052: The World of The Golden Square, Part III: Structures & Ecologies
The Future Is A Mixtape
An old forgotten sign from the Farm Equipment Association of Minnesota and South Dakota once said: 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...
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051: The World of The Golden Square, Part II: Experiences & Methods
The Future Is A Mixtape
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...
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050: The World of The Golden Square, Part I: Definitions & Foundations
The Future Is A Mixtape
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...
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049: Every Neighborhood A University
The Future Is A Mixtape
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....
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048: The Long Winding Road to Housing Decommodification
The Future Is A Mixtape
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...
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047: Free Housing For All
The Future Is A Mixtape
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....
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046: Utopia With Comrades: Part II
The Future Is A Mixtape
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...
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045: Utopia With Comrades: Part I
The Future Is A Mixtape
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...
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044: The Dawning of The Feminist City
The Future Is A Mixtape
“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 &...
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043: A New Feminism for Our Unfolding Future
The Future Is A Mixtape
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...
info_outlineIn the most famous scene from the legendary film, Network (1976), populist news anchor, Howard Beale, creates a viral sensation before the internet became a thing: he tells his viewers, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!” And thousands of people across the country yell from their windows and rooftops repeating the mantra, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!” More than 40 years on, in our neoliberal wasteland, we have every right to be mad as hell as we huddle in our unpaid Covid-abodes with no more Bernie Bucks or stimulus, while microbes attack us relentlessly. With the Siberian forests on fire, the Great Barrier Reef deforming into black bones & ash and the oceans gasping for oxygen while record temperatures make Death Valley feel like Venus, we must become mad – with a rage that runs on love for what’s been lost and for what we might still win. This week, Jesse & Matt celebrate the multi-authored manifesto, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, published in 2019 by Verso Books. Our co-hosts will talk about the vitality and importance of this book and how the beating heart of any radical Green New Deal must include The Golden Square: the decommodification and universal provision of Food, Shelter, Healthcare and Education for All. We live in the worst version of a Cyberpunk world that doesn’t even offer up androids or flying cars, while we gloat over our miniature technology & its secret surveillance as politicians offer up empty platitudes and technocratic masturbations. As the Social Ecologist, Murray Bookchin, once told us, the enemy isn’t us; the enemy is the fossil fuel industry; the enemy lives inside McMansions and billionaire castles made by myths of perpetual market growth, peddled by the celebrity worshiping pyramid scheme of an influencer class clawing onto the old carcass of illegitimate hierarchies. We are in revolutionary times and collective actions require collective designs; so we must continue to draw the contours of what lies just beyond the horizon. We have a planet to win.
Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com
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