Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the left.

The Home of the weird left.

I'm Jeremy Gilbert.

I'm here as usual with my friends Nadia Idol.

Hello.

And Keir Milbin.

Hello.

And today we are going to be talking about the concept of the mainstream.

So, why are we talking about this today? Kier tell the people. It's a classic ACFM topic, isn't it, the mainstream? Do we want to be

mainstream? Do we want to be weird? I think it was our second episode where we talked about

the weird left, this idea of the weird left versus normy socialism. And we ended up

talking about normality and norms and like norminess is like related to norms. And it's a long

time ago and I said like five years ago. The sort of conclusion we were coming to is that like

norms is like a, it's almost like a disciplinary thing basically. You know, you must conform to

the norm. And in fact, because it's a norm, nobody actually inhabits it. Everybody's a little bit weird in their own way, basically. Mainstream's a bit different, isn't it? It's a different take on that. It's a different concept. And I think it's a little bit more of an ambiguous concept, because people talk, I'm sure we'll talk about this later. You know, when people talk about mainstream media, that is never used in a positive way.

It's like, you know, it's meant to be a term of critique, but like there's lots of,

there's lots of political discourse about how we need to be mainstream, we need to make

these ideas mainstream, etc. So it's just an absolute classic ACFM topic, I think. Yeah, definitely.

I do think this is a classic ACFM topic. I think I'm interested in mainstream, partly because of

what's implied in the name, that this idea of a direction of travel. So both in terms of

politics, you know, and our own lives, but also where, you know,

those things meet. So I'm interested in when the term mainstream is used, when it's

...