Cancelling The Apocalypse

In the second part of our bumper 2-part utopianism and the pastoral deep dive, we explore Jon Bois’ internet masterpiece 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future. What does a long-form multimedia piece about the distant future of football and humanity teach us about nature and better worlds? We consider the magic of being in an audience; communal and individual play; surplus, self-sufficiency, simplicity, and choice. Also don’t miss us making it extremely clear that we will never, ever monetise this podcast. Media 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future (Jon Bois) The Wandering Earth (dir. Frant Gwo, based on The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin)

We got talking about the pastoral and utopia and we had so much to talk about that we’ve had to divide this one into two whole episodes. In this, the first part of our pastoral/utopia deep dive, we talk about the spectacle and mystery of Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi, via some old favourites including wrestling, Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky, mould, allotments, and Christopher Marlowe the horny shepherd. Media Li Ziqi - The Life of Cucumbers (on YouTube) Interview with Li Ziqi (on YouTube)

In this mammoth episode, Dom and Raph get into two of the big utopian novels of the 1970s - Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. Featuring all your old favourites including second wave feminism, mental health, queerness, écriture féminine, spatiality, cults, exams, the moon, Will Gibson’s id, Maggie Gyllenhaal, killing your own mother, uh Media The Female Man (Joanna Russ, 1975) Woman on the Edge of Time (Marge Piercy, 1976)

Do you remember how Dom and Raph had a podcast about utopia? Man, that sure seems like a while ago now, you might say, and increasingly irrelevant given… *gestures around* this. Well, you would be wrong. Dom and Raph are in fact alive, kicking, angry, hopeful, and weirdly invested in talking about two recent indie games, Kentucky Route Zero (2013-2020) and Disco Elysium (2019). Join them (us? I’ve now gone too far with this third person routine and it seems too late to roll it back) to chat about utopian communities, debt, death, and dancing. They also are now living on two different sides of the planet, which frankly sucks, but their glorious microphone, The Prince, has been replaced by a Discord bot called Craig. Shout out to Craig. Media Kentucky Route Zero Disco Elysium

Dom and Raph decide to bite off more than they can chew, because Raph’s hatred for Tomorrowland (2015, dir. Brad Bird) consumes 70% of this episode; 15% of the remainder of which is just Raph forgetting the word ‘gardens’. Also we discuss Disney’s version of children versus actual children, why prettiness is important, and Keanu Reeves, the nostalgia triple threat. Media Tomorrowland (2015, dir. Brad Bird) Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto (Adam Flynn) Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime? (Elvia Wilk) Cyberpunk 2077 (Video game) The 3 Words Disney Employees Aren’t Allowed to Say

We examine the ouvre of our hero John Boyega, in particular Attack the Block: A John Boyega Film and Pacific Rim 2: A John Boyega Film: Uprising, which takes us into council houses, slow and fast violence, intentional communities, friendship, and the inevitability of climate crisis. Also how much we hate George Lucas. (So the usual). Media Plan C (UK activist organisation) Attack the Block (2011, dir. Joe Cornish) Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018, dir. Steven S. DeKnight)

Dom finally gets an opportunity to deploy her genuinely fearsome knowledge of professional wrestling and we consider the utopianism of a hypothetical lack of Europe. Media The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson, 2002) Why Professional Wrestling is Fascinating (YouTube) The New Day vs. The Usos (YouTube) Kofi Kingston wins the WWE Championship (YouTube)

In an unexpected but ultimately not remotely surprising move, Dom and Raph take under an hour to prove that the sprawling, magisterial Hainish cycle by beloved utopian novelist Ursula K. Le Guin is in many ways exactly the same thing as a reality TV show on the History Channel about a bunch of dudes who dig up mysterious artefacts on a cursed island. Join us! Media The Hainish Cycle (Ursula K. Le Guin) - Wikipedia The Curse of Oak Island (History Channel, 2014-) - Wikipedia

Dom and Raph continue their exploration of utopian and maybe-not-so-utopian stories with the 1995 film Hackers and the novel Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. Are all kinds of nostalgia anti-utopian? Can migrancy be positive? What does Dom have against Angelina Jolie? Why, Dom? Media Walkaway (Cory Doctorow, 2017) - Wikipedia Hackers (1995) - Wikipedia Cory Doctorow: ‘Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies’, in Locus Magazine And, as promised:

In the inaugural episode of Cancelling the Apocalypse, Dom and Raph’s podcast about whether the things they love reading and watching are utopian, we interrogate why it’s important to talk about utopias, suggest how to make the world less terrible, talk about how dystopian unboxing videos are, then chat about Peppa Pig and Star Trek, two houses both alike in dignity though not in the number of phasers they contain.