Episode 151: Transcript
Episode Name: How to turn a story into a deadly weapon
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Charlie Jane, what's your favorite Deep State PSYOP? Is it Taylor Swift or Geordi LaForge?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:05] Oh man, it's so hard to choose. They're both so good. I feel like, though, I really like Gallagher, the guy who smashed watermelons with a big hammer. I feel like the idea that he was like the American ideal, smashing all of the wrong thoughts. I feel like Gallagher really kind of captured something in the American spirit.
Annalee: [00:00:25] I mean, the watermelon thing was pretty prescient too. Like, it means something totally different now and he predicted all that.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:31] He did.
Annalee: [00:00:31] But here's the thing. Geordi's visor on Star Trek: The Next Generation was actually a spy cam operated by the Federation. So all those meetings he had on the holodeck with Dr. Leah Brahms, those were actually secret meetings with his handler from the Special Circumstances Division. So, I'm just saying.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:51] It was actually Section 31, Annalee. Section 31 all the way down. And Level 42. Both of those.
Annalee: [00:00:55] I don't know. I think that you might have had the wool pulled over your eyes a little bit. I mean, you pick up a lot of stuff when you do your own research. And don't even get me started on J. J. Abrams career. First of all, everyone knows he's a robot created by the Defense Department, which is why he now controls every important franchise like Star Trek and Star Wars, and he's now secretly bringing back the Krofft Supershow.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:24] I mean, I feel like I'm willing to give up any liberties and pretty much any of society's norms in order to get the Krofft Supershow back. Let's just do it.
Annalee: [00:01:32] I’m just helping out.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:33] Banana splits, man.
Annalee: [00:01:35] I’m just doing my job, man. I'm just doing my job. But for reals, you are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct.
[00:01:43] Today, we're going to be talking about PSYOPs, influence campaigns, and culture war. In reality, but also in fiction. I've spent the past four years thinking about this, and I poured my discoveries into my forthcoming book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. It's hitting bookstores on June 4, but you're getting a preview right now. So put on your Geordi visors and get ready.
[00:02:10] And later in the episode we're gonna answer your burning questions taken right from our Discord server, which, as a reminder, is open to anyone supporting us on Patreon.
[00:02:18] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and a science fiction writer. My forthcoming book, as you just heard, is called Stories Are Weapons, and I'm also the author of the recent science fiction novel, The Terraformers.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:32] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer. I also do comics and other stuff. I have a book coming out in 2025 called The Prodigal Mother, and you can also now get my third young adult novel, Promises Stronger Than Darkness, which is nominated for the Lodestar Award, in paperback.
Annalee: [00:02:49] Also, on our mini episode next week, we'll be talking about the wonder that is the animated show, The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:00] Which reminds me, as Annalee mentioned, we have a Patreon and any of your support just goes back into helping us make the show. It pays for our incredible producer, Naya Harmon. It pays for our jet rocket boots that are just like jet rocketing all over the place.
[00:03:15] And if you join us on Patreon, you get a mini episode every other week. Plus, you get to hang out with us in Discord and you get to be part of the Our Opinions Are Correct community. Find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:03:30] Okay, let's get psyched.
[00:03:32] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:04:06] Okay, so Annalee you have this amazing book Stories are Weapons, which is all about PSYOPs and culture war and everything coming out in June. I've read it I love it. I think it's an incredible book. What got you interested in this topic in the first place?
Annalee: [00:04:19] Well, actually, it was science fiction. I actually just wrote a newsletter about this, but I was at a sci-fi convention way, way back, and I was talking to the writer E.J. Fisher, and he was saying, have you heard of this guy Cordwainer Smith? He writes these amazing stories about human-animal hybrids who have a revolution and they live in this world controlled by authoritarian cyborgs. And it just sounded awesome. It sounded like completely my jam. And I was like, yes, I'm going to go find Cordwainer Smith. I need to read about uplifted animals, sticking it to the man.
[00:04:53] And so I started doing a little research on it and discovered that Cordwainer Smith was the pen name of a guy named Paul Linebarger, who worked for the US Army during World War II and the Cold War, and he wrote the very first US Army Guide to Psychological Warfare. That was his area of expertise.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:14] Wow.
Annalee: [00:05:14] And it made me realize that a lot of his stories, which I had read, actually dealt with that question of how do you use propaganda? How do you use persuasion to help bring in a new political regime? And I just got super fascinated by that connection between storytelling and actual military psychological operations. And I just couldn't stop. I kept researching it and looking at more historical documents and realized that this is actually this overlap between basically popular genre fiction and also pop culture in general. The overlap between that and PSYOPs in the United States goes basically all the way back to before the nation was even founded. It's a real American tradition and so that's what I wound up writing about is that long history.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:10] Yeah, there are so many eye opening things in your book, including the stuff about how Ben Franklin did PSYOPs during the Revolutionary War, which I had no idea about. And how we kind of used disinformation and psychological warfare when we were wiping out indigenous people in this country. And that was part of how we did it, was, you know, through psychological warfare and misinformation and everything.
[00:06:32] So, obviously right now, it's 2024. We're kind of drowning in all kinds of political messages, and I was hoping you could kind of entangle for us what's the difference between, on the one hand, propaganda, where it's just like, trust the government, or support our troops, or whatever, versus psychological warfare, versus a PSYOP. What makes something specifically a PSYOP, rather than just propaganda?
Annalee: [00:06:56] I mean, there's a really simple answer, which is that a PSYOP, which stands for a psychological operation, which is sort of the, the smallest unit of psychological warfare, it is something that is explicitly connected to a military engagement, which usually means it's state-sponsored or it's sponsored by a non-state actor that's challenging a state and, or a set of states.
[00:07:18] So, anything that is coming out of a military campaign would be a PSYOP. Now, propaganda could certainly be part of a psychological campaign, but you can have propaganda for anything. You can have propaganda for the Kardashians, you can have propaganda for the church, whichever church you choose, right? You can have propaganda for capitalism. So propaganda is a much broader term for any kind of narrative or creative product, could be imagery, could be advertising, anything that's intended to persuade you to change your behavior.
[00:08:00] And that's what propaganda shares in common with PSYOPs, because at their root, a PSYOP launched by the military is intended to reach an adversary. It's intended to influence our enemies to change their behavior. Usually it's intended to make the enemy surrender. So a lot of PSYOPs, of course, are aimed at demoralization and making the enemy feel like their fight is futile so that they will say, all right, fine, US, you win, you know, take all of our stuff. But sometimes they're also used for the purposes of confusion. They can be used just to undercut the enemy's leadership, but generally it's just stories or ideas intended to change behavior, not just to entertain you.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:47] Right and you know propaganda usually is more straightforwardly like support this guy! The military is great! Everything is, the USA is number one, whereas you get like disinformation and fear uncertainty and doubt, right? You get things where it's just trying to make people confused and scared and not sure what to believe and also to demoralize, like you said, to demoralize your enemies.
[00:09:11] So you talked about this as being like a military thing, but one of the things that I loved about your book is that you kind of talk about how just the same way that we get military weapons and military equipment being given to the the US police and to the carceral state here in the United States, the same thing has happened with CYWAR. That CYWAR starts as a military project and it has now become a civilian project. Can you talk more about that?
Annalee: [00:09:32] Yeah, I mean, that's really the crux of my argument is that we've seen, especially over the past 50 years, well, really since the Cold War, what I would call a weapons transfer campaign where a lot of strategies and techniques developed in the military to demoralize the enemy, to misinform the enemy, have a become weapons in our domestic culture wars. And there's a lot of problems with that because of course, PSYOPs... I interviewed a PSYOPs instructor in the military who told me, very clearly, PSYOPs are never intended to be used domestically. And he acknowledged that our politicians love to propagandize to the American people, but that we are not supposed to be unleashing these weapons on domestic soil.
[00:10:23] And I'll say just a couple things about how you know that there's been this weapons transfer program, because I think it might not be obvious. But when you look at a typical kind of culture war, like, let's take, the culture war that we're dealing with right now in the states around, queer and trans people. The thumbprints of Psywar are all over that because one of the main ways that queer people in the states have been persecuted and prosecuted has been to frame them as un-American. And this goes back to the Lavender Scare in the 1950s when government workers who were suspected of being gay or who had been revealed as being gay were fired. Which is a really horrible thing to have happen. I mean, it means you lose your livelihood. It's a form of social death.
[00:11:17] And this, again, was framed as these are people who are un-American, they will betray the United States. And this kind of rhetoric comes all the way up into the present day, where again, we're seeing these questions about what kinds of things do we want to allow in American schools? What are things that are American ideas that are permitted? What should we allow teachers to say? What should we allow librarians to put in the library? And you get that kind of framing that certain things are just not American. And that that's part of the problem.
[00:11:52] Of course, the other part of the problem as it's articulated, particularly in places like Florida and Texas, is that anyone who is not heterosexual, cisgendered, is somehow a menace to children, that there's something about them that is inherently criminal. That they are “groomers” in modern rhetoric. But again, this rhetoric goes all the way back to the earliest days of persecuting and prosecuting gay people. Goes back to J. Edgar Hoover framing queerness as a kind of crime, a pedophilic crime.
[00:12:28] And, this also, I would argue, grows right out of PSYOPs, because one of the things about PSYOPs that's permitted, and in fact encouraged in the military, is that they should contain threats. They should contain, often violent threats, threats that you will be imprisoned, threats that you'll be killed or maimed or harmed in some way.
[00:12:50] And again, this is not typical political rhetoric. Claiming that your adversary is someone who is inherently criminal, that they deserve to be imprisoned just for who they are. That's not a democratic debate. You can't have two sides of that issue. That's that's saying I am not a criminal, you are a criminal.
[00:13:11] So again, that's that's really PSYOP language. And so those are the kinds of red flags when you look at a domestic debate, which we have plenty of domestic debates that may be very vitriolic, but are perfectly free of PSYOPs. You know, you might be arguing over resource allocation and it doesn't end up having violent threats associated with it or accusations of un-American behavior.
[00:13:35] But anytime you start to see political rhetoric with violent threats and this kind of framing of the bad guy being somehow un-American, which again you see of course with rhetoric around immigrants and a lot of other stuff, that's when you're in the territory of this weapons transfer situation.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:50] Yeah, and I mean that's such a useful way of thinking about it because like part of what frustrates me is that until pretty recently a lot of people thought of culture war as just sort of, it's not serious. It's just, we're just arguing over, you know... It's just a matter of taste or it's just entertainment or it's just like it's political theater.
Annalee: [00:14:09] It’s just democratic debate. Yeah, it's it's portrayed as just a part of democratic debate. It's just free speech.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:15] But also it's political theater. It's just like, oh, yeah, they're gonna yell about the gays. They're gonna yell about immigration. They're gonna yell about DEI and CRT and it's just our pageantry. It's just our political pageantry. And so, you know hearing you talk about it is like this is a military weapon that's been unleashed on American civilians makes me think about it really differently. Is that part of what you're hoping this book will do is help people to kind of take these things more seriously?
Annalee: [00:14:42] Yeah, I want people to understand that culture war is a form of warfare, and that it takes lives. People kill themselves as a result of these kinds of psychological attacks. People are sent to jail, and most importantly, and most commonly, people lose their jobs and it's often people who are already vulnerable. It's usually people who are marginalized, who are minorities in some way or who are in professions that are very precarious, like teaching, where getting a good teaching job can be quite hard. And it’s a whole process. Or they're just very rare government jobs.
[00:15:18] And that's a way of ruining a person's life is to take their job away and to say to them, oh, well, you could just move somewhere else where people aren't going to do that. Like, how am I supposed to move somewhere else when I've lost my job? You know, I don't have any money now. So it really is something that we need to treat like a form of warfare.
[00:15:40] And as a result, we need to also be asking the same kinds of questions of culture war that we ask of a total war, which is, for example, under what terms does this war end? What is our plan for ending this war, for a ceasefire, for some kind of diplomatic negotiation? And culture war casts itself as a never-ending process. And that is the direction of... I mean, first of all, that's not sustainable. And second of all, it's something we would never accept if we acknowledged that it was a military engagement.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:18] Yeah. Why would we want to stop when we're having so much fun?
[00:16:21] Changing gears slightly, because this is obviously really dark and scary stuff to talk about. But one of the things I love about your book is that there's so much hope in it. Reading your book gave me just tons of hope. And you have these amazing stories about people who find ingenious ways to fight back against psychological warfare. And one thing that jumps to my mind immediately is the indigenous people who basically kind of almost get the better of the Smithsonian and manage to kind of, can you tell us that story? It's such an amazing story.
Annalee: [00:16:51] It is a really great story. So a big part of the book, as I'm talking about the history of PSYOPs in the United States, a big part of the book deals with the Indian wars, which were, you know, a series of battles between the US government and US militias and hundreds and hundreds of indigenous nations and tribes that were pushing back against US expansionism.
[00:17:12] And tons of PSYOPs were used in that process. There was brainwashing happening at residential schools. I think people are relatively familiar with with all the atrocities that went on, but it's not that common to frame it as a psychological war because of course, there was so much total war happening as well. And what remains of those conflicts is very much psychological. We now talk about intergenerational trauma. How do people recover from that? What do you do when your history has been stolen from you? Your land has been stolen from you? And of course, tons of indigenous thinkers, philosophers, ordinary people are asking that question.
[00:17:52] And so one answer is we reclaim our history, you know, that indigenous tribes who've been robbed of their land claims and histories coming up with amazing ways to repair the damage by going into libraries. And so I interviewed this amazing anthropologist at the University of Oregon named Jason Yonker, who's also the chief of the Coquille tribe in that area around Coos Bay in southwestern Oregon. And when he was a grad student in the 1990s, he and a bunch of other folks from the Coquille and Coos tribes got a little grant to go to the Smithsonian and the National Archives in Washington, D.C. to Xerox any information they could find that had been gathered mostly by the War Department in the 19th century about their history and about their land. And the thing that was particularly poignant about this was that the Coquille tribe had had a land claim that was mapped by white settlers and by the War Department in the 1850s. And that land claim was lost. That map was allegedly lost. And so when the tribe tried to claim that they existed, when they tried to get government recognition, the US government was like, well, we don't have any record of you guys being here, so too bad, you're terminated. Terminated just meant they no longer had tribal status, and so they weren't eligible for a lot of really important government programs, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:19:26] Right, and that's part of the psychological war, saying that they don't exist anymore, basically.
Annalee: [00:19:31] That is a huge part of the psychological war. To say to someone's face, you don't exist, and therefore, you have no rights. And it happened to hundreds and hundreds of tribes and nations in the U. S., as well as the Coquille. So, Jason Younker and his colleagues got this little grant and they were like, well, we just want to find out like the truth here. Like, we don't have any documentation. We know this map is lost, but we just want to get some stuff. So the Smithsonian says, you know what? We're feeling generous. It's the 1990s. In the spirit of truth and reconciliation, we'll let you have free Xeroxing. Anything you want to Xerox is fine. And they're obviously thinking to themselves, because they're kind of trapped in this psychological war, too. They're like, there's not gonna be anything, you know, we're probably gonna make ten Xeroxes for these poor guys, right?
[00:20:24] So Jason Younker and his colleagues get there. And they, first of all, they find the map in the National Archives. The quote unquote “lost” map, which has now been digitized and you can find it online. And of course, you can read about it in my book and in Jason Yonker's work as well. So they find the map, which is huge. So it's going to be a really expensive Xerox, like it's already, they're racking up the money. And then they go through the archives and they find 60,000 documents related to the Coquille, the Coos and about six other tribes in the area.
[00:20:59] And they go to the desk and they're like, okay, here we are. 60,000 documents and the Smithsonian, to their credit. And I think, you know, very rightly said, okay, you know, we said we'd do it. And when I interviewed Jason Younker about this, I was like, did they kind of seem surprised? And he was like, “Oh yeah, they were not exactly thrilled, but they did it.”
[00:21:26] And I think that that's, you know, a great example of a small thing that is an effort to undo a PSYOP. And now all of that documentation, all the Xeroxes and a lot of it's been digitized now is in the possession of the Coquille tribe. They own that history. They've shared that history with the university in a potlatch ceremony. So it wasn't like they had to then, when they came home, that they gave it to the university right away. They're like, no, this is ours. It belongs to our tribe. But we will gift it to the university. So I went and visited the collection that they had gifted to the university. And there's parts of the collection they've subsequently gone back and done more research and more Xeroxing, which they did have to pay for that time.
[00:22:11] And some of that collection is still only in the possession of the tribes. And maybe they're going to do another potlatch, maybe they're not, but it's a way of taking ownership over their history. Having that map gives them absolute proof of where their tribes were located at the time that white settlers came and the US government tried to claim that land. So if they do get threatened with termination again, they can be like, “Hi. We have the receipts now and you can't take them away because we've made copies of them and every other tribe in the area has copies of these too.” And so it's this very kind of DIY, low tech, Xeroxed way of reclaiming history, putting it back in the hands of the people who deserve it.
[00:22:58] And yeah, I just was so inspired by that. And of course, Jason Younker is just one of many indigenous archivists who are doing this kind of work. We're seeing this happen all over the country. Nations and tribes are getting hold of these kinds of papers that were produced by the US government and keeping them in their own educational institutions, in their own libraries, and making them available to the people whose lives are touched by them. So I love that. I love the archive as a solution because history is part of what PSYOPs try to rob from us. One of the most common PSYOPs is to say, what you think happened, never happened. And it's very effective.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:44] This is why certain people hate libraries. This is why certain people hate universities. They don't want these things to be available.
[00:23:51] So, okay, kind of final question. So obviously, I don't have a grant, I'm not going to the Smithsonian, but I'm an individual in 2024 trying to survive with a constant bombardment of psychological ordinance exploding outside my window, just, like, 24/7.
[00:24:11] What's your advice to ordinary people who are trying to survive this and trying to maybe find our way towards a psychological ceasefire in the future?
Annalee: [00:24:19] I think the first step is to acknowledge that culture war is part of total war and that this is an actual combat situation and that as a result we need to have some kind of guidelines on how it ends. And that we start talking about it in the context of something that has an ending. And how do we reach that point and to think about it in those terms? And I'm not saying that you can kind of write to your Senator and say like, I demand an end to the culture war. But I think that framing it that way in our own minds is really helpful.
[00:24:55] I think another thing that's incredibly helpful is just knowing what those red flags are when you start to see rhetoric coming from politicians and community leaders that have the thumbprints all over them of psychological operations. To realize that those are weapons and they don't belong there.
[00:25:13] And you can dodge those weapons. Unlike a bullet, you can dodge a psychological weapon once you recognize what it is. And you can say, okay, somebody just designed this specifically to hurt me or to hurt my community. It's easy to say, you know what? I'm not gonna believe in it. I'm not gonna fall for it.
[00:25:31] And also, another piece of that is to acknowledge how hurtful it is. And to realize that part of recovery from this stuff is therapeutic. To say like, yeah, actually, it really does hurt me to see these damaging stories about queer people or about Black people or about immigrants, that are clearly weapons.
[00:25:58] So, this is not like a typical political situation where there is a way, like I said, to write to your senator or to engage in some kind of letter writing campaign. We have many, many ways that we fight it. Partly we fight it by, you know, getting together with our communities and sharing stories about what's really true and sharing stories about our history and preserving them, sharing stories about who we really are and making those available, helping each other, taking care of each other, making sure that online information is as truthful as possible when we can, fighting back against misinformation.
[00:26:34] People act like there's some kind of simple solution. But the problem with culture war and the problem with psychological war is it comes at us from everywhere. And so, it's more like there's a balanced breakfast of things that we can do. Some of which really do resemble therapy and some of which resemble things like consciousness raising, like coming together and just having a nice time with people who see you for who you are.
[00:27:00] And that can really help you the next time somebody throws a PSYOP at your head. Remembering, actually, this is just fake. They're just throwing a fake story at me to hurt me, and I know what's real. What's real is me and my friends going out and having dinner and being queer and being perfectly nice people, not committing crimes, not doing any of the things they say we do. And that's what we have to do to fight back, is just stick together, take care of each other, and protect who we can.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:30] Yeah, I think community building is so powerful and so helpful, especially when you're under attack. I really love when people come together in real life or online to build community, and also spread positive stories about how great our folks are and how we're not these monsters. Not arguing against the monsterization as much as just like being like, no, look how great we are. We're fucking great.
Annalee: [00:27:54] You can't argue your way out of it, but you can create stories that show the truth. You can maintain archives of the truth. Keep your receipts. Tell your story.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:06] Hell yeah. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then when we come back we're going to answer your questions, including some very interesting potato thoughts.
[00:28:15] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:28:19] So as we have been promising, we will be having regular listener questions from our Discord. If you're a supporter on Patreon, you can be in our Discord asking questions. we do these segments pretty regularly, so this is this week's segment and let's get started.
[00:28:38] Our first question comes from Keffy, who also transcribes these episodes for us, by the way. He's awesome. And he asks.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:45] So, he’s gonna have to transcribe our answer to his question. It’s very meta.
Annalee: [00:28:48] Exactly, so, yeah, we'll see if he cleans it up or anything in the final result. So Keffy asks, If someone made a stop motion animation of one of your books using potatoes and only potatoes, which book would be the most delicious?
[00:29:05] Charlie, I think you need to start this one off.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:09] Wow. Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot since I saw that question. And I just, I really don't know. I mean, first of all, I'm going to just assume that the potatoes in question are going to be like fried potatoes. Like we can have fries. We could have like tater tots. We could...
Annalee: [00:29:21] Mashed potatoes.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:23] I was thinking it could be like, different types of potatoes.
Annalee: [00:29:26] Hasselback.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:26] So really the criteria is, like, if you ask which would be the most delicious, what you're really asking is which book would allow you to have the most varieties of potato representation within the book. What would have the most kind of kinds of potatoes represented in the book?
[00:29:41] And I feel like The City in the Middle of the Night, I'm going to stick up for that book. I feel like they go to a lot of different environments. There's creatures, there's... I feel like you would build like the cities. There’s three cities in the book you could build them out of different kinds of potato architecture. And I feel like you go to the sea of murder that would be mashed potatoes. You have, like, there's the light side of the planet, which would be, I don't know french fries and the dark side of the planet would be baked potatoes.
[00:30:18] I feel like there's a lot of different ways for potatoes to express themselves in that book.
Annalee: [00:30:22] You could engage in a lot of spud speculation.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:26] Yes. Okay, pick a book of yours to adapt with potatoes.
Annalee: [00:30:30] So, I'm going to cheat and pick a short story, which is “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” because the crows in that book love eating human trash. And they talk about it a lot and they spend a lot of time hunting down trash. And also judging humans for throwing away so much great stuff like why would you throw away this bone that's kind of half rotted? That's when it gets really yummy. So I think that the crows would provide you many opportunities to have potato foods in every state of decay, but also in their perky state. And you could have like, oops, somebody accidentally dropped their french fries. Now there's going to be like a crow festival all around the front.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:21] But the crows would also be potatoes in this scenario.
Annalee: [00:31:23] Well, they'd be cannibals. I mean, that's part of...
Charlie Jane: [00:31:26] They’d be, like, baked potatoes, I guess?
Annalee: [00:31:27] They'd be... I think they'd be raw potatoes with some sticks in them for beaks and then maybe a little propeller or something like that, some way to help them fly. Or maybe they could be flying on like, sliced potatoes, for example. But I think they would have to be raw because I just think it's too creepy for a cooked potato to eat another cooked potato. So I think if a raw potato eats a cooked potato, it's cannibalism, but it's gentle cannibalism. It’s okay cannibalism at that point. Obviously. Obviously. So i'm gonna go with that.
[00:32:03] That was a great question.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:04] Thanks for explaining okay cannibalism. I feel like I'm learning a lot from this podcast.
Annalee: [00:32:09] Yes, I think so, too. I feel like i'm really dropping some wisdom, now.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:12] So i'm just gonna jump to Tashi's question, which is if you visited the Star Trek mirror universe, what do you think your mirror selves would be like? And Annalee, I want you to answer that one first.
Annalee: [00:32:22] Oh, no! I mean, obviously I would have a twirly mustache and a goatee. I would have like a really—
Charlie Jane: [00:32:29] Of course.
Annalee: [00:32:29] And it would be one of those sleazy goatees that's kind of cut in a way that makes me look terrible. And then, I would be in charge of some kind of evil experiment to turn people into perfectly proportioned reality TV stars and then have them promote a kind of fascist capitalism. And so like the show could be called something like Fashy Fashion.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:07] Love it.
Annalee: [00:33:08] And like, I would be going around from planet to planet, like kidnapping people and giving them coercive plastic surgeries. And then they would show off all these super expensive outfits, like, “For the glory of the nation!”
[00:33:24] So that's what I would be doing. What are you doing?
Charlie Jane: [00:33:24] Oh, yeah, I mean, I feel like what I love about the mirror universe in Star Trek—and I actually complain about the mirror universe in Star Trek a lot, so i'm going to say something nice about it for once. Which is, I love the fact that it's the horny, kind of violent version of the Star Trek universe where everybody wears these little crop tops and sashes and everybody's just kind of walking around looking kind of gothy or Hot Topic.
Annalee: [00:33:47] People are, like, feeding each other grapes and stuff like that.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:50] Yeah, and then you have like the weird BDSM thing where you could give each other electric shocks and like you stab each other. It's kind of ,you know, I don't know.
Annalee: [00:33:59] Very sexy.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:59] It's sexy and horny and violent and kind of id-fueled and I feel like the version of me in the mirror universe would probably still be extremely neurotic but I think that I would actually be the person who just murdered all of my rivals using traps and devices and snares. Just like, rig people's consoles to electrocute them when they try to like go doo doo doo doo or whatever. I would just be the person going around killing like a ton of my crewmates like—
Annalee: [00:34:33] Wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:33] Without anybody knowing it was me.
Annalee: [00:34:36] Yeah, so you're you're doing like secretive intimate murders. I'm all about spectacle. I’m about the spectacle of enslavement and capitalism. We could be working together.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:47] If you look at the plot of the original “Mirror Mirror,” everybody's going around stabbing each other attacking each other.
Annalee: [00:34:54] No, I remember. Your agonizer, please.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:55] Yeah, yeah ,yeah, but then Captain Kirk has this device in his chambers, like the evil Captain Kirk, that just allows him to go boop, and he could just make people disappear at a distance. And that's the big kind of like, whoo, he's no longer just stabbing people and killing people in this honorable-ish way.
Annalee: [00:35:13] Yeah, honorable way.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:13] He's killing people secretly with this disintegrator that's like, the Tantalus device or whatever. And so I feel like, that's kind of the cheat code of the mirror universe is just killing people without actually having to like stick your neck out in any way.
Annalee: [00:35:28] Next question is from Small Town Wizard.
[00:35:31] If you could psychically bond with any animal, Charlie Jane, what would it be?
Charlie Jane: [00:35:35] I mean, I already psychically bonded with my cat. So, I feel like there's that. I feel like my cat and I are very psychically bonded. Although, we don't always have perfect communication. There are times when I sort of imagine what if I could like be telepathically linked to my cat and we could hear each other's thoughts or we could be like a hive mind.
[00:35:56] I think that that could be weird at times because my cat sometimes probably, there are things that he thinks about that I wouldn't actually really enjoy. So I’d want to be able to turn it on and off, maybe. But I feel like my cat, but then I think about it some more and I’m like well, you know, one of my favorite things to do in San Francisco is walk into Golden Gate Park and hang out with the bison because the bison are so chill and so kind of soothing. They just hang out. They're very kind of like, “Hey man, we're just sitting here eating grass and we're giant and we don't give a shit. And yeah, you can talk to us. We don't care.”
[00:36:31] So I feel like if I could be psychically linked to the bison in Golden Gate Park and just kind of like tap into their sense of like, yeah, man. It's just, it's a nice day. It's sunny. I'm eating grass, whatever. I think that that would actually be really good. How about you, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:36:46] I think that I would jump right past mammals because I feel like I already have okay ways of communicating with mammals, especially, you know, there's like cuddling and feeding and all that kind of stuff.
[00:37:02] So, the creatures that I'm really curious about are ants and bees. I really want to know what does it feel like to be part of a social animal like that? Sometimes they're described as having hive minds, which I think modern biologists don't really think of it that way anymore. But they are definitely colony organisms that work together in sync in ways that humans just can't even imagine.
[00:37:35] And I want to know! I really want to know, do bees actually think of themselves as a hive mind or is it, in fact, we've just totally misunderstood bee culture completely and actually each bee is doing their own thing and the queen is off doing a thing and all the workers are doing? You know, that they actually have discussions and debates and that they're not all just in lockstep, but actually, maybe it's a lot more chaotic than we thought.
[00:38:02] And same thing with ants. I feel like ants are doing a lot of stuff that we need a psychic link to understand. And so, once that's all fixed up and I am able to be psychically connected to ants and bees, then I'm going to psychically link to the tree in my backyard and find out what's going on.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:24] Mm-hmm.
Annalee: [00:38:25] Because I really need to talk to that tree.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:27] Once you're psychically linked to ants, you can tell them to stay the fuck out of my apartment, which I would really appreciate. Like you could just be like, you know, go after these other people. I think I have a list of people who I would like to have their apartments overrun by ants, but I'm not on it. So, you know.
Annalee: [00:38:40] Yeah, this is the problem with ants, though, is like, once I'm psychically linked with them, they might be like, listen, we have a really good reason for being here. And so then I would end up having to be some kind of diplomat. And I would be the ant diplomacy negotiator. And I would be like, okay, Charlie, what if they came like only between the hours of like, three in the morning and five in the morning. Would that be okay? Just leave out some stuff for them and they'll go away.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:05] Okay.
Annalee: [00:39:06] Would you be up for that?
Charlie Jane: [00:39:07] No. I don't want them in my apartment. They're not welcome. They are unwelcome. I am anti the ants.
[00:39:16] Okay. So another question. Noctificant asks, what are some of the podcasts you each enjoy listening to?
[00:39:23] Annalee?
Annalee: [00:39:23] Okay. I love the podcast Moderated Content, which is hosted by a Stanford law professor named Evelyn Douek. And she's amazing. She often has Alex Stamos on there as well, who is a cybersecurity expert, among many other things. And they just talk about all of the laws and social issues around moderating content on the internet. It's very much about media and how it intersects with the law, and I turn to it every week because they just help explain stuff like the jawboning law that's being debated right now in the Supreme Court. Stuff like that that really could affect the kind of stuff that we see online, and they just break it down really well.
[00:40:15] Both you and I, of course, are huge fans of the podcast Stuff the British Stole, which comes out of Australian public broadcasting, and each episode is the story of an object stolen by the British, usually from some kind of colonized area, and the story tracks where it came from where it went and often ends with the object being repatriated. Not always, but there's, there's definitely a number of very satisfying episodes where the British Museum has to say goodbye to something that it thought it owned. And so, I really love that.
[00:40:49] And I really like the science podcast that's put out by Science magazine, which is a production of the American science academies [American Association for the Advancement of Science]. It's AAAS. I don't know actually what all of those stand for, but it's basically Science magazine, which is a very reputable science journal. And every week they have a great podcast covering some of their stories with new discoveries and interesting scientists from all over the world. And it's just a really great, very mellow, interesting listen. Okay, give me three that you love.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:19] Yeah, I mean, so I get a lot of my political news these days from The Bugle, which is a satirical comedy podcast hosted by this guy in the UK, Andy Zaltzman, with a rotating cast of comedians. And I first discovered The Bugle because they had somebody, I think, Mike Masnick, maybe, linked to their description of AI and the tech industry that Alice Fraser, who's one of their main comedians, came up with. Where it was like basically like a cat rating app where they just throw a cat through your window or something. It was like the funniest description of the tech industry. I can't do it justice. It's the funniest description of the tech industry I've ever heard.
[00:42:00] And Alice Fraser actually has her own spin off podcast called The Gargle, which I also listen to. Besides that, I mean, I'm listening to a couple of tech skeptic podcasts lately that I find really useful. One is, you know, Paris Marx's podcast, Tech Won't Save Us.
Annalee: [00:42:16] Tech Won't Save Us is like a must listen. I really love that podcast.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:19] It's frickin great. And then Better Offline with Ed Zitron is also, he just mercilessly rips the tech industry to shreds. And then, I really love A Bit Fruity, the podcast, which is just sort of talking about queer stuff and social issues.
[00:42:34] And I also really love In Bed with the Right. So that's actually a bunch of podcasts that I'm loving right now.
Annalee: [00:42:38] Oh, wait, let's not forget, Vibe Check.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:42] Oh God, Vibe Check.
Annalee: [00:42:43] So good.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:43] Vibe Check is a must listen. It's been just keeping me singing lately.
Annalee: [00:42:46] Also, it is on fire right now.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:48] It’s been so good lately. It's been just essential.
Annalee: [00:42:52] Yeah. So it's basically cultural analysis by three friends, including Sam Sanders, who used to do NPR's podcast. It’s Been a Minute, which is, itself, a great podcast that I listen to all the time. Brittany Luse, who’s the new host, is also terrific. So if you like crunchy, smart, cultural analysis, both Vibe Check and It’s Been a Minute. But Vibe Check is three friends they're all queer black guys and they just have great chemistry and they are really smart and just tackle all kinds of stuff that I want to know about, so it's really good.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:33] 100 percent.
Annalee: [00:43:34] Okay I think that was a great I think we got a great collection there of stuff. I could go on. So, I listen to way too many podcasts.
[00:43:42] All right, here's another question. Oh, this is a good one for you, Charlie Jane. DriveTime asks, if you could write for any current science fiction show, what would it be?
Charlie Jane: [00:43:49] I mean, you know, I don't think anybody's gonna be surprised that I'm pretty obsessed with the idea of writing for Doctor Who. I feel like, you know, I have a thing where I'll come up with story ideas for things I don't own the rights to, like Batman or Superman or whatever and normally I just flush those down the memory hole as soon as I think of them. I'm like, well, whatever. I'm not writing Batman. I'm not going to sit and think about this Batman story idea that I came up with. But, when it comes to Doctor Who, I actually do have Doctor Who story ideas that kind of live in the back of my mind that are just kind of like sitting there kind of germinating. And I would love to write a Doctor Who thing someday, like a novel or a comic book or whatever, but especially if I could write for the show, I would definitely love that. And also Star Trek. I feel like I would have a lot of fun writing for Star Trek.
[00:44:37] How about you, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:44:41] Also, Star Trek for me, obviously, because I have been invested in Star Trek for, gosh, 30 years now. I know that show better than anything.
[00:44:53] I would also, like, if they ever brought The Expanse back, I would love to write for The Expanse. I love the politics in that show. It's just a really great premise and I love where they were taking it. They were taking it in all kinds of really amazing directions. So I think those would probably be my top two.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:11] Hell yeah. Final question. Shiri asks, I'd like to hear about the connection between speculative and absurdist as genres.
Annalee: [00:45:19] Ooh. I would like to hear your answer to that, Charlie Jane, because I know that you love absurdism.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:26] I mean, I do love absurdism, and I've sort of described myself in the past as an absurdist writer. I love, like, Douglas Adams. I just recently wrote an obituary for Christopher Durang, the absurdist playwright who influenced me a lot.
[00:45:40] I do feel like there is a strong connection between the speculative and the absurdist, and it's interesting because there's two ways that this works in my mind. One is that you can use speculative stuff to kind of push real stuff to an absurd extreme. You could take real life things and just make them heightened until they become really absurd. And you can be like, well, what if we had technology that allowed us to actually take this kind of thing that we already do, but metaphorically boost it to this ridiculous length.
[00:46:07] And then the other way that I feel like the speculative allows you to kind of insert absurdism into stories is by kind of putting in an outlandish element into a real life story, that just doesn't make sense. It’s like, really bizarro and weird and just like what the hell is this? Like a giant onion appears in the middle of New York City. Just a two mile wide onion just smushes part of New York City. It's like, what is this giant onion doing here? What does it mean? How are we gonna live with it?
[00:46:39] And oftentimes, having kind of bizarro, inexplicable things happen kind of allows you to show how ridiculous and weird human society is and how people's reactions to things don't make any sense and how people tend to be kind of absurd and weird.
[00:46:53] I feel like a big part of why absurdism is useful in a speculative context is because, as I've ranted it a million times, people in the real world do kind of try to pretend that the world makes sense in a way that it really doesn't make sense. And oftentimes that can be really toxic and just kind of messed up and kind of not cool.
[00:47:13] And so, as adding absurdism to speculative fiction kind of lets you puncture that, on the other hand I feel like people have pushed against it because they want their their science fiction and fantasy to be grounded and quote unquote “realistic” and to be taken seriously. And the moment you start getting absurdist, it's harder to be grounded or to be taken seriously.
[00:47:34] That's my kind of CliffsNotes answer.
[00:47:36] Annalee, what do you think?
Annalee: [00:47:37] Well, I agree with all of that, and I love your example of the giant onion, because I feel like that's a perfect absurdist plot. It kind of, it actually reminds me of a book that I really loved when I was a kid by D. Manus Pinkwater called The Hoboken Chicken Emergency.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:51] Yes!
Annalee: [00:47:52] Where, and in fact, Pinkwater wrote a lot of young adult books in the ‘70s that I read that were absurdist and really influenced me. And The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, by the way, is just a giant chicken comes to Hoboken and they have to figure out how to deal with it.
[00:48:09] And I think that the thing about absurdism that sometimes worries me, and I don't use absurdism very much at all in my writing, not because I don't like it, but because it worries me.
[00:48:23] I feel like absurdism can lend itself to fascism and authoritarianism because it is a style that revels in chaos. And I think that that can be very liberating and very beautiful and fun, but it can also create a sense of extreme disorientation in the reader and make you hungry for any kind of coherent meaning. And that's where some kind of authoritarian can step in and say, well, actually I am the one stable thing in this absurd universe.
[00:49:03] And I'm not saying that there's like oh, there's a direct connection between people writing absurdist plays and fascism becoming really popular. I just feel like sometimes absurdism in its darker form is a symptom of a culture that is questing after a strongman leader, or questing after authoritarian figures who are powerful.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:28] Ooh, I hadn't thought about it like that. That's so interesting.
Annalee: [00:49:31] Because when you think about, at least in the United States and Europe, the moments when absurdism has become popular have been phases in history when fascism was also really popular, like in the ‘20s and ‘30s.
Charlie Jane: [00:49:45] Do you think absurdism is a reaction against fascism as well as an enabling of fascism? Because you get like, Ionesco uses absurdism to critique fascism in Rhinoceros.
Annalee: [00:49:56] This is why I don't use absurdism in my work, because I think it is a reaction against it, 100% and I'm down with it. I love the surrealists poking our eyes and things like that. But, I don't think it's a coherent reaction. I think it's just an expression of rage and anguish. And it doesn't take you anywhere.
[00:50:16] And I'm, for better or worse, I'm the kind of writer who loves allegory. And I love to show you the problems of the world, but also show you that there's many pathways through those problems to kind of offer a coherent picture of what's going on so that you aren't left in a state of just like, my brain is just in a shambles right now. And I'm feeling the ache, the horror of reality, but like nothing is real. Everything is absurd. And it's like, where do you go with that? I feel like pointing out to people that everything is absurd and pointless is step one.
[00:50:58] And again, this is not shade on people who do that kind of work because there's tons of absurdist stuff that I absolutely love. I'm just saying why I personally know I don't like to connect them.
Charlie Jane: No, I get it. Interesting. Man.
Annalee: [00:51:12] It scares me too much because I don't ever wanna discover that some shitbag has found my work and is like, yes, this is a great critique of wokeism and DEI. See, it's all about this chaos. And of course I can't stop that. Maybe someone's doing that with my work right now. I have no idea.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:30] I guarantee people are deliberately misinterpreting all of our work all the time.
Annalee: [00:51:34] Exactly.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:35] Or maybe not even misinterpreting it. They're just seeing it through their own lens. And like, it's a valid interpretation, even though it's awful.
Annalee: [00:51:42] Yeah, and I can never stop people from doing that, but I would like it to be harder for them to do that. I would like it to be an extremely strenuous counter-reading.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:55] Huh, interesting.
Annalee: [00:51:55] And so I do think that as much as I enjoy absurdism, it does scare me to invite it in too much because... even though, when I play D&D, I always play characters who are chaotic good, I think in real life, I'm somewhere in between chaos and law. I like to have a little bit of structure.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:14] This is making me think we need to do an episode about absurdism at some point.
Annalee: [00:52:17] Okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:17] You know, because I feel like there's a lot to unpack here.
Annalee: [00:52:21] Yeah, so tell us, what you think in Discord. Should we do a whole episode on absurdism and unpack this further? We're at your mercy. Tell us what to do. We live in an absurd world. We need someone to tell us where to go and what to do. So, on that note. Go forth and be absurd, but in a consensual, happy way. And you've been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. Thank you so much for listening. Remember, you can find us on Mastodon, on Patreon, on Instagram and TikTok.
[00:52:55] Thank you so much to our very non-chaotic and brilliant producer and engineer, Naya Harmon. Thanks to the Chaos Monkeys, Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for our music. And if you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord and if not, we will be back in your ears in a couple of weeks with more unchaotic but slightly chaotic discourse.
[00:53:16] Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:53:16] Bye!
[00:53:16] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]