Hi everyone!
As I promised in my 10K subs video, here’s a Q&A video now that we’ve reached 25k subs. And wow, honestly that’s amazing, thank you all for subscribing and thanks also to my Patrons for their continued support.
In fact, since statistically most of you are new here, come, let’s do a little look back on the history of the channel so you all know how we got here. So ironically considering how many of these sorts of things started in the Pandemic, I actually began this channel in February of 2020 which was really just before the pandemic hit in New York—I think we didn’t get sent home from work until March (reluctantly on my employers part by the way, the people I worked for at the time hated work-from-home and their message telling us to do it suggested they thought the whole thing was exaggerated and would blow over in a couple weeks).
Originally, the channel was kind of an inversion of what it became, rather than talking about politics and current events with some piece of media used for illustration, it was going to be a more straightforward analysis of media through the lens of politics and criticism, a bit more like what Pop Culture Detective does with maybe a bit more history and economics. The videos were also much shorter then, I was trying to get out a 10-15 minute video a month around my day job and kid (I only had one then), which was a challenge I can tell you. The first hint of the format it would become happened around the fourth episode, which was the first to talk directly about the pandemic. This was “How Can I Save You? 12 Monkeys and the Coronavirus”, which few people have seen compared to my more recent videos but which I still think is one of my best episodes. (The video did get demonitized for content which means it isn’t promoted well by the algorithm.) In the 1995 Terry Gillium film 12 Monkeys (which was a huge movie when it came out but doesn’t seem to be talked about much anymore), a pandemic wipes out most of humanity, and a man travels back in time to before it happens not to save the world (he can’t) but first to bring back information from the past and then to escape into it. And in the video I specifically focus on the helplessness both the pandemic and the movie invoke, where terrible things are happening that I felt I had no power to influence.
Also originally the channel was designed to be a blog, a podcast, a newsletter, AND a YouTube channel, in part just to increase the odds of something sticking and also just to see which format would do the best. And honestly I kind of hoped one of the other formats would become more popular than the YouTube channel, because the videos are easily the most of work of any of them. But no, I mean, I know people complain about the YouTube algorithm, but I don’t know how to publicize for shit and the algorithm meant that I had something, however flawed, promoting the work and it quickly became clear that YouTube had the largest base. The newsletter as of last month still had only 75 subscribers and a 40% open rate, so I discontinued it completely as not worth the effort. The blog continues as both the transcription and bibliography for the videos, and the PodCast gets around 150 downloads an episode and I’ll keep doing it because it’s relatively low effort and I know some people who prefer it. But yeah, this is very much primarily a YouTube channel now.
Anyway, while YouTube did better than those other mediums, that didn’t mean it was doing particularly well, relatively speaking. After the first four years, as the episodes had became longer and more irregular, I had attracted just over 800 subscribers. And honestly, I was like “wow, 800 people! That’s amazing!” And it was, I treasured my little, hard-won audience, and really had no reason to expect more than that. But it certainly wasn’t enough to get into YouTube’s partner program, so I wasn’t making a lick of money besides all of $40 I was making per episode on Patreon, and so it was very much a passion project I was doing to have some way of expressing myself to the world. And the format kind of solidified with “Loki and How Conservatives Become Fascists” and then “Star Trek into Socialism”, where I was gonna take big swings into large topics motivated in part by my own desire to learn more about those topics myself, and only coming out with 1-3 videos a year but with each one trying to be an “event”, with songs I recorded for them.
And then 4 years in and 2 years ago, “How Capitalism Became Feudalism” changed everything by blowing up, getting over 100k views and launching my subscriber count from around 800 to over 10,000. Which was pretty insane. Of course, then I came out with “Gravity’s Rainbow Over Palestine”, which I think is actually my best episode, but didn’t do nearly as well probably because a) like “How Can I save You”, it’s demonitized for sensitive content by YouTube which restricts how much it’ll be promoted by the algorithm, and b) I think people are a bit tired and wary of Israel/Palestine material because it’s such a harrowing topic, and it is harrowing. But I feel like it was kind of inspired to mash up of the conflict and the genocide in Gaza with the postmodern novel “Gravity’s Rainbow” with its meditation on hopelessness against the system, paranoia, conspiracy, and wondering where the next bomb is going to drop and whether you’re going to be at the business end of it, and the result is really a stand-alone work of art.
The growth did seem to flatline a bit after that though, and when I finally came out with “Anarchism and the Promise of Revolution”, I was honestly in a bit of a funk because it felt like I’d completed the project I’d begun with “How Conservatives Become Fascists” that went through the history of different political ideologies to understand how we got here, and I didn’t know what else I wanted to say. On top of this, I unexpectedly lost my day job around that time (they were basically laying off people in the developed world to hire cheaper people in the developing world; one of the upshots of work-from-home has turned out it makes it much easier to outsource office jobs). And looking at the job market in the field I’ve worked in for nearly 15 years now was just crushingly dispiriting, few jobs that match my skill set and the ones there are basically all wrapped up to the gills in AI bullshit. (At least I’m not a computer programmer anymore, the situation there is dire.)
Anyway, by my own measure while this channel has been shockingly successful, it’s not yet making me a living wage, and as I said wasn’t growing that much. And I’m doing other things for money as well, but having no job did give me a bit more time to make videos. I ended up jotting down the words “Mooks” and “Anti-Life” in a notebook and those both grew into episodes. I made the “Mooks” video and it… didn’t do very well. And that was a little dispiriting too, I think it’s a good video that talks about something that normally goes unsaid in our media environment and is worth talking about. But then I did the “Anti-Life” video and it became my most successful video since “Technofeudalism”. Incredib I guess there’s an appetite for people talking about capitalism dying and giving way to a technofeudal order. Gee I wonder why.
So yeah, I’m trying some new things, the channel needs to change. I’m showing my face now every episode, I’m not necessarily linking every episode to a piece of media, I’ll be coming out with more frequent and maybe shorter content. Maybe some additional things up on the ol’ Patreon where you can get early, ad-free episodes and exclusive author’s notes for only $1. And I have a Discord server now, link here if you want to join that.
Also, one of the many reasons that AI is so annoying for me is that I’m someone who’s kind of antisocial and reads a lot, so there’s a lot of words I’ve only read and never heard pronounced which means I mispronounce words. It’s practically a gag at this point, but I swear I’m not doing it on purpose. But since the rise of AI I get people accusing me of being an AI voice, since mispronouncing words is one of the hallmarks of that because AI is dumb as bricks. But no, I don’t use AI, I just don’t know how words are pronounced a lot of the time, sorry.
Anyway, let’s move on to the questions!
First question, and this is from one of my Patrons and so gets pride of place here at the top. Thanks, Steven! What are my feelings on this being a passion project and also trying to get a larger viewership and am I conflicted at all about creating what I want to do vs. what I think will have more impact. Well, I alluded to some of that above, but yeah, this is always a thing, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t do a video about something just to do a video, I have to feel like I have something I want to say or else it feels like there isn’t a point. Like a topic has to have some juice for me to be able to write about it.
At the same time, I absolutely find myself thinking about how many people would actually want to watch something, like for example one of the reasons I did the “Anarchism” **video using V for Vendetta rather than The Dispossessedby Ursula K. LeGuin, which is a novel that goes much more in depth into what a functioning anarchist society would actually be like and the kind of people it would produce, is because V for Vendetta I thought would get me clicks and also would give me a lot more visual material to work with, which is a problem with doing episodes about novels as I discovered with “Gravity’s Rainbow Over Palestine” and “Our Coming Cyberpunk Dictatorship”. That doesn’t mean I won’t do future episodes about novels or written works, just that visual material gives you more to work with in a visual medium. (The Dispossessed is a great novel though, I definitely recommend it if you haven’t read it.) And certainly when I’m coming up with titles and thumbnails, I have to think about whether this will get someone to click or not. At the same time, like I said in the 10k video, I often have no idea why one video is popular and another isn’t. Before I put them out, I didn’t know that “Mooks” would not be a hit and “Anti-Life” would be. So yeah, it’s a struggle, and usually I try to trust my gut and assume that if I’m enthusastic about some subject so will the viewer be.
And like I often in my videos do long deep dives into history, and I don’t know if that’s what people really want, but it’s what I think is interesting and gives context to what’s happening now. I sometimes wonder if I’m boring people with that stuff and if they’d like it better if I didn’t go so deep into historical details, but I don’t know it’s just what I’m interested in and the way I think it makes sense to talk about these topics and if other people don’t talk about these topics that way then that’s just the thing I’m bringing to the table, it’s what I’m offering, and hopefully it’s interesting to other people to.
And sometimes I just don’t do a topic because I don’t think I have much useful to add. Like there’s a lot of stuff going on right now about trans people and trans rights, and I could easily see the shape of an episode where I talk about say, Harry Potter, JK Rowling, and the struggle for trans rights. But I’m not trans and like there’s a lot of great trans creators on YouTube already doing much more well informed and personally motivated work about trans rights, and talking about Rowling specifically and trans rights has kind of been done to death at this point. And so even with a new Harry Potter TV series in the works, and with it being an interesting and relevant subject that might get some clicks, it just doesn’t seem like what I should be doing. You can go watch Jessie Gender or whatever if you want that, she’s gonna do a better job than I probably will.
The next question is what are my thoughts about the current administration and its effects in November and 2008? So I think it’s worth here reflecting on some of the things I said in the “What Do We Do Now?” and “Cyberpunk Dictatorship” videos, because I made some predictions there.
Actually, going back to “What Do We Do Now?”, which is the short piece I made right after the election, it starts off with a mistake. I say Marx called liberal democracy a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. He actually never said that, though he did call it a “bourgeois democracy”. It was Karl Kautsky who coined the term “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”, but anyway, that’s another story I’ll maybe get to one day. But yeah, it does seem like more than ever that the US is basically a plutocracy where money buys power and influence and the openly corrupt succeed. But at the same time you have left wing candidates sweeping in in the face of that, with actual self-described socialists winning seats and the mayorality of my own city, which is the kind of thing where I never thought I’d see the day. And as I said in the “What Do We Do Now?” video, a lot of these sort of fascist situations that are built around a single person’s cult of personality don’t last long once that person is gone or brought down in some way, and we’re finally starting to see even the Republican tide turning against the president in the face of the dumbass war he and Netanyahu started with Iran and which Netanyahu it seems won’t stop murdering long enough to let him get out of.
I also said people would die and and masses of others would have their lives destroyed, and unfortunately and obviously that’s come to pass, and the things going on in the deportation centers we seem to have almost forgotten about now but that makes them no less horrific, and we’re still brazenly murdering people in boats off South America, and we and Israel have been literally bombing hospitals in Iran. I have no words. And Netanyahu will be an albatross around the neck of America, as I said at the end of “Gravity’s Rainbow Over Palestine”, he wants to sew as much death and genocide as he can in order to stay in power, he will not stop, and he’s more than happy to drag the US along with him. The good news is that the US populace is finally, finally turning on Israel and becoming less willing to provide them with all the money and weapons they want, but we’ll see how much that actually affects those in power. I mean, we finally got rid of Pelosi, we desperately need to get rid of Schumer and Jeffries, please people primary those assholes. Also Kirsten Gillibrand, why are my state’s Senators such garbage.
Anyway, the thing to watch now is really the midterm elections and how much Trump gets away with cheating to prevent the Blue Wave that’s coming for him. There’s still the possibility that he tries to somehow suspend or ignore the constitution in 2028 and stay in power, but the main advantages we have against that now are, as mentioned, the Republicans are finally starting to turn on him, and he’s absolutely crippled with senility, just has a brain like mush right now. Of course, they could try and suspend elections without him and make Vance the president or something, and while someone like Stephen Miller probably has an action plan to do just that, it’s hard to see how they could get away with it. So that’s the good news.
And then as I said in the “Cyberpunk Dictatorship” video, if someone with actual balls could get in on the Democratic ticket in 2028, they could actually do a lot of good given the precedent that Trump set for executive power. Of course, the problem is that the Democratic establishment doesn’t want that, they desperately want a return to normalcy and status quo bullshit. My nightmare is that someone like that absolute turd Gavin Newsom gets the nomination and we’re just completely fucked at that point.
And with the system as openly corrupt as it is, it’s hard to be hopeful even with the wins the DSA has been winning. But as I’ve also said before the thing to do is to organize locally, join organizations like the DSA that are actually doing something to change the direction of things, and do whatever we can at any small level to make things a little better even if things continue collapsing all around us.
Next question, thanks Wethebestcheese. He asks about Democratic Socialism, Market Socialism, and central planning, and is Democratic Socialism the same as Market Socialism?
Okay so, “Market Socialism” and “Democratic Socialism” actually refer to two different things that may or may not overlap with each other.
Democratic Socialism is the idea that we should try to achieve socialist goals and create a more egalitarian society through predominantly peaceful, democratic means. Democratic Socialism does require organizing outside of the government in order to build power for ordinary people, through organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America for example, but it’s chief focus is things like getting people like AOC or Zohran Mamdani elected to move things in a more socialist direction.
Market Socialism is the idea that you can replace the small number of business owners and shareholders with workers themselves or consumers in the case of consumer coops, which is a whole other subject I haven’t really addressed but probably should at some point, but still have those businesses compete with each other in a market economy. You could also have businesses owned by larger worker-owned organizations that also do other things, which was the case with Histadrut in Israel until it was gutted in the 1980s, something I talked about in great depth in “Gravity’s Rainbow Over Palestine”. And you could have more or less overarching government oversight, regulation, and management on that market economy, just as you do with market capitalism. And this sort of Market Socialism is an example of why socialism doesn’t mean government control, it means worker control. Control by the people.
Now Democratic Socialists have often promoted coops and Market Socialism, and I also think building up market socialism is an important way to help build worker power towards a democratic socialist future. And Bernie Sanders, for example, passed a law that made it so that worker coops can get SBA business loans, as an example of a Democratic Socialist promoting Market Socialism. They’re just two great tastes that taste great together.
But you can have Democratic Socialism without Market Socialism, in fact Michael Harrington who co-founded the Democratic Socialists of America was somewhat dismissive of coops.
And you can have Market Socialism without Democratic Socialism. In fact, probably the largest scale example of Market Socialism was in Yugoslavia during the reign of Communist dictator Josip Tito, who broke from Stalin and his central planning to promote large scale worker cooperatives in the country. And countries like Cuba, China, and even North Korea have large worker cooperatives and worker cooperative movements. So you can have Market Socialism without Democratic Socialism as well.
I’m also of the opinion that central planning isn’t all bad. As shown in the book The People’s Republic of Walmart(2019) by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, large corporations like Walmart and Amazon are basically already doing central planning with great success, and the US Military does lots of central planning to feed and equip service members. And you can actually have market socialism with some amount of central planning as well, and there’s all sorts of ways of doing mixed economies, there isn’t only one way to do things.
That all said, I think it’s good to pursue multiple solutions and angles and not a one-size-fits-all solution. Like I could easily imagine a democratically controlled government nationalizing Amazon but the businesses that sell on Amazon being worker cooperatives, and the whole system operating for the larger benefit of everyone. I also think that as Democratic Socialists, it’s important to get behind worker cooperatives as a way of showing that non-capitalist solutions already exist and already work, and to build up worker power.
Finally, and thanks for the kind words SvalbardSleeperDistrict. The question is what are the three crises around the world that worry me the most? Three is of course a bit of an arbitrary number, but sometimes in life I guess you need to pick an arbitrary number. I mean, the first and most obvious crisis is the climate crises which, for whatever people keep talking about solar panels, as I said in the Infinite Growth video we’re still in 2026 emitting more carbon into the atmosphere every single year and not less, and we’re seeing the effects of this everywhere and I worry about some coming tipping point where things are going to get dramatically worse. The second crisis is the explosion in income inequality and the movements of the billionaires at the top of the game to rig everything in their favor, corrupt the system, and convince us that there’s nothing we can do about it. And the third crisis is the employment crisis which is not going to be as simple as everyone becoming unemployed but much worse than that, with work reduced ever more to piecemeal, freelance labor without benefits filtered through AI that will never work right but that we’ll keep using because the billionaires need us to, and so we face a nightmare scenario of us all working training algorithms to do things worse than we can without them forever because it’s cheaper for capitalists to have bad AI than expensive labor. Which is all stuff I talked about in the Technofeudalism video. And our main advantages there I think is that the billionaires are idiots surrounded by yes-men telling them their idiotic ideas are super great, and the worse things get and the more the people on the right say that things we want like universal public health care are socialism, the more socialism will seem like actually a really great idea and like maybe we should do that. But we have a long, rocky road ahead of us. Hang tight, organize, and help each other.
And that’s it. Thank you all for your continued support. The next episode will be “Ground News and How the Right Destroyed the Truth”. I’ll do another one of these when and if I hit 50k subs, and here’s to it! Talk to you then!