“Culture is stagnant, so politics is stuck” – playwright James Graham | Radical Thinking – podcast

Are we doomscrolling our way into a democratic crisis? That’s what the playwright James Graham fears may be happening, as he suggests that our algorithms have led us into ‘a massive crisis of the new’ and are preventing us from imagining a different future

Watch the full episode with James Graham here . INK will be released in UK cinemas on 8 January 2027

Aditya suggested reading (and watching) list for James Graham:

James Graham has written a shaming amount. I’ve listed below three

Dear England : about England’s football team

Sherwood : mentioned in the conversation, set in the village where James Graham grew up in the shadow of the miners’ strike

Quiz : set on the British quiz show, Who wants to be a millionaire, where a contestant wins a million quid

A lot of people say culture is stuck, although few sketch out the political consequences of that stagnation as well as James Graham does in our chat.

For ‘it was the algorithm that did it’, read Filterworld: How algorithms flattened culture by Kyle Chayka

For a wider ranging explanation look at ‘Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century’ by W. David Marx

Those two are fairly recent. Much earlier and truly magnificent is the much-missed Mark Fisher on what he called the slow cancellation of the future

On the same theme this essay by Adam Mastroianni is great