YouTube Version | Podcast Version
Got 10,000 subscribers on the YouTube Channel, and did a Q&A! Watch the video link above if you want to see my pretty face. Or just read the script below.
It’s funny in the last video I made a remark about how I wasn’t getting paid by YouTube, and then that video got so popular I actually became eligible for the YouTube Partner Program! So now I actually am one of the 0.03% of YouTubers who actually get some ad money from YouTube. YouTube used to let you just turn off ads if you didn’t want them, which I’d probably do because I hate ads, but in their enshittifying wisdom they decided to stop doing that, so if they are going to put ads on my videos I might as well get some of the money for them. [Edit: they actually let me turn off the ads for this video, who knew?]
I made my first purchase using my new channel income to buy a cam light to make my face look alright, but I think I’ll still save video for Q&As and the like and use the illustration for my regular videos. It’s too much trouble to worry about my face on top of everything else and makes editing more difficult. Plus I’ll start thinking about turning what’s behind me into a “set” or something and nobody wants that. That illustration btw is by Jeremy Nguyin and it’s from some years ago which is why I have more hair than I do now. Jeremy was a co-worker of mine way back when, and now he’s an illustrator who does comics for the New Yorker and other places. It’s a cool picture, right? Somebody mentioned that the spaceship in it is from some video game or anime or something I’m not familiar with, I’m probably just too old.
So, I told myself if I get to 10,000 subscribers I’d do a Q&A, but I thought that time would be far in the future, honestly, at least with the rate of growth I had. After about four years I had 800+ subscribers, and I was proud of that number. And then the Technocapitalism video blew up in the algorithm and now I have 14,000+ subscribers and counting. Why did that video do so well? I could hazard some theories, but honestly I have no way to verify them, it’s just guessing. When “Fame” became David Bowie’s first number 1 hit in America, he remarked that he had no idea why one song was a hit and another wasn’t. That’s how I feel, I just don’t know. It is interesting that while the popularity of that video (which has over 100,000 views now) has spilled over onto my other videos, the one that it’s had the most dramatic effect on is “How Conservatism Becomes Fascism”, so it might be that there’s just an appetite for videos specifically about authoritarians and their ideologies taking over the world right now. I can’t imagine why.
I thought about doing this Q&A as a livestream but the idea of being live actually gives me a panic attack so I thought better of it. I’m much more comfortable with a script and the ability to edit things later.
Anyway, thank you all for subcribing and watching and for your questions! If you have any more questions, feel free to ask them and I’ll see about answering them when I hit, let’s say 25,000 and do another one of these. I’m hard at work on the next proper video which I warn you is going to be loooong. I’ll reveal the title at the end of this video.
And now the questions:
Since som tum always tastes better after it has been in the refrigerator overnight, why don’t Thai restaurants prepare it a day in advance?
- This question is from my old friend Jay Quackenbush, who’s a wise guy. I don’t know, man.
What’s the geopolitical position of the US is gonna be in three years from now if Trump wins the election?
- I have very little confidence in my ability to predict the future. That said if we’re talking internationally, it’ll probably hasten America’s decline on the world stage because Trump will likely undermine our agreements like he did repeatedly the first time, play quid-pro-quo games with Ukraine like he did the first time that might get the country finally swallowed by his buddy Putin, enable the Netanyahu regime even more than Biden hastening the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians etc etc. and he’d probably cause of a lot of chaos and suffering carrying out the promised mass deportations. I think the long term consequences of a second Trump term would probably be worse than the short term ones though, with the judges and other positions he’d appoint, the Federal agencies he’d gut, the climate change regulation he’d overturn or fail to implement, and the likelihood he’d attempt an Orban-style abolition of democracy.
Do you watch anime?
- I’ve watched some but not a lot. I was much more of a manga reader than an anime person and even then the manga was sort of on the side of my American comics reading which was much more my thing. I actually worked in the comics industry for a while.
If so, list your top three.
Top three anime:
- Cowboy Bebop
- FLCL
- One-Punch Man
Top manga: 20th Century Boys, which is amazing. I don’t think they ever made an anime out of it, though they did make a live action film series which I haven’t seen actually, I kind of don’t want it to displace the books in my mind.
Are you a cat person or a dog person?
Cat person but I also like dogs. I have a cat named Cthulhu because he sleeps forever and when he wakes up he destroys the world.
Assuming from previous videos that you are someone who supports the idea of transitioning to private democratic collaborative corporations, (co-ops) do you believe that institutions like those are capable of degrowth?
This is an excellent question. So the main problem with degrowth, from an implementation standpoint, is that our current economy is based on growth. Like if the economy stops growing, all the economists freak out and the government starts implementing policies to try and “get the economy back on track”. To implement a policy of managed degrowth would require an enormous reconfiguring of our economy, and the bourgeois class would fight it tooth and nail. Transitioning entirely to a market socialist, cooperative economy would eliminate the bourgeois as a class, so you’d no longer have people wringing their hands about the direction the stock market is going, which would absolutely make a degrowth policy easier to implement. But at the same time, cooperatives operating in a market economy would still necessarily be oriented towards growth. A system in which the government completely or predominantly controlled the means of production would be easier to implement a degrowth framework, as would a syndicalist system where businesses were organized in coordinated syndicates allowing them to manage the effects of degrowth. My advocacy for market socialism is primarily based around the idea that it’s the easiest way to peacefully transition out of market capitalism. Someone in my comments though pointed out something that’s been rattling around in my brain ever since, which is that degrowth may be coming whether we like it or not. Guys like Elon Musk are obsessed with natalism not just because their eugenicists obsessed with their own greatness, but because we may be heading for a demographic cliff as birthrates decline, and declining populations generally mean contracting economies. We can ameliorate this to some extent with immigration from places with higher birthrates, which makes it a bit ironic that Musk and his ilk are also anti-immigration. And so if degrowth is coming one way or another, the question is simply how we’ll manage it. And I think capitalism is uniquely maladapted for that. Market socialism may not be the best solution either for degrowth specifically, but if degrowth is coming one way or another, I’d certainly rather be in any kind of socialist paradigm than in a capitalist one.
Does your family support your Youtube endeavors, or merely tolerate them?
Some of each, probably.
When are you going to fix your audio? (I love your content, amigo, but dammmmn it’s janky:)
So after following up with the person who wrote this, a lot of the problem seems to be the noise floor. I’m trying to eliminate it here, let me know what you think.
I would love to hear your thoughts on “private cities” and their analogues which are growing in popularity. Most are still in the idea stage but there is Prospera in Honduras and Neom(if it ever happens) will also be a private city with its own laws.
So Prospera is absolutely bonkers. I wish I’d known about it when I was making the technofeudalism video because it would have fit in. For those who don’t know, Prospera is a corporate-owned city in Honduras that was set up by an autocratic government there which essentially has its own laws. It reminds me of the corporate city states you find in Cyberpunk works like The Diamond Age or Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson or Neuromancer by William Gibson which, you know, was supposed to be a warning not a recommendation, but techbros never seemed to understand that about Cyberpunk. The Honduran dictator was replaced by a left wing democracy which has tried to get rid of Prospera, but because of the contract they signed that can only be officiated by a corporate court run by people paid for by Prospera, so the government’s in a lot of trouble. This may be a harbinger of things to come as more tin pot dictators cater to the whims of rich assholes who want to isolate themselves from the hoi poloi.
Could you elaborate on your main point about the Soul video, perhaps with more recommended reads of the subject? How might Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus contrast? What are your thoughts about therapy in relation to the reality of capitalism?
So I haven’t read “The Myth of Sisyphus” but I’m generally familiar with Camus’ existentialist ideas, but here I think he’s more talking about dealing with the inherent absurdity of life and finding meaning for yourself in the meaninglessness, which is important but kind of orthogonal to what I was talking about in “Soul”. The “Soul” essay is about how capitalism wants you to find meaning in improving yourself as an individual separate from the system you live in and how it recuperates leftist anti-capitalist ideas like rejecting consumerism and corporate ladder-climbing by framing them in terms of personal development rather than systemic change. I was wracking my brain to think of a single further reading book that talks about this specifically, and I just don’t remember now, but it’s a common socialist idea that comes out of Marx’s theories of alienation, that people under capitalism become alienated from their work because they’re doing things for a wage rather than for any kind of more fulfilling purpose. And Marx’s answer to that is not “finding yourself” and meditating or whatever but like seizing the means of production. Likewise, psychotherapy is great and if psychotherapy helps you deal with the problems of alienation from your labor under capitalism, that’s wonderful. But if we say oh people just need therapy and then everything will be fine, then you’re treating therapy as just another way of focusing on the individual instead of the system, when we should also be focusing on the system.
Do you have any thoughts on Loki Season 2:
I got asked this a lot in the comments to “How Conservatives Become Fascists”, since that came out before Season 2 did. Someone else commented actually that the “downside” to stabbing a fascist in the heart is the fact that they’ll just be replaced by another fascist, the actual problem is the system that put him there, and I think that’s pretty apt. Especially at the end when we see Loki going over and over the problem, until he finally figures out the only way to win is to stop playing the game, to change the system itself into something completely different. {}Of course, it ultimately is still him at the end having his “hero’s journey”, making the big sacrifice, and becoming the center of the system around which everything revolves. And so while that’s portrayed as him being completely different from The One Who Remains, in terms of power it kind of isn’t really, in fact, it’s not really clear what he’s doing there—he’s making it possible to for the TVA to root out all the Kangs so they don’t make multiversal war? I don’t know. It was an amazing image him there with all the timelines becoming the Yggdrasil, I just don’t know if ideologically it makes sense as a response to fascist control—like it seems like just another instance of someone having total power is fine actually as long as it’s the right person, as long as it’s “our guy”. And that’s always bullshit.
You should make a Discord for the channel
The problem with a Discord server is that it takes work to moderate and maintain, and I’m already stretched pretty thin as it is. I’m also not sure I’m big enough to warrant it yet. I don’t know, maybe if enough of you say you want a Discord server and I can find people willing moderate I’ll try it out at some point.
Alright, thanks again everyone! Find me on Patreon.com/ericrosenfield where you can get exclusive author’s notes, deleted excerpts, and other goodies as well as early access to episodes.
And the title of the next episode is… Gravity’s Rainbow over Palestine