Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
From Cybernetics to Social Reproduction: Examining the Interconnectedness of Community and Technology with Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson
What happens when we reframe our understanding of community and technology? Join us in a fascinating conversation with Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson, associate professor at NYU in Media, Culture, and Communication, as we explore this complex relationship and challenge our perspectives on cybernetics, Marxist theories, and the impact of historical and technological transformation.
In this thought-provoking episode, we discuss the financial crisis of 2008-2012, its effects on the publishing industry, and how social organizations leverage technology to achieve their goals. We also touch on the unique challenges of leftist goals, the need for coordination between different actors, and the public culture required for success. Delve into topics such as organizing, representation, and social reproduction, and learn how access to arts education, sports education, and other services can benefit working-class communities.
Finally, we examine the economic relations present in the service economy, the gender disparities in left media, and the need to cultivate the terroir of people who know a lot about music and other forms of art. Discover how churches and religious institutions play a role in providing social change, and how frameworks, models, and code-switching can bridge the gap between different language communities. Don't miss this eye-opening conversation that will broaden your understanding of the world and inspire you to think differently.
Erica Robles-Anderson is a professor of media, culture, and communication, at New York University. focuses on the role media technologies play in the production of space. In particular, she concentrates on configurations that enable a sense of public, collective, or shared experience, especially through the structuring of visibility and gaze. Trained as both an experimental psychologist and a cultural historian she has employed a range of methodologies to explore the definition of media-space. She is currently writing a book about the 20th-century transformation of Protestant worship space into a highly mediated, spectacular "mega-church" (under contract, Yale University Press).
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @skepoet
Facebook
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival
Hello and welcome to VARM blog. And today I'm talking with Dr Erika Robles Anderson about community in the broad sense, but how the left should start to frame it. And I'm going to go ahead and begin with saying that everything I just said, other than your name, should probably be put in quotation marks, because I think every term in that left community frame it is contestable. So before we get going, can you tell my audience a little bit about your work and what you do?
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Yeah. So I'm going to give you the kind of like, since this is like our first time having like a conversation, i'm going to give like some anchor points that seem like they might be useful for us to navigate around and then we'll see what we want to do with that. So, biographically, i'm an associate professor at NYU in a department called Media Culture and Communication, so we basically study like everything right, i think we are the oldest like media studies department effectively in the United States. We were founded in 1970. So that's an interesting kind of feature of the way that we've been shaped and we're internal to an education department. So we look a little interesting and are probably marked by 1970s New York, i think in our sensibilities.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So I came there from Stanford where I did undergraduate and graduate degrees. I mentioned this because in my present life I'm a cultural historian but I was an undergraduate in the Silicon Valley in the late 90s, early 2000s, so I've seen a few crises, let's say. And I started life thinking I was going to work on engineering and design. So I've always loved like kind of symbolic systems, forms, complexity, sorts of things like quantity, and then I moved into the quantitative social sciences And now I would say that my work is really properly historical. But methodologically the questions have reshaped but the theoretical and analytical interests have been pretty much the same. So my origin, like my villain backstory, would be that in the 90s and 2000s, thinking about wanting to build stuff because that's what you do when you go to school in that area I was really baffled by the dominant discourse And I didn't have like a language for this at all. So I'm really internal to the process of wanting to build things.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:I was really baffled by the conception of technology as something that was for individuals, like the individual user, the individual user experience, the idea that the way that we should conceive of interaction would be through this kind of individual use case, because it seemed to me like most of the experiences that we have are already pre-borded as eminently collective things, whether that's through like what I would now think of as like kinship forms, right, like collectivities, households, organizations, firms, anything in that layer is really not the dominant way that we think about building worlds And I just think that's a broken paradigm.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:It really limits the imagination of what's possible and it does a poor job descriptively for thinking about what counts as agency for historical and technological transformation. So that sort of set me on a path that I have been pursuing and that I think has pushed me more to think about what political economy has to offer, what various social sciences do and do not have to offer, how we might reconceive of the kind of social research we wanna do and towards what ends we would wanna be building. So that's where I would kinda enter around community. Yeah, let me leave it there for a second.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, that's actually interesting. When I first encountered you on Twitter, i went and looked up your work and I was like, oh, there's interest in media and technology. There's also an interest in community and what we mean by that term, because that term is to me both important but vitally underdetermined term. Right, you know it's. I remember sitting in activist meetings are in lecture halls, actually and I was talking about community and then going I've been an educator now for 16 years and community is a word to get thrown around there too And realizing that I had no idea what collectivity we were actually referring to by community at any given stage.
C. Derick Varn:But to kind of parallel to the other point that you indicated, that my understanding of technology have been limited by this kind of paradigm of individual use cases.
C. Derick Varn:It actually made me really not understand, for example, what cybernetics was about until probably about seven, eight years ago when I was really trying to understand. Okay, you know, i read, read plenty. I know now something about how this was being conceived of kind of in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s And that sort of led me down this weird like technological, like research pathway that I've now been kind of on trying to understand what has happened with cybernetics, like why can we talk about it? Like you know, i've read a whole lot of critical theory. I've been rereading it from Vriliyoh and Baudrillard and going like, oh well, they think cybernetics is X. I'm learning stuff from the 40s where cybernetics is Y And I've been trying to figure out what happened between, say, 1965 to 1990, where, other than some kind of facile arguments based off of etymology, where the perception of this entire field completely changed, both internal to itself and definitely external to itself, so that overlaps with your work, but kind of from the opposite perspective, to be like, my journey's been the other way.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Well, i think we're probably about the same age, right, we're probably. So I'm let's just assume that there's probably something like I grew up in Texas. We're about the same age, we're both from the same country, right? There's probably some kind of like felt historical something, right? That should be able to structure the range of interests that we and we're both educators So some things happened. But also there should be some overlap that we could probably identify and ask, like what the hell happened in the last 40 years, right? Like how should we think about that productively from the inside of our subject position and also in a way that's like useful for where to go?
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:I have also shared the cybernetics fascination. I took a course in maybe graduate school with two guys who still teach like straight up cybernetics, one who was a student of Gordon Pask, guys who are like kicking around the valley, who've done a lot of work like teaching cybernetics for years, and it was a really fascinating class. There were people who would come from Chile like every semester every year and take it again. Really fascinating group of people and that kind of cybernetics which was like a course from first order, second order and third order and how to build cybernetics systems To me seemed also to not at all match both what I have heard about cybernetics, right, the dominant historical narrative which just cannot get over, norbert Wiener, you know, it's just like stuck right there, like one more story about the Macy conferences but also that didn't seem to kind of bring the kinds of concepts that I still think are really useful, like requisite variety and conversation, and none of those debates seem to make it into a moment that is like network society, let's say.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So. Something happened in a range of thoughts about how we were gonna do organization that obscured some ways of talking about co-electivity and its processes and that papered over a few others, and maybe our job is to kind of rework that terrain and think about what kinds of what should we be talking about? right, what's the agenda from here? you know?
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, i think the elephant in the room is the internet somehow became I'm hesitant to say more commodified, because I've been called out on that, because it's always to some degree been heavily commodified, but the directness and obviousness of that commodification has become more and more apparent to people. I think there is still, you know, there's also the way in which, you know, our lives have been dominated by mass media in a way that even the generation prior to us has a memory of a time before. You know. It's very similar to like the way kids in their 20s I probably shouldn't say kids, but kids in their 20s experienced the world as mediated through the internet in a way that, like, i can't really address because I do remember a time before and there's been a lot of backfiring in that And this isn't immediately obvious or does it immediately feel like it's relevant to politics.
C. Derick Varn:But, for example, all the research on early cyber, the effects of like the internet on education and on cyber education, and all this we're all done on people who had grown up in some ways with the technology but also still had access to like what the world was like prior to the technology in some degree. So, for example, like how people ask questions on Google and how immediately useful it was and how much context you needed to teach. That was all kind of based off of, frankly, not just the normal weird assumptions you know, white, rich, educated, first world, et cetera, but also on, like you remember, a time when contextualizing questions was more important because it was harder to do research. Therefore, you had to contextualize questions And over time we started noticing, oh, all that original research isn't actually pertinent to what we're seeing with students now, because all that was done basically assuming these preconditions and assumptions and community assumptions that were not obvious, how temporal and very specific they were. So because, yeah, I mean, there's always the obvious problems, most psychological and educational research is done on college students who are from a certain background, but there was also like a very temporal part of that that made, you know, all that invalid.
C. Derick Varn:And what I find interesting also, you have a communications background and one of the early research on this was actually from the communications end of things, and they were also some of the people who realized that a lot of the educational assumptions that were being built off of this early data from internet were not panning through. Even before, say, teachers and pedagogical researchers realized it And I'm not quite sure why that is Like I don't know what the lens of communications gives you there, but it was definitely something I saw that we did all this research on the effects of. You know, we always say technology. This is really more specific than that, like on education, And I think that's interesting. What I haven't thought about until recently was how that affects community conceptions and whatnot, because if it affects education, it's also gonna affect the community conception. Like how people approach this, what they ask about community formation et cetera, would be kind of strongly mediated by our conceptions around technologies and endpoint use, data and stuff like that. Does that make sense? That's a great Totally, totally.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So I'm gonna try to, i'm gonna sort of like keep reworking this terrain, because I feel like we have the luxury of both being like capacious readers, let's say, and then having to kind of broker the range of fields that we care about, like, so that people can find each other with common concerns, who may not speak the same disciplinary languages right, it's like that's a thing we both care about and care to participate in. I think, right, it's educators. So I'm gonna just like be pretty bald about my like critique of whatever some dominant story is to give us some traction to talk about this technology and computer thing, right, or communication bit and community. So I think we live in a, we lived through a period where we felt right, this constant dominant narrative that placed the usual suspects into the driver's seat of agency Technologies, sometimes financial kind of modes of capital. But those are the kinds of vulgar, dialectical things that count as agents of history And they propel us forward. And the thing which is static and sitting in the background is culture, right, where it is the functional and traditional, and it's backwards somewhere. I'm not sure where it is, maybe it's far away where those other people are, but we rehearse this kind of like modernity ideology, over and over again to propel the idea that maybe the future comes from like one place in California and it's gonna spread and eventually everyone will catch up. And we live with that narrative constantly. And as much as we're critical of that narrative for its obvious absurdities, one thing that we haven't sort of attended to enough is building a language that allows us to reverse the causality or make more constitutive, causal claims about the way that what we kind of broadly call culture shapes the migration into new technological regimes, because then you get accused of sort of having your ideas mixed up about whatever the real economic stuff is. That's kind of like that. I'm in a hand wave and say that that's like the discourse you encounter most often in whatever in the empire we live in.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So the goal might be to think about what you'd have to do to make a kind of constitutive causality appear, so cybernetics kind of. We might wanna pull from that. We might wanna think about studies of communion, symbolic exchange, modes of social production that are generative as economic transactions, so that we don't bifurcate those. We might wanna find a language to disavow public, private distinctions. We might wanna sort of open up the terrain of the terms that need to come together so that we can both get out of that sort of modernity story where techniques is both the cause of our isolation and the promise of the cure to connect us back together in this network And then open it up to some other kinds of descriptive processes and also things that we can use to organize different kinds of worlds.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:And so that's a huge problem, but it's the it's definitely, or at least I will say it's the problem that has gotten me out of bed every day for the last two decades And that to me seems like it needs like a thousand more hands on deck working that out as a project which gets us to this problem of community right.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So, if you'll belabor it, there's one more piece we have to put in here to kind of mess with, which is we also live through the 1989 moment And you know then whatever the 1995 moment, in the 2001 moment. But we there was a fantasy about the nation that comes through Ben Anderson's work on imagined community. That is about living in a flat, modern, homogenous time that is linear, where the new symbolic thing is gonna be either forms of nation carried in language, something like that. We're living in a moment we live in the wake of that being a dominant story for how community operates and persists, and I wanna say that there are all kinds of problems with that story. There always have been, and they run neatly alongside the problems of putting techniques into the role of modernizing constantly towards the next available stage. I think we should dump that all mostly out, or at least sideline it for a while, so that we can work on these problems of sufficient alignment to carry on, which gets us to education, maybe.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, subtly, you have probably upset every Marxist in the room.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:I know, i know, but that's okay, I'm, that's fine, that's true, that's true.
C. Derick Varn:Just actually pointed out. For the Marxists who haven't realized they should be angry, sorry, but but I actually I think that's there's a lot of key points in that that we should, like I've been. You know, it's funny how much our concerns parallel each other in a kind of different way but are generationally consistent. I have been racking my mind over how the conception of nations and national and nationalisms have gotten specifically leftist, but in a larger sense everybody but in cul-de-sacs for a long time. That if you try to start reconciling what that sort of modernist view of a nation is, which itself is tied into techniques, because you're right, one of the things that Benedict Anderson's particular version of that story does is say well, the printing press is why nations exist.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Absolutely.
C. Derick Varn:So you know the national formation is not just an imagined community of language. It's imagined a community of language that is possible because of communication technology and it's flattened out. Over my 20 years of dealing with this and also trying to figure out how to talk about like cultures and nations responsibly, i've really come to doubt that Anderson narrative as actually super explanatory. Ever, but particularly not right now.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:It's my favorite hate read. I'll be honest, Okay.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, it's To me Anderson is like trying to do the thing where he takes a Marxist conception and kind of makes it more copacetic to standard understandings, but also I think it creates more problems than it solves.
C. Derick Varn:And this got me to one of the questions that we talked about privately. When I first asked you if you wanna do this interview, you know you said you asked me like why don't we talk more about why social reproduction is not looked at as primary versus like production? And I realize that again, i have different reasons for how we came to this conclusion, but that, like this, has been something I've been really interested in too, because social reproduction is where relations of production come from in this really like old school Marxist way of understanding things, and relations of production actually determine the mode of production. Yet when we talk about that, we actually seem to talk about it like entirely inverted, as if modes of production just like arrived because some machine exists and we don't even know how to explain that and then all of a sudden, like bam, everything changes, which is not really Marxist particular way of describing the world, but it is like the implications of focusing mostly on production and then going well, you know, but production is also social, so social relations too.
C. Derick Varn:But really there's capitalism. By capitalism what we actually mean as industrial capitalism, going you know, etc. Etc.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Yeah. Yeah, i mean it binds us into a so we can say like, look, you could be really good about the kind of fidelity to what Marx or any thinker enables right and we should hold and do right by those thinkers. We can also track the communities of reception and the ways that the work gets used as a useful kind of social problem. Why is it picked up in this way, by whom to who is this useful, etc. And those are like both useful pursuits, right. The way that Marxism fits alongside this dominant story that we tell is that in both cases it allows a number of people with vested interests to describe a liberal kind of modernity that is headed somewhere, you know, and I want to reject that metaphysically, but it lets us sideline a lot of very difficult problems to solve. Right, like making people and relations is a time, it's an effortful endeavor, and whether or not the intellects themselves didn't mean to make the difference so stark, one thing anthropology unfortunately teaches us is that the kinds of gendering differences that we see in kinship forms radically predate and exceed anything that looks like an industrial economy. So we have to tangle with that. How does it make us think about the theory right, and what can this theory do? And how is this theory also, like every theory, part of its own historical moment, in a way that if we want to keep the ideas moving and work with them, we have to have a critique of our recognition of the historical subject as well. So I'll give you a really concrete example.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:When we set up this kind of techniques and stages model, then we have to tell a story about agrarian or domestic modes of production that have to become industrial and then they become post-industrial. That means that we haven't bothered to think about the fact that an enormous amount of post-industrial society piggybacks on domestic modes of production. Like we just haven't sat down and articulated how, like we're both I mean I'm at home right now, right, like, literally, i work from home. The internet is mostly a thing I do at home, right, so that's an ordinary and everyday experience, but it certainly reverses the sensibility of where the economy and political economy is a matter of concern, and we just haven't bothered to do that because it's the thing that's supposed to be back there, you know, and that's just sloppy. I mean we could do it right.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, i think the question of like social relations relations, of gender relations, of sex relations, of social reproduction, is something that really got me and started me kind of breaking me out of like in the assumptions of whatever Marx imported from classical political economy into Marx's assumptions. Because I would look at, because I am educated enough and I apologize if I need to bring it up that like, i know, for example, that immediate return hunter-gathering has very, has very gender relations. It is in almost all cases more relatively egalitarian than, say, our current situation between genders, but it is varied, intergender violence is varied, etc. Which starts to lead you to a question of okay, it can't solely be that this is just automatically coming out of quote printed communism and immediate return hunter-gatherer relations. Right, when you realize that you start looking at other things like okay, i've always assumed and I think you know Ingalls' work on my family is fairly good on this, although it is also over, it's extremely old at this point that agricultural societies led to things like viewing women as property.
C. Derick Varn:And then I started looking more at different agricultural societies and it turns out, yeah, that is the case a lot of the time, but it can't actually be deemed determinative in a strict way.
C. Derick Varn:That can't be the cause, because there's plenty of. There are plenty of agricultural societies Christopher Ryan points to some of these in kind of questionable ways but that don't actually end up replicating marriage in that way that is assumed in the Ingalls' early anthropological picture that well, women start to get treated as property and domestic rulers of the home with agriculture, because also, kinship becomes more important, because proving parentage becomes more important for genetics, there's all kinds of assumptions that are built into that and you start looking at the actual index of societies we know about and you hit the well, that's true most of the time, but it's not true all the time. So it can't be certainly determinative and that actually does damage to this whole. Like modes are that determinative of the way communities and social organization goes, and I think that's something to think a lot about when we start talking about community in this sense. Now, this is probably going to seem very abstract to people. So maybe we can start, we can ground things too.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:I mean maybe it's useful to kind of think about what examples feel helpful to think with, because I mean I think, like if I'm hearing what you're saying, like once I started noticing this problem too, i was like wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. how is this question of social relations not like, really like, how are people out there feeling confident in their social theory when social relations isn't central, if it's a peripheral question, or like if you, you know, if they have the weak on social reproduction, i just feel like wow, like that just seems like a really inadequate solution to the thought and so once you start seeing it, you kind of can't stop seeing it and wishing to do work in that. So I don't know which examples, which kinds of examples, resonate with people, but, like you know, i mean you could take something like in the COVID moment, the discourses between you know invisible labor, right as the suddenly discovered thing in the pages of you know exactly the kind of bourgeois, like periodicals, you'd guess, or like the New York Times. you're like, oh, the labor of, like the women is so invisible. I don't think it's invisible. It's funny that it keeps being rediscovered as forgotten, right, but that the invisible labor is not the same as the essential worker is a tip-off that there is something that is not merely constitutively gender as a structure.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:There's an economic question that needs to be unpacked as a political economy internal to domestic economies. that absolutely has a kind of relation to the market. Like not everybody's workload went up because some people worked in other people's homes, for example, and so they couldn't come to that job because you couldn't have your nanny or your you know house cleaner in. So it's not that women's labor is invisible, it's that there are always domestic economies And similarly, like, some professions happen at home, which means housing has to be a key engine of social differentiation. that's an asset, and we have to think about assets not merely wages and wage gaps, but just this much more complex formulation of what counts as economic activity And like we live with that all the time, you know, or we live with remittance economies, we live with inheritances, we live with family firms. That's just stuff that tends to be peripheral as a matter of inquiry, but it doesn't have to be, you know.
C. Derick Varn:So one of the things I think that this leads me to thinking about the structure of communities is the way both intentional structures that emerge from the interaction of individuals, such as the way people interact on Tritter, are undergirded by this like massive public infrastructure that does seem to be semi-invisible, ie because it doesn't manifest itself at the end point of the user. It's not really thought about it. You know, when we think about like the cloud doesn't take up as much energy as like physical storage, and I'm like it doesn't take much energy on the standpoint of your personal computer, but from the standpoint of where that server bank is actually it probably takes up more, but that's not. That is not entirely hidden, but somewhat hidden from view. It's hidden in the way that like it's not a secret, it's not but it's not brought out. And second, yeah, i mean with this you bring up you know, care work which all of a sudden got temporarily prioritized as part of this whole invisible labor trend in COVID. That was interesting to me because I was like how is this not obvious?
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Exactly, this is not hidden. Nobody made this invisible. He's the person who should take care of someone with cancer.
C. Derick Varn:I can tell you this has never really been that invisible. In fact, it was the primary thing in my life.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:And it's a huge chunk of like economic activity in a country. If you would just want to do account for stuff, it's not a small portion of the things people get up to.
C. Derick Varn:You know, I mean you would like. What is it like? the service economy is a huge portion of the individual consumers actual engagement in the economy, and a whole lot of the service economy is just trying to enable the thing that we're talking about, which is the maintenance of family and whatnot, And community in other ways. Whether is intentional or not, this stuff is, is is there.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Yeah, so recently I know there was the big SVB meltdown thing and you know I tuned into some of the Venture types talking about the need for the bailouts bailouts and I am always curious I I guess my ears perk up when, when the language shifts, they were like we need this for the innovation community. Who is the innovation community Like? what an interesting use right of the term. And we saw it yesterday as well with the Starbucks Founder, right, who was saying like he made it by himself. Right, he grew up in public housing, he went to public schools, he got here on his own with his billions, but he's always been so proud to share his profits with the people of Starbucks. And I'm like, when you start hearing community and people like it's it's doing some kind of work For better or worse right, and not as a judgment, but it's interesting to watch what can't be talked about as an an economic relation and I think we get into trouble if we keep trying to separate economy and society from each other, because it keeps us from developing a language that would allow us to talk about the fact that I'm sure I'm sure venture capital dude does feel some version of sympathy, right, for people who have similar Interests that he does is that we could talk about that as a class.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:That's another kind of collectivity. We could talk about it in all kinds of ways but a cartel, right. But we should. We should have a more robust language for not having to purify the community ones as the absolutely anti-economic, no resources required kinds of organic connection. I just don't think anything meets that standard, frankly right.
C. Derick Varn:If that's what community is, then it doesn't exist.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Yeah, and it doesn't exist right, and you just, and then you feel like a chump for like wanting and wishing to feel some Relationship to other people. So I just that's, it's not a it's not a helpful road in that sense.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, i remember I had this realization when I used, you know, when I first got into vulgar and marxology land, probably about ten years ago, and I was talking about organic community, and it stopped and thought about that for a second. I was like when the hell was there ever an organic like What? what community just exists. But I guess I, i guess what we actually mean by the organic community is community that is Pre-saged on, you know, organic relations, which is actually usually law, which is serve, you know, which is actually prompting these so-called organic relation, as opposed to the economic relations, which is somehow not law, even though it is law really, because law is what guards how we, when I and I realized that I was like, oh, this, this, this distinction is not like, it's one of those distinctions that, as like in a common language way, i get it and I get why we say it, but when, the moment you actually press on it at all, you start seeing, oh, this, this was never like.
C. Derick Varn:I'm positing something about, about modernity that imprised a discontinuity with the past, that if you look at it For 30 seconds without the language of modernity being imposed on it, you realize that There actually isn't that much of a distinction.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Yeah, yeah, and it has teeth right. So it's like we could be, like it's fine people, you know, people use words However they want, but it has real teeth. In two ways, it sets you up to think about What kinds of things should we look at right? What are the serious things to care about? and then we invest more kind of effort in Studying those and keep not looking at others, which isn't gonna help us create a better model. And the second thing is that it loud. It allows you to do that nostalgic move of like it was better back then, and The reason that, and now we're broken or fragments it in alone, ah What, we'll solve it right. And this is where some form of something has to step in to promise This reunification, right. So you kind of get stuck in this like lap Sarian Fort dog game. You know that is unsolvable and so I just don't. It doesn't. It's not a. There's not a politics there that is Actionable actually.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, actually the, and I guess that is why There is a there's kind of sometimes a clean movement between, like Volger, marxist and weird-ass religious reactionaries, because there is a real sense in which, like, well, if I reified the categories to that term, yes, marxism tells me, like as a meta principle, that this is better than the past because the past was even more, even more exploitative in its own kind of. It's also a questionable Wiggish thing, but that if I just abandon that one element There, it's very easy to go back to. Well, you know when, when we still have ritual symbol, is it?
C. Derick Varn:I'm actually reading a ton of bung-ho Chan right a Han night now and His disappearance ritual, and I'm like I get why he has this longest claim in the book, like please don't read this as a way to go back and talk about how it everything was better when we had ritual, because the book, without that disclaimer, seems to lead people to do that. And I'm like, yeah, and that can lead you to some very weird places about, about the past, because what he's actually describing is differences in the, in the way we conceptualize mediation And and what. The end point of that is not like it wasn't it cool when we have public rituals. I mean, you know, i mean even that like The line between what is a public ritual, what isn't a public ritual is actually somewhat hard to clear out.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Totally, totally hard, yeah. So when I started thinking about this seriously, i think at that point I had I had thought okay, uh, i know what I'll do. I will stop being a builder for a little while and I will become an experimental psychologist, and I will. I will use my building skills to make these like networked screen systems And I will show that you can do things to environments to create this shared collective Experience, and that that's a thing. You know, that there are features of it that we could like scientifically study it.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:And my writing just kept getting like weirder and weirder. Um, you know, i I don't know that that's the best method to attack those questions. Um, and so there was a real kind of break for for me, and luckily a very supported one in terms of the mentors I had, where I was, like you know, i need to go find uh examples in the world of uh places and organizations where Collectivity is upfront, where they really like they buy into ritual and communitize and the whole nine yards, and then study how they do innovative things with organizational form and technology, to try to invert that question, so that there could be a language about this kind of mediation. And so I started studying mega churches because they they could bankroll, they had the capital to, to install these massive sort of technological systems. They're super innovative in terms of organizational form in the back half of the 20th century And that sort of set me down a road of studying.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:You know conservatives, which is predominantly what my historical research has been on um for the last 15 years. Um, because I think it disrupts exactly this binary. It's like all of this places where all the traditional backness is supposed to be Are building stuff. So how are they doing that and how do they talk about it? Um, that's a good tip off that it can't possibly be a backwards.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, this is similar to when I realized that the best examples of dual power in the 20th century was hasballah and hamas.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Right, right, it's a great example. It's actually.
C. Derick Varn:And I was like, oh, okay, let's we let's figure out what they're doing, whether, um, yeah, and it's, it's actually interesting because that also indicates that's both interesting to me because there's there is an innovation in mega churches um, there's also been kind of a collapse of their, of their social cohesion in the last I, i think it's pretty recent, i think it's like last 10 years. Um, that i'm also interested in. Like what? why did they hit that wall? because if you'd asked me in 2000, even as to the latest, like 2006, 2007, definitely post 9, 11, if mega churches We're going to start really showing social limits and breaking down and showing the kinds of social pathologies We associate with, like Very insular communities, i would have thought your wave, what are you around?
C. Derick Varn:these people are too cohesive and too powerful. Um, but it also is interesting How much this idea of well rational people will produce rational technologies is Not supported. When you actually go and like, okay, the people that you think are Backward social reactionaries are better at technology than you, are more innovative and in, sometimes weirdly, without even meaning to be more egalitarian and their actual structures than you, and that That's got to be something that should make people uncomfortable.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Yeah, that totally shit, and I would totally agree. I mean, i I think if you had asked, well, how should I put this? I think I also would have by it too. If you'd asked me in 2005, i think I would have had the same exact reaction as you.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:By by the financial crisis, um, let's say, 2008, 9 through 2012, ish, something really changed for them, right? I mean, they got hit with the same, i think, uh, the same conditions of crisis and the conjuncture of a transforming internet Publishing industry digital publishing, like everyone else, and they show some, some, so many of the features of other industries that are adjacent. At the same time, um, the Challenge maybe this is the case, you know too on on the left is to think about How these institutions and organizations, even when they didn't last forever, lasted for long enough to train an enormous number of people, to give them a pedagogy for how to do growth And cells of it convert multitudes, and that stuff carries on in the bodies of the actors who've been through those worlds and moved on to other professions. It diffuses into other parts of their social life and they use those skills, um, that were quite practiced, uh, in these environments, and so we can keep tracking the implications, even after some particular form sort of seem seemingly breaks down.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, it's interesting because I live in utah. Um and uh, you want to talk about one of the most effective and technologically advanced conservative social organizations that i've ever seen in my wife, absolutely, and has been. What? if an interesting about it is, it's done some things that, like leftists, obstinably want, but they have no idea how to do and I don't think they actually understand the implications of, one of which is here um, utah is a state where there's still a lot of people who know people from other social classes, and that actually is mostly thanks to the lds.
C. Derick Varn:Um, and That's just not the case almost anywhere else in the united states I've been or am from, or anything like that, where you just don't, people really do not have that great of an idea of the way other people live, even though We are obstinably more connected through these Technologies.
C. Derick Varn:But since these technologies to bring it back to point you brought all the way back tend to be focused on the individual user end point And somehow reflecting the individual user end point back to themselves or even predicting what they think, that is, um, the, they being the, the people marketing stuff to you, um, it, it, you know it weirdly leads to the whole jonathan height, freak out like, oh, everyone's just become narcissists because everything's right reflected back at them like well, i mean, as a chris relash scholar, i can tell you that everyone's been calling everybody narcissists for like a half century now.
C. Derick Varn:Um, so that's not new and can't be blaming on the internet. But there is, there is this cordon cordoning off, and then i'm like but then we have to ask ourselves like, okay, if a left wants to do some of this stuff that we see social conservatives do or mega churches do, what do they have to give up? um, are, what can they not inculcate? because I do like to remind people that, like you know, leftist goals, just just from a strategic standpoint, are actually Gonna always be harder than, say, right wing goals, because we're not starting from a status quote norm, like they're just like, like definitionally, like orientationally, it's a harder sell, um. So what are some things that you noticed about these organizations, like the way they use technology, the way they organize themselves yeah, so, okay.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So, after spending, i thought, you know, like, after spending a lot of time at church, like I'm not I've been secular my whole life I'm now, like, affiliated in religious studies. I'll probably study religion forever. It's fascinating stuff, um, but I um, i didn't know that at the time. Um, so when I started, when I started going through the archives and looking at how they managed to, uh, really, i mean, protestantism Was not known for being Massive, right, that's, that's what Catholics did, and so it.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:It really did take a lot of, uh, teaching people to regard material culture in different ways, to legitimate this form, and so I don't want to undersell how many, uh Many, alignments were required to make that system work. Um, i think one of the core things about those alignments is that you will often see, always, people who are quite heterogeneous actors Come together, who don't totally like see each other's visions, but they can find the right elements to see how both of their visions are Able to be furthered in this moment. They can do this coordinating move, and I think that coordinating move is really different than an impulse towards mass politics of agreement, where the idea is like a massive, a massifying of power that then overturns right, the kind of vulgar grand chian Sensibility. This ain't that. This is a much more constitutive, and so I'll kind of pull in the cybernetics and communication part here. This is a kind of um Constitutive set of coordination between people in relatively different social arenas, that is, and all of those things are required, uh, along with a kind of public culture that can hold it up to make this happen over time. And I think that's a really different strategy and one that we probably, um could, could do a lot to develop. So Once I was pretty deep in the archives thinking about, like, how the, the organizations that were early to this strategy, managed to Um convince others to do it, um, and convince them that this was an appropriate thing to do.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Um, you'd see something like, uh, big donors, some big donors not a lot of big donors, but some big donors, and the big donors I saw were coming from similar industries. Um, so, uh, namely and this will get us to Utah namely multi-level marketing. Yeah, right, and um, this is early like fortus family, multi era multi-level marketers. So people who uh were coming out of michigan also right who are absolutely in union areas in the late forties, who are moving west towards places like utah in california, who are shifting laws about who counts as an independent contractor and who's an employee. You know, these pieces are moving together and people are buying into a vision that is reconfiguring the boundary between, like, households and their capital And these massive organizations though the two don't look alike right, and so at that point I was like, okay, i Boy, i sound like an altisserie.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:And I'm like here's the church, here's the house. Um, we probably should be talking about education in the school also And the changes that are happening That make possible something like a homeschool movement in our moment. And you find some of the same people right, or people who are married to people, or people who know people not in a conspiratorial way, but it's interesting to start map. I mean, all my work is mapping this stuff And I would say that in the mapping of it you start to think about an organizational strategy. That's about, uh, topologies of coordination and who you kind of strategically know you need to know Enough to keep a kind of field moving in a certain direction. But they don't have to be the same kind of people. In fact, it's best if they speak very different languages from one another.
C. Derick Varn:That's an interesting point. So I come from the deep south, a different part of the deep south that you hear from, texas, which uh Yeah The eight rhymes, but texas is its own particular place. So so i'm not claiming we have similar experiences here, but i'm intimately aware of the homeschool movement because it actually caught Uh members of my family early on And one of the things I can tell you is that was how I learned what b y? u was, because the first place of uh Uh when the internet first started coming along in the 90s, if you were a homeschool parent and you didn't have You know, particularly if you weren't a particularly like religious one um, ironically, the best place to find a curriculum was b y? u put it all out there. Also, you know they They were doing it for their own, even evangelical wish purposes, but It didn't really matter, it was an okay curriculum put out there. Um. As you know, part of what I do now is my day job and I don't talk about my day job much because I'm a public uh educator in utah. But um Is actually trying to form a public uh option within the public school to compete with uh, the b y? u services almost it's like almost explicitly for that um and And and. So, yeah, i know it overlaps, but it doesn't speak the same language. It's one of the things that you're right about. Like, if you're, you would think, okay, b y u, it's going to be some weird uh, some weird more mania gelco stuff.
C. Derick Varn:And yet when you actually dig into it, that wasn't why people were using it in georgia. That wasn't why, uh, the homeschool movement. When it caught members of my family, my family's, jewish and catholic They were never part of that protestant homeschool thing and yet they got sucked into that world tangentially by homeschool. You know, like um, and why homeschool had an appeal for them. Uh, it's also interesting because it's tied into this social reproduction stuff. It wasn't actually, um because of ideological reasons. It was because A lot of us were working, you know, um right to keep my family afloat and My younger brother used that to continue working And also he had kids, young so, and raises kids and get something like a high school diploma, um, and so it served this, this function that the public school kind of couldn't serve, particularly at that time. I mean, like Uh, because we're talking late 90s um, and I started, you know, retrojecting, i started thinking about that experience. I'm like, yeah, we don't do things that enable this. Now, this is not in a union stronghold or whatever, but you're, you're absolutely right.
C. Derick Varn:One of the things about utah that's I think people don't understand Um, even though union penetration is not great here It's not great in a lot of places It's still so much stronger Than most of the rest of the mountain ret west, like it's actually like our public school unions are actually significantly more, and they used to be also simply more Larger and they used to be significantly More militant even, and they were tied into specifically lds community issues. Um, and so that's led me to think about, you know, this religious component of it in a different, in a different way. Hasn't Maybe want to convert? not gonna like that's not what it's done, but it has made me look at like, okay, they understand things about social organization that we don't. Another thing that I'm gonna say uh, for, however patriarchal their ideology is, and it's pretty damn, women's work and women's validation is often More forefront than it is in left stuff. Oh, 100%.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:100%. I mean I, if I've spent a lot of time At, i spent a lot of time in multi-level marketers, and that is where if you wanted to study like Women and business, that's that's the place to do it right. Like there are plenty of people who are absolutely the Financial center of their families, even if they, on the one hand, continue to speak a language about, like gender differences. If you Look at the accounting forms of what makes that work right, if you look at the Business charts that are also often kinship diagrams, you will see Matrilines that just don't represent if you don't look at it closely and that's you know. It's fine that it isn't.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:But I think that sort of Not taking the 10,000 feet back view like at face value from, let's say, like the chattering classes about how lefts and rights are, you start to see this kind of a Tension to, okay, how do we practice coordinating work, how do we practice organizing? that makes these kinds of portraits like deeply interesting and Really important. I mean, obviously I'm bought in right to study and think about like well, what would we do right? Like why, why can't I find the, let's say, the D? I'm just gonna pick on the DSA because they can take it. They're big enough, right? Why don't they have like a like the equivalent of the BYU curriculum up and running for people who are educating K through 12? Right, like it just doesn't even exist as a thing they they work on and publicly create resources for, but Hillsdale does it for free, you know, and like that's a low bar. Most of these texts are Available. You could make study guides for fifth graders or whatever the case available.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, i'm often shocked that, like I'm making a reading list for people in my show that I'm like, well, why hasn't this been done and then made available for free and put out there other by then, like verse or whoever who's clearly selling you a book? But yeah, i mean, i started wondering this when I was like, just I started dealing with female representation and left media. It's been something that I've thought a lot about. But I also would be like, okay, so I'd go to the same meeting as 80% man I'm in the I'm in the left media space. It's worse than 80% man. Like I brag about having 20% female audience and that's actually kind of a big deal. Yeah, that's kind of pathetic. But Yeah, it's not as good as conservative media. No, it's not that what that's what I was saying.
C. Derick Varn:Conservative media. Conservative media is like 50% women. And And the other thing I would think like when I, when I go do stuff for church, like women are Forward, when I do stuff with left, with left stuff, if it's, if it's a, i can't use my union because my union is gender skewed to an extreme. But if I was to say I Look at like my partner does activists work and it's almost always I go out and help and I'm like one of three men out of like 27 people there. And yet when I go to these political meetings not just, you know, in the media space it's 80%. Even it, even if their leadership is 50% or more women, the actual membership is 80% man. And it led me to think about what about social reproduction? What about Validization? what about like immediate payoff? these conservative organizations understand That we don't. Are these religious organizations who are supposed to be beyond being political? but they're not. We all know they're not. What do they understand that we don't?
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:What do you think I mean, cuz I'd be curious.
C. Derick Varn:I mean I don't know if you feel comfortable saying I think one of it is It's more intimately tied to social reproduction.
C. Derick Varn:It's immediately and intimately tied to that. Another is It has to be a space for families to exist in, whereas I think left stuff has actually been predicated on on young people with few social ties, because the The what you get to what you give ratio has actually never been actually particularly good, with the exception of unions, but even there it's gotten. It's gotten to be a harder and harder call because of structural reasons. So like when you join a, you join a left organization, right You're, you're fighting the change the world, but almost all payoffs to you are like way down the road, like probably you are never gonna see them, even if you succeeded. And So there's that. I also think some of it's their models are based off of. I've been trying to tell people it's great that we can talk about what the unions and socialist political parties did in 19th century, and it is actually good to study that, because they did a lot of things We don't do, like There was socialist soccer leagues and shit like that.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah and You were actually. You know when people were talking about we, i remember because of the sexual harassment issues, people talking about dining, banning dating between Socialists, and I was like that's like banning dating at church, that's stupid. Oh, that's how people work, but it also okay. But I I get why you think that, because your only model for Organizational and accountable leadership actually is like a corporate model, whether you realize it or not. So I think that's part of it, but I don't know. I mean, there is it.
C. Derick Varn:There's an inherent irony to me in it that I have not been totally able to reconcile And I have talked about a little bit. That makes so many people uncomfortable because they think A lot of people think when, when you say this, it like you're a stowing their social norms And I'm like I don't, i'm not a stowing there, like I don't think it's a virtue thing, i'm not even I'm not. I don't think it's about like what they say they believe. I think there's something else going on there about the structures and integration of Particularly churches, but not just churches. You talk about multi-level marketing stuff like that.
C. Derick Varn:For a very brief time, my mother pulled my family into Amway like I like I know what it's like, and They continued to do it For a long time, even though they realized it was not Not Going to make them rich After a while but it's not gonna.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:I mean it's. It's interesting to talk to people who do it because, like, i've talked to a number of an, a number of people who've done a range of them over time, and I haven't found anyone who's as in debt from it. As Small business entrepreneurs should do things like start restaurants that fail and, like the first year or two, oh, absolutely So. It's like. Well, if you're thinking about, like how am I in a deal with the fact that I can't get a sufficient wage in a mark? What's what's here? What is my ecology of options? Right then the buy-in level for some of these things is just the capital required is so small Compared to what it would take to start something that's regarded as a legitimate business, and the levels of financial ruin are still interestingly like.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:They're lower right like people with student debt can easily have six figures of debt. I've never met anybody who has six figures of like supplements debt or something you know like that, and that's. It's part of the The world we live in and I think it's useful to talk about those things. Even so, we can just figure out What are the range of reasons people practice whatever they practice.
C. Derick Varn:This is actually. This is actually an interesting point that I have not thought about till right now, so I'm not gonna like no. My parents today I'm way they they they, from their standpoint Blew a lot of money on it. However, they continued to it for for many, many years after they feel like it was not gonna deliver off like this exigler promises, because It inculcated them into a social circle. And you're actually the other point that you're right. Yeah, when they stopped, they didn't lose a A bunch of money either, like it was. It was not like opening a business which is something that my family also tried to do and that was a disaster. That was bankruptcy for years.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah so it's. You know. It's something that I think is is Look down upon, because, yes, it is a highly highly exploitative market, but then we use it not to look at how many other things are highly, highly, highly exploitative markets, right? Somebody's more so.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Right, like obvious. I mean, we both have degrees, right Oh?
C. Derick Varn:yeah, I have.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Right, right and like if there are pyramids, we can't. We can't exempt ourselves from that kind of Discussion, you know? yeah.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, yeah, and you're right. Also, the capital required is much lower, like I mean. So Do we think part of why Multilevel mark marking is so stigmatized? It's because it's primarily female.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:I think that that is Probably a big piece of how it gets going and it's a it's an abiding question and when it's regarded as a thing That's predatory, it's usually like the, you know, you'll hear that the community word pop up, the black and Latino community, like.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:The kind of biggest defender in the last ten years has been Bill Ackerman, who's like a hedge fund dude, who's like I am, you know, taking a short position on urban life as a defender of the black and Latino community who I've now met and I am championing, i'm like I. That makes none of this makes any sense, but of course he's. He's the SVB guy who's also saying the same thing about the innovation community. So I think we have to at least presume that part of our Part of our allergy to some forms of capital more than others, as opposed to a kind of blanket critique, let's say, is that there are these other Senses that something is matter out of place, it's happening in the wrong space somehow, and I think that And I'm not an apologist for any of these things, i just think, you know, if we want to be responsible and do social inquiry, that can't be the posture of figuring out why people do what they do, you know, especially if you want to build other things from it.
C. Derick Varn:That's a good That's that's actually a good point. I think You know one of the things I mean. We know about like fields that have been valorized because it became masculinized, the. The obvious is low-level coding which was like Traditionally. Whatever fuck traditional means We're talking about.
C. Derick Varn:What, until the 1960s, was associated with women in clerical work and relatively low-level education, and then when, when it became more lucrative, it became associated with men. We know about that and I also talk I personally talk a lot about like why Primary education, even though everything we've ever seen says this more important than secondary education and I say this as a secondary educator is not valorized. It's because, like it's, it's it's extremely feminized and so feminized actually, that if men go into primary education, because of this associated with young children, there's a whole lot of assumption that you're creep and that's absolutely That's, you know, like the nice word for it. So So it's like super stigmatized and I think it's. It's something that we don't like.
C. Derick Varn:Leftist, from the Marxist perspective I should actually just probably say Marxist. Do you have an issue dealing with? because we would love to pretend that this is that, that we can disaggregate And also subordinate gender relations, and all this because, you know, i guess we have to run some kind of eternal battle against liberal, feminist or something. I don't really know what that's about, but, like I Know, i mean, even liberal feminists found some of those, some liberal, feminist traits annoying, so I don't really know why getting hung up on the discourse about that is because we're all kind of missing the train here on on communities that seem to be able to to Incorporate different elements of social reproduction into how they maintain themselves, and they do tend to be more viable than most the Organization the left throws out.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Yeah, i mean, i wonder, do you think there's a day when there we won't have to use the word social reproduction to talk about social theory?
C. Derick Varn:Just talk about social theory. Yeah, relations include, you know, the primary one that most of us care the most about How we get here and how we don't go crazy from isolation. Yeah, i, It's one of the things that I sometimes wonder if Marxist have like Right, we always insist it's political economy and I'm sometimes like, well, what we should probably, and we always talk about social theory, but we're always subordinating One element to the other, like, instead of having to admit like is a very complex thing. You know, i always refer to my family is is As working class in both the Marxist and the liberal form of it.
C. Derick Varn:But you know, as I'm sitting here explaining you, they've also kind of sorter, been petite bourgeois. They've also kind of sorter been. They tried to be business owners. They're invested, you know, very mildly, not a lot, but you know they've, they've tried to scour the way their investments, which means they're tied into owning capital in some indirect way.
C. Derick Varn:And They're definitely, for most of my life, like right at the poverty, like what was considered the functional poverty line, which I consider the pale grant line, not the, not like the absolute, weird, unchanging, eternal, like $18,000 a year that we've had for like since the 70s or whatever for the poverty line, but But I find that I find that we don't discuss it that way at all.
C. Derick Varn:And so when we approach, like working class people, i don't think we approach a lot of you know, we, we Actually talk to them about the way they experience their lives, which I do think is actually often an advantage that, frightly, churches do have. And And I think I think it doesn't help that so many of us on the left are like urbanites in areas where those institutions actually aren't common and they also don't know what social roles they fill in for. Because You know, i've pointed out the people in this, like, when we talk about the south, i'm like there, it like, even when there's Like government, like federal welfare, it's so poorly administered that basically half What's holding, you know, the black community and like most poor right communities together, is like a church Soup kitchen and the fact that you can go there relatively shame-free and eat. And when you talk about like, say, utah, the LDS has a advanced welfare system completely, independent government like it's actually kind of Crazy.
C. Derick Varn:I live like three blocks away from like, their granary. You know They have a granary and And that's also part of how they keep times up, because people do feel like they get something for it, not just you know, not just eternal life or the temple recommend or whatever.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:But I think there are things. I mean, there are things that we could do right. So what are the things that we we actually have in spades?
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:I Gosh, we have a lot of really educated people who can teach stuff right, who can work against skill hoarding You know, for free, like we could do that, like like education is really expensive and boy, we have a lot of people who Could be tutoring right, or could be translating concepts, who could be making, like You know, curricula for things like those are ordinary problems that you can solve And they were probably equipped to help with.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:And so I think part of it is deciding like alright, let's be, let's like be efficacious, you know, like what, what is the abundance that that you can organize to kind of take a prosperity line, because there's a kind of Permanent base of need That you can fill. Because that's kind of how churches think about it when they make a ministry right. It's like what is a community need that we think we have the resources to be able to provision and who are people who can kind of solve that problem, and that in and of itself is a kind of, you know, community, community building exercise for the people who have come from different positions but share enough of a common interest in in producing a kind of world to become Disciples, let's say, in studying how to do that, work together and Fulfilling something that they take to be like a mission right.
C. Derick Varn:Do you think we don't do that because we're too invested in, like official government institutions doing that?
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Okay, well, I'm gonna frame that back to you.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:I'm very baffled by the seeming distinction between the like statused versions of left interest and the, the more mutual aid and archic versions of left interest as strategies. And these two groups. I'm gonna say this totally is like social science brain, right. It's interesting to me how they shape up and how much religion still features as well as like abolition and Sort of black churches on the side. That looks to me less invested in state solutions And that I find fascinating. Right, like, like it's not that nobody on the left cares about the role of religion and bringing about social change, like Islam and Christianity are all over that scene, but it's an anti-state, there's no faith in the state as the solution in that mode of it. And so is there a reproach, mom, possible? Is there something that could be done to Commensurate? I don't know.
C. Derick Varn:I don't know, this is where I become a dirty Bolshevik, but where I'm just like well, dual power institutions are about like You don't trust the people who run the state, but you're not necessarily against government existing, so that you're building parallel institutions to them, and I do kind of feel like we get stuck in this cul-de-sac between waiting for government actors to do what we want them to do, which we have no evidence that they're ever going to, barring things that we can't immediately do right now.
C. Derick Varn:or I can't say on air and Thinking we could capitulate, like recapitulate the entire government apparatus, like in a small community where you might be able to do that, but it's not gonna scale. So And when I think, when you think about churches, you're absolutely right. But then I'm like, yeah, but the churches themselves don't really care. I mean, yes, they care about government because they care about manifesting their power, but they're not trying Most of them are not trying to get rid of the US government.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Right? not at all. But it doesn't mean there's, there's, they've had a range of relationships. Let's say to the state right, and so that whole space of organizations is not the space that has traditionally dominated political, economic concerns. Economists want every. You know, ideally everything will be a flat and total market right, or you'd have some kind of top-down total structure. This intermediate layer that is heterogeneous and never total, that is kind of intermediate, is civil society in all of its formulations and I think It's never going to be all one way. But I can't see how you Mass something up to take the state and then build out whatever institutions hold Social reproduction thereafter. I don't see how that's not a constitutive problem of having things Hold the frame while you're also doing organizing work, because don't, don't you need all of those things to Make people.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, you do. I mean, and I And I, it's just funny when we talk about like successful, like radical movements, whether they were revolutionary or even reformist, you actually do see that you usually see, like there it's not that there's a line of State and non-state actors, there's actually a gradient and they are Coordinating and they have no problem with those things being somewhat separate and diffuse. I Do, you think there's a tendency. Maybe this is a bad habit of modernity, because it's something I've increasingly started pushing back on with with leftist, and I've been pushing back on it, not in the normal, like Centralization versus decentralization, but just like talking about structures and math, like look like there's a trade-off between Fragility and cascade failure and centralized efficiency, and you can't, you can't pretend that there's not a trade-off there, that that's like something that's beyond, like that's not. That's not like Something I'm an ideologically get around, it's like that's physics.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So Oh, They're more dynamics will get you like that. Yeah, yeah, that's a great example, though. So, like how do you, how do you talk about that as a like, what do you do with that?
C. Derick Varn:I don't know. I mean I Do, i do like. My big despair is often like when we learn good lessons from like churches or whatever We don't, we still can't scale it. And part of that is resources churches have access to, to monetary resources that leftist generally don't know how to valorize, although I will say when I hear the left doesn't have any money, i'm like that's not true, that's absolutely not true. Um, but you know, and I will also say, like I said earlier, our goals are different, but there are certain things that I wonder why we don't do like Even from like the status aporachic think tank thing.
C. Derick Varn:One of the things that I've noticed that Even you know non-church conservative organizations do is they will build Ideologs by going out and finding smart people amongst actually relatively poor people and, hmm, and training them up, and it's totally cynical, but it works and it's We don't.
C. Derick Varn:There's a weird actual entrepreneurial bootstrappy thing on the left in regards to this. Like like no one's going out and finding like I Don't know, like Poor women and being like okay, we're gonna make sure not only that you become a media figure, but we're gonna make sure you get the good education, because we're gonna do this, because it's worth it for us because you're gonna pay that back in time as a Representative and we're gonna take care of you and And thus help you take care of your family, etc. And I just I don't see a lot of that and like, even so, that, even like that Senate and I will say that's totally cynical, on on, on, like Movement conservatives part that they do that I'm not sure it's as cynical in churches, and churches will occasionally do that too, but It's something like we won't do in the same way. At least I don't know of us doing it in the same way.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Yeah, i mean I I've asked around a lot too since I started sort of looking at home schools and Now classical education stuff I was. I was really curious, right, like as any you know. I was sort of asking people who are like the red diver babies I knew like, did you go somewhere? was there like a camp, you know, like Sunday, the equivalent of Sunday school or Anything like this, you know, and the answers are like eclectic but they're not coherent in the way that you see, and that's real. I think it's really baffling. Like I Did this thing in high school.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So, like I'm, i'm Latina, like first person to go to college, i'm, you know, family, that kind of thing. I did this thing that I think is still operational in high school. That was, like all other Latinos, like very unusual, like, since We are our, our colleague in common, our comrade on the resp, nala, also did it, aoc also did it. It is running out of Maxwell, texas And it's at the time right, like at the time I didn't really have a sense for what it was. It was like, okay, you seem like you might be college bound, you should meet other kids like you and We should do some skills acquisition, but also you should just think about Your subject position.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Let's say, and practice rhetorical arts, basically right, like debate and like youth legislature or stuff, and it's like, well, how do you produce people who in their 20s are really good on their feet? You put them with other kids who are also fighting about politics and economy and you let them get to know each other and all the ordinary summer camp ways and Try out all their mean bar, you know, playground insults on each other as they cultivate a position. You know and I don't think it's an accident that When I run into other people who have a similar profile to myself, they have some. They know what this network is, but nobody outside of it seems to know what it is. So occasionally, right, it happens, but I don't even think that's a cynical position.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:It's like It was great, it was amazing to get to meet other people who wanted to have conversations about, you know, latin American politics or something. When you're a nerdy kid and it's just you and you know you probably don't know anybody else Police, pre-internet, they care about that stuff. Like that's just basic Social life, right, yeah, that.
C. Derick Varn:When I was a more traditional public school teacher, one of the things that I was really big on was Was academic games with Recruiting not from the honors classes but because the honors class is actually wearing particularly helpful. I know I'm gonna make a lot of conservatives mad about this, but it mostly codes for behavior, not not intelligence, but like just really promising mostly Brock students in my school who are falling out and not being recruited to drama etc. And I, the first school I worked at was also the school that I grew up in and that was it was a, it was a 6040 no Sweat are maybe close to 50 50 racially divided because they're because of the size of the county. There's actually, weirdly, no private school for white flight to happen. So the demographics of the school are actually, roughly speaking, the demographics of the county and that's actually kind of weird in Georgia. But and I would do that because I realized that they would be, even though I also realized I was gonna like, even as late as 2005, 2006, 2007, when I first started doing this Yes, i'm exposing the people to like microaggressive racism from from certain quarters. I realized that and I realized it even back then before I had the words for it. But I I also knew that I would be building them in the connections that they needed if they wanted to Get into certain schools.
C. Derick Varn:And I had several kids from that program like go to Pretty innovative colleges. They wouldn't even heard about right otherwise. And so I've always done stuff like that. I've always run debate programs. For that reason too, and And One of the things that's kind of changed about it is I didn't used to view that as a political project actually at all, and Now I kind of do. Some of my former students patronize my show, so it's it's like something that has even to me like been beneficial to me, and it wasn't.
C. Derick Varn:I wasn't thinking cynically about it whatsoever, but it is something that I think about when you talk to like well, why isn't the DSA like doing this kind of outreach? here? You can kind of get it. Yeah, you can kind of get in the Union stuff, although even their conception of Union stuff mostly towards it, towards political battles Immediately, which I often think is misguided. That's a whole different thing. But I don't see them do it with other social organizations. Occasionally you'll see DSA chapters go. Well, you know, maybe if we provide childcare, we get more women from you know, from Working, you know from working-class communities, because they probably need childcare. I'm like, okay, yes, that's like step one and also obvious. But yes, i'm glad you did have that realization.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:But what about like arts education, right, so like church is still probably, if you want to learn how to play a musical instrument or sing, you know?
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:that money, the church is the place to go like no, now right, exactly because public school doesn't even provide that at this point. You know, for most people That's like a fancy schmancy thing that you're gonna put a lot of extra effort into in terms of time and money. So if you want to build like the terroir of people who know a lot about music, you got to have some kind of aesthetic education that can handle People having exposure to the arts without having to be gifted professionals. Right, and that's how you build audiences, that's how you build publics, that's how you sustain a couple people who might want to do it in innovative ways, but that's you want to be like cultivating the terroir, and so this is another one of those things where it's like well, dsas etc Whatever different organizations could totally do that kind of stuff Or you provide something as a service to the community that is hard to get without entree through like capital.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, i mean it's. It's actually interesting that it's hard to convince people that that would be worth doing, because I'm like, no, but People would come on a regular basis to get that skill. Sports, similarly to increasingly like I know people don't really realize this outside of football School is no longer a good and cheap way to get sports education One, and a lot of states that the the fees have gone up astronomically. I think, like to be a cheerleader here is too grand or something That's to a public school and that's like they do wave it for, like it's proportional to your wave, to your Proportional school lunch waiver. But still, it's still kind of crazy to think about, because I'm like, yeah, like Like I could never, my parents could never had afforded that like and like, even with like the 20% off cheaper school lunch or something, there's no way. Um, but uh, even beyond that, increasingly, for a lot of sports that people like here care about, particularly like soccer, our football, that sort of thing, dancing, those are all club sports and the club fees are even more expensive.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah and I'm like we have people that can do that. I know we'd have to deal with with like liability insurance or whatever, and that's another cost, but as a side note, it's cheaper than trying to buy a candidate. I'm actually gonna write, it's just It. It's. It just makes me wonder, like, do you guys know what? how churches build people power? and I remember When anyone started talking about this at the dsa. You get automatically the left is not a church And I'm like well, a lot of things aren't churches.
C. Derick Varn:I still do what churches do churches do things that churches shouldn't do like Making george's like half a church business, but uh, but like that's, that's not the here nor there like either nor there, like these social functions are or what they are, and I know they're harder to do, but in some time, you know, i've had Anton Jager on my show and he was, but you know, somebody's demoting that the crime of the social and he was. He got pushback for people saying that right, wingers Are also ups, you know, or damaged by this, even though I'm like, yeah, they are, this is, this is something that's made church life a lot harder. But I have been increasingly going like why do you think that is? why have you just accepted, just because that it is, that we can't do anything about it?
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Well, this is why I think it's so important to not To make the kind of decision to stop talking about social reproduction as the the peripheral question of the secondary, though I don't think anybody consciously means to do it.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:It means that the hard stuff to solve, like the real material problems, can't be the social things. And then you're stuck. We're stuck in this kind of lamentation that The proof that there is an urgency to this task is this kind of accelerated technical, financial March of time and history to make us ever more atomized, more and more and more isolated, fragmented, until either we like End up in a utopian luxury of some kind or a planet of slums, and those are both like absurd and unsatisfying answers to the The persistence of the social in The last instance. Actually, you know, like EP Thompson I don't know if you like he wrote this sometimes if when I teach Alta Sarah, i'll teach it with this EP Thompson like super long essay about like taking Alta Sarah down, called about In the orary of errors, where he's just really pissed about it right, i make my my, my art to Sarah and friends.
C. Derick Varn:Read it, they come on my show as priestly for real Oh.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Man that's stick, burn right. But he's constantly like what is this last instance, this last instance, right, that never arrives. You're like he's gonna get a point. It's like come on, like like you can't see the ground to the Determinative thing. That's very silly, like just track, track what's there. And then how do you kind of create the sorts of the loops you know That that give you enough to to constitutively move something you know?
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, i think, i think this is I. I'm actually thinking like I just got Martin Jay's Totality book because I I come from the, you know, i come from a very frankfurt school oriented orientation and it's taken me a long time to sort of like get beyond that. But I was like, well, if you view everything as an interlock totality, then no wonder you like think that like thinking is the only thing you could possibly do to To like get out of that interlock totality because you've already made it where there's no movement possible. And also, frankly, i don't know how you think new social movements ever emerged in the first place, like And I think about that when we talk about like the social reproduction versus reproduction problem, because I Are production problems, see, even I I just I don't think we can separate those out anymore, like that's where I'm at, i agree.
C. Derick Varn:Like, and so that was the question when we started talking about this. And you're like, and I was like, oh yeah, like, like, because this has become increasingly something I think about about my life. What would I was? I was thinking about like, well, how does capitalism affect your love life? And I was like, well, there's the obvious ways, but there's a whole lot of unobvious ways. But some of these things are pre capital, like gender relation issues, are I Don't know of a society even relatively out, like egalitarian ones, who do not have them.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Right. We just off like a lot of people. You know that right.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, there's a whole lot of like very subtle digs that have been coming out of, but but I don't know, like I don't know societies that don't have that.
C. Derick Varn:And I remember I remember talking with a social reproduction Theorist who kept on talking about male gender relations being informed by capital, and I'm like I Mean they are, but like I Don't know, i feel like these problems are Older than that And And what you start seeing is they do affect political, political economy.
C. Derick Varn:I know that, like I mentioned, christopher Ryan brought up the Mazzau as, like this example, and he was doing it about polyamory, but I'm like, yeah, but they have a completely different political economy and also, even though they weren't hostile to the state, mal felt like he needed to bust them up because he couldn't figure out how they figured into a, you know, a Communist political economy that's still based off capitalist production, because they had been able to stay outside of it, like, and be stable for Forever. And I'm like, yeah, i don't know that we always want to just bust those things up And not like learn from them in some way, like pretty crucially, because that leads us to this other irony that we haven't really talked about, but the irony of like Marxist in particular. I'm spreading the thing that they hate so they can defeat it.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
C. Derick Varn:We're gonna spread nationalism, capitalism, everywhere, so we can also undo it. Wait, yeah, that's one that I still like Wrap my head around, or when we start talking about indigenous issues or whatever, and they're like, well, we don't know what they do about the indigenous, because, because it's outside of this- And. I'm like, well, i don't know, give them relatively autonomy over a fair chunk of land, and I Don't think it matters, i don't know well.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So I mean I think you could think about it is like, or I think about it is like okay. So what are the methodological? What kind of social inquiry do we need? Right, what are some sort of what's on the wish list? you know it's like okay.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Well, culture cannot be exogenous, it can't be like this culture versus that culture And it can't be epiphenomenal. You know, we've got to have some kind of more endogenous language for cultural processes so that we don't have like this thing over there or far away and And that's that. So it has to be overtaken or or set apart as difference. That just doesn't feel like a satisfying answer. So we need to think endogenously. We need to have some models that don't come from the kind of modern liberal framework, not because we're trying to return to them, but just because we need some other models, so that we can put on different glasses and Try to figure out what something is. You know, because otherwise, yeah, you, you're, we pre-bored the analytics, which actually just isn't very good for for our inquiries, we stay pretty stuck, you know. So I mean like Around, like I guess 2015. So this was like 2015, 2016, i think I must have been right, right around baby two, right? So I'm like I'm not going anywhere. Like I am, i'm, i fully am in the reproductive whatever realities of my conditions.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:I started This like reading group was like open to everyone at first. We had this whole fight like she would be a feminist economics group, and there were people like no, don't call it feminist because no boys will come, kind of thing. And so we we sort of settled on thinking about the oikos Like it's kinship economy is just trying to put some other starting point in front of ourselves, not because we want to return to antiquity or something, but because we wanted to think about the, the span of economic relations where the household and the polity Were blatantly in relation to one another, not the individual and the public private. And it's been super generative Just to just to read stuff from other periods that work that way and not read them with the eye of like This is, i'm looking for the right solution for how to run society. But just like I don't want to naturalize my categories, i want to be able to think about what's a useful category to build to get the work done. You know that's actually.
C. Derick Varn:That's a great place to kind of wrap this up. But I also think that's a great Point because I've been thinking a lot more about framework, modularity or whatever, because it's increasingly become obvious to me, when I've just been arguing with Marxist for four years, if you don't put something in Marxological terminology, they'll never take it seriously, because they just don't believe that something it isn't in their jargon is real, even though they often don't understand their jargon And you can tell it annoys me so bad that I remove myself from the Wii and that, like, i'm just like, oh god, like this, like we're not talking about weasel anymore. Normally I'm a Marxist dude, but this is so annoying. But the but I've also been thinking about it, like when we approach, like I've been telling people, for example, if you want to look at like, so I'm like, i'm like, i'm like, i'm like, i'm like, i'm like, i'm like, i'm like, i'm like, i'm like, i'm like, i'm like, i'm like, i'm like.
C. Derick Varn:So, societies that don't have a like very high hierarchical, um, very between people, you do need to look at them, their context and how they understand the world, all three not Like. In fact, i was a little bit critical of David Graber, for now, looking at the context, but I think it's important that he does put back the frameworks matter And I think we need to do a lot more of it, because we've been stuck in the same like Conceptual coalescence now for a long time. I mean, just go, i keep going back and I dig Deeper and I'm like, oh, we've been debating the same shit since like 1920, like literally a hundred years, right?
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So yeah, i mean I think your show is really interesting in the in the in this in that way though, because You do take a pretty big tent approach. You know, and you that means You're you're doing a lot of code switching and translating, and I think hearing people code switch and let things be partial, that there are many kinds of voices That can move through the same topics in different fashions, is shakes things a little bit right. It says you don't have to talk in the proper way to be at the table. There are several kinds of people who think about these things that don't talk the same way, and maybe that I mean I find that a very hopeful Provocation for saying, like there's actually a lot of mysteries and work to be done, um, and that that's good, right, like we're not out of ideas but, thanks, i uh learning to teach people.
C. Derick Varn:The code switch was Crucial for just like, but I first became a teacher, just like on the. Okay, i don't want to make everyone speak whitey language, but I also know if they don't speak whitey language, uh, they're not gonna get a job. So let's try to reframe this. And then I went back and found stewart hall and like it was, even though, yes, we could talk about how stewart hall has been removed from his radical context, blah, blah, blah blah, but it was really useful. And then I've now just increasingly think, like I need to do this between disciplines, because a lot of disciplines right now cannot talk to each other and definitely can't present it to the fucking general public because they're so Inamored with the prestigitation of their own words. Like it, it's, it's just, but they're thinking hard.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:I mean, sometimes I think like I bet a lot of these people would talk many ways if If they were. I mean, as you know, right, like language is really hard.
C. Derick Varn:That's true.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So the we need the poets. They're desperately required, right? Um, actually, they make, they make these kinds of switches possible so that we can build together Um, and I don't want to. I don't want to undervalue how skillful that is um for making social life.
C. Derick Varn:Uh, yeah, that That fights against my own tendency to kick the poets out just because I hang out with them and am one. Um, so People are it's like. Uh, it's funny. I took the implicit bias test recently and it was like You just like white people in jews and I'm like I don't like. Most people show that they like bias towards themselves and apparently I just don't like people who are like me. But it's just, i don't know. It's pretty obvious what that says, but, um, but it is. It is a thing, and I think The skills need to be do need to be transferable and particularly, i know it makes people uncomfortable to start thinking like why are conservatives able to do this? What are they doing? And what people tend to take away, unfortunately, is when people start like what we can learn from conservatives, let's like mirror their bigoted ideology and I'm like oh god, right right, right, exactly Like.
C. Derick Varn:That's not what makes them appealing actually.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:But we need semi-autisticians, right, we need people to pull apart The practice from the associations and the qualia and note that these are different things and you can take those connotations And rejigger this way and you can take the practice and move it away from the denotation And these are not the same, right, and that's a good analytic kind of habit of mind. Um, yeah, yeah, that's great, i don't know. Yeah, anyway, um, i mean, thank you for for doing this and and um for the work you're doing and you know, thank you.
C. Derick Varn:Thank you for the work you're doing. Hopefully people outside of academia read it. So Um, where can they, where can people find your work?
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:So you can. I mean, i'm a professor, so I'm I'm decently public, um, and if there's something that people can't find like, i'm first and foremost sort of a teacher. So you can always reach out and find me and I'll you know, i'm happy to, i'm happy to talk and and learn together, you know yeah, um You, you will be.
C. Derick Varn:You will be amused to know that I consider you part of pro social twitter.
C. Derick Varn:Oh what's what's pro social, so I have pro social twitter and anti social twitter, most twitter and anti social Um, this is a stupid binary, but it's what where I'm like, oh, i read this person because I I learned something from them, as opposed to I read this person because I'm gonna argue, so so like pro social learning, anti social arguing, um, and so yeah, so I, i would tell people to check out your twitter. It's actually remarkably Not super snarky, um, which.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:I know I'm so earnest. It's totally opposite. I'm not I'm super earnest, but that totally means like, also, i'm, i'm, i'm totally comfortable with argument. It doesn't, i wouldn't ruffle my feathers. I don't take it personally. If people have questions or they disagree, like I'm pretty patient, you know with that, and always happy to learn more and be wrong, it's okay.
C. Derick Varn:Yep so uh Follow Erica on twitter. Thank you for coming on.
Dr. Erica Robles-Anderson:Okay, bye, have a great day, you too.
