50k Subscriber Q&A!

Well, hello again! I don’t know if you expected me to be doing this again so quickly, I know I certainly didn’t.

So to recap from the 25k Q&A episode, I started this channel as a kind of passion project, making videos when I had free time from my day job and kids. For four years, it made almost no money and then the Technofeudalism video blew up and got over a hundred thousand views and I went from about 800 subscribers to over 10,000 subscribers. Then for the next two years I made a little bit of money but growth was relatively slow and I still had fewer than 20k subscribers by last March when I got laid off from my day job. And it was a mass layoff, they laid off me, my boss, and a lot of other people, total bloodbath. But I got a severance, and I figured while I looked for a new gig I could make videos more frequently. And then to my delight and amazement those new videos have taken off. I hit 25k subs and then two months later I hit 50k subs, and it’s starting to look like I might not need that new day job after all. Maybe. Which is good because the job market right now is… it’s pretty bad.

Feel free to kick me some money at Patreon.com/ericrosenfield where you get early, ad-free videos, exclusive authors notes and more for only $1/mo so I can keep doing this.

But also people have been going back and discovering my old videos and like, I worked so hard for so long with so little reward, I can’t tell you how this feels. It’s really gratifying, and basically my whole life I dreamed that I could do something full time that was mine, doing things because I wanted to and believed in them, and so, thank you all so much, it really means a lot to me.

Now, I’ll tell you one thing, when I started showing my face I thought maybe people would make comments about my looks, but I didn’t expect such a strong reaction specifically to my hair. There’s been a lot of comments about my hair. Like I guess the style now is for people with a receding hairline to shave it down to stubble, but really why would I want to look like AG Sulzberger or Steven Miller? And there are people who shave themselves completely bald but there’s a name for people like that and it’s “cowards”. I’m kidding, I don’t really care what you do with your hair. But yeah, honestly, the comments were making me want to go the other way and do a full George Carlin or Bill Bailey thing with the hair grown out. I mean, what I have now is normal but that’s iconic. And yes, I know Bill Bailey eventually joined the ranks of head shavers, the fool. He used to be Bill Bailey and now he’s just budget Peter Gabriel. Look at that. Anyway, you know what? If people aren’t wearing their hair like this anymore, maybe this is actually iconic now. I’m a trend setter. That’s what I’ll keep telling myself, anyway. Fundamentally, though, like I just feel like it’s okay to have male pattern baldness. This isn’t something you have to hide or be ashamed of or minimize. It’s okay to get old. It’s natural.

Anyway, after my takedown of Ground News there was some people who were chomping at the bit for me to take down other YouTube sponsors, but if you look at my backlog you can see this isn’t the YouTube sponsor takedown channel. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The first Ground News video I think you can see was really using Ground News as a lens to understand how the news media has been politicized and manipulated to legitimize right wing lies. And then the second Ground News video I made just because new things had come to light about the ownership of the service and the services it uses that I wanted to cover.

Of course, YouTube sponsors have a bad reputation for a reason, and you don’t need me to tell you again about the problems with crap like Honey or BetterHelp. And as the channel has gotten bigger, I’ve started getting sponsorship offers, and like I have a mortgage and two kids, I could really use the money. The problem is like… yeah, I don’t want to do ads for VPNs and data broker removal services, other YouTubers have done videos on the problems with those things, even if they’re not outright scams or psy-ops like Ground News I don’t really like them. Though actually there have been instances of outright scam VPNs like the Meta Onavo VPN, go read about that if you want to know one of the many reasons why I refuse to use any product or service owned by Meta, and yes that includes WhatsApp. Anyway, I’m going to try and be selective but don’t be surprised if you see sponsorships on this channel. And if you want to sponsor me, especially if you have a cooperative of some kind, please do reach out. And if I do have a sponsorship, the version of the video that goes up on the Patreon will not have it, those videos will always be ad-free. And if you’d like to help grow the channel so I don’t need sponsorships, consider supporting me for as little as $1/mo and get those early and ad-free videos, exclusive author’s notes, and more at Patreon.com/ericrosenfield.

And I got a lot more questions this time around than the last Q&A so I’ve been a little bit selective about which ones I answer and I apologize to folks who asked the ones I didn’t get to, there’s still a lot for me to go through here, so buckle up. And as before, questions from folks supporting me on Patreon get pride of place at the top.

Kyle Smith and Lyn Bee ask what book or reading recommendations I have for someone who wants to become more familiar with socialism.

So I put some recommendations on the “What is this?” page on the Literate Machine website that I’ve linked to in a couple places. If you want the basics I recommend Richard Wolff’s short books Understanding Capitalism, Understanding Socialism, and Understanding Marxism. For more depth on the theory and economics, I recommend Escape from Capitalism by Clara Mattei. And for more on the history and about the Democratic Socialism movement specifically, I recommend Socialism Past and Future by Michael Harrington, who was a co-founder of the Democratic Socialists of America.

There are of course a dizzying number of other books. China Mieville’s books A Spectre, Haunting about the creation and background of the Communist Manifesto and October about the Russian Revolutions of 1917 in particular are extremely readable and well done. David Graeber’s books are always great, but in particular his book The Democracy Project about the Occupy Movement and what it means to create socialism within capitalism is fascinating. And Yanis Varoufakis’ book Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works–and How It Fails is also a very readable primer on contemporary economics from a leftist perspective. Also After Occupy by Tom Malleson is an incredibly detailed breakdown of the case for worker cooperatives and economic democracy.

Nonplus Ultra Media Hegemony asks a bunch of questions, starting with what do I think socialists should do to contest elections based on our fundamental rejection of the consensus of neoliberal global hegemony.

So I’m going to talk about this more in the “Technofeudal Roadmap for Socialism” video, but the first thing you have to understand is that the consensus of neoliberal global hegemony has already broken down. Neoliberalism effectively died when Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and took a torch to it. Remember, Neoliberalism is based on principles of free trade and globalization, and Trump’s tariffs and strategy of absolutely torching relationships with our allies are actually directly opposed to that. What we’re seeing now isn’t Neoliberalism anymore, its economic nationalism and protectionism, which are also bad but bad in a different way than Neoliberalism was bad.

But both the surge in popularity of Trumpian populism and of socialism is because the status quo isn’t working for people anymore and folks actively want to destroy it. Recent research suggests that the advantage of centrism to “electability” has disappeared. People want change. The key thing now is to get the message out that the change they actually want is democratic control of the means of production, which is to say socialism. And this is something I think people miss when they criticize the DSA. Like do you remember Joe Biden wondering why Bernie Sanders called himself a “democratic socialist” when his policy proposals were mostly pretty standard progressive stuff? Simply self-identifying as a socialist was one of the most powerful things that Sanders did, because it sent a message that socialism is good actually and socialism will get votes even in a country that’s been as inundated with antisocialist rhetoric as the US. And in fact it completely neuters the right-wing talking point of calling anyone to the left of Francisco Franco—I got the name right this time!—a “radical socialist”. When centrist democrats are called radical socialists they go on the defensive and have to proactively declare their fealty to capitalism and back capitalist proposals and then the right still calls them a socialist anyway which gets them to try and move further right (and if this sounds familiar with what the right wing did to the mainstream media, it should, it’s the same strategy). But if you self-identify as a socialist, calling you a socialist doesn’t do anything, and it gives permission to everyone else to declare themselves socialists too and fundamentally shifts the narrative. And this is also part of the “sewer socialism” strategy, where you call yourself a socialist and then materially help people improve their lives even in small ways, and that helps the larger socialist movement.

So in addition to everything else I’m going to talk about in the next video, one thing we need to do is own the narrative and show that socialism is good, actually and as the capitalists continue wrecking everything, we become the sensible alternative.

Nonplus Ultra Media Hegemony also asks if I’ll make a video explaining why everything wrong with US Politics is probably Bill Clinton’s fault?

No. Though I have toyed with a video explaining how exploding college debt can actually be blamed on LBJ. And I do think much as Tony Blair was Thatcher’s greatest accomplishment, Bill Clinton was probably Reagan’s.

Then they ask why there’s an absence of black comedy and effective satire. Honestly, I think it’s hard to do satire when the world is providing something more satirical than any writer could ever come up with. I mean, I don’t think Joseph Heller could have come up with Trump in his worst fever dream. That said if you want to see some great satire of contemporary American capitalism, go watch I Love Boosters, that movie ruled.

And they ask for the second time why Thai restaurants don’t marinade shredded green papaya and cabbage overnight, and like you ask the Thai restaurants and let me know on that one, dude, that’s a bit out of my field.

On to the questions from YouTube:

DokiDokiChii asks what is a trusted news source of mine. One important thing I think you should take away is that you should not completely trust any news source. You need to bring your own critical thinking to any piece of news reporting at all times, because writers might not even be aware of how their own biases can be reflected in the way they report the news. And frankly that goes for everything I’m saying to you as well. That said, I like journalist coops like the ones I mentioned and subscribe to them and I also have my BlueSky feed with people I’ve specifically subscribed to.

Doonieman10 asks what is the best response I know to the arguments that police are necessary, that jails and prisons are necessary, and that a border is necessary? I mean, I explained about the border in “Superman and the Case for Open Borders” and about the police way back in “Defund the Paw Patrol”. I haven’t really done prison abolition yet, though it’d make a good topic at some point. For borders you can really just point to the big metastudy that undocumented immigrants don’t raise crime rates and other studies that show they increase economy activity. The problem is that people who are deeply invested in anti-immigrant rhetoric will not believe these studies, and will often dig deeper into essentially racist nationalist narratives. For police and prisons you can similarly point to studies that show police don’t actually solve crimes and in fact routinely flout the law and brutalize the poor, and that prisons as we have them actually increase recidivism, thus actually creating more crime rather than reducing it. And you can start talking about things like restorative justice as a solution to prisons and actually dealing with poverty which would solve most of the crime problem. But again, people deeply invested in these things will reject these studies and will not really listen to you, and there’s a fundamental belief many people have that some folks are just “bad” and we need to be protected from them, and the fact that these “bad” folks are usually poor and brown feeds into the white supremacist nature of our social structure.

Freshanatha asks how I’m able to talk about such a wide array of topics. And thanks for the kind words. So the way I know the things I know is that I’m a nerd who reads a lot of books instead of doing things like playing video games or having a social life. But for any one of these videos I try to find some books on the subject and read them, though I admit I don’t always read them cover to cover, but often I do. And just to keep myself honest at first I started just putting the quote from the source material on screen so you can see exactly where I got whatever information I’m citing. That said, I do get things wrong sometimes and I put corrections in the descriptions of the videos because YouTube unfortunately doesn’t let you update videos after you upload them except to edit bits out. Now, I don’t have the breadth and depth of knowledge on these subjects that an actual academic or scholar would have, I do have a bachelor’s degree but honestly most of what I’ve learned has been autodidactic and when you do that there can be holes in your knowledge and you can sometimes kind of come up with your own theories about things without the ability to bounce them off someone who knows more than you to see if they hold up. Like obviously my writing here isn’t peer reviewed. But this is actually something I really appreciate about the Discord communities I’m a part of because they often help me refine and shape my ideas or just give me someone to try them out on and see if they make any sense. And I have my own Discord community you can find, link in the description if you’d like to join that.

Kaybrarian asks how do I plan to create or join a worker’s cooperative? So currently, I don’t have a plan to do that, unless you consider this a worker cooperative of one. Right now my focus is trying to build this thing to the point where I can support myself. If this gets much bigger though there’s a scenario where I could create a little cooperative of some kind of make the episodes and maybe do other related things, and that would be cool, but this thing would just have to be making a lot more money to support more people. And right now I don’t want to join or start another coop doing something else because I want to focus on this and try to make it successful.

Naajaw says some kind words about “Gravity’s Rainbow Over Palestine”, thank you for that, I honestly do think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. They ask what my thoughts are on Norm Finkelstein’s framing of the October 7th attacks, where he compares them to the Nat Turner slave rebellion and refused to condemn them. So I’m not familiar with the whole of Finkelstein’s argument. I admit, though, I have a hard time justifying killing civilians in any case or the idea that no Israelis are civilians because they’re colonizers, which I mean like Americans are colonizers too and this country was built on the back of genocide and slavery but I don’t think we’re all fair game either. That said, obviously Israel’s response is, as Israel’s responses tend to be, openly genocidal and Israel has murdered many times more civilians than were killed on Oct. 7th both before and after it and the whole situation is a direct result of the Apartheid conditions of Israeli colonization and Zionism. And so I get why the subject is thorny and people have… strong opinions.

AdventZZZx asks what my background is. So, I have a bachelors degree from a university without declared majors but where I studied literature and philosophy, and otherwise as I mentioned I’ve written a lot of stuff online and am otherwise just a nerd who reads too much. I think my work stands on its own without the burden of credentialism though.

KociciKebab asks if I’ve read or seen One Piece and notes that One Piece iconography has been used in protests and revolutions in recent years. So I read the first One Piece book back when I was working in the comics industry, and I saw some of the live action adaptation on Netflix. It’s a bit startling to me, though, to read KociciKebab also calling it “the first fictional work causing meaningful geopolitical change”. I mean, Abraham Lincoln once joked that Uncle Tom’s Cabin started the Civil War, it had such a huge impact on the abolition movement. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle basically created modern meat inspection and led directly to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration (which now we appear to be disestablishing, hooray), and the novel What is to Be Done? from 1863 helped inspire the Russian Revolution. And that’s just off the top of my head. One Piece is fun, though, and it is interesting to see its iconography repurposed for political action. It is, however, infinitely long and I’m not sure I want to spend the time reading it or have a “take” on it that I think would be worth a video.

sorcerena asks if I’m going to cover political messaging in games like Elden Ring or Hollow Knight: Silksong. So the thing is I don’t game. And frankly I don’t feel like I have time or patience for it. Lots of people have made interesting videos about video games, and this isn’t a judgement on video games as a medium at all, it’s just not my lane. There’s a reason the two video game episodes I’ve done are both about games from my childhood.

mohaamer6866 asks does 50k feel different from 25k? And I mean, 25k was like two months ago, my head’s still spinning.

Combineadvistor asks will I do anything about Dune, the Alien franchise, Project Hail Mary, Ghost in the Shell, or Disco Elysium, and about my thoughts about May 1968. So, the reason that the media properties I tend to cover seem a bit random is because I have to have something to say related to it, something I specifically want to talk about. Which is why I don’t generally do videos about whatever the big new movie or TV show is, because usually I don’t have a “take” on them I think is interesting enough to write about, even though when I do talk about things that are current hits like Loki or Severance it tends to do good things for my viewcount. Dune, for example, is a fascinating book series with a few fascinating adaptations now, but especially since there’s been a lot written about them already I’m not sure what I have to add that’s useful, though that could change if I think of something. And for Disco Elysium, as I said, I just don’t game.

As for May, 1968, well there’s a lot there. I’ve actually been thinking of a follow-up to the “How the Hippies Became Yuppies” episode that draws directly from books like From Counterculture to Cyberculture and The Nerd Reich that talk about how the hippy movement was transformed into technofascism in Silicon Valley, and that would talk some about 1968 and everything that went with it. So don’t forget to subscribe!

RubyKona7 asks what are some socialist policies/programs that could be done on a small scale. So I’ll be talking more about this more in the “Technofeudal Roadmap for Socialism” episode and of course there’s laws related to worker coops that can be passed that I mention in the “Medievalization of Work and the Cooperative Cure” episode, like towns and states could easily have programs to support and create worker cooperatives. But here’s another thing you could look at: community land trusts. A community land trust is when a community buys land and owns it together and then leases it to businesses and homeowners. In other words, it’s social ownership of land, but governed directly by the community rather than the government. And because the community owns the land they can keep costs down much more than a capitalist enterprise would and can therefore make the homes and businesses more affordable to operate, and because it’s governed the people in the place its in and not by the municipal government itself, like it has its own organization, its less susceptible to interference from capitalists. And this is something policy makers can help encourage, for example by granting loans for creating land trusts and easing regulations to allow them more easily. Again I’ll have more on this in the next episode, but municipal governments can do a lot for cooperatives, community land trusts, mutual aid groups, libraries of things, and unions, all of which aid workers and worker power.

triloboats asks for my thoughts on Kate Raworth’s “Donut Economics” framework. So I hadn’t heard of this until I saw this comment, and it seems to be a reimagining of economics around regeneration and sustainability over growth which sounds good to me. However, and again I haven’t read Raworth’s book or looked deeply into this, but it doesn’t seem to focus enough on ownership of the means of production for me and I’m not sure how we could reorganize the way the economy functions without reorganizing who has power in the economy. It’s well and good to say we should do things differently, but without changing the bedrock systems of power it’s almost impossible to imagine.

Combineadviser also asks for my perspective on Eduard Bernstein’s complicity in the failure of the German Revolution. So this is referencing the video “How Will Capitalism End? (The Orville and What is to Be Done?)” where I talk about Bernstein, and the German Revolution looms large in socialist history because it was an event where basically what had been at the time the main socialist party took control of Germany under the leadership of what we might now think of as a moderate social democrat type named Friedrich Ebert. Germany came close to a true socialist revolution, something Ebert said he hated like he hated sin, and he sided with the entrenched conservatives and proto-fascists to violently crush the revolutionary socialists. Eduard Bernstein, the father of Democratic Socialism and someone for whom I’m something of an apologist, was part of Ebert’s government though he didn’t have any power—he was the assistant secretary of the treasury—but he’d been an influential figure and his ideas were used as cover by Ebert and other opportunists to justify their opposition to radical change, which um, shall we say, has been something of a sore point between certain schools of socialisms ever since.

Now, it should be noted that Bernstein didn’t approve of the violent crackdown on the revolutionaries, he told Ebert to meet with them and find a peaceful solution. And before that, when the more radical Marxists had left Ebert’s government in the first place, he’d implored them to stay and trust in the process. Which was Bernstein all over, he truly believed people could find peaceful, democratic ways through political problems, and it was why he’d broken from Orthodox Marxism in the first place after being friends with Marx and a close friend and disciple of Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels. In fact, one of the things he’d pointed out generally was that attempts at violent revolution that failed often resulted in a reactionary crackdown and backlash which is exactly what happened, and I mean even Rosa Luxemberg thought the Spartacist Uprising was premature which is why she hadn’t participated in it in the first place. So honestly it’s hard for me to hold Bernstein to blame for what happened. Like obviously counter-factuals are always hard, but moderates existed in the SPD before Bernstein and I feel like even if he had never existed there’s good reason to think things might’ve ended up more or less the same way as they did, and I think Bernstein and his ideas are actually kind of unfairly maligned by their association with Ebert’s government.

And that’s it! Thank you all so much for watching the channel, I appreciate every one of you. I’ve got lots of great stuff in the pipeline. You can get it early and ad-free along with exclusive author’s notes and bonus material at Patreon.com/ericrosenfield for only $1/mo. I guess I’ll do another one of these if and when I hit 100k subs. See you then!

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