The Chatterbox

This is the first episode of Cited Podcast’s new season, Green Dreams. Green Dreams tells stories of radical environmental thinkers and their dreams for our green future. Should we make those dreams reality, or are they actually nightmares? For the rest of the episodes, visit the series page, and subscribe today (Apple, Spotify, RSS).

In the 1970s, Gerard O’Neill drew up detailed plans for large space colonies. The Princeton physicist claimed that these colonies could beam limitless energy back down to Earth, solving all our environmental problems. As climate change accelerates, O’Neill’s once-forgotten green dream has become influential again; many of today’s corporate space evangelists refer to themselves as “Jerry’s Kids.” For solutions to Earth’s problems, should we look to the stars?

Plus, in the back half, we talk to Mary-Jane Rubenstein about the religious and colonial language of the early space evangelists, and why that language persists into the present day.

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Facial recognition cameras, tenant screening platforms, digital property management—many landlords use sophisticated technology to monitor and screen tenants. Erin McElroy weighs the impact of so-called proptech on prospective renters, on tenants’ lives and well-being, and on people’s ability to respond to and organize against landlord abuse. McElroy also talks about what they call Silicon Valley imperialism.

Neda Atanasoski and Nassim Parvin, editors, Technocreep and the Politics of Things Not Seen Duke University Press, 2025

Erin McElroy, Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times Duke University Press, 2024

The post Landlord Tech appeared first on KPFA.

• Colin Drumm's Capital & Power - a huge influence on our book, and an excellent discussion of Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan (heavily discussed on the pod today).
• Friend of the pod Richard Hames' excellent Critical Collapsology series. 
• Laura Tripladi's series on Material Interfaces.
• Reza Negarestani's Draw of the Desert  - one of the most incredible and contentious pieces of modern political philosophy around.

Our new miniseries, Not Now, But Soon, challenges the stories we often tell about disasters, and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies. On our first episode, host Malka Older talks to Steven Gonzalez, an anthropologist of technology who researches the human labor behind data centers. 

Gonzalez is also a speculative fiction writer under the byline E. G. Condé. He is one of the creators of Taínofuturism, which incorporates Indigenous Caribbean traditions to imagine futures from a radically different perspective. His novella, Sordidez, explores how survivors’ efforts to rebuild after a hurricane intersects with oppression and conflict in a future Caribbean. 

In this episode, Gonzalez compares these different types of disasters: the dramatic and immediate impacts of the hurricane, and the slower, steadier, and often overlooked disasters of environmental destruction, resource depletion, and exploitation of human labor associated with our internet infrastructure. 

Resources: 

Visit Steven Gonzalez’s website to learn more about the impacts of cloud computing. 

Find Gonzalez’s fiction under the byline E.G. Condé. Check out his novella, Sordidez, winner of the Indie Ink Award for "Writing the Future We Need: Latinx/Latine Representation by a Latinx/Latine author." 

This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project. Read all Future Tense Fiction stories here.

A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, Tavia Nyong’o is the William Lampson Professor of American Studies at Yale University, with award-winning books including The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018) . His work in critical theory and performance studies explores the intersection of history, imagination, and Black aesthetic life through the lens of performance. Tavia Nyong'o's public-facing writings have appeared in prominent publications such as Vogue, them, The Nation, n+1, Artforum, Texte Zur Kunst, Cabinet, Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, and NPR.  and has been recognized with fellowships from prestigious foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He serves on multiple editorial boards and co-edits the Sexual Cultures book series at NYU Press with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson. Currently curating public programs at the Park Avenue Armory, Nyong'o is completing groundbreaking research on topics ranging from digital technology's cultural history to racial and sexual dissidence in art and culture. In today’s conversation, we discuss his latest monograph Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (University of California Press, 2025), where he shows that the end of the world is crucial to afrofuturism and reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore their similarities.

Interview with Patricia Owens, author of 'Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men'The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role in the creation of this new cross-disciplinary field. In Erased, Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century, international relations relied on the intellectual labour of women and their expertise on such subjects as empire and colonial administration, anticolonial organising, non-Western powers, and international organisations. Indeed, women were among the leading international thinkers of the era, shaping the development of the field as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals—and as heterosexual spouses and intimate same-sex partners.------Javier Mejia is a Stanford University lecturer who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine.

Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/JavierMejiaC

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/javier_mejia_c/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/javier-mejia-cubillos-64504562/

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Jon Lee Anderson about the Taliban in Afghanistan over the past 20 years. They provide an overview of Afghanistan, how the Taliban came to power, makeup of the Taliban, their intentions for an Islamic state, Hamid Karzai, Taliban resurgence in 2012, US withdrawal, Taliban reign at present, the future of Afghanistan, and many more topics.

Jon Lee Anderson is an author and a staff writer for The New Yorker. As a longtime observer of political violence and revolutionary movements, he has reported from many war zones over the years, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Angola, Somalia, Mali, and Liberia. He has reported frequently from Latin America and profiled political leaders such as Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Nicolás Maduro. Anderson also wrote a celebrated biography of the late Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. He is the author of the latest book, To Lose A War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban.

If you know anything about the Amazons of ancient legend, it's probably that they were fearsome female fighters, who bravely battled against male heroes of Greek legend. But, according to Professor David Braund, the Amazons were far more than just formidable warrior women – he explains why to David Musgrove.

(Ad) David Braund is the author of Amazons: The History Behind the Legend (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amazons-History-Behind-David-Braund/dp/1108834493/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty.

The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine.

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The tech industry is pitching data mining and new infrastructure as the key to national prosperity. But will it deliver? And if so, for whom?

Tech Council of Australia CEO, Damian Kassabgi joins regular panelists Digital Rights Watch Chair Lizzie O’Shea, Health Engine CEO Dan Stinton and Per Capita’s Peter Lewis for the latest episode of Burning Platforms.

The show also covers:

fresh concerns over age verification

the creepy rise of intimate AI companions

And Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa’s address to the National Press Club

To discuss the issues raised in this episode join us in the Democracy Sandpit - https://civility.bettermode.io/welcome

Prof. Fiona Williamson (Singapore Management University) joins Dr. Philip Gooding to discuss her recently published monograph: Imperial Weather Meteorology, Science, and the Environment in Colonial Malaya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025). Their discussion covers the development of meteorological science under British rule in colonial Singapore and Malaya, with real implications for how the impacts of global warming are understood in the present.

A specialist in the environmental history of southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean World, Prof. Williamson has particular interest in the history of the climate, meteorology and extreme weather in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Scholar profile: https://faculty.smu.edu.sg/profile/fiona-clare-williamson-1066

Book: https://faculty.smu.edu.sg/profile/fiona-clare-williamson-1066

The Indian Ocean World podcast is hosted by D. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sam Gleave Riemann and Sofia O’Reilly, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership, “Appraising Risk, Past and Present.”

Music: “Nam Nhi-tu” by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con