Exploding Appendix Podcast 4: Greg and Bradley’s Institute of Idea Diary – Day One

This Exploding Appendix podcast is part of a three part audio diary recorded at the Institute of Ideas’ annual event called “The Academy”. Every year the Institute of Ideas chooses a topic and delivers a series of lectures on it. In a way, these two days offer an alternative vision of what a university could be like, a space where intellectual rigour is combined with a welcoming of controversial and thought-provoking ideas, where the theorists of the past help us explore the challenges of the present. The theme of this year’s Academy is “From Universal man to Identity politics: the rise and fall of the self.” During their time at this event, Exploding Appendix’s Bradley Tuck, and Culture on the Offensive’s Greg Scorzo, kept an audio diary, where, each night, they would discuss the day. These were often after a few drinks, after the jitters and exhaustion from the day. In this respect, they are not meant to be the final word, but part of an ongoing musing about philosophy, politics, culture and the Institute of Ideas itself. This episode, which was recorded on the 14th July 2017, the first night, after arriving, covers topics such as the origin of Spiked Online and The Institute of Ideas in the Revolutionary Communist Party, Marxism, the importance of civic values, free speech and democracy, what a post-scarcity economy might look like, the difference between representational and direct democracy, and what it actually means to trust people. There will also be a short interlude where you will hear a segment from a lecture given in October 2011 by Michael Albert on the topic of participatory economics.