Next Comes What

We are in the midst of the deliberate worsening of every aspect of existence. But we don't have to accept it.
Support Next Comes What + Get Andrea's posts FIRST: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe  
Read the post: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/turning-the-world-to-shit 
Listen everywhere: https://pod.link/1779885475  
WATCH

YouTube: https://youtu.be/KgOVkFaWci8 
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@degenerateartnews  
This week, "Next Comes What" considers the enshittification of the world. Andrea Pitzer lays out Cory Doctorow's theory of how the internet got ruined and then extends that concept to the deliberate destruction of nearly every aspect of modern life by government and tech companies globally. (You can read more about the concept in Doctorow's book, Enshittification.) Andrea considers the enshittification of detention in the U.S., and the parallel destruction of any functioning parts of immigration in the country. Together, those have led to the expansion of concentration camp detention through ICE campaigns and DHS policy. 
She also takes on the enshittification of health care and climate policy, and discusses how these shifts make the public more dependent on authoritarian leaders just to survive. People become reluctant to demand more, for fear that the system will unleash even more punishment. Andrea considers the ways that the unmasking of secret meetings under the auspices of tech giants reveal how the stage is set for further disempowerment and enshittification of daily life. The episode closes with a look at the importance of radical hope and ways to imagine a better world, which can begin with tackling specific, concrete policies close to home.
0:00 – What Is Enshittification? Cory Doctorow's Term Explained
1:27 – Google's Enshittification: How Search Results Got Worse
2:44 – Enshittification Beyond Tech: From Politics to Daily Life
5:51 – Fascism and Enshittification: A Century-Old Playbook Returns
9:06 – Policing, Detention, and the Weaponization of Concentration Camps
11:17 – Immigration Policy Enshittified: Refugees, Detention, and Global Crackdowns
17:09 – Climate Crisis, Water Bankruptcy, and the Manufactured Supercrisis
18:11 – Healthcare Under Attack: DOGE Cuts, Medicaid, and the NHS
19:14 – Propaganda, AI, and the Billionaire War on Reality
24:35 – How to Fight Back: Civil Rights, Renewable Energy, and Demanding Better

Concentration camps using forced labor are alive and well today in America. But there's a lot we can do to put an end to them.
Support Next Comes What + Get Andrea's posts FIRST: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe 
 
Read the post: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/forced-labor-in-concentration-camps 
 
WATCH
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y1NNhzA9cT8 
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@degenerateartnews 
 
Listen everywhere: https://pod.link/1779885475 
 
This week's episode of "Next Comes What" tackles the use of forced labor of detainees at ICE facilities around the country. Andrea Pitzer looks at the massive expansion of profit from the country's two largest detention contractors, GEO Group and CoreCivic, and details the hunger and labor strikes detainees have been conducting nationwide. She also considers the history of forced labor in concentration camps around the globe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with German genocide on Shark Island in what is today Namibia, she also describes how mandatory work was used in Soviet Russia, under British rule in Kenya, in post-Revolutionary China, and elsewhere.
 
In each country, the international trend of concentration camps fused with preexisting local history and culture to create different models of forced labor. In the case of the U.S., Andrea suggests that mandatory work in ICE detention rises out of the long use of prison labor. Noting that the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution left in place a slave-labor exception for convicts, she traces the way that arrests and convict leasing continued the work conditions of slavery for many Black men and boys in the wake of the Civil War, despite emancipation. Yet forced labor in ICE detention adds another layer of injustice, in that the vast majority of people held in immigration detention don't even have charges filed against them, let alone a conviction. Andrea closes the episode with a look at ways that people have fought back under extraordinary conditions in the past and are resisting now--including ideas for those looking to eliminate forced labor in the US and to abolish ICE.
 
0:00 Introduction – Delaney Hall strikes & forced labor in ICE detention today
3:13 Overview – A survey of forced labor in concentration camp settings
5:45 Nazi work camps – Forced labor from 1933 through WWII
6:55 Why detention makes forced labor worse – expendability, punishment, profit
9:44 Pre-Nazi precedents – Shark Island / German Southwest Africa (early 1900s)
10:33 World War I – Ukrainian Canadians interned as "enemy aliens" in Alberta
12:09 The Russian Revolution & Gulag – Forced labor under the Bolsheviks
12:26 The Gulag system – Expansion, quotas, starvation rations, the Dead Road
15:01 Post-WWII & the Iron Curtain – Western vs. Soviet models of camp labor
18:00 US domestic roots – Slavery, the 13th Amendment exception, convict leasing
22:01 Scale of deportation – The administration's 15–20 million target
24:46 Resistance – Gulag uprisings, Free Alabama Movement, the Menocal lawsuit
27:42 What you can do – Calls to action, spotlighting strikes near you
30:21 Outro

.

Race nostalgia has infected nearly every political argument made today. A look at what it is and how to stop it.
Support Next Comes What + Get Andrea's posts FIRST: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe 
Read the post: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/race-nostalgia-as-social-blight 
LISTEN wherever you get podcasts: https://pod.link/1779885475 
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@degenerateartnews 
This week, Andrea Pitzer considers the prioritization of white South Africans in US refugee policy, noting that they make up literally the only refugees currently being admitted to the United States. She explores how that policy is part of a larger map of racial grievance that has already led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people of color around the globe--a choice enthusiastically embraced by the current administration. Laying out a theory of the angry daddy as the model deliberately adopted by Trump and his fellow travelers, Andrea explores how it gets injected into politics as a promise to not only provide for the chosen followers of the leader, but also to punish those deemed less worthy.
 
Walking listeners through the ways that solidarity with racially aggrieved white communities frames the entire political enterprise running the government today, Andrea then turns to the ways the same concept likewise animates the strategies adopted by those who see themselves as opposing Trump. She questions the tendency to seek macho white male candidates, as if these are the only politicians capable of securing democracy. Looking at the recent expanded damage to the Voting Rights Act inflicted by the Supreme Court and the frenzy of gerrymandering it has unleashed, Andrea explains how the tendency to raise up white men as savior candidates on the left will only speed and amplify the disappearance of candidates of color from office nationwide. The episode closes with some way to think about taking action to address the corruption and crony networks that make this kind of resegregation possible.
0:00 White South African Refugees and Trump's Race-Based Immigration Policy
1:16 The $100 Million Taxpayer Cost of Afrikaner Refugee Policy
3:27 White Solidarity and the Roots of MAGA Race Nostalgia
7:22 Strict Father Politics: How Authoritarian Psychology Drives Voter Behavior
12:25 Strategic Racism: How Politicians Use Dog Whistles to Divide America
17:26 USAID Cuts and the Hidden Cost of White Refugee Policy
20:42 Andrew Sullivan, Demographic Change, and the Eugenics Trap
23:41 Democrats Adopting White Solidarity Tactics to Win Back Voters
28:18 How to Fight Corruption and White Supremacy at the Local Level

Why are elected Democrats punishing the very people who voted for them?
Support Next Comes What + Get Andrea's posts FIRST: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe
Read the post: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/when-leaders-don-t-lead
WATCH: https://youtu.be/lQZseXoDs7E 
LISTEN ANYWHERE: https://pod.link/1779885475 
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@degenerateartnews 
This week's episode tackles the tendency to criticize Democrats when Republicans are the principal drivers of authoritarianism in the U.S.right now. Andrea Pitzer tries to answer the perennial question "What do you want Democrats to do, if they don't control any branch of government?" Her response boils down to giving examples of harmful actions from several Democrats voters had hoped would do more.
She considers Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer's recent appearance with Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has endorsed genocide against Palestinians and encouraged violence in the West Bank. She also considers recent actions taken by three governors: Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, and Jared Polis of Colorado. These Democratic governors have undercut their party and democracy alike—in one case by pardoning an unrepentant criminal election denier who betrayed her office, in others by inviting the state police to brutalize demonstrators or by ignoring the will of the people and the legislators of her own party. 
 
0:00 – What Do Voters Want From Democrats Right Now?
1:18 – Democrats Acting Like an Opposition Party: Early Examples
5:35 – Chuck Schumer's Failure to Lead
7:18 – Schumer at the Israel Day Parade With Bezalel Smotrich
8:59 – Virginia Governor Spanberger's Veto Spree Against Her Own Party
12:53 – Colorado Governor Polis Frees Election Denier Tina Peters
15:33 – Delaney Hall: What's Happening Inside the Newark ICE Detention Facility
21:27 – Mayor Ras Baraka vs. Governor Sherrill: Who's Actually Fighting Back?
26:23 – Why Democratic Politicians Must Oppose Authoritarianism — Lessons From History

Four hundred years of propaganda is way too much. Here's how we can push back.
Support Next Comes What + Get Andrea's posts FIRST: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/subscribe 
Read the post: https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/the-propaganda-loop 
Find Next Comes What wherever you get podcasts: https://pod.link/1779885475 
WATCH

YouTube: https://youtu.be/6j2g3hP4A6o 
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@degenerateartnews 
This week, Andrea Pitzer traces the introduction of the idea of propaganda and its role in nearly everything bad that's being sold to the American people today. She begins with the pope's recent encyclical warning of the dangers of AI, and then steps back to another pope, one from the seventeenth century, who introduced the idea of propaganda to the world. In between, she looks at Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who created wartime propaganda and then made a killing using the same tactics to sell cigarettes to women.
From misrepresentations to stunt marketing, the half-truths and open lies of propaganda are still very much with us. All these tactics boil down to treating human beings as things, cheating people, and dividing humanity. Andrea considers the useful tool that machine learning could have been if the billionaire class had been satisfied to develop it for use in the big-data, tech, and science worlds that reflect its actual usefulness. Instead, they've sought to maximize profits by selling humanity a lie about how it can be a companion, a therapist, and a creative genius. Andrea closes with how to recognize the dangers and build a world that's more resistant to propaganda.
0:00 – AI, Propaganda, and the World Being Built Without Your Consent
0:40 – Pope Leo's Encyclical: What the Catholic Church Gets Right About AI
1:57 – Edward Bernays: The Father of Propaganda and the World He Made
5:52 – Cigarettes, Coups, and Corporate Manipulation: Bernays' Real Legacy
8:04 – How Social Media Primed Us for a Concentration Camp Society
16:16 – AI Is the New Propaganda: Tech Billionaires and the Myth of Intelligence
23:08 – Father Coughlin to Trump: A Century of Demagogues and Groupthink
26:24 – How to Think Beyond Propaganda and Build the World You Actually Want
26:46 – The AI Resist List: Global Movements Pushing Back on Big Tech
28:36 – Say What You See: Anti-Propaganda as a Radical Act