Pretty Heady Stuff

Natasha Lennard is a Contributing Writer for the Intercept, and her work has appeared regularly in the New York Times, Esquire, Vice, Salon, and the New Inquiry, among others. She teaches in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program at The New School for Social Research and is the author of two books: Violence: Humans in Dark Times, co-edited with Brad Evans, and Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, from Verso Books. In this interview I ask Natasha about the recent murder, by police, of Tyre Nichols, Keenan Anderson, and the environmental activist known as Tortuguita. She talks about the fact that these are just three of the more prominent deaths this year alone at the hands of police, and explains the relationship of these losses to the inherent violence of policing. What she makes clear is that, despite the fact that cops don’t stop or prevent crime, and actually produce more violence than they stop, it is still the case that, for a number of reasons, the burden is never on those who align with carceral thinking to defend the police. And why is that the case? Because there is a deep ideological attachment to police and policing, to so-called “justice” in a carceral world. And that attachment is fed by a regime of representation that reinforces the heroism of cops in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. As a means of working through this problem, Natasha talks about Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” as a tool for understanding some of the baseline assumptions that exist to regulate action and reaction. These are some complicated issues. And she admits that it’s tricky. While we can fall into the trap of using what feel like exhausted ideas, the trap of political theatre, Lennard’s analysis has a way of cutting through the contradictions and centring the fact of ongoing oppression. If you do that, then you move out of the theoretical debates about strategy and into the streets. For this reason, she celebrates the small but nimble and durable protests against Cop City in Atlanta. She speaks ardently in support of the need for trans liberation, and articulates that imperative against the array of powerful revanchist far-right forces who stand against it.

Sarah King is the Head of Greenpeace Canada's Oceans & Plastics campaign. Pushing for a plastics-free future by holding corporations accountable for the growing plastics pollution crisis, Sarah has worked to protect our oceans and ocean-dependent communities for over a decade. She studied in the Environmental Applied Science and Management programme at Toronto Metropolitan University, and has worked at a consulting firm doing environmental impact assessments in order to help determine the scope of negative impacts associated with various development projects. I speak with her about the place of plastics in our everyday lives, the impact that plastics have on the environment, and the many ways that the Trudeau government’s plastics ban is woefully inadequate. I won’t summarize everything that Sarah explains here, but I will quote a particularly pithy summary of her position: she says that, in fact, “the entire category [of single use plastics] is a problem,” because of the overwhelming scale of production and our “lacking and disjointed infrastructure.” She stresses that the government is actually “very scared… to take strong action to hold industry… accountable. The result tends to be policies that benefit industry and do nothing to protect the environment. Loopholes can be found throughout Canada’s environmental regulations, and that means profit over survival. We have a new set of policies that the Liberal government is claiming will give us a “zero plastic waste” future by 2030, but King is very pointed in her assertion that, actually, the government has to know that this is a false promise: in her words, “they have to be looking at that [target] knowing that it’s impossible,” given the state of environmental protections in this country and the incredibly minor push to end plastics production and pollution. Confronting industry and closing loopholes is all about moving radically in a different direction. King says that embracing a “reuse and refill revolution” would legitimately “signal the end of the plastic era” and begin to seriously challenge “our fossil-fuel-dependent system” in which “the wrong things are valued.” Getting to that entirely reasonable, feasible alternative will take a project of accelerated solidarity-building, though, because the lobby for fossil fuels and petrochemicals is very strong. For this reason, King is really looking for more alignment between segments of the environmental movement. We’re starting to see this, and to see a shift both toward the centring of “the people that are most impacted” when it comes to “crafting solutions and a way forward” and toward, as Sarah puts it, “addressing not just our planetary crisis, but also our social justice crises around the world.”

Heather Davis and Mark Simpson discuss the urgent need for new communication strategies regarding plastic pollution. They explore the complexities of plastics, the limitations of recycling, and the emotional complexities of activism and scholarly work. The conversation also delves into the concept of 'low hanging data fruit' in activism and the importance of collaboration in addressing environmental challenges.

Kim Fry is a co-founder and board member for Music Declares Emergency Canada along with her daughter Brighid Fry from the indie rock band Housewife. Music Declares Emergency is a group of artists, music industry professionals and organisations that are looking to create solidarity in declaring a climate and ecological emergency and demanding an immediate governmental response to preserve life on Earth. Kim has worked on energy efficiency and climate but has also spent a lot of her career as an elementary school teacher, a union activist, a staunch climate justice activist and environmental campaigner. She’s worked for a number of environmental organizations, which is part of the reason she’s found herself devising strategies for Music Declares Emergency, which is moving to get a seat at the policy table by using the specific capacities of music to move people. Our conversation covers a number of different things that we’re both curious about in relation to these capacities. But we also dwell with the material problems associated with the music industry at a time of escalating climate emergencies. How does the music industry contribute to climate change and what should be done to correct some of its impacts? Thinking in these terms helps us move beyond the tempting, but also fairly limiting, logic of condemning particular artists for their hypocrisy, their ostentatious lifestyles, etc., and into a conversation about the kind of music scenes and spaces of meaningful local music participation we’d like to see. What kinds of structural and infrastructural changes might have to be put in place for that to be realized? We’re also concerned here with problems around genre, what kinds of music resonate, which tones seem out of touch with the complexity and urgency of the crisis created by an unaccountable fossil fuel industry and infrastructure… And we can’t help but land on the fact that it’s extremely complicated: there is undeniable power and influence in celebrity, and there is an inarguable concentration of power in a still quite monopolistic music industry. Transforming these things takes time that we do not have. The pace of change we need is more like a metal song, but what we’ve got is plaintive folk. It’s not an easy problem to solve, this stuckness, but Kim encourages us to remember the meaning of the word folk – it’s meant to be the music of the people. Just as pop is meant to be the music that is popular at a given time. This might give us an opening for thinking about the emergence of a new music nomenclature for conveying the climate breakdown that is coming if nothing stands in its way.

Tanner Mirrlees (https://twitter.com/tmirrlees_) is the Director of the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at Ontario Tech University. His current research focuses on topics in the political economy of communications such as war and media, work and labour in the creative and digital industries, and the links between far-right hate groups and social media platforms. He’s the author of Hearts and Mines: The US Empire's Cultural Industry, Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization, co-author of EdTech Inc.: Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age, and the co-editor of Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change and The Television Reader. He’s also heavily involved in efforts to spread the knowledge practices of academia beyond the university. So, he has appeared in documentaries like Theatres of War (https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theatersofwar) and Myths on Screen, and contributed to putting together podcasts like Darts & Letters’ Dangers of Techno-utopianism series. Our conversation is an attempt to wrestle with American militarism, especially but not exclusively as it finds form through popular cultural representation. There is a very long history, Tanner points out, of the US Department of Defence investing in media products that project American military power in precisely the way the DoD wants. While this collusion is now loosely understood, Mirrlees’ insights point us to specific aspects of the ongoing partnership. We talk about the massive popularity of films like Captain Marvel and Top Gun: Maverick—spending a lot of time unpacking the dizzying spectacle of Maverick, one of 2022’s biggest movies: truly a dizzying spectacle, in terms of the gap between dramatized surreality and the actual logistics of military operations. Even though the DoD’s stated policy is that it will support films that give a “realistic” and “authentic” representation of the military, the reality of the representational choices in Maverick expose how tenuous that grip on reality needs to be, and in fact how films benefit financially and technology from the Pentagon when they fudge the facts firmly in their favour. There are long standing fears that drive this sort of forceful fabulation: one is the fear of a decline in the United States’ imperial power, relative to other influential states like China and Russia. Another is the threat of nuclear annihilation. The Pentagon’s particular investment in how Hollywood represents this threat has shifted over time, with Tom Cruise’s last two big action films, Mission Impossible: Fallout and Maverick, centring on this threat as a chief way to threaten the integrity and hegemony of American empire. Mirrlees offers some valuable commentary on how Maverick was written out of a time in the recent past where the threat of Iran enriching uranium was front of mind in US security planning. The United States has waged wars without end for a very long time. The country dominates in virtually every corporate sector. And yet the US empire functions in ways that are distinct from past modes of colonial imperial command. Multiple spheres interlock and interoperate in sometimes subtle ways, and while force is fundamental, cultural impact is also critical. As Tanner puts it, “no corporation sees itself as an emissary” of the US national security state, and yet they are incentivized or compelled to serve its ambitions. What are the foundations of that sort of power? How can we examine its constitutive elements?

El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She teaches in the department of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. She’s the author of Live from the Afrikan Resistance!, a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism. Her work focuses on feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism and decolonization. In Rehearsals for Living, Robyn Maynard describes El as a “Black liberation visionary and long-time prison abolitionist [who] was nourishing abolitionist freedom dreams for years before the public would listen.” Since 2016, El has co-hosted a radio show called Black Power Hour on CKDU-FM. We talk about the important role that show played in producing the sorts of bonds that allowed for more substantial and sustained prison organizing. El explains how the show translated into building relationships, which translated into legal advocacy, a significant prison strike, and the creation of a manifesto demanding justice for those behind bars. The show led to the creation of a “kind of trust where” people like Abdoul Abdi could get to know El, feel connected, and from positions where they are made to feel utterly disconnected from the rest of the world. El’s been on the podcast before, but this is a special occasion, because she’s just put out a book that represents, as she’s put it elsewhere, her “life’s work.” The book, which you should order from Fernwood right now, is called Abolitionist Intimacies. It’s started to appear on a number of lists of the best nonfiction books of 2022, and it is a difficult-to-describe intervention. As El describes it, the different parts of the book, the different approaches to writing in it, are kind of “in conversation with each other;” she says that different images and events “preoccupy” her throughout and tend to show up again and again in this iterative, poetic, meditative way. But the main idea of the book, she states very simply, is “friendship,” it’s about love. What is by no means simple, though, is the book’s preoccupation with the barriers to that friendship and love. Those barriers are not housed in the hearts and minds of the incarcerated, she says, but in the phone system that makes it near impossible to maintain communication with the world, the guards who police contact in the prison, the administrators who ban people from coming in. El is asking: How can anything like intimacy be sustained under those conditions? One way that she has cultivated over time is by thinking a lot about the power and the intimacy of voice. So much of Abolitionist Intimacies is about voice, voices heard over the phone, over the radio. There is so much joy there. And pain, too. Someone’s voice, and the feeling of connection, can change your day. Take you away. There are some indelible moments in El’s book where she documents exactly this sort of witnessing: witnessing the strength of connections across borders and through walls. Against the tyranny of a carceral society. And she points out that changing the world we have is within our grasp, even if it’s difficult to imagine. Like, she admits that “it’s difficult to live a different kind of life.” Of course it is. But the point is that it can be done, just not through separated acts of individual behaviour change. It has to happen collectively. Sacrifices, in her words, are also blessings.

Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay is clinical faculty at the McGill Department of Family Medicine, focusing on supporting rural and low-resource practice. Mukhopadhyay organises around issues related to extractivism, migrant rights, policing, public services and decolonizing global health within local and international networks and collectives. Alexis Shotwell is a Professor in Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her academic work addresses impurity, environmental justice, racial formation, disability, unspeakable and unspoken knowledge, sexuality, gender, and political transformation. She is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding from 2011, and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times from 2016. We discuss Baj’s new book from Fernwood Publishing, Country of Poxes: Three Germs and the Taking of Territory. In the book, we get an innovative technique for telling the history of colonialism and its effects on past and present capacities for collective survival, threatened as it has always been by microscopic entities that enter our bodies and undermine a misplaced and sinister pretence to mastery. In this conversation we talk about the question of culpability. Baj’s book prompts Alexis to think about agency and how illness is distributed. In her reading, its argument stresses how social actors have made consequential choices in the past, and how, as Baj writes in the book, “reflecting on these experiences in the past” can enable “those of us who believe in a more just, a more healed… future” to “contribute in some way to cobbling together a truer liberation.” You won’t just learn a lot by reading Country of Poxes—a text that focuses on the colonial continua of smallpox, tuberculosis, and syphilis—you’ll also learn, I think, to think differently about the tendency to accept suffering and death. The book historicizes contemporary diagnostic tools, dominant and subordinate ideologies of care in health, as well as the struggle for radical alternatives to the “fragile” health care systems we currently have. Mukhopadhyay’s articles from Briarpatch and Upping the Anti: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/the-labour-of-care https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/19-care-as-colonialism Country of Poxes: https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/country-of-poxes

Fab Filippo is an actor, screenwriter, and playwright. Most recently, he co-created, wrote, and directed the critically acclaimed comedy-drama “Sort Of,” for CBC and HBO Max. A winner of a slew of awards, Sort Of (https://gem.cbc.ca/media/sort-of/) is the main focus here, but Fab has also worked on a huge array of shows and films over the years, from his work writing and directing Save Me, to co-writing the true crime indie film Perfect Sisters. Gray Powell has worked all over Canada with various theatre companies, but has spent the most time acting at The Shaw Festival where he is a Festival star. His most recent film and television credits include “Hudson & Rex,” “Designated Survivor,” “Murdoch Mysteries,” and the Netflix film ARQ. My conversation with Fab and Gray grew out of an article that I just wrote for CBC that focuses on this fantastic show Sort Of, a series focused on the character of Sabi, played so captivatingly by Bilal Baig, who is also the show’s co-creator, executive producer and writer. My article talks about my experience as the father of a transgender kid in the 21st century, and about how the show challenges us as caregivers to consider the emotional labour that kids, and especially gender nonconforming kids, often have to do to support their parents. The show has caused me to think about some of my own ideas around identity. It is remarkable for the ways it does this through subtle storytelling, rather than by being didactic or “preachy.” And this is one of the things that we talk about a lot in this conversation: how does a show that’s built, in part, out the parameters of trying to find arts funding in Canada create a tone that is “gentle” and “subtle,” without losing its edge or abandoning its radical commitment to honesty, gender and racial inclusion, intersectionality, and queer love? Fab senses that one defining feature of the new Canadian flourishing of progressive television might be an interest in “cross-sectionality.” At a couple of points here Fab talks about how he’s “thrilled by existence of this interview with Gray” because of the original genesis of Sort Of: to make a show about how each of us is going through transitions, and about how “not all transitions are alike.” The three of us talk about what it means to try to constantly learn and be humble as dads, to negotiate “ego” and be adaptable. Fab’s point is well-taken here: he reminds us that “you cannot engineer your child.” Just like, as an artist, they have to “let go of… perfectionism,” being a parent means relinquishing control of your kids and giving them “room to be new.” The result, with Sort Of, is a show where every character has a distinct voice and three dimensions, the humour feels organic, and yet the overall tone feels cohesive. A rare feat. And one accomplished, they say, but creating a creative environment that respects difference and that seeks difference.

Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University, Toronto. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, In Praise of Copying and The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice, which was just recently released from Duke University Press. I was really excited to speak with him about The Politics of Vibration because it’s a terrific, dense, complex book. There are so many ways to approach thinking about the beauty, power and moving qualities of music and vibration. Maybe because glory has connotations of the divine, we’ll start there. Boon doesn’t avoid the spiritual aspects of music in his book. He reinforces this sense of the ineffable in sound and vibration. But what does this mean? He relates it to the way that, when he has conversations about what music is with colleagues and friends, they’ll sometimes claim that he isn’t “playing fair.” Meaning that he catches them off-guard with ontological questions about something that they experience on an emotional level, at the level of uncomplicated pleasure. They’re aware that they don’t exactly have a language for what they’re experiencing, but aren’t ready to concede that this means what they’re experiencing is something spiritual, and maybe—I can only speculate here—because spirituality feels too immaterial to fit in our obsessively material and materialistic age. In the same way, though, that Boon was exploring the conflicts between the material and supernatural or spiritual in psychedelic drug use with The Road of Excess, in The Politics of Vibration he’s invested in working against what he calls a “desacralized music aesthetics” and toward a framework that includes the rather enticing notion that music is made when we make “decisions about how to play with waves,” how to “craft” spaces of feeling through waveforms. If we adopt this sort of expansive framework, Marcus is saying that we move rather quickly into a world where music is actually asking “ontological questions” of us. And he explains how non-European cultures of music have an intuition and a technical expertise in this: that the pursuit of “target states” through music is not a foreign concept in many cultures. The idea of tapping into the “vibration of the land” in many Indigenous musical pathways is a vital practice, for example, in a settler colonial context where finding meaning and belonging in spite of alienation and disconnection is an urgent matter. Beyond that, it’s clear to Boon that many people integrate music in their lives as a tool to resist what he terms the dominant “time regime” of neoliberal global capitalism, in which we’re in many ways compelled to sacrifice the tempo, rhythm and temporality of our lives to a regime that imposes profit-driven structures from outside. So the way Boon approaches the question of music is both philosophical and political, but it’s also very personal. He talks about how music “holds you up,” it allows you to find courage in hard times, bathes you in a kind of lightness and supportiveness. Music can be restorative for us as individuals, and motivating for us in collectives. Some music “impinges” on you, he points out. And some scenes of music (in particular, house music, hip hop, punk, some experimental music) impinges on us a little bit more powerfully because the people embedded in it feel it in a less fearful way, in a way that more openly embraces all the ways that sound can shape us, alter our consciousness and transport us somewhere different. He gravitates to those scenes where folks are less fearful of the embodied effects of music and the “possibilities of sound.”

Ben Tarnoff is the author of A Counterfeiter’s Paradise and The Bohemians. He’s the co-founder of Logic magazine. His writing has appeared in a lot of different places, mostly left publications like The Guardian and Jacobin. His most recent piece of writing, and the focus of this conversation, is a book called Internet for the People. It’s an incredibly engaging study of how the modern internet came to be, why it's fundamentally broken, and what steps we can take to make it less broken. I asked Ben about the approach he took to writing Internet for the People because I was really impressed with how he was able to weave metaphors in with accessible language to give folks a much deeper understanding of “the stack,” as it’s called: or the massively complex architecture of the modern internet. One of my favourite lines from the book comes from his description of how the internet is “too sprawling to squeeze into a single frame,” and “too big to see without a metaphor.” That just makes intuitive sense, but it also becomes a sort of method for Tarnoff, as he works to explain the interlocking systems that create the conditions for living life today in a way that is increasingly saturated by internet technologies. His argument in the book is both easy to grasp and hard to pin down: when it comes to internet access, he makes it clear that increasing access by wresting the power away from large telecom companies that pioneered the privatization of the net isn’t just important in terms of protecting consumers from being gouged by ISPs, it is actually—in the era of more and more virtual activity—a basic condition of democratic decision-making and participation. One of the threats that your average internet user might be able to identify, when it comes to the links between online life and a healthy democracy, is the problem of “filter bubbles.” This is another area where Ben’s robust ability to synthesize a lot of research on the subject gets combined with his capacity to break things down: he says that this idea of “filter bubbles” basically brainwashing people is not just unfair, it’s inaccurate. We talk about some of the biggest companies in tech: touching on Zuckerberg’s empire, the power of Amazon and Uber, and how these companies are all sitting on a proprietary accumulation of data that makes them some of the most supremely valued corporations in history. What does it mean, Tarnoff asks, that data itself has become this valuable? The book answers that question in easy-to-parse ways, but the implications are still only now being worked through: I think it’s particularly important to think about his claim that, in fact, companies like Uber are allowed to lose money in part because of the aura around them as a “novel corporate form,” and because of the data they collect and control. At the end of the conversation Ben describes some of the places that he derives hope from, and you can read more about that by looking at his long piece at Logic magazine titled “The Making of a Tech Worker” movement (https://logicmag.io/the-making-of-the-tech-worker-movement/full-text/). There is a redefinition of labour in tech coming—in an industry that doesn’t like to call what happens in it work, and which nonetheless relies on the skills and time and commitment of a vast cross-section of people from different classes and sectors. There is, he suggests, also a radical break on its way: a breaking away from the sort of bourgeois identification that might be a barrier to organizing across classes in the tech sector. And this is happening at the same time that a broader “techlash” is figuring the founders of these companies—long deified as genuines—as effectively the antagonists in a struggle for a more free, fair and democratized access to the power of technology in the present moment.