New Books in Technology

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 professorship, earlier Levin-prize winning Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 , role as President of the Society for Novel Studies; and forthcoming co-edited Columbia University Press collection of conversations from podcast she co-founded, Novel Dialogue.) Aarthi is brimming with unexpected insights about writers responding in varied and unpredictable ways to textual production under digital conditions: Patricia Lockwood, Lauren Oyler, Tao Lin and even Sheila Heti, who early on experimented with LLM conversations in the New Yorker. She sees a new range of writers (Vauhini Vara, Meghan O'Gieblyn) maintaining a commitment to experimental writing, while engaging the power dynamics befalling them with this new tool, what she calls a new case of the "writer's hand at a distance."
Finally, when it comes to defining the "multi-front battle" university English departments will have to fight for their survival, Aarthi also wants to respond generously to students whose desire to write is as strong as their desire to read: why should we condemn that as a narcissistic impulse?
Mentioned in the episode
Karen Hao, Empire of AI
Sarah Wynne-Williams, Careless People
Laurence Lessig Free Culture
Xu Bing's Book from the Ground
Fred Bennison's Emoji Dick.
“glitch art”
Recallable Books
 Elizabeth Eisenstein's 1970 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, as well as this AHR debate between Eisenstein and Adrian Johns.
Ben Mangrum, The Comedy of Computation: also this excellent Recall this Book conversation about the feared obsolsence of the human knolwedge worker).

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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 bestsellers CYCLES and The Generative Organization: AI Playbook for Exponential Leaders.
There’s the question before the formal questions begin, and then there’s adding humans into the loop—and all across the innovation process, AI has an instrumental role to play. That’s the verdict of this week’s guest, Bryan Cassady, who, true to his word, has put together an outside-the-box book that has brought into the fold multiple co-authors. One of Bryan's main points in both his book and this interview is that AI is a brilliant co-pilot, but a terrible pilot alone. Good prompts are vital for establishing context, role-playing scenarios, and using synthetic-user personas to create a Customer Avatar that helps you tell whether your innovation is likely to find buyers in the marketplace. If there’s a more charming, thoughtful guest than today’s, we’d be surprised.
Bryan’s Offer
You can learn more about him at BryanCassady.com and take advantage of his offer to download a free book and toolkit here, helping him achieve his mission above!
Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out the website here.

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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 earned his PhD in government at Georgetown University, he was a founding editor of The American Mind, Return, and Frontier, where he is currently editorial director. The author of The Art of Being Free (2017), Human, Forever (2021), I Know This Sounds Crazy (2024), and an upcoming book called, Golden Age Problems, he recently wrote a Palladium Magazine essay called, “The Dostoevskian Moment,” which we use along with Human, Forever to discuss the digital technology crisis.
Along the way we discuss media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Jean Beaudrillard, the American political tradition, post-Cold-War civilizational states, cryptocurrency and AI, digital sovereignty, the modern camps fighting over technology among effective altruists, vitalists, gnostics and post-humanists, conversions to Eastern Orthodoxy, the Pink Police State, why Mars colonies are safer for humanity than Lunar ones, and the genius of David Lynch.
Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes. Please share and enjoy.

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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 governments preserve meaningful control as technological competition intensifies—and who bears responsibility if they fail?

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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 to project images onto surfaces for audiences to view. The optical lantern helped the projected image become a ubiquitous form of media, known by wide and diverse publics during a wave of 19th century media popularisation.
From the 1880s until well into the twentieth century, the optical lantern was an immensely important tool to disseminate knowledge both within and outside academia, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. This volume maps the lantern-illustrated lecture from various perspectives, with contributions on how to research historical audiences, on the spaces where projection was used, on the role of images as evidence, on the shifts in pedagogy that were supported by the projected image, and on the archives and sources that provide access to material that allows an understanding of the multiple ways in which the medium was used.
Projecting Knowledge was edited by Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves, Nico de Klerk, Frank Kessler, and Jamilla Notebaard. Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves is a historian interested in the cultural dimensions of media, science, and technology. She earned her PhD at Utrecht University within the research project Projecting Knowledge, producing the first large-scale survey of public lantern lectures in Dutch society from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. She currently holds a postdoctoral position in the Technology, Innovation & Society group at Eindhoven University of Technology.

Nico de Klerk is an independent researcher and archivist in the field of film and media history. Between 2018 and 2023, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the project Projecting Knowledge at Utrecht University, which partly overlapped with his research for the project Educational Film Practices in Austria, 1918-1970, at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut for Digital History, Vienna. His current research focuses on the film-illustrated lecture in the Netherlands between c. 1910 and 1940.
Frank Kessler is professor emeritus of Media History at Utrecht University. He is one of the founders of KINtop. Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films and the KINtop – Studies in Early Cinema book series. His research interests focus on the emergence of cinema as a multi-facetted medium and a cultural form, as well as on nineteenth-century visual media. His most recent research is dedicated the optical lantern as a tool for knowledge communication.
Jamilla Notebaard is a historian whose doctoral research explored the use of the magic lantern in Dutch academic education at the end of the nineteenth century. Her work reflects a deep interest in the history of science, particularly in the epistemic role of images in shaping knowledge within scholarly communities and beyond. She investigates how visual representations function as carriers of meaning, influencing both collective understanding and individual perception.

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