The Institute of Economic Affairs is one of the most powerful and secretive think tanks in the UK, known for promoting free-market Thatcherism as a solution to all of our economic woes. Who’s behind it? This week, Kristian Niemietz, a director at the IEA and a long-time Novara Media hater, sits down with Aaron for […]
Donald Trump is the next president. Meta, Walmart and McDonald’s have forsaken their diversity policies. Elon Musk is demanding that Keir Starmer be removed as PM. Why is this all happening at the same time? And why do progressives have so little to offer when it comes to the economy and people’s everyday lives? Brett […]
The ACFM gang gather for a midwinter reading of one of the most influential political tracts ever written. Download a version online and follow along as Nadia, Keir and Jem reassess The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm Sign up […]
Having long promised to decentralise power, Bitcoin is looking more and more like it will end up as a tool of American power under Trump. But blockchains could also be used to empower local economies. And why should the left stay attached to a money system controlled by the state? Sam Hart is a developer, […]
In Richard Curtis’ Love Actually, a selection of mainly white and middle-class Londoners seem to be living in a parallel universe – one in which the war on terror never happened and the ’90s never ended. What kinds of love are really on offer in this misty-eyed vision of modern Britain? Following Novara FM’s investigation […]
On 10 December, Ash Sarkar, Michael Walker and Aaron Bastani discussed an epoch-defining year and its implications for the future. Is Starmer screwed? Are expansionist wars back? Has ‘woke’ died? Find out in our end-of-year Downstream special. Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support
Die Hard is a perennial of festive TV, but is it really a Christmas movie? James Butler and Eleanor Penny explore what the 1988 action comedy reveals about corporate power, class antagonism, mid-century terrorism and women in the workplace. Who is Bruce Willis’ shoeless cowboy cop out to rescue? And what is going on with […]
Just two months before a general election, Germany finds itself in a precarious position. The European project is fragile, the country’s manufacturing innovation has stalled, and Germany’s dependence on Russian resources has become, quite obviously, disastrous. So what will happen to this once deeply consequential world power, and what does its story tell us about […]
In the 2010s, we found out that we were all being watched. A series of leaks, from Wikileaks and others, revealed that our governments were conducting mass surveillance operations on their own populations. But what were the longer term consequences of those leaks? And why hasn’t something of equivalent size stepped in to replace Wikileaks since? […]
When the Taliban retook all of Afghanistan in 2021, it came as a shock to much of the West. The day after the last American soldier left, journalist and filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at flew into Kabul to spend a year filming with the Taliban’s senior military leadership. What he found was a regime drunk on power, […]
Which side are you on? Keir, Nadia and Jem consider the ebb and flow of political commitment with ideas and music from Jodi Dean, Gramsci, John Coltrane and the Raincoats. Is cultural production the same as political action? What’s the difference between an ally and a comrade? And why do some communists end up as […]
In 1891, the French drew the borders of what became Mali. Like many colonial borders, they were arbitrary, absurd to the many nomads who supposedly lived within them. Now climate change is ravaging the Sahel region, and many of those nomads are being forced to settle down. And Russia and China have arrived to replace […]
Humanity has long pursued an elixir of youth and dreamed of eternal life. For the Abrahamic faiths, physical immortality was lost in the Garden of Eden, with only the soul remaining of permanence. More recently, futurists and thinkers have speculated about the possibilities of radical life extension. For neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston there is another alternative, […]
Imagine a person arrested for keeping a brothel. Who are they? An abusive pimp? Such people exist, no doubt, but the law isn’t set up just to catch abusers: it also targets sex workers working together to stay safe. With Labour in power, big changes could be afoot, but legalising sex work could harm sex […]
While the first modern trains were built in the early 19th century – more people travel by rail today than ever before. Not only have passenger numbers risen in the UK but the likes of China, Iran and Uzbekistan now have high-speed networks. On this episode of Downstream, Aaron Bastani is joined by author and […]
In October 2024, SpaceX caught a rocket. An astonishing feat of engineering, it took humanity one giant leap closer to the era of everyday space travel – and possibly one small step closer to its own obliteration. Despite a long list of treaties attempting to prevent it, space is now a militarised zone. Nuclear-laden ICBMs and […]
Global heating is a serious problem, but the question of just how urgently to fight it is a fraught one. Should 2C or 1.5C of warming be our limit? Or can we blow past these limits now, and come back down to them later, using technology to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? There’s […]
Disruption is a byword for success in the tech industry, but when it affects people’s daily routines – say, when JSO activists are slow-marching down a road – it becomes nothing short of criminal. On this Trip, Jem, Nadia and Keir unpack the political uses and abuses of disruption and the ‘creative destruction’ inherent to capitalism. […]
In 2016, the alt-right seemed to come from the internet and infest politics. In 2024, the internet and politics have become identical. Are we swimming in the world the alt-right built for us? Perhaps no one knows the world of online politics better than Joshua Citarella, an artist and political theorist whose 2018 book Politigram and […]
Everyone knows that the Roman Empire rose, then fell. Historians don’t all agree on the reasons for the collapse, but their misunderstandings can shed plenty of light on the current state of the world, according to the authors of How Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West. Peter Heather, a historian of […]
The rise of artificial intelligence will bring about a planetary-scale shift in human life and politics – and, it seems, a lot of weird social media spam. But for all the grand pronouncements from techno-utopians and pessimists alike, the reality is that there’s still much to be decided about the future that AI portends. At the […]
War is spreading throughout West Asia, a situation understood by many observers as an outgrowth of Israeli expansionism. In a return visit to Downstream, historian Ilan Pappé provides a century’s worth of context to the unfolding crisis. He talks to Aaron to talk about the lack of a viable left in Israel, why nation-states haven’t […]
In their new book Loving Corrections, adrienne maree brown poses a crucial conundrum for all progressive thinkers: how do we liberate people from bad ideas? One of America’s most energetic thinkers talks to Rivkah Brown about putting the pol back in idpol, understanding the IDF, navigating the US election, and why we might need to […]
What if instead of talking about history from the perspective of humanity, we told it from the perspective of the resources that made human expansion possible? Sunil Amrith is a historian and author of The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of The Last 500 Years. He sat down with Ash to explain how a bumper […]
Around the world, far-right movements are mobilising support by placing the blame for real catastrophes – Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, their own riots and insurrections – on entirely made-up enemies, among them Muslims, immigrants and feminists. This is what Richard Seymour, a writer, theorist and founding editor of Salvage magazine, calls disaster nationalism. He joins Richard Hames […]
From pollinating crops to managing organic waste on a continental scale, insects are vital to life on Earth. They are also disappearing. Dave Goulson is an entomologist and ecologist whose books communicate the majesty of insects and arthropods – along with a grave warning about their demise. He talks to Aaron to Bastani talk about the […]
What does Israel hope to achieve this time, nearly 20 years after its last failed ground offensive in Lebanon? And how should we understand its adversary, a political party that also functions as a fighting force, a historical movement, and a regional power? Richard Hames is joined by Elia Ayoub, a Lebanese-Palestinian researcher and writer […]
Stephanie Kelton is an author and economist, and subject of the new film ‘Finding The Money’. Her work as a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory and as an advisor to Bernie Sanders has put her front and center of the debate around government debt, taxation and the potential green industrial revolution. She sat down for […]
Of all the unseen forces that shape human society, could death be the most powerful? The ACFM crew take a leftwing look at mortality in this Trip, asking how capitalism has altered our approach to the inevitable. Jem, Nadia and Keir think about how industrialised workers were taught to prepare for death, why powerful men […]
The English language is full of pejoratives for large groups of people: mob mentality. Herd behaviour. Crowd contagion. Much of this apprehension stems from one of the most influential works of psychology ever written, Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Unfortunately, Le Bon’s big idea – that crowds produce derangement […]
