Novara Media

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 railway engineer Gareth Dennis. They discuss the rationale behind HS2, why Hyperloop was always destined to fail and the real reason Britain has so many potholes. Plus: does every major city really need a tram system? And how come Britain is so bad at building new infrastructure?

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 weapons systems on satellites are just the tip of a secretive iceberg of new risks, whose enormous power threatens us all. And next year Elon Musk, avatar for this new era of space expansion, will take up a key position alongside the Trump administration.

Eleanor Penny sat down with Daniel Deudney, author of Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity to talk about the perils, promises and progress of our expansion out into our vast and indifferent universe.

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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 only one problem: those technologies don’t yet exist.

In this Downstream, Andreas Malm, human ecologist and author with Wim Carton of Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown spoke with Ash Sarkar about the delusions of climate change politics, if we should put a big mirror in space to reflect sunlight, and whether the politics of Colombia might be our best hope.

Recorded at Peckham Levels in front of a live audience on November 5th 2024. Set decoration provided by After Noah. Stills by Blaze A. Emin.

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. Featuring music from Björk, Disrupters and Stormzy and ideas from Joseph Schumpeter, Michał Kalecki and the Communist Manifesto.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm

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 the Post-Left kickstarted a flurry of investigations into new political cultures. His Doomscroll podcast looks at the development of online politics now.

As the results of the US election were still coming in, he spoke to Richard Hames about the disasters of vibes-based liberal politics, how the Trump campaign spoke to a bloodlust in the American people, and where the American left goes from here.

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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 antiquity, and John Rapley, a political economist, talk to Aaron about the uncanny parallels and productive differences between ancient history and the present day. What do most historians get wrong about the fall of Rome? Was 1999 the peak of civilisation? And can anything stop western decline?

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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 forefront of those investigations is Marek Poliks, a composer, theorist and co-host of the Disintegrator podcast, where he and Roberto Alonso explore the frontiers of human-AI relations with guests from all disciplines.

He joins Richard Hames to talk about what’s next for AI now that it’s ingested the entire internet, how the concept of ‘lift’ helps us understand how AI will impact capitalism, and why there’s no point asking if AI is capable of ‘creativity’.

Marek and Roberto’s book, Choreomata: Performance and Performativity After AI, is published by CRC/Taylor and Francis.

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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 worked in the Middle East, and why the British Empire is ultimately to blame. Pappé’s new book, A Very Short History of Israel-Palestine Conflict, is available now.

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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 suck it up and ‘bear hug’ our enemies.

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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 crop of grass powered the Mongol empire, how the two world wars irreversibly changed the planet, and to wonderif the global north can ever come to terms with the need to consume fewer resources.

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