Daniel Kreiss is back on the podcast with his new book Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Kreiss is associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law Sc ... Show More
Jan 6
Aaron Bateman. "Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative" (MIT Press, 2024)
A new and provocative take on the formerly classified history of accelerating superpower military competition in space in the late Cold War and beyond. In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan shocked the world when he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derisively kn ... Show More
20m 48s
Jan 5
Florentine Koppenborg, "Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance" (Cornell UP, 2023)
Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation that the triple disaster of March 2011 “exposed severe deficiencies in Japan’s nuclear safety governance.” This is the starting point ... Show More
42m 56s
Dec 31
Jordan Frith, "Barcode" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel to how the global economy is managed. But few people likely give them more than a second thought. In a way, the barcode's ordinar ... Show More
1h 17m
May 2024
All About Money? Elections, Campaign Spending and the Effects on Democracy
Election campaigns are becoming ever more expensive, with many parties and candidates spending large sums of money on advertising, campaign materials, and staff. But how does money affect campaign environment and electoral outcomes? Does more money mean better chances of winning? ... Show More
26m 22s
Nov 2020
Homebrew VC Hunter Walk Talks Twitter, TikTok, and Tech in the Time of Biden
During Donald Trump’s presidency, tech products became explicitly political. Operatives from both sides picked apart their algorithms and features, examining how they shaped society’s beliefs. And the companies, meanwhile, made choices about what parts of the administration they’ ... Show More
58m 53s
Sep 2023
AI can be democracy’s ally—but not if it works for Big Tech
Kennedy School Lecturer in Public Policy Bruce Schneier says Artificial Intelligence has the potential to transform the democratic process in ways that could be good, bad, and potentially mind-boggling. The important thing, he says, will be to use regulation and other tools to ma ... Show More
43m 53s
May 2024
Political ads are embracing legal loopholes and playing dirty
Political advertising in the UK has been a largely regulated space, that us up until about a decade ago.Historically, political advertising has been banned from broadcast aside from a small allotted period of time in the run up to an election. However, as the times are-a-changin, ... Show More
22m 36s