The Workers’ Speculative Society podcast

I’m pleased to announce the launch of The Workers’ Speculative Society, an interview-driven podcast about the future Amazon is building and the workers, writers and communities that are fighting for different worlds.

We begin on July 11 with an interview with Marc McGurl, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, about Amazon’s sci-fi narrative and the fate of literature in a moment when one unscrupulous corporate empire controls so much of what we read.

Future guests include:

  • Charmaine Chua on logistics and workers’ struggles
  • Robin DG Kelley on workers, writing and the radical imagination
  • Cory Doctorow on Amazon’s “chokepoint capitalism”
  • Syrus Marcus Ware on Black futures and activism
  • David A. Robertson on Indigenous speculative fiction
  • Alessandro Delfanti on Amazon’s robots and warehouses
  • Leonika Valcius on the work of literary agents
  • Jamie Woodcock on wrtiting as workers’ inquiry

The podcast is part of the Worker as Futurist project, which supports rank-and-file Amazon workers to write and publish short works of speculative fiction about “The World After Amazon.” You can learn more about that project here and read some of the things we’ve written about it here.

To listen online you can head over to our Soundcloud page. To subscribe in your podcast app, search for “RiVAL radio” and look for the logo of RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab (below). You can also use this RSS address to subscribe directly. Or find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify.