Psychology of human responses to climate change

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I recently spoke at, and took part in, a UK event organised by the Climate Psychology called “Fertile and Sterile Dialogue in the Climate Change Debate”. It was a stimulating day, shared with emotionally smart people who think deeply about why we are so slow to respond to gathering evidence of human-induced climate change. I […]

Brand value of democracy

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Russell Brand has kicked up a welcome fuss with his responses to Jeremy Paxman’s recent questions in an interview about democracy and voting. His was a sparkling performance that showed the limitations of Paxman’s political thinking and highlighted the failures of the UK governance system. I would say the same is true of Western representative […]

Comment faire face au fascisme?

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Yannis Youlountas parle de son film “Ne vivons plus comme des esclaves” – un documentaire qui fait le tour des actions, des journaux alternatifs, des radios rebelles et lieux d’occupation et d’autogestion qui se multiplient dans une Grèce en crise. Pourquoi une mise en ligne gratuite? Youlountas souhaite que l’accès gratuit au film participera à […]

The theatre of elections – US or otherwise

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I have a lot of time for the work of Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight centre for digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite school of journalism and mass communication. Not least of my likes is his publishing model for his book Mediactive (2010), about how people can be empowered as new […]

Résistances – not your average documentary film festival

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Frenchman François Manceaux, director of a documentary on the financial crisis in Portugal, explains what makes the annual Résistances film festival unique among its peers. By placing questions of money and marketing behind overall content and coherence, the organisers produce an event that makes people think deeply about the realities of modern-day politics. Manceaux’s film […]

Slaves no more – lessons from the Greek crisis

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http://youtu.be/uAE877E3ToM Franco-Greek Film director Yannis Youlountas talks about his film “Ne vivons plus comme des esclaves” (Let us be slaves no more), a rough cut of which was screened during the Résistances film festival in Foix, southwest France on July 10. The documentary, which will be free-to-download and view on the internet on September 25, […]

Résistances – un festival unique

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J’ai passé deux jours cette semaine au 17ème édition du festival de films Résistances à Foix en France. Ils se sont donné comme objectif le suivant: …de promouvoir un cinéma rarement diffusé sur les écrans, pour créer un salutaire étonnement, faire connaître d’autres regards et d’autres cinéastes que ceux du prêt-à-penser habituel. Alors bravo – […]

Greenwald on Snowden, self and conventional media

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Guardian journalist Glen Greenwald, who brought NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to the public eye, speaks at length on the last few momentous weeks. His speech follows a series of scoops revealing the massive extent of US government surveillance and storage of digital communications worldwide. The talk, which starts at 10 minutes in, features Greenwald’s reflections […]

Fraudcast News reloaded, nearly

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I am getting through the final stages of re-publishing Fraudcast News, a process that involves changing print-on-demand publishers (from Lulu to Lightning Source) to allow me a better distribution arrangement and greater flexibility in the cover design. That’s the idea anyway. The first tangible evidence of the change arrived yesterday in the form of a […]