Richard Hames

I’m Richard Hames, a journalist, writer, and aspiring experimentalist.

I make podcasts and videos about contemporary politics for Novara Media and write a substack about collapsology called Crude Futures. It will also become a book.

I’ve previously written two books, one about the far right in the age of the internet and the other about climate change and the far right.

Get in touch, or download my CV.

Now, I think about the interaction of two megatrends:

Changes to the structures that make our collective lives possible, which also means changes to what is possible.
Changes to the structure and status of humans, which also means the structures — brains, environments, movements and computers — through which we think about this.

Journalism

Do Your Own Research

A show I host on Novara Media that documents and diagrams our most serious attempts to understand the world at scale.

Novara reports

Video reporting from the field: the 2024 US presidential election, the general election, the founding of Your Party, and the far right on British streets.

A still from a Novara report: a man speaking to camera in a street full of flags.

Novara FM

Four years commissioning, producing, hosting and editing one of the UK’s most popular political podcasts.

12 Rules for WHAT

Over sixty episodes of a research podcast on the far right and anti-fascism, founded and hosted with Alex Roberts.

The Rise of Ecofascism

Climate change and the far right — what happens to reactionary politics when the environment becomes undeniable. Polity, 2022, with Alex Roberts.

Post-Internet Far Right

The far right in the age of the internet, and what a politics native to the platforms actually is. Dog Section Press, 2021, with Alex Roberts.

Collapse

Crude Futures

A substack mapping collapsology: the study of a society that may not survive itself, written as it happens.

Critical Collapsology

The forthcoming book: the nature of social structure, our contemporary catastrophic imaginary, and the limits of our political norms.

Critical Collapsology at the New Centre

Eight lectures for the New Centre for Research & Practice, building the theory of collapse the book is written from.

The New Centre’s listing for Critical Collapsology Part 2: Limitless Risk, beside Alexander Zemlianichenko’s photograph of a toppled statue.

Crude Futures Magazine

A 93-page magazine made by writers and designers in a two-week studio in France, published by New Models and expanded by STACK.

A figure in a yellow hazmat suit and gas mask, sitting on the grass reading Crude Futures.

How It Happens

A storytelling game about collapse, made with the Crude Futures gang — playable online at a browser table that deals it and then forgets it.

Experimentation

Experiment Mag

A live platform that solicits and supervises the experiments people run on their own lives.

Experiments in Algorithmic Life

An idea I have been developing: turning the current rush of automating technologies back on itself — using them to produce autonomy in the philosophical sense, the law you give yourself.

Practical workshops

Building a workshop where I can learn practical skills — enhancing autonomy and deepening my understanding of how things work.

Regimen

An open source regimen of training for multi-scalar environments, from immediate sensation to the indifferent universe beyond.

Game design

Battle Chess

Chess with the turns taken out: no move order, a 14×14 board, and an economy of tokens and cooldowns in place of taking turns. Playable online, two to a board.

A chess position mid-game, one square highlighted.

Battle Chess Clock

The clock for playing Battle Chess over a real board, counting rates rather than turns.