The Dig

Dan interviews the hosts of Time to Say Goodbye podcast on Asian American politics and identity. Check out Time to Say Goodbye wherever you get podcasts. Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig

Fred Turner, Stanford scholar of media and American culture, traces how 1960s counterculture seeded techno‑utopian ideas. He discusses cybernetics, the Whole Earth network, psychedelics, the WELL, and Wired‑era fusion of commune values with market tech. Short takes explore hackers as cultural icons, the marketing of the internet, and the political blind spots of early digital utopianism.

Astra Taylor interviews Achal Prabhala on emerging global vaccine apartheid: from the neoliberal turn handing the pharmaceutical industry global patents to today’s government-funded vaccines put under private pharma control. Groups fighting global vaccine apartheid Public Citizen: citizen.org/topic/safe-affordable-drugs-devices/global-access-to-medicines MSF: msfaccess.org Prep4All: prep4all.org People’s Vaccine Alliance: peoplesvaccine.org Recent work by Prabhala: nytimes.com/2020/12/07/opinion/covid-vaccines-patents.html nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/covid-vaccines-china-russia.html theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/15/peoples-vaccine-coronavirus-covid-wto Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join the Dig Book Club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club

Why we need the PRO Act with Jimmy Williams, General Vice President of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. Sign up to join DSA’s PRO Act phonebank actionnetwork.org/forms/proactphonebank Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join The Dig Book Club and discuss The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy with Paolo Gerbaudo thedigradio.com/dig-book-club. Same to zoom with Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll on their doc You Are Not a Loan.

Dan interviews Jacobin‘s Alex Press and organizer Jonah Furman on the state of the labor movement. Sign up to join DSA’s Pro Act phonebank actionnetwork.org/forms/proactphonebank Read Alex Press’s interview with political scientist Michael Goldfield on the Amazon organizing drive in Bessemer jacobinmag.com/2021/02/amazon-unionize-alabama-operation-dixie-organizing-south Subscribe to Jonah Furman’s newsletter whogetsthebird.substack.com Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join The Dig Book Club and discuss The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy with Paolo Gerbaudo thedigradio.com/dig-book-club. Same to zoom with Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll on their doc You Are Not a Loan.

We’re taking a week off to play catch up and posting an early Dig episode from the archives that people keep returning to time and again: Barbara and Karen Fields on their book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (episode 75 from December 13, 2017). Peruse The Dig’s vast archives at thedigradio.com and we’ll be back with a new ep next week. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join The Dig Book Club and discuss The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy with Paolo Gerbaudo thedigradio.com/dig-book-club. Same to zoom with Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll on their doc You Are Not a Loan.

Dan interviews Sarah Jaffe on her book Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone. Support this podcast on Patreon.com/TheDig Join The Dig Book Club and discuss The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy with Paolo Gerbaudo thedigradio.com/dig-book-club

Dan interviews Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sitman on the history and post-Trump trajectory of conservative intelligentsia. Listen to Know Your Enemy, their really great podcast on the American Right, wherever you get your podcasts. Sign up on Patreon for bonus episodes: patreon.com/knowyourenemy Recommended reading and listening: “What’s left of liberalism? Why the left and right both seem to agree that liberalism has failed us.” By Sam Adler-Bell “Know Your Enemy #13: What Happened to Norman? with David Klion” “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong.” By Rick Perlstein “The dark history of Donald Trump’s rightwing revolt.” By Timothy Shenk “The Year the Clock Broke.” By John Ganz “Anti-’68ers and the Racist-Libertarian Alliance: How a Schism among Austrian School Neoliberals Helped Spawn the Alt Right.” By Quinn Slobodian “Leaving Conservatism Behind: How I renounced the God-and-guns conservatism of my blue-collar roots and embraced class politics.” By Matt Sitman Join the Dig Book Club and zoom with Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club. Watch their doc You Are Not a Loan here. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig

Dan interviews Jeanne Morefield on her book Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection and how the disavowed wars have come home on the American Right. Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join the Dig Book Club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club Check out our vast archives at thedigradio.com

Dan interviews sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo on his book The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy. How does the promise of direct digital democracy obscure how leaders are made more powerful and less accountable? Examples from Italy (Five Star Movement) and Spain (Podemos). How does the failure to incorporate people into rooted forms of political organization undermine the left’s power, coherence, and durability? Example from the USA (the funhouse mirror-appeal of a certain YouTube comedian). Related episodes from The Dig archives: Hegemony How-To with Jonathan Matthew Smucker thedigradio.com/podcast/hegemony-how-to-with-jonathan-matthew-smucker How Left Parties Neoliberalized with Stephanie Mudge thedigradio.com/podcast/how-left-parties-neoliberalized-with-stephanie-mudge Support this podcast at Patreon.com/TheDig Join a Dig Book Club at thedigradio.com/dig-book-club