035: Library Socialism & The Golden Square

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For this special episode, Matt</span> <em><span style="font-weight: 400;">&</span></em> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Jesse are joined by Shawn Vulliez from the</span> <em><span style="font-weight: 400;">SRSLY WRONG Podcast</span></em> <span style="font-weight: 400;">for a very important discussion about how the concept of Library Socialism might dovetail with the idea-shape of The Golden Square. As Shawn laments, the inexorable crisis of capitalism is that it turns us into “Tool-Handed Monsters who can’t hug our own children.” But published in 1971, Murray Bookchin’s</span> <em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Post-Scarcity Anarchism</span></em> <span style="font-weight: 400;">provided some initial inklings of a world without work or want—where the even-flow of Social Ecology, Libertarian Municipalism, and an abundance of material resources would allow us to finally hug our children, our shared future. Yet, given the climate chaos of the here and now, it’s hard to imagine how we might get there as we face the fast-Fascist collapse of the biosphere. Insects, animals and the Earth’s ecosystems die-off while capitalism forces us into collectively stuffing more Big Macs into our mouths. How might we meet the human rights to food, shelter, healthcare and education, and in so doing, create a new horizon for physical objects, where we could live in an ever-revolving circularity of consumer abundance? Beyond the bleak choice between denial of reality or submitting to involuntary human extinction, is there a third avenue left unlisted by popular imagination, one that doesn’t require a magic marker to see or decrypt? Thankfully, there is a clear path toward an</span> <em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ecology of Freedom</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">, where we say goodbye to the continued maintenance of hierarchy and make way for its utter annihilation and dissolution, replacing it with a shared prosperity. As such, we must Decommodify the means to a dignified life, and D