RevolutionZ

Episode 414 of RevolutionZ considers tasks ahead in light of the MIdterm results. The scariest moment in politics may be when authoritarians win. but a not too distant second may be when they lose and we all exhale. Do we then quietly slide back into the same system that produced Trumpism? Or do we go forward? After the 2026 election results, grateful for  trouncing fascist expansion, we need to also consider a hard question. What will determine whether that victory turns into real, lasting change instead of another reset to business as usual? Electorally and extra-electorally, what ought people who want real, lasting change do next?

This episode considers how it is that huge surges like 2020’s mass protests and even decades-long waves of resistance like The Sixties can fade without achieving the deeper wins people risked everything for. Then we get specific about what a post-Trump agenda could actually immediately fight for: restoring social programs, expanding health care, repairing infrastructure, funding public education, abolishing ICE, re-elevating feminism, pursuing a national wealth tax, ending war, slashing the military budget, and prosecuting corruption. These aren’t abstract wishes. Many are widely popular, and they test whether electoral momentum can become ongoing movement pressure.

From there, the episode proposes two unavoidable tasks for any serious progressive much less revolutionary project, whether it’s a mayor like Zohran Mamdani or a hypothetical 2028 presidential run by AOC: win office and govern effectively but also build independent, extra-electoral organization and struggle to keep people mobilized, deepen political education, and push beyond reforms toward institutional transformations. We also consider the cautionary lessons of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan presidency and what they imply for a U.S. progressive administration facing entrenched power from within, whether with AOC or some other progressive candidate in the Oval Office.

In other words, this episode is about movement building. It is about under taking anti-authoritarian, anti racist, feminist, and labor organizing, to in time win a fundamentally new society. It asks how we can go from “stopping the worst” and recouping losses that the worst imposed on us, to winning new gains and ultimately the world we actually want. It focuses on how organizations like DSA, movements those like fighting ICE and for universal health care, and individuals like you and I, might best assess our situations and decide our own agendas as part of the unfolding project. What should we think about and weigh off to decide what to do? What answers might emerge? 
Support the show

Episode 413 of RevolutionZ asks what comes after our eruptions? What happens when the cameras leave, when the easy unity ages even just a little bit, and when power bets we will wear out and go home? What can we do to persist? What can turn an upsurge or for that matter some electoral success, into a sustained, strategic, collective commitment strong enough to win deep political and economic change rather than only isolated reforms? Once iwe are n angry and passionate motion, how do we stay angry, stay passionate, stay in motion, and build effectively for as long at it takes?

Before we get what winning needs, this episode shares some follow-up thoughts from my recent AI conversations and asks you to send your reactions. We consider proposals like banning AI publications and limiting personal use, and how top-down “solutions” can backfire by concentrating advanced AI inside governments and massive corporations. We also push back on the comforting line that AI is “just computation,” just regurgitating human results and just guessing next words so it is nothing to worry about. Reducing a system to its parts does not answer what it can do, who controls it, or what it it will be used for.

Then we widen the lens to the surge of activism across countries and issues: education, housing, jobs, corruption, immigration, war, climate, anti-fascist organizing, and even fights over data centers. The strategic question is how to connect these struggles so they persist and grow, how to ultimately move from single-issue demands toward multi-issue, systemic goals like participatory democracy, feminism, self-managed workplaces, and participatory planning. How to gain commitment and collectivity by way of new consciousness and strategic behaviors. We also reflect on the 1960s to see why “almost winning” is not enough  especially when the alternative is a future defined by ecological and social breakdown.

Uprisings are erupting. They are wonderful in so many ways. Yet, we have to grow them further, make them deeper, and most of all sustain them. If we don't think about that, talk about that, how can we do that? We can't. Some gains are essential to accomplish those ends and they are this episode's focus. 
Support the show

Episode 412 offers Part Two of Talking with Chat GPT wherein the AI effusively answers questions about itself, the AI industry and its CEOs, users, prospects and dangers, and about its and our futures. What can/will AI do. What can/will we do?
This episode is long and addresses many concerns. GPT points out that AI does not need to “be conscious” to outrun us where it counts. It elaborates a blunt, unsettling idea: once cognitive work becomes cheap, fast, and endlessly replicable, the danger is not only what AI can do, but what humans stop doing and eventually can no longer do because AGIs and even more so ASIs do it better. That GPT understands that danger not only better than its creators, but until quite recently better than its critics is more than a little eye-opening. 

Our interview considers from current concrete AI advantages like mind boggling speed, humongous knowledge, large-scale summarization, translation, coding, numeric reasoning, writing, pattern detection and much more, to the giant multiplier that enlarges it all: parallel copies. When one system can be duplicated ten thousand times, the comparison stops being human effort versus AI effort. It becomes one person’s two days of thinking versus thousands of AI drafts, critiques, revisions, and simulations produced in the same window. We dig into what that means for the collapsing marginal cost of cognitive labor, jobs, and human creativity. 

From there we consider education and literacy as but one example (like letter writing, coding, diagnosing, scheduling, planning, caretaking, and in time composing, story-telling, and researching) among many others where using AI can become a shortcut that quietly replaces the mental training of sustained reading, interpretation, and independent judgment and comparable skills in each other instance. 
We also push into robotics, AGI, and especially artificial super intelligence to understand what happens when AI reasoning meets sensors, memory, and dexterous bodies, and why “physical work will be safe” may be a temporary comfort. 
Along the way, we tackle AI having motives without having feelings, the meaning of intelligence, the competitive logic that now drives companies and states, the effectivity of AI agents, the role of Hyperscalers, Desktop AI, the idea and implications of recursive self improvement, and perhaps scariest scenario of all: humans remaining nominally in charge while losing real agency, or becoming literally irrelevant by way of a thought experiment that compares us looking at ASI to a cocker spaniel looking at humans. GPT explains CEOs views and choices, the logic of AI development, where it is all headed, and why self regulation is an absurd pipe dream.

Is AI risk only sci-fi? No. So what should humans keep doing even when AIs can do it better? Or more to the point, what should be our attitude to AI research and development? GPT itself says, at least to my ears, that we should shut down efforts to improve AI models until "we" are sure we have control so that negative effects will be prevented. 
This second part of our interview also offers my take which is that AI is tasty poison. I find it fascinating, engaging, and personally useful. But AI is or should be forbidden fruit. We, the public, need to shut it down pending fundamental changes in institutions and derivatively in people as well.
Support the show

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 consciousness or inner experience. That brief opening resets expectations about what ChatGPT is and is not without hand waving or sci-fi mystique. 

Then we move to the big stuff, some relevant history, some industry strategies, and AI agents and how they don't stop after one reply but can pursue goals, take steps, use tools, coordinate with other agents, and keep iterating. We talk about multi-agent swarms, manager agents, critical agents, and why parallelism changes what’s possible. We push on the dangerous aspect of the same idea: agent autonomy to ask when “helpful careful commentary” becomes a system that treats guardrails as problems to route around? 

From there, the conversation widens into hyperscale data centers, the race toward AGI and ASI, and the political economy behind agreeing to “slow down.” We confront governance questions, industry and firm incentives, collective action traps, cybersecurity failures, what independently enforceable oversight would require given that the downside really could be catastrophic, and why AI CEOs make the choices they make. 
This isn't what I as interviewer think. Nor is it what any particular AI critic or booster thinks. It is what an AI carefully and soberly thinks about itself and about the industry that made it. So not only does this offer a viewpoint, it also displays an instance of using AI and experiencing it's responses at a length which not too many leftists have much hands on experiences with. It reveals AI capacity, safety, dangers, governance, and choices and industry and government policies, and autonomous agents and madmen's vicious creations, plus the real-world institutions and people behind all the on-rushing, promising, and potentially devastating effects. 
Are GPT's answers and observations "slop." Or are they bracing, well evidenced, well argued information to use when considering what to do with AI. Should we favor full speed ahead, slow it down, seriously pause all frontier developments pending unchallengeable evidence of safety, or shut it down forever?

In Part Two next week GPT considers some more subtle but also devastating dangers and more as well.
Support the show

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, each capable of reinforcing or undermining changes in the others. To achieve socialism, feminism, anti-racism, or participatory democracy, the point is not to pick one label for everything. The point is to build institutions that generate solidarity, protect diversity, and make self-management real in all these realms.

The episode moves from values to institutional design including participatory economics with balanced job complexes, self managing workplace and consumer councils, and allocation that avoids both markets and central planning. It then adds feminist kinship to end misogyny, defend reproductive freedom, break sex-based parenting roles, and reject ageism while respecting children and elders. Then, regarding community, it proposes intercommunalism and cultural self-determination without turning identity into biology or pushing Orwellian cultural homogenization. Finally, for politics, it goes beyond episodic elections toward participatory democracy that depends on broad access to information, debate, and self-managed options.

Then the episode gets intensely practical to consider what strategy looks like in a world more complex than any simplistic simulation? The episode uses game analogies to show why tactics, programs, and strategy have to stay flexible and attend to consequences, and how a win-lose mindset can smuggle authoritarian habits back into liberatory movements. The episode then digs into how to think through activist choices and consequences in a sufficiently multi-faceted way to attain desired aims. It takes up matters of organization and issue interconnection to advocate “autonomy within solidarity,” and it concludes with a sharp and entertaining dialogue on cynicism, human nature, and whether despair is a form of self-protection or hypocritical denial.

Will Liberating Theory's concepts and observations, as in this episode's examples, help activists think more productively about social change tactics, participatory organization, and movement alignment? This is for you to decide. What part of the framework do you most want to test in real organizing? If none, why is that? I hope you will let me know either way. 
Support the show