And first of all, so, you know, Mark Collier is a COO of the Foundation, and I'm Lauren Sell, a marketing at the Foundation, and then down here is Margie Callard, who joined us about a month and a half ago in marketing. She actually came from Internet, so she's seen the OpenStack community for a while, and we're happy to have her. And where's Claire? Here's Claire Massey, and she joined us in December at the Foundation, also in marketing, and she's been working really hard on this summit. So thanks to Claire for everything she's been doing. It's been a lot of work. And then over here, we have Kathy Catatori, and probably a lot of you have been working with her. She is helping us out on industry events and sponsorships, and also coordinating some of the global events that we do. So have a great team. We're missing Todd Morey here, who's the man behind the brand too. I don't know if you guys have worked with him, but he might be in here in just a little bit. But that is our team. Just a little bit for today. I really don't have a lot of slides, but really the intent was to get everyone together. We've been working on a new marketing portal that we want to share. It's just staging right now, but I want to show what we're thinking and get your feedback on that, and then share a couple of plans. And mostly just want to make sure everyone here is plugged into the different marketing channels that we have. We do monthly open marketing meetings for everyone in the community. We have a marketing mailing list that you can get plugged into, but really want to find out how we can better work together. Our foundation team is working on creating this core layer of materials that hopefully all of you can leverage, but we also want to get feedback from you because you guys are working with customers and you know what people are talking about and what we need to be better messaging towards and what we need to be building materials around. How many here have dialed into one of those monthly marketing meetings? Anyone? Quite a few. Cool. Hopefully all of you all will sign up to the mailing list and start joining those. Good deal. So I guess I'll dive right into the marketing portal. So I actually should just really pull it up. But basically, I mean one of the biggest things that we do with the foundation and some of you all probably asked us for this is you know give out the latest collateral or graphics that you need for whatever slides or deck that you're building or how can you use the OpenStack logo in different ways or what kind of materials do you need access to. So we're trying to make that a much better process and have it all online and easy for you guys to download and also just make sure that we always you know all have access to the latest materials. Obviously OpenStack is moving very quickly from a marketing perspective. It's pretty difficult to keep up with that as well. So you know we always are working on new materials. So let me pull it up really fast so you guys can see what we are looking at and then I'd love to just get some feedback on it. Banter, banter. Yeah, so the portal is really like Lauren said just a place you can go. So there's one website you can go and get the latest materials. And we've done things with Dropbox and other sort of you know shortcut tools but this is going to be a lot more organized and something will always be updating. Is that good Banter? That's true. So basically and this is you know version one. We have a lot more ideas of what we want to build into it but again want to get your feedback of where we go from here because really at this point it's us posting these different materials and you being able to download them and you know eventually we'd like to be able to get more feedback on the materials and also be able to even collaborate on some of these things that we're working on. But up top it's really more information. We're trying to make it pretty immediately obvious where you can go for help whether you have a product launch and you need help you know knowing which commercial logo to use or what kind of messaging you can use with your product launch whether you're doing some PR and want support from the foundation whether it's a quote or to use some of our media and analyst relationships to help you know their distribution channel for your news. Also along the same lines customer case studies we're always looking to help promote those and get them plugged into our different marketing channels. So the up top all of these and unfortunately I can't click through to the different pages right now but our different pages just have more information about how to do that. And then we have different graphics here so probably this software diagram over here is the one I get asked for the most but just a way that everyone can have access to the latest graphics and diagrams. Has everyone seen this before? That graphic. It's pretty popular. It is a Todd Morey special. And then we have different banner graphics and actually I think Martin developed this one for one of his events in Hungary right? And we've been using it for other Martins here. He helps organize a local user group in Hungary. And anyway so he developed that and this is just a great example of he sent it to us and we were able to use it for other events and modify it a little bit and we've distributed it out to other people to use as well. So that's how we really want to encourage the marketing process overall. So we have of course the graphics and then we have different presentations and collateral that we've been working on. And we have a lot of plans this year to continue to build out that content. And that's definitely an area where we want more feedback. And whether it's industry vertical specific, whether it's use case specific, whether we're getting more into the business level, it's definitely been evolving over time. When we started this two and a half years ago, it was really about getting developers on board and getting companies on board. Now we're definitely messaging more to end users and want to help you message to your customers as well. And then finally events materials and some of this, like when Cathy's coordinating with different, I guess regional one day open stack events or even helping to organize open stack presence at different industry events, she develops a lot of materials around that, whether it's sponsorship prospectus or boost staffing diagram and things like that you can take advantage of and leverage, but also just some other graphics and materials that you might need to promote open stack at different events. And of course, over on the right side, we have links to different case studies. So I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with the user stories page, but we've made a lot of progress on building out quite a few case studies on this page and are looking to update it and redesign it too in the next couple of months. Help us find all of your cool users out there, because these are really the, and if you look around the summit, you'll notice that a lot of the sessions are packed, but the ones that are users talking about what they're doing with open stack are by far the most popular. People love that information and it inspires more people to adopt open stacks. If there's one thing we always want more help with is identifying users that are willing to talk and we can do a lot of the work with the writers that we have, you know, freelancers and stuff to produce it. So it's not a lot of work for the users, but if you can send them to us, we can put a lot more up. So that's kind of the overview of what we're building and launching pretty soon. This is just in staging, so I wanted to get some feedback from all of you on the type of content that is most important, you know, where we should be focused, any other kind of, and also, you know, open the feedback in terms of how I've been communicating if you think that the marketing mailing list is useful, if you think that the monthly open meetings are useful, if you'd rather see something else happen, we'd love to get your thoughts. Yeah. This one? Oh, good. We should probably have note-taking ability right now, huh? Okay. Okay. Yeah, so is this if you're sitting down with different companies or even if you're doing presentations and stuff like that? Okay. Yeah. That's great. So what, I'm sorry. Like, if you individually wanted to, like, those, yeah, that might be something that would, you know, tie back to what he's asking for, which is, you know, going into detail on each of the services and then maybe there we could make the icon as an asset or something, but we don't have it broken out that way, but that could be a project that I think we could do. Yeah. And do you tend to organize it by compute storage and networking, which is what we've been trying to kind of do because, you know, there's so many more than, there's so many projects now and we try to kind of not get into the weeds too much with, you know, project language that, you know, maybe is lost on customers and do something more conceptual like these pillars of, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's definitely, I mean, it's definitely the tricky thing about trying to simplify concepts is there's always, you know, places where there's a limitation that's not as accurate as if you went into more detail and that, you know, definitely the object store, block store is kind of one of those examples where when the customer wants to get a little deeper and wants to know more about the nuts and bolts, you need to get into that level of detail, but I think if you have only three boxes, I think these are the right three. So it just kind of depends on how deep you want to go. Maybe it's making like an icon for each one of those if you want to talk about them separately in another context, but. Yeah. Have you, are there examples of other landing pages out there that you like that might help us, you know, more fully grasp what you're, what you're having in mind? Okay. Okay, yeah, to business value oriented. Yeah, so I would say, I guess somewhat recently in the last couple of months, we've been, you know, evolving the messaging we're using in our collateral and even through the website, although probably the software section is a little just more focused on the technology, even if it's features, but if it's not overall all business case, but we have been trying to evolve to more of that business value messaging. And honestly, what's really helped with that for us, I mean, for me has been hearing more of these user stories and actually having, you know, real anecdotes or real feedback that we can start messaging towards. I mean, I think it's really informed our marketing efforts and we've been able to evolve that way. So I think that's absolutely what we're working toward. Maybe it's, you know, getting it outside of just like the collateral to having a more dedicated place in the website for that. So we've talked about before, you know, if you come to our website, should there be different paths for different audiences? And I don't think that honestly, we're quite ready to take that on yet, but I think that we can definitely take incremental steps and add some of that content along the way. Sure, help me help you, Sandy. Yeah, and I think even just like some of the users we've heard from today and we're gonna hear from tomorrow, that, like Lauren said, I mean, that's really helping us, you know, go from sort of the hypothesis of why people are interested in OpenStack or why they're adopting it to some really concrete examples and looking for patterns amongst the different users as to what are the real like top three reasons they picked OpenStack. Just not just about cost. Yeah, I mean, yeah. It seems to be agility is the word of the day, I think. Cool, any other feedback on that? Yeah, we do too. That's funny you say that. So, yeah, so what we are working on actually is like a real time stats page that is updating directly from our databases. And we are testing, I don't know if you've ever heard of Chardio, but it's a startup out of San Francisco, but they can help us kind of make pages like that. I think they've done a similar one for the Mozilla community and a couple different companies, but that way it could just be public and actually through here, you can always go and access the latest stats. Cause we spend our life updating all of these stats for different meetings and presentations and they change every single day. So I think it's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, so you mean like from specifically about your company, how you should be talking about it or just overall like the health of the community? Okay. Yeah, that's a good point. Because yeah, I think it's a net, yeah, I think, and especially with summits and in any time that people are wanna sort of have bragging rights around XYZ and yeah, I would never even think of something like that, but okay. Yeah, and from the, you know, just overall community health side, one thing that we've been tracking a lot more is not even just the total number of contributors, which I think we're up over 900 now, but the average monthly contributors, which, you know, been going up a lot. And I think that shows that really consistent health versus just kind of that cumulative number, which actually I just have to call out here. There's another open source project, cloud open source project, a stack project that counts their contributors just by mailing list signups, which we kind of dug into some of their data recently and figured out. So I mean, as far as like, you know, developers really working on the project. I mean, that's a huge strength for us and something that we definitely wanna keep talking about.  I think a lot of the geographic diversity of our users of, you know, even just the visitors, the website or any of the metrics about user groups, you know, that's an incredible strength that is, I think, you know, it's a feel good story. Everybody's excited to work on something that they know people all over the planet working on 500 million API requests. Yeah, yeah, that is amazing. Yeah, this actually brings up another area that was further in the slides, but I'll chat about now.  And right now it's Tim Bell from CERN and Ryan Lane from Wikimedia and JC Martin from eBay. And they're, you know, trying to figure out exactly how this organization will self-organize or how it'll be represented. But it really, their purpose is to, you know, build this engaged user community and be able to provide more feedback directly from users into the development process. But as part of their initial research, we helped them create like a user survey, deployment survey that we ran for about two weeks starting the end of March through, I guess, right early April. And we had, it was kind of, this is our first attempt at it, but we built it, so it was putting, you know, the information directly into our database versus just having like a separate survey. And it's something that the link is still live. I can actually show it to you guys now. Yeah, I think that's a really good idea. And it, mm-hmm. So we ran just like a two-week campaign and we got, we found about 200 unique deployments through that, which they, you know, were able, and basically, you know, some of the deployments told us that they absolutely want to be confidential and private, but we can use their information aggregate and some of them are, this is hopefully the way we can discover new users that we can talk about too. But this is still up and it will be up ongoing. And the idea is that we want to do kind of a campaign before each summit to get people to go in and update their deployment information so we can then pull a new report every six months and have fresh data. So we, they presented some of that Monday and honestly I don't have all the slides. But it's really interesting to see the technology choices, the, you know, different types of clouds that are out there. I think it's a lot of information that'll be useful to you guys. So we'll be digging into that more and definitely sharing it for everyone to leverage as well. So we just ran like a two-week campaign to get initial responses about two weeks before the summit. The user committee actually presented their kind of first pass at the data on Monday. So they have a presentation and it's recorded, but kind of after the summit, once we have a little more time, we're gonna really dig into it and put it into a format that people can consume and you guys can, you know, use it and promote more readily. So yeah, it's an ongoing survey that will really, you know, we're really looking to get deployment profiles on as many deployments as we can indefinitely. But what we did prior to the summit was we just took a two-week block of time and said, okay, there'll be a cutoff and then it'll give us, you know, the user committee time to analyze the data and prepare it. But really, we wanna continue to get people filling this out. And those, their slides are online. I don't have the link handy, but their slides are online in their session. Like you said, it was recorded and that'll be online in a few days. Yeah, but we also wanna kind of take a stab at the findings too and put them together. That's a great point. But yes, send your customers here if you haven't, or if you know that they haven't filled it out because they're really trying to track all of this information centrally and have them be part of the aggregate stats. Well, any other questions? That's actually one of the pages in the marketing portal, so it'll be up there soon with more information. But for right now, contact me and I can help you out. Actually, our PR agency is here. There's Kevin in the gray sweatshirt and Royal over here. But basically, you know, if it's like product news or if you're announcing a customer, then or if it's someone like joining or sponsoring the foundation, then we'll generally provide a quote for that, you know, something that's beneficial for the community. If it's, you know, we kind of have to do a judgment call in terms of if the company or organization is really involved, if it's something that we wanna put the foundation weight behind. But generally, we don't do joint press releases in terms of adding our boilerplate to a different press release. We'll just do a quote and help kind of fact check and make sure you have the most recent information that helps. And a lot of times, you know, we have a lot of media relationships and that we can help distribute your news. And we also just have a lot of channels through OpenStack. I mean, we have the bi-monthly newsletter now that Claire helps manage. If you have news, she can distribute it. It goes out to almost 9,000 people at this point. We have the OpenStack blog. We, you know, can help tweet. So the more that you can give us a heads up about your news and what you're trying to do, we can help, you know, amplify it that day. Beyond just the press release.  Kathy's welcome to pitch in too, if you want to. But I'm not sure if you guys have been. Right now we have kind of, before we have this marketing portal set up, we have a marketing wiki where you can find, there's a Google calendar with all the events that we're going to and just different information there for the time being. But some of the big ones that we have coming up are Structure in June and Oskon in July. And then we are sponsoring two Gartner conferences this fall, the bigger IT expo and then the data center conference as well. And in several of these industry events like Oskon and like Gartner, we wanna have a bigger OpenStack presence there. So we have, you know, taken out pavilions and kind of split that cost with different companies and sponsors in the communities. I think the Oskon pavilion is sold out but we'll have like eight pods and a bigger booth. And then we're doing the same thing and looking for partners and sponsors to be part of the Gartner event now as well. And then other things that we've done at these different industry events is, I think that Cloud Expo last year was actually a really good example, but we created these tabletop signs that said OpenStack to the core and I guess like stickers and other giveaways that we can hand out to all of the sponsors at the event that were part of OpenStack, part of the OpenStack community. So instead of just having like one OpenStack booth on the floor at these trade shows, we had OpenStack branding and signage and 20 different booths on the floor. So it just really felt like OpenStack was everywhere and you felt this much stronger community and it was pretty cool. So that's something we wanna continue doing at these different industry events and reaching out to the sponsors beforehand to coordinate. And we're definitely opened ideas there too in terms of what else we can do. Are you gonna have access to the rap song? It's actually, it's at dopenstack.com. Yeah, you can go check it out. Feel free. You thought it was fun. A little bit about Hong Kong, so I'm not sure if you all heard the announcement this morning, but yeah. It's pretty exciting. We've been promising people for some time now that we are going to move out of the US for an event. So we did a big search for this fall and we're pretty excited about going to Hong Kong. We are in the very final stages of getting this locked down, but it's looking like November 5th through 8th, which is a Tuesday through Friday. We're planning for a much bigger event, probably more like four to 5,000 people, but we're thinking of structuring it just a little bit differently. So that, because I mean, obviously we don't want four to 5,000 people in breakout sessions and trying to get into the design summit. So we're talking about tearing out the access this time in terms of passes because we don't wanna lose kind of the core event itself, but also wanna give other people that might be. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending day two of open-stack, all of these sessions are now closed. I thought that was them back there. I was like, okay, you could have just given me a hand signal or something. Ladies and gentlemen, continue to talk about marketing. Anyway, so that's what we're looking at in terms of just options for the event. I think something, and we've been talking to a lot of people about these summits that makes it really different than just another cloud industry event is bringing together developers, bringing together the ecosystem and bringing together the users all into one format, it really being a working event and keeping the content level very high and the passion level very high. So we definitely, we're open to feedback. We definitely, we know we have a lot to improve with every event that we do. So we're always looking for feedback in terms of how we can continue to keep it going. Any questions about Hong Kong? Our plan right now, we're kind of scoping out just the sponsored prospectus and deciding how we're working with a local agency there. So I don't know if you guys know F and Tech who is a production company we've been working with in San Diego in here to put on these summits and then they have a local partner in Hong Kong called MCI who we're gonna be working with kind of on the street there to get the event executed and we went over there and met them and they're really great. So we're feeling really good about the show. Is anyone interested in learning about being a sponsor at the summit in Hong Kong? Good, sold. We haven't... It's called the Asia World Expo. It's actually near the airport. Is there a convention center? Yeah, a little, but it's the only place it's big enough for us with the number of people we have. But there's a convention center and there's a hotel that's attached to it as well which helps us kind of spread out some of the sessions too and hopefully keep the design summit kind of isolated. Have y'all liked the design summit this time? Have you walked in there and seen it? They weren't supposed to walk in there. Lauren, that was the whole idea. Was that a trick question? All right, I'll do a shout out for some other events we have going on. I don't know if you guys are familiar with all the different OpenStack days that get organized, but a lot of times it's a local leader who wants to organize a bigger OpenStack event than just a meetup. And usually they attract a couple hundred people depending on where they're happening and they'll work with us in terms of helping them kind of get it coordinated and branded as an OpenStack event. We have an event policy that's on our website as well just in case you guys are interested in throwing out. But really the intent behind the policy is that any event like this that's branded OpenStack should be a community-focused event, not commercial, not for profit, but should, I mean obviously if you're organizing and participating then you get the benefits of that. But we wanna make sure that we have the brand facing well to the community. But some of the ones coming up and if you guys are interested in sponsoring or getting involved or looking for speakers, Martin's here and he's organizing one in Budapest on May 29th. I think that we might be out there for that. There's an event happening in Tel Aviv. I don't know if you know Naughty Shalom at Gigaspaces. He's one of the primary organizers. And that's May 27th. And there's an event in Berlin at Linux Tog. There's gonna be an OpenStack day there on Friday, May 24th. That's being organized by Florian Haas at Hustexo. So I think we might try to go out and make the rounds and hit those different events late in May. I think you're gonna be in Tel Aviv right, Arturo? Yeah? He's been around a couple of these events too. But anyway, so if you guys wanna get involved we always try to keep these events on the list and please contact Kathy or the organizers. Any questions about events coming up? No. Sorry, I'll let y'all get out of here. Yeah, yeah, so right now there's kind of a, we have a marketing wiki until we get the marketing portal live. But there's a Google Doc with all of these events and that marketing wiki. Oh, cool. What's the date? Of April 26th. April 26th. Who wants to go to Vietnam? The next week. Is it today? Or no? Okay. This is quite a pitch. Definitely a marketer. Well, I was gonna say a great forum for that is the marketing mailing list. I think I just checked the numbers and we have like 160 maybe? I can't remember what it was. Yeah, something like that. There's like 160 people subscribed to the marketing mailing list now and if you're needing speakers, I mean I think that's a great place to go put out a message and get it out to a lot of different people in the community that might be able to help out. And it's good for us to know because we can kind of help get out the word too and see what's possible. Yeah, we don't have to do it. I just wanted to make sure there were like 25 more slots. There's 25 more slots. I'm outta here. Well, I just wanted to give y'all a quick update. We've been doing a lot of research into the different analyst relationships that we wanna have in terms of paying for services and whether it's reports or some inquiries. We've just signed up with Forrester in the last couple of weeks and we're hoping that these are resources that you can leverage as well what we're working with them for. So I wanted to let you know about that. We again are interested in any kind of feedback there, directions that you think we should go in terms of the types of research that would be helpful. I mean, I think that we definitely want to get case studies and some kind of industry reports published that you guys can leverage as well. See what else. That's really about it. The last thing is just making sure that you guys are plugged in and signed up. So we do have those monthly open meetings. We just do it over a WebEx type service. So you can sign up. We always post the slides and post the recording and right now all of that's on the wiki. So please go there. Sign up for the marketing mailing list. We announce the meetings and anything else going on on that list. I think I mentioned the bi-monthly open stack update. Claire's the owner of that and like I said, it goes out to 9,000 people. So we try to put company news in there. We put new sponsors and members and also try to have some thoughtful articles. So if you have any ideas there, please let us know. Logo program, we didn't really talk about a lot but we've added a lot more resources to the website about this in terms of if you're branding your product with open stack but you can find more resources there or get in touch with us. I think that's it. Any other questions? We can hang out and chat for a minute. That's a great question. This is something that we probably failed at before the Grizzly release or I'll take responsibility for failing at before the Grizzly release just because we didn't get enough of the materials together in time but we're actually looking for volunteers to help us with translations. We would like to be able to get our core set of materials done earlier and then have them have local volunteers which is what's worked for us in the past help us with translations and then I'd like to make all those materials available through the portal. So if you're willing to help, that would be awesome. That would be great. Thank you. Okay, that'll work. And you don't offer tours of downtown Athens either. Great. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, we've actually been thinking about that. I mean, when we first designed it, we had like three so it was like no need but now we have a lot and I think there are different ways to sort it and I think we have some ideas about how to do that. Which helps tell that business value story a little bit too, as someone was asking earlier. Well, we'd like to thank all of you. Yeah, thanks for sticking with us here after six.


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Good afternoon everyone. I am Vandit from Mitspilani. I am going to represent specifically tech power assessments. Starting from sounds, images and video, we will go to a lot of applications from different interns. But I will start with some of the common things of this presentation like the purpose. In particular arts of tech power assessments, we are focusing on automated assessments of unexplored areas. Now, what are the unexplored areas? Means you go to some online content and there are some, you learn from that website. There are some assessments, there are some MCUs, let's say, there are some questions and you will be elated according to that. But unexplored areas, let's say sound, let's say image and videos, there are unexplored areas particularly for assessment. So, when we started our intern, it was our first task to explore applications. That, okay, we decided sound, image and video. So, what are the applications and what are the factors we need to consider while deciding these applications? So, first we need to choose, but first we need to see the ideology of the space suit or the e3 store, which was explained by Ayushi. And when we think that, we need to put this application as a course with assessment on ID Bombayx platform. And it should be some course with learning assessment, which is useful for the students. So, these are the areas and applications, you can say, which were decided by us. In sound technology we have piano, tabla, then in image we have drawing, painting, shaping, and then for video we have gymnastics and this diving. So, one thing which was in our mind was that we need to choose an application which is feasible for this 50 days. We can complete in 50 days because any application, we need to give it a final shape. If we choose some large application, if we are not able to complete in 50 days, it is useless. Project methodology, this is very common for all the projects. So, when we decide application, we started searching for exercises, what are the exercises that we can give to students and now what is our task as a developer? So, these are the exercises student, what will student upload, what will the process and how this results will be shown to students. So, with that when we become developer from this stage, we started exploring open source technology which we can use for specific to applications, then what pre-processing we need to do. After pre-processing only the student file is like eligible to be matched with the teacher's file because that is how we will do assessment, student file, teacher file matching and then score calculation and then response to students because we need to tell student that these are the things you did wrong in this part, you did right in this part and final score. Obviously, we did test, we did test and the success of project obviously depends on the parameter tuning and testing means there are a lot of applications, these are all research, I am not saying exactly but kind of research like things. So, there are a lot of things we need to decide parameters at some stages. So, this is how we did all these projects. The pre-processing that is talking about is mainly concerned with negating the effect of differences between the environment capture. For example, the teacher has played tabla one type of tabla, student has played another type of tabla. We want to know whether student has played tabla properly, the recording may be different. So, the student tabla noise has to match the teacher tabla noise, I always call sound as noise. So, they always get upset, there is no music, there is only noise for me. So, basically the amplitude they have to match before they start matching that. Similarly, there is a image drawing image that is uploaded, the student can upload a larger image, smaller image. So, I have to scale the image, I may have to rotate the image before I actually match. So, that is the pre-processing that is required in all size, that is to take care of any discrepancy between what the student has uploaded, the capturing environment with student has uploaded and the teacher is capturing environment. Noise reduction also, noise reduction also is part of their exercise. Okay, images some clean up, I think they may have done or may not have done. What if student plays? Better than the teacher. Better than the teacher, here assuming that the teacher file is the most ideal file according to means when you are matching. No, there is no better, okay, because better is a concept based on the human ear, correct, it is not better. What we are considering is how much does it match? So, even if it sounds better, okay, he will be feeling, okay, because it is not matching the teacher. We don't know what the interval is. We are matching the, okay, to answer that question, one of the things which No, no, no, no, because there is no interval. Intervals, from intervals you want to say that, I am playing piano, then Saree, Gamma, Prudin sir, that difference. Yes, so teacher plays perfectly, okay, and you are assuming it. No, no, teacher plays something, student has to replicate. Applicate? No, but student has to replicate. Teacher makes a mistake. Student has to replicate the mistake. There should be some suggestion for teacher that there is some mistake somewhere. Suggestion from student to teacher, right? Not student, the system itself. System itself. So, you should do some basic analysis at least. Okay.  Okay, this is music, this is arts, nothing like what is perfect, okay. And then, something should be perfect, right? You are singing? No, no, if we actually take the music of all of those which have been sung in Bollywood, you will come to know what is, how they are sung, right? That is out. That was discarded in the beginning only. Okay, this is only music. That is one way of doing it, but one way would be to actually study the sound. Study the sound, okay. So, at the end, do analysis on it. Yes, sir. So, what you are doing is, teacher file is there and student file is there. So, student is uploading, it is comparing with teacher. You are saying that it should be, it should give analysis of teacher file also, right? Right. So, for analysis of teacher's file, that should be... Okay, okay. Another question. Yes, sir. A student is playing. Okay, sir. Okay. The student is actually not matching with the teacher. Student? Yes. So, do you give any suggestions? Yes. You will show. That was what I want to see. Yes, sir. So, I have just one comment. You are saying that teacher's file should be analyzed, right? Yes. So, at the end, that is some reference. Machine knows the music, right? Machine doesn't know the music. So, you have to write certain models, no? How machine will know the music? Yes. You are saying that you need to analyze the teacher's file also. Yes. Analyze teacher's file means what? We are analyzing teacher's file, obviously. But for evolution, for assessment, we are taking, it is a reference.   Yes. And then show a demo. Correct, sir. So, I will ask Prashant for the demo.


And welcome to School of Resistance, a discourse platform that invites experts on change around the world to discourse a blueprint for a politics of resistance. Tonight's conversation is called Blow the System So Change, Destruction as a Tool for Survival, and we'll consider an ideology of destruction. What if self-destruction and destruction of property are the only tools left for survival in a hyper-capitalized world? What if destruction is an act of loss but an act of love? This particular episode has been produced in the context of the Gantian Belmundo Festival, a locally city-based festival thinking about international solidarity. This year's festival is devoted to the question how to change the system. My name is Elin Banken, and I'm very happy to contribute to this question together with these two interesting speakers who will join me in tonight's conversation. Our first guest speaker is the associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, Andreas Mann. In May, Versa will release white-skinned black fuel on the danger of fossil-fascism, a book he co-authored together with the Z-kin Connective. My second guest is the psychologist and author Marianne Domer. In her Self-Roosting's book, Warum Me Meeren Moetestinke, Trinke, Blüte, Belmde en Danse, translated, it's a manual to self-destruction, why we should smell, drink, bleed, burn, and dance more often. She accuses the self-help industry of keeping us in line by imposing yoga leggings, pedometers, and positive thoughts. In the meantime, the book has also been published in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, and France will follow next this month. Before I open up the conversation, I want to remind the audience of the possibility to enter the discussion, and you can do so by posting your questions on the live stream on Facebook, or by sending them to the e-mail address schoolofresistanceofentigence.be. So I would like to start this discussion by quoting a book of Andreas. It's called How to Blow Up a Pipeline. In that book, Andreas, you give an overview of several historic revolutions, such as the abolitionist movement, or the suffragettes, and illustrate the part of violence played in bringing about effective change. Connecting it to the climate crisis, you ask yourself, and I quote, when do we start physically attacking things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason why we have waited this long? What are your thoughts on the role of nonviolent protest place in the current climate movement? Where do you think, does it come from, and what do you think, and do you think that the current climate strategy could be redefined to encompass a notion of destruction? Yeah, thanks, Liam, for having me on the School of Resistance, I should say first. I'm honored to be part of this. So, as you quoted from my book, I'm sort of posing the question of when, if ever, do we escalate in the climate movement and go beyond what we've done so far? And I'm talking about the climate movement in the global north, more specifically. And so far, we have been very firmly committed to absolute nonviolent civil disobedience. And this has been a productive, fruitful strategy that has achieved a lot because the movement has made an impact, has rallied a lot of people to the streets, notably in 2019, when we saw an unprecedented wave of climate mobilization, and can demonstrate a number of local victories, often on a fairly small scale, but still one terminal or pipeline project defeated here, a coal-fired power plant there, and so on and so forth. So, I am by no means against this kind of nonviolent direct action to the contrary. I try to participate it as often as I can, and I describe just a few actions that I've been part of in Northern Europe recently in the book. And I'm not arguing that we should desist from this kind of action and cancel that kind of tactic. But I do think that we need to diversify it and add more confrontational and militant tactics because I don't think, and that's where the historical cases come in, I don't think there is any useful analogy to the climate struggle that hasn't involved a component of proper destruction and other types of more radical confrontation with the ruling order. And we don't need to go very far back into history to see this. I mean, just look at the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, the people there stormed the police station in the third precinct and burnt it down, and that was the act that catalyzed the wave of protests that then engulfed the country and turned into the largest social movement in U.S. history if you count the number of people participating in demonstrations. And there is this idea that I refer to in the book as strategic pacifism that as soon as you engage in anything like property destruction or what counts as violent tactic, you immediately lose mass support and alienate your base. But here, in this case with BLM in the U.S., it was exactly the other way around that the targeting of police property immediately after the murder of George Floyd broke the paralysis around the structural and systematic violence perpetrated by the U.S. police against African-Americans and demonstrated very concretely that this is not an inexorable force. It's not beyond our influence. It's something that we can go in and physically put an end to by damaging or destroying the property from which these racist cops operate. And it drew in unprecedented numbers of people into that movement. And I think that's just one of many cases of the climate movement could learn from. And I should say that I'm far from the only one posing this question. I'm recommending to everyone right now the marvelous novel, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stiley Robinson, which deals quite a lot with a scenario of organized sabotage and destruction of the property that destroys the planet as a central component of the transition as he imagines it might play out, even in the best case, because that's how he conceives in the book that it's a sort of best case scenario for what might happen in the coming decades. And then a key element of that best case is concerted effort by people, particularly from the global south and more particularly from India to put out of business fossil fuel infrastructure around the world. And let me just finish by saying that what triggers that movement of sabotage in that novel is a hyper-lethal heat wave that takes place in Uttar Pradesh and India in the year 2034, so that will be 13 years from now that kills 20 million people in one week because the temperatures reach a level that cannot be endured by human bodies. And it's after this event of an almost genocidal scale that young people in India start fighting back by destroying fossil fuel property around the world. And just the other week, a paper was published in Nature Geoscience, one of the leading climate science journals that demonstrated that this kind of heat wave is on the way it's coming, particularly in tropical zones of the world that are pushed towards the limits of human habitability and adaptation because temperatures of this kind are in the pipeline almost literally. And the question that he asks with this novel is as I take it in the beginning of the novel of these, at what point do we start the fight back in these more concrete terms and do we have to wait for a heat wave that kills 20 million people or should we start earlier? Yeah, that's the question can be posed. Yeah, I'm wondering because in the book you're mainly talking about destruction, constructing the fossil fuel properties or the infrastructure that produces that transports fossil fuels such as pipelines, mining areas, machines. But at one point you also turn to the destruction of private property, namely you refer to a group of Swedish activists that deflated the tires of SUVs in their cities in order to raise awareness to the polluted effect they have. But I'm wondering these sorts of actions, do they turn the action, do they turn responsibility? I'm sorry, no, let me repeat it. These sorts of actions, I feel that they turn the attention to the responsibility of the consumer. But how do you think do these two sort of actions, destruction of private property and destruction of the property producing fossil fuels, how do they relate to each other? Do you agree that pointing to consumption is diverting the attention from the role that the system plays in this? Yeah, that's a good question. Let me just say first that what these activists did in Sweden was not actually to destroy property and not even to damage it, but just very temporarily neutralizing those SUVs by deflating the tires. So you could just refill the tires with air and the SUV would be ready to go again. But I personally wouldn't be necessarily against more hands-on destruction of SUVs because SUVs are an incredibly important source in our current predicament. Believe it or not, but figures from the International Energy Agency suggest that the rising share in SUV sales on the world car market has been the second largest driver of the increase in CO2 emissions in the past decade. I mean, and these are machines that no one really need. It's not like there is a basic human need for SUVs that cannot be fulfilled by other cars that emit less. And generally what we have here is a problem of elite consumption that is extremely destructive to the climate and thereby, I mean, in the end, contributing to the death of people. Sorry, this is my son who's knocking on the door here. I'm on parent leave. So we have a little bit of a symbiosis going on right now. And this kind of consumption just goes on day after day. And there is no stigma attached to it. To the contrary, people often regarded as the ideal, the model to strive for, to reach that kind of pinnacle of high consumption. And it just can continue that way. Another report that came out, and these reports are, you know, they come out all the time. But there was one that was published in last autumn from Oxfam and Stockholm Environment Institutes that showed that the richest 1% of humanity has, through its consumption, caused more than twice as large CO2 emissions as the half, the poorest half of humanity since the 1990s. So the richest 1%, by driving SUVs and being hyper-frequent flyers and having the largest homes and living these kind of lifestyles with SuperYaks and everything, they have contributed more than twice as much to global heating as the poorest half of humanity. And when you think of it, it's absolutely mind-boggling, dizzying that the world can be operating in this fashion. And I think that it's legitimate to try to, to try to attach a question mark to that kind of consumption. Although I would still, I mean, I wouldn't much prefer that climate movement that escalates and moves into forms of sabotage, target fossil fuel production, extraction and the companies that produce and distribute things like SUVs or SuperYaks or private jets rather than personal consumers or the goods that they have in their parking lots or whatever. But I don't see necessarily that it would have to be a distraction and a diversion to target the luxury emissions of the ultra-rich. I think the ultra-rich do not have any kind of sacred right to combust this planet to death, although they now go about their lives as if they had that kind of right. But I think the time has come to puncture and deflate that right in handsome manner. Yes. That's also something that we find in your book, Marianne, like the individualization of the crime crisis by focusing on consumption behavior that we divert the attention from what indeed the super-rich or the system and the system that is making these choices for us. Another tendency I feel that is closely related to this is the issue of shaming. People are often shamed for eating meat, they feel guilty for taking the plane, et cetera.  What effect do you think do these sorts of feelings have when it comes to, yeah, right in the climate crisis? Yeah, well, yeah, there has been done a lot of research about this and shame is a really, really corrosive emotion. It makes you feel really small. It involves self-hatred. And for millennia in history, it's been a form of punishment. Also, shaming, the public shaming of people. But it works. But again, it diverts the attention. And I really see it as a tactic. In the 60s, you had this slogan, the personal is political, which means how your life is lived. That's a political question. And nowadays, under neoliberal ideology, it has been changed. So now the political has been made personal. So we constantly make things personal. If people get a burnout, it's not because of a constant stress of being under a flex contract or not being able to pay your insanely high rent. But you need to yoga more and you need to learn to say, no, it's your problem. If you are unhappy or depressed or anxious, it's not because the world is really depressive or that our communities have been broken, but it's something wrong in your brain. You need to take a pill. If your son or daughter cannot sit still in class, it's not because the classes are way too full. The teachers are way too busy. There's not enough time to play no. It's because of their brain. They need to take written in. So in this way, everything is constantly made personal. And in a way, it's like saying, well, the system we live in, that is good. It's working.  And you see the same in the climate debate or debate in the struggle for climate justice. It's changing a little bit now, but it used to be for a very long time.  And it's sort of a lie because it's not going to change a lot. If everybody does it, it will, but it won't because we have a problem in the production of things. It's more of a, yeah. You have always had a supply and demand market and we think that demand is what the supply is based on, but it's again the other way around. There's a lot of supply and so demand is created and that it needs to change. And while I agree with Andreas that the 1% have a lifestyle that is outrageous, still I think that it is not useful. Shaming is not a useful tactic because it makes things personal and individualized and I kind of feel sorry for people when they are ashamed because it really is a really bad emotion of guilt. The church, it rested on it by playing the guilt and shame cards. It's a religious thing almost and I would rather see it go. Yeah, in a way it also reminds me a bit like you say where you refer to this Ritalin or this yoga. In a way, you could also see it as a form of self-deception because I also think that people make themselves believe that they need it in order to function in this world. In a sort of way, people want to know what they can do and it's sort of a way it seems like it's easier to change yourself than to change the whole world. So yeah, but in the end it's a form of self-discipline. Last year there was a sort of strike by workers from Starbucks in the United States and the workers demanded more better working hours and a better salary and more stability and they didn't even go on strike but they filled in a petition and so the heads, they took in this petition and after a few weeks they came back to the workers and they said, yeah, we listened to you very well and this is what we are going to do. You all get a subscription to Headspace from now on and Headspace is a mindfulness app. So this is literally how it works. People are like, how do you say this? They adapt to the system by mindfulness yoga so they can take more, more of the stress that the world and society is putting on them and they don't look what the workers did but in general they look less at what's wrong with the system and try to fit in with all these tools. Yeah, in a way this also beautifully connects to the subtitle of the book like why we should smell, drink, bleed, burn and dance more often that it's a clear call to indeed step out of this neoliberal logic of self-optimization of a constant adaptation to a system that might not be healthy. Could you elaborate on this story and express your viewpoints on how self-destruction could have like an emancipatory tool or an emancipatory result? Yeah, well I meant the word self-destruction of course is an antidote to the self-help industry which is constantly saying optimize yourself, be better, adapt better to the world as it is. And in my book I keep saying well you are not the problem here the problem is the world we live in but it's also kind of the self-destruction of your neoliberal self, your neoliberal super ego Freud would say. So this self that wants to adapt and I see it as like people are more and more by this optimization which strangely enough is always the same for everyone. So it is said we live in a hyper individualized times but somehow the best version for everyone is the same. So it's fit and tight and very productive and if you're a woman you have pumped up lips and you are eternally young and so if you look on Instagram or social media everybody starts looking more and more the same and it's like robots who come out of how do you call that, forgot the word but it's reducing us to hard working robots to be as productive as possible not waste any time but always work, work, work and go in this grind thing culture and my things, the sub title and the titles of the chapters is making you human again. To be human is to stink and sweat and it is to drink that is waste time and that's how I wrote it. Some is taken literally others not but it's to waste time and not be productive and be in a different kind of aesthetic mood. So it's all about a very dehumanizing culture and the resistance against that and the destruction of the robots that come out of this culture and to be human again. Yeah, I remember that in a column you wrote that you referred to the NAP Ministry which is an initiative by Tricia Hersey and it's an attempt to dismantle capitalism and white supremacy by napping and by daydreaming and by really stepping out of the system so to say. How do you think that considering this form of inactivism if I could say that is this compatible with a form of progress? Because of course progress is associated with this idea of neoliberal self-optimization and bettering yourself, bettering the world but if we take initiatives such as Tricia Hersey's NAP Ministry which clearly advocates a form of inactivism if I can say that would that mean that that is incompatible with progress or how do you feel towards that? Yeah, in that case everything depends on what you call progress how you define progress and nowadays progress is defined as growth so economically growth or personal growth and of course money-wise so we need to pursue more, earn more, be more everything has to be more but obviously this is not progress because it's destroying people and animals and the earth itself so that is not a sustainable way of living that is a very destructive way of living so this system with the ideology that belongs with it that needs to be destroyed and I think that's why I wrote my book I think it's really hard to destroy a system where you do not attack the ideology that goes with it because this ideology of growth and self-optimization and robotization it's in commercials, it's in movies, it's in social media it's in books so you also need to attack that to get hopefully this mental system because I wanted to say that and that connects Andreas also with me because what this does if everything is made personal it turns the energy inwards people start looking at themselves what is wrong with me how can I be better but that energy needs to go outwards and Andreas has a whole plan for that what you do once the energy goes outwards but what I would like to do is first change that within a person do not look at yourself what is wrong with you go outwards and all this energy and self-hatred and guilt and shame needs to go there and then you can act I'm wondering Andreas because of course in how to blow up a pipeline you call for quite another form of activism you question how the revolution could be optimized possibly by considering a form of activism that goes beyond or that goes together with peaceful protest but next to that also has a form of a more militant approach what do you think of this form of this sort of inactivism do you think it works or well I'm not sure I think that the I mean if we look at it very concretely the combustion of fossil fuels is ongoing and growing and the accumulation of capital by means of extracting and selling fossil fuels is as rampant as ever and there was just a report that some of you might have seen saying that since 2015 when the Paris Agreement was negotiated the 60 largest banks in the world have pumped something like 4 trillion dollars into projects for extracting more fossil fuels so the capitalist class to speak frankly is still enriching itself more and more by taking out even more fuels to pour on the planetary fire and how do we deal with this do we deal with it by being inactive or do we deal with it by targeting it more effectively than we've done so far straight forward and aggressively if you like and I think obviously I'm leaning towards the latter I agree that shame is not the productive emotion here the one emotion that needs to be fanned is anger and research suggests that if there is one emotion that drives social movement mobilization it is anger it is rage and there is a lot to be angry about and upset about in this sphere of climate change the fact that something like Total the single largest private company in France is about to go into the Arctic to drill for even more fossil gas to take out and sell on the market or the fact that solar engineering is coming closer and closer as as an alternative option for addressing this this problem which will just throw us down the lane of another kind of disaster in the climate system most likely so for me it's not about so much optimizing the I mean that's not a term that I would use but yes we do need to look for strategies and tactics that work I mean we have no other option really than to look for forms of mobilization that work and this is not about cultivating a lifestyle an activist lifestyle but about using different means to draw in as many people as possible into the climate movement and the mobilization that it is engaged in with its allies and to refer again to the wonderful novel that I mentioned the Ministry for the Future if there will be a transition away from fossil fuels it will be a very turbulent process it will be messy it will be filled with contradictions it will involve a lot of people in many different roles including everything from sabotage to negative emissions to regenerative agricultural cooperatives and the whole spectrum of activity and this is not about you know furnishing a particular agenda of activism not about shaming people and I agree that shame is not the best emotion to this and people into mobilization on the other hand I'd like to point out that a lot of social progress is about that certain acceptable so many other people absolutely illegal once slavery was finally abolished and the same with child labor and other forms of exploitation and I think the task here is to lay down in as concrete terms as possible that it is not acceptable to burn profligate amounts of fossil fuels that is a form of crime and it needs to be dealt with as such and because our states are still not capable of laying down that principle that we need to step forth and do it from outside of the states to obviously with the aim of eventually pushing the states to enact the necessary legislation and set full transition in motion go ahead because I think they are totally complimentary so the inaction is within the machine the inaction is to not be a radar in this machine if you rest like the net ministry says which is healthier than my drinking but if you rest she says that because you take yourself out of this mindset and this grind culture this keeps us within the inactive is not on things where you need to be active I totally agree but as Andrea says you have to get mad and you have to get angry but as I said this energy goes inwards nowadays people get mad and angry at themselves because they feel like a loser because they stand outside of the system and to get mad that energy has to go outwards not to yourself but outwards and then you can act I totally agree with that so these two things are complimentary they are just different things but I think they align I'm not just wondering as well because I also get why the feeling of anger would be a much more fruitful breeding ground than the feeling of shame but of course anger is also very likely or can have this effect indeed of destruction and violence and looting and how aren't you afraid as soon as a climate movement might consider a more militant approach an approach of destruction that it gets easily stigmatized as being a terrorist grouping because the logic of violence has been often associated with not that valid revolutions that happen so to speak of course there is that risk I think every kind of climate activism mobilization runs the risk of demonization, I mean even Extinction Rebellion although it observed absolutely perfect non-violent civil disobedience at least until very late in the day in 2019 where the infamous Tube action was accused of being terrorists or Nigel Farage of the UK he used the term economic terrorism for the XR and if you step up and actually destroy things of course some people will call you terrorists and the far right will hate you and maybe even more than they've done so far this is inherent to the problem just as the BLM wave in 2020 in the US elicited enormous rage and hate from the white supremacists convinced that BLM was guilty of terrorism that doesn't mean that it was in any way wrong or unwise to do what BLM did and when you are facing an enemy that is extremely powerful in society there is no way around polarization and antagonism you cannot win over that enemy by being kind and nice and gentle this is what we've tried in the climate movement for some time and we fundamentally believe that fossil capital most primarily the corporations that profit from production of fossil fuels that's a force that needs to be vanquished and that needs to be put out of business we cannot have a habitable climate and these kind of corporations at the same time we have to choose that means that if we are going to win this fight of course we are going to suffer backlash and varying forms of demonization the important thing for the climate movement is to not actually go down the route of terrorism which means do not kill people do not more particularly kill innocent civilians to create fear because that is what terrorism is all about as long as you are intelligent and precise in targeting the material sources of destruction you have at least a fair chance of convincing people that what you are doing is not terrorism because it isn't what you are doing is you are taking out the machines that are destroying the planet and actually at the end of the day taking the lives of multitudes which is an activity that comes to the definition of terrorism and what it would be to take those machines offline but I really can't stress enough first of all we shouldn't do at this stage any harm to people from the climate movement that would be disastrous and it would be wrong and we need to be cautious and careful and smart about any kind of escalation and diversification of tactics that comes close to destroying property or anything like that you need to be able to explain to people why you are doing it and you need to be able to gain some level of mass support for it and it needs to be part of a mass movement just like the property destruction that ran through the BLM mobilization of last year was part of the mass movement in the US I mean all through from Minneapolis to Portland in the BLM movement that targeted properties of cops what you did not have thankfully were BLM activists who assassinated police chiefs or sent suicide bombers into police headquarters something like that that would have been terrorism that would have done damage to the movement but the radical flank that you had as the cutting edge of the mobilization actually I do think contributed to pushing the BLM struggle to another level last year and that's what we need to see in the climate struggle when the next wave of mobilization comes I think again I want to say something I think which is in these days that property of course is something holy there is no nothing holier than property and a man is his property so audiences are really not very open I think to destroying property and that's why because I agree with Andreas but that's what you've done with it is a discussion about ownership and about whose property is this so we have to discuss who owns the Amazon for instance and now it's not the people who live there it's not the Brazilians it's not the animals who live there but it's Unilever or the big companies who make soy plantages there so along we need to discuss who owns the planet but also personally who owns our time our attention our work so the way we structure structured businesses is with ownership of a few how do you call them andale holders shareholders who take the profit and if you work for 40 years somewhere you own nothing you see that is coming up with businesses who try to think differently about this and think about ownership and I think this should be like a discussion that we should have on all grounds about the planet and also about our lives and as I said who owns our time is my time because I have a smart phone is it in my boss time he can call me anytime he likes who owns my attention we have this social media which we are made to be addictive to so along with Andreas destruction this is a topic we should talk about I did in my questioning yourself about these questions who owns our time we could maybe consider more about what it is we are actually devoting on to really make the best use of it so to say and in this way I am again using this terminology of the best use and then I am falling into the trap of this and again but it is an interesting question I do want to say because we received some questions from the audience I am happy to read them to you the first one is to Andreas I think so it is a behalf when as Marianne says we should resist a hyper individualized world we live in what are your thoughts on this well we live in a hyper individualized world and much of what goes for activism these days is fairly atomized and largely due to social media it is quite evanescent and transient and it is about individuals coming together on a very temporary basis often responding to calls for demonstrations and disappearing and everyone goes home and that is the end of that wave of demonstration and then the news cycle moves on I think we need to find ways of building more solid forms of organization that lasts longer than more or less spontaneous wave of demonstrations and I think any kind of action of the sort I have been considering here and to some extent advocating is a question of acting collectively together groups of people it can be enormously large groups of people or it can also be smaller groups of people but it has to be collective action and it has to be part of some kind of mass mobilization and do we have the agency to do that well we are not exercising that agency at least not very successfully and certainly now under the pandemic the climate movement has canceled all activities and just retreated very obediently to everyone's individual home and screen which is disastrous in a sense I think the movement in Belarus or the abortion rights movement in Poland and other cases have shown now in Myanmar that it is actually possible to have social mobilization even revolve under the conditions of the pandemic so the climate movement needs to get off its ass again and get back on the streets I do think that there are not technically or physically or even psychologically impossible for us to act as collectives and do it in a more sustained and effective fashion than what we have seen in recent years we just need to learn and perhaps relearn how to do that maybe you want to respond as well Mariano this idea of learning these collective sorts of action again I agree with Andreas the word learning is a good one we need to learn collective action again because of course again this individualization is also a tactic as I said before communities have been broken there are still libraries but a lot less and more I don't know all the English words for this but community centers and where elderly people met younger and they have all disappeared because people should be take care of themselves and it was all too expensive so communities have been broken I don't know if we're that individualized but we have been optimized, made atoms so it's difficult to find each other again in a collective goal also because of this ideology that you need to take care of yourself and altruism doesn't exist we're all in competition with each other but I think we're learning again you see that as with Black Lives Matter and with the climate movement because people find each other again so I'm really hopeful in that way that we're on a good trend there is one more it's a question to both of you what are your thoughts on expropriation and socialization how can we reinvent these ideas without repeating the course of the 20th century if anybody of you wants to take the lead go ahead I'm very happy to talk about this I'm all for reviving notions of socialization and expropriation and I think a key demand for people in countries where private fossil fuel corporations exist or where they are headquartered is to demand their immediate nationalization so in the Netherlands an obvious demand should be that Shell be nationalized and instantly it will terminate all fossil fuel production and the entity should be transformed into something else for instance an organization for taking CO2 out of the air instead of adding to it and the same for BP, Total, ExxonMobil and all the others and of course there is a whole massive section of these kind of companies that are already state owned and compel the state to do what's necessary with these companies, namely to order them to stop doing what they're doing and turning them into something different but in countries where the property is private the struggle begins by making it national and taking over those companies and we really need to understand that human survival is not compatible we can't end the century with continued private property in fossil fuels as in the right for private property owners to take up coal or oil or gas and sell them on the market or for private owners to take those fuels and burn them it's just a question of time if we want to have a biosphere in which we can live that these resources will have to be put under public control and the ownership of them, the private ownership of them terminated. The task for the climate movement is to make that happen sooner rather than later how to avoid the mistakes of the 20th century? Well that's a question of understanding the causes of the mistakes and the horrors that ensued in the Soviet bloc so that's a question of our understanding of the reasons for why we had something like Stalinism and I for one don't think that the reason that we got Stalinism in the Soviet Union and in the satellite states was that there was something inherently oppressive with socializing the means of production I think we had completely different reasons notably the isolation of the Russian Revolution the very impoverished part of the world and its failure to spread into Germany and other parts of the country that condemned the Russian Revolution to degeneration but that's a historical discussion that we should take another time but I think that a transition away from fossil fuels in this century will have to be global just as socialism in one country was an impossibility in the 20th century to de-generate it and became Stalinism and then eventually it became capitalism again this century a transition away from fossil fuels in one country doesn't make sense at all it has to be global and that means that the dynamic will be very different from what we saw in Russia and what came up from that country Thank you I keep thinking about I'm reading a book about Quantum Mechanica Helgoland it's called and somehow it is discussed in this book about Quantum Mechanica the Russian Revolution is also discussed and what went wrong there from a Quantum Mechanic perspective but I'm thinking about this because he says sort of the mistake Lenin made was that they had this ideal that they knew exactly what kind of world they wanted to build and I think for me everything starts with a no so this is not good no and then after you say no people always say yes what kind of world do you envision you have to have a vision of this new world but I don't think so and I think in the book you mentioned Andreas the ministry of I read an interview with Reider and he also says that it's like little steps that we figure out with each other what kind of world we want to build afterwards or going to that point instead of having this one vision and everything has to move it's really about baby steps coming together and of course I don't know exactly nobody knows how this should be done but it's a yes we have to figure out after we have said no so that is my really vague answer to this that's of course no problem I do want to address it's one more tendency that I experience when I'm watching the climate movement it seems for me and you could always correct me if you think I'm wrong that the activism has some sort of being appropriated by the capitalist system because I feel especially also because of the advertising we already touched upon it like social media has become like a very specific and concrete image of what an activist lifestyle what it should look like and it's similar logic I feel that we now see with the current pandemic and how with the care crisis and how big industries are now capitalizing on care by care so I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this idea of activism being appropriated by capitalism and I am wondering also because the overall team of the festival this discussion is part of has been devoted to system change I'm wondering how can we take down a system that takes benefit of all the actions that we carry out in order to take it down it's a question to the both of you so anybody who feels over if you want to respond Mahel yeah yeah yeah no it's but this might be the biggest power of capitalism the way it always takes in resistance to it so I believe it is in a book I forgot his name in capitalist realism Mark Fisher Mark Fisher he quotes Kurt Cobain one said nothing plays better on MTV than a protest against MTV so somehow the system is always capable of taking it in and then Shell makes starts telling you how you could lower your footprint and everything so that is a danger it takes the radicalism out of it and yeah how there's nothing you can do to stop that but it's sort of you have to be more radical than to still attack the system so yeah that's what we're doing right now being more radical and I think one of the I don't know if you said this or if you emailed this earlier but one of the problems is also that it's not really a lot of fun to be an activist it's really of course because the world is really depressing and I think because we've been learned so much to punish yourself and self-hatred that we're not doing enough that we're not I can't find words anymore that has taken the energy also out of us and out of the struggle and the fun but again my opinion is as soon as we stop doing all this energy in words and blaming ourselves and pushing it outwards nothing is impossible anymore and the fun can go back and the energy also yeah I mean this is something that the left and anti-capitalist social movements have had to struggle with for a long time the ability of capitalism to co-opt forms of protests and not believe their aesthetics but when it comes to the climate movement there are certain forms of action that so far haven't been amenable for co-optation and that's the more radical kind of mass action that we've I mean Fridays for Future is one thing and you can have politicians and even businessmen posting with Greta Thunberg or something like that but I haven't yet seen that kind of co-optation of something like the climate camps which is the form of climate movement that I praise the most lavishly in my book How to Blow Up a Pipeline and that I have identified with most closely in recent years particularly in the Gelände the climate movement in Germany but it has its Dutch off-shoot in Kolder Road and other similar climate camps across Europe by Standing Rock and other indigenous protest camps in North America and in those camps people certainly have a lot of fun there is a lot of dancing happening in those camps and people certainly stink and I think they bleed too and smoke and have a lot of fun so you can certainly I mean in that kind of collective communal space I release a lot of these emotions because it's a lot about finding community and collective solidarity in living differently while at the same time targeting the property that is at the root of the problem and this is one of the most promising forms of action that I know for the climate movement now unfortunately it's all on hold because of the pandemic I hope it can kick off again very soon Yes, but that is the point because a collective action it's so much more difficult to appropriate that or to co-op that and to individualize it and sell it on a t-shirt that is really difficult so that is the way to go indeed and come together Yes, thank you and also actually thank you for initiating my last question to the both of you which was exactly on this notion of joy because it seems sometimes there is a tendency towards a rigid sort of a skeptic lifestyle where there is little room left for pleasure and joy when it comes to fighting a crisis so my final question to the both of you even though you already touched upon it would be how much joy is there allowed or you think is necessary in fighting for a better world Yeah, necessary everything that one of the interesting things nowadays is if you look at the elite so the 1% and always used to be a lot of eating, a lot of partying letting it all hang out but if you now look at the CEOs at Silicon Valley especially the one from Twitter who I forgot his name they are so self-controlled they fast they take cold ice baths they live a really joyless stoic existence and say to people do just like me and then you will be successful too and people say okay I will live a joyless existence too so but that was on a side note but no I think it all starts with with the joy and also with feeling how do you say that feeling good enough for the joy so I think now you are back there was a slide was I lost yes you were lost we lost you a bit okay focusing that in energy outwards yeah I mean my own experience of collective action is not that it's well at least not since the 1990s and I think I think of asceticism and renunciation and things like that I mean certain things will have to be renounced no for certain fuels and that it is perceived that way by people who don't see the necessary to fight climate change they feel that the people on the left are really joyless and yeah I mean even something like a riot or a big square occupation or some other kind of carnival of revolt tends to involve quite a lot of fun I have to say so I'm all for combating rage and that's what revolutionary politics has been about for a long time yes alright I think it's indeed might be indeed a good idea to invite some of the more skeptics to one of the climate camps one of the riots that could be a very fruitful start alright both of you thank you very much for joining me tonight in this conversation which discussed how discourse might enable taking down the system several possible strategies in building up a world once more thank you for for this and I'm very happy to continue and redefine protests and resistance in the near future before I say goodbye to the audience I have the pleasure of announcing something namely the worldwide release of the new gospel it's the newest movie after its premiere in Venice the movie is now widely released and can be watched from April 1st till April 4th via the website tickets cost 8 euros and subtitles are available in Dutch French, Italian and English since we believe this movie is an exemplary illustration of how art and activism managed to take down the system I very much want to encourage you all to watch it so I'm wishing you all a good night for now thank you once more and hope to see you soon thank you it was a pleasure, a joy thank you bye


There was some interesting news that came out in the New York press this past week. Jerry Capace over at Gangland News was able to illuminate some interesting tidbits from the New York FBI office that I want to share. It's related to what's been an almost decade-long feud between the FBI offices in New York and Philadelphia related to Skinny Joy Merlino, the most compelling mafia Don in America, the Instagram Don as I call him, the brand new podcaster of his show, The Skinny on YouTube. We're living in some crazy times in 2023 where you have a godfather that's YouTube. And this would be like if John Gotti in 1988 was a host in a television show. But getting away from the surreal nature of that, we've known for about seven or eight years that there was acrimony between the FBI offices in New York City and Philadelphia related to a 2016 racketeering indictment that they referred to, the federal government referred to as the East Coast LCN case. They took down leaders of five separate families, four of the five New York families, and then Joey Merlino, who's been living down in Florida since 2011 when he got out of prison on his most recent serious case, his racketeering conviction in 2001, and he moved down to Florida and the New York FBI was investigating Joey down in Florida as well as when he was coming up to New York to meet with the Genovese crime family and some of the KZs. So we knew when the case dropped in the summer of 2016 that the Philadelphia FBI felt kind of blindsided by it. They weren't kept in the loop. They were shielded, I guess, from what New York was doing, and they felt that New York owed them at least lip service, at least, you know, if not including them in the investigation, at least for them to receive word of what was going on. But New York didn't want Philadelphia or the Miami FBI office to know that they were investigating Merlino. Miami is kind of the boots on the ground for Joey because he spends most of the year in South Florida, but the Philadelphia office still has Joey prominently on their dartboard. He's public enemy number one. He claims he's no longer a mob down. He's retired. He's been retired since he got out of prison over a decade ago, but the FBI still believes. He's the head honcho of the Bruno Scarfield crime family. What's most interesting about this news, I kind of buried the lead, I apologize, is that the New York FBI office was involved in subterfuge. It's coming out in a new book called War Against the Mafia that's being going to be published around Christmas time, written by a retired FBI agent, Mike Campy, is telling the story that not only did they keep Philadelphia FBI office in the dark related to communications, they took their investigation that was on the FBI mainframe computer. So anybody that has federal law enforcement security clearance around the country can get into the mainframe and see what investigations are going on around the country. The New York office intentionally removed any reference to Joy Merlino investigation from the mainframe, so the Philadelphia and Miami offices wouldn't be able to get out of the computer and see that anything was going on with one of their targets. This I'm guessing that the Philadelphia FBI office already knew this and the public didn't, but it just shows you to the lengths that some of this gamesmanship between different law enforcement agencies, even within it's normally these robberies pop up between federal and state, but you can see within federal law enforcement, you can have this kind of stuff pop up to where one group feels like they're being undermined by another. George Anastasia and Dave Shroutwizer reported right when this happened back in 16, 17 that the Philadelphia office was at odds with the New York office. Joey ended up going to trial on the East Coast LCN case, hung jury, he eventually pled out to one gambling account, did about a year in jail. He's out now podcasting. And then the other piece of information that came out in Jerry Capace's Gangland News Story, which is kind of a side note to what I'm talking about, but I feel like it's relevant, is that another retired FBI agent by the name of Joy Camp, according to this book, was involved in a pretty salacious sexual relationship with a mafia turncoat named Cookie Durso, and Cookie claims that she was forcing him to sleep with her. Her husband was like the head of the OC Bureau in this New York office or head of the office all together, and she was kind of leveraging that to have an affair with him. But she also was investigated by the FBI internal affairs division about erasing or removing the data about Joey Merlino from the New York mainframe, so Philadelphia, Miami couldn't see it. She was cleared of any wrongdoing, but she was investigating, so she was involved in that East Coast LCN case and investigating Joey Merlino. So I just wanted to keep people updated and let people know that that's the heights that some of these law enforcement units will go to to keep things close to the vest. And I'm not exactly sure what the motive was other than, I don't know if they worried that there was a leak or if it was just a territory dispute. This is our case, we're going to make the headlines, we're going to get the promotions, and we don't want you to button your nose into it. Just kidding, an update on the rivalry between the New York FBI office and the Philadelphia FBI office related. Just kidding, Joey Merlino. OG pod, I'm out.