I’ve done a couple of interviews recently, a new thing for me.
There was a long and recently interesting one with Isabelle Castro for her substack, Utopia in Beta. I’ll write a little more about this another time – because there’s a movement in the tech/crypto world seeking to establish utopia in the present, called Network States,which strikes me as worth a philosophical investigation – but for the time being the interview is here, entitled ‘The Uses of No-Place’. (Be warned that the transcription was done by a machine and is uncorrected.) Enjoy Isabelle’s substack: there’s interesting material there.
And there was an interview with Morgan Meaker of Bloomberg, which fed into a very brief piece which I can’t find because it’s behind a paywall. And I have some more coming up.
The Uses of Utopia has received a different kind of attention from my earlier books. It’s a talking thing as much or more than a reviewing thing. Fewer wanted to sit down and discuss the movement of news – or, to spin it a little differently, the impact on society and the sense of regional and national identities of the creation of an innovative, highly-networked system for sharing information – after The Great Exchange (2025) (ok, there was the brilliant Ellie Cawthorne on the History Extra podcast.
Utopia is a talking point. Is that simply because it’s timely – we live in utopian/dystopian times – or because there’s something about utopia and utopianism that is fundamentally dialogical?
Tomorrow, Monday 14 September, I’ll be back in the Bath, speaking Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, speaking on The Uses of Utopia. Please come – it’s possible to attend virtually. I’ll talk around the value of the word and idea of Utopia, and why we’ve tended to malign and/or misuse it. I hope to see you there.
Joad Raymond Wren 