[4][8] He held a significant role in the 2010 United Kingdom student protests against increased tuition fees as an activist and organiser.

[8] After he used a bin to jam open an HSBC bank door at a 2011 protest, he was convicted of a public order offence and served a year's community service at Mind and as a leaf sweeper.

[4][10] He completed his PhD in 2015 after writing the doctoral thesis in six months; in a blog post he credited this in part to his high carbohydrate diet and his purchase of a MacBook Pro.

[4][11] Named after the Italian city central to The Working Class Goes to Heaven, Novara Media was initially an hour-long radio programme on Resonance FM.

[4] In its early years, the organisation produced short-form media that Bastani compared to BuzzFeed, but it branched out into long-form content.

[20] He later said that the concept is based on Karl Marx's Das Kapital and Grundrisse, and imagines a society with decentralised control over technologies that reduce the amount of human labour required.

[19] The concept has been compared to a 1930 essay by John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, that predicted improving technology would lead to a 15-hour working week within a century.

[22] Hobson and Modi criticised FALC as a misunderstanding of economics and how technology relates to social orders, saying that it assumes a gendered notion of labour and ignores ecological factors.

[20] In The Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler argued that the idea is "complete baloney" because it would "fail in real life" due to "productivity".

[23] The phrase, and variant "fully automated luxury gay space communism", circulated online as a meme after Bastani's usage.

[25] In it, he conceives of a Third Disruption that would see the overthrow of capitalism and effective use of solar power for energy and mineral-rich asteroids for resources.

[28] Andy Beckett of The Guardian described Bastani in 2019 as "an effective but slippery broadcaster and online presence: always fluent and flexible, able to switch from fierce defence of Corbynism to cheekier updates on the busy British left's latest preoccupations".