The Fiction of Douglas Lain

Episode #75: A 21st Century Anarchist (a conversation with Douglas Lain)

January 18th, 2010
Douglas Lain is a fiction author and the anarchist podcaster behind the Diet Soap Podcast. In this interview, Doug and Frank Aragona discuss the intellectual roots of socialist anarchism, Paris in 1968, Silent Revolution, and Psycho-Geography.

In this final installment of the C-Realm Podcast for 2009, Doug Lain, host of the Diet Soap Podcast, joins KMO to revisit 2009 C-Realm interviews with Jeff Vail, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Joe Bageant, and Frank Rotering. Can inferences about the economy and social relationships legitimately be drawn from observations about the cyclical behavior of a forest ecosystem, or does this sort of comparison lend legitimacy to unjust power relationships? Can a recovering Libertarian and a wavering Marxist even hear one another through the ideological noise? Take heart.

Listen to the podcast.

I attended the film “Up in the Air” last night and, as is typical for me, I’ve been reading reviews of the picture today in order to search out my own position on the movie. The impression I had while watching was that the picture was making light entertainment out of our moral/cultural/economic bankruptcy, but when the story didn’t end happily I decided that perhaps it was a more subversive and thus better picture than I originally thought. In any case, here’s a review I found interesting.

Unemployment Gets a Lift in ‘Up in the Air’

Here’s an excerpt from a story I’m working on.

It’s still amazing what can fit in your pocket these days, but while standard computing and gaming devices like iPhones and Mini-Wii systems continue to dominate the market, the most expensive and advanced personal computing device, the Time Box, has had a rough couple of months. Both the recent problems with the marketing and introduction of Box3.0 which met with less than the projected demand, and the chorus of consumer complaints that the Time Box version of history is too self-contained and static ( for instance, thousands have written to the company and complained that their visits and revisits to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland always concluded with the Titanic sinking), has led to a downturn in the company’s stock. While educators, science fiction fans, and historical hook-up artists are still purchasing the box, the company must do something to increase sales beyond these niches, and the company is pinning its future to the hope that version 4.0 will reinvigorate sales. The new Box includes many features consumers have come to expect with hand held computational devices like the Box. Partnering with Sprint and Dell, the new Box will allow customers to make cellular calls from the past, to maintain an internet connection as long as one is within the last thousand years of history, and to photograph and video tape both past events and encounters with what everyone agrees is an ever expanding present. –The WSJ, December 20th, 2013

If anyone needed more proof that the gadget driven marketing scam that was the American Empire died years ago, the utter failure to adequately create demand for the world’s first personal time machine should serve. Nintendo, Time Warner, and Apple computers have all backed off their various offers to buy out Time Box incorporated, and while it’s hard to fathom that the product may suffer the same fate as Betamax and electric cars, in a world where people have no history let alone a future it’s conceivable. The public seems content to leave history to the necrophiliacs and Civil War Buffs.

Just doing my part to catapult the propaganda.  I look forward to seeing this movie in the theater in October.

Here’s an excerpt from a review in the Wall Street Journal. The reviewer points out several “flaws” in the film which, from my perspective, all seem like strengths:

As an alternative to the profit motive, the filmmaker cites the example of Jonas Salk, who gave the public his polio vaccine rather than patent it. For his part, Mr. Moore gives the public plenty of snake oil. He blames government and industry for the decline of American unions without mentioning foreign competition. He illustrates the scandal of subprime mortgages with glib cross-cuts between bank executives and Mafia thugs. He shows the anguish of an eviction, which he characterizes as “a robbery,” without a clue to its factual context, and assigns far-reaching significance to a family of Miami squatters in the process of reclaiming their repossessed house: “Sometimes,” he says, “revolutions begin in unlikely places.”