logo
episode-header-image
Jan 2025
33m 46s

The Epiphany: What Joyce, the Dead, Musk...

DAVID MCWILLIAMS & JOHN DAVIS
About this episode
We explore today's seismic changes in media and society, by tracing historical parallels between James Joyce’s The Dead (1907) and today’s digital age. Joyce’s observations on in The Dead about generational divides, the rise of newspapers, and societal shifts echo loudly in 2025, as new gatekeepers like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos wield unprecedented influence over the flow of information. How did media transform from a tool of advertisement to the battleground for ideas? What can we learn from Joyce’s depiction of societal upheaval in 1907 as we navigate the tribalism and cultural revolutions of today? Join us from a snowy Ireland - as it was in The Dead - while we unpack history’s lessons, from the industrial age’s middle-class explosion to the rise of modernism and today’s chaotic digital landscape. Are we witnessing a similar hinge moment, and what does it mean for the future?

Join the gang! https://plus.acast.com/s/the-david-mcwilliams-podcast.


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Up next
Jul 8
Trieste and the City of the Future
Trieste is a city that’s belonged to everyone, and no one. This week, we go walking through a place that’s been Austrian, Italian, Yugoslav, and, at one point, technically run by the United Nations. It's a port city without a hinterland, a European crossroads where empires once c ... Show More
37m 59s
Jul 3
Who Killed the Living City?
After travelling through Montreal, Bilbao, and Vilnius, cities alive with colour, sound, and soul, I returned home and felt the contrast sharply. Dublin, like many cities across the developed world, feels hollowed out. Despite booming economic growth and over €150 billion sitting ... Show More
39m 15s
Jul 1
Content, Culture & the Bottom Line: How Finance is Killing the Avant-Garde
Are we living through the death of innovation? We’re back in HQ asking a tough question: has culture stagnated, and if so, is economics to blame? We explore the twin juggernauts of our age: financialisation and tech. From Florence under the Medicis to Hollywood in 2023, we trace ... Show More
31m 29s
Recommended Episodes
Apr 2020
Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS
A short trailer to introduce a new series of talks by David Runciman. In a series of twelve podcasts, he explores some of the most important thinkers and prominent ideas lying behind modern politics – from Hobbes to Gandhi, from democracy to patriarchy, from revolution to lock do ... Show More
2m 12s
May 18
[BEST OF] "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" by Karl Marx
ORIGINALLY RELEASED Mar 19, 2024 Alyson and Breht explain and explore Karl Marx's classic work "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." Together, they discuss Marx’s incisive analysis of Louis Bonaparte’s rise to power, the complex interplay between historical events and class str ... Show More
1h 37m
May 2024
Fareed Zakaria’s ‘Age of Revolutions’
Does progress always come with a backlash? How should societies think about managing the immense changes unleashed by technology and globalization? CNN host and author Fareed Zakaria joins FP Live to discuss his latest book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to ... Show More
51m 15s
Feb 2025
Heir-raising: the boom in inheritance
As the baby-boom generation starts to die and economic growth slows many more people are getting rich from family wealth. Are we returning to the age of Jane Austen? The latest EIU Democracy Index reveals what a bumper election year did to country rankings (9:36). And our corresp ... Show More
22m 48s
Jul 2024
The global rise of right-wing populism (rerun)
It’s been a few months since our deep dive on populism, but following the annoucement of JD Vance as Trump’s VP pick, the term is back in the headlines. Today, we’re revisiting that episode because it’s important to know what populism is and isn’t, and why a specific brand of pop ... Show More
31m 17s
Jun 27
Going gang-buster: we meet Ecuador’s president
Yesterday’s arrest of a notorious gang leader is a win for Daniel Noboa. He assures our journalists he can beat back rampant transnational gangs without trampling democracy. The torrent of big geopolitical news has, perhaps surprisingly, not much moved the markets; we ask why. An ... Show More
25m 48s
Nov 2024
America’s reactionary moment
What just happened?It’s been almost two weeks since the presidential election, and many Americans are still grappling with the result. The political reckoning will probably last for months, if not years, and we may never know exactly why voters made the choices they did. But one ... Show More
1h 18m
Apr 2024
87 | The Politics of Left-Wing Climate Realism w/ Dr. Ajay Singh Chaudhary
In this episode, we are joined by Ajay Chaudhary to discuss his book The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World and the political, economic, and affective sites of exhaustion reproduced through climate degradation. We examine the expanding colonial relations of what ... Show More
1h 14m
Nov 2024
Novara FM: How MAGA Went Mainstream w/ Joshua Citarella
In 2016, the alt-right seemed to come from the internet and infest politics. In 2024, the internet and politics have become identical. Are we swimming in the world the alt-right built for us? Perhaps no one knows the world of online politics better than Joshua Citarella, an artis ... Show More
1h 18m