RevolutionZ

Ep 378 WCF Transcend Media Madness

Michael Albert Season 1 Episode 378

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Episode 378 of RevolutionZ, Transcend Media Madness, continues our presentation of chapters from the forthcoming book The Wind Cries Freedom. 

What turns a sea of handmade signs into a movement that can’t be ignored? Partly it is information, so we follow that question into the heart of media. Who holds power inside newsrooms? How are stories shaped? What content is addressed? Why does institutional structure matter as much as personal intentions?

With Miguel Guevara and Leslie Jordan, a veteran broadcaster and organizer, we examine the quiet hierarchies that once defined alternative media and the concrete steps that dismantled them: balanced job complexes, real mentorship, and quality safeguards that spread skills instead of hoarding them.

From there, alternative media took on the engine behind so many bad outcomes: market logic. Chasing donors and clicks rewards brevity over depth and funnels creative energy into fundraising rather than reporting. How do media activists in the next American Revolution explain their choices to treat media as a public good, to plan budgets across outlets, and to distribute resources based on movement needs, not who can shout loudest. As competition gave way to cooperation, Leslie tells how new voices surfaced, class analysis deepened, and editorial agendas widened beyond the narrow lanes advertisers and even elites within organizations prefer.

For the new revolution's media movements, change also meant challenging corporate newsrooms from within. Leslie highlights movement campaigns that pressed for fair pay scales, inclusive hiring, participatory decision making, and editorial corrections. Journalism schools became a lever for the future, seeding norms that prized shared power over star systems. She also explains why RPS maintaining principled distance from any single alternative media organization kept independent media truly independent and free to critique allies and opponents alike while still coordinating for impact.

Along the way, we confront a live hazard: the push to strip AI guardrails for militarized use, and what that says about state-corporate pressure on communication tools. The stakes are high. If media is the nervous system of society, then democratizing it changes how every struggle moves. Our episode is part story, part strategy to turn moments into durable movements. 

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SPEAKER_00:

Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and this is our three hundred and seventy eighth consecutive episode. This time I again offer a chapter from the forthcoming book The Wind Cross Freedom. In it, via the Oral History's Interviewers Questions, we meet Leslie Jordan near her home in Atlanta, Georgia, who, with Lydia Lawrence, who we have heard from earlier, explores RPS media politics and practice. Why am I doing this? Why am I offering these chapters? Well, it's because I think it's a way to present a look at the possibility of revolution in the United States in the future, stemming from now. It's a way to present what might be the views of lots of participants, I think eighteen, lots of participants in that project. And thus it's a way to convey what they think of as their lessons learned in that project. That should be useful in our time and place, or if it's not, it should be critiquable, adaptable, refinable to become useful. That's my thought in any event. First, however, it has been at least a little while since I have relayed a musical offering. It is always lyrics, and this time too, it is lyrics. But this time the song comes from a friend of mine, and his project is called Critical Action, which I hope you will visit at Critical Action Music That's one word, CriticalAction Music dot com. The song is titled You Say You Wanna Fight and here are the lyrics. Want you to forget what you've done, want you to forget what you've won. Want you to forget you didn't run, face the threat, fought and won. Tried to break you with clubs and bullets, you overthrew kings and despots. Want you to forget your history, turn your memory into mystery. And then there's a chorus. You've been here a thousand times, crossed a thousand lines. Nothing was ever set right in a night. You said you wanted to fight, so fight. Life on the line for abolition, mobilized against segregation, national strike across America, demanded what's right at Seneca. In the streets you've ended war, unionized, demanded more, from stonewall to keystone, everything you've got you've fought for. You've been here a thousand times, changed a thousand paradigms. Nothing was ever set right in a night. You said you wanted to fight, so fight. You marched to end apartheid, fought and won Title IX. EPA clean air and streams, organized, you changed regimes. Rolled the capital for ADA, won marriage rights the same way. Memory means they've already lost, build the pressure, raise the cost. You've been here a thousand times, changed a thousand minds. Nothing was ever set right in a night. You said you wanted to fight, so fight. That isn't a song called from the past. It is a song from and for now, and the album from beginning to end and also for now, will be with us soon. And on a related front, if you want a tool to help you volunteer to help with the fight, check out all of usdirectory dot org. It has a simple search facility you can easily use to find progressive projects and organizations near you, and that have a focus and needs tuned to your interests, and that you can contact directly through the app. Finally, just a few minutes before recording this episode, I read a short article indicating that Pete Hegseth, the bodybuilding, weightlifting mental midget who now runs the Department of War, was having a confrontation with the CEO of a major AI company about its product, which is named Claude. Hegseth issued some kind of directive or ultimatum, remove the guardrails that impede Claude from being used as we wish, we the Department of War, or I will label you a national security risk and follow up with various powerful penalties. Think about that. I hate to take the side of a CEO in another lesser evil contest, but what Hegseth is saying is that we, I, Pete Hegseth, the Department of War, want to use Claude to surveil and kill, and your built in guardrails are getting in our way. Get rid of them, so we can have Claude do whatever we wish. Of course it is Hegseth who is the national security rest, or really the national and international survival risk. He is coming at a corporation, which is already horrid enough, with a make your product more horrid demand, or you are in for big trouble. Will that work? I don't know. But it isn't all that odd. Fascism is a system in which there is still capitalists, but the state dominates them and the economy. With every new day, public pressure regarding AI is becoming more needed. Due to the jobs trajectory, for sure, but on many other counts as well. And Heggseth, well, he needs to return to whatever workbench he was created at. Okay, enough sidebars. Now we go to the oral history, where Miguel Guivera begins by asking Leslie Jordan, Leslie, you are already an accomplished media personality on both television and radio. You're widely known for your fierce defense of free speech and for advancing RPS policy and analysis. Not only about media, but across the board. By using your show as a platform, do you remember what first got you into journalism and media work and what brought you to being radical? My story isn't particularly glamorous or dramatic. In school I was drifting, disengaged, without much direction, until I enrolled in a journalism course. The professor was electrifying, genuinely alive in the material. That lit a spark. I took another course, and somewhere along the way the craft of journalism became something I could see myself inside. At the same time, I found myself pulled into the world of video production. I enjoyed the tools and techniques, and as it turned out, I wasn't half bad in front of the camera. So I started experimenting, short commentaries, just for fun, but it grew fast into something larger. And the radicalization? That was a slow burn too, not a sudden rupture. I came from a deeply progressive household, so by the time I was writing for the campus paper in my junior and senior college years, I was already covering radical issues. I didn't just report on movements, I felt aligned with them. By twenty three, I would say I was already revolutionary in my outlook. I knew in a way that was moral, visceral, and also political, that there is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. At thirty, I had my own radio show. I was broadcasting about economic injustice and social transformation. That's what led me to RPS, and once I encountered its vision, there was no going back. Miguel asks, I have been asking folks to recount a particularly personal, moving or inspiring episode from the period of the rise of RPS. Could you do that for us as well, please? There were so many. Within the RPS context, one formative moment was the creation of media workers for social responsibility. That felt like a breakthrough. Journalists reclaiming our fields for something deeper than spectacle and scandal. But if I step further back, to a time when RPS wasn't yet named but was clearly information, a time when history felt as if it were coiling, ready to spring, I think of the global wave of women's demonstrations. It wasn't just the march itself that lodged in my memory. It wasn't even the sheer numbers, the handmade signs, the rhythmic chants, the cathartic power of bodies reclaiming space. It wasn't hearing about system marches across the country, though that too mattered. Nor was it the flurry of stories in the following days, of people showing up after long silences or marching for the very first time. All of that was deeply affecting. But two other things stood out for me. First was an unexpected conversation I had with a pair of Trump supporters. And here's the truth. These two, at any rate, weren't what I expected. They weren't brutes or fools. They were thoughtful, caring even. They had been ground down by their circumstances, financial, cultural, emotional. They felt ignored. They assumed everyone else's suffering was permanent and inevitable. And somehow they saw Trump as a possible rupture in all that. Someone who might blow it all up in a way that could bring relief. They were horribly wrong, of course, but they weren't delusional or venal. They thought different things were true. They were people trying to make sense of their pain, and these two listened. That alone, their capacity to really hear another person was more than I can say for too many on the left and on the right at that time. The second thing was this dawning awareness that the outpouring itself, immense as it was, wouldn't be enough. It wouldn't topple Trump, it wouldn't dismantle Trumpism, and it certainly wouldn't transform into a durable radical movement. Liberalism still dominated the energy of those early actions, and I knew in my gut that building something transformative would require much more. It would require listening, not just yelling. It would require strategies grounded in real life, not just moral urgency. It would mean winning over people still living in the shadows of this world, hearing them, respecting them, building with them. I understood then, as I hadn't before, that sometimes mass movements birth new futures, but other times they dissipate. I felt this profound responsibility, a generational obligation even, to try to help make sure that didn't happen. That we didn't go back to business as usual, that we didn't trade Trump for a liberal veneer and call it final victory. As RPS took shape, joining wasn't a decision, it was a necessity. It was in the deepest sense inevitable. Miguel asks, an obvious factor in social change is communications, including having our own media as well as impacting the mainstream. How did these aspects develop in the early days of RPS? This is one of those areas where the left, even before RPS, was brimming with insight, at least on paper. We knew and said often that mainstream media was a corporate echo chamber, designed not to inform but to sedate. It didn't serve truth, it served its advertisers. Its content was shaped not by journalistic values, but by the imperatives of commercial viability, to keep its audience docile enough to be sold, to keep its message bland enough to avoid disruption. In contrast, the best of alternative media tried to break through that consensus trance. It aimed to provide information that could actually serve movements. It tried to be a vehicle for truth telling and resistance. RPS pushed this understanding forward, clarifying and sharpening what we ought what we thought we knew. We didn't just call out the mainstream, we also looked inward at alternative media's own assumptions. And here's where things got very real. We didn't tell those outlets to abandon their goals, quite the opposite. We said your goals are sound, but your means, your internal structures, your labor practices, your underlying assumptions, they're not cutting it. If you want to deliver alternative content, you can't run on conventional engines. So we challenged a core inconsistency. Many alternative outlets understood they shouldn't reproduce racism, sexism, or autocracy inside their operations, but they were blind or at least hesitant about how their internal hierarchies modeled on corporate divisions of labor were quietly undermining everything they were trying to achieve. What good is radical content when it's created through a system that mirrors the very social divisions you're trying to upend? What happens when decision making power, status, and influence are concentrated in a few coordinators while the rest are locked into mechanical roles? You can't build liberatory media on disempowering foundations. RPS made that case. We said, If you're serious about radical change, start at home. And while there was initial resistance, real fear even, many outlets listened, and they started to transform. Miguel asks, What did the changes look like? How were they implemented? Did they matter for alternative media's product? The most fundamental shift was structural. Alternative media began to expand its commitments, not only to reject racial and gender based divisions of labor, but to also reject class based ones. That meant dismantling the old top down structure, the division between empowered thinkers, in quotes, and disempowered doers. In its place, they instituted what RPS called balanced job complexes. And these weren't just ideas, they were implemented. In fact, alternative media may have been the first sector where these transformations took root institutionally. Of course, this wasn't seamless. Nothing about it was easy. We live in a society considerably shaped by class, and class isn't just about income. It's about culture, confidence, education, access. By the time people enter a workplace, they're already conditioned. Some are prepped to lead, others are groomed to follow. It's the air we breathe. So imagine an alternative newsroom or production house with twenty staff. Before the shift, some of them were gatekeepers, writing, editing, budgeting, visible personalities. Others kept the ship running, data entry, cleaning, warehousing. One group was structurally empowered, the other structurally silenced. To truly democratize, you had to shake that up. You had to radically redistribute the work, not just symbolically, but substantively. Every person's job had to be redesigned so that each role carried a similar mix of empowering and rote tasks. That was the only way to lay the groundwork for collective self management. And it was the only way to build an organization with integrity, one that could critique class oppression in society without replicating it inside its own walls. Miguel asks, but Leslie, what about the fact that people's expectations, confidence levels, and comfort, as well as their skills, as well as their skills, knowledge, and contexts all seemed shaped by their past roles and unsuited to the new, more balanced roles being proposed? What about the common complaint that if those accustomed to making decisions and handling the empowering tasks stepped back from those roles, even somewhat to take on more routine work, the operation itself would suffer or even collapse? Once RPS insights and pressure began to circulate inside alternative media, those temper those tensions surfaced immediately. One camp said we need to rinse restructure, full stop, not just because it's ethically right, but because it's the only path to actually living the values we're trying to promote. We'll get stronger, more effective, we'll become the media we want to be, we'll become the media we want to see in the future. But others pushed back hard. They argued that the overhaul itself would be a disaster. That while it might sound noble, it would gut operations, wreck the product, drain the talent. The mission might survive in theory, but not in practice. Their argument was we can't afford this level of disruption. And yes, those defending the status quo stood to lose some privileges, power, status, the comfort of familiar routines, but many of them sincerely believed they were fighting for the greater good. And that's what made it so thorny. Their opposition wasn't always cynical, it wasn't always selfish. Still, change came, slowly, unevenly, but it came. One breakthrough was in how we approached readiness. It turns out, with real training and real support, people grew into new roles faster than anyone had expected. The learning curve wasn't as steep or as long as the skeptics warned. And what previously looked like irreplaceable expertise turned out to be mostly a mix of confidence, access, and practice, all of which could be built. Some organizations managed the transition by asking previously empowered workers to rebalance their task and to mentor others. They took on added responsibilities, not just as a burden, but as a kind of restorative justice. They'd been benefiting from structural privilege for years, so now they helped redistribute power. Other outlets built oversight mechanisms into the transition, like the probationary periods you'd have when onboarding somebody new. These structures help ensure quality control while people got up to speed in new areas. And it worked. Before long, these workplaces looked and felt radically different. Everyone became more fluent in the whole of the operation. Everyone understood the mission. Everyone had a voice. Importantly, implementing ballot job complexes didn't mean throwing people into work they hated or couldn't do. No one was forced to do illustrations if they despised drawing. No one who struggled with numbers had to manage the books. Instead, people crafted combinations of tasks that suited their capacities, but that were also equally empowering. That was the point. No more information gatekeepers, no more editorial monopolies, no more islands of expertise walled off from a collective input. Instead, across every domain, finance, editorial, outreach, roles were distributed. Everyone was connected to the decision making that shaped their work and its outcomes. Soon, having just a few people at the top became as distasteful and as politically incoherent as having women confined to cleaning or Latinx relegated to packing boxes. We were done with structural subordination. And the results were extraordinary. New voices emerged, creativity exploded. People stopped just clocking in. They began thinking, innovating, shaping. They didn't just work, they contributed, and the bigger the firm, the bigger the gains. The coordinator class, that empowered caste that dominates most progressive institutions, lost its claim to natural leadership. And that, in turn, opened space to talk honestly about class. Just as earlier generations of feminists and anti racists had pushed alternative media to cover gender and race with more depth and insight, now working class staff were pushing for sharper, more honorous coverage of class itself, both inside the newsroom and far beyond it. Then came another evolution, subtler, but just as seismic, a rejection of market logic. For a long time, even the most radical media spaces still functioned like market actors, competing for donors, eyeballs, attention. RPS helped shift that. We began to treat markets, including our role in markets, the way we treated authoritarianism, as something to be actively dismantled. And when that shift happened, something else became possible collaboration, medium. Media projects started supporting one another rather than fighting over the same pie. We moved from competing to cooperating. We imagined a different kind of media ecology, one built on solidarity, not scarcity. Miguel asks, what about campaigns addressed at mainstream media? Among leftists, this was left fraud, at least on the surface. We'd long been analyzing the structural rot inside corporate media. Everyone could recite the critiques, top down ownership, commerce and command, suppression of dissent, and those critiques were right. But for too long we stopped at critique. We shouted at the machine, but we didn't try to jam the gears. RPS changed that. We asked, why is it that we mobilize direct action to fight war, inequality, police violence, and climate breakdown? But we leave media power largely untouched. Yes, we build alternatives and that's vital. But why aren't we also organizing inside the corporate media itself? Why aren't we demanding reforms that democratize access, challenge ownership concentration, and break the grip of corporate sponsors? If media shapes the terrain on which every other struggle unfolds, how can we afford to treat it as untouchable? And so a line was crossed. We didn't just sit around analyzing the mainstream media anymore. We began actively opposing it, not just rhetorically but structurally. We stopped treating media critique as an end in itself and started organizing to demand actual material change. One strand of this campaign went straight at the internal mechanics of mainstream newsrooms, pay scales, hiring practices, how decisions got made. We challenged the oligarchic culture of top-down control, and we demanded reforms that pushed toward RPS's core goals equity, participation, accountability. Another track targeted content. We pushed for news sections dedicated to amplifying grassroots voices, communities perpetually ignored, misrepresented, or silenced, and we called out manipulation. We demanded corrections that were visible, timely, and taken seriously. Eventually, some of us even began organizing around the idea that mainstream outlets, having grown richer off public trust and public airwaves, should be compelled to transfer resources to independent grassroots media as a kind of restorative justice. Media was a natural area for early RPS advances. First, we already had critical literacy across movements. People understood what was wrong. Second, media wasn't just another sector. It was the central nervous system of society. Transform it and everything else is affected as well. And third, the incentive was personal. For those of us working in the field, the toxicity of the system was immediate and unavoidable. We were ready to build something better. Miguel asks, What do you think were the key early events in moving toward new media? A lot of groundwork have been laid before RPS formally launched, but in the years right after the first convention, four major developments really catalyzed the shift. First came journalists for social responsibility. That was huge. A network of working journalists who took on the norms of the industry from the inside. They launched campaigns like the ones I mentioned earlier, challenging newsroom hierarchies, exposing censorship and self censorship, demanding real oversight and accountability. And they didn't stop at the workplace. They brought this energy into journalism schools too, where it began shaping the next generation. Second was Press the Press, a mass campaign for democratizing the media. It wasn't just media workers, but regular people demanding something better. They wrote letters, organized actions, ran petitions, and lobbied for structural returns. Sometimes they collaborated with journalists for social responsibility. Sometimes they pushed them further. Either way, it created a broad base for media transformation. Third, we focused on organizing inside media workplaces, mainstream and alternative. That was a critical bridge. Connecting those two worlds allowed ideas to flow in both directions. The mainstream learned about participatory structures, and the alternative spaces got sharper about labor rights and workplace fairness. Each helped the other evolve. Fourth, and this may seem minor, but it was transformative. We actively encouraged alternative media projects to stop cannibalizing one another. No more zero sum fundraising, no more duplicating efforts for the sake of ego. We fostered cooperation around content strategy and resources, and slowly that changed the culture. Miguel asks Lydia, and this is from her session at her home in St. Louis, RPS shied away from direct ties with alternative media, but actively sought support from it and submitted content to it. RPS also helped with mainstream media battles. Was the RPS approach optimal? Nothing in society and human relations is ever optimal, but a wise idea guided the RPS choice and it worked out fine. The thinking was if RPS made direct connections with specific alternative media, including bringing those media under RPS auspices, ultimately that media would lose independence. Whatever we might prefer, the pressure to praise RPS and to repress criticism of RPS, even if the latter was only implicit or benignly motivated would have adverse effects. Now you might think, sure, but so what? If RPS has media that it is staffing and financially supporting, but other alternative media exist as well, won't the latter provide a counter pressure so the effect on narrowing and alternative media agendas of RPS allegiance is overcome by other alternative media? The answer is yes, that was conceivable, but it was also conceivable that as that as RPS grew, its media would become steadily more robust and secure, and other alternative media would lack in comparison. The former would grow, the latter would shrink. By the time society transformed, we might have a single orientation dominant in the world of communications and information. So our thinking was if we don't want that, then why take a path that could potentially, even with no ill intent by each participant, lead toward that? So RPS decided to send content, seek support, help with battles against mainstream media, and even provide funds for alternative media to share, but not to become institutionally entwined with specific alternative media. That approach helped generate fiscally sure secure media of incredible diversity beholden to no organizational sponsor. Miguel asks, how did the fiscal security come about? Do you mind if I note, Miguel, that it feels strange you are so often asking questions you have contributed answers to from your own experience? But in any case, as you well know, mainstream media operates on a commercial model of selling audience to advertisers. For alternative media to do that, though some did try at times, was antithetical to our overall agenda. You couldn't fully serve fiscally poor audiences when your logic of existence was to attract viewers with disposable income. You couldn't fully provide honest and needed information and vision when your logic of existence required that the audience you dangled before advertisers should be ready to buy products rather than being made disgruntled, angry, depressed, or actively hostile to commercialism ads and corporate logos and machinations by your content. You couldn't sustain insightful attitudes toward market driven commercialism when you were commercially market driven. But Miguel, you may wonder, or well, again, I know you are familiar with all this, but some of your readers may wonder, if we refused ads, how would we pay our bills? While that difficulty had existed for decades, the Internet in some ways worsened the situation in many respects. The prior solution had been to seek listener, viewer, and reader support, or sometimes foundation support, all in the form of donations, as well as, of course, to get revenues from informed purchases of books, magazines, and the like. If you weren't soliciting companies to give you ad revenue, then you had to get revenues from your audience. In at least one way, however, the internet made this actually harder by establishing the view among its users more than ever before that information should be free. People would visit sites that had ads all over and think, how great, I don't have to buy the information, and therefore there is no cost. They ignored that the price of what they bought all over society included the cost of the ads, and that access to them was being sold to advertisers, which, with a different spin, should have been understood to be a major personal and social violation. Then the same people would visit alternative media sites, whereas before the rise of the idea that all information should be free, appeals for donations seemed reasonable. Now, at least for many, not all, but many, such appeals seemed annoying. Why should I give anything when I can get whatever information I want free from other sites? Why should I get a print subscription, say, or buy a book? Why should I donate? It mostly wasn't as overt as my questions suggest. It was mostly more subtle, a kind of meme like diffusion of resistance to paying. But in response, alternative media had to become even more perpetually, aggressively, and even apocalyptically fun seeking than it's in than in its past. Alternative media seemed at first to grow with the internet, but it undeniably also suffered major losses. And the losses weren't only financial, and in having to become fixated, sort of like political candidates, on spewing out nearly perpetual, urgent, often exaggerated fundraising emails. Another set of problems had to do with content and scope. The internet, and in particular Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging, Instagram, and all the rest of it, and their variants and successors tended to acclimate people to short content. This in turn wreaked havoc with people's attention spans and content expectations. When you get used to short, you seek short. Long starts to feel onerous and even oppressive. Eventually, even alternative media drifted toward a short as beautiful orientation, partly desperately trying to preserve audience, but in time extolling and advancing the ethos of short, shorter, shortest as if this trend owed to some positive logic rather than to the dictates and impact of air-driven commercialism. It got to the point where polls showed that college students, including a top-tier universities, reported rarely or never reading a whole book, and even doubting that they had the capacity any longer to do so. And then there was clickbait, part and parcel of manipulation, or less delicately put, fraudulent lying. Before long, everyone was creating misleading and then outright deceptive titles. A subset of users got frustrated and turned off to information providers. Another subset became addicted to passing time with clickable content before they became disgusted with insubstantial content. But you asked about how the fiscal security came about, and I'm getting off track. The answer is RPS argued with all who would hear, both in its membership and beyond, that alternative media was a public good and should be financed by collective support from the whole community. It should be like public education. Each item should be free to the person using it, and to that end, the project as a whole should be funded by the community as large as. RPS argued that separate alternative media institutions shouldn't compete with each other for donor support, which in time led to partial participatory planning inside left media. The whole progressive community put up funds needed, which were, in turn, dispersed among alternative media projects in accord with their delivery of socially desirable output. Since the broader society should also contribute, RPS also initiated a campaign for government support of dissident media, and for the spoils of popular support to also be collectively shared. RPS brokered meetings of alternative media operations to form an alternative media industry council, and it urged the community of users to interactively and cooperatively negotiate the output of alternative media. The idea was that various projects would propose what they wanted to do and what it would cost, and the sum of all that from each of its participants for each new year was what the whole alternative media industry wanted to do. This would be made known to those who use alternative media, and the involved community would make known their reaction and how much they would provide. And it would go back and forth a bit, and there would be an agreement, and thereafter, for that year, each independent operation would have a budget to pursue its own efforts. All alternative media operations who prescri who subscribed to this, and not all did, had to forego individual fundraising, or if they had contacts they wanted to pursue, had it had to report doing so and allot the donations to the collective bounty. Different projects had different budgets because of having different agendas that required more or less staff and resources, but not because they knew wealthier donators donors or won fundraising competitions. Miguel asks, so was it like a mini instance of cooperative planning? Yes, Miguel, in a way, but of course, half a bridge is often very hard or even impossible to cross. So while it revealed much about such planning, it wasn't a full test because it was so partial. Nonetheless, it freed up valuable time that had been going to endless, alienating, self-seeking, competitive fundraising, and it caused alternative media groups to see one another as partners rather than adversaries, which yielded more synergistic work. It was a major achievement for RPS, yet RPS itself got from it only the same benefit as everyone else greater stability, more solidarity, and better communication. And one thing more, there was the aid that media renovation could lead to other facets of our revolution as models and as educator. And all that said, that's the end of this chapter, this episode, and this is Michael Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.