Radio Reversal Podcast

This week we are back with the third installment of our series A(gainst) I(mperial) Technofascism. Marissa takes us up to Kabi Kabi country (Sunshine Coast, QLD) to chat to organisers of the School Strike for AI Regulation who have been meeting and organising regular school strikes in opposition to a planned Data Centre on the Sunshine Coast. School students and supporters have been gathering outside the Sunshine Coast Regional Council office throughout the term to protest against AI, build solidarity for folks to resist AI, and call on political leaders to regulate this technology. In this episode you'll hear some recordings from their Term 3 School Strike protest plus an interview with organisers and school students, Lilly and Ruby.

Hello and welcome to another meeting of the NOlympics Committee, chaired by your intrepid Radio Reversers Anna & Nat.

This week on the show: THE OLYMPICS IS FASCIST! A provocation and an invitation to think about the long and continuing relationship between the Olympics and fascism.

We kick off by digging into the historical links between the Olympics and fascist regimes in Europe, including the role of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin in the rise and emboldening of the Nazi regime in Berlin. We consider how the the governing bodies responsible for the Olympics have very often served as landing pads for (often self-described) fascists, with key roles held by "strong-man" figures for many decades with little oversight or accountability. We also talk a little about how the Olympics as a contemporary mega-event serves as a testing ground for key technologies of fascist governance: including mass surveillance and "anti-terrorism" laws, border policing and protest repression.

Are you ready for another meeting of the NOlympics Committee? On today's agenda: how the Olympics reflects, reproduces, advances, and launders nationalism and militarism.

Anna and Nat are joined this week by Dr Samid Suliman - Samid is Director, International (Arts, Education and Law) and Senior Lecturer, Migration and Security (School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science) at Griffith University. He is interested in migration studies, security, climate change, and political theory, and is currently working on projects exploring art, democracy and free speech, nuclear colonialism and militarism, borders and security, and more.

Samid is going to help us understand what nationalism and militarism are, particularly in the context of the present alt-right and fascistic resurgence, how these dynamics are expressed through international mega-events like the Olympics, and how the feel-good-marketing (propaganda) of the Olympics can launder and normalise dangerous politics and practices.

Hello friends and welcome to a new series here at Radio Reversal, all about Fascist Affect & Everyday Resistance.

To kick it off, we're sharing a show we've been talking about and promising for ages : a sort of 'Fascism 101'. Regular listeners will know that over the past year or so we have been talking a lot about fascism and the resurgence of far-right movements here and elsewhere, and the relationship between fascism and other contemporary issues and politics (e.g. fascism and AI, fascism and transphobia, fascism and settler colonialism, fascism and the policing of protest movements). To listen back to some of these episodes, head to radioreversal.org or listen back through our old episodes right here.

And yet, despite so much discussion of creeping and resurging fascism, we haven't really dug into what exactly we mean when we say 'fascism'.

So that's what we're going to do in this episode, focusing on (Anti) Fascism 101: what is 'fascism', what are the traits, tendencies, attitudes and affects of fascist movements; how do fascist ideas take root and gain ground; and how can we resist, challenge and uproot fascist logics, tropes and stereotypes in all their iterations? We'll be considering the way that fascist politics and movements adapt themselves to different places, different contexts, and different moments, and looking beyond those superficial differences to see the patterns that betray fascist politics in all its guises. Finally, and most importantly, we'll be asking what exactly we need to watch out for, as people opposed to fascism in all its forms and looking to create and support meaningful anti-fascist movements.

We're back with Episode #2 in our A(gainst) I(mperial) Technofascism series, this week asking "what is the relationship between AI and fascism"? We're joined this week by the brilliant Dr. Karen Crawley from Griffith University who recorded a live podcast conversation with Radio Reverser Anna as part of a counter-cultural convergence called No Phones, No Phascists in Magan-djin, so-called brisbane. We asked Karen to share some of the insights from her research to shed some light on the relationship between the assemblage of technologies that we call "AI" and the resurgent waves of fascist organising, aesthetics, tropes, and logics that we are seeing across the globe in the present conjuncture.

In this conversation, Karen shares some critical insights into the different kinds of AI and their different relationships to fascist movements, politics, and affects, and the range of different strategies we can use to intervene, contest, and go Full Luddite on harmful AI technologies. Unmissable content for the Summer of Ludd ahead!

This week on the Radio Reversal podcast we're kicking off our new series "A(gainst) I(mperial) Technofascism", digging into all things AI, authoritarianism and technofascism. In this first episode, Marissa is joined by good friend of Radio Reversal and passionate luddite Dr. Jathan Sadowski. Jathan is an Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash Uni, and host of the brilliant weekly podcast This Machine Kills. In this conversation, Marissa and Jathan consider the current state of AI technologies in australia and unpack some of the dominant mainstream political discourse on "AI" in the present moment. In particular, they explore Anthony Albanese's recent Press Club address, “AI in Australia’s interests", and how resistance to AI and meaningful regulation of the powerful and exploitative AI industry is undermined by a politics of normalisation and “just embracing it”. To find the rest of the episodes in this series and catch up on past content, head to radioreversal.org and join us as a subscriber. You'll get every episode delivered to your inbox, as well as regular newsletters, reading lists and standalone series shared right with you.

In this week's episode of the Radio Reversal podcast, Nat takes the NOlympics Committee back to May 2025 to dig into one of our first episodes examining the then Planning (Social Impact and Community Benefit) and Other Legislation Amendment Bill (POLA) (which has subequently been passed into law in Queensland. Nat and fellow Radio Reverser (and planning nerd) Jonathan Sriranganathan are joined by good friend Edward Cordery to talk about what these planning instruments do in practice, and why they're so dangerous.

In case you missed it (or skimmed over it because it seemed boring as hell) the POLA Act is an outrageous example of how events like the Olympics capture city planning processes, creating an artificial sense of urgency that then justifies running roughshod over Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage management processes, removing pathways for appeals and injunctions, and basically opening the city up for waves of new private development. In this conversation, Nat, Jonno and Ed dig into the substance of the act, how it "streamlines" the development assessment process into practical non-existence, creating jobs for buddies of those in power, and rendering the few environmental protections that exist in queensland powerless.

Expect legislative lament and administrative anger, and lots of it! And if you haven't already, make sure you catch up on the previous NOlympics Committee 2032 episodes by heading to radioreversal.org and subscribing !

This week on Radio Reversal, join Marissa and Roshan as they remember the fight for Kurilpa Commons - a beloved community space in Brisbane's West End on the Kurilpa peninsular, which has been carefully tended by a collective of (human and more-than-human) gardeners, composters, growers, gatherers and organisers for almost five years. They reflect on the closure of the commons as part of a much longer ongoing struggle against greedy developers, corporate goons and the colonial state - and think about what these spaces (and the fight to protect them) can teach us about being human in this time and place.

Welcome to the third meeting of the 2032 NOlympics Committee! In this episode, join Anna & Nat on an excursion to Ibis Island where they give a talk on fascism & olympics fatalism, and how we can resist it. We dig back into the concept of Event Capture that we've been exploring over the past few weeks, this time introducing the concept of "narrative capture" or "future capture" - the way that the storytelling and political discourses around the Olympics serve to fuel fascism, launder settler colonialism and obscure more radical possibilities for the city.

G'day friends and welcome to the second official meeting of the Brisbane NOlympics Committee! In this episode, Anna and Nat are continuing the conversation from our first NOlympics show to consider why exactly the Olympics is such a bad proposition for host cities (and what we could still be doing about it!) We pick up on John Rennie Short's theory of "event capture" to express the many and varied ways that these kinds of mega events work to reorganise the city around the needs and interests of global capital rather than local people, focusing in particular on the idea of "legal capture", and the way that the ordinary "checks and balances", accountability mechanisms and development approval processes get waved during mega events because of the manufactured urgency of the event deadline.

Towards the end of the show, we also introduce the idea of "narrative capture" to consider how mega events work by reinvigorating and operationalizing repressive forms of nationalism; and how this goes hand in hand with rising fascism and new forms of colonialism and colonial violence. If you're interested in this concept, stick around for the next episode of the podcast where we share a talk we gave at a protest action at Barrambin, so-called victoria park, which digs further into the way that the Olympics functions to foreclose more radical possibilities for the city and to stoke the flames of fascism in the here and now.