Late last June while addressing a meeting of Facebook employees, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook would grow from a company involved in social media to building “a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — the metaverse”. He argued that “you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness”.
Second Life attempted to build and popularise this idea fifteen years ago with a very limited success. Two questions therefore arise. What makes Mark Zuckerberg think he can succeed where Philip Rosendale failed? What consequences will we face - socially and individually - if he actually succeeds?
In this episode of Genuine Inquiry Owen Kelly explores these questions and the deeper problems of “virtual reality”.

Jonathan Gross researches and teaches in the department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London.
In this specially repeated episode, Sophie Hope talks to him about the relationship between autobiography and cultural action, and the needs to explore memory and history as a means of making sense of one’s own cultural politics.
During the conversation they each discuss how they came to view cultural democracy as a meaningful idea and a useful tool, and what inspired them to do so.
The conversation then broadens to include the work of Aristotle, Sheila Rowbottom, Lynn Segal and Hilary Wainwright. They then begin to ask whether we should see cultural democracy primarily as a kind of practice or as a demand for systemic change.

{openradio} describe themselves as “a platform to support independently produced open-content audio streams and provide listeners with a way to find this content”.
The team consists of Kaustubh Srikanth, who created India’s first independent online radio station, Infinity Radio, dedicated to discovering and sharing fresh music and promoting open content, and Sophea Lerner who directed Finland’s first open-content FM & online station and has championed open-content awareness in the public broadcast sector in Australia.
Outside {openradio} Kaustabh acts as an open-source technologist specialising in digital security for human rights defenders. Sophea works freelance as a creative producer, researcher and audio technologist who loves open-content, DIY broadcast operations and community tech.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks to them about how {openradio} began, what it does, and what ambitions they have for it. For serendipitous technical reasons this episode has the sound and feel of a live-streamed global broadcast from the days of Telstar.

In the eighth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with Bermudian artist Bill Ming in his studio in Nottinghamshire, England.
Bill’s work in sculpture, assemblage, painting, and collage draws on the whole of personal and collective history, from the racism he faced growing up in segregated schools to his reponse to the death of George Floyd, from childhood toys to the blues to the Middle Passage. He’s worked in schools and communities, his work has been exhibited in major museums, and his public art can be seen in several countries.
Bill talks about how all of this fits together, each practice informing the others, and his long journey in making art out of the materials that come to hand.

Owen Kelly has held a number of workshops in Helsinki exploring ways of making industrialised products at home. He has made face creams and oat milk. This year he turned his attention to vegan cheese which led him to look at the various ways in which industrialists have begun to create plant-based meat substitutes.
In this episode he looks at the different approaches to replacing meat before returning to the vexing question of why most vegan cheese tastes disgusting. He offers a reason that relates to the whole business of industrial substitutes, before offering a different way forward.

Following directly from last month’s episode, we revisit a discussion between Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly about the reasons that cultural democracy began to find favour among some people working in the British community arts movement in the 1980s.
They used it to describe the goal and purpose of their work, when Roy Shaw at the Arts Council of Great Britain began to try to paint them as quaint missionaries. In The Arts and the People, Shaw had written that:
The efforts of community artists to serve ‘the people’ in centres of urban decay or neglected rural areas are often admirable attempts to apply in cultural terms the principle which John Wesley commended when sending his methodist missionaries to the working class: ‘Go not to those that need you, but to those that need you most.’
As Francois Mattarosso has observed, “Patrician indeed”.
Once it became clear that the Arts Council had decided to pretend that community arts had nothing to do with politics but only with a general wish to “do good”, many people began to look for an idea that could describe their ambitions in their own terms.
Cultural Democracy became that idea and the conference in Sheffield in 1986 became the (not necessarily successful) attempt to launch the idea publicly.

Most months have four Fridays, and we know what to do with them. We put out a podcast: a different but related one for each Friday in the month.
Sometimes, however, a month has five Fridays, and then we do something different - usually celebrating sound in one way or another.
This month on Friday Number Five we continue an irregular series of podcasts of music issued under Creative Commons licences: music to listen to during the summer heatwave.
The music ranges from old-school EDM to soundscapes and indie folk, but it all flows together nicely. The musicians include Comfort Fit, Monopole, Nobara Hayakawa, Paper Navy, adcbicycle, Entertainment for the Brain Dead, Halogen, and Brad Sucks.

A year or so ago we talked to Monika Dutta and Jake Harries about A Little Piece of Land. Today their project seems even more relevant than it did then, and so this week we revisit that discussion to look again at the ups and downs of rewilding.
Monika Dutta and Jake Harries use A Little Piece of Land to “develop ideas and formulate questions which we can mediate via artistic production. It gives focus to our responses to: the politics and economics of globalisation; climate change; accelerations in urbanisation; the increase in an urbanised, colonising world view and the decrease in agency experienced by ordinary people in areas of activity that our ancestors would have taken for granted; and to researching and re-imagining what kind of food landscape people living on this land would have recognised before the arrival of farming”.
They explain “what it is actually like” to engage in this work, not just in theory but in day to day practice. How does rewilding work? How do they know what they can eat? How do they know how to cook it? How does this fit into their wider practice, and to the struggle towards cultural democracy?