New Books in Technology

Debates about AI typically deal with its immediate material consequences, from cybersecurity and infrastructure to plagiarism and copyright. Yet most people deal with AI as a generative consumer product that raises longer-term questions about its cultural effects on American society, human art, and ultimately, our souls. What is the role of the artist, for example, when a bot can crank out the same thing more quickly and efficiently?
To help answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest the playwright, novelist, and essayist Matthew Gasda. The author of the novels The Sleepers (2025) and Stranger Beauty (2026), he has written, produced, and directed over thirty plays, including Dimes Square, Zoomers, and Doomers, with his former production company, The Center for Theatre Research.
Today, drawing on his upcoming book, Futurepast (Encounter Books 2026), alongside Stranger Beauty, his many essays on culture and technology, as well as his Ted Talk about training an LLM on his own works, we discuss the future of the creative arts in the AI age.
We also touch upon the paradoxes of Jorge-Luis Borges, Harold Bloom’s literary criticism, what is different about large language models, why Kafka felt older than his predecessors, the mysteries of poetic inspiration and of the soul, what hosting live theater was like during the pandemic, the possibility of secular monasteries, how to use AI as a competitor to root out artistic complacency, and the unpredictable prospects for cultural renewal.
Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.

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In this episode of International Horizons, host John Torpey sits with Pepper Culpepper, Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy at the University of Oxford, to explore the core thesis of his recent book, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy (co-authored with Taeku Lee).
Drawing historical parallels to the American Progressive Era and the trust-busting of the early 20th century, Culpepper explains how corporate missteps act as catalysts for public action. The discussion delves into the concept of "latent opinion"—the submerged, widespread unease regarding corporate power, tech monopolies, and unchecked wealth that may be missed by conventional polling endeavors — and how high-profile scandals mobilize this sentiment into concrete regulatory reform. From the fiasco of Cambridge Analytica and controversies over AI data centers to the rising political tension surrounding billionaires, this conversation offers a nuanced, "possibilist" framework for how public outrage can revitalize democratic institutions and establish essential guardrails for modern capitalism.

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As law enforcement agencies deploy increasingly advanced technologies to suppress dissent, hunt migrants, and target marginalized communities, The Carceral Surround (U Minnesota Press, 2026) offers a powerful new theory of police and prison power in the digital age. Making sense of the rapid expansion of digital carceral infrastructure in a nation that claims to value freedom and individual rights, R. Joshua Scannell moves beyond familiar debates over privacy to show that understanding digital policing requires confronting the political and racial logics that sustain police power. Drawing on digital media theory, science and technology studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and carceral theory, The Carceral Surround reveals how twenty-first-century policing is less about managing crime than about governing possibility. Carceral power now operates across every register of daily life through predictive analytics, risk modeling, and algorithmic systems that track, sort, and preempt. From social media archives and facial recognition software to satellite mapping and radiation sensors, Scannell charts how seemingly disparate media converge into an environment of control that links technocratic governance to the maintenance of racial hierarchy and capitalist order. Tracing today?s technoauthoritarian regime from the NYPD?s assault on Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition?s campaign to end predictive policing contracts, The Carceral Surround is a rare hybrid of critique and refusal, illuminating the digital logic of US authoritarianism while imagining pathways for collective resistance beyond its grasp. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.
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In Hollywood today, thousands of data specialists work for streaming video platforms, playing a role not just in distribution and marketing but also in decisions about content and production. In Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming (Princeton UP, 2026), Violaine Roussel examines the emergence of this new category of professionals at the heart of the Hollywood dream factory. Roussel shows how the rise of data and algorithm specialists has transformed organizations and rearranged power relationships within them. Drawing on extensive interviews and in situ observations, she describes the ways that technical “data work” carried out by professionals at streaming platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ has had a significant effect on creative decisions.
Rather than fetishizing data and algorithmic models, Roussel explores the practices of the professionals who shape them, manipulate them, and give them power. She examines the relationships of these workers with traditional producers, describing legitimacy struggles and the eventual stabilization of new professional arrangements. Roussel’s account of the ways that data specialists deploy algorithmic models to reinvent their industry’s approach to content, artists, and the market—the first in-depth sociological study of the rise of this new profession—reveals the new forms of power and knowledge at play in today’s Hollywood.
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I spoke with Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington about her 2026 book Artificial Historians, co-authored with Anne Martin and Lewis Yarlupurka O’Brien. A distinguished historian, philosopher, academic leader, and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) based at the University of Adelaide, my guest explores how the logic of history, defined around trivalent logic (the “maybes,” the “ifs,” the ontological uncertainties), intersects with and challenges the logic of dominant AI algorithms.

The book raises urgent questions about the changing status of human agency, the ethics of AI-powered data collection about us, and the de facto histories that AI is writing about us every second—histories that may decide whether we can travel, access education, or receive medical care. We talk about the opportunities that this perspective on AI presents to humans (and historians in particular!), how some non-Western conceptions of history—for instance, those of the Indigenous nations of Australia—complicate the dominant Western understanding of what history is, and the challenges we must address as we hand over more and more data and delegate the writing of actual human histories to AI.

Aristotle makes a cameo, and my guest talks about how the economy might be shifting from knowledge bias to ethics bias.
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