Front Scroll
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EP24: Darts and Lasers (ft. Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, & Batya Weinbaum) [Rebroadcast]
It’s stardate 99040.01 and lead producer Jay Cockburn is temporarily taking over command of Darts and Letters for an episode. This week we enter the world of science fiction, revealing how it’s long been a vehicle for radical thought We dig into post-scarcity, Afrofuturism, and feminist speculative fiction as we set our phasers to fun and go where no podcast has gone before.Listen now -
EP40: War Games (ft. Tanner Mirrlees)
Why are there so many war games? They exploded in popularity post 9/11. Maybe you’ve played some of them. Or all of them. This week on Darts and Letters, Tanner Mirrlees, associate professor in the Communication and Digital Media Studies Program at Ontario Tech University and author of Hearts and Mines: The US Empire’s Culture Industry, joins us as we plunge headlong into the history of the militainment industrial complex, to understand the militarization of gaming and the gamification of war.Listen now -
EP39: Three Corporations in a Trenchcoat (ft. Matt Stoller & Dwayne Winseck)
If you eat, use a cell phone, connect to the internet, open a bank account, down a pint, or pick up a prescription in Canada, you’re probably experiencing the country’s familiar brand of oligopoly and monopoly. It’s arguably worse than the US. We’re basically three corporations in a trenchcoat.Listen now -
EP38: Democracy Dies in Snarkness (ft. Michael Tracey & Robert McChesney)
You can’t have a functioning democracy without a trusted media. That fact explains the state of U.S. democracy, at least in part. The United States has the lowest rate of media trust in the industrialized world, with just under a third of respondents in a 2020 Reuters poll saying they trust the media they consume. But whose fault is it? And, is the media even trustworthy?Listen now -
EP37: Save the Whales (ft. Torulf Jernstrom, Mary Flanagan & Maru Nihoniho)
We’ll save the Moby Dick puns for the episode itself, but suffice it to say that sinister game developers are on a whale hunt. This episode is about the sophisticated psychological tactics they use to hunt and capture their prey. On this episode of Darts and Letters, we take a journey to save the whales.Listen now