There's a story you can tell about the post-Occupy left gravitating towards a more state-oriented kind of politics. However, this misses how autonomous and anarchist-inflected social movements have brought enormous energy, and enormous change. In this episode, we examine the theory and practice of anti-statist organizing, including the Kurds within the area formerly known as Rojava.

Psychedelics have gone from the counterculture, to the mainstream. However, can you turn take such an ineffable thing -- personal revelation, cosmic oneness, spiritual enlightenment, whatever people have called it -- and make it just another commodity? We look at the deep rifts in and around psychedelic medicine, as different camps vie for the future of these drugs.

The WEF is yet another example of the scrambled ideologues of our moment. Conservatives condemn the WEF, and news organizations like Rebel cover it doggedly; at the same time, left-leaning NGOs speak there, and progressive news organizations say little. On this episode, we examine the shifting politics around our global financial elites.

What's safer than baby powder? Parents have been using it for over 100 years to powder their baby's bottoms, and they've found one brand especially trustworthy: Johnson & Johnson. Yet, numerous studies have revealed the presence of trace amounts of asbestos in this talc-based powder. Thousands of parents now claim that this asbestos is responsible for their cancers. In settling these claims, J&J is using a proposing a bankruptcy move called the Texas Two-Step. Critics say is nothing...

We're excited to announce Academic Edgelords. This is a scholarly podcast about scholarly provocateurs. Gadflys, charlatans, and shitposters sometimes get tenure, believe it or not. This is a leftist podcast that takes a second look at their peer-reviewed work, and tries to see if there’s anything we might learn from arguing with them. We start with the ultimate academic edglelord: Ted Kacynski, the domestic terrorist.

Could an artificial intelligence diagnosis what ails you? Medical futurists offer a vision of perfect personalized risk assessments, diagnoses, and treatment recommendations. Yet, recent stories belie this optimism. Many of these robot doctors are rather stupid, and they seem more interesting in cutting costs than providing care.

Paulo Freire offers activists and academics everywhere a lesson in what it means to be a radical intellectual. He is known as the founder of critical pedagogy, which asks teachers and learners to understand and resist their own oppression. On this episode, we look at the life and legacy of Freire.

The COVID-19 lab leak theory went from being dismissed as mere misinformation, to now a credible matter of debate. What's changed, and what does this teach us about science journalism and science communication?

Online masculinity is getting weirder and weirder. We’re way past mere misogyny and sexual predation (though, that’s still certainly there). Now, we’ve also got bro science, ball tanning, ball eatin,’ piss drinkin,’ and who knows what’s next. Eat your hearts out, Hugh Hefner and the old kings of male revolt–in fact, these kings of this new manosphere will literally eat hearts. However, perhaps these mockable male influencers are onto something, in a roundabout way. There is just...

The story of the Fountain of Youth is as old as history itself. Herodatus, the father of ancient Greek history, wrote of a mythical spring that extended the life of its bathers. Today, biotech entrepreneurs, scientists, and health influencers are still searching for that mythical spring.

For seven years, from 1968 to 1975, one eighteen story high-rise was the heart of Canada’s counterculture. Rochdale College in Toronto, ON, was jammed full with leftist organizers, hippies, draft dodgers, students, artists, and others just looking for a good time. Although, Rochdale wasn’t really a “college.” It was something much bigger: a political, educational, communal, artistic, and psychedelic experiment. During its time, it was endlessly lambasted by conservatives and leftists...

The Darts team is working on another big episode! In the meantime, we’re sharing this one from our friends at PlasticPills – Philosophy & Critical Theory Podcast. They do a great discussion of OpenAI and its implications in academia. For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

The idea of moving to Canada figures prominently in the imagination of many disaffected Americans. Usually, they don't come. However, between the mid-60s and early-70s they really did--and in the 10s of thousands. Yet, when these Americans made their way, they did not always find the Canada they expected.

In this special bonus, we're sharing the latest episode of Kino Lefter, the socialist film podcast! Our host Gordon and producer Marc join Kino Lefter host Evan MacDonald to discuss our latest episode, a retrospective on the 2004 documentary Discordia.

We revisit the extraordinary National Film Board documentary Discordia, directed by Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal. The film covered the 2002/03 school year at Concordia University in Montreal, QC. Pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with police, and this event came to be know as "the Concordia Riot."

Forced by the courts, the Canadian government has recently instituted an expansive Medical Assistance in Dying regime (MAID). You need not be terminal to seek MAID, and in March, 2023, you might even be able to seek MAID for mental health issues. The usual Left impulse on MAID has been to honour people’s wishes, and afford them dignity and autonomy over their own bodies. Yet, a string of cases in Canada has troubled this impulse. There have been news reports of at least 14 cases in which...

In the creative industries, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow say there’s often a ‘chokepoint’ between creators and their fans.  Corporate behemoths — be they streaming apps, publishers, tech giants, or others — put on the squeeze, exploiting their market power to extract rents, push down wages, and push up prices. On this episode, guest host Jay Cockburn asks Cory Doctorow how these monopolistic (and monopsonistic) corporations put on the chokehold, and how we can loosen their grips. With...

The collapse of the crypotcurrency exchange FTX has caused major shockwaves throughout the financial world.  This has brought new attention to the ongoing reckoning around crypto, and urgency to the calls to reign in and regulate these emerging technologies. FTX’s collapse has also sparked a philosophical reckoning about the ideas that inspired their CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried is a major proponent and funder of Effective Altruism, a philosophical and political movement that...

Today, right-wingers attack science and liberals defend it. Science good, anti-science Republicans bad–that’s the prevailing narrative, especially so during the March for Science in 2017. However, it’s not so simple. Perhaps science should be defended from reactionary attacks, but not uncritically defended as inherently good. That’s the message of Science for the People, a radical movement of scientists and educators who argue that science has always served capitalism, patriarchy, and empire....

We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thinking, but we’re coming to a somewhat surprising conclusion: there isn’t as much of it as there used to be. Our Silicon Valley tech bros have quite a curtailed vision. If they do have a utopia, it is a utopia of sustaining the unsustainable. We speak to Paris Marx of Tech Won’t Save Us on the shifting politics of Silicon Valley. We’ll traverse the intellectual history of hippies-turned-arch-capitalists, and focus...

The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise. However, the state under neoliberalism doesn’t have the technocratic ambition it used to. This just isn’t a period of grand New Deal-style programming. There is still a state, but it increasingly outsources its functions. Is technocracy dead, then? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sector. More...

Last episode, we looked at the technocrats of the industrial age: Thorstein Veblen, Howard Scott, and the “industrial tinkerers,” as Daniel Bell put it. But Daniel Bell went on to say we were entered a new age — a “post-industrial age” — where a new kind of technocrat would vie for power. They would develop new intellectual technologies that could be codified into complex ways of understanding, predicting, and maybe even controlling global systems. One such intellectual technology was...

Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. It makes a certain amount of sense, given how irrational our politics seem to be right now. So, technocracy is seductive. In fact, it’s an idea as old as politics itself. We begin the first of a three-part series telling stories of technocracies past, present, and future. In this first part, Ira Basen tells us the story of Technocracy, Inc. This 1930s movement aimed to install non-democratic North American...

Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. It makes a certain amount of sense, given how irrational our politics seem to be right now. So, technocracy is seductive. In fact, it’s an idea as old as politics itself, and it emerges just about everywhere — left, right, and somewhere in between. From Plato’s philosopher kings, to Soviet economic planners, the cybernetic dreams of Cold War liberals, and today’s algorithmically-governed workplaces. So...