Novara Media

Sam Bright, author of Bullingdon Club Britain: The Ransacking of a Nation, joins the speaker to discuss the ruling class and their shift towards extracting wealth from the nation. They explore encounters with privileged backgrounds, foreign ownership in football clubs, contradictions of Brexit, perception of conspiracy theories and corruption in media and government, private corporations and government contracts, corporate manipulation and media distortion, and the analysis of responsibility and objectivity.

Festivals. The perfect embodiment of the ACFM aesthetic, and even social politics… or are they? As the season comes to a close, Nadia, Jem and Keir ask themselves what festivals are really about. Is it music? Camping? The breakdown of everyday hierachies? Or is it just 20,000 people standing in a field? With help from Bakhtin’s concept of the “carnivalesque” and Bataille’s “excess”, the gang discuss hippies and punks, counterculture and commerce, and the role of Glastonbury in the national imagination. Music under discussion comes from Banco De Gaia, Hawkwind, The Magic Mushroom Band and more patchouli-scented wanderers. Subscribe to the mailing list: https://novara.media/ACFMnewsletter Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support Music: David Bowie – ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ / Pulp – ‘Sorted For E’s and Wizz’ / Seize The Day – ‘With My Hammer I Break The Chains’ / Hawkwind – ‘Silver Machine’ / The Magic Mushroom Band – ‘Revolution’ / Ozric Tentacles – ‘Dissolution (The Clouds Disperse)’ / Culture Shock – ‘Stonehenge’ / Autechre – ‘Flutter’ / Banco De Gaia – Excerpt from Deep Live TV: Festivals Britannia (BBC) Books & articles: Mikhail Bakhtin – Rabelais and His World / Jeremy Gilbert & Ewan Pearson – Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound / Georges Bataille – The Accursed Share / Frederic Jameson – Archaeologies of the Future / Penny Rimbaud / The Last of the Hippies

Mental illness is endemic to life under capitalism, yet it’s still largely talked about as a personal and medical issue. But what if we ditched the campaigns to “raise awareness” and instead turned our attention to criticising the systems that make us mad? Micha Frazer-Carroll is a journalist and the author of Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health. She joins Novara Media’s Charlotte England to discuss how her own experiences of madness and diagnosis fed into the book’s reframing of everything from disability and psychiatry to racism, abolition and work. Addressing the heated debate around Micha’s recent Novara article on mental health diagnoses, they also discuss the impact of the rise in self-diagnosis, whether the working day is itself a kind of dissociative state, and if we’ll still be mad after capitalism. Help us build people-powered media: http://novara.media/support

We live in exciting times for ufology. We’re also coming to realise that many of the modern-day myths around visiting spacecraft were in fact planted by our own intelligence services. But how to tell fact from fiction? Trevor Paglen is an American artist known for investigating the invisible through the visible. His practice has taken him to Afghanistan to uncover “black site” prisons, underwater to photograph the cables that carry the NSA’s data, and to the Californian desert to photograph the 350 unidentified objects currently orbiting Earth. Richard Hames talks to him about the art of the psychological operation (or psyop), the continuing legacy of MK ULTRA and, of course, aliens. This episode contains descriptions of torture at CIA black sites in its first half. Help us build people-powered media: http://novara.media/support

“Democratic media is the oxygen of democracy.” That’s the maxim that motivates Amy Goodman, award-winning American journalist and longtime host of Democracy Now!, the daily news show that has blazed a trail for alternative media in its nearly three decades on air. Whether reporting on East Timor’s independence movement or following the pipeline protests at Standing Rock, Goodman has dedicated her career to reporting the facts that go ignored by the mainstream media – even if it means putting herself in harm’s way. Ash Sarkar talks to her about the state of independent media in a year of mass layoffs and bankruptcies. They also discuss arrest warrants, influencer-journalists, and what to do when Bill Clinton calls into your show. Help us build people-powered media: http://novara.media/support

The media and the public seem to be fixated on sex scandals this year, from household names in the headlines to salacious rumours spread on social media. But haven’t we always been intrigued by the private lives of those in power? Ash Sarkar is joined by Novara Live researcher Steven Methven to delve into the long history of sex scandals, from antiquity to the internet. Help us build people-powered media: novara.media/support

In this bumper Trip, the gang survey the totalising modern phenomenon that is The Internet. Nadia, Keir and Jem dredge up their early interactions with a primitive web and explain how the dream of free and open communication was displaced by closed networks of e-commerce and data harvesting. Following Keir’s recent Microdose episode with Malcolm Harris, they discuss the connections between self-optimising techies and the pseudo-science of eugenics. They also talk about digital hygiene, the “Californian ideology”, why the Soviets didn’t invent the internet, and whether psychedelic drugs were the driver of Silicon Valley’s dominance. Music comes from The Fall, Le Tigre and the very online Lil Pump and Macintosh Plus. Join the mailing list: novara.media/ACFMnewsletter Help us build people-powered media: novara.media/support Music: Knife Party – ‘Internet Friends’ / Le Tigre – ‘Get Off The Internet’ / The Fall – ‘Telephone Thing’ / The Penguin Cafe Orchestra – ‘Telephone and Rubber Band’ / Wiley – ‘Eskimo’ / Hannah Diamond – ‘Hi’ / Grimes – ‘Oblivion’ / Macintosh Plus – ‘リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー’ / Lil Pump – ‘Elementary’ / FKA twigs – ‘Ride The Dragon’ Books and articles: Daniel Levitin – The Organised Mind / Alison Winch & Ben Little – The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism / Benjamin Peters – How Not to Network a Nation / Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron – ‘The Californian Ideology’ / Malcolm Harris – Palo Alto / Jeremy Gilbert & Alex Williams – Hegemony Now / Nick Couldry & Ulises Ali Mejias – The Cost of Connection

Author Malcolm Harris discusses the unique political history of Palo Alto, connecting the founding of California, the emergence of Silicon Valley, and the influence of the military-industrial complex. The podcast challenges the narrative of Silicon Valley's origins, explores the role of eugenics and class struggle in Palo Alto's history, and examines the ties between weapon manufacturing and the development of the region. It also delves into the unexplored paths of personal computing and the Internet, highlighting their potential for different ideological outcomes.

Has the left misunderstood the state of our nation? Sociologist and trade unionist Dan Evans thinks so. He talks to Aaron about the unexpected power of the petty bourgeoisie – the insecure class between the working class and the bourgeoisie – and how its Thatcherite values of home ownership and entrepreneurialism have reshaped British politics in the last few decades. They also discuss the political culture of Dan’s hometown in South Wales, what Corbynism got wrong about class, why university graduates are facing downward mobility and – perhaps inevitably – the state of the Labour Party. Dan’s book, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of The Petty Bourgeoisie, is out now from Repeater.

The global meat industry has grown fivefold since the 1960s and is still growing. Yet sales of vegan and so-called ‘plant-based’ alternatives are soaring, as more of us question our relationship with meat and our attitudes towards animal life and the planet’s health. In her provocative new book Meat Love, writer Amber Husain plucks examples from Greek tragedy to bourgeois restaurant culture to interrogate our most well-meaning assumptions, revealing the empty promise of “ethical” meat. Does eating the whole animal make killing it OK? Can you really love a creature and send it to be slaughtered? And why would Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall want to cosplay as a peasant? Amber tells Eleanor Penny about the cultural conditions that sustain our desire for flesh while devaluing both human and animal life.