The Future Is A Mixtape

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 up for a San Antonio Food Bank—the aerial photos...

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 candle of socialism burning during its most bleak pe...

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 m...

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 fanfare, this book-length plea has rapidly flickered in...

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 membe...

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 these clashing tragedies have made the Old World n...

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-crisis, where an untenable economic system of neo-feu...

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 robots and porn-jazz, for the entranced, the film...

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 by promising simple stories to explain complex...

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 Policy Project (3P). Funded by small donations fr...

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, equity and solidarity with two folks who've jump-start...

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 transcendent belief in socialism, but how they went be...

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 create this program on a citywide scale when the myt...

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 and visionary aspects of this book, weighing out the...

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 real debates. The majority of the podcast will dis...

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 both the past and present to make another world po...

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 oeuvre. After shooting and releasing a misshapen...

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 and essential human rights. It's hard to imagine a...

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 about what's suddenly taken place in his personal life...

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: namely, the universal right to human shelter. While...

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 comprised of the four most essential tracks in our sha...

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 "former American ex-pat" who was a film student i...

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 After Capitalism , argues that there are actuall...

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 Hanks, Emma Watson and John Boyega. Matthew will also...

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: Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82 -...