136 - The New Flesh feat. Adam Jones

Jay:
[0:00] A while back justin mentioned cybernetics in an episode but in the cyborg way and i was like actually cybernetics is about systems of feedback and he was like whatever and now he's all like on his cybernetics kick i'm like uh-huh i don't remember this conversation.

Adam:
[0:23] Purpose of a podcast is what it does that's good.

Jay:
[0:28] Exactly yeah because i'm really into like nicholas luman and like systems theory that way come into like zettelkasten and like networks of information and stuff like that and then so i was getting briefly into cybernetics a little bit a while back so.

Adam:
[0:44] I ended up sort of getting into it through i don't know how i actually got into it i think i ended up finding a bunch of like management textbooks that's really sort of cool paperbacks and i always saw delers and Guattari are always into it, but so many of the old cybernetics textbooks are so cheap now. Especially ones, so the cybernetics I learned from was a guy called Fred Honeywell George. And it's not because he's a brilliant, innovative cyberneticist, but he was one of the best guys explaining the absolute basics of it. And so in that way, he was also NATO's computing consultant. I mean, you can't learn cybernetics without knowing some proper spooky shit. I mean, it's a military industrial complex science, in a way.

Jay:
[1:21] I mean not.

Adam:
[1:22] Necessarily the lumen systems theory stuff i mean that's they usually sort of end up identifying alongside that especially also as well some of the early ai people to try and put some distance between that that idea of cybernetic systems.

Jay:
[1:34] Yeah but i remember it blew my head like blew my mind when i learned that cybernetics wasn't the same thing as like cyborg shit like that those are like completely different things that then just relate in some ways but that cybernetics is not about ghost-in-the-shell nonsense. I was like, oh, okay.

Adam:
[1:54] I remember trying to explain cybernetics to my mum, and I thought, okay, how do I do this? Well, she's type 1 diabetic, and she has an insulin monitor, and I'm like, you are basically a cybernetics system. This is easy. Positive feedback is if you just eat way too much sugar, you eat a whole fucking bar of Cadbury or something. negative feedback is that regulatory thing of just getting the, I find that, there's so many everyday examples that i think that's kind of the scary thing we find these systems everywhere or you know as soon as we let cybernetic thinking out of the box it's hard to see what isn't i mean probably because the concepts are so they are so general i guess you know.

Jay:
[2:35] Yeah like the first time i heard about it as like the feedback loop kind of thing i was like oh that's just the reference interview in library science it's like you ask people questions and then based on like what they say then you adjust then what you give back to them and it goes back and forth back and forth until you get to like actual what they were asking i was like oh that's a thing in my line of work yeah.

Justin:
[2:58] Or it could be something like applied to malthusian logic which is like positive feedback is the over reproduction of unwanted peoples and then the negative feedback is famine because they won't have enough food and so that's i think if you apply that logic to like Like, why people have so much fear of immigration. It probably has the same sort of cybernetic logic somewhere in their mind where they've gone, this is a positive feedback that will lead to a negative one. Therefore, we have to do something to stop it. Or something along that line. But that kind of logic can be applied even if it has absolutely no bearing on reality. It's like a model of the world is something I'm starting to get. These are models that can be flawed.

Jay:
[3:42] When people.

Justin:
[3:44] Use them as like metaphors.

Jay:
[3:46] Yeah also i apologize for sounding so stuffy i've been working with books from the mid to late 19th century all week and i tend to have like a mustiness allergy so i've been on the struggle bus funny.

Adam:
[4:02] Actually the first talk i ever gave on this sort of subject particularly this book was actually to the british libraries one of their document preservation teams.

Jay:
[4:11] Oh, okay.

Adam:
[4:12] So there's always been a kind of a through line because the archival stuff only really comes in towards the end of the book. But it's interesting how central the aspect of library science is to a lot of the cybernetics work, which in stuff like Antioculus, we just didn't really know how to get into it sort of thing, you know.

Justin:
[4:58] I'm Justin. I'm a Skollcom librarian. My pronouns are he and they.

Sadie:
[5:01] I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they, them.

Jay:
[5:05] I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian, and my pronouns are he, him.

Justin:
[5:09] And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Adam:
[5:12] Yeah, I'm Adam. I'm from the podcast Acid Horizon. I also don't know when to come in on podcast intros, sadly, but my pronouns are he and him.

Jay:
[5:24] Everybody does it. You're fine.

Justin:
[5:28] No. One day I'll figure out a better way to segue into that. It doesn't catch so many people off, but I haven't figured it out yet. Thanks for coming on. We got talking on Twitter and I had just been in the middle of reading Antiochus and I had also heard the live episode where you talked about Antiochus and you had talked about having a book coming out. And I was like, oh, that sounds really interesting. I can't wait for it to come out. And then you sent me an early copy, which I really appreciate. So I'm really excited to get into it. So first, why don't you just tell us about your work in general with Asset Horizon, Antiochus, and your book, The New Flush?

Adam:
[6:06] No worries. So Asset Horizon has been a podcast for maybe four years now, a podcast that covers many of the kind of particularly the canonical names in continental philosophy and various kinds of weird attempts applying philosophy to what we call in Antiochus as our kind of cyberpunk presence, isn't mostly thinking about control society critiques of control domination from marxist and overall leftist perspectives but not always necessarily marxist marxist post-marxist anarchist, sometimes occultist we have a little side show called inner experience where we occasionally have people on to do sort of live psychoanalysis or talk about their ufo experiences actually from quite a cybernetic perspective but yeah we put out a couple of books we put out our first book book, Anti-Oculus, A Philosophy of Escape, almost a year ago. Which is essentially trying to summarize all the stuff we've been reading and sort of summarize all the stuff we've been working on to present it to a wider audience as kind of a philosophical toolkit, gives you introductions to things like cybernetics, control theory, and essentially how to escape them. It's not just about control systems. It's also about means of escape or concepts of escape. So we draw particularly a lot on post-psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry, the philosophy of disability, queer studies, and central figures on top of that would be people like Bataille, Deleuze, and Guattari.

Adam:
[7:29] Hegel, but very, very critically, people like Catherine Malibu, stuff like that. And yeah, this upcoming book, which is out in late November, I believe, and it's called The New Flesh, Life and Death in the Data Economy. That's just a solo effort from myself, and it's about basically how posting drives you kind of mad, but not generally how posting drives you mad, but with one very critical eye to the notion of madness, But two, looking mostly into the production of data and how the production of data shapes increasingly more spheres of everyday life, from basic things to shopping, such as the ways that social media is infrastructurally designed to amplify or create new forms of behavior. Behavior and indeed trying to look into concepts of what we use when we talk about the digital world, particularly things like virality and feedback in terms of how we start behaving more like the things we see online in order to understand contemporary forms of not only fascism, but also the imperialist structure of data production today. So what I'm talking about particularly is things such as micro-work.

Adam:
[8:35] So basically the moderation of data sets, and how this can work in terms of not only essentially capturing dispossessed peoples and paying them pennies on the dollar to essentially do captures and find faces that look like theirs, which will eventually be used to hunt them down in the imperial court and through other technologies, as we're seeing with the genocide side in palestine and their so-called ai machines but generally the ways that data is a hidden form of labor that's essential to the post-modern sort of capitalist economy.

Justin:
[9:06] Yeah and i also like the discussion of how there was a part in anti-oculus where it was talking about how we are i always forget if i have the right word but like we are de-amalgamated we are de-identified and put into a series of lines not de-identified but we are put into a series of lines of things you are this piece of data and this piece of data you're a series of descriptions about yourself you're de-personalized the dividuality right dividuality yeah yeah yeah i really like playing with that idea especially as we were just talking about linked data and how it's kind of important to have the full record because linked data is not very good at pulling individual pieces of data like a cert from those what are essentially documents, like our MARC records are essentially full documents. And so my head was starting to connect a lot of those things with the way that we control and classify data and how when we want something useful, we kind of pull the full document. But that also has to do with other things that are not related to what we're talking about. But thank you for the overview. Could you tell me a little bit more about the new flesh and the parts that did end up overlapping with library science?

Adam:
[10:27] Yes. So this is predominantly in the chapter on the virality, which is the biggest chapter. It essentially takes the work of someone like William S. Burroughs and takes the idea of a certain virality to language and then runs with it. But it tries to do a few things that Burroughs doesn't do. For one, it tries to actually define quite rigidly what we're talking about. And also avoids his weirdly anthropological and sometimes kind of what he racializes the theory of the virus more than people would like to admit but what i was trying to do with that part is to look at viruses look at virality in terms of writing essentially because the model by which we used to define a virus we go by the the famous famous scientist cock who discovered the tuberculosis mellosis bacterium and the previous manner it was almost like what in philosophy we call a transcendental argument we would work backwards from the experience of disease to find the the thing that's causing it and therefore viruses are always seen in terms of disease but now using sort of basically virology textbooks sort of most recent ones i can get my hands on looking at viruses in terms of what's called bioinformatics which is as writing as codes as There's chemically coded beings, really, and they can write, they can encode.

Adam:
[11:46] And here I want to talk about the ways in which writing can sort of mutate, can code, can flow in a way like a virus. And not even like as a virus, I want to say, because we can, whilst we can get rid of various metaphors about intention.

Adam:
[12:01] Direction with viruses, What I found to be interesting is, from all of my research into these virology textbooks, is they can't get rid of the idea of viruses as writing and coding machines.

Adam:
[12:11] This is, for example, retroviruses are a good example of this. So retroviruses, these viruses which, rather than replacing the entire code of a cell's DNA, they replace a little bit, they add a bit more. And we use these things in yes what's called i guess gene therapies where we have a retrovirus that corrects well depending on what one changes the code of a cell so to as to remove something which the person or the person writing the virus doesn't want to be there you can do that you can rewrite cells and those cells can replicate each other and then replace gradually the rest of those cells but retroviruses don't have what they call proofreading ability and so there's an inherent mutatability to this. I wanted to talk about the dissemination of codes, dissemination of writing in a way that the.

Adam:
[12:59] Function of communication in a viral manner to essentially also to undermine one of the real points of fascism i see today which is we see i mean it's i wouldn't say turfism because the r and the f don't usually come into it but the transphobic discourse of social contagion by completely undermining any ontological or philosophical basis for thinking about virality and communication in those terms and this is why the it moves from bioinformatics and virality and biological science to the burning of the institute for sexual science in berlin as a kind of way of looking at the politics of immunology and this is when i get to these concepts of the archive and i mean there is a there isn't an anarchist bent to this which can be taken too far but i use a concept from the trans study scholar mel y chen called the viral archive which is essentially to present archives of transformation as you know modes of transformation as opposed to archives of fixed form which are trying to preempt anything else coming out of it so the example that shen gives is particularly youtube transition timelines yes really for the trans max people and i thought i just found this concept and this is this yes and i thought i just i just ran with it in terms of how do we have archives allow us to in a way go viral in the sense of subtracting codes and giving us new possibilities rather than virus viralities which which is add code and sort of delimit possibilities in advance.

Adam:
[14:26] Which I think is the way that racism works, coding. I mean, if you want to give an example of what I would call a fascist semiovirus, the coding that makes the equivalent of Haitian person, and basically anyone, anyone, anyone, any person of colour in the United States, particularly black people with pet eater being spread by Trump and Vance and Chris Ruffo and his mates, that is an example of a fascist virus that adds codes in order to render you sort of something to be taken out by what they've described as a social immune system.

Adam:
[14:56] And this library of forms and potentials, what delimits it, I think it's a real thing that goes. Of course, there is a way one can take this a bit too far into any categorization is fascist but oh my god we can't know anything but rather i'm just trying to provide points of resistance to that and sort of find recodings to it rather than blow it up entirely i know before we started proper i mentioned the first talk i gave on this was to the british library like i wasn't saying that you know well we should we should burn you all down you're fascist you have you know you've categorized books into genres what is this no no it's just about trying to find ways of undermining fascist applications thereof i'm sorry i went on too long but no.

Jay:
[15:36] That was perfect and i love that that paper of like like the the trans masculine like youtube thing as like an archive and like the trans body as an archive of every step of transition and so preserving the archive not as something fixed but as something that does change and everything yeah i've yeah i've used that paper when like doing talks before.

Adam:
[16:00] It's absolutely brilliant so.

Jay:
[16:01] Good it's so good the.

Adam:
[16:04] Whole book is yes trap door it's called if anyone wants to look it up yeah.

Jay:
[16:08] There's like a specific paper that i've seen that.

Adam:
[16:10] Talks about.

Jay:
[16:11] The like trans masculine youtube timelines as an archive it's so cool i'll have to read that book though that sounds great.

Adam:
[16:17] It's a huge collection fred motham's in it as well which is always a joy and.

Justin:
[16:22] We do talk about like classification because classification is sort of like the imposing of borders and of course borders imply the violence needed to maintain those borders so classification does have like its its own risks in itself and i do have a question like later on about about that but yeah the archive and archive kind of reminded me of a very early episode we did with someone who was doing what was called human trash dump and And that was their performance art archive that was also done online. So, it was an online archive and it was performance art and the performance art was the archive. And it had to do with, you know, they would give like talks and like a full like latex suit and things like that. It was very fun. I want to revisit it because I haven't listened to it in a while. But I did want to give people an idea of like what cybernetics is. Is, and I know we covered this a little in the cold open, but how would you define cybernetics for people listening?

Adam:
[17:23] So, cybernetics really is a project, some would say a science, of trying to map out the world. It's a system of systems. It's a way of creating models of systems that basically draws diagrams of them in terms of the relations between various functions, and its main concepts are all to do with what feeds into a system. So we've got information, which is defined as difference that makes a difference, because if the difference makes no difference, then it's not informative.

Adam:
[17:52] Otherwise, you're just checking, okay, what's the status now? Same as before. That does inform you, but it's not really information in the sense of making any practical difference to a system. A system itself is a very vague term, because these terms in cybernetics are generally quite vague. A system could be anything. I mean, we are forming a system collectively with everything here. Here, one forms a system with, I mean, Gregory Patterson gives the example of cutting down the tree. There is the components of arm, axe, tree, gravity, for example. It's just a general tone of mapping. But the main concepts people will be most familiar with are concepts of feedback, both positive and negative, and feedforward. So feedforward actually is the one that people lose sight of the most. But I'll start with feedback. Feedback, for example, could be positive in the sense of a vicious circle. So if you leave two rabbits alone for a certain amount of time, suddenly you have 40 of them. Or, for example, viruses spread. Pandemics are positive feedback loops. They spread. One person spreads it to three, spreads it to four.

Adam:
[18:59] Negative feedback is the essence of the first kind of wave of cybernetics that we know, which is essentially it's something that moves against the direction of a system. But what do I mean by that? The classic example is thermostats.

Adam:
[19:13] Cybernetics as a paradigm, it's a kind of engineering that moves past one of the original problems, which is power. So power engineering talks about, for example, how do we heat up a house? What fuel do we use? What generator do we use? What does the generator have to look like? For cybernetics, the problem isn't so much power. It's not so much the means of achieving an end directly. but rather it's a problem of information as to how and when and to what extent to enact that mechanism so for example a we know how to heat houses we have fuel we have electricity we have radiators but how to maintain a decent temperature is a matter of information when to turn off the generation of heat and when to keep it on and this sort of idea of negative feedback for example would be when you want say you want 20 degrees and you don't want the generator to keep.

Adam:
[20:10] Keep burning the basically you want to burn the place down the negative feedback would be you have a periodic generation of heat such that every so often the heat is turned off something moves against the direction of that system that is the direction being the generation of heat and then you know it stays at a regular level thermostat so the typical example also just driving i mean cybernetics comes from kubernetes which is steering if you want if you if you want to go to one direction, you don't want to go simply too far to the right of the steering wheel, you're just going in circles, you need to move right and a bit left. That negative feedback is you pushing against direction that you're already moving in to maintain a stable course. And we get cybernetics from the same sort of term as governance.

Adam:
[20:55] That's positive and negative feedback. Feedforward is more interesting for me because it's about preemption. Whereas negative feedback requires something to go a little bit wrong in order to correct it. That's what what correction is you know but feed forward tries to preempt any error in advance which means of course it can't you know it can't learn it can't do negative feedback but it has to have an additional layer of systems on top of it i think that's the basic concept of cybernetics here and they're sort of everywhere now they've diffused into business studies management studies and that's because on top of cybernetics there is also a fuck ton of differential calculus which no one has time for. I mean, I've got an old book of servo control systems. No choice. I'm not going to process that. Who founded cybernetics has loads of differential equations about how feedback loops work, but for general cybernetic theory, you just need feedback, feedforward, concept of modeling, and concepts of the system. I think that sort of cybernetics, at least as far as I'm going to be using it, and most cybernetic theorists generally reuse it.

Justin:
[22:00] Yeah, I had listed down an example as academic writing is cybernetic. So I guess the feed forward part would be when you're writing, you're anticipating the critiques that other people are going to give you. And then actually getting feedback, then getting peer review, then, you know, if there are any critiques after it's been published. And then of course, the positive feedback of did you get well cited? Did people ask you to write more? That sort of thing. So that's a small example. example or.

Jay:
[22:29] Like the way that people have learned to post on social media as they are like predicting the way that people are going to cancel them based on what they say and so you like every like you can tell like the way that people have talked online i know the way i talk online like people over explain or they will say this and they won't say that because our goal if i say this then people are going to come at me for this like that kind of thing exactly.

Adam:
[22:54] That i mean those are both the examples i give in the actual book i should have just come with them but uh yeah.

Justin:
[23:00] Yeah that's one of the things that actually drives me the most nuts is where you you see someone post and you realize that they've already had like a whole argument in their head before they posted the first thing they've posted and i go like i know it's twitter and we're not all friends here but i'm your friend and you're probably talking to people like me like you didn't need to this is why just just join a discord of people that are cool there you go join our discord we've got a link to it i never plug it but yeah it's it's because there's also the feedback that i think what drives me more nuts now is the way that people try to predict what will be de-boosted by an algorithm so of course the the new techno babble which is like on a live or i've been watching a whole lot of corn you know like just saying like making you talk like a five-year-old And it is really like, we just need to go somewhere else because this is not a place for adults anymore. Like, this is a playpen that we've been put in and it's making us worse people.

Jay:
[24:05] Spelling sex, S-E-G-G-S in all of the captions. I'm like, stop, stop.

Justin:
[24:11] Just don't go viral. Don't try to go viral. Don't try to have anyone see your posts.

Sadie:
[24:15] Well and then you get the thing of like people who have posted something, specifically just for the very small audience of their friends on their twitter or whatever which then goes viral and you get like the thousands of people who are suddenly taking it out of like what way out of context there's a word for that we've, Talked about it before.

Jay:
[24:35] Breaking containment, escaping containment or something?

Sadie:
[24:38] Yeah, well, I was thinking it's like contextless behavior or something like that.

Jay:
[24:43] Oh, okay.

Sadie:
[24:45] Yeah, so it's like I meant this to hit 15 people who know specifically what I'm talking about because I've talked about it before. And instead, it's going to 15,000 people who have actually no idea what any of it means beyond this single sentence that I said. So, yeah. Yeah, that's just the for you page on Twitter. Oh my God.

Justin:
[25:07] It's just like people with like the weirdest, you're just like, why? I wonder what I'm missing. And then you read it and you're like, oh, this is just a trans person who's also a fascist. Weird that I got suggested that, but there we are. That's who that was. And that's, I didn't misunderstand the context. This is just a creature of the internet who I should never have been exposed to.

Sadie:
[25:29] Well and i wonder how that kind of cycle of of algorithmic feedback too is going to start you know affecting people who who anticipate it when it's not actually present because i don't know if you guys have seen like on tumblr which is like the only social media i actually use anymore because i can actually control what i see is like people who are, tagging things weirdly like they like they do on tiktok to try to get the most views when that's not actually how tagging on tumblr works or people who use the unalive and and segs words to try to circumvent an algorithm that does not actually exist in that most user well it does exist but most users just turn it off right so like i think it's interesting to see how that starts to influences people's behavior to become like a weird feedback cycle that then becomes normalized and then nobody remembers the actual source of it anymore so yeah that's what i think about in terms of social feedback yeah.

Justin:
[26:32] So we've complained about our usual gripes but what why why study cybernetics uh thank.

Sadie:
[26:39] You for keeping us on track justin do.

Justin:
[26:42] My best why study cybernetics and automation like what's what's the importance of it why does it keep coming up.

Adam:
[26:48] I'm not sure if i take us off track or not now because because those things that we've been talking about are chapters one and two of the book so that's it no no but i'll just start just by saying something briefly about that because so chapter two is called feedback addiction and it's about the infrastructure structure of social media and how it's designed to actually give you a sense of self-fulfillment through the consummation production of data but at the end of the day one's account especially on things like twitter facebook and the like one's account doesn't actually have any content other than that which passes through it you just kind of a relatively empty space where content has to move in order to be to receive feedback to receive likes but this and it's i put it in the same way it's indeed structured like academic writing trying to preempt that kind of feedback that is i use the notion of cybernetics of communications engineering versus power engineering to talk about how feedback can become a kind of site of what in what the psychoanalyst gardi lang would call like ontological security so there's an example of we call engulfment from.

Adam:
[27:56] Group therapy he brings up and i use it to apply to twitter and my co-host won't mind me saying this because i used all of us as case studies basically of posters disease in this book to try and sort of write ourselves out of it but in this group therapy session lang notes that there's these two people in the therapy session you're arguing and one of them eventually says to the other look please we have to stop and says why if you win this argument you win another other argument if you lose so if i lose this argument i cease to exist and it's this kind of way in which the self becomes intertwined with the image of the account and indeed the way that things can spiral because you know social media encourages short form content and therefore encourages categorical statements which can which have to have the most appeal and most shareability but also.

Adam:
[28:45] It's also structured in the way of group chats but a group chat where the borders are completely not here yeah people can have what used to be internal community discussions but that's that's the thing it's not an echo chamber it needed to be an echo chamber an echo chamber would have been good in the same way that your local bar is a sort of an echo chamber to that extent but now any fascist can walk in on what would usually be essentially just you know any like conversation about say any sort of philosophy in any pub and then go well i disagree with that and therefore you're all doing it because it's designed for maximum shareability and i think part of the reason why we should study cybernetic and automation is because it's coming for us and already has sort of come for us i mean cybernetics as a science no but vena is not coming for us but i think these systems insofar as they are understood cybernetically do just generally just exist in terms of data production i don't think that cybernetics exhausts what they are but i think the the limit finding the limits of cybernetics is finding the limits of that kind of control everything i've written is not very pro cybernetics it's actually saying look these machines just exist that way because that's how they're designed but there are going to be this is the classic map territory distinction cybernetics wants to map the world and it imposes a violence and the things that it maps because it wants to make them match completely so we just need to make more data and we see this with i mean the racial profiling of and indeed the inherent gender profiling of facial recognition technologies.

Adam:
[30:12] I think we should study these machines in cybernetic terms, because while it's a very good basic toolkit that one can use to map these machines out.

Adam:
[30:21] But also one has to look to find the limits of them, because at the end of the day, cybernetics isn't just a science, it's also a set of political images.

Adam:
[30:32] We shouldn't study cybernetics because it's correct. We should study cybernetics because in many ways it's wrong. and, If you want to look at the way people are thinking cybernetically, I mean, the images of cybernetics, for example, mostly come from the imagination of cyberpunk. And William Gibson is a great guy to read, not just in terms of his fiction, but in terms of his essays. There's a book he has called Distrust at a Particular Flavor, and it's a collection of his essays, and he comments on them. And he says at one point, well, he says before anyway, that I was writing about modem before I knew what the fuck a modem was. He's a figure of the poetics of cybernetics. And the image of cybernetic enhancement, of course, very much an ableist discourse, the image of cybernetic brilliance, this is the thing that's running through the minds of every tech pro-fascist today. And understanding the limits of their worldview is going to take something of an engagement with cybernetics to find out where it's leaking, where it can be attacked. Because these machines, they are mostly images. The cyberpunk present chapter of Anti-Oculus is mostly about how cyberpunk is real, but it's not about going to Mars. It's not about cybernetic organs. It's about the fight for healthcare. Most cybernetic stories are about the fight for healthcare. The feedback loop isn't Nick Kland and the AI guys making the new god.

Adam:
[31:54] The feedback loop in people's lives now is going to be food, it's going to be heating, it's going to be endocrinological regulation. These are the real cyberpunk fronts here in terms of the unity of high tech and low life and I think these are just very pertinent images which are good to sort of deconstruct the imaginations of Elon Musk and the techno-fascists of the world and what also helps as well is that it's also presented in a manner that's also somewhat enjoyable people enjoy cyberpunk but they in a way the transformations of their own body and the horror of it is something which is weirdly kind of enjoyable.

Adam:
[32:34] In a horrorific sense i mean you know shout out to john and the crew of horror vanguard for this of course and of course i did the sci-punk episode with with k and and then kyle over a gap but these images are quite good to use because they're quite enjoyable and there's it reminds me of something that mark fisher and kojo eshen said about jungle music was that this idea of jungle music you're being chased through a fucking field by the terminator the libidinizes anxiety and the The free rave move where you're just doing this mass trespass, it libidinalized the anxiety of knowing there's a machine against a capitalist entity chasing you. And if we can libidinalize that anxiety, then you also libidinalize the confrontation with it. And so I think the use of cyberpunk images is partially aesthetically very pleasing, and we don't want to do too much aestheticization of politics, because Walter Benjamin warned us about that. But insofar as these machines are more imminent to our lives in terms of datafication, I do think this is one of the best factors to go through. Not necessarily the only one, but definitely one I think is going to be quite helpful.

Justin:
[33:39] Mark Fisher.

Jay:
[33:45] You were just waiting. We haven't brought up Mark Fisher in a bit.

Justin:
[33:52] No because i.

Jay:
[33:53] Was on a mark fisher kick for a little bit and i was like reading through all of k pong it's i'd bring him up every episode or so it's.

Justin:
[33:59] It's just a necessary button it do.

Jay:
[34:03] Be like that sometimes.

Justin:
[34:04] One thing i i was thinking as i was going through anti-oculus in particular was all the applications of that work to libraries and so i had all these notes i was writing down on my whiteboard as we were going and it was also kind of like could i turn this into a study of library punk is there a library punk critique i can play with that could kind of summarize what we've been doing for the past few years maybe that could be like a theme that we play with for the next few episodes and so i was trying to think of all the ways in which libraries have like control control, automation, a million nudges that keep you in place, and then data collection, the amalgamation of views as parts of data. So you talk about your individual profile.

Justin:
[34:57] It's sort of digging quote here for to lose individuality is characteristic of the control society in which paradigm of social control tends towards mobilizing flows of data to expand surveillance, motivate consumer habits and optimize apparatuses geared toward generating forms of compliance. And libraries have unfortunately become part of, you know, data collection and usage. And also, I think what I've been thinking about more is the extremely large amount of AI boosters in higher education in particular, and that's making its way to academic libraries, which is kind of surprising to me because a lot of the boosterism that we saw around, for instance, blockchain, you would get a few people who would go, I'm going to go read about this. It sounds interesting. I've got to go find out what an NFT is and if it's going to be relevant to anything in libraries. Because libraries, I think, are pretty tech-forward people in many ways. My university spent a couple hundred thousand dollars to make a Second Life campus, which was one of the main ways that Second Life made money and in the later part of its business was selling digital land. And of course, that's probably why Meta was so interested in making the Metaverse is if you don't have any land to sell, you can create new land and sell that and extract rents from it.

Justin:
[36:17] But I think AI is one that has been interesting to me, in particular, the ways in which it removes kind of the human aspect of library service. I was thinking in particular, like, why are library websites so bad? And one thing i noticed as like a sort of recurring theme is library websites do everything they can to invisibilize our labor and part of that is sort of the nature of like the feminized nature of of librarianship and library work and there's a lot of like gender happening with that invisibilization but a lot of it is so intentional it's we want it to look as smooth as possible and look like it just runs on its own you look at a library website and you don't see people you see You see, you know, maybe a nice picture of the building. You see, search the catalog. Here are some events that are happening, which might have some pictures of people, but all the services and stuff in our library alone, the book just gets to you, the catalog, the e-resources. All that stuff is automated and comes straight to you. And then, of course, we have Ask a Librarian chats, which people don't want to use anymore because they assume it's a chatbot. And you have to tell people it's not a chatbot. It's a person there. Generally don't use chatbots but we've done so much of a removal of the human interaction that it's grubbed from it.

Jay:
[37:38] Yeah like in one of my previous jobs more so than in my job now but also now relevant to my job now as like a cataloging librarian and i used to in a previous job like maintain like the i don't know if you've heard this term before adam but a discovery layer. So instead of the old school digital library catalog, now the thing that will bring in not only the books, but also it will also bring in the articles from databases at the same time. That's called the discovery layer. I maintained that for the university that I worked at. And I always used to say it was really hard for me to self-advocate in my job because if I was doing my job right, no one knew I existed. If everything was that smooth, then my labor, like i was like was invisible to people because the fruits of my labor were working so well but it was only when things went wrong that it was obvious that i was the the thing in the supply chain or whatever that had screwed up yeah like this is a really huge thing for tech services librarians and like library workers like sadie who like work in it yes.

Adam:
[38:48] Yes the the invisibilization aspect of this labour. There's definitely two. It seems at least that, There's two extremes here in terms of, one, you said the invisibilization of labor, which goes all the way down to the data sets. I mean, especially with data moderators. I mean, I think it was about a year, almost a year ago now, like last May, I believe, that chat GPT's moderators finally unionized in Kenya. And, you know, most of the work is micro work. But for actually working in these library services, I mean, so the next Asset to Horizon episode, which will be out by, I think, by the time this is out, is with a professor called Dan McQuillan, who wrote a book called Resisting AI, an Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence.

Adam:
[39:31] One of the things that he brings up, and I wonder if this connects to your experience as well, which is what AI does is invisibilizes the everyday flow of work, but also it includes what he calls micro rests. So essentially, the only things that in highly automated and highly... I say AI-ified, but it's not just AI. It's neither either a nor i really it's so-called ai enabled workplaces and highly digitized and automated workplaces but it seems like the some in some accounts the work becomes more stressful in the way because where the human intervenes is predominantly only in the hardest cases where a machine is simply unable to do it so for example i mean i'm explaining your experiences i mean i want to resonate with your own experiences because i mean mcquillan was using example like automated call centers, where if you can't be solved in a basic press of a button, you get the most stressed or the most unable to work with that tech callers. Do you think that ends up eliminating part of the smaller, almost semi-rest periods of work when you get automation coming into the library system?

Jay:
[40:35] I mean, I feel like it might depend because like when I was in grad school, for example, and worked at a service desk, the majority of the questions I got were directional or non-research informational. Where is the bathroom? How late are we open? Stuff like that, like stuff that is easily findable on a website if a website is like tagged and made well. That is like that's something actually reasonable for a chat bot a non-ai chat bot to be able to like be programmatically matic pull or it was things like a freshman or anybody being like hey i can't access this journal article like something in the electronic resources pipeline it breaks down and usually in that case there's something wrong with them going through the authentication system like they went through it through the publisher's website to the library website, or a URL somewhere changed without it being notified. And in some of those cases, it could be as easy as like going through like a standard troubleshooting. Like, have you done this? Have you done this? Have you done this? So I could see for some instances, how it could remove a lot of that, like basic, non research informational and directional questions. That is a lot of what public service staff do get.

Jay:
[41:59] But also sometimes those very quote, because I remember like the librarians, never wanted to sit at the reference desk because they were tired of answering those questions. They thought it took away from their time to do the rest of their job. But what working with those types of questions lets you know is where problems in the system are and how people are looking for information. If people can't find this information on the website on their own, then there's a problem with the website. Or the type of basic questions that people were asking. If there was a bunch of, hey, I can't access this article, did you go through the library website? Oh, no. Then why aren't we getting it across that people need to go through the library website first? So it would both take away, it would be kind of easy for a lot of those to be automated, I think, but also it would remove the point of having a person who also does the research questions, who can put all of these things in context together. And i hear like ai can kind of do that do that sort of like pattern matching whatever like it does in health care but still well.

Justin:
[43:15] One thing it definitely can't do is be is is a basic reference interview because right um and that's always sort of tied up you never know when a basic question is one that needs a follow-up question so for example yeah if, Like, AI would interpret a lot of basic reference questions as directional questions. So, a student will come up to you and say, I need a book on the Roman Empire. An inexperienced person or an AI will say, it's under, you know, G or D or wherever. I don't remember where Roman history would be in LC. see. But the question is, if you're working at academic library, the question is, is this for a class?

Justin:
[43:58] And especially if it looks like a freshman, then they say yes. And you say, okay, what's the assignment? And they say, well, my professor said I need to have three sources for my discussion board this week. And I'm like, I promise you, your professor doesn't want you to read three books this week what you want is a reference article you want probably another reference article and it may be a short research article and that way you're only going to be reading you know you're saving the time of the user which is one of the laws of library science right but also you're helping them do the exact thing and sometimes you need them to pull up like on their phone what the assignment is so that they can read it to you and you know when i was doing night reference at a community college that was every question was you know is this for an assignment and i think only once in like the three or four months when i was working at that community college did someone say no i'm just interested and i said cool let's walk up there and i showed them how to like shelf read the section but even then like it helps with the follow-up but no i really don't think like i don't know anyone who's really put like a chat bot the only thing i know is people have done the automated faqs so like if it's after hours like an faq bot bot will show up and it'll be like here's the top five most asked questions click on one it'll take you to the faq page about it but it's not really like a conversational bot that pretends it's a person right.

Jay:
[45:19] And like the the reference interview example that i was given like all the way back in grad school my reference class is like what might be a simple question is actually requires a lot of digging through is a patron coming to the desk going i want information about coca-cola and you go oh like well there's like a vending machine down the hall or like here's the key words for searching for for searching for coca-cola in the database which is probably what like an ai would do like oh here are the keywords you want to research this topic right when actually what that patron was curious about was why coca-cola bottles have the shape that they do, But people don't know how to ask the questions that they're actually wanting to know about. Every person does this, including librarians. But that's the purpose of the reference interview is to get at what a person is actually asking. But there's like, I studied a lot of question formation for my master's thesis. And like, there is like a lost in translation aspect that goes from the information need, like the question need, to like verbalizing that either to another person or even to a chatbot or even to just a search bar.

Sadie:
[46:33] Well, I think a lot of this is really relevant to IT work too, not even necessarily in libraries, but in general, because like you're talking about like call centers are kind of those escalating cases of like, you know, all the directional things have been taken out and all of that. So, so the P when it actually ends up in a person, it's actually like a really complex case, which in some ways can be really interesting because then you're getting the more interesting cases that you can take apart and figure out what's actually going on using reference interview review skills, which are absolutely relevant to any sort of IT career. But like, I've kind of experienced it not necessarily in our own, like my own line of work, but trying to work with vendors to get more, more information being that sort of complex case, where it's like, you throw a question at Microsoft, and you get an engineer who's very clearly just going through a series of knowledge-based articles that they're not allowed to deviate from, which is important.

Sadie:
[47:32] That you've already done because you know how to look up the same exact knowledge-based article and apply it to your case and go, okay, this is not that. So you're looking for somebody to actually ask you those sort of reference-y questions. So you can actually, you're like, I must be missing something here, right? And troubleshooting this. And then you get somebody who's just doing the same exact thing. And it takes a week or two to actually get escalated to an engineer who knows how to ask those questions and look at your very specific case, right? And then that translates into a delay for our users who are library staff, which then translates into a delay for the users who are the patrons at the library. So it's like something in our email breaks and it's this chain of delay that ends up being reflecting that on us because our vendor that we have a contract with who we're paying has the support that is supposedly automated and streamlined and it actually you can't actually get past that automation part when you already know that you need to be escalated past that right so, I'm not actually sure how relevant that is now that I've said it all out loud. But I can see where those sort of cases of human intervention actually work against the automation flow that they're trying to create, if that makes sense.

Adam:
[49:01] The thesis i'm sort of working on sort of after all this which is thinking about why why are we being sold more of these cybernetic you know automate machines to intervene in our jobs constantly all the time and why do none of them fucking work whatsoever because he said we were talking about here they the people that are selling these machines one are mostly startups to hoover up venture capital money and they're sort of you know as as the interest rates went up and the free money stopped going around they became more and more fascist because you know the The system, these people were sort of the true believers of the cybernetic image, which is the system just needs more data or the system works because it works. I mean, we see people like Musk and techno-optimists like Marc Andreessen, and they hate people. They hate all of us. They hate people who actually work with information because they don't want to be informed.

Adam:
[49:48] Because there's no democracy technologies, because people who actually work with them can't actually be part of the feedback process. Then it's left up to, well, I think it is a positive feedback system, mostly because, I mean, CEOs are weird creatures, aren't they? I mean, they are definitely a separate, not in the sense of biological or social essentialism, but in the sense of they're the weird new kind of human that which the word no has disappeared from their earshot. They've not heard the word there has been a pure positive feedback loop of okay the system is going to work because i've thrown money at it and if it doesn't work i'm going to pay someone else who will tell me it can work and this is why we see you know open ai just creating slop we see stuff like you know the line in saudi arabia people with so much money you have hoarded so much money and everyone and because they have this they have this much money because they've stolen it from the rest of us and destroyed the welfare state and impoverished the entire world so then the only people that can say no to them are someone who doesn't need their money, which is not very many people if you're actually able to work with them in the first place. And so they can just go in these cycles of impunity where they demand these systems work because they work, because they work, because they work, you're fired. Okay, but someone else will come on to tell me they work. This links everything from the fact that Twitter magically won't start working if you fire all of the tech staff to...

Adam:
[51:12] Any library not responding to one saying this system is shit i mean i don't know if it was real much about the british library but they take it it's a british institution it's collapsing that's what i'll say about it i mean even in terms of let's be honest the military military industrial complex which is stuck in the same loop of these systems work because they work because they work because we spent money on them no they don't that sort of impunity that lack of negative feedback which can only really come from democracy which is what you know neoliberalism is so hostile to is completely flat i mean this is why for all the money that you know the money the idf spend on stupid fucking machines they don't work very well because no one has ever told them no you know no one tells elon musk no until they will just keep investing investing to believe that what they call once the elon musk reality distortion field keeps working so i really think we are stuck in this sort of positive feedback loop with these kind of machines where.

Adam:
[52:06] They're being sold as for humanity, but only on a basis that they fucking hate humans. They really do hate us. I mean, in terms of Twitter, for one, we're there mostly to fill the gaps between ads, and Musk hates us because we're not telling him how lovely he is. And even in terms of... So I work in publishing. AI does come in a few times, and these machines are completely irresponsive for any negative feedback. It is genuinely a sort of crisis of techniques here, mostly because there is no way to say no to people who have so much power that you can't really reject these machines any other way apart from the classic means of machine breaking or letting machines collapse but again it's not the CEO who feels that power it's the privatization of gains and the socialization of losses and as you know the worker is the one at the head of it but sorry I've been rambling a bit too long.

Jay:
[52:57] No not at all you're fine we usually go pretty late too.

Justin:
[53:01] Mm-hmm i i have all these notes that i'm like looking at because i took a photo of it in of my whiteboard and part of it was like the automation of control but also the messiness of human interaction and i think this was part the thing is when i was writing these notes down i didn't write what part of anti-oculus i was on but i i just have this part that says like the messiness of human interaction which i tied into the race riots that recently happened in the uk which was burning one of the libraries as well, because it was seen as a threat of a benefit to outsiders and the way that libraries create insiders and outsiders. There's the residents and the non-resident who is outside of the library. There is the patron and sort of the non-patron where we have all these things, especially in like university libraries, you know, there's the student faculty researchers, they can all have access. And then the public, we usually will begrudgingly give some access to. You get a shitty little computer in the corner you're allowed to play with, and that has your public access to it. You might be allowed to check out books, but usually it's kind of hostile.

Justin:
[54:08] And of course, university parking is usually pretty hostile to outsiders, too. But I also have a section on the sort of liberal marketizing logic of, I guess, in general, the current moment that suppresses non-market life. And I was trying to get at what the contradictions libraries are, because they're both a threat to the logic of marketizing every part of our life, and they operate within it as an assumption. So property relations, government ownership of materials, paying late fees, paying replacement fees. We call the cops on you if you don't bring the book back because the city library is part of the city government and it's city government property. Therefore, the police are going to go show up. It happens in some places where the library and the police are a little too closely related.

Justin:
[54:59] But also libraries are expected to provide job skills, coding centers, internet access, because you have to be plugged in. You have to be, you know, trackable. You have to be able to go apply for your benefits on the internet and usually through a smartphone, too. But that's a whole other issue. But libraries still give the promise of free time, free expression, free inquiry. So there's all these contradictions. And I think that's part, it's kind of part of why it drives us so crazy on the show, which is, you know, all of the lip service we do to libraries being important to democracy and libraries are good. The libraries are also arms of the state and mechanisms of control. And there's this, there's this, you know, all of these contradictions that I really want to hammer out and find out some way through and find out like what they start to mean. And so anyway look that's a long way of saying i really enjoyed reading all your work and listening to acid horizon because it's given me an outline of to start to start going down this rabbit hole and then hopefully on the other side i'll come out with something succinct and meaningful that i can say instead of spending an hour and a half trying to poke at it and see what the outlines of it might be i.

Jay:
[56:12] Mean this is unironically why the whole little free library, project is so sinister because it shows a like neoliberal ideal of what a library is and it's just a place where books are that librarians aren't where no labor is required and also you can call the cops on people if you think you're stealing out of it even if it's a free thing, which yeah like this whole like people do that i know it's so dumb but yeah like every i'm always a buzzkill when i'm with people and they see a cute little free library in boston i'm like those Those things are fascist, actually. Librarians hate those things. They're real bad.

Justin:
[56:48] Weirdly enough, I think the machine of liberation is the vending machine because it's just the free Narcan vending machine instead of the free Narcan little free library. It's usually like, you know, punch in the number and the Narcan falls out. I don't know.

Adam:
[57:04] There's an article in The Guardian about a month ago or now which was about the few libraries left in quite a regional town. If you just google it god i mean i'm not gonna recommend the guardian actually go to the archive the org and find it there don't give the fuckers your money because they don't deserve it given what they've been up to over the past few years but i i don't i'm not i'm not that from the right i mean they're a transphobic rag in touch with the british state but in terms of what libraries are like in britain i mean some of them are called idea stores now the idea store i mean luckily i mean there's a few near me that are far better so one of them is named after clr james which is we love to see it but yeah i mean that's exactly the thing when public services are in uk and at this you know they're hollowed out purely so they can be something to lure people in with the resources and access to them and then yes the reintroduction of the border pure and simple benefits applications any sort of help that you can't get from anywhere else you end up going to a library and rather than the introduction i have when i was a kid which was there's fucking loads of books here, there's computers, and like, oh my, there's stuff to do here, you can come here and it'll be safe, rather than you can come here if you have to.

Adam:
[58:14] How dare you take up space? All British institutions treat you like a child who is unworthy of anything because, one, they're British, and two, they're ruling class. I mean, they've had such a smooth ride since 1066 that, you know, our royal family have forgotten that they can sweat because sweating is a negative feedback mechanism. Prince Andrew hasn't seen negative feedback in quite some time, so they forget that they can even do sweating at this point and there is this i mean genetically they may not be able to well well this at this point the inbreeding of the house of taxcoba gopher might reach that point i mean who knows we see what the current ones look like but.

Adam:
[59:02] In terms of i mean there are some good experiments and most of it does end up having to be outside of library systems i mean i'm thinking about but so there's a lot of it there's a few info shops in london so shout out to fizzle 56a uh south london yeah it squat fuck squatted place i mean i mean freedom books started by kropotkin still in east london hasn't been firebombed in about 15 years and god damn it they've lasted about 200 so whenever you know we're never going away fuck yeah it is at least trying to find this way where essentially any kind of resource source manager ends up being a compromise with state power and i think it's also because it's it's it's a land issue i mean the uk it's a land issue we never had any kind of land reform rather than converting aristocrats into landlords we've historic i mean this is just probably definitely a uk problem we never really got rid of aristocrats we converted them into landlords i didn't know about the the leasehold system where you can buy your own home, but you're still paying rent because you don't own the ground the home is on. And that's usually owned by an aristocrat or the church, which is owned by the king. And now we have a king. I mean, some people, when they buy homes, they have to get insurance so that the church cannot invoke the ancient right to make you pay for the repairs.

Adam:
[1:00:20] We didn't technically abolish feudalism. We debated capitalism and did it far, far better. Sir but that is kind of the idea of libraries end up being a kind of annoyance to the state essentially something that we have to give you a little bit to tempt you in so we can we can we can measure your measure your social skull basically and see what's going here and in terms of the attacks and it was attack on the library as well and specifically a citizens advice bureau which is kind of a lifeblood of any sort of working class involvement if you don't have the money to keep up with all the tech and actually get a vice on anything from tax to jobs to even social social any sort of social security everything's been so hollowed out that attacking that yes i think some the fascists in the uk would rather burn it than see it given to anyone else because they they genuinely believe that there there is nothing left for them other than wanton destruction and this isn't this isn't an idea that really comes organically from the working class never has it's all been funneled to them by essentially our media class i mean over in the states folks are lucky you've only got one fox news we have about 10 and you know it helps have murdoch on side in election year but in the uk what rupert wants rupert gets sadly uh.

Justin:
[1:01:34] To wrap up i guess my my final thought is is what i've been poking at the whole time which is how do we create to succinct political critique to AI hype and systems of control, particularly because we're seeing so many people say, oh, AI will help us make question sets. It'll help us teach more effectively. It'll help us do all these things that actually remove intention from what you're doing. And if there's no intention, then there's a problem of value. Maybe you could say it loses its aura because of its mechanical reproductive nature or something like that. I don't think we have one yet, but how would you think we could move towards creating one?

Adam:
[1:02:16] So firstly, we need to start critiquing the idea of AI itself, I think. For one, I mean, so a book everyone should read, and I'm not going to sell Antiochus' New Flesh here. It you just read a book called work without the worker by a guy called phil jones no relation and he is talking about all the ways in which micro work data moderation is becoming on the biggest fronts in the global economy particularly amongst refugees and people in the global south and he there's a quote in there from jeff bezos himself about mechanical turk one of the big data moderation platforms and he says i call it aai artificial artificial intelligence because it it's the invisibilization we need to start grappling with the idea that data is a kind of dead labor.

Adam:
[1:03:04] Every time you walk through anything that's creating data, you are making a commodity for someone to sell on. And Work Without the Work is a great book at highlighting this. And we understand that ultimately this is all dead labor, and we're making it, and not just us. It's also conditioned on various aspects of literally global imperiors. If you displace people, they do micro work for you, and they're paid cents on the dollar. And if they escape your fucking concentration camps they've trained the various face recognition algorithms through the work you've put them in a place of doing but at the same time we cannot simply regurgitate the images of these machines because a lot of these machines are just images for generating investment and they do not work then they will never work if we give up this sort of pep based hope some sort of fusion of hope and hype but not really hope you know read john greenaway's work on block to figure it out to work on on the hope aspect there we will because sometimes there's a risk here of critiquing these machines as if they really do what they say they're doing and that ends up being sort of a negative marketing the example i give of this and i've given it in talks before is the ai so-called ai machine that israel using to create generate target list like fuck are they using any they haven't got a supercomputer no they've got one that they want to sell because they have an incredibly booming AI industry.

Adam:
[1:04:28] And so-called AI. And it's marketing. They generate kill lists because they have data collection things anyway. And also, since when did they ever give a shit about killing anyone else in collateral? It's marketing. We need to make sure the machines we're talking about, we need to critique them, say they don't do what they say. We have to undermine trust in these AI boosters and say that anything that these things can actually do are being done already by a human, so pay the human. And given how essential the humans are to the machines, we should realise as well that we can break them. We can render data in the unusable, and to some extent, this is happening with these machines themselves. So, i keep saying university of chicago i think it might be then but they've generated this thing called nightshade which is a means of protecting copyright against having your stuff put into an ai data set which basically means put a bit of metadata in there poisons the data set you can strangulate these machines technically literally technically but also it has to be a politics of not saying that humans are so much better but saying that we're being taken for a ride these these machines and these machines rely on data captures which affects all of us across the periphery and the imperial core and if we don't tackle them now they're going to be used against us yeah so.

Justin:
[1:05:52] I just need to do that but about libraries and then then i'll have the next few episodes lined up.

Adam:
[1:05:57] Cybernetics is great because it flattens everything into the same kind of functional relation if you think about data production you can apply this model like again and again it's very translatable i think yeah.

Justin:
[1:06:07] And i think it gives us a lot of a lot to play with in terms of different all the different ways libraries exist as sort of like a machine, as a social institution as a side of social reproductive labor it's got all these different faces out into the world so you can do the application again and again to all these different systems it touches because they're they're so interrelated but i think it's been helpful in making me think of, I'm being annoying about, you know, the fact that we do business with Relics because that technology is being used to racially profile people in my neighborhood, right? It's the same company. It's the same, you know, data vendor. And I can show you exactly the mechanism through which that happens because of the way that the value is generated for that vendor. Which means they can also, once those people have been arrested, they can sell software to their public defenders who would then use it to look up the law to defend them. And then they will sell terminals to the prisons in which the prisoners can do their own legal research on those proprietary databases. Is the same and it's because it's only two vendors it's all it's the same people the same people who got you who stole your privacy and your image in order to get you profiled and got you put in jail are also giving you the means through which to research your own freedom so.

Justin:
[1:07:34] And we didn't even have to jump between two companies to get through that whole list of things so yeah i think that's where we'll go well uh i mean thank you so much for coming on adam is there anything else you want people to go to everything's gonna all the links are going to be in there but anything in particular oh.

Adam:
[1:07:52] No thank you so much for having me it's been fantastic i mean yeah just the link for the new flash will be up at some point i probably towards the end of september but i don't exactly know when anti-oculus is out already if anyone has a problem accessing it contact myself or asset horizon on twitter we'll make sure you'll be able to get a copy of it and yeah the podcast is pretty regular we have reading groups check it out.

Justin:
[1:08:15] All right. Thank you so much. It's really fun.

Jay:
[1:08:19] Thank you.

Justin:
[1:08:20] Good night.