Downstream: Democracy Is Under Massive Threat From AI w/ William MacAskill

Just over two years after the beginning of the genocide in Gaza, and just days after the announcement of a ceasefire, Aaron Bastani spoke to three Palestinian writers in front of a live audience at EartH in Hackney. Ahmed Alnaouq is the host of Palestine Deep Dive and the co-founder of ‘We Are Not Numbers’, […]

Amid the bumpy launch of a new left-wing party and the rise of the Greens and Reform, the ACFM crew turn their attention to parties. Do we still need them? Do parties work by drawing people together, or by excluding the uninvited? And should a political party have anything in common with a dance party? […]

Artificial intelligence is set to be one of the most disruptive technologies this century. For some, a machine capable of augmenting its own intelligence is a matter of time — and could even arrive within a decade. This week’s guest is philosopher and author William MacAskill. One of the leading thinkers in the Effective Altruism […]

Economist, and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis joins Aaron to discuss his most recent book Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance, a memoir about the women in Yanis’ family who raised him, and gave him his political conscience. They discuss the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic, is patriarchy harmful to the perpetrators, as […]

In the summer of 2024, hotels sheltering Muslim asylum seekers across Britain were attacked by violent mobs. A year later, as the summer of 2025 drew to a close, a far-right demonstration of 100,000 people marched through London, bearing St George’s flags and led by Tommy Robinson. On Downstream this week is Myriam François, a […]

After last week’s ACFM Trip to the Future, Jem and Keir reconvene to talk about science fiction. Is sci-fi a reaction to the “time-space compression” of the present? Is it inherently progressive? How did dystopian and paranoids visions of the future come to dominate sci-fi? Was Arthur C. Clarke an early acid communist? Find all […]

It’s almost 10 years since Britain voted to leave the EU, and we’re still dealing with the consequences. In his new book, Between The Waves, Politico’s chief UK political correspondent Tom McTague argues that the journey to Brexit really began with Enoch Powell, before be taken up by his political heir, Nigel Farage. He talks […]

What if we stopped treating the future like a speculative asset and started trying to actually build and prepare? The ACFM gang look to the horizon in this Trip episode. Did young people always worry so much about their futures? Has the currency of emergency been devalued? Does conservatism have an idea of the future? […]

What were the ancient alternatives to democracy? Did people in the Bronze Age forget how to write – or deliberately stop? And what’s the use in studying ancient languages? In a Downstream IRL recorded at EartH Hackney, Aaron Bastani speaks to Josephine Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University, about some lesser-known aspects of the […]

What can the collapse of the Ottoman Empire teach us about the danger of the current discourse around migration? ‘Re-migration’ is not a new concept conjured up by the far-right, but rather something that would be familiar to many Europeans of a century ago. What would those involved in these tragedies think of the direction […]