The Chatterbox

Over the past few years, the practice of technology politics has outpaced its theory. As a result, fundamental questions remain unanswered: is technology the means or the ends for geopolitical contestation? Does technology denial work? What's the best strategy to outpace your adversaries? To get answers to these foundational questions, Pranay Kotasthane speaks to Ansgar Baums, the co-author of The Tech Cold War: The Geopolitics of Technology (https://www.techcoldwar.io/). Baums is Senior Advisor to Sinolytics and consults corporations on geopolitical risk management

All Things Policy is a daily podcast on public policy brought to you by the Takshashila Institution, Bengaluru.

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Find out more on our research and other work here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://takshashila.org.in/research-areas⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Check out our public policy courses here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://school.takshashila.org.in⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

When it comes to powering the US, “energy dominance” has become a favorite phrase of the Trump administration. But who or what are they trying to dominate with all that oil and gas? In this episode, we zoom out from climate change to trace how gender became so embedded in our collective understanding of nature. How did we go from worshipping Gaia and Indigenous earth-mother figures to extracting “natural resources” from private property? And how did oversized gas-guzzlers become a symbol of proud American … manhood? It all goes back to dominance.

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For a long time many (although by no means all) scholars saw the relationship between capitalism and democracy as mutually reinforcing: economic competition and growth were expected to sustain democratic competition and improve governance and public good delivery for citizens, in turn creating a better environment for capitalist competition to flourish. But as capitalism has changed and has in many respects freed itself from the constraints of the state and of democratic processes, it has unleashed a new era of extreme wealth accumulation, deregulated markets, weak states, unresponsive political elites, and choiceless democracies. In this episode, CEDAR host Licia Cianetti talks to Rachel Riedl about her recent essay on “Neoliberalism and the Third Wave” to better understand why and how this happened and what we can do about it. This episode is part of PPP’s ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Democracy.

Rachel Beatty Riedl is Professor of public policy and government at Cornell University and the Peggy J. Koenig '78 Director of the Brooks Center on Global Democracy. Her latest co-edited book is entitled Global Challenges to Democracy: Comparative Perspectives on Backsliding, Autocracy, and Resilience (CUP 2025).

Licia Cianetti is Lecturer in Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and Deputy Founding Director of CEDAR. Her latest publication is “What is a “regime”? Three definitions and their implications for the future of regime studies” (Democratization, 2025).

The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world.

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Emily M.Bender and Alex Hanna have been leading the charge against "AI", helping us understand it for the con that it is, and how AI companies are turning to health, education, and other social realms to try to recover their costs. In this episode we discuss LLMs vs. what the AI (and AGI) con is -- who benefits, and who loses -- and much more. Recorded July 15, 2025. Released July 28, 2025.

The AI Con

https://thecon.ai/

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000

https://www.dair-institute.org/maiht3k/

The predatory fantasy of worker empowerment in AI marketing

Justine Zhang, Su Lin Blodgett, Nina Markl

AI x Crisis: Tracing New Directions Beyond Deployment and Use workshop, Aarhus 2025.

AI isn’t replacing student writing – but it is reshaping it

https://theconversation.com/ai-isnt-replacing-student-writing-but-it-is-reshaping-it-254878

Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anna Kornbluh on the prevalence of aesthetic immediacy and why we need climate counteraesthetics.

at the Zollo Collective:

https://www.instagram.com/zollo.hamburg/?hl=en

https://labandavaga.org/?page_id=102

https://resuso.ch/

Shownotes

http://www.annakornbluh.com/

https://engl.uic.edu/profiles/kornbluh-anna/

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3031-immediacy-or-the-style-of-too-late-capitalism

https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/we-didnt-start-the-fire

https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/climate-realism

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo44521006.html

https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/creative-construction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_Pauline_Gumbs

https://www.alexispauline.com/

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a44819303/climate-crisis-maui/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_fiction

https://rebeccasaltzman.net/

https://www.dukeupress.edu/staying-with-the-trouble

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691220550/the-mushroom-at-the-end-of-the-world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heist_film

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Lucky

https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781784991340/

https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2013/03/04/e-m-forster-the-difference-between-story-and-plot/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-anxiety

https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/red-plenty

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hyperstition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson

https://store.orbit-books.co.uk/products/the-ministry-for-the-future

https://store.orbit-books.co.uk/products/new-york-2140

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal

https://aldanacohen.com/

https://climateandcommunity.org/

https://youtu.be/d9uTH0iprVQ?si=8O-M_fS2iO_AQhiL

https://www.versobooks.com/products/2546-a-planet-to-win

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk

https://www.zohranfornyc.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_realism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Taylor_(writer)

his website:

https://brandonlgtaylor.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colson_Whitehead

his website:

https://www.colsonwhitehead.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession_(TV_series)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Somewhere_(TV_series)

https://communia.de/en/project/public-luxury/

https://autonomy.work/portfolio/public-luxury-in-practice/

https://www.versobooks.com/products/772-neither-vertical-nor-horizontal

http://www.olufemiotaiwo.com/

Táíwò, O. (2020). Who gets to feel secure? On Liberty, Security, and Our System of Racial Capitalism. Aeon.

https://aeon.co/essays/on-liberty-security-and-our-system-of-racial-capitalism

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/from-the-editors-what-is-the-state-for/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_drive

Future Histories Episodes on Related Topics

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e32-jacob-blumenfeld-on-climate-barbarism-and-managing-decline/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e30-matt-huber-kohei-saito-on-growth-progress-and-left-imaginaries/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e23-andreas-malm-on-overshooting-into-climate-breakdown/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e03-planning-for-entropy-on-sociometabolic-planning/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e02-george-monbiot-on-public-luxury/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e27-nick-dyer-witheford-on-biocommunism/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e18-drew-pendergrass-and-troy-vettese-on-half-earth-socialism/

https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s01/e16-richard-barbrook-on-imaginary-futures/

If you are interested in democratic economic planning, these resources might be of help:

https://www.democratic-planning.com/

https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/ccha/29/1

https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/creative-construction

https://www.indep.network/

https://www.planningresearch.net/

---

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/FutureHpodcast

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

Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@FutureHistories

English webpage:

https://futurehistories-international.com

#AnnaKornbluh, #JanGroos, #Interview, #FutureHistories, #FutureHistoriesInternational, #futurehistoriesinternational, #DemocraticPlanning, #DemocraticEconomicPlanning, #FutureImaginaries, #Art, #Literature, #Representation, #Immediacy, #ClimateChange, #ClimateBreakdown, #ClimateCollapse, #Capitalism, #Economics, #Collapse, #GreenNewDeal, #ClimateAnxiety

"It shouldn't be that hard" says our guest. Americans first recognized Indians as tribes and as nations, at least at a national level. North America's indigenous peoples had government and effective government before european arrival.

Returning to that model of self government should therefore be an answer to today's challenges. American Indian history is the topic of discussion in this interview with Professor Adam Crepelle at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. He is the author of "Becoming Nations Again."

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Great Power Week continues here at American Prestige as historian Michael Brenes joins the show to talk about how prolonged competition with China threatens democracy, peace, and prosperity. They compare Biden and Trump’s respective approaches to China, whether the national security establishment is trying to manufacture an existential threat out of The People’s Republic, whether there is any national interest in a new Cold War, the degradation in American leaders, why rivalry is bad economically, erodes American society’s social fabric, and leads to violence, and alternatives to the great power framework.     

Read his book on the matter (co-authored with AP regular Van Jackson), The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy.

Don’t miss the companion episode with Stacie Goddard from Sunday, “The Era of Great Power Competition.” 

From Plato and Derrida to anti-aging treatments, cryogenics, cloning, and whole-brain uploads, the dream of indefinite life is technological and, as Adam Rosenthal shows in Prosthetic Immortalities: a matter of prosthesis, the transformation of the original being. There can be no certainty of immortality and yet, the problem of immortality continues to haunt the soul. Rosenthal engages David Wills and Deborah Goldgaber in a conversation that touches on philosophy, transhumanism, biopolitics, Dolly the sheep and the return of the dire wolf, what it means to extend life or, ultimately, to extend death. Access a transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/05f90526

Adam R. Rosenthal is associate professor of French and global studies at Texas A&M University. Rosenthal is author of Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life and Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida.

David Wills is professor of French studies at Brown University and author of Prosthesis. 

Deborah Goldgaber is assistant professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University and author of Speculative Grammatology: Deconstruction and the New Materialism.

REFERENCES:

Plato 

Homer

Descartes

Heidegger (the Dasein)

Derrida

Geoffrey Hinton

Hegel

Nick Bostrum

Dolly the sheep

David Chalmers

Aubrey de Grey

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Praise for the book:

“Rigorous, compelling, and beautifully written, Prosthetic Immortalities is at the vanguard of the new wave in Derrida studies.”

—Nicole Anderson, founding editor, Derrida Today Journal

“Adam R. Rosenthal conjures up the ghosts of metaphysics that return today through the promises of indefinite life from medical science and transhumanist speculations, moving brilliantly between science and science fiction.”

—Francesco Vitale, author of Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences

Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life by Adam R. Rosenthal, with foreword by David Wills, is available from University of Minneota Press. Thank you for listening.