Vicky Osterweil
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
But also I think that reaction of like culture jamming is sort of stupid or like, you know, like talking about who wants to talk about culture at this point. I think that that made sense in the context in which we were moving and organizing. But like now, once again, it is clear that by abandoning the cultural sphere in many ways, we have in fact lost a tremendous amount of ground.
Behind the Bastards
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So I think it's actually really important to have cultural organizations that aren't just theory, that aren't just news, but that are like really talking about art and beauty and like excitement and joy and fiction and all these things that we find really important.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Because, you know, I think a lot of people sort of think, well, it's a crisis moment, you know, the world's ending, why would you do that? But like the world has been ending since 1492, like the world worth defending has been ending since then. Yeah. And it hasn't ended yet.
Behind the Bastards
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And one of the ways it hasn't ended is by Indigenous and Black and other marginalized cultures and stories and narratives and works of art has been an important mode of history and resistance, just as much as organizing and struggle. And yeah, I think we can move some struggle onto that terrain right now. And I think there's a lot of craving for it now.
Behind the Bastards
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Because I think also for a while, things felt really oversaturated. But the last five years, the internet doesn't feel helpful anymore. Everything feels like streaming is a mess. Everything's a mess. There's no access to culture that feels good. Everyone hates what they're doing. They know it's exploiting the artists.
Behind the Bastards
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They know Spotify is giving people pennies and that HBO and all the streaming services support Amazon and they're... They're just miserable, right? And I think there's a real opening and a real desire for something else at this moment, at the same time that things are indeed quite on fire, literally, ecocidally, but also sort of politically.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. I just like to build on that, Carla, because I think that was really beautiful. I second everything that you said. Many of us have a perspective that huge structural change is going to need to come and that often that will come through these big social movements, these explosions of energy, these lightning strikes, right? But you can't force those. You can't make those happen.
Behind the Bastards
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And in the meantime, you can... I think I've spent a lot of my in the meantimes in... trying to sort of organize stuff that's sort of oriented towards mass movement, you know, and it just feels, often feels like wheel spinning, you know, like I'm building, I'm trying to build mass movement, organizing, like, you know, like whatever that means.
Behind the Bastards
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And in the 2010s, like one of the things that happened from like 2011, arguably 2009, but definitely 2011 to 2020 was that wherever you were, it was never more than probably 18 months before there was like something else going off in the streets. And so, although those could be very hard, those waves could be very difficult. Um,
Behind the Bastards
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you still had a lot of periods where, you know, you could just sort of be waiting and it would just sort of happen again. That was certainly what I was doing in that decade in a way that I don't think I appreciated until it was over. Yeah. Because the last four years has been very different. The rhythm has been very different since the pandemic started. And I can't just say panini on this podcast.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah. Since the pandemic started... You know, those rhythms have been disrupted. And I think the Biden counter-revolution against 2020, which has also really disrupted those things. And in that space, it has felt very clear to me personally, and I'm older, you know, whatever. I'm like, you know, a movement elder at this point, just because our movements are so youth focused, not because...
Behind the Bastards
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And actually old. Like the decade before 2011, from like 2001, you know, from 9-11 until sort of Occupy is sort of how I periodize it a bit. There wasn't a ton of street movement. You had the Iraq War stuff that was really, really big. And there were important exceptions to that in the U.S., I'm doing a pod of history here.
Behind the Bastards
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Obviously there's exceptions to this, but you definitely had all this time and the stuff that was sustained and remembered were largely like sort of cultural projects. And so like, I think like now as we're moving into this era here in North America, um, on turtle Island of extreme repressive danger, right? Like we shouldn't like joke about it or downplay it.
Behind the Bastards
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Like we were facing a lot of extreme repression and, uh, fascists back in the streets in a big way. It doesn't feel like big political organizing of the kind that happened during the first Trump administration where people did a lot of marching in circles, but there were targets for the pressure. They don't feel as relevant now. Now I'm really off. Now I'm way off.
Behind the Bastards
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But no, I think we're in this moment where the fascists both are quite empowered and very unfocused. They're confused. They They think Liz Cheney is just as much a revolutionary as Assata Shakur or whatever, right? And that leaves us some space to move and to build things that can maintain a spirit of resistance, that can reproduce a culture of resistance, that can also organize.
Behind the Bastards
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And another thing that has really been important for me recently with Ka is that I've been doing an organizing project that I won't talk about the details of, but that the skills have largely come from punk music that I did in the 20s, in my 20s, being in a touring punk band. And those skills have made this organizing really easy.
Behind the Bastards
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And that's been a huge thing for me because I'm working with other people who are younger, who don't have that experience. Like, oh, how do you do this? I'm like, oh, no, no, it's so easy. You just like do this, you know, here's the skills I learned just from doing music. And like, I don't think that's just like accidental.
Behind the Bastards
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As Julie was saying, like the DIY nature of some of that work, the culture work, you know, maybe the band wasn't revolutionary. The bands I was in certainly weren't like the revolution or whatever. But they gave me all of these powerful skills and ideas and concepts for doing really important work.
Behind the Bastards
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And I think that that's also a reason to pursue DIY culture in a way that's genuinely sustainable and world-building.
Behind the Bastards
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Exactly. And speaking of which, one thing anarchists are famously bad at doing is accepting that we do require money and asking for it. So I'm going to do that for the squad. We are currently fundraising because it's actually really hard to make something sustainable for four people. Yep, yep. And we have a fundraiser going on.
Behind the Bastards
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If you like what we're talking about here, you can donate to our Indiegogo. Literally anything helps. Once we fully launch in February, we're going to have a pay what you want subscription model. So everything will be subscribed, but we really want to have three months worth of living wage for all of us to do two days a week on it, right?
Behind the Bastards
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So we're not even, you know, we're not talking full salaries and that's $45,000 because four people for three months, it's not even a tremendous amount of money.
Behind the Bastards
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Because we're including solidarity funds in that and paying any writers who contribute, lots of other stuff. So yeah, if you have a few bucks and maybe you're thinking about getting off of one of those sub stacks or something and you want to throw our way, we would be absolutely honored and very excited to accept anything in this launch.
Behind the Bastards
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And if you don't have that money, which is true for a lot of us, which is why we feel bad asking for the money and because there are so many people who need it right now, you can subscribe online. You can find us on social media and keep in touch until we do launch and then you can join and subscribe that way. That's also a really great way to support us.
Behind the Bastards
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If you have a few, few bucks you want to throw, if you want to give someone a present of a year's membership, you can get that for a hundred dollars for the holidays, you know, radicalize your uncle, you know, just with, with our work. We'd really, really appreciate it. And yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, thanks so much. And yeah, as a longtime listener, first time caller, it's really exciting to be on here. So thank you, Mia, so much.
Behind the Bastards
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I just go on so many podcasts, Mia. Like, can you blame me? Sorry. Yeah. Well, anyway, it's really exciting to be here and talking to everyone and we hope to meet y'all in the future. And we'll have a, well, we will have a discord community. We'll be having like writing class. We're going to have a lot of like really exciting stuff.
Behind the Bastards
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So even if you can't throw in money right now, please sign up to our website, koshanythings.com to stay in touch and find out all the really cool stuff we're doing.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, it really came together around the Corvid theme, I think. Yeah. The combination of enjoying shiny things, extreme intelligence, and never-ending spite, I think, are all sort of motivating factors for all of us.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I'm happy to take a spin at that. This is Vicky, by the way. Yeah, so KA is sort of like, I mean, it's an anarchist journal of arts and culture that is a collective of anarchist writers. It's also a Corvid Appreciation Working Group. There's a lot of different acronyms for it. And What we are doing is we are bringing all four, at first, just all four of our efforts together.
Behind the Bastards
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So a lot of us work on separate podcasts. We have pedagogical tasks. We have many activist projects that center around culture. You know, I have a newsletter. Shuley has a Patreon. Carla has a newsletter. Danny also has an email list. There's all these different projects and projects.
Behind the Bastards
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We realized that, like, for all of our talk about mutual aid and working collectively, when it comes to writing and creativity, the market has been so fractured and so alienated and so turned into, like, everyone has an individual newsletter that they're competing with one another, you know. even though they don't want to be like they want to be.
Behind the Bastards
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But that's sort of ultimately what's happening is that there's limited customers. And there's also this other trend going on right now of this really exciting kind of worker-owned journals, a lot of them local journalism. There's some in New York and Chicago, and there's one in Asheville and all over the country, as well as like on special topics.
Behind the Bastards
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So like Aftermath, which like does, I think the video games and there's 404 Media who does tech. There's just like all these different sort of sites doing this sort of thing. And I think in some ways, all of us are sort of collectively reinventing the newspapers that have been sort of stolen and destroyed by capital, you know, in a big way. Yeah. So there's sort of two goals that we have.
Behind the Bastards
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And I think Carla speaks really eloquently to some of this, but One of which is to make writing radical culture work, beautiful, joyful, fun, and also critical like movement work to make it sustainable for us and for anyone else who wants to share in this project who we can sort of expand towards.
Behind the Bastards
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But also to make it easier for people who are reading to have access to these things, like in one place, instead of having to, you know, decide who they care for and who they like in order to sort of, you know, do that math of like, who can I afford to subscribe to?
Behind the Bastards
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Like, I personally, I don't know if this is true for everyone else, but personally, I usually have about two or three people I can afford to subscribe to a month and then switch it out just like on a very arbitrary basis, you know, or something like that. That was very technical and financially focused. But what we're really excited to do mostly is support each other's work.
Behind the Bastards
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Because I think we all really love and admire each other's work and have for a long time. And this is just this really exciting opportunity. Instead of my writing just being for me, it's for Shuli and Carla and Danny now. And that just makes it feel more inspiring and exciting as well as a collective process.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. And even the projects that have sustained, that have survived, which are all really awesome, you know, like, and exciting, like very few of them have offered real sustainability, like on a professional level. And like, I've been publishing like, quote unquote, professionally.
Behind the Bastards
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for 15 years and like i'm the like newest writer on the scene like from our crew basically like we're incredibly experienced and all of us have books out all of us have edited volumes all of us have like podcasts and like are people who i like really respect whose names i think are big and important in in the world of theory and activism and like in the anglophone world especially and none of us can sustain ourselves as writers as such because of the way that
Behind the Bastards
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Just, you know, both politically, but also just like the way the market has come down.
Behind the Bastards
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And it just feels like something we could apply our politics to solving as a workplace issue rather than just sort of as like a, you know, are you committed enough to sacrifice all your time issue? And so hopefully like that will also function to make more work available to produce and to platform and to, yeah, to sort of work as an example simultaneously. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I mean, I think that's really like true. And I think like I have for a long time now sort of accepted that writing is never going to support or sustain me. And all I needed was a push from a few other people to be like, wait, what if we like actually tried to do it collectively to be like, oh, yeah, like. I could actually try that.
Behind the Bastards
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I don't have to just accept that I'll always have a full-time job plus whatever writing in whatever hours I can steal and with great difficulty put out some writing sometimes and then always feel guilty when I'm not putting out enough to sustain myself. That whole process, I think a lot of creatives right now know that struggle of having gigs and work and lots of other important things to do. And
Behind the Bastards
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And, you know, sort of accepting that that's the conditions. And I think, like, what's so inspiring about, you know, because Carla, as Carla was just mentioning, they sort of brought, I'm the last one on the crew. And I was sort of the closer, you know, or whatever. But I think, like, I don't know what that means, genuinely. But I was brought in.
Behind the Bastards
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And I think just having them propose it already, just as a project that we've been thinking of, has, like, changed the way I've been thinking about what is possible with the writing I'm already doing. And so I think just to underline that point and go on and on and on, collaboration is really, really important and supporting one another is so powerful.
Behind the Bastards
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So I wasn't actually active at that point, but I was like very adjacent to some of that stuff at the moment. And some of that was actually because a lot of what was going on in the alter globalization movement in that period was happening through culture. I think most famously, like touring punk bands would also bring zine libraries with them.
Behind the Bastards
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So they would have someone distroing zines and playing the show and like I mean, I got radicalized through punk. I know a lot of people who did. That was, you know, when I finally did, it was after that movement had largely crested. But I think there was a lot of focus on culture and also a critique of culture was also pretty central to how people were thinking and moving.
Behind the Bastards
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And I think the explosion of social media and, like, posting and, like, the sort of... quote-unquote democratization and leveling of communication capabilities, which in some ways was more real in the early 2010s certainly than it is now. It wasn't totally like a made-up narrative, but it was also over-relied on. I think people sort of reached for a kind of like...
Behind the Bastards
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Well, anyone who can use these tools to communicate, like that's valuable. So critiquing sort of media in general or critiquing sort of capitalist media is sort of beside the point because we can go around it. We can sort of go, we can, you know, go on Twitter and subvert it and we can like do all these, you know, go sideways around it.
Behind the Bastards
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So I was, you know, a participant in Occupy Wall Street in 2011, which people also don't know anything about because that's just being older. But Occupy Wall Street was started by a magazine called Adbusters, which came out of the WTO movement and sort of managed to stick around. And by 2011, when they did that, we thought it was like a joke.
Behind the Bastards
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It was like, oh, these culture jammers who like make fun of advertisements, like they started the movement. Like, that's ridiculous, right? Like, that's silly. And like, this is not to defend Adbusters. I think whatever. Yeah, there's some issues with them, but they also did, I don't know.