New Books in Technology

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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

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#1995
Yesterday · 40 min
Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life with Mona Sloane (U California Press, 2026)
How AI is rewiring our social fabric—and how we can better shape our future. The age of AI is not what you think. Rather than ushering in a fourth Industrial Revolution, AI has become a crucial social infrastructure of everyday life. It's embedded in the tools, platforms, and systems that organize our most intimate lives and our interactions with the most fundamental institutions of society, from government agencies to banks and schools. In these linkages are embedded assumptions about who we
#1994
Wednesday · 43 min
Governance by Emulation: The Oversight Board, the Digital Services Act, and the Struggle for Platform Accountability with Moritz A. Schramm (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Social media giants like Meta and transnational regulators such as the European Union are transforming private governance by creatively emulating public law frameworks. Drawing on exclusive interviews and in-depth analysis of Meta's Oversight Board and the EU's Digital Services Act, Governance by Emulation: The Oversight Board, the Digital Services Act, and the Struggle for Platform Accountability (Cambridge UP, 2026) explores how these approaches blend European and American perspectives, bridgi
#1993
October 4 · 1 hr 16 min
Will AI Make Human Labor Obsolete? with Garrison Lovely
Today I’m speaking with Garrison Lovely, technology journalist and author of the new book, Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us — and How to Stop It (OR Books, 2026). Garrison’s Obsolete is a fantastic round-up of the most important social and economic challenges posed by AI. I’m thrilled today to have Garrison on The Truth About Bullshit to understand a bit more about the Obsoleting Project.
#1992
October 1 · 25 min
The Generative Organization: AI Playbook for Exponential Leaders
How Do AI & Innovation Cohabitate? Bryan Cassady is an author, professor, and all-around innovator, whether in book form or in classrooms, real and virtual, stretching from Europe to India. He is a professor, consultant, and a serial entrepreneur now with a mission: to teach 1 million innovators by 2027. He has built companies in 6 countries and trained 40,000+ leaders. He’s also a former professional racquetball player turned mathematician, a United Nations professional who speaks four lang
#1991
October 1 · 45 min
Aarthi Vadde has a Platform (JP)
It is fair to say Aarthi Vadde's wonderful new book, We The Platform, demostrates "how literature changes our perspective on the internet." But you also need to add that it "respond[s] to decline narratives about literature and literary study and to offer an alternative to prevailing sense of defeat and nostalgia that guides them.” Her conversation with John, like the book itself, aims to narrate the history of Web 2.0 from about 2004 to the present and to explore how writers themselves have re
#1990
September 30 · 1 hr 4 min
How to Stay Human Forever: On America's Digital Technology Crisis with James Poulos
Many Americans have a constant dread of impending doom. Glued to the screens of our computers and smartphones, we sense that some total catastrophe is just around the corner. But what if our anxiety stems from an event that’s already completely destroyed an old world? What if the real cataclysm was the introduction of those computers and smartphones, and our current political, cultural, and social crisis is just our way of merely dealing with the fallout? So argues the political theorist James
#1989
September 27 · 37 min
“Ten Percent” – Will Humanity Survive AI?
Could humanity’s most powerful invention become a threat to its survival? In this episode of The Survival Curve, we examine the disturbing prospect behind the “ten percent” debate: a risk of catastrophe that cannot be precisely calculated, but whose consequences demand serious attention. We explore three routes to disaster: machines escaping human control, people using AI to unleash devastating cyber or biological attacks, and military systems accelerating a crisis towards nuclear war. What hap
#1988
September 25 · 58 min
Projecting Knowledge: The Optical Lantern and Science Communication, 1880s-1940s with Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves, Nico de Klerk and Frank Kessler (Brepols, 2026)
Projecting Knowledge: The Optical Lantern and Science Communication, 1880s-1940s (Brepols, 2026) takes one of those fundamental questions - how does knowledge circulate? - and says, like others: we must look at the media technologies through which that knowledge not only circulates, but is transformed. This edited collection does that by looking at the history of the projection lantern across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The projection lantern, also known as the 'magic lantern', 'opt
#1987
September 24 · 39 min
Mehran Gul, "The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)
Increasingly, it seems like the corporate names that dominate headlines are much more diverse than they used to be. Samsung, TSMC, and SK Hynix. Alibaba and Tencent; BYD and DeepSeek. Sea and Grab. For twenty-five years, it seems like every major technology was American . That assumption is now under strain as innovation spreads from one place to many. Mehran Gul tries to map out this new network in his book The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies
#1464
September 22 · 47 min
Ehsan Dehghan, "The Discursive-Digital Link: Antagonism and Polarisation in Digital Spaces" (Routledge, 2025)
We are in a state of crisis. Democracy is under threat, authoritarian politics are on the rise, and digital media—once heralded as emancipatory technologies—are increasingly implicated in democratic erosion. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a critical framework for understanding the entangled relationships between discourse, digital media, and the hidden dynamics behind antagonism and polarisation. The Discursive-Digital Link: Antagonism and Polarisation in Digital Spaces (Routledge, 2025)
#34
September 17 · 29 min
179* What does the Pope have to teach us about AI? (JP, from Public Books)
When I heard that Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” was about “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” my first reaction was dread. Turns out I was wrong; always something new out of Chicago..... This is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side and to JP's earlier Hannah Arendt articles) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form h
#33
September 16 · 30 min
Billionaire Backlash
In this episode of International Horizons, host John Torpey sits with Pepper Culpepper, Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy at the University of Oxford, to explore the core thesis of his recent book, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy (co-authored with Taeku Lee).
#32
September 16 · 51 min
Writing Against the Machine: On Artistic Culture in the AI Age with Matthew Gasda
Debates about AI typically deal with its immediate material consequences, from cybersecurity and infrastructure to plagiarism and copyright. Yet most people deal with AI as a generative consumer product that raises longer-term questions about its cultural effects on American society, human art, and ultimately, our souls. What is the role of the artist, for example, when a bot can crank out the same thing more quickly and efficiently? To help answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have
September 12 · 36 min
R. Joshua Scannell, "The Carceral Surround" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
As law enforcement agencies deploy increasingly advanced technologies to suppress dissent, hunt migrants, and target marginalized communities, The Carceral Surround (U Minnesota Press, 2026) offers a powerful new theory of police and prison power in the digital age. Making sense of the rapid expansion of digital carceral infrastructure in a nation that claims to value freedom and individual rights, R. Joshua Scannell moves beyond familiar debates over privacy to show that understanding digital policing requires confronting the political and racial logics that sustain police power. Drawing on digital media theory, science and technology studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and carceral theory, The Carceral Surround reveals how twenty-first-century policing is less about managing crime than about governing possibility. Carceral power now operates across every register of daily life through predictive analytics, risk modeling, and algorithmic systems that track, sort, and preempt. From social media archives and facial recognition software to satellite mapping and radiation sensors, Scannell charts how seemingly disparate media converge into an environment of control that links technocratic governance to the maintenance of racial hierarchy and capitalist order. Tracing today?s technoauthoritarian regime from the NYPD?s assault on Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition?s campaign to end predictive policing contracts, The Carceral Surround is a rare hybrid of critique and refusal, illuminating the digital logic of US authoritarianism while imagining pathways for collective resistance beyond its grasp. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology
#1128
September 7 · 1 hr 15 min
Violaine Roussel, "Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In Hollywood today, thousands of data specialists work for streaming video platforms, playing a role not just in distribution and marketing but also in decisions about content and production. In Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming (Princeton UP, 2026), Violaine Roussel examines the emergence of this new category of professionals at the heart of the Hollywood dream factory. Roussel shows how the rise of data and algorithm specialists has transformed organiz
#1127
September 3 · 59 min
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, "Artificial Historians" (Routledge, 2025)
I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic leader, and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) based at the University of Adelaide, my guest explores how the logic of history, defined around trivalent logic (the “maybes,” the “ifs,” the ontological uncertainties), intersects with and challenges the logic of dominant AI algorithms. The book ra
#1126
September 2 · 40 min
Xiaochang Li, "Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI.  With original research and clear explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) a
#1125
August 31 · 22 min
Special Episode: Accounting for Computing, or Why We So Badly Need a New Social and Economic History of Everyday Digital Technology Use
This special episode features a short talk Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, gave at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia. The event featured a great mix of historians and Science and Technology Studies scholars and was organized by Jacob Bruggeman, who recently finished his dissertation on the politics of computer hackers at Johns Hopkins University and is now headed to a job at Ohio State University. Thanks to Jacob for putting the event together and hearty congratul
#1124
August 23 · 1 hr 13 min
Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, "Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination" (Polity, 2027)
What if AI’s biggest impact on journalism isn’t replacing journalists, but forcing us to rethink what journalism is for? In this episode, Joanne Kuai speaks with Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, authors of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination (Polity, 2027). For decades, journalism has been caught on a “hamster wheel” of acceleration: producing more stories, for more platforms, with fewer resources. AI promises even greater efficiency, but is doing
#1123
August 20 · 56 min
Jeff Jarvis, "Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine empires.This is a tale populated with wondrous characters: tragic inv

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