Techs on Texts

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 Battista Piranesi's "Imaginary Prisons"
• All Things Shining, the book I refer to as "Everything Shining" in the podcast
• Gene Wolfe, who Ursula K. Le Guin referred to as "our Melville"
• Aleister Crowley
• Bodhisattva
• Natural history
• Various soundtracks to Piranesi:
  • "Everything Forgotten Flows" by Priori
  • "Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo" by Francesco Messina and Raul Lovisoni
  • In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country by Boards of Canada

Next month, will be Jurassic Park (the movie and the book!) with Mark Chambers.

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

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 Successful Design presentation: 5-minute version, 45-minute version
• Noah's unassailable guidance on using a dishwasher
• Pace Layers from Stuart Brand
• The Double Diamond bike frame
• Work on Stuff That Matters by Tim O'Reilly
• Jared Rusten – my woodworker of choice

Next month, Matt Price will be on to talk about Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

New Secret School album! Enough? Remixes on Apple Music and Spotify.

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

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)
• The Waste Land on Wikipedia
• Hypertext enjambment
• Blueberry Boat by The Fiery Furnaces
• The truly great Carl Malamud
• The Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex
• Jack Dorsey talking about how dispatch systems influenced Twitter (Dorsey, like Eliot is from St. Louis, as is past guest Jason Goldman and Sam Altman)
• Rashomon
• My essay on Internet Power (thanks to Dan for pushing me over the edge to finally publish this)
• Trut from Emigre Magazine #41
• The Nature Book
• Cahokia Mounds
• Children of a Modest Star by Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman for all those interested in the limitations of the nation stata
• The end of the Internet

Always remember:

There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

— Cormac McCarthy 💖

Next month we'll be talking with Noah Ilinsky about China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh.

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

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 production assistance.

Many show notes!

• Alex Merose's website
• Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
• Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work by Maurizio Lazzarato
• Coffee Mill - Marcel Duchamp's 1911 painting at the Tate
• Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation
• Vaporwave
• Heraclitus the obscure
• David Reich on the Dwarkesh Podcast - discussing genetics and human history, including some theories about the emergence of language
• If on a winter's night a traveler
• Opening keynote from CNG Conference 2025

Many thanks to Alex for sending these references:

• How Food Played a Role in the Rise of Patriarchy
• Nagarjuna (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Alex's photos of Art by and inspired by Marcel Duchamp from the National Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul
• Alex's photos of Duchamp's works mentioned in the Lazzarato paper from the Museum of Modern Art in NYC -
• Work: A Deep History by James Suzman
• Work podcast on Spotify

If you enjoyed this, please share it.

Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

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 Manso (my olde Tumblr)
• View Source, Johnny's Tumblr
• Renaissance Philanthropy's Playbooks, inspired by A Pattern Language
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, a seminal software engineering book heavily influenced by A Pattern Language
• Martha Stewart on Elio's

In May, we will be reading Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata and Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work by Maurizio Lazzarato.

If you enjoyed this, please share it.

Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

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 Claude that the episode was a conversation with George Dyson about Childhood's End. In any event, that is precisely what George and I talk about.

We also talk about many other things, including AI and social media as "overlord technologies," analog computing, ESP, and why he believes every company should employ an historian and a biologist.

Show notes:

• Buy George's new edition of Project Orion
• George's 2002 TED Talk about Project Orion
• Solar cigarette lighters
• Mina Rees, first female head of the mathematics department of the Office of Naval Research
• Tim O'Reilly: The End of Programming as We Know It

More show notes at techsontexts.net

If you enjoyed this, please share it.

Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

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"! Online or buy Exhalation wherever you buy books.
• Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers
• Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases
• The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes
• Socratese's story of Egyptian king Thamus and the invention of writing
• Ted Chiang on the dangers of runaway AI relative to the dangers of no-holds-barred capitalism: Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

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 others already do: Gina is the best.

Notes!

• Van Halen logo in MS Paint
• Ira Glass on he taste gap
• Podcast with Nina Jacobson, producer of The Life Aquatic
• Tig Notaro on why nothing matters and that's a good thing
• Always remember no one cares.
• The Vampire Problem: A Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Paradox of Transformative Experience
• Cargo cults in post-World War II Melanesia

Also, Enough! is a great new album by Secret School (who did Techs on Texts's intro music): Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify.

If you enjoyed this, please share it.

Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

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. As Nathaniel says in our discussion: the movie is somehow more relevant to society today, 50 years after it was made.

Many thanks to Natty for coming and doing this with me. He was the absolute best person I could have on to discuss The Conversation.

Notes!

• "New ways of seeing create new ways of being blind" - Interview with Nathaniel about monitoring atrocities in Sudan
• The Conversation (1974) Behind the Scenes with Francis Ford Coppola
• Treasures from the Yale Film Archive: The Conversation
• Noli Tangere Cordis, do not touch the heart: a story of medical progress and shifting ethics
• The historic Blue Baby operation
• The revelation of MKUltra in 1973
• The Satellite Sentinel Project
• Recap of the discussion of Internet Power talk at Yale
• The Conversation final scene

Listen next month for a discussion with Gina Trapani about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

If you enjoyed this, please share it.

Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

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 humans like things, leaky boats as a metaphor for a lot of software, and the fact that any human power can be changed by human beings – including, possibly, the power contained within ourselves.

Many thanks to Mark for coming out to record with me at Yale. Huge treat to get some time with him in real life.

Tons of shownotes!

• The passage from Analogia by George Dyson that I refer to: "The Apache was a hard foe to subdue," according to John Gregory Bourke, "not because he was full of wiles and tricks and experienced in all that pertains to the art of war, but because he had so few artificial wants and depended almost absolutely on what his great mother – Nature – stood ready to supply. Our government had never been able to starve any of them until it had them placed on a reservation."
• Tales of the Tyrant, the story about Saddam Hussein mentioned by Mark.
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• Social media and the Arab Spring
• Facebook's Oversight Board
• Biz Stone's tweet revealing the weight of having to deal with Twitter accidentally becoming a non-state actor
• Planetary Boundaries
• Le Guin's acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal, which includes this phenomenal passage: "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."
• Simon Willison on NotebookLM's AI podcast generator
• Mark's (is it really Mark's?) NotebookLM-generated podcast about Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence"
• "Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art" by Ted Chiang
• Literally Unbelievable
• Domi & JD Beck covering "Flim" by Aphex Twin
• "Girl/Boy Song" by Aphex Twin
• How Russell Holzman teaches himself how to play breakbeats live
• Day Million
• Tracking bird populations with radar data
• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling

If you enjoyed this, please share it.

Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.