Novara Media

This week marked three years since the Hamas attack of October 7th, and the beginning of the Israeli state’s genocidal onslaught against the Palestinian people. In that time, Western leaders from Joe Biden and Donald Trump to Keir Starmer and now Andy Burnham have refused to call the genocide what it is, despite the consensus of genocide scholars. One outlier among Western leaders during this period has been Humza Yousaf.

The former first minister of Scotland, and first Muslim leader of a Western nation, has written a book about his time in government, ‘Under Fire: My Family’s Escape from Gaza and the Cost of Leadership’. On Downstream this week, Aaron Bastani sat down with him to hear first-hand what it was like governing Scotland, while his family were trapped in Gaza.

How did he and his family manage the first few days and weeks of the genocide, while balancing his responsibilities as Scotland’s leader? What kind of pressures did he face internally, and externally, to support Israel? How did he make decisions in government, and how did he take the decision to stand down? What does good leadership require? And what does he think about the fate of the union, and the direction of travel in Britain today?

Huawei makes the pipes and cables that power the Chinese internet. Its global reach has made China into a superpower.

Huawei is often accused of spying for China. But how was the US so sure that Huawei’s technology could be used for spying? Because they had already hacked it and were using it to spy themselves.

That’s not even the strangest episode in the company’s history. Its installations were bombed by the UK and US in Iraq before 9/11. In 2018, its infrastructure allegedly pinged back the secrets of the Africa Union to China overnight. And it now stands accused of doing business in Iran.

Eva Dou is the author of the deeply researched House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company.

She spoke to Richard Hames about the geopolitics of telecommunications, how Huawei made China into a global superpower, and whether or not Huawei is, in fact, a wing of the Chinese state.

0:00 Intro

3:57 Huawei’s Current Legal Battle

14:14 Huawei & Espionage

24:34 Huawei in Africa and Iraq

33:07 The Great Firewall and Tech Rivalry

46:40 The Mysterious CEO: Ren Zhengfei and Shenzhen

55:04 Who Owns Huawei?

1:03:09 How Tiananmen Square Changed Chinese Tech

1:11:19 AI and Microchips

1:19:46 Sanctions, the UK and Huawei’s future

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Are we in the era of trauma Top Trumps? ‘Lived Experience’ has become a byword for standpoint authority and progressive politics. It has allowed people from marginalised groups to speak and be heard, and forced us to confront how power plays out in interpersonal dynamics. But it has also become a way for people to brand themselves online, and excuse antisocial or even downright nasty behaviours. Has ‘lived experience’ helped the left, or turned us into self-obsessed therapy-speakers, incapable of communicating with the majority of people?

At the latest Downstream IRL, Ash Sarkar sat down with Catherine Liu – cultural theorist, professor and author of Virtue Hoarders – to discuss her new book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering. Liu argues that as class politics has declined, the language of psychology has stepped in to explain problems rooted in capitalism. But what happens when trauma becomes content and politics gives way to what Liu calls the ‘gentrification of pain’? Is ‘lived experience’ a prerequisite for legitimate political analysis? Why do movements so often end up policing each other rather than confronting power? And if politics becomes about who’s hurting most, who benefits?

Welcome to Series 2 of Do Your Own Research. Until the end of the year, I will be focusing on the most important and interesting country in the world: China.

We’re starting with Tianyu Fang, an editor of Chaoyang Trap, a newsletter all about the Chinese internet.

We’re starting with the internet because that’s so much of what we see of China: fragments of life online. What’s the reality behind them, and how do we square these beguiling, details with the vast story of China’s rise?

What is happening online in China is often reduced to a few memes or movements. We see the dazzling skyline and we stop thinking, and start gawping: that’s what I call the gawp-zone. How do we get out of it?

In this conversation, we go far deeper, into the circuits and technology of the Chinese internet, from its earliest utopian moments to the hemisphere-spanning computing stack we see today.

And we’ll be making our map of everything that has ever mattered and ever will: this new edition focused on China, available here: novaramedia.com/dyor

The effect of pornography on the people who consume it is often moralised about, generally due to its influence over the nascent sexuality of young men. But the business model, technological innovations and broader, parasexual, cultural effects go crucially underexamined.

This week’s guest, investigative reporter for the Financial Times, Patricia Nilsson, has written a new book unearthing exactly the ways in which these underexamined forces emerged and how they continue to exert influence on society.

She spoke to Ash about pioneering camgirl entrepreneurs, the sado-masochistic-inflected rise of Andrew Tate, and how algorithms have entered the bedroom.

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