The Chatterbox

***This program contains distressing content. The voices of all active Watermelons have been changed for security reasons*** The Myanmar military is now riddled with soldiers betraying their colleagues. Military green on the outside, rebel red within. They are known as the Watermelons. BBC Eye goes inside the Watermelons unit to reveal how these spies are helping the armed pro-democracy resistance achieve the unthinkable. Nearly four years since seizing power in a coup the Myanmar military now only has full control of less than a quarter of the country.

Looking back from our contemporary vantage point, the United States’ global capitalist empire looks both omnipresent and inevitable. Much of the world’s trade is denominated in dollars. American financial institutions are at the helm of international investment and capital transfers. And US military might enforces this order, either implicitly—or sometimes quite explicitly.

But as Mary Bridges argues, America’s financial dominance was neither pre-ordained nor monolithic, particularly in its early days at the start of the twentieth century. In her new book, Bridges’ follows the foot soldiers on the imperial frontier: everyday bankers, working at overseas branch banks in places like Manilla and Hong Kong. It was these bankers who did the daily work of building out American global finance. And they brought with them their classed, racialized, and gendered worldviews, embedding those structures of inequality in the very foundations of dollar-dominated globalization.

Danny speaks with Andrew deWaard, assistant professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, about his book Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture. The two discuss how the falling rate of profit shapes the modern media landscape, the increased drive toward consolidation in entertainment companies, the big movers like private equity firms, hedge funds, asset managers, and venture capitalists, artists' limited ability to defend themselves, the rise of IP, and more.

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Ever since Serial burst onto the scene back in 2015 , it birthed not only the world of podcasting itself, but an entire cottage industry of true crime podcasts, each one more ethically dubious than the last. But one such podcast may be, at least by title, the very worst: My Favorite Murder. This wildly popular series has been criticized over the years for its flippant water-cooler recounting of people’s real life traumas. And while My Favorite Murder made efforts to correct some of its wrongs, it has facilitated an avid online fandom called Murderinos, comprised mostly of self-proclaimed mentally ill girlies who have grown so prominent on the internet as to embody their own subculture. In this episode, Hannah and Maia discuss the bizarre formation of this alt-girl army, question arbitrary lines drawn in the true crime sand, and ponder whether shame is sometimes a good thing. Tangents include: Hannah and Maia undergoing public couple’s therapy, and Hannah’s coining of the term “shame-negative’. 

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With more and more data available about each of us all the time, what are the consequences of rapid data-driven decision making by organizations, and what are the implications of it for democracy and social well being?

William Davies teaches Politics at Goldsmiths University of London and is the author of several books, including Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason.

Greg and William discuss how the ongoing crises are misunderstood by elites, and reasons behind the decline in public trust toward experts. William goes over the impact of advancements in behavioral economics, and how modern political and economic phenomena are influenced by historical and sociological contexts. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Brexit
• Friedrich Hayek
• Daniel Kahneman
• Amos Tversky
• Frankfurt School
• Michel Foucault
• Scientific Management
• Elton Mayo
• Mary Poovey
• Dominic Cummings
• Boris Johnson
• Jeremy Bentham
• Thomas Hobbes

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Goldsmiths University of London
• WilliamDavies.blog
• Wikipedia Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
• The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
• The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Theory, Culture & Society) 
• Economic Science Fictions

True happiness lies in quality time, not more work or consumption

53:18: This science of happiness proves, not that surprisingly, that actually spending time doing things that we consider to be intrinsically worthwhile, like hanging out with our families or pursuing activities in the outdoors that we enjoy doing, is more likely to make us happy than simply working more and consuming more. This is not a mystery. Most people intuitively understand this, but that would then point towards a set of policy goals regarding work-life balance and the rights to log off and to not always be at the beck and call of your manager, and that thing. So, those are more about empowering people than just fixing them the whole time.

How social media weaponizes our comparisons to others

30:35: I think one of the things that a lot of political psychology and economic psychology demonstrate quite convincingly, and I think that this is something that social media platforms weaponize, is that, when we compare ourselves to others, it makes us far more unhappy than economics.

Why culture mass surveillance aligns with conspiracy theory

46:35: [The] culture of mass surveillance goes hand in hand with a mentality of conspiracy theory because a conspiracy theorist believes, in some ways, quite correctly, that there's all this other stuff going on; you don't yet know about it, but someone else knows about it, and they're right! And that, in a way, has always been a feature of conspiracy theory, of social life. There's always been more to political institutions than meets the eye, but what there wasn't in the past was this capacity for vast quantities of data to suddenly come spewing out and often discrediting quite famous and quite powerful people.

On immediacy, representation, and anti-politics.

Anna Kornbluh, professor of English and author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism talks to Alex about the cultural, political, and economic changes she refers to as 'immediacy'. We discuss:

Is 'immediacy' just a vibe, or is vibe itself non-mediated?

How does anti-representation in film, TV and books relate to anti-representation in politics?

And can we relate culture immediacy to the 'material base'?

How do Fleabag, Uncut Gems, and the turn to memoirs and autofiction exemplify immediacy?

Why does self-disclosure fit so well with the data economy?

In what way is contemporary anti-theory nihilistic and apologetic?

How does the style of immediacy relate to Frederic Jameson's understanding of postmodernism?

Is the desire to put everything private on show a response to alienation?

And is the professionalisation of 'theory' a problem or solution?

Links:

Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh, Verso

Has culture become pure vibe?, Anna Kornbluh, Spike Art Magazine

The Theory of Immediacy or the Immediacy of Theory?, Jensen Suther, Nonsite

Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves, Todd McGowan, Repeater

This summer, sound artist and “guerrilla academic” Ben Coleman got in touch to say how much he enjoys Phantom Power. He also suggested we check out another podcast he’s into called Love is the Message. 

We’re glad we did! Love is the Message: Music, Dance & Counterculture is a fantastic show from Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert, both of them authors, academics, DJs and audiophile dance party organisers. I recognized Tim Lawrence’s name from his great book on Arthur Russell. Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London and a prolific author. Tim and Jeremy have been longtime collaborators and when the clubs closed and universities cut faculty hours due to covid, they started podcasting. 

The way I’d describe their show is, imagine the amazing college class you never got to take where you learn about the intersections of global dance music and radical politics, from the 1960s to today. They do shows on disco, Motown, reggae, tropicalia, funk, you name it with a strong cultural studies perspective. And I think the episode we’re going to hear today is a perfect example of their approach—it’s ostensibly an episode about Fela Kuti, but it’s also terrific seminar on the Black Atlantic and the political history of Nigeria. 

So thanks, Ben, for the recommendation. Thanks, Tim and Jem for sharing the pod with me and doing this episode swap. And thanks everyone for listening. Talk next month!

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CNN correspondent Elle Reeve has spent the last decade reporting on extremism in the United States. Her book, "Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society and Capture American Politics" provides an insider's glimpse into the "insidious"—and underestimated—world of alt-right internet culture that is now at the center of the Republican Party under Donald Trump. 

Lawfare Associate Editor Katherine Pompilio sat down with Reeve to discuss her investigative reporting and "Black Pill," incels, political violence, memes, what it's like to build working relationship with alt-right figures, the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, Jan. 6, the 2024 presidential election, and more.

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In Episode 393 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Herman Mark Schwartz, a professor in the Politics department of the University of Virginia and the author of three books on economic development, globalization, and the geopolitics of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Demetri and Mark discuss an article that he recently co-authored in American Affairs about AI’s potential to create a new growth wave of creative destruction that could rival or surpass those of previous innovation cycles, with enormous implications for business, society, and the role of government in the economy. They discuss what these so-called “Schumpeterian” growth waves typically look like, how they create complex interactions across all facets of the economy, and how they ultimately exhaust themselves, making room for the birth of a new innovation cycle.

In the second hour, Mark and Demetri apply this framework to the growth wave that we have been living through for more or less the last 50 years and which now appears to be in the late stages of endogenous decay. They examine three scenarios for what might come next. The first is an extension of the current wave, the second is a new paradigm driven by AI as the key general-purpose technology, and the third is neither an extension of the current wave nor a transition to a new paradigm, but rather a series of crises characterized by commodity shortages, energy insecurity, political polarization, and global conflict.

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Episode Recorded on 12/02/2024