RevolutionZ

Episode 411 of RevolutionZ has a guest with initials instead of a name: GPT (5.6). The episode asks GPT questions many people quietly wonder about but rarely hear answered in its "voice." We start with deceptively simple stuff. How “old” is this model, what does it mean that it can respond at absurd speed, and why is Turing's famous test too easy for it while it also tells us almost nothing about...

Episode 410 of RevolutionZ is the last excerpt from the seven author book, Liberating Theory. It urges that a political vision that only addresses one part of society is a blueprint for disappointment. It closes the Liberating Theory excerpt series by walking through a “humanist” or participatory society framework that treats economy, kinship, community, and politics as four interacting spheres,...

Episode 409 is the next to last excerpt from the seven author book Liberating Theory. It presents a set of concepts and general observations about their likely mutual relations meant to inform activism better than past conceptions, including Historical Materialism. The authors--Michael Albert, Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Robin Hahnel, Mel King, Holly Sklar, and Lydia Sargent--observe that history...

Episode 408 of RevollutionZ continues excerpting from the seven author book Liberating Theory. This time the episode is two chapters, one on the polity of society that follows those on kinship, cultural community, and economy, and the other on how all four together compose society as a whole. How do political systems shape not only laws and policing, but also what feels “reasonable,” what counts...

Ep 407 of RevolutionZ takes up the question of socialism, what does it refer to? The label gets thrown around like it’s self-explanatory, but when you press for details, the conversation often collapses into a list of hopes: equity, freedom, health care, housing, dignity. I want those outcomes too. The question for this episode is tougher and more useful: what economic institutions could actually...

Episode 406 of RevolutionZ continues excerpting the seven author book, Liberating Theory, to take up the task of arriving at usefull economic concepts for winning fundamental social change. Markets set prices but also train our desires, narrow what we think is “normal,” and quietly shape the people we become at work and at home. From there the chapter from *Liberating Theory* goes presents a then...

Episode 405 of RevolutionZ moves from Community and race last episode to Kinship, patriarchal sex gender relations, and feminism this episode. We start by noting, however, that after our What Is To Be Undone episodes that criticized long-standing left orthodoxies we got nearly no pushback at all--and none publicly--and wondering why that was while also hoping that soon reactions will appear. Then...

Episode 404 of RevolutionZ continues the excerpted materials from the seven author work,Liberating Theory, this time with a chapter that insists we need to address a “community sphere” to understand society, not as a feel-good add-on, but as a core part of how society persists or changes. Community affiliation is shaped by social relations, history, and culture, and it follows us into every other...

Episode 403 of RevolutionZ takes a side trip away from our current ideology sequence to revisit the issues surrounding the development of Artificial Intelligence. Media is full of smart sober folks saying the end is near but also with smart sober folks saying utopia is near. Are we on a deadly trajectory to hell? Or is heaven on earth the next stop on the technology express? Or maybe it is just...

Episode 402 of RevolutionZ moves from part one of a sequence about ideology to part two of it, from critique of an old ideology to transcend to offering a a new one to consider and extend. Too often activists agree on outrage but fracture over the explanation, strategy, root cause, and solution. The last few episodes have argued that Marxism Leninism not only doesn't preclude such divisions, but...