ACFM

In a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG), a group of people take a trip into an imaginary world, guided by an MC or ‘dungeon master’. Not limited to the Tolkien-esque themes of the famous Dungeons & Dragons, TTRPGs range from gritty sci-fi scenarios to steampunk heist fantasies, and from everyday life to magic, monsters and vampires. […]

Games are all around us. They let us escape from drudgery and experiment with other worlds and ways of being. But they can be traps too: apps designed to be addictive, producing only the most hollow sense of achievement. In this Trip, Nadia, Jeremy and Keir throw their polyhedral dice to explore how games shape […]

What defines each era? Historians often lean on terms that point to technology: bronze, steam, carbon, silicon. So is technology a fundamental aspect of being human? On this wide-ranging Trip, the gang take on one of their biggest topics yet. Starting from the basis that technology is an application of knowledge for a practical purpose, […]

Throughout history, countless good ideas have been side-lined or dismissed because they were put forward by women. That’s the frustration which motivates historian Katrine Marçal, who delves into her myth-busting research for a Microdose all about technology’s missed turnings. With ACFM host Nadia Idle, the author of Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored […]

Just what is it good for? This time on ACFM, Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle and Keir Milburn respond to the Ukraine invasion with a conversation about war. Is it an aberration, or an unavoidable product of human power struggles? Are conflicts between nations better understood as a reflection of domestic divisions? And how is war […]

Has democracy broken down? Is it even an idea worth fixing? Trip 22 is a three-horse race as Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn consider the anti-democratic shifts happening across the political spectrum and ask what it really means to be ruled by the people. The gang discuss whether democracy is necessary to tackle […]

When he’s not working on #ACFM, show producer Matt Huxley is a musician. His recent EP under the name Muckers is the inspiration for this Microdose – a short audio essay about land, family, trespass and belonging. Recorded while out walking, Acid Camping considers who owns the landscape, the methods by which people have been driven […]

In the first #ACFM Trip of the year, Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn look at the conflicting desires and demands that make up a political movement. Is unity possible? Is coalition desirable? Do we need to agree in order to win? The gang discuss the difference between liberal and radical conceptions of identity […]

What can we learn from the women of the Popular Front? Ahead of an #ACFM Trip on Unity and Difference, Nadia Idle talks to actor and activist Norah Lopez Holden about the milicianas who fought in the Spanish Civil War. What brought these women together – and what pushed them apart? Lopez Holden has worked […]

What should political organisation in the 21st century look like? Wiggly? Lumpy? Diagonal? Something rather like that, suggests political theorist and author Rodrigo Nunes, who joins Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert on this additional revolutionary Microdose. Focusing on the last few decades of radical left politics, the trio reflect on on their own experiences in […]