Festival Fever | The Friday Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

So, despite what the italicised explainer above suggests, these posts usually focus on what I’ve been up to for the preceding five days from Monday to Friday. At least in this more work-related section anyway. But, the most exciting part of my current week actually came at the end of the last.

A few months back, I was contacted by the organisers of Devon Transformed, a left-wing festival ideas around 30 minutes up the road from me. The festival is an offshoot of The World Transformed, an annual event which began as a supplement to the UK Labour Party conference but which now exists as a separate festival which allows left-wing activists and thinkers in the UK an opportunity to get together and hear panels, music and more.

I’ve never made it to The World Transformed. It’s always managed to clash with something else as well as being a little far away. So, it was great to see a local event springing up that was easier to get to.

I was initially asked to present on a panel about media ecosystems and how ideas spread through the media from newspaper to newspaper and news channel to news channel. Eventually, though, I ended up chairing four panels throughout the event. Which was a lot of work! But, I had an absolute blast.

It’s been a little while since I’ve done much presenting in public like this so I was a bit nervy before I got there. But, at risk of blowing my own trumpet, I think I’m actually not too bad at it! While I love making videos, it’s really, really fun to be in the same space as people, hashing out ideas.

The rest of the event was brilliant too. And it was actually pretty nice to be camping! It’s a measure of how much of a good time I had that I ended up falling asleep at 8:30pm on Monday night!

And outside of work?

The festival actually ate into most of my non-work time this week. But, I have been finding some time to get out running again.

Planning and organising my wedding took away some of my momentum with keeping fit as there was just so much to do! But now I’m back on it and have been on a few 5k runs this week. I’ve got a half marathon booked in towards the end of the year which I think will be a big, big challenge but it’s good to have some motivation to get back on it!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

Last night, I went to see Dumb Money with my wife. It’s a dramatisation of the Game Stop short squeeze which took place in 2021 where retail investors organising through the subreddit r/WallStreetBets began buying large amounts of Game Stop stock, pushing up the stock’s price and causing financial problems for a number of hedge funds who had bet on the stock going down in value.

I’d seen a documentary about the short squeeze around 6 months or so ago so I had the weird experience of actually being quite aware of how much of it had unfolded. I thought the film did a good job of retelling these events. It tries to capture a range of perspectives of the short squeeze from the livestreamer who orchestrated it to the hedge fund managers who were threatened by it.

Nevertheless, I did with it had prodded a little more into the motivations and ethics of the whole affair. Whilst many who participated sought to frame themselves as some kind of latte-day revolutionaries, I wonder whether some were using that as cover to try and get rich. As this movie would have it, all the redditors participating were perfect paragons of virtue seeking to tear down the system.

Nevertheless, if you happen to be passing by a cinema with it playing, well worth 90 minutes of your time!

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!