Introducing Season 2 of Connected & Disaffected.

We started Connected & Disaffected because we were sick of never hearing the views of our generation (i.e. under 30s or Millennials or whatever you want to call us). The podcast was an attempt to change that. So we ranted and raved about Brexit and the snap-election and every stupid comment made by incompetent politicians for about 6 months.

It was pretty cathartic. But, recently, we’ve gotten sick of covering politics like a sports event. Every week, we reacted to what just happened and bemoaned the short-sightedness of politicians and media talking heads. Of course, we weren’t much better.

So we’ve decided to change pace, as I mentioned in the last blog post.

We want to cover the future of politics. We want to cover how technology has and will change the way we do politics — from voting to lobbying to activism, media coverage and everything else. Rather than focus on the system as it exists now — and being annoyed it doesn’t reflect how we see the world — we want to understand how it might change and, even more, how we might go about changing it.

We know the future of politics will be digital in one way or another. We know it probably won’t look like the last 100 years. So what might it look like? And what would you guys want us to investigate to better understand it?

To start with, we decided to look at where we are right now. Not in terms of Theresa May or Boris Johnson, Trump, Macron, Putin or Merkel, but in terms of the underlying system that they are operating within: neoliberalism.

For the last 40 years, neoliberalism has dominated elections throughout the world. All the totemic political figures of recent history have been neoliberal icons — on the right and left — because the ‘neoliberal consensus’ kept winning elections.

This episode contains the first installment of an ongoing series on neoliberalism. After defining politics for decades it looks like this phenomenon is maybe, just maybe, on the way out. But where did it come from? What has it meant for the world? What might come after?

To get started on this massive topic, Warren spoke to John Quiggin, a post-Keynesian economist at the University of Queensland. You can find his work all over the place. He’s on Twitter, he has a blog and he has a book. Most recently he published interesting articles in The Guardian and Aeon on what might come after this current period of flux.

Stay tuned for more as we go through this massive topic.

For Season 2, we’re also introducing recurring segments. This week, we kicked off with two: The Week In Bullshit and Meanwhile On Twitter.

The former is our way of dealing with our past failures. Obsessing over the news from day to day means you spend an enormous chunk of time reading about stuff that, one week later, nobody even remembers. That’s bullshit news. That’s the horse-race. There are other flavours of bullshit news: misleading coverage of important topics, early reporting that comes out before the facts, slow news headlines that make mountains out of molehills etc. We’ll be flagging it as we see it.

The latter segment is for those of you who do not spend their lives online, scouring threads on politics Twitter in the early hours of the morning. Sometimes, the political chatter online — much of which is between some of the most plugged in actors in the space — is totally different from what’s going on out in the real world. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Sometimes we think it’d be useful to connect normal people to what politics nerds are obsessing about.

Season 2 is a work in progress, so please get in touch about our new segments or features. Here’s to the future of politics!

Be sure to subscribe to Connected & Disaffected on Soundcloud. You can also follow us on Twitter or on Facebook.

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