This is a conversation with carla joy bergman, the editor of the excellent book Trust Kids!: Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy and co-author of the equally excellent book Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, both published by AK Press.
She’s also the co-host of the Grounded Futures podcast alongside her son Uilliam Joy. Make sure to check them out!
As the title suggests, we focused on youth autonomy. What does it mean? How is it integral to structures of power and oppression, and how can we challenge it? Why are children so routinely undervalued while also always spoken for?
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- Earthsea by Ursula K LeGuin
- Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki
- The Mushishi series by Yuki Urushibara
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Episode design: Elia Ayoub
Transcript prepared by Lizartistry and Antidote Zine:
I started using the phrase “solidarity begins at home” to deepen the conversation: adult supremacy is everywhere, all the time. It’s in every single room, always. This is an adult issue at the end of the day; this book is primarily for adults. We need to do this work.
carla joy bergman: Hello, thanks for having me on your show. I really enjoy your pod and it’s an honor to be here.
My name is carla joy bergman. I use she/they pronouns. I’m calling in from so-called Canada in the Pacific northwest, Vancouver—on Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh lands—and I’m a writer, story-teller, mom, and podcaster. A multi-media artist. I like to collaborate and work with folks and amplify voices that are less heard or deliberately silenced, and use technology and various mediums to do that work, from print to film and everything in between.
Elia J. Ayoub: Awesome. carla, thanks a lot for joining us. We’ll primarily be talking about this book you edited (and you also wrote for) called Trust Kids! Stories of Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy, which came out with AK Press a few months ago.
Talk to us a bit about this book, the genesis behind it, some of the contributors behind it, how it came about, and the general question to anchor this conversation: what is youth autonomy and why does it matter?
cjb: Wow, that’s a big question. I’ll start with the book and then go into the topics in the book. It goes back to my own childhood and being frustrated with relationships that are hierarchical, non-consensual, and unfair. I can’t really pinpoint a moment when this became a hot topic for me and I wanted to talk about it, but it really took flight when I became a parent. I was pushing for—and often demanded—horizontal relationships when I was in college; I wouldn’t buy into the hierarchy in the classroom. Luckily most of my instructors and professors found it refreshing, and I ended up building solid relationships with them.
So it’s been orbiting around, but it doesn’t really get tested until you’re a parent, or until you’re in a living situation with someone really young, because all of a sudden you have this tremendous amount of power, and trust is coming at you really easily, and you can manipulate and use it in all kinds of ways to wield things to go your way. Being challenged about my adult supremacy every single day, and failing constantly, was where it started to become more of a topic in my mind, or in my heart. It just began to bloom.
My older is neuro-different, definitely on the autism spectrum, so school is just a disaster for him and that’s where the intersection of schooling and anti-authoritarian or anti-hierarchical relationships started to come together and coalesce. About twenty-one, twenty-two years ago, we started being part of a democratic school where these conversations and topics orbited around the project. Then I started participating in a youth-run arts and activism space called Purple Thistle. My son went first at age eleven and I slowly followed.
There is where it started to take hold for me, because it was about solidarity and working with kids in the neighborhood who had to go to school, and carving out a space that could be theirs: they could hang out and do cool stuff and connect with other struggles in the community for free, and it was after school. A tremendously brilliant project that was founded by Matt Hern and six youth in 2001.
I’m getting to why I did this book. There’s two pieces. One is the conversation around youth liberation—which is quite different from autonomy, which I’ll get to in a second. The narrative around organizers and radicals was that only privileged kids could do it; it was confined to school and school resistance. So I started using the phrase “solidarity begins at home” at that point to deepen the conversation to Adult supremacy is everywhere all the time—it’s in every single room, always.
It was that juncture, when I started thinking of adult supremacy as a systemic problem, that it really gelled for me. Youth liberation—what happens is it silos it down into an individual group who is facing some structural oppression, and they need to get free from it. And there’s this thing that happens with young people: they grow out of it. They literally age out of it and they become part of the domineering group, adults. Where’s the intersection there? Where can we really grapple with this?
For me, it was confronting adult supremacy and then working toward youth autonomy in the everyday with the young people in your life. “Autonomy” just means they have their self. They get to decide how they live, where they live. There are varying pieces; three-year-olds can’t choose where the family is going to live (because of capitalism and all kinds of things, and it’s too much pressure to put on a young person)—but autonomy for themselves.
That includes consent in a deep way around food, bodily autonomy, school—all those types of things. It sets up a place where adults can be in solidarity with young people, because it’s up to us to do the work and all work together for collective liberation, because that’s the goal.
EA: In the introduction of the book, you say that part of it is “how we can create more autonomous communities through deepening our relationships with children.” Then you connect that with “creating long-lasting change by co-creating a future that is local, decolonial, and autonomous, all amid the discussion of capitalism.”
Quite a few of the writers themselves are under eighteen. What was that process like? Maybe you can focus on those specific chapters, if you want. Talk to us about them.
cjb: My work has always been about including young people in a non-tokenistic way, in a genuine way, around relationships—it has to be a web of relationships. I didn’t just seek out, Who are the young people who are writing today or thinking about this topic? It’s all very relational, either directly to me or through other friends in the book. It felt important to drive home that this is an adult issue, confronting adult supremacy, so that’s why it’s mostly adults in the book; this book is primarily for adults. I’ve had people say, Why isn’t it filled with young people only? It’s because we need to do this work.
I try to approach things in a deeply, profoundly intersectional way in terms of axes of oppressions. Trans issues, particularly in the US, are intersecting with a type of fascism that’s brutal. It was important to me to include some young trans voices in particular around this, because it’s a big issue. I started the book off from personal stories, and a couple of them are parents who are talking about this issue. One of them, Dani Burlison, is in conversation with their trans child, and that’s really nice.
I love the opening essay from Noleca Radway. Our work intersects, because she ran a free school as well, and she’s been in this conversation a long time. To have her talk about where she was still hitting hard edges around the issue of kids becoming their full selves at a young age and identifying as queer and trans—her piece shows a level of vulnerability that was really important to open up the book.
The third or fourth piece is from my youngest, Uilliam. He and I do a podcast together called Grounded Futures, and I’ve learned a lot about him and about facing my adult supremacy in the everyday, especially around power and how I wield it and use it—such deep, subtle ways I use it. He’s so kind, and we’re in such deep friendship around it, so I’m able to learn a lot. His piece felt vital. It had to be in the book because he thinks about things and does things in a way I wouldn’t do.
Then there’s kitty sipple; they had a young person in their life and they had a conversation in the book as well. Thanks for asking.
EA: That’s amazing. While reading those particular chapters, I couldn’t help but wonder why that wasn’t present when I was that age. I’m thirty-one, so I still have memories of my teenage years; under that a bit less. But I do remember one of my earliest memories and I wanted to bring it up as an anecdote. I was going to this private Catholic school for most of my teenage years and it was pretty conservative. I did have some nice teachers here and there, but overall I would describe the experience as broadly negative.
At the age of ten or eleven, there was—I don’t know what else to call it—a moral panic. A satanic panic, even: a moral panic around the satanists are coming. This was a global thing in the late nineties, early 2000s; in my case it was in Lebanon. I remember I was scared. I was pretty religious at the time, and I was told to wear a crucifix everywhere in case satanists come to kidnap me. None of that happened; there were no satanists anywhere around. What’s funny is—I remember this clearly because it was a few years before The Da Vinci Code. They mixed all of that stuff together with goths, kids who listen to Metallica, and people who read The Da Vinci Code—an “all of the above” kind of thing.
And I just remember never actually being talked to, no one actually asking my opinion. I had lots of feelings that were very confusing—asking myself, What is this? Why is it happening? What can we do about it? But no one bothered—the adults I mean—no one bothered to ask. The irony is, many of the kids later would be listening to Metallica, for example; it was a popular band at the time. That just shows the adults had little to no idea what was going on in our lives. They had no idea what we were listening to, what we were talking about. We had a persona we had around them, and then we had the persona we had around each other.
Later I ended up listening to Metallica and being quite okay with satanists, because I googled them at one point. That fear wasn’t there after I had the tools. It was in the early days of the internet; I had the tools to to look things up.
I thought a lot about that while reading this book. I knew when I was around thirteen or fourteen that school wasn’t for me; I was unhappy there. I was not learning much. And here I’m currently finishing a PhD. I’ve gone the route of academia and education, so by any standard I’ve “done well.” But I honestly think I would have done better had I been allowed to leave school earlier and do something else, and then maybe apply to college later on.
All of this is to say, I really like the book. I like that it’s also not linear, in the sense that the chapters are independent from one another and embody so many different experiences; I was able to relate to aspects of it even though contexts were different.
cjb: I love that. I love the story. I’m sorry you didn’t get context around that fear. It was really big; when that was going on, my youngest was really young, and I had already experienced some of that. It comes up constantly. It was a big thing in the early eighties as well. Judas Priest and those bands were the “culprits.”
EA: One of the reasons I brought it up is because one of the through-lines in a lot of these moral panics, and usually intersected with conspiracy theories, is the idea that kids have to be “protected”—and also, just as importantly, they are very rarely actually talked to. They are not asked their opinions, not asked how they feel.
The way I picture it is so-called parents’ groups expressing concerns and then going to some kind of townhall, or voting in a certain way, or talking about it on a Facebook group, coming together and saying, Our children are being brainwashed—in the US it’s Critical Race Theory or whatever. I know there’s a through-line because I’m quite obsessed (I’m autistic so I go through obsessive stuff) with conspiracy theories, how they function, and why they exist, because they say a lot about what’s happening. And from the witch trials to the satanic panic to QAnon to the Red Scare—even to aspects of white supremacist violence—so many of these phenomena often take for granted that children cannot be talked to, have no opinion of their own, and if they do have an opinion it’s de facto wrong. And that’s it.
Even the terms we use—This is childish equals This is immature or This is not to be taken seriously. We have situations where climate activists like Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakata (and many others who were under eighteen when they started) were being belittled because of their age while at the same time the largely adult crowd was acting “like children,” in an “immature” way.
I don’t know what you make of these recent developments, because we have seen much more of a youth presence; usually Gen Z-ers, for example. I’m sure it depends on context, but it’s something that is noticeable. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that.
cjb: Oh, I have lots of thoughts. First of all, I’ve had people ask me why I didn’t reach out to Greta for this book. I had started working on it before the pandemic but then I put it on hold because I didn’t want it to be a pandemic-focused book—and also, families were struggling intensely. So I paused it for a year.
Young people are always allowed to be activists; they’re always allowed to be tokenized and have their little group and have the youth panel, the youth group. That’s always been a thing. In fact, it’s quite white to say it’s new, because—in the context of North America—we know that young people in more marginalized communities, where life is challenging and hard, always organized and were always part of the struggle, and it was always multi-generational and inter-generational rather than tokenized.
I have nothing against Greta, but I don’t like what the movement has done with her, how they use her. It is not youth autonomy; it has nothing to do with liberation. In fact, it was Uilliam—we did our podcast because when that was all going on, he was really frustrated. It got siloed down to school and school actions, and as an un-schooler he was like, It’s so controlling and so contrived! For him, he’s like, I want to have conversations about “What are we building? What are we creating? What are we doing about climate change?” I don’t want to just go stand a protest. That feels like we’re just getting caught in the professional mode of movement building instead of actually doing something.So we started our project and started having conversations with organizers and people doing cool stuff about this issue.
I like to point out that that isn’t what I’m getting at. That doesn’t actually confront adult supremacy at all. Maybe there’s glimmers of it, because people are listening to a seventeen year old, but there’s always been charismatic leaders across ages. Just like when most movement leaders were white cis men there was always that token woman, that one Black woman. It has always been part of the left and the rhetoric. It concerns me, because it makes people go, Oh well, everything’s fine. It’s like the joke in the US: when Biden got in, liberals literally had signs that said, Now I can go back to having brunch. It’s like, Oh my gosh! It’s not even close to being dealt with.
EA: Absolutely.
As you pointed out quite well, there’s a lot of reasons to be skeptical; to use [Greta] as an example again, it also usually lets the adults in the situation off the hook because they’re like, Oh, well, at least we’re platforming her. At least we’re inviting her, and others. We saw this in the recent COP in Cairo, which was particularly egregious, allowing very little space—Egyptians are not allowed to do anything, because it’s a dictatorship.
There is a parallel, in a bizarre or interesting way, between how young people are talked about and how elderly people are talked about. I’m reminded of a sketch from an episode of Seinfeld (I recently did an episode on Seinfeld): the punchline is that when you are a kid, birthdays don’t matter, and when you’re of a certain age, birthdays also don’t matter. The joke was that the adults around you are treating you like a kid; they’re changing your diapers, that sort of thing. He was just mocking old people, mocking kids, but there is an interesting argument to be made here: you can think of a timeline, and from a certain age to a certain age, we are more or less taken seriously, but anything before that and after that, with some occasional exceptions, we’re not.
This is why we say we’re “infantilizing” the elderly. We’re using that term to say we’re treating them like children—which says a lot about how we treat children.
cjb: I have a response, and I have to thank Toby Rollo (who wrote for the book) for it, because I hadn’t really thought it through. It’s definitely something I would get hung up on, ageism at the other end of life. He says no, and let me explain why. Elders, at least most places, not everywhere, have rights. They have rights for their body, they have rights for how they’re treated; they’re protected in a real, deep way. Kids do not. It’s still legal in many states to spank you children.
It’s very different, but there are similarities when we pull it apart and talk about power. Between thirty and seventy are the prime ages where people have the most power. That’s based on all kinds of supremacy stuff around intellectual ability, money, income earning; all those types of things are webbed into that power, and who has it, and how it’s wielded, as people become elders. Klee Benally did this: you have to earn to be an actual elder. You have to show up and treat young people well and be in community in a good way, and be willing to be challenged.
The fact that comedians, or anybody, calls it “infantilizing the elder” shows you how much hatred there is for young people and for children. That’s probably one of the hardest things I had to look at and be more vocal about working on this book
I used to try to hold the nuance of single moms, or moms who are struggling, or parents who are struggling, and the more I get close to adult supremacy and really examine it, the hatred of children is pretty deep—and it’s by design. It was designed this way. Colonizers know that the best way to assimilate people in one generation is to go after the children, to take away their sense of who they are, and use pedagogy as the ultimate tool to get rid of it.
EA: Yeah, it’s the infamous “Kill the Indian, save the man” that American missionaries were talking about at that time.
This book helped me reflect a bit deeper. There was this joke growing up: for example, you’re an undergrad at university; you’re seventeen, eighteen, and someone who’s in their last year is twenty, twenty-one—there’s a hierarchy there. Part of it is, you’ve done two years, you’ve done three years. When I started university we would say to one another, Well, next year it will be us, and In two years it will be us, so let’s hold on for now and then we can be the older people in the group. Because usually in situations where the age bracket is three, four years at a time, it’s very easy to conclude, Well, you just need to wait, and then you will be better off then the person who’s coming after you, and you can feel good about yourself then—because you didn’t feel good about yourself last year.
I remember very distinctly hating younger folks—anyone who was one year younger. I didn’t think about it consciously at the time; I didn’t act on it as far as I can remember—or I may have, in subconscious ways. It’s the same as Kids are pointless. What’s the point of a kid? Like the stereotypical older person who is grumpy or complaining about the youth. That joke—I feel like it’s been internalized somehow. It’s something I’ve seen in myself, my friends, even in the broader culture, whether it’s here in Europe or back home in Lebanon.
There is, as you said, a genuine, raw hatred of those who are younger. They’re often talked about in headlines, in articles—just pick up any newspaper that has a topic on children or teenagers, it’s almost always (with the exception of some who are tokenized as a savant or genius) that Something is wrong with the youth. The reverse, which can be problematic as well, is The kids are alright, or The kids are going to be alright.
cjb: They’re going to save us! is the worst.
EA: It’s an amazing burden to put on people.
I don’t know if you have any reflections on that, feel free.
cjb: Thank you, that’s beautiful. I’m loving that we’re having a dialogue.
I agree, it is internalized. That’s how oppression works, right? Why I was really pulled to working on this topic is that it’s something we all experience in one way or another. I don’t mean to collapse this into sameness; this isn’t a liberal call of We’re all the same. It’s very different, the levels at which we experience youth oppression and childism—but it is something we can all remember and talk about, because it is internalized, and we do carry it forward. It is in every single room we’re in. It’s always present. It’s a place to come together and move out from there.
I agree with some of the scholars who put it at the center of all oppression, including bell hooks. She saw it as, That’s where it all begins. It all begins in the home, with the oppression and domination of the child. I love that she said the “patriarchal parent”—she did not distinguish that it had to be a cis male. It didn’t matter.
EA: Yeah, it’s a form of power regardless of who’s wielding it.
Linking to that, throughout the book there’s quite a number of chapters that have to do with the topic of education: schooling versus unschooling versus non-schooling and other ways of schooling. Had this book been around and part of a wider conversation back home in Lebanon, a good chunk of the years I consider largely negative—I have very few positive memories from the first two decades. Which is saying a lot because I’m three decades [old] now, so two-thirds of that.It’s very sad.
Me and my wife have this conversation all the time. We’re at this stage now where we’re trying to reckon with everything that happened, and it stops with us; we don’t want to reproduce it for the next generation. I’m still struggling, to this day, with issues of language. I love learning languages, but I struggle with them a lot due to childhood bullying. And it’s not just that: certain subjects in school were made inaccessible because there was only one way of learning and that’s it. If you were not resonating with how the teacher was teaching you math, that means you suck at math and that’s it. If you didn’t resonate with how the teacher was teaching you philosophy, you suck at philosophy and that’s it.
I failed philosophy at the baccalaureate because the teacher said I didn’t understand—I got an eight out of twenty. And I’m doing a PhD in philosophy now. I can say, Oh, fuck you, and it doesn’t matter, because that was twenty years ago now. But the problem is, this is still happening. People are still teaching this way, whether it’s a point system, whether it’s tests. There’s some conversation about that in the UK these days.
It feels like it should be obvious that up until a certain age, some guidance is needed, and then the more we mature the more we can be autonomous. One of the things I appreciated in how my dad did things is that when I was fourteen, I decided I wanted to quit school and become a footballer, and my dad said, Okay, you can do that, but you know, there are footballers who continue school. Basically, I couldn’t rebel; there wasn’t a rebellion to be done, so I got bored of the topic of football at some point. But the fact that he did some research and said, You can join this club if you want to start training, gave me the impression that I could do something about it if I wanted. It was limited; I don’t think it was entirely autonomous. But even that tiny window of opportunity was already something I had that most people around me back then didn’t.
I’ve mostly recovered from that past; there’s still hiccups. But damaging self-confidence was at the core of the education system. To tell you that you’re not good enough, and These are the steps that you can take, and if you achieve them you can position yourself in some kind of hierarchy: This is how good you are. This is your self worth.
It feels like it should be obvious that this is a moronic way of doing things—an unhealthy way of doing things. It feels like it’s trying to solve a problem by creating a problem. The point of schools in this system is to create “productive members of society” and that’s it. It’s not about learning. It’s not about growing. It’s not about gaining knowledge. It’s like, Well, you can do those on your own time. It’s like a side job or a hobby, rather than something you do because you want to.
cjb: Totally. That resonates with me a lot. I have learning disabilities and dyslexia and speech apraxia. And if a teacher couldn’t see past that stuff, then I failed. I was one of those students that failed, got incompletes, or got A‘s. If the teacher could see through that barrier I had, they saw my penchant for being a nerd and loving ideas and loving knowledge and loving history. But it took a unique learning space for that to get nurtured and cultivated, and it was rare. I’m a high school dropout and proud of it.
One of the things we tried to do at Thistle was a bit challenging. High school particularly is, for most youth, a waste of time. It really ought to be abolished, a hundred percent. It’s such a fertile time! If we’re living in a way where this age group is still living in a house where people are financially supporting them—what an incredible time to do exploration and deep connecting to self! I’ve seen it in both my kids, and not just them. It gets testimonial, but because of the work and communities I’ve been involved in in the last twenty years, countless numbers of young people who didn’t do high school are in my life who are now in their thirties or forties (and teens and twenties too), and seeing how they enter their twenties is so incredibly different than the people I was around, or most people who are schooled, because they have to do that fumbling and finding themselves and figuring out their autonomous selves in their twenties instead. There’s something wonderful that can happen in the teens.
For un-schoolers, or kids who have a more autonomous and consensually-based life at home at a young age, individuation or maturation happens earlier, because they have a sense of themselves. They don’t feel gaslit. They know themselves really young. And guidance happens all along the way. I still reach out to my friends, including my kids, for guidance because we should support each other.
And it all works out in the end. Thirty, forty years later, you can be like, Oh, well, I ended up here! But every now and again I feel a bit sad because I had the potential—”potential” isn’t even the right word. It was like a desire and a penchant towards being a scholar. But it was constantly thwarted because of my learning disabilities and dyslexia and speech apraxia. People would belittle me or write me off because I couldn’t say a word correctly, or my sentence structure would be a bit wacky.
EA: Right. In my case it was because I couldn’t roll my Rs. I still can’t.
cjb: I can’t either.
EA: In French and in English it’s okay. In French especially it’s common. But in Arabic it’s distinctive.
cjb: So you can relate when I say I had a speech impediment.
EA: Yeah. As soon as I opened my mouth, immediately I was noticeable. I wasn’t able to say a sentence for the value of that sentence. There was always something that preceded the actual content coming out of my mouth.
The early 2000s sucked. I was ten when 9/11 happened, and then 2003 was the invasion of Iraq, and Lebanon was also affected. It was not fun in general. Even putting aside the bigger events most of us can’t control in the immediate term, I remember so many days that are blurred into one another. I can’t distinguish most of them because we’re sitting in class, everything is the same all the time. No creativity. It’s literally not allowed. You can’t draw. You can’t decorate your class. I know schools differ on that, which is good. But that was my experience.
I remember thinking a lot of the time: I could be doing something else right now. I want to be done so that by three p.m., the bus takes me home and then my day can start. That’s how it felt. My day started at three-thirty p.m.: have a late lunch, then start the day. Then between four p.m. and the time we went to bed, at nine or ten at that age, it’s like an entire world was happening. It’s the same time as the time that was spent at school: eight, eight, and then eight hours of sleep. It says a lot.
cjb: It’s perpetuating this thing we have to do under capitalism called being a worker. You have to be okay with being bored, and your real life starts after work.
EA: Yeah, and the hierarchy; you can enjoy things on your own time. Want to learn Japanese? That’s fine, you can do this after school. Want to get into some series, or a movie, you can do that, it’s fine, as long as you have finished the serious stuff. Because there’s a hierarchy of what counts as important and not.
What was that Mark Twain quote? Happy is the person who makes a living out of their hobby, or something along those lines. It says a lot. We know hobbies are associated with happy stuff. We know these are positive feelings. We know these are things that are good for us. At the same time, this knowledge or realization we have is in tension with a different thing we have internalized: even if it’s important, it’s not as important as the thing that counts as “productive.”
My partner is into art. She’s exploring. She’s getting into it; I could see her doing this “full time.” She’s learning; she has to learn certain skills—and she’s able to do it to a larger extent than she would have in a different situation, because her work is flexible. But fundamentally, because of the world we live in, and we have to think about rent and all that stuff, for the most part she can’t say, Oh, I’m just going to quit my paid thing and dedicate myself to this, and maybe in a year or two, or five years, I can make enough money out of it to sustain myself. Because you have to think about it within capitalism.
Those flexibilities, you can create them in the household if it’s a place of trust and safety. But even in that situation you have the internalized worker, you have the internalized productivist mindset that is difficult to get rid of. I’m not completely rid of it. I’m trying to here and there; I have some successes. Sometimes I’m chilling on the couch and it’s like, Fuck, I need to to be doing something now!
cjb: I can’t pull the Latin word out of thin air, but “school” literally means “leisure.” It’s like hanging out, or learning together.
EA: Lycium, yeah.
cjb: We know this. We know there’s all kinds of problems of who got to learn together under pre-capitalism. But we also know that the rise of universities—the hierarchy wasn’t there, because the teachers were the ones who were graded. The students owned the universities early on. It was student-run, and if you didn’t pass your oration at the end of your philosophy class, that professor was let go. It was all on them to show up and create the learning space and mentorship. It’s all gotten [to be] about supporting capitalism and warehousing young people to be good workers. Of course there are accelerated programs and special programs for those special kids who get to be the future leaders and future ruling class. That’s all built into the system as well.
I don’t like the narrative that Kids today aren’t very smart or Kids today don’t read. It’s all connected to schooling and school cuts and poverty—there’s all kinds of things going on—but there was Harvard study about Harvard students, Gen Z, showing up and not reading books…and you dig into it and it’s all these affluent kids who have been bought into Harvard. So it’s a very skewed test. It’s not really about young people in general and different interests. That’s always been a thing. Not every kid loves reading, and that’s okay. That’s one of the things I push against, this whole centering a certain way of being in the world and being valued.
This is why I identify as a de-professional, because this whole idea of everyone trying to become a professional is so tied into colonialism, whiteness, and empire, its control over us. Some kids have other things to contribute to our lives, to each others’ lives, to their own life, and it’s not sitting in a corner reading theory books. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t like those narratives. I’m a Gen X-er and when I was coming of age, our generation were the “lost generation.” We had a very similar narrative about us, the punk kids and the latchkey kids: super neglected. The intersection of women’s rights and women being able to work more—that feminist movement left kids behind.
It’s propaganda that does this, and it’s part of the machine, but wow, it’s like goldfish memories about history! It recycles itself. A historical amnesia is at play. It’s cultivated and manufactured as well.
EA: I’m currently listening to a series on Behind the Bastards on the Illuminati—or rather, the conspiracy around that. It was a group of people in Bavaria, and there was an entire conspiracy around them that ended up taking on a life of its own. It then got recycled every generation since then, whether it’s the satanic panic, the QAnon stuff, the antisemitic stuff, the “Jewish cabal,” and stuff like that—all of these things get recycled.
Robert Evans, who’s the host of the podcast, was reading a scholar quoting one of those Illuminati people from the 1700s. From the scholar’s analysis of that time, and how conspiracy theories worked at that time, you could just change some vocabularies here and there and it would sound like the QAnon stuff. It can be quite disheartening, thinking about how certain things are the same. At some point, one of the guests on the podcast said, This just sounds like people who are ranting on Twitter.
cjb: Yeah. We have a joke in our house about people who wake up in the morning and go, I have this idea! No one’s ever thought of it before! and they tweet it out—and it’s cliché. Not only has it been thought of before, it’s deeply cliché and goes back two thousand years.
And whatever, that happens. Ideas are in the ether and people get aware of them. This isn’t to post shade on people understanding something for the first time—it’s that they tweet about it that’s funny to me.
EA: In an alternative timeline where Twitter isn’t where it currently is, we would have seen all of these as opportunities. It became toxic at some point six, seven years ago, but there was a moment. I still remember the golden age when it was generally fine to say something and someone’s going to respond—which is what Mastodon is now for me: someone will respond to you nicely! Even if you said something that might be ignorant, someone will call you in instead of calling you out, hold you accountable if it’s wrong. But there is a learning curve built into it which I quite appreciate, and is linked to what we’re talking about.
Youth autonomy before the internet is probably very different than what it looks like with the internet. The principle is the same of course, but the way it can be achieved is fascinating. Part of me is like this inner child, excited about what the internet can be for kids now—again, with all of the caveats. You can learn so much on YouTube, but it’s still YouTube; it’s still owned by Google, and all the caveats that come with this. In theory you can, for example, spend your entire day watching crash course history, and then go onto some documentary or lecture.
I was born in 1991. I lived half my childhood, roughly, before the internet became everywhere. There was no smartphones. It was still a time when you had to decide whether to use the phone or connect to the internet. That’s my childhood. But when you did connect to the internet, then there was this opening up of my world. In many ways, I’m a child of the internet. I’m a kid who grew up on the internet, as much as I would describe myself as someone who grew up in Lebanon. That’s easily understood. But if someone says Where are you from? and I say I’m from the internet, that sounds weird, right? But it is that. It’s something I guess I’m still grappling with.
cjb: Absolutely. I love doing analog projects and work, and having a physical space where people can come together and learn together. There was this whole movement about a decade ago called “edupunks,” and they figured I would be part of that scene that’s learning about everything becoming digitized on the internet—and I’m like, No, people still need to learn together and be together and have relationships.
And also, I agree with you. I’m not anti-internet. I’m not a big fan of Web 2.0 because of capitalism. It had potential; the Gen X-ers and younger boomers who were creating these community spaces early in the eighties for people to come together had a good idea. It was really important. It was very much used for the left early on. That’s how we worked in solidarity across distances, and it really helped. We know it helped movements and struggles and connectivity. But we know—all media studies will tell you—that Web 2.0 hasn’t helped: it’s caused more friction and problems.
For both my kids, connecting across the world has been vital, and I’m the same. This is why I’m not anti-technology. With my learning disabilities, and also being shy and an introvert, I wouldn’t be doing anything I’m doing today without email. All that stuff, I just wouldn’t have. Maybe eventually, but it would have taken a lot longer.
EA: Absolutely. As I said, I didn’t know I was autistic growing up. It was something I discovered much later. There’s no comparison. On the one hand, my mom was very understanding in that she saw her son had a thing for books, so there was an unlimited budget when it came to books. That helped me a lot. I remember this very distinctly. I’m still very grateful that she genuinely tried.
Lebanon’s internet is notorious for being slow, and to this day, it’s still one of the worst in the world. At one point, we had one of the fastest internet connections, which is still very slow by Switzerland standards (where I currently live). But it was still much faster than other parts of my neighborhood, and that’s because she paid the premium fee, because she saw how much I needed it. She saw me spending most of my time on Wikipedia or those sorts of websites.
I don’t know if you have any general reflections—feel free to share whatever you want to share. Talk about some of the projects you’re doing, and we can get into the book section after that.
cjb: Thank you. This conversation’s been really fun and generative. I’m not on Web 2.0 anymore, but you can find me at Listening House Media. We do a little press of pamphlets (bringing pamphlets back!). I do audio and visual work there. I’m part of a collective collaborative called Grounded Futures. We have podcasts and different projects. I do a show with my teen called the Grounded Futures show. Trust Kids! you can get at AK Press. My other books and work you can find through GroundedFutures.com.
Trust kids. Listen to kids, they know. But also, show up in solidarity. It’s not up to them to save the world. We have all the power; we should be breaking down these walls, these social borders between us, and working together. That’s my final message.
I do have three books. I’m really interested in multigenerational and intergenerational ways of coming together, so I picked three books that are all ages—though it depends on your kid how young you go.
The first one is the Earthsea series from Ursula K LeGuin. Since the onset of Harry Potter I always suggested to kids: if you want to read a book about a wizard creating a better and different world, not replicating all the horrors, please read Ursula. Ursula’s at the core of all my work, so shoutout to her.
The second one is Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. It’s Miyazaki’s first film but it was also his first manga. It’s four books. The movie crosses all four books. But I recommend getting the manga. It’s beautiful. Any Miyazaki shows youth autonomy in a really profound way. Whisper of the Heart especially. It’s just beautiful.
And then the other series is also a show now and has been for a while. I recommend the manga, The Mushishi series. With my speech impediment, I’m not going to try to say her name [Yuki Urushibarla] but we’ll put it in the show notes. Those are my three.
EA: I was this close to wearing my Totoro hoodie. I’m learning Japanese, and one of the many reasons is Miyazaki’s movies. I was obsessed with Spirited Away and Mononoke. I don’t know how many times I watched those. And then I got into Kiki’s Delivery Service, which is still my favorite movie. But Whisper of the Heart is fantastic. Nausicaa is beuatiful. I haven’t read the mangas; I should. Earthsea I haven’t read either, yet. My wife has. She loves it. I will at one point.
carla, thanks a lot for this. This was super fun.
cjb: Thanks so much for having me on. This was a wonderful conversation.
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