Techs on Texts

Kate Chapman, geographer and technologist, joins us to discuss Hugh Howey's Wool. We discuss failures of governance, the perils of IT supremacy, the difficult ethics of constrained environments, and competitive goating. Kate shares her background building digital public infrastructure (Common Space, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Open Supply Hub) and currently providing fractional CTO work and AI enablement. We discuss how Wool serves as a cautionary tale about bad governance, the intersection of information control and governance, and what happens when humans can't push boundaries or explore frontiers. Show notes: Wool by Hugh Howey - Originally published as five novellas, later compiled as the Wool Omnibus "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson - Short story about the dangers of blindly following tradition How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier - Classic book on cartographic manipulation Nonviolent Communication - Framework for conflict resolution Terrible, Thanks for Asking (now Thanks for Asking) - Kate's favorite podcast The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office” - Fantastic analysis of how The Office portrays social dynamics Slavoj Žižek's red ink joke: "In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair — the only thing unavailable is red ink.”" If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Kevin Bullock joins us to discuss the sublime first season of Vince Gilligan's Pluribus. Yes, TV is a "text," especially when Vince Gilligan is making it. We talk about individual morality, the ethics of science, AI, human nature, selfhood and memory, and ghosts. Inexplicably, we do not talk about HDP. Show notes:Pluribus on WikipediaVince GilliganAndrej Karpathy on Dwarkesh PodcastSatellite views of Carol's cul de sac - Kevin's fantastic post on LinkedIn.The insane rig built to film Carol's drive in the unicorn truckGeorge Dyson on Childhood's End - Techs on Texts Episode #14¡Chinga tu madre, quebrón! (sic)Also:Listen to Great Data ProductsGet your tickets to CNG Forum If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Cyd Harrell, devout civic technologist, joins us to discuss Jorge Luis Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." We talk about tungsten cubes, techno cults, and our guesses about the "horrifying or banal" truth revealed by the story.Show notes:Buy Cyd's book! A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide (Bookshop.org, Amazon)"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" on Wikipedia"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" PDFDiscussion of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius on Very Bad WizardsJulius PringlesKarl the fogRosicrucianismCrisis Text Line and Loris.ai ControversyPicigin: an amateur sport from Split, Croatia played in shoals or other shallow water, usually consisting of cooperating players keeping a small ball from falling in the water."Pets" by Porno for PyrosReality-based communityGreat Data Products blog post - blog post based on the talk I gave in October in which I warn against open data dogmas.The duodecimal systemA painting called Pan Arbol referencing the duodecimal system by Borges's friend Xul Solar, who is mentioned in Andrew Hurley's translation of the story as a translator of Tlön's language.When Republicans Became ‘Red’ and Democrats Became ‘Blue’ If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

"Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" on Wikipedia - note the fan art book coverRead "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" on MediumOr buy Exhalation: Stories, the collection containing this storyThe Weathering Podcast – More discussions of Earth systems, chaos, and the meaning of life from Marta, Marshall, and AldenKierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety on The MarginalianStoner by John WilliamsNo Way Recordings on YouTubeMore show notes at https://techsontexts.net/episodes/2025/11/chiang-marta-regn/Next month, we'll talk about "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges. If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

George Dyson – historian, boat maker, and volunteer Staff Historian at Radiant Earth – returns to discuss Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud. We discuss the cultural conflicts that arise between scientists and politicians, the limits of human language, human-incomprehensible modes of communication, the inevitable benefits of creating new observing instruments, alien consciousness, and the perils of simplified science.Show notes:The Black Cloud on WikipediaFred Hoyle on WikipediaGeorge's keynote at Radiant Earth's Expanding and Accelerating Global Climate Data Collaboration workshop on 14 October 2025Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic? – as mentioned by George, the paper exploring extraterrestrial origins of life on Earth, co-authored by Hoyle's student and collaborator Chandra WickramasingheBuy George's books!Next month will be a discussion of Ted Chiang's "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" with Marta Regn. If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Mark Chambers – my friend from high school (and former Chief Sustainability Officer of DC and NYC among other things) – joins us to discuss Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. We talk about the collision between money and science, the illusion of control, dignity, public service, how many humans there should be, why it may or may not be ok to grill, and positive visions for the future.Show notes:Jevons paradox – how technological efficiency can paradoxically increase resource consumptionWhat Michael Crichton Reveals About Big Tech and A.I. - Cal Newport's New Yorker piece about Jurassic ParkThe Weathering Podcast – exploring Earth systems, climate, and chaos. I don't talk about it in the podcast, but I should because it's relevant and so great. I love it.Colossal Biosciences Dire Wolf Project (Wikipedia article) – the real-world de-extinction effortThe 13th Warrior – A movie Mark loves that I still need to watchMark Coatney on A Wizard of Earthsea – our previous conversation about power and its pitfallsNine Inch Nails wins Country Music Award for "Old Town Road"Internet PowerThe Ministry of the Future (Wikipedia article) by Kim Stanley RobinsonNext month (hopefully): The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle with George Dyson.Bonus announcements:CNG Conference 2026 announced for 6-9 October 2026New work podcast: Great Data Products If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Matt Price – technology historian and dedicated educator – joins us to discuss Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. We talk about egos, ego death, cults, academia, Christianity, Buddhism, and psychedelics. No insights, only more questions.Show notes:Susanna Clarke's official websitePiranesi on GoodreadsVery Bad Wizards on PiranesiGiovanni Battista Piranesi on WikipediaCarceri d'invenzione, Giovanni Battista Piranesi's "Imaginary Prisons"All Things Shining, the book I refer to as "Everything Shining" in the podcastGene Wolfe, who Ursula K. Le Guin referred to as "our Melville"Aleister CrowleyBodhisattvaNatural historyVarious soundtracks to Piranesi:"Everything Forgotten Flows" by Priori"Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo" by Francesco Messina and Raul LovisoniIn a Beautiful Place Out in the Country by Boards of CanadaNext month, will be Jurassic Park (the movie and the book!) with Mark Chambers. If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Noah Iliinsky – most-esteemed information visualization expert, speaker and author – joins us to discuss Maureen F. McHugh's China Mountain Zhang. We talk about what matters, heavy furniture, sensible defaults, the burdens created by unnecessarily "innovative" design, pace layering, humans as instruments, and the double diamond bike.Show notes:Buy Noah's books!Noah's very excellent Guaranteed Successful Design presentation: 5-minute version, 45-minute versionNoah's unassailable guidance on using a dishwasherPace Layers from Stuart BrandThe Double Diamond bike frameWork on Stuff That Matters by Tim O'ReillyJared Rusten – my woodworker of choiceNext month, Matt Price will be on to talk about Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.New Secret School album! Enough? Remixes on Apple Music and Spotify. If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Daniel X. O'Neil, the worldwide entertainment juggernaut of the 21st century, joins us to discuss T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. You will learn almost nothing about The Waste Land from this discussion, but you will learn about poetry, modernism, truth, hypermedia, (the "end" of) America, and enjambment. Show notes:[T.S. Eliot reads *The Waste Land* on YouTube](T.S. Eliot reads: The Waste Land)The Waste Land on WikipediaHypertext enjambmentBlueberry Boat by The Fiery FurnacesThe truly great Carl MalamudThe Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complexJack Dorsey talking about how dispatch systems influenced Twitter (Dorsey, like Eliot is from St. Louis, as is past guest Jason Goldman and Sam Altman)RashomonMy essay on Internet Power (thanks to Dan for pushing me over the edge to finally publish this)Trut from Emigre Magazine #41The Nature BookCahokia MoundsChildren of a Modest Star by Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman for all those interested in the limitations of the nation stataThe end of the InternetAlways remember:There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous. — Cormac McCarthy 💖Next month we'll be talking with Noah Ilinsky about China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh. If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Alex Merose extols the virtues of lazy action and calls on us to embrace Duchamp into our hearts through discussion of Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman and Maurizio Lazzarato's essay "Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work." We explore themes of conformity, work, resistance, lazy action, and whether or not Duchamp was right that "language was a mistake."Shout out to Maxime Lenormand for production assistance.Many show notes!Alex Merose's websiteConvenience Store Woman by Sayaka MurataMarcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work by Maurizio LazzaratoCoffee Mill - Marcel Duchamp's 1911 painting at the TateBaudrillard's Simulacra and SimulationVaporwaveHeraclitus the obscureDavid Reich on the Dwarkesh Podcast - discussing genetics and human history, including some theories about the emergence of languageIf on a winter's night a travelerOpening keynote from CNG Conference 2025Many thanks to Alex for sending these references:How Food Played a Role in the Rise of PatriarchyNagarjuna (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)Alex's photos of Art by and inspired by Marcel Duchamp from the National Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in SeoulAlex's photos of Duchamp's works mentioned in the Lazzarato paper from the Museum of Modern Art in NYC - Work: A Deep History by James SuzmanWork podcast on Spotify If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Johnny Rodgers, my friend from Tumblr (among other things), joins us to discuss Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. We explore how Alexander's design philosophy has endured and influenced not just physical infrastructure, but also the software and algorithms that increasingly encroach on our built environment. Show notes:A Pattern Language on WikipediaOn Surfing and Reading Books from Manso (my olde Tumblr)View Source, Johnny's TumblrRenaissance Philanthropy's Playbooks, inspired by A Pattern LanguageDesign Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, a seminal software engineering book heavily influenced by A Pattern LanguageMartha Stewart on Elio'sIn May, we will be reading Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata and Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work by Maurizio Lazzarato. If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

I had the pleasure of recording this on-site with George in his Bellingham workshop (a former tavern). I experimented with having Claude write shownotes for this episode, and it proposed this as a "key theme" of our discussion: "The parallels between Clarke's Overlords and modern artificial intelligence as agents of human transformation." This is a pretty remarkable guess given that I only told Claude that the episode was a conversation with George Dyson about Childhood's End. In any event, that is precisely what George and I talk about.We also talk about many other things, including AI and social media as "overlord technologies," analog computing, ESP, and why he believes every company should employ an historian and a biologist. Show notes:Buy George's new edition of Project OrionGeorge's 2002 TED Talk about Project OrionSolar cigarette lightersMina Rees, first female head of the mathematics department of the Office of Naval ResearchTim O'Reilly: The End of Programming as We Know ItMore show notes at techsontexts.net If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Keith Garrett, coy technologist, father, and former marine, comes on to discuss Ted Chiang's masterful "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling." We talk about the benefits of forgetfulness, the limits of attention, the difficulty of assessing the benfits of cognitively affecting technologies, biases, colonialism, religion, and traffic.Show notes:Read "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling"! Online or buy Exhalation wherever you buy books.Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi driversToward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of BiasesThe Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon TribesSocratese's story of Egyptian king Thamus and the invention of writingTed Chiang on the dangers of runaway AI relative to the dangers of no-holds-barred capitalism: Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Gina Trapani, exemplary human and champion of good things on the web, comes on to talk about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. We talk about creating universes, friendship, parenthood, all kidns of relationships, play, vulnerability, loving the web, the beauty of being bad at doing things, blank white boards, and learning a lot. If you listen, you will know what so many others already do: Gina is the best.Notes!Van Halen logo in MS PaintIra Glass on he taste gapPodcast with Nina Jacobson, producer of The Life AquaticTig Notaro on why nothing matters and that's a good thingAlways remember no one cares.The Vampire Problem: A Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Paradox of Transformative ExperienceCargo cults in post-World War II MelanesiaAlso, Enough! is a great new album by Secret School (who did Techs on Texts's intro music): Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify. If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, joins me to talk about Francis Ford Coppola's masterful 1974 film, The Conversation. Nathaniel makes a compelling argument that the movie was a history of the future – with Coppola accurately documenting the profound shift that surveillance technology would have on individuals and society. As Nathaniel says in our discussion: the movie is somehow more relevant to society today, 50 years after it was made.Many thanks to Natty for coming and doing this with me. He was the absolute best person I could have on to discuss The Conversation.Notes!"New ways of seeing create new ways of being blind" - Interview with Nathaniel about monitoring atrocities in SudanThe Conversation (1974) Behind the Scenes with Francis Ford CoppolaTreasures from the Yale Film Archive: The ConversationNoli Tangere Cordis, do not touch the heart: a story of medical progress and shifting ethicsThe historic Blue Baby operationThe revelation of MKUltra in 1973The Satellite Sentinel ProjectRecap of the discussion of Internet Power talk at YaleThe Conversation final sceneListen next month for a discussion with Gina Trapani about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Mark Coatney, long-suffering digital media pioneer (Time! Newsweek! Tumblr! Al Jazeera!), gets me to finally read a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin and I loved it. Topics include our changing world, what the world is for, preindustrial longing, why we should maybe recognize that media companies are ephemeral things, the pitfalls of power, lame AI, floating orbs of light, humans imitating machines, why humans like things, leaky boats as a metaphor for a lot of software, and the fact that any human power can be changed by human beings – including, possibly, the power contained within ourselves.Many thanks to Mark for coming out to record with me at Yale. Huge treat to get some time with him in real life.Tons of shownotes!The passage from Analogia by George Dyson that I refer to: "The Apache was a hard foe to subdue," according to John Gregory Bourke, "not because he was full of wiles and tricks and experienced in all that pertains to the art of war, but because he had so few artificial wants and depended almost absolutely on what his great mother – Nature – stood ready to supply. Our government had never been able to starve any of them until it had them placed on a reservation."Tales of the Tyrant, the story about Saddam Hussein mentioned by Mark.Parable of the Sower by Octavia ButlerSocial media and the Arab SpringFacebook's Oversight BoardBiz Stone's tweet revealing the weight of having to deal with Twitter accidentally becoming a non-state actorPlanetary BoundariesLe Guin's acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal, which includes this phenomenal passage: "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."Simon Willison on NotebookLM's AI podcast generatorMark's (is it really Mark's?) NotebookLM-generated podcast about Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence""Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art" by Ted ChiangLiterally UnbelievableDomi & JD Beck covering "Flim" by Aphex Twin"Girl/Boy Song" by Aphex TwinHow Russell Holzman teaches himself how to play breakbeats liveDay MillionTracking bird populations with radar dataThe Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Esther Dyson, whose bio defies summarization (and who happens to be sister of previous guest George Dyson), discusses Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Spike Jonze's Her. We discuss the substance of life, bioethics, why our senses aren't always reliable, institutions and culture, predatory business models, child labor, mortality, building communities, and gardening versus carpentry.A few notes and links related to conversation:Wellville, the nonprofit Esther founded to to achieve long-term, equitable, community wellbeingTwo-phase commit protocolGoogle AI search tells users to glue pizza and eat rocksThe Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison GopnikBetween Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia by Joshua YaffaExit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert O. HirschmanThe Order of Time by Carlo RivelliSteve Jobs's 2005 commencement address at Stanford If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Jordan Tigani, duck herder and renowned "database person," gives us the gift of "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Jorge Luis Borges. We talk about about the potential of language, the limits of language, compression, sloppy ontologies, LLMs, what thing the universe is, simulated annealing, our vague comprehension of what embeddings are, and why it's unfortunate that there's no way to not sound pretentious when talking about Borges.A few notes and links related to the conversation:Read "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins". It's quick!The Wikipedia article about the essay is pretty good.Jordan is also a very talented writer about data and technology, which is great because he's better informed than almost anyone on the planet. Read Big Data is Dead from the MotherDuck blog.Simulated annealing on Wikipedia 🤯TrieHuffman codingLinnaean taxonomyWhy Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu MillerThe Importance of Common Data Schemas and Identifiers from the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum blog (written by Chris Holmes and me)Brad DeLong finds that ChatGPT doesn't know what ISBN numbers areEdgar Codd, proto database personWorldCat gets scraped (Hacker News discussion)I asked ChatGPT to write a limerick about Borges and I wish I didn't have to admit that it's pretty good:🍀🇦🇷🍀There once was a poet named Borges,Whose stories were full of deep forges,In labyrinths vast,Where time could not last,And mirrors reflected strange Georges. 🍀🇦🇷🍀 If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Buy Night FlightBuy The Little PrinceListen to Minds Behind MapsLook at the glorious website for GDAL (the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library). It's perfect!"The Little Prince becomes world's most translated book, excluding religious works"The post on LinkedIn where I asked for people to recommend fiction books.Next month's reading is "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Jorge Luis Borges. Read it! It's short! If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.

A few notes and links:Buy Jorge Luis Borges's Collected Fictions"The Zahir" PDF"An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" PDF (Note that this is a different translation than those in the Collected Fictions that I've recommended)The counterfeit Zahir (Reddit discussion)Idealism on Wikipedia If you enjoyed this, please share it.Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.Intro music by Secret School.Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.Please donate to Radiant Earth.