Current Affairs

Rebecca Giblin is a professor at the University of Melbourne and the co-author (with Cory Doctorow) of Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back. The book is about how corporations that act as gatekeepers between the creators of creative work and the public are able to use their power to extract huge amounts of wealth from workers. From YouTube to Amazon to LiveNation concerts to news conglomerates to Spotify, Giblin and Doctorow look at how corporations that own the means of accessing content are able to keep musicians, artists, and writers from reaping the full value of their work. But Chokepoint Capitalism isn't just a critique of how these institutions hoard wealth and keep creative workers poor. It's also filled with clear and workable solutions that can change the situation and give those who produce creative work a fairer share of the value they produce. In this conversation, we discuss:How Amazon locks in its customers and uses its size to dictate extortionate terms to its suppliersWhy Prince was right about the music industryHow even Peter Thiel has admitted that it's monopolists, not innovators, who make moneyWhy copyright law as it exists doesn't actually protect the creators of intellectual propertyWhether monopolies and market concentration are actually the most important issue, or whether the real problem is that for-profit corporations are the ones with the power.Why Rebecca and Cory think they can make the terms "monopsony" and "oligopsony" sexyHow collective action by creative workers can be effective and why corporate power looks imposing but is actually quite fragileThe Peter Thiel lecture is called "Competition is For Losers." Listen to Cory Doctorow's interview with Current Affairs, which also touches on some of the themes in the book, here. The thumbnail for this episode is a nod to Amazon's infamous "Gazelle project" which tried to prey on book publishers the way a cheetah would prey on a "sickly gazelle.""Let's make interventions that directly support more power to creative workers rather than rights-holders." — Rebecca Giblin

Wayne Hsiung is a former law professor who was recently acquitted by a Utah jury after being charged with stealing two piglets from a factory farm, in a story that made national news. In 2017, animal liberation activist group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) released a video showing the horrifying conditions of pigs in a facility run by Smithfield Foods, and showing the rescue of two dying piglets from the farm. The activists, including Hsiung, were pursued relentlessly for the next five years, with the FBI even invading animal sanctuaries in order to try to recover the stolen piglets. Hsiung faced significant jail time if convicted, but successfully managed to convince the jury to acquit him. The case is important because a conviction would have had a chilling effect on important activism exposing the abuses of factory farms. But jurors even went so far as to ask why Hsiung hadn't rescued more of the facility's sick piglets. Today, Wayne joins us along with DxE investigator Matt Johnson, to discuss the original nighttime operation, the Utah trial, and what DxE hopes to expose about the animal farming industry. We talk about why DxE chooses the tactic of going into factory farms and removing animals, how a Utah jury became convinced Wayne's actions weren't a crime, and the work yet to be done in creating a humane life for animals everywhere.More on the time Matt tricked Fox Business into thinking he was the CEO of Smithfield Foods is here. Wayne's blog The Simple Heart is here and information on the campaigns surrounding is at righttorescue.com. The interview with Marina Bolotnikova on factory farming is here. 

Norman Solomon is one of the foremost progressive media critics, having founded the Institute for Public Accuracy and authored or co-authored many books on media including Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, and The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media. Today Norman joins to give us a crash course in how to be an informed and careful consumer of news media who can spot bias and buzzwords. Norman explains how to read your morning newspaper to figure out what you're not being told, and gives examples of how dissenting opinions (particularly on war) are censored. He shows how words like "defense" and "reform" are used to obscure the truth, and argues that when you actually understand an issue deeply, you can easily see how bad the media coverage of it is. We discuss how social movements like Occupy and the democratic socialists are covered in the mainstream press, and what we can learn from a generation of prior media critics like Upton Sinclair and I.F. Stone. Norman also encourages us to be skeptical of progressive media as well, making sure that we're always concerned with a fair representation of the facts. As a bonus, Norman recounts his 1990s run-in with Dilbert creator Scott Adams. Long before Adams went full MAGA, Norman was warning that Dilbert posed as a satire of the workplace but was actually clearly written by a reactionary. He even wrote a book called The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh. At the time, Norman was presented in the press as hysterical killjoy, but he has been fully vindicated over time and deserves credit for being among the first to see through Adams. Norman's Nation tribute to Robert Parry is here. The website of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) is here. The full conversation between Noam Chomsky and the BBC's Andrew Marr is here. Nathan's article on the 2019 DSA convention is here, and one can contrast it with the depiction of the same event on Fox News. Nathan's article on the Guardian incident is here. Ashleigh Banfield's full speech can be watched here. Philip Agee's CIA diary is here. How to Read Donald Duck is here. Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism can be read in full at Project Gutenberg. George Seldes' memoir is here.The thumbnail for this episode is from the Dilbert comic written about Norman Solomon in February of 1998. More on the episode can be read in 1990s newspaper articles like "Author dismisses Dilbert as corporate shill" (Tampa Bay Times) and "Dilbert detractor is not amused" (Los Angeles Times).These are the 17 pro-war media talking points that form the table of contents of Norman's 2006 book War Made Easy: 

Shawn Vulliez and Aaron Moritz are the creators and hosts of the utopian leftist comedy podcast Srsly Wrong and also the creators of the new animated series Papa and Boy, currently making its debut on the worker-owned streaming platform Means TV. Papa and Boy is an absurdist comedy, but it's rich with political and social commentary. It's set in a dystopian world where fathers tyrannize over sons and justify their rule with a spurious ideology. Today Sean and Aaron join to discuss how they managed to make the series leftist while keeping it funny, and how Papa and Boy depicts:The role of propaganda in keeping populations docile and complacentThe way meritocracy forces those at the bottom to compete for scraps and meaningless baublesHow hierarchical relationships are not only oppressive but do not even serve the interests of those at the top of the hierarchyHow people who suffered personally sometimes use their own experience as a justification for keeping others in similar conditionsHow the oppressed are deprived of knowledge about the possibilities for alternate social arrangements and kept in the dark about the power of collective actionMuch else!The Current Affairs article Nathan mentions about meritocracy and bullshit jobs is here. "[The social order] requires the boys to be demoralized and it requires the papas to be fearful of what the boys can accomplish and to prevent them from collaborating, in the same way that in current society huge companies like Amazon and Starbucks are fighting tooth and nail to prevent unionization efforts, because they know that if workers work together they'll be able to extract concessions from them and to change how things are working.""If you can't imagine that another world is possible, or even that resistance to the current world is possible, it places you exactly where the hierarchical systems want you to be. That's why propaganda, and terms like 'It is what it is,' are so powerful in terms of keeping society the way it is, because they seek to limit the horizons of what people as see as possible. Having those moments of realizing 'Oh, maybe it is what it is but it doesn't have to be,' is so powerful." 

Some, including both geniuses like Stephen Hawking and nongeniuses like Elon Musk, have warned that artificial intelligence poses a major risk to humankind's future. Some in the "Effective Altruist" community have become convinced that artificial intelligence is developing so rapidly that we could soon create "superintelligent" computers that are so much smarter than us that they could take over and pose a threat to our existence as a species. Books like Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence and Stuart Russell's Human Compatible have warned that we need to get machine intelligence under control before it controls us. Erik J. Larson is dubious about the chances that we'll produce "artificial general intelligence" anytime soon. He argues that we simply have no idea how to simulate important kinds of intelligent reasoning with computers, which is why even as they seem to get much smarter, they also remain very stupid in obvious ways. Larson is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think The Way We Do (Harvard University Press) which shows that there are important aspects of intelligence that we have no clue how to make machines do, and that while they're getting very good at playing Go and generating images from prompts, AI systems are not making any progress toward possessing the kind of common sense that we depend on every day to make intelligent decisions. Larson says that a lot of progress in AI is overstated and a lot of people who hype up its potential don't grasp the scale of the challenges that face the project of creating a system capable of producing insight. (Rather than producing very impressive pictures of cats.)Today, Erik joins to explain how different kinds of reasoning work, which kinds computers can simulate and which kinds they can't, and what he thinks the real threats from AI are. Just because we're not on the path to "superintelligence" doesn't mean we're not creating some pretty terrifying technology, and Larson warns us that military and police applications of AI don't require us to develop systems that are particularly "smart," they just require technologies that are useful in applying violent force. A Current Affairs article on the "superintelligence" idea can be read here. Another echoing Larson's warnings about the real threats of AI is here. The "Ukrainian teenager" that Nathan refers to is a chatbot called Eugene Goostman. The transcript of the conversation with the "sentient" Google AI is here.The image for this episode is what DALL-E 2 spat out in response to the prompt "a terrifying superintelligent AI destroying the world." 

Raina Lipsitz is a journalist whose book The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics profiles the young leftists who are bringing socialism back to American politics. Raina looks at high-profile campaigns like those of AOC and Bernie Sanders, but also at the left political victories that fly under the radar, occurring on city councils and in state legislatures. To anyone who wants to feel hopeful that a new generation of political leaders is rising that can take on the most serious challenges we face, Raina's book offers an encouraging assessment of the possibilities for a new movement. This episode should have come out yesterday but Nathan has COVID-19 and was feeling too weak and useless to press the "post" button. 

Sam Shain is a public school teacher whose book Education Revolution: Media Literacy for Political Awareness argues that K-12 students need to be equipped with the ability to analyze media and spot misinformation. This crucial skill, which helps them become informed participants in democracy and resist demagogues, is not actually widely taught. Shain explains how he teaches his students critical thinking, including playing "spot the fallacy" with Ben Shapiro videos and having students write their own piece of "fake news." In our conversation, we talk about why it's important to bring politics into the classroom and how to make sure kids hear dissenting perspectives without trying to indoctrinate them. Shain also recounts his own disturbing experience being forced out of a job after a complaint from a Trump-supporting parent. Nathan's recent article "Six Subjects That Should Be Taught In School But Aren't" can be read here. The book that Sam got in trouble for teaching, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, is available here. "If the teacher is merely teaching something that happened [in history], or teaching a book that might be a little bit controversial, [administrators] need to hold the line [against parent complaints]. And teachers need to do this sort of thing." — Sam Shain

Prof. Elizabeth Popp Berman is the author of Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy, which documents how a style of reasoning that heavily emphasizes efficiency over equality came to dominate U.S. social policy. In our conversation we discuss the rise of "cost-benefit analysis" and how applying the economists' favored framework excludes important values from being taken into account. We talk about what the "economic style" misses and the solutions it leads policy-makers to embrace in areas like student debt, healthcare, climate, and antitrust. (We also make clear that not all economists are the problem. Karl Marx was an economist, after all!) The Boston Review piece discussing Thinking Like an Economist is here. The Adrienne Buller interview is here, although it was not from "last week," as Nathan says. It was from July, and Nathan just forgot that time has passed and it is already late September. The image accompanying this episode is a stock photo depicting "Cost-Benefit Analysis" taken from Shutterstock. 

Today we return to our interview with Dr. W.D. Ehrhart, for the second part of a conversation on what Americans should know about the war in Vietnam.The photograph is of Dr. Ehrhart himself in Vietnam. It appears accompanying his 2017 New York Times article "God, Jesus, and Vietnam." Edited by Tim Gray.

Dr. W.D. Ehrhart is a Vietnam veteran, poet, teacher, and essayist who was active in Vietnam Veterans Against The War and has written multiple volumes of memoirs about his observations of the war and his return to civilian life afterwards, beginning with Vietnam-Perkasie. He has been hailed as "the dean of Vietnam war poets" and "one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature." His work offers a blunt and often haunting look at the realities of war. His collected poems, on Vietnam and many other subjects, can be found in the volume Thank You For Your Service. (Included are the poems featured in this episode.)Today, Dr. Ehrhart joins to discuss how the Vietnam War destroyed the image of America that he had formed during his upbringing in small-town Pennsylvania and give some insight into the true nature of the war for both Americans and the Vietnamese. It is a powerful and important conversation about a period in this country's history that we might rather forget but need to confront head-on.An article by Nathan on the Vietnam War is here. An old video of Dr. Ehrhart on YouTube talking about his war experiences has received nearly 20 million views and can be found here. Examples of Dr. Ehrhart's poems can be found on his personal website here.This is Part I of II. Edited by Tim Gray.