Hostile Architecture in Neoliberal society

Hostile Architecture in Neoliberal society Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:27Speaker 01

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• 1:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Rub your tongue along the judge's bunion, you wonderful ultens. Welcome to the Blind Eye Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. And if you're a regular listener, a ten-foot Declan, a steaming Quava, you know the crack. I'd like to thank you all for your patience last week. After my computer fucking broke, I managed to get it fixed, which was not a complicated process. Well, I managed to make it fucking complicated because

• 1:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  I brought the computer to a fella to fix it. And when I, I first off, I arrived with the computer in a prem, because I had no other way to bring it, so I brought it in a child's prem. And then when I got to the place to repair the fucking computer,

• 1:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  your man who was fixing it,

• 2:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  he, he looked, he was the fucking image of the, the football player, Paul Gascoigne. Now, I mean,

• 2:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  do you know when you see someone who looks like someone and it's not like, oh, that person looks like Paul Gascoigne? It's like, fuck, is that, is that Paul Gascoigne? Is that actual Paul Gascoigne working in a tiny computer shop in Limerick? Is that what's happening here? And then he started talking and he was from Druada. And Druada,

• 2:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  the Druada accent, it's a bit like the Newcastle accent of Ireland, because Paul Gascoigne has a Newcastle accent. So the Druada accent is as ridiculous as the Newcastle accent. No, no disrespect to anyone from Druada or Newcastle, but you know the crack. You've got silly accents. Anyway, I got so distracted by this cunt looking like fucking Paul Gascoigne that I handed him the computer and forgot to tell him what was wrong with it. So then I had to go back and tell him what was wrong with the computer. He shouldn't have taken off me. But anyway, it was grand. One of the fans, one of the fans had gone in the computer and the fan needed replacing. Tiny fucking job. What pissed me off was that it was a Windows update, a fucking, a Windows update that I didn't ask for.

• 3:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Managed to blow the fan on my computer, which is unacceptable activity. Because we don't, we don't really own our electronics anymore. We think we own them, but we're effectively renting them. Like if you've got an iPhone and it's a couple of years old, or a Mac laptop and it's a couple of years old, you know that the next update could be the thing that makes your device unusable. And you can't not update because your apps won't work. So once you're in that situation, you don't really own your fucking phone anymore. Even though you bought it and you think you own it, you don't, you're renting it. Apple owns it. And now PCs are going that way too. And I can hear people screaming through the podcast, "Switch over to Linux. Switch over to Linux."

• 4:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm heavily reliant on, on too much software. That I have to use it on either Mac or fucking PC for my job. But anyway, my computer's fixed. I didn't lose any data, so I'm very happy with that. I want to update you on the milk situation in my office. I'm currently losing the milk battle. I won't say I've lost the milk war, but I'm losing the milk battle. So as I mentioned two podcasts ago, I rent an office, a communal office, from a gigantic multinational office renting corporation with an annual turnover of 4.5 billion. Part of the agreement when I rent this office is, you know, not only do I have a space to work 24/7,

• 4:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  but basic amenities like a canteen, a fridge, and tea and coffee facilities are provided. They're not free. I rent them. It's part of the fucking service I pay for. And fresh milk is provided by the office for everybody to enjoy. Everybody who wants to have tea or coffee in my office, the milk is free. It's there in the fridge, fucking free, regular dairy milk. But the corporation has decided, in order for them to save money, they're switching from fresh milk to UHT milk, ultra-high-temperature milk, which if, if you enjoy tea and coffee, you know that that's not an option. It's disgusting. It doesn't taste like milk.

• 5:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  It makes your tea taste like emulsion paint, so no one will actually drink it. No one's gonna drink the UHT milk. I successfully fought this two years ago. Now they're bringing it back and I'm trying to fight it at the moment by emailing the CEO. The CEO of all of Ireland, regularly. They're probably just gonna cancel my contract, but I'm, I'm gonna continue because of the, the idiocy of it and the injustice of it. Now, if you're listening, you might be thinking, why, why do I give a fuck about the milk situation in your office, Blind Eye? Why is that important to me? It's not that important to you. To be honest, it's not really that important to me. It's

• 6:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  a minor annoyance, a minor inconvenience. But what irritates me about the transition from fresh milk to UHT is that

• 6:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  it's like a little tiny case study that represents much wider problems in society. So this tiny little inconvenient issue,

• 6:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  it's holding a mirror up to what's wrong with society at large. And that's the thing that's pissing me off. So I get into my office Monday morning, open up the fridge in the canteen, and there it is, UHT milk. Nobody using it. It's just there in the door of the fridge. No one's drinking from it. No one wants it, but it's there. Then I look around the fridge more. Small little pints of milk. The, the fresh milk that people have gone and purchased themselves privately, not my milk. So, okay, now I gotta buy my own fresh milk. Who gives a fuck? Not a problem. And one litre, one litre of milk will do me for the week. Over to the shop to purchase one litre of milk.

• 7:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  It only costs a euro and 20, not expensive. Minor inconvenience and going to the shop anyway. It's just one extra thing that I have to do, that I didn't have to do last week, but I'll deal with it. A litre of milk a week, who gives a fuck? But here's the thing. If I come back from that shop with a one litre carton of milk and place it in that fridge, see, other people in the office are gonna use my milk. And that one litre is gone by the end of the day because other people have used it. Now, why are other people gonna use that milk? Because the fresh milk, it was once a public service. We all paid our little milk tax and we all got free milk for everybody.

• 8:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  And we never had to worry about it, never-ending milk that everyone paid for. But the office, the big corporation, in order to save money, have replaced that public service from fresh milk to UHT. So what they've done is they've taken a public service and then reduced the quality of it to the point that people are forced to go private. And the people who use my milk, you know, they see that carton of milk. Are they being selfish? Are they being mean when they use that carton of milk? No, because psychologically, that carton of milk still feels like a public service. It looks the same as the milk that was free last week.

• 8:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Also, if you get caught, if I was to walk into the canteen when someone's using my milk and I go, "Hey, that's my milk." They go, "Oh, sorry, man. It's just a carton of milk." I thought it was everybody's and that's a plausible excuse. Now, I know this from the last time it happened two years ago, so what did I do?

• 9:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  I had to think about it and go, right, okay. I now have to purchase my own fresh milk. How do I do it in such a way that nobody else uses it? Now, I'm not gonna write any aggressive labels on the milk. I'm not gonna get a permanent marker and write on the milk and say, my milk, leave it alone. Not your milk, because that's antisocial. That's overtly aggressive. That creates conflict. That's bad manners in a shared office environment. It makes you look like a lunatic that creates fights. So I'm not gonna do that. So what I did instead was, and this is the bit that pisses me off. I purchased a, a one litre water drinking bottle, a reusable water drinking bottle

• 9:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  in the most un-milky colour possible, in a colour which is as far, I'm not gonna, just in case there's one person listening to this podcast who's in my office, I ca, I ca, I bought a wa, a fucking water flask, a re, a reusable water bottle. That's the opposite of milk, not black, just a colour that's not milk, an un-milky colour. And then I poured my milk into that and that works because psychologically, the person in the office now who wants milk for their tea and coffee opens up the fridge. They are not going to touch someone's water bottle, even if they know there's milk in there and they wanna, and they wanna chance it.

• 10:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  If they wanna chance stealing my milk, they are not gonna steal it from a fucking reusable water bottle because it's very clearly private property and it doesn't feel hygienic. It's like, what if that person is drinking from their own private water bottle? I'm not using that. Now, if you get caught, now you look like a cunt. Now you look like you're stealing milk, you see? So no one's gonna touch it. They're gonna go and get their own milk. So this solution has worked. I've got a, a water bottle in, in a loud colour. My milk is fresh, it's untouched. I have a new fresh milk supply. It's private and paying for it myself. Why is this information pertinent enough?

• 11:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  That I can spend 10 minutes talking about it to a million people on a podcast? Because I've just engaged in hostile architecture and that impacts all of us. The private milk situation is a, it's a perfect model for very bad things that are happening all around us in society that we don't see. And one of these things is called hostile architecture. So let's just take an, let's take an example of what used to be a public service that was paid for by people's taxes. Housing, healthcare, mental healthcare. Since the 1980s, housing has become financialised. Council houses are not being built anymore.

• 12:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  The financialisation of the housing market means that houses are about the accumulation of wealth. Our healthcare system.

• 12:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  In Ireland, our healthcare system hasn't become fully privatised, but I'd argue that it's in what's called managed decline. Same with the NHS over in England, Scotland and Wales, where a health system becomes gradually underfunded until you get longer and longer waiting lists. The public system appears to be broken and then what that does is it forces people to, if they can afford it, towards the private system. Same thing happens with housing when they're just not building council housing anymore. They're just not doing it. And then the people who need council housing are instead, and this is, this is in UK and

• 12:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ireland, and I, I think America too, where these people are given allowances or credits that instead of acquiring a council house, they perpetually rent from the private market and this is subsidised by the government, which means there isn't a solution or people aren't provided with homes. But instead homelessness is, becomes a source of profit for the private market and that's fully where we are in Ireland today. The homelessness crisis is managed as a for-profit industry. Private landlords profit from it. Huge hotel chains profit from it. Taxes are not being spent on providing people who need homes with homes.

• 13:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Taxes are being given to hotels to provide what's called emergency accommodation, but it's being done in perpetuity for profit. The hotel rooms are being rented out at market rate. The money comes from the government through, through taxes and most of that money is absorbed by the hotel chains as profit. This also has the impact of creating scarcity. So the amount of hotel rooms that are available to the public to purchase are less and less. So now the price of hotel rooms goes up. Same thing happening with giant investment funds buy up entire housing estates. This reduces the amount of properties that are available to rent, which pushes rent up.

• 14:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then these investment funds rent the houses to the government at market rate. This is presented to us all as a solution to the, the crisis of homelessness. It's not. People's misery has been turned into a for-profit industry. The homeless crisis is managed for profit rather than actually solved. So public wealth taxes just get siphoned off into private pockets. That's neoliberalism, a big, annoying, confusing word. But what it means, hand public services to the private market so that a private for-profit company can place a toll booth between your taxes and a public service.

• 15:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then you look around you and go, why has everything shit? That's why. But what you get from, from years of managed decline of public housing, public healthcare and public mental healthcare, you then get left with a, a crisis of homelessness and a crisis of addiction. You see people sleeping rough or people in active addiction who should be accessing public mental health services, self-medicating and then destitution, suffering, pain, homelessness becomes very visible in our cities. And that's where we are now in most neoliberal economies after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

• 15:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then you see the rise of what, what is called hostile architecture.

• 15:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hostile architecture is something that is all around us, but if you're not the target of it, you don't notice. I'll give you an example of hostile architecture. Any new benches gone up in your city? Benches for sitting on. Notice there's, there's no such thing as long benches anymore. I remember when benches used to be long. Public benches aren't long anymore. They have dividers in between them now. Now, if you're someone who goes into your city to purchase goods and you wanna sit down on the bench, you might be thinking, grand, bit of privacy somewhere to rest my arms. But that's not what those dividers are about. They're to stop homeless people sleeping on them, spikes on the ground in doorways.

• 16:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're not gonna notice them because you have no business hanging around fucking doorways. But if you're a homeless person and you need somewhere to sleep that night, then you fucking notice it. Then you notice the spikes on the ground that you can't sleep on. That is called hostile architecture. Me pouring my fresh milk into a reusable water flask is hostile architecture. If you open the fridge, you just see a water flask. If you're looking for milk, then you go, that fucking cunt's after hiding his milk in that fucking flask. And now if I go near it, I look like a robber. Bollocks. I really need milk for my tea. Fuck, I'm gonna have to buy my own now. My covert milk hiding device is anti-homeless spikes. Why?

• 17:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because what was previously a public service, fresh milk, in order to save money, was put into managed decline. See, technically they're not breaking contract. Like I'm, I'm paying for tea and coffee facilities, I'm paying for milk. They're doing it, they're just giving us milk that's so shit, it's unusable, but they're still abiding by the contract. So the fresh milk situation has been put in managed decline. I'm then forced to the private market and now to protect my assets, my, my week-long milk fucking supply, I have to engage in hostile architecture to exclude other people. Now, if anyone came and asked me, can I have some of your milk?

• 18:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Of fucking course you can, but I, I just, I can't go putting the bottle of fresh milk in the fucking fridge because it'll be gone in two hours. It's happened before. So I have to become Mr. Private, Mr. Covert, Private Hostile Homeless Spike Milk. It's a minor inconvenience, but it bothers me because it holds a mirror up to much more serious things that are happening around us in society. My milk scenario, this is exactly what neoliberalism does to society. Hostile architecture, not hostile infrastructure, is the covert way that an ultra-capitalist neoliberal society controls people's behaviour.

• 18:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's always done covertly to maintain the facade of the freedom of capitalism, to maintain the facade of democracy and abundance. You see, they can't just say, There's loads of homeless people, so no homeless people on benches. Homeless people on benches is illegal and you're gonna get arrested. Because that doesn't look like capitalism, that doesn't look like freedom, that looks authoritarian. So the bench is given dividers. It's a way of designing a public space that deters the presence of certain people. And these certain people tend to be the ones at the bottom of the system.

• 19:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  The ones most impacted by neoliberal policies. The targeting homeless people is the most obvious one and it's done in very, very sneaky ways. It's greenwashed in 2018 in, in Seattle. Seattle, which would be seen as a very liberal American city, a very open American city. There's a bridge there called the Young Street Bridge. Underneath this bridge, homeless people would sleep there. There was a large homeless community underneath this bridge. You'll know it directly from the Nirvana lyric, from the Nirvana song, Something in the Way. The opening lyric is, "Underneath the bridge, tarp has sprung a leak."

• 20:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's Kurt Cobain, who was a heroin addict. Kurt Cobain, when he ran away from home when he was a teenager, he went as a homeless person and lived underneath this, this fucking bridge in Seattle. And the tarp is the, his tent has sprung a leak. So underneath this bridge, which was providing shelter and home for, for homeless people, to give them some relief from their misery. You gotta remember with people in homelessness, sometimes sleeping rough is safer than sleeping in shelters. So in 2018, Seattle, liberal city, a city who could not be seen to remove homeless people or not allow homeless people to sleep under this bridge. What did they do? They filled it full of bike racks. They greenwashed it.

• 20:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  "We are providing amenities. Don't drive to work, cycle to work, get out on your bike. Save the planet, save the environment. We've provided all of these wonderful bike racks underneath the bridge." If you're in employment, if you work in the city, this to you seems like a good thing. Brilliant bike racks underneath the bridge. If you are at the bottom of the system, if you're homeless, now you don't have a place to sleep anymore. So those bikes are actually hostile, the bike racks are hostile architecture. Another example of neoliberal hostile architecture is, you can find it in Limerick City. Henry Street Dun Stores, just there off the Burchett district. If you wanna go up the stairs to get to the multi-storey car park,

• 21:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  you walk into the fucking staircase, which is dark, and you're suddenly overcome with this. A strange feeling like the air has changed. It's hard to see, the light has changed. The lights are a weird type of blue. I, as someone who wants to walk up the stairs, just notice it as something strange, something different. But those blue lights, it's so that, it's so people who are injecting heroin can't see their veins. That's hostile architecture. For me, it's a mild inconvenience or something strange or different. For someone who's in active addiction, it is, "Get the fuck out, you can't inject here." That person doesn't have access to a safe injection centre and he facilities with clean needles.

• 22:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Instead, the addiction is criminalised and managed. This year, my city introduced, so guards on the beat, police on the beat, public service. Something that you'd expect. Of course there should be guards on the, isn't that their fucking job? If you're in a city, aren't there supposed to be police walking around? It's public service. They brought the police on the beat, walking all the city blocks, specifically to deter what they called aggressive begging. And that's another form of hostile architecture. Because aggressive begging is a code word. What it really means is people who are begging for money for crack or heroin. That's what it means. I'm in the city every single day.

• 23:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've never experienced, I've never been intimidated or aggressively, had anyone aggressively beg me for money when they need, need this for their addiction. But that type of begging, the begging from a person who's strung out, who's physically ill, that's more visible. That's the wrong type of begging. So they brought the police in to combat this aggressive begging. But really what it means, if the police are there, the people in addiction are not going to beg because they either want to buy drugs or they have drugs on them. And that isn't, that's hostile infrastructure there. And it's neoliberal because it's, it's when public space itself becomes privatised.

• 23:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  If your benches are, they're for you because you have a job and you're in here buying goods and services. But these benches are not for you. You who doesn't have a home, who needs this bench to rest, to sleep, it's not for you. It's for you there who's here to buy goods and services. That's the privatisation of a public space. The privatised infrastructure of neoliberalism, it pushes everything down onto the individual. It very cleverly makes structural issues feel like individual problems. If you walk around a city and now there's police on the beat because they need to stop aggressive begging, i.e. people who are addicted to drugs.

• 24:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or if the bench that you sit on is a little bit more annoying because it has been adapted to prevent a homeless person sleeping on it. Or you can't go for a piss because there's no public toilets. They've removed the public toilets because they say that's where people use drugs. So now if you wanna use a toilet, you have to go to a coffee shop. But the coffee shop, you go to a fucking Starbucks. You can't use the jacks in a Starbucks because you have to purchase something to get the code for the toilet on the receipt. "That's not fair, I'm sorry, we gotta keep out the homeless people." And then you finally find a public toilet, but it's difficult to use because they have those weird blue lights so that people can't find their veins.

• 25:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Are you going, you try and rent out a hotel room and you're pissed off because your hotel room is so expensive? But the reason your hotel room is so expensive is because there's huge scarcity that's caused by all of the homeless people that are being given emergency accommodation in hotels. Or you're lucky enough to save up and afford a mortgage and you actually get a mortgage, but you go to buy a house, but then the house is bought already. But that's gonna be used for people on housing assistance payment. That creates a general hum. A general hum where the structural problem is completely blurred. And each time it's because of that group of individuals. Hostile architecture, hostile infrastructure, which is a tenet of neoliberalism,

• 26:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  will have you pointing fingers at the people at the bottom of the system rather than the complete stripping of the public services that created that system that put those people at the bottom. Another, another facet of this hostile fucking neoliberal infrastructure is, like the manosphere is one example. Andrew Tate, men who promote a version of masculinity, which is just about anger and aggression and, and very little else, and dominance and bullying. Now patriarchy, misogyny, that's always been a problem.

• 26:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  I grew up with a, a narrative of, of patriarchy and a narrative of male worth. Society sold me an idea that to have worth as a man means owning a house, having a full-time career and being the sole breadwinner to provide for a woman. So that's the narrative of male worth, patriarchal male worth under capitalism. Neoliberalism made all of that impossible, but the expectation didn't shift. The rules stayed the same, the social expectation stayed the same.

• 27:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  So you're effectively destined for, for worthlessness. My dad and his generation. So first off, my dad got a job in Aer Lingus, which was a state-owned company. Full-time contract, guaranteed pension for life. That means after he's retired, very difficult to get fired because there was a union, a union that protected your rights as a worker. Guaranteed stable predictable income. Getting a house, first off, houses were not expensive. How did he get a house? There was a thing called the Small Dwellings Act. The government, and this, this wasn't just Ireland, this would have been in Britain too.

• 28:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  The government believed that as a public good, it was a good idea if people had houses. This was a good thing. You have a healthy society with a social net. If people can get houses, and this is not a difficult thing to do. So lots of houses are being built. Supply is high, so prices are low. And my dad just got a, a loan from the council. It wasn't a mortgage, it was a fucking loan from the council. Fuck all interest. Like with a mortgage, I think for the first 15 or 20 years, you're not even paying the mortgage, you're just paying the interest, the profit that the bank makes before you even begin paying off the loan. Getting a house, holding down a job, providing for a family,

• 28:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  became the, the social conditions of a, of a man's fucking worth, which is bollocks, bullshit. But those, that was the socially agreed upon conditions of a man's worth. Then that's all stripped away. Unions got replaced with HR. Full-time contracts got taken away. The state-owned companies got privatized. So you get a generation of young men growing up whose bullshit idea of worth, self-esteem, external worth, is stripped away by, by structural issues, but it's experienced as deep, personal failure. And the hostile infrastructure that steps in, into that space,

• 29:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  is these alpha male influencers. Trade unions, full-time contracts, affordable housing, these things get replaced with self-improvement courses, dating strategies, lux-maxing, and the hostile individualistic identification of proximate targets who have caused all this. So when homelessness becomes visible in a city, and the city is then designed to target the homeless people through benches, ballards, taking away public toilets, and then your environment tells you, what's them? They're causing it. They're the problem. Look at them, they're, they're criminalized.

• 30:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  When housing becomes unattainable and job security becomes unattainable, and the social construct of patriarchy attaches male worth to these things, well, then it's the feminist's fault, isn't it? Can't afford a house? Well, fucking, I'm involuntarily celibate. What do you mean? I, I'm, I, I can't have sex because women only want a man that has a house, and I can't get a house, so I have no worth, so I'm involuntarily celibate, so I fucking hate them. They're doing this to me with their high standards. And the manosphere influencer backs that up and says, yeah, that's correct. That's how it is. And it avoids the evidence-based structural critique. Housing's been financialized.

• 31:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  The fucking prices are after outpace in wages. And the actual price of a house from your parents' generation, it, it's multiple, multiple times what it was then. So it, it's unrealistic because of structural fucking issues that were planned to benefit the wealthy. Feminism destroyed men. Women don't want children anymore because of feminism. I'm depressed. That's because feminism has society only caring about women. The neoliberalism creates the structural insecurity. And in that space, a, a private commodified space opens up for manosphere, manosphere influencers to step in and, and reframes it as the fault of feminism,

• 31:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  or actual structural issues become interpersonal grievances, finding a group to point that, whether it's feminists or immigrants. And then on top of it all, the places where most of this discourse is occurring, it's not real-life spaces, it's online spaces that are controlled and owned by billionaires who decide what the algorithm shows you, who are clearly overwhelmingly pushing these narratives and these particular influencers, manosphere influencers. And also find me the manosphere, manosphere influencer who doesn't also call everyone a communist. The manosphere influencer who doesn't,

• 32:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  every, if they're not complaining about feminists or immigrants, they're complaining about socialism. I mean, what socialism, really? Well, I think taxes should be used to fund public services. I don't think public services should be private. Everyone should have access to healthcare because humans are humans and humans get sick. Everyone should have access to housing. Workers should have unions. They should be able to organize to collectively bargain. A worker's right to healthcare, security, to be able to live, that, that's more important than a company's profits. I don't think billionaires should pay less than 1% tax.

• 33:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just today, I saw a headline in, in Bloomberg where the, the world's largest hedge fund have figured out a way for the wealthiest 1% in the world to pay zero taxes. So what's a socialist? Someone who believes that society works best when everybody has universal access to healthcare, housing, education, and social security. That's it. Find me the manosphere influencer who espouses that, or who doesn't take that word socialist and completely vilify it. It's all the blame game, pointing figures so that you never, ever question the structures that led to this. And if you wanna hear the truth

• 34:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  out of any of these particular influencers, something that's started to emerge in the past four or five years, in the, the real post-truth era, and Israel does this too. They accuse other people of what they themselves are doing. So if you take someone like Andrew Tate, him and his brother right now are, they're fighting, they're in, they're in the US. They were in Romania and somehow got safe passage to the US via the Trump administration, but right now they're in the US. They're on extradition charges. They're wanted in the UK on rape, sex trafficking, and child sexual abuse material.

• 34:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's what you're dealing with. As influencers, I'd wager strongly that the Tates are compromised individuals, which means I, I would guess that because they're in the US, they're being politically protected. They're now working on behalf of an intelligence organization of some description for propaganda purposes because they're compromised, politically compromised individuals. So their messaging would align with what intelligence organizations would want them to, to say. And just this week, Andrew Tate was being interviewed, and someone said to him, why are you being prosecuted? He implied that he's, the deep state are trying to take him down,

• 35:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  that like the CIA are trying to take him down. And I'm paraphrasing now because I can't find the fucking interview. I can't find the clip. And they said, why would the CIA wanna take you down? And Tate said, along the lines of, the CIA's main concern is to prevent a revolution. So he's trying to say there that he is the cause of the revolution because the things that he says are so truthful that they will cause a revolution and the CIA need to shut him down. But he's so politically compromised, he's been protected in America. Through his lies, he's telling the truth. The truth is, yes, they are trying to stop a fucking revolution, but the revolution they're trying to stop is the one that would turn against neoliberalism, the one that would turn against the billionaires.

• 36:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's why the US are trying to put people who speak in an anti-capitalist way to label these people as terrorists now. And just around social media there, one example, one clear example of neoliberal hostile architecture that doesn't really exist anymore, but it did exist around the 2000s, before the Great Recession. And if you were alive then, you'll remember it in the news. So gangs of teenagers used to be a thing. When I was a teenager, there was fuck all to do but go outside. And you'd roam around in massive groups and meet up with other massive groups.

• 37:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I remember times from my childhood, 12, 13, 14, on a Saturday night, gatherings of up to maybe 200, 250 teenagers in a fucking park. And this was, this became a moral panic in Ireland and, and hugely in Britain. Hoodies, 2004, 2005, hoodies were all over the news because it was just the fashion at the time. If you were a teenager, you wore a fucking hoodie. But this was then freaking out adults, assuming that every teenager who had a hoodie was out for trouble. But you see, under the neoliberalism of the 80s, youth clubs started to get defunded or removed completely.

• 37:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fucking community centers started to disappear. Things that were running at a community level went away. So by the 90s and the early 2000s, you had a lot of teenagers with fuck all to do other than hang around on corners. I used to be one of those teenagers. Just hang around corners and spit in a circle, that was it. And then by about the year 2000, hostile architecture that targeted teenagers started to be introduced in public spaces. They were known as mosquitoes. And you'd find them, we used to come across them outside petrol stations, outside shops, outside private businesses. There were devices that emitted a very high-pitched noise that could only be heard by someone under the age of 25.

• 38:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  You can still buy them today, like the, the mosquito, they have a, a website to sell them. And the, the opening fucking text on the website is, fed up with teens lightering outside your home or business? Are homeless encampments and rough sleepers invading your local area? Have you been the target of vandalism? Look no further than the mosquito anti-lightering alarm. I remember hearing it. I remember it. It would actually make you fuck off from outside a shop. I can try and play the mosquito now, online. Can I hear it? Can I fuck? Because A, I'm too old, and B, I'm riddled with tinnitus. So I live with the mosquito 24/7. There's no way it's worse than my tinnitus. But that there is an example.

• 39:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know, why are there kids all over the place in the early 2000s? Because austerity measures took the funding away from community centres, youth clubs, all of these spaces. And then kids had nothing to do but hang around. But then the private market enters with a hostile device to target the ears of fucking children, which creates the exact type of distraction where it's like, no, this isn't structural issues, this has nothing to do with youth clubs or tanshur or any shit like that, nothing to do with that, it's them, it's those fucking teenagers. They're so bad that we had to put this thing outside our shop. I know this all started because of a fucking milk bottle, but it's the same shit.

• 39:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Austerity measures towards the milk have put me in a position where I'm engaging in hostile architecture. Why don't you see gangs of teenagers? You don't see it anymore. I can't remember the last time I saw a fucking gang of teenagers. And if I do see a collection of teenagers, they're on their way to school, but you don't see them hanging around anymore. Well, number one, birth rates have declined, there's less teenagers. And what do you expect? With expensive housing, no full-time contracts, even people who are fully employed, it's like, well, is that with a multinational corporation who might disappear from the country tomorrow at the click of a finger to save money? So you don't actually have security.

• 40:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Those conditions over 20 years, 30 years, a lot of people just didn't have kids. And then 2012, smartphones, social media, socialising itself, became privatised and commoditised. People could now perform their identities online through avatars from 2012 onwards in their fucking smartphones, so kids just didn't need to go out and meet as much anymore. And all of that interaction, like if you hang around on a street corner and you're spitting on the ground, you're not earning anyone money when you do that.

• 41:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ironically, the only person who might earn a bit of money is when you do go into that local shop, the local shop that didn't want you hanging around outside. Out of that gang of teenagers, someone went in and bought sweets. But once that physical interaction disappeared and kids instead stayed at home and met up online, every bit of that meetup was commodified and earned money for Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, whoever the fuck. And then when it comes to young adults, twenties, I watched the nightclubs disappear. Like I was there, I first started gigging properly, 2009, 2010.

• 42:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  There was, there was too many nightclubs in Ireland anyway, because of the Celtic Tiger. They all started to close down and I used to gig those nightclubs from about 2009 to 2013. And each year, the nightclub would fill up later and later and later, until about 2013, what was left of the nightclubs, the only people that were showing up were showing up at about half eleven, twelve, already drunk from the house party and then only showing up to the nightclub, not buying drink, paying admission and only showing up at twelve just to meet the opposite sex. That's why they were coming in there at twelve circa 2013, just to meet the opposite sex.

• 42:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then as soon as dating moved online, 2015, 2016, with the emergence of Tinder, then people stopped fucking meeting in real life for dating. You, what's the point of the fucking, like, if the nightclub is no longer even a space you can go to because you're drinking at a house party, then now no one's going to the nightclub to dance, because that used to be the mating ritual. Now it's all being done on Tinder. So that became privatised. And I watched that. And now, 2026, there's a dating app called, I think it's Hinge is the one. And Hinge, they're trying to move their dating app model towards AI.

• 43:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think it's Hinge, I could be wrong, but there's, there's one of the big dating apps. And they're going to use your data to create an AI version of you. That AI version is going to go out into the app, go on dates with other AI versions of other people. And then these virtual AI dates are going to happen with your avatars and then they'll come back with the results of compatibility based on how your AI versions went on dates with each other. And if that happens, and two humans meet each other because their AI avatars went out and dated each other, and then two humans meet in real life and have sex with each

• 44:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  other and have a child, that means that we become domestic animals of artificial intelligence. That means the AI has domesticated us because it is, it's breeding us. I'm putting all this shit into, into, into the emails that I'm sending about the milk. I can't tell if this week's podcast is making sense or if it's utterly mad. Um, before I do the Ocarina pause, like even this podcast in a way, it's not hostile architecture, but it exists. There's certainly, it's a product of neoliberalism. And what I mean by that is, I'm a huge fan of public service broadcasting, radio, television,

• 44:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  forms of entertainment that are publicly funded and that are not necessarily run for profit, like pure public service broadcasting. And I suppose the heyday of it would have been mid eighties, seventies, maybe the sixties, although we don't have a lot of it left because they used to not record things. But creative platforms that are funded to create for the sake of creating. It doesn't matter if the thing that's being made is wildly popular or if no one watches it, because the public service model is about funding a space for playfulness and creativity to happen.

• 45:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like I'm working with the Abbey Theatre right now, as you know, rehearsals have begun today, where the Abbey are adapting my short stories through the director, Dan Colley, who's fucking brilliant, adapting my short stories into a play. The Abbey Theatre, publicly funded, it's the National Theatre of Ireland. At no point in the creation of this play is anybody talking about advertisers or even bums on seats. I mean, if a lot of people show up, that's brilliant, isn't that great? But really, it's, we're publicly funded, this is the National Theatre, we like what you do, here is some time and space to explore and create something.

• 46:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's how public funding of the art should work, simple as that. As opposed to, most of this funding comes from a bunch of brands. We definitely need to make them money because they've invested. Therefore, you don't really have any creative freedom, you have a bit, but this work is definitely going to need bums on seats. And the best way to do that is to be topical or appeal to the lowest common denominator or be controversial for the sake of it, or have some people in the play who might not be the right actors for the play, but we're putting them there because they already have a profile and that'll bring people in. When you create art that way, as I've said before, you get consistent mediocrity.

• 47:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  When you fund art in a way that here's a space for playfulness and failure, when you do that, you get a occasional brilliance. The Abbey Theatre, it's, it's one of the last places where that environment exists. So it's great crack working with them. Our national broadcaster, RTE, it would have worked like that at one point, maybe the seventies and eighties, but it's not really operating that way anymore, even though it does receive public funding. Advertisers and a for-profit model means that a genuine space for playfulness is really difficult to, to have. This podcast, like Jesus Christ, if RTE give me a radio show, I wouldn't be able to

• 47:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  take it and they wouldn't offer it to me in the first place because I wouldn't be able to do the type of shit that I do on this podcast. But instead, so this podcast, it's a, it's a neoliberal form of fucking public service broadcasting. Like if you put a gun to my head and said, who's my hero of spoken word? You know, it'd be Joe Frank. Joe Frank was an American, an American broadcaster who used to make very experimental radio shows that were blurred the line between radio show and fiction. He made art through broadcast audio. He was hugely influenced by Samuel Beckett.

• 48:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  And Joe Frank, huge influence on me when I started to create this podcast 10 years ago. He was PBS in America, which was a listener-funded model, where he had the freedom to do whatever the fuck he wanted. And that's what I'm trying to do here in a neoliberal way, because it is privatised. So if you enjoy this podcast, if you like listening to it, if it brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, entertainment, please consider funding the podcast directly via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. If you met me in real life, would you buy me a pint? Well, you can do it digitally.

• 49:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that allows me to do this as my full-time job, to have the time and space each week to show up. Not to try and succeed, but to use this as a playground of curiosity and following my gut and not thinking about whether this is going to be popular or not popular. Start thinking that way, that's when you get your dog shit. And even though this is funded through Patreon, it is private, it's a private neoliberal model of funding. I don't gatekeep the result. The podcast is free to listen to by everybody.

• 49:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Whether you pay or not, that's the important thing for me. Everybody gets to listen to this podcast because some people can't afford to pay. But if you can't afford to pay, you're paying for the person who can't afford to pay. And if you can't afford to pay, someone else is paying for you to listen. Everyone gets the exact same podcast whether you pay or not. I get to earn a living and I'm trying my best to operate in the, the public service broadcast model when the, the state public broadcast service model doesn't really exist anymore. Not in that completely free way. This model does protect the podcast from the whims of advertisers. Advertisers come here.

• 50:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  By my rules, they have no input, no sway, no influence. They can never pressure me to make content that takes boxes or does well in the algorithm or platforms people that I'm not interested in platforming. So patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. Let's do the, I have a creaky chair this week. I need to, I need to tighten a few fucking screws. Let's do the Ocarina pause, you'll hear some advert for bullshit here now, watch. Too high, that is a dog disturbing pitch or some teenagers possibly. Again.

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• 55:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sounds like a dying Kestrel. All right, gigs. I mentioned on last week's podcast, there was going to be a, a gig in Garnish Island on the, the 6th of September. That's sold out in 10 minutes. So thank you to everybody for coming along to that. That's going to be great fun. I didn't gig all together now this weekend. I chose instead to spend time with family. I do not regret that one fucking bit. And I have a, a wonderful, warm, fuzzy feeling of, of meaning because I made that choice. Right, Scotland, England and Wales tour this August. Kicking it off in Brighton at the Brighton Dome on the 18th of October.

• 56:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then over to Wales at the New Theatre Cardiff on the 20th of October. Making our way to Coventry there, the Warwick Arts Centre on the 21st. Bristol, Beacon Hall on the 22nd of October. Guildford, G Live. London, sold out, Barbican. Glasgow, as good as sold out. Gateshead, come along to Gateshead on the 29th of October. And then I've got Halloween off in Gateshead. Keep thinking about what the fuck I'm going to do on Halloween in Gateshead. Some Anglo-Saxon shit. I've never spent a Halloween night outside of Ireland, so I'm looking forward to seeing what the crack is in Gateshead on Halloween night.

• 57:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  What I would like to do in Gateshead on Halloween night is... So Ridley Scott, who directed Blade Runner is from that area and the opening scene of Blade Runner, set in 2019, the past, is the city of Los Angeles with these big towering chimneys full of fire. And apparently Ridley Scott, when he was a kid, used to go over this huge bridge in Gateshead and there were oil refineries or steelworks or something underneath the bridge that would shoot fire into the air. And he saw this as a school kid walking home on this bridge at nighttime and that inspired the opening sequence of Blade Runner.

• 57:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I'd like to try and see that on Halloween night in Gateshead. But because of Maggie fucking Thatcher, all of that industry is gone. So apparently there's nothing there anymore and you can't see what inspired Blade Runner. So thanks for that Maggie. And then my last gig's in Nottingham on the 1st of November. And then fucking, actually I nearly got my fucking head kicked in. I have a gig in Sligo, which I haven't been promoting on this podcast, even though in fairness, most of the tickets are gone already and I didn't even fucking advertise the fucking thing. But I've, I actually have a gig in Sligo in the Hawxwell Theatre in... What is it, the 19th of November? Which, it's nearly half sold, so if you're around Sligo on the 19th of November,

• 58:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  come along to the Hawxwell Theatre and recommend a guest to me. Sligo is steeped in fucking history. Megalithic tomes and cairns. Surely there's interesting people up around Sligo I could speak to about that. Any of those dates there as well, in England, Scotland and Wales, recommend some guests for me. Then off to Australia in April 27, which this tour is... It's nearly fucking sold out this tour. Let's see what's gone. So Auckland in New Zealand is the first gig. Tickets left for that. I'm in the town hall in Auckland. Then Melbourne Palais Theatre. That one's going quick. Down to the last 200 on that one. Brisbane, sold out completely.

• 59:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Perth. You're down to 30 tickets in Perth. I mean, thank you so much to all ye. Fucking hell, lads, this gig is nearly a year away and it's almost sold out. So thank you so much for this tour. So Perth, yeah, you're down to the last 30 tickets. And Sydney Opera House, yeah, you're down to the end at Sydney Opera House. So that's nearly... We're down to the last tickets at Sydney Opera House, which is on the 22nd of April 2027. All right. This week's podcast was a fucking phone call podcast. Not a pure phone call podcast. I got some researching to get my facts and data correct. But the computer incident from last week did fuck me up. So I did lose last week's...

• 59:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  I didn't lose any other data. I kept all my other podcasts, thank fuck. Last week's podcast that I recorded, I did lose it because the computer crashed mid-recording. I hadn't been saving or auto-saving, so I learned a lesson there. So I lost last week's podcast and I put out the live one a week early. I spent all of this long weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I spent all of it with my family. I wasn't researching, doing any work, prepping this week's podcast, because it was supposed to be a live podcast this week. So that's why this week's podcast was a bit of a phone call. But I'm going to be up tomorrow morning researching and writing next week's podcast.

• 1:00:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  In the meantime, rub a dog. Wink at a swan, chin you flick to a worm. Dog bless.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

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• 1:01:35Speaker 04

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