Good evening. Welcome to this evening's edition of Tiskey Salmon. My name's Aaron Bostani. Thanks for joining us again. Obviously Michael normally hosts this show, but I've been in the chair both this evening and yesterday because we've gone to five nights a week for both this week and potentially next week, obviously depending on what happens. But we'll be going nightly between now and Thursday. Well, that's the plan anyway. Tonight I've got the immense pleasure of being joined again by Ronan Burton. Sure, hey, don't run. Hi, Aaron. How's things? Ronan, obviously as some of you may recall is the editor-in-chief, is that right, of Tribune Magazine? We just use editor, but yeah, yeah. Not editor-at-large. No. No. Editor-in-chief of Tribune Magazine, which is something of an appendage of the Jacobin Empire in the US, I guess it's fair to say. Because Jacobin started in what, 2011? 2010, 2011, yeah.  Yeah, as a relaunch publication. So obviously Tribune goes a lot further back. We may even talk about some of this given the context of other publications that are in the minds of the left at the moment. Tribune goes back to 37 and the campaign around the popular front against fascism and the British kind of wing of that campaign, the desire to try to bring together various forces on the left towards a coherent anti-fascist narrative, which was not being served by many other media outlets at that time. That's where Tribune comes from and then became the Bevanite publication through the Second World War, arguing for a class struggle perspective on the Second World War and then for the reconstruction of Britain along socialist lines after 45. So it has a great and rich history, but yeah, we launched it a year ago at having fallen into very tough times. A state of disrepair, it's fair to say. Yeah, and we are where we are now. We've had a year of this for better and worse. A lot of work, but we're doing alright. So for most of tonight's show, because obviously I spoke with Ronan last week, we discussed the media. We're not going to be, for once, I won't be denigrating and moaning about the state of the mainstream media. I mean, I do that so often. I don't like doing it. In fact, that's why I started the foreign media along with James Butler, but it's obviously something that has to be discussed in the context of the general election right now. We won't be doing that. We'll be talking more about new media. What's its impact been in the general election? Has the left deployed it in a better way compared to 2017? What can be learned going forward? We're not going to speak for that long. We're maybe going to speak for 30, 40 minutes, maybe 30 minutes. What I want to see is comments from you guys. Feedback. Is it being effective? How are you consuming political media?  Are you finding that social media is effective in changing people's minds on the doorstep when you're canvassing? These kinds of questions. We want to know what you think. Before we do any of that, Ronan has hinted at what we're going to talk about very briefly. Obviously, there was the New States editorial yesterday. I have to be very clear about this. Great deal of respect for many journalists at the New Statesmen, but the editorial is a whole different thing. What did you make of the editorial? As somebody who's editing a magazine, which is effectively, it's a competitor publication. What did you make of the editorial? And what does it say to you about the state of the politics currently behind the New Statesmen as a magazine? Well, look, I mean, one of the things that Jason Cowley said in response to the left-wing criticism of that editorial is that no one had taken it on from an intellectual standpoint or from the point of view of its arguments. I think it's worth doing, actually. In my view, it is the classic liberal editorial during an election cycle where there is real class struggle at play. I think it's well worth socialists getting into their minds. The difference between liberalism and socialism. What liberalism is about is the mediation between capital and labour. So at times like the 1990s, the early 2000s, when there's generalised prosperity, when living standards are improving for a majority of people, and there's a buy-in, a political consensus about how things are going, it can do very well. You get these big dynasties built up, Blair, Clinton, Schroeder. And there is this kind of belief that develops among liberals, the kind of that, I think of the King Canute kind of example, right when you're standing there at the sea and watching the tides come in and out and thinking that you're somehow responsible for that. Of course, in the actual King Canute example, the Henry of Huntington story, King Canute realises that he doesn't control the tides and that actually there is this greater power of God, which is more powerful than any king. That is the realisation that liberals never come to. They always believe that capitalism in this instance can simply be controlled, can be contained. I think of another very important article has been written in the last few weeks by a prominent liberal in Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. Martin Wolf has been writing time and time again for weeks, for months, for years about the system being out of control, about capitalism needing to be reined in, the problems of inequality, the problems of the financial sector, all of these things. But the liberal position is always and will always be to believe as the good bourgeois that what you have to do is reform the system from above. And they always get petrified at the prospect that any of the kind of reforms that would be necessary to capitalism will be won through struggle from below and from workers. And so Martin Wolf, having said all of these things about the needs to change the system when he is presented with a Labour Party manifesto, writes a kind of vaguely hysterical piece about how it's going to destroy the economy of Britain. Despite the fact the Labour manifesto was no more radical and would have no more public spending and would have no more nationalisation than is common in many parts of Europe and particularly in Nordic countries. And that is because that kind of Elizabeth Warren t-shirt that was going around today made clear that capitalism without rules is theft, you know. These people really do believe that the fundamental question is reining capitalism in and so they're left standing there on that beach when the waves eventually wash over them and totally incapable of responding to it. That is what happened to Blair, it's what happened to Clinton's, what happened to Schroeder. It's what happened to the entire centre left in the period of 2008 when the kind of financialised economy that they sat on top of in order to redistribute fell apart around them. And that is the characteristic, the political tradition that is represented by new statesman's leader in this in this instance. It talks about the need for reform. It talks about some of the problems that exist within the British economy. It even mentions the word capitalism, but presented with a movement that could actually affect the kind of changes needed to prevent the descent into hardline right wing politics. It shies away from it. And it shies away from it, not just because of XY scandal because of Brexit because of the anti-Semitism case. It shies away from it fundamentally because the new statesman from the beginning of the Corbyn project has never been comfortable with it on the basis that the Corbyn project is attempting to reinvigorate class struggle. It's attempting to reinvigorate the idea of a society that is not going to have good liberal reformers sitting on top dictating this or that change, but where the power of concentrated wealth is going to be taken on, is going to be challenged. And through that battle, society will be reshaped and a better economy will be produced. So I think people need to get into their minds what that kind of political position is, and therefore what you can expect from those kind of publications. You can expect them to bring in some good left-wing writers. And as we've just said, there are some good writers at the publication. You can expect them to be favorable to some of the things we said. But on the fundamental question of what our politics is about, that fight, they're never going to be with us. And so I don't think it's surprising. Do you think that left-wing writers should write for them? Now, obviously, people have to pay bills, they have to make ends meet. But also, it seems to me, and there's some great people that write for them, but it does seem to me that they're using that left-wing cashier credibility. Look, the Tories tweeted that. The Daily Mail wrote about it. So it's almost, you know, I mean, I think I've written something for the news dates and before, you know, that they've spoken very favorably about Navarra Media. Well, my worry is that the left continues to give them, furnish them with that credibility, which is then used against us.  Until that changes, then they're never really going to fall on the right side of this, are they politically? No, I mean, I think it's interesting because, again, this gives lie to many of the conceits of liberalism, right, that really the media environment is about the exchange of ideas. It's not. There is a means of production of ideas and the means of distribution of ideas in a very clearly Marxist sense. People cannot just go out there very easily, set up their own publication without funding. They cannot just have their ideas proliferated.  And so I would never criticize anyone. I mean, I take a very broad perspective on this. I would say the sun is out and so forth and the really kind of hard line, right ones, right wing ones, okay, fair enough. But also, as I said before, I was a youth rep for the NUJ, I get it, people go and they write for places because they need to make a living. And the truth is in this country, there is no large socialist publication that is producing enough readership to give people a living. And so people have to. But there's a few things that are important when you're considering that question, right? Because I thought one of the really interesting points of Cowley's editorial, our leader, was when he opens up and he talks about the problem of our hyperpartisan media. Because that told me so much about where the new statesman sits and why it was a quintessentially liberal position. If you can't look at the British media landscape in any objective sense today and say, oh, it's hyperpartisan, it's slanted one direction. We talked about this the last time, 60% of the print media owned by Murdoch's News UK and the Daily Mail Group, the vast, vast array of right wing propaganda coming out of the print media resulting in huge bias against labour, then being reflected and pushed through the public service broadcasters because they're allowing the news media to set the agenda. When you look at that and you don't see a huge imbalance and a role for yourself to be on the left fighting back against it, and instead you look at that and you see something that's hyperpartisan that you must stand above in this kind of, or I consider it to be pretty arrogant, but this kind of the position of the critic, not the position of the partisan, then I think you've got a serious problem. I think it tells you a lot about why right wing interests continue to defeat left wing interests, why the rich continue to be able to walk all over the poor in this country is because so many people who are in positions and have huge pedestals like the New Statesmen who could be using it to be partisans in a battle for a better society are instead standing aloof from it as critics. There was one part of the article which made me think it said, and I quote, I mean when we can pull this up, I haven't dropped it in on what Fox doesn't really matter. As a publication that is beholden to no party or faction that defends the intellectual traditions of skepticism, independence of thought, a spirit of criticism and a willingness to debate, we believe that those deserve betters. None of those things are objectives, none of those things are goals. They're all means. I like skepticism. I agree with independence of thought, but what do you want? You know, obviously in a general election political parties are offering the electorate different things, that those are means to ends rather than ends in themselves. Carries on by saying there are many fine parliamentarians from all parties, Luciana Berger, Joanna Cherry, Jess Phillips, Rosie Duffield, June McMahon, Dan Jarvis, Sarah Williston, Rachel Reeves to name but a few whose full student resilience are admirable. And you're saying we're not really aligned to a faction and then you basically list a bunch of kind of centrist, neoliberal technocrats, which that's again that's fine, but that is, you know if we had PR in this country, proportional representation and there was a centrist liberal party, that would be its composition. So it seems strange to me to sort of disavow we're not ideological and we'd have no faction and then literally name by name list a faction of people. I mean the other thing is I find that interesting because in one sense I have great respect for that idea of the critic which I was giving out about a second ago, right? And it's this idea, you get these people who to history as journalists have seen it as their responsibility to take their audience and challenge their prejudices rather than reaffirm them, right? This is the role of the critic and this is the idea I think that the new statesman's editorial team has about its role in society. But let's be totally 100% frank about this. Going and writing to a load of liberal middle-class people about why you can't back Corbyn because of Brexit and anti-semitism is not challenging people's prejudices. I mean there's a great line that when I think of critics for all of his flaws, the journalist Alexander Coburn had about the New York Times firing volley after volley of cliche into the densely packed prejudices of its readership. Well I mean that's what this is. That's what this is.  I saw quite a sad, it was a joke, I mean chuckle. It was a photo of a woman sort of helping a homeless person on the street and the caption was sorry I'd love to help but I need a leader who's coming out for a remain along with their partners think this is basically it. You know more than 700 people dying on the streets. Me, Dialeth, believe in Liverpool or near Merseyside yesterday and they're quite proudly sort of just owning that. Before we move on we spoke briefly about Tribune magazine. I mean you are something of a rival to them I guess. Where would you like to see Tribune in two, three years? When we say we're a rival I mean we're a fraction of the size and influence in a new statement so we're not. Are you a fraction of the size? Yeah well because I mean their print circulation isn't that big. No but then there's a couple of things to say there right. So the new statement's print circulation might not be massively large on us so we've got about 10,000 subscribers now and their print circulation thinks around 30,000 but they're out much more regularly than us. They've got much more online subscribers and also their online traffic is much much bigger so. Even with the paywall? Yeah yeah you've got to be realistic about that. There's no question that it is. So you know and it is an large part because of resources. Now it's not to say that they don't do a lot of things better than we do. I'm sure that they do but it's the fact that when you've got the resources to hire a massive staff we have one full-time member of staff you know. It's just not comparable to- You've only been around a year? Yeah exactly. I mean how many full-time staff does Jacobin have for instance in the US? That is a good question. Now I think Jacobin's total staff, full-time and part-time is up to 45, 50. Well that's big. Yeah it is. It's gotten big now. How much of that is all with the mothership and how much is with because there's various Jacobin projects in terms of Jacobin Brazil, Jacobin Germany and so on. Jacobin Italia. So there's a few different parts of that but yeah it has and it but you know we're talking about Jacobin starting in 2010, 2011 and we're now in 2019, 2020. So it takes a long time to build up to even the position that Jacobin was in and it is you know something that people have to get their head around. If you want to have an alternative, if you want socialists not to be reliant for the communication of their political message on hostile media outlets, liberal media outlets or you know even worse right-wing media outlets, we've got to build our own, we've got to support our own, people have got to be able to subscribe to things, contribute to Navarra because at the moment there is this media ecosystem which has so few left-wing outlets and so much concentrated power on the right and wealth on the right that we're fighting a very uphill battle and it does not. This is again coming back, I know people are going to think I spend all my time going off at liberals, sometimes I do but you know this is one of the big conceits of that position of the critic right, the liberal critic that we're in this exchange of ideas that's what the media is about. No it's not, it's just not, it's about the projection of ideas by people with an awful lot of power and wealth. That's what the big media institutions are about. They're not democratic, they're owned in a massively concentrated way by billionaires who subject themselves to no accountability, no scrutiny. They're able because of this to pay people to produce a huge amount of content that affects the whole circulation of information in our society and looking at that and thinking we're engaged in the free exchange of ideas is mad. I mean can I, because we're going to talk about this a bit more detail with regards to digital stuff. I just wanted to say just building on that, a great example, probably some of you have seen this video with Andrew Neil today, he's basically, it seems to me an admission that we're not going to be able to get the interview with Boris Johnson. This is, these are the questions I would have asked, which in a way isn't good because obviously Boris Johnson does choose to do the interview, he's now fully prepared and he has an advantage which other people didn't have. But Boris Johnson former editor of the spectator, Andrew Neil of 2004, chairman of the spectator. Dominic Cummings wife is a commissioning editor at the spectator. Michael Gove, former leader writer at The Times, Andrew Neil a former editor at The Sunday Times, The Sunday Times owned by Rupert Murdoch, the spectator owned by the Barkley brothers. And so it's not just about a concentration of wealth, which it is, but I think if people understood the extent to which it's a concentration of human beings, like a lot of these people literally live on the same street. You know there were top people at the BBC living next door to Boris Johnson who lived near Sarah Sands who used to edit the evening standard. Now she's editor at the today program on BBC. You know, it's just a huge and they're all living London. They all know each other. They went to the same universities and then you alloy that with the resources point. And I think that you know the fact that Britain is such a concentration of wealth is always a big thing. But when you add to that the predominance of London metropolitan bias in Britain, the predominance of two universities and the university system, the private school system, I mean it's horrific. And for 50, 60 years we mitigated it through labour based socialism. Exactly, yes. But that's now kind of well it's hopefully coming back. It's on the way. It's certainly much weaker than it was, you know, before we were born for instance. I agree and it looked that produces a lot of things. You know the term I think to use there as the habitus, you know the kind of accumulation of the cultural norms within that kind of small space and people are going through the same schools and they're coming from the same area and they're going through the same dinner parties and they're living next door to people and so forth. Well then the kind of conversations that they're having day in and day out are going to shape a very particular world view. And there may be, you know, spectrums of that world view but it's not going to be massively departing from the establishment political view, right? Because you're not going to have your views challenged that often in that space and particularly not views challenged in a such a way that it might inconvenience, you know, you or that it might cost you some amount of your salary or whatever else. So, you know, I can understand that say on Brexit, I'm quite sure that there would be very, very significant arguments on those streets that you just mentioned between people and their lines and their views on these things and on social questions there will be disagreements. But one of the fundamental differences I think between us as socialists and that kind of sphere is the question of what does Brexit represent? Is Brexit itself the crisis or is Brexit a symptom of a crisis, right? So, again, to hop back on the new statesman leader, you know, the key thing comes up there that Corbyn didn't take a position on Brexit. His refusal to take a position on Brexit is the reason why he's disqualified as a prime minister. Whereas it's perfectly acceptable for a new statesman to refuse to take a position on the proliferation of food banks, people dying because of the fit for work program, massive homelessness, 130,000 homeless kids at Christmas, you know, they're perfectly permitted to refuse to take a stance on those things politically. But not taking a stance on Brexit is unacceptable and disqualifying. And it raises the question in what kind of world is the refusal to take a stance on Brexit so much more significant than a refusal to take a stance on those things. And the answer is in a post-material world, in a world where you don't really have to care about material things, you're doing all right, the system is working for you.  And it's a world that's getting smaller. And that's one of the reasons why, I mean, when I speak to journalists, friends and colleagues of mine, they're outraged that people go on and criticize the media and I say to them, if you're living in that world and it is shrinking and it is getting smaller, you may expect the people outside of it, not up the hill, to be critical and to be increasingly angry at the worldview that you're reflecting that doesn't reflect their opinion. It is crazy. It is a really bizarre situation to be in a country where the leader of the main opposition party has not one media organization of any size that backs him and backs his program. How does that change? That's a long quick answer. We have to build our own institutions. You don't think that the Guardian or the Daily Mirror could ever be or the new statesman for that matter could ever be? Do you think until you change the ownership of these publications they can't really be real allies for the left? I think it's difficult. Again, what I'm not saying here is that people shouldn't write for them and I'm not saying either that people shouldn't be in there and having a battle and trying to look part of the socialist project has got to be to transform institutions that are not at all in our favor, right? Institutions that were built partly to repress working class interests and so on. This is what we're engaged in. We have to transform institutions as well as building new ones. But fundamentally, like even from the question of how do you shift the coverage of the likes of the Guardian and new statesmen and so on? Well, in all probability the most effective way of shifting that coverage will be showing that people are migrating from reading their stuff to reading left wing publications. Is even that true? Because I was thinking about the new statesmen thing and it's obviously not, I don't think it's a political decision they've made, personally. It's definitely not a business decision. I think it's, you see the question comes down, right, to this. Well, do you think they're out? Let me, sorry. So do you think, look at, they've just got Jeremy Cliff who actually thinks a perfectly enjoyable person to read, former economist guy and that's clearly showing the kind of political trajectory they want to go down. Agreed. Rather than, I mean they were picking some interesting left wing people that they're sort of moving away from that now, going to this kind of center ground sort of, of debate, you know, moderately social democratic on economics, but not really sort of slightly to left maybe of Blair and then sort of centrist moderates on social issues. But it seems to me, if you look at young people, if you look at millennials, the exact audience that Jacobin gets in the United States or the exact kind of content that's proving very successful, Teen Vogue, right, or Loud Bible, or Joe, they're producing content to the left of the new statesman. And so it shows you there's a huge market for these guys. So just purely from a business perspective, why don't you think they catering for that? Or you think they do? They do. No, I think it's a business decision for it, but I think their business model is different. That would be my analysis. And now this is one of those points where I step off to kind of, you know, into speculation. So people have to accept that. You know, I don't know what's going on inside the new statesman in terms of their business decisions. But here's my guess. My guess is that they figure that the audience that was going to pick up political magazines, general political magazines, right, are people who are more middle-aged, who are going to pick up new statesmen because they've got some liberal leanings, but they're politicals. They're interested in like politics for politics. They're interested in the show, with the personalities, the characters, at least as much as they're interested in any of the kind of substantive questions of policy and so forth. And they're going to be because we have to be realistic within the Corbyn project. There is a serious age divide, right? There is the kind of younger Corbynites. And it's almost, it almost plays out and I want to like it too, Freudian about all this, but it plays out as a kind of edible thing where you've got younger left-wing Corbynites and their parents that are giving out about the centrist dads. I remember when that phrase was coined, I thought to myself, oh God, this is, you know, I understand what people are saying with it, but it's problematic what it reflects, which is that you've got this kind of big generation in the middle of politics who are disproportionately hostile towards the left because they grew up on their political worldview was shaped by the 1990s and 2000s that I described, right? Blair and Clinton and Schroeder. And they are desperate to get back to it, to the status quo ante, to the world just before 2008 or even, you know, to the London Olympics and all of that kind of nostalgia. They're animated by nostalgia just as much as the right is. And I think that a magazine that's looking to sell off the shelf today, right, and is looking to try to make money that way is going to be aiming at that so-called centrist dad market. Okay, okay. I understand that impulse although that's a very, very, very saturated market, from GQ and arena all the way through to the new European. It's basically the entire of print media is catering to that demographic 45-year-old centrist, moderately affluent man. But surely there's a space. And I'm talking about this to Jim, what I shouldn't say is probably on the record. I was talking to Jim Waters, about this a couple of years ago when he was at BuzzFeed and he said, you know what? I think the most, the gap that's really obvious in British media right now is millennial left-wing lifestyle slash politics slash culture website. Very heavy on a social media halo. Clippable video is going to Instagram and Snapchat. And it seems to me so common sense. And you see glimpses of it with Joe or with Ladd Bible. But people are the new statesman. I think they've got 2,000 followers on Instagram. Now, I know what you mean but it just does seem to me that there's a whole, there's a whole business opportunity that isn't even being engaged. But we'll leave it at that. I do think what you're saying makes perfect sense. We've got 1,400 people watching this but we've only got 238 thumbs up.  If you like what Ronan's saying, I want you to maybe comment. Let's get the algorithm going, algorithmic capitalism being what it is. And also actually I want to say I'm a big fan of Tribune. The last issue you published was excellent. Had something from a Sheffield counselor, had something from a counselor I believe in Hull, talking about race abuse against taxi drivers. You had a brilliant piece about soldiers in North Africa and World War II prefiguring the parliament of 1945 and the Labour Government of Clement Attlee. So if you're not familiar with Tribune, go check out the website. It's quite cheap to subscribe. I'm not being paid to say this, believe it or not. I think it's probably so cheap to subscribe that you probably need to rethink it at some point but that's a whole different conversation. It's a really good publication. Can't recommend it enough. What we're going to do now is really to talk about the social media stuff and this is where I want to bring you guys in a bit more. Social media. Is it working? Has it been effective in circumnavigating the mainstream media in the selection campaign over the last six weeks? I think it's very hard for us to circumvent. So this has been a challenge from the beginning of the kind of Corbyn project and I don't think it has answered it.  And I think we've ended up kind of oscillating between those two positions in an unconvincing way. It's hard to go around when we think of say for instance Donald Trump's campaign and people making the points that well it wasn't he able to go around the kind of biggest media institutions in the U.S. Well, yes to a certain degree but he was able to do it with a huge amount of money poured into online advertising building up like profiles of these people it's like the idea that when the right does this say like the Tea Party and whatever that it's some kind of grassroots phenomenon. It's not. These are like extremely well funded operations that I have a strategy of getting around the mainstream media that works in a large part because of their funding. So to be a vulgar materialist about it I think it's very hard unless we discover some Bernie Bros in Silicon Valley who are prepared to bankroll us to do it. I think it's very hard to use social media alone. The other thing which we have to acknowledge here is social media is not like some kind of free arena. You've got major corporate interests who are dictating the circulation of information there too. But that's a separate thing, isn't it? It is but then the question so like I'm not saying it's a revolutionary way of doing political communications but the question is does it allow even if it is subject to the logic of capitalism etc. Does it allow us right now to circumvent a different kind of elite sort of media? We can do a certain amount of it. I think you guys do it well where you try to create you're aiming at like going around the media with the stories that they don't tell so you're going directly to I saw Ash had a piece there on talking to some of the homeless about the election, right? People I think she was with the Labour campaign against homelessness and if you're going and you're doing stories like that and they're compelling then yes you can circumvent them because you can create viral content that people share and there's a worthwhile we don't we don't have an alternative right now to doing that and I think it's well worth trying to do and I think a lot of people do it better than us. For tribunes like in terms of what tribune does we're obviously not like the kings of viral content it's not what we do well and one of the reasons why is that I do think you have to be careful that there's two projects here obviously there's the project of getting our message out to society but there's also the question of developing how people see the world think about the world and doing the job of political education and they're kind of different because we found ourselves even last while bending the stick very far towards you know talking more and more and more about Labour's policies all of which is good with the hope by the way that what ends up happening is people read the pieces go out in the doorstep argue for Labour's policies at the door and don't get drawn into things like the real fear that I have at this campaign a kind of anti-Borisism you know what we're all talking about is how this guy is terrible and he needs the nasty things that he said and so on that instead what you get is people talking about the policy but you're not going to get viral content off like doing that so what you're saying is you think print still matters which is a question I probably should have already asked because obviously yeah I'll go into that yeah one sec so tribune obviously started in a context of you know apparently print no longer is relevant makes money not economical etc that isn't true because obviously they're very successful print publications started in recent years like monocle magazine for instance The Economist Private Isle doing very well but what you're saying is actually the intention here isn't to get the most eyeballs isn't to get the most attention but it is to be part of a broader movement where people can engage in a process of political education you think print is good for that still in a way that it probably always has been yeah I mean my view is that this is going to be a long struggle that we're just coming back I think of this as the the tide went so far out in 1990 for the left obviously you know there was the fall of the of the burden wall and and the communist states and so forth but actually the one that's not discussed enough is that there was this historic defeat of the social democrats who all basically became social liberals gave up the idea of fundamentally reforming the economy and started just thinking about things in terms of getting a bit more growth to redistribute and ended up then producing a huge problem for the center left and the tide went so so far out for people who are critical of capitalism in 1990 this is just like it coming back in and it kind of picked up whatever was on the beach when it came back in so you got like people like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonald who were on the you know the fringes for a very long time taking principled oppositionalist positions in defense of socialist values but had almost no hearing and they you know get swept into leadership all of these young people and people of my generation and generation younger who are getting you know brought into politics but who don't really have a great amount of political experience even like when you think of say our generation even there was there were battles and the student movement and so forth and in Ireland obviously there was the huge stuff around the austerity the troika the water movement but actually in the last number of years there hasn't been any like big social movement struggles on those kind of scales that's going to like bring people forward and develop their ideas and so what we've got now is a kind of hodgepodge project that's not true in the US though is it you've got Alexander Ocasio-Cortez probably the world's most high-profile millennial politician you've got a big mass movement you've got the DSA in some ways it's more advanced the DSA is about 50,000 members in a country of 330 million sure but I mean it's membership only a few years ago was 10% of that yeah look this is what I mean we're coming but the tide is only coming back in this is going to be a long battle Capitalism has not produced a new model of popular prosperity it's not managed to build a consensus about it to a majority of society it's not improving people's living standards it's concentrating wealth and power in a very small number of people and it's going to have systemic challenges going forward I mean what I encourage people always to think of in this case when they think oh you know it's possible the system just writes itself again do we really believe we're going to go to the next decade the 2020s without a financial crash okay or some degree of economic like serious recession even if it's not a crash right I mean most solid left-wing economists would say that it's it's quite unlikely that that happens and what happens when another big economic disjuncture hits this political arena with the rising far right with huge amount of class frustration and whatever I mean we're only at the beginning of what is going to be a long reorientation of politics and economics and what's needed in in our view anyway is that Tribune Tribune yeah is that you develop you know a layer of people with strong socialist arguments that can be communicated out of the society that's not just you know because this project often ends up and has ended up as a carbonism and about the man carbon perfectly decent man so forth right very important that he's risen to the position he has but like Tribune is is not a carbonized publication it's a socialist publication and the idea is that we have to make the case for fundamental systemic change we're going to have to do it on a sustained basis and we're going to have to to do it from a position of people understanding what we're arguing for and having really good kind of historical grounding in where the system has come from and where our movement has come from understanding the socialist tradition having a really good understanding of economics right socialist economics and what alternatives we propose and why what capitalism is so that it's not just seen as you know business or someone making a bit of money here and there but that it's a scene as a system and we understand well what's the role of labor within that and how how do working people you know fight back against it and fundamentally move beyond it that is the idea behind Tribune and I don't think certainly at this period I don't expect we're going to be getting wonderfully viral content but if we managed in a couple of years to have you know our subscriber base being people who are very strong about in their views of how society was going to be changed and they were active locally they're in the party they're in their unions they're in movements they had clear socialist perspective and we had 10,000 we had 15,000 we had 20,000 that'd be great that'd be a very very good start because we need that kind of force in society to push through the changes we want I'm going to pull up some statistics from this article that was in The Guardian maybe you can just bring up the screen grab but the link is there on the document Fox so this is from the this is from actually this is from Ofcom some bits in The Guardian the second so this is from Ofcom from 2019 TV is still the most popular way for people to access news that's formed from 75% 79, 75% of adults social media has gone from 40, 40, 49% what was really interesting now about this was the sort of prominence of the BBC BBC One remains the most popular news source despite a fallen use the use of BBC News Channel has fallen after BBC One and ITV was Facebook which I thought was really fascinating and I mean I've always viewed that the channels that matter of social media face in this country the print media Facebook and then the BBC and then this was what came up in The Guardian now we can pull this up Fox if you can this is a really great piece how smartphones turned election news into chaos and there was a quote from this Dionio who's one of the researchers said he had noticed people struggle to remember individual stories adding news doesn't stick as well there's a drama new drama every day and cliffhangers on a daily basis a lot of the respondents didn't have a good memory of what happened a week ago and so I suppose the question I would ask you is how do you do politics in that kind of context where people and the same article talks about for instance people will actually only click about a third of the articles of the of which they seen the headlines so that basically again just you know the sub editor or whoever's written the chosen to write the headline massively important people are sharing articles without reading them I mean I've done that before I don't do it you know it's not a habit of mine there was one woman it was a case study in that article of how she was on the right she would read an article from top to bottom which she disagreed with so that she would be well informed but then intentionally sharing something to wind up her left wing friends which she actually didn't even agree with so how do you do political media in that environment of a disintegration of a capacity to concentrate a disintegration of shared rules and norms as well as all the stuff about oligarch on media the billionaire class with their newspapers and so on it's funny though right I mean when we've described that exactly what you've just described happening in media is happening in politics and it's happening in the economy as well all right that these things are all linked and there is a kind of in my view any way a consistent approach to it which looks a lot more like say what Bernie Sanders does in the United States in terms of political communication which is people have got to be clear and consistent you have a perspective that you are putting forward that is very clear that you're making time and time again that you're talking about the kind of stories so say for instance wealth inequality you're talking about the problems of poverty and social injustices you're talking about why though fundamentally that they're coming around so you're talking about the fact that society is not fundamentally a question of competing ideas it's a question of competing interests and that at the moment the people who are able to pursue their interests because of their power are the very richest because they're able to pursue their interests to the political system they're able to pursue their interests through the media this is why the media is owned by a billionaire class they're not doing it just out of some like idle fancy that they some of them I'm sure are quite vain people but they're not doing it for that reason like a lot of them even these people when you think about it are not seeking the political front lines for their own opinions they're doing it because if you own the media outlet and you kind of set the terrain on which it operates well then you can dictate the broad framework and terms under which people are understanding what what it's writing and what I mean by that is this that you say right people don't remember individual stories well I'm not saying that's what the data seems to indicate sure right but they remember the tenor precisely they remember so the affect yes it's people are no longer hearing the individual instruments they're hearing the orchestra and they know kind of which way it's playing right that's what's going on so if you're able then to influence a huge range of media outlets by owning them and they all have a pretty similar kind of line on things and you're carpet bombing people effectively with a whole series of different stories that all leaned one way Corbin is this Corbin you know is not to be trusted economically responsible anti-semitism and creature taxes yes and by the way it's happened with the liberal press as well you know that brexit is something there was very little attempt actually strikingly so to kind of explain and and pull apart the reason why brexit happened it was mostly the question of saying there are these brexit here so we're all you know from a different era and they want to drag Britain back and they're just rather than you know what a critical media would do which is look into in a serious way the kind of factors underlying it and start asking the question of why brexit is so similar to phenomena like Trump in the United States and like the rise of pharaoh in France people would be would be asking the question right why all these phenomena are happening and looking at global patterns actually what happens and this is this is why it's so important that we see the media this way as a way of pushing perspectives on the world rather than you know critically assessing it it is people are pushing a narrative around brexit that benefits certain fractions of the ruling elite so in terms of the brexit stuff that narrative was pushed forward in order to give power to basically liberal business interests who were very concerned that they'd lost the Labour Party to the left that the Tory party was moving to the right and they were going to be left without a political vehicle through which to exercise and their preferred vision of the economy which is one that has you know it's pro-globalization pro-free trade the kind of stuff the economist argues for well this is I mean the economist today has come out with this endorsement of the Lib Dems which in a way is interesting because it speaks to the fact that those precise interests actually don't really have that much influence anymore over concrete political outcomes in the way they would have 10 years ago so you guys have a print magazine in this context where we agree with the data that people's concentration is disintegrating I suppose there's two responses to that either you say those are the new rules of the game which is kind of what Navarra does a little bit I mean not all the time it's the long form conversation but a lot of our content is 30 seconds on Twitter these are the new rules of the game let's play by those rules and let's try and take it in a socialist direction or do you think the answer is no we need to actually go back to older forms genres of journalism long form print listening to the orchestra but also the instrument rather than just the orchestra so is it a balance of both or actually do you think we need to make a bit of a bid a bit of a play for a different kind of media to 30 second Facebook clips I think it's interesting because obviously there's a lot of shared perspective between the two projects in Navarra and Tribune but then there's differences and significant ones right your audience is significantly bigger and I would say in this election you'll have a much greater impact and one of those reasons it is because the difference between are kind of stuck in the mood perspective on some of these things that's how it would be criticized I'm sure and the view you know not only in terms of politics where like I would think of us as like the new old left you know emphasizing the party the state class the questions of capitalism in a way that is maybe more reminiscent of previous generations and Navarra coming from like the best of the new lefts and perspectives and traditions right and that is replicated then also in terms of how you communicate the message some of this is like following on from what was inevitable like I was never going to be the kind of person who was going to be able to produce young and trendy content it's just Tribune is quite trendy though in a very particular way I'll come to that in a second it's never something I was good at and I say that like for not as I said yeah it's critical too in terms of I remember when I was involved in youth organizing and trade unions there was also something I struggled with at a time when I really would have benefited from it and I think unions would benefit from being able to speak more clearly in the terms and through the medium the media that young people use but it was never something that I was particularly good at but I also think that there's something behind that which is that there is a need as much as you lean into the moment like my analysis of why young people are coming to the left is not that they're coming to the left because we're culturally cooler in the main people are young people are coming to the left for boring old bog standard materialist reasons their rent is too high their wages are crap their prospects of being able to live a decent life going forward a diminishing year on year the public services they'd be relying on young people are coming to the left for those reasons or the ones that are coming for the wrong reasons don't stick around very long right I mean I would agree with that people that say oh well if Corbyn you know loses on Thursday the project's over end of you lot I'm like if only you know I've lived in 15 place in 15 years thousands tens of thousands of pounds of student debt etc you know that's not that I mean sadly that isn't going away whatever happens on Thursday well part of it would if Jeremy Corbyn's a prime minister but yeah it's bigger than that but I mean there is a part of having to be cool isn't there otherwise if there wasn't then obviously all the old left publications the Communist Party of Great Britain etc they would have 30,000 members I agree the DSA does and they don't because it's a bit cooler as well as having good politics it's always a tension between the kind of the perspectives we're representing here how much do you lean into the moment of history and say you know that society has changed fundamentally and some of the publications that you know I learned from I think of the mass publications of the early 20th century right things like the Irish work and the Workers Republic obviously Connolly and Larkin's papers I know very well right the history of them I've studied and how they were able to get big audiences and the kind of work that they did to generate those and so on but we have to accept that like those days are gone and the time has moved on from being able to have you know kind of one strong shop steward in a workplace who hands this out and then all of a sudden over a few years you get like a very strong readership of this left-wing labor-oriented newspaper the ways of communication have changed the question is always how much are you leaning into those changes and how much are you pushing back against them and my worry is that you know if you don't do what we're trying to do in terms of the political communication at least in the kind of strong socialist stuff that if say for instance we were defeated on Thursday and we get you know a new labor party afterwards that is much more middle of the road economically but tries to appeal to young people mostly through cultural appeals how much have we given people the sense of saying you know that is not what our politics is Do you think that's I mean we're sort of moving away now from journalism to politics but I suppose we can talk about it quickly I mean how I mean I don't even think that's plausible if I'm honest a worsening thing for me would be the kind of the response to Berlusconi in the 90s which failed or the response to Trump impeach him that could be a you know a really powerful popular response and I think it's bad politically but I think the response of of Boris Johnson becoming prime minister all of a sudden the labor party's like we're going to go back to like a vet cooper I'm telling you the worry that I have is that you end up with anti-Barist politics so kind of like anti-Trump politics in the US where Bernie has managed to push through obviously despite it because he has a movement behind him and so on but the truth is if you get relentless day in day out controversies about what Boris did in his personal life some stupid joke that he made and this kind of fascination with Boris the personality then politics could the coordinates of politics could be realigned but on the topic you know on the topic of the the media question the media is more interesting for me yeah I think yeah yeah I know and this is again coming through some differences because I came out of having been a journalist I was so disillusioned that I'm like now everything is politics now but I do believe that I mean I genuinely do believe that there's no media that exists outside politics right so all of this structures even the economic question you know if you have a society that has vast the disproportionate wealth with a huge concentration of a small number of people you will have that reflected in the media and you will have it reflected in what the media says but there is the there is the the fact that you need to be able to develop an audience big enough to sustain yourself as an alternative you have to use the tools that are available in this day and age the values the tools you're using are more effective at developing an audience questionably than the ones that we are what we're aiming at in terms of like the print publication is a bet right that if you're selling a print publication you can over time develop a very reliable revenue stream through your subscription base that will allow you to not go up and down so much on the on the tides and instead of being asking say to crowdfunding or whatever you're actually giving people the product in exchange well I think that's your big I mean that's your big advantage right yes compared to us yes that's why Jacobin has been so successful but then there comes problems with it too obviously you know part of the gambit having just gone off about you know the kind of style over substance stuff I'm now going to admit you know the part of our gambit in terms of how Tribune is designed right and how it looks is this idea that if people are going to buy something in this day and age they're going to want it to be something that can't get for free online so they're going to want something that you can have at home that looks really good and I've told this anecdote a few times so apologies to anyone listening in who's heard me say it but that kind of line that Martin Luther King wrote about when his mother he was going out one day to a civil rights rally and his mother pulled him back by the collar and said if you're going to say something radical wear a suit and this idea right that it does matter aesthetics in politics does matter and the other thing is we believe that people if they have the convictions of their politics will pay for something right so we'll contribute to that if they believe enough in the political line that's our argument but we will always be more limited less you know fleet footed than an organization that can respond fast through things like video and digital we're going to get a question in a second because I want to hear what you think how you consume the media how the left could be doing this better but last question do you think the left could ever have a daily newspaper in this country? yes yes a daily newspaper yes they could so let's say the because the daily mirrors on its last legs it's kind of it's business model is is premised upon integrating lots of local media that might last a long time but fundamentally it's it's got problems big ones yeah yeah it's not really profitable so you think it's plausible that you could have a successful daily paper like the Daily Mirror which is politically good but also can make ends meet yeah I mean I think the Daily Mirror is in a tough spot because it's you know if you look at what's happening in the selection you can see it's like it's somewhat where the problems are coming from the mirror and again it's the politics of it which is that it's you know a daily tabloid paper aiming at an older market which is going very quickly to the Tories basically you know older people again for material reasons that the more secure sectors of society are going over towards the Tories and so it's competing in a market where its potential readership space is declining so I think that it's stuck in a tough place and there's some really good people in the mirror who are trying to do the right thing and I think you know I have a lot of sympathy for that battle it's a tough one but do I think that we could get a daily paper in this country that unlike say the mirrors kind of editorial line was actually socialist yeah I do I do think so you could certainly get a big media outlet whether or not it would produce daily papers or whether it would have a weekend paper and daily coverage like of the standard and frequency of major newspapers yes in terms of audience there really is no reason why because if you talk about say for instance the tabloid paper if you wanted to look at some of what the tabloid sector tends to do where you are taking on individual problems in society and you're naming the enemy and you're kind of developing an understanding of who's responsible for the injustices that is a big part of what tabloid campaigning does of course the tabloids are the right name all of us as the enemies and Jeremy Corbyn is responsible for I don't know making the queen cry or whatever the latest thing is but you could do that from the left of course you could in a country with massive concentrations of wealth huge amounts of poverty and a lot of popular anger the difficulty is again coming back to my old vulgar materialist position it costs a hell of a lot of money to put together a big large-scale media operation and unless you have a patron of some kind at the beginning who can inject a large amounts of money in without immediate return it's a very hard thing to do you look at organizations like The Intercept who I think have been great they produced a big left-leaning media institution great I'll let you know but they're backed by somebody who is pyramidia eBay guy I mean he's given them a lot like hundreds of millions or tens of millions I don't know the exact numbers this is what I mean this is what I mean so the problem in this country and it you know it is going to come down to it I've tried to make the case many times to comrades in mine in the unions and stuff about these things and I know the unions are all concerned too about making sure they don't leave themselves to expose in the case of long strikes and whatever with their money but the truth is I can't see any other source of funding for that big media outlet other than at least for the seed capital for the things that started other than significant support from the labor movement and there was actually an attempt in the 80s people can go and look up I can't remember what the name of it is it was like something world I think it was I'll tweet about it later the trade unions tried to launch a publication in the 80s and a lot of people who I've spoken to in the unions are still burned about that because big money was put into it and it didn't go anywhere they brought in all kinds of people at Pelger was writing for it and Michael Folt was like a daily columnist all this kind of stuff right but because it was incoherent partly because they didn't know what they wanted to say so on one page you'd have kind of strident left-wing stuff and the next page it'd be very middle of the road and the next page it'd be like celebrity gossip they didn't know what they wanted they weren't sure what the project was it's a bit like a lot of things unfortunately that can be made by the union movement which is like a camel a horse by committee that can happen very very often in the trade unions because this is a stakeholder negotiation process and that is the risk and I understand that that burned a lot of unions but I can't see for us I can see it happening you could have a left-wing daily I think that's where you would need to get the money So I don't think a daily would work from that same article the Guardian article there's I think there's a brief image or maybe not maybe it's the Pew one people are getting news from their phones Yeah well so even if even if we say daily is like now Even all the people even all the people are more likely to be getting news from their phones than from the television Even if we say daily now include say like regular coverage every hour online and then maybe a printing at the weekend the question fundamentally is is there an audience big enough that would sustain a properly socialist newspaper of size there is absolutely no question absolutely no question That's kind of why I'm surprised but there isn't the money Yeah and this is why I'm kind of surprised that somebody hasn't said look let's give this a try let's see if there's you know market there and then because it could at least make ends meet I mean I don't think it's something you'd have to sink money into which and there's lots of causes on the left people sink money into and they don't you know they don't really look at extinction rebellion I mean we can talk about its success or not I mean I think it's been very good at putting climate change on the agenda all that stunt today I thought was utterly ridiculous but you know that's never that money's never going to come back whereas anyway No no I agree with you and this this question of like people wanting returns that the fundamental business model of media today is to get an audience and then sell it to your advertisers right now could that be done from the left yeah to a certain degree but again it would want to be leaning as you were saying into like the young audience so I because that like I don't think you're going to be going out there to a load of advertisers and so we've got this massive audience of lefty people what do you want to sell to them because they're not going to have any models built up to marketing of like what what lefty people want because it's not considered to be a an audience if you were to say we've got a whole lot of young people who are left leaning and whatever you could see how that could work you know that advertisers would want to buy advertising with that publication that's good questions Hugh Slueskant sounds like a Dutch name I hope I'm not wrong friends in the family love the short content from a minimum of our on economy housing that's good we want to see more of that in the comments what do you think has been the most influential stuff for you that's what we want to know a question from Joshua Pym how might we account for the seeming decline on concentration getting news via bite-sized clips headlines I think social media firms are making an assault on our ability to focus is that a problem in particular for the left in so much as we try to build a political movement on reason self-interest it is and it's one of the reasons why I'm a curmudgeon because I think that it creates a real problem that if we do have a kind of narrowing and narrowing and narrowing of the attention span left-wing arguments which are necessarily about people getting their heads up and thinking in a more sustained way about society right in that kind of trendy academic term being counter-hegemonic or whatever you have to be able to in order to counter the daily kind of right-wing drumbeat that people get to their jobs to the media you know we have to be able to counter that in a sustained way in order to build our case and it gets harder and harder the fewer words you're able to use so I do think we have to fight back to some degree against this kind of shortening of the attention span how much we can do it I don't know whether we're trying a Tribune anyway next question this is from Pie Man presumably it's not your real name Mr. Man why is American new left media landscape so much more developed than the UK left media which I mean it is you've got not just Jacob in like the newer ones and the intercept but you've also got older ones the New Republic the Atlantic which don't really have a an equivalent over here well I would say like the likes of the Atlantic and much more middle of the road and sort of the New Republic too I mean I think if I was to go in terms of thinking really left media in America I'd go from the likes of Baffler in these times the current affairs magazine and you know there are new shows the kind of the majority of port and all those kind of ones right yes there are more of them here's one thing that I learned very quickly right jumping from being in the Jacobin stable to being in Tribune the American pond is a lot bigger it's a lot bigger and it's easy to underestimate the degree to which there's so many more people available to tune into it because of the size of the country and because across the world people are because of American hegemony of the entire globe which again is a long-term structural thing people are tuned in people want to read about American politics you get people in countries you know every corner of the globe who the whole political life is formed around liking or disliking some American politician it's a peculiar peculiar world but that I think is a big part of it but do you think I mean because what the US population is four times bigger than the UK's right UK's about 65 68 million US is about what 310 million these days or whatever do you think that because it strikes me at that point there I mean it's not just on the left like I say you've got the Atlantic Republic is it New Republic or the Republic New Republic yeah New Republic you've got even like Harper's Bazaar all these publications which are basically where the new statesman is and the nation I would say the nation is the most comparable it's a little to the left in a new statesman but it's the most comparable but even then it seems that sort of that media space compared to here is a lot bigger than four times you know they have like seven eight nine publications whereas we have like basically just the new statesman maybe prospect you know yeah then again though right this is the thing the Guardian if you look at the Guardians online readership the Guardian has about a 100 million in terms of visits it's huge bigger than the MYT I believe over here in Britain and it has 300 million internationally the majority of those the international ones are coming from America so actually you've created you know there is this kind of question where if you're asking what the most influential you know broadly considered left media outlet in the world is it would probably be a Guardian so I think that's it's a complicated question if I another another thing I can say right about the the new left media in America versus here is that there's a lot more permeation of socialist arguments into the mainstream over there than there is here partly because America had the left off the pitch for so long that its liberals are not as prepared to wage war against the left when it raises its head and so Jacobin has been able to get all kinds of very favourable kind of write-ups and people you know engaging with what they write and going back and forward I mean Baskar's always on television in the U.S. Baskar the founder of Jacobin yeah he's doing yeah he's he's all about he's and I'm thinking these the exact same people with only that kind of money in Britain would despise you what do you think that is it's this reason it's that here like the 70s the 80s the war on the left you know these people remember it the liberals in this country they remember the battles and minor strike and where everything happened there they remember the battles against the Benites and they remember driving the left out of political life and and so they're much more prepared to put up a big wall between the center left and the rest of the left and the Americans have benefited for sure my colleagues over there have benefited for sure from the willingness of major center center left publications to engage with them to give them platforms whether in a way that over here they're just relentlessly hostile I mean feverishly hostile irrationally hostile they hate you not you you know I did this they probably hate me more than you but the plural are you they don't know who the hell I am so I well they pretty you know there's probably a yeah they as soon as soon as they figure out as soon as they figure out my politics are they hate me yeah a lot more vicious over here it seems a lot more personal a lot more vicious towards the left than what you see in the US there's actually a very good story about hatred I went to very briefly and I have more questions go on but Ed Miliband was over in the states in the nation I believe interning in the 90s and it was Alexander Coburn who I mentioned earlier the journalist and he was interning with him and Coburn wrote about this at one point and he was talking about you know is this guy going to have a future in journalism and whatever and he was getting frustrated by what Miliband was writing and he turned to him and at one stage and he says you know that the number one thing that you've got you've got to have you've got to ask yourself this question is your hatred pure you know do you really hate the people you're going after and Miliband said you know I don't really hate anyone and Coburn said well that's that's the moment that I knew he wasn't going to be like and actually there's a truth to it which is it doesn't bother me greatly if you're a socialist and you're getting hated by people who fundamentally are politics is about trying to replace on the political map No it doesn't bother me either but it does seem of a wholly different yes scale here compared to the U.S. Darren Allevi asks on Super Chat you have five hands thank you Darren can Coburn create an art before I actually carry on because you've just done that Super Chat Darren we haven't done this shout out today I give a shout out for Tribune but not for Navarro Media if you like what you're watching and why not head to support.navarromedia.com make a one-off payment or make a subscription ongoing payment we want to generally ask for around an hour's work that you're paid for so whether you're on 20 pounds or 30 pounds or 40 pounds or 10 pounds if you're on less than 10 pounds for you don't give us money we you know we'd probably just hold people to that if they're paid the living wage or more why not just give us that a month that's what we propose of course it can be more it can be less we can't do what we're doing without your support we've grown immensely over the last two years anybody that's been with us since before the 2017 election will know that we're operating at an order of magnitude higher than we were then we want to keep doing that whatever happens next Thursday so if you want to be a part of that help us get there change politics in this country and elsewhere go to support.navarromedia.com Darren Alavi via the Super Chat can Corbyn create an Our Revolution org like Sanders has created in the US that funds working class people running for elected office this is a question I mean over here I have to be honest over here there is a better production line of working class people into politics than in the US which is not to say over here is perfect and obviously Westminster is dominated by a very small coterie in a small segment of society but you do have the trade unions training up people coming from the shop floor in many cases coming from being trade union organizers and going in I know Unite have been doing it for quite a long time a lot of the left MPs left leaning MPs elected since certainly 2015 have come through a union production line and I tell you my American friends would look at that and say how can we get that because the American union movement is so so to the right and so uninterested in the idea of moving working class people into the political arena but more needs to be done so that's a no optimism regarding Britain which we have done so far yeah yeah yeah I think that's I think there's a lot of things here that are better there's a reason why this project the Corbyn project has outlasted the Syriza thing in Greece the Prudemos thing in Spain the rise and fall of France and some ease in France because it's pillars that are holding it up are strong and particularly the fact that labor is still connected to the trade union movement which gives it a foot outside of the kind of politicals and whatever or off the campus and into workplaces which is absolutely crucial that we have some ability to communicate these ideas and develop support not just of people who are very interested in politics but people who can see how a Corbyn government would improve their daily lives we need to do a lot more of it I think momentum is you know kind of the equivalent of our evolution now if I'm being frank it's and it does quite a lot of our evolution things better than our evolution but there's also a problem with that which is that momentum has become a very effective kind of campaigning body I mean it's world-class yes what it does but two potential limitations I think they're trying themselves to adjust you know one is that it became its communication became quite captured in kind of younger metropolitan cosmopolitan kind of language and messages which I understand why you lean into it because this is where your base is but fundamentally for a socialist project that has big weaknesses they tried to shift that I think they had Cameron Mitchell from boss over there on the other day I was watching a video and which was an excellent one I think we need to do a lot more of that and the other one is in becoming an effective campaigning organization you know basically what we don't have then is the kind of the grassroots political education stuff as much of the linking up with the campaigns and so forth and that's kind of been the price that was paid for momentum becoming so effective at doing campaigning work but it's very hard to put everything on one organization you know I know people will be will be critical in momentum but like all of this projects we all it's an uphill battle to come to the left coming back on the pitch after being probably off the pitch for the longest time it had been in more than a hundred years and trying to elect the first socialist prime minister and to affect major systemic change in a party led by a lot of anti-capitalists this was a tough tough bat and and the fact you know we're still in the fight we're still in the fight as I said earlier on online a third of all labor supporters in the last election made the decision who they're voting for in the last week so there is a serious chance that if people go out and canvass and marginals and knock on doors and win people around that they can do some of the work of basically undoing the bias written into our whole political life by the power of the billionaire media and can win people over to the reality that a labor program would massively and transformatively improve their lives question from Jane Pickering the last question Jane asks hello Jane what about podcasts where do they fit in are they the new radio does the fact that people can choose when they listen to them make a difference do you do a podcast at Tribune? we do I mean Alex Daherty's politics to the other yeah yeah we have aspirations to expand as well but Alex does a great podcast called politics to the other which came into the Tribune stable when we when we relaunched and that's on Tribune radio if people want to go listen to that I'd very much encourage them to do so I think we should do a lot more podcasts but again what we're trying to do right now at this moment is you put in place the parts of you know we can we can see the structure around us basically you know and we're trying to put in place the foundations and then you're putting in place each part each room of the house as you're building it and you want to make sure it's done right so we want to make sure that we have very good daily content at the moment we're hitting three four or five articles a day on Tribune so that people can you know during the election campaign can go to us and know you're getting socialist media and this is the key question at the end of all of this right how do we move on from the situation like the new statesman editorial and being beholden to all this we are going to be reliant on hostile media outlets until we build our own ones and make them sustainable and people contribute to them and we build up enough of war chest to develop and grow your coverage and we then over time will liberate ourselves from having to be cap in hand to a whole lot of people who at the end of the day when the question comes do they want to take on the rich do they want to be in the fight or do they want to be on the fence we know the answer I think that's a great place to end on what I would say and this is optimistic is that if they'd written that editorial five years ago it would have been oh well we have Twitter you know will we need to do something what has I think decisively changed in the last four years will be I think too slowly is that now there are very much living embodiments of an alternative whether it's Navarro whether it's Tribune range of other you know efforts so we're getting there of course a lot more work to be done Ron you've been great thank you all for tuning in I would love to have gone longer but we've done our in 15 this has been excellent I think we're going to be back tomorrow I think Michael is here with Ash is that right Fox and then we'll be doing Monday Tuesday Wednesday and of course election sesh our live election coverage on Thursday evening don't miss that so hit that subscribe button you can also actually see the link for that it's already on the Navarro media YouTube page maybe we'll share that in the comments in any case we'll see you same time same place tomorrow night good night


Hi, my name is Jeff Denworth. I'm a co-founder of VASdata. And today we're here to talk about DAIS, the Disaggregated and Shared Everything Architecture that's the basis for the VASdata platform. DAIS is the core of everything that we do and how we build distributed systems. And so we wanted to first start and explain how we think about distributed infrastructure and why the inventions that we built are so powerful for the AI era. And really everything starts with essentially an idea that we want to simplify every single aspect of data and infrastructure management and processing. On top of that, we really want to embrace standards such that customers can bring their data and their applications to our systems and essentially they don't need to refactor everything. And so as an enterprise infrastructure, what happens is that your data essentially just becomes ready for the next generation of AI as opposed to having to build different systems that you use for AI processing. And finally, ownership is also everything where we want our customers to own their data and be able to deploy that on their infrastructure of choosing. We don't make these choices, we're not the stewards of infrastructure or data for our customers and they can build their own zero trust environments as they see fit. So what we're doing is we're building AI scale distributed infrastructure and I'm purposely not saying storage right now because there's a broader definition in play here. Roughly about 20 years ago, the first Shared Nothing systems were introduced to the world and since that time, there's been hundreds of billions of dollars of systems that have been introduced into the world that kind of are in the spirit or mirroring that style of architecture that Google brought. That system was really built for a style of processing that is less and less relevant today. You know, if you look at this through the lens of just a storage environment, then that becomes a pretty myopic view. There's never been one solution to solve all the problems of performance and capacity. We realized that there was a lot of opportunities for invention based upon all the challenges that we saw with that classic Shared Nothing architecture which didn't solve for all of the problems of scale up and so we decided to build beyond the state of the art and it starts with an approach that we call DAIS. DAIS stands for Disaggregated and Shared Everything and it starts by decoupling the CPUs from the underlying storage devices and building systems that are interconnecting CPUs with storage devices over next generation commodity low latency storage fabrics. We had to work a lot on a data structure that basically made it possible for all these CPUs to access the same shared state without having to coordinate with each other and when you get there, you basically have a system that's designed for crazy levels of parallelism. Parallelism that's required to take these systems beyond the classic use cases to also support applications like high performance computing, like distributed databases and of course, next generation AI applications. We're building systems that scale into the hundreds of petabytes range and that is really never been seen within a distributed systems architecture where you can get to that level of scale with that level of availability in a single systems architecture but that's what we designed for from day one. This new approach allows you to scale to tens of thousands of CPUs, exabytes of low cost flash infrastructure and we apply a number of efficiency algorithms against your data such that you can really afford one tier of flash for all of your data. Now that you've got this kind of the basis for your data store, the next thing that we wanted to do was to essentially build a mechanism that allowed us to manage data better than what you've been able to do in the past and it's basically a landing zone or a shock absorber for the system that allows us to place data into a part of the system before the data gets flowed down into very, very low cost web scale flash. You can snapshot across the whole system at any directory depth and you can have up to millions of snapshots running in the system and that snapshot engine becomes the basis for all sorts of other types of data manipulation that we do. It becomes the basis for a distributed replication engine data cataloging becomes the basis for all of our efficiency and most importantly, we can run global compression mechanisms by correlating data at global scale before that data gets flowed down into low cost flash. You can deploy it in any choice of locations from cloud to edge and so now you can build a single data plane that runs across all the different spaces that you may compute in a global namespace that we build called the vast data space. What comes from this is essentially a foundation for the next generation of computing functions and logic that's married with state. You can build data center scale computers interconnect those computers all around the world and it's infrastructure that's essentially more affordable than any approach before more parallel and more scalable than any approach before and simpler to manage and more resilient than anything that's ever been built before it.