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PODCAST

Techs on Texts

Techs on Texts is a podcast featuring conversations with technologists about the literature that has influenced them. Hosted and produced by Jed Sundwall. Learn more at https://techsontexts.net

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All Episodes

00:53:59

Episode #21: George Dyson on The Black Cloud by Fred...

Techs on Texts ·

2025/10/31

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

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01:36:52

Episode #20: Mark Chambers on Jurassic Park by...

Techs on Texts ·

2025/09/30

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

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01:32:37

Episode #19: Matt Price on Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Techs on Texts ·

2025/08/30

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

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01:13:06

Episode #18: Noah Iliinsky on China Mountain Zhang...

Techs on Texts ·

2025/07/26

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

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01:14:15

Episode #17: Daniel X. O'Neil on The Waste Land by...

Techs on Texts ·

2025/06/23

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

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01:07:45

Episode #16: Alex Merose on Convenience Store Woman

Techs on Texts ·

2025/05/30

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

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01:25:09

Episode #15: Johnny Rodgers on A Pattern Language

Techs on Texts ·

2025/04/30

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

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01:25:30

Episode #14: George Dyson on Childhood's End

Techs on Texts ·

2025/04/01

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

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01:25:29

Episode #13: Keith Garrett on The Truth of Fact, The...

Techs on Texts ·

2025/03/01

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

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01:21:10

Episode #12: Gina Trapani on Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,...

Techs on Texts ·

2025/01/24

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

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01:11:20

Episode #11: Nathaniel Raymond on Francis Ford...

Techs on Texts ·

2024/12/21

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

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01:31:27

Episode #10: Mark Coatney on A Wizard of Earthsea by...

Techs on Texts ·

2024/11/26

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

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01:20:49

Episode #9: Esther Dyson on Never Let Me Go by Kazuo...

Techs on Texts ·

2024/10/30

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,

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01:25:59

Episode #8: Jordan Tigani on The Analytical Language...

Techs on Texts ·

2024/09/22

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

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02:06:57

Episode #7: Max Lenormand on The Little Prince and...

Techs on Texts ·

2024/08/30

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.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

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01:06:53

Episode #6: Io Blair-Freese on Borges

Techs on Texts ·

2024/07/30

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 WikipediaIf 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

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01:23:51

Episode #5: George Dyson on The Voice of the Dolphins

Techs on Texts ·

2024/06/29

George Dyson, historian, boat maker, master human technologist, and friend of friends discusses the totally wild The Voice of the Dolphins by Leo Szilard, which Dyson read when it was given to him by Szilard's wife when Dyson was 11 years old. We talk about AI, geopolitics, alignment (lol), and humanity.A few notes and links:George Dyson on WikipediaLeo Szilard on WikipediaThe Voice of the Dolphins on archive.org.George's book AnalogiaKontiki – the book that got George into lashing.The Valencia

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01:14:06

Episode #4: Chris Beddow on Jorge Louis Borges and...

Techs on Texts ·

2024/05/30

Chris Beddow, mapmaker, voyager, philosopher, and very good skier uses Borges's "On Exactitude in Science" and Umberto Eco's "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1" to go very very deep on the map–territory relationship. Listen and learn how to recognize how your experience on this planet is mediated by the maps you use.A few notes and links:Read Chris's essays at WorldbuilderChris's essay on The Fractal Map and Impossible SymmetryBuy Jorge Luis Borges's Collected

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01:16:02

Episode #3: Sean Gorman on Dune by Frank Herbert

Techs on Texts ·

2024/04/24

Sean Gorman, geospatial entrepreneur extraordinaire, uses Dune to explain security policy, geopolitics, capitalism, sustainability, common knowledge, the erosion of common knowledge, the importance of friction in political institutions, reasons to think harder about opening up data, and why the OpenStreetMap community are basically Fremen.Note that we recorded this in August 2023, long before Dune: Part Two came out. There are no spoilers from the movie, but we discuss the book at length and Sean

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01:19:31

Episode #2: Jason Goldman on Dune by Frank Herbert

Techs on Texts ·

2024/03/14

Jason Goldman, one of the world's foremost Dune podcast pioneers (listen to Escape Hatch!), talks about all of the Dune books, all of the Dune movies, the Dune TV shows, democracy, institutions, the dangers of charismatic leaders, the (a)moral arc of technological progress, the potential of governing with data, and how so many technologists miss the point of the literature they love. Our conversation left me wondering: could Obama be a mentat?A few notes and links:Escape Hatch - The podcast formerly

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21 results

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