The Future Is A Mixtape

An old forgotten sign from the Farm Equipment Association of Minnesota and South Dakota once said: “Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” We must fully acknowledge that there is no human society without trees, rivers and air – just as there is no Earth without the sun. The web of one life lives along the lines woven by other lifeforms, so perfectly balanced, so perfectly clear as to be made invisible by what our eyes have thus far failed to see. No matter the pace or scale of humanity’s technological ingenuity, the Earth sets upon us planetary boundaries and immutable laws of its own ecology. But with DeathKult Capitalism’s insatiable drive to consume all that exists, our fragile planet is being  plundered and bruised beyond repair. In this final episode of a trilogy of vision-sketches, Jesse & Matt imagine what the world might be like if the starting point for organizing society was The Golden Square: food, shelter, healthcare and education, all equally and universally provisioned. What would Earth look like if these four tenets were fully realized? Is there a role for the State to play? Or, as we look back upon the cruel banality of so many failed and failing republics, should the State be recalibrated in radically innovative ways toward the city-state? To survive beyond the catastrophes of the here and now, we must transcend the tired old ghost-roads of feudalism and the broken and breaking embankments of endtime capitalism. The structures and ecologies of a world of The Golden Square illuminate an urgent pathway, guiding us away from the continual climate catastrophe of our pre-apocalypse toward an emancipatory project of repair and restoration. Much has been made of the technological notion of the Singularity in science fiction circles; but might remaking the world according to The Golden Square bring about a kind of Social Singularity – where impossible-to-imagine forms of human consciousness are unleashed in a truly egalitarian and ecological society? And from that, might the constellations of the Utopian Sphere begin to flicker into one shared vision? Would our aching, tortured past bleed back as if it was words in a book that befuddles us in some utopian future? But before that circle can be drawn, we need to uncouple our minds and our world from colonization’s final form: climate collapse. We must continue to ring the bell for humanity’s right for food, shelter, healthcare and education – free to all, without request or restraint. This is the calling of our lives. We don’t have much time.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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In the midst of global apocalyptic collapse, the so-called solutions on offer from the imperial core are miles away from even marginal forms of dignity. The disdainful refusal to muster anything more than symbolic misdirects buried under bureaucratic mazes of means testing illuminate how deeply incapable the neoliberal boot-strap ideology is of addressing basic human needs. An anxious capitalist class and its corrupt, craven supplicants are waging an all-out war against any measure of “socialist” “entitlements” that might help build the social infrastructure desperately needed in this age of climate chaos and psychic despair. To acknowledge that everyone deserves The Golden Square—the unconditional and universal provisions of Food, Shelter, Healthcare, and Education—should be as common sense as sunshine. As Peter Kropotkin detailed in The Conquest of Bread at the end of the nineteenth century, if society was organized around first meeting human needs, we could easily be living in a world of abundance and leisure for all, all while working much less. But instead of cooperatively creating a rational and egalitarian world of post-scarcity, the cult of propertarians and their armies of indoctrinated worshipers & wage-slaves have foisted upon us polluted cities and poisoned water, expecting us to be grateful for fast fashion and fast food, the complimentary side-dishes of batshit construction and bullshit jobs. What we need, instead, are walkable cities, shorter work weeks, balanced job complexes, and a post-scarcity economy based on care and freedom. Imagining such a future involves asking a series of questions that must be fully explored . . . How would our lives be different? How would work get done, and who would do it?  Would meeting The Golden Square require a focus toward centralization or decentralization? In this second of a three-part series envisioning The World of The Golden Square, Jesse and Matt investigate the experiences and methods of a world re-made to meet human needs in a rightful relationship with the planet. We live in capitalism – a patriarchal social order forever insisting that there is no alternative –  a system that has been violently curtailing ideal innovation for more than two centuries, just as feudalism and the divine right of kings did for so many centuries prior. The heartless handmaidens of this system are tyrannical mega-corporations living as “para-states,” floating above the world’s so-called democracies, leeching every available drop of use-value from the earth and its inhabitants in a callous competition for monopolies of power & profit. These corporate parasites will continue to destroy everything in sight as long as the deeply irrational market-logic myths about “Supply & Demand” and “The Rationality Economic Man” are the organizing basis of our shared reality. This Age of Techno-feudalism – to borrow Yanis Varoufakis’ neologism – is a bullshit system that makes batshit products, based on horseshit ideas. The urgent existential responsibility that we now face – to heal our scars and secure a livable future – will require nothing less than birthing a real global utopia as quickly as humanity can muster – an open-source world designed around The Golden Square.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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We stand at the precipice of apocalypse – together bound by “The Legacy of Domination” to a dystopian world in the midst of full-melt collapse. The death-drive of empire can no longer hide behind a facade of limited bourgeois comforts, as the parade of twenty-first century catastrophes lays bare the macabre realities of a social order designed for maximum hierarchy. But another legacy of human history travels with us as a persistent revolutionary beacon – “The Legacy of Freedom.” While the pharaohs of our neoliberal capitalist hellscape continue to insist that there is no alternative – that the ultimate achievement of human potential is a do-or-die Battle Royale waged in the patriarchal pyramid scheme they call the market, the wise among us have always known that egalitarian, non-market social relations – “baseline communism” as David Greaber called it – are what makes society possible in the first place. To institutionalize freedom, we must first guarantee the right to live by provisioning an irreducible minimum to all. And though the nations of the world have long acknowledged that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services” as stated in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), all of these same nations have absurdly failed to make this a binding reality. Because to truly meet these minimum standards of human dignity, it would require the full decommodification of all of these basic needs. Alas, a deeply rooted ideology of scarcity continues to hold us back, like a dark ghost squatting on the future. To get to the radical root and finally unlock the post-scarcity future that is our common inheritance, we must re-make the world with The Golden Square as our new common sense. But what would it mean to organize the world based on the universal, unconditional, and life-long provisions of free Food, Shelter, Healthcare and Education to every person on the planet? For this half-century mark of the podcast, Jesse & Matt venture beyond the urgent and undeniably rational demands to decommodify our basic human rights, and begin to imagine what it might actually feel like to live in The World of The Golden Square. It’s one thing to recognize the clarity of this Idea-Shape’s moral demands, but it’s perhaps more tantalizing and propulsively utopian to actually envision the profound implications of living in a world designed to meet those demands. With this episode – the first of a three-part series  – our exploration begins by tracing the definitions and foundations of a world built to ensure freedom from want and the right to well-being for all. Building another world requires smashing the denials from those above us and who haunt the insides of us. The World of The Golden Square is indeed possible – a world without property, without paywalls, and without physical borders separating humans from humans, flowers from flowers, water from land. Join us on this journey.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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Inhabitants of other worlds looking down on our earth for the first time may very likely deduce that this planet is dominated by a civilization of cars, and we humans are just puddles of mud hidden inside. We live in a world turned upside-down—a utopia for automobiles, where instead of being communities built for freedom & flourishing, our cities are glittering monuments to petroleum, patriarchy, and profit. But buried under the grotesque mélange of cul-de-sacs, commodities, and mind-numbing commutes that define our suburban dystopias, rest designs for liberation hiding in plain sight. Where social reproduction is not subordinated to the production of profit. Where food, shelter, healthcare, and education are all decommodified. And where the unconditional and universal provision of these human rights is the non-negotiable foundation for institutionalizing freedom and unleashing human potential. In this episode, Matt & Jesse embark on a dialectical synthesis of ideas, weaving together the liberatory notions of a Feminism for The 99%, The Right to The City, and Free Housing For All into a conception of The City of The Golden Square—by imagining every neighborhood as a university. This inventive world-building exercise illuminates a mixtape for the future, conjoining the joyful & egalitarian features of neighborhoods with the noble & emancipatory potentialities of universities. Paradoxically, despite histories of racist, colonial, and capitalist violence, along with ongoing plunder by the corporate neoliberal state, both neighborhoods and universities still carry seeds of emancipation and together offer a coherent set of social and spatial paradigms that prefigure the shape of a better tomorrow. Thinking about neighborhoods becoming indistinguishable from universities is a way to envision what might emerge in our cities if we can erode capitalism, abolish the cost of living, and build a just transition to a green future of radical egalitarianism—where real democracy might finally blossom. Universities should be as common as neighborhoods, and every neighborhood should shimmer with the wholeness that only universities can offer. Every Neighborhood a University is a vision rooted in Social Ecology, grounded in Anarchism, born of Communalism, aimed at Library Socialism, and based on a new social contract: The Golden Square. If the borders between neighborhood and university can dissolve, making them one and the same, humanity might open up a sociological singularity, unleashing the rainbow light of our caged fecundity into the post-scarcity future we all deserve. Join us in this conversation to explore how the architecture of a solarpunk utopia can arise from the ashes of the here and now.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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The wealthy have enjoyed generations of post-scarcity, living as they do in self-isolated bubbles of private hoarding. But what about the rest of us? The billions of us who can’t afford the last three months of unpaid rent, or have to ration life-saving medications, who skip meals in order to afford college textbooks, or who are washed away in the floods of climate catastrophes? Our shared reality in this global society is one of planned scarcity imposed from above: the shimmering Poison Pyramid of a callous status-quo swarming like a rapacious daggered virus into each blood-chamber of our secret beating hearts. While 21st century Pharaohs ride dickships through the stratosphere for suborbital self-love, the rest of humanity is kept from the secret that the ruling class has always known: we could always-already live in a world of post-scarcity for all, if only our politics unveiled it; that is to say: if common sense dictated it. This much is certain: if our institutions were designed to expand, not constrict freedom, fulfilling the universal right to free housing could quickly become a simple everyday reality. As such, it’s time to remake the world according to a new social contract that is as easy, breezy and taken-for-granted as breathing the air that floats around us. To do that, we need an ecology of anticapitalist tactics that will uncover the urgency and achievability of The Golden Square. To accomplish this, Jesse and Matt attempt – in this episode – to trace some of the main avenues in the long, winding journey toward the full decommodification of housing as a guaranteed human right. In doing so, they’ll navigate across three different waterways: access, affordability, and finally, the ocean of our pacific dreams: full decommodification. They will make the direct case that we can truly create freely available, zero-carbon, safe, comfortable housing for all – and guarantee it to every person on the planet from cradle to grave. But we mustn't think of this demand as merely some far-fetched goal; but rather, we should think of this aim as a thrilling organizing tool leading us toward The Utopian Sphere. Calling out like a siren from beyond the cruel cul-de-sacs of rents, mortgages, and the cost of living, the rainbow light of decommodification beckons to us – toward the truly liberated and fecund future we so rightly deserve. 

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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One of the many outrageous and surreal moral paradoxes of life in the imperial core  was made disturbingly obvious early on during the COVID crisis in a shuttered Las Vegas—then void of tourists—when its city officials moved unhoused residents into an empty outdoor parking lot. In a woesome illustration of capitalism’s hallmark scarcity in the midst of plenty, looming directly above the forgotten were the city's glitzy-ritzy hotels with thousands of empty, unused rooms stacked skyward—taunting the unsheltered who were made to sleep below, partitioned by lines of chalked concrete. Let’s call it what it was: an open-air prison. Fast forward a year later, with vaccines aplenty, millions of additional Americans are now at risk of joining the ranks of the unsheltered thanks to the soft-fascism of the Biden administration and its refusal to take direct action to prevent a looming eviction crisis. These days, few can afford to join the American-dream-home-ownership-cult, as prices have soared past their breaking points all across the nation, with California exemplifying the surge, where homes are now selling for $50-70,000 above their listing prices. And even for the renters who aren’t behind on their monthly debt payments to land-barons, they are confronting increased housing precarity as well, with rents skyrocketing to ever outrageous levels. In a world where housing—a basic necessity that everyone needs—has become a speculative hyper-commodity driving unfathomable levels of wealth inequality in the midst of apocalyptic climate chaos, to say that there is a “housing crisis” is a tragic understatement. Our contemporary and abject social contract can be summed up as: “PAY RENT OR DIE.” So without pause or confusion, we must unapologetically recognize that housing is both a human right and a public good that must be provided unconditionally to every person on the planet. Accordingly, there should be no such thing as a “housing market”—a gross absurdity that does little more than guarantee that housing’s exchange value will always trump its use value. Let us be clear: Housing is a human right. Therefore, rent is a human rights abuse and landlords are human rights violators, full stop. Not surprisingly, as the core feature of the second most important node along The Golden Square, free housing for all needs to be acknowledged as a non-negotiable, bare minimum provision to be expected from any decent society. In this episode, Jesse & Matt grapple with the unconscionable injustices of for-profit housing, seeking out those much too neglected vectors of emancipatory struggle where housing decommodification can begin, brick-by-brick, archway-to-doorway.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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In the second part of our conversation and collaboration with the Coffee with Comrades podcast, we begin seeking out works of literature, cinema, and scholarship that might illuminate Anti-Anti-Utopian blueprints for building new worlds. As Matt remarks, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a list of films that would be called utopian, but Pearson argues that you could – in fact – come up with a robust list of fiction and non-fiction texts that spell out the shape of this new genre of hope-making. A developmental syllabus of Anti-Anti-Utopian study may start with Ursula K. Le Guin’s iconic and epic “ambiguous utopia,” The Dispossessed (1974), and include Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy of novels (1992-96), as well as  nonfiction books like Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), and A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos (2019). These visions of still imperfect, but radically more just & egalitarian worlds teach us that striving toward the utopian horizon is neither naive nor impractical, but instead all too necessary and prudent, especially now. As such, The Golden Square affirms that the decommodification of life and democratization of society are not just revolutionary goals, but in fact, the revolutionary project itself. Beyond the ceaseless academic obsessions with diagramming the corpse of our dystopian hellscape, we must chart a path outside our pyramid-shaped cages by realizing the unconditional rights to food, shelter, healthcare, and education for every person on earth – a readymade threshold separating us from the Utopian Sphere. Moving outward, Pearson, Jesse and Matt talk about the key planks that might make up the political philosophy of Anti-Anti-Utopia and how charting an emancipatory path forward requires an intersectional anti-capitalist compass magnetized to the many symbiotic, multilectical transformations necessary to abolish empire. As Matt has been fond of saying of late: “Be like an anarchist,” first and foremost.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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For this special episode, Matt & Jesse venture out of their self-inclosed Build-A-Bear tent thanks to the gracious prodding of their new friend and comrade, Pearson, host of the always excellent Coffee with Comrades podcast, in order to imagine alternatives and discuss the theory of “Anti-Anti-Utopia.” While each of us who’ve seen a Hollywood summer blockbuster, perused Netflix, or owned a dog-eared copy of a Hunger Games novel have sipped from the bitter cup of our Terminal Dystopia Syndrome, few have dared to dream of utopia. As something paradoxically both  dangerous and trivial to the tyrants and influencers who police the status quo, utopia remains largely a pejorative signifier for naive and unrealistic visions of the future. Simply by existing as a concept, utopia’s most rude offense is the failure to acquiesce to the myths of our doomed fate built long-ago into the so-called “laws of human nature.” In the era of capitalist realism, the prescribed common sense drives a relentless anti-utopianism, a dangerous ideology that requires a countering through anti-anti-utopianism. So WTF is “Anti-Anti-Utopia” anyways? Coined recently by Kim Stanley Robinson in an essay entitled “Dystopias Now,” the science fiction writer starts by saying, haltingly: “The end of world is over. Now the real work begins.” What would it look like to admit that the world as we know (or knew) it is beyond repair, and that living through the Capitalocene means that we will have to build a better world from within an active apocalypse? In the first half of this two-part conversation, we discuss these terms – Utopia, Dystopia, Anti-Utopia, and Anti-Anti-Utopia – four corners of a semiotic square, a balance of contradictions and counter-forces that together light the way for new beginnings. So whereas Star Trek may have illustrated a far-off future of post-scarcity, it failed to imagine the contours of revolutionary change that would secure – for humanity – a utopia lovingly wrought on Earth. Star Trek instead scripted and drifted toward new but familiar conflicts outside of us, amongst the stars. So perhaps, to boldly go where Utopia might be found, an Anti-Anti-Utopianism is the voyage we must now chart for ourselves, together, here on this fragile planet. Trapped under the dystopian rubble of empire, we deserve all the light that glimmers above us, and so we must reach for it.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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“Physical places like cities matter when we want to think about social change,” writes Leslie Kern. So in this third episode in a trilogy on 21st century feminisms, Matt & Jesse move from celebrating feminist manifestoes to exploring feminist geographies with a discussion of Kern’s Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. This richly observed mapping of man-made urban spaces expertly juxtaposes pop cultural reflections, academic scholarship and hauntingly personal accounts of a lifetime struggling to claim feminine space in cities, first as a child, then a teenager & college student and later as a mother & scholar. As the feminist geographer Jane Darke once said: “Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.” In all-too obvious displays of crude masculine power, the towering phallic monuments to capitalist expropriation that define city skylines cast long shadows reminding us all that this is a man’s world. From 12th century churches, to 20th century office towers, and from Beverly Hills mansions to billionaire's row penthouses—cities are monuments to myth-making, extraction, and exploitation—making concrete structures out of the poisoned logics of religion, capitalism, and celebrity. The world is built by and for patriarchy, and it’s the “cosmic background radiation” of white, male, cis-hetero, and able-bodied privileges that allows men to coast through life on cruise control, never burdened by the realities of other people’s lives. Free from the constant nagging fear of sexual violence lurking around every public and private corner, men not only enjoy the privilege of designing our global cities, but they’re also free to explore them with unrestrained liberty. The geography of the city demonstrates clearly that the maintenance of capitalism is contingent upon an ever-present threat of violence, and primarily on gender-based violence. The sustained anxieties perpetuated by patriarchy and white supremacy are manifest not only in the violence enacted through policing and policy making, but also in the shape of our urban environments. So to transform the city, we must look beyond simply “gender-mainstreaming” city planning and vacuous liberal pleas for symbolic reforms. As Kern writes, “once we begin to see how the city is set up to sustain a particular way of organizing society—across gender, race, sexuality, and more—we can start to look for new possibilities.” So we must start to look for those possibilities to decommodify life and democratize society. Because the reality is, without challenging the notion of private property, we aren't challenging the patriarchy. Private property and the enclosure of land is the conscription of patriarchy on the planet. To demolish this structural domination and transform our cities into environments that are open, safe, and free for everyone, we must once and for all—abolish the motherfucking cost of living. 

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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How might feminism be reinvigorated to fully reverse our age of climate chaos and techno-feudalism? Will the next feminist wave be revolutionary enough to address the totality of capitalist cis-heteropatriarchal racism? Sitting on the knife’s edge between despair and hope, humanity picks up a silhouette manuscript of its own death, but which, if flipped over, reveals pages that illuminate a way back to the womb of a better future-possible. If we are going to build a just world for all of us, it must start from a politics that addresses the deep complexity of our collective wounds. So in this second episode in a trilogy on 21st Century Feminisms, Jesse & Matt discuss Zillah Eisenstein’s short book Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution (2019). This idiosyncratic manifesto (of sorts) swings in synchronicity with the ethos of this podcast as a brief polemic frustrated with the fucked nature of a besotted world of never-ending injustice, while nonetheless stubbornly insisting on radical, anticapitalist and intersectional solutions. As such, Zillah’s voice swims very much in the form and feeling of conversational exchanges—a dialog with her past self and fellow feminists—yearning, groping and clutching onto new ways of thinking that drift into view. The text weaves in and out of many different dimensions at a rapid pace—with a frenetic, anxious energy and a morally righteous indignation—a splicing of many disparate references, experiences, and perspectives into a complex tapestry of exasperated fury. And rightly so. A long, long time ago, we should have already won The Golden Square, and be fluttering into the light of The Utopian Sphere; but alas, here we are instead: still trying to wrest ourselves from this locked, dismal future and leap into a spinning, dazzling and enchanting one. What we must continue to seek out—in the ongoing struggle for human liberation—is a politics that can confront the deep entanglements of compounded hierarchies limiting our collective potential. In order to claim the dignity we all deserve and to unleash the beauty of a shared utopian promise, our unfolding future demands the most radical feminism yet: to dismantle and shatter inequality itself and replace it with boundless love.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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