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In China in the 1990s, the arrival of the internet was swiftly met with the ‘great firewall’: a complex matrix of censorship, surveillance and state control. Since then there have been two internets: the World Wide Web, and the Chinese internet. ​

Aaron Bastani talks to China analyst Yi-Ling Liu about the cultures and innovations that have evolved in this separate digital ecosphere. How have feminist and LGBTQ+ movements manifested through the Chinese internet? How has the Chinese Communist Party negotiated the promise and threat of the internet, and now AI? And why is the West suddenly so obsessed with China?

Yi-Ling Liu’s book is The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet.

After mulling over the problem of boredom in the last Trip episode, the ACFM gang return with a solution: hobbies.

In this episode Nadia, Jem and Keir wonder why hobbies tend to mutate into jobs, which hobbies are appropriate for commoners, whether men and women approach their hobbies differently, and why having a hobby is often framed as uncool.

It’s a weird-left spin on private pastimes with ideas from Engels and Gary Cross and music from Television Personalities and Shonen Knife.

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For fifty years, Alfred McCoy has exposed covert operations. In 1972 he uncovered the CIA and French intelligence’s complicity with the heroin trade during the Vietnam War – research that the CIA tried to suppress.

He’s the author of many books, most recently Cold War on Five Continents, which gives a comprehensive account of late 20th century geopolitics, decolonisation, and covert operations.

But now he’s warning of a New Cold War. Is it over for the US empire?

He talked to Richard Hames about the strange parallels between the 1956 Suez Crisis – a turning point in global British influence – and the 2026 war on Iran and the new Chinese World Order.

Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make life possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

Donald Trump has threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants in an expletive-laden Truth Social Post, and the U.S. account of its rescue of two airmen inside Iran raises more questions than it answers.

With Michael Walker, David Wearing and Daniel Levy.

Liberalism, in one form or another, has been the pervading political ideology of the past 200 years. It has become so pervasive, as an ideology, that it lays claim to the middle ground and common sense itself. But liberalism is a set of dogmas and doctrines like any other political ideology, and unfathomable horrors as well as huge advances have been made in its name.

Today on Downstream, the ideas we call liberal or centrist are up for scrutiny, as Aaron Bastani interviews Adrian Wooldridge. Wooldridge is a liberal insider, having been a journalist at the Economist magazine for thirty years. His new book, Centrists of the World Unite! The Lost Genius of Liberalism is an account of his own sense that liberalism in 2026 is in a state of crisis. It must reinvent itself, he argues, or die.

So what exactly is liberalism, where did it come from, and how can we characterise it today? What was the historical relationship between liberalism and slavery? Why are liberals always so reluctant to acknowledge this aspect of their history? In times of crisis, do liberals always defect to the fascist far-right? And what must centrists do today, if they want their ideas to organise the 21st century?