The Chatterbox

In this episode, produced in collaboration with the Qatar Foundation, Marc Owen Jones — Associate Professor of Media Analytics at Northwestern University Qatar — talks to us about this age of disinformation and how it manifests in the context of the Middle East. We discuss regulating social media platforms and try to understand what exactly disinformation is and where it came from. Touching on significant socio-political events such as the Arab uprisings of 2011, Professor Owen Jones reflects on the unique role that social media plays in the region. Referencing the dangers posed by monopolized social media platforms and data colonialism, we also talk about how the news industry is changing and what this means for historical records. Finally, the conversation moves to young people today and how they grapple with Ai, disinformation, false and new narratives, and orientalist perceptions of the Arab world.

Marc Owen Jones is Associate Professor of Media Analytics at Northwestern University Qatar. He is the author of Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media.

Connect with Marc 👉 https://www.instagram.com/marcowenjones/?hl=en

Get his book 👉https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/digital-authoritarianism-in-the-middle-east/

Hosted by:

Mikey Muhanna 👉 https://www.instagram.com/mikey_mu/?hl=en-gb

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ABOUT AFIKRA

afikra | عفكرة is a movement to convert passive interest in the Arab world to active intellectual curiosity. We aim to collectively reframe the dominant narrative of the region by exploring the histories and cultures of the region – past, present and future – through conversations driven by curiosity.

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Hosted by: 
Mikey Muhanna 👉 https://www.instagram.com/mikey_mu/?hl=en-gb

FOLLOW & RATE THE AFIKRA PODCAST:
» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/lb/podcast/the-afikra-podcast/id1529437743
» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5nafoF1Zs7F48mGZjlhrze
» Anghami: https://play.anghami.com/podcast/1014643869

THIS SERIES IS PART OF THE AFIKRA PODCAST NETWORK 
Explore all episodes in this series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfYG40bwRKl5xaTkBDrUKLCulvoCE8ubX&feature=shared

ABOUT AFIKRA
afikra | عفكرة is a movement to convert passive interest in the Arab world to active intellectual curiosity. We aim to collectively reframe the dominant narrative of the region by exploring the histories and cultures of the region – past, present and future – through conversations driven by curiosity.
📍 Local events in 40+ locations worldwide http://afikra.com/chapters
🎧 New podcasts + videos weekly http://afikra.com/podcasts
⚡ Become a member: https://www.afikra.com/membership
🔗 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/afikra_
🔗 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/afikra.official
🔗 Twitter: https://twitter.com/afikra

For one turbulent week at the end of July this year, serious rioting broke out across around 20 towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland. Rioters attacked homes and businesses owned by immigrants, and set fire to accommodation housing asylum-seekers. The riots began near Liverpool after the horrific murder of three young girls in a neighbouring town, about which far-right supporters spread false claims online that the perpetrator was a Muslim migrant or asylum-seeker.

Whilst some women were involved, the vast majority of the rioters were men. So how should we understand the place of masculinities and misogyny in these events, and in extreme movements more generally? What should we make of the response of the authorities, focused largely on criminality, arrests, and imprisonment? How significant is the subsequent upsurge in anti-racism rallies across the country, which heavily outnumbered the far-right rioters?

We talk to Dr Elizabeth Pearson about her recent book ‘Extreme Britain: Gender, Masculinity and Radicalisation’, which explores misogyny and masculinities in relation to the far-right (English Defence League, Britain First, and For Britain) and the Islamist group al-Muhajiroun. The book is based on interviews with figures including Anjem Choudary, Tommy Robinson, Jayda Fransen, and Anne Marie Waters. Elizabeth argues that radicalisation is a ‘masculinity project’ for those who get involved in extremism – both for those on the far-right, and those in Islamist groups.

Elizabeth is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is also an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) for Defence and Security Studies. Prior to academia, she worked as a radio journalist for the BBC.

• Profile: https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/persons/elizabeth-pearson
• Twitter: https://x.com/lizzypearson
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-pearson-3572a117/
• Elizabeth’s ‘Extreme Britain’ book: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/extreme-britain/
• She also co-authored ‘Countering Violent Extremism: Making Gender Matter’ (2020): https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-21962-8
• Her Conversation piece about the riots: https://theconversation.com/the-hypermasculine-far-right-how-white-nationalists-tell-themselves-they-are-protecting-women-and-children-when-they-riot-236250
• Her writing for RUSI: https://rusi.org/people/pearson

Episode timeline

• Introduction (00:00-02:37)
• Elizabeth’s feelings as she saw the riots unfold (02:37-05:42)
• Government and public responses to the riots (05:42-09:30)
• Discourses about ‘protecting’ women and girls (09:30-14:41)
• Connections between misogyny, domestic abuse, and extremism (14:41-19:06)
• Men's responses (19:06-23:55)
• Break (23:55)
• Why extremist radicalisation is a ‘masculinity project’ (24:00-27:45)
• Similarities and differences between the far-right and Islamist extremism (27:45-33:37)
• Elizabeth’s experience of conducting her research (33:37-39:40)
• Women’s place in the far-right (39:40-49:11)
• What got Elizabeth involved in this area of research (49:11-54:12)
• Conclusion [The counter-protests; addressing the root causes; links between the mainstream and far-right; exploitation of working-class men; protest masculinity; engaging with people across divides] (54:12-01:02:29)

Explainers

• More info at Hope Not Hate: https://hopenothate.org.uk/case-files-hub/
• Tommy Robinson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson
• Andrew Tate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tate
• Nigel Farage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Farage
• Greggs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greggs
• Anjem Choudary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anjem_Choudary
• ‘Home Grown’ by Joan Smith - https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/joan-smith/home-grown/9781787476066/
• Prevent Strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONTEST
• UCL ‘Grievance’ research team: https://www.grievance-erc.com
• Prof Joel Busher: https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/persons/joel-busher
• English Defence League: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Defence_League
• Britain First: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britain_First
• For Britain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Britain_Movement              
• Al-Muhajiroun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Muhajiroun
• Jayda Fransen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayda_Fransen
• Anne-Marie Waters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Marie_Waters
• Boudica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudica
• Pegida: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegida

What story can be told of the American welfare state when you broaden the view beyond established government programs and official actors? We kick off season 3 with a conversation with historians Salonee Bhaman, Bobby Cervantes, and Salem Elzway on their AHR article “A New Welfare History.”

• Fazi’s landmark book, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics—still essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of technology. About the fundamentals of what computation does and what material, ontological and epistemological consequences this holds. 
• Brian Cantwell Smith’s essay, “The Foundations of Computing” (2003)—a text we explore, even if Fazi offers a different perspective on the nature of computation.
• Oh, also, look to Anil Bawa-Cavia's (life changing) episode of Interdependence, where he enumerates further on computational functionalism, computational realism, but more importantly for more color on the paths to incompleteness traced in Gödel and Turing -- to which Fazi builds her main thesis: these incompletenesses are actually strengths and not limitations of computation.

Tim Sahay returns to the show provide a world tour of the flows and chokepoints of goods and finance that make up our global economy. 

Support this show and others like it by becoming a subscribing member of Convergence at convergencemag.com/donate

The Soviet gulag was a place of brutality, exploitation and death. But it was also home to tens of thousands of medical personnel who had to overcome limited facilities, appalling conditions and political menace in a battle to save the inmates' lives. Professor Dan Healey, author of a new book on these Gulag doctors, talks to Rob Attar about their complex roles in the heart of Stalin's labour camps.

(Ad) Dan Healey is the author of The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps (Yale University Press, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gulag-Doctors-Medicine-Stalins-Labour/dp/0300187130#:~:text=Dan%20Healey%20explores%20the%20lives,a%20proportion%20of%20their%20patients./?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty.

The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.

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Jonathan Anomaly is a world renowned expert on the science and ethics of genetic enhancement and the Academic Director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics, & Economics in Quito, Ecuador.

Dr. Anomaly introduces the concept of Enlightened Tribalism, a virtuous mean between blind tribalism and undiscerning universalism.

We discuss why tribalism gets a bad rap, the evolutionary origins of tribalism, how altruism gets selected for in groups, liberal cosmopolitanism as a response to the excesses of nationalism in World War I and World War II, the difference between Enlightened tribalism and pathological tribalism, pitfalls in the ways liberals propose to extend altruism indefinitely, the problems with genetically engineering people for altruism, why people are not fungible to institutions, the moral case for Enlightened Tribalism, and why real diversity requires a rejection of cosmopolitan liberalism.

Paper on Enlightened Tribalism: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?aid=ANOETA

Jonathan Anomaly: https://jonathan-anomaly.com/

If you enjoyed this interview, please leave a review on Spotify/iTunes.

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We’re often told that it would be unfeasible for everyone on the planet to live good lives—that if there wasn’t some degree of poverty—or at least lower living standards—in the rest of the world, then we’d blow right through the ecological limits of the planet. Even if it’s not said explicitly, the argument is that some people need to be poor in order for us in the Global North to live good lives. There’s a lot wrong with this assumption on a lot of different levels, but most importantly—it’s empirically inaccurate.

It is possible, in fact, for everybody on the planet to have their needs met and to live a good life and make it happen, in fact, with only 30 percent of current global resource and energy use. That might sound unbelievable, right? Well, that’s capitalist realism for you. Because not only is it believable—it’s based on solid research and empirical data. It would, however, require ending capitalism and moving towards eco-socialism. So yes, it’s possible. But it won’t be easy.

To discuss the research behind these exciting findings we’ve brought on economic anthropologist Jason Hickel. Jason is a professor at the The Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the author of the books The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World. He’s the lead author of the paper “How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis” published in the journal World Development Perspectives, and which we’ll be discussing today. 

As you may know, Jason is a regular guest on the show and was on most recently to discuss two other fascinating and important papers he recently co-authored, “Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015” published in journal Global Environmental Change and "Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy" published in the journal Nature Communications.

What assumptions go into traditional economic thinking and how have they limited the way we conceptualize poverty and how we address it? How do we conceive of good lives—and how does our current economic system limit these conceptions and perpetuate environmental destruction and social immiseration? What would an economic system that is designed around meeting actual human and planetary needs look like? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we get there? These are just some of the questions we discuss in this fascinating conversation with economic anthropologist Jason Hickel.

Further Resources:

• The Political and Economic Determinants of Health Outcomes: A Cross-National Analysis, Hugh F. Lena and Bruce London
• How to pay for saving the world: Modern Monetary Theory for a degrowth transition, Christopher Olk, Colleen Schneider, Jason Hickel

Related Episodes:

• How the North Plunders the South w/ Jason Hickel
• The Divide – Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets with Jason Hickel
• International Development and Post-capitalism with Jason Hickel
• How Degrowth Will Save the World with Jason Hickel
• The Green Transition Pt.1 – The Problem with Green Capitalism

Covert art: Berwyn Mure Intermission music: One Last Wish

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Daniel discusses his recent Harper's cover story, "The Life and Death of Hollywood," which focuses on the economics of entertainment as private equity and streaming have changed the industry.

Recorded May 24, 2024

Follow Culturally Determined @CulturallyDet

LINKS

Daniel's piece, "The Life and Death of Hollywood"

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/the-life-and-death-of-hollywood-daniel-bessner/

Max Read on the piece

https://maxread.substack.com/p/one-weird-trick-for-fixing-hollywood-6f0

Sean Clements's podcast, "Subtitles On"

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/subtitles-on-with-sean-clements/id1694805292

Daniel's podcast, "American Prestige"

https://www.americanprestigepod.com/

Follow @dbessner

Follow @AryehCW

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