In a letter dated June 1, 1925, Upton Sinclair announced a revolutionary experiment: the petro-novel, a new category of fiction inspired by modernity’s most vexing paradoxes of fossil-fueled life. “This oil novel,” Sinclair predicted, “will be the best thing I have ever done.” Over the next ten months, that story poured out as a “gusher of words” to become the great American novel of petroleum power. By turns ardent family saga, scintillating potboiler, and anti-capitalist tirade, Sinclair’s 1926–27 tale warrants its exclamation mark. Oil! is an energetic tour de force whose plot goes everywhere. From ivory towers and gated estates to bleak frontiers of slow death, the book shows how a thirst for crude created new democratic dreams of freedom and their opposite. Through it all, the novel anticipates how the wreckage unleashed by big oil might lead to a greener, more inclusive world yet to come. It remains one of the most important critiques of fossil energy ever printed.

Today the earth is on fire, and fossil fuel corporations keep raising the heat. Recent years have been the warmest on record, sparking waves of mass migration and accelerating die-offs, with no real cooldown in sight. In a way, we’re all to blame. Climate experts agree that the extreme weather of our time comes from human energy use. Northern countries like the U.S. have burned eons of accumulated hydrocarbons since the twentieth century’s dawn—too much and too fast for the planet to absorb them again, leading to a carbon cycle that’s perilously out of whack. But vowing to scale back and buy less, to burn less, won’t kill the flames. The truth is that twenty-five fossil fuel giants are responsible for more than half of all carbon emissions now, and a huge fraction of U.S. workers already live hand to mouth while energy earnings soar. Dismantling these institutions and their pyromaniacal profit-motives will require concerted action. It will require new intimacies across economic, racial, and gender lines. And it will require alternatives to very old habits of thinking that make it hard to conceive a world without oil. To avert a dead-end future for humans and our planetary kin, we must reimagine who we are, and in no time flat.

Oil! is the novel that best illuminates how we got here and that leaves the blueprint for a more equitable future out of its ashes. At its core is the story of a whole new kind of society being born through the early twentieth century, when elites learned how to control a petroleum-powered system of production; that system allowed a few white men to get rich quick by exploiting everyone else below them. It’s a system that has turned the world into the private landfill of oligarchs who have taken our land and labor and would now, in a final move, take a habitable future from us as well. But the novel shows that the story of oil isn’t a tale for all time. We can contest an unsustainable system of energy and work that took hold not long ago, when deep-pocketed corporations combined to let the world burn. A hundred years after fossil capitalism kicked into high gear, the question at the heart of Sinclair’s novel remains: How may we transition to a postcarbon democracy now? Oil! provides an outline for this urgent mission, the unmet demand on which all future life depends.

***

Jules and Andy are joined by Jim Campbell! Freshly back from Brazil and freshly stung by a jellyfish. Because it’s Jim.

We discuss Leicester’s FA Cup exit last night as Brother Brendy’s house of cards continues to topple, while there’s love for Fulham’s tackling machine and Emi Martinez for once doesn’t do something obscene to an award. Plus, can Arsenal and Liverpool overcome their demons tonight? And will anything more Italian ever happen than Atalanta’s manager chucking a ciabatta at some Milan fans?

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up for our Patreon for exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble.

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

Using Coinbase to facilitate racism and hate is apparently no longer against the cryptocurrency platform’s rules under little-noticed revisions the company made to its terms of service several years ago. 

Until August 2021, the “Prohibited Uses” section of Coinbase’s user agreement banned customers from wielding the platform to “incite, threaten, facilitate, promote, or encourage hate, racial intolerance, or violent acts against others.” That month, Coinbase stripped that section from the agreement.

“Coinbase quietly removing hate speech and racism clauses from its terms of service sends a clear message: Coinbase does not care about the safety and well-being of Black people who use their site,” said an emailed statement from Jade Magnus Ogunnaike, a vice president at Color Of Change, a civil rights group focused on inequity and technology. “Without strong content moderation policies, Coinbase will continue to put Black consumers, their own employees and stakeholders in harm’s way in order to enact a long broken vision for Big Tech.”

Coinbase’s move to strip its user agreement of language explicitly barring hate took place about a year after the company, amid national racial justice protests, banned internal discussion of nominally external political issues and promptly faced public accusations of racism from Black employees.

Financial tech companies, including both PayPal and Square, often have language in their user agreement policies banning their use to promote “hate” or “racial intolerance.” White nationalist Richard Spencer, for example, was banned from receiving money on Paypal in 2017 following the violent Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virgina. Prominent Islamaphobe Laura Loomer has also been banned from the digital payments platform.

From "cursed" gemstones to emblems of famous love affairs – and dark histories

January 28 – February 28, 2023

January 28 – February 25, 2023

What is this video? A plot summary might run something like this: A low-quality cell phone records, in slow motion, a small suburban lake being stocked with fish. A long, transparent inflatable tube runs the fish from a truck across a lawn and into the lake. They get stuck; they struggle; they clog the tube; they swim, weakly, upstream; and eventually men in aprons (the fish stockers?) pick up the tube and force the last fish out. Neighbors (I presume) have gathered to watch the process—children are filming, a lone man reaches out piteously to stroke the clots of confused fish through the tube, and a goldendoodle’s fluffy head bobs in and out of the frame. The video, by the artist Barrett White, borrows its grand title—“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”—from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and letters, in which that phrase describes the coexistence of apparently contradictory orientations to the world. White sets the video’s banal footage to Arvo Pärt’s solemn “Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten,” complete with periodically tolling bell.

The video’s appeal is its constant oscillation between tragedy and, well, bathos. At first, the video seems like a funny TikTok—grand music, slo-mo, grainy vertical footage, silly suburban fish situation. Ha. But then it goes on for almost eight minutes? Just as Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” becomes a gorgeous and resigned dirge when slowed down (recommend), something about the dilation of time changes the tonality of White’s video. It creates space for an aesthetically sensible movement between the video’s contradictory tonal cues. This extension of time allows for multiple and layered juxtapositions of grand and banal. You can really feel this circulation when you’re watching it—feel the way your own feeling turns into its apparent opposite, and back.

I’ve returned to this video repeatedly since I first saw it last year. It has a total of 110 views as of February 1, at least ten of which are mine. Sometimes I notice the way the tumble of the fish’s bodies looks like a Renaissance etching of sinners tumbling into hell; sometimes I notice the bearded man’s camo pants; sometimes I notice the confused pathos of the man who leans out to touch the knot of disoriented trout—and I feel, like him, the terror of the fish, and sadness for them. Like the fish, I feel the force of the cues at play—for them, it’s water pushing one way; for me, it’s the music’s command to FEEL! PATHOS NOW!, which also has the ironic overlay of saying how silly it is, to feel that. But I resist: I don’t like being told what to feel, and if I do feel something like mourning, maybe I’m a fool. Maybe those feelings are out of scale, out of tune with the world as it actually is. Or maybe when I see this situation as ridiculous, and I’ve accepted a certain kind of banality, that’s when I’m out of tune with the world as it actually is. Maybe this tube leads to death. Or maybe it leads to another slightly larger holding tank that is just fine.

—Kirsten (Kai) Ihns, reader