Technosleep: Frontiers, Fictions, Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) draws on a variety of substantive examples from science, technology, medicine, literature, and popular culture to highlight how a new technoscientifically mediated and modified phase and form of technosleep is now in the making – in the global north at least; and to discuss the consequences ... Show More
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
Mar 2023
Patrick L. Schmidt, "Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)
Harvard's Department of Social Relations made history in the 1950s and 1960s as the most ambitious program in social science in the United States. Dedicated to a synthesis of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines, the scope of its ambitions were matched only ... Show More
1h 20m
Mar 2023
Patrick L. Schmidt, "Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)
Harvard's Department of Social Relations made history in the 1950s and 1960s as the most ambitious program in social science in the United States. Dedicated to a synthesis of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines, the scope of its ambitions were matched only ... Show More
1h 20m
Feb 2020
Ep79 - Barbara Sahakian: "Sex, Lies, and Brain Scans: How fMRI Reveals What Really Goes on in Our Minds"
Barbara Sahakian is Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology at Cambridge, Past-President of the International Neuroethics Society, Past-President of the British Association for Psychopharmacology, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In this talk, she discusses her book ... Show More
57m 58s
Aug 2023
Neurotechnology (AI + BRAIN TECH) with Nita Farahany
<p>Machine poets. ChatGPT fails. Neurological surveillance. Brain implants that treat depression. Is it scary? Cool? Let’s firehose some questions at Duke Law professor, neuro and bioethicist, author and TED speaker Dr. Nita Farahany. She explains the history of AI, the dawn of c ... Show More
1h 19m
Dec 2023
Jesse Dart, "Feeding the Hustle: Free Food & Care Inside the Tech Industry" (Lexington Books, 2022)
Food is increasingly a subject of interest in social sciences: how we cook, consume, and share food is relevant to our social lives. In Feeding the Hustle: Free Food & Care Inside the Tech Industry (Lexington Books, 2022), Jesse Dart draws on ethnographic fieldwork to consider th ... Show More
53m 41s
Dec 2023
Jesse Dart, "Feeding the Hustle: Free Food & Care Inside the Tech Industry" (Lexington Books, 2022)
Food is increasingly a subject of interest in social sciences: how we cook, consume, and share food is relevant to our social lives. In Feeding the Hustle: Free Food & Care Inside the Tech Industry (Lexington Books, 2022), Jesse Dart draws on ethnographic fieldwork to consider th ... Show More
53m 41s
Apr 2023
Karen Frost-Arnold, "Who Should We Be Online?: A Social Epistemology for the Internet" (Oxford UP, 2023)
The Internet plays a central role in how we communicate, share information, disseminate ideas, maintain social connections, and conduct business. The Internet also exacerbates existing problems regarding irrationality, bias, wrongful discrimination, exploitation, and dehumanizati ... Show More
1h 4m