YouSaid · the spoken record

Sarah Kendzior

lines on the record: 65
first: 2020-04-24
most recent: 2020-04-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I think you're right. You know, he is very skilled at media. He is very skilled at PR, and people have continually underestimated him, including people in the media. You know, you see his evolution from the New York tabloids through reality TV, through Twitter. And what he does is he creates his own reality through these mediums. And it's a one-way exchange. With Twitter, he's putting out policy. He's announcing wars. He's putting out medical information. And it is one way. He doesn't reply. He doesn't talk back. What happens is journalists are taking apart his tweet. They're looking for spelling errors. They're trying to decipher them like their code. I mean, that's a completely insane. That's an insane way for a society in a country to run. But reporters now, three years in, you know, they treat it like it is normal and it's acceptable. They've stopped demanding the kind of treatment that a free press should deserve. The White House briefings were all”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So one of the things is holding on to money and holding on to the information. And this is different. Now, autocrats do that all the time. That's usually grab the radio station or whatever whenever you're feeling like being an autocrat. There's sort of a playbook, an autocratic playbook. Talk a little bit about this idea, and then I want to get to your book and what you're predicting now and then sort of the rise of Donald Trump. Talk about the idea of grabbing the information, because one of the things that Donald Trump has done very well, which you've written about, and is grabbing information and using these social media tools in a way where he couldn't have grabbed the networks, although he did. He got the networks to broadcast his things without any kind of, and he continues to do in these briefings, which is a really interesting problem because you have to broadcast what the president is saying at the same time. It becomes a campaign rally. Talk a little bit about the grabbing of power by someone like Donald Trump and what it means, because he's used Twitter. I think he couldn't exist without Twitter initially.”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, people are living lavish lifestyles, often within the tech community. And it's very dystopian. And I do worry we're heading toward a worse place. I look at what's happening in China, for example, with their surveillance system and their use of technology, things like social credit. There's a lot of potential for this to take old autocratic practices and make them new through technology in a very damaging way.”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the same thing, but I think the particular type of power that they wield is unique. Their access to this immense amount of information that we are semi-voluntarily putting forward. You know, a lot of people try to blame the public. They're saying you're opting in, you're participating, but it's impossible. I mean, look at our current situation. This is the only way that anything can get done is by using a lot of these platforms that are unsafe and that invade our privacy. And so that's a completely unique situation. And, you know, honestly, I found it sad because the emergence of the internet was a very exciting thing in the beginning. And for people like me that live in a place like St. Louis, you know, it's an opportunity to be able to participate, you know, with a broader politics and media that I'm traditionally excluded from. That's not how it's played out. What we've seen is a conglomeration of wealth in a few cities. We've seen San Francisco have income inequality through the roof, homeless camps while”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so when you think about this latest group of plutocrats, which are largely tech plutocrats, because if you look at the list of the top wealthiest people in the world and in this country, they're all tech people. All the tech companies are the largest ones. How do they measure up in those terms? I think they're all the same. I think I always say they're so poor all they have is money. And they do try to put this idea out that they're better. And in some ways they are. Some ways they're more enlightened, I guess, or at least are more out front of it. And some of them are terrific. But it really is the same thing as far as I can tell because their interests eventually lie in keeping their wealth.”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When plutocrats and oligarchs at that level are just so unaccountable to anyone that they can coast through a pandemic, essentially unscathed and with no consideration toward the public good. It really relies on a social contract that's fundamentally broken. It relies on not just laws but norms and it relies on good people being willing to uphold those norms. And what we've seen over the last four years is that laws are only as good as the people uphold them and these people were never that good to begin with. And in terms of our politics, that money that upholds it comes from that billionaire class, that donor class, and it's dark money have corrupted the American system from inside out. And I do fear for the future because it's very hard to take back the kind of leverage we need to move forward as a country and as a society and improve our current”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gig economy judge. That's a huge part of it because that is just such an element of instability. You lose your access to healthcare, to benefits, things that are necessities of life like healthcare, like education, like childcare, child birth even, the costs for all those things began to skyrocket at the exact same time that wages were either stagnating or going down. And so that led to a completely unsustainable situation for every one of my generation and honestly of most generations. I mean, this spans everyone. I think we're all feeling that right now during the coronavirus crisis, we're seeing how interconnected we are with the exception of the group that you just mentioned, of these billionaires who can just coast above it, who seem immune from daily life. And you see that reflected in the stock market, which doesn't seem to have any grip on the tragedy of our reality. And that's a frightening thing.”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This situation has been growing exponentially worse for my entire life, but especially since the crash of 2008, which was not exactly a recession so much as it was a restructuring. And I talk about that a lot in view from flyover country, that companies had workers in such a bind that they basically could be in a position of not paying them, you know, calling things an internship, saying you'll get paid in exposure, so on and so forth. And then you see people locked in minimum wage jobs and low wage jobs where they're”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's Pandora because Sandra was the one who knew the shoe. Everybody dismissed her and thought she was, you know, a lunatic.”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right. That's nice Can I just say because the Cassandra myth gets a bad rap. She's always seen as this idiot who opens a box, but actually it's much more complex than that. And so I wouldn't use that word because I think it's only because...”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Down the kind of autocratic trajectory that so many countries have gone down. But of course, our own history debunks that, our history of slavery, of Native American genocide, of internment camps during World War II. We have had selective state-sanctioned autocracy, and we have had a long history of white supremacist demagogues and of plutocrats, you know, disempowering the people. So it's not at all surprising that that would help lead to Donald Trump. Then there are other things too, like what Russia did with the FBI did, a lot of different factors, but that's why from flyover country, while it came out before the election, it became popular after the election, because that was the point where people took me seriously and started writing these articles about me called like the Cassandra of Trump.”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the thing when people throughout that phrase, nobody saw it coming. It really shows who they mean by nobody. Because certainly when you look at things like income inequality, poverty, systemic racism, the people who are victims there, who are suffering there, they saw it coming and they spoke out. They lived that life. That's their lived experience. What happened is people in power didn't take it seriously. They either just dismissed it as irrelevant because these are people who lack power or they thought, you know, this is being hyperbolic, this is being partisan, you know, and so on and so forth. They tried to politicize it. They treated it like a game instead of somebody's real life experience. And so that's part of it. I also think that there's a loss of civics education in the US. And I think there's a loss of a broad international perspective. You know, there is this view that America is somehow different, that we wouldn't ever go.”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was pushed through to the very bitter end. It's only in the last couple of years that that illusion has fallen away for people. And it's only under the worst of circumstances. You know, you and I are now having this conversation as we're sequestered from a plague that's being exploited by an aspiring autocrat that's rapidly consolidating his power. Like, you know, you would think you can't go lower than that. I know that you as someone who studied Nazi Germany, I mean, you know exactly how low it can go and what sort of dangers we may be facing in our future.”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. And I think that our politicians or pundits really underestimated the amount of pain people were in, the amount of suffering they were experiencing on a daily basis, and how easily that pain is exploited, how easily it's put to bad ends, and how few will speak out and fight against it. And I don't mean ordinary people, because most people are just struggling to survive. And plenty of people are looking out for each other. They're looking out for their communities, their neighbors. But at a kind of high level, there is such endemic corruption and rot within our institutions that when they were attacked externally from actors like the Kremlin or what I've been referring to as a transnational crime syndicate, because that's really what it is. It's not just Russia who has at fault here. It's a lot of people. Our defenses as Americans were down. And I think some of that is this veneer of American”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the view from Flyover Country covered the loss of institutional stability of social trust. In the United States, but also worldwide. And my background is an anthropologist by training. I have a PhD. I study dictatorships in the former Soviet Union, especially Uzbekistan, and the use of digital media. And so, you know, this book was written between 2012 and 2014. It's a collection of essays that covers economics, politics, technology, and so on. But basically, it covers loss. It covers grief. It covers the collapse of a lot of institutions that I think people thought were stronger than they were. And it helped create the conditions that allowed people like Donald Trump to rise in the US and that also led to this worldwide rise of right-wing demagogues, of white supremacists, of white-collar crime blending.”
2020-04-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sarah Kendzior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT