After last week’s episode on Parties, this time ACFM exposes the predicament facing Your Party, the new leftwing faction led by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. What expectations do leftwing voters have for Your Party? Does the Corbyn faction distrust the membership? Is Zarah a politician or a poster? And does ‘Yorp’ stand a chance […]

Ghosts have already got their own festival: Halloween. So why do they spook us at Christmas too? Do they represent forces of goodness and charity, or some nameless demonic evil? And what gifts have they brought? Jeremy Gilbert shields his eyes from the ghostly apparitions of Jacques Derrida, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and M.R. James as […]

Adam Smith claimed that “the propensity to truck, barter and exchange… is common to all men”, but anthropologists know that this isn’t the case. In fact, humans tend towards the opposite. So why do we feel compelled to give away our wealth? Nadia, Jem and Keir unwrap the cultural and economic pressures on doing pressies […]

We don’t get enough of it. We take drugs all day to fend it off. We’ll do it when we’re dead. And it’s our last line of defence against 24/7 capitalism. Sleep, the main course in life’s feast! The ACFM crew rouse themselves from slumber to wokeness in this month’s Trip, exploring the political and […]

ACFM reunite for spooky season with one thing on their minds: the horror, the horror! Nadia, Jeremy and Keir embark on a historical, literary and cinematic exploration of scary stuff. Why do (some) humans love to be terrified? What can horror teach us about the nature of the universe? What do the latest crop of […]

We live in irrational times. From the resurgence of interest in astrology, tarot and occultism to the deepening influence of conspiracy theories and positive thinking, culture is experiencing a turn towards the magical. What does that mean for those of us on the “weird left”? Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn gather round the […]

In 1999, an anonymous Italian collective published a novel called Q. Imagined by its left-wing authors as an “operation manual for cultural disruption,” the book has had a bewildering political afterlife, with its story arc and the collective’s media pranks around Satanic ritual and paedophilia seemingly providing the basis for alt-right conspiracy theory QAnon. Did […]

How can we care for each other within a system that doesn’t care about us? In this episode, Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn get to grips with birth, death and all the social reproduction in between. When did we start putting our elders in care homes instead of our own homes? What happens […]

In a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG), a group of people take a trip into an imaginary world, guided by an MC or ‘dungeon master’. Not limited to the Tolkien-esque themes of the famous Dungeons & Dragons, TTRPGs range from gritty sci-fi scenarios to steampunk heist fantasies, and from everyday life to magic, monsters and vampires. […]

Games are all around us. They let us escape from drudgery and experiment with other worlds and ways of being. But they can be traps too: apps designed to be addictive, producing only the most hollow sense of achievement. In this Trip, Nadia, Jeremy and Keir throw their polyhedral dice to explore how games shape […]

What defines each era? Historians often lean on terms that point to technology: bronze, steam, carbon, silicon. So is technology a fundamental aspect of being human? On this wide-ranging Trip, the gang take on one of their biggest topics yet. Starting from the basis that technology is an application of knowledge for a practical purpose, […]

Throughout history, countless good ideas have been side-lined or dismissed because they were put forward by women. That’s the frustration which motivates historian Katrine Marçal, who delves into her myth-busting research for a Microdose all about technology’s missed turnings. With ACFM host Nadia Idle, the author of Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored […]

Just what is it good for? This time on ACFM, Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle and Keir Milburn respond to the Ukraine invasion with a conversation about war. Is it an aberration, or an unavoidable product of human power struggles? Are conflicts between nations better understood as a reflection of domestic divisions? And how is war […]

Has democracy broken down? Is it even an idea worth fixing? Trip 22 is a three-horse race as Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn consider the anti-democratic shifts happening across the political spectrum and ask what it really means to be ruled by the people. The gang discuss whether democracy is necessary to tackle […]

When he’s not working on #ACFM, show producer Matt Huxley is a musician. His recent EP under the name Muckers is the inspiration for this Microdose – a short audio essay about land, family, trespass and belonging. Recorded while out walking, Acid Camping considers who owns the landscape, the methods by which people have been driven […]

In the first #ACFM Trip of the year, Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn look at the conflicting desires and demands that make up a political movement. Is unity possible? Is coalition desirable? Do we need to agree in order to win? The gang discuss the difference between liberal and radical conceptions of identity […]

What can we learn from the women of the Popular Front? Ahead of an #ACFM Trip on Unity and Difference, Nadia Idle talks to actor and activist Norah Lopez Holden about the milicianas who fought in the Spanish Civil War. What brought these women together – and what pushed them apart? Lopez Holden has worked […]

What should political organisation in the 21st century look like? Wiggly? Lumpy? Diagonal? Something rather like that, suggests political theorist and author Rodrigo Nunes, who joins Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert on this additional revolutionary Microdose. Focusing on the last few decades of radical left politics, the trio reflect on on their own experiences in […]

The #ACFM gang square up a suitably momentous topic for their milestone 20th Trip: revolution! Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn wonder how the idea of political revolution ever became thinkable, and if it’s still thinkable today. Was the sexual revolution a real revolution? How did disillusionment with Soviet communism affect our political imagination? […]

In anticipation of the next Trip, the ACFM trio deliver a condensed but essential history of revolution from Oliver Cromwell to Fidel Castro, with stop-offs in France, America, Haiti, China, Spain and Russia. What does it take to cook up a revolution? Is the French Revolution still relevant to our idea of radical social upheaval? […]