You heard that right, everyone. Who knows, maybe we’ll be back someday, though!

(Long-time listeners: stick around for the last bit of this episode. Trust us.)

Music

• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.
• Something special

Respond

We (still!) love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Also: MARIMBAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

Show Notes

The books we covered this season:

1. Phaedrus, Plato: 8.02, 8.03
2. The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard: 8.04, 8.05
3. The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil: 8.06, 8.07
4. Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton: 8.08, 8.09
5. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein: 8.10, 8.11
6. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne: 8.12, 8.13
7. The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin: 8.14, 8.15
8. Evolution as a Religion, Mary Midgley: 8.16, 8.17
9. Contact, Carl Sagan: 8.18, 8.19
10. Twitter and Tear Gas, Zeynep Tüfekçi: 8.20, 8.21
11. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan: 8.22

Stephen’s list

1. Twitter and Tear Gas
2. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
3. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
4. The Postmodern Condition
5. Contact
6. Jurassic Park
7. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
8. The Real World of Technology
9. Phaedrus
10. The Age of Spiritual Machines
11. Evolution as a Religion

Chris’s list

1. Twitter and Tear Gas
2. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
3. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
4. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
5. Jurassic Park
6. Phaedrus
7. Contact
8. The Real World of Technology
9. The Postmodern Condition
10. The Age of Spiritual Machines
11. Evolution as a Religion

Credits

Music

• “Foxglove”, by Ryan Dugré. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

• Robin Sloan
  • Sourdough
• Ruby
• George Saunders
• Cory Doctorow

Credits

Music

• “Getaway Car”, by Ezekiel Songs originally written by Make Sure. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

• Zeynep Tüfekçi
  • her recently-launched newsletter Insight
• 52-Cent Party
• Cultural Revolution
• Tianenmen Square
• Twitter and the 2020 US election
  • Twitter’s own take
  • Hunter Biden
• Electoral college
• Ben Thompson
• Matt Levine’s newsletter Money Stuff
  • His latest issue before going on parental leave back in August
  • profiled in the New York Times

Matching blazers

Upcoming Book

• December (8.22 and 8.23): Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan.

Credits

Music

• “Drop Off”, by Vertaal, feat. Severin Bruhin & Loren Hignell Used by permission, please don’t use without permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

Things we mentioned on the show, in the order we mentioned them:

• Zeynep Tüfekçi
  • her recently-launched newsletter Insight
• modern Turkey
• Zapatistas
• Occupy Wall Street
• 1999 World Trade Organization protests
• Arab Spring
• Tea Party
• China’s treatment of the Uyghurs
• Capacities/capabilities
  • The Capability Approach, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Amartya Sen
• American Civil Rights Movement
  • March on Washington
  • Montgomery Bus Boycott
  • John Lewis
• The Internet Archive

Upcoming Book

• December (8.22 and 8.23): Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan.

Credits

Music

• “Ode to Youth”, by Liam Mour Used by permission, please don’t use without permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

After reading Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact and watching the 1995 movie of the same name, we discuss a major epistemological question: what are the acceptable grounds for belief? Are religious belief and scientific proof compatible? Sagan’s surprisingly nuanced views give us interesting ways forward.

Things we mentioned on the show, in the order we mentioned them:

• Carl Sagan
• Cosmos: TV show and book
• Non-overlapping Magisteria
• More commentary on Sagan’s complex and complicated relationship with religion
• One of many episodes of the Bible Project talking about God working through history
• Richard Dawkins
• “Verily I say unto you, they have received their reward in full” (Carradini version, a mashup of the KJV and NIV translations of Matthew 6:2)
• Sagan’s views on religion and nuclear war
• Jenkins and LaHaye dispensationalist eschatology, otherwise known as the Left Behind series
• Postmillenialism
• Soviet genetics, also known as Lysenkoism (bonus: Lysenkoism is based partially on Lamarckism, which should be familiar to you if you just listened to our episodes on Mary Midgley’s work)

Upcoming Book

• November (8.20 and 8.21): Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufecki. You can also download it from Tufecki’s website as a PDF.
• December (8.22 and 8.23): Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan.

Credits

Music

• “Character” by Kylie Odetta. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

We read Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact and watched the 1995 movie of the same name. In this episode, our overview of the book: its plot and its basic interests.

Things we mentioned on the show, in the order we mentioned them:

• Carl Sagan
• Cosmos: TV show and book
• Neil Degrasse Tyson
• Fermi Paradox
• Wow! signal
• Very Large Array
• Arecibo Observatory
• Neil Patrick Harris (wait for it, it’ll all make sense in the end)

Upcoming Book

• November (8.20 and 8.21): Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufecki. You can also download it from Tufecki’s website as a PDF.
• December (8.22 and 8.23): Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan.

Credits

Music

• “It’s a Movie, It’s a Dream” by Josh Caress. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

• Descartes’ belief that people can’t be rational without God; see paragraph six
• Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene
• David Hume
• Immanuel Kant
• John Rawls, the specific claim Stephen most has a problem with is the veil of ignorance concept explained in this page (although this is not mentioned in the episode)
• Jacques Monod
• Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay
• Robinson Crusoe

Here’s another great cover of the book from the ’80s!

Upcoming Book

• October (8.18 and 8.19): Contact, Carl Sagan (and the movie)
• November (8.20 and 8.21): Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufecki. You can also download it from Tufecki’s website as a PDF.

Credits

Music

• “Sailor’s Cry” by A.M.R via Silk Music. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

• Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene
• “Superman” and Friedrich Nietzsche
• David Hume
• Immanuel Kant
• The other book Chris is reading on politics &c. currently: Politics and the Order of Love, Eric Gregory

Here’s another great cover of the book from the ’80s!

Upcoming Book

• October (8.18 and 8.19): Contact, Carl Sagan
• November (8.20 and 8.21): Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufecki. You can also download it from Tufecki’s website as a PDF.

Credits

Music

• “Acquainted with the Night” by Ezra Feinberg. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

• Cold War peace movement
• Peace movements in Canada
• Second-wave feminism (to which Dr. Franklin’s feminism approximately belongs to)
  
• History of environmental movements, post-WWII
• Bijker, Hughes & Pinch’s seminal work on Social Construction of Technology: Stephen left out Hughes. Sorry, Thomas P. Hughes.
• Actor-Network Theory
• John Law and Annemarie Mol’s Handpump article: Stephen incorrectly only mentioned Mol instead of Law and Mol. Sorry, John Law.
• Robert Moses’s bridges
• Bay of Pigs invasion, also sometimes known as the Bay of Pigs incident: Stephen’s point in bringing this up was to allude to the point made neatly in the Wikipedia article: “[The failed invasion] also pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union, and those strengthened Soviet-Cuban relations would lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.”
• Almost no nuclear power plants have been built since 1990
• Nuclear power plants historically have decreased carbon emissions significantly: see paragraph four

Here’s the great cover of the book from the ’80s–note that at no time are floppy disks mentioned in the book.

Upcoming Book

September (8.16 and 8.17): Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, Mary Midgley

Credits

Music

• “Vista” by Escaper. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. We usually announce that on the show, but a technical error resulted in a second straight month without verbal crediting. Argh! Argh!
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

• Cold War peace movement
• Peace movements in Canada
• Second-wave feminism (to which Dr. Franklin’s feminism approximately belongs to)
• Third-wave feminism (to which Dr. Franklin’s feminism approximately does not belong to):
• Oklahoma historically dumping stuff in rivers
• Arkansas historically dumping stuff in Oklahoma’s rivers
• Oklahoma contemporarily dumping stuff in rivers

Here’s the great cover of the book from the ’80s–note that at no time are floppy disks mentioned in the book.

Upcoming Books

• September (8.16 and 8.17): Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, Mary Midgley
• October (8.18 and 8.19): Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman

Credits

Music

• “Mission Plan” by Matthew Shaw. Used by permission, please don’t use without permission. We usually announce that on the show, but a temporary glitch corrupted that section of the podcast. Whoops. Also, learn more about Matthew Shaw, this song, and Stephen’s long and storied enthusiasm for Shaw’s work here.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

• Critical theory
• Critical race theory
• Black feminism
• Intersectionality
• White as default in AI, potentially due to biased/non-diverse training data
• Finding God in the Lord of the Rings
• Looking for God in Harry Potter
• Surveillance Studies
• David Hume

The two main subjects we mentioned on the show as relevant were critical theory (and specifically critical race theory) and surveillance studies. Notably, while Browne describes herself as a black feminist and makes reference to the adjacent idea of intersectionality, she never explicitly refers to critical (race) theory. We applied the term to her work based on the historical and interpretive methods she used.

Reminder: as noted in 8.12, Stephen was definitely recording from a closet and some of his level drops are a result of (potentially) getting hit in the face with a sweater:

Upcoming Books

• August (8.14 and 8.15): The Real World of Technology, Dr. Ursula Franklin
• September (8.16 and 8.17): Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears, Mary Midgley

(Last episode we said we had a plan for the year and then it changed, so we’ll just keep going two books at a time!)

Credits

Music

• “Sali Lento” by Chouk Bwa & The Ångstromers. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

The two main subjects we mentioned on the show as relevant were critical theory (and specifically critical race theory) and surveillance studies. Notably, while Browne describes herself as a black feminist and makes reference to the adjacent idea of intersectionality, she never explicitly refers to critical (race) theory. We applied the term to her work based on the historical and interpretive methods she used.

Stephen reviewed our intro music, Joshua Crumbly’s “New Rock Thingy,” here.

Finally (as noted on air), Stephen was definitely recording from a closet:

Upcoming Books

• August (8.14 and 8.15): The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin
• September (8.16 and 8.17): (probably) Technopoly, Neil Postman

(We actually have a tentative plan through the end of the year… but we’ll publicize it once we’re more solid!)

Credits

Music

• “New Rock Thingy” by Joshua Crumbly. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, meaning you can do whatever you want with this music… as long as you share it for others to likewise do what they want.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Shoot us an email, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!

Show Notes

Eisenstein’s outline:

• dissemination
• standardization
• reorganization
• data collection
• preservation
• amplification
• reinforcement
• cultural effects
• the Republic of Letters

Links to things mentioned on the show:

• On context collapse: 2.02: Basketballs ≠ Pumpkins
• Our strongest take on “big data:” 6.06: A Kind of Blindness—Smart cities, “big data”, and the meaninglessness of mere information.
• The Republic of Letters
• Clarkives

Upcoming books

• July (8.12 and 8.13): Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown
• August (8.14 and 8.15): The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin
• September (8.16 and 8.17): (probably) Technopoly, Neil Postman

Music

• drawn, by Trevor Ransom. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

We almost entirely ended up talking about the contents of this book specifically! And we weren’t joking about how dense it is:

We did mention a couple other episodes of the show:

• 8.08: Jurassic Park—Explained
• on friction
• 7.09: Frictioneers

Upcoming books

• July (8.12 and 8.13): Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown
• August (8.14 and 8.15): The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin
• September (8.16 and 8.17): (probably) Technopoly, Neil Postman

Music

• “Alpha Orionis” by Juffbass
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton (and the movie!)

Show Notes

We put dinosaurs mostly in the background and talk about what Crichton really wanted to discuss: the science/industrial complex, the limits of science to interpret or re-create nature, the limits of discovery, and disciplinary power.

Things mentioned on the show

• People trying to recreate mammoths in Siberia to fix … climate change?
• The world’s fastest supercomputer being used for climate simulations, among other things
• The wild tale of Anthony Levandoski’s self-driving cars corporate espionage
• Self-driving cars as a zero-sum game

We also mentioned the famous “you didn’t stop to consider whether you should…” quote in 6.11: Very Thoughtful Ethics Dogs.

Upcoming books

Note that we’ve ended up changing plans since we recorded our Kurzweil episodes! We originally planned to read Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, but decided to talk about our “background” reading so far!

• June: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein
• July: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown

Music

• “Pull Apart (feat. Samantha Eason)” by Summerooms
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton (and the movie!)

Show Notes

Things mentioned on the show

• Media OS—see TVTropes’ “Extreme Graphical Representation” for many examples.
• The Expanse
  • TV series overview
  • book series overview
  • Caliban’s War: the book in which “complex simple systems” appear
• Nuclear meltdowns
  • Three-Mile Island
  • Chernobyl
  • Fukushima

Upcoming books

Note that we’ve ended up changing plans since we recorded our Kurzweil episodes! We originally planned to read Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, but decided to talk about our “background” reading so far!

• June: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein
• July: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown

Music

• “Achime” by TENGGER
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil

Show Notes

Things mentioned on the show

• Stephen’s music blog
• 7.06 and 7.07: The ERLC AI Statement Parts 1 and 2
• Mass Effect and Mass Affection
• The Matrix
• I, Robot
• Tolkien, Aüle, dwarves:
  • Dwarves: Origin at Tolkien Gateway
  • Aüle: The Creation of the Dwarves at Lord of the Rings Wiki
• Turing test and Alan Turing
  • Lanier via Jacobs, 59th thesis

Upcoming books

• May: Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton (and the movie!)
• June: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown

Music

• “SOL” by Pascal Schumacher
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil

Show Notes

Things mentioned on the show

• The Age of Intelligent Machines
• Moore’s Law
• Universal constants, and especially the speed of light
• You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier
• The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr
• René Descartes
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Paul Feyerabend
• Thomas Kuhn and particularly The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Daniel Dennett
• Pentium III and Core i7s
• Turing test and Alan Turing
  • John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument: “Minds, Brains and Programs”
    • a helpful deep dive
    • Chris’ blog post about it in 2018
  • Lanier via Jacobs, 59th thesis
• Google’s Calico project

Upcoming books

• May: Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton (and the movie!)
• June: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown

Music

• “King of Thumbs” by Alex Dowling
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Lyotard’s postmodernism, the politics of power, and aesthetics: what do we keep and what do we reject?

Show Notes

Errata

Chris, because he was slightly sick, forgot that although we were recording in February, the episode was coming out in March. This threw off everything we said about dates for the rest of the episode. Whoops!

(The book schedule is adjusted accordingly below.)

Things mentioned on the show

• “Information wants to be free”
• The Year of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs, which we discussed in 7.01: Do We Really Need to Keep the Internet Around?
• Simone Weil
• Jacques Ellul
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn
• From Chris’ newsletter, quoting and discussing Elizabeth Eisenstein’s note on learning: Across the Sundering Seas 2020 #07
• Richard Dawkins
• Apophatic theology and via negativa

Upcoming books

• April: The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil
• May: Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton (and the movie!)
• June: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown

Music

• “Gizmo” by Camel Power Club
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Jean-François Lyotard on postmodernity, science, and kitschy art.

The Postmodern Condition, Jean–François Lyotard

Show Notes

We do our best to explain this dense piece of French aesthetic theory, its arguments with German idealist philosophers, and its very strong feelings about non-avant-garde art.

Errata

Chris, because he was slightly sick, forgot that although we were recording in February, the episode was coming out in March. This threw off everything we said about dates for the rest of the episode. Whoops!

(The book schedule is adjusted accordingly below.)

Things mentioned on the show

• German idealists
• Jürgen Habermas
• J. L. Austin and his work How to Do Things With Words
• John Searle
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Theodor Adorno and his work Aesthetic Theory
• Systems theory
• Kurt Gödel
• Positivism
• Karl Popper
• Friedrich Nietzche
• Artists Lyotard brings up in his strange appendix:
  • Marcel Duchamp
  • Marcel Proust
  • James Joyce
  • Gustave Flaubert
• Karl Barth and specifically his work Nein

Upcoming books

• April: The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil
• May: Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton (and the movie!)
• June: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown

Music

• “Tony Sendo” by Bluestaeb & S. Fidelity Present Underground Canopy
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

We dig into our disagreements with and appreciations of Plato’s Phaedrus!

Other things mentioned on the show:

• C. S. Lewis’ Introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation
• Marshall McLuhan
• Ellul and Mumford
• 2.02: Basketballs ≠ Pumpkins
• Chat apps Slack and Twist

Next month’s book: The Postmodern Condition, Jean–François Lyotard

Music

• “Electric 1 (Part B)” by Elkhorn
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

We really only did one thing in this episode: talked about Plato’s Phaedrus! What did Plato say? How did he say it? What does it mean? There are, though, lots of interpretations.

• Relevant to our next episode: people have cited Lyotard a lot.
• Oh… and Alan Jacobs is back on Twitter.
• The Andy Matuschak post referenced in the episode

Music

• “Oak Forest” by Ivan Muela
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Douglas Campos
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

The authors and topics we discussed in detail on the show:

• Phaedrus – linked here are a wide array of translations
• Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Hardcore History

Music

• “To My Brain” by Aryl Barkley
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

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An interview with author and editor (and our friend) about his new book!

Show Notes

An interview with author and editor (and our friend!) Jake Meador—focused especially on his book In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World.

Links

• Jake Meador

• Mere Orthodoxy

  • possibly of interest to listeners: posts and essays Chris has written for Mere O

• “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate”, Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic

• The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt

• “Why Don’t Rich People Just Stop Working?”, Alex Williams, The New York Times

  • Related, see the episode “When meritocracy wins, everybody loses” on The Ezra Klein Show

• On India’s tax break for companies which can invest at least $750M in data centers: “This State’s 50-Year Bet on Big Tech Could Cost Hundreds of Millions of Dollars”, Mya Frazier, Bloomberg

• Derek Rishmawy: [@DZRishmawy](https://twitter.com/DZRishmawy) and Fred Sanders: [@FredFredSanders](https://twitter.com/FredFredSanders)

• Second Treatise on Government, John Locke

• ”Questions for Jake Meador after reading his lovely new book”, Brad East

• Herman Bavinck

• On the Christian view of marriage and family in the future:

  But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.…”

  —Matthew 22:29–30, ESV

• Desiring God, John Piper

• Anne Bradstreet

  • “The Author to Her Book”

• Sylvia Plath

  • “Stillborn”

• “Slow Cooker vs. Crock Pot - What’s the Difference?” (because regionalisms are fun, and you might call this something else)

• For Chris on Sabbath and rest, check out the final section of Corecursive 34: Using TypeScript Like A Pro with Chris Krycho, or check out the transcript here

• The Divine Imperative, by Emil Brunner (read about him)

• Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

• Lord of the Flies, William Golding

Music

• “Shush Me” by Nimrawd
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

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Show notes

• Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel
• Alan Jacobs’ Pinboard
• “The Web Falls Apart”
• Chris’ newsletter Across the Sundering Seas the last couple weeks, on progress and decline:
  • Flux (#27)
  • Edges (#28)
• Jaron Lanier
• Your Undivided Attention, Episode 9: The Dictator’s Playbook
• Chris’ Christology class

Chris also wrote a follow-up post on Twitter bots and decline, to which Stephen thoughtfully replied.

Music

• “Emerge” by Liam J. Hennessy
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

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Show notes

Which would make for healthy localist cities in 80 years: sustainable long-distance transportation, or really great virtual reality? Chris says sustainable long-distance transporation. Stephen says VR. Fight!

(In which the phrase “I don’t think that’s true!” appears more than any other episode of the show… ever.)

Links

• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
• The Opolis
• Cities/metropolitan areas on the East Coast with more than 4½ million residents
  • Atlanta
  • Baltimore
  • Boston
  • Miami
  • New York
  • Philadelphia
  • Washington D.C.

Music

• “The Wait” by The Fierce and the Dead. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

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Show notes

What will the world be like 80 years from now if we avoid technocratic thinking? We discuss the far future of ecologies, urban planning, and … open-source code economy. Listen all the way through for the closing note about the next episode and one of the most incredible bloopers we’ve ever produced.

Best efforts notwithstanding, we couldn’t actually find a news story about the Woodmoor HOA’s fight with its own residents—Chris got this from a friend who lived through it, but the news items (if any) are lost to the depths of time.

Links

• iPhone comparison to a tricorder
• The inventor of the cell phone says Dick Tracy inspired the cell phone, not Star Trek (Mea culpa: We said that iPhone was potentially inspired by Star Trek but it was really the first cell phone embroiled in this controversy)
• Eastern Colorado’s unsustainable land/water management
• Interactive tool assessing Phoenix’s water issues (Bonus: co-created by a member of Stephen’s academic department)
• Flash Forward’s episode on space crime
• Norman Music Fest

Previous episodes:

• 5.09: Regulate All the Things! (This is the “local loop unbundling” episode)
• 4.06: Kickstarting a Hyperlocal Superfarm

Errata

The best thing about the blooper is that Stephen technically correct but still also technically wrong: While the state of Denmark (16,577 sq. mi.) is indeed larger than Rhode Island (1,034 sq. mi.), it is also larger than eight other U.S. States. It would place 42nd on a list of sizes, after West Virginia (24,087 sq. mi.) and before Maryland (9,775 sq. mi.). Furthermore, Denmark (as astute newswatchers know) technically includes Greenland and the Faroe islands as part of Denmark, making in total 857,510 sq mi; this would make Denmark literally the largest American state by almost 300,000 square miles. Depending on how you count it, Denmark is actually more than three times the size of Texas. Oops.

Music

• “On Reflection” by Message to Bears. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

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Press pause on the dystopias. Set aside interventions. Dream a little of a non-technocratic world.

We’ve mostly been in the weeds of thinking about specific interventions around technologism this season. Today, we press pause and just spend some time imagining—dare we say, dreaming—of what a non-technocratic world might look and feel like.

Links

• psychohistory
• The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
• Confessions, Augustine
• The Expanse
• Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 and Mars Trilogy, beginning with Red Mars
• our collective forgetting of the 1970s
  • Alan Jacobs
  • Slate Star Codex (see Section II.)
• Life Finds a Way Kickstarter
• What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly (Chris cited it as being from Wired; in fact it is a book by one of the cofounders of Wired)
• Software Against Humanity? An Illichian perspective on the industrial era of sofware, Stephen Kell
  • Ivan Illich, Tools for Convivality
• The Bible Project – Series on Generosity (Abundance and Scarcity)

Music

• Hayato’s Theme, by Home Brewed Universe. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show notes

We talk about the currently-trendy concept of (design) friction and how it is necessary but not sufficient for right action on the Internet.

Links

• Facebook admits that it intentionally defrauded children by making it easy to buy in-game purchases
• The creator of the retweet button now thinks it was a bad idea (Mea culpa: We stated this article was written in Wired but it was in BuzzFeed)
• Dark patterns
• Alt-Meat Trounces Animal Meat’s Massive Inefficiencies
• The Launch: After two decades of research and development, WA 38 lands this fall. It could disrupt an entire industry.—It’s an apple.
• Manton Reece on hashtags and curation—note that Chris said these were totally curated, and they’re not; but they’re also designed not to behave like trends and hashtags on Twitter.
  • Search in Micro.blog
  • Books on Micro.blog
• A short history of Gamergate
• A compendium of articles concerning how Gamergate changed the Internet
• Data arguing that Gamergate was more about harassment than ethics
• A growing list of former tech company workers who regret their design decisions
• The Center for Humane Tech’s podcast Your Undivided Attention
• Tim-Berners Lee on his disappointments and frustrations with what people did to the world wide web

Things Chris has written in relation to this episode:

• Friction is the Friend of Serendipity

Previous episodes:

• 2.03: Impervious Scale—The Roman Empire and Friendster Have Things to Say to You
• 6.08: People Do Reject Technologies, Part 2—Nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and how to argue well with intractable disagreements.
• 7.01: Do We Really Need to Keep the Internet Around? Season 7’s charter—by way of a rollicking argument about Alan Jacobs’ The Year of Our Lord 1943 and Tolkien’s idea of eucatastrophe.

Music

“Stig of the Dump / Ogglet (Live)” - El Toppo (By the way, Stig of the Dump is a classic British children’s story, just in case you were wondering. Stephen looked it up after the show.) - “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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We pause from issue-focused episodes and try to pull together the threads of the season so far to take a step toward our ethic of technology.

Links

• Donald Trump cannot block critical Twitter users, court rules

• The Lindy effect – John D. Cook on the expected lifetimes of technology:

  …if all you know is that a technology has survived a certain amount of time, you can estimate that it will survive about that much longer.

• President Bush’s “can’t get fooled again” gaffe

• “Keep your eyes peeled”

• A Framework for Moderation – Ben Thompson, published two days after we recorded

• After Technopoloy, Alan Jacobs. Stephen to this referred to as “Against Solutionism”—accidentally conflating Jacobs’ piece with a thesis Chris has been mulling on/slowly building an essay around this year. Chris is, uhh, flattered to be confused with Jacobs.

  • Jacobs’ other blog posts on solutionism

Things Chris has written related to this episode:

• Friction is the Friend of Serendipity

• “Zuckerberg’s Blindness and Ours” (L. M. Sacasas)—Solutionism is a nasty besetting culture-level sin we barely recognize as such. (riffing on a post by L. M. Sacasas)

• “Free Speech”

  …the whole reason we have these arguments — and the reason people tend to think as they do about the “free speech” question in these situations, legally nonsensical or not — is that we have outsourced the vast majority of our public discourse to these private platforms.

• “The Slow Web” and the limits of “solutions” (from the email archive, discussed in more depth in 7.04)

Previous episode:

• 2.03: Impervious Scale—The Roman Empire and Friendster Have Things to Say to You
• 6.08: People Do Reject Technologies, Part 2—Nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and how to argue well with intractable disagreements.
• 7.01: Do We Really Need to Keep the Internet Around?—Season 7’s charter—by way of a rollicking argument about Alan Jacobs’ The Year of Our Lord 1943 and Tolkien’s idea of eucatastrophe.

Music

• The Commuter by Mister Lies
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

We dig into the rest of the ERLC’s statement on AI—everything from security and privacy to just war and the sovereignty of God.

Links

• Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles

• In Search of the Common Good, Jake Meador

• Minority Report

• Deepfakes

  • Fake ‘drunk’ Nancy Pelosi video goes viral, and it wasn’t even that hard to make (Mashable)

• 6.06: A Kind of Blindness—Smart cities, “big data”, and the meaninglessness of mere information.

• Just war theory (Wikipedia)

  • Niebuhr is sometimes described as adhering to just war theory, but in fact articulated a different strand of thought: Christian realism

• Evolution and the Fall, eds. William T. Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith

  …we will have to concede that the determination of [what falls outside the essence of the Christian tradition] is entrusted to the people of God, which is wider than the realm of academics, scholars, and scientists (though scholars and scientists who are part of this community of practice also get to participate in this discernment process).

  See also Chris’ review at Mere Orthodoxy: Faithful Extension and the Question of Human Origins

Music

• Signals by Arwen & the Mega Reset
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

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Show Notes

The ERLC published a statement on artificial intelligence and ethics. We give them an ‘A’ but have some substantive disagreements.

Links

• Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles
• Mass Effect - Mass Affection
• I, Robot
• Ray Kurzweil
  • The Singularity
  • Newton’s Wake, Ken Macleod
• 6.03: I’m Not Puttin’ That Chip in My Cheek—Bodily modification, from hip replacement to magnets in your fingers.
• 6.05: Crispr—Setting limits on how far we modify ourselves
• Deepfakes

Music

• Mixtaped Monk by Mixtaped Monk
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

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Show Notes

We look at everything from American racial history to the differences between Chattanooga’s and China’s “local” internets.

Links

• The New Sewer Socialists, Evan Malmgren, Logic

• An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons, Nadia Eghbal, on Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

  Ostrom noticed there are many situations where common resources are allocated efficiently, without intervention from the market or state. She explores, through a series of case studies, why this occurred, and under what conditions we could recreate these situations.

Music

• Bali” by Ryan Dugré
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

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Show Notes

We dig into the challenge of taking a non-solutionist approach and rejecting a technocratic view of the world… while not rejecting “interventions” and making real progress along the way.

Corrections

Stephen accidentally referred to Chris’ reference in his newsletter to C. S. Lewis’ foreword to St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation as “On the Annunciation”—the annunciation is a related but distinct bit of Christian doctrine, when the Incarnation was announced (‘annunciated’) to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Chris thought we talked about thinking-together-about-cell-phones in Season 4; it was all the way back in Season 3.

Links

• “The Slow Web” and the limits of “solutions”, Chris’ newsletter issue mentioned on the episode
  • The Slow Web
  • The Convivial Society, No. 15: Fortnite and the Good Life, L. M. Sacasas
• This is Water, David Foster Wallace’s commencement address at Kenyon College
• A Regulatory Framework for the Internet, Ben Thompson’s careful, thoughtful, excellent take on the subject
• The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande
• Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women, Reuters
• why Chris reacted at his use of the word “nudges”: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, Richard Thaler

Previous episodes referenced on the show:

• 3.10: Saying “Enough” – Phones, technological determinism, Christian ethics, and life in community., where we talked about cell phones and community life
• 6.06: A Kind of Blindness – Smart cities, “big data”, and the meaninglessness of mere information., where we talked about redlining and credit scores and the problems of “big data” as solutions

Music

• “Hidden Worlds” by Teen Daze
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

We chat with Ari Wallach of Longpath about his vision for the future and the importance of trans-generational ethics. (There’s obviously a lot we both find valuable and disagree with here… keep your ears open for reflection on some of those differences in the future!)

Corrigenda

Buckminster Fuller didn’t invent the trimtab—but he did invent the metaphor of the social aspects of trimtab!

Links

• Forget short-termism: it’s time to think longpath
• Our longpath future
• “Faithful extension” – Evolution and the Fall, Cavanaugh and Smith, and Chris’ review of the same
• Ari’s TED talk: 3 Ways to Plan for the Very Long Term
• epigenetics and mitochondrial DNA
• Auburn Theological Seminary (notably, a seminary with wildly different theology from our own!)
• Theodor Adorno
• Max Horkheimer
• Jürgen Habermas
• Karl Marx
• Frankfurt School
• Freud
• Friedrich_Nietzsche and “God is dead”
• UC Berkley
• Buckminster Fuller
• Peter Schwartz and Stewart Brand, and their Global Business Network
• Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno
• transhumanism and singularitism, the religions of SV
• Moore’s Law
• analogy to “interventions” from epidemiology – e.g. hand-washing
• neuroplasticity
• blockchain, monorails, jetpacks
• trim tab
• “stay woke”
• Hermann Hesse
• Soto Zen tradition
• yurts
• yeshiva model
• WeWork
• telos
• Exodus narrative
• longpath.gather
• Future Congress

Music

• ”First Do No Harm” by Kazyak
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

• John Deere discussion in 6.13
• $200M lobbying from oil companies
• 43 Democrats not even voting on a thing they support
• $200M in lobbying from oil companies
• Jake Meador’s articles:
  • “Whose Reaganism? Which Republicanism?” (Mere Orthodoxy)
  • “America’s Farming Crisis, Laid Bare by Midwest Floods” (Christianity Today)
• “A Community Environmental Project”, Andrew “Spence” Spencer
• Star Wars: Vision of the Future, Timothy Zahn
• The church history podcast Stephen keeps mentioning: Communio Sanctorum

Music

• ”Spring” by Teen Daze
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

Major figures we discuss in this episode:

• Alan Jacobs’ recent work The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisi
• Jacques Ellul
• C. S. Lewis
• T. S. Eliot
• Jacques Mauritain
• Simone Weil
• J.R.R. Tolkien
  • The Lord of the Rings
  • The Silmarillion
  • eucatastrophe: from “On Fairy Stories” (published in The Monsters and the Critics)

Other topics/figures/books/etc. we mentioned:

• The Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate
• “A Conflict of Crypto Visions” – Arjun Balaji on Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions
• Oliver O’Donovan – see especially his Resurrection and Moral Order
• natural law and the naturalistic fallacy
• technocracy
• Chris’ newsletter and specifically his issue on 1943: Have We Already Lost?
• Phaedrus

Also, Audio Hijack saved our bacon because Chris’ computer temporarily lost power due to a blizzard—and we lost nothing. If you’re in the business of audio and on a Mac, you should check out Rogue Amoeba’s excellent apps.

Music

• ”Mi Naci” by Panfur
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

An interview with writer, director, and actor Jessica C. Blank, focusing on her approach to using writing and acting as a means of accomplishing social change. We talk about her work on The Exonerated and How To Be a Rock Critic, as well as her theory of story and the way it can help create common ground even when people have deep disagreements.

Links

Most importantly:

• Jessica’s website
• her Instagram

All the things we talked about on the show!

• The Death Row 10
• The Culture Project
• The Center on Wrongful Convictions
• The Innocence Project
• Vietnam Veterans Against the War
• National Vet Center
• Oxytocin and Cortisol
• George Ryan of Illinois
• A few of the actors who participated in The Exonerated:
  • Richard Dreyfuss
  • Danny Glover
  • Mike Farrell
• Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey
• Marshall Ganz
• Mirror neurons
• Lester Bangs
  • Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
  • Almost Famous

Music

• “Gorilla” by Beatlove
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

• On burnout:
  • Chris’ New Rustacean episode
  • Chris’ blog posts
• Shannon Vallor and Technology and the Virtues
• “Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware”

Music

• “Tiananmen Square” by Cameron Blake
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Marnix Klooster
• Nathaniel Blaney
• Spencer Smith

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

Back in September, we recorded this episode live, both of us in person, at Pikes Peak Brewing Company in Monument, Colorado—as Stephen was out visiting Chris and just hanging out for a weekend. We talk a bit about the history of the beer industry in the 20th and 21st century, with an eye to the way that government intervention can variously make things much worse or much better, when it’s tailored just right.

…and then we failed to publish it for almost exactly 2 months, because Chris ended up with a horrible case of burnout.

Links

• Ben Thompson
  • On GDPR
  • On Aggregators
• Previous episodes:
  • [6.09: Granular Levels of Tomato Tracking][6.09]
  • 5.09: Regulate All the Things!
  • 5.02: Monopoly: Never Okay
  • 4.12: Five Years of Facepalming
  • [4.07: Kickstarting a Hyper-Local Superfarm][4.07]
  • 2.09: Hi, We’re the Internet.
  • 0.01: We Need Some Context!

Music

• “Us” by Jamison Isaak, a.k.a. Teen Daze
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

AI is coming and it’s going to take all of our jobs! …or, not, depending on who you ask and how optimistic they are or aren’t about the limits of AI as we understand it today. Regardless: how should we think about roboticizing all the jobs?

Links

• A telling quote:

  OH (from an awesome Lyft driver): “Today has been great. I’ve been blessed by the algorithm.”

  Immediately had an eerie feeling that this could become an increasingly common way to describe a day.
  —@kcoleman

• Hyperion AI – truly independent AI in sci-fi

• AI in Healthcare

• Boston Robotics Dog

• The polar bear problem paper

• A popular-level discussion of teh generalization problem

• And the same applied to roadblocks for automated cars

• The DeepMind papers

• AirBnB’s machine learning-powered sketching tool

• Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

Previous episodes reference on the show:

• 6.10: The Future of Something Like Work

• 6.06: A Kind of Blindness

• 3.08: Juice of the Weird Edges of the Ecosystem

Music

• “Knocking” by Basement Revolver. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Daniel Ellcey
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

It’s been four and a half years and 100 episodes of Winning Slowly! We pause to take a bit to reflect on what we’ve done, what we’re about, and where we hope to go from here. We also reflect on some of our craziest titles along the way. (“Buying Me Off With Warm Fuzzies”? “Juice Up the Weird Edges of the Ecosystem”? These got wild at times.)

Links

• Cameron Morgan
• Vallor’s book: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting
  • My blog post about it: Good Arguments
• IBM Has a Watson Dilemma - WSJ

Previous episodes

I mean, look people: basically it’s just “go look at earlier seasons.” So… quick links to earlier seasons it is!

• Season 0
• Season 1
• Season 2
• Season 3
• Season 4
• Season 5
• Season 6

Music

• “No Haters” from New Life by The Midnight Sons, a.k.a. Stephen. It’s Creative Commons Attribution licensed, just like this website!
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

Economists, guilt-ridden Silicon Valley inventors and investors, and others have been looking at the future of work. One possible conclusion? That it’s going away. We don’t think that’s quite right—and we don’t think it would be good if it did. Not exactly, anyway.

Links

• current US unemployment rate
• Tolkien on subcreation: see his essay On Fairy-Stories
• notes on J. S. Bach’s reception over time
• Previous episodes
  • 3.13: Inevitable? – Self-driving cars, the limits of technology, and the tension between the personal and the communal.
  • 3.07: One Size Does Not Fit All – Amazon’s workplace culture as a view into corporate ethics and responsibility

Music

• “Forever” by The Gray Havens. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

Blockchain and the associated currencies and techniques derived from it have been in the news a lot for the last few years. And it’s an incredibly interesting technology, which basically only has benefits for individual users – but has some profoundly distortive effects at scale, on everything from economics to energy consumption. So what do we do about it?

Links

• Cryptokitties

• Chinese Bitcoin Miners getting relocated to… Canada.

• ICOs (“initial coin offerings”) explained

• “Smart Contracts”

• current regulatory approaches

  • in Europe

  • in South Korea, including the latest as of the show’s publication

  • related: the relationship between trade agreements and regulation

• Blockchain and triple-entry accounting

  • that’s exactly what it is!

  • that’s not what it is

• Bitcoin will use 0.5% of the world’s electricity by the end of 2018

• Terrorists have (unsurprisingly) already been using cryptocurrencies

• Bitcoin in your (rural!) neighborhood

• On the basically-asymptotic difficulty of “mining”:

  • “Is the asymptotic performance of bitcoin O(n) relative to the block chain length?”

  • “How many bitcoins will there eventually be?”

    Every block introduces 50 new coins in the system. This quantity (50) halves every 210,000 blocks. So, getting the limit of coins it is possible to generate is quite easy: it’s the sum of a geometric series.

    The total number of bitcoins that can ever be created is 21,000,000.

We also discussed the importance of regulation in some detail in a couple episodes in season 5:

• 5.09: Regulate All the Things - on regulations and the open internet
• 5.11: Fences, Neighbors, Etc. – on vaccinations and the application of force

Music

• “Heavy Eyes” by Palm Ghosts. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

Sometimes, the rejection of a technology is far less clear cut than in last week’s discussion of Google Glass. With nuclear weapons (and nuclear waste), for example, decades of rejection by many people has not stepped further development and proliferation. What do we do when we face intractable disagreements, especially about things we think represent grave moral evils?

Links

• Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Fire bombing of Dresden
• Nuclear fallout
• Half-lives
• Mustard gas
• 9 countries with nukes
• Yucca mountain explainer
• Yellow journalism
• “The Really Big One: An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.”, on the Pacific Coast Warning System

Previous discussion of similar themes on the show:

• 4.05 – The Price of Democracy: The necessity and the limitations of gradualism, incrementalism, and compromise in politics.
• 4.10 – The Ancient Wisdom of Usenet: Populism, social media, and wisdom in when, how, and where to (dis)engage with people you disagree with.
• 5.11 – Fences, Neighbors, etc.: How do we defend great common goods when they pose small, but real, individual risks?

Music

• “Assembling the Fleets” by Andreas Waldetoft. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

Google Glass failed miserably. Why? Because people sometimes do reject technologies. But why? People’s snap judgments are far from infallible, of course, but in this case they seem to have been correct. How can we train our snap judgments to be correct more often? And how can we interrogate and sharpen our own judgments?

Links

Google Glass background and commentary:

• Google X and the Science of Radical Creativity: How the secretive Silicon Valley lab is trying to resurrect the lost art of invention (The Atlantic) – with this important note that Stephen mentioned during the show:

  First, they said, Glass flopped not because it was a bad consumer product but because it wasn’t a consumer product at all. The engineering team at X had wanted to send Glass prototypes to a few thousand tech nerds to get feedback. But as buzz about Glass grew, Google, led by its gung-ho co-founder Sergey Brin, pushed for a larger publicity tour—including a ted Talk and a fashion show with Diane von Furstenberg. Photographers captured Glass on the faces of some of the world’s biggest celebrities, including Beyoncé and Prince Charles, and Google seemed to embrace the publicity. At least implicitly, Google promised a product. It mailed a prototype. (Four years later, Glass has reemerged as a tool for factory workers, the same group that showed the most enthusiasm for the initial design.)

• “I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass” – Matt Honan at Wired

• “The Rise of the Term ‘Glasshole,’ Explained by Linguists” (The Atlantic)

• “How the Camera Doomed Google Glass: By including a recording device, the first-gen smart specs went from dorky to disturbing.” (The Atlantic)

• “Google Glass 2.0 Is A Startling Second Act” – Steven Levy at Wired, covering how Glass is finding its home in a more sensible role

Chris’ example of his own snap judgment was in reading “Google’s Selfish Ledger Is An Unsettling Vision Of Silicon Valley Social Engineering” at The Verge.

Music

• “Leafroad” by BLACKNIGHT. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

We attempt to take down the idea that more data is the solution to our problems. Without wisdom, and without an ethical frame, numbers mean nothing.

Links

• The metadata of experience, the experience of metadata – Nick Carr
• China’s New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech – Rene Chun at The Atlantic
• “Smart” refigerators DDOS-ing things
  • Massive Dyn DDOS Attack: Experts Blame Smart Fridges, DVRs And Other IoT Devices Why Your Internet Went Down
  • KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Record DDoS
  • The Democratization of Censorship
• Redlining:
  • Wikipedia
  • Modern-day redlining: How banks block people of color from homeownership
  • See also: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ discussion of redlining in his much-discussed piece in The Atlantic, “The Case For Reparations”

Music

• “Sharalee” by Jamison Isaak, a.k.a. Teen Daze
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

What are the limits on gene editing? Should we be doing it at all? If so, under what circumstances? Who determines where it’s okay to use Crispr?

Links

• Crispr Makes It Clear: The US Needs a Biology Strategy, and Fast
• Human Embryo Editing Gets the Ok—But No Superbabies

Music

• “Kept” by Jason Van Wyk
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

We dig into the reasons why so many Silicon Valley companies go so wrong. We talk about Chesterton's fence. We manage to agree with each other by arguing about Apple. We talk about everything from community practices to antitrust.

Links

• Chris’ earlier podcast failure
• Chesterton’s Fence
• Biblical notes on greed
  • on the desire to become rich
  • on the love of money
• #DeleteFacebook

Music

• “Tamu”, by I Am Sonic Rain – used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

How should we think about bodily modification, on the range from replacing a hip joint or a heart valve to enhancing people well beyond normal human capabilities, to adding entirely new capabilities to the human body?

Links

• The Olympics and body modification: Oscar Pistorius is an amputee with artificial legs
• Tiamat Dragon Lady
• Cambridge Analytica and #DeleteFacebook
• On the question of whether we’re already past “peak body hacking”
  • An early prognostication: “6 Extreme Body Enhancements to Expect in the Next 10 Years
  • “I Hacked My Body For a Future That Never Came
  • The Hype Cycle (and its “Trough of Disillusionment)
  • “Cyberpunk Yourself: Body Modification, Augmentation, and Grinders
• Ear gauges
• NFC
• The poll we referenced: “What Americans Think of Human Enhancement Technologies” (Scientific American)
• Transhumanism – and see also Futurisms, at The New Atlantis, an incisive blog criticizing transhumanism. (This post highlights some of the very same questions we get at in this episode.)

Matthew Lee Anderson’s Earthen Vessels is, sadly, out of print – but we know Matt, and he has some extra copies, so if you want one, email us!

Music

• “Quartessence”, by Kerim König used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

We talk about out explicitly Christian ethics - including our ethics of technology. How do we reason about technologies as individuals and communities? What is human flourishing?

Links

Our previous discussion of self-driving cars (and note the title we picked two and a half years ago): 3.13: Inevitable

Articles on the self-driving car crash:

• “A self-driving Uber car has killed a pedestrian in Arizona”
• “Uber ‘likely’ not at fault in deadly self-driving car crash, police chief says” (The Verge)
• “Can You Sue a Robot?”, Ian Bogost/The Atlantic - a fairly thoughtful argument… which nonetheless ends up with some sweeping judgments of just the sort that we’re not sure are warranted in this specific case.
• John Gruber representing the “just get us to the future; it’s worth the cost” side of things -

Mentioned on the show:

• Prolegomena
  • Specifically referenced: Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (wikipedia article)

• “All the Poor and Powerless”, by Shane and Shane

• L. M. Sacasas with some important reservations about Heidegger - reservations we share about a man who, whatever his influence, seems to have been a Nazi sympathizer.

• Mal’s speech in Serenity:

  A year from now, ten, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that.

Music

• “True Refuge”, by Ezra Feinberg. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

Introducing a season focused on one theme: rejecting technology. Or rather, as you’ll hear us trace out in more detail in the episode: rejecting some technologies at some times, and thinking harder about them in general.

Links

• L. M. Sacasas
• “Why the Luddites Matter”
• “What Technology Do We Really Need? A Critique of the 2016 Personal Democracy Forum

Music

• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jake Grant
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

You knew this was coming! We talk our likes, dislikes, deep loves, and both hopes and concerns for the future of Star Wars.

Links

• The Incomparable on The Empire Strikes Back

Music

• “Main Title and Escape,” from The Last Jedi by John Williams. Fair use.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

We chat about a Chinese novel with an American translation, our love of sci-fi and fantasy, and the ways different cultures tackle the same kinds of underlying problems through fiction. We also talk about the beauty, and the limitations, of thinking about different cultures through their art. (Including what might happen if you tried to understand American culture through its popular art!)

Links

• The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
• Season 4: Globalization
• “genre-savvy”
• The 1200-page-long Brandon Sanderson novel mentioned: Oathbringer
• The Incomparable’s discussions of The Three-Body Problem:
  • Ep. 251
  • Ep. 256
• Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
• Trappist system
• Ancillary Justice
• Howl’s Moving Castle and Hayao Miyazaki

Music

• “Warm” by Speakman Sound feat. Frankie Forman. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

Wrapping up Season 5! We take a look at the things that worked well, summarize some of the big things we learned (or learned how to say more clearly), and give a bit of a preview of where we're going in Season 6!

Links

• More __ in your __

Previous episodes we specifically called out during the show:

• 0.01: We Need Some Context!
• 2.13: A Disputation of Theses
• 5.03: It's Not Like Uber
• 5.04: Stuffy, Boring, Old, Lame
• 5.05: "Faint Not" (Live at NC State) -- when we talked about civil forfeiture
• 5.10: Super, Duper, Even Uber Bad
• 5.11: Fences, Neighbors, etc.

Music

• "International Dreams" by Farm Hand. Used by permission.
• "Winning Slowly Theme" by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month's sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you'd like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

It's one thing to be pro-vaccination. It's another to mandate vaccinations for everyone on the same schedule without any exceptions.

It's one thing to be an anti-vaxxer. It's something else entirely to have reservations about the particular schedule a government mandates.

How do we defend great common goods when they pose small, but real, individual risks?

Carefully.

Links

• "Measles outbreak grows in L.A.'s Orthodox Jewish community despite California's strict new vaccination law" (LA Times)
• "Volvo dragged into VW emissions scandal"

Music

• "Basement Halloween" by Make Sure. Used by permission.
• "Winning Slowly Theme" by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month's sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you'd like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

We look at the tech industry’s persistent habit of treating women badly – both overtly, in terms of sexual harassment, and less overtly, in terms of simply hiring and mentoring fewer women. What can we do to improve matters? What is the responsibility of individuals? Of companies? Of culture at large? Of the government?

Links

• Recent examples of sexism in the tech industry:

  • “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber” – Susan J. Fowler, with the piece that plunged Uber into its current, very much deserved, hot mess by explaining just how sexist its internal practices were.

  • “The fall of 500 Startups CEO Dave McClure” – Marisa Kendall, writing for the Mercury News, on Dave McClure of 500 Startups, who was forced to resign after (apparently well-founded) allegations of sexual harassment.

  • Binary Capital

    • “Women in Tech Speak Frankly on Culture of Harassment” – Katie Benner, writing for the New York Times, on women harassed by Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital.

    • “Binary Accused of Post-Resignation Harassment by Ex-Employee” – Emily Chang and Sarah McBride, writing for Bloomberg, on Justin Caldbeck’s threats to a woman who had stopped working with Binary Capital on account of pervasive sexism.

  • “The long-term cost of sexual harassment” – Catherine Shu, writing for TechCrunch, with a description of her own experience of being harassed and the way it affected her long term.

• “Can Venture Capital Be Saved?” – Mitch and Freada Kapor, making a case for their own VC fund’s approach, with a clear recognition that (awful as it is) sexual harassment is a symptom of yet deeper problems with VC culture:

  How can the industry celebrate people who glory in breaking all the rules, ask forgiveness not permission, and then be surprised when people are predatory, abusive and pursue their own desires at the expense and over the objection of others?

• “I’m a startup founder and I had sex with an investor — and I am sorry” – Perri Chase, writing for Business Insider, with a really thoughtful reflection on the current state of affairs, including a frank admission of her own choices and how they have played into things, but without blaming victims (a hard line to walk).

• Previously on the show:

  • Season 3 – many reflections on business success by way of taking the slow road.

  • 3.07: One Size Does Not Fit All – Amazon’s workplace culture as a view into corporate ethics and responsibility.

Music

• “Jonah 2” by The Jonah Project. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

We look at internet policy and regulations as a view into the broader question of the relationship between government regulations and markets. Are all regulations harmful to the free market? Is a free market always the best? How do ideas like net neutrality and local loop unbundling play into it?

Correction

Chris said, wrongly, that the North Carolina state government prevented Charlotte from building its own municipal fiber. What actually happened was the state passed a law preventing cities (like Wilson, North Carolina, which with the FCC sued the state but ultimately lost in a federal appeals court) from building out infrastructure to other communities (including rural areas outside the incorporated area of the city). The laws claimed to be in defense of competition; but there is notably no rush to build higher-speed internet to those rural areas.

The Winning Slowly Internet Platform

What do we think is necessary for a well-functioning internet?

1. Consistency and Reliability: or, you should be able to get sufficient speeds to learn or do your job on a normal basis.
2. A Free/Functioning Market for Content: or, a level playing field for all the bits.
3. A Competitive Market for Internet Service: or, enabling (1) and (2) by making internet service providers earn customers.

Links

• Net neutrality

  • Wikipedia

  • “Net Neutrality in the US: Now What? (Vi Hart)”

  • The Open Internet (net neutrality advocate)

  • Zero-rating (Wikipedia)

• Local loop unbundling

  • Wikipedia

  • “Planey Money 691: The Great Unbundling”

  • As an alternative to net neutrality: “We don’t need net neutrality; we need competition—Op-ed:”Unbundled access" actually works.“

• The FCC vs. North Carolina and Tennessee on municipal ISPs offering service to neighboring communities

• Cell phone competition:

  • The big four in the United States: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile

  • MVNOs: Wikipedia
    • Cricket
    • Ting
    • Republic Wireless

• Previously on the show:

  • 4.12: Five Years of Facepalming – The EU and internet law—monopolies, copyright, taxing, freedom of speech, and learning from each other.

  • 5.07: Books, The Internet, and Homeless People – Positive / Invisible / Legal (Organized): public libraries and the common good

Music

• “Jep Shuffle” by Holy ’57. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy Cherfas
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

In the wake of the surprising outcome of the 2016 American presidential election, we talk about how we do politics going forward. In particular, we look at how empathy and treating each other (no matter how sharp our differences) as people made in the image of God must inform our politics, even as we acknowledge that no amount of empathy will overcome all disagreements.

Links

• “What A Difference 2 Percentage Points Makes” – Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight

• Previously on the show
  • 4.11: How People Read C. S. Lewis
  • 4.10: The Ancient Wisdom of Usenet
  • 4.09: We’re Idealist Realists
  • 4.05: The Price of Democracy
  • 1.12: Political Appinations
  • 1.06: Rebuke Me Some People

Music

• “Kid” by Arwen and the Mega Reset. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Who, as it turns out, has been close friends with one of the

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy Cherfas
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

We talk libraries. Why? Because public libraries are awesome. They’re on of the few unalloyed successes in social experiments. They do good in a wide array of areas, and they’re free to use (because we support them as taxpayers). If you want to hear Chris giddy, this is the episode.

The second of two episodes recorded live at NC State University on September 22, 2016. (Yep, our schedule is way different this year. You can thank Stephen’s Ph.D. thesis and the combination of Chris’ M. Div., work, and travel for that!)

Links

• Dewey Decimal System
• Library of Congress Classification system
• Samsung Galaxy Note 7: exploding phone, do not buy, return if you bought one
• TESOL (“Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages”)

Music

• “Widows and Revolutionaries” by Darling Valley. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. After this episode, he should write something about libraries.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy Cherfas
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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Show Notes

Chris and Stephen have a wide-ranging conversation with Dave Radford of husband-and-wife folk-pop duo The Gray Havens about the value and purpose of art, the business side of the music industry, and the process of putting together their latest album, Ghost of a King.

• Musical influences:
• Simon and Garfunkel
• James Taylor
• Cat Stevens
• Frank Sinatra
• Dean Martin
• Queen
• Coldplay
• Mumford and Sons
• Florence and the Machine
• Fleet Foxes
• Bon Iver
• Lyrical influences:
• The Lord of the Rings
  • the Gray Havens in _The Lord of the Rings
• The Chronicles of Narnia
• The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
• Other people mentioned on the show
• Jon Foreman
• Ben Shive
• Stephen’s rant on iPods: 1.10: Because Capitalism Yay
• Temple board
• John Piper
  • 0.01: We Need Some Context—in which, in our very first episode, we discussed John Piper and Pope Francis as representing very different styles of using social media. (Also: whoa, that episode is rough…)

Music

• “Shadows of the Dawn,” “Band of Gold,” “Diamonds and Gold,” and “This My Soul” from Ghost of a King by The Gray Havens – used by permission. Go buy this album!
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Who is also deeply inspired by Tolkien, for the record.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
  • Jeremy Cherfas
  • Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

Links

• “Civil forfeiture in the United States” – Wikipedia
• “NYPD admits accounting for its civil-forfeiture seizures is hopeless” – RT
• “Asset Forfeiture Abuse” – ACLU
• “Civil Forfeiture” – Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
• “Police Can Use a Legal Gray Area to Rob Anyone of Their Belongings” – Kaveh Waddell, The Atlantic

Music

• “Faint Not” by Jenny & Tyler – used by permission, and with the deepest gratitude.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Not quite as awesome as Jenny & Tyler, but that’s okay.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy Cherfas
• Jeremy W. Sherman

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

Links

• An article in The New York Times, in 1903, referenced in The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras, by Robert J. Flanagan:

  The permanent orchestra season has, as usual, been financially a bad one all over the country. With the end of April… come the bills for those who pay the piper…. There is always a deficit, which public-spirited guarantors are called upon to pay year after year. A permanent orchestra, it seems pretty welle stablished by American experience, is not at present a paying institution, and is not likely immediately to become so…. [Neverthless,] the prevailing note of the guarantors of the America Orchestras is one of hopefulness. Things are coming on; the public is being educated; it will support the orchestras in larger and larger numbers till they are finally… self-supporting.
  

• Stephen’s top three Dutch minimalist recommendations:
  • “Canto Ostinato” by Simeon Ten Holt
  • Joep Franssens, whose best known work is “Music of the Spheres”
  • Jeroen van Veen
• Prog rock Chris likes:
  • Explosions in the Sky
  • Faunts (and especially their album M4)
• Other music mentioned on the show:
  • Bach’s Mass in B Minor
  • Lecrae
  • Industrial music
  • Stomp dance
  • Mahler Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”
  • Blue Man Group
  • Spoken word
  • Poetry slam
• A few of Chris’ composed works

Music

• “Generation Love” by Jon Reynolds – used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Composed along with hours of other music over the course of his teenage years and adult life. Maybe he’ll make a second career out of that.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy Cherfas
• Jeremy W. Sherman

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

In which we look at Facebook... but not like we ever have before. Why are people starting to turn off Facebook, and what social pressures are arising from that? How do social pressures of this sort work, and what kinds of changes do they affect?

Links

• Virtue signaling
• “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains”, Nicolas Carr, The Atlantic, July/August 2008
• “The road out of Denton” – Jim Bradbury for TribTalk/The Texas Tribune, July 8, 2015, on Texas and municipal attempts to block oil drilling.
• Chris’ conversation with his friend about social media:
  • spawned from this tweetstorm
  • the conversation started with this response
• Before you go: “The cease-fire in Colombia’s long civil war starts today. Here’s what you need to know.”, The Washington Post
• Previous discussions of social media or episodes referenced directly on the show:
  • 0.13: Ten Thousandth Lightbulb – What Happened to ADN, Paying to Socialize, Free or Not Free
  • 1.01: Massive Emotional Contagion – Facebook’s Social (Network) Science, User Responsibility, and Corporate Ethics
  • 1.13: Hello Ello? – Definitely Still a Beta, That’s Not a Gift, How People React to News, A Working Business Model
  • 3.01: The Ad-Driven Web, Part I – Denny’s, Newspapers, Native Advertising, and Vicious Cycles
  • 3.02: The Ad-Driven Web, Part II – The responsibilities of producers, consumers, and advertisers on the modern web
  • 3.04: Mom Memes – Generational shifts in social media and the diversifying web
  • 3.05: You Have Agency. Use It. – ‘The Web We Have to Save’—hyperlinks, the stream, algorithms, and human responsibility.
  • 3.11: Augustine’s Podcast – Social circles on- and offline and differences between our embodied and virtual selves.
  • 3.13: Inevitable? (Live at NC State) – Self-driving cars, the limits of technology, and the tension between the personal and the communal.
  • 4.10: The Ancient Wisdom of Usenet – Populism, social media, and wisdom in when, how, and where to (dis)engage with people you disagree with.

Music

• “The Best Part” by Young Mister. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. He’s composing other music right now, and this inspired him a bit along the way. Get inspired yourself and remix it! We’ll feature it if you do.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Kurt Klassen
• Jeremy Cherfas
• Jeremy W. Sherman

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

Marijuana legalization is happening in various states in the United States. How does that kind of change fit into the system we’ve devised for talking about structure and agency/systems and individuals? Because norms do change: all the time. How?

Links

• Reefer Madness
• “What’s More Dangerous: Marijuana or Alcohol? A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast”
• “Four of the Major Fear Campaigns That Helped Create America’s Insane War on Drugs” – we don’t necessarily endorse all the ideas here, but it does a nice job summarizing a lot of the issues around the drug war
• “Stop Treating Marijuana Like Heroin” – the New York Times editorial board, on the DEA’s recent decision to continue categorizing marijuana the same way it does heroin (as a Category 1 drug)
• “Donald Trump’s economic speech is basically about getting a do-over” – in which the journalists employed the Internet Archive as part of their reporting on Trump
• Previous episodes mentioned on the show:
  • 4.12: Five Years of Facepalming (Live at NC State) – learning from other countries about our own legal approaches
  • 5.01: A Ph.D.-Level Math Problem – introducing our axes for analyzing systems and their effects on individuals

Music

• “DaVinci” by Jaw Gems. This song is from Jaw Gems' new album Heatweaver. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. He’s composing other music right now, and this inspired him a bit along the way. Get inspired yourself and remix it! We’ll feature it if you do.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

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P.S. We might just have more bonus episodes at some point. Like this one, they'll be in the feed, and in the Bonus category on the site, but not highlighted in the "Current Season" on the front page. Because they're, well... bonus episodes.

Explanation: New Rustacean is Chris' podcast about the Rust programming language.

Show Notes

We introduce our system for thinking about the "structure/agency" or "systems and individuals" problem: how do the systems and structures of our lives shape us? How do we shape them? How free are we, and where are the places where more freedom is good, and the places where it might actually be bad? How do we confront the structural issues we face, or strengthen and preserve the good systems we do have in place?

Questions we'll be asking

• How much can a system penalize an individual for not being part of it?
• How much can a system hurt an individual who is part of it?
• How much can a system benefit an individual that is part of it?
• How much can a system benefit an individual who is not part of it?

Our analytical axes

• Positive vs. Negative: is the relationship between systems and individuals good or bad---and if so, for society as a whole, for individuals, or both?
• Visible vs. Invisible: is the structural pressure visible or invisible---i.e., living in a capitalist society is invisible but deeply impacts us.
• Legal vs. Social: does the structure get its force through law and the power of the government, or through cultural and societal pressure?
  • Organized vs. Unorganized: both social movements and legal structures may be more or less coherent and organized.

Applying the axes

Two big questions we'll ask about the particulars for each issue we look at:

• How constrained are you by these structural pressures?
• To what extent is that constraint or freedom good or problematic?

We think that in almost no cases is a radical end of individual freedom or structural control right. Nor does any system have merely positive or negative outcomes; we live in a broken world where even the best systems working in the most productive cycles with the most virtuous individuals still cannot solve everything perfectly. (And, since people's own situations and religious and ethical beliefs differe, there will be people who dispute our positive/negative valence. We make no apologies for ours, but we welcome disagreement!)

Links

• 32 Theses (and several more words) on Podcasting
• The Internet Archive

Music

• "Equations", by The Midnight Sons, which is Stephen. Used by Stephen's permission. Or insistence, even.
• "Winning Slowly Theme" by Chris Krycho. Kind of strange to think it's been two and a half years since he wrote this.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial
support! This month's sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you'd like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give
directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

We use the Panama Papers as a jumping-off point to sum up the season and talk about:

• the alleged flatness of the world
• the possibilities of both globalization and localization
• the twin dangers of imperialism and parochialism
• the ways that growing income inequality intersect with globalization
• the things different cultures can learn from each other
• the distinction between “reasonable” and “justifiable” responses
• the importance of humility, whether in art or in charitable action
• the value of choosing not to do something at times

In other words: how can you be a good actor in a global space?

As an aside, on the rough size of a Word file (referenced with regard to the size of the Panama Papers data release): a 20-page paper from Chris’ seminary degree is about 52 kilobytes. 2 gigabytes would be 20,000 such papers.

Links

• The Panama Papers:

  • “400 reporters kept the Panama Papers secret for a year. Here’s how they pulled it off.” (Mashable)
  • “David Cameron Answers for the Panama Papers” (The Atlantic) – and with a hilarious subtitle: ‘In a robust debate, one member was thrown out of the House of Commons for calling the prime minister “dodgy Dave.”’
  • “The 8 most important things to read to understand the Panama Papers document leak” (Vox)
  • “The Panama Papers leak, explained with an adorable comic about piggy banks” (Vox)

• The Three-Body Problem (Liu Cixin)

Previously on the Show

• 4.07: Kickstarting a Hyper-Local Superfarm
• 4.08: A Ghost in Singapore
• 4.10: The Ancient Wisdom of Usenet
• 4.12: Five Years of Facepalming (Live at NC State)

Music

• “River’s Sigh”, by Hazelwood. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. This theme is never changing. Even if we get a neater recording, or a variation on it: it's slowly winning at taking over your brainspace at the end of every episode..

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

We look at how Christianity is changing as it shifts from being heavily Western to being far more global (as it was in its birth). What new things might we see and learn as other eyes come to the same text? What do the various cultures of the world have to offer each other as we practice the same, ancient faith?

Links

• Reading we’ve found helpful on today’s topic:

  • Misreading the Bible Through Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible (E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien)
  • Theology in the Context of World Christianity: How the Global Church Is Influencing the Way We Think about and Discuss Theology​ (Timothy Tennent)
  • The Next Evangelicalism: Releasing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity (Soong-Chan Rah)

  (Note that we don’t endorse everything in these books, as we don’t with most things we link—but that particularly bears repeating when looking at theology.)

• Zencastr

Music

• “SARCOPH▲GUS”, by GLYPTØTEK. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. That Creative Commons bit is pretty great: it means you can do whatever you want with this theme wherever you live.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

In this second of two episodes recorded live at NC State (with a different class of students), we tackle the European Union’s approach to internet legislation—including everything from copyright law to dealing with monopolies—as a way to look at how differently things work around the world. What might we learn from other countries here in the U.S.? What might they learn from us?

Links

• Internet history
  • ARPANET (Wikipedia)
  • MILNET (Wikipedia) (actually a subsection of ARPANET used specifically for military purposes)
  • World Wide Web & Tim Berners Lee (Pew)
  • Minitel (Wikipedia)
    • “Minitel, France’s precursor to the Web, to go dark on June 30 [2012]” (Ars Technica)
• Monopsony (Economics Online)
  • Applied to the tech industry: “Publishers’ Deal with the Devil” (Stratechery)
• United States v. Microsoft Corp.
  • “Justice Department Files Antitrust Suit Against Microsoft for Unlawfully Monopolizing Computer Software Markets” (United States Department of Justice, 1998)
  • Wikipedia summary
• “EU Politicians Try To Create A New ‘Link Tax’ To Protect Newspapers Who Don’t Like Sites Linking For Free”
• “Google dominates search. But the real problem is its monopoly on data”
• Pirate Party (Wikipedia)
• TARDIS
• Last mile “loop unbundling” (Wikipedia)
  • “We Don’t Need Net Neutrality; We Need Competition” (Ars Technica)
  • “You Won’t Have Broadband Competition Without Regulation” (Reuters blog)
• Schengen Agreement (Wikipedia)
  • “The Schengen area and cooperation” (Summaries of EU legislation at europa.eu)
• DuckDuckGo
• Bing
• Packet sniffing
  • Packet analyzer (Wikipedia)
  • “Packet sniffing basics” (Linux Journal)
  • Wireshark network protocol analyzer tool
• “Brazil Arrests Facebook Executive in WhatsApp Data Access Case” (New York Times)
  • “Brazil orders release of Facebook executive arrested in WhatsApp dispute” (The Verge)
• End-to-end encryption (Wikipedia)
• “Why Are We Fighting the Crypto Wars Again” (Steven Levy) – with a helpful history of the fight in the 1990s as well as the current issues
• “You Can’t Outlaw Math (Accidental Tech Podcast 26:31 and following)”
• Trans-Pacific Partnership
  • “Everything You Need to Know About the Trans-Pacific Partnership” (Washington Post, 2013)
  • “Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement” (Electronic Frontiers Foundation)
• DMCA (Electronic Frontiers Foundation)
• Digital cash in Kenya
  • “The Invisible Bank: How Kenya Has Beaten the World in Mobile Money” (National Geographic, 2012)
  • “Kenya’s mobile innovation brings digital money closer” (BBC)
  • Similar ventures in the U.S.:
    • Square Cash
    • Venmo

Previously on the Show

• 4.09: A Ghost in Singapore

Music

• “The House”, by Air Traffic Controller. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. That Creative Commons bit is pretty great: it means you can do whatever you want with this theme wherever you live.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

In the first of two episodes recorded live at NC State, we tackle the challenges posed by protest art. When does art cross a line and become morally reprehensible? When is it a viable alternative to other, far worse ways of dealing with the esame problems?

Links

• “Stab Stab”
  • (Palestinian Anger in Jerusalem and West Bank Gets a Violent Soundtrack" (New York Times)
  • “NYT Front Page Indulges ‘Blunt’ Palestinian ‘Protest Songs’ Encouraging the Stabbing Murder of Jews” (NewsBusters)
• C. S. Lewis
  • The Great Divorce
  • Mere Christianity
  • The Chronicles of Narnia
• “Free Speech”
• Shades of Blue
• Black-ish
  • Season 2, Episode 16: “Hope”

Previously on the Show

• 0.01: We Need Some Context!
• 4.02: Helpiness
• 4.10: The Ancient Wisdom of Usenet
• Disagreeing well
  • 1.06: Rebuke Me Some Peopl
  • 4.05: The Price of Democracy

Music

• “Half a Second” by Hemmingbirds. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Big horns underneath and some piping woodwinds carrying the top line? Interesting thought.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

There’s a wave of populism sweeping the world. Twitter and Facebook are some of the epicenters of the new populism. How should we think about interacting with radical populists in general? And what about specifically on social media?

Links

• “Is Google Making Us Stupid (Nick Carr at The Atlantic)”
• Bernie Sanders runs to man who fainted during speech (CNN)

Previously on the Show

• 4.05: The Price of Democracy – the necessity and the limitations of gradualism, incrementalism, and compromise in politics.
• 3.11: Augustine’s Podcast – Social circles on- and offline and differences between our embodied and virtual selves.
• 3.04: Mom Memes – Generational shifts in social media and the diversifying web
• 0.01: We Need Some Context – Religious twittering, Google nesting, and hobbyists careering.

Music

• “Optimist” by Wanderwild. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. If you’re wondering what it would sound like as a majorly epic score, he’s thought about doing that version.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

We discuss the problems that face major nation-states trying to respond to the massive refugee crisis in Europe. We also look at the complex relationship between nations on topics like this in a “global world” (nice, Chris) and suggest that Americans both invest actively in making things better and chill out a bit insofar as we don’t live in Europe.

Links

• “One in, one out”: Turkey and EU agree outline of ‘one in, one out’ deal over Syria refugee crisis (The Guardian)
• “Central American Families Fear Deportation As Raids Begin” (NPR)
• “The Shame of America’s Family Detention Camps” (The New York Times Magazine)
• Safe cities in Syria: Why Syrian ‘Safe Zones’ Could Be Dangerous for Civilians and U.S. Policy (TIME)
• Stephen’s Biblical metaphors:
  • “Take the beam out of your own eye…”
  • Casting stones

Previously on the Show

• 1.12: Political Appinations – in which we talked (among other things) about the value of more local politics
• 4.06: Kickstarting a Hyperlocal Super-Farm – in which we talked about local governance in the context of the
• 4.07: A Muscle-Flexing Flyby – in which we talked about Russia
• 4.09: A Ghost in Singapore – in which John O’Nolan exhorted people to be charitable in their assessments of businesses

Music

• “Come Down” by Water District. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of there not being any sweet remixes yet. Someday. Someday.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Show Notes

We invite Ghost cofounder John O’Nolan on the show to talk about Ghost’s reincorporation in Singapore, what that means for them as a non-profit, and how we should think about these kinds of moves. We talk about everything from the specific details of Ghost’s move to the ethics of business tourism, and John basically hammers on themes we’ve been talking about all season. It’s fantastic.

Links

• “Ghost is moving to Singapore—and saying goodbye to the UK” (John O’Nolan at the Ghost blog)
• Stripe
  • Stripe Atlas
• VAT
  • VAT-MOSS
• Net neutrality in the US
• FBI demanding iPhone unlocking under a law from the 1700s
• “Singapore” – Freedom House Report
• “Censorship in Singapore” (Wikipedia)
  • “Internet Censorship in Singapore”
  • “Media Censorship in Singapore”
  • “Human Rights in Singapore”
• “Singapore Professor Denied Tenure, Sparks Academic Freedom Debate” (Wall Street Journal)

Music

• “A Better Life” from Silent Moon by Supersmall. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. If you ever do a remix of this track, we’ll probably feature it on the show. (Seriously.)

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

We talk about nation-states, war, hopes of permanent peace and how “the end of history” and the notion of fewer major wars is likely a pipe dream. But also, how to think about foreign policy issues as citizens of nations we love, and the value of nation-states even in a “global village.”

Links

• Fall of the Berlin Wall
• Russo-Japanese War
• World War I
  • “War to end all wars”
• World War II
• Proxy wars
  • Cold War
    • Korean War
    • Vietnam War
  • Arab-Israel conflict
• Exclave
  • Kaliningrad Oblast (Russian exclave on Atlantic ocean)
• Gulf Wars
  • Gulf War
  • Iraq War
• “War on Terror”
• “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine” (All of Vox’s coverage)
  • “Russian military intervention in Ukraine”
  • “Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation”
  • “The Link Between Putin’s Military Campaigns in Syria and Ukraine” (The Atlantic)
• China’s building islands in the South China Sea
  • “What China Has Been Building in the South China Sea”
  • “China’s President Pledges No Militarization in Disputed Islands”
  • “With China in Mind on a Visit to Manila, Obama Pledges Military Aid to Allies in Southeast Asia”
• Neoliberalism
• “End of history”
• Nation-state
• North Korea hack of Sony
  • “Timeline: North Korea and the Sony Pictures hack”
• Britain considering exit from EU (“Brexit”)
  • “A background guide to “Brexit” from the European Union”
• Putin flexing

Music

• “Warpaint On” by Risley. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. He doesn’t need permission to use his own stuff. But you know what? It’s Creative Commons Attribution licensed… so neither do you.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Links

• The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman
• New Rustacean, Chris’ other podcast
• “Kickstarter Lesson #65: How to Get US Backers if You’re Running a Non-US-Based Kickstarter Campaign”
• “Hong Kong has probably lost HSBC’s headquarters for good—and Beijing is to blame”
• “The Facebook-loving Farmers of Myanmar”

Previously on the Show

• 4.03: The Podcast Awakens—in which we talked about global fandoms specifically in the context of Star Wars
• 3.12: Hungarian Folk Music—in which we talked about musical (sub)cultures not especially well-served by the current music market, but also how the internet is helping subcultures thrive

Music

• “Solitude” by Alpenglow. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Still Creative Commons Attribution licensed.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

We dive back into the deep end with a discussion of the necessity and challenge of compromise in the political realm. How do we work steadily but slowly toward the things we value? How do decide what we can compromise on and what we can’t? Can we “trade favors” in a good way? What about people working at totally cross purposes on a given issue?

Corrigenda

The Myanmar military party no longer has a majority, but retains a substantial fraction of the parliamentary seats.

Links

• “Myanmar opens new parliament session after military rule”
• “Myanmar speculation mounts over Suu Kyi ‘president move’”
• Keystone-XL
  • One site for it
  • One site against it
• “Theological triage”

Music

• “Curtain Call” by Takénobu. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho, who still thinks that when he grows up he’d like to be a composer like John Williams.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Links

• Theodore Adorno
• XKCD 915: Connoiseur
• “I Want to be Well” from The Age of Adz by Sufjan Stevens, on Genius
• The Force Awakens soundtrack on iTunes

Music

• “Rey’s Theme” from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, by John Williams. Fair use. Utterly lovely.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho, who still thinks that when he grows up he’d like to be a composer like John Williams.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Links

• TheForce.net Literature Forum, where Chris was Master_Keralys
• “How Disney Plans To Sell ‘Star Wars’ In China, A Box Office Far, Far Away”
• “‘Star Wars’ China Box Office: Lukewarm Presales Could Signal Trouble For Disney Juggernaut”
• The Force Awakens soundtrack on iTunes

Music

• “Main Title” from Star Wars, by John Williams. Fair use. And amazing.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho, who started composing in no small part because of the “Twin Suns” cue from A New Hope, which rocked his world when he was just a little kid, and nothing was ever the same.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Links

• When Helping Hurts
• Microcredit
• Toms
  • Corporate Responsibility
  • “Some Bad News about TOMS Shoes”

Music

• “Hero”, by Starlight Girls. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho, who still dreams of doing a dance kit version of this, and a rock version of it, and a massive orchestra version of it. Someday, maybe.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up on Twitter, App.net, Facebook, or via email!

Links

• Quartz:
  • “Mark Zuckerberg can’t believe India isn’t grateful for Facebook’s free internet”
  • “Zuckerberg says the internet lifts people out of poverty, but is giving them subpar access”
• Alternatives to Internet.org:
  • Medianama: “Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker offers alternatives to zero-rating for Internet services”
  • Jana
  • Gigato
• Huffington Post: “Is Net Neutrality More Important Than Internet Access? Why Babajob’s On Internet.org”
• “Internet.org VP: We used the Facebook platform to lobby TRAI just like the people on the other side”

Music

• “Oh Boy”, by Hazelwood. Used by permission. (Fun fact: Hazelwood’s lead singer is Stephen’s wife!)
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho, who still dreams of doing a dance kit version of this, and a rock version of it, and a massive orchestra version of it. Someday, maybe.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up on Twitter, App.net, Facebook, or via email!

Links

• Structure/agency problem (Wikipedia)
  • Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
  • Web accessibility
• Globalization
  • Code for the Kingdom
  • The World is Flat
  • “Albuquerque”
• Owning your own content:
  • Indie web
  • WordPress backups
  • Medium
  • Craig Mod essays
• Previously on the show:
  • 3.12: Hungarian Folk Music

Music

• “Broken” by Featurette. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Still. Always. Forever.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up on Twitter, App.net, Facebook, or via email!

• venture capitalism (both of us)
• online classes (Stephen)
• the ethics of algorithms (Chris)
• tracking people at work (Stephen)
• transparency in business (Chris)

Links

• Venture capitalism article on Wikipedia
  • Insightful piece by Ben Thompson at Stratechery: “Venture Capital and the Internet’s Impact”
  • “Democratizing celebrity styling: Uber for your hair has arrived”
• Algorithms failing: “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot”
• Amazon worker treatment:
  • “Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon’s sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers” (from Salon, with a bit more acerbic a take than we might offer)
  • “They’re Watching You at Work” (The Atlantic)
  • 3.07: One Size Does Not Fit All

Music

• “Run With Me” by Heather LaRose. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho, who is plotting ways to make this theme more robust for the upcoming seasons.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up on Twitter, App.net, Facebook, or via email!

Corrigenda

• Stephen meant “Black Beauty” rather than “Black Betsy”.
• Mat Honan’s piece we referred to was on BuzzFeed, not Wired.

Links

• Google’s Cute Cars And The Ugly End Of Driving: The main thing you should know about autonomous vehicles is that they are utterly inevitable.
• Chrysler hack

Before You Go

JetBrains gets subscription pricing right!

1. Original post: “Introducing JetBrains Toolbox, easier access to your coding tools, more control and flexibility, and a lower entry price”
2. Follow-up: “We are listening”
3. Announcement of updated model: “Final update on the JetBrains Toolbox announcement”

Music

• “Spring” by Sam Birchfield. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho, who still wants to find a Steinway and a good piano microphone to get a non-synthesized version of the theme.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up on Twitter, App.net, Facebook, or via email!

Links

• “The Enhanced Experience So Far: It’s the Indies Who Support the Fledgling [Enhanced CD] Format”
• “The Invention of Compact Discs”
• Hungarian Folk Music
• Ryan Adams, 1989
• Dart Music
• Creative Commons
• Lawrence Lessig
  • Remix
  • campaign
• Max Richter
• Ingrid Michaelson
• Murray Gold
  • Wikipedia
  • IMDB
  • iTunes Catalog
• Amanda Petrusich’s Do Not Sell At Any Price

Before You Go

The Atlantic Notes—still absolutely killing it. Good work, guys.

• Adoption stories series
• Incredibly thoughtful discussion on rape and empowering women

Music

• “Psychrocker” by Honeymilk featuring De Montevert. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho, who is getting that composing itch again…

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up on Twitter, App.net, Facebook, or via email!

Links

• Geocities
• Tripod
• Friendster
• Xanga
• Augustine’s Retractions
• First Friday in Raleigh
• “Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg thinks telepathy tech is on its way” – The Guardian
• Google Buzz
• Google Plus Circles
• Configuring the Networked Self, Julie Coen

Before You Go

• “Ahmed Mohamed swept up, ‘hoax bomb’ charges swept away as Irving teen’s story floods social media” – The Dallas Morning News
• “We Stand with Ahmed (and We Hope He’ll Join Us for Astronomy Night)” – WhiteHouse.gov
• #standwithahmed

Music

• “Modern Language” by Postcards from Jeff. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up on Twitter, App.net, Facebook, or via email!

Links

• Sap.py – Chris’ podcast with his wife about her experience learning Python
• Experience economy
• Post-scarcity economy
• Social constructivism
• Substantivism
• Previously on the show:
  • 3.08: Juice Up the Weird Edges of the Ecosystem

Before You Go

Two good bits from The Atlantic:

• “Almost Half of Syria’s Population Has Been Uprooted”
• “A Map That Dramatizes (and Helps Explain) the Refugee Crisis”

Music

• “Song of the Sun” by Fell Runner. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho, who thinks you should check out the theme for Sap.py, too. Bells are fun!

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up on Twitter, App.net, Facebook, or via email!

Links

• Many Beautiful Things:
  • The score
    • Stream it
  • The documentary about Lilias Trotter
    • trailer
• Sleeping at Last
  • on television
  • Kid President
  • Notes on making “Mercury”
  • Yearbook
    • Box set
    • iTunes
  • Atlas: Year One
  • Atlas: Year Two subscription
• Hans Zimmer
  • The Buggles
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Previously on the show:
  • 2.11: Encoding Quality: Potato
  • 0.11: Only Acceptable Cream Cheese

Before You Go

• Charity water:
  • Overview
  • Ryan’s campaign
• Narcos

Music

• All music from Many Beautiful Things by Sleeping at Last. Used by permission. Go buy this fantastic album!
  • Intro: “Overture (Instrumental)”
  • 5:38–6:58: “Almost Idyllic”
  • 17:07–18:58: “Seeing”
  • 27:10–28:28: “Ill Equipped”
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho, who wishes he were cool enough to write 36 songs in a year.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up on Twitter, App.net, Facebook, or via email.

Links

• Carriers dropping subsidies:
  • “T-Mobile faces war of words after killing subsidies, contracts” (CNET)
  • “Verizon Wireless moving away from contracts and phone subsidies” (Ars Technica)
  • “Sprint to end two-year contracts - now here come the deals” (CNN)
• Motorola Razr
• “Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS” (The Verge)
• How Blackberry Fell (The New Yorker)
• MMS (multimedia messaging hack)
  • on iOS: “iOS bug lets anyone crash your iPhone with a text message” (The Guardian)
  • on Android: “950 million Android phones can be hijacked by malicious text messages” (Ars Technica)
• Xiaomi
• Windows Phone
• From the Garden to the City
• Previously on the show:
  • 1.18: Keep on Keepin’ On

Before You Go

Music

• “Pirates”, by Heptagon Heaven. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Slowly winning the “can’t get it out of your head” spot in every listener’s inner ear.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

Respond

We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up on Twitter, App.net, Facebook, or via email.

Links

• The original piece which sparked this discussion: “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace”

• “Why the New York Times’s Amazon story is so controversial, explained” (Vox) – with a scathing and accurate comment on blue-collar workers as the real problem for Amazon:

  The real workplace scandal at Amazon — and in the economy writ large — isn’t the treatment of white-collar workers with plenty of options. It’s the treatment of blue-collar workers with none.
  Most of Amazon’s workers, after all, aren’t highly paid engineers or marketers sitting in a Seattle office. They’re contract warehouse workers rushing frantically to meet their packing quotas.
  

• Responses:

  • “Full memo: Jeff Bezos responds to brutal NYT story, says it doesn’t represent the Amazon he leads”
  • “An Amazonian’s response to”Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace“
  • “Amazon: Friend of the Christian Family?” – an outsider praising the ethic itself as well as the results of that ethic in the American economy (First Things)
  • “I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at Amazon. This Is My Story”
  • “Amazon as an Antidote to Life Inside the High-Technology Bubble”
  • “The Case Against Full-Time Employees”

• Takedowns of Amazon’s warehouse practices:

  • “Inside Amazon’s Warehouse” (2011)
  • “I Was A Warehouse Wage Slave” (2012)
  • “My Week as an Amazon Insider” (2013)
  • “Amazon workers face ‘increased risk of mental illness’” (2013)
  • “Exclusive: Amazon makes even temporary warehouse workers sign 18-month non-competes” (2014)
• Previously on the show:
  • 1.02: On Family

Before You Go

Music

• “it was gone” by orchid mantis. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. The piano version is cool; somewhere in the future is a rock orchestra version that’s been playing in Chris’ head for years.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Slingshot this!

Links

• New Horizons
  • XKCD What if?: New Horizons – on how incredibly fast New Horizons is traveling.
  • Wikipedia
• Active solar system probes
• The Expanse – a delightful romp of a space opera Chris and his wife have read.
• SpaceX
  • Sued the Air Force
• Virgin Galactic
• Military-industrial complex:
  • Wikipedia
  • Eisenhower’s speech (from which the term derives)
• The Fermi Paradox
• Fusion reactor
• Alcubierre Drive
• Previously on the show:
  • 1.02: On Family – “You Can’t Have It All; Singleness Not a Disaster; and Family, Work, Innovation, and the Long View”
  • 1.04: Superhero Movies!
  • 1.11: We Need Life Editors – on Doctor Who
  • 1.15: Timelessishness – on HomestarRunner.com
  • 2.04: Might Actually Be Iron Man – Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, and landing rockets on barges after using the!

Before You Go

Music

• “Don’t Go Quietly” by Light Music. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. This week, it managed to cover up some of those fussy children in the background. (Good editing work, Stephen.)

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Links

• “The Web We Have to Save” (Hossein Derakhshan)
  • His follow-up on the response
• “The End of Surfing” (Chris Krycho)
• “79 These on Technology. For Disputation” (Alan Jacobs)
• Previously on the show:
  • 3.04: Mom Memes
  • 3.03: Look in Your Soul
  • On Alan Jacobs’ theses: 2.13: A Disputation of Theses
  • 1.01: Massive Emotional Contagion – on Facebook, social responsibility

Before You Go

Music

• “Plastic Skateboard” by Brave Baby. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. This week, with an all-new… no, actually. There’s nothing new about this. It’s still great, though, right?

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Links

• “God-Tier: Facebook Moms Run the Meme Game”
• Mommy bloggers:
  • “The Rise of the Mommy Bloggers” (Mashable)
  • “How moms won the internet – and what that means for the rest of us”
• meme
  • Badgers (requires Flash!)
    • Wikipedia article
  • Scumbag Steve
• “Black Twitter”
• Previously on the show:
  • 2.13: A Disputation of Theses
  • 3.03: Look in Your Soul

Before You Go

• “Charles Koch Urgest Conservatives to Skip ‘Corporate Welfare’” (TIME)
• “Cecil The Lion Update: Yelp Users Outraged After Thousands Of River Bluff Dental Reviews Vanish” (International Business Times)

Music

• “The Fog”, by Beach Moon, Peach Moon
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. A little fuzzy the past few weeks, but it’ll be back to its full glory by next episode, don’t you worry.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Links

• Ashley Madison hacked
  • The DMCA
  • Lives being ruined: “Married Man Whose Name Was Leaked In Ashley Madison Hack By The Impact Team Speaks: 20-Year Marriage, $19 Paid Delete”
  • Very human reactions: “Ashley Madison hack: ‘Out of all the data breaches, this is probably the funniest’—It’s hard not to feel sorry for the site’s adulterous users, but when I think of how betrayed they must feel…”
• Doxxing
• Rule of law
• Just one example of another contentious issue: “Undercover video shows Planned Parenthood official discussing fetal organs used for research”
• Previously on the show:
  • 2.10: So You’ve Been Hacked
  • 1.06: Rebuke Me Some People

Before You Go

Music

• “There’s No Love”, by We Are Magnetic. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. He’s been playing with electronica lately, so maybe you’ll get an electronica version eventually—but maybe not, because that would be a little strange.

Sponsors

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Links

• Quartz: “Over one-fifth of people use ad-blocking software—and it’s beginning to hurt”
• Ad blocking:
  • AdBlock Plus—associated with some not-so-savory practices, including letting advertisers buy their way onto a white list.

  • μBlock: aiming to be super light-weight, and no shenanigans about letting advertisers buy exceptions. Two variants:

    • μBlock
    • μBlock Origin—the blocker Chris uses.
    The reasons for the split are political, personal, and quirky. Welcome to open-source software!
  • Ars Technica: Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love
  • The Art of Manliness: “How Advertising Works on the Art of Manliness” (via listener @mikehoss on App.net)
• The history of the internet:
  • MILNET
  • ARPANET
  • The World Wide Web

• @oluseyi on App.net:

  It is absolutely staggering how, once you visit a vendor’s site, nearly all of the ads you see for the next hour or two seem to be from that vendor. A real-time reminder of how much you’re being tracked.
  cc @winningslowly
  

  
  ∞ July 21, 2015 3:01pm
• Do Not Track
• Tracking-blockers:
  • Ghostery—alleged to have some similar issues to Adblock with their relationship to trackers.
  • Disconnect.me—the ad tracking blocker Chris users. Identifies what trackers and third-party cookies are blocked on any given page, and allows you to enable or disable them as you like.
• Previously on the show:
  • On Circa:
    • 2.01: Take My Money Now!
    • 2.15: Metapodcasting
  • 0.03: Echo Chamber—we talked about “losing parts of the internet” via link rot, which is a big part of why we’re supporting the Internet Archive.

Before You Go

Music

• “Even Fireworks”, by Pushing Static. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. If you make a remake of this, we want to hear every beat.

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Links

• Denny’s Tumblr
  • That Huge Pork Heist
• John Gruber/Daring Fireball
• Ben Thompson/Stratechery
  • Why Web Pages Suck, on the same topic as today’s show… but posted two days after we recorded it.
• Andrew Sullivan/The Dish

Before You Go

• Europe’s demands on Greece
• The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

Music

• “Marina and I”, by The Gorgeous Chans. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Used by… uh… yeah, we kind of have permission to do whatever we want. Of course, it’s Creative Commons Attribution licensed, meaning so do you. How neat is that?

Sponsors

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.

Before You Go

• Patreon—it’s a thing; we’ll be doing it. Keep an eye out.

Music

• “Enanthropoisis” by Chris Krycho. Permission granted to remix! Seriously. It’s Creative Commons Attribution licensed, just like all of our content on this show.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Written years after the other piece.

Links

• Exponent Episode 044: Up in the Clouds with Twitter—Ben Thompson and James Allworth
• “Exclusive: Amazon makes even temporary warehouse workers sign 18-month non-competes: Contract says it can limit jobs across the globe”

Previously on the show

Follow/Subscribe

• Twitter:
  • @winningslowly
  • @chriskrycho
  • @scarradini
• App.net
  • @winningslowly
  • @chriskrycho
• Subscribe
  • RSS
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Before You Go

• “The Brutality of Police Culture in Baltimore” by Conor Friedersdorf
• “Orioles VP Angelos Makes Profound Statement Following Baltimore Protests” by Conor Friedersdorf

Music

• “St. Julian” by The Midnight Sons. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Fact: Chris studied music composition in college.

Links

• “The Upwardly Mobile Barista” by Amanda Ripley
• “Amid Funding Cuts, Will LSU have to declare ‘Bankruptcy’?” by Martha C. White
• “Corinthian Colleges Shuts Down, Ending Classes for 16,000 overnight”
• Jubala Coffee
• Scott Walker’s University Budget Cuts–How Big? by Dave Umhoefer
• Rider University Apologies to Rider grads.
• Getting Smarter on Skills Testing by Paul Fain. An article about skills-based credentialing.

Previously on the show

• 2.12: In the Meanwhile— We talked about a small corporation being ethical.
• 2.11: Hi, We’re The Internet— We talked about Uber acting unethically.
• 2.06: The Ones- and Zeros-sphere— We talked about Marvel’s ethics.

Follow/Subscribe

• Twitter:
  • @winningslowly
  • @chriskrycho
  • @scarradini
• App.net
  • @winningslowly
  • @chriskrycho
• Subscribe
  • RSS
  • iTunes

Before You Go

• The Middle East

Music

• “Mind Your Manors” by The Bandicoots. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. “I am moved by this music” -Aeschylus, probably, if he had heard it

Links

• 79 Theses on Technology. For Disputation. by Alan Jacobs
• An archive of blog post responses to the 79 Theses
• Alan Jacobs’ website
• The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr.

Previously on the show

• 0.03: Echo Chamber—we talked about losing parts of the Internet.

Follow/Subscribe

• Twitter:
  • @winningslowly
  • @chriskrycho
  • @scarradini
• App.net
  • @winningslowly
  • @chriskrycho
• Subscribe
  • RSS
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Before You Go

• SpaceX Rocket’s First Stage Crashes During Landing Attempt | Video by Thomas Friedman

Music

• “Phoenix” by Laura Joy. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. We considered adding an explosion just because of the Before You Go, but alas, time constraints.

Links

• One Company’s New Minimum Wage: $70,000 a year by Patricia Cohen
• High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton. The article that Dan Price read.
• Scripture about Gleaning: Leviticus 19:10
• Costco CEO Craig Jelinek Leads the Cheapest, Happiest Company in the World by Brad Stone. Costco
• Public-benefit corporation Wikipedia page
• Rolling Jubilee
• Fight for $15
• When Helping Hurts: Alleviating the Poverty Without Hurting The Poor…And Ourselves by Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert

Further Reading

• Praise and Skepticism as One Executive Sets Minimum Wage to $70,000 a year by Patricia Cohen

Previously on the show

• 1.14: Buying Me Off With Warm Fuzzies—we talked about how corporations fund the arts.

Follow/Subscribe

• Twitter:
  • @winningslowly
  • @chriskrycho
  • @scarradini
• App.net
  • @winningslowly
  • @chriskrycho
• Subscribe
  • RSS
  • iTunes

Before You Go

• Iran and the Obama Doctrine by Thomas Friedman

Music

• “Number One” by The Sideshow Tragedy. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Now with more techno! Just kidding.

Links

• Tidal
• Spotify
• Pono
• Bandcamp
• Beatport
• The Piano Guys’ YouTube Page
• Pentatonix’s Youtube Page
• By the Numbers: 80+ Amazing YouTube Statistics
• 33 Amazing YouTube Facts & Stats to Tweet & Share
• 13–24 Year Olds Watching More YouTube Than TV - To The Surprise of No-one by Andy Smith
• Lily Allen: “Tidal Will Make Fans Swarm Back to Piracy…”
• Neil Young’s PonoPlayer: The Emperor Has No Clothes
• Why Netflix needs to crack down on foreigners accessing its US site by Leo Mirani
• Bandcamp Hits $100 Million Payout Milestone, Plans Artist Subscriptions by Andrew Flanagan

Further Reading

• Jay Z Launches TIDAL As “Artist Owned” Music Service: Big On Star Power, Short On Details by David Ulevitch

Previously on the show

• 2.03: Impervious Scale—we talked about YouTube’s Music Key product and their problems with artists like Zoe Keating.
• 2.10: So You’ve Been Hacked—we talked about how all industries are affected by the Internet.

Follow/Subscribe

• Twitter:
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Before You Go

• These maps show why internet is way more expensive in the US than Europe by Allan Holmes and Chris Zubak-Skees

Music

• “Older” by Brother Moses. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Watch out, Hans Zimmer.

Links

• Slack
• March 2015 security incident and the launch of two factor authentication Slack’s blog response to their hacking incident.
• Target: Hacking hit up to 110 million customers
• Target hacking mastermind identified as 17-year-old Russian Here’s another instance of passenger safety being breached in dangerous ways.
• Heartbleed
• Bash bug vulnerability
• A big list of church management software
• Health insurance companies prime targets for hackers by Jen A. Miller
• Premera hacked - 4 key takeaways from another healthcare data grab

Further Reading

• The new normal — We’re all security companies now by David Ulevitch
• A security firm claims it was Russia that hacked Sony — and that it still has access Stephen mentioned that safety issues haven’t been in the news as much, and that was challenged very shortly after this was recorded.

Previously on the show

• 2.06: The Ones- and Zeros-sphere—we talked about Marvel’s hack.

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Before You Go

• NC State: PKP brothers must vacate house by the weekend by Ken Smith, Mark Simpson, Stan Chambers Jr., and Angie Basiouny
• NC State to conduct thorough review of its Greek system by Michelle Hankerson

Music

• “It’s Quiet Now” by Mon Draggor. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Alas, you’ll never hear this on the radio in an Uber car.

Links

• Uber
• Lyft
• Circa news app
• Philadelphia Woman Accuses UberX Driver of Rape Stephen mentioned that safety issues haven’t been in the news as much, and that was challenged very shortly after this was recorded.
• Indian Uber driver arrested after alleged rape, police say Here’s another instance of passenger safety being breached in dangerous ways.
• Uber Regulatory Issues via Circa News
• This is Uber’s playbook for sabotaging Lyft by Casey Newton
• Uber goes Big Data, shares customers’ data with a hotel chain by Lisa Vaas

Further Reading

• Why Uber Fights by Ben Thompson
• Why Uber Is Worth $18.2 Billion by Ben Thompson
• Obsoletive by Ben Thompson
• Don’t Blame Uber by Ben Thompson

Previously on the show:

• 1.03: Disrupting All the Things!—When talked about disruptions in tech.
• 1.12: Political Appinations—When we talked about the limits of technology in the real world.
• 1.09: Kind of Like a Virus—When we talked about seemingly intractable evil.

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Before You Go

• As Two Oklahoma Students Are Expelled for Racist Chant, Sigma Alpha Epsilon Vows Wider Inquiry

Music

• “Red” by Mt. Wolf. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Boomshakalaka.

Links

• “One Twin Exercises, the Other Doesn’t” by Gretchen Reynolds
• Earthen Vessels by Matthew Lee Anderson
• Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam
• 1 Timothy 4:8 by Paul
• 1 Corinthians 6:19 by Paul
• Previously on the show:
  • 1.12: Political Appinations—The first time we talked about neighbors

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Before You Go

• “What ISIS Really Wants” by Graeme Wood.
  • “The Phony Islam of ISIS” by Caner K. Dagli. A response to “What Isis Really Wants.”
  • “‘What ISIS Really Wants’: The Response” by Graeme Wood. A collection of responses to responses to the original article.
• What If Wes Anderson Directed X-Men?—Prepare to laugh.

Music

• “78 Eatonwood Green” from A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band by Rich Mullins. Fair use.
• “The Color Green” from A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band by Rich Mullins. Fair use.
• “Creed” from A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band by Rich Mullins. Fair use.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. You can probably hum this by now.

Links

• Andrew Peterson
• The Jesus Album
• “Elijah”
• An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis
• Previously on the show:
  • 1.05: Ars Moriendi—The first album we reviewed here on WS.

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