New Books in Technology

In Good Vibes Only: Phenomenology and the Biopolitics of Algorithmic Legitimation, Robin James argues that “vibes” have become a way for how we see ourselves and understand our tastes, as well as how corporations and governments see us in order to categorize and control. Vibes, according to James, are an orientation that situate beings and things in space with others, closer to some things than others, facing is certain directions, and more likely to be grouped together. Drawing from a diverse set of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including continental feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, phenomenology, and popular music stud...

Groundbreaking discoveries in reproductive biology and regenerative medicine are reshaping our ideas of conception, fertility, and the origins of disease. In Embryo: The Science of Becoming Human (Prometheus, 2026), world-leading developmental biologist Alfonso Martinez Arias traces the embryo's formation over its first fifty days while exploring how new technologies are changing how we view our origins, ourselves, and our future. The events that shape our lives happen in secret, inside our mother’s wombs, but Martinez Arias’s research with stem cells has laid them all out in the open. His work has shown that during the first fifty days afte...

From maps of colonial empires to charts of national trade, data visualization has long been used to consolidate knowledge and power. But just as often, it has been used to uncover oppression and bring about change. Data by Design: Visualization and Power from Abolition to the Dawn of Data Science (MIT Press, 2026), journeys across continents and over centuries to expose the power of visualization—and to show how it can be wielded back. A group of British antislavery activists who created a diagram of captives in the hold of a ship, accelerating support for the abolitionist cause. A Ñudzahui (Mix...

Tablet computers appear commonplace today, yet for decades they represented an ambitious—and often unrealized—vision of personal computing. The Tablet Computer: The Idea of a Machine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) traces the long history of this idea, from early conceptual designs in the 1970s to the consumer devices of the twenty-first century. Dr. Elizabeth R. Petrick examines the tablet as a shifting concept shaped by expectations about learning, productivity, accessibility, and human–computer interaction.

Across multiple generations of failed prototypes, partial successes, and rebranded technologies, developers imagined tablets as book-sized, portable, networked computers operated through touch. These...

Today’s book is: The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World (Princeton UP, 2024), by Dr. Allison Pugh, which explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other is valuable and worth preserving. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions—from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers—Dr. Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. The threats...

It has become something of a cliché to say that social media is making us tribal. But what do self-styled tribespeople themselves think about social media, and how might they help us better understand the role of the internet in our current political moment? Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork among Bedouin in Jordan, Social Media Tribes: Jordan's Bedouin and the Margins of the State (U Texas Press, 2026) underscores the varied but broadly intelligible ways in which distinctive groups domesticate social media to suit their needs.

Organized around key concepts in Bedouin life (including tribalism, envy, and mercy), S...

Cybersecurity is often presented as a technological challenge: protecting computer networks, preventing attacks and investing in increasingly sophisticated security systems. Yet even the most advanced technology may prove inadequate if organisations cannot interpret threats, communicate their consequences or respond effectively. What role does communication play in building cyber resilience, and why should it matter to business leaders as much as to cybersecurity specialists?

In this episode, Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo speaks with Nina Paine and Ashley Sweetman about Communicating Cyber Risk: Build Cyber Resilience Through Compelling Communication (Kogan Page, 2026). They discuss the book's origins and the distinction between c...

When Mario’s adventures escalated from Bros. to Land to World, the only direction left for an ambitious plumber was up into the stars. In Super Mario Galaxy, defeating Bowser means launching from planet to planet, pausing for just a moment in each Launch Star to wonder what pleasures and challenges await. 

The sheer joy of navigating Super Mario Galaxy’s varied, clever, and physics-defining planets to Mahito Yokota’s uplifting score is more than enough to satisfy Mario fans. And to casual players, brought into the hobby through the Wii phenomenon, Galaxy offered new delights beyond motion...

Introduction to the new show, and a discussion of our AI moment with host, Lee Vinsel, co-host Paula Bialski, correspondents, Gretchen Von Koenig, and Javaid Sofi, as well as special guests danah boyd and Adam Wynne.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We are often told that social media well-being is simply the result of individual users making healthy digital choices. All it takes is a little self-discipline. In Healthy Users: The Governance of Well-Being on Social Media (U California Press, 2025) Niall Docherty looks closely at this belief and exposes the complex relations of power expressed through its articulation and enactment. Docherty creatively and empirically shows how the discourses, designs, and habits of online well-being push user conduct in certain directions, at the expense of others. This is a contingent mode of governance that combines logics of neoliberalism, practices of psychologized...

Will artificial intelligence soon be fighting our wars for us? Could a machine ever command an army? Anthony King is skeptical. In AI, Automation, and War: The Rise of a Military-Tech Complex (Princeton University Press, 2025), he argues that AI is changing war less by replacing soldiers than by bringing civilian tech experts into the headquarters where wars are run.

The conversation begins with how the September 11 attacks turned King toward war, and with his quarter-century of tracing changes in warfare. Then, drawing on 126 interviews across the United States, Britain, and Israel, King explains why AI can be...

How AI is rewiring our social fabric—and how we can better shape our future.
 
The age of AI is not what you think. Rather than ushering in a fourth Industrial Revolution, AI has become a crucial social infrastructure of everyday life. It's embedded in the tools, platforms, and systems that organize our most intimate lives and our interactions with the most fundamental institutions of society, from government agencies to banks and schools. In these linkages are embedded assumptions about who we are, what we can do, and where we belong.
 
In Predicted: How AI Is Restr...

Social media giants like Meta and transnational regulators such as the European Union are transforming private governance by creatively emulating public law frameworks. Drawing on exclusive interviews and in-depth analysis of Meta's Oversight Board and the EU's Digital Services Act, Governance by Emulation: The Oversight Board, the Digital Services Act, and the Struggle for Platform Accountability (Cambridge UP, 2026) explores how these approaches blend European and American perspectives, bridging distinct legal traditions to address the challenges of platform governance. Analysis of content moderation practices and their implications uncovers a critical pattern in the evolution of governance for industries that will de...

Today I’m speaking with Garrison Lovely, technology journalist and author of the new book, Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us — and How to Stop It (OR Books, 2026). Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most discussed and most misunderstood topic today. Even to the experts and captains of industry, the frontier large language models are essentially black boxes. AI poses many reasons to be both skeptical and optimistic, yet it also poses a fundamental threat to our current economic order and social contract. If AI succeeds, what will it mean for workers, consumers, and the huddled mass...

How Do AI & Innovation Cohabitate?
 

Bryan Cassady is an author, professor, and all-around innovator, whether in book form or in classrooms, real and virtual, stretching from Europe to India.  He is a professor, consultant, and a serial entrepreneur now with a mission: to teach 1 million innovators by 2027.

He has built companies in 6 countries and trained 40,000+ leaders. He’s also a former professional racquetball player turned mathematician, a United Nations professional who speaks four languages. A researcher who has published on innovation, alignment, and social-media addiction. He’s co-created books with 50+ experts worldwide, including the international...

It is fair to say Aarthi Vadde's wonderful new book, We The Platform, demostrates "how literature changes our perspective on the internet." But you also need to add that it "respond[s] to decline narratives about literature and literary study and to offer an alternative to prevailing sense of defeat and nostalgia that guides them.”

Her conversation with John, like the book itself, aims to narrate the history of Web 2.0 from about 2004 to the present and to explore how writers themselves have responded since 2008. (That means compression" so please Google Aarthi to learn more about her Duke pr...

Many Americans have a constant dread of impending doom. Glued to the screens of our computers and smartphones, we sense that some total catastrophe is just around the corner. But what if our anxiety stems from an event that’s already completely destroyed an old world? What if the real cataclysm was the introduction of those computers and smartphones, and our current political, cultural, and social crisis is just our way of merely dealing with the fallout?

So argues the political theorist James Poulos, who is my guest in Episode 7 of Season 6 on Madison’s Notes. Having earn...

Could humanity’s most powerful invention become a threat to its survival? In this episode of The Survival Curve, we examine the disturbing prospect behind the “ten percent” debate: a risk of catastrophe that cannot be precisely calculated, but whose consequences demand serious attention.

We explore three routes to disaster: machines escaping human control, people using AI to unleash devastating cyber or biological attacks, and military systems accelerating a crisis towards nuclear war. What happens when a human still approves the decision, but no longer has the time or information to question the machine?

Can govern...

Projecting Knowledge: The Optical Lantern and Science Communication, 1880s-1940s (Brepols, 2026) takes one of those fundamental questions - how does knowledge circulate? - and says, like others: we must look at the media technologies through which that knowledge not only circulates, but is transformed. This edited collection does that by looking at the history of the projection lantern across the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The projection lantern, also known as the 'magic lantern', 'optical lantern', and 'sciopticon', amongst other names, is part of a long history of media technologies and techniques that have allowed users t...

Increasingly, it seems like the corporate names that dominate headlines are much more diverse than they used to be. Samsung, TSMC, and SK Hynix. Alibaba and Tencent; BYD and DeepSeek. Sea and Grab. 

For twenty-five years, it seems like every major technology was American . That assumption is now under strain as innovation spreads from one place to many. 

Mehran Gul tries to map out this new network in his book The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies (Simon and Schuster, 2026). From China's startlingly messy AI ecosystem to Singapore's government-led innovation, from South Kor...

We are in a state of crisis. Democracy is under threat, authoritarian politics are on the rise, and digital media—once heralded as emancipatory technologies—are increasingly implicated in democratic erosion. The Discursive-Digital Link offers a critical framework for understanding the entangled relationships between discourse, digital media, and the hidden dynamics behind antagonism and polarisation.

The Discursive-Digital Link: Antagonism and Polarisation in Digital Spaces (Routledge, 2025) presents a fluid social ontology that theorises how discourses and digital communication technologies are inseparably entangled, and how this entanglement contributes to the formation of complex hierarchical relations. Drawing on discourse theory and new m...

When I heard that Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” was about “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” my first reaction was dread. Turns out I was wrong; always something new out of Chicago.....

This is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side and to JP's earlier Hannah Arendt articles) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for info...

Debates about AI typically deal with its immediate material consequences, from cybersecurity and infrastructure to plagiarism and copyright. Yet most people deal with AI as a generative consumer product that raises longer-term questions about its cultural effects on American society, human art, and ultimately, our souls. What is the role of the artist, for example, when a bot can crank out the same thing more quickly and efficiently?

To help answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest the playwright, novelist, and essayist Matthew Gasda. The author of the novels The Sleepers (2025) and...

In this episode of International Horizons, host John Torpey sits with Pepper Culpepper, Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy at the University of Oxford, to explore the core thesis of his recent book, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy (co-authored with Taeku Lee).

Drawing historical parallels to the American Progressive Era and the trust-busting of the early 20th century, Culpepper explains how corporate missteps act as catalysts for public action. The discussion delves into the concept of "latent opinion"—the submerged, widespread unease regarding corporate power, tech monopolies, and un...

In Hollywood today, thousands of data specialists work for streaming video platforms, playing a role not just in distribution and marketing but also in decisions about content and production. In Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming (Princeton UP, 2026), Violaine Roussel examines the emergence of this new category of professionals at the heart of the Hollywood dream factory. Roussel shows how the rise of data and algorithm specialists has transformed organizations and rearranged power relationships within them. Drawing on extensive interviews and in situ observations, she describes the ways that technical “data work” carried out by profe...

I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic leader, and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) based at the University of Adelaide, my guest explores how the logic of history, defined around trivalent logic (the “maybes,” the “ifs,” the ontological uncertainties), intersects with and challenges the logic of dominant AI algorithms.

The book raises urgent questions about the changing status of human agency, the ethics of AI-powered data collection about us, and the de facto histories that AI is writing ab...

Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI. 

With original research and clear explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attemp...

This special episode features a short talk Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, gave at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia. The event featured a great mix of historians and Science and Technology Studies scholars and was organized by Jacob Bruggeman, who recently finished his dissertation on the politics of computer hackers at Johns Hopkins University and is now headed to a job at Ohio State University. Thanks to Jacob for putting the event together and hearty congratulations on his accomplishments. In the talk, Vinsel argues that we are missing a synthetic social and economic history of how our...

What if AI’s biggest impact on journalism isn’t replacing journalists, but forcing us to rethink what journalism is for?

In this episode, Joanne Kuai speaks with Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, authors of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination (Polity, 2027).

For decades, journalism has been caught on a “hamster wheel” of acceleration: producing more stories, for more platforms, with fewer resources. AI promises even greater efficiency, but is doing more with less really what journalism needs?

Lewis, Zamith, and Dodds argue that the current AI mome...

Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine that Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg's movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time, and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper, book, and magazine empires.
This is a tale populated with wondrous characters: tragic inventors, malign media moguls, hand-typesetters called the Swifts who turned their craft into a spectator sport, and authors and journalists...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with writer and researcher, Jehnie I. Burns about her book, Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation (Lexington, 2023). This conversation builds on earlier ones on music and technology, especially our earlier episode with Anthony Kwame Harrison about the ethnography of hiphop. Vinsel and Burns chat about the rise of mixtape culture, how it played out in different subcultures, and how it was wrapped up in and transformed by technological change. We also announce some big news at the beginning of the episode.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.su...

We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia University Press 2026) by Aarthi Vadde is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing formats, and vast communities of readers responding to stories publicly and instantly. Countering ubiquitous decline narratives, she offers powerful examples of literary innovation, adaptation, and survival. Among them are Jonathan Lethem and Lauren Oyler’s challenges to individualist ideas of authorship, the Twitter fiction of Je...

Are we driving our technology, or is it starting to drive us? In this thought-provoking conversation, Eli Karetny sits down with researcher and author Eduardo Albrecht to explore the invisible, rapidly encroaching frontier of AI governance and data surveillance.Moving far beyond traditional debates about data privacy, Albrecht warns of a near future where the state and corporate partners bypass human speech entirely, relying instead on "sentiment detection" to ascribe thoughts and make decisions that impact our physical lives. Together, they trace the historical trajectory of control—from early fingerprinting and eugenics to modern biometrics and neural implants—and chal...

The definitive feminist analysis of reproductive and ‘caring’ labor to emerge from Italian feminism of the 1970s.

Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic work expands and transforms how we analyze the sphere of reproduction, redefining the value of the individual’s life and the labor performed in the home.

Released here for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital (Verso, 2025) is a foundational text and e...

Beyond the Facts: Tacit Knowledge and the Hidden Infrastructure of Our Informed Times (Bloomsbury, 2025) describes tacit knowledge, what it is, how it used and its role in our current data driven world. Author James Cortada argues that fuzzy, hard-to describe information is greater and more, important than just hard facts. What is tacit knowledge? It is what we might consider knowledge that is unable to be fully communicated; knowledge that we understand implicitly, but it is a bit hard to explain. For example, it is the kind of knowledge one needs to ride a bicycle, but that cannot be...

Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated, and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic computer as they sought to cut costs, speed up labor, manage supply chains, and—they hoped—bring stability to the postwar economy. Their efforts would shape early computer science and the first applications of computer technology in manufacturing and business, with profound consequences for workers and managers alike. By the 1960s, practices originally developed to improve industrial efficiency were being used by Wall...

How do authoritarian regimes silence critics across borders? And what are the repressive tools and strategies that authoritarian regimes use transnationally? In this episode we are joined by Arild Engelsen Ruud, Mubashar Hasan and Karin Zackari to discuss the role of digital surveillance, emotional blackmail, enforced family isolation, psychological harassment, and the imprisonment of relatives on fabricated charges by Asian authoritarian regimes seeking to control populations and narratives across borders.

You can read more about the research discussed in this episode in the book The Long Reach of the Strong Arm: Evolving Forms of Transnational Authoritarianism, published...

Michael Brand is a CX strategist and trainer, based in Switzerland, who has been named a Thinkers 360 Top 50 Global Thought Leader on Customer Loyalty. Dr. Vincent Covello directs the Center for Risk Communications, and is a nationally and internationally recognized trainer, researcher, consultant, and expert in emergency, crisis, risk, and change communications. Deanna Leonard is a futurist, executive coach, and AI transformation leader. Her career has spanned senior leadership posts across a wide range of Fortune 500 companies.

In this freewheeling, one-hour roundtable discussion, the focus is on the Customer Experience through the lens of both the opportunities...

How is finance changing in the contemporary world? In FinTech Capital: The Digital Transformation of Everyday Money and Finance (Princeton University Press, 2026), Paul Langley, a Professor of Economic Geography at Durham Universityand Andrew Leyshon, a Senior Fellow in the Centre for Economy, Policy and Place, Nottingham Trent University and Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham, chart the rise of a new form of capitalism in the digital age. Drawing on detailed case studies from across the world, from familiar everyday examples such as Klarna to continent-spanning institutions such as Standard Bank, the book theorises the dy...

Host Licia Cianetti talks to Venezuelan democracy activist and co-founder of the World Liberty Congress Leopoldo López. As part of PPP’s ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Democracy they discuss Leopoldo’s recent article on Democracy in an Age of Networked Control. They discuss the technological challenges that democracy activists worldwide face today, and how some activists are rethinking their use of technology to elude the infrastructure of control and create new infrastructures for freedom.

Guest:

Leopoldo López is a Venezuelan democracy activist and the cofounder of the World Liberty Congress, which is a g...