The Chatterbox

Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. 

In The Map in the Machine: Charting the Spatial Architecture of Digital Capitalism (U California Press, 2024), Luis F. Alvarez Leon examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of IP geolocation, ridesharing, and a new Earth Observation satellite ecosystem. He develops a geographical theory of digital capitalism centered on the processes of location, valuation, and marketization to provide a new vantage point from which to better understand, and intervene in, the dominant techno-economic paradigm of our time. By centering the spatiality of digital capitalism, Alvarez Leon shows how this system is the product not of seemingly intangible information clouds but rather of a vast array of technologies, practices, and infrastructures deeply rooted in place, mediated by geography, and open to contestation and change.

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Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to end all future funding to South Africa claiming that in the country, “certain classes of people” were being treated “very badly.” Trump went on to announce a new specialized refugee program which would facilitate the entry of White South Africans — Afrikaners — into the U.S., as a result of “government sponsored race-based discrimination.”

It’s left many wondering exactly why Trump has taken up this new interest in South Africa? The answer to this may lie in a group of white billionaires and political insiders from apartheid-era South Africa that have embedded themselves within Donald Trump’s orbit, a group which includes the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, the billionaire Peter Thiel, Trump donor and official David Sacks, and well known South African golfer Gary Player. 

Chris McGreal is a journalist with The Guardian and a former South Africa correspondent with the paper through the final years of Apartheid. He joins the show to unpack the throughline connecting apartheid South Africa to the US today.  

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Why do we love evil?

We may condemn tyrants and abhor serial killers, but we are obsessed with evil and violence. Our news and our entertainment focus on such material. Are we fascinated by evil, violent characters because they make life more exciting? Or because they express our true nature? Should we look to end this morbid obsession, or accept it as a feature of humanity?

Join Terry Eagleton, Susan Neiman, and Stephen de Wijze for a debate about why evil is so seductive to modern society. Terry Eagleton is is a literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher and cultural commentator. Stephen de Wijze is senior lecturer in political theory at Manchester, whose work concerns the interface between ethical constraints and political action.

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Ben van Kerkwyk is the host of the  @UnchartedX  Youtube channel, best known for his study of unbelievably precise stone vases from the pre-dynastic period in Egypt. The strangeness of these vases cannot be overstated. They’re hewn out of some of the hardest stones known to man with micron precision. Mathematical relationships like pi, phi, and the flower of life are encoded in their construction. And they are OLD. Some have been found in tombs that date back to 6000 BC, more than three thousand years before the peak of Egyptian civilization. When they are discovered, it is always among other vases that *look* similar, but lack the precision and fine workmanship, or are made from softer stone. It is as if they are prized heirlooms, passed along through the generations, from a people whose ability to work stone (at the very least) rivals ours - but who are completely missing from the archaeological record. Who were these people? Why did they make these vases? What else were they doing? We sit down with Ben to unravel the story.

Ben's channel, UnchartedX here on YT: https://www.youtube.com/@UC2Stn8atEra7SMdPWyQoSLA

(00:00) Go!

(00:05:18) The Enigmatic Vases of Ancient Egypt

(00:07:53) Contextualizing Pre-Dynastic Egypt

(00:12:02) Advanced Stonework: Evidence of Ancient Precision

(00:20:34) Egyptian Artifact Enigma

(00:25:10) Museums and Unseen Records

(00:27:19) Mythological Memories

(00:32:10) Cataclysmic Events and Memories

(00:38:36) Cultural Evolution and Memory Loss

(00:40:42) Ancient Egyptian Symbols and Theories

(00:42:06) Cargo Cults and Cultural Memory

(00:44:04) Egypt's Architectural Mysteries

(00:47:04) Human Antiquity and Technological Gaps

(00:49:23) Civilization Cycles and Future Challenges

(00:55:09) Energy, Society, and Civilization’s Future

(01:03:11) Unfinished Works and Ancient Techniques

(01:06:40) Evidence of Advanced Machining

(01:10:38) Theories on Ancient Machining Methods

(01:19:40) Ancient Machining Techniques

(01:32:22) Mathematical Encodings in Art

(01:39:03) Analysis of Vase Geometry

(01:43:14) Mathematical Modelling Precision

(01:47:01) Historical Implications & Mathematical Knowledge

(01:52:33) Machining Challenges

(01:56:28) Geopolymer Theories

(02:02:02) Precision in Ancient Artifacts

(02:09:06) Authenticity and Provenance Concerns

(02:22:51) Functional Speculations of Ancient Structures

(02:25:11) Rewriting Historical Narratives

(02:31:11) Tour Challenges and Insights

(02:34:22) Future Research Themes

(02:37:11) Interconnection of Beauty and Mathematics

(02:38:36) Mathematical Precision in Ancient Designs

(02:43:00) Ancient Civilizations and Their Lost Histories

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Quinn Slobodian joins us to discuss his new book, Hayek’s Bastards (subtitle subtitle) - which traces the syncretic relationship of scientific racism, techno-solutionism, and the quest to destroy the cathedral to Neoliberalism’s crisis of mission in the 1990s.

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Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism (SUNY Press, 2024) argues that capitalism fosters sadism and masochism--not as individual psychological proclivities but as widespread institutionalized patterns of behavior. The book is divided into two parts: one historical and the other theoretical. In the first, Eugene W. Holland shows how, as capital becomes global in scale and drives production and consumption farther and farther apart, it perverts otherwise free markets, transforming sadism and masochism into borderline conditions and various supremacisms. The second part then turns to Deleuze and Guattari's 'schizoanalysis,' explaining how it helpfully embeds Freud's analysis of the family and Lacan's analysis of language within an analysis of the capitalist market and its psycho-dynamics. Drawing on literature and film throughout to illuminate the discontents of modern culture, Holland maintains that the sadistic relations of production and masochistic relations of consumption must be eliminated to prevent capitalism from destroying life as we know it.

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University

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