Episodes
Tuesday Nov 28, 2023
/377/ The Locked-Up Country ft. Shahar Hameiri & Tom Chodor
Tuesday Nov 28, 2023
Tuesday Nov 28, 2023
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Was the pandemic another success for the 'lucky country'?
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How was the Australian state transformed from the 1970s to the 2020s?
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Why was Australia's pandemic planning inadequate?
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What was up with the hotel-based quarantines?
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Why did the public largely support these measure?
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And what can the rest of the world learn from the experience?
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
/362/ Life Doesn’t Have to Zuck ft. Cory Doctorow
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
Tuesday Sep 05, 2023
- The Internet Con: How to seize the means of computation, Cory Doctorow, Verso
- Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow's blog
- Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle, Tricontinental Institute
Tuesday Aug 22, 2023
/359/ Apollo Gets High ft. Benjamin Fong
Tuesday Aug 22, 2023
Tuesday Aug 22, 2023
- Building Big Things, Damage Magazine, Issue 1
- Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge, Benjamin Y. Fong, Verso
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Who Deserves Amphetamines, Benjamin Fong, The Point
Tuesday May 09, 2023
/338/ The Energy Theory of Everything ft. Matt Huber
Tuesday May 09, 2023
Tuesday May 09, 2023
On who owns the power.
Matt Huber joins us to discuss his article, "Socialist Politics and the Electricity Grid", and how organised labour is central to a politics of plenty. What is the grid and who owns it? What are the limitations of a "100% renewables" approach?
On the politics of energy, the left is divided in a similar way to the ruling class. How do we move from a strategy of 'blocking' (preventing new infrastructure) to one of 'building'? And why does a movement to limit climate change need to focus on production, rather than consumption?
We conclude by discussing the conflict between struggles around "the end of the month" (living standards) and those around "the end of the world" (climate change).
Readings & Links:
- Socialist Politics & the Electricity Grid, Matt Huber & Fred Stafford, Catalyst
- Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, Matt Huber, Verso
- On post-neoliberalism: /326/ What Did Capitalism Do Next?, Bungacast
- On de-growth: /310/ Do You Want to De-Grow?, Bungacast
- On green activism: /91/ Exhaustion Revealing ft. Leigh Phillips, Bungacast
- Matt's Twitter thread on Kokei Saito's degrowth communism
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Excerpt: /335/ AI & the End of the End of History
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
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Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history, Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
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Is this the end of “The End of History”?, Robert Stark
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The call for an AI halt disguises the real problems with tech, Jason Walsh, Tech Central
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/306/ AI Capitalism: Inhuman Power (unlocked Bungacast Reading Club episode)
Thursday Apr 06, 2023
UNLOCKED: /306/ AI Capitalism: Inhuman Power
Thursday Apr 06, 2023
Thursday Apr 06, 2023
On Inhuman Power.
[Unlocked episode from Bungacast 'Reading Club', originally released 6 December 2022]
Contemporary capitalism is possessed by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) question – one of the few areas today in which capitalists still seem to have ambition. Why is this so, and is there something about AI that gets to the nub of what capitalism is, as a mode of production?
Is capitalism without humanity anything more than a dystopian Skynet nightmare? And would the creation of a surplus humanity still be capitalism? Would it be techno-feudal, or something else?
Reading:
Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen and James Steinhoff, Pluto Books
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
Excerpt: /323/ Tasty Frictionless Convenience
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
Tuesday Feb 21, 2023
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Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, Adam Greenfield, Verso
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Delivering Restaurants to Wall Street, Alex Park, Compact
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5 Reasons Marxism Has Nothing To Offer Millennials, Austrian Economics Center
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
/321/ Covid Dissensus ft. Toby Green & Thomas Fazi
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
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The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left, Toby Green & Thomas Fazi
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/213/ The Leopard Lockdown ft. Adam Tooze
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/38/ The Economics of Exit ft. Thomas Fazi
Tuesday Jan 03, 2023
Excerpt: /310/ Do You Want to De-Grow?
Tuesday Jan 03, 2023
Tuesday Jan 03, 2023
On 'degrowth communism'.
Why the rage for degrowth now? With deindustrialisation, energy rationing and severe pressure on standards of living, it looks increasingly like degrowth is official policy.
Yet its advocates, drawing from the work of radicals like Mike Davis, John Bellamy Foster, Jason Hickel, and Kohei Saito, would argue that ecological Marxism or degrowth communism is wholly different from stagnant capitalism. How much continuity is there between much older generations of socialists and the contemporary left?
Readings:
- The paradox of Degrowth Communism, Thomas Fazi, UnHerd
- ‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan, Justin McCurry, Guardian
- The degrowth delusion, Leigh Phillips, openDemocracy
Thursday Dec 01, 2022
Excerpt: /306/ Reading Club: AI Capitalism
Thursday Dec 01, 2022
Thursday Dec 01, 2022
Tuesday Nov 29, 2022
/305/ Techno-Feudal Unreason
Tuesday Nov 29, 2022
Tuesday Nov 29, 2022
On "techno-feudalism".
In the Bungacast Reading Club for patrons, we've been discussing various works on "neo-feudalism" - a thesis that tries to explain capitalist stagnation and inequality by arguing that we are moving beyond capitalism – toward something worse.
In this free episode, we discuss one of the most thoroughgoing critiques of this thesis: Evgeny Morozov's "Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason".
Why has this thesis becomes so popular today, across the political spectrum? What is the economic and political logic of feudalism, and how do current trends supposedly indicate a resurgence of these logics? Why have Marxists, who draw such a clear line between feudalism and capitalism, believe that politically-driven expropriation is replacing exploitation?
And how do Big Tech companies make money - purely through rent, or do they produce commodities?
To join the Reading Club, sign up for $10 at patreon.com/bungacast
Readings:
- Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason, Evegeny Morozov, New Left Review
- The 'New' Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession, David Harvey, Socialist Register (pdf)
- Escalating Plunder, Robert Brenner, New Left Review
Tuesday Aug 02, 2022
/279/ Society of the Speculative ft. Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou
Tuesday Aug 02, 2022
Tuesday Aug 02, 2022
On our financialised world.
We talk to Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou about his new book, Speculative Communities. How has speculation become the very practice around which modern societies coalesce? And how does speculation actually give voice to the waning legitimacy of neoliberalism?
Do dating apps, Tik Tok and other social media give birth to 'speculative communities'? And is populism a speculation on the future, a leap into the unknown?
Thursday Jul 21, 2022
/273/ Eco-Leninism? [UNLOCKED]
Thursday Jul 21, 2022
Thursday Jul 21, 2022
On the climate emergency.
We are specially unlocking this episode of our monthly Reading Club – the concluding episode of the first half of the 2022 syllabus (download it here). If you'd like full access to all of the Reading Club, go to patreon.com/bungacast
We discuss Andreas Malm's Climate, Corona, Chronic Emergency and Adam Tooze's review essay, "Ecological Leninism". How convincing is Malm's call for Soviet war communism as a model for responding to climate change?
We also approach these readings in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the knock-on consequences for energy politics. And what should we make of Tooze's contrast of social democratic time-frames with the eco-Leninist one?
Tuesday Mar 29, 2022
/250/ Oil & Disorder ft. Helen Thompson
Tuesday Mar 29, 2022
Tuesday Mar 29, 2022
On energy, the material basis for all our politics?
Helen Thompson, podcaster and professor of political economy at Cambridge and author of Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century, joins us to talk about the geopolitics of oil, stretching from the 1956 Suez Crisis to the Fracking Revolution of today. How does US energy independence help explain shifting politics in Europe and the Middle East?
Plus, did the End of History stay afloat on a sea of cheap oil?
Part 2 of the interview, plus our After Party, is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/251-oil-disorder-64394535
Readings:
- Profits from fossil fuel energy power Russia's war machine, and Ukraine suffers, Helen Thompson, New Statesman
- What Is Fueling Our Century’s Global “Disorder”?, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Nation
- How Did Europe Get Hooked On Russian Energy?, Paul J. Davies, Bloomberg
Tuesday Nov 02, 2021
/222/ Nukes 4 Kids ft. Emmet Penney, pt. 1
Tuesday Nov 02, 2021
Tuesday Nov 02, 2021
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Nuclear Barbarian - pro-nuclear podcast & newsletter
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ex.haust - Emmet's other, co-hosted pod
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Undeveloping America, Emmet Penney, The American Conservative
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Political Life in the Lottery of Babylon, Emmet Penney, The American Conservative
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How we happened to sell off our electricity, James Meek, LRB
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A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, Robert Bryce, Public Affairs (book)