How to Say No to Fascism: Curtis White’s Anti-Manifesto of Resistance

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. A few months ago, we did a show with Gal Beckerman, who writes for the New York Times [ed.: Beckerman is a staff writer at The Atlantic; he was previously an editor at the New York Times Book Review], on how to be a dissident. He has a new book out on that, which is doing rather well. He suggests the best way to be a dissident is to be pessimistic. And a few days ago, carrying on in that vein, we did a show with Gloria Browne-Marshall, about, A Protest History of the United States. That's the title of her new book. And carrying on in the same vein, we are talking not about protest or dissidents, but resistance. My guest today, Curtis White, a very distinguished literary thinker— one magazine called a splendidly cranky utopian— has a new book out. It's called On Resistance: A Manifesto. And Curtis is joining us from, Port Townsend in Washington. Curtis, congratulations on the new book.

00:01:38 Curtis White: Thank you.

00:01:39 Andrew Keen: What are we resisting? What why did you write this book? Why is there a need to resist?

00:01:46 Curtis White: Oh, I was being provocative, I think. But, it's a an unconventional book in many ways, especially for a book called On Resistance. There's not actually much in the way of conventional politics in it. So I don't mention Donald Trump more than once or twice, and, there's no, discussion of party politics or the midterm elections or anything about like that. Any intervention in the sort of politics as usual. What I focus on in the book and what I've always focused on is cultural politics. And, another way— the way that I try to talk about cultural politics, my particular version of it is as psychic treason. And that's a term that I take from Ted Gioia's book, Music: A Subversive History. And Gioia's argument is basically that music in particular, but all of the arts really, are, subversive by their nature. In other words, they're particularly— and the thing that we recognize most often is the subversion of form within a particular art. So music is particular— particularly aggressive in that way. And, so what I have latched onto is the idea that a certain kind of treason is in the— is sort of constantly being committed by the arts. Sometimes that treason is formal and sometimes it's more— it blends in. It moves with. It allies itself with social movements. Now the best and earliest example of that [unclear] is the Romantics. Alright. Once the church was out of the way, the English and the German Romantics in particular sort of declared cultural war. And, so you get figures like Schiller and Goethe, the Jena crowd, the Jena movement in philosophy in the, late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. And, of course, the English poets were, I think, what you would call now— we would call now the first dropouts. They, they dropped out of the rigid, notion of what it was possible for the children of the educated classes to do, which would either join the military, join the clergy, or run the farm back home, keep, you know, keep track of what the mansion and the properties are doing and collecting rents from the peasants. So figures like Wordsworth and Coleridge basically said, I'm not having anything to do with that. I'm gonna go to the countryside and write poetry. So in many ways, they're an example for me

00:05:05 Andrew Keen: Okay. So the— so, I mean, we'll come back to this, obviously, in some detail in a few minutes. But from what I'm getting from you so far, Curtis, On Resistance is a cultural kind of resistance of artists, of poets. We did a show with my old friend, Jon Taplin, recently as well, where he asked what's the— where's the countercultural outrage to Trump? I don't wanna turn this again into another conversation on Trump. He had a piece in Rolling Stone on asking whether the counterculture can rise again. Taplin was an important, participant in the counterculture of the late sixties. He was Bob Dylan's tour manager. He was the producer of— of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. He's very familiar with that. He saw this in generational terms. He wanted young Americans to get back out on the street. Are you— you're also, in some ways, a veteran of the sixties and of the counterculture. Is On Resistance a form of nostalgia, or are you re— rejecting nostalgia? You began this conversation talking about Yeah. Coleridge and Wordsworth. I was guessing you're probably about to come on to the Grateful Dead. Are you suggesting we just go back to the nineteen sixties, Curtis, or the eighteen sixties for that matter?

00:06:26 Curtis White: No. I, I'm in the, counterculture. The sixties counterculture was huge for me personally. I grew up in the East Bay and, had many formative experiences, in Berkeley, and then I moved to San Francisco in the late sixties, early seventies. So, yeah, that counterculture was huge for me because, in my own personal experience, started in late high school, it became clear to me that what my country was, what you call America on your program, was, it had lied to me, and it had, it had shown that it has— was indifferent to whether or not I lived or died. That was a kind of formative insight or enlightenment even, I would call it, for me. Then I'm— when I moved to San Francisco, I met [unclear] that didn't say these things to me and, in fact, encouraged me to, not go to Vietnam or whatever. So, yeah, that was very important to me. But as I make clear, I think, in the introduction, my position is more Nietzschean, which is to say forget the past, move on to the next what Nietzsche calls joyful deed. Move on to the next joyful deed. And that's what we're having so much trouble with not right now. It's not that we're returning to the sixties. It's about how do we find that edge where we could commit the next

00:08:06 Andrew Keen: Right. And you summarize it nicely in, in I know the first chapter of the book is Psychic Treason. It got published in— on CounterPunch last year. And I'm quoting you, and you write it in a kind of Gramscian sense, I guess. I'm living in a world that no longer exists. We're in this, period between periods, I guess, an interregnum as Gramsci describes that. Is that what you're trying to say in this book, is that, we're all in this world that no longer exists, and we want to look back, but we actually need to look forward?

00:08:43 Curtis White: Yeah. Well, living in a world that no longer exists is for me in terms of the counterculture. It's true for me. It's that those years are still in my head, and, I don't think they're gonna go anywhere, but that's just being human. But they needn't be the world that, anybody else is, missing. And, yeah. So the focus for me is on finding the edge and, living. So I've always had this, since my book, The Middle Mind, I've had this sort of motto which has fared well for me, clarified things for me. And the motto was sort of misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win. The making beautiful can be any number of things. It doesn't have to be art. And the trying to win is where you socialize the impulses to miss from a misbehavior.

00:09:49 Andrew Keen: And you've written a number of books, as you say, including The Middle Mind, which did rather well. You've written The Science Delusion, Memories of My Father Watching TV, which is a great title. It's a little bit vague, though, Curtis. You're a professor of literature. You've talked about nature and Wordsworth and Coleridge and blah blah blah. But how people actually supposed to resist? What exactly does this involve?

00:10:13 Curtis White: That's for— not for me to say.

00:10:15 Andrew Keen: So why write the book On Resistance and manifestos are supposed to be calls to action, aren't they? I mean, when one thinks, for example, of The Communist Manifesto, it was a call to get up and change the world.

00:10:29 Curtis White: Well, it's a call to self-reflection for sure for thinking about where we are now. So, you know, you can't get to what Hegel called the absolute without, knowing it. Right? So the problem isn't merely one of acting, resisting, active resistance in the street or whatever. It's also a problem of self-understanding, of knowing who we are, of knowing what you wanna see in the future and, socializing those ideas. Right now, we need what we really need is not to try— think that we can overturn the status quo. What we need right now is companions. So we need to socialize our impulses, and focus that on, what we can do. But, you know, I'm just not the sort of person, you know, being an artist or novelist myself, I'm just not the sort of person who can, tell people what they ought to be doing. That's for them to discover.

00:11:34 Andrew Keen: Okay. So I take your point. Although, again, I wonder whether people picking up a book On Resistance on a bookshelf, for example, might think that there would be if it's a manifesto, there'd be a kind of guide. So what's our— but okay. So I take your point, Curtis. But what is the thing that we are supposed to resist against? I don't wanna turn this into a Trump conversation. So leaving aside politics, we've done many shows on our age of anxiety, for example, particularly this generational sense. Is that what we're supposed to be resisting? What are the forces that drove you to write this book On Resistance?

00:12:14 Curtis White: I think I, make it pretty clear in the book that what I'm the way I'm going to approach the problem is through story. And, the fir— the first half of the book is, basically ideology critique. Speaking of Gramsci and Adorno and the Western Marxist— Western Marxist humanist tradition. So the first half of the book is a critique of okay. If we say we want resistance, what does the culture say to us? It says you have no need for resistance because we've already provided it for you. So you have philanthropy. You have, virtuous corporations, and you have, the liberal tradition in politics. Those three things provide all the resistance that you need. So I spend the first half of the book critiquing that idea. The second half of the book then begins to develop, at least, an intellectual framework, a sensorium of what, what better stories we might be telling ourselves about where we are and what we ought to do.

00:13:35 Andrew Keen: As I said, one the Paris Review once described you as a splendidly cranky utopian. So

00:13:44 Curtis White: That was actually Molly Ivins. [ed.: Ivins called White "a splendidly cranky academic"; "The Splendidly Cranky Utopian" was the title of his 2016 Paris Review Daily interview]

00:13:46 Andrew Keen: Oh, so Molly Ivins described you. Is that what they're quoting her? But, in this book On Resistance, is it a critique then of liberalism? You're saying that philanthropy won't help us, but so what? What else? What were the other two things apart from philanthropy?

00:14:06 Curtis White: Virtuous corporations and liberalism.

00:14:09 Andrew Keen: Well, virtuous corporations are probably a little bit of a straw man. I'm not sure how many people actually believe in. What you're thinking about Amazon or Google or something?

00:14:17 Curtis White: Well, sure. I mean, think my main, my main example is Steve Jobs and Apple and the way in which he first Buddha-branded, counterculture-branded his products as a way of inducing us to buy his products because he assumed that we already were sympathetic to that tradition.

00:14:36 Andrew Keen: What about companies like, Patagonia, for example? And we did a show recently on a, it seems, though, very decent company, Bookshop.org, where you can actually buy you a new book, which is redistributing revenue from book sales to back to writers and bookstores themselves. Are you suggesting that you can't be a good corporation?

00:15:10 Curtis White: The evidence would suggest that's true.

00:15:14 Andrew Keen: Well, I don't

00:15:15 Curtis White: I mean, I'm happy to suggest it. I don't spend a lot of time. I mean, the Apple example and Steve Jobs is just a way for me to give an example of what I'm talking about.

00:15:26 Andrew Keen: Old example, Curtis. I mean, it's many people have made it in the past. I think even Jobs now, if he was around, probably wouldn't defend it. But, I mean, what about Patagonia, for example, or as I said, Bookshop.org, which is helping local bookstores survive?

00:15:45 Curtis White: Actually, Patagonia is probably an exception to the rule, and it very, very quietly does what it does. I know some people who work for Patagonia, and, all the signs that they— all the things that they say to me make me think that it is indeed a virtuous corporation. But I would say the— they're an exception to the rule.

00:16:08 Andrew Keen: And then on philanthropy, again, there are presumably some people doing good things with their money, aren't there? Or you're suggesting that philanthropy, by definition, is a bad thing?

00:16:21 Curtis White: Oh, no. What I'm saying is that, philanthropy is a form of resistance or a form of liberalism that is, limited by its own need to protect the source of its money. So I give examples of, especially, of, the relationship between the, what I call big green, the big green, institutions like Sierra Club and its, relationship to, actual on the spot, you know, activists and the way in which it comes into a site that is working on a particular problem at the grassroots level comes into that site sort of takes over and, and limits the kind of resistance that that group can offer. And, this is an argument that, the, writer Mark Dowie makes in much much greater detail than I can make here. So, yeah, if you wanna know how it is that philanthropy, sort of, assists, environmental groups while also protecting their— the source of their, wealth. The official

00:17:58 Andrew Keen: So are you suggesting I mean, this, Bill Gates, of course, is a very well known controversial philanthropist. We've done shows on him. Are you suggesting that he only gives money away for vaccinations in Africa to somehow protect his own wealth?

00:18:16 Curtis White: I have no idea why he gives money away.

00:18:18 Andrew Keen: Well, you're the one who brought up philanthropies. I'm just curious as to as the— and it always seemed to me that there are some good and some bad philanthropists like in anything else.

00:18:28 Curtis White: There is, there is a section of the book that talks about, the, the controversy that the Gates Foundation created when it was helping with, polio vaccination in Africa in the shadow of a energy producing thing, an oil company or something, a gas company that was, polluting the area and actually causing the early deaths of, the people there, the children there. So on the one hand, he was helping with poll— polio, and on the other hand, he was invested in, an oil producer, I think it was, who is, causing lung problems, causing early deaths among the

00:19:15 Andrew Keen: It's a very dark

00:19:16 Curtis White: This is not something that I made up.

00:19:19 Andrew Keen: No. I do that. I know. And

00:19:21 Curtis White: The LA— [unclear].

00:19:22 Andrew Keen: And we've done shows on the problems with Gates's philanthropy. You're not alone, but it's a very dark take. I mean, you brought up Steve Jobs. His widow now has been another philanthropist, been very generous with her money. She, for example, funds The Atlantic magazine that I don't know if you read it, but I know a lot of our viewers and listeners do. It seems very good. I'm guessing that she doesn't just fund that because she wants to somehow recycle or protect her wealth. There must be some forms of philanthropy that aren't such a bad thing, Curtis, aren't they?

00:20:00 Curtis White: No. I'm just suggesting that I don't know. I'm not a— an expert in, the business of philanthropy, and I don't know what every corporation does. I'm simply saying that, and giving three examples of how, these, progressive— these forms of progressive politics self-limit in order to protect their— the source of their wealth.

00:20:24 Andrew Keen: Are you— yeah. So is your book On Resistance— you said it's not political, but you brought up liberalism and you beat

00:20:31 Curtis White: It's not conventionally political.

00:20:33 Andrew Keen: I don't know what conventionally political means, but, are you said— are you offering an alternative to liberalism? Some people might think given your critique of philanthropy and corporations that you're a socialist.

00:20:50 Curtis White: Well, given the current state of affairs, yeah, I'm offering an alternative. That alternative is called dropping out, doing something else, and doing it with other people. And, you know, I mean, an example of that is simply all the local organic, organic farms and the farmers markets have created in most cities in this country, a thriving kind of communal, well-being. And I say, god bless them. So we need more things like that in more areas of life. But, unfortunately, it's really difficult for people because, they're in what I would call a money jail. The things that is possible for people to do are limited by the fact that, everybody's struggling for money. So that's an— that's a problem. I don't, you know, I don't have a recipe for getting around money, but I will say that I think money is a prison.

00:21:51 Andrew Keen: Well, as you say, we're all for better or worse.

00:21:53 Curtis White: It's a large generalization, Andrew. I know. Yeah.

00:21:56 Andrew Keen: I mean, it's a bit vague. I mean, you're certainly not the first or last person to describe money as a prison. So coming back to the sixties, I mean, you've argued that I know that we should forget the Beatles, forget the sixties, but it sounds to me like you're telling everybody to just drop out like they did in the sixties. Go and live in a commune, do something completely different, drop out of the system. I'm not being critical here, Curtis. I mean, I think it's a an interesting argument. Why not just go back to the counterculture, to the ideal, the promise of dropping out in the sixties that you lived through?

00:22:35 Curtis White: Well, if the form of resistance that I'm advocating, is successful, it will look somewhat like the sixties because it will be led by art. But what I'm— we're missing right now is that all of the arts are kind of, isolated. They're isolated from each other, and they're especially isolated from any social movement that might be in process. And that's what I'd like to see change.

00:23:05 Andrew Keen: Why, though?

00:23:06 Curtis White: I don't know how desperate this culture is gonna have to get before, any of these things become plausible.

00:23:14 Andrew Keen: Right. So to go back to Jon Taplin, I think in some ways, you're on the same page as him, and perhaps in other ways, you're not. He wants to go back to the culture of the sixties too, the explicitly political culture. He wants the counterculture to rise again to challenge the current status quo. Would you agree with that? I mean, Jon, in his Rolling Stone piece, said that artists have always led resistance in America until Trump and the technocracy took over. Is the problem with the system or with the artists themselves? Where

00:23:46 Curtis White: It's not until Trump. It started much earlier than Trump. It basically started with Reagan and Reaganomics and the slow gradual decades-long withdrawal of public money from public goods like education, especially education, but also, health care and that. I would say I'm not returning to the sixties counterculture. I have no interest in that at all, but I am interested in countercultures. But it doesn't have to be a sixties-style counterculture, although it will necessarily, I think, and beautifully, involve art.

00:24:25 Andrew Keen: You said that, and you said this and you've also written it that, telling stories. So we need to tell better stories. That's how we, above all else, successfully resist. That's what On Resistance is. Tell me a story, Curtis, that somehow captures this.

00:24:51 Curtis White: There, it's not so much a story as a history, I suppose, but I have spent my life, working with other authors in the independent press movement, which started just shortly after, I'd say, the heydays of the sixties. And, I helped create a press that still exists. It celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, just a year or so ago called FC2, originally the Fiction Collective. And it is a publisher of innovative fiction, that is run by its authors. And so there's a sense in which my participation in that and it goes on. I'm actually, I'm thinking of— we're talking now about creating a Substack that would— the problem is it's not visible. So we're talking about creating a Substack that would make the still existing, still thriving artistically independent press movement more visible. And, you know, from the point of view of an individual like myself, what else can you do? I've committed myself to that. And,

00:26:02 Andrew Keen: So you're considering doing a Substack. Substack's been around a while, Curtis. I mean, I've been on it several years. Why are you still thinking about it? Why not just put it on Substack? What's the big deal?

00:26:14 Curtis White: Well, no. I— we're— I think we're having some difficulties organizing ourselves, but, eventually, we're gonna have a Substack that features independent presses, you know, outside of the money circuit of commercial publishing. And, all that stuff still exists. I mean, people complain that there are no good books anymore. Baloney. There are a lot of good books being published by presses like, Graywolf and Coffee House and, they're like an o— a translation press called Open Letter in Rochester. You know? And they do maybe half a dozen books a year, but they're high quality. They're really wonderful books. And, they— the problem is that they don't have any visibility in part because they don't have any money. So, yeah, I saw may— maybe Substack will help with that, and that's why— that's what we're talking about. But

00:27:13 Andrew Keen: But the— well, this new media does enable people to self-publish and put their movies up on YouTube or

00:27:20 Curtis White: Self-publishing.

00:27:22 Andrew Keen: Well, but I'm not entirely sure why. So what's your argument? You say there is still good literature around in some of the underground or, independent presses. Why aren't people reading them?

00:27:35 Curtis White: Because they're invisible. They people don't know about them, and that's be— and that's because of the dominance of, commercial publishing. So, you know, it's a long shot, a long road, whatever, but I know a heck of a lot of people that are committed to it.

00:27:53 Andrew Keen: Well, your book, Curtis, is on Pen— Penguin Random House, which is the largest publisher in the world. It was— it's,

00:28:01 Curtis White: wait a minute. Wait. It's published by Melville House, which is an independent publisher.

00:28:05 Andrew Keen: They— Yeah. But it's distributed by Penguin Random House. When we look at the web

00:28:14 Curtis White: Melville House is an independent publisher. In fact, I don't know how they, managed to, publish a book like mine, given the given the, politics of the present. You know? Why hasn't

00:28:31 Andrew Keen: So what are you saying that's so radical or outrageous that people should just drop out? It's not very— doesn't sound very radical. It's been said before.

00:28:42 Curtis White: I'm not trying to say anything radical or outrageous.

00:28:48 Andrew Keen: But you said that a mainstream publishing house wouldn't touch your book. Why?

00:28:56 Curtis White: Ask them. I mean, mostly because of

00:28:58 Andrew Keen: Well, you're the one who said it. I'm just curious why in your mind they wouldn't touch it.

00:29:04 Curtis White: Part of the reason it would be— well, an early review of the book called it playful and fierce. And both of those things, I think, are anathema— the— to commercial publishers in my experience. The critique is too fierce and the form in which the book performs. And that's another thing I would wanna emphasize about my book is that it's not just a sort of a thesis and then four chapters developing that thesis and then the clue— conclusion that says, see there? Told you so. You know? The book is a performance. The book moves. And, actually, that's one of the things that I hear quite often from people who like my work. They say they like my work because they don't know what's gonna happen next. And that's sort of what you would expect to hear somebody say about a novel. Right? And, you know, I mean, maybe that's because I am also a novelist. But, what I'd, like to do in these things is make them live. A book like this that is a political critique, I want it also to live because it then becomes an example of what I'm talking about.

00:30:17 Andrew Keen: What are the— who are the people you're trying to emulate or continue in their footsteps? I know you write in the book about Sartre, lots of very famous writers, Hemingway

00:30:30 Curtis White: Yeah.

00:30:30 Andrew Keen: Nabokov. Are you continuing in some of these men's footsteps? Is this the tradition you're trying to

00:30:35 Curtis White: Hope so.

00:30:36 Andrew Keen: Maintain or resurrect?

00:30:38 Curtis White: I tell you, I was thinking about that because I thought it might come up. And, I think my tradition in American literature is, is Thoreau and Whitman and William Carlos Williams who I quote several times in the book, and then more recently, a character like John Berger. Berger was— was, you know, really a model and I idolized the guy's work. You know, he was a great art critic. He was a Marxist, and he wrote poetry. You know, he wrote great lively living books. So, yeah, Berger.

00:31:18 Andrew Keen: Do you— you said that he was a Marxist. Do you consider yourself a Marxist? I know you've written about the need for capitalism to have workers who, what you say, are stupid smart. Are you against capitalism? Are you a revolutionary?

00:31:35 Curtis White: No. I'm not a revolutionary. The— I never forget. Ask that question again.

00:31:46 Andrew Keen: Well, you brought up when you were talking about Berger, the great

00:31:49 Curtis White: Oh, he's a Marxist. Right?

00:31:51 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Anglo-American. You said he was a Marxist. Are you a Marxist? I mean, you know, when you think about the manifesto, you've written a manifesto, which, of course, brings to mind The Communist Manifesto, the great manifesto of Marxism.

00:32:03 Curtis White: You know, there is no Marxism, really, because there's too many varieties of Marxism. The variety of Marxism that has taught me is, well, in particular, Marx's, early essays, like the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. This was before well before his book on capital. And it's a very humanistic book because the main focus is not bringing down capital. The main focus is on alienation and the problem of alienation and how capitalism alienates human beings from their own nature. And, the tradition of Western Marxism, that moved through, say, figures like Herbert Marcuse was— who was practically you know, he was a culture hero in the United States in the sixties and early seventies. That's the sort of thing that they— you know, Marcuse wrote a book called One-Dimensional Man, and his argument was basically don't let's not be one dimensional. You know? Capitalism makes us one dimensional. It makes us basically you know, our whole lives orbit around consumption and money. Let's not do that. So he was a real spokesman for that for the,

00:33:21 Andrew Keen: Would you— are you in that camp? Would you agree with him?

00:33:24 Curtis White: Of course.

00:33:31 Andrew Keen: But, again, I mean, Marcuse has written it. The Frankfurt School's come and gone. The sixties have come and gone. What are you saying, Curtis, that's in any way new in On Resistance? It sounds as if and maybe there's nothing new to be said. It sounds as if you're just recycling what, what's already been said. I live above the Haight-Ashbury District in San Francisco. Sometimes one goes down there, and it looks like an attempt to reinvent the nineteen sixties. What are you saying new in this book?

00:34:02 Curtis White: Well, a good part of what's new in the book is the way that it's written. I mean, it is— it is playful. I mean, part of it is fierce in its criticism of certain aspects of capitalism. But then it— a lot of it is generating story. You know? And the structure of the book is— you know, it moves. And so if I succeed in making the book move, then I can perhaps invigor— reinvigorate ideas no matter how, old they are and how familiar they are. I don't see a problem with trying to reinvigorate the worthy ideas of the past. Why does it have to be a new idea that no one's ever had before? You tell me that.

00:34:58 Andrew Keen: Well, I'm curious. So, basically, what you're doing in On Resistance is sort of writing in, as you say, a playful, engaging, original way, almost like a novelist

00:35:09 Curtis White: Right.

00:35:10 Andrew Keen: To get people to, what, think about how to resist, how to drop out. Is that fair way of putting it?

00:35:16 Curtis White: Yeah. Thank you.

00:35:19 Andrew Keen: Very good. And, so finally, what conclusion I mean, when people pick this book up, it's, On Resistance: A Manifesto. When they've put it down at the end, and it is you know, I've been reading it. It's very readable, very engaging. What do you want people to do? It's supposed to be a manifesto. I mean, maybe you should have called it an anti-manifesto, Curtis. What are you calling for?

00:35:46 Curtis White: To say— call it a manifesto is it— you know, it was playful to a degree, but I'm making manifest. That's all manifestos do. They don't necessarily represent a movement or an organization or work— and just making manifest what I think for the final time, in this life.

00:36:09 Andrew Keen: What do you mean the final time?

00:36:11 Curtis White: I'm not writing any more nonfiction. I'm 75 years old. I got novels to write.

00:36:18 Andrew Keen: But what— when people put down this book having read it, what do you want them to do? What would you like them to do? Well— but you're putting ideas into their mind. You're creating narratives. You're telling stories. Give me a couple of scenarios. I see that, yeah, you're not some sort of doctrinal, thinker who's telling people to do a specific thing. You've talked about being against philanthropy and capitalism and liberalism. What do you want people to do?

00:36:48 Curtis White: Well, I want them to, think about what they might do. You know, it's not for me to dictate what they ought to do. Then you— then I do get in trouble with The Communist Manifesto, which does, I think, tend to try to dictate to people how this thing ought to work. You know, I wrote this book in the spirit of play. I hope people leave it in the spirit of play.

00:37:14 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. The book is out. Curtis White's On Resistance: A Manifesto. I think Curtis, we might have called it a manifesto in, with a question mark or maybe in italics because it's not quite what many people think of as a manifesto.

00:37:30 Curtis White: That's okay.

00:37:31 Andrew Keen: But it's out. Congratulations, Curtis, and thank you so much. That was a— Hey. A fascinating conversation.

00:37:37 Curtis White: And, Andrew, this was a great conversation. Thanks so much. Seriously. Blessings.