There are plenty of podcasts that will tell you how the latest tech gadget or “innovation” will affect the tech landscape tomorrow, but there aren’t that many concerned with the potential impact of that tech in a decade—much less a century. In a culture obsessed with now, how can we make choices with a view for tomorrow, next year, and beyond? 25–35-minute episodes released the first and third Wednesdays of the month.
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan: 8.22
Stephen’s list
Twitter and Tear Gas
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
The Postmodern Condition
Contact
Jurassic Park
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
The Real World of Technology
Phaedrus
The Age of Spiritual Machines
Evolution as a Religion
Chris’s list
Twitter and Tear Gas
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
Jurassic Park
Phaedrus
Contact
The Real World of Technology
The Postmodern Condition
The Age of Spiritual Machines
Evolution as a Religion
Credits
Music
“Foxglove”, by Ryan Dugré. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission.
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
After reading Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact and watching the 1995 movie of the same name, we discuss a major epistemological question: what are the acceptable grounds for belief? Are religious belief and scientific proof compatible? Sagan’s surprisingly nuanced views give us interesting ways forward.
Things we mentioned on the show, in the order we mentioned them:
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
We read Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact and watched the 1995 movie of the same name. In this episode, our overview of the book: its plot and its basic interests.
Things we mentioned on the show, in the order we mentioned them:
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
John Rawls, the specific claim Stephen most has a problem with is the veil of ignorance concept explained in this page (although this is not mentioned in the episode)
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
We point out several concerns that we have with the arguments Dr. Franklin makes in her lectures-turned-book: the ineffectiveness of her holistic and prescriptive technologies frame, her deeply cynical view on policy, and other thorny places that her arguments lead (like the Soviet Union).
Bay of Pigs invasion, also sometimes known as the Bay of Pigs incident: Stephen’s point in bringing this up was to allude to the point made neatly in the Wikipedia article: “[The failed invasion] also pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union, and those strengthened Soviet-Cuban relations would lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.”
“Vista” by Escaper. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. We usually announce that on the show, but a technical error resulted in a second straight month without verbal crediting. Argh! Argh!
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
The two main subjects we mentioned on the show as relevant were critical theory (and specifically critical race theory) and surveillance studies. Notably, while Browne describes herself as a black feminist and makes reference to the adjacent idea of intersectionality, she never explicitly refers to critical (race) theory. We applied the term to her work based on the historical and interpretive methods she used.
Reminder: as noted in 8.12, Stephen was definitely recording from a closet and some of his level drops are a result of (potentially) getting hit in the face with a sweater:
screenshot of our Zoom call with Stephen in a closet
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
The two main subjects we mentioned on the show as relevant were critical theory (and specifically critical race theory) and surveillance studies. Notably, while Browne describes herself as a black feminist and makes reference to the adjacent idea of intersectionality, she never explicitly refers to critical (race) theory. We applied the term to her work based on the historical and interpretive methods she used.
Stephen reviewed our intro music, Joshua Crumbly’s “New Rock Thingy,” here.
Finally (as noted on air), Stephen was definitely recording from a closet:
screenshot of our Zoom call with Stephen in a closet
“Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.
Sponsors
Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:
Daniel Ellcey
Douglas Campos
Jake Grant
Marnix Klooster
Spencer Smith
If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.
Respond
We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!
We put dinosaurs mostly in the background and talk about what Crichton really wanted to discuss: the science/industrial complex, the limits of science to interpret or re-create nature, the limits of discovery, and disciplinary power.
Note that we’ve ended up changing plans since we recorded our Kurzweil episodes! We originally planned to read Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, but decided to talk about our “background” reading so far!
Note that we’ve ended up changing plans since we recorded our Kurzweil episodes! We originally planned to read Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, but decided to talk about our “background” reading so far!
Lyotard’s postmodernism, the politics of power, and aesthetics: what do we keep and what do we reject?
Show Notes
Errata
Chris, because he was slightly sick, forgot that although we were recording in February, the episode was coming out in March. This threw off everything we said about dates for the rest of the episode. Whoops!
(The book schedule is adjusted accordingly below.)