The Chatterbox

To accompany our podcast series, Death in Westminster, hosts Kojo Koram and Dalia Gebrial met with investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan and former private wealth lawyer Stephanie Brobbey at EartH in Hackney last month.

Digging into the dark money that flows through Westminster, Kojo and Dalia find out what made Stephanie quit her job hiding rich people’s assets, why Peter couldn’t find anyone to publish his story about Labour corruption, and what normal people can do to challenge the global system of wealth extraction.

Listen to Death in Westminster, hosted by Dalia and Kojo Koram, in the Novara Media podcast feed. Follow Peter’s work through the Democracy For Sale newsletter.

Kenya's crisis stems from elites disconnected from our societal roots. Imported from global neoliberal templates, they prioritize foreign debt traps, IMF dictates, and elite capture over organic, people-driven solutions. This alienation fuels inequality, erodes trust, and stifles authentic African agency—demanding we reclaim leadership grounded in our lived realities.

What happens when a private equity company takes over a music festival? For this Critical Listening live taping at the ESNS Conference in Groningen, we spoke with Dutch investigative journalist Henk Willem Smits to unpack this very question. Smits works with the community-supported outlet Follow the Money,  specializing in tax avoidance by multinationals and wealthy individuals in music, and the intersections of private equity and electronic music culture. His 2025 piece "Loud Music, Silent Takeovers" specifically looked at the 1.3 billion euros spent by U.S.-based private equity firm KKR on music festivals in recent years.

In his reporting, Smits has found that after private equity buys festivals, they can be subject to higher ticket prices, more commercial partnerships, and homogenized lineups driven by Spotify and TikTok data—in order to "tailor lineups more precisely to audience demand," he wrote last year. "A lot of festivals, especially smaller dance festivals, don't have big margins," Smits told us. "It's a very small margin business. So what you see now is management layers getting fired... That is something that happens a lot, but that is not something the audience notices. What also happens is you see some festivals not being organized. Or they skip a year."

Below, see some more highlights from our conversation with Smits, which also covered his reporting on the connections between KKR and Israel, and how pop stars use the Netherlands as a tax haven.

How else do festivals change when they are acquired by private equity?

What has been the biggest takeaway from your festival reporting?

Are there any open questions for you, still, regarding the relationship between private equity and live music?

In this wide-ranging conversation, Ronny Joe Grooms of KSVY Sonoma 91.3 FM sits down with author, journalist, and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow to discuss his novel The Lost Cause and the real-world systems shaping its near-future vision.

Originally recorded on December 7, 2023, this interview takes on new resonance today as many of the issues explored in The Lost Cause—political instability, technological disruption, and the restructuring of society after crisis—have moved from speculative fiction into lived experience.

Doctorow connects the themes of the book to present-day realities, breaking down how copyright law has expanded far beyond its original purpose, why it often fails to protect creators in a monopolized system, and how artificial intelligence is reshaping labor, ownership, and creative work.

The conversation also explores:

• how The Lost Cause imagines a world after a failed political turning point
• the concept of “enshittification” and the lifecycle of digital platforms
• why lawsuits against AI companies may miss the real issue
• the role of monopoly power in shaping both technology and culture
• how open systems and collective action offer alternative paths forward

This is both a literary conversation and a systems-level analysis—connecting fiction, policy, and lived reality in a rapidly changing world.

Host: Ronny Joe Grooms (KSVY Sonoma 91.3 FM)
Guest: Cory Doctorow

Recorded: December 7, 2023

• The Lost Cause and its vision of the near future
• Copyright law and its modern expansion
• Fair use and legal access
• Creative Commons and global collaboration
• AI training, lawsuits, and labor implications
• Platform economics and “enshittification”
• Monopoly power and media systems

• The “failed revolution” concept in The Lost Cause
• Why fair use often depends on legal resources

• AI and the misunderstanding of infringement
• Platform decline and user exploitation

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, journalist, and activist focused on digital rights, copyright reform, and the political economy of technology. His work explores the intersection of technology, power, and society.

Life, social constructs and highlighted difference of the continent.

Source: Precolonial Black Africa by Cheikh Anta Diop

Feedback : [email protected] (audio/written)

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Youtube: ChristinaBCG

Instagram: @blackgirlcouch

China didn’t set out to fix climate change. Its production of clean energy and electrification tech is changing the world, but this particular green revolution is a byproduct of China’s economic strategy and its quest for energy independence. The global financial crisis, the US shale boom, and the US attitude towards China have all contributed to China’s new dominance of clean energy manufacturing.

Guests: 

Jessica Chen Weiss  - Professor of China Studies and the faculty director of the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC

Jake Werner - Director of the East Asia Program, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

Hosted by energy and climate finance expert Kate Mackenzie, and Tim Sahay from the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins University. They co-author The Polycrisis newsletter, which explores connections between energy, geopolitics, climate change, finance and industry. 

• Produced by Sarah Allely
• Original music by Russell Stapleton
• Mixed by Bethany Stewart

Contact us at: [email protected]

Links:
Jessica Chen Weiss in 2024; "The Case Against the China Consensus", Foreign Affairs
CSIS note on the implications of China's rare earths export controls for US military and semiconductor manufacturing 

This MCLR+ event on David Garland’s Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment (Princeton 2025) gathers an international and interdisciplinary panel of scholars to reflect on several of the fundamental analytic and normative issues explored in this important and ambitious book, including developing a nuanced comparative-historical analysis of U.S. penality, laying out a broader methodological framework for similar accounts of other penal systems, and–crucially–advancing a theory of the relation between political economy and crime control and a realistic framework for pursuing progressive change.

The event proceedings, including the panelists’ commentaries and the author’s response, will appear in a special online MCLR+ book forum.

Welcome back to After Order - a series from Macrodose and the Alameda Institute - exploring power, sovereignty, and crisis in today's unstable world.

⁠⁠Event Tickets: Political Economy in a Time of Monsters ⁠⁠

In this week’s show, host James Meadway is joined by Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla - political strategist, activist, Co-General Coordinator of the Progressive International, and Executive Secretary of the Hague Group, a coalition of Global South nations launched in 2025 to hold Israel accountable for its crimes in Palestine.

Varsha’s work sits at the intersection of law, empire, and resistance - as both an organiser and an intellectual, grappling with what it might mean to build a decolonial internationalism rooted in the Global South.

From Honduras, where a US corporation is suing the state for billions in a secret tribunal, to Ecuador, where an authoritarian regime with the direct assistance of the US is crushing democracy in the name of the War on Drugs, to the bombs falling on Gaza - in flagrant violation of international law - it’s clear we are living through a rupture in the global “order”. 

But Varsha argues that “order”, the so called “rules-based international system”, was always and fundamentally a veneer, one that masked the systems of coercion, extraction and exploitation that uphold global capitalism. 

In the context of war on Iran, it’s a particularly prescient argument. The veil has lifted, we are seeing the return of hard power across the world, and an open defiance of international institutions, from Cuba to Palestine. 

But we’re also seeing something else. A wave of solidarity with the victims of colonial oppression, and new forms of coordination among states seeking to resist through the cracks of disorder.

So the question at the heart of today’s conversation is this: as the old fiction of order breaks down, what comes next? 

And what would it mean to build a different kind of sovereignty - and a different kind of internationalism - in a world After Order?

Subscribe to support the show at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/Macrodose.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Your pledge is a donation supporting free public education; perks are thank-you gifts for your support.

Got a question or comment? Reach out to us at ⁠[email protected]⁠.

To learn more about the work we do at Planet B Productions, head to ⁠⁠planetbproductions.co.uk⁠⁠.

Listen to Death In Westminster - a new documentary podcast from Planet B Productions & Novara Media.

Boom to Bust is a timely investigation into the rise of Peak TV and the perfect storm that caused a rapid decline in Hollywood work.

When Hollywood writers and actors went on strike in 2023, they drew attention to the rapidly changing nature of film and television production. In Boom to Bust, media industry experts Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller combine economic and cultural analysis and interviews with industry workers to capture the lived experience of Hollywood in crisis. Tracking major disruptions of the preceding decade—including the transformation of streaming services into studios, the overproduction of series during Peak TV, as well as #MeToo and COVID—the authors explain how the conflicting interests of studio executives, creative workers, and workers' unions compelled a renegotiation of the terms of work. Grounding readers in the history of Hollywood labor negotiations, the authors provide a road map to make sense of Hollywood’s present—and what comes next.

Miranda Banks is Professor of Film, Television, and Media Studies at Loyola Marymount University, author of The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild, and coeditor of Production Studies.

Kate Fortmueller is Associate Professor of Film and Media History at Georgia State University and author of Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production and Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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What if the most consequential immigration policy decisions in America aren't being made by elected officials, or even by government agencies—but by software? Right now, a sprawling ecosystem of private technology vendors is quietly reshaping who gets flagged, detained, and deported in the United States. At the center of it is Palantir's ImmigrationOS, a platform for end-to-end automated enforcement. But it’s just one piece of a much larger machine.

Today we’ll hear from the authors of a new law review article that argues that private tech vendors have become a third governing power in American immigration—sitting between the federal government and the states, encoding policy into code, and building infrastructure that increasingly poses a threat to democracy and the rule of law. Guests include:

1. Chinmayi Sharma, an associate professor at Fordham Law School who is also affiliated with the Strauss Center at University of Texas, the Atlantic Council Cyber Statecraft Initiative, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology, and the Center for AI and Digital Policy.
2. Sam Adler, a third year law student at Fordham Law School.