Information and communications technologies have offered so much to the world—including WORT community radio and this very show! But it’s important that we bring a critical lens to the way we think about, design, and use technological tools like AI, data, and the internet.

That’s the message of Your Computer Is on Fire, a new edited volume from MIT Press about the “inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.”

For today’s show, Monday host Patty Peltekos speaks with co-editor and media professor Benjamin Peters about a range of issues—from keyboard languages to anarchist librarians, Russian radio to server farms—and why he believes we should harness our collective human creativity to make tech more equitable.

Benjamin Peters is an associate professor and chair of the Media Studies Department at the University of Tulsa and affiliated fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. He is the author of How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (MIT Press, 2016), editor of Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (Princeton University Press, 2016), and co-editor of Your Computer Is on Fire (MIT Press, 2021).

Cover photo by Florian Krumm on Unsplash