An old forgotten sign from the Farm Equipment Association of Minnesota and South Dakota once said: “Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” 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 o…

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 add…

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 …

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 a…

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 …

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…

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 Pea…

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 summe…

“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 obse…

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 fl…

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, mainstrea…

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? G…

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: “…

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…

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…

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…

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 E…

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…

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…

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 al…

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 …

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 a…

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…

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 …

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 organi…

On March 30th, 2020—as COVID-19 locked millions of panicked Americans in their homes—the homeless in Las Vegas were forced to sleep in white-chalked parking lots as the city’s gleaming and empty casino-castles loomed above them and whose closed windows hid empty beds that could have provided warmth and safety. On April 11th, ten thousand cars lined…

On this episode, Jesse and Matt dive into Erik Olin Wright’s posthumous work on imagining practical utopias, entitled How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century, which was published in the fall of 2019—just six months after the author’s untimely death from cancer. Our co-hosts will talk about Erik Olin Wright’s place in keeping the can…

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, …

On this third episode exploring the Misfit Twelve, Jesse & Matt will assess Alex S. Vitale’s book The End of Policing, which is equal parts a love letter to liberals—pleading for them to end their thumb-from-mouth habit with reformist politics, while also opening up a doorway to abolitionist thought. Published in 2017 by Verso Books to small fanfar…

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 th…

After a long hiatus from The Future Is a Mixtape, Jesse & Matt return to a more battered and broken world, whose lungs throb with phlegm while a new world is breathing hard and fast, demanding to be born. For this episode, our co-hosts discuss how the Old World Tragedy of Police Brutality is ripping into the New World Tragedy of COVID-19, and why t…

Beyond Blade Runners and Replicants, there must be a place “Over the Rainbow” for us to exist in solidarity and equanimity. And certainly, the 21st Century hovering above us should be a cause for hope, not despair; yet even with this new century being no way near its quartermark, it’s already given us a planet wheezing from ecological crisis-to-cri…

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt discuss the slow, spiral reckoning of Ridley Scott’s much-celebrated and increasingly influential film Blade Runner, whose long and winding road lead to a sequel, Blade Runner 2049. While detractors of the original film might feel they’re viewing a sexy-time noir featuring little more than r…

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt explore the paranoid dread and narcotic pull of Adam Curtis’ most recent documentary of political-noir, HyperNormalisation. In 2 hours and 40 minutes, it charts the globe-hopping travails of terrorists, bankers, politicians and America’s digital aristocracy--all of whom use humanity as pawns…

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt have a discussion with Matt Bruenig--a lawyer, blogger, political analyst and Twitter-dynamo who’s got your back when you’re kettled by Roaming Hillbots and Randian Regressives. More importantly though, Matt has just started the first grassroots, people-powered think tank called The People’s…

What would democracy look like if it first existed at the workplace rather than in the woesome consignment of America’s party-politics, which renders our dreams for The Golden Square into Squalid Shit-mash? For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt have a discussion about this paradise where workers actually experience freedom, equi…

On this episode, Matt & Jesse have a discussion with Kelsey Goldberg (@KelseyFGold) and Jack Suria Linares (@SuriaLinares213) from DSA-Los Angeles chapter about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Kelsey and Jack explore their childhood and later political awakening by describing the moment (or moments) that led to not only their transcende…

For this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt have a discussion with Frantz Pierre--a community activist and organizer who’s leading a revolutionary project to educate Los Angeles residents about the benefits of Universal Basic Income via a local, first-of-its-kind, pilot program. But how might Frantz Pierre and other fellow comrades cr…

On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse explore the most exceptional work of utopian thinking since the days of Occupy Wall Street: Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015). This is the co-hosts third such “CliffPod,” and they will hum over some of the most far-reaching an…

On this episode, Jesse & Matt discuss their fraught and less than ambivalent feelings about their first time at Southern California’s Politicon, and provide a discerning look at how it represents the shallow conceptions of what politics so often involve, and how it could have been reimagined as a democratic space for transformational insights and r…

On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matthew & Jesse go beyond Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next and his apt citations of policy successes in other societies found outside the U.S., and will instead grapple with the stasis of the Left and its tragic inability to wrest change from the Death-Dealers of Neoliberalism. How can we learn from b…

Beyond just talking about rabbits shitting outside their cages, in this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt will provide a sustained analysis on Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next. Not only was this the finest documentary released in 2015, but the film is Michael Moore’s magnum opus without parallel or peer in his storied and fecund …

On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Jesse & Matt finally shoot off some long-stored Roman Candles, letting their fireworks rain down on an area of community life they’ve spent an inordinate amount of time living inside of: the looking glass of education. As the fourth node of The Golden Square, education is the capstone of these most basic …

On this episode, Jesse & Matt discuss the third most important element of The Golden Square which is so simple and obvious, that it’s remarkable this idea is even contested as a human right in the Yankee-lands of Ol’ Red, White and Blue: the absolute right to healthcare for every human being on Earth. Matthew will provide a surprising prologue abou…

Gentrification. Housing Bubbles. Developers & Their “Pay 2 Play” Campaign Donations (Bribes) to City Council Members. And then there’s the needless cruelty of permanent homelessness. On this episode, Jesse & Matt ratchet-up their manifesto on their Mixtape for the Future by talking about the second-most important cornerstone of The Golden Square: n…

For this week’s episode, Matt & Jesse transition away from talking about which man-made myths must be stripped out from the the mixtape for the future (“The Poison Pyramid”) or what should just be ignored while they haplessly spiral in the drain (“The Circle”). Instead, our co-hosts will introduce a new idea-shape “The Golden Square,” which is comp…

In the sixth episode of The Future Is a Mixtape, Jesse & Matt break out of their self-imposed duo-igloo and bring forth two friends far more adept at exploring the miraculous and shocking rise of Jeremy Corbyn in British politics: 1) Alex Biancardi, a dual British-American citizen who is an instructor of Political Science; and 2) Joshua Bregman, a …

In this fifth episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse discuss Peter Frase’s diaphanous, compact and idea-drenched work of “Social Science Fiction,” which revs up & rides out to the sweet page-count of 150 pages, and contains far more ideas than most books three-times its size (ahem, The Circle). Frase’s nonfiction book, Four Futures: Life …

On this episode, Jesse & Matt discuss the mucky-malarkey of Dave Eggers’ 2013 “satire” (?) of Silicon Valley: The Circle. While this podcast will focus on Eggers’ conscious intentions and unconscious outcomes of his novel, some discussion will also be meted out on The Circle’s even more miserable film-adaptation of the same name, featuring Tom Hank…

On this episode, Jesse makes the case that the third point of “The Poison Pyramid,” which should be readily designated for the dumpster, is the worship of the Celebrity. Matthew makes the case that this is just a shiny, distracting feather to something that rides upon a much larger, deeper and more worrisome creature. Mentioned In This Episode: Rob…