New Books in Technology

Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today's strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalise infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator.Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Dr. van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism's individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfilment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today's infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, Dr. van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure's potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

From the telegraph to the touchscreen, how the development of binary switching transformed everyday life and changed the shape of human agency.The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans (U Minnesota Press, 2023) traces the sudden rise of a technology that has transformed everyday life for billions of people: the binary switch. By chronicling the rapid growth of binary switching since the mid-nineteenth century, Jason Puskar contends that there is no human activity as common today as pushing a button or flipping a switch--the deceptively simple act of turning something on or off. More than a technical history, The Switch offers a cultural and political analysis of how reducing so much human action to binary alternatives has profoundly reshaped modern society.Analyzing this history, Puskar charts the rapid shift from analog to digital across a range of devices--keyboards, cameras, guns, light switches, computers, game controls, even the "nuclear button"--to understand how nineteenth-century techniques continue to influence today's pervasive digital technologies. In contexts that include musical performance, finger counting, machine writing, voting methods, and immersive play, Puskar shows how the switch to switching led to radically new forms of action and thought.The innovative analysis in The Switch makes clear that binary inputs have altered human agency by making choice instantaneous, effort minimal, and effects more far-reaching than ever. In the process, it concludes, switching also fosters forms of individualism that, though empowering for many, also preserve a legacy of inequality and even domination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Florentine Koppenborg’s Japan’s Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance (Cornell UP, 2023) begins with the understated observation that the triple disaster of March 2011 “exposed severe deficiencies in Japan’s nuclear safety governance.” This is the starting point for the rather curious story of the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and how they created a new system with a strong independent nuclear safety regulator that has refused to back down even as the political tides have changed, and what this has meant for energy policy in Japan in the past dozen years. Koppenborg’s history of nuclear power regulation in Japan also seriously considers the implications of this dramatic break for regimes in other countries. This case study provides a complex and thought-provoking contribution to discussions of the role of nuclear power and independent regulation in global efforts to decarbonize our energy supply.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Danger Sound Klaxon!:The Horn That Changed History (University of Virginia Press, 2023) reveals the untold story of the Klaxon automobile horn, one of the first great electrical consumer technologies of the twentieth century. Although its metallic shriek at first shocked pedestrians, savvy advertising strategies convinced consumers across the United States and western Europe to adopt the shrill Klaxon horn as the safest signaling technology available in the 1910s. The widespread use of Klaxons in the trenches of World War I, however, transformed how veterans heard this car horn, and its traumatic association with gas attacks ultimately doomed this once ubiquitous consumer technology.By charting the meteoric rise and eventual fall of the Klaxon, Dr. Matthew Jordan highlights how perceptions of sound-producing technologies are guided by, manipulated, and transformed through advertising strategies, public debate, consumer reactions, and governmental regulations. Jordan demonstrates in this fascinating history how consumers are led toward technological solutions for problems themselves created by technology.Dr. Jordan also directs the News Literacy Initiative, including co-hosting its podcast News Over Noise.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Simon Johnson (MIT Sloan Economics Professor and Former IMF Chief Economist) joins the podcast to discuss his new book "Power and Progress", co-authored with his MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu, on the interplay between technology, political economy, and economic development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Xaq Frohlich’s From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (U California Press, 2023) is a biography of the Nutrition Facts label that adorns millions of food products and has become an integral part of the food and information landscape in the United States. Frohlich’s story unfolds in part as an institutional history of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for the label, using the agency as a way to understand the ideological and policy debates about responsibility for communicating scientific information to the public, from regulation and gatekeeping to information brokering and nudging. From Label to Table is the story of how the contemporary American food information environment emerged out of this history of transformation from paternalism to “informationism.”Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The technological revolution we are facing today is artificial intelligence. At least this is what we are told. Those doing the telling include tech experts such as Elon Musk, linguist Noam Chomsky, as well as philosophers, politicians and intellectuals of all stripes.What are to make of all this and how are we to manage a world experiencing such rapid change as practitioners?We explore the role of A.I. and its place in a line of societal change that has serious consequences for all of us. We discuss practice, and thinkers including Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Noam Chomsky and a bunch of contemporary commentators and their thoughts. We look at the big picture of society in turmoil and ask what practices might help us navigate this moment of intense change and disruption. We look at what it means to remain human despite the push to merge ourselves with the spectacle of social media and the calls to become more than human by tech dudes and the emergent forms of Capitalism and their need for us all to discard ever more of our humanity.My companion in this episode is the co-founder of the podcast, Stuart Baldwin, who came back for this one off episode. The topic of tech and A.I. is close to his heart and the conversation both captures past glories of earlier episodes and signals a new maturation in our relationship in what we hope will be a stimulating conversation for serious practitioners. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute recently sponsored a panel discussion on the topic, “Can you fall in love with ChatGPT?” and we recorded this discussion as a live podcast. The panel, which brought together a computer scientist, humanities scholars, and social scientists, focused in part on the latest advances in sociable AI, but much more on the impact these technologies are having, and are going to have, on human relationships.As our AI becomes more able to anticipate and perform human-like conversation and emotional responses will we, as the sociologist Sherry Turkle suspects, develop ever deeper relationships with our machines? What will this mean for our relationships with other humans? In an America beset by a loneliness epidemic, is the future of companionship, and of care, to be found in the artificial? To put the issue at its starkest: can, or should, you fall in love with ChatGPT? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future.The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization (Knopf, 2023)--calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material. Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel to how the global economy is managed. But few people likely give them more than a second thought. In a way, the barcode's ordinariness is the ultimate symbol of its success.However, behind the mundanity of the barcode lies an important history. Barcodes bridged the gap between physical objects and digital databases and paved the way for the contemporary Internet of Things, the idea to connect all devices to the web. They were highly controversial at points, protested by consumer groups and labor unions, and used as a symbol of dystopian capitalism and surveillance in science fiction and art installations.Jordan Frith's book Barcode (Bloomsbury, 2023) tells the story of the barcode's complicated history and examines how an object so crucial to so many parts of our lives became more ignored and more ordinary as it spread throughout the world.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology