Of course.

But literally, like, it was coming out of groups that would use concepts from William Gibson's books, like, intentionally.

Like, it was a consciously cyberpunk movement.

And then you also had in Florence, or in Firenze if you're wanting to pretend like you've been there, you have a group called Inventati.

Now, Autistici, you're like, "That sounds like the word autistic." It means autistic.

It's the autistics, right? And what their concept was ...

I don't know.

Mm-hmm

Of course.

But literally, like, it was coming out of groups that would use concepts from William Gibson's books, like, intentionally.

Like, it was a consciously cyberpunk movement.

And then you also had in Florence, or in Firenze if you're wanting to pretend like you've been there, you have a group called Inventati.

Now, Autistici, you're like, "That sounds like the word autistic." It means autistic.

It's the autistics, right? And what their concept was, I don't know, I'm not holding this up to today's lens of how we wanna talk about this neurodivergence.

What they were saying is, "We're all interacting with computers instead of each other, so that's what we're gonna call ourselves, are the autistics." Inventati was, uh, the self-invented, and these were the citizen journalists, and they, they came out of a group of, um, basically protest journalists that were mostly students in, uh, in Firenze, in Florence.

Mm-hmm

Of course.

But literally, like it was coming out of groups that would use concepts from William Gibson's books like intentionally, like it was a consciously cyberpunk movement.

And then you also had in Florence, or in Firenze if you're wanting to pretend like you've been there, you have a group called Inventati.

Now, Autistici, you're like, that sounds like the word autistic.

It means autistic.

It's the autistics, right? And what their concept was, I don't know, I'm not holding this up to today's lens of how we wanna talk about this neurodivergence.

What they were saying is, we're all interacting with computers instead of each other, so that's what we're gonna call ourselves, are the autistics.

Mm-hmm

[laughs]

... um, yes.

I am, uh, the ho- a host of Live Like the World is Dying, uh, a podcast for what feels like the end times, AKA these times.

And it's like if you, you know, want to learn about, uh, disaster preparedness but are not somebody who wants to, like, hide in a bunker with all of your beans, um-

Mm-hmm

... you know, instead maybe le- can, like, learn about how you can acquire skills and build community and, um, you know, also hear about other people who are doing cool stuff like that.

Um, it's a lot of fun.

Check us out.

Yeah.

... specifically the drama is just around...

It's around the nuclear football, it's around the chain of command as it relates to it, uh, in the current one.

And it's what started me, like a couple weeks before this, starting thinking about being like, "Oh, this isn't as..." Like, I sort of thought, I was like, "Oh, we probably have, like, decent intercept systems if it's just, like, one missile, right?" You know?

... who knows what's going to happen?

I hate to say that H.G. Wells is right, 'cause I don't actually believe in one world government, um, kind of famously with my political position.

But this idea that, like, the only way out of this, besides everyone deescalating-

Well, Margaret, pluggables?

Yeah, uh, I have a Substack.

I write about the things that I talk about on my show in my Substack.

Margaret Killjoy, you can find me on all of the various internet things that I'm on and not the ones that I'm not on.

And I'm not aware of any other Margaret Killjoy except apparently a Disney character where she, uh, from the second-

They made a second?

I actually could be having this character...

It might be, I might have the movie wrong.

Um-

I wonder if, like, the villains in pulp stuff from, like, 200 years ago didn't even claim that they're gonna destroy the world.

Whereas, like, now we have villains who are like, "I'm going to destroy the world."

Fucking, who wasn't? (laughs) Like-

I know.

One who wasn't, yeah.

And even if they were, do you know how many, do you know how many, uh, children you'd have to sacrifice to get anywhere near the evil of what Rome did in terms of killing them?

It's our only chance to survive.

And I, like...

It's a weird comparison to this, like I, I spent a while kinda hanging out more on the streets when I was younger, and the idea that, like, the way to survive this sort of, like, rough and tumble life of living under bridges or whatever is to, like, strike first is entirely incorrect.

That is, like, absolutely how everyone would-

Yeah.

Anne Jacobsen describes it in a, like, the aftermath of this in a harrowing way in her book Nuclear War: A Scenario.

Quote, "The mess inside Slotin's dead body was like a sea of rotten soup.

'His blood was uncoagulable at autopsy,' one of the doctors wrote in a classified postmortem report.

Mm-hmm.

That there was a work slowdown of the Nazi, the Nazi bomb program, where they were like, and they went and they tried to tell their US counterparts like, "Hey, we're, we're slowing down this bomb.

You all sh- need to slow it down too." But the person that they told didn't believe them and was like, "Oh shit, they're trying to lie to us.

They must be like right about to build this bomb."

No, no, no, it's not.

Uh, I, I've, okay, I can never remember the name of the book 'cause I found it in a trash can 20 years ago.

It was about the social history of building of the bomb.

And I read this and, and it like changed the way that I was perceiving this stuff.

Mm-hmm.

... and then the, the break shit people can be like, "Oh, okay.

Well, we'll make sure we break shit somewhere else than where you are." And, and, and all of this stuff, and...

Whereas a decision-making body would get together and your spoke would have a mandate from your group.

They would be empowered to make decisions for everyone, knowing that the decision has to be within a certain framework.

And then they basically when they're done you'd be like, "Okay, you did or didn't succeed at your mandate.

We're gonna send someone else next time," or whatever.

... and not for a king.