Politics Theory Other

Last month the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference - better known as COP30 - was held in the Amazonian city of Belem in northern Brazil. The conference was widely seen as a disappointment - with a binding agreement for a roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels being blocked by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other oil producing states. In the today's episode economist and activist Sabrina Fernandes joins PTO to talk about her thoughts on COP30. We spoke about how the structure of the COP process could conceivably be reformed in order to stop recalcitrant states vetoing action on climate. And we also talked about whether multi-lateral climate negotiations are being rendered irrelevant by developments in the global economy and the rapid expansion of renewable energy. We went on to talk about Sabrina's recent article in 'The Breakdown', titled Lula's Dilemma. We talked about the contradictory approach of Lula and the Brazilian worker's party towards climate and the environment and what Sabrina sees as a failing politics of "class conciliation" that has disastrous environmental consequences.

In 2006, the music streaming service Spotify, founded by Swedish entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon was launched in the context of widespread music piracy, file sharing, and declining profits for the music majors. Presenting themselves as music fans who were intent on saving the music industry, Spotify has since gone on to become the dominant music streaming platform, far eclipsing any of its rivals, and making Ek and Lorentzon billionaires. While once lauded by the media, Spotify's reputation has significantly declined as understanding of how little most musicians receive from streaming has become more widespread and as Spotify has courted controversy by populating some of its playlists with so-called "perfect fit content" - stock music produced for Spotify in order to reduce the amount of royalties the company pays to rights holders. Journalist Liz Pelly has done more than most to bring to light practices such as these and to challenge the myth-making of Spotify's founders. In today's episode we spoke about the early years of Spotify, as it emerged in the context of mass file sharing and as the major music labels were coming to see Sweden as a lost market - making it ripe as a site for experimentation with streaming. We went on to talk about how Spotify is shaping the user habits of listeners and about the damaging consequences of the datafication of music. Finally, we chatted about some of the inspiring efforts to challenge the dominance of Spotify that have emerged in recent years, as both musicians and listeners seek to find ways to create music communities and to preserve and curate music history - practices that Spotify's dominance has severely eroded.

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PTO has now been going for more than seven years and some of the earlier episodes unfortunately have truly abysmal audio quality - because of the podcasting technology of the time. But, thanks to the wonders of audio editing software in 2025, it's been possible to quite significantly improve the sound quality of those episodes, and so in the coming months there will be a few interviews from the archives appearing in your feed.  In the following interview - recorded six years ago - Alexander Gallas talks about the extent of popular support for the Thatcherite project and about the debates of the 1980s between Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop regarding how to characterise Thatcherite hegemony. Alexander is the author of 'The Thatcherite Offensive: A Neo-Poulantzasian Analysis'.