Mutual Exchange Radio

This episode is Part I of a two-part interview with Aurora Apolito and William Gillis, two of the lead contributors to our summer symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. Part II will be released on December 21st, although patrons can access that here now. Aurora Apolito is a mathematician and theoretical physicist. She studied physics in Italy and mathematics in Chicago, and later worked for various scientific institutions in the US, Canada, and Germany. She also works on mathematical linguistics, and on mathematical models for neuroscience and has authored six books on various aspects of this work. I should also note that Aurora Apolito is a pen name meant to differentiate this research from her work in other fields. Our other guest is someone most listeners will be familiar with, William Gillis. Will currently acts as technology coordinator at C4SS and was formerly our coordinating director. Will is a second-generation anarchist who's worked as an activist in countless projects and capacities since getting involved in the lead-up to N30 (also known as the "Battle in Seattle"). Gillis studies high energy physics and has held a deep fascination with the egalitarian potential of markets since 2003. Their writing can be found at C4SS.org and humaniterations.net. Here are both Will & Aurora's essays in the summer Symposium: The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism, Aurora Apolito Action Is Sometimes Clearer Than Talk: Why We Will Always Need Trade, William Gillis Centrifugal Tendencies in Information & Wealth, William Gillis *Support Logan Glitterbomb* As noted in this episode's intro, we're currently raising legal defense funds for C4SS writer Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Learn more and donate here. Meet the podcast team: Zachary Woodman - Host Tony Dreher - Audio Editor Can Standke - Editing Assistant Logan Marie Glitterbomb - Audio Contributor Cory Massimino - Treasurer Alex McHugh - Producer

Aria DiMezzo is a candidate running for Sheriff in Cheshire County, New Hampshire as a republican. Why have a Republican sheriff candidate on an anarchist podcast, you ask? Well, Aria is not what you'd expect from a GOP cop. She has had many encounters with police in her life, and very few have been positive. She is high priestess of the Reformed Satanic Church, a trans woman, and an anarchist. And she is definitely not a socially progressive libertarian trying to hijack the Republican Party, as you will discover in our conversation. In this conversation we discover why and how, exactly, an anarchist trans women is running for Sheriff as a Republican, Aria's views on economics, moral dimensions property rights, police, criminal justice, and religion, as well as some reflections on the complicated relationship between socially left-wing views and the libertarian movement as it currently exists. This conversation was a fun one, unique to have. It is not every election year you see such an interesting candidate running in an election that very few would normally pay attention to, but hey it's 2020. Meet the podcast team: Zachary Woodman - Host Tony Dreher - Audio Editor Can Standke - Editing Assistant Logan Marie Glitterbomb - Audio Contributor Cory Massimino - Treasurer Alex McHugh - Producer

Joining us today is Emmi Bevensee. Emmi is a senior fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society and currently organizing the Mutual Exchange Symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. They identify as a solarpunk mutualist and research disinformation and fascism on the internet as a Mozilla Open Web fellow and data scientist. In this discussion, we discuss Emmi's lead essay in C4SS' recent Mutual Exchange Symposium on Decentralization and Economic Coordination. This is a rich discussion about a complicated issue that anarchists of all stripes, and political theorists more generally, need to take on: how do we get the goods delivered to where they need to be in society. Emmi expresses a sense of skepticism about claims social anarchists have made that communes can economically coordinate in the absence of markets. We also discussed the lead essay of and their reply to another essay from the exchange which tried to give a mathematical formulation to social anarchist attempts to work around the calculation problem by Aurora Apolito. This was an interesting informative discussion, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed having it. Meet the podcast team: Zachary Woodman - Host Tony Dreher - Audio Editor Can Standke - Editing Assistant Logan Marie Glitterbomb - Audio Contributor Cory Massimino - Treasurer Alex McHugh - Producer

Joining us today is Akiva Malamet. Akiva is completing his BA in Government at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC) in Israel. He is an incoming MA student in Philosophy and a member of the interdisciplinary program in Political and Legal Thought (PLT) at Queen's University, Kingston, and Frédéric Bastiat Fellow in political economy and public policy with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He has written for Liberal Currents, Libertarianism.org, and other publications. He was a winner of the 2018 'Carl Menger Undergraduate Essay Contest' for his paper "Spontaneous Order as Social Construction", from the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics (SDAE). This episode is hosted by producer Alex McHugh. Akiva's essays: Fearing Ourselves: Dignity and Disgust in a Pandemic Vice in The Virtue of Nationalism Akiva Malamet on Israeli Politics and Jewish Culture (podcast) The Zen of Chaos If Not Now, When? Contextualizing the White Supremacist Threat to Muslims and Jews Postmodernism: A Libertarian Introduction Reconciling Libertarian and Leftist Views of Power and Equality Black anarchist/radical resources: Burn Down the American Plantation #8toAbolition Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police As Black as Resistance Meet the podcast team: Zachary Woodman - Host Tony Dreher - Audio Editor Can Standke - Editing Assistant Logan Marie Glitterbomb - Audio Contributor Cory Massimino - Treasurer Alex McHugh - Producer

Joining me today is Vermin Supreme. You might know Vermin as the satirical presidential candidate from the last few election cycles who ran on a platform of free ponies and mandatory tooth brushing, or you might just know him as that guy with a boot on his head. But this year, he's running a slightly different campaign for the Libertarian Party Presidential Nomination. Rather than his usual dog and free pony show, he's seriously promoting left libertarian and anarchist ideas such as mutual aid and non-domination to the largely right libertarian audience in the LP. In this interview, we discuss this campaign, as well as the use of humor as a de-escalation tactic at tense protests, his history of activism within anarchist communities, and where he sees himself standing within anarchism ideologically. This was a very entertaining discussion that is quite different from the sorts we usually have on this show, so I hope you enjoy it.

Joining me today is Jason Lee Byas. Jason is a fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society. He is also a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Michigan. His academic work focuses on punishment (and its alternatives), rights theory, and justice beyond the state. He approaches that work from within the liberal, libertarian, and anarchist traditions -- all of which broadly construed. Today, we discussed some recent work he's been doing on "methodological anarchist" approaches to political philosophy as well as the nature of violence and its relation to a theory of just property rights and distributive justice. The first part of this conversation centers on a bias a lot of analytic political philosophers have of myopically focusing on the realm of justice applying to the state and what political theory and discourse would look like if we adopted a "methodological anarchist" framework that sees the nexus of justice as existing in social norms writ large rather than just official institutions. The second part goes into a libertarian theory of violence that, when combined with normative presumptions against violence, can accommodate and generate property rights claims. We then tried to work through the implications of this theory for intellectual property, absentee landownership, and the relations of such rights claims to concerns about equity.

Joining me today is Joel Williamson of Non-Serviam media. Joel is an individualist anarchist from Texas who has been involved in different activist projects over the years. These projects range from fundraising to support political prisoners such as Ross Ulbricht, organizing "counter economic farmers markets, and engaging in varied direct action efforts. His activism has most recently been focused on Non Serviam Media, which is a small collective dedicated to exploring the world of anarchist and anti-authoritarian ideas through audio and video production. If you spend much time in the left libertarian or anarchist podcast space, you may have come across Non Serviam's excellent podcast Joel hosts called Non Serviam. If you enjoy this show at all, you probably would enjoy, if you are not already enjoying, that show. I went back and looked at our guest backlog, and roughly half of our past guests have also appeared on Joel's show. Because of the similarities between our shows and audience, we figured some cross-episodes between Non Serviam and MER were in order. I appeared on the latest episode of Non Serviam to discuss my work on democracy, nationalism, and political authority and, today, we are happy to have Joel on. This was a fun conversation that covers a range of topics from underlying philosophical foundations of Joel's anarchist outlook, to agorism, to praxis and direct action. It was much more exploratory and funny than previous episodes of MER, which made for a fun and insightful change in pace. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it. Also, check out Joel's interview with me on Mon Serviam, as well as all his other episodes if you happen to enjoy this conversation.

Joining me today is Roderick Long. If you spend much time looking at C4SS' work or any work in the market anarchist tradition in the last twenty years, you have likely come across Roderick's work and surely something inspired by or responding to it. Dr. Long is a professor of philosophy at Auburn University, president of the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society, editor of The Industrial Radical and Molinari Review. He is a founding member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, an original founding member of C4SS, and senior fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society. His work centers on the intersection of ethics, especially in the Aristotelian tradition, political philosophy, especially in the libertarian anarchist tradition, and philosophy of social science. You can find Long's writing on his blog, the Austro-Athenian Empire, Bleeding Heart Libertarians, and, of course, C4SS.org, among other places. Today's discussion centers around Long's work on libertarian class theory, as well as the normative concerns that rise out of such a theory on balancing distributive and relational justice concerns with individual liberty. As we will discuss, libertarian class theory sees a primary creator and enforcer of class distinctions as the state. This is a wide-ranging discussion that touches on the economic and sociological analysis on class theory at the heart of Roderick's work on the issue, the empirical plausibility of such a theory, whether class distinctions of this sort would continue to exist under market anarchism, and the ethical and normative framework of justice that motivates this theory. Roderick draws from Aristotelian virtue ethics to bring the seeming contradictions between a concern for individual property rights and a concern for equal treatment of all in society into balance in interesting ways. This was an extremely good, informative discussion of the sort that C4SS has become quite well known for, and I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it. Just to set the stage a little more, like our last episode with Will, this was recorded at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Roderick, through the Molinari society, organized a panel with himself, William Nava, Jason Lee Byas, and myself where we presented papers on new work in anarchist philosophy. The following day, Roderick and I went out to lunch, with a few others from the Center. We then went up to my hotel room and recorded this fun conversation off-the-cuff. I'm surprised it went so well with so little preparation. I also recorded our previous episode with Will Nava on political legitimacy that weekend, so if you haven't I encourage you to go checkout that episode. But without further ado, here is my conversation with Roderick Long.

Joining me today is Anthony Di Franco. Anthony works at the intersections of complex adaptive systems and computing and focuses on developing convivial technologies, decentralizing infrastructure, and increasing the agency of individuals and communities. He is a co-founder and board member of Counter Culture Labs, a group of biohackers in Oakland, where he founded the Open Insulin project, an effort to develop open technology for insulin production at microbrewery scale and organize patient-led cooperatives to manufacture it. Additionally, he is currently pursuing computer science research on foundational technology to make software easy to create and modify for laypeople, built on declarative programming techniques together with techniques for representing uncertain information.

This month, we bring you a special episode from the Please Try This at Home transhumanism conference. In this episode, podcast producer Alex McHugh interviews Jahed Momand on autonomous medicine. Jahed is a PNW-based anarchist interested in epistemological anarchism and radical approaches to science. He writes long-form essays and a newsletter at againstutopia.com. In the episode, we get into the problems caused by hierarchy and authority in scientific discovery, and specifically the limitations this system has placed on treatment options for mental health issues. Jahed's research focuses on depression, but we also dig into other mental health issues, such as psychotic disorders and personality disorders. It's a bit science-heavy, but Jahed explains the terms well and anyone with a basic understanding of biology should be able to keep up.