200 – Library Socialism & Complementarity

Warning, this is the 200th episode of Seriously Wrong. Celebrations, yeah. Yeah, 200. My name's Aaron. And my name's Sean. We are back from our little break. This is our bicentennial, bicentennial would be 200-year celebration. Right, 200-year is not 200 episodes. Bicent. What's the ending that means episodes of a podcast? Bicentisode. Bicent episodes. Yeah, so before we go on, I just want to thank everyone for listening, but I want to thank in particular the people who donate to our show to help keep it going. We wouldn't have made it to 200 without you. And without more of you, we're not going to make it to 400. Oh, no. We really want to make it to 400. I want to make it to 400. 400, so bad. But no, yeah, really, like you, you make the show happen. And I anticipate that we will make it to 400 thanks to you and people like you. So that's just awesome. It's on Patreon. And you get bonus episodes. Thank you. So today's episode is about complementarity. And I want to say, you know, we did 200 episodes. There's some complementarity between myself and you, Aaron. How do you think? We worked well together. Oh, thank you. I thought so too. I was too embarrassed to say. Well, I wasn't too embarrassed. I was brave. It's shameless. It just says, "Lewis." I was shameless. So know what I do it again. We have to acknowledge this type of stuff. We're being positive male role models right now by sharing a moment. Yeah. Welcome to this show. This is the world. This is the wise egg. I'm so happy you're the one who made your own. You're the one who made your own. It's just say, "I know how to make a new one." Oh, that's a shame. First, it's introduced. Then it goes to many. That's prong! How I'll show you how things really work. How things really work. I'm not going to cry. I could have been there. I'm going to say, "You're right." You're right. So this is the third library socialism episode. Part three. The trilogy complete. Library socialism and use of rock, the use and profit of property, but not its destruction. A changed version of property relations that we propose based on the principles of a lending library. There's library socialism and the irreducible minimum, which is the level that no one should have revolved below. All human beings deserve housing, food, shelter, community, affection, and so on. And finally, library socialism and complementarity. Complementarity is a way of looking at non-hierarchical difference as something generative. Complementarity is a bunch of different members of a team all do specialized things in relation to each other, and the outcome is greater than some of its parts. It's when the elements of a system complement one another, rather than clash with one another or insult one another. It's a basis for any functioning complex system. It's the basis for functioning complex ecosystems. It's a basis for functioning complex community groups, technological systems. And for the library society that we want to build, the parts of the society have to work together in a complementary fashion. And we can see the library is an embodiment of the principle of complementarity in action. You have this massive collection of books of all various kinds. And what makes it a library is that incredible diversity of opinions, perspectives, subject matter, and so on. That together, cumulatively, create something that has its own character. That is the library is a place that you can go and learn anything. And the fact that it's not restricted, that it's open, and that there's cooking books and history books in the same place, generate something that's better than if we had a cooking library, a history library, and so on. Even within that, you did have a cooking library. The diversity of cookbooks by different authors from different traditions within it is generative. That access to knowledge and experience and context creates a positive social outcome. And the librarian, but also the library system and the organization and cataloging and curating the sum of the history of human knowledge, condensed down into these individualized libraries or into the larger inter-library, global library. Exchange system. That system, the librarian, those people, the librarians facilitate the complementarity that exists between a person who's seeking information about history and history books. There's a complementary relationship between that person and those things, but you need this institution and these human mediators in order to facilitate that complementary relationship. Otherwise, the person seeking information about history might not be able to find it or might not have access to it. But you can also think of the librarian and the library patron relationship as having complementarity to it in that we wouldn't expect everyone to know everything about the library, but you can expect one person or group of people to together know everything about a library and then help be able to connect people to what they need. Today's episode of "Seriously Wrong" is brought to you by "Working Well Together." Some things just work well together. For example, you can take three or four different week metals, make an alloy that's stronger than all of them put together. Where does that extra strength come from? That's just how it is. Imagine Canvas covered with doves of paint that create a beautiful picture, but then imagine if all those paint drops were spread across a million canvases. All you would see is one tiny dot on each canvas. It wouldn't be a picture. The dots of paint are all that's there. When they come together, you get a picture. In the business world, they call that synergy. I'm reminded of the delicious French soup, "Mirplac." You could put carrots and water, and it's alright. You could put celery and water, and sure maybe it's edible. You could put onions and water, and it's probably the best of the three, but you put the three of them together in hot water and make a soup. Oh boy! That is such a tasty soup. It's called the "Mirplac." It's just got its own character. It's distinct from each of them. The sum is greater than its parts. It's just they work well together. This talk about food makes me hungry for combinations of food that are better together than apart, like peaches and cream. Oh, or peanut butter and jelly. Serial and milk. Roast beef and potato. Bacon and eggs. Lentils and sesame seed and tahamis. Curry. It's all curry. Take all these individual little spices, mix them together into a symphony of the perfect delicious spices. Now I love fruit, but give me a good fruit bowl, and you've made my night. Yeah, and if a bowl of different kinds of fruit mix together doesn't make you realize that working together is working better than working apart, then I don't know what to tell you. Working well together. Today's sponsor of "Seriously Wrong." The place that these three concepts, irreducible minimum use of fructing complementarity, first were introduced to us and became the basis of our discussions on library socialism. In the ecology of freedom by Murray Bookchin, he briefly mentions pre-literate societies basing their societies on these three principles. So there's anthropological historical examples of Neanderthals that were born disabled and were able to grow up to maturity. The only way to understand these disabled Neanderthals being able to reach maturity is that they were taken care of and made part of the community in some way to be allowed to grow and die of old age rather than die of the disability they were born with. So I think this example in the human realm about complementarity is important to underscore it because we have this common liberal conception of diversity which is criticized by like reactionaries in the right. Oh, you know, liberals like diversity for diversity sake, like more diversity, like there's no logic behind it. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's probably true that like liberals don't think deeply about what it means for diversity to be strength, but diversity is strength in a really real sense. And it's just to make an extreme example, a tall person and a short person might be useful in different situations. Maybe a short person could fit through somewhere, a tall person could reach a high shelf. And together the short person and the tall person are able to provide mutual benefit to one another. And the same principle applies to the young and the old, to people with various levels of abilities in various ways. And also I think really underscores the need for decency and humanity towards people who are differently able to have physical disorders or developmental disorders or whatever is that there's room for them in the human tapestry. Now this is like something that the Nazis were against. The Nazis said that disabled people needed to like do stuff to prove that they were worth it, like it's worth keeping them alive. And obviously I think we all listening stand in opposition to that, but what's the basis for that? The basis for that is that we don't let anyone fall below a certain level and we understand that extending our circle to include everyone gives us benefit. There's a shared benefit. It's not a transactional benefit. It's a generative benefit. It's a positive, emergent outcome. Talking about diversity is our strength or like the positive benefits that come with diversity and the criticisms of that. Like obviously having difference doesn't mean there's going to be complementarity that it's all going to work together. Diversity is a strength when there is complementarity when there is non hierarchical difference between groups. And so there are major clashes going on that stem from the hierarchical differences and how people are treated. And then these right wing people who are like, "Oh, diversity doesn't work." Are the ones like actively against all of the efforts that are made. in order to foster complementarity between different groups of people in a culture. So for example, in the United States culture, there's like ongoing efforts by anti-racist activists to foster complementary relationships between historically marginalized racial groups in America and the white majority. And one of the ways in which the right-wing critique of diversity is so toxic is that it just becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy where they're fostering the opposite of complementarity, they're fostering tension and clashing, attempting to enforce the hierarchy. Maybe we can jump back to sort of what we mean by hierarchy because there's often a misconception about what hierarchy is or like the naturalness of hierarchy. Like our position is that hierarchy is not like a normal relationship in nature that it's not comparable to say a Boston employee versus like a predator and prey, which is often the metaphor is used by like neoliberal capitalism to describe competition. Because hierarchy refers to specifically sort of a command and control structure where one person has authority over others in the ability to punish them. And there's like different sort of flavors of hierarchy within that, but that's the commonality. Lobsters don't have hierarchy in the sense that there is an institution where a lobster is in charge of all the other lobsters. He tells the lobsters what to do if they don't listen to them. Those lobsters are punished, maybe lose their homes, have to go to lobster jail. So there might be instances of like proto-hierarchies within nature where you have like say a pecking order within a group of roosters. But these are temporary arrangements which can be upheav'd and are individualized. It's not that the boss monkey picks his son, picks the Donald Trump Jr. monkey and then makes him the head of the monkey corporation. The point is that hierarchy is a social relationship. It's often institutional. And what we're criticizing when we criticize hierarchy is not that when there's a group of people together one person might talk more and maybe people look up to them, listen to what they have to say. And that sort of like mild social relationship isn't the hierarchy that we're talking about. We're talking about institutional long term command and control structures. Yeah, especially when there's compulsive participation in some way. Like you need it to get your needs met. And then the anarchists are often criticized for their anti-hierarchy stance of like what you think there should be no leaders. Are you saying that I shouldn't defer to a bootmaker on the issue of boots? And then the anarchist says no, there's a great quote about that. I actually specifically do defer to the bootmaker on the issue of boots. It's fundamental to anarchism. So what's being described there is an understanding of difference rather than hierarchy. It's not that the bootsmaker is in charge of everyone's boots and can punish you for building boots the wrong way. It's that there's a difference between someone who really knows a lot about boots and someone who doesn't know very much about boots. And so whether you call that sort of like deferring to someone a hierarchy, some people might use language that way, I'd argue to reframe that, to like talk about that in different terms. Because also another key thing about this about this type of hierarchy if you want to call it that is that the relationship between a student and teacher is eventually eliminated. The role of the teacher is to bring the student to the level of the teacher. So there's theoretically some day through this mentorship, through this peer relationship in difference where the gap is closed and then they're both teachers. Or at least both have the same amount of information as the teacher. They both have the capacity to teach. Yeah, and like those kinds of hierarchy relationships, command and control relationships are outside of some very specific context antithetical to any kind of complementary relationship because the hoarding of power that makes that type of hierarchy possible prevents the people who have the power from adequately meeting all of the needs of the people in the system. Like the lowest down employees at a company are the ones who are the most aware of the fact that they don't have healthcare or that they don't have enough money to pay their rent or have a vacation, to learn things, do skills training, anything. They have all the awareness of those problems and what those problems are and they feel the immediacy of those problems because they're happening to them. But then the people at the top hoarding all the power needed to meet those needs. They don't have a very high awareness. They have an abstracted understanding from people who've made the case to them. But they don't have the same visceral awareness and like connection to those problems. So hierarchies subvert complementarity by enforcing that distance keeping all the power in one very small concentrated place and not letting it get to the places in the system where it could do some good. Welcome to the library socialism films about libraries film review. The segment of the show where we review films about libraries. And obviously we review these films on a scale from don't borrow it to borrow it and then borrow it and renew it which is our highest. Kind of a clever nod to libraries with that ranking system. So this week Aaron you watched a movie, a film about libraries called ex-leabras. More than one person recommended this film to us. And when I looked it up it was actually one that I almost went to see the Vancouver Film Festival but ultimately decided against it because it's three and a half hours long. Ooh that's long. Yeah but it has like rave reviews. And I was always interested in libraries even in 2017 I think when that was. Before we did any library socialism stuff. It's like a three hour documentary about libraries, rave reviews. Maybe I'll check it out. It's a non-narrative documentary so they're not like making any arguments or anything like that. It's just kind of like immersing you in the world of the New York Public Library system. This is a really special library. This library is part of Lincoln Center. So we share its mission of presenting artistic excellence of the highest caliber. We're also part of the New York Public Library. So we share the library's mission of being a warm welcoming place that's committed to education and committed to nurturing everyone's individual passions and curiosity. And we like to think that we're a great marriage of those two missions. And this recitals and I really represent that well in my opinion. Carolyn is an incredible pianist, a great artist. She's performed in many of our city's great performance halls. And she's also I think a wonderful embodiment of that welcoming, generous spirit that the library tries to embody as well. [Music] It's kind of like the series of shots that show all these different elements of the library experience. So you'll see some people sitting on the computers in the library doing whatever they're doing, and minecraft watching videos, and then like pokes the other one or something. Then you're like in one of the back rooms with all the people on the telephones, talking to callers who are looking for specific books or like helping them look stuff up, listening to people read poetry or it's job fair that's going on at the library or you're in the back room listening to this guy who loves talking about public-private partnerships way too much. Say that over and over again in different contexts. It's really great and it gives you just this like immersive glimpse into how all these different, disparate pieces work together to make something that's more than the sum of its parts. Everything a library does. There are these just like amazing institutions that offer so much that doesn't immediately come to mind when you just think about lending books. And yeah, it's really slow paced, it's chill. You can put it on in the background and do other stuff and just kind of let it catch your attention when it does or you can sit there wrapped in attention for the whole three and a half hours, your choice. But either way I do say, what was it? Check it out, Andrew now. Whoa, check it out, Andrew now. Library, documentary, phone. I'm going to have to check that out and then renew it. Yeah, you do have to. Sorry everyone, if you were trying to take that out of the library, I renewed it because it was so good. Should have placed a hold, which would have prevented him from renewing it. That wraps up another Wrong Boys library socialism documentary films about libraries. Film review. Thank you. Complementarity, it's something that you can find in nature or you can find in human societies. But it isn't a guaranteed thing, it's not just like a rigid naturalism that we're arguing when we're talking about complementarity within societies or ecosystems or whatever. It's something that's contingent. It can be created, it can be destroyed, it can happen by chance. But I think it's worth noting that we sort of come alive, we come awake in a system that's really complex and that complementarity is already happening. Complementarity is necessary for function in all complex. And like take that as many levels back as you want, but like be no biology. They just be like a chaos of atoms, like you know that don't cohere in any way to create anything that works. Like everything's a complex system of some kind or another. Even if on one level of analysis something's pretty simple. There's other levels of analysis where you can look at where it's a complex system in and of itself. Like a single person's body or whatever is a complex system. But it's also just simple, it's one unit, it's a person. and depends on how you're looking. at it. But in order for anything to function, there needs to be complementary relationships between the pieces of that system. And that's just like a descriptive claim that we notice from looking at nature and looking at complex systems that do work. So it's not that everything in nature is always complementary to each other. It's that we observe in nature that when aspects of a system are complementary, they work together. And when they aren't complementary, the system degrades. I like this framing. I've been partial to political plurality. I've always sort of like the idea of there being room for difference and exploration. And like this, in many cases, a straw man, but maybe also in some cases, real, this idea of like a party line or the way things that are supposed to be being enforced rather than like through discussions and difference. I've always favored the difference in plurality, and I feel like complementarity gives us a good lens on how to talk and think about these differences. And it's also sort of why rather than using market metaphors, we try to use ecosystem metaphors. So you could talk about like the ecosystem of ideas or the ecosystem of tactics rather than a marketplace. Because the way to talk and think about these differences in opinions has to do with can they all work well together more so than can they crush the other one in competition or whatever the marketplace metaphor is there. It presumes a very particular type of relationship. In ecosystems, there's like a lot of different ways that things can work in complementary ways to one another. Sometimes it could even be a type of competition in some instances. And the ecosystem metaphor I like too, because you can use it to defend a diversity of ideas or to express worries about groupthink or whatever while also having like a strong framework for understanding that the reason we want to have differences of ideas is to create productive complementary outcomes. So like certain ideas like hey, genocide's really good, doesn't help produce productive complementary outcomes. So that's an extreme example obviously. It's going to depend on context, which ideas work together in what situations. But the ecosystem metaphor really helps grapple with the way that ideas actually relate to one another way better than the marketplace idea where everyone goes and sets up their idea stand and then they try to sell the most ideas, fight it out in the marketplace and one idea crushes the other one totally destroyed, go out of business forever. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a broken metaphor because I mean, companies going out of business don't go out of business through triumphant conflicts where they're like, these are my products. And then they're like, no, these are my products that these prices and at the end one is vanquished. I much prefer the ecosystem metaphor is because it allows us to choose which parts of nature we want to highlight, which parts of nature we want to actualize or recreate. What sort of like socio biomimicry we want to do much, much preferable to the market metaphor, which was incoherent to start. And it's based on this conception where we take human ideas about hierarchy and markets, then we project it onto nature. And then we say, oh, look, we found a nature examples of hierarchy. It's evidence that hierarchy and command and control systems are natural because look, all the other lobsters are afraid of that lobster. That lobster is really proud and all the other lobsters are shameful and follow that lobster. It's just like our society. It's just like a landlord or a boss or a police officer. That process of projecting our relationships onto animals and then using those animal relationships is justifications for what we do. Is the basis of like social Darwinism and is just factually wrong. We can do something much more interesting with taking metaphors from nature where we look for what it is that we want to actualize in nature. Look for examples of it. Say like different species who have symbiotic relationships. They're greater than the sum of their parts. They can do things together. They can't do alone. We know that humans are in these relationships also. So it's not to deny that bad things happen in nature. Like nature is only this beautiful pure place in perfect balance until humans showed up and threw everything out of balance. And before that, it was all like cats and dogs living together. It was beautiful. Every cat finds a dog and they like pair up and they just like trot around the earth together. Like having adventures fun. So the planet was like, before we got here. Yeah. So I mean, I reject that naive view of nature and say like, oh, we just need to live according to nature. We just have to take all the patterns from nature and actualize them in our lives. Because there are patterns in nature which are disgusting, like laying eggs in each other. Yeah, no humans should be laying eggs inside other humans. Absolutely not. But we can use aspects of nature, find structures that work in this iterative repeating process of evolution and complex ecosystems to find hints about the direction that we should go and apply natural metaphors to what we do. Yeah, again, it's looking at what actually works in nature and then trying to mimic that. Hey, gamer son. Oh, hey non-gamer father. What are you doing? I'm just playing some games. I know you can't pause all of them because it's the kind that you can pause or yes, I can. I can pause it. Like I'm not a gamer myself, but from previous interactions we had, I know that when you're playing online, you can't just pause because then they can still shoot you and stuff and I get that. It's totally, but cool. Thanks for pausing. Thanks for asking, being aware that I might be in a situation where pausing is difficult. I appreciate it. Yeah, well, I'm not a gamer, but I try. Some of the other gamers are like, oh, you have a non-gamer father and I'm like, yeah, it's not so bad. He listens. Well, that's like some of the other parents are like, oh, your kids are gamer. You know what that means? And I'm like, I don't know what you mean. He's the same conscientious, helpful son that he's always been. Now he just plays games in his spare time and it's a release for him. He enjoys it. Thank you. Non-gamer fathers do understand. Yeah, I was just thinking about something really cool. I wanted to share it with you and even thought of sort of a way that I might be able to like, although we have different interests and I'm not a gamer that I could maybe connect with you. And then let me know if it's lame to try. But I was reading about this thing called companion planting in gardening. Like if you put certain vegetables and fruits together when you're growing them, there's mutually beneficial relationships between the different vegetables. So like dozens and dozens of examples where you just have this sort of like natural little combination of plants, like a really famous one is the three sisters squash beans in corn. You plant squash beans in corn together and all three of them thrive and grow better together because squash prevents weeds from growing corn stalks help the beans grow up faster. And the beans make the soil better for squash and corn by pulling nitrogen out. Super cool. And I thought it was super like minecraft. So from when I remember and correct me if I'm wrong. In crafting, you'll put down like here's a piece of wood, here's a piece of wood, here's a piece of stone. And then together you make a sword with it or something like that. It's just kind of like part of how things are that those things work better together. Yeah exactly. It's part of how things are and this is what really blows my mind about it is out there in the world in nature. There's these secrets to discover. It maybe sounds right, but there's this natural way of things when our relationship to nature where we can put certain vegetables together and make vegetables grow way faster. And it's just the way it is. And then we figure that out. And it's maybe we observe it in nature. First of all, or maybe we experiment together. It's like a video gamer like cheat code or something. It's just like it's out there. Yeah. And it makes like if you know the cheat codes, you kind of like make the system work for you way better. Like hacking the system kind of. It makes sense. Yeah. Like hacking the system. Yeah. That's what's so cool about it. It's sort of like garden hacks. You need to know the source code in order to hack something. Yeah. So you need like the natural wisdom of what plans work together in order to hack gardening. That's really cool. Along the same lines, like there's biomemically where in technology we can take inspiration from nature and then in our design when we're creating technology to make our technology more effective. So like we can actually find examples of things that have evolved in nature that have a certain form that serves a purpose that we might not have guessed and then replicate what we find in nature, which was sort of hardened by evolution. That was created through the process of evolution over a long period of time and then take those features from you know plant life or wildlife and then apply that to technology and generate good outcomes from observing nature and then implementing the wisdom that nature shares with us that was created through the process of evolution. It's so cool. Isn't that kind of like how they made airplane wings? They based them off of bird wings, the shape of them to get the lift. Absolutely know there's tons of examples of successful biomemically. For example, in the United States, they invented forms of wind turbines. They took inspiration from the lumps on the fins of humpback whales and it turns out those lumps actually served a purpose about generating more drag. So they used the whale lumps as inspiration for wind turbine lumps, which generate more power with less speed. In the 2008 Olympics Speedo, produce a form of bathing suit that replicates these little tiny hooks on the skin of sharks that helps them move forward in the water faster. For whatever reason, this little shape of hook at a tiny microscopic level makes the water move aside easier. 98% of people who won medals in the 2008 Olympics for swimming were wearing this type of swimsuit and as a result, the Olympics actually banned that material for giving an unfair advantage. There's also a shopping mall in Zimbabwe that uses 10% less electricity to cool it than other shopping malls because in the design process of building a shopping mall, they emulated cooling dynamics that exist within termites' nest. Wow, yeah, that is really cool. My mind's just reeling with all the possibilities. Looking at how nature works and like using those cheat codes, that's brilliant, Dad. Thanks for interrupting my game for that. No problem, you know the 2020-20 row, right? For every 20 minutes you spend looking at a screen, you should look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds that reduces ice strain. You probably won't do that, it's hard to do. Maybe we can just biomemick me some new eyeballs after I break these ones. You know what, that is some edgy cynicism, but fingers crossed that we perfect self-driving cars or replacement eyeballs because there's no way in hell anyone's doing that shit. And like your generation, I mean my generation, we got bad eyes, but your generation and your eyes are going to be, God knows what, dried up. Yeah, wrinkled like prunes. There's space around the eyeball in the socket, a little prune in there. It's creepy. Little unblinking prune. I better get back to causing that to happen. Okay, cool, see you later, I'm going to go watch TV and my phone. Cool. Two screens. Two screens, two eyes. You enjoy the games. Always do. Part of a balanced lifestyle. Talking about the socially-collogical idea of first nature, second nature, third nature. First nature being nature that exists pre-humans or without humans, the wild nature. Wild nature. And then second nature is human artifice, human society, human existence. What humans have built. Because that's all natural too. That's part of nature. We are part of nature. And then the idea is third nature is the complementary melding of these two things in a way that makes sense. Because we're destroying the habitability of our biosphere. And like broadly, the process through which we're doing that is by not having a complementary relationship, we're having a type of relationship where we clash with nature, where we insult nature, where we destroy nature for our own immediate benefit, but long-term loss, because it's all part of the same system. We're not mimicking what works in nature by finding ways to exist in a complementary relationship with our ecosystem. We're mimicking what doesn't work in nature. And we are. We're innovating new ways to not work in nature. Yeah, we're innovating new ways to insult nature, to exist in an insultarity type of relationship with nature. Because of this kind of like ideological view that humans are above nature, separate from nature, that our rationality has uplifted us to this place where we can impose our will on nature, that nature's subordinate to us rather than something we're a part of, and we must relate to in a way that makes sense. We have a human hierarchy, like a boss and employee. Yeah, yeah. Humans are at the top of the hierarchy, and then everything else in the world is our employee. Literally, that's like the problem with anthropocentrism. Is this idea of human hierarchy over nature and the use and abuse of it? Yeah, it's our particular weird fixation on this hierarchy, on this idea that there's this master slave employee employer, that there's always these hierarchical relationships, that fixation has like truly messed up our relationship to the planet and the biosphere that we live on. So like a hierarchical view of humans relationship to nature might be we should use nature for our benefit, whereas a more reciprocal view of the role that humans play in nature could still be we can use nature for our benefit, but also we must allow ourselves to be of use and benefit to nature, to first nature outside of ourselves. If we aren't providing back sufficient benefit for the benefits that we are provided, then the system's going to fall apart and we won't be able to continuously maintain that relationship as an ongoing support system for everything else that we want to do. Sometimes I'm worried, I'm like trying to express my thoughts on complementarity. There's so, I've got so many thoughts and I feel like it connects to so many things and it's just where I'm worried that I'm being too open ended or not specific enough, but like really to take it to the extreme with that. Like I remember being a teenager and first hearing Carl Sagan say we are away for the universe to know itself and how my teenage atheist mind was so blown by that and what makes it a profound statement to me connects in with my concept of complementarity so profoundly and that humanity needs to have a complementary relationship to the world around us. We need to not just thrive ourselves, but we need to mutually thrive. We need to help other things thrive or we'll lead to our own destruction. The difference and not hierarchy between humans and other things in the natural system that we're a part of because of our specialized language, our complex social relations, our use of technology, our aspirations to be greater than we are, our aspirations to carry ourselves with ethics and forethought. Our ability to retain information, technology, knowledge, culture, society through generations and like build this continuous legacy of all that we have known and have been in the past and like to build on that. In our aspiration to better ourselves in the world around us and our capacity to actually do that, it's unique in nature. Like I love whales. I love whales as much as anyone, but they can't do what we do. Yeah, and we can't do a whales do, but they can't do what we do. Like, there's many things whales do that we can't do. Yeah, we're away for the universe to know itself. Whales are away for the universe to be enormous, things of fat that echo locate around the ocean. So we are away for the universe to know itself. We're also away for the universe to exercise ethics, away for the universe to take responsibility, away for the universe to love in a real sense. So we've got a special little place in nature and that distinction between difference and hierarchy becomes really like potent here because I think people sometimes go too far in the opposite direction where they're like, oh, humans aren't in charge of the universe. Humans think they're so great and all they do is destroy things and they're awful. And this sort of misanthropic and virus centric sort of, we're a bad case of fleas and the earth's just got to shake us off. Yeah, the problem isn't our lack of complementarity in our relationships to the other aspects of nature. The problem is us itself, we're corrupted. And that logic is like the logic of insultarity. It's the logic of not relating to each other. It's a logic of not fixing problems that the people themselves are the problem rather than the roles and the relationships is the problem. Like when we look at the climate crisis, the problem, you know, the climate crisis is absolutely caused by the rich. You know, the oil companies knew about this stuff decades before the rest of us and paid millions of dollars to try to confuse us into not taking action. Crimes against humanity. But the people themselves, it's not like we just get rid of those people and the problems suddenly soft. Like, oh, those were the evil people. It's the relationships, the power differences between oil executives and the rest of us and the motivations and systems that led to that that are the problem. So like when I think of misanthropy and my opposition to misanthropy, I think of it in a much, much broader sense than just hating humanity in general, but in times where we find ourselves hating human culprits rather than systems and roles is a type of misanthropy. And it might be justified in some, and people, you know, there's cathartic reasons to hate when you've been wronged. But at the same time, I think the really rigorous analysis, we're looking at the roles and institutions, not the individuals. To often people assume like, for example, a politician or a political party, you don't like throw that politician out and it's going to solve the problem. Well, guess what? They just get a new guy to step in there and the whole system and institutions stays the same. It's like chop off the king's head and pick a new king, you know, close, sweetie, close. Yeah, you got to chop off the role of king. Yeah, and you have to institute a directly democratic commune of communes that pace that people according to need. 10,000 years of world peace make the rivers run with lemonade. Oh, it's nice to take a hike up this mountain side with you, my triplet brother. Yeah. It's our little tradition, two of three triplets, us two. Something to do just without Artemis, because we spend so much time with Artemis and he'll be around forever. And it's so we thought, now I give anything to have him on this hike with us to see him one more time. Yeah, freecax, what took Artemis out? I'm not saying like, oh, we should have brought Artemis on every private hike with two out of three triplets. It was needed. I love him, I miss him, but he was a little much. Yeah, but then I see, you know, there's three shelves in the fridge, one of them's empty now. Three bedroom condo with just two out of three triplets. Yeah. And I guess, I mean, we should just throw out that bicycle built for three. And I can be riding that again anytime soon. Also when we order milkshakes now only get two straws. Two straws. Or we're going to get a third straw and just sit there. Yeah. Oh, look, baby deer. Yeah. Here we are thinking about death and the miracle of life right before us keeps things in perspective anyway. That's beautiful. You know, every piece of the ecosystem plays its part, you know, the deer, the grass, the it's not working together, produces the beauty of nature. It's sort of like the beauty of me, you and Artemis. Yeah, the triplets, a singular one from three is now two thirds. When we put our heads together, we had the. brain power of four or five brothers. We just play. - Oh, easily. Yeah, easily. I've had so much trouble concentrating in the reading group lately. Interesting stuff. I love the basics of library science, but keep seeing Artemis's face dancing before my eyes whenever I close them, you know? Artemis's party trick of face dancing. I miss it too. - Of course I wanna learn about collection management, information systems, research methods, cataloging, preservation, information architecture, and management, but like. - Well, yeah, I mean, the sociopolitical revolutionary project to overthrow society as it is and replace it with a use of refugee and library society. You know, you have to study library science, but when your triplet brother dies, come on, let's fuck it up to experience. Like, we can't be revolutionaries all the time. Okay, sometimes we gotta go for a walk in nature, mourn our dead brother. No one's making us do this. We put this pressure on ourselves. - Do you wanna hop over that stream or just find some way to see if we can go around? I think we can make it over to get issues wet. - Worst case scenario, little ankle wetness. - All right. - Nice. - Whoa, good jump. - Oh, thank you. - Okay, here I come. Oh, oh, just a little splash. That's okay, I'm all right. Little wetter in the sock a bit, but can't jump as far as you. - Oh, yeah, but you have lots of other great qualities. - Oh, come on, dry. - We work for example. - We work together, you know, sometimes you need to jump far, sometimes you need to draw. - That's all. - Yeah. Are you all caught up on the reading for tomorrow night on the five laws of library and shit? - Yeah, I just skimmed it. I was gonna like the-- - The founder of library science made these five laws, right? They're pretty good. First ones, books are for use. You know, they're not keeping these books in libraries just to keep them, right? It's no good having all this stuff if people can't access it and use it, you know, so you need libraries that are open, accessible, well cataloged, available to everyone, regardless of class, race, sex, anything, you know, it's just open access to all books or for use, for people to use. And as a library, socialists, I take that one step further and say, things are for use. - Yeah, some more modern librarians have updated it to media are for use because of media richness in library environments now, but definitely once you have libraries that archive and provide to people on a use of freckty and basis, not just media, but all kinds of items that people need, things are for use, absolutely. And the second lot, every person, his or her book, meaning, you know, anyone who comes to a library, they're looking for something and the mission of the library is to have that book for them. So you want to have complete collections, you want to have broad collections that cover wide arrays of topics so that any person who comes in, it has their book, it has their media or has what they need, you know? - To each recording to their need. - Exactly, every person, his or her book, second lot of librarianship. And then the third law is just kind of a corollary of that, every book, it's reader, meaning, you know, books have a place in the library, even if smaller demographics of people might choose to read it. You know, every book has its reader and a library of the future that meets all of people's needs, even if only a few people might need something, you still want to have it in the library, just in case, so that people truly can get their needs met. - It's interesting that duo, every book, its reader and every reader, its book, when metaphor it up to society, level, like library socialism becomes very similar to each recording to their ability, to each recording to their need. - Yeah, absolutely, the kernel of socialisms and libraries from the start. Yeah, and then the fourth law is one of my favorite, save the time of the reader and sometimes save the time of the reader and the librarian, just meaning, you want the library system to be efficient, you want it to be easy to find what you need, get them in, get them out, or if they want to leave or stay whatever to community space as well, of course, but efficiency needs to be part of managing massive collections of books, needs to be part of managing library society. - Absolutely, I mean, a principle that us library socialist uphold is that ease of use and efficiency, user experience, are things that are beneficial, convenience is good. - Absolutely. - It's amazing that we have these libraries in our pockets, the access and convenience of it, it's incredible. And, you know, we celebrate and uphold the convenience store. - Time is a limited resource. - Yeah, we need to do more from less. - And then, of course, the fifth law, the library is a growing organism, just meaning, you know, you don't collect all of history's work and then it's done. There's always new stuff being written. There's always older works you don't have yet. There's always things that maybe the library doesn't need anymore, duplicate copies, non-notable works that might need to be called curated. It's a growing organism, shifting, changing with the needs of people. And, of course, like, media richness is part of that too. Libraries didn't use to have DVDs. - It's such a cool fifth law of librarianship. The library is a growing organism. It's like, sort of psychedelic. That's the meat that made the cut, the laws of librarianship, according to the founder of library science. - Yeah, it's a recognition that, you know, library, it's more than just a collection of books. It's a just all of the books there. And the people there and the reference materials, it creates something more than the sum of its parts. The library itself is a force to be reckoned with an organism in itself that grows and changes. - And the library of society has to be a growing organism itself. You know, we're never gonna have a perfect revolution where all of a sudden everything is just like a perfectly ticking clock for the rest of history. - Of course not. - There's forces and counterforces and there's growth and curation and development and change. And we acknowledge that. You know, we acknowledge that there isn't an end in sight. There's just new beginnings. There's always just new beginnings over and over again. That's something that we embrace. That's library socialism and a nutshell. - Yeah, absolutely. And it's rooted in the history of library thought. Like, these laws were published in 1931, almost a hundred years ago. The seeds of the future library society being planted. - Yeah, just all this talking about libraries, cohesive whole. Just reminds me that our whole, the whole three triplets of us is no longer cohesive. Yeah, Artemis was a hell of a guy. Needless to say, our band is not gonna be the same without a guitarist. - I play drums you sing. Where's the riffs gonna come from? - Yeah, this sounds like it might be challenging or artistic music. - Yeah, and we were never trying to make challenging music. - Just general fun music for people to dance to. - Yeah, what people to dance to from three triplets in a band. Having fun. - Yeah, let's see, under this tree. Sun's probably gonna be setting. I feel like this might be a really good spot to watch. - Hell yeah, they're get between me and a beautiful sunset. - Trying to talk about library socialism here. Without talking about the meaning of life, I wanted to sidestep talking about the meaning of life here, but I just can't. Of these three component parts of library socialism, complementarity is the piece that touches closest to the meaning of life. When we're talking about our relationship to nature as a species and our relationships to each other. - Yeah, fostering relationships that work between ourselves and the people that you relate to, the social systems and environmental systems that you are embedded in. The meaning of life is always gonna be about that relationship between you and what else, the else, the elseness and complementarity, like it's just saying, we want those relationships to work and to not not work. That's what people find meaningful in their everyday lives is creating things that work and produce positive outcomes. Like we can say, the meaning of life is what you make of it where people choose or just happen to find different things meaningful, but producing positive workable outcomes between relating parts, between yourself and things that you're relating to. Like I can't think of anything that anyone would say they found meaningful that you can't describe as an instance of that. - So we like face an environmental crisis and all these overlapping social crises. I just don't see any way that we can do it that isn't going to engage in some form of like biomimicry on the technological side and being kind to each other on the social side. And complementarity can broadly touch on both of those concepts and many other concepts in a really useful and fruitful, interesting way. I'll give the example of death. Like death is bad. Death is usually like pretty bad to be involved with. Like if someone that you care about dies, that's horrible. If you die and you don't want to, that's horrible. - It's a painful experience. - Loss is painful, it's negative, and it's something like that, ideally in most circumstances, you want to try to avoid, although it happens, as part of the world. We come from a system of evolution and iterative natural sequence of individuals, our genetic materials pass down for millions of years in ways that we can't imagine. And it's impossible that all of our ancestors would stay alive in some sort of weird pure retention system where just like there's my dad, he's older than me, my grandpa, even older than him, my great, great grandpa, even older than him, and so on and so on, all the way back to single-celled organisms. The world doesn't work that way. The world that we've found ourselves in doesn't work that way. So our very existence, our very life, is owed to this heritage of death. Like our very existence is owed to the principles of the system that will kill us. And in that sense, there's sort of a philosophical complimentary. between life and death. The things that we love about life are caused by death. Complementarity implies limits to what is acceptable and what produces positive outcomes. And one of the most fundamental limits we have on our existence is death, is that we all will die. It's really hard to accept that. It can be really difficult, but I think it's important to highlight this one specifically because of how extreme it is and because how it highlights that like complementarity doesn't necessarily mean everything holding hands and singing kumbaya together. Like lions are holding hands with rabbits and humans holding hands with the lion on the other side and we all got our ukuleles out. Life without capitalism. Yeah, it's like this is a complimentary society and it's all good all the time. Everyone's only always nice to each other. Nothing ever dies. Part of complementarity is pain and loss. Complementarity is like the generative positive emergent outcomes of complex systems through non-hierarchical difference. And in the case of death, there are complex positive outcomes generated through the interplay between life and death. Although like death is a social tragedy. The overall outcome of it in the long term is an incredible amount of diversity and wonder and unpredictability and lack of fate. An uncalcified, open, thriving world is the result fundamentally of death among other things. Yeah, I mean like I'm open to the idea of overcoming death or attempting to overcoming death but like it creates urgency like the fact that you know you're gonna die. Especially just like the more you age and you notice those numbers always go up and they never go down and there's fewer of them left than there were before in front of you always. Yeah, it creates this sense of like oh if I want to do something while I'm here I have to actually do it. So as recently a campaign manager for the NDP in Canada and we lost we came in second place by about 1500 votes. First time ever running an election where we totally lost like where we just there was no victory at the end. For you first time you. Yeah, first time that I was in an election where I was a serious part of making it happen. My goal, my singular goal was to elect someone and make them win and then election day came the balance were counted. We were short of winning. We lost. Yeah, there's no way around it. There's no silver lining. Second place we did better than last time. It's like I went home at the end of the day having not won, having not elected the person. Yeah, which was my goal and my goal wasn't oh we're gonna get closer than last time. My goal was straight up get this motherfucker in and I lost. And so obviously I thought a lot about that. I wasn't just like oh whoops well. Oh meant to win. Thought a lot about it. And so one of the things that I thought about was the benefits of losing. Now like I wanted to win but what could I get from it is I've got more experience than I had before. I'd never lost an election before now I have. And I got all the experience that came through running that election the entire time. The pain of loss was always a part of the joy of the victories that I had had before. I just never got to experience it myself. So this is my third election. Two times we won. Well the second time we more than half won. There's multiple candidates. It's municipal. Third time I lost. But every time I won there were four other campaign offices that lost nearby. And I didn't think for a second about what I felt like to that. That is second side. And I wouldn't. I wouldn't be like oh I'm about to win this election. I hope but what about those guys? Oh better lose. Like no it's just part of the system. It's part of this broken system honestly. And I think the system needs to be overthrown and redesigned in our lifetime. That understanding of the way that my victory was connected to people's past losses and that my loss was connected to someone else's victory and stuff like that. This sort of stuff helped me sort of center my thoughts on the fact that no you don't just automatically win every time. And sometimes you can work really really hard for a really really long time and like put your heart and soul into something and try your best and sacrifice so much to make it happen and then still lose. This sort of helped me think about this because we're thinking I was already thinking about complementarity because of this being around the corner. Loss is always painful and like the loss of a human life is like of the ultimate loss that most people can imagine. But like losing an election is similar in a lot of ways like you're mourning the loss of this thing that you wanted or that you were expecting or hoping for. You were hoping for MP Sven Robinson in office. But what you got is MP Terry Beach what's his name? I got it right. Damn liberal Terry Beach and like so there's there's this distance between what was desired and what is and the loss of the thing that was desired is always painful. And like in this instance it's probably it's like it's a bad outcome morally broadly at least from our perspective. I'm sure the liberals disagree. Well they're not going to meet the climate change targets so they can eat my ass. And like everything about how we need to change the system and like even first pass the post and the way winners and losers and that specific system are decided is bad. And the pain of loss is something that we all need to be comfortable with because it's part of all systems like we can't hold on to everything forever. We can't hold on to anything forever because we die. But like as a collective we do our best to hold on to some things forever. And that's part of like what the library project is about. It's not it's not just the history of human knowledge. It's the history of human knowledge that's been written down that's been attempted to be preserved over time. And that that attempt to preserve is like this human impulse against loss this human impulse to like prevent loss through the generations to retain. But retaining information retaining knowledge what can be retained cross generations is made meaningful by a selection process and like curation and keeping what is most necessary and what is most useful and allowing what else there is to be gone to disappear to be lost. You can't have one without the other. You can't have a body of knowledge without pruning without like cultivating. So there's always this like interplay between this desire we have to prevent the pain of loss. This desire we have to retain and the fact of loss the fact that time causes degradation that time brings about loss. It brings about loss through death. It brings about loss because your book will eventually disintegrate. The like paper doesn't last forever. Even with the best of like maintaining it in like temperature controlled humidity controlled environments like we can keep things for a really long time. But like nothing lasts forever. Loss is inherent to the universe. It's part of the march of time. And libraries are just like this beautiful stand against that. This beautiful legacy of human knowledge and human capacity stored catalogued and interacted with in a way so that like people can interface with it and make use of it. I don't know. It's hard to explain what I'm saying. But like it's a stand against loss in a sense. But at the same time it's dependent on loss. It's dependent on the loss of curation and on the loss of what isn't deemed worth the effort required to maintain to retain something forever. Yeah there's some like naive part of me that wants to just retain everything and be like the library should have every book possible and just keep on piling them in and just get the library bigger and bigger forever until everything. And I mean everything forever. All the new things that are going to come out just keep on growing that library never decrease only increase only retention never loss. But it doesn't make any sense. It'll end up defeating the purpose. I think it's a good thing to work with physics. So like we need to understand the system and then work within it to the best that we can to actualize the most ethical outcomes that we can imagine. That's the point of life. That's the purpose of life. Obviously. Hey I'm a library socialist too. Wait don't tell me. Yeah. Library socialism, Sean Ville, I thought splitters, turncoats. That is just as bad as fascism. Seeing you show up in the comments on my posts makes me want to vomit into the trash can. Aaron Moritz took a beautiful idea, developed. Let's be honest mostly by Sean and completely destroyed it. So thoroughly that you have to assume it was on purpose and that he was a seditious evil man. You people are just part of a cult. It's the cult of Sean thought. We're free thinkers over here and you guys are just cultoids. You're just like humanoid people made of shadow energy. You barely conform a coherent thought. I believe there's a famous quote that's says he who calls someone else in a cult is the one who's actually in a cult. So therefore it seems that you are the one who's in a cult. Aaron Morts is the deviation if you weren't a completely brain-dead, warm brain-infested brain idiot who can't rub two thoughts together. Maybe you would see the truth but as it is now it seems like you're just sitting in a bathtub with a rubber chicken slamming it against the keyboard pressing enter on whatever it happens to type. Okay, thought that thought. I guess we threw all pretense of good faith out the window. I won't waste any more of your time. I thought I might come here for an open-minded discussion of differing factions of library socialists. Instead I've got nothing but abuse and gaslighting. I get strength from the knowledge I'm right and I get strength from the knowledge that you're a fool and with that I block you. You contradict yourself, sir. For if you were strong you would not block. I do. And so that day a playwright just coming down from the high of releasing their second off Broadway initiative happened to stumble upon that very comment section. This playwright was so taken by the mastery of the arguments, the strength of ideas and the tension of great minds that playwright adapted that comment section into an award-winning off-Broadway play. The keyboard warriors which toured across the country becoming one of the top performing plays in American history. We now go to the last show on the tour where two actors are typing on their keyboards and the text is appearing up in a projector behind them. They don't speak acting out that famous scene. Now the director of the keyboard warriors. Thank you. Thank you. It's a spotlight on me and the audience I'll never get used to it. But as you all know this is the last stop on the tour. This play we started on Broadway. Went on tour and a lot of people are asking me what's next, where's the show going to play next. Have an announcement regarding that which is it won't. It won't be playing next. This was the last performance ever that will ever be done. I own the rights to the play and I will use every lawyer at my disposal to prevent anyone from ever getting access to it. Now or in the future I believe we had a perfect run. Anything beyond this would just be overstaying or welcome. I want to make room for new plays, for innovative plays like this one. Thank you again. I know you're all disappointed and you won't be able to see it again but all good things must come to an end. Thank you. You'll just pop up the tape. That's the end of the movie. It's just credits after that. Oh wow. That all of it holds up but is there ever any sequels to that movie or maybe a reboot or no? No, no. That little monologue is the end of keyboard warrior. It's over. They didn't do any after that. Oh why? There's something to be said about renewal. Yeah like rebooting an old thing and doing it over again. Or just sometimes it's just retiring something. And that loss I mean we can mourn the loss of the potential. The thought of oh there could be a sequel. What would it be like? Maybe enticing. But is it really necessary? Maybe it's good to close the book on some things. Experience that loss. Feel that loss. Now I just want more. It's like when you read through big book series you get to know all these characters and at the end you're like oh my friends. Yeah they're all gone. Technically die but there don't exist anymore. It's like oh the last page of Anomorphs. Oh damn all my friends are dead. There's no more stories about them. Alright and let's play a tape popping out sound effect and pretend that we're popping out of tape as we often do on the show. So that tape that we were pretending to listen to but we were actually making was characters in a universe where a keyboard warrior movie was made discussing whether or not that was the end of the keyboard warrior franchise or if it came back again in their universe. Yeah and really that ending of the keyboard warrior sketch we just did grew out of our desire to kind of do something really special with this particular keyboard warrior sketch something we hadn't done before. And the reason that we wanted to do that was because well it's hard to even say it but we're retiring keyboard warrior that is the last keyboard warrior sketch. It's the last sketch. Yeah I mean we've been doing keyboard warrior basically longest of all right from the beginning. Still use that same intro music. It's like several Facebook sounds ago at this point. Definitely. People love the keyboard warrior sketch but you know maybe sometimes we rely on it a bit too much. You know we just want to open things up and do something different. I mean there's only so many endings. They disagree to the end of the song reasonable. One of the mind reasonably starts agreeing or they come to a synthesis of some kind or something weird happens like you get married or one of them dies or a third person joins a conversation but yeah done that. But we want to send it off right we've invited everyone in wrong town to come to a funeral to mark their retirement of a good one a good part of the family. Why that why not? At least it wasn't dad and son. Did you see the body? It looks unreal. Yeah they didn't do the best job. So campaign to dull open caskets weird. Well it's European. Dad and son do you want to get up to say a few words about keyboard warrior? I always really liked the keyboard warriors because of the typing sound effects that go clickety-clack and then people got mad at each other and it's funny. I'd watch this sketch with my son he asked me what does libertarian socials mean? I'm like okay it's sort of the beginning son. Great educational tool fun sounds as Mike Sun mentioned. Yeah we'll be missed definitely part of this year's Ceylonk family and to retire a sketch like this it's too soon. Anybody else want to stop in the tape and popping it out? No to embarrass this anything. Recently resigned and disgraced Peach of Chilif. Haven't seen you in a while. Yeah so I'd like to say thank you to keyboard warrior radio theater for always holding it down in wrong town for all of us and not afraid to speak the truth not afraid to push boundaries. I also want to apologize to everyone here for some of my behavior tonight at this funeral. I will be resigning as a eulogist the things that I did today were inexcusable and I will be stepping down. Thank you I won't be taking any questions. If you don't mind I'm gonna say a few words so just the music here. Today on a confirmation bias news special report from the retirement funeral of keyboard warrior theater keyboard warrior was a great sketch. A sketch that was beloved by many liked by even more and hated by very few. This just in keyboard warrior was a penetrating look into the strange new realm of internet arguments and online debates and this just in keyboard warrior was a fundamentally human project putting all of our collective foibles disagreements and sorry I'm breaking up a little bit. foibles disagreements on display you know I usually don't break down like this reading the news but no just play me up just play the song. On behalf of all the residents of wrong town let me just say it's the one good politician. This was a treasured sketch. This was a treasured sketch and to know that it no matter what happens no keyboard warrior will ever happen again from here on out forever. It just it hurts to sit with that knowledge. Let's just have a moment of silence to think about what it means for something to die. There's something to be said for the impermanent the ephemeral the had and lost. Maybe the library of Alexandria is more beautiful as a metaphor for the loss of information than what we would have actually gotten from it. Maybe it was just mostly bullshit anyways. More commentaries on Plato. I haven't read any of the generations of commentaries on Plato that already exists. Yeah a good part of the library of Alexandria is shit that we already have copies of anyways but since it's gone we can be like oh wow is this amazing thing we don't know and then the rest of it was mostly like comment section stuff. I don't know like I can mourn the library of Alexandria with the best of them but isn't there some sort of meaning and it's loss. Yeah everyone knows about it and even people who don't visit any libraries and don't care about libraries can be like oh it's so sad that that was like it's become this like cultural touchstone to like talk about loss of information. Maybe that's more valuable than it would have been. But like just to give some other examples of times when that instinct to prevent loss, the like the graspingness becomes a problem like hoarders where these people are so afraid of losing anything that they they might need later that they fill their spaces with all this junk like stacks and stacks of newspapers from decades ago that I just I just want to keep it just in case it's it's this furtive desire to keep as much as possible and to not let anything go in service of you might need it someday you've turned your living space into something that's completely something that runs contrary to a life worth living yeah to have all of your free space filled up with newspapers in case you need them and it runs contrary to like enjoying a concert to spend the entire time watching it through your cell phone screen because you're like desperately trying to save this moment forever so you can experience it again later and then you don't even end up really experiencing it as well as you could in the moment because you're focused on this desire to retain something that actually can't be retained. At least not very well with a cell phone video maybe if you had like a 360 degree camera and surround sound to record it for like a virtual reality thing or something maybe like the idea. That's a fine idea but you imagine everyone in the audience bring out their 360 surround sound cameras and hold some up you can just have one guy do that like yeah someone's getting caded to do it but yeah it's like oh man you know I'm a fireworks head I love fireworks I check out fireworks every chance I get but when I'm at the fireworks it's not very often I'm joking I don't really care about them but occasionally you get the opportunity to go there's fireworks and there's people here watching fireworks let's do it I'm not like oh I'm better than this it's not my favorite thing in the world but Sean got made fun of for liking fireworks too much yeah I'm just trying to clarify where I stand on the fireworks question it's fine and I'm not it's not that I don't watch it it's just that it rarely blows me away because it's because I was about to say anytime I'm watching fireworks it sounds like oh you fireworks chasing some people immediately think no I see people with their little digital cameras or like smartphones recording fireworks and if you ever watch video of fireworks it's such a good metaphor for this over-attention bullshit yeah because video of fireworks is so much just exponentially a whole level dumber and worse than regular fireworks which are already just like pretty good if you're an adult you know yeah I mean like it's cool it's really big like the thing that's awesome about fireworks is the whole sky is this canvas for these like big brilliant lights it's awe-inspiring like especially if you're a kid you haven't seen it very much or before but even as an adult it's this big thing like the sky is huge and it opens up to the universe and like just against that background you're having these colorful explosions of light it's very pretty people put effort into the shows but almost none of that comes through on a cell phone camera video yeah so you've taken your experience of this thing you've degraded it by 40% to record the video of it to have a copy that's only worth 10% of what it was in the first place you're losing a third percent it's like you think of how many times you go see fireworks but then think about how many times you've been like all right everyone I'm gonna go on YouTube and watch the fireworks we're like let's sit down as a family around the large screen TV and watch our old videos of fireworks that we kept wow it's pretty it's just like it's just bad it's just it's just a bad experience that nobody wants but like you think you want it in the moment and so yeah that over retention I think is a real silly thing to do anxiously zero-oxing your experiences as they happen yeah for no purpose except the most vague promise of somehow keeping it yeah you can't keep experiences you can take a couple pictures you'll have a memory of the experience sure but like experiences aren't something that can be bottled up and stored and then taken out again and had again you have to have them while you're having them they are inherently fleeting inherently ephemeral and like you just have to embrace that I mean you don't have to we're gonna make you but it's better another place that we get attention on this over-attention thing is like with the internet age that we're in now conversations that we've had that any other time period that would be ephemeral become part of the record which can be really damaging it can be damaging to people's lives the fact that this stuff is sort of like Facebook or Google databases private conversations say like a fight with your lover from 2011 I'm just trying to trigger someone specifically like maybe you said something really really like mean about your mom to your brother over email in 2005 who knows there's a million different things that should be a ephemeral but which aren't in the internet age the NSA has these huge databases of all these communications from all these different people copies of text conversations and all this stuff I'm sure they've got it in some form they claim that they only look at it in patterns they don't look at the individual pieces in a sense it's like the library of Alexandria it's one of the biggest compendiums of information on humans that have ever existed you could treat it like a database for historical research in the future and it would no doubt be really really useful to historians to piece some stuff together and piece some detail yeah or even just like humans like colleges like to take a look at one person having a crisis and then like what did they post publicly on their social media streams what did they say in private conversation like you could learn a lot about how humans are when they feel like they're not being watched but actually are being watched and recorded in perpetuity like yeah it's it's a fucking treasure trove of information that could give out a lot of benefits to like have and study and analyze to add to the library of human history yeah but at the same time it should probably all be deleted yeah for the purposes of like human liberation sometimes it's best that certain things are just gone when I was younger we mostly used MSN messenger to chat with each other so I don't have any of those conversations I don't know if that's stored somewhere or if that's gone it's gone to me like I can't get it and part of me like wishes I could because it just be like I'll just check it out like see what was I saying when I was in like seventh grade when I was 13 on the internet chatting with my friends but then part of me is like yeah yeah maybe it's for the best that that's gone I mean it would be interesting it's been long enough now that I wouldn't be like upset by it but it's also like me at 12 13's like not me at my best no so for it to exist means for people to find it potentially and it's just like I don't know like there's so many interactions I've had in my life that are a femoral that I'm really glad we're a femoral there's not something specific and big I'm thinking of but just as a general rule like as I grew up and became who I am today there were a lot of parts that happened off the record and I'm glad about that and I think I'll I can go all of us are glad like just an extreme example to just I think we're all on the same boat here so the part of your brain that wants to catalog and keep everything and just bring that forward and then think okay for whatever reason there is a complete record of every time you've masturbated should it be retained or deleted it's not a hard choice for me but what if you need it what if you need it later yeah okay check oh what if I used to masturbate differently than I do now you can always check it's there look I'm gonna keep it until I have a chance to go through it and separate the good from bad so I'm just gonna hold on to it till then because some I want to keep yeah yeah no I'm fine with that not existing a lot of times a lot of videos yeah embarrassing yeah it's a lot garyan did grandfather ever tell you about the great war when the library socialist army overthrew the privatizing profiteers who were sending wrongtopia into a dark age the year was 2119 the stationaries had taken over all the libraries and kept out the nomads but we banded together in cells the first step was narrative work we spread the word about the change that we wanted to make in the fight that we wanted to bring back then we used a mixed strategy of creating the institutions that we wanted to exist and using the resources of existing institutions to eventually overthrow the social order and bring about full usafruct based library society that pays everyone according to need meeting their irreducible minimum we use these different tactics in a complimentary way and overthrew it is that when they change the slogan of the wrongtopia to more with less yes more with less that's exactly the war yeah that's the one the more with less and that was also the start of the retention project to record every aspect of or as the slogan goes every moment from every angle when we perfected library socialism we also perfected total surveillance yeah otherwise your library will have massive holes in it yeah and what if you need that Yeah. Let me get my notebook. I want to record just some handwritten notes on reflections of this conversation. Oh yeah, I will too. Every moment from every angle, you know. Grandpa told me story. When he said the motto. Because I mean, if you're going through the logbook and one note is 230 and the next note is 245. Yeah, what happened? The inspectors wouldn't probably go, huh? What happened then? Yeah, and then they'd place us under solitary surveillance, right? That's right, yes. Place under camera completely by yourself. And then at least we'll know what they're doing. The first job of every citizen is to complete the record. And I've done that my whole life, my whole long life. The amount of information in history that was never recorded is the greatest tragedy of all. And I can see that you've retained some of the great family features. The joy set our family has the hearts of archivists. All right, the hearts of archivists. And I'll just make a note. It was touching. And Grandpa made some notes. And I made a note about this notes. OK, I think we're up today. Oh, I just had some private thoughts I should record one second. OK, I'm going to head to the washroom. OK, well, remember to turn on the camera in there when you go in. Oh, yeah, of course. What if we need it? Recording yourself go to the bathroom is the building blocks of library social. Grandpa, did you know we've almost reached 18 trillion records of humans using the washroom? Oh, that brings a tear to my eye. OK, you record that tear, and I'll be right back. Had a tear come to my eye as I imagined 17 trillion perfect records lined up in rows of clean millions. The collection complete. It's beauty, immaculate. The library, the archive, growing. Today's episode of "Seriously Wrong" is proudly brought to you by Perfect Complement, a fun new dating app for people who are looking for someone who matches them perfectly. That's right, you heard me perfectly. Hold on a minute. Are you telling me? 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If anyone's gonna have access to all my private data, it might as well be someone who's gonna match me with my perfect romantic partner forever. And it's a pretty standard contract these days. Please note that perfect complement is unable to purge old records under the emergency retention act of 2031. All records public or private are held indefinitely. ♪ Yeah, it's hot time we've got nothing to do ♪ ♪ So baby ♪ ♪ See it, see it, see it ♪ Now it's time for the Q and A, where people hold library socialism to account and we put all doubts to rest through vigorous answers to tough questions. Can't wait. Just clap my hands and rub them together in anticipation. Do you doubt the first question? Yes, here it is. I hate traditionalists. I think traditionalists cause all the most horrific things in the world. Know we'd have without tradition utopia. And I think this library socialism stuff I get some weird traditionalist vibes. First of all, I think you just need to check your premises here, but the idea that we're gonna set up a dichotomy between novelty and tradition and then just like pick one side, bizarre thinking. Obviously we have no choice but to embrace a hybrid between novelty and tradition. But I mean, what specifically we have to do with tradition is see what is the liberatory potential of the past and try to actualize that potentiality. So pull on history, not an explicit like zero-oxing terms, like reproductive terms, but use history as a piece of the puzzle and building new combinations to create a ever better society. Tradition has an important part in library socialism but it's a remix culture. We don't just follow tradition from on high but we certainly acknowledge its existence and respect it. And there's some traditions are better than others. Absolutely, and novelty comes from tradition. Like can only exist in reference to something else that isn't novel. The idea that our current ideas or the newest ideas are inherently always the best ideas and we must destroy traditions from the past completely that don't align with our values. As lead doesn't really horrifying things in the past, like cultural genocides or things like residential schools where first nations peoples in North America were forced to go to schools run by white people that specifically meant to quash their history and traditions. Obviously many traditions are problematic. Novelty is great. Novelty's part of the equation but pure novelty with nothing as a reference point or a basis to start from isn't even a coherent concept that makes sense unfortunately for you and your question. And I mean, I think it's just worth noting before we move on here that a true and full novelty that isn't just a novel combination of pre-existing characteristics, it's gotta be extremely rare. Like we're talking about the creation of a new mineral or something, you know? Like most of the time it's just a novel combination of already existing repetitions from the past. And I think tradition can be a source of wisdom both by listening directly and learning from the lessons of it. So I just absolutely disagree and reject this incoherent criticism about the synthesis of novelty and traditionalism that underpins library socialism and I won't have it. Can you please read the next question? (upbeat music) All right, it says here earlier Sean, you seemed to imply the only or main reason to keep disabled people alive is because they're useful. Unlike the Nazis you disagreed with who said they weren't useful, which was why they killed them. Are you saying that the only reason to keep disabled people alive is because you find them useful? - Hey, thanks for the hard to answer bad faith question. No, okay, so let me just be clear. The reason that we should keep all human beings alive rather than kill them in a genocide away is because we have a responsibility to other human beings as human beings to help meet their basic needs and that includes their human rights. The human dignity is the center of this argument. - The system works better when everyone is kept alive. That's what makes a coherent, wonderful society. And it just happens to be true that the Nazis were wrong about disabled people never being useful. - Yeah, it just that underscores the collective ideological poverty of the Nazis. They're just factually wrong on so many things. It's incredible. - Yeah, so don't confuse a mere statement of the facts. We should keep disabled people alive, disabled people are useful to saying that the first one is dependent on the second one. That's not what anyone's saying. - But it is absolutely true that it is good for us as a species to give everyone the potential to thrive within their context. Society's better for everyone when we all are able to express ourselves, be supported in having our basic needs met and being able to thrive. That's the core complementarity argument there. And also key to this is the idea of difference rather than hierarchy. People with differing abilities, it's different, it's not a hierarchy. It might be true that most people are born with 10 fingers, but if someone loses a finger in an accident, it doesn't make them any less human. And everyone's welcome to have a seat at the table and contribute and thrive. And if we let everyone do that, we're gonna have the best results. That's the point. - Yeah. - Next question. (piano music) It's unclear to me, wrong boys, you seem to be contradicting yourselves. Do you support the permanent or the ephemeral? Pick a side. - Yikes, what's with all of these poor assumptions in the questions? - Like picking a side between left and right. - Sometimes you need to turn left, sometimes you need to turn right. - And the two exist only in relation to each other. - Absolutely, and like, permanence, true permanence is a fantasy. It's maybe potentially possible, but it would require work forever, done by a succession of conscious agents and perpetuity, and so it's not really a real thing. What we talk about with permanence is more staving off of degradation, which is inherent to time. - So there's a need for an interplay between both degrees of permanence and degrees of ephemerality. They're both part of a coherent, singular worldview on information. So next question. (piano music) - There has been a major divide recently on the left. On one side, fully automated luxury communism. It's opposite degrowth. Where does library socialism stand? - You know what? - I like this question. - The answer is library socialism is fully automated luxury degrowth. It's doing more with less. The principle of usafruct and the principle of complementarity help generate the irreducible minimum. Usafruct is generative of more instances of use cases for objects. Complementarity's aspect of synergy where you can get more than the sum of its parts means that you're getting more from less also. So when you're compiling these things together, you've got something really powerful where you can actually decrease carbon emissions, decrease the amount of carbon output and garbage output, decrease the amount of pollution, while giving people a higher level of access than they've ever had in history to what they need and desire. It's both. - Yeah, I mean that really just covers it. What else can you say? (laughing) Next question. So does complementarity just mean that whenever anything good happens, that's complementarity seems like a totology. Thanks for your question. - Quick answer? No, it's not a totology. It's not just like anytime something good happens, like that's complementarity, but anytime something good happens, you can look for the complementary relationships in these complex systems that allowed this good thing to happen and you'll usually be able to find them. You'll wanna look for relationships that are reciprocal and sustainable, two sort of elements of a complementary relationship. When you have non-hierarchically different elements coming together in ways that are reciprocal and sustainable, that's complementarity and that will produce good outcomes. - So this analytical lens of complementarity is also tied to an ethics of complementarity, which is sort of like the basis of anarchism, non-hierarchic. And in social ecology, in particular, a description of the way that humanity's relationship fits into nature. We've inherited a historical legacy of domination where nature was treated as something that humans could conquer, were above the entire world as just one big slave for us to enslave. And humanity's fate is to enslave the stars. - Right, so yeah, the ethic is like we shouldn't do that. We shouldn't enslave the planet, we shouldn't enslave the stars, we should form sustainable reciprocal relationships with these things. - Yeah, human beings should have a relationship with other living beings and nature as it exists. That's complementary, where our unique features contribute to making the universe a more lush and beautiful place that human beings could use our capacities to produce a richer and more creative developmental whole, not as a dominant species, but as a supportive one. And I also just find that this ethic and lens of analysis inspire all of these creative, so many different things that I just feel like relate to this dynamic and this generative capacity of non-hierarchy is so fascinating and awesome. And so well encapsulated in the library, where the library is more than some of its parts, not just because it's a one-stop place to do any sort of generalized learning, but also in the way that it functions on usifruct means that people have access to what they need rather than ownership. And it's just like such a complimentary process to be like, oh, you get this book while you're reading it. It's basic, but it's so profound at the same time, like the thing that needs to be somewhere gets there. And when it's no longer needed to be there, it is put somewhere else where it's needed. The only reason this blows my mind is because I live under this regime of private property and ownership. (laughing) Like, wow, it's crazy. Like when you're not riding the bike, someone else can ride the bike. And then it's like, there's two bikes. There's like a bike comes out of nowhere. - Yeah, and forming these complimentary relationships where you use it when I'm not using it makes the whole process more sustainable because we end up using less things. And that makes our relationship to nature more supportive and reciprocal, which is a good outcome. One of the many good outcomes, like complementarity, fosters. - And so through these forces of complementarity, usifruct and the irreducible minimum, libraries hold the secret to tackling both the crises of inequality and climate change using the same principles. It's so, it's not just any good thing, it's that. It's like all these sort of psychedelically connected related concepts that have to do with the generative functions of non-hierarchical relationships and conceptions. - So as you clear that up, and when we move on to the next question, (soft music) Hey, wrong boys. So you say that you want absolutely everything to function like a library. But what about food? What can we share food on a usifruct and basis? Do I have to return my food when I'm done with it? Do you guys want me to return my poop? Ha, ha, ha, ha, gotcha. - Great question, colorful question. It's questions like that that really brighten up a dull show. - Yeah, and it can tell you had fun writing it too, because you wrote ha, ha, ha, in the question. - Yeah, you have to be laughing pretty hard. - Yeah. - The answer to your question is, what are you gonna do with your poo, if not give it to us? You have some sort of special room in your house for you to keep poo, or are you already engaged in the process of returning your poo to the government? - Yeah, this question definitely seemed a bit bizarre to me because I was like, we already return our poop. I mean, unless you don't, I'd talk that episode of "Hooray Poo Keeping Guys." - There was buckets all over the place. It was a nightmare. - Daily reminder, don't keep your poo. - Unreturned poo can be a health hazard. So we really want people to return their poo through plumbing, tubes already installed in every building that gets kind of returned to the system more broadly is treated. Maybe we can find uses for it in nature, return it to the ecosystem in a way where it's a useful input into another process. We want that waste to equal food. Waste equals food is a fundamental building block of library socialism. So it makes sense. You take food out of the library and you return waste to the library through your toilet. - Yeah, if you want more information on that, you can check out we did a three part series on ecotopia and ecopocalypse. We cover this topic, any ecotopia that's worth anything. You know that you have to use the force of littering for good by turning all garbage into something that can contribute to the environment. The same would work for poo and pee in a well-functioning system. Is there useful stuff in there? You can't deny it. It's a little bit gross for sure, but there's a lot of protein in poo. And I'm not saying that you should eat protein poo, like protein from poo. I'm saying there might be a day when it's an affordable alternative. I'm just saying a well-functioning system would at least feed that protein to like, I don't know, dogs or something. - Yeah, turn it into compost. There's lots of useful things to do with poo. - Maybe no one has to eat it. I don't care. That's not my thing. I've just heard about that. - So I mean, but your question, though, using a poor example does actually get it something interesting, which Sean was gesturing to, which is that some things you aren't gonna use and return some things are consumables, like tissue papers, packaging, drugs you consume. There's many things that a system based on the principles of a lending library doesn't actually really work for. You're generally not gonna return your weed after you smoke it. So part of a library society, obviously, with a complementarity would be not just lending libraries, but dispensaries that could give out things that don't need to be returned. But still, of course, always keeping in mind the principle that waste must equal food if the packaging on your chip bag isn't meant to be returned. It should be so that wherever you put it, it will be a useful input into the ecosystem. If you live on a sea city, it should be able to throw it in the water, fine. Or if it does have to go in a recycling bin of some kind, that's basically returning it. Everything gets returned to nature in a sense over time. You know, it's like ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that. We live in a relatively close system here on the planet. The library system would recognize that and not just operate as if production is an end to end process, but realize that production and society is always a loop and that all outputs should be useful inputs. Dispensaries have a type of complementarity to them too, in the sense that people get what they need. You don't go to a restaurant, food dispenser, you know, free restaurants, obviously, part of the future, and get more than you need, or at least not much more than you need. So much food waste happens in people's fridges because planning out exactly how much they're gonna eat at what time and stuff like that, and then they go camping and stuff. Oh, my lettuce is spoiled. I could give you numerous examples of food spoilage in the house because people are trying to be principled, responsible adults who aren't going to restaurants. But if you have some sort of big shared kitchen, maybe. similar to a restaurant and the consumer rent, where food is being distributed according to need and used based on what materials were in, you could effectively avoid food waste by pooling resources. It also makes it cheaper to produce overall because of the economy of scale. It takes up less time in people's lives than cooking does, which again you're getting more from less. Going to these public feeding areas, these people's cafeterias, you're better prioritizing the use of people's times in their day, you're using less resources to produce the goods, the cost is cheaper overall. That is still a great example of complementarity and complementarity is in a really real sense to each according to their need and also from each according to their ability. Yeah, and just to bring this back around to your question, all of the food that you eat at the free restaurants, the free dispensaries, please, please, please return your poop after. A library society will not have a bunch of open sewage anywhere, hopefully, that's the plan. Really, I was concerned by your question because it was just so bizarre to me. You'll make more, I mean, if you need it for something, I don't know what you would. We love you, but you do after returning your poop. Dear Wrangwats, may I keep my poo under your system? May you, I don't know, like we're not going to send you to jail, but no. Yeah, it's weird. We're going to come for it for sure. Like eventually it's a health hazard. Yeah, like this isn't just an individual's freedom. Something, yeah, like in your fridge or I don't know. But there is a certain point where you have enough poo in your house, the government intervenes. The system already works that way. Like we didn't innovate this. There's already a threshold and like we're not going to keep granting you more and more homes to continue filling with poo because you don't want to get rid of any of it. That wouldn't be insane. But some freedom that infringes on other people's freedom. Yeah, exactly. We live in a society, as they say. Please return your poop. That's what we mean by complementarity under library socialism. Thanks for your hard-hitting questions. You're welcome for the hard-hitting answers and now that all doubts are to rest, welcome to the cult. Uh, I love being in this cult. Wrong to be a divorce court. I'm the judge. Plaintiff looking to divorce. Why have you decided to waste my time today with this? There was an infidelity. When do you suggest this infidelity occurred? Multiple times your honor, but for sure there was an instance on the night of October 3rd. Baylor's, can you push out the big screen TV, please? All my friends and family are in the seats behind me. You're the one who wants a divorce. Yeah, because of this provable instance. Can you just watch it in private or you in the jury or? This is what we do now. Okay, family, if any of you want to leave, no, nobody's okay. There's nothing wrong with wanting to watch everyone. We found this seemingly righteous reason to do this unthinkable invasion of privacy. Get into it. You don't become a divorce court judge without a voyeuristic stream. Well, at least it's not me up on this screen. That's right, it's not. I mean, that was the problem for you. We'll bring in a special erotic stenographer because it's important that we capture not just the words on the video, but also the spirit and tone of human sexuality, which we celebrate in library socialism. It's part of the legal record. Which angle are we going to be watching the act from? What? It's up to you. Why? We could see what she sees. I'm just spitballing. I don't know. Anything works. Every moment, every angle. Could we do an angle from miles up in the sky? We have that angle in that moment, but that's not going to get the evidence the court needs. If you're uncomfortable with it, I propose something like a CCTV-style corner room. Okay, sure. Attention all judges in the break room. There will be a video showing in courtroom 7. No, you know what? Sorry. I'm changing my mind. Sorry to interrupt. An angle right behind the guy's ass. I want the screen to be full of ass. Never mind. Accuser. Do you mind standing up next to the big screen saying your full legal name? And so I said, no, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to stand up there and say my name. This whole procedure is humiliating, you know, doctor. Something traumatic happens in our lives. Well, I mean, do we have to archive everything? Sorry, I was just. What'd you say? I was archiving. Do we have to archive everything? Well, yeah. I mean, what if we need it? Yeah, I mean, that's what everyone says. What if we need it? Every moment from every angle is recorded. We've got the biggest archive ever. That's nothing to shake a stick at. We're destroying forests that we need to keep the air clean, to hold all these data storage units to store everything. But you know this. The record can't be incomplete. What if we need it later? We should at least go through it first. We can't go through all of it because while you're going through it, you have to make records of that fact that you're going through it and then go through those and make records that you're going through that it doesn't work. Well, there's one way to do things. There's one way to think about it. And that's why you're here. So this outbursts. Not very good. I think you're therapist abilities, honestly. Well, I know I was assigned to be a therapist. It wasn't my dream, but it's something that I have come to understand. It's for service of library socialism. I do my assigned role. Sure, but I wanted to be a therapist. I was my dream as a child. And then they assigned me to be a race car driver. Well, that sounds alright. I guess. Oh, I mean, I drive the car well, but I always last in the race. I'm trying to be safe out there. That's cool. Yeah. Well, it's always first and foremost. Leave them the same. I don't want to be responsible for sending someone off the depent. And I often will spend, I mean, a lot of time talking about myself. You seem interested in race car driving. Why don't we switch? I know because that's not what we were assigned. I don't know what to say. You've got criminal thought. And my job as a therapist, first and foremost, is to call the police if this happens. So do you want to stay here while the police come to arrest you and put you under solitary surveillance? No, I'm going to, I think I'm going to escape actually going the right. No, don't do that. Yeah, you know, just stick around. Cops on their way. Oh, did you already press a silent alarm or something? No, I still need to call them, but I'm going to. You know what? I will stay, but I really have to take a long bathroom break. So if you go, just call the cops while you're in there. No, call them when I get back. Just I don't want them like knocking on the door while I'm in the bathroom rushing me. It'll just make me take longer. So you're saying you get to the police station faster overall? Yeah, if you wait till I'm back from the bathroom to call them. So you're just going to go to the bathroom and I won't call the cops? Yeah. Well, you will, but once I get back. Yeah, yeah. Cool. You know, I never planned on being a police officer. No, wasn't my dream as a kid, but where's jobs? But the system works. You got to give it credit. Can I argue with that? A book to every reader. So what about this madman that's on the loose? Politically radicalized madman who's shouting political obscenity at the parliament? Oh my god. I'm going to distract them from voting yes. Yeah, I feel like we really perfected parliaments when we had one monolithic party that all representatives are members of and they all wear the same color shirt and all vote yes on every motion. Yeah, when you're in a perfect society forever, obviously everyone has the perfect ideas. If everyone has perfect ideas, every motion put forward will be perfect. Every shirt will be the perfect color. And every vote will be a perfect yes. It's just how perfect societies work. I mean, if there's two parties, three parties, four parties, that sort of thing. You would have to meet in there's four or five wrong parties. You have the truth party. So what else are you going to add? I always redundant. I always redundant. You just have a bunch of truth parties that I'll believe the same thing. No point. Or yeah, the lies party. So one is enough for us, thanks. Oh man. It's looking here like this madman said, forests are more important than data storage units. Let's see if we're looking unnecessary hierarchy between things. It's too bad with these guys. There's such lunatics, people who have big public breakdowns over their political views on more and more of a kind of society. Yeah. Weird how perfection seems to stimulate outbursts. I think it's just that outbursts were already there. Not even perfection. Could stop them. Could stop them. Yeah, that's our following sense. But we'll still keep criminals just under solitary surveillance. That's what you'll see going to do. Great to stop the spread, recorded everything to make sure the records full. Absolutely. Yeah. Criminals are basically like eggs in a carton, just producing hours and hours of video and audio for us. I learned this all at police school. My first love is soup. Mirpois. Have you tried it? It's incredible. It's like better than some of its parts. Oh, there he is. Look. Oh my god. Okay. Sir, freeze. So, yeah, it's me, the judge, and I just want to hit my big hammer as his custom. The defendant is clearly guilty. And he sentenced this. And so our hero who saw through the madness and lies to the library of society was found guilty of four acts of data destruction and 540 acts of preemptive data destruction by not recording. In the judge's written declaration, he said the act of leaving the record unfinished is so heinous and so brutal that it deserves death. And so our hero is marched through crowds of screaming citizens, screaming for blood, screaming for vengeance, as was custom. He was marched up to the platform and his head was gingerly placed underneath the guillotine. The executioner fastens his neck and the device and pulls the enormous blade still glistening with the body. blood of the last thought criminal up to the tippy top of the guillotine. Our hero is trapped by a malevolent and unjust society, which has the means to imminently destroy him for his political thought and action. Nothing can save him to be continued. So we started this library socialism series talking a lot about kind of our own ideological development and how we came to the ideas we currently have and how we came to calling these ideas library socialism. And when I was looking back over kind of our body of work and thinking about complementarity and ways that it's shown up, but one other thing that really popped out at me is for a while kind of around like the hundreds era episodes of our show, we were doing things a lot like knowledge versus imagination, centralization, bunch of episodes, not all of them titled x versus y, but playing on this idea of things that people tend to think of as inherently opposed forces that you have to like pick one side of or like one thing's right and one thing's wrong. And we kind of like had this internal meme of being like hashtag balance, you know, you need some of both. But even like I think the balance framework is inferior to a complementary framework because the idea of like, oh, it's not knowledge versus imagination. You need to balance of knowledge and imagination isn't quite the same thing as saying knowledge and imagination are both important things that actually work together. And maybe sometimes some of these things are intention. Obviously, centralization, decentralization could be intention, but tension doesn't preclude reciprocity and it doesn't preclude two things actually working together or potentially complementing one another, even if they could potentially not complement one another. And yeah, I just I think we have a long history of like wanting to resolve perceived binaries, which is kind of I guess like dialectic. I don't know that much about dialectics, but it makes me think of dialectics. Complementary is not just talking about two opposing forces. It can be applied in situations like that, but it is so much broader and can talk about things where there's more than two opposing forces or there's things that aren't necessarily opposing. It's just talking about again, non hierarchical difference working together to produce synergistic emergent outcomes that are more than the some of their parts. Another ancient thing I remember from our show that seems relevant to this subject matters in some early episode. I can't remember when it was like something we figured out while recording was a way of thinking about centrism and it's always somewhere in between in the golden mean saying like it's usually true that the truth is somewhere in between, but it's usually like hugs one side. The truth is somewhere in between, but it's way way closer to antifa than fascists, right? Which is sort of like the product of a recursive centrism, like the center of the center and the side, the center of the center of the center of the center of the center. Yeah, yeah, I like the recursive thing because it kind of helps get around these overly simplistic, complementary ideas or like, you know, just take like hashtag centrism like, oh, the left and the right both have a point and it's like, well, they might both have a point like someone might say, oh, you know, like sure, complementarity. That's why we should have heteronormativity men and women are complementary to each other. There's a non hierarchical difference there. And so in sexual relationships, it should be men and women. It's complementary. But then if you kind of zoom out from that and say, okay, heterosexual relationships exist, complementary to that, there's also the potential for all kinds of pairings and genders and relationships that contain more than two people. Like there's not just a very simplistic complementarity that everyone must adhere to this one thing. It's a expanding recursive application to continually be looking for the ways in which different instances, different parts of society, different concepts, different inventions, different abilities, different anything can work together well. I can think of a lot of context where there's positive, emergent outcomes and complex systems through the interaction between non hierarchical differences. I can think of ones that exist and I can think of ones that should exist or ones that I would hope to make exist. Looking for other contexts where we can create effective teams where specializations have a complementary outcome towards the end. There's also the angle of the celebration of difference. Let's say like ideological difference and mutual criticism and dispute over ideas. That context can be generative of better outcomes that tensions between differing positions when put together can create better outcomes. There's another piece of this that I think is important. There's also just the general complementarity of how do you be a human being who is complementary to society, the world and others. I think part of that is generally speaking being nice. Starting with being kind to each other is a building block of interpersonal complementarity. But also figuring out ways of how organizing works. How do we build relationships where we can encourage each other to do the right things and do the right things together? Making all the right moves for all the right reasons. That's what complementarity means. All these things. Yeah, absolutely. If we don't exist in a complementary relationship with nature and the world around us, if we burn through all the resources, we're all going to die in fires or tsunamis or something. Maybe you'll be a human action. Yeah, fighting for the scraps of resources that are left, murdered by a former best friend. Who knows? Yeah, the stakes are certainly high out there, friends, but we're glad that you're with us on this journey to create a ever more perfect society. It's an important task, commune, commune, that pays according to need. Full library society that curates and cultivates the best of human knowledge, a giant storehouse that wards against the degradation of time and making the entire history of human knowledge and technological development available to the public, not just as information, but actually applying it, utilizing that human legacy to bring about a fully automated society that meets people's needs, all of their needs, brings about an irreducible minimum using usifruction property relations to create more with less and build a vibrant and fecund society using our collective legacy stored in library around the world. Ending all hierarchy, including racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and others that I'm not remembering right now. It's going to be glorious. It's going to be a perfect society, a perfect utopia forever. It's actually going to be really hard and it's going to take steps and take iterations and change over time. It's never going to be perfected, but we move towards more and more decency to one another using the instruments that we have available over time. And big steps should be made soon, so I'm optimistic we can all do that together. This has been the seriously wrong podcast. We are Sean and Aaron and speaking of the past, the record in the show's archive, we have very special offer that if you become a patron on Patreon for us, you get access to the entire backlog of episodes going all the way back to 2014 when we were more naive and brash and who knows if it holds up. There's a lot of those old episodes are behind the paywall, like most of them from those early years. And what are we hiding? $6 a month and you get a chance to try to cancel the wrong voice, find the content, make the sizzle reel, find all the worst things we ever said into microphones. They're definitely in there. It's probably not that bad. I think it's more like cringy for social reasons. Yeah, it's never anything truly awful, but I think you could create a pretty compelling sizzle reel if you wanted to. I mean comedy sometimes involves taking risks. Who knows how at all age, but $6 a month you get to cancel us worth a shot. But if you like the show and don't want to cancel us, we also have some other great benefits for Patreon, including a bunch of bonus episodes, including our Revolution series. And at just $2 a month, you can get access to our Discord servers and private Facebook group. Give us reviews, give us shout outs, rate us on platforms positively, send us messages, spread the words. So that's it. Yeah, it's been a slice everyone. I hope you have a great week. Thanks so much for listening everyone to 200 episodes to end to this trilogy. This is major culmination. We were happy to share it with you. Thanks for giving us your time and attention. Life is such a busy and crazy thing. And there's like so many other things to do instead. And then you chose to listen to our show. I feel really humble about that and I honor your time. I honor your time. I just get touched. You're on podcast. I honor your time. We try to honor your time. Thank you. [Music] So you've got systemic trouble time to break out of your bubble and be wrong. Next time on seriously wrong, Mr. What is Was and ever will be meets his nemesis. Mr. What wasn't is not and never will be. What are you doing here? I'm here to destroy you. I thought you didn't exist. I thought you weren't. But you are. And I always will be. I must defeat you. Otherwise, what isn't and wouldn't be becomes what might be. Mr. What is Was and ever will be you fancy yourself a hero. But I think you're actually a villain. Your tedious mathematical logic making a projection of one specific way that it will be completely detached from the reality. It's never been wrong. The world is a fundamentally chaotic place and the world of potential is larger and more varied than you could ever imagine. Not if I defeat you first. Mr. What is Was and ever will be the impossible happens every day and you can't held it back. To take that. Bring chaotic wildness to the universe. Your original insistence on upholding a calcified fate is going to fundamentally limit our potential. We need to overthrow what will be. Looks like I've got you right where I. I didn't foresee that. It shouldn't be. I'm telling you old man. Impossible things happen every day. Hop on my hog. And so Mr. Defeated Mr. What is was and ever will be. Decalcifying the fate of humankind. Shattering the world of potential into millions of millions of cascading potentials. Unpredictable. Duplicating, splitting, merging and being lost that are faster rate than anyone can imagine. The future is not written. I'm going to get on my hog and. We now go back to the planet of Wrongtopia where the library socialist Heretic convicted of destroying records and failing to create records has his head in the guillotine which is sharp, sparkling and ready to drop, separating his head from his body with no possible way out. Any last words? Yes. I. Oh my god. All horses. Stamp heating. Oh my god. The stampede of world horses knocked over the guillotine turning its sideways and the heading of the entire audience. But not beheading the person who was set to be executed. That's incredible. I don't know how to take a record of this event. My paper is turning to Raspberry Jam. Oh my god. Raspberry Jam is coming out of my fingernails and eyes. I can't see. Let me lick it out of the way. Oh, your tongue's made of spiders. And so, after a series of incoherent and extreme circumstances, the library socialist Heretic got away and he hid in the mountains, running and hiding served him well. And he built up strength there, building his faction of library socialism. Aaron Moritz thought, which looked to criticize the deviations that had swept the world. That thought criminal built a bonafide people's army with extreme intelligence services. When wrongtopia broke out in a civil war, they were well positioned to do the diplomacy and fighting that it took to reconquer the world and liberate all. Library socialism, Aaron Moritz thought, was a better, kinder socialism. That took care of all, did more with less and made waste equal food. And it too soon became corrupted, extremely corrupt. The end.