Programming Note: Darts and Letters is off. We are producing a new season on Cited Podcast, which is called “the Rationality Wars“.

Licking Elon’s Boot: The Politics of Technology

  • Thumbnail for EP67: Darts Transit Commission (ft. Paris Marx)

    EP67: Darts Transit Commission (ft. Paris Marx)

    We speak to Paris Marx of Tech Won't Save Us on the shifting politics of Silicon Valley. We'll traverse the intellectual history of hippies-turned-arch-capitalists, and focus especially on their ideas for transportation policy. Do they have a radical vision for a different transportation future, or is it a vision of maintain the status quo?
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  • Thumbnail for EP66: Technocracy Now!, pt. 3 (ft. Sam Adler-Bell & Alessandro Delfanti)

    EP66: Technocracy Now!, pt. 3 (ft. Sam Adler-Bell & Alessandro Delfanti)

    The first two episodes of this series told stories of technocrats who tied themselves to a muscular state. They believed the state could remake society, if it had the right expertise. However, the state under neoliberalism doesn’t have the technocratic ambitions or capacities it used to. Does that mean technocracy is dead? No, technocracy is just moving into the private sphere.
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  • Thumbnail for EP65: Technocracy Now!, pt. 2 (ft. Joy Rohde & Eden Medina)

    EP65: Technocracy Now!, pt. 2 (ft. Joy Rohde & Eden Medina)

    Last episode, we looked at the technocrats of the industrial age: Thorstein Veblen, Howard Scott, and the "industrial tinkerers," as Daniel Bell put it. But Daniel Bell went on to say we were entered a new age -- a "post-industrial age" -- where a new kind of technocrat would vie for power. We look at mid-century cybernetics.
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  • Thumbnail for EP64: Technocracy Now!, part 1 (ft. Noam Chomsky)

    EP64: Technocracy Now!, part 1 (ft. Noam Chomsky)

    Technocracy is the idea that experts should govern. For the common good, presumably. It appeals across the ideological spectrum, and it is perhaps an idea as old as politics itself. We begin the first of three-part series telling stories of technocracies past, present, and future.
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  • Thumbnail for EP62: Socialize the Series of Tubes (ft. Ben Tarnoff)

    EP62: Socialize the Series of Tubes (ft. Ben Tarnoff)

    Recently a major outage took nearly a third of Canada offline. No phone, no internet… even access to 911 got shut down in some places, all thanks to Rogers Media Inc. But why does one company get so much control over a vital service like the Internet in the first place?
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