050: The World of The Golden Square, Part I: Definitions & Foundations
Release Date: 09/23/2021
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_outlineWe 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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