New Books in Technology

This podcast features Brian A. Wong, discussing his new book, The Tao of Alibaba: Inside the Chinese Digital Giant That is Changing the World (Public Affairs, 2022). Brian joined Alibaba early, as its 52nd employee and first American employee, and worked for them for nearly twenty years. His book provides both insider insights and an analytical perspective on how Alibaba grew to become one of the most important companies in the global digital economy. This well-written and engaging book explains Alibaba’s unique organizational culture and how the Alibaba platform has helped spread economic opportunity beyond the elites in China’s big cities to the broader world of small and medium businesses throughout the country.

Brian Wong’s Radii China is an independent media platform founded in 2017 dedicated to bridging the East and West by highlighting topics and issues that connect the world’s young, globally-minded citizens. Listeners interested in the development of the US-China relationship are encouraged to participate in the NCUSCR’s CHINA Town Hall, on November 17th, featuring a national webcast by former Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr. Local partner events around the US, including one at the University of San Francisco, provide opportunities to discuss the topic further in person with other community members and local experts on China. In the interview, we also discuss Benjamin Ho’s book Why Trust Matters, featured on this show last year.

Peter Lorentzen is the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research focus is the political economy of governance in China and he is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations (NCUSCR) and USF’s new Center on Business Studies and Innovation in the Asia-Pacific.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Dr. Ashley Sweetman works in cyber security for a London-based global bank and holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. While studying for his PhD he spent a short time as Researcher-in-Residence at No. 10 Downing Street while working for The Strand Group in the Policy Institute at King's. Before this, Ashley studied History at Queen Mary, University of London. Ashley is a proud Welshman and was brought up in Neath, South Wales. He currently lives in North London.

In his first book Cyber and the City: Securing London's Banks in the Computer Age (Springer, 2022), Sweetman provides evidence that cyber security is a long-lived phenomenon. Banks started to worry about it early in the adoption of computers in the late 1950s. The UK has a particular feature where banks rapidly agree on the measures to be taken, making the overall system more resilient. 

Sweetman uses a wealth of archival material and introduces de concepts of proportionality and the confidentiality-integrity-availability triumvirate to explain and interconnect the evolution and articulation of security in bank networks. 

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What are teens actually doing on their smartphones? Contrary to many adults' assumptions, they are not simply "addicted" to their screens, oblivious to the afterlife of what they post, or missing out on personal connection. They are just trying to navigate a networked world. In Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing) (MIT Press, 2022), Emily Weinstein and Carrie James, Harvard researchers who are experts on teens and technology, explore the complexities that teens face in their digital lives, and suggest that many adult efforts to help--"Get off your phone!" "Just don't sext!"--fall short.

Weinstein and James warn against a single-minded focus by adults on "screen time." Teens worry about dependence on their devices, but disconnecting means being out of the loop socially, with absence perceived as rudeness or even a failure to be there for a struggling friend. Drawing on a multiyear project that surveyed more than 3,500 teens, the authors explain that young people need empathy, not exasperated eye-rolling. Adults should understand the complicated nature of teens' online life rather than issue commands, and they should normalize--let teens know that their challenges are shared by others--without minimizing or dismissing. Along the way, Weinstein and James describe different kinds of sexting and explain such phenomena as watermarking nudes, comparison quicksand, digital pacifiers, and collecting receipts. Behind Their Screens offers essential reading for any adult who cares about supporting teens in an online world.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Paris Marx is one of the sharpest modern writers on Silicon Valley and transit. We have been talking a lot lately about the idea of techno-utopian thinking, but we’re coming to a somewhat surprising conclusion: there isn’t as much of it as there used to be. Our Silicon Valley tech bros have quite a curtailed vision. If they do have a utopia, it is a utopia of sustaining the unsustainable, of paving over the continent to keep everyone in their cars.

With Paris we’ll traverse the intellectual history of hippies-turned-arch-capitalists, and focus especially on their ideas for transportation policy. Do they have a radical vision for a different transportation future, or is it a vision of maintaining the status quo? Marx is author of the book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, out now from Verso Books.

SUPPORT THE SHOW

You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button.

If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.

ABOUT THE SHOW

For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In this episode, we discuss a book that will be appealing to a general audience and which helps to bridge the gap of the story of communication in the broad history of computer technology. In Cellular: An Economic and Business History of the International Mobile-Phone Industry (MIT Press, 2022), Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly make a splendid job to portray the evolution of this industry from the times of Marconi all the way to 5G networks, while considering developments in places as diverse as China, Mexico, New Zealand and of course, Europe, Japan and the USA.  

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Andrei Nae's book Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games (Routledge, 2021) investigates the narrativity of some of the most popular survival horror video games and the gender politics implicit in their storyworlds. In a thorough analysis of the genre that draws upon detailed comparisons with the mainstream action genre, Andrei Nae places his analysis firmly within a political and social context.

In comparing survival horror games to the dominant game design norms of the action genre, the author differentiates between classical and postclassical survival horror games to show how the former reject the norms of the action genre and deliver a critique of the conservative gender politics of action games, while the latter are more heterogeneous in terms of their game design and, implicitly, gender politics.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet.

Points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In You’ve Been Played, game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools, and governments use games and gamification as tools for profit and coercion. These are games that we often have no choice but to play, where losing has heavy penalties. You’ve Been Played is a scathing indictment of a tech-driven world that wants to convince us that misery is fun, and a call to arms for anyone who hopes to preserve their dignity and autonomy.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis's book Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility (Rutgers UP, 2020) focuses on an understudied dimension of the war on terror: the fight against bioterrorism. This component of the war enlisted the biosciences and public health fields to build up the U.S. biodefense industry and U.S. global disease control. The book argues that U.S. imperial ambitions drove these shifts in focus, aided by gendered and racialized discourses on terrorism, disease, and science. These narratives helped rationalize American research expansion into dangerous germs and bioweapons in the name of biodefense and bolstered the U.S. rationale for increased interference in the disease control decisions of Global South nations. Bio-Imperialism is a sobering look at how the war on terror impacted the world in ways that we are only just starting to grapple with.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author. Before moving to the UK in 2021 she was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Today I talked to Jim Wilson about his book (co-authored with Paul Daugherty) Radically Human: How New Technology Is Transforming Business and Shaping Our Future (HBR Press, 2022).

Technology has evolved from device intelligence to data intelligence (big data) to now the new stage of a more human-centric approach where the user/worker’s needs, wants and biases are being taken into account to make technology easier to deploy and more of an equal partner. That’s the progression Jim Wilson champions in this book and on-air conversation. Covid-19 ushered in not only a host of human behavior changes, e.g., hybrid work arrangements and the Great Resignation, the pandemic also spurred the Great Acceleration as companies rushed to adopt technology that will transform their business practices. How to do so in a way that will democratize technology, empowering employees and rewarding customers along the way, is the challenge that Wilson addresses here. After all, technology innovations that don’t also safeguard and enhance trust will instead create “algorithm aversion,” and undercut the promise of how technology can benefit companies, societies and individuals alike.

Jim Wilson is the Managing Director of Thought Leadership & Technology Research at Accenture Research. Jim speaks to business audiences worldwide, is a long-time contributor to the Harvard Business Review and has been cited as one of the top 50 Business Innovators by CODEX.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun sees value in the truth, but worries what data we might be looking at to find it. Chun discusses her new book, Discriminating Data (MIT Press, 2021), and how we might use data, objects, and truth in better ways. She also considers the violence of a drawing of a gorilla and the one thing she knows is true.

Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at here. 

Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology