“Where’s My Jetpack?!” is a politics and pop-culture podcast with sci-fi and socialist leanings, hosted by Derek Johnson and Ani White. But what do we mean by politics and pop-culture, sci-fi and socialist?
By socialism, we mean a project of collective self-determination ultimately transcending class structures and states. By sci-fi, we mean cool spaceships blowing things up. Yet sci-fi also allows us to consider questions of political futurity – what happened to the jetpacks? What happened to the futures our parents were promised? Why weren’t we promised much of a future at all?
The podcast is produced by the multimedia ‘No Fate’ project. ‘No Fate’ goes both ways, a promise and a warning. In the Terminator franchise it’s an optimistic statement about averting the robot nuclear apocalypse; for us, this means the possibility that capitalism can be averted before it wipes out humanity. Yet if “the future is not set”, that also means we can’t rely on an inevitable progression from barbarity to civilisation. ‘No Fate’ is both a licence to imagine and make futures, and a reminder that those futures are not guaranteed.
A short list of topics we plan to cover includes: ongoing revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, 50s BBC sci-fi serials, fighting nationalism and fascism, masculinity in comics, frontlines of the contemporary union movement, choice mechanics in the Life is Strange games, feminism for the 99%, John Carpenter, contemporary socialist political programme, superheroes getting kicked in the balls, alternatives to Red-Brownism, and Nigerian zombie movies. Basically, this podcast is about everything we find interesting.
If that sounds like a good time, please sign up to our patreon (please we’ve already spent a bit lol).
The podcast goes live in July.