Nov 19
Carl Benedikt Frey, "How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations" (Princeton UP, 2025)
In How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2025), Carl Benedikt Frey challenges the conventional belief that economic and technological progress is inevitable. For most of human history, stagnation was the norm, and even tod ... Show More
54m 29s
Nov 17
Cory Doctorow on Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
In this special livestream edition of Peoples & Things, host Lee Vinsel and very special guest host, danah boyd, formerly of Microsoft Research, presently Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University, chat with writer and activist, Cory Doctorow, about his new book, ... Show More
1h 36m
Nov 11
Hilary Allen, "Fintech Dystopia: A Summer Beach Read about Silicon Valley Ruining Things" (2025)
Silicon Valley wants to disrupt finance, and it might just succeed. In FinTech Dystopia, professor Hilary Allen offers an accessible, irreverent, and occasionally furious account of how tech elites are quietly taking over the financial system and making it worse in the process. D ... Show More
52m 13s
Dec 2023
Laila Shereen Sakr, "Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Laila Shereen Sakr's book Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford UP, 2023) explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed f ... Show More
33m 12s
Dec 2022
Ask Us Anything: You Asked, We Answered
Welcome to our first-ever Ask Us Anything episode. Recently we put out a call for questions… and, wow, did you come through! We got more than 100 responses from listeners to this podcast from all over the world. It was really fun going through them all, and really difficult to ch ... Show More
42m 51s
Dec 2023
Laila Shereen Sakr, "Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Laila Shereen Sakr's book Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford UP, 2023) explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed f ... Show More
33m 12s
Jul 2023
Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius, "Awkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum" (Archive Books, 2022)
Awkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (Archive Books, 2022) proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logi ... Show More
50m 32s
Feb 2023
Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt: A Conversation with Andrew Simon
Andrew Simon, a historian of media, popular culture, and the Middle East at Dartmouth College, discusses his new book Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2022) , with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Media of the Masses is an engagi ... Show More
1h 6m
May 2023
Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt, "Prison Media: Incarceration and the Infrastructures of Work and Technology" (MIT Press, 2023)
Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras today, there is a long history of prisons being used as a testing ground for technologies that are later adopted by the general publ ... Show More
25m 23s
Dec 2023
Nettrice R. Gaskins, "Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom" (MIT Press, 2021)
Today I talked to Nettrice R. Gaskins about Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom (MIT Press, 2021).
The growing maker movement in education has become an integral part of both STEM and STEAM learning, tapping ... Show More
22m 43s
Dec 2023
Laila Shereen Sakr, "Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Laila Shereen Sakr's book Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford UP, 2023) explores an alternative origin story of twenty-first century technological innovation in digital politics—one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. Developed f ... Show More
33m 12s
In Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021), Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project -- not as linear, bound and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, sho ... Show More
<p>Is the academy and our culture as a whole in need of newer, bigger ideas?</p><p>Looking for a link we mentioned? It's here: <a href="https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimes" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimes</a></p><p>In the ... Show More