The Future Is A Mixtape

The Future Is a Mixtape is a podcast about designing utopia.

052: The World of The Golden Square, Part III: Structures & Ecologies 10/02/2023

052: The World of The Golden Square, Part III: Structures & Ecologies 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 insatiable drive to consume all that exists, our fragile planet is being plundered and bruised beyond repair. In this final episode of a trilogy of vision-sketches, Jesse & Matt imagine what the world might be like if the starting point for organizing society was The Golden Square: food, shelter, healthcare and education, all equally and universally provisioned. What would Earth look like if these four tenets were fully realized? Is there a role for the State to play? Or, as we look back upon the cruel banality of so many failed and failing republics, should the State be recalibrated in radically innovative ways toward the city-state? To survive beyond the catastrophes of the here and now, we must transcend the tired old ghost-roads of feudalism and the broken and breaking embankments of endtime capitalism. The structures and ecologies of a world of The Golden Square illuminate an urgent pathway, guiding us away from the continual climate catastrophe of our pre-apocalypse toward an emancipatory project of repair and restoration. Much has been made of the technological notion of the Singularity in science fiction circles; but might remaking the world according to The Golden Square bring about a kind of Social Singularity – where impossible-to-imagine forms of human consciousness are unleashed in a truly egalitarian and ecological society? And from that, might the constellations of the Utopian Sphere begin to flicker into one shared vision? Would our aching, tortured past bleed back as if it was words in a book that befuddles us in some utopian future? But before that circle can be drawn, we need to uncouple our minds and our world from colonization’s final form: climate collapse. We must continue to ring the bell for humanity’s right for food, shelter, healthcare and education – free to all, without request or restraint. This is the calling of our lives. We don’t have much time. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/28202216

051: The World of The Golden Square, Part II: Experiences & Methods 11/26/2021

051: The World of The Golden Square, Part II: Experiences & Methods 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 age of climate chaos and psychic despair. To acknowledge that everyone deserves The Golden Square—the unconditional and universal provisions of Food, Shelter, Healthcare, and Education—should be as common sense as sunshine. As Peter Kropotkin detailed in The Conquest of Bread at the end of the nineteenth century, if society was organized around first meeting human needs, we could easily be living in a world of abundance and leisure for all, all while working much less. But instead of cooperatively creating a rational and egalitarian world of post-scarcity, the cult of propertarians and their armies of indoctrinated worshipers & wage-slaves have foisted upon us polluted cities and poisoned water, expecting us to be grateful for fast fashion and fast food, the complimentary side-dishes of batshit construction and bullshit jobs. What we need, instead, are walkable cities, shorter work weeks, balanced job complexes, and a post-scarcity economy based on care and freedom. Imagining such a future involves asking a series of questions that must be fully explored . . . How would our lives be different? How would work get done, and who would do it? Would meeting The Golden Square require a focus toward centralization or decentralization? In this second of a three-part series envisioning The World of The Golden Square, Jesse and Matt investigate the experiences and methods of a world re-made to meet human needs in a rightful relationship with the planet. We live in capitalism – a patriarchal social order forever insisting that there is no alternative – a system that has been violently curtailing ideal innovation for more than two centuries, just as feudalism and the divine right of kings did for so many centuries prior. The heartless handmaidens of this system are tyrannical mega-corporations living as “para-states,” floating above the world’s so-called democracies, leeching every available drop of use-value from the earth and its inhabitants in a callous competition for monopolies of power & profit. These corporate parasites will continue to destroy everything in sight as long as the deeply irrational market-logic myths about “Supply & Demand” and “The Rationality Economic Man” are the organizing basis of our shared reality. This Age of Techno-feudalism – to borrow Yanis Varoufakis’ neologism – is a bullshit system that makes batshit products, based on horseshit ideas. The urgent existential responsibility that we now face – to heal our scars and secure a livable future – will require nothing less than birthing a real global utopia as quickly as humanity can muster – an open-source world designed around The Golden Square. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/21293522

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

050: The World of The Golden Square, Part I: Definitions & Foundations 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 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 Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/20581625

049: Every Neighborhood A University 08/26/2021

049: Every Neighborhood A University 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. Where social reproduction is not subordinated to the production of profit. Where food, shelter, healthcare, and education are all decommodified. And where the unconditional and universal provision of these human rights is the non-negotiable foundation for institutionalizing freedom and unleashing human potential. In this episode, Matt & Jesse embark on a dialectical synthesis of ideas, weaving together the liberatory notions of a Feminism for The 99%, The Right to The City, and Free Housing For All into a conception of The City of The Golden Square—by imagining every neighborhood as a university. This inventive world-building exercise illuminates a mixtape for the future, conjoining the joyful & egalitarian features of neighborhoods with the noble & emancipatory potentialities of universities. Paradoxically, despite histories of racist, colonial, and capitalist violence, along with ongoing plunder by the corporate neoliberal state, both neighborhoods and universities still carry seeds of emancipation and together offer a coherent set of social and spatial paradigms that prefigure the shape of a better tomorrow. Thinking about neighborhoods becoming indistinguishable from universities is a way to envision what might emerge in our cities if we can erode capitalism, abolish the cost of living, and build a just transition to a green future of radical egalitarianism—where real democracy might finally blossom. Universities should be as common as neighborhoods, and every neighborhood should shimmer with the wholeness that only universities can offer. Every Neighborhood a University is a vision rooted in Social Ecology, grounded in Anarchism, born of Communalism, aimed at Library Socialism, and based on a new social contract: The Golden Square. If the borders between neighborhood and university can dissolve, making them one and the same, humanity might open up a sociological singularity, unleashing the rainbow light of our caged fecundity into the post-scarcity future we all deserve. Join us in this conversation to explore how the architecture of a solarpunk utopia can arise from the ashes of the here and now. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/20277224

048: The Long Winding Road to Housing Decommodification 08/12/2021

048: The Long Winding Road to Housing Decommodification 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 secret beating hearts. While 21st century Pharaohs ride dickships through the stratosphere for suborbital self-love, the rest of humanity is kept from the secret that the ruling class has always known: we could always-already live in a world of post-scarcity for all, if only our politics unveiled it; that is to say: if common sense dictated it. This much is certain: if our institutions were designed to expand, not constrict freedom, fulfilling the universal right to free housing could quickly become a simple everyday reality. As such, it’s time to remake the world according to a new social contract that is as easy, breezy and taken-for-granted as breathing the air that floats around us. To do that, we need an ecology of anticapitalist tactics that will uncover the urgency and achievability of The Golden Square. To accomplish this, Jesse and Matt attempt – in this episode – to trace some of the main avenues in the long, winding journey toward the full decommodification of housing as a guaranteed human right. In doing so, they’ll navigate across three different waterways: access, affordability, and finally, the ocean of our pacific dreams: full decommodification. They will make the direct case that we can truly create freely available, zero-carbon, safe, comfortable housing for all – and guarantee it to every person on the planet from cradle to grave. But we mustn't think of this demand as merely some far-fetched goal; but rather, we should think of this aim as a thrilling organizing tool leading us toward The Utopian Sphere. Calling out like a siren from beyond the cruel cul-de-sacs of rents, mortgages, and the cost of living, the rainbow light of decommodification beckons to us – toward the truly liberated and fecund future we so rightly deserve. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/20126567

047: Free Housing For All 07/03/2021

047: Free Housing For All 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. Let’s call it what it was: an open-air prison. Fast forward a year later, with vaccines aplenty, millions of additional Americans are now at risk of joining the ranks of the unsheltered thanks to the soft-fascism of the Biden administration and its refusal to take direct action to prevent a looming eviction crisis. These days, few can afford to join the American-dream-home-ownership-cult, as prices have soared past their breaking points all across the nation, with California exemplifying the surge, where homes are now selling for $50-70,000 above their listing prices. And even for the renters who aren’t behind on their monthly debt payments to land-barons, they are confronting increased housing precarity as well, with rents skyrocketing to ever outrageous levels. In a world where housing—a basic necessity that everyone needs—has become a speculative hyper-commodity driving unfathomable levels of wealth inequality in the midst of apocalyptic climate chaos, to say that there is a “housing crisis” is a tragic understatement. Our contemporary and abject social contract can be summed up as: “PAY RENT OR DIE.” So without pause or confusion, we must unapologetically recognize that housing is both a human right and a public good that must be provided unconditionally to every person on the planet. Accordingly, there should be no such thing as a “housing market”—a gross absurdity that does little more than guarantee that housing’s exchange value will always trump its use value. Let us be clear: Housing is a human right. Therefore, rent is a human rights abuse and landlords are human rights violators, full stop. Not surprisingly, as the core feature of the second most important node along The Golden Square, free housing for all needs to be acknowledged as a non-negotiable, bare minimum provision to be expected from any decent society. In this episode, Jesse & Matt grapple with the unconscionable injustices of for-profit housing, seeking out those much too neglected vectors of emancipatory struggle where housing decommodification can begin, brick-by-brick, archway-to-doorway. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/19696355

046: Utopia With Comrades: Part II 06/06/2021

046: Utopia With Comrades: Part II 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 Guin’s iconic and epic “ambiguous utopia,” The Dispossessed (1974), and include Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy of novels (1992-96), as well as nonfiction books like Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), and A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos (2019). These visions of still imperfect, but radically more just & egalitarian worlds teach us that striving toward the utopian horizon is neither naive nor impractical, but instead all too necessary and prudent, especially now. As such, The Golden Square affirms that the decommodification of life and democratization of society are not just revolutionary goals, but in fact, the revolutionary project itself. Beyond the ceaseless academic obsessions with diagramming the corpse of our dystopian hellscape, we must chart a path outside our pyramid-shaped cages by realizing the unconditional rights to food, shelter, healthcare, and education for every person on earth – a readymade threshold separating us from the Utopian Sphere. Moving outward, Pearson, Jesse and Matt talk about the key planks that might make up the political philosophy of Anti-Anti-Utopia and how charting an emancipatory path forward requires an intersectional anti-capitalist compass magnetized to the many symbiotic, multilectical transformations necessary to abolish empire. As Matt has been fond of saying of late: “Be like an anarchist,” first and foremost. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Support Coffee with Comrades on , follow them on and , and visit their . /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/19374365

045: Utopia With Comrades: Part I 06/06/2021

045: Utopia With Comrades: Part I 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 trivial to the tyrants and influencers who police the status quo, utopia remains largely a pejorative signifier for naive and unrealistic visions of the future. Simply by existing as a concept, utopia’s most rude offense is the failure to acquiesce to the myths of our doomed fate built long-ago into the so-called “laws of human nature.” In the era of capitalist realism, the prescribed common sense drives a relentless anti-utopianism, a dangerous ideology that requires a countering through anti-anti-utopianism. So WTF is “Anti-Anti-Utopia” anyways? Coined recently by Kim Stanley Robinson in an essay entitled “Dystopias Now,” the science fiction writer starts by saying, haltingly: “The end of world is over. Now the real work begins.” What would it look like to admit that the world as we know (or knew) it is beyond repair, and that living through the Capitalocene means that we will have to build a better world from within an active apocalypse? In the first half of this two-part conversation, we discuss these terms – Utopia, Dystopia, Anti-Utopia, and Anti-Anti-Utopia – four corners of a semiotic square, a balance of contradictions and counter-forces that together light the way for new beginnings. So whereas Star Trek may have illustrated a far-off future of post-scarcity, it failed to imagine the contours of revolutionary change that would secure – for humanity – a utopia lovingly wrought on Earth. Star Trek instead scripted and drifted toward new but familiar conflicts outside of us, amongst the stars. So perhaps, to boldly go where Utopia might be found, an Anti-Anti-Utopianism is the voyage we must now chart for ourselves, together, here on this fragile planet. Trapped under the dystopian rubble of empire, we deserve all the light that glimmers above us, and so we must reach for it. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Support Coffee with Comrades on , follow them on and , and visit their . /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/19374332

044: The Dawning of The Feminist City 05/01/2021

044: The Dawning of The Feminist City “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 & college student and later as a mother & scholar. As the feminist geographer Jane Darke once said: “Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.” In all-too obvious displays of crude masculine power, the towering phallic monuments to capitalist expropriation that define city skylines cast long shadows reminding us all that this is a man’s world. From 12th century churches, to 20th century office towers, and from Beverly Hills mansions to billionaire's row penthouses—cities are monuments to myth-making, extraction, and exploitation—making concrete structures out of the poisoned logics of religion, capitalism, and celebrity. The world is built by and for patriarchy, and it’s the “cosmic background radiation” of white, male, cis-hetero, and able-bodied privileges that allows men to coast through life on cruise control, never burdened by the realities of other people’s lives. Free from the constant nagging fear of sexual violence lurking around every public and private corner, men not only enjoy the privilege of designing our global cities, but they’re also free to explore them with unrestrained liberty. The geography of the city demonstrates clearly that the maintenance of capitalism is contingent upon an ever-present threat of violence, and primarily on gender-based violence. The sustained anxieties perpetuated by patriarchy and white supremacy are manifest not only in the violence enacted through policing and policy making, but also in the shape of our urban environments. So to transform the city, we must look beyond simply “gender-mainstreaming” city planning and vacuous liberal pleas for symbolic reforms. As Kern writes, “once we begin to see how the city is set up to sustain a particular way of organizing society—across gender, race, sexuality, and more—we can start to look for new possibilities.” So we must start to look for those possibilities to decommodify life and democratize society. Because the reality is, without challenging the notion of private property, we aren't challenging the patriarchy. Private property and the enclosure of land is the conscription of patriarchy on the planet. To demolish this structural domination and transform our cities into environments that are open, safe, and free for everyone, we must once and for all—abolish the motherfucking cost of living. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/18938495

043: A New Feminism for Our Unfolding Future 04/16/2021

043: A New Feminism for Our Unfolding Future 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 second episode in a trilogy on 21st Century Feminisms, Jesse & Matt discuss Zillah Eisenstein’s short book Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution (2019). This idiosyncratic manifesto (of sorts) swings in synchronicity with the ethos of this podcast as a brief polemic frustrated with the fucked nature of a besotted world of never-ending injustice, while nonetheless stubbornly insisting on radical, anticapitalist and intersectional solutions. As such, Zillah’s voice swims very much in the form and feeling of conversational exchanges—a dialog with her past self and fellow feminists—yearning, groping and clutching onto new ways of thinking that drift into view. The text weaves in and out of many different dimensions at a rapid pace—with a frenetic, anxious energy and a morally righteous indignation—a splicing of many disparate references, experiences, and perspectives into a complex tapestry of exasperated fury. And rightly so. A long, long time ago, we should have already won The Golden Square, and be fluttering into the light of The Utopian Sphere; but alas, here we are instead: still trying to wrest ourselves from this locked, dismal future and leap into a spinning, dazzling and enchanting one. What we must continue to seek out—in the ongoing struggle for human liberation—is a politics that can confront the deep entanglements of compounded hierarchies limiting our collective potential. In order to claim the dignity we all deserve and to unleash the beauty of a shared utopian promise, our unfolding future demands the most radical feminism yet: to dismantle and shatter inequality itself and replace it with boundless love. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/18753068

042: Strike Feminism 03/17/2021

042: Strike Feminism What would it mean if our society prioritized social reproduction above production for profit? Our racist, cis-heteropatriarchal, capitalist dystopia is a world turned upside-down—where the essential work that creates & sustains life is assigned to women and subordinated to the making of profit. Instead of aiming to undue this perversion, mainstream feminism of the past decade has prioritized a “Lean In” strategy, advocating “equal opportunity domination” as the ultimate horizon of gender equality. According to this liberal-feminist doctrine, what the world needs is not the abolition of social hierarchy, but simply a more diverse representation to maintain seats of power that already enshrine and expand inequality. Thankfully, this bankrupt approach has been counter-punched by a new wave of feminist strikes emerging in recent years, including ones in Spain, Poland and the #RedForEd strikes in the U.S. that swept across the country in the months after Trump’s election. In the powerful and accessible book Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser articulate an urgent anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and eco-socialist vision of a feminism informed by the International Women’s Strike Movement. So in this episode, Matt & Jesse celebrate this new, more radical, more intersectional feminist vision for the 21st century—by exploring this indispensable text that is a brief, focused clarification of key issues in our shared emancipatory struggle. While it may seem like an outdated term, “the personal is the political”—a key rallying cry of 60’s Student Movements and Second-Wave Feminists—is a zeitgeist phrase that is ever worthy of being rescued in our Age of Climate Despair. The essential truth of this maxim is increasingly evidenced in women’s lives, and especially for single mothers and women of color who represent the majority of Americans who are laboring for starvation wages, risking their lives during a global pandemic to keep the world working for everyone else that doesn’t look like them. And though the voices and perspectives of women are so often silenced, shunted and brayed by Boyland Domination, we must recognize that the path towards justice and human liberation requires a robust feminist analysis. Because, on the Periodic Table of Injustice, the subjugation of women is the most common element found in the world. Misogyny is everywhere and it damages all of our lives, devaluing and dehumanizg women, trans, and non-binary folks, while unjustly exalting masculinity in a violently enforced tyranny of suffocating gender constructs. We live in a world designed by, and for, the interests of patriarchy, one of the very oldest forms of social hierarchy—an ancient institutional structure whose abolition must first start with the building of The Golden Square. So indeed, this rousing document, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, offers a forthright proclamation of values, and in so doing, properly identifies all those paper clips stuck to that sick magnet called capitalism. One-by-one, fingers to palm, the authors help us pry off those paper clips, so we can put them back in the bowl of new beginnings. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/18356960

041: Idea-Shapes For Emancipation 02/04/2021

041: Idea-Shapes For Emancipation What would it mean to gain a sense of the world if it was nothing more than a series of geometric patterns? What if there were a few simple shapes that could describe the complex dynamics of our byzantine world and provide solutions to intractable global problems? Would this instantly recognizable geometry unlock long-obscured fundamental truths? Gilded upon the artwork accompanying these humble conversations between comrades sit three defining shapes: a triangle, a square, and a circle. So for this episode, Jesse & Matt will map out the contours of these three fundamental Idea-Shapes: The Poison Pyramid, The Golden Square and The Utopian Sphere. This simple arrangement of basic shapes illuminates an emancipatory trajectory: a systemic diagnosis of our dystopian world; a necessary and practical new social contract that extends dignity and freedom to all; and finally, visions of our utopian potential and the flourishing, post-scarcity future we all deserve. This triptych of Idea-Shapes outlines a comprehensive “No-Bullshit Theory” about the double-down shitty myths that ceaselessly gaslight us, the shared abundance that we must claim in the here-and-now, and ultimately, how the joyful promise of our utopian horizon should be a central cause for collective motivation. These radical essentializations of the world offer a framework for dealing with the chaos of the social order, and clarify how we can erode the compounding systems of hierarchy that poison everything with unending violence, despair, and disorder. As a condensed syllabus for this “Grad School for Radicals,” these three shapes unlock a critical deep-systems curriculum that provides transformational engagement without the typically mystifying pretense of intellectual knowledge-hoarding. And so these conversations seek to give unmistakable clarity in contrast to the shouting hordes of bad-faith actors who needlessly complicate things–both for their own fame-seeking vanity and to further the ruling-class drive to keep the masses from winning a deep democracy. So if we wish to reverse the apocalypse, we must answer these three deceptively simple questions: Where are we? Where are we going? And what should we be aiming for? The ruling elite never hesitate to assault our modest aims for meaningful lives with their garish distractions of consumer-glitter, privatized-pleasure, and the ritualized-worship of their god-awful ideas. Despite eons of bad myths blocking our potential, this certainty remains: we all live in a delicate interdependence upon this beautiful spaceship called Earth. There is no Planet B. It will take everyone one of us—not just the lone, logical Spock—to repair our ship’s precious and damaged Warp Drive. Once fixed by our many hands, all of the stars, both seen and unseen, will beckon to us with open smiles. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/17825645

040: Everything Must Change: A Conversation 01/18/2021

040: Everything Must Change: A Conversation In this, the second part of our double-album release, we return to our familiar conversational format to discuss the ideas and diagnoses put forth in CrimthInc’s poetic manifesto, To Change Everything. The 48-page pamphlet documents a dizzying array of morbid disorders from the same sick nation-states that give you endless awful B-sides, such as: “Disney’s Manifest Destiny,” “Healthcare, Sometimes,” “Bootstraps Best for You,” “Lock’em & Cock’em,” “Student Debt Meets Mr. Ramen,” and finally, “Do the COVID-Collapse.” Many of the threatening obstacles and dangerous injustices diagrammed in CrimethInc’s proclamation adhere, like super-glue, to the plastic surface of the U.S. petroleum project. And so, the collective’s polemic is always aware that the solutions required must be bigger than one state, one nation or one continent to contemplate, fathom or undertake. The manifesto stirs with telling details and insightful observations about what we know and what we wish to ignore in this, our shared reality that spins like a deranged compass. And while To Change Everything functions as a good primer to anarchist ethics and its attendant traditions, it’s worth noting how little it offers in the way of clear, practical, and focused solutions—like The Golden Square—or what Jesse & Matt like to call the “No-Bullshit Blueprint for Socialism” explored in Episode #031. The promise of anarchism is not some grand plan, or some self-righteous political dogma that will magically release us from capitalism’s death-grip, but its values demand us to make a clear paradigm shift away from the dizzying maze of domination and violence that perpetually blocks humanity from having any nice things. Anarchism points towards a deep-system critique and an egalitarian ethics of rights and responsibilities that we so desperately need in our institutions and social relations. By flipping the script on a world built on a logic of forced scarcity and do-or-die competition, we can instead design a world of mutual cooperation and shared abundance. As CrimethInc writes, “Every order is founded on a crime against the preceding order—the crime that dissolved it.” But we can’t commit that righteous crime with a fetishization of poetic ambiguities; we must work in solidarity to build dual power—abolishing institutions of state violence while we build new institutions of care & freedom at every level. Above all else, if we are going to survive together on this fragile planet, we must decommodify life and democratize society. And to do it now, we must start by changing everything. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/17595527

039: Everything Must Change: A Reading 01/18/2021

039: Everything Must Change: A Reading The Dumpster Fire of 2020 is over, but the song remains the same: capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy rage on in a celebrity-fueled clusterfuck of mass death and ecological collapse. And so it begins: A new calendar unfurls like a blanket to smother or console our traumatized lives. The New Year is a time when Christmas decorations get wanly huffed into garage boxes and when people busy themselves by hatching plans for privatized notions of change; some post their resolutions publicly on social media, while others whisper theirs sheepishly to friends and lovers, almost all of which get thwarted by the exhaustion, depression, and despair of life in this capitalist inferno. But what if real change in our personal lives is contingent upon the collective emancipation of all of us? Let’s face it: each and every year comes with the same urgent imperative: everything must change. But yet, too much is expected to come from within ourselves for ourselves. And our relationship with time is too passive. Upon any year that passes, we too often say that this 12-month cycle did us wrong, did a bad thing, crushed our diaphanous dreams to shards of amber. But what if a year was just a random collection of days, and “2021” is only worthy of its name if it inspires us to abolish what’s unjust and hurts us all? This year, unlike past furtive ones, we must work collectively toward a global socialist revolution against the dark, driving engine of capitalism, which forever churns out newer hierarchies to grind against older, more ancient ones. We must start anew with a struggle that confronts the onslaught of climate chaos propelled by a capitalist death-cult. So to burst forth in this New Year, The Future Is A Mixtape humbly offers our version of a double-album. In this episode, Jesse will be flying solo by reading To Change Everything: An Anarchist Appeal from CrimethInc, an ex-worker collective that surfaced out of Olympia, Washington, more than two decades ago. Immediately following the reading, the next episode contains Matt & Jesse’s conversation about this eminently accessible anarchist manifesto. This international network of anonymous, aspiring revolutionaries declares that we should be free to direct our limitless potential on our own terms, and that no government, market, ideology or sky-daddy should be able to tell us what our lives must be; and that, finally, the world should be arranged by self-determination and mutual aid, just as water from a lake is best collected from two hands rather than one. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/17595242

038: Democracy or Death 12/28/2020

038: Democracy or Death In the annals of Occupy Wall Street, in what seem like distant folktales, hundreds of sites burst open like wildflowers in the morning light of 2011. Born by water and sunlight, but pitched by wind and dirt, one encampment after another would rise only to be crushed by the brutal boot of the State before this movement could figure itself out. While this horizontal uprising’s rejection of representation and managerialism were vital and narcotic to some, others found it disorganized and chaotic, garbled by its shrill mic-checks and lack of overt demands. As David Graeber, a co-founder and dream-seeker of this spectacle of mass democracy, wanly stated, “While Americans can do communism, they have absolutely no conception about how to do democracy.” Astra Taylor, Graeber’s friend and skeptical co-conspirator at OWS, investigates our collective troubles with the idea of democracy in her most recent, gorgeously entrancing work of nonfiction: Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. Published in 2019, as a philosophical couplet to her documentary, What Is Democracy?—released a year prior, Taylor’s book hums in a noble persistence that democracy is a utopian ideal worthy of our time, despite the term having long been abused and defiled by politicians and plutocrats into a kind of milky nothingness. The author deeply considers the meaning of democracy in a graceful series of paradoxes bound by binaries within each chapter. Much like her meditative and dreamy documentary, Taylor’s book asks big questions about the trajectory of democracy in both its idealized conceptions and in its less savory, dirt-dreary praxis points. Jesse & Matt will ponder the philosophical and intellectual questions of these works as masterful collages composed of many voices—where a formerly incarcerated poet-barber exchanges stories side-by-side with Plato, political scientists, immigrants, and school children alike. How can we take democracy from being breath and vibrations of air into a concrete system of self-rule? Astra Taylor’s twin projects reflect what democracy does best when we fall into its enchanting thrall: real democracy is a conversation, a struggle to deliberate, to talk and to listen. Certainly, in this era of a global pandemic, economic devastation, and a climate collapse, now is the time—more than ever—to connect, heal and listen to the voices outside of ourselves. Democracy is a word for something that doesn’t exist yet; but the quiet acts of deliberation, being vulnerable and listening to others might make this word real for the first time. These wondrous projects demonstrate this politics of listening, a reminder that the mixtape of a flourishing future must be gathered from the songs of us all. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/17349149

037: The Excrement End of Social Change 11/12/2020

037: The Excrement End of Social Change Dejected and defeated—by the slimmest of electoral margins—Donald J. Trump spent his post-election nightmare hiding at a Washington golf club straddling between swings of his Titleist 910D2 Driver and plans for a bitter campaign of denials, recriminations and lawsuits. Having narrowly snatched victory out of the jaws of their own defeat, McLiberals celebrate the vanquishment of America’s cosplay fascist and promise to “save the soul of America” by bringing “decency and compassion to The White House”—a castle built by the ruthless exploitation of African slaves. Grazing through the deforested wasteland of our celebrity-food-chain media-scape, Blue-State Brunchers raise their champagne flutes to toasts of a “return to normal” on social media, while millions of desperate Americans remain unfed, unhoused, and unloved. Covid-19, like a knife that never stops, slashes into wounds already open. In the words of Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” So what must be done to bring a new world to life? While electoral politics should not be simply ignored or discarded, we must recognize that its feckless attachments to spectacle at the expense of direct democracy leave the world more disfigured than transformed. Voting is, ultimately, the excrement end of social change. It’s a sign of where power turns to shit: sometimes fertilizing gardens of future flowers; but more often than not, it ends up poisoning our local water systems (e.g. Flint, Michigan). Real democracy requires deliberation: with strangers in the streets, with neighbors on the corner, with colleagues in the workplace, and at home with family & friends. More than just an American obsession with the reality-show dumpster fire of 45, the world has for decades suffered from a sick addiction to Presidential politics, a myopic deference to the almighty power of a single individual. Instead, what we desperately need is real democracy. So, for this episode, Matt & Jesse will consider practical solutions that can finally end the shit-parade of legalized bribery and pay-to-play campaigning that comprise electoral politics as we know it. Beyond the long list of obvious and necessary reforms (including abolition of the electoral college, public financing, and universal suffrage) lies the unearthing of a long-forgotten central pillar of democracy: legislative appointment by lottery. Sortition, or the drawing of lots, is a democratic tool as old as the notion of democracy itself, and may be a key to designing an egalitarian future. Democracy is a fragile, morpheus dream. And ultimately, democracy is a wish we release into the air like a question mark or a song; some sounds dissipate quickly, but others echo through the forest into the ears of others. As Mark Fisher once wrote, “The long dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.” Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/16787777

036: Debt Abolition: A Battle Plan For The Future 10/29/2020

036: Debt Abolition: A Battle Plan For The Future If aliens could beam to our shores with recording devices, a savage irony would immediately and immaculately light up their antennas: not only does our global society fail to provide The Golden Square to every person on Earth, humans are increasingly forced deeper and deeper into debt for those fundamental rights to Food, Shelter, Healthcare, and Education. The debt-staircase has become grossly absurd and toxically tragic—a ruinous prank laid upon us at an ever-accelerating rate since the dawn of neoliberalism. From cradle to grave, we’re trapped on a noxious treadmill of Debt Achievement Goals: School Lunch Debt, College Debt, Credit Card Debt, Auto Loan Debt, Housing Debt, Medical Debt, and more. And even after death, debt collectors hound our family members and moralize about unpaid balances. As David Graeber once said, “As it turns out, we don’t ‘all’ have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.” And who is that “some of us,” exactly? Well, certainly not the 1%; rather only the rest of us—the great unwashed 99%—as we resign to rumination and self-blame for not being entrepreneurial enough. As capitalism forces us to pay for our own existence (while it indiscriminately tears through the Earth’s remaining ecologies), we must seriously question the moral plea to “pay all debts.” And as it turns out, there is another path that leads us away from Terminal Dystopia Syndrome (TDS). Forged from relationships built during the prefigurative struggles of Occupy Wall Street —The Debt Collective has published an urgent and instructive new manifesto tackling the emergency of now: Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition. In this episode, Matt & Jesse consider the emancipatory ideas of this important book, the necessary demand to abolish debt, and how we might reclaim the “intellectual luxuries” we all deserve. The Debt Collective offer a persuasive argument for how and why Debtors Unions have dynamic potential to become the most liberatory union movement in history, providing the leverage needed to redress hierarchies of racial capitalism and colonial plunder by inaugurating a new era of investment in “Reparative Public Goods.” Amidst the powerful and dark-tidal pull of the COVID-19 pandemic, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay provides a capstone to a trilogy on debt: David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (an anthropological reckoning); Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot (a popular awakening), and finally, this book by the Debt Collective—a battle plan plan for how we unfuck the world that capitalism has smothered and smeared into shit. A 21st Century Debt Jubilee must be wrought by all of us, collectively. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/16605983

035: Library Socialism & The Golden Square 10/21/2020

035: Library Socialism & The Golden Square For this special episode, Matt & Jesse are joined by Shawn Vulliez from the SRSLY WRONG Podcast for a very important discussion about how the concept of Library Socialism might dovetail with the idea-shape of The Golden Square. As Shawn laments, the inexorable crisis of capitalism is that it turns us into “Tool-Handed Monsters who can’t hug our own children.” But published in 1971, Murray Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism provided some initial inklings of a world without work or want—where the even-flow of Social Ecology, Libertarian Municipalism, and an abundance of material resources would allow us to finally hug our children, our shared future. Yet, given the climate chaos of the here and now, it’s hard to imagine how we might get there as we face the fast-Fascist collapse of the biosphere. Insects, animals and the Earth’s ecosystems die-off while capitalism forces us into collectively stuffing more Big Macs into our mouths. How might we meet the human rights to food, shelter, healthcare and education, and in so doing, create a new horizon for physical objects, where we could live in an ever-revolving circularity of consumer abundance? Beyond the bleak choice between denial of reality or submitting to involuntary human extinction, is there a third avenue left unlisted by popular imagination, one that doesn’t require a magic marker to see or decrypt? Thankfully, there is a clear path toward an Ecology of Freedom, where we say goodbye to the continued maintenance of hierarchy and make way for its utter annihilation and dissolution, replacing it with a shared prosperity. As such, we must Decommodify the means to a dignified life, and Democratize every area of society. This dual principle is the only game in town, and its consecrated demands will lead us toward a vibrant and fecund future. These principles need foundations, though, which is why Library Socialism and The Golden Square can mutually embrace as complementary concepts: The Golden Square as the new social contract for society, and Library Socialism as the means for organizing our world. This conversation between comrades traces the beginnings of a mutual vision to address our ecological & social crises with practical solutions and an imminently achievable purpose. Humanity has an infinite amount of untapped potential that these outlined concepts toward a dignified global society aim to unleash. We should break from the Baby Yoda Nostalgia Blankets © of the possible—that keep us swaddled in narrow dreams and demands—and chart a course toward The Utopian Sphere. To paraphrase the now-radicalized Mandalorian (upon hearing us): “The Golden Square is the Objective. Library Socialism is the Way.” Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/16493930

034: 101 Things I Didn't Learn in Art School 10/14/2020

034: 101 Things I Didn't Learn in Art School In terms of audience reception, art can be a source of ridicule and scandal in mainstream society: as seen in Marcel Duchamp’s notorious Fountain – a readymade sculpture that’s a porcelain urinal flipped upside down and signed “R. Mutt”; but just as well, art can also create terrifying horror with a political charge (Edward Kienholz’s Five Car Stud), spectral presence and spiritual depth (Louise Bourgeois’s Spiders series) or art can become a psychedelic wonderland for the masses: as seen in Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room – a dazzling and diaphanous fractal maze of half-silvered mirrors that make one feel endless and glowing. But when it comes to how we feel and breathe about art’s raison d'être: What’s art’s purpose for existing? Who gets to make art? Who gets to experience art? Sadly and grotesquely, just the rich. In this capitalist hellscape of commodified depravity and celebrity-driven attention hoarding, all measures of real freedom, including the ability to choose a life in the arts, are reserved only for the rich & famous. No matter who you are or where you were born, there is an alternative version of you behind every dollar of your parents; the money your family has or doesn’t have, shapes the trajectory of your life and determines your available options. As such, this tragic lottery is ultimately a game best tossed into history’s garbage bin. Our co-hosts will reflect on lifetimes of dashed dreams, yearning for freedom and imagining what art might be like in a socialist future – sketching visions of a New Renaissance waiting just behind the doors concealing humanity’s suppressed imagination. Once achieving The Golden Square, where dignified lives no longer worry about food, shelter, healthcare and education, art is inevitably what comes next. We don’t need Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket to 15 seconds of Ocean Spray © TikTok fame, which is the newer, crueler, sadder reality of the American Dream. The Golden Square is how we get freedom for everyone, not just a few lucky lottery winners in this vicious, boring dystopia. Building real Socialism will unleash a gazillion blooming flowers of human creativity – singing out in a joyous weave toward The Utopian Sphere. New art will ask new questions, make new demands, and push us toward the unknown horizons of belonging, fulfillment, and happiness never-before realized in human history. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/16404002

033: Sunrise Sit-ins & a New Social Contract 09/30/2020

033: Sunrise Sit-ins & a New Social Contract As The New World burns into Old World ruins, climate chaos warps the safely contoured psychic borders between the dystopian films we watch inside versus the reality of scorched skies and deadly plagues outside. To build a world worth living for, we must find a way to transform our economies, build resilient communities of zero-carbon housing for all and keep fossil fuels in the ground – all while racing against the terrifying ten-year window of opportunity still left to avoid a catastrophic, civilization-ending bio-collapse. But after decades of fumbles and false starts in the environmental movement, a new dawn might be rising. Just one month after the IPCC’s alarming 2018 report, The Sunrise Movement and AOC stormed Nancy Pelosi’s office, demanding bold action to secure good jobs and a livable future. Just months later, AOC and Ed Markey would go on to introduce resolutions for The Green New Deal in the US Congress. Two years after the viral media success of the Sunrise sit-in, the movement’s co-founders have put out a big, thick book called Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can. This volume arrives amid a wave of recent books from writers, activists, and scholars raising urgent calls for a Green New Deal. This anthology presents a collection of endorsements from famous thinkers and organizers of the broader Left who make up the voices of its 16 chapters; so, in accord with that project, we offer this episode as an additional chapter of endorsement; one too radical for its publisher, Simon & Schuster, to find “fit for print.” So while this book’s target audience is presumably those liberals who are merely Green-New-Deal-Curious, we hope it will serve to expand the massive choir needed to sing a collective chorus for eco-socialism and the end of capitalism. In order to progress towards a just, utopian horizon, we must burn down old myths, heal our cities, and build a world where our collective responsibility to provide each other with the material means for a dignified life is the basis of a new social contract. The world we deserve is one that’s as happy & wild as a child’s mind in playful abandon. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/16209263

032: A Summer of The Poison Pyramid 09/15/2020

032: A Summer of The Poison Pyramid During most summers in the U.S., one can expect soundtracked montages of pure Americana: music festivals, camping trips, BBQs, an onslaught of smash’em’up Marvel movies, beach parties, and 4th of July fireworks. But this summer, the world over, regardless of nation-state hallucinations and the petty borders carved by ancient violence, Mother Earth coughs up plagues, spits out wildfires, and vomits forth hurricanes. It’s been a nonstop clusterfuck of catastrophes. Doomscrolling through our social media feeds, paralyzed by anxiety, we see how millions face unemployment, healthcare loss, and eviction. The entire West Coast of North America is now threatened by the largest conflagration in modern history. We live in a time of great calamities. But those calamities have an origin story that must be identified, criticized, and undone in order to build a world of The Golden Square. The origin of these calamities lies in the toxic designs that Jesse & Matt collectively call The Poison Pyramid, a rotten triptych composed of hierarchy-producing machines: 1) Religion; 2) Capitalism; and finally, 3) Celebrity. We are living in yet another summer of this Poison Pyramid—best illustrated in a stunt orchestrated by amerikkka’s greatest huckster: Donald J. Trump, a raggedy pastiche of a man who trolled his way to the presidency. On June 1st, this flabby but unflagging con-artist directed police to deploy tear gas and violent tactics of domination to cleave through the George Floyd protests along Lafayette Square, so that he could stage a photo-op in front of St. John’s Church. Waving a bible haphazardly in the air, Trump became the pure apotheosis of The Poison Pyramid run amok—the toxic fumes of religion, capitalism and celebrity enmeshed in an expensive, violent, & vacuous nonevent. A fundamental matrix of domination, The Poison Pyramid circumscribes a comprehensive series of hierarchies within hierarchies—a nesting doll hiding other cold cruelties. To design a world of dignity, this gross idea-shape must be dismantled from its insides, and the sick myths of this matrix must be discarded. We must follow the abolitionist arc of emancipatory struggle to dismantle these roadblocks to human flourishing. Only socialism will do Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/16021361

031: The No-Bullshit Blueprint for Socialism 08/28/2020

031: The No-Bullshit Blueprint for Socialism What would Socialism look like? All too often, when the Left tries to define “socialism,” they stumble into the weeds with seven pairs of trousers tied to their ankles as they hop helplessly with socks stuffed in their mouths, attempting to hit a golf ball with their neighbor’s dildo—all done in order to get that hole-in-one, even though they had already swung three times, which had lead to them to the weeds in the first place. Sounds daft & confusing? It doesn’t have to be. For this episode, Jesse & Matt talk about what socialism is, what it should be, and how we might best achieve this vaunted fantasia, making it so fully felt that it sounds like your loved one’s heartbeat. Socialism should be straight-forward, obvious, and undeniable. Moving toward the full decommodification of The Golden Square – the universal and unconditional rights to Food, Shelter, Healthcare and Education – is a poetic starting point. Clearly, capitalism isn’t working and its core myths are failing to persuade much of anyone anymore, especially the young. Capitalist mythology wants you to believe that we live in an unrivaled utopia of boundless consumer plenty; but what it won’t tell you is that capitalism is a creepy, gyrating homogenization machine that ruins the beautiful, natural diversities of Earth and humanity in a drab, boring, tedious, and repetitive circle-jerk of dangerous rituals that lead to bio-collapse. It's over-run with all kinds of sick and sweaty M&Ms: Militarized, Monopolized, Market-Worshiping Malls, Mini-Marts, Megaplexes, McMansions, and Miles & Miles of Milquetoast Suburbs, Stacked with Super-Sized SUVs. Now more than ever, it is clear that we must cancel this dick-in-the-box ideology. At this moment, we must choose between socialism or more of neoliberalism’s DeathCult barbarism. The former leads to utopia, while the latter leads to certain oblivion. The choice should be so dumbfoundingly obvious that it’s akin to dropping your backpack to catch a falling baby from a window above. The Golden Square offers a No-Bullshit Blueprint for a socialist tomorrow that we can begin building today. It is a clear path to a world that is inclusive, accessible, sustainable, vibrant, colorful, diverse, dynamic, enriching, expansive, exciting, innovative, joyful, fun, restful, and yes: queer as fuck. It’s the launchpad to a flourishing, utopian future. Let's right the wrongs and start building socialism now. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/15787256

030: A Green New Deal to Build The Golden Square 08/19/2020

030: A Green New Deal to Build The Golden Square In 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 Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/15681290

029: The Anticapitalist Compass 08/12/2020

029: The Anticapitalist Compass For this episode, Matt & Jesse build upon their prior discussion (Episode 026) of Erik Olin Wright’s posthumous book, How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century, by mapping out how we might best choreograph the dance steps in making revolution fully realized. Wright’s historically magnificent project of delineating the internal contradictions of class in America (and the world over) made him the most important Marxist in Sociology post-WWII. After his mapping project of class was completed, the intellectual turned his attention in the latter half of his career to seeing how we might build real utopias in the here and now – after both the failure of statist “proletarian” parties and the success of neoliberalism’s onslaught of rapacious transnational capital, where everything could be outsourced or automated, and where labor was left emaciated, fragmented, and unconscious of its own exploitation. While Wright’s final work provided an excellent diagramming of the strategic logic of Eroding Capitalism, he never outlined how we might orchestrate these various movements on the playing field of global capital in order to build a symphony of revolution. Increasingly, the triumphant narrative that markets “heal the boo-boos” seems ever-less persuasive as capitalism reveals itself to be a harm-grinder against humanity and our desiccated biosphere. Matt will discuss what he argues is our most powerful anticapitalist wedge issue - money in politics, and Jesse will offer his Theory of Emancipatory Struggle along with the strategic directions of The Anticapitalist Compass. In closing, Jesse & Matt will examine how converging emancipatory movements joining in a chorus of revolution can build toward the first glimmers of The Utopian Sphere. The time has come to not only announce that “a better world is possible,” but to detail the choreography of transcending capitalism once and for all. We must make the future ourselves, collectively, and not let the future be made by an oligarchy that seeds DeathCults in its wake. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/15592730

028: From Rebellion to Revolution 08/03/2020

028: From Rebellion to Revolution On this episode, Jesse & Matt spin the radical salad by saying the quiet parts out-loud about how we go from the first manifestations of a rebellion—with the Floyd Uprisings—toward the massive euphoric heave of a revolution that must be made at a time when the Covid-Collapse is occurring in fast-break waves upon our no-job, no-rent lives. As organizers rattled through megaphones across America in July: “This is not a MOMENT; this is a MOVEMENT,” any successful revolution is one made up of a cross-stitching of other liberation movements: as seen in the work of Covid mutual aid units collaborating with BLM activists, while youth-led climate groups like Sunrise Movement have now hurled banners across freeways—not only to demand a #GreenNewDeal, but to #DefundThePolice and #CancelRent. Already, tens of millions of Americans have hit the streets to defend Black lives, while also identifying how the blood stains of police brutality connect to the patriarchal, colonial violence beating the drum of Capitalism’s deathwish. We are in the midst of a generation-defining, global, mass-death catastrophe, and so Kali Akuno’s call to “Unite and Fight, Build the General Strike” will need to have multiple connecting demands to Defund the Police; Care for the People; Cancel the Rent; Forgive the Debt and Build the Green New Deal. Anything less than this will mean the end of mass civilization, its past achievements becoming newspaper kindle to the fires of the post-apocalypse. Toni Morrison once said, “All paradises, all utopias are defined by who is not there, by the people not allowed in.” In fact, it’s the poisonous ideas and myths that exist inside them and us that should not be let in. So let’s start a very different kind of fire then. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/15468683

027: Our Urgent Demand: The Golden Square 07/29/2020

026: How to Erode Capitalism in the 21st Century 07/14/2020

025: The Era of Truth, Reckoning, Reparations and Transformation 07/08/2020

025: The Era of Truth, Reckoning, Reparations and Transformation To build a better mixtape for the future, Matt & Jesse transition from diagramming how the George Floyd uprisings can move beyond defunding the police (and abolishing it entirely), and instead look at how this movement could lead to larger more long-term transformations. The demand first met must include a long-sought Truth & Reckoning Commission, which has not only happened in South Africa (and more recently Canada), but has occurred in 41 other nations and counting—all of which shows how this is not a dancing unicorn demand in a nation that largely ignores demands from below; there is a vital and visceral need for this commission to surface in the here and now. Our co-hosts will then talk about how this Commission can ramp up to justly deserved reparations for America’s Twin Sins: the enslavement and genocide of Native & Black folks during the era of settler-colonialism, the lawfare and warfare of Jim Crow and the continued racist sadism of the State as COVID-19 ravages Black & Native communities across a country. While many Americans are faced with celebrating this 4th of July without fireworks or freedom, Jesse & Matt acknowledge how white folks’ entrapment in their homes has built a secret solidarity with the lives of African Americans, who have been geographically and economically trapped by centuries of racial capitalism, and who have neither felt freedom nor fireworks in a nation-state that denies their right to breathe or exist. And lastly, money—our shared, mass hallucination—will be questioned and reimagined in order to create a new understanding of what “value” must include, so that we can firmly seed a future of what’s so rightly deserved. To stand up, we must fight back; as the Black Communist & poet, Claude McKay, once wrote: “If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot [. . .] we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Comprehensive show notes can be found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/15136709

024: Erase The Thin Blue Line With Red 06/29/2020

023: Goodbye Twelve. Hello Rainbow Light. 06/22/2020

023: Goodbye Twelve. Hello Rainbow Light. On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse deepen their discussion on the bad, bad behavior of The Misfit 12 by branching beyond myth-busting to diagram how we might abolish the police in strategically smart and tactical ways. The central core myths of what have kept them in power so long, as well as the brutal costs they create in their wake, go far beyond the victims, family members and the beloved community at large; even when we don’t see the sun from seashore, The Carceral State’s cloud-eyes peak over the financial aid packages of college students, monitor truancies of 12-year old Black children from their buses to their schools, strip-search working-class girls and check the inside of our souls without our consent. So to seize the means to abolish the police, how do we “defund, disarm, dismantle?” Where do we start? In what order? Or is it better for us to think about leverage-points than simple-step chronology? Our co-hosts will talk about the “low hanging fruit” of getting cop-killers and cop-gropers out of our K-12 system, freezing—then melting—police budgets and pouring that money into The Golden Square: Food, Shelter, Healthcare & Education. Jesse & Matt will also talk about how this realization of abolishing the police—amid the societal collapse of COVID-19—allows for new terrain struggles for Universal Basic Income & Medicare for All to make it into the Mixtape of the Now. And finally, they will suggest why this might be the right type of righteous storm to blow down the trap-house of capitalism, cleansing the Earth of its Visigoths and Goldman-Sachs ghouls, so we can return to our mother, Freedom—the same mother George cried out for. Only when we strip property definitions from our bodies, can we begin to decommodify the Earth’s ecology and get on that Rainbow Light of the Utopian Sphere. Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: /episode/index/show/thefutureisamixtape/id/14919329

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