're talking about the Frankfurt School. Of course, some people who talk about Marx think you shouldn't be talking about the Frankfurt School, but in any case, people are talking about different left-wing theorists and thought currents. But there is a sense that, well, for one, we're playing into algorithms and that does a number of things. It makes money for the capitalist system very directly. You might make money for yourself if you have a patreon, uh, but you're also making money for these huge platforms and um. It also means that these platforms and whoever's reading the information, you know, they basically know your, they know your thoughts. You know there's various different ways that that functions, um, which can can be dangerous depending on who takes power and what they want to do with the data um.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:20

But also, you know, we have a number of figures in our midst who are just hell-bent on their own success and fame and enrichment and don't seem to understand, don't seem to have a very, you know core, kind of communist belief in the way they behave towards other people. And I think sometimes that gets kind of obscure because people say, well, we can't behave in a communist way until we achieve communism, so for now we're just going to have to behave in a very hierarchical way and they treat it like a type of vanguardism. So, yeah, you get a situation of vanguardism um. So, um, yeah, you get kind of. You get a situation which you get in in the left cultural fields generally. You get it in, uh, art museums, you get it in art galleries, you get this kind of appropriation of leftist uh images, but the actual system is very much a hierarchical capitalist one. So we definitely have that problem.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:12

But we do have a lot of good people as well, some of them. Unfortunately, they get too wrapped up in the numbers and you think you know, are they really thinking about the right thing? So the some smart young person comes along, starts youtubing and then the next thing you see them a couple years later and all they're talking about is their figures. And you thought, well, you used to talk about marx a lot more, you know um is their figures? And you thought, well, you used to talk about marks a lot more.

Mike Watson: 1:24:36

You know um are they talking about whatever's trending on on x or twitter that day or whatever?

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:41

I mean yeah that's what's trending and then they're going to make a video on that. But I don't want to be super cynical because I can count, like quite a few people I've met through these, through this medium, doing what we do, um, who are really sound, you know, and they're the ones I tend to engage with, to be honest.

Mike Watson: 1:24:59

Yeah, I mean it's a double-edged sword. But you know, as a person who used to really believe, I mean and that hasn't been true for a long time but I was like, oh, we have media, we can get these ideas out now and I'm not this lone weirdo in the middle of nowhere. At the same time, that can it can lead you to over represent your numbers, to chase clout and also, honestly today I mean, I mean your book doesn't talk about this but those numbers aren't trustworthy, like the amount of bots and view buying and stuff that can go into this, to also juke your stats mean that, like you can create this sense that you have way more of an audience than you do and you meet people who are internet famous, you know, and you talk to people just around the water cooler. If such a thing still exists at your job, it actually does in mine and you realize nobody has any idea about any of this shit. There's not just that they don't know you or your stream, they don't even know about the culture at all. And it's like, oh yeah, these mass aggregations of culture, even if you assume they're not bots, it might be thousands of people, but they're so diffuse that there's not a community there, really, there, really. And yet you know, I do believe that most of the polling that indicates that, like, left-wing ideas when you don't say that they're left-wing, um are very popular. You know that they're already are popular even amongst conservative minding people, as long as you don't call them socialism or whatever, um, so it just makes me, it makes me wonder about the purpose of all this. But yeah, I've definitely seen. The other thing is there's a lot of people who have been good people who get caught into the numbers.

Mike Watson: 1:27:05

I think one of the big dangers and I think this is a danger not just in streaming, I think this is a danger for activists too is, if you make this your living, um, the incentives are bad for you to actually try to figure out how to solve the problem, because if you solve the problem, you, unless you really really solve the problem like you had a revolution everybody benefits, um, you actually lose your stream of income, like.

Mike Watson: 1:27:36

So it has a a really set of perverse incentives in it and I was really like I felt validated by, uh, by the, the last slide of your chapter which we have, uh, we have nothing to lose but our audience, and I was like, yeah, sometimes I think you know, if you're going to be an honest leftist and operate in this world, you have to be willing to lose your audience or otherwise you're going to go in very strange places.

Mike Watson: 1:28:05

You know you cannot be captured by your audience because, uh, in an Adornian sense and I don't mean this in the negative Adornian sense of like everything is bad I mean this we all live in this society and it affects us, even if we think we see through it, that sense of things from Adorno and I think he's right about that that there's not a way to be a little isolated Island outside of society. Who, just, I see through the imperialism, I see through the capitalism or whatever a lot of people do. That doesn't matter, that's already factored in. People have seen through it from the beginning, like um, the. The thing is, can you build a community that can do something beyond that? And unfortunately I don't think it's going to happen through streaming. That's a very. Ideas that cannot be embodied are basically entertainment.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:02

so yeah, I don't know if I see it coming through streaming. I think if we check our behavior a bit, if we try and stick to what it is we're trying to do and don't get distracted, and we're honest with ourselves, if we're kind of going wayward and we become all about the numbers and the money, um, you know, if we can be honest with ourselves, we can do a lot better and then maybe we can use this, these platforms, to try and get people to meet up in real life. You know a bit more, but I'm not a great organizer in that sense I have ideas in organizing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:42

A lot of organizing is having different people in the right roles. So you know, we, some people, are just broadcasters. You know they're very good broadcasters. So maybe I, maybe I I'd be unfair, I, I'd be unfair, it'd be unfair if I was to put pressure on and say those people should be on the picket lines, you know, or when I don't, trade union organizing and the writers have have their role as well. Um, but I think within that, you know, there's enough people interested in this kind of way, in left-wing politics, to organise, to get the right people doing the right thing. Maybe we can have a sense of community again. Who's going to step in and make that happen? Because I'm a writer.

Mike Watson: 1:30:30

Right, yeah, as a writer, teacher and union guy, I will tell you, um, that, weirdly, even though I do all of those things from the same moral, political impulses, they don't overlap at all, like at all. Like you know, it's just I actually feel very weirdly segmented in the way that I interact with all this and the the media is good for getting these ideas out, but, like I will say, for example, if I'm doing something with, uh, a union action, I would never use my show for that, and one of the reasons why is, like my, my audience isn't primarily where I live. It's just, you know, the case I have, you know, my audience is in, like Toronto, new York and Stockholm, sweden and Manchester and London, almost as much as I mean, definitely more than it is in Utah where I actually live, I mean, and so it's, it just wouldn't be useful for that even. And so thinking about the function and structure of media and what it can do and what it can't do really seems important if you want to use it to build communities, because there's certain things, like there's certain communities and international relations and networks that I could build, but I can't actually help a union action here with it, and that's something that I think a lot about.

Mike Watson: 1:32:02

And the other thing I think about that you brought up is I'm dependent on capitalist media organizations that are privatized and making money off me media organizations that are privatized and making money off me. You know, um I try to resist it in some ways. I deliberately sabotage my seo and my seo. People don't realize I do that, but I do, and I um don't monetize my youtube, but at the same token, like I'm still totally dependent on them, they could cut me off at any moment for any damn reason.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:35

um that's true, yeah, but I think, yeah, we both teach and that makes things in in a way. You know, it makes things easier. It's a weird thing to say, but because we're not completely reliant on on platforms, because someone is some, some people are are completely right on platforms. You know, I actually, even if they're earning what I'm earning, I I kind of feel sorry for them, you know oh yeah because I have a job that gives me a freedom to get my stuff done.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:05

Even in my job I teach in university. I teach academic writing, some kind of communication type themes. It's not exactly, it's not really what I write about, it is related, but it still gives me. You know, it enables me to write what I do. Yeah.

Mike Watson: 1:33:22

Yeah, I think, as a as a as a high school teacher, there's a little bit more tension between my writing and what I teach, but it is.

Mike Watson: 1:33:32

It does enable me to have a certain freedom to not If I have a bad week on Patreon, I'm still going to be able to pay my rent, and so if I say something that's unpopular because I think it's true, there's very little that would stop me from saying it. The thing that I often consider that stops me from saying things these days is not money. It's actually other people's responses. Like what am I going to? How are other people going to respond to what I say? Are they going to understand it or is it going to put them in a corner and cause them to react against it? And I do think, as communists, we should think a lot more about that ladder when we talk to people, and a lot less about, like, whether or not it's going to be popular. It's more like am I framing? It's not so much a matter of like what I say, although it does affect it, but am I framing the message in a way that I can be honest and not also put people in a situation where they can only respond against me?

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:36

and that that's true. Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, exactly, but I think sometimes, if you can, you can tweet, if one can tweet, and then, yeah, you might check in sometimes to see what people have said. But it doesn't really matter. You know, you're not like not getting like really worked up about oh shit, people are angry. Okay, so a hundred people get pissed off at a tweet. It's not really going to affect me because it's not affecting my bottom line. You know it's not. That's important. So that's the kind of contradiction where a job gives you freedom and it's kind of unclear what Marx had in mind from a utopian society when he has this um idea of you can be hunting in the morning and fishing in the afternoon and critiquing over dinner in the evening, but he certainly thinks you'd be doing stuff, you know yeah, I mean that's absolutely true.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:27

So the hunting, the hunting and the fishing he describes well, that's so. You get food, you don't get to do nothing. You've still got to go and get your food, and then that is what makes it possible to eat dinner. And then he says critiquing at dinner, which sounds odd, but I think he means talking about politics over dinner, intellectualizing over dinner. But you've only done that because you worked in the day. It might be casually, you could do some hunting here, you could do some hunting here, you could do some fishing here. Sounds kind of nice, but you're still working, you know, and I think that's reasonable, you know.

Mike Watson: 1:36:04

Yeah, I mean socially necessary labor is still labor. It might not be. I mean we could get into the semantic distinction whether or not it's work, because a lot of anti-workers will you know when you really push on what they're're saying.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:15

They're actually not saying that there won't be work except for, like the fully automated luxury communism yeah, well, there is, but there's so much of what passes for communism now is is fully automated luxury variety. That's really kind of infiltrated how people think about communism yeah, yeah and and that.

Mike Watson: 1:36:34

well, that worries me for a variety of reasons, because that actually is a relationship of dependency, like if you're if you're concerned about ending classes and you're concerned about people being able to to actualize their own life in a way that is responsible and and doesn't exhaust all of our resources, et cetera, but still has the freedom to do so, then making us all super dependent on automation is a terrible idea, because the thing about automation is you still need people doing something somewhere.

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:17

And I don't think you get around that by exactly. And you need people owning it and okay, so they're talking about communism, so there'll be no owners, but where are they? How they're getting there, whilst you're also fully automating everything, because I think at some point people who own the stuff that are fully automating everything are going to think we don't need these. You know, eight billion people in the way. You know we've got machines that can do everything and we can have a much nicer, greener planet without all these other people. So you know, if you're basically not needed for production, you're superfluous, and the whole history shows us that they've only the late don't mind just getting rid of people who are superfluous to the production, to their wealth. So there, there's a big bit there missing. I don't know how some fairly smart people have managed to not see that, unless they're just not as cynical as I am. But you know, I don't think it's just cynicism, I think it's just a grasp of history.

Mike Watson: 1:38:05

Yeah, the removal of surplus peoples is, and by surplus I don't't mean like unnecessary socially, I mean unnecessary for profits, before people misunderstand what I'm saying here. I mean that's why there's such a big prison industrial prospect in in the United States. And I'll also tell you like, if you want to commit a genocide, the best way to do it and actually we see this in palestine and israel is to not allow a population to work with you and make them completely superfluous to your social existence. That you know like, once you see that you can almost be like something exterminationist is going to come down the line pretty soon, and so we should always be looking out for that.

Mike Watson: 1:39:03

I'd like to thank you so much for your time, mike I know it's probably getting a little bit into the evening where you're at over there across the planet and the Finnish speaking zones, and just to commensurate with you, I tried to learn Korean, which is a language that is somewhat similar to Finnish, and apparently it's really easy to learn if it's your first language. But if it's not your first language and you're not a speaker of languages that work that way, of which Finnish is actually similar to Korean. I mean, there was a theory for a long time. That I think has now been pretty much abandoned, but that they were somehow related on the Asian steps. But those languages are really hard to learn for me. I can speak Korean in a restaurant, but if you ask me, actually actually formulate a sentence in a way that makes any sense, I can't.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:01

My son speaks Finnish and English. He's three, but he's equally as adept in both. So I learned some Finnish statements and things that are said to him, so like nuukomaita, nukuma-aita. Nukuma-aita means bedtime now. Okay, but this is not much use in a social context, you know.

Mike Watson: 1:40:21

Right, yeah exactly.

Mike Watson: 1:40:23

Yeah, so I just wanted to give you a little bit of solder in there, because I definitely feel that. Anyway, thank you so much. We'll be seeing more from you and your authors. I would tell people to read most of your books. They're all short and they're all super dense, but they're very readable despite being super dense.

Mike Watson: 1:40:49

I know when I say something super dense it sounds like it's not going to be readable, but I think you actually share a trait that I admired about Fisher. I often give Fisher a hard time, but I actually do think Fisher was another one of these guys who could write very clearly and very enjoyably about something and get you thinking about it, and not a whole lot of pages, like you know you didn't. That's not a gift I necessarily have myself. So, um, every time I look down in an essay I'm like god damn it, it's 40 pages, I'm gonna have to cut this down. Um, so it's it's. Uh, I want to give people, uh, to go check out your book. Uh, what else is anything you'd like to plug for what you're doing? Or revo or anything like that?

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:33

um, just quickly. All my books are supposed to be twice as long but I just end up getting what else is anything you'd like to plug for what you're doing? Or Revo or anything like that? Just quickly, all my books are supposed to be twice as long, but I just end up getting to 90 pages and thinking I've said it all. So I obviously the opposite tendency to you and I'll keep you posted on my finished learning. And then what's coming up? Well, revolve Press have some interesting things coming up. Actually, one Dime, tony Chomas, aka One Dime, is producing something for us on totalitarianism in a democratic state, looking at America. So that's going to be really interesting. He's just finishing that up now. Then I'll be editing that For myself. I'm writing a book on ecology, digital culture and the Frankfurt School for an academic press, so maybe we'll be a little bit different called the Anthem Press, based in the UK. And, yeah, we have other things coming from Nevol Press, including your book eventually, when you're ready.

Mike Watson: 1:42:35

When I'm ready, I should have some essays for you soon. I have about five different essays that are in various states of being unfinished.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:42

That's something we can work on, yeah.

Mike Watson: 1:42:46

But yeah, people check out what Ruvio's doing. I have read your book and the Darkest Timeline and I buffed that. Yeah, I buffed that one pretty good. I do worry that we might accidentally end up being considered the doomer of Leftist Threats.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:13

We have started off fairly gloomy. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know that one dime is going to pick up much. I don't think the movie is going to pick up very much with one dime and I highly doubt it's going to with me either we'll see. We'll do that with some other people. Let's see if anyone will come in with some kind of saving grace yeah, alright, thank you so much cheers.