PODCAST · arts
Techs on Texts
by Jed Sundwall
Techs on Texts is a podcast featuring conversations with technologists about the literature that has influenced them. Hosted and produced by Jed Sundwall.Learn more at https://techsontexts.net
Episodes
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Techs on Texts is on Hiatus
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...
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Episode #28: George Dyson on The Tale of the Big Computer
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…
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Episode #27: Justin Kiggins on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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…
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Episode #26: JB Flinders on Sneakers
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…
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Episode #25: Kate Chapman on Wool by Hugh Howey
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...
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Episode #24: Kevin Bullock on Pluribus by Vince Gilligan
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…
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Episode #23: Cyd Harrell on “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges
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...
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Episode #22: Marta Regn on “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” by Ted Chiang
"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...
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Episode #21: George Dyson on The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle
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...
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Episode #20: Mark Chambers on Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
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...
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Episode #19: Matt Price on Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
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...
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Episode #18: Noah Iliinsky on China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
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...
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Episode #17: Daniel X. O'Neil on The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
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...
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Episode #16: Alex Merose on Convenience Store Woman
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…
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Episode #15: Johnny Rodgers on A Pattern Language
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...
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Episode #14: George Dyson on Childhood's End
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...
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Episode #13: Keith Garrett on The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling
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,...
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Episode #12: Gina Trapani on Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
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…
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Episode #11: Nathaniel Raymond on Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation
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…
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Episode #10: Mark Coatney on A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
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...
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Episode #9: Esther Dyson on Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Spike Jonze’s Her
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...
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Episode #8: Jordan Tigani on The Analytical Language of John Wilkins by Jorge Luis Borges
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...
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Episode #7: Max Lenormand on The Little Prince and Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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...
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Episode #6: Io Blair-Freese on Borges
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…
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Episode #5: George Dyson on The Voice of the Dolphins
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...
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Episode #4: Chris Beddow on Jorge Louis Borges and Umberto Eco
Chris Beddow, mapmaker, voyager, philosopher, and very good skier uses Borges's "On Exactitude in Science" and Umberto Eco's "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1" to go very very deep on the map–territory relationship. Listen and learn how to recognize how…
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Episode #3: Sean Gorman on Dune by Frank Herbert
Sean Gorman, geospatial entrepreneur extraordinaire, uses Dune to explain security policy, geopolitics, capitalism, sustainability, common knowledge, the erosion of common knowledge, the importance of friction in political institutions, reasons to think harder about opening up data, and why the...
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Episode #2: Jason Goldman on Dune by Frank Herbert
Jason Goldman, one of the world's foremost Dune podcast pioneers (listen to Escape Hatch!), talks about all of the Dune books, all of the Dune movies, the Dune TV shows, democracy, institutions, the dangers of charismatic leaders, the (a)moral arc of technological progress, the potential of...
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Episode #1: Tim O'Reilly on Dune by Frank Herbert
I've listened to this episode countless times as I've edited it and it is such a gift. I'm really grateful to Tim for doing it with me. A few notes and links: Frank Herbert, by Tim O'Reilly Many of the works Tim mentions in this post are mentioned in this blog post: Books That Have Shaped How I...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Techs on Texts is a podcast featuring conversations with technologists about the literature that has influenced them. Hosted and produced by Jed Sundwall.Learn more at https://techsontexts.net
HOSTED BY
Jed Sundwall
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Techs on Texts have?
Techs on Texts currently has 29 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Techs on Texts about?
Techs on Texts is a podcast featuring conversations with technologists about the literature that has influenced them. Hosted and produced by Jed Sundwall.Learn more at https://techsontexts.net
How often does Techs on Texts release new episodes?
Techs on Texts has 29 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Techs on Texts?
You can listen to Techs on Texts on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Techs on Texts?
Techs on Texts is created and hosted by Jed Sundwall.
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