Literate Machine

Does Star Trek show us what socialism looks like? What would it look like if we organized society democratically instead of allowing a few people to control most of the resources?

Bibliography and Further Reading

* Obviously, the work of Marx and Engels is key to this piece. Particular texts I drew on here include The Civil War in France (1871) (modern editions contain the first draft and the address on the Civil War) and The Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). Marx's "La Liberte" speech (1872) is where he proposes that some countries might transition to communism peacefully: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/09/08.htm

* One of my chief inspirations for this piece and in general is the book Socialism: Past and Future (1989) by Michael Harrington, founder of the Democratic Socialists of America. Socialism does a good job of summing up the history of socialism, the rise of democratic socialism, the problems we faced in the 20th century, and where we might go from here.

* The Preconditions of Socialism (1899) (also published in English as Evolutionary Socialism) by Eduard Bernstein is a fascinating book by the father of the democratic socialist movement and the idea of achieving socialists goals through gradual reform. A controversial figure both in his time and today, both with orthodox Marxists and modern democratic socialists, his story is one I find endlessly fascinating. Much as during the Social Democratic period of the mid-20th century, when Preconditions was first published, it seemed as if gradual socialism was working in Bernstein's native Germany. Then of course the First World War brought Germany to its knees. Bernstein himself, who'd become a member of the Reichstag, would die three weeks before Hitler came to power, undid all the achievements of his party, executed its leaders, and most of the members of Bernstein's ethnic group. While researching this piece, I also drew on The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (1952) by Peter Gay, and the excellent introduction to the English translation of Preconditions from 1993 by translator Henry Tudor.

* For the history of the Russian Revolution, I highly recommend China Mieville's October (2017), a highly readable retelling of the story of the revolution and the events around it.

* I am highly indebted to the work of Richard Wolff, whose Democracy at Work (2012) and associated website and YouTube channel opened my eyes to the possibilities of worker cooperatives as a tool for workers to control the means of production within a capitalist society and so create a mechanism not only to improve the lives of workers in the near term, but to build up worker power and control in the long term.

* I'm also indebted to the continued work of Cory Doctorow in and out of his Pluralistic project, with too many useful and informative pieces to list here. For example, Pluristic turned me onto how municipal broadband providers are the only ones with consistent customer satisfaction, or his piece in Boing Boing about how the notion of the "tragedy of the commons" is based on lies and fraud. Other important pieces include "What Comes After Neoliberalism" and "Excuseflation".

* Carlos Maza's excellent video essay "The Pay for It Scam" is essential for understanding the ways in which only programs for the social good are ever asked "how will you pay for it", while corporate subsidies, tax cuts, and the military budget piles on the debt.

* For more on the "primitive communism" of the Iroquois and other native tribes, I recommend The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) by David Graeber.

* Most of my research on Gene Roddenberry comes from the book The Impossible Happened: The Life and Work of Gene Roddenberry, Creator of Star Trek (2016) by Lance Parkin

* More on how modern corporations actually show the power of a centralized economy, a piece inspired by the book The People's Republic of Walmart (2019): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRepEvmCCIg

A larger bibliography can be found at: https://literatemachine.com/2023/04/11/star-trek-into-socialism/#paragraph

Marvel's Loki shows us what fascism looks like, and how it comes to take root within innocuous conservatism.

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Corrections:

• Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Bros are not Jewish. Actual examples of Jewish funders of the right include Sheldon Adelson and Ike Perlmutter. I may upload a revised version of this audio with the names changed.

• Malthus never directly said that the poor and unskilled should be liquidated, but he did oppose aid to the poor on the theory that they should be allowed to naturally die out if they were of no use to society in order to preserve resources.

Interstitial music:

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Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US

Bibliography and Further Reading

• David Brooks article on the foundations of conservatism: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/brooks-true-conservatism-dead-fox-news-voter-suppression/620853/?utm_source=feed
• George W. Bush says he looked in Putin's eyes and "saw his soul": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovenia_Summit_2001
• Mussolini on Totalitarianism and Fascism: http://www.historyguide.org/europe/duce.html
• "Ur Fascism", Umberto Eco
• Rich Scott wants to raise taxes on the poorest: https://news.yahoo.com/rick-scott-lies-tax-proposal-171630154.html
• 10% of Americans own 89% of the stock market: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.htmlRight-wing proposals to nationalize Facebook: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/bannon_proposes_nationalizing_facebook_google_data
• Laura Ingraham on punishing Disney: https://www.thewrap.com/laura-ingraham-disney-apple-republican-retaliation/
• Texas arresting parents of trans kids: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/10/texas-trans-kids-abortion-lgbtq-gender-ideology/
• Republicans allowed the Child Tax Credit to expire, throwing 3.7 million children into poverty: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/study-child-poverty-rising-tax-credit-expires-83071832
• FDR achievements: https://fdrsuite.org/americas-greatest-presidents-franklin-delano-roosevelts-top-achievements-as-president/
• Half of Americans are "not American in any meaningful sense": https://americanmind.org/salvo/why-the-claremont-institute-is-not-conservative-and-you-shouldnt-be-either/
• More than half of Republicans believe in Great Replacement Theory: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/09/nearly-half-republicans-agree-with-great-replacement-theory/
• 77% of drug traffickers are US citizens, and come through ports of call: https://www.cato.org/blog/77-drug-traffickers-are-us-citizens-not-illegal-immigrants
• The border is not a "war zone": https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/not-war-zone-veterans-visit-texas-borderlands-military-outdoors-sierra-club
• Growing number of Republicans think Democracy is wrong for America: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/21/republicans-biden-trump-election-democracy
• GOP seizing the election system: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-01-01/insurrection-gop-seizes-election-power
• 401ks are a scam: https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses
• America's disappearing middle class: https://www.thedailybeast.com/in-the-future-well-all-be-renters-americas-disappearing-middle-class
• Peter Thiel's essay on how democracy is not compatible with freedom: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
• Republicans becoming anti-democratic in charts: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22274429/republicans-anti-democracy-13-charts
• More information on the Backfire Effect, where people dig into their beliefs when presented with contrary evidence: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2017/01/13/yanss-093-the-neuroscience-of-changing-your-mind/

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Text of the show and more information about other formats it's available can be found at: https://literatemachine.com

Bibliography and Further Reading

- Hallmark Christmas movie montage sourced from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vu6GlstKl8

- On the urban-rural divide of Christmas movies: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-24/the-urban-rural-divide-of-tv-christmas-movies

- The TV Tropes entry for From New York to Nowhere: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FromNewYorkToNowhere

- Ted Koppel's piece on The Andy Griffith Show and modern politics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/12/29/ted-koppel-mayberry-cbs-sunday-morning/

- A fascinating video that explains how the ethos of "personal responsibility" leads naturally to white nationalism: https://youtu.be/jmT7nLDinhY

- How and why small towns are in decline: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/14/opinion/rural-america-trump-decline.html

- How teen birth rates are higher in rural areas: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/teen-birth-rate-higher-rural-areas

- On the myth of welfare dependency: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare-childhood/555119/

Is the Paw Patrol an unintentional conservative utopia? What can the show tell us about how the political spectrum views the police, its purpose, and its funding.

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More information about the show and other formats in which it's available, including YouTube, can be found at https://literatemachine.com

Bibliography and Further Reading

• How the regulations around tv shows as toy commercials were repealed in the Reagan administration
• How square dancing was popularized as a tool of white supremacy
• How EMTs are underpaid, overworked, and underrecognized
• About police officer Joe Crystal, shunned by police for trying to hold them accountable
• Wikipedia entry on the Blue Wall of Silence
• NYPD internal investigator called a "rat"
• Prosecutors don't like to prosecute cops
• Attorney General Letitia James plan for civilian oversight of the NYPD
• Police departments aren't largely being defunded
• Crime is rising in cities that did not defund their police the same as those that did
• How torture doesn't work
• About Abner Louima who was sodomized with a broken broomstick by the NYPD
• The great Forced Adversity video about the Punisher/Police Problem
• Some More News video about the Warrior Mentality training given to the police
• How congress buys equipment for the military that it doesn't want or need as pork barrel
• Study finding conservatives lack a sense of humor
• Last Week Tonight's video about Tucker Carlson and his lightly veiled fascism and even less well veiled white supremacy
• Edmund Burke and the origins of conservatism
• Conservatism defending the status quo
• The myth of meritocracy
• Book about how billionaires are funding the radical right: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer
• On prison labor in America
• The Thought Slime video that covers the video where John Doyle says that conservatives aren't about equality, they're about hierarchy and natural law
• Police will tell you to obey them if you value your life
• Republicans legalizing the automative murder of protesters
• Poor people can't just get a better job
• Why conservatives are more punitive than liberals
• The penal system as slave labor

How Aaron Sorkin whitewashes the story of hippy activism, and how the hippy activists whitewashed themselves.

Text and video version of this episode, as well as how to get it in your inbox, can be found at: https://literatemachine.com

**Bibliography and Further Reading** * Abbie Hoffman testimony at the Chicago 7 trial: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Chicago7/Hoffman.html * Differences between the film and what really happened: https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/trial-of-the-chicago-7/

* Wikipedia page about COINTELPRO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO * _Do It!_ (1970), Jerry Rubin * _Growing Up at 37_ (1976), Jerry Rubin * A profile of Jerry Rubin from the 1980s: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1981/10/18/jerry-rubin/beb88e6b-ba7e-4839-80ac-4442f6d47809/ * Abbie Hoffman's debate with Jerry Rubin in 1985, "Yippie vs. Yuppie" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOFBAJ8BlJs&t=913s, and another time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P1x9u-466A * NY Times obituary of Jerry Rubin: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/30/obituaries/jerry-rubin-56-flashy-60-s-radical-dies-yippies-founder-and-chicago-7-defendant.html * "The 'Me' Decade", Tom Wolfe: https://nymag.com/news/features/45938/

Pete Doctor takes us into the meaning of life, but is there something hollow at its center of it?

Bibliography and Further Reading

* Soul using uncomfortable blackface: https://noripatterson.medium.com/whats-wrong-with-pixar-s-soul-animation-racism-and-blackface-c9a7709cd50f * Tom Wolfe's famous article declaring the 70s the "me decade": https://nymag.com/news/features/45938/ * Google ngram of the term "personal fulfillment" showing its rise in the 1960s and 70s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Personal+fulfillment&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CPersonal%20fulfillment%3B%2Cc0 * How distrust of the government among the hippy movement led them to embrace Libertarianism: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/may/19/comment * Twitter thread about conservative's using the "money can't buy happiness" slogan to say we don't need to raise the minimum wage: https://twitter.com/cons_owned/status/1372670714201968641/photo/1

What does it mean to be an artist?

Corrections:

* The high school students put one of Simon's poems into their high school yearbook, they don't post it up everywhere. Henry puts the poem up in the mute woman's store at her request.

* Fay puts Simon's poem on the internet after Henry asks her to. Henry doesn't know how to use a computer.

In the 1990s, Myst and Doom fought a war for the soul of video games. Myst sold almost twice as many copies. Within ten years, the entire industry had remodeled itself around Doom. Special call out to Jimmy Maher at the Digital Antiquarian (https://filfre.net) whose work covering early video games I drew on extensively.

Some Corrections: * I mention the Nintento 64 as the rival to the Genesis when I meant the Super Nintendo * Doom was not Id's last Shareware game; their next game, Quake, was also distributed as Shareware * First person mode was the primary mode of Ultima Underworld * There are 5 worlds in Myst, not 7 * Jimmy Maher points out the Lucasfilm's games declined in quality after 1993, and so poor design may still have been a factor in the decline of Adventure games.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Computer Programming Used to Be Women's Work: https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-so-it-was-paid-less-and-undervalued, https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding, https://qz.com/911737/silicon-valleys-gender-gap-is-the-result-of-computer-game-marketing-20-years-ago/

Sierra c-founder Ken Williams on the future of the medium: https://community.telltale.com/discussion/23327/roberta-williams-josh-mandel-discussion/p6]

On the development and reception of Wolfenstein 3D: https://www.filfre.net/2020/05/the-shareware-scene-part-3-the-id-boys/wolf3d/ On Doom: https://www.filfre.net/2020/06/the-shareware-scene-part-4-doom/

On Myst: https://www.filfre.net/2020/02/myst-or-the-drawbacks-to-success/

On Doom: https://www.filfre.net/2020/06/the-shareware-scene-part-4-doom/ Computer ownership in the 1990s: https://www.bls.gov/cex/research_papers/pdf/computer-ownership-up-sharply-in-the-1990s.pdf

Example list of the most popular games: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/g30910862/best-video-games/

Feminist Frequency, feminist critique of gaming and target of GamerGate: https://feministfrequency.com/

More about GamerGate: https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/gamergate-video-games-five-years-later.html, https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/video-games-shootings-el-paso-gamergate-8chan-connection.html

For 30 years, Dave Sim engaged in one of the most remarkable ongoing artistic endeavors ever while he gradually lost his mind.

Bibliography and Further Reading

* A collection quotations of Dave Sim's most misogynistic writing: https://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/sim.html * An account of Sim's LSD epiphany at the unofficial Cerebus fanzine site: http://momentofcerebus.blogspot.com/2016/03/sims-lsd-breakthrough.html * Sim on his schizophrenia diagnosis: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiAo4706PjqAhVqS98KHZxVBiAQFjAKegQIARAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fetd.ohiolink.edu%2F!etd.send_file%3Faccession%3Ddayton1304648596%26disposition%3Dattachment&usg=AOvVaw3KLMmd_z3nhKHTIG_i7Av_ * Tegan O'Neil's excellent posts on Cerebus have been a great resource for this piece, which are indexed here: https://whenwillthehurtingstop.blogspot.com/2013/10/fun-and-games-with-dave.html The comment about Sim and his interpretation of Genesis is found in part 1 of her series: http://whenwillthehurtingstop.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-we-will-read-cerebus-part-i-as-i.html * Sim on his injury and medical science: https://bleedingcool.com/comics/dave-sim-admitted-into-hospital-for-surgery/ * The Cerebus in Hell Coronavirus special: https://bleedingcool.com/comics/dave-sim-publishes-free-coronavirus-cerebus-in-hell-digital-comic/

How the worms ate into my brain, what I did and did not understand about The Wall, and what it tells us about the rise of the Alt-Right.

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Bibliography and Further Reading

* The Libertarian-to-Fascist Pipeline: http://[https://medium.com/@thomas.perrett97/from-hayek-to-hitler-an-analysis-of-the-libertarian-to-fascist-pipeline-dcd219fba473]

* How Trump supporting figures like Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon literally don't believe in Democracy: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-steve-bannon-peter-thiel-214490

* Study about how whites backed Trump because of the perceived threat to their dominance: https://www.prri.org/research/white-working-class-attitudes-economy-trade-immigration-election-donald-trump/

* Interview with Michael Kimmel about how people get swept up in Neo-Nazi movements: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/27/michael-kimmel-masculinity-far-right-angry-white-men

* Film Critics Hulk's essay on the problems with Joker: https://www.patreon.com/posts/33213577

* And finally, Sean Skull's essential deep dive into how The Bell Curve is based on sand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo