Brutal South

Welcome to Episode 5 of the Brutal South Podcast. My guest this week is Dr. James N. Gilmore, assistant professor of media and technology studies at Clemson University.

I met Jimmy at the University of South Carolina in the freshman Honors College dorm, which was an old building full of lovable weirdos. He had a film criticism blog going at the time that I really loved, and when I became an editor at the Daily Gamecock student newspaper, I convinced him to start writing reviews for us. I considered it a coup.

Jimmy went to grad school, then he went to more grad school, and he became an expert in subjects like wearable technology, digital infrastructure, and Southern cultural studies. Every few months now, it seems like, he announces the title of a new paper he's just published, and each one is a certified club banger.

I invited him onto the podcast to talk about wearable tracking devices, parenting, protest, and policing, all of which have surprising common threads. As a bonus, he sent me a recent article he had published about a Google data center that was built right in my backyard, and we talked about that too.

You can follow Dr. Gilmore on Twitter at @JamesNGilmore or visit his website at JamesNGilmore.com. One book he recommended during the podcast is The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames, which you can find at your local bookstore or via the Brutal South Bookshop page.

Here are the articles and papers we discussed in this episode:

Sen, Ari. “UNC Campus Police Used Geofencing Tech to Monitor Antiracism Protestors.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 21 Dec. 2019, www.nbcnews.com/news/education/unc-campus-police-used-geofencing-tech-monitor-antiracism-protestors-n1105746.

Gilmore, J. N. (2019). Securing the kids: Geofencing and child wearables. Convergence. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856519882317

Gilmore, J. N., & Troutman, B. (2020). Articulating infrastructure to water: Agri-culture and Google’s South Carolina data center. International Journal of Cultural Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920913044

The image at the top of the page is Colonial Policy by Pavel Filonov, c. 1926.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

This week’s podcast episode is a very Charleston episode. Sorry, not sorry.

While the police killing of George Floyd has set off protests and uprisings across the globe, we are seeing activism take root differently in different communities. In Charleston, South Carolina, it’s dredging up some recent history of police abuse and white supremacist terrorism.

My guest this week is Mika Gadsden, founder of the Charleston Activist Network. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @mikagadsden, and follow the Charleston Activist Network on Instagram at @charlestonactivistnetwork. Her podcast Mic’d Up on Ohm Radio is essential listening for Charlestonians, and I recommend subscribing via iTunes or listening on Soundcloud.

Stay safe. Take care of each other. Talk to you next week.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

For the third episode of the Brutal South Podcast, my guest is the man behind the popular Twitter account @YesYoureRacist.

Twitter, for the uninitiated, is an open-air insane asylum where celebrities, world leaders, and everyday people log on to air their grievances. Logan Smith is a political communications worker from North Carolina who has been dunking on racists on the website since 2012.

Themes for this episode include white fragility, ongoing beefs between North and South Carolina, and the time Logan’s Twitter account went from idle entertainment to anti-racist information clearinghouse.

We also spend some time on the subject of digital duality, or the idea that our online selves and our “real” selves are separate. I’ve written about this before in a newsletter about Instagram and parenting, which borrowed some ideas from Nathan Jurgenson’s book The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Verso, 2019). That book, like the others I mention in the newsletter, is available to order via the Brutal South Bookshop.

If you haven’t already, you can check out the previous episodes of the podcast here and here. You can subscribe to the podcast for free via iTunes or Spotify.

As always, if you’d like to receive something interesting in your inbox every Wednesday, subscribe to the free Brutal South newsletter at the link below. For an optional $5 a month, you can support my work now and get access to exclusive content later on down the road.

The image at the top is Coccothraustes rubra (now Cardinalis cardinalis) from Mark Catesby’s The natural history of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands: containing the figures of birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, insects, and plants, Vol I.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

One bright morning in May 1953, Aldous Huxley dissolved four-tenths of a gram of mescaline in a glass of water, drank it, and waited to see what happened.

It wasn’t idle curiosity that drove the author of Brave New World to try the psychedelic alkaloid of the peyote cactus. Late in life, he had questions that remained unanswered. Chief among them were questions about perception, self-knowledge, and human connection.

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves,” Huxley wrote in The Doors of Perception, the 1954 account of his mescaline experiment. “The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.”

For the second episode of the Brutal South Podcast, I brought on a guest who shared his experience with another psychedelic drug, the psilocybin mushroom, which has been compared to mescaline for its hallucinogenic and therapeutic qualities.

Adam F. Naughton spent much of his 20s working for Republican politicians in South Carolina before undertaking some radical changes in his life and worldview. He now considers himself a socialist, and he has gotten involved with disability activism. While no single experience pushed him over the edge, he says taking psilocybin while undergoing integration therapy helped him see the world in a different light.

I’m no drug evangelist, and I’ve never tried psychedelics, but I am fascinated by their potential. If you are interested in learning more, John Semley has an excellent piece on the state of psychedelic therapy in the May issue of The New Republic (currently it’s for subscribers only; sorry). I am also pretty pleased with this feature I wrote for the Charleston City Paper in 2014 about an Iraq War veteran who found relief from PTSD in a clinical therapy trial involving MDMA, also known as ecstasy.

Adam’s website is notyourinspiration.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @adamfnaughton.

The Brutal South Podcast is available via the Apple Podcasts library and most podcast player apps. Subscribe if you like it, and don’t forget to leave a nice review.

The image at the top is “Encounter” (1908) by the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

I’m broadly skeptical about consumer activism. The first time I set foot in a Whole Foods, I saw a laminated sign beside the coffee grinder indicating that the machine might have been contaminated by non-organic coffee and that eco-conscious consumers might want to grind their beans at home.

My eyes rolled all the way back in their sockets. I just wanted to go back to Food Lion.

Whole Foods is, of course, a union-busting grocery chain owned by Amazon, a monopolistic company helmed by richest-man-on-earth Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos makes something in the ballpark of $9 million per hour via an empire that specializes in online retail, web services for enormous swaths of the internet, and tax dodging.

Amazon owns Audible, Goodreads, IMDb, Twitch, and The Washington Post. Amazon is helping ICE break up migrant families and local police departments set up a panopticon of Ring-brand doorbell cameras, all while exploiting its own warehouse employees and slandering workers who dare to speak out about unsafe conditions during a pandemic.

My point is that individual consumer choices are not going to affect Amazon’s bottom line in any meaningful way. I’m also wary of the classist overtones in shop-local jingoism. I buy a lot of groceries at Walmart and Food Lion, for example, because it’s how we can afford to eat. Lots of families do the same.

All of these caveats notwithstanding, I think there’s a case to be made for buying books without Amazon, if you can afford it. Since its debut in 1994 as an online bookseller (how quaint!), Amazon has wreaked havoc on the market for authors, publishers, and booksellers by selling books as a loss-leader. Amazon can afford to slash prices on books because it’s recouping the money elsewhere.

In this week’s newsletter, I’m debuting the Brutal South Podcast. Episode 1 is an interview with Christen Thompson, co-owner of Itinerant Literate Books right here in North Charleston, South Carolina, who has some thoughts on how we can push back against Amazon’s dominance in the book industry.

I’m a big fan of Christen’s store, which started out as a mobile bookshop in an Airstream-style trailer before moving into a renovated house in my neighborhood. I’ve taken my children there for story time, participated in open-mic poetry events, attended book signings for my friends, and spoken there during Banned Books Week about my favorite dangerous books. If you are in the neighborhood, you should check them out — they’re even doing curbside pickup during the pandemic.

One topic we spent some time on in the interview is an alternative home-shopping platform called Bookshop that gives a portion of its proceeds to independent bookstores and to affiliates like (ahem) myself. If you are interested in reading more about the business model, Christen had a great explanatory piece in Publishers Weekly earlier this year. The Itinerant Literate Bookshop storefront is here, and mine, if you are interested, is here.

OK. Stay safe. Let me know what you think about the podcast.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com