PODCAST · society
The Future Is A Mixtape
by The Future Is A Mixtape
The Future Is a Mixtape is a podcast about designing utopia.
Episodes
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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: "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 –...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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...
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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:...
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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...
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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....
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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…
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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...
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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…
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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…
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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...
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027: Our Urgent Demand: The Golden Square
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…
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026: How to Erode Capitalism in the 21st Century
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...
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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...
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024: Erase The Thin Blue Line With Red
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...
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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…
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022: Abolish The Police
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...
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021: The North Star of Human Decency
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…
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020: More Bleak Than Bleak
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...
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019: Fake Plastic World
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...
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018: Putting the 'Think' Into Think Tanks
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...
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017: Imagining Democracy In The Workplace
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...
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016: DSA-Curious? #TrySocialism
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…
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015: They Owe Us a Living, Of Course
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...
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014: A World Without Work
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,"…
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013: The Slingshot Seven
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...
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012: #$hitsStillFuckedUpAndBullshit
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...
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011: Picking the Flowers, Not the Weeds
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…
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010: Squaring the Golden Square: Education
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...
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009: An Apple A Day . . .
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...
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008: Gimme Shelter
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...
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007: Grammars of the Palate
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…
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006: 'Ye Are Many – They Are Few!'
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...
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005: Captain Picard - "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."
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...
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004: TDS - Terminal Dystopia Syndrome
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...
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003: Star-Fuckers
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…
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