Exploding Appendix Podcast 10: Imaginary Futures, Media Theory and the Cold War Origins of the Internet. An Interview with Richard Barbrook

In this episode of the Exploding Appendix podcast, Exploding Appendix‘s Bradley Tuck is joined by Richard Barbrook a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Westminster. Richard Barbrook is the author of numerous books such as The Class of the New, Imaginary Futures and Class Wargames, as well as pioneering essays such ‘The Californian Ideology‘, which he wrote with Andy Cameron. In this podcast we open with a discussion of media and cultural theory. We discuss theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, Stuart Hall, Guy Debord, Adolph Reed and Angela Nagle. Following this we turn to discussing Richard’s 2007 book Imaginary Futures, which tells the story of the cold war origins of the internet. In this context we discuss the American anti-communist cold war left, Communist reformers in the Soviet union and the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In this podcast you will hear clips from Adolph Reed Jr. delivering a lecture on ‘Race and Class in the age of Obama‘ at the Villanova University on 6th November 2015, Angela Nagle discussing the internet at the Virtual Futures Salon on 15th December 2017, Daniel Bell discussing his book The coming of the Post-Industrial Society, Attilio Mineo’s Century 21 from his album ‘Man in space with sounds‘, recorded for the Century 21 Exposition, otherwise known as the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, and a clip from Disney’s ‘Its a Small World After All‘ ride for the 1964 New York world’s fair. This podcast was recorded on 1st March 2018. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this, please look out for a forthcoming second part of the interview where we discuss Richard Barbrook’s 2014 book Class Wargames, which explores why the avant-garde theorist and radical intellectual Guy Debord developed his own wargame. We discuss Richard’s art project that inspired the book, gaming more generally as well as the uses of gaming and strategy in relation to the Labour party.