The Walt Right
Walt Right Perspectives
Episode 34 : COVID Art with Anna Cole
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Episode 34 : COVID Art with Anna Cole

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In today’s episode of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with the artist Anna Cole

Anna is the Artistic Director of Out of Lockstep, an art exhibit exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns altered the world and individual lives. The installation involves multiple rooms exploring a range of themes related to the dystopian life that evolved beginning in early 2020.

You can learn more about the exhibit here.

The exhibit will be featured at the Porcupine Freedom Festival (AKA Porcfest) at Roger's Campground in Lancaster, NH from June 17-23rd—anyone in the Northeast should definitely go check it out!

Topics include:

  • It was first seen as right-coded / xenophobic to be scared of Covid in early 2020

  • Different reactions towards Covid in the first few months of the pandemic

  • Why society wasn’t able to pivot on Covid policy

  • We ruined everyone’s life for two years to keep old fat people alive

  • Epidemiologists were inappropriately making normative claims about society’s risk appetite and this destroyed public trust in experts

  • The Dems swept Covid under the rug with Ukraine and nobody was punished

  • The government relied on voluntary social ostracism to enforce mandates

  • Covid game people license to hate an outgroup

  • Blue city hatred for conservatives is often sublimated family resentment

  • How Anna lost friends over her resistance to Covid

  • Stupid people are better at judging issues on a case by case basis because they aren’t capable of mental gymnastics / forcing narrow heuristics onto the world

  • Polarization made it impossible to have moderate views on topics like abortion

  • Republicans should have known Dems would find a pregnant 11 year old to turn into a cause celebre after Roe was overturned

  • Dems are smart enough to not talk about bad shit they did (Covid, Floyd riots) and thereby take advantage of short attention spans

  • The weird and gross liberal worship of Fauci in 2020-2021

  • Why did Ukraine happen *just* as liberals wanted to stop talking about Covid?

  • Lots of liberals defected from the Left to resist lockdowns and authoritarianism

  • Anna’s interaction with the hard left in Bushwick

  • Anna’s experience working as a background actor on HBO Girls

  • The way people project a low resolution filter about themselves when engaging with broader society

  • The hyper-competitive ladder-climbing aspect of living in a big progressive city

  • Lots of people in NYC snort addy to keep up with things

  • The early lockdown was comfy and had a cool dreamlike liminal vibe

  • TSA and the security state was the same thing as Covid lockdowns but came from the right

  • The modern economy screws you over with hidden fees and add-ons, subscription fees, weird Uber price discrimination

  • The “millennial lifestyle subsidy” of cheap VC money allowed Uber to take over the market with uncompetitive and unprofitable business practices

  • Working as a Doordash delivery person is a more appealing job than working at McDonalds

  • Walt wants Uber Eats banned because he wastes a ton of money on it

  • WFH enables you to live in a degenerate way if you don’t have the right hobbies

  • Covid mental health issues made people gain weight or get addicted to things

  • Covid ruined a lot of business opportunities for people

  • Grift around PPE loans and media dishonesty have discredited institutions

  • In the 2010s only the far right was attracted to free speech platforms but after covid you get people from all ideologies on Substack

  • Substack is one of the only platforms that doesn’t feel dead

  • Why are recipes on Google full of weird AI-generated stories

  • How parenting strategies have changed over the past 50 years

  • Zoomers are either hyper-agentic and entrepreneurial or lazy dopamine zombies

  • Will Covid make Gen Alpha iPad kids autistic?

  • TV was less addictive than Skinner Box mobile games on an iPad / YouTube shorts

  • The decline from Art → Entertainment → Content → Addiction

  • The slower and more intimate pace of old movies

  • Why were movies from the 70s so intellectual compared to grug simplistic movies in the 80s (Rocky vs Rocky IV)?

  • Early Boomers vs Late Boomers

  • Was it normal to use a typewriter in the 90s?

  • Anna and Walt reminisce about America Online CD-ROMs and the early interet, Billy Banks, Madame Cleo, Osama Bin Laden memes, Newgrounds

  • Was Lena Dunham really the voice of a generation?

  • Was HBO Girls a tacitly conservative show?

  • The lockdown really hurt extraverts

  • How to monetize art

  • The extremely leftist nature of the art world has made it hard for Anna to promote and engage with collaborators

  • Leftists hate themselves

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The Walt Right
Walt Right Perspectives
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