Upstream is a quarterly documentary and bi-weekly conversation series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Blurring the line between economic analysis and storytelling, we look beyond the numbers to explore a wide variety of themes pertaining to our tumultuous 21st century economy.
197 episodes transcribedFully automated luxury communism. Fully automated luxury gay space communism..? Fully automated, queer, neo-decadent, meta-modern communism? Okay so,...
More than just a region, Silicon Valley has also become a concept — and what that concept represents means a lot of different things to different peop...
The latest installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC report, released this month, gives us three years to drastically cut...
“The pursuit of private financial gain is what drives inequality and ecological harm.” This is the perspective of Jennifer Hinton, a leading proponent...
Standing Rock was a pivotal moment in regards to Indigenous resistance — but it was just one in a long line of battles that Indigenous peoples have be...
There are many ways women across the world have been disproportionately impacted by COVID. The pandemic has simultaneously increased the demand for un...
By traditional metrics, the U.S. economy is doing pretty well right now — better than any other high income countries. But, at the same time, we have...
In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers lose focus every three minutes. We ten...
Why do so many of us often feel like shit when we leave work? Where does that ambient feeling of alienation come from? That nagging sense that we’ve s...
It’s probably safe to say that at this point, most people recognize that it’s not a question of whether climate change will have devastating impacts o...
Happy Solstice 2021! Here is our second annual solstice conversation with fellow podcasters Manda Scott and Nathalie Nahai. In this conversation we as...
In this episode, we’re talking inflation — a somewhat slippery topic that has been dominating headlines recently. It’s all caught up in the murky and...
In this episode we’re talking NFTs. If you don’t know what this latest phenomenon in the crypto, blockchain, asset speculation world is, if you’ve hea...
It often feels like contemporary life diverges from everything that actually matters. Our global economic system could not be less in touch with patte...
With strikes in a wide variety of private sectors popping up all across the country — Kelloggs, Kaiser Permanente, coal miners in Alabama, John Deere,...
Feminism means different things to different people. If you listened to our episode earlier this year, Feminism for the 99 percent, we took a deep div...
It’s pretty crazy to think that it’s already been a decade since Occupy Wall Street — but, at the same time, it also feels like forever ago. So much h...
The summer of 2020 saw perhaps the largest collective uprising in the United States. The uprising, sparked by the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd,...
What are the material conditions which underpin much of the bizarre phenomena taking place during this strange era that we’re in? What unites the cons...
We are currently living in an era dominated by overwork. Whether it’s your punch-in, punch-out job, the side hustles and extra gig work you pursue to...
