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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

043: A New Feminism for Our Unfolding Future

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

044: The Dawning of The Feminist City

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

Find Coffee with Comrades at coffeewithcomrades.com

045: Utopia With Comrades: Part I

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

Find Coffee with Comrades at coffeewithcomrades.com

046: Utopia With Comrades: Part II

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

047: Free Housing For All

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at  thefutureisamixtape.com

048: The Long Winding Road to Housing Decommodification

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

049: Every Neighborhood A University

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

050: The World of The Golden Square, Part I: Definitions & Foundations

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

051: The World of The Golden Square, Part II: Experiences & Methods

An old forgotten sign from the Farm Equipment Association of Minnesota and South Dakota once said:  We must fully acknowledge that there is no human society without trees, rivers and air – just as there is no Earth without the sun. The web of one life lives along the lines woven by other lifeforms, so perfectly balanced, so perfectly clear as to be made invisible by what our eyes have thus far failed to see. No matter the pace or scale of humanity’s technological ingenuity, the Earth sets upon us planetary boundaries and immutable laws of its own ecology. But with DeathKult Capitalism’s insatiable drive to consume all that exists, our fragile planet is being&nbsp; plundered and bruised beyond repair. In this final episode of a trilogy of vision-sketches, Jesse &amp; Matt imagine what the world might be like if the starting point for organizing society was The Golden Square: food, shelter, healthcare and education, all equally and universally provisioned. What would Earth look like if these four tenets were fully realized? Is there a role for the State to play? Or, as we look back upon the cruel banality of so many failed and failing republics, should the State be recalibrated in radically innovative ways toward the city-state? To survive beyond the catastrophes of the here and now, we must transcend the tired old ghost-roads of feudalism and the broken and breaking embankments of endtime capitalism. The structures and ecologies of a world of The Golden Square illuminate an urgent pathway, guiding us away from the continual climate catastrophe of our pre-apocalypse toward an emancipatory project of repair and restoration. Much has been made of the technological notion of the Singularity in science fiction circles; but might remaking the world according to The Golden Square bring about a kind of Social Singularity – where impossible-to-imagine forms of human consciousness are unleashed in a truly egalitarian and ecological society? And from that, might the constellations of the Utopian Sphere begin to flicker into one shared vision? Would our aching, tortured past bleed back as if it was words in a book that befuddles us in some utopian future? But before that circle can be drawn, we need to uncouple our minds and our world from colonization’s final form: climate collapse. We must continue to ring the bell for humanity’s right for food, shelter, healthcare and education – free to all, without request or restraint. This is the calling of our lives. We don’t have much time. 

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at  https://www.thefutureisamixtape.com/episodes/2023/10/02/052-the-world-of-the-golden-square-part-iii-structures-ecologies

052: The World of The Golden Square, Part III: Structures & Ecologies

On this episode, Jesse makes the case that the third point of “The Poison Pyramid,” which should be readily designated for the dumpster, is the worship of the Celebrity. Matthew makes the case that this is just a shiny, distracting feather to something that rides upon a much larger, deeper and more worrisome creature.

Mentioned In This Episode:

Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82 - Obituary by The New York Times 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/arts/design/14rauschenberg.html

“How a 94-Year-Old Genius May Save the Planet” - Newsweek
https://www.forbes.com/sites/krisztinaholly/2014/01/15/why-great-entrepreneurs-are-older-than-you-think/#30166d413016

David Shield's Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity
http://amzn.to/2rstBrU

Ty Burr's Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame
http://amzn.to/2rK4NM6

The Strange Power Of Celebrity - Tom Ashbrook's On Point Featuring Ty Burr
http://onpoint.legacy.wbur.org/2012/10/05/the-strange-power-of-celebrity

Thomas Schatz’s The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
http://amzn.to/2rsaWwu

Paul McDonald’s Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities
http://amzn.to/2r9rrwq

“Clown Genius” - Scott Adam’s Blog
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/126589300371/clown-genius

"How Dilbert’s Scott Adams Got Hypnotized by Trump" - BloombergBusinessweek
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-22/how-dilbert-s-scott-adams-got-hypnotized-by-trump

On Matt’s Comments About How “Trump Rick-Rolled the Nation,” Here Is How Rick Astley Got Rick-Rolled Himself: 
http://people.com/music/rick-astley-on-the-first-time-he-was-rick-rolled/

“Rick Astley on the First Time He Was Rick-Rolled: "I Kept Thinking, 'What Is This Idiot Doing?'" - People Magazine

Tim Heidecker with Adam Curtis and How Trump Operates as a Click-Monster 
https://soundcloud.com/thetalkhouse/tim-heidecker-with-adam-curtis

Jake Halperin Commentary on NPR: Tom and Katie, Zeus and Hera:  
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4708341

David Giles' Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity
http://amzn.to/2s7IUTa

Don DeLillo's Mao II: A Novel
http://amzn.to/2rsop7C

“How Much Do We Love TV? Let Us Count the Ways” - New York Times: 
https://goo.gl/fquPBx

“Americans Check Their Phones 8 Billion Times Per Day” - Time Magazine 
http://time.com/4147614/smartphone-usage-us-2015/

Who Said It: Presidential Hopeful Donald Trump or ‘Idiocracy’ President Camacho? - Jason Bailey’s Flavorwire
https://goo.gl/x5bT1u

Idiocracy star Terry Crews will reprise his role as President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in a series of ads targeting current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Buzzfeed reported. 
https://goo.gl/akfPhu

John Lennon's Comments on The Beatles Being "More Popular than Jesus" 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETFKXMdjbkU

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success 
http://amzn.to/2r9FTV8

Excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s Commencment Address at Kenyon College in 2005: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion About Living a Compassionate Life:
https://goo.gl/QHhMxm

Little Brown and Company’s Book Printing of David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water
http://amzn.to/2s1YTDp

“Here Is the Scandalous Father John Misty Interview You’ve Been Waiting For” - Pitchfork Magazine
https://goo.gl/3hd87o

Father John Misty and Zane Lowe go in-depth on his new album, Pure Comedy. - Interview on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqvb1m0YuPo

Genius prodigy-pianists are becoming all-too-common: “Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen” - New York Times
https://goo.gl/bmxAUI

003: Star-Fuckers

In this fifth episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse discuss Peter Frase’s diaphanous, compact and idea-drenched work of “Social Science Fiction,” which revs up & rides out to the sweet page-count of 150 pages, and contains far more ideas than most books three-times its size (ahem, The Circle). Frase’s nonfiction book, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, argues that there are actually four possible futures for humanity. The book accomplishes this task, ingeniously so, by threading together science fiction novels as well as marxist and futurist theories to see what aspects will appear in these futures, and how they might overlap or build off one another. The author doesn’t simply re-shuffle the easy card-deck of the Star Trek versus The Matrix techno-binary--that Yanis Varoufakis and other activist-thinkers often cite as the only two techno-futures available. Instead, Peter Frase offers up four possible futures: Communism, Rentism, Socialism and Exterminism. And by coordinating these “ideal types” upon the axis points of equity vs hierarchy and abundance vs scarcity, the author illuminates what these four futures are likely to give us. 
 
Full show notes at: https://www.thefutureisamixtape.com/episodes/2017/6/22/005-captain-picard-tea-earl-grey-hot

005: Captain Picard - “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt have a discussion with Frantz Pierre--a community activist and organizer who’s leading a revolutionary project to educate Los Angeles residents about the benefits of Universal Basic Income via a local, first-of-its-kind, pilot program. But how might Frantz Pierre and other fellow comrades create this program on a citywide scale when the mythology and romance of the “work ethic” and the sin of “laziness” are so indoctrinated in our communities and belief systems? How will we demand “wages” if such an enslaved chunk of our lives--going to jobs we hate--has been entirely automated, and work for the 99% no longer exists? And if and when the argument is truly won, where will the money come from? This podcast will aim to answer those questions. It will also detail why this utopian notion should be viewed as the “New Common Sense” in our global age of shafted, precarious employment, and why UBI is an essential spring-step toward human liberation.  

Full Show Notes: https://www.thefutureisamixtape.com/episodes/2017/8/31/015-they-owe-us-a-living-of-course

015: They Owe Us a Living, Of Course

Beyond Blade Runners and Replicants, there must be a place “Over the Rainbow” for us to exist in solidarity and equanimity. And certainly, the 21st Century hovering above us should be a cause for hope, not despair; yet even with this new century being no way near its quartermark, it’s already given us a planet wheezing from ecological crisis-to-crisis, where an untenable economic system of neo-feudalism ravages plants and animals, as well as the rights of those we love (or should love). In the Terror & Twilight of Our Broken Age, what ideology best speaks and acts from a place made from compassion and love? Instead of passively looking at the new century that hangs in the sky, blinking obliquely above us, we should instead reorganize our motions to The North Star of Human Decency, namely that of Anarchy. For this 21st episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse will finally come out of the “political closet” and show some raw & real skin: they are both Anarchists Without Adjectives, and they believe that this ideology of love is the only practical solution to the world’s byzantine disorders, fraught with confusion, warbling on without a just antidote. In their most personal and revealing podcast since the show’s first episode, Jesse & Matt explore their disparate journeys to humanity’s greatest romance, Anarchy; they will describe its origin story, its turbulent relationship with authoritarian communists and how this political philosophy is not only the most idealist of ideologies, but also why it’s the only one which can ride inside us--whispering out “hope” for a utopian future. 

Full Show Notes: https://www.thefutureisamixtape.com/episodes/2017/11/25/021-the-north-star-of-human-decency

021: The North Star of Human Decency

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at:  thefutureisamixtape.com

031: The No-Bullshit Blueprint for Socialism

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

035: Library Socialism & The Golden Square

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

036: Debt Abolition: A Battle Plan For The Future

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

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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