New Books in Technology

We chat with historian David Kirsch, Associate Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School, about how to understand the Dot Com bubble and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s. David both lived through the Dot Com moment as a California resident and is a scholar of technology bubbles, including through his coauthored book, Bubbles and Crashes: The Boom and Bust of Technological Innovation (Stanford University Press, 2019). We talk to him about how to think about past and contemporary bubbles from both personal and professional historical perspectives.
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In this episode, Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Alex Rivera Cartagena discuss the looming social, cultural, and knowledge catastrophe described in The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (Harper, 2025). They explore how narratives around artificial intelligence are
shaped by powerful tech companies, often obscuring the real limitations,
risks, and social costs of these systems.

Their conversation challenges many common assumptions about AI’s
inevitability and neutrality, examining how the hype surrounding it
threatens university life, just labor practices, and resource
allocation. They also bring to light practical ways that individuals,
communities, and institutions can resist misleading claims and advocate
for more accountable technologies. They argue on behalf of a
critical roadmap for rethinking our relationship with AI—one grounded
not in hype and speculation, but in democratic values and collective
action.

This is the first of two episodes about The AI Con. The second, in Spanish, will appear on the New Books Network en español.

This conversation is sponsored in part by the Teagle Foundation and
the “STEM to STEAM” program, which stresses the importance of reading
and integrating humanistic perspectives in the sciences.

Quotes, organizations, books, scholars, and articles mentioned in this conversation:

Instituto Nuevos Horizontes

Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez



Elogio a las cercanías: crítica a la cultura tecnológica actual, Héctor José Huyke.


The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking, Shannon Vallor.


The Costs of Connection and "Rethinking Big Data's Relation to the Contemporary Subject," by Nick Couldry and Ulises Ali Mejias.

DukeGPT

Wendy Brown

Ivan Illich

"Has such promise but is so empty." -Alex Rivera Cartagena

"We know that they don't understand." -Emily M. Bender

"The real privilege is not using this technology; it is avoiding it." -Alex Rivera Cartagena

"AI flattens relationships into the words we exchange instead of the things we do." -Emily M. Bender

"It's not about the text specifically but the idea the text enables." -Alex Hanna

"It doesn't make us think about process." -Alex Hanna

"The
groups that are already formed can be very powerful pathways for
political education and for ensuring there's an integration of society
and tech that works for people." -Alex Hanna

"The very idea of
intelligence is that you can rank people based on one property...that
same racist eugenicist concept." -Emily M. Bender

"The imposition of technology is presented as philanthropy." -Emily M. Bender

"Metaphor of data colonialism" -Alex Hanna

"How do we get there without a natural disaster?" -Emily M. Bender

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Despite the importance of innovation for the growth of firms, industries, and the national economy, the strategic tools available to effectively manage and create new technologies are often neglected by entrepreneurs and corporate managers. The Management of Innovation: Managing and Creating Technology Capital (Rotman-UTP Publishing, 2024) examines how firms can leverage and create technology capital. The analysis considers the two key stages of the innovation process: technology management and technology creation. Each stage involves complex managerial decisions related to resource allocation and the assessment of relevant costs and benefits. This book examines the most frequent trade-offs that shape the innovation process across these two stages. It also provides an introduction to intellectual property and patent analytics.
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Who makes a living from the music industry? In Music Technology Panic Narratives Beyond Piracy: From Taping to Napster to TikTok (Anthem Press, 2026) David Arditi, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Arlington, looks at the history of technology in the music industry. This history illustrates the way the industry continues to profit even as artists struggle to make money. The book charts the development and evolution of listeners’ uses of formats and technologies, from cassette tapes and CDs through sharing to streaming, demonstrating how the record industry has initiated moral panics to stop threats to their profits. This is in a context where listeners and independent labels have found new ways to engage with music because of these same formats and technologies. An engaging and accessible overview of issues central to creative industries, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary culture.
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The Origins of the New (Princeton University Press, 2026) presents a revolutionary approach to evolutionary success in all realms of life. In this groundbreaking book, Douglas Erwin takes readers on a dazzling excursion across science and history to explore how evolution generates new and enduring features in biology, culture, and technology.Erwin begins by tracing how thinkers from Darwin’s time to the present day have sought to discover the driving mechanisms of evolutionary novelty. He then lays out compelling empirical evidence for separating novelty from innovation, showing that novelty involves the emergence of unique characteristics, while innovation concerns the success of those characteristics over time. Erwin develops a unifying conceptual framework for these powerful dynamics, demonstrating how they have shaped everything from the evolution of avian feathers and flight to the creation of human language and the breathtaking advances in digital computing we’re witnessing today.A landmark work that redefines our understanding of the changes happening all around us, The Origins of the New reveals how the forces of novelty and innovation are the same across nature and culture, continually producing new forms and refashioning the world as we know it.

Our guest is doctor Doug Erwin, who is an independent researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, after retiring as Senior Scientist and Curator of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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