Anews podcast 108, 3.22.19

From Anews Podcast

Welcome to the anews podcast. This podcast covers anarchist activity, ideas, and conversations from the previous week on anarchistnews.org.


Editorial: Monstrous Flowers, by a member of thecollective, read by chisel
TOTW: Cyberspace, with Aragorn! and a friend

sound editing was by Dim
what’s new was written by Jackie and narrated by Chisel and Dim
Music!
Naked City – Torture Garden
Demi Lovato – Work of Art
Kraftwerk – Computer Love

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There are 7 Comments

Thanks for the constructive criticism. Isn't most popular anarchist writing a way of working ideas out?

How bout all that love for the comments?! I'm misting up here :')

I've changed my mind about finding the criticism constructive. It almost seems to be saying that young, confused, angry people shouldn't offer their thoughts.

The TOTW discussion seemed rather devoid of any anarchist content. Save for the negation of tech in that it isolates young people socially (at least from f2f associations), could be I simply fail to see any of that relating to anarchy. It could have nearly doubled as an infomercial for tech devices. The nature of the TOTW format seems to centralize, decontextualize, and, thereby trivialize thought. It invites the listener/reader to contemplate a random object (e.g. cybernetics, art, etc.) and then imagine "what would I say/write about this". Then like a web surfer, one's mind becomes like a search engine pulling up a list of relating anecdotes. Discussion content becomes more reactive and naturally less proactive. It seems to trivialize content, reify it, and thus move it farther away from stories and or ideas about everyday life as an anarchist or at least one aspiring to experience anarchy. If the spectacle of mass society is to be ignored, then let us not merely "keep looking through the eyeglass in revers" and thus not entertain society’s current obsession with internalized naval gazing. There must be some happy medium. I know you folks are living up there in that citified college town, but try not to be such slave to the Topic-Nazis in your midst.

This resonates with me to some extent, in that yeah I find participation in the TOTW threads often boring and draining (and likely because of this phenomenon of everyone forcing themselves to retch up words), but I'm not sure that the problem (if it could even be called such, obviously some people enjoy it) is quite so simple. E.g., I do fine in reading group discussions, what makes those any different?

Well...again I may be too simple hear but books
....books ostensibly connected to the writers need to create, having less to do with an abstract detachment from everyday life, and more to do multi-topic desire to engage with it. random association games my be fun for the players, not so much for spectators.

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