They Tried to Warn Us

David Foster Wallace was not a futurist, technologist, or academic theorist. Yet, few writers captured the emotional and existential toll of modern life as presciently as he did. With a mind equal parts linguistic gymnast and moral philosopher, Wallace wrote about addiction, irony, attention, loneliness, and the quiet, often unbearable burden of being awake to the world. His sprawling 1996 novel I...

In his 1964 masterwork One-Dimensional Man , Herbert Marcuse described a society where dissent was smothered not by overt oppression but by consumer satisfaction; where entertainment replaced engagement and even protest became another lifestyle brand. He worried that the very tools that could free us – technology, language, imagination – were being hijacked to make us complicit. Marcuse, who died...

Mary Shelley didn’t just invent science fiction. She wrote a blueprint for the age of innovation without accountability. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was a parable of invention, creation, and catastrophic responsibility. It asked what happens when we build something because we can, without asking whether we should. In 2025, we brought her back. She was not impressed. "You’ve now re...

When we think of dystopia, we often imagine Orwell’s jackboot: surveillance, censorship, control through terror. But Aldous Huxley offered a different nightmare – one where oppression wears a grin. In Brave New World (1932), Huxley imagined a world pacified not by fear but by pleasure. A world where citizens are kept docile through engineered happiness,endless distractions, and a little pill calle...

He cracked the Nazi Enigma code—and may have shortened World War II by two years. He helped invent the modern computer—before the term even existed. He asked a question no one had dared to ask: “Can machines think?” And then set out to answer it. His name was Alan Turing. A Cambridge mathematician turned wartime cryptanalyst, Turing worked in secret at Bletchley Park, leading the effort to break G...

Guy Debord was a Marxist filmmaker and founder of the Situationist International, a group of radical artists and thinkers who believed that modern life had been hijacked by appearances. Debord saw not just the rise of media, but the rise of mediation - and it terrified him. He died in 1994, just before the Internet fully absorbed us, so we brought him back to view an era where the spectacle is not...

What happens when the man who warned us about runaway technology comes back to see how it all turned out? In this episode, French philosopher Jacques Ellul—author of The Technological Society —explains why every innovation that can be made will be made, regardless of need or consequence. He introduces his concept of “technique,” showing how efficiency often trumps ethics, and why opting out of mod...

Rachel Carson wasn't a politician, a futurist or a tech mogul. She was a marine biologist. Her 1962 book Silent Spring sounded the alarm that industry refused to hear. She was accused of being hysterical, anti-progress, even a threat to national security. She died before seeing her work become the foundation of the modern environmental movement. What would she make of the age of carbon markets...

Before memes, before iPhones, before your mom started texting in all caps—there was Marshall McLuhan. The Canadian media theorist, cultural provocateur, and surprise cameo star in Annie Hall makes his ghostly return to decode the 21st-century media swamp he predicted decades ago. In this episode, Ray sits down with the OG of media studies, a man who once said, “We shape our tools, and thereafter o...

“What happens when the man who saw it all coming returns to tell us… we misunderstood the punchline?” In this premiere episode of They Tried to Warn Us , we resurrect the voice and mind of media theorist Neil Postman —the man who warned us that entertainment would devour public discourse, and that we might laugh ourselves into tyranny. Recorded from beyond the grave (don’t worry, it’s not creepy—j...

They Tried to Warn Us is the podcast that resurrects dead thinkers—writers, theorists,prophets, poets—and asks them what they make of the world we’ve built. We’ve used a little creative license—and a lot of historical research—to bring back the voices of those who saw it all coming. This season, we talk to ten prophetic voices from across history— from media theorists and science fiction authors t...