CZM Book Club: Cool Zone 2054: Live From DinoCon 4 in Helsinki
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Book club, book club, book club, book club. It's the Cool Zone Media Book Club, the book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you. I'm Margaret Giljoy and this week and this month on Cool Zone Media Book Club, we have missives from the future. That's right. It's week two of Cool Zone 2054 reports from the Dino War. And what do we have from the future? Well, let's find out.

Welcome to Cool Zone 2054, Reports from the Dino War. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and alongside the rest of the Cool Zone team, we're covering everything World War 3.5. Alongside some of the rest of the team, I spent the past week in Helsinki, Finland, at DinoCon 4, and I'm excited to share with you all what I've learned. But first, this podcast wouldn't even be here if it weren't for our biggest sponsor, the one, the only, DinoCadence.

What started as an avant-garde dinosaur dance troupe soon became the world's premier network of combat academies. If you're serious about dino riding, you need to get serious about dino cadence. Admission is free, but spots are limited. So apply today to save the world tomorrow. When the wheels of the ancient 737 hit the runway at Helsinki Vanta, I wasn't the only one to breathe out a sigh of relief.

We'd made it. We landed. We were on the ground. Which is, from my point of view, where we belong. You will not catch me riding a pterodactyl, and not just because I'm far too old for it. And look, I wasn't worried about the plane falling apart. Ever since the cooperativization of Boeing in 2037, when workers took over the beleaguered company, it's gone from producing the world's least reliable airplanes back to producing some of the world's best. No, I was worried about getting shot out of the sky.

I'd just flown in from free Poland, which meant flying over three different nationalist-occupied Baltic states. Every journalist is a war journalist in World War 3.5. The plane, like any post-war retrofit, was equipped for non-electric flight in the case of EMP. But I've been in planes hit by EMPs twice in my life already, and it is never fun. Capable of not crashing is an entirely different thing from comfortable flight.

Our 737 was also equipped with its own Vishnu shield, in case of incoming surface-to-air missiles. But for the past year, of course, nationalist forces in Estonia have had the habit of firing dummy rockets at more or less everything flying anywhere near their airspace. The whole flight, I told myself I was getting too old for this shit. And I tried to distract myself with work, like I always do. I caught up on about a week's worth of email, and I figured out my DinoCon itinerary.

Then we landed and I stepped out into the unseasonably warm Helsinki December air. Can you even say unseasonably anymore? Does that even mean anything anymore? Like, it's like every morning God spins a big spinny wheel with numbers from negative 30 to about 130 to determine how hot it's going to be.

I guess that only works if you're one of us weird old poor people who can't internally shift to Celsius. Um, negative 30 to plus 50? I don't know. Do your own Celsius math, you metric men. I stepped out into that pleasant air and we took the train into town and I looked out the window and I remembered I love Helsinki and I love my job and flying is just part of it and danger is just part of it and that's okay.

It's funny how our conscious mind works to forget danger as soon as it passes. Funny how hard our unconscious mind works to hold on to the memory of fear. But unless you've got that sorrow phobia, there's nothing to be afraid of at DinoCon, besides having too much fun hanging out with dinosaurs and their riders. Well, I mean, besides the MicroRaptor incident at DinoCon too. But that won't happen again, probably.

When you first come in through the gates after the security checkpoint that I'm legally required to not tell you about in detail, the first thing you see is Captain Emily Hanford Jr. herself. And of course, her faithful trigger. That is to say, the most decorated dinosaur and dinosaur rider respectively.

Trigger was waving and smiling, hair pulled back into that "don't fuck with the librarian" bun that they single-handedly brought back into style. Their uniform was gleaming with medals from the war and little one-inch buttons from bands they listened to. Captain Emily Hanford Jr. is, of course, an ankylosaurus.

And I've never been able to tell a reptile's mood by looking at its face, and I think people who claim they can are lying. But she seemed happy enough and occasionally nuzzled her massive head into Trigger's shoulder for scritches. I wasn't able to catch an interview with Trigger that morning. But if you listened to last April's episode, why do we use metals at all in an internationalist army? You can hear me and Mia Wong talk to them at length. It's mostly just war stories that episode, but...

You know, they're good stories. It's controversial for internationalist forces to have any sort of mascot soldiers at all. But whatever acclaimed Trigger gets, Trigger has earned. My first stop at DinoCon 4 was, of course, the swag table.

Flash a little Cool Zone media badge, explain that, don't worry, you're not Robert Evans, and no, you haven't seen Robert Evans, and no, you will not be commenting on the news about Robert Evans, and you are set up with one of the coolest swag bags ever produced. This year, it was a plush Ankylosaurus backpack filled to overflowing with doodads and general promo. A little floaty pen with a pack of raptors chasing away a cartoonish Nazi. A mug that reads...

I survived the dino war so far, but death is inevitable and comes for kings and commoners alike, so really my goal isn't to survive, but to live a full life and live free and or kill fascists for as long as I can. The type is pretty small on the mug, except that dino war is in big red letters. There was also an edible wristwatch made out of protein plastic. Look, I know most people say it's safe, but I am just too old to start eating plastic on purpose, plant-based or not.

A tiny SD card full of virtual training environments and the latest military games, as well as full scientific documentation on more or less everything on display at the con. And this year, an honest-to-God paperback book called Heliotropum and the Egg that's going to come out early next year from Helm, that best-selling anonymous mononymous collective.

I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but the back promises it's, quote, like nothing Helm has ever produced, and that it will, quote, shake the internationalist world to its core, and that it, quote, isn't just war propaganda we promise. Which is a funny disclaimer, but necessary these days.

Us at Cool Zone Media, though, we can't make that disclaimer. We are war propaganda. I mean, for fuck's sake, our founder is General Lichterman herself. All we can promise is that we're honest war propaganda. But frankly, you shouldn't take our word for it. We may be war propaganda, but we aren't fully sponsored by any given war department. So we still have ads. Here are some of them.

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And we're back.

Anyhow, after a nice young person with a retro slicked-back haircut gave me my dino backpack, they gestured me towards the mobility aids available, but instead went and got myself a Jurassic Park-style cane from a bin, complete with faux amber and faux mosquito, and started off towards the biggest monsters. I know we're not supposed to call them monsters, but dear listener, I have been a trans woman for a long time now, and I think like recognizes like.

Dinos and trans people, we've got a lot in common. There's a whole 50% of the world population trying to de-extinct us both. But we've got too many teeth and claws and allies and, uh, writers, depending on what you're into, for that 50% to succeed. It's no secret that the various dino units compete with each other for acclaim and recruits alike.

Pterodactyl jockeys think that they're the best because they are the hardest crew to get in with and they sharpshoot moving objects, well, people, while themselves flying through the air. The Ankylosaurus brigades are certain that they're the best because they've got a real proletarian vibe and interface smoothly with infantry. It's true that the Ankylosaurus brigades have liberated more towns from fascists than any other because they're the ones who roll in like tanks to capture terrain.

The Rex riders have their whole cowboy vibe, whether they're mounted or not, with 10-gallon hats over their polymer helmets. The mother hens don't ride dinosaurs at all, of course. They herd velociraptors the size of, and attitude of, overly aggressive roosters. And the mother hens have got style. John Waters would have loved the mother hens, every one of them copying the, quote, armed drag fashion of the first six folks who formed the first velociraptor unit.

Then there are the Amazons and their Ceratopsian mounts, who are some of the finest and most feared units in the war. I went past recruitment booth after recruitment booth and talked politely to the press liaisons of each of those units. You can hear those conversations themselves in the extended episodes, which are of course available to paid subscribers, internationalist soldiers and veterans, and anyone in the Civilian Volunteer Corps or your territory's equivalent thereof.

But more than anything else, I was there to talk to the newest unit, one with a terrifying claim to fame. I was there to talk to the Dreadnoughts. Their booth was easy to find. Plain black banners hung vertically like medieval flags. Each of the fighters, please call them fighters, not soldiers, wore heavy medieval-inspired armor with plain black surcoats over them.

Every soldier of every unit proudly bears arms, of course, but the Dreadnought fighters? They are dripping with weapons. Pistols and grenades and rifles and the occasional saber or labrus. Behind their booth was a Dreadnoughtus, one of the largest dinosaurs in history and one of the largest dinosaurs in Helsinki. Though they ride any sauropod, they use the Dreadnoughtus as their icon because its name means fears nothing. And the banner over their booth? It reads...

Join the Dreadnaughts. We have the highest mortality rate of any unit in the Internationalist Army. Their spokesperson, a very short man with a bright pink afro and brighter pink full-plate armor, wore a large pin with their slogan: "Live fast, kill racists, die young." That's right. Their claim to fame is that they die a lot. The average Dreadnaught dies on their second engagement.

Of the original 1,000 fighters when the unit was formed in February of this very year, only 112 are still alive and fighting. Their unit, though, now boasts more than 10,000 fighters. I swear to you, World War 3.5 is a war unlike any other in history. I talked with their spokesperson, who introduced himself as Lord Glimmerdark, for quite some time. The crux of my questioning was, quite simply, why?

Why advertise based on a high mortality rate? Half of you listeners are probably wondering the same thing. While the other half of you, well, you probably know the answer in your hearts. Lord Glimmerdark, glim to his friends, answered honestly and at length. There's a whole lot of simple answers and also a long answer. The simple answers are things like, well, some people feel that the closer you push towards death, the more you can feel alive. Or that some people just have a death wish.

Or that every fighter in the Dino War lived through a war where a billion people died. And death is so inevitable, and it's better for your mental health to embrace that. I mean, I have a mug for my swag bag that basically makes that argument. I've built my career on the idea of radical optimism, strategic optimism. I can't encourage any of you to join the dreadnoughts. But oddly, talking to Lord Glimmerdark, I realized...

These two positions are not as fundamentally at odds as you might think. The dreadnoughts are not pushing despair. My position and their position are what the theory heads would call "in a dialectic with each other." Radical optimism and "thonadonialism," as the dreadnought philosophy is called, can work hand-in-hand to build a better world, Glimmerdark argues. "Thonadonialism" is, of course, the long answer to my question.

Lord Glimmerdark told me about a text I hadn't read in a good 30 years. A text called "We Are All Very Anxious." That piece argues that every era of capitalism has had a dominant affect that is utilized by capitalism to control its opposition. Before the first couple of world wars, that affect was misery. Just keep everyone too miserable to rise up. After the wars, until around the turn of the century, it was boredom.

The early 21st century, when that piece was written, it was anxiety. Everyone was too anxious to do something. Then, after World War III, it was, as thanatonealism proposes, morbid fascination. This is now the dominant affect of our times. They call it morbidity, though obviously that's a new way of using that word. Everyone was too obsessed with death to rise up, is the argument there.

The problem for capitalism, Glim argues, is that each affect of each era can be utilized as a form of resistance as well. The miserable created the French Revolution. The bored created the countercultures of the 60s. The anxious started the fight for the future of the 2030s. And the morbid, Lord Glimmerdark said, are not afraid to kill Nazis because they're not at all afraid to die.

They merely wish for their deaths to have some sense of purpose. Lord Glimmerdark doesn't think that everyone should become dreadnoughts. Not everyone is going to want to dress like a medieval knight armed with rifle and grenade and ride a titanosaur into battle. They ride the titanosaurs, like the big dinosaurs, not specific dinosaurs, the type of dinosaur. They ride them because they pack as many as five people onto each mount. No dreadnought dies alone is another one of their slogans.

Not everyone is going to want to join the army of the soon-to-die. Most people want to live. I know I want to live. I do like armor and swords, though. I'm hoping a more hopeful batch of medievalists pops up soon in the strange LARP we call this war. When I pushed back against his points, Glimmerdark's deep brown eyes gleamed. Indeed, you could say they glimmered, if I'm being honest.

I told him my work has always been to work to accept death, but to use it to inspire a strong desire to live, to fight back against death and killing. Exactly, exactly, he would scream excitedly from time to time, even though I was trying desperately to disagree with the man. It might all be very dialectic, but I've been at this for a very long time, and I don't really, at the end of it all, know what that means.

The dreadnoughts seem to have it figured out, though. Or they've got something figured out. What I've figured out, though, is that it's time for another ad break. This podcast is brought to you by our sister podcast on Cool Zone Media, Under the Pants and Under the Ground, your guide to everything sex, geology, and folklore in the 21st century. Join us this spring for our fifth season as your hosts take you deep inside the kobold sex cult in Zurich.

This podcast is brought to you by our enemy podcast who paid an awful lot of money to get me to do an ad read for them. Good People Love Leaders is the premier podcast that argues for a hierarchical structuring of the internationalist cause. I agreed to read the ad because I secretly think that their podcast proves my point, not theirs, since each episode is yet another person who claims that they would be the best person to lead the internationalist cause. And most of those people hate each other.

They agreed to let me write this ad in the way that I want because they think that my podcast does the same thing for anarchist arguments as I think their podcast does for theirs. This podcast brought to you by the Toothbrushing Council. Just because there's a war on doesn't mean you shouldn't brush your teeth. Join the war on plaque. Go to the dentist more often. It's free now. And how else but dental records are they going to recognize your body after a nationalist mourner blows up your house?

This podcast brought to you by Danny's Delicious Din Din Diner, the slow food diner just like the ones your grandparents used to complain about. Remember, if it doesn't have five Ds, you're only playing 4D chess.

This podcast brought to you by Mighty Makhno's Machete and Mortar. If you need a blade or a bomb, look no further than Mighty Makhno's chain of military armament stores. A portion of all proceeds goes directly towards funding the new Makhnovia project in its aim of creating a non-state, anti-capitalist region in Ukraine. We are required to disclose that Makhno's Machete and Mortar was founded by Cool Zone Media podcaster Robert Evans, though it no longer has any economic or legal ties to Robert Evans for reasons that are obvious to anyone who has read the news.

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Hey, nice glasses.

Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, the next generation of AI glasses. Just say, hey, Meta, to harness the power of Meta AI. Listen to music, make hands-free calls with open-ear audio and built-in microphones, and so much more, all while staying present to the world around you. Shop Ray-Ban Meta Glasses at meta.com slash smartglasses.

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Subject to eligibility requirements. Rewards are non-withdrawable bonus bets that expire in seven days. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku channel, your home for free and premium TV, is giving you access to holiday music and genre-based stations from iHeart all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeart Christmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku channel is available on all Roku devices, web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs, and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices.

So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iHeartRadio on the Roku channel. Happy streaming. Hey loves, it's Paris Hilton. Are you ready to slive your best life this holiday season? Well, I've got the ultimate holiday giveaway just for you. Go to parishilton.com slash giveaway to win a fabulous gift basket filled with handpicked faves from my gift guide. From my iconic cookware and chic apparel to glam goodies from my go-to brands, this bundle has it all.

Don't wait. Enter now at parishilton.com slash giveaway. Good luck and happy holidays. Keeps living. That's hot. The dating app fatigue is real. Mindless swiping, meaningless DMs, and an overwhelming amount of likes have made us feel more disconnected than ever. While most dating apps are all about pursuing someone else, there's one that's carved out a space for you to find yourself. Download Feed.

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See any field bio. Download fields. F-E-E-L-D. On the App Store or Google Play. PK! And we're back. After my time talking with the dino units, I decided to head over to the little, out-of-the-way, forgotten drone fighter corner. Everyone likes to think the war on drones is over and done. But that ignores the endless work put in by those unsung heroes, the engineers. Under the big war, the dino war, there's another war.

The drone war. The secret war. It's still going on. There's an arms race. It's still happening. The other side builds new EMP shielding and gets some murder drone in past a Vishnu shield. So engineers on our side rush to upgrade their EMPs. And then our side builds new shielding and gets murder drones past their shields. And so on and so on forever.

Without the drone fighters, the people fighting against the drones, we'd be back into the horrors of World War III, instead of, I suppose, living in the horrors of World War 3.5. Still, I had a nice visit with the engineers of the California Cooperative, many of whom traveled all the way from Silicon Valley to show off some of the products they'd been developing for the rank-and-file soldiers of the Dino War.

This year, the latest trend is single-use wearables. Most likely to save the most lives, there's the Crab with two Bs. It's a belt-mounted Vishnu shield that automatically activates when it detects any autonomous drone within its range, which is currently 10 meters, but they're expecting to get it out to 50 meters by next summer.

That difference matters, of course. With a 10-meter shield, you need just about one for every soldier. With a 50-meter shield, you could get away with one per squad. I asked the spokesperson for California Cooperative why the product was called The Crab. And with usual Jen Beans attitude, they told me, yeah, well, I guess it sounds cool.

Which, look, I know I'm old and grouchy, but that's sort of what you'd expect to hear from someone from a generation that decided to call itself Gen Beans. Ugh, that's the most get-off-my-lawn thing I'll probably say all podcast. I manage to always do at least one get-off-my-lawn, you dang kids, every podcast. I try not to. I want you to know that. I want you to know how hard I try.

Besides the Crab, the new hot item is the Goosey. It's spelled like goose but with two of every letter. I did not bother to ask why it's called the Goosey nor why it's spelled that way. It's a wristwatch basically and it even functions as one until it detects incoming drones, at which point it activates a 2 meter shield. Like the Crab, it's single use. Also like the Crab though, the Goosey saves data about the attack.

And if you return to the California Cooperative, they'll extract the data to build better systems in the future and return it to you recharged and ready to save your life again. If you don't bother to return it, it's still an analog wristwatch after it's used up its single charge. They gave me one, which is sweet, because even though I'll never actually be on the front lines at my age, the thing is, is that kind of everywhere is the front lines now.

And it's even more useful than my new edible wristwatch that I will never eat. Maybe I'll give the edible one to someone from Gen Beans. I'm skeptical about these single-use personal shields. Drone fighters have struggled with the same problem for 10 years now. Everyone thinks that drones are over, nothing to be worried about. Why lug around a wristwatch or a belt-mounted object you assume you'll never use? Soldiers are famous for ditching everything they see as dead weight. But still...

The drone fight goes on, and the unsung heroes keep building new machines. It was mid-afternoon by that point, and the day was coming to a close for me. I was grateful for my John Hammond cane, the one I'd prefer to pretend I don't need, but I quite obviously do. I'd say the sun was setting if I'd been anywhere further south than fucking Helsinki. The sun had gone down hours prior at that point.

I went outside, passed the protests, and got into a pedicab to take me back to my hotel, where I wrote this, and now I'm recording it, because the podcast minds never stop. And now I'll pass it over to my comrade, co-worker, and friend, Jamie Loftus, for what she saw and did today.

And before you write Cool Zone Media complaining about the air horn noises, please take note that Jamie formally changed her name to include the air horn noises or the party popper emoji when written 10 years ago now. And you can stop writing us to complain about it. Take it up with her or just, you know, accept it.

Well, I don't know what the rest of you were doing inside the convention, because there was clearly plenty going on just outside the gates. And I don't mean the street vendors, though their food was better than the food court anyway. I mean the protest organized by Dino D, denizens interested in not oppressing dinosaurs. And if you think they didn't know there's a little wink and a nudge going on every time someone hears the name Dino D, well, then you don't know modern activists too well.

And look, the name is a little problematic considering the allegations of impropriety currently levied against Dino D's discredited director, David Dorsen. Jen Bean's love of alliteration is just too catchy, and I'm not sorry. But the thing is, David wasn't.

About 40 protesters have been camped outside DinoCon for the past two weeks, passing out leaflets and holding signs and continuing the anemic chanting that has plagued certain social movements since basically forever. I wanted to like the signs, but they weren't much better than the chanting.

Besides the ubiquitous friends don't take friends to die in war, there was dino war equals dinos no more and free the dinos. And then there was one gal, maybe 40 years old, with one of those beanies with a tail that went down to her knees. You know, the kind I'm talking about, whose sign read, I think dinosaurs are cute and I don't like when they get shot. And so they shouldn't be in war.

I spent most of the morning talking with the activists, most of whom expressed a disinterest in being conflated with Dino D, despite admitting Dino D called for the protest. Kind of like how vegans didn't want to be associated with PETA back when I was young and the world was new.

The protesters outside DinoCon have a pretty diverse range of opinions, from the dinosaurs are our friends angle to the newfangled nihilist philosophical critique that using dinosaurs as the modern mascot of war undermines our strategic efficacy. I couldn't tell you if that's true or not.

A woman who only gave her name as Beth Burt told me that, well, let's see, she wouldn't let me record her voice, but she did let me write it down word for word. So she told me, quote,

Unquote.

There were only two conflicts I saw the whole morning. First, a man, I kid you not, he was wearing a fedora, came over holding a re-extinctionist sign that read, Let the dead stay dead. Dinos are fuel, not friends. With that little re-extinctionist logo at the bottom, the one with the upside down stegosaurus. He tried to join the crowd and was roundly kicked out.

Then, less than 20 minutes later, a unit of new Amazons came out of the convention, easily distinguishable by having only one breast each. Some with breasts removed, some with breasts added, depending. There's a video you can watch if you'd like, but the whole thing just makes me sad.

Two women at the front started shouting the names of their centrosauruses that had fallen in battle, whom they mourned, and whose contributions to the internationalist cause they thought were being erased by the protesters. And while I'm on the subject of the food court...

Was I on the subject of the food court? If I were on the subject of the food court, I would tell you that the Helsinki Street Fair is rockin'. And by that, I mean the Somali-Finnish food. For anyone who didn't know, and how could you not, Somali immigrants make up the largest African group in Finland and have been embedded into Finnish culture for generations. And that means you can get sambusas pretty much everywhere. And that includes right outside of DinoCon. DinoCon.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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