Techs on Texts

I'm too busy to do this thing the way I want to, so I'm taking a few months off before coming back with something better. In the meantime, please check out: The Ends of Information: Searching for Truth in the Digital Age by Nissim Lebovits: https://symposeum.us/the-ends-of-information/ Downtown Loyal Heights: https://dtlh.org Tons of CNG (Cloud-Native Geo) events this year: https://cloudnativegeo....

George Dyson – historian, boat maker, and volunteer Staff Historian at Radiant Earth – returns for his fourth appearance to discuss The Tale of the Big Computer , written by Hannes Alfvén in 1966 under the pseudonym Olof Johannesson. Published in Swedish in 1966, the novel is a remarkably prescient vision of how machine intelligence could quietly take over the organization of society. We discuss A...

Justin Kiggins , neuroscientist, artisinal oboe reed maker, and builder at the intersection of AI and biology, joins us to discuss Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . We explore the book's concept of Quality, what it is, where it lives in the scientific method, and whether AI will make it more or less elusive. Show notes: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on Wikiped...

JB Flinders – omnitechnologist, fellow Ute, and co-host of the Andy and Ammon's Excellent Odyssey podcast : joins us to discuss the 1993 film Sneakers . We discuss data as the primary seat of power, the ethics of privacy protection work, panopticons, Heidegger's "standing reserve," fear as the driver behind nearly every decision in the film (and in life), and what Martin Bishop means when he says...

Kate Chapman , geographer and technologist, joins us to discuss Hugh Howey's Wool . We discuss failures of governance, the perils of IT supremacy, the difficult ethics of constrained environments, and competitive goating. Kate shares her background building digital public infrastructure ( Common Space , Wikipedia , OpenStreetMap , Open Supply Hub ) and currently providing fractional CTO work and A...

Kevin Bullock joins us to discuss the sublime first season of Vince Gilligan's Pluribus . Yes, TV is a "text," especially when Vince Gilligan is making it. We talk about individual morality, the ethics of science, AI, human nature, selfhood and memory, and ghosts. Inexplicably, we do not talk about HDP. Show notes: Pluribus on Wikipedia Vince Gilligan Andrej Karpathy on Dwarkesh Podcast Satellite...

Cyd Harrell , devout civic technologist, joins us to discuss Jorge Luis Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." We talk about tungsten cubes, techno cults, and our guesses about the "horrifying or banal" truth revealed by the story. Show notes: Buy Cyd's book! A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide ( Bookshop.org , Amazon ) "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" on Wikipedia "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" PDF D...

"Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" on Wikipedia - note the fan art book cover Read "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" on Medium Or buy Exhalation: Stories , the collection containing this story The Weathering Podcast – More discussions of Earth systems, chaos, and the meaning of life from Marta, Marshall, and Alden Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety on The Marginalian Stoner by John Willia...

George Dyson – historian, boat maker, and volunteer Staff Historian at Radiant Earth – returns to discuss Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud . We discuss the cultural conflicts that arise between scientists and politicians, the limits of human language, human-incomprehensible modes of communication, the inevitable benefits of creating new observing instruments, alien consciousness, and the perils of sim...

Mark Chambers – my friend from high school (and former Chief Sustainability Officer of DC and NYC among other things) – joins us to discuss Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park . We talk about the collision between money and science, the illusion of control, dignity, public service, how many humans there should be, why it may or may not be ok to grill, and positive visions for the future. Show notes:...

Matt Price – technology historian and dedicated educator – joins us to discuss Susanna Clarke's Piranesi . We talk about egos, ego death, cults, academia, Christianity, Buddhism, and psychedelics. No insights, only more questions. Show notes: Susanna Clarke's official website Piranesi on Goodreads Very Bad Wizards on Piranesi Giovanni Battista Piranesi on Wikipedia Carceri d'invenzione , Giovanni...

Noah Iliinsky – most-esteemed information visualization expert, speaker and author – joins us to discuss Maureen F. McHugh's China Mountain Zhang . We talk about what matters, heavy furniture, sensible defaults, the burdens created by unnecessarily "innovative" design, pace layering, humans as instruments, and the double diamond bike. Show notes: Buy Noah's books! Noah's very excellent Guaranteed...

Daniel X. O'Neil , the worldwide entertainment juggernaut of the 21st century, joins us to discuss T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land . You will learn almost nothing about The Waste Land from this discussion, but you will learn about poetry, modernism, truth, hypermedia, (the "end" of) America, and enjambment. Show notes: [T.S. Eliot reads *The Waste Land* on YouTube](T.S. Eliot reads: The Waste Land) Th...

Alex Merose extols the virtues of lazy action and calls on us to embrace Duchamp into our hearts through discussion of Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman and Maurizio Lazzarato's essay "Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work." We explore themes of conformity, work, resistance, lazy action, and whether or not Duchamp was right that "language was a mistake." Shout out to Maxime Lenormand for pr...

Johnny Rodgers, my friend from Tumblr (among other things), joins us to discuss Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language . We explore how Alexander's design philosophy has endured and influenced not just physical infrastructure, but also the software and algorithms that increasingly encroach on our built environment. Show notes: A Pattern Language on Wikipedia On Surfing and Reading Books from M...

I had the pleasure of recording this on-site with George in his Bellingham workshop (a former tavern). I experimented with having Claude write shownotes for this episode, and it proposed this as a "key theme" of our discussion: "The parallels between Clarke's Overlords and modern artificial intelligence as agents of human transformation." This is a pretty remarkable guess given that I only told Cl...

Keith Garrett, coy technologist, father, and former marine, comes on to discuss Ted Chiang's masterful "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling." We talk about the benefits of forgetfulness, the limits of attention, the difficulty of assessing the benfits of cognitively affecting technologies, biases, colonialism, religion, and traffic. Show notes: Read "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling"! O...

Gina Trapani , exemplary human and champion of good things on the web, comes on to talk about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. We talk about creating universes, friendship, parenthood, all kidns of relationships, play, vulnerability, loving the web, the beauty of being bad at doing things, blank white boards, and learning a lot. If you listen, you will know what so many oth...

Nathaniel Raymond , Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, joins me to talk about Francis Ford Coppola's masterful 1974 film, The Conversation . Nathaniel makes a compelling argument that the movie was a history of the future – with Coppola accurately documenting the profound shift that surveillance technology would have on individuals and society....

Mark Coatney , long-suffering digital media pioneer (Time! Newsweek! Tumblr! Al Jazeera!), gets me to finally read a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin and I loved it. Topics include our changing world, what the world is for, preindustrial longing, why we should maybe recognize that media companies are ephemeral things, the pitfalls of power, lame AI, floating orbs of light, humans imitating machines, why...

Esther Dyson , whose bio defies summarization (and who happens to be sister of previous guest George Dyson), discusses Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Spike Jonze's Her . We discuss the substance of life, bioethics, why our senses aren't always reliable, institutions and culture, predatory business models, child labor, mortality, building communities, and gardening versus carpentry. A few no...

Jordan Tigani , duck herder and renowned "database person," gives us the gift of "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Jorge Luis Borges. We talk about about the potential of language, the limits of language, compression, sloppy ontologies, LLMs, what thing the universe is, simulated annealing, our vague comprehension of what embeddings are, and why it's unfortunate that there's no way to n...

Buy Night Flight Buy The Little Prince Listen to Minds Behind Maps Look at the glorious website for GDAL (the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) . It's perfect! " The Little Prince becomes world's most translated book, excluding religious works" The post on LinkedIn where I asked for people to recommend fiction books . Next month's reading is "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Jorge Lu...

A few notes and links: Buy Jorge Luis Borges's Collected Fictions "The Zahir" PDF "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" PDF (Note that this is a different translation than those in the Collected Fictions that I've recommended) The counterfeit Zahir ( Reddit discussion ) Idealism on Wikipedia If you enjoyed this, please share it. Produced by Jed Sundwall . Write to jed at techsontexts.net w...

George Dyson , historian, boat maker, master human technologist, and friend of friends discusses the totally wild The Voice of the Dolphins by Leo Szilard, which Dyson read when it was given to him by Szilard's wife when Dyson was 11 years old. We talk about AI, geopolitics, alignment (lol), and humanity. A few notes and links: George Dyson on Wikipedia Leo Szilard on Wikipedia The Voice of the Do...