Novara Media

We’re going back to basics on Novara FM this autumn with a series about the big one: class. What does it mean to look at the world through the lens of class in the 2020s, an era of precarious work, rising inequality and elusive social mobility?

Three classy thinkers join FM to investigate: political researcher Nihal ElAasar, cultural critic Juliet Jacques and writer and Verso editor John Merrick. They begin the series with an introspective session on the meaning of class today, drawing on their very different upbringings in Egypt, the home counties and the north of England.

The series continues in two weeks with writer Kenan Malik exploring the clash between class and identity politics.

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Most people know that the game is rigged. Those who set the rules – win the game. Grace Blakeley has made a career of studying the rules, exposing the exploitative ways in which powerful institutions govern our lives and figuring out ways in which we can beat the banker and resist the game itself. Grace is an economist, writer and media commentator. Her work can be found in Tribune Magazine, Jacobin and Novara Media.

Who exactly is the ruling class? The conspicuous top hat and tailed Bullingdon Club still exert dominance, but their era is waning. There are new folks in town. They can’t beat the obscene wealth of petrostate oligarchs, so they’ve joined them in ransacking the country. Ash is joined by Sam Bright, author of Bullingdon Club Britain: The Ransacking of a Nation.

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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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

Ahead of an ACFM Trip about the internet, Keir Milburn is joined by Malcolm Harris to talk about the unique political history of his hometown of Palo Alto, the intellectual laboratory for a century of American hegemony.

The Kids These Days author tells a story that connects the founding of California, the violent removal of its native population, Stanford University’s eugenicist agenda and the parallel emergence of Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex.

Is the entire project of personal computing and the internet tainted by this brutal history?

Malcolm’s book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, is out now.