For this week's bonus, we discuss the UK ending all COVID testing, the NYT/Serial 'Trojan Horse Affair' podcast making British columnists lose their minds, an update on Roku's hilarious financial peril, and a long rumination on what would happen if Keir Starmer took Julia Fox on a date. We hope you enjoy.
2022-02-23 21:27:04 +0000 UTC View PostIt's the free one!
This week, Nate and Hussein speak with Brian Reed and Hamza Syed of the Trojan Horse Affair podcast, an investigation into a hoax letter in Birmingham in 2014 that–despite being known to be false–kicked off an intensification of surveillance and mistreatment of British Muslims. And everyone knew it was fake at the time!
It is the official position of Trashfuture that you listen to the Trojan Horse Affair, which is available here: 2022-02-21 12:43:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Now unlocked to the $5 tier!
Nate and Milo watched the early-2000s UK TV show 'Road Wars' and talked about British cops, but the episode got derailed with various tales of personal experiences with cops, and how little you can get away with in the US without getting arrested and charged. Hope you enjoy!
2022-02-17 17:30:39 +0000 UTC View PostWe speak with Q Anon Anonymous U.K. correspondent Annie Kelly about how, far from being fringe whackos, the lumpen petit bourgeois wingnuts that meet on telegram and gather outside Parliament are central to the right wing project. Also, we read Starmer’s baffling paean to NATO.
2022-02-17 16:22:15 +0000 UTC View PostIt's the free one!
Gareth Dennis (@GarethDennis) of Rail Natter returns to our hallowed halls to talk about, among other things, the decision to put the capital’s transport network into “managed decline,” so we can enjoy the standards of infrastructure currently only available to exotic places like “Italy” or “Quebec.” Also, a Foxtons for the Metaverse.
Check out Rail Natter her...
2022-02-14 22:50:48 +0000 UTC View PostIn this special extra segment, Nate interviews Sam Asumadu from Media Diversified (@WritersOfColour) about the phenomenon of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs), a now-banned sentence that has resulted in thousands of British residents effectively receiving life sentences for acts as minor as stealing a mobile phone at age 17. Sam’s written an article on the topic for OpenDemocracy, which is availab...
2022-02-13 18:36:01 +0000 UTC View PostThis week, Nate and Milo are joined by Paul Ewart (@paulewart23) of the University of Sussex to discuss Margaret Thatcher and how she changed Britain (pretty much solely for the worse!) And guess what: none of those effects are felt today, in any way.
2022-02-11 19:37:48 +0000 UTC View PostWe speak with technology critic Evgeny Morozov about the history of ideas like “Web 2,” “Web 3,” and who these ideas serve and how - and what a better web may look like.
Check out Evgeny's 'The Syllabus' project here: https://www.the-syllabus.com
Dear friends,
We're having a live show in London on Wednesday, March 2. Tickets are available here, and we wanted to extend an offer to you all for being $10+ patrons. Apply code 'tfhog69' when you check out for a £5 discount. And yes, we know the URL is for an old show lol, all of the ticketing etc is being run by the venue, so we h...
2022-02-08 15:01:49 +0000 UTC View PostIt's the free one!
We speak with Phil Burton-Cartledge (@philbc) about his book, Falling Down, about the sociology of the U.K. Conservative party. How is it to be understood? What are its weaknesses? But first, we look into a number of chickens that appear to have come home to roost in the Labour Party. Riley Quinn: And also, of course, we talk about a ludicrous Web3 Project.
Buy Phil’s book her...
2022-02-07 21:30:41 +0000 UTC View PostThis was released on the free feed as well
Riley sits down for a discussion of the implications of the upcoming Health and Care Act for the NHS with Dr Allyson Pollock and Peter Roderick from Newcastle University, and tries to get to the heart of the question: what do we mean when we talk about “privatising the NHS.”
2022-02-07 19:17:39 +0000 UTC View PostWe review the further state of institutional rot in the U.K., where a lot of our most prominent dunces are feigning surprise that the met police, EHRC, etc., may simply have been rotten all along. Also, we review Ark’s Big Ideas Summit, which is essentially a kind of Autonomous Cars for Christ pamphlet.
2022-02-03 00:01:59 +0000 UTC View PostIt's the free one!
We look at the shape of the (contracting) frontiers of politics and (expanding) frontiers cooked up in the minds of our most addled billionaires. Let Mark Zuckerberg make a skinwalker out of you, let Elon Musk put your brain into a tunnel, but try to work a little less and - as the British state always does - then "we got problems."
2022-01-31 23:34:58 +0000 UTC View PostWe recorded this a few days before the new year, but it got put on the back burner thanks to the declassification of documents related to The Dome (we are not joking). However, Nate got in a bike accident and we had to delay this month's second Britainology. So, on the last day of the month, not at all last minute or anything, please enjoy this Large Wide Questionnaire of the Past Twelve Months.
2022-01-31 20:59:29 +0000 UTC View PostOur politics and economy has once again found itself hitting the bottom of a large hole - and their solution is to dig up! We revisit some troubling developments at our old friends Netflix, Peloton, and THG, then we read an article about sending in a hot British general to fix up Downing Street.
2022-01-27 00:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostIt's the free one!
We’ve brought on Jonathan Bernhardt (@jonbernhardt) of Patch Notes podcast to discuss Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Activision Blizzard. We discuss Activision’s super-villain CEO, the dismal state of its business at present, and what ‘metaverse’ fixations mean for the future of gaming. We al...
2022-01-24 22:06:53 +0000 UTC View PostWe retvrn to tradition (we unwound by watching a recent-era Guy Ritchie movie). Geezer Hugh Grant, Eddie Marsan gets romantic with a pig, and everyone is really upset about… dealing weed? Journey with us into the mind of a confused old man, as we review THE GENTLEMEN.
2022-01-20 00:01:59 +0000 UTC View PostIt's the free one!
We are joined by Alex Press (@alexnpress), of Jacobin and the Primer podcast, to do some more Amazonology. This time, we look at the specifics of how HR operates at this company, how its shittiness ends up hurting workers, and how Amazon is gearing up to export more of its working practices to others. But first, we wonder at why and how it was the parties that finally turned t...
2022-01-17 22:38:51 +0000 UTC View PostMilo subjects Nate to yet another property-themed British TV show, except this one is about people buying derelict homes at auction and renovating them in order to (in most cases) rent them out at huge markup. We brought on Alice Caldwell-Kelly, who described this show as 'like a nature documentary about parasites,' and we have a delightful time.
2022-01-14 21:56:22 +0000 UTC View Post(This was going to be the first free episode of 2022, but we decided to go with the Dome story instead. So, apologies for it being slightly out of date, but we hope you like it). In which the full cast of TF discusses the BBC bringing on Alan Dershowitz to discuss the Maxwell verdict, and recent fawning coverage of Liz Truss that wants so desperately to make her the next Thatcher. Also, yet another terrible start-up.
2022-01-13 00:01:03 +0000 UTC View PostIt's the free one!
Jathan and Ed from TMK return to help us figure out exactly what “Web 3” is, and what people actually mean when they say “Web 3.” What we find when we look under the hood is a virtual series of colonia dignidads all layered on top of one another promising that only when we have interpreted Hayek correctly, will we find utopia.
2022-01-10 23:05:17 +0000 UTC View PostThe remaining stock of our Vonk Binman shirts and Warrior's Heart sweaters are now back on sale - there aren't many left so snap them up while you can!
£5 off for patrons code: tfhog69
https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/shop
In which we get into the specific zones of the Millennium Dome, their various corporate sponsors, and what they said about Britain c. 2000 and how New Labour saw its subjects' lives. We completely lost our minds doing this and we hope you enjoy.
2022-01-04 00:25:04 +0000 UTC View PostIt's the free one!
This week, we have the full cast of TF together to review the history of the Millennium Dome, a New Labour attempt to create a modern exposition of Britain. It definitely became an exhibition of how weird the inner circle of Blair’s Labour was, but it’s largely regarded as a failure–and we learn about how it transformed a chunk of Greenwich from the Goop Zone into the Empty Luxury Flat Zone.
2022-01-04 00:11:05 +0000 UTC View PostIt's the free one!
For the holiday week, Nate and Alice speak to author Jane Pek about her debut novel THE VERIFIERS, a detective story involving online dating, the ever-present algorithm, the tech economy, and Alice’s long-standing dream to read about a lesbian private investigator. This was a lot of fun for us to record, and if you enjoy it, please reach out! We’re happy to try and make this an ongoing series.
*NOTICE* If you enjoy this epis...
2021-12-27 22:09:36 +0000 UTC View PostNow unlocked to the $5 tier!
We decided to review a different kind of Christmas movie: David Cronenberg's 2007 film EASTERN PROMISES, which is both a film about Britain, a film about Russians in London (featuring no Russian actors), and a film where you see Viggo Mortensen naked. We got Olga Koch (@rocknrolga) on to discuss this and, uh, she did not like it.
2021-12-27 21:59:47 +0000 UTC View PostYou had questions, we had answers. This is normally on the $10 tier but we ran out of bonus content after Milo and Riley were felled by The Plague. Hope you enjoy!
2021-12-24 00:09:37 +0000 UTC View PostIt's the free one!
Former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg now works for Facebook to the tune of eight figures. He has some opinions about Facebook’s policy decisions. As you can guess, they sound like thoughts from a man who’s been hit in the head really hard–which is why Riley, Milo, and Alice analyze a recent Meta appearance in which his Nintendo Wii-looking avatar complains about his headset a lot, among other things. We also talk about the recent byelection in North...
2021-12-20 22:14:26 +0000 UTC View PostThis week, in the midst of Riley and Milo being struck with covid, we recorded an all-remote episode to discuss some recent Britain news, with a special emphasis on recent leaked texts from Daniel Kawczynski MP in which he's begging for a Saudi consultancy role in order to pay private school fees. There are a lot of other points covered in this episode but this part really captures something ineffably British. Hope you enjoy!
2021-12-17 23:07:12 +0000 UTC View PostIt's the free one!
This week, we speak with writer and friend of the show Trevor Strunk (@hegelbon) about recent developments in the smartest sector of our very real economy: the gaming/crypto convergence, in which powerful thinkers from Andreesen Horowitz have decided that the best way to develop jobs is to pay people in the developing world a pittance to do XP grinding on behalf of gamers in the deve...
2021-12-13 19:58:23 +0000 UTC View Post